INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 Read Online Free PDF

atmosphere suffocated.
    The night sky yielded the products of his imaginings. With head tilted back he gazed through his open casement window, each star a possible creation, each pinprick an aspiration. Adamson scorned the astrological books that his parents bought on special occasions, he didn’t want to understand the universe through second-hand knowledge: he wanted to experience it directly.
    What made the human race different from the other species was that it sought not only to live within its surroundings, but to adapt them, to expand knowledge beyond necessity, to live outside its means.
    Adamson had a special fondness for the brightest light in the night sky. He imagined darkness fell infrequently, that its radiance came from silver-suited occupants who braved the surface and were reflected back into the blackness as a message. He wanted this to be a truism. Adamson was lonely on Earth. He felt there were few people like him. If only he had known he was just a typical teenager who would live an average life and see all his dreams shattered, then maybe his perspective would have shifted.
    •••
    Gareth pinched the fly between his thumb and forefinger. Movement was felt rather than seen, a tremulous vibration resonated within the grooves of his fingerprints and made him want to rub those digits together, to erase the beating of that eloquent heart. Yet instead he maintained the grip, dropped the insect into the jaws of his Venus flytrap.
    It bounced once against the plant’s interior, then unfolded its squashed wings like an escapologist freeing itself from a sticky straightjacket before rising and buzzing vehemently against the windowpane, catching a breeze and drifting to freedom.
    Gareth sighed. He pressed the point of his pencil hard against the paper where he recorded his experiments and made a mark. The fly had been too fast. The trap would only spring when prey had contact with one of the three hair-like trichomes on the upper surface of the terminal lobes. Even then the hair had to be touched twice in quick succession – or two trigger hairs touched within twenty seconds of each other – for it to work. It was a delicate mechanism; but it was also deadly. The trap would shut within a tenth of a second under the right circumstances.
    He found the entire process fascinating.
    The Venus part of the plant’s name was a misnomer. It didn’t come from Venus. Gareth did, although he didn’t know it. Both the planet and the plant had been named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. The flytrap had been historically known as a tipitiwitchet , a possibly oblique reference to its resemblance to female genitalia.
    Gareth didn’t know enough about female genitalia to make that comparison.
    •••
    Beth put down her copy of Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers and shuddered. She had seen all four movie versions, the black and white classic directed by Don Siegel, the much-lauded remake featuring Donald Sutherland, the passable 1993 version directed by Abel Ferrara, and the execrable The Invasion made in 2007; yet it was the book which got under her skin.
    There was something about the simplicity: of the idea, of the telling, of the plot, of the invasion. It resonated tiny triggers inside her body; goosebumped the skin like hairs stood to attention. It felt familiar , somehow. As though it had already happened and Finney was only setting out the facts for future generations to discover and find truth in it.
    She arced herself back on the bed, looked upside-down out the window. The stars were in a reverse hemisphere, but not the opposing hemisphere of the Australasian states. She could still identify the three stars of Orion’s belt, the distinctive shape of the Plough, and the bright ‘star’ that was Venus. She looked for a long time at the planet, until closing her eye she found the afterimage remained on her retina, as though behind her eyelid was a pinhole camera.
    She imagined Finney’s pods blowing