Last and First Contacts (Imaginings) Read Online Free PDF

kinetic energy, that would be locked up in a craft of a few tons travelling at half the speed of light. Why, you wouldn’t need munitions; an impact alone could sterilise a whole planet. So that’s von Braun’s dream. After this war is won, and the next with the Japanese.’
    ‘A dream to do what?’
    ‘Why, to build a bigger and better comet, and fire it back at Alpha Centauri. Do to them what they should have done to us, before they missed their chance – and gave us the technology to strike back at them. What an error that was! War is inevitable, between worlds as between nations. We must strike first. Why take a chance?’
    Perhaps their baby, she thought, of which Adam was still entirely unaware, would live to see that war. The first interstellar war.
    ‘Those damn English. One bomb landing in the wrong place tonight – why, the destiny of worlds hangs in the balance, my love. In the very balance…’
    She held his hand, and on her other side Dirk’s, as the English bombs stomped across Peenemünde, coming ever closer.
     
     

In The Abyss of Time
     
    St John Elstead’s cosmological time machine was a hole in the ground.
    I was choppered in from LA. We flew maybe sixty kilometres north, skimmed across the Mojave, and descended close to the town of Edwards. From the air Elstead’s facility was a ring of blocky white buildings that might have spanned a couple of kilometres, set out over the desert. The hub of the facility was a huddle of buildings at the rim of the circle towards the south west, like a diamond on a wedding ring.
    We landed on a helipad, an uncompromising square of black tarmac. A gaggle of technicians in orange jumpsuits, some of them carrying lightweight cameras and sound gear, stood at the edge of the pad. I climbed down with my backpack. This was the Mojave, in July. I had just flown out from a rainy London, and jet lag and furnace heat made me reel.
    A tall, spare figure came striding towards me, smiling. He wore a jumpsuit like the rest, with a nametag on his chest and some kind of mission patch on his arm. His coiffure was expensive, his skin toned, and though I knew he was in his fifties he had the easy physical grace of a man with the time to play squash.
    He grabbed my hand. ‘Ms Oram. Susie?’
    ‘Yes –’
    ‘Glad you could make it. You know who I am.’
    What arrogance! But as Time’s Man of the Year of the previous year, 2023, St John Elstead, founder and life president of Cristal Industries, was unmistakeable. I was tempted to mispronounce his name – ‘Saint John’ rather than the correct ‘Sin-junn’ – but that would have been petty.
    He turned on his heel and marched back to his technicians. I hurried to follow, my pack heavy on my sweating back. Over his shoulder he asked me, ‘Do you know why you’re here?’
    ‘Because you’re paying me half a million euros.’
    He laughed. ‘Fair enough. But you don’t know anything else? And it doesn’t bother you?’
    I decided to be blunt. ‘I’m just back from covering the efforts of Christian peacekeepers to broker an armistice in the Iraqi civil war. Writing up some businessman’s latest vanity project does not frighten me, no.’
    He glanced at me. ‘A bit of spirit. That’s what I detected in your work for the Guardian .’ His accent was the strangulated Bostonian familiar from a hundred ads and a dozen high-profile self-publicising stunts: ballooning, swimming with the sharks, a circumlunar jaunt on a rented Soyuz. ‘Full briefing later. But for now, two words: cosmological exploration. ’ He grinned, but it meant nothing to me.
    The technicians stood around a hole in the ground. It was maybe a metre across and covered by a heavy metal hatch, like a submarine’s. As we walked up two heavy-set techs turned the hatch’s wheel and hauled it open. A shaft led into the ground, filled with a silvery light, and I felt an unaccountable thrill.
    ‘Down we go,’ Elstead said to me.
    ‘Now? Just like