Thirteen years ago I wrote my one and only effort at fiction. Analog, the science fiction magazine, had a feature of very short stories called “Probability Zero”. I do not know WHY I never submitted it, but I have just come across it among my old papers and have decided to publish it myself here. But first some background if you are not familiar with what inspired me:
From Wikipedia:
“The War of the Worlds” was a Halloween episode of the radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air directed and narrated by Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds (1898) that was performed and broadcast live at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938, over the CBS Radio Network. The episode is famous for inciting a panic by convincing some members of the listening audience that a Martian invasion was taking place, though the scale of panic is disputed, as the program had relatively few listeners.[1]
Probability Zero
“War of the World” Revisited
“That Wells fellow came uncannily close!”
The speaker was leaning with his suede elbow patch against the huge rough hewn oak beam of the library’s fireplace. He was holding an exceedingly small, incredibly old book, which he gestured with as he spoke. The book, while not out of place in the library, was as out of place in 2011 as the speaker. Few homes had libraries in an electronic world, but everything about his lifestyle looked back in time!.
On a chilly winter night, he was wearing the required academician’s garb, a tweed coat, even though there was a blaze in the fireplace. As the universities became more fragmented in their divisions, dress came increasingly to be a symbol of what you taught and who you were.
Since brownouts were still common, civilization having not yet recovered anything like its former reliability since the aliens’ invasion, it was no longer an affectation. As he grew older, he also appreciated his comfort even more. Central heating just was not what it used to be.
“How do you mean?”
His partner was a much younger man, with the merest remnants of the self-assured air to which scientists in the 21st Century had long since become accustomed. He was one of the few who would even give the time of day to an antiquarian of English literature. Technocracy was long since the order of the day, and written fiction had been all but totally supplanted in the popular culture by televised fantasy. But of course, this friendship went back to the days when the antiquarian was his father’s younger colleague, and he was like an uncle.
“Wells wrote “The War of The Worlds” in the 1890’s. I only have a copy because it was reprinted a little over 50 years ago, in 1960. Well, he posited just such an invasion. He had it breaking down within England, well before it engulfed the rest of the world, as it has now. He also got the description right – huge machine-like turrets on stilt-like legs – walking over the countryside. Of course, he could not have known when it actually occurred they would be arthropods! The signal he picked up that inspired his story must have been so highly attenuated that long ago.”
“Who would have dreamed we had had telepathic warning of what was to come over 120 years ago?”
“Who would have listened? The point is moot now, in any case. Herbert George even referred to it in his book. He mentioned a lack of a mouth, which was quite the opposite of course. In fact, he, and his peers, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, were quite skeptical of telepathy. But of course, we now know it exists.”
“Yes, and it’s a good thing we in the West were still fairly well fed. Imagine, a biology based totally on energy from adipose tissue and minerals!”
“Wells had them transfusing blood directly, a most unlikely evolutionary step. In spite of my sympathies, it is a good thing Technocracy has held the environmentalists at bay as much as it has these past thirty years. And it all started with James G. Watt in the States.”
The young scientist got up and walked to the bar where he replenished his drink. He offered his friend a refill, which he politely refused. Turning back to the fireplace, he told the antiquarian:
“It came closer than you know to going against us. If the U.S. chemical companies had not continued shipping chlorinated hydrocarbons overseas, and if so much was not still coming back to us in animal products, we would all have been so much “fat” for their fires, so to speak. The assays we have just completed show that the contamination in our tissues was within just a few parts per trillion of the amounts needed to poison our predators.”
“Yes,” said the older man,
“ I suppose mankind, in its folly, saved its own neck!”