Sci-Fi Film Fiesta, The Swingin' 60s - The Complete Book by Chris Christopoulos - HTML preview

“I'd like someone to tell me something that makes some sense”

When I returned to the airbase after successfully landing the X-80, I was soon struck by a strange feeling of eeriness and unease. The airbase appeared to abandoned, and suffused with an air of silence, disuse and desertion. The worn and discarded airbase sign underscored my rising feeling of apprehension. Familiar features seemed to ring with distant echoes of bygone times.

Unable to process what I was seeing and feeling, I suddenly caught sight of what appeared to be a futuristic city just beyond the airbase. It was as if the city were a product of an artist’s imagination transferred onto canvas! All of a sudden, strange pulsing lights situated on the top of the tallest buildings assailed my eyes after which I decided to make my way toward the city in the hope of finding some answers to the impossible riddle that I found myself confronted with and was unable to solve.

Soon after reaching my destination, I appeared to have blacked out and when I regained consciousness I discovered that I was being held captive within a clear tube-like container. There appeared to be a couple of armed guards looking at me as well as a very beautiful young lady with a very, very short skirt from which emerged a pair of gorgeous legs. I had the impression that she was somehow in charge or had some authority and could even direct the guards without even so much as uttering a word. In fact, none of those present would speak with me which only served to heighten my sense of anger and frustration for which I found an outlet by lashing out at my captors.

After the young lady silently directed the others to back off I began to calm down and apologised to her for my behaviour. With the young lady taking the lead, we all headed off to where I hoped someone might provide me with some answers as to what was going on. I must say I could have enjoyed watching that young lady clip-clopping along walkways and corridors all day long!

I was eventually brought before the leader of the city and he went by the title of the Supreme. The city itself was called the Citadel. The elderly leader explained to me that he and his second-in-command, the Captain, are the only two inhabitants of the Citadel who are able to speak or hear. The rest of the inhabitants were deaf-mutes, including the Supreme's granddaughter Triren who had brought me before him. The Supreme was quite surprised to learn that I had come from “a nation of speaking peoples.”

I could sense that there was a strong undercurrent of suspicion, paranoia and hostility even to the extent of me being accused of being a spy. So much for me obtaining answers to my questions. It was they who wanted me to tell them all that I supposedly knew. As per my training, all I was prepared to tell the Captain was my name, rank and serial number.

As far as the Captain was concerned, I was lying and he accused me of having come to the Citadel to spy on their solar energy installation and that I was searching for some one called Karl Kruse and a Dr. Bourman. I was also accused of being what they termed “one of the scapes” and something or other about “mutants.”

It seemed that Trirene did not approve of the Captain’s intended course of action with me in that she had somehow found some truth contained in my thoughts. It transpired that as a telepath, Trirene could read my thoughts revealing that I was not a spy. It also turned out that Trirene may have had “more than the usual interest” in me, but I had a lot of other things on my mind as I was being forcibly led away to confront what the Captain had in store for me.

“Has the whole world gone mad?”

I was marched off to a kind of underground prison which contained a group of bald, crazed and violent mutants who appeared determined to attack and kill me. As the mutants lunged towards me I managed to, overpower one and by so doing I was able to obtain some answers to my steadily growing pile of questions.

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I learned from these miserable creatures that the inhabitants of the Citadel had been infected by some kind of plague and were not able to escape it, unlike apparently Karl Kruse and others like him whom they term “scapes.” They believed that I was in that category too. The mutants believed that the scapes had left them to die when they ran away from the plague and that as a result the scapes would all be found and killed.

The Captain soon reappeared and released me from this prison of insanity and I was once again brought before the Supreme. The old fellow informed me that his granddaughter had chosen to protect me and had expressed faith in what I had told them. That was when I learned that Trirene had a gift the rest of the Citadel’s inhabitants did not possess: an “extra sensory power” with which she was able to perceive every thought within other people’s minds. Suddenly and unexpectedly, I was then given freedom of the Citadel! This seemed to have been granted on the basis that it would have made Trirene happy.

So, some questions were answered while raising still more questions .Later, Trirene helped tgo fill in some of the gaps by showing me some historical photographs that reve;ed something about the Citadel's and her own family’s history. I learned that her father and mother came to the Citadel before she was born and Trirene had never lived in the air and sunlight. Somehow the mutants and plague had caused the population to abandon the old city “and move to the subterranean world.” The mutants had been responsible for deaths of her father and mother. I then convinced Trirene to take me Karl Kruse so he could help me better understand what was going on.

“Major, this is 2024”

While making my way to Karl Kruse with Trirene, I was able to take in more of the Citadel’s architecture and construction. If you ever saw that great science fiction movie of just a few years ago, Forbidden Planet, you’d come close to what it was like in terms of scale and design.

An elevator quickly conveyed us to a kind of workshop in which I found Karl Kruse (who used to be general Karl Kruse), together with aProfessor Bourman and ex-captain Markova. They too were accidental time travelers: Markova, a Russian Captain came from 1973, while General Kruse and Professor Bourman arrived from colonies on other planets in 1994. They seemed to be astonished that I was a United States Air-force pilot from the year 1960. This meant that I had come from a time prior to the plague.

While I was on the verge of really finding some answers to the questions I had, Markova suddenly got quite nasty and catty towards Trirene by insinuating that she had “found herself a big, good-looking playmate, and a fiery one too” and that she had ulterior motives and designs on me. Of course, it turned out that Markova’s seemingly rude conduct was a ruse to get Trirene out of the way on account of her ability to read their thoughts and find out things they didn’t want her to know. Good grief! Reading people’s thoughts and constant spying with surveillance gadgets! What kind of world had I wound up in?

In the short time we had to speak freely, Kruse and others informed me that they had escaped the cosmic plague and as “scapes” they were hated by the inhabitants of the Citadel for having ledt them behind. Kruse and his party had managed to convince them that their skills were needed to keep the solar power system operating otherwise they too would have been imprisoned with the mutants.

Neither the mutants nor the Citadel dwellers managed to escape the plague. The latter were all first-stage mutants - deaf, mute and….sterile. The last would prove to be a death sentence for the human race as there hadn’t been a new birth in the citadel for the past 20 years. Trirene however, may not have been sterile and that’s apparently where I “fit into the plan.” I had been chosen as her mate and was the last hope for their society.

With that shocking revelation flooding my mind, I was brought abruptly back to the ‘present’ by being informed that it was the year 2024: 64 years into my future! This plague we were talking about hadn't happened in my world of 1960!