The Written Word Group

  If the old Colonel used his binoculars he could look across the airfield to the hangers and watch them pushing the planes in and out; could watch the men as they worked on the planes when they left the hanger doors open.   He knew that he might get into trouble for watching what they were doing, that they might think that he was a spy or something, but he was just interested and it gave him something to do; I mean what else can you do when you are in your eighties and stuck in the house.           During the night he couldn’t see anything, oh they might wheel a plane out, but the hanger doors would open, the plane pulled out, then the doors shut quickly so that they kept it so that the lights showed as little as possible just in case an enemy bomber was in the area and saw it.   Everyone in the village was worried sick about being next to an active airfield, but they couldn’t evacuate an entire village; I mean where would y...

  The shock wave of a star going Super Nova can expel material at speeds up to several percent of the speed of light. This shudder sends an expanding X-ray death wave into its surrounding interstellar surroundings. The Wyse, the branch of science and war that had planned the exit from our dying sun, had found some suitable planets we could colonize. We were the last remains of our cephalopod's civilization. Uprooted and launched on a perilous diaspora journey across the vastness of time and space. Were they aquatic beings like us out there? Will they resist our coming to take up residence, in their Solar System. And if life had evolved, as it should with aquatics, they could not be, other than intelligent, and therefore open to an intelligent negotiation.   724 light-years away, Ubururu had hung like a shining welcoming beacon in the black emptiness of space. They said it was a rare wonder, a complete water world. Would they share their planet with another al...

            Tom lived quietly on his own in the ground floor flat, he didn’t bother anyone, in fact very few people in the block knew of his existence he was so quiet.   Mable, who lived directly above Tom knew of him though and visited him once a week just to make sure he was all right.   She didn’t know how old he was, but guessed at around eighty.   She thought that he must have been in the Navy because there were pictures of war ships on the walls and models of war ships on the sideboard and windowsills.           She never asked, and he never told, what he had done before he retired, but he was always well dressed and polite when Mable saw him in the street, and his flat was always clean and tidy.   She used to say that he was a proper gentleman of the ‘old school’.   Other people in the flats might see him going out and about, catching the bus into town, or com...