![]() But the most creative variation on the story of all came just a couple of years ago, when Peter Watts earned a Hugo nomination for this short story that retells the familiar tale from the alien menace's perspective. Campbell, Jr.'s novella Who Goes There? - and its John Carpenter-directed Hollywood adaptation, 1982's The Thing, is well worth your time. Since its publication in 1938, many writers have been influenced John W. So I guess I'll never have a chance to talk to the President again. I used to think he might call me another time, but it only happened once, in the beginning. When I listen to that tape now, I wish I had thought of something else to say. Then his voice got real serious, and he said everyone was praying and thinking about me, and he hung up. That made him laugh, like he thought I was making a joke. He asked me how I was feeling, and I said I was fine. I couldn't think of anything to say back. My heart flipped, because it's so weird to hear the President say your name. He said, "Hi, is Jay there? This is the President of the United States." He sounded just like on TV. The other best thing I have is the cassette tape from that time the President called me on the telephone when I was six. The story takes the form of a series of diary entries, written by a young boy who's being kept in a hospital for reasons he doesn't fully understand. Like many of the stories on this list, Due's Patient Zero is best-read with as little knowledge as possible, so I'll keep my summary brief. ![]() Frankie appears to be in a kind of peaceful trance, and if someone took a picture of him he would look like he was waiting to receive a spoonful of ice cream rather than emitting that horrific sound.Ĩ. No matter how many times he hears it he jolts up with such images playing in his mind, and he always runs, thumping into the child's bedroom to find Frankie sitting up in bed, his eyes closed, his mouth open in an oval like a Christmas caroler. It is the worst sound Gene can imagine, the sound of a young child dying violently - falling off a building, or caught in some machinery that is tearing an arm off, or being mauled by a predatory animal. Here is a high, empty wail that severs Gene from his unconsciousness like sharp teeth. It has become frequent, two or three times a week, at random times, midnight: midnight - three A.M. As a bonus, the PDF copy of the story available online is a winking mockup of a 1914 newspaper story, with era-appropriate "ads" to match. Lovecraft and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes for a case about a mysterious and disturbing death in London. Neil Gaiman won a Hugo Award for this clever pastiche, which blends together the best of both H.P. A Study in Emerald, by Neil Gaiman (2004) And not only he, her lover, Master's valet, but Master himself had flattered her, so craftily: "I would trust you, ah! with any responsibility!"ģ. Condemned to the eternal motions of washing the mud-muck of the Sea of Azof off her body, in particular the private parts of her marmoreal body, with fanatic fastidiousness picking iridescent-shelled beetles out of her "Scots curl" to flatter her - for the truth, too, can be flattery, uttered with design. How painful then to conceive of herself in this astonishing new guise, an object of horror, still less an object of disgust. In life she'd been a modest girl, a sensible and sane young woman whose father was a poor country parson across the moors in Glyngden. "Why doesn't it just do us in and get it over with? Christ, I don't know how much longer I can go on like this." It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer. He didn't move, but his voice came out of his covered face quite clearly. Ellen knelt down beside him and stroked his hair. The three of us followed him after a time, and found him sitting with his back to one of the smaller chittering banks, his head in his hands. It was almost as though he had seen a voodoo icon, and was afraid of the future. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it. When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that, once again, AM had duped us, had had its fun it had been a diversion on the part of the machine. There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette unsupported hanging high above us in the computer chamber and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern.
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