Hi guys I don’t know if you remember me but I was a guest back in the lazy days of summer, been lurking a while and now that I’ve handed in my notice i don’t feel guilty about spending work time with you again so, here I am a fully paid up member
Enough about me, here’s the question … in a collection of short sci-fi stories in a book with a pale blue cover by Arthur C Clarke (I think) there’s a story about an astronaut or someone who is lost in time and tryng to run home, he lands on earth every hundred years or so and a religion has grown up around his apparition which lasts longer each tilme, at some point the watchers can hear that he’s shouting something but they only get the first sound which they interpret as ‘Jo’ or ‘Go’ when in actual fact it is ‘home’. Any idea the name of the story or the collection ? (Another story in the same book was about a guy who was in a space ship with empaths who had removed his nerve endings so he couldn’t feel any pain, until he reached his home planet that is).
Sorry this isn’t any clearer, I ‘borrowed’ the book from big brother’s bedroom almost twenty years ago ( :eek: ) and would like to read the stories again.
I’m also thinking not Clarke, as I read my local library’s entire Clarke collection (for whatever that’s worth) as a youngster and neither story strikes me as familiar. Maybe it was a collection of various authors?
Sounds real familiar, but also not like Clarke. Well, that’s not much help, is it? Not even sure if it’s a Brit; sounds like possibly Fredric Brown or Poul Anderson.
The first sounds like Vonnegut to me too, and I think I’ll agree that it was Sirens of Titan. The semi-main character was caught in a time warp that whisked him about, occasionally depositing him at his home where crowds waited. All the odd occurences in the story were a way to deliver a replacement part for the spaceship of an alien stranded on Titan. The other may have been a snippet of a Kilgore Trout plot; Vonnegut was fond of inserting these into his books. Maybe that’s why you remember it as short stories.
Remember some elements of the story: every year the “ghost” appears briefly. It turns out that it is an astronaut in a space suit and (very fuzzy memory from here on) he is caught in another dimension that intersects Earth’s space/time at a particular point in our orbit, hence the once a year thing.
He is trying to “get home”, maybe to prevent some disaster. I think his time is running backwards to ours.
The story is called “The long walk home” (but it could be called something completely different :dubious:
Brilliant, that’s it K364. I even recognize the name of the hero.
(After posting I started to have second thoughts about it being old Arthur C but I had no idea who else it might have been.)
Thanks a lot folks, hope I can return the favour one day.
This is making me think of another short story, about astronaut’s who die on a mission through time because something is stuck on their landing pad when they return. The story ends with a rather bitter astronaut leaving (IIRC) a VW Beetle on their landing pad to complete the loop in time.
Although, I’m guessing now I was wrong. The story is from 1973, right? TOS was '66 - '69, so the one could not have preceded and thus inspired the other.