Compulsion

At about noon the Earth ship landed. Gerol had been in the library at the time, reading the ancient history of Beasphor. Liddie had come in through the door, the bright sunlight behind her and said, "They're here." Everyone had looked up and stopped and the silence had been electric with the thoughts each person had thought. Gerol had looked at Liddie's slim silhouette and had thought about new beginnings and the ending of everything familiar.

From The Earth Ship by Graham Storrs

"By the beauty of the Great Witch Jade, by the never-failing might of Terry, Creator of the World, by the power invested in me by the State of California, etcetera, etcetera, I hereby utter the spell that will abolish gravity." There was a pause. Doctor Strange began to rotate slowly as he started the incantation. "Edit sub gravcontrol," he intoned. "Findstring 'gravconst equals 9.8'. Substring 'gravconst equals zero'" Then, with a flourish; "Recompile!"

From Magic by Graham Storrs

It was their second week in God I Hate This Place. Barbara was on the terrace as usual, writing postcards. Robert appeared from the villa, red-faced and hot. "I'm going down to The Flea Pit to get that Brussels business settled. I'll probably be gone a couple of hours the way they prat about in the Belgian office."

And then he was gone.

God I Hate This Place was actually a rather beautiful spot on the Costa Brava where Barbara and Robert had rented a villa for a couple of weeks. It was high up a steep, forested mountain with breathtaking views of the little cove below and its picturesque village. The Flea Pit was the four star hotel in the village which at least had some basic business facilities, like a fax machine, with which Robert could continue to harass the poor minions who had mistakenly thought they were rid of him for a while.

From A Spanish Holiday by Graham Storrs

Aunt Effie had grown more and more ill in the last few days and only this morning she had had to have a big row with that nice Dr. Seales from the village because he wanted her to go into a hospital and she had refused to leave her house. Jessica's mother had gone in to say she thought the Doctor had been right and it really would be for the best but Aunt Effie had told her to get out and to stay out. At lunch, keeping her voice low so as not to be heard in the nearby bedroom, her mother had called Aunt Effie "That old bitch" and said that they were going home tomorrow and that was that.

From Honkie by Graham Storrs

Of course, what consenting adults do to each other in their own homes is up to them. It’s when they’re out in public that they need to be controlled. Having said that, I’ve given up hoping that the behaviour of motorists can ever be improved. I think that most motorists just simply want to kill people and that’s all there is to it. And, while we continue to think of killing people with cars as "accidents" rather than the inevitable consequence of doing something inherently and recklessly dangerous, I suppose they’ll continue to get away with it. Instead, I’d like to try to get some order into the way people on foot use our streets. That’s why I’m proposing a code of conduct for pedestrians: The Pathway Code.

From The Pathway Code by Graham Storrs

The smell became a regular feature of our lounge. "Try feeding them in a separate tank," the saleswoman suggested. "They can be very messy." After several days of experimentation, it was obvious that they would sooner starve than eat anywhere but in their stinking tank. Pleading with them, shouting at each other and railing at the Heavens had no discernable effect. "We could let them go in the river down the road," I suggested but I knew we couldn't. Neither of us would have the heart for it, however much we were growing to hate the ugly little green monsters.

From Pet Story by Graham Storrs

He opened his eyes and looked around. Everything was much as it had been. A little tarnished maybe, or was that just his imagination? The rest of his crew were still 'unconscious' in their harnesses, hanging like plastic dolls in their lifeless state, power supplies and data feeds plugged into their stomachs like umbilicals. Lee studied his Science Officer, Tang Chui Yi, hanging opposite him. Her humaniform body looked young and shapely. She had been a very attractive woman and the artificial form the Programme's technicians had given her was modelled on her original body, although nobody now would mistake Chui Yi, or any of the crew for that matter, for a real human being.

From the novel Emissaries by Graham Storrs

Aboard the spaceship Canta Libre, nothing stirred. For almost a year, it had cruised through interstellar space at almost one thousand times the speed of light and it was now close to its destination; a place the K'Ha had called Adanor but which humankind knew as M27, the Dumbbell Nebula. The great ball of gas and dust, the remains of a five thousand year old stellar explosion, dominated space ahead of them. It glowed faintly in blues and reds, the steady, bright glare of a white dwarf blazing at the heart of it, lighting up the unimaginably huge filaments of stellar debris. Ravelled balls of dust dotted the cloudy dust-lanes, like fur-balls, each one larger than the solar system the humans had left twelve hundred light years behind them.

From Supplicants by Graham Storrs

She went out mid-morning and spoke to Caroline's parents again. Debbie Kakanis was a tall, elegant woman, clearly the source of Caroline's looks. Even in her grief, she had a kind of dignity that was as much due to her physique and her high cheek bones as it was to her character. Nick Kakanis was plump and sleek, a salesman for a computer company, not unattractive but shallow to the core. Alexandra ony had to ask one or two questions to realise neither of them knew much about their daughter. They didn't know her friends, they didn't know where she went of an evening and they certainly didn't know why she'd dress up as a schoolgirl. They'd written her off, Alexandra realised, and had just been waiting for her to leave home so they wouldn't have to worry about her anymore. Perhaps, she thought, they were secretly relieved that she was dead.

From Manhunt by Graham Storrs

Holmes laughed. "Excellent woman!" He turned his piercing eyes on the Contessa who was discovering she was still wearing her whalebone corsets and voluminous white bloomers. His gaze flustered her as he caught her wondering how they could possibly have sex when she had all this stuff on. "So, tell me my dear, what of the roof space? Was I wrong about that?' She pursed her lips in irritation. How could he have known? "Ha!" he declared, leaping out of bed to pace up and down the room. He was wearing a long silk dressing gown over an equally long night-shirt. "So, just as I thought, there is absolutely no sign of a perpetrator of this supposed murder. What does that tell us, Watson?"

She looked around to find Dr Watson watching Holmes intently from a high-backed armchair. "Why, it tells us that the case is impossible, Holmes!" he cried. "Because I can assure you, as a medical man, that there is no way for a man to strangle himself with his own hands."

From Together by Graham Storrs