It happened gradually. Never when he was looking at it, never exactly the moment he turned away.
It grew. The green-ish mold-like whatever grew. So slowly, it was like watching the Tar Drip experiment. Again. It grew floating inside a near-absolute vacuum in a spherical glass container, with nothing to support its growth.
Well, there was sunlight, but no matter how efficient it was, it couldn't possibly synthesize matter from that.
The worst part was that when he released the vacuum, the particles scattered everywhere. All he could then was to reinstate a vacuum in the container and hope some...
They were listening. From somewhere distant, came the familiar sounds of gunshots, stone-throwing, angry slogans. But here it was quiet- deserted streets, shut down shops, boarded windows and houses so dead that they wouldn't be out of place in a graveyard.It was safe to be here. Nobody would mind, nobody would bother. They flitted out in the glorious sunshine of a bright day, trying to ignore the smell of dried blood mingled with the fragrance of the lake, the trees and the mountains. The pigeons of Srinagar were not worried about the curfew.
The shipwreck was catastrophic -- the kind where the powder magazines fireballed into the sky. Wood and masts and sails and all that turned into a bunch of toothpicks even Dennis Hoffman couldn't count.
Only Dark James Jameson survived, catapulted as he was from the plank he'd been stumping down as he crossed himself and wished the darling world goodbye. He landed in the evian blue water with a sploosh, swam about in a silent camera shot and bobbed to the surface for a breath -- upside down. His leg was the only bouyant bit about him.
He hung upside...