Two great novels to download for Christmas. First frighten yourself with the chaos and terror of global flooding; coming NOW ! Then reassure yourself and the human race that it will all turn out OK in the Utopian Future. Both are gripping and romantic tales that you won't be able to put down. Most readers hide away from family, friends and all interruptions and read from cover to cover in one session - or on an airline flight. All the heroines and heroes are real people - we apologize for any similarity to fictional characters.
And the factual bases are realistic. These things will come to pass. Treat yourself to a truly good read.
Buy at Kindle Books - Click the covers on the right of this page - or follow the links below:
OUT OF THE DEPTHS by Noel Hodson
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| CLICK TO BUY AS AN E-BOOK |
Chapter One – London 2008
“Fifty years ago, most of the glaciers we looked at were
slowly growing in length but since then this pattern has changed. In the last
five years the majority were actually shrinking rapidly.” Scientists estimate
the glaciers are losing 250 cubic kilometres of ice to the seas each year –
about 60% more than they gained through snowfall. British
Antarctic Survey report – 22
April 2005 .
On
the late afternoon low tide Alice slid her kayak into Hans Place, just behind
Harrods, lifted the paddle from the dark, swirling waters, drifted to a half
submerged first-floor window, floating twenty feet above street-level, checked
as she always did that the darkened room behind the glass was abandoned and
empty of decaying corpses and their unquiet ghosts, clung onto the window
struts under the wide dark-red brick lintel, where she all but disappeared from
view, stopped breathing – and listened.
Alice
Whitaker was now turned nineteen. And although she had the best of everything
that she had ever wanted or in her wildest shop-a-holic fantasies, had ever dreamed of having, after
three years of creeping inundation and recurrent plagues, Alice’s face, and her
character, had changed from being outgoing, confident, innocent and in full
bloom to being pale, set, paranoid and wary. She wore her fair hair tied up
tightly into a top-knot and pony tail, not for the pleasing appearance it gave
but to lift the hair clear of her ears – ‘all
the better to hear you with, my Dear’ – and out of her eyes – ‘all the better to see you with, my Dear’.
Survival depended on being always alert.
The
tide was on the turn and grey-brown, threatening water was already pouring
inwards, rushing through broken windows, along alleyways and narrow streets,
and surging dangerously around corners of buildings, lampposts and pillars. Alice bobbed in her camouflaged double-handed Aluet Sea
“I’m
coming in…” she whispered, “…OK?”
“OK”
confirmed a husky reply – also whispering.
High
above the water with views over much of London, in the Executive Suite and
Restaurant of the two-hundred-and-forty-foot, seventy-five-metres high Post
Office Tower, latterly BT Tower, on Cleveland Street, south of the Marylebone
Road; an ordered chaos of electronic telecoms boxes nested in a bewildering
maze of wires and fed signals from near and far into recording equipment and,
of particular threat to Alice’s preference for secrecy, into the headphones of
one of several middle aged men who bent tensely over a control panel – and
listened with fierce concentration to Alice’s “Privacy Guaranteed” conversation.
Chapter
Two – Waving or Drowning
Mount Kilimanjaro, (Kilima
Njaro, Shining Peak )
at 5,895 metres (19,340 feet) Africa ’s tallest
mountain, has lost its famous snow cap. Fifteen years earlier than the most
pessimistic global-warming forecasts, the volcanic tip of the mountain is
visible for the first time in 11,000 years, testifying to the devastating speed
of climate change. G8 Energy and Environment Summit , London
“Avian Flu found in
migrating geese. Tens of thousands of birds that could be carrying the
H5N1 avian influenza virus are due to leave the reserve…” The Guardian Thursday
July 7 2005 .
Three
years earlier, on government advice which in turn the government obtained from
the very best scientific authorities, the population of central London, North
and South of the river, had stayed put when the waters rose and spilled over
the Embankment in the Spring Tides.
About
two million souls, including Alice,
hopeful, dark-eyed, slim, pretty, seventeen and dating, and her family among
them; all imbued with the same stubborn and stoical spirit as the people of the
London Blitz, humming Land of Hope and Glory and appropriate sea-shanties,
simply decamped from their ground floors, abandoned their cellars, delicately
ignored the politely named ‘reflux’ that washed back up the lower lying
lavatory pans, basins and bathtubs, donned waders to go shopping, rescued what
precious belongings they could, watched the filthy waters rise and invade their
buildings and then, with their families and household pets, moved upstairs.
“Protect
your property from looters.” Was the sensible and sound advice issued by
London’s Emergency Services Council, in turn taking their advice from HM
Government, which in turn relied heavily, as they often repeated, on the best
available scientific advice, “You may be uncomfortable for a few days; but
don’t lose a lifetime’s assets for want of a few days of vigilance.” Nobody
could be sure that their Household Contents Insurance would remain valid if
they ignored the government’s advice – and so they stayed - for the duration.
The
duration was far longer than Londoners expected. At high tide The Thames rose
several feet above the pavements in Parliament Square, flooded Guy Fawke’s
cellars under The Palace of Westminster and, nudging forwards a margin of
mostly unmentionable flotsam and jetsam, it crept up Whitehall, made a left
into Downing Street where Number 10 was protected by the very latest home-flood
barrier, and, after spilling ten feet deep at the end of the street down into
Horse Guards Parade, it edged up Whitehall towards Nelson, the greatest of all
English Admirals, who had been raised high enough to ignore the mess which had
been advancing for some weeks in his direction and who could therefore turn a
blind eye to it with haughty disdain.
The
salty tidal waters rose and fell twice a day, the tides flushed out the sewer
rats and all the other sewer contents and, over several weeks, the sea sank
deep into the ground, down through fissures and abandoned pipes to pollute the
famous artesian wells that had reliably supplied the city with fresh water for
more than two thousand years.
But
as the tap water became bitter and diseased, Lady Porter and Lord Sainsbury
showed their true metal, buried their political differences, rose nobly to the
occasion and directed vast supplies of bottled water from Tesco’s and
Sainsbury’s supermarkets respectively, discreetly charged at only ten times the
usual price, to the stricken areas below and East of Teddington Lock. From the
west the Thames above the lock still flowed with fresh-water which was piped,
in rapidly laid yellow plastic mains, to cleaning and pumping stations above
the shore line in Chelsea
The
North Sea - during the Easter Spring Solstice, when the Sun and the Moon line
up to tug in tandem at the Earth and lift the mighty oceans into a higher than
usual bulge - had flooded up the river estuary, unobtrusively flowed across the
Swanscombe and the West Thurrock Marshes and had spilled down into the Dartford
Tunnel – fortunately at night when there were no gridlocks of queuing vehicles
– then swamped the Dartford Marshes and flooded up the River Darent to Dartford
town. Some seventy thousand homes between Dartford
and Eltham awoke to find their feet in freezing cold salty water, with human
waste floating on the surface. And most of the brave inhabitants, as advised,
stayed put.
That
same night The Woolwich Ferry had found its slipway and jetty was suddenly
twenty feet below water and was unable to dock on either side of the river. City Airport
and the Royal Docks became part of the Thames as did New Charlton – and the North Sea flowed effortlessly around the Thames Barrier.
The Blackwall Tunnel was flooded through its airshafts – again, Thanks Be to
God, without anyone being trapped inside under the water – and Bow Creek
expanded from being an interesting narrow channel into a broad, unpredictable,
swirling, dangerous tidal surge. Canary
Wharf
With
the dawn of the next day, joy riders packed the Overhead Light Railway to
Docklands from Minories at the edge of The City just for the novelty of seeing
the sea below them, sweeping past the rails’ pillars and supports as the tide
inexorably advanced on London
Town
The
sea had flowed to the north up the Lea
Valley London
New
Concordia Wharf on Jacobs Creek and Joseph Conran’s huge Butlers Wharf
development, taking in the old brewery by Tower Bridge, had been surprised by
tidal flows twenty feet higher than the previous records, which reached high
over the puddle-clay skirts, which had kept the submerged basements of those
early Victorian masterpieces in baked bricks completely dry for nearly two
centuries. The ground floor apartments were soaked, the basements filled and
many of the occupants were forced to go out for lunch to expensive restaurants
– also as it happened - owned by Joseph Conran.
While on the north bank at the other end of Tower
Bridge , The City stood proud of the
first floods and, apart from the Traitor’s Gate in the Bloody Tower
But,
higher up the River Thames at the royal end of London, in the Boroughs where
the Royal Court had first settled in an uneasy truce with the wealthy and
fiercely independent City, at Westminster and along the Victoria Embankment, it
was the north bank that the North Sea had first breached, before it leaked
along the southern walk and into the National Theatre and the Royal Festival
Hall, swamping the electric drives of the Millennium Wheel and stranding people
who had been curious and brave enough to want to go up aloft in the Wheel’s
observation cars to view the scene of creeping and insidious devastation for
themselves. They were eventually rescued by Royal Engineers with back-up from
Royal Air Force helicopters. It was
estimated that more than seventy-thousand more homes, mostly in Pimlico,
Lambeth and Battersea had been flooded to a depth of up to four feet on their
ground floors – obliging residents to move up to the next floor.
Chapter Three – Elixir
From studies of 35,000 post-menopausal women in Iowa, 58,000
men and 62,000 women in the Netherlands and many other studies, drinking tea,
green tea and black tea, apart from being refreshing, is thought to protect
against cancer, arthritis, heart disease, high cholesterol, Crohn’s disease,
multiple sclerosis, malaria and sepsis. The English have been drinking tea for
350 years. The Chinese and Japanese have imbibed tea for two-thousand years. A
British economist in 1790 lamented that tea was replacing beer as the national
drink for the peasantry. “Take two lean hogs” he wrote, “and feed one on home
brewed barley beer and the other on tea. The beer fed hog will thrive and get
fat; the tea fed hog will wither and die.” He predicted that the fashion for
tea would bring the end of the British Empire .
Internet fragments 2001.
As
evening faded into night, Alice Hans Place
******************
AFTER GLOBAL WARMING.
By Noel Hodson. ISBN 1-4137-6870-9.
Buy from Kindle books Amazon.co.uk;
Amazon.com;
email noel@noelhodson.com.
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Chapter
1 - Cold Comfort
The last thing
Sebastian Huggins felt, immediately before he fell in love with the most
beautiful woman in the Universe, was very, very cold.
Cold because Concorde,
complete with its precious cargo of privileged New Years Eve revellers, landed
not at Heathrow on the First of January 2000 AD as planned but due to a freak
accident with a magnum of champagne and its metal bound cork, it landed in a
deep crevasse, a cavern of blue and white ice, in the unforgiving Polar Ice
Cap.
The valiantly
heroic efforts of the flight crew, from keen eyed, sun bronzed pilots through
to svelte, polite stewards, had slowed the supersonic flight, reassured the
passengers, levelled out the serene wings and sculpted belly and brought the
beautiful aircraft into the longest ice slide in history, shedding wings, tail
and wheels before plunging deep into the icy chasm, yawning unexpectedly at the
end of the impromptu runway. The shrieking
fuselage, the shock of the impact and the quick blast of a fuel tank exploding
brought tons of rocks, icy water and packed snow down on the plane in a
frenzied avalanche of steam and spray, which froze within minutes locking the
capsule and the passengers deep within the ice, where they disappeared from all
human knowledge; for a long, long time.
The Polar Ice
winced, crackled in hoary complaint at the invasion by the foolish, briefly
warm tube of mammals, then burped up a few spouts of residual steam before
grumbling back into a dark, timeless coma.
**********
Days passed, and
the intrepid, dogged searchers gave up their intrepid dogged searching and went
back to their own humdrum lives; shaking their anorak enveloped heads in
disbelief that something so large, so sophisticated and so expensive could
vanish so completely - complete with its payload of disgruntled movers and
shakers, who, had they had the facilities to instruct their lawyers from their
inconvenient new location, would have sued the airline for everything it owned;
right down to the last roasted, salted cashew nut.
Weeks passed and
the newspapers reduced the column size to two miserable inches, tucked away at
the bottom right hand corner of page five. Months passed and grieving relatives
held funerals and glorious memorial services before making a brisk businesslike
visit to the readings of the wills. After all - life must go on. Flowers were
dropped from helicopters onto the incommunicative ice, near where the tail had
been found, which was many, many miles from where the sleek body of that
supersonic aircraft now lay stilled, immobile for ever, and deathly
silent.
Years passed, while
the insurance companies resisted claims in the USA ,
Britain
A century passed,
and the insurance companies after carefully deducting a not unreasonable annual
management fee, paid up; on the grounds that they accepted the passengers had
not returned to their families, had not been discovered alive and well and
living in South America and were, on actuarial
statistical grounds alone, after one hundred years, in all probability, fully
dead. Sebastian Huggins, one of the
privileged passengers, was not dead however and was not aware of time passing,
but, though he mercifully did not know it, he was extremely cold. More centuries passed.
**************
Sebastian's first
feelings, as awareness returned, and before he fell in love, were dominated by
the most gigantic, excruciating, intrusive and overwhelming attack of pins and
needles any soul in torment ever had to suffer.
He whimpered with self-pity. He writhed with discomfort. He tingled with
distress. There was nowhere to put the afflicted limbs and divorce them from
himself until the attack subsided. He was the afflicted limb. It was all
pervasive. It was universal. It was the
whole of existence. And it was torture.
But he did feel
warmer. The miracle was that he felt at all.
Gradually the pins
melted into the needles and transformed into a deep hot pulse. Minute
electrical impulses flashed through billions of little grey cells that had been
in the OFF position; awareness gradually returned and peeked out timidly at the
brave new world they were about to experience.
Chapter 2 - Fat of the Land
From his very
foreign, deeply unsettling, but strangely comfortable magnetic-flotation bed, a
very large and, as he still believed, a seriously wealthy, American male of the
genus homo-sapiens, circa 1955, extended one of his ponderous arms and with his
heavy fingers bashed neurotically at the keyboard set into his bedside table to
summon another ten Big-Macs-with-Fries and a side Coke to add to the immense
pile of fast food that was rapidly filling his floor. Joseph Sigmund Hanson the
Third, President and owner of the $1.7 billion Buttermill Corporation, as he
still liked to believe, was upset and disoriented. And when he was upset he
needed to eat and to be reassured that he could continue to eat for as long as
it took to console him. In this crazy place, that did not use money, he had
been assured that the computerised hole in the wall would deliver any goods he
wanted be it food, clothes, jewellery, a car, a plane or an ocean going yacht
making him, in effect, as wealthy as he had ever been – but crucially, without
money.
There were many
unaccustomed and upsetting things that he currently chose to ignore but the
information, that he most urgently needed not to believe, was that this very
modern institution functioned without money, and that therefore he, the 140th
richest man in the world, as he desperately had to continue to believe, was no
richer (nor poorer) than any other citizen and that despite the loss of his
wealth, power and position in society he could still order anything he wanted,
and was therefore logically (he had a powerful urge to ram their damn logic up
their neat, corked up, athletic little fundaments) as wealthy as he had ever
been – and so was everybody else, he either had to reject, test to destruction
or risk a complete mental breakdown. He
had selected the second option, unconsciously linked it to his need for comfort
food, and was demanding burgers, chips and sweet beverages by the minute. So
far the computer had smoothly and quickly brought him everything he asked for.
The
instant and continuous response from the computer that, after some initial
confusion to sort out exactly what he wanted, was currently flooding his room
with delicious and high quality food, did nothing however to allay his huge
anxiety. As he punched the key-pad automatically and repetitively and as
sumptuous food soundlessly appeared in the panel at his every command, his
psyche writhed in un-assuaged torment as his universal paradigm, the very
essence of his identity and self-knowledge, soundly based on his unquestioned
assumptions about the permanence of capital, wealth and the American way of
life, crumbled around his faltering ego.
Another part of his unconscious mind
knew there was no need to keep on punching in the computer codes to instruct it
to deliver Big-Macs-with-fries. But he absolutely refused to enter into a
dialogue with the goddamn computer, because in his real world, in the
real world, computers could not hold chatty conversations with homo-sapiens
circa 1955 and he urgently needed, or his sanity needed, to hang on to that
fact.
Chapter
3 - The most beautiful woman in the World.
Sebastian opened
his eyes experimentally, subconsciously aware that an uncountable amount of
time had elapsed for which he had no memory.
He took in a high-tech, silvered room where he was lying on a gadget
festooned, high-tech bed. Tubes snaked
around him and stuck to various sensitive bits of him - but stopped at his
integument. Nothing pierced his skin. Nothing invaded his physical boundary,
yet somehow they brought vital fluids and soothing pharmacological balms which
washed him gently back to life. Sitting
by him, leaning over him and perilously close to him was the most beautiful
woman he had ever seen. Her delicate
face was radiant with warmth, interest and intelligence. Her interest was in
him; Sebastian was the recipient and subject of the most powerful personal
interest he had ever known. Even his mother, when available between social
events, had bottle-fed him at arms length, to avoid any infantile incidents or
leakage, usually watching television or reading Vogue Magazine; her attention not directed at the somewhat
wrinkly and compressed little fruit of her womb - an unfortunate child – as she
described him, with some maternal warmth and even pride, to her friends.
But the vision looking down at him now was
absorbed in his every breath, his slightest movement, the tone of his skin and
hair. Her own skin bloomed with health
and exuded subtle exquisite perfumes. Her hair swayed in the strong lights and
shone with a vigour only previously achieved in twentieth century advertising
studios. Her large grey eyes twinkled in the lights as they studied him with
wit, humour and compassion. The diamond in the centre of her forehead glowed
with inner life and glittered and scintillated with immeasurable value. She was
totally alert yet completely relaxed.
Her body was slim, athletic and strong.
Her breasts were perfectly formed and, to the excusable victim of what
Sebastian could safely assume would turn out, when full memory returned, to
have been a terrifying ordeal, they looked accessible and comforting to
touch. But he constrained himself,
gasped, and almost swooned back into unconsciousness.
Sebastian was lost
in her ambience. This was the only
moment in the entire adventure when he believed he was dead and in heaven. If he wasn't dead, he wanted desperately to
die for her. And he was dumbstruck. His
fascinatingly interesting lips fell open incontinently and he gasped a little
more. The vision spoke.
"Mr Huggins.
Are you with us? ...I'm Doctor Eloise Le Friac, your Unit Leader. Do not be
afraid. You've been asleep for five hundred years and you are now safe in my
care".
Sebastian Huggins
was not, in his professional life, a man of few words. In fact, as a serious
political journalist and economist he was a man of many words; friends might
say far too many words on far too many subjects, but his words failed him now
as he absorbed this altogether delicious message. Safe in her care fulfilled his every desire.
If he had been able to re-write the script, as he did with sweeping imagination
and little regard for accuracy in his memoirs, he would definitely not have
said what he is about to say. He would, had he rehearsed the moment, have
composed something quotable, as he later remembered he probably had, to mark
this historic and unique occasion. But his very real excuse for being less than
original was that his brain had just a few moments earlier been defrosted,
warmed to room temperature and drained of accumulated waste products after an
unremitting five hundred years in deep freeze.
"Where am
I?" he heard himself say with crashing and dramatically disappointing
predictability. The next completely embarrassing thing he did was to feel not
only the deepest, abiding, undying love for the angel bending over him but to
realise to his eternal shame that his genes had seized the opportunity to make
an early bid for their immortality. His genes stimulated his creative male
instincts; which were boldly, some would say nobly, rising to the challenge,
covered only by a thin if ultra-warm indestructible sheet. He rapidly bent his legs and made an all
encompassing tent. He went pink all over.
A stage whisper
intruded from over her head "How very intriguing. He's immediately
cathected with Eloise and would mate with her". Another voice came from
above "A marvellous example of the life-force asserting itself - in the
first few minutes. This is a most interesting project" it whispered
excitedly.
"Mr
Huggins". The vision leaned nearer
to him, when Health & Safety officers might have advised a rapid move in
the opposite direction. And she crooned softly and intimately in his burning
ear, "You're safe and well but we are intruding on your privacy. We will
withdraw and return when you are composed."
"No - don't
go." cried Sebastian, reaching out to catch her divine wrist, but to his
everlasting regret, his hand caught nothing. His hand went through her arm and
hit the metallic bedside, sending a cascade of delayed pins and needles coruscating
up his lonely arm.
"Mr Huggins.
I'm not present. We are communicating by enhanced 3-D laser projection. I
assure you I will return in ten minutes. In the meantime, be assured of your
absolute privacy." As she and her
chair dissolved, to his distress, before his eyes, she turned her exquisite
head on her exquisite neck and spoke to the ceiling "Computer - priority
need. Mr Sebastian Huggins, guest status
Angel Gabriel City
Precisely 5 minutes
and 46 seconds later a panel of warm, metallic looking material sighed gently
open in the wall nearest his bed and a twenty-sixth century jump suit complete
with undergarments, exactly tailored to Sebastian's measurements, appeared as a
soothing computer voice murmured "Your clothes Mr Huggins", before
discretely switching itself off.
Dressed and more in
command of himself, Sebastian creaked around the room on muscles, bones and
sinews which had not moved for half a millennium. He reflected that he was born
into a new world, with nothing. He was naked, or just had been, penniless and
alone. And he didn't have his spectacles. On further reflection he felt fine.
In fact he felt great and he felt famous - which indeed he was. As the
Rip-Van-Winkle of this brave new world he had become, without the least effort
on his part, a celebrity. His economist
mind triggered daydreams of the chat-show fees he would command, of the
royalties from his best selling book, of the speaking engagements he would tour
- at ever increasing fees. The film of the book, or perhaps the book of the
film would earn a fortune - and he was deeply in love. Plummeting in an
air-crash and freezing nearly to death wasn't all bad, he mused - if you were
rescued by an angel. As this thought flitted through his mind he glanced out of
the window and buckled at the knees as terrifying vertigo struck him to the
floor.
Hanging onto the
window-sill for dear life and trembling uncontrollably, Sebastian levered
himself up, parked his nose on the sill and peered out cautiously. It was not
just the towering height of the building that made him reel; he could see down
twenty, thirty, forty stories and he could sense the building carrying on
upwards and upwards above his head; but he'd been in tall buildings before; it
was the indisputable fact that where the building stopped, where the ground
floor clearly was, there was no ground to rest that floor upon. The ground, which his unnerved stomach and
absented courage suddenly yearned for, was a long, long way below the ground
floor. So far below as to be hazy and
indistinct and, even as he managed to force his timorous gaze down and down to
focus on it - it wasn’t even ground - it was water. If anyone were to walk out at ground floor
level they would simply drop a long, long way, - down - accelerating at fifteen
feet per second per second until the physical laws of air resistance forbade
any greater speed and the ground, or rather the water, was inevitably,
conclusively, finally and fatally reached.
His very recent,
last memory of plummeting downwards in an out of control Concorde as the
unyielding icy surface of the North Pole rushed up to meet him had, he felt,
sensitised him to vertigo. He felt no shame in this newly acquired phobia to
add to his collection. After plunging five miles in Concorde and being frozen
for five hundred years he thought he was entitled to vertigo - and he probably
would also avoid having ice in his drinks for a long time.
As Sebastian
clutched the window sill and tried to implant his feet into the floor to assure
himself of grip and stability, the 26th century door to his room flew open with
a resounding whoosh; admitting a figure, wreathed in billowing white and in
full and determined flight which unnerved Sebastian almost more than had his
discovery of the absence of sensible foundations for the building.
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