When my brother and me were kids, about that age right before you make the move to teenager, my brother wanted to be a science fiction writer. He loved Star Trek and stuff like that. He even had this big book, like a volume, you might say, that had inside all these blue prints of every ship in the Federation fleet or whatever they called it. It even included the enemy ships, the Klingons and Ramulans blah, blah.
Someone, somewhere actually sat down and drew up these blue prints with all the little details as if these things actually existed. Crazy. More crazy was someone else, somewhere else had the idea they would get it published on account they figured there were enough geeks in the universe that would shell out money for a book just like this. And they were right, at least one person that I knew shelled out.
That "They Were Right" party might have been a relative of mine. Our dad had this first cousin, which made him our second cousin, I think, or some cousin once removed or something like that. He was older than us so he was more of an uncle, the cool type, with no kids and a fast car. This relative worked at a big publishing company and every now and then he would send us a box full of free books his company printed. I didn't read so I didn't give a fuck but my brother went ape over the science fiction paperbacks. I have to admit, these books had really cool pictures on the front: lasers, aliens, space ships, astronauts with their faces melting off, that kind of junk. It really made a person want to pick them up and read what was inside but I never did, read the inside.
My brother told me his idea for this one science fiction story of his own. These aliens invade Earth but instead of landing spaceships and killing everybody with radiation or stuff like that these aliens turned themselves into microscopic parasites and invaded the human host, his words, not mine, and once inside the human brain, the aliens could make the humans do whatever the aliens wanted, like make the humans destroy themselves without the aliens lifting a finger. My brother was working this into a bigger story that would explain the second world war, as in the real reason for the war was that aliens infected Hitler and the Russian guy and made them start fighting and destroying the human race.
My brother had a big imagination but he was lazy and I don't know if he actually wrote any of it down and before too long he made the move to teenager, being older than me and always doing things first, and he got interested in cars so he started reading car and girlie magazines instead of sci-fi paperbacks.
He told me about another idea he had, too. It was about some guy in some kind of future city where everything was crowded and polluted but on another planet in another universe, I guess, maybe. It sounded to me more like a horror story than science fiction and it gave me creeps then and sometimes even now all these years later when the moon gets that look on his face like he knows something bad is about to happen but can't look away and your little hairs stand up.
The story was called "Method of Acquisition" and it went like this....
John Truelove 