The Soul Shadow and Other Tales of Tomorrow

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  Klein

  Klein, a three-eyed being with six legs, the pride of Planet Zeros, was pushed on his platform to the edge of the film set. Built from the most durable new material available, he teetered slightly, his long head swaying in the sun while his three eyes gazed in different directions.

  "What is it?" demanded Tom Stacey, a production assistant who had just joined the set of Journey into Oblivion, an epic being shot on a shoe string.

  "It's called Klein and needs checking three times a day," replied Frank Perry, Stacey's colleague.

  "Yes, but what IS it?" Stacey persisted, as one of the three yellow eyes swivelled towards him.

  "God knows!"

  As though offended Klein slowly lifted and shook a serrated leg.

  "Gives me the creeps," admitted Stacey, although aware that on the other side of the trolley another assistant was merely testing for flexibility.

  Klein's surface was covered with scales comprised of sliding plates and was the colour of mud-soaked leather. His nostrils beneath the three eyes, were prominently dilated, his mouth ringed with sharp teeth.

  He was the indulgence of director Peter Petti, who for ten years had lived with his vision of Zeros, a planet outside the Solar System, with unique properties including resources that were indefinitely renewable.

  In his film, Zeros was threatened by those planets that had squandered their own resources and Klein was bred as a defender that, once provided with a mate, the inhabitants of Zeros hoped would proliferate.

  Meanwhile, the ready-made Klein, presenting a permanent leer, waited awkwardly in a wooden stall near the set. As preparations for filming proceeded, Petti inspected Klein constantly, compelled to scrutinise every joint and interlinked plate. He began to talk to the creature, discussing his plans and what Klein would be called upon to do. Once Petti thought he gave a twitch, as though in comprehension, but it was probably no more than a joint undergoing natural expansion.

  When the crew had gone and the shadows crept cautiously into his stall, Klein sighed, ground his teeth and looked with his three eyes for some means of escape.

  Filming was about to start. Stacey and Perry helped move Klein into the sunshine and onto a lorry. They headed for a suburban wasteland, which Petti perceived as the bountiful Planet Zeros. Weeds willingly regenerated, the ground was littered with glass, plastic, metal; glinting in distant shots like a trove of rich resources.

  Klein, lifted carefully from his trolley and placed on his six legs on a low rise, swivelled his yellow eyes in disdain, missing not a shard of shattered glass. Stacey, standing near, thought he heard a low groan.

  Petti fussed over the creature's joints and posture, working out ways to secure his independent movement. He felt Klein flinch as he touched a mud-coloured plate, believing for a moment the movement was an animal response.

  The crew moved to complete a shot on the far side of the site, marshalling disorderly extras with gleaming gold suits and bald heads. Klein sniffed, inhaling the urban air and slowly lifted his thick, segmented tail, so it curved a few inches from the ground. A clutter of other wheelable properties ground to and fro, fulfilling Petti's ideal of a powerful planet, mobilising against the intrusion of squanderers.

  He might be the dictator, overseeing artistic moves and dramatic developments but in essence, he was realising a fantasy of personal power.

  Klein followed Petti with his sour yellow eyes, grasping the man's role of manipulator. Had he been in politics he would have been a dangerous dreamer.

  When Petti and the crew returned to activate Klein for the first scene, they found the trolley abandoned. They searched every inch of the site, scouring the backs of dumps and derelict sheds that, while shooting, Petti had kept carefully out of sight. Klein had vanished.

  Petti, hardly believing his ears, called, "Klein, Klein!" His colleagues looked alarmed. He bit his tongue, then from the street beyond the wasteland, came a high-pitched wail, followed by a woman's scream.

  The crew ran towards it, scattering equipment. Half way down a busy shopping lane, jammed with cars and people running at random, was Klein, rolling along on his six thick legs, swinging his long head and frenziedly focusing his three eyes in different directions. He thumped his prehensile tail and two of his sliding plates dropped off. He wailed again and blundered into a stray pedestrian.

  "It's the mechanism, it's started by itself," said Dick Cummings, who knew most about the way Klein worked. Petti halted, white-faced, not knowing what to believe.

  The crew spread out to corner Klein. Through a loud hailer, Petti suggested everyone left the street instantly. The last pedestrians scurried away. But Klein pushed his head through the plate glass of a hardware store and, alarmed at the noise, bared his teeth, swerved to the left and rolled off rapidly across the road. He disappeared up a side street, thrashing parked cars with his long tail.

  His pursuers could not keep pace, as he discovered the potential of his six legs which were soon bearing him along at high speed. More plates dropped off his back with a clatter.

  Petti gathered them as he ran ahead of the crew, but soon Klein had gained the corner of the wide road leading to the zoo. He wailed as he smelt and heard other animals and now, almost without scales, his underbody gleaming grey in the early morning sun, he hurried through the gates.

  Five minutes later the crew caught up, in time to see Klein rolling towards the monkey house, drawn by the chattering of the chimps. He knocked over two keepers and charged into the compound where a tea party was underway, scattering tables and terrorising the chimps who scrambled up the nearby netting.

  A keeper, struggling to his feet, ran for a gun, but Petti restrained him. "He's harmless," he insisted.

  "He's only nuts, bolts and pliatherme," Cummings confirmed, but was no longer sure. Then, as the chimps clung to the netting and teacups rolled over the hard ground, Klein's head drooped, his eyes glazed and closed. One by one his legs crumpled and he collapsed, the remaining scales slid off, his tail lay lifelessly.

  Petti approached him with care and gently prodded his wrinkled neck. No response.

  "He's dead," he announced.

  The zoo's vet arrived, mystified. Klein shuddered and the vet bent to examine him. "No doubt about it," he stated. "Rigor mortis!"

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