Good afternoon! Allow me to introduce myself – my name is Merlin – Merlin Silk – and I was born and raised in Germany, at that time called West Germany.
At the young age of fifteen or sixteen, I somehow got my hands on a colorful booklet with a big title “Perry Rhodan” across the top. These sixty-page novellas were considered ‘Schundliteratur’ (trash literature) and the publishing format was called ‘Groschenheft’ (dime booklet or pulp magazine) and my parents did not condone reading such trash.
I did it anyways, just kept it mostly to myself.
These Perry Rhodan booklets were serialized novels that put the reader in the far future of the 2400s. The Perries, as we—I had one other classmate who also read them–-usually referred to the booklets, had started in 1961 with a weekly publishing cycle and had reached booklet 300+ at the time of my first encounter. “When I met Perry, the publisher was also selling a second edition, that had by then reached 80s booklets, playing in the 2040s.”
Now imagine, you dive into a world of wonder and mystery—and you have no idea how it all started. Fortunately, my encounter with Perry had been well-timed, as around that time, the publisher had started to sell the booklets starting with number one all over again.
This is how I found out how Perry Rhodan, an American astronaut, in 1972 (eleven years in the future from the publishing of this story), was the first human to reach the moon. He, and his companions, found a stranded and damaged spaceship belonging to an alien race, unified mankind, and started us on the way to reach the stars.
One of the most fascinating facets of these stories were the mutants—good mutants, mind you, not those with three legs and four eyes. A mutant with the special talent of mind-reading was called a telepath, or a teleporter who had the power to move himself instantly from place to place with just his mind.
How it all started
The one that fascinated me most was Ernst Ellert. He was a teletemporarier. He could leave his body and travel in space and time.
That wasn’t too unrealistic, right? So I started to practice because, “Why shouldn’t I be able to do what Ernst could?”
So, every night, after going to bed, I relaxed my body, cleared my mind, and attempted to leave my body. I could feel it a bit below me, slowly increasing the distance, until I perceived my body lying beneath me. It was not a particularly stable location – one wrong thought and I snapped back into my body, with my center of perception right behind my eyes.
But I did not give up!
Practice makes perfect, they say – so I practiced and practiced, widening the distance from me, my center of perception, further and further away from my body. After initially just moving upward out of my body, I then proceeded laterally, out through the door, down the hallway, and into the kitchen.
But there was always that little nasty thought that caused me to snap back into my body, with the center of perception again right behind my physical eyes.
Really hard to overcome!
It became more manageable once I stopped beating myself up about it. I just let the snap happen, did not judge myself for it, and went right back to where I had been, or, at least, moved along the same path back to where the snap had happened.
The next milestone I reached was the ability to feel myself flying, with the full perception of flying in three-dimensional space, combined with the sensation of rolling, pitching, and jawing – including the occasional loop.
I liked those loops and tight turns.
Still, these moments of full perception of the “Me”—“Myself” or “I”? — doing these maneuvers remained short, often interrupted by a quick visit at the location right behind my physical eyes.
Fortunately, getting back to the point from where I had snapped back, became faster as well, so not much time was lost – and who cares about time if you can travel through it, as was still my goal.
Ernst Ellert could do it!
No, really — the fact that he was a character from a pulp magazine, invented by K.H. Scheer and Clark Darlton, made no difference. Fortunately, I was young enough so that things did not need to make sense.
If these lines you are reading here would be your run-of-the-mill story, then it would now continue with me telling you how I got older, went to college, got a job in science but still continued reading my ‘Perries’—generally just growing up—becoming a proper adult.
But this is not what happened!
Instead, I noticed that my out-of-body ventures did not really need time—I could make a trip to the moon, maybe swing around the sun for good measure, and be back in my body the moment I left.
Unfortunately, the experiences outside faded from consciousness rather quickly after I took my place behind my physical eyes again, just as if it had been a dream.
To the oblivious observer, it appeared as if I indeed did all the standard ‘growing-up’ – including going to college and getting my degree in physics. Most of the time, I myself, was such an oblivious observer.
Fortunately, once I went out onto an excursion, all the info on what happened on earlier trips and what the combo of me and my body had been up to since the previous adventure, was readily available. Once I was back from a trip the impressions of that trip faded quickly like a dream and my so-called regular life was not affected – except for some little things, but more about that later.
I liked it that way – the combination of me and my body needed the oblivion to function properly, but now that this combo is aging fast and is on its last leg, something has to change.
One idea was to write this story, that may or not be fiction.
Laying the Foundation
When I had started to zoom around with no regard for any physical laws, it was just pure fun, but I soon realized that this whole world was not based on a firm foundation – two German writers had invented a character that now allowed me to jilt physics.
Something had to be done about that.
To my dismay, interaction with the so-called real world was difficult when free of my body, to say the least. I could easily receive a stream of information, but causing an effect in the outer world seemed impossible. Even moving the smallest piece of matter was futile.
I got the idea that this way the world protected itself from the butterfly effect.
But wait, if I could roam free of physical restrictions, why should not somebody else – everybody in fact – be able to do the same?
So, like a creep, I started to hang out around K.H. Scheer and Walter Ernsting, trying to catch one or both just between falling asleep and drifting into dreamland. I pretended to be that Ernst Ellert that I needed them to create for me, to become my idol.
And then one afternoon, after he and Canon-Herbert had a long phone conversation about the upcoming Perry Rhodan story line, I caught him when he was just dozing off.
“Hey, it’s Ernst – Ernst Ellert!”
“I just thought about you and how I would create you. What are you doing in my dream?”
“No, no, this is real, not a dream. I just wanted to get in touch to make sure, you bring me into this world properly, with all the necessary abilities.”
“Ha, that’s funny, are you trying to create a time loop that will last forever – that’s actually an idea I could have had on my own – – in fact, I think I did. But, you know, Herbert wants you to die soon because these all-knowing characters will kill a story.”
“True,” I said, “just like nobody likes those deus ex machina endings of a story – they are just witnesses of the author’s inability to develop a logically consistent idea. This will be different, though. In a few decades, science will come up with theories of parallel universes that are continuously spawned whenever a decision is made. I can see ALL those possible futures, so anything just far enough ahead will be indistinguishable from not knowing the future at all.”
“Some might be more likely than others,” I continued, “but there is no danger of me, as an omniscient man, killing the story. And I like the idea of dying soon—but only physically. This would create more options for how I will still survive and have my adventures.”
“Good point! But, please, now I am going to sleep. I have a long evening of work before me, and I need my beauty-sleep.”
“Sure, go ahead. I just stopped by to make sure my existence is assured. Sweet dreams now!” I concluded.
He, very quickly, left the state between awake and dreaming and was off to Lala Land, where he hopefully came up with some good ideas for Ernst Ellert’s adventures.
My job here was done! I could be sure that Ernst Ellert would be there for me to learn from in six to seven years.
Mars Base
All my practice moving me—the essence of me—out of my body, made progress, but that progress was slow, too slow for me at least. After all, I was in my teens and had not yet had my class in patience.
I started to look for a shortcut, something that would enable me to be out of my body and pursue other challenges.
Mars had always had an unusual attraction for me. I roamed the surface one night after my body had gone to sleep and came upon a deep canyon that reminded me a bit of images I had seen of the Grand Canyon here on earth.
To be continued…