“Urinate directly onto the paddle,” it said.

How completely ridiculous!  She didn’t have the . . . directional control.  Who came up with the idea of a pregnancy test designed by men?  Surely even the most basic market research would reveal that nearly all the customers were likely to be women.
 
Two minutes later Sally had her answer.  Unfortunately it arrived in a package deal with a whole bunch of questions, none of which she was equipped to deal with.  Nor were these the everyday ordinary questions which her friends had sometimes had in the same circumstances.  “Who’s the father?” was not something that was in any doubt.  Will it be a boy or a girl?  Sally could only say that she hoped so.

None of her friends had ever had to ask themselves “what species will this baby be?”   Half human, she supposed.  But that too raised more questions than it answered.  What were the medical implications?  And, down the line, the legal implications?

It was Sally’s mother, ever the practical one, who asked the most basic question.  How long is the pregnancy likely to last?  That was another conundrum that she was not likely to resolve very quickly.

No doubt, some time in the future, all these questions would be routine.  There would be doctors of exo-biological medicine.  Probably even exo-obstetricians.   As far as she knew, Earth’s top expert on aliens was, well, Sally.  There had been other reports, of course.  Close encounters of the Fourth, Fifth, and even Sixth Kind.  But, frankly, Sally had never believed in them.  The people claiming Sixth Kind had always seemed to be rather sad and lonely individuals who couldn’t get laid by Earth girls and invented alien girlfriends instead.  And anyway, the pregnancy test showed that Sally’s encounter had just jumped from the Sixth to the Seventh Kind.

With a rather resigned air, Sally made an appointment to see her GP.  Perhaps she could discuss with him a referral to some sort of specialist.  But her mother suggested this was most likely to get her referred to the department of psychiatry at Barts, and Sally could hardly disagree.  Perhaps the best thing was to stay quiet.  If routine scans started to show up inexplicable features she could mention the fact that her child was only half human then.  If everything proceeded as normal, then probably no-one needed to know anyway.

But it was time for her to depart for school.  She was teaching maths to class 4C at nine o’clock.  Then she had PE with the first years, and had promised to show them some martial arts.  “I’ll be late home tonight, Mum,” she called as she dashed to the door, “I’m coaching the gymnastics team after school”.

For obvious reasons, it was rather difficult to concentrate on her day job.  Sifu had always taught her to be focussed while doing “the form” – the carefully choreographed series of 37 postures that comprised her favourite style of Tai Chi.  But, Sifu be blowed.  He had never been pregnant, and most definitely not by a mysterious alien whom she was not expecting to see again. 

Jeremy Black suffered from amnesia.  At least, that’s what the doctors would probably call it.  Jeremy liked to think that he had a fast-forward button somewhere in his head.  It was something he had discovered at the age of seven when he got into a fight at school.  It was by no means his first fight.  In fact, whenever there was a scrap on, Jeremy liked to be there.  He liked to think that he was quite good at fighting.  He certainly won more often than he lost.  So, in and of itself, a fight was no big deal.

But this fight was rather memorable.  It was the first and only time he had had a fight with a girl.  Since she was two years younger than he was, the fact that she completely thrashed him was more than a little embarrassing.  He was rather expecting that when he went to school the next day he would be teased mercilessly.  However, the next day everyone seemed to have forgotten the whole experience.  That was not the oddest thing.  Jeremy and his school friends all seemed to be several inches taller and now they were in Mrs Taylor’s class not Pig William’s.  When you add to that the fact that it was now mid-winter when it had been July the previous day it is easy to see why Jeremy found the whole thing rather confusing.  One day he had been seven; the day after he was nine.  Fast-forward.

It was now three years on from that rather disconcerting day, and Jeremy was sixteen.  There had been three more ‘jumps’ in his life, and each had fast-forwarded things by a few months to two years.

Jeremy’s second jump had been induced by tragedy.  It was the day his father died.  He had gone to bed crying and when he was still crying the following day, his mother couldn’t understand why.  When he had said it was because of Dad, she had come over all teary and said that it was so sweet that he still got upset thinking about his father.  That was when Jeremy knew it had happened again.

The best jump was the shortest.  He managed to compress the time between his birthday and Christmas to just two days by falling off his new bike.

By the time of his fourth jump it shouldn’t have been so surprising, but it was.  It was the first time he saw his new PE teacher, Miss Sally Jenks.  To be strictly accurate, it was a few hours later, and took place in the bathroom at home.   It had accelerated him from the age of 13 to 15, almost a year ago now.  In the intervening time, he had apparently joined Miss Jenks’s after school club, and even acquired some real skill at gymnastics.  Gym club had become the highlight of his week.

As far as Jeremy could tell, humiliation, grief, pain and, well, lust, all seemed to be able to press the fast-forward button.

Niall Jefferies was a professor of exo-biology at City University with a series of peer-reviewed papers to his credit.  At least, that is what he told girls in bars.  In fact, he was a junior lecturer in bio-chemistry with a simply staggering collection of science fiction books and the Dr Who theme tune as the ring tone on his phone.  He was working on his first genuinely peer-reviewed paper, and it had nothing to do with anything remotely extra-terrestrial.  His articles on that subject were wholly speculative and had been published only in Fortean Times.   Niall, was, however, determined to become the world’s first professor of exo-biology.   The challenges associated with this task were considerable.  The first principle of science is observation, and with nothing to observe Niall was finding that problematic.

His first task was to familiarise himself with the way life adapts to unusual environments, such as the high pressure of the deep oceans.  That was something he could study.  He could correlate that with the growing body of knowledge that astronomers were gaining about conditions on other planets.    When he had published a handful of genuinely scholarly papers Niall was planning a wholly speculative book.  This would enable him to set up a speaking tour and, well, should earn him rather more than the university was willing to pay.  This was the plan – or at least it was stage one of the plan.  For stage two he needed to keep publishing the occasional scholarly paper.  He wanted to keep calling himself an academic so that when, one day, extra-terrestrial life was finally discovered he would be the expert to whom everyone would turn.  It was a matter of carefully balancing his academic and popular science careers.  Ultimately, it would give him the opportunity to make the most important scientific discoveries of all time.

Unfortunately, the plan kept getting interrupted.  The university expected him to deliver lectures to spotty 18 year olds, which was not his idea of serious scientific research.  When he mentioned this to his head of department the response had been guffaws of laughter, and a sputtered response about Fortean Times – which even Niall had to concede was not considered the most respectable of academic journals. 

As a prospective professor of exo-biology, it was rather disappointing to Niall that he could not afford to buy his own house.   Of course, house prices in Islington are horrendous.   Presumably the fees from speaking tours would change many of the equations – though books themselves seemed to pay very little to people not named Grisham or Rowling.  For the moment Niall was obliged to share a house with his sister, a newly qualified gynecologist.  But Niall had faith that his carefully planned career would make him the world’s greatest expert on extra-terrestrial life forms just in time for some matter to be discovered for his subject.

Part Two of our Story by Five Authors will be continued by Jennifer Oravetz.