Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds
Page 22
He never told me he was from another world:
I never told him I was from his future.
Homecoming
His hometown was space, and he never left:
The boy who watched the Russian beeper drift
through the twilight is the old man who camped
outside the Cape to watch huge dumbos lift
their loads of metal, oxygen, water…
Living in the back of an ancient Ford,
showing children, at night, the starry sky
through a telescope his young hands had built,
seventy years before.
He died the week before
they came back from Mars. But every story
ends the same way. Some extra irony
for the Space Junky. His life had twists, turns,
wives, deaths, jail, a rock. One story that he loved:
The time he gave the army back exactly
what the army gave to him. “Bend over,
Westmoreland,” he’d shout in his cracky voice,
and only other oldsters would get it.
In college in Florida, just because
he could watch the rockets; the Geminis
the Apollos—roaring, flaring, straining
around the Moon…
but then he was drafted.
Sent to ’Nam months after Tet. Bad timing
more ways than one. The fighting was awful,
the worst yet—but worse than that, the timing!
The year! When men first stepped down on the Moon
he was not going to be on his belly
in the jungle. He was going to be there.
The Space Junky was a poker player
without peer. Saved his somewhat porky ass,
this skill, just knowing when to push your cards,
and when to pass—the others always stayed
in every hand; it was like harvesting
dandelions. Almost embarrassing,
the way the money piled up—play money,
“Military Payment Certificates,”
but a shylock in Saigon would give you
five for six, in crisp hundred-dollar bills.
Kept them in a Baggie in his flak vest,
those C-notes, until he came up for “Rest
and Recreation,” a euphemism,
trading the jungle for a whore’s soft bed
for a week. He went to Bangkok, where girls
were lined up on the tarmac as you left
the plane. He chose a fat and kindly one,
and explained what it was he had in mind.
She took him home for two bills, made some calls.
Gave him a rapid bit of sixty-nine
(not in the deal), and put him in a cab.
A man with a printing press signed him up
in the Canadian Merchant Marine.
Seven seasick weeks later he jumped ship
in San Francisco, and made his way down
to Florida, in July of sixty-nine,
to stand with a million others and cheer
the flame and roar, the boom that finally broke
the sullen surly bonds of gravity.
And then in a bar in Cape Kennedy,
a large silent crowd held its beery breath,
watching a flickering screen, where craters
swelled and bobbed and disappeared in sprayed dust,
and Armstrong said “The Eagle has landed,”
(put that in your pipe and smoke it, Westy!)
and it was tears and back-slaps and free drinks,
but the next day the Space Junky was where
he’d be for the next seven years, the night
sky hidden by layers of federal
penitentiary.
But iron bars do not
a prison make to a man whose mind is
elsewhere. He was just a little crazy
when he went in—and when he came out
he was the Space Junky, and not much else.
He never missed a launch. When the Shuttle
first flew, he pushed that old Ford from the Cape
to California, to watch a space ship—
a real space ship—come in for a landing.
He watched the silent robot probes go by
every planet save one (well, you can’t have
everything), and an asteroid, comets,
countless rings and moons.
In the winter cold
he watched ill fated Challenger explode.
Less surprised than most, shook his head, dry-eyed;
he cried years later when it flew again.
The Space Junky saw them lift the Station
piece by piece; saw us go back to the Moon,
from the back of a succession of Ford
station wagons, always old and beat up.
He made enough with cards to get along;
lived pretty well, cooking off a Coleman,
sipping cola, waiting for the next launch.
After some years, they all knew who he was,
engineers, P.I. men, the astronauts
themselves. It was a Russian cosmonaut
who bent over the rusty sands of Mars,
and picked up a pebble for the Space Junky.
They were all sad to find he hadn’t lived.
They put the rock in a box with his ashes.
They put the box in low orbit, falling.
It went around the Earth just seven times,
and sketched one bright line in the starry sky
that was his hometown
where he’d not been born
and where he never visited, alive,
but never left.
Time Lapse
At first a pink whirl
there on the white square:
the girl too small to stay still.
After a few years, though
(less than a minute),
her feet stay in the same place.
Her pink body vibrates with undiscipline;
her hair a blond fog. She grows now
perceptibly. Watch…she’s seven,
eight, nine: one year each twelve seconds.
Always, now, in the audience,
a man clears his throat.
Always, a man.
Almost every morning
for almost eighteen years,
she came to the small white room,
put her bare feet on the cold floor,
on the pencilled H’s,
and stood with her hands palms out
while her father took four pictures:
both profiles, front, rear.
It was their secret. Something
they did for Mommy in heaven,
a record of the daughter
she never lived to see.
By the time she left (rage and something
else driving her to the arms of a woman)
he had over twenty thousand
eight-by-ten glossy prints of her
growing up, locked in white boxes.
He sought out a man with a laser
who some called an artist
(some called a poseur),
with a few quartets of pictures,
various ages: baby, child, woman.
He saw the possibilities.
He paid the price.
It took a dozen Kelly Girls
thirty working hours apiece
to turn those files of pretty pictures
into digits. The artist,
or showman,
fed the digits into his machines,
and out came a square
of white where
in more than three dimensions
a baby girl
grows into a woman
in less than four minutes.
Always a man clears his throat.
The small breasts bud
and swell in seconds. Secret
places grow blond stubble, silk;
> each second a spot of blood.
Her stance changes
as hips push out
and suddenly
she puts her hands on her hips.
For the last four seconds,
four months;
a gesture of defiance.
The second time you see her
(no one watches only once),
concentrate on her expression.
The child’s ambiguous flicker
becomes uneasy smile,
trembling thirty times a second.
The eyes, a blur at first,
stare fixedly
in obedience
and then
(as the smile hardens)
the last four seconds,
four months:
a glare of rage
All unwilling,
she became the most famous
face and figure of her age.
Everywhere stares.
As if Mona Lisa, shawled,
had walked into the Seven/Eleven…
No wonder she killed her father.
The judge was sympathetic.
The jury wept for her.
They studied the evidence
from every conceivable angle:
Not guilty,
by reason of insanity.
So now she spends her days
listening quietly, staring
while earnest people talk,
trying to help her grow.
But every night she starts to scream
and has to be restrained, sedated,
before she’ll let them take her back
to rest
in her small white room.
Editor’s Acknowledgments
Our assistant editor was Tim Szczesuil. Boris Friedberg provided valuable assistance with scanning the manuscripts. Our proofreaders were Ann Broomhead, Gay Ellen Dennett, Lisa Hertel, Mark Hertel, Merle Insinga, Rick Katze, Ken Knabbe, Tony Lewis, Rich Maynard, and Sharon Sbarsky. As usual, our final proofreader and copyeditor was the irreplaceable George Flynn. Our contract negotiator was Peggy Thokar. Critical technical assistance and advice were provided by Jim Mann and Mark Olson. Special thanks go to Gay Ellen Dennett for her support and Merle Insinga for her encouragement.
Aron Insinga, Editor
Nashua, NH
December 7, 1992
A Biography of Joe Haldeman
Joe Haldeman is a renowned American science fiction author whose works are heavily influenced by his experiences serving in the Vietnam War and his subsequent readjustment to civilian life.
Haldeman was born on June 9, 1943, to Jack and Lorena Haldeman. His older brother was author Jack C. Haldeman II. Though born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Haldeman spent most of his youth in Anchorage, Alaska, and Bethesda, Maryland. He had a contented childhood, with a caring but distant father and a mother who devoted all her time and energy to both sons.
As a child, Haldeman was what might now be called a geek, happy at home with a pile of books and a jug of lemonade, earning money by telling stories and doing science experiments for the neighborhood kids. By the time he entered his teens, he had worked his way through numerous college books on chemistry and astronomy and had skimmed through the entire encyclopedia. He also owned a small reflecting telescope and spent most clear nights studying the stars and planets.
Fascinated by space, the young Haldeman wanted to be a “spaceman”—the term astronaut had not yet been coined—and carried this passion with him to the University of Maryland, from which he graduated in 1967 with a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy. By this time the United States was in the middle of the Vietnam War, and Haldeman was immediately drafted.
He spent one year in Vietnam as a combat engineer and earned a Purple Heart for severe wounds. Upon his return to the United States in 1969, during the thirty-day “compassionate leave” given to returning soldiers, Haldeman typed up his first two stories, written during a creative writing class in his last year of college, and sent them out to magazines. They both sold within weeks, and the second story was eventually adapted for an episode of The Twilight Zone. At this point, though, Haldeman was accepted into a graduate program in computer science at the University of Maryland. He spent one semester in school. He was also invited to attend the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference—a rare honor for a novice writer.
In September of the same year, Haldeman wrote an outline and two chapters of War Year, a novel that would be based on the letters he had sent to his wife, Gay, from Vietnam. Two weeks later he had a major publishing contract. Mathematics was out of the picture for the near future.
Haldeman enrolled in the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with luminary figures such as Vance Bourjaily, Raymond Carver, and Stanley Elkin, graduating in 1975 with a master of fine arts degree in creative writing. His most famous novel, The Forever War (1974), began as his MFA thesis and won him his first Hugo and Nebula Awards, as well as the Locus and Ditmar Awards.
Haldeman was now at his most productive, working on several projects at once. Arguably his largest-scale undertaking was the Worlds trilogy, consisting of Worlds (1981), Worlds Apart (1983), and Worlds Enough and Time (1992). Immediately before releasing the series’ last installment, however, Haldeman published his renowned novel The Hemingway Hoax (1990), which dealt with the experiences of combat soldiers in Vietnam. The novella version of the book won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, a feat that Haldeman repeated with the publication of his next novel, Forever Peace (1997), which also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
In 1983 Haldeman accepted an adjunct professorship in the writing program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught every fall semester, preferring to be a full-time writer for the remainder of the year. While at MIT he wrote Forever Free, the final book in his now-famous Forever War trilogy.
Haldeman has since written or edited more than a half-dozen books, with a second succession of titles being published in the early 2000s, including The Coming (2000), Guardian (2002), Camouflage (2004)—for which he won his fourth Nebula—and The Old Twentieth (2005). He also released the Marsbound trilogy, publishing the namesake title in 2008 and quickly following it with Starbound (2010) and Earthbound (2011).
A lifetime member and past president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Haldeman was selected as its Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for 2010. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012.
After publishing his novel Work Done for Hire and retiring from MIT in 2014, Haldeman now lives in Gainesville, Florida, and plans to continue writing a novel every couple of years.
The author and his brother, Jack, around the year 1948. The image is captioned “Stick ’em up or I’ll shoot. Woy Wogers and the Long Ranger.”
Haldeman in third grade, the year he discovered science fiction.
Haldeman’s mother, Lorena, and a bear cub in Alaska around the year 1950.
Joe and Gay Haldeman on their wedding day, August 21, 1965.
The author, with a cigarette, a beer, and a book, waits for a helicopter to arrive on the tarmac in Vietnam, July 1968.
A pamphlet with details on how to handle prisoners of war. Haldeman carried this with him in Vietnam.
The author in Vietnam, examining bullet holes on a US Army vehicle.
Haldeman and the actor Jimmy Stewart in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, 1968.
The author in Vietnam with a book and sandbags.
Joe and Gay Haldeman with their friend, prominent science fiction personality Rusty Hevelin (at right) in Alaska, 1993.
The author with his Questar telescope in 2004.
Janis Ian, Joe Haldeman, and Anne McCaffrey at the 2005 Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards weekend.
Honoring tradition, Haldeman wears the infamous tiara after winning the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for his novel Camouflage.
Celebrated science fiction auth
or Harry Harrison (at left) and Haldeman dressed as pirates during the 2005 World Fantasy Convention in England.
Joe and Gay Haldeman enjoying the Valley of the Kings in Egypt during a trip to see a total solar eclipse in 2006.
The author outside St. Augustine, Florida, on the first day of a cross-country bicycle trip with his wife in February 2013.
The author’s Hugo and Nebula Awards.
Joe and Gay Haldeman, 2013.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This collection includes works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“Passages” appeared in the March 1990 Analog. Copyright © 1990 by Joe Haldeman.
“A !Tangled Web” appeared in the 14 December 1981 Analog. Copyright © 1981 by Joe Haldeman.
“Seasons” appeared in Alien Stars, edited by Betsy Mitchell (Baen, 1984). Copyright © 1984 by Joe Haldeman.
“The Mazel Tov Revolution” appeared in the September 1975 Analog. Copyright © 1975 by the Condé Nast Corporation.
“Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds” first appeared in The Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Lloyd Eaton Conference in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Copyright © 1992 by Joe Haldeman.
“Not Being There” is copyright © 1993 by Joe Haldeman.
“Confessions of a Space Junkie” is copyright © 1993 by Joe Haldeman.
“War Stories” is copyright © 1993 by Joe Haldeman.
“Photographs and Memories” is copyright © 1993 by Joe Haldeman.
“Saul’s Death” first appeared in the February 1983 Omni. Copyright ©1983 by Joe Haldeman.
“Homecoming” first appeared in Fires of the Past, edited by Anne Devereaux Jordan (St. Martin’s, 1991). Copyright © 1991 by Joe Haldeman.
“Time Lapse” first appeared in Blood Is Not Enough, edited by Ellen Datlow (Morrow, 1989). Copyright © 1989 by Joe Haldeman.