A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  When he told her that, she smiled. “I soloed in a special Piper Tomahawk last April. I hope to get enough hours by fall for my certificate. If the workload eases and nothing more important comes up.”

  They rolled down U.S. 1 past Key Largo toward Tavernier, the sun passing in and out of cloud fluff. The air, hot and humid, blew past them at seventy miles per hour. Wenders had no clear idea what the weekend would bring, what the arrangements would be. He knew only that he was relaxed for the first time in a long while. He was with someone who had plenty of reasons to be bitter about life, and there she was, humming some nameless Broadway show tune, keeping time by bopping her left elbow on the side rest as she drove along, both hands on the wheel, eyes bright and alert behind amber sunglasses.

  What more could he admire about a woman whose license plate frame read “My Other Car Is A Spaceship” ?

  “So answer my question,” she said after they had crawled through crowded Tavernier and resumed speed over the stretch of water on the way toward Islamorada.

  “Hmm?” Wenders interrupted his idle observation of a flock of sea gulls.

  “My question. What would you give to go into space?”

  Wenders snorted out a laugh. “If it cost a million dollars—I mean, if someone were actually offering flights and charging a million, and it wasn’t a scam—I’d find a way to get the money together. To live up there, that is. I wouldn’t spend a million just for a vacation.” He paused. “Well, I might. But it’d have to be one hell of a vacation.”

  “What if the money didn’t matter so much?” she asked. “What if it required that you change—that you become someone you aren’t? What if you had to do things you never thought you’d do?”

  Wenders shrugged. “People change all their lives. I’m not the person I was twenty years ago. Nor even five.” He gazed at Terry. “I’m not even the same person I was two weeks ago.”

  She tapped the brakes lightly with her fingers, disengaging the cruise control. They slowed as she signaled a turn. “There’s a motel on the key up ahead with a great view of the beach. Let’s check in.”

  He lay there in the steamy warmth of the afternoon, holding her tightly against his flesh. She felt so light on his waist, such a gentle pressure on top of him. She used her arms—lithely muscled beneath her pale skin—to slide back and forth against him. Her sable hair, damp from the heat of passion—whipped against her jaw, cheek, and face with every urgent motion.

  He grasped her hips tightly, felt an electrifying, forbidden excitement as he let his fingers slip to her scars. His touch drove her onward until her heavy, hearty breaths turned to moans and she fell from him to the soaking sheets.

  Unquenched, he rolled over to leap upon her and thrust easily into the center of her heat, twining his fingers into hers as they seared together. He spent his fire in a trembling gasp of release. The universe vanished to them for a moment, and they were utterly alone together in an instant of eternity.

  They used the weekend to explore each other’s lust almost wordlessly. Joe felt transported to another world, free of care, free of time, free of all restriction, all taboo.

  Joe had expected the trip back to be laced with some degree of subdued pensiveness on Terry’s part. Instead, she hummed more show tunes and smiled warmly at the setting orange sun. It was dark by the time they reached her apartment, a modest first-floor two-bedroom a few blocks off the highway.

  Wenders watched in amazed admiration once again as, rejecting any assistance from him, Delbert pulled herself out of the driver’s seat, through the back of the minivan to where she opened the rear window.

  She grasped a bar welded outside the window and—with a huff of exertion—pulled herself up and through the portal, twisting to lower her body gently into the chair. She strapped in and gave everything a final once-over. Satisfied, she yanked a handle that lowered the wheelchair rack and released the wheel-blocks. Gravity rolled her out of the contraption and onto the pavement.

  She did not reject, though, his offer to wheel her into the apartment.

  Once inside, when she turned on the lights, Wenders beheld a living room piled high with NASA publications: tech briefs, manuals, abstracts, handbooks. And more: science books of every description, books about space travel, magazines and newsletters devoted to space exploration. From the ceiling hung beautifully constructed and finished spacecraft and satellite models, all painted with a high degree of detail and realism. On a credenza stood scale models of nearly every rocket the U.S. had ever built, from Redstone through the second-generation shuttle still on the drawing boards. Dwarfing them all was a four-foot-high model of the Saturn V.

  For once, she looked a little embarrassed—this at Wenders’s admiration of the models. “Those were from my first couple of years after the . . . accident. I thought it would be good therapy. Then I realized that I was just a handicapped person on disability payments wasting away in a room of my parents’ home. So I stopped being handicapped.”

  Wenders gazed at a model about half the height of the Saturn V. It had three solid boosters attached to a liquid-fueled first stage, and a large-diameter second-stage payload shroud. It looked like a modified Delta, but out of scale with the one standing near it. He had never seen anything like it before.

  “What’s this one?” he asked.

  “Oh, just an original design I played around with.” She turned her wheelchair toward the telephone on the hall stand to rewind her messages. “Terry, Call me about circuit switches,” said a deep man’s voice.

  “Hi—it’s lane,” said a woman’s voice. “There’s a meeting planned after work Monday about the SRB. Same place.”

  “Never ends, does it?” Joe said.

  Terry nodded, jotting notes in her Day-Timer. The next message caused her to freeze.

  “Terry,” a muted voice said, “Shako’s at the Medical Center. He’s had an accident. He wants you.”

  They looked at each other for a moment.

  “I’ll come with you,” he said.

  “Only if you want to.”

  SHE HELD Shaka’s hand, a paler brown from the loss of blood. He lay quietly staring at the ceiling, speaking in a drugged monotone. Wenders looked down below the man’s waist to where the form under the sheet ended.

  “I don’t remember seeing the tree,” he whispered, glancing for just a second from the ceiling to Delbert, then to Wenders, then back to the ceiling. “I was busy watching the boat below me. Frank and Gabe—by the time they got me out and to the dock and paramedics got there . . .”

  He did not cry. His voice simply trailed off. Terry clutched his hand with a firm warmth, her eyes wet, her gaze unwavering.

  “Sleep now,” she said. “I’ll be strong for you. Others will be strong for you. We’ll help you. We love you.”

  Verwoerd closed his eyes, a tear squeezing out to run down toward his neck.

  As they left the hospital, Terry muttered, “Sometimes I hate this world and what we have to go through.”

  “The way you were with him,” Wenders said. “Your calm and your strength . . . It was in his voice, but he said it anyway: “I love you.”

  She turned to gaze up at him. “I love you, too.” She reached around to grasp his hand. Her fingers were icy cold.

  She spent many hours after work with Verwoerd over the next few weeks. Wenders sometimes came along, but usually agreed with her that she could assist his recovery better than anyone else. When he was discharged from the hospital, they both helped him get settled at home, Joe arranging Shaka’s townhome for wheelchair use according to Terry’s suggestions.

  She took him to a support group every night for two weeks.

  When Shaka was ready to return to work, Joe arranged the welcome-back party. It was very little, he thought, compared to the magic Terry had wrought on Shaka. The man showed no trace of sadness or resentment, but rather, seemed to be rededicated to his job. Maybe, Wenders thought, this was his way of forgetting his loss—by losing himself in his
work. It seemed to be astonishingly effective therapy.

  One evening, Terry turned over in bed to face Joe. She looked at him with an odd expression.

  “Do you really want to get into space, Joe? Ever?”

  He grinned. “I’ll tell you what space I want to get into—”

  “I’m serious.”

  He frowned a gentle frown at her digression. “O.K. Yes. I do. And the shuttle seems to be—”

  “The shuttle,” she said with a sudden acidity, “is an overpriced pork-barrel example of welfare for the aerospace industry. They and NASA would be perfectly happy if we just screwed around with it on the ground and never made a single launch again. The only reason they do launch anything is to con the taxpayers into thinking something worthwhile is being done. Haven’t you noticed how our launch schedules become more aggressive in an election year?”

  “Honey, that’s nothing new. We’re all at the mercy of the people with the checkbook.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I feel as if we’re perpetrating the biggest fraud on the world. We talk about opening space to humanity, when in fact we’d never let ordinary people up there for fear someone would vandalize a spy satellite.”

  Joe ran a placating hand along her side. “Commercial space is opening—”

  “Too slowly. Too slowly.” She gazed at him intently. “Tell me you’d go into space if you could, Joe. Tell me that.”

  “You know I would. In a second.”

  “Tell me that you could leave this world behind without a second thought. Without any regrets.”

  “Only if you were by my side.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes. She clung to him desperately. “Tell me what you would give to go into space. To go right now.”

  “Anything, my love. Anything but my love for you.”

  She backhanded tears from her eyes. After a moment she said, “I want you to meet some people. People who want what we want. People who are ready to go into space right now. They think the shuttle is a dead end, and they’ve found their own way. Not a lot of bells and whistles and spaceships built by committee, but something cheap and simple. They’re not interested in pushing technology to new limits or making aerospace companies rich; they just want to get into orbit with as many people as possible. And they’re going to do it. I know they are.”

  Wenders knew about space-migration societies—they usually comprised a lot of teenagers with great vision but no means. A few years out in the world earning a living dampened their enthusiasm enough to disband most groups. He said as much to Terry, who shook her head.

  “These people have taken irrevocable steps to prove their dedication. By anyone’s standards. They’ve sunk their life savings into it. They’ve pledged their lives, fortunes, sacred honor, and much more. You’ve got to be willing to do the same.”

  “I am,” he said in quiet seriousness. “I’d like to meet them.”

  “If you do, you must join us. We’re nearing our launch date, and we cannot have anyone know about us who isn’t ready to leave Earth with us.”

  “Where will we go?”

  “Low-Earth orbit. About two hundred to three hundred mi—”

  “I mean, where are we going to meet them?”

  “I’ll drive. It’s a midnight meeting, so we can get there in plenty of time.”

  “Tonight?”

  She nodded, rolling out of the low bed to the floor, where she walked a naked hand-by-hand to the dresser.

  THEY DROVE up to a large one-story home in Melbourne Beach.

  “That’s it,” she said, driving past it a block or two. “We try not to clutter the front with our cars.” She killed the lights and headed for the back of the van. Wenders took a deep breath, let it out, and stepped out the passenger door into the dank night air. The beach nearby smelled of iodine and dead fish.

  At the door, she reached to press a doorbell mounted low to be easily accessible. The door opened.

  Wenders stared at the spectacled man opening the door. It was Shaka Verwoerd. He looked up from his wheelchair at Wenders, then at Delbert. “Welcome,” he said.

  “I see you’ve got the newcomer’s job,” Terry said to Shaka, wheeling herself into the room. Wenders followed.

  “I’m glad to feel a part of all this.” Verwoerd closed the door behind Wenders. “They’re in the den.”

  “Give me a push, will you, Joe?”

  It was rare that she asked for help, foe took the handles to guide the wheelchair through the hallway toward the rear of the home. All around them stood cartons filled with paper, bookcases crammed with books, note binders, blueprints, boxes of computer disks, and trays of microfiche. They turned a comer on the well-worn carpet and entered the den.

  Thirty-five people sat in the room. In thirty-five wheelchairs.

  Joe felt the same dizzy, stomach-wrenching sensation that had overwhelmed him when he first glimpsed Terry’s lovely body ending at nothingness below the hips.

  “I can’t take this,” he whispered to her.

  “Yes, you can. You must.”

  “Welcome, Terry,” said an older man facing the others. He had a shock of unrefulgent black hair that fringed a large bald spot on his head. From behind pilot-framed glasses, he smiled at the new arrivals. “Welcome, Mr. Wenders. Everyone, Terry has brought foe Wenders as her guest tonight. Mr. Wenders works on the shuttle.”

  Joe nodded to the others, then noticed there was only one seat available, an empty wheelchair in the leftmost part of the front row. The speaker motioned toward it.

  Wenders walked unsteadily to it and sat down with slow unease. The sheet of vinyl that served as the seat stretched under his weight. It felt uncomfortable and constricting. Terry wheeled up beside him.

  “I was just informing the crew,” the speaker said, “That we have a barge arranged for the launch, and that Ms. Steiner has made final arrangments for the liquid oxygen.” He looked toward the back of the room. “What is the status of the solid rocket boosters, Mr. Taylor?”

  A man with a pile of printout on what little lap he possessed said, “All three have been successfully mated to the first stage.”

  “Good,” the speaker said. “Life support?”

  A woman in the front row spoke up. “We’ve loaded enough lithium hydroxide to scrub the atmosphere for six weeks, which will enable hydroponics to be in full production for at least a two-week overlap. Also . . .”

  The meeting dragged on for several hours. All that time, Wenders sat quietly in the wheelchair, fighting the urge to break and run. He knew what Terry would ask him when the evening was over. He knew, and his stomach churned at the thought.

  “I cannot believe,” he told her in the van, “that thirty-five people would mutilate themselves that way. Just to . . . to—”

  “Just to embark on the greatest adventure of their lives? Of anyone’s lifer Terry’s voice possessed a sharp, almost scolding tone. “Some of us did not do this on purpose, you know. Some of us had the opportunity thrust upon us.”

  “Not Shaka, though, right?”

  Terry shook her head. “No—he chose it freely. Happily.”

  “Did you convince him by seduction, too?”

  Terry said nothing for several minutes, quietly steering the van through the night with tense concentration. When she finally spoke, her voice possessed a metered, forced calm.

  “Legs . . . legs are useless dead weight. You just don’t need them at all in space. So why bother taking them up there? By doing what we are doing, we can take 30 percent more mass with us. More food, more life support, more people. We can build a larger community faster. We’re not some cult of self-maimers—we’re doing this only so that we can get up there. Our children . . .” She paused to glance at Joe. “Our children will be born with legs.”

  The tightness that trembled in Wenders’s guts refused to subside. “It’s so sick,” was all he could say.

  Her voice grew ever sharper. “You said that you’d give anything to get into space. You
said you’d give your life. What’s so important about legs? I’ve proven to you that legs are unnecessary even on Earth—in space, they’re an absolute impediment’.”

  For a long moment, she said nothing more; then she began to laugh. It was a harsh and bitter laugh. “Impediment,” she repeated, shaking her head. “Even the language forces us to worship our legs.”

  She pulled into her parking space, squeezed the brakes sharply, and cut the ignition.

  “You said you loved me.”

  Joe shook his head. “And if I love you, I should be willing to cut off my legs for you. Well, I—”

  “Not for me,” she said, turning toward him. “For you.” In the darkness of the van, her green eyes still held enough light to pinion him with their gaze. “If you want to go into space, this is the only way to accomplish it in your lifetime. NASA would never put you, a mere citizen, into space. We will. But we can afford just one flight. Period. The life savings of over a hundred people are invested in this one chance to get away. Then we’re either dead or we’re up there for good—just as the first settlers turned their back on Europe for the dangers of the American wilderness. No one else is offering you this.”

  “You can’t ask me to do it.”

  “I told you,” she said in a steady tone, “that if you went to this meeting, you would have to join us. An outsider cannot know what you know.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  She pulled the keys from the ignition. “I’m not asking you for any sacrifice on your part. I’m telling you where I’m going and the conditions that would enable you to accompany me. If your love is strong enough, you’ll be with me. Love lies in the heart, not in the legs.” She regarded him again. “I love you. But do you expect me to abandon my dream and stay behind for you? If going into space is your deepest of dreams, follow it. Ask yourself again what you would give to live in space. And give yourself a true answer this time.”