A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  He climbed out of the van. “Now that I have a chance to make the decision,” he said, “the choice is no longer clear.”

  He strode to his car and drove away. The predawn darkness shortly swallowed up the engine sounds, leaving Terry alone in silence.

  WENDERS CAME to work that morning without sleep. He found it difficult to concentrate on the job at hand with so many conflicting thoughts and emotions battling inside him. Every person he looked at became a walking example of the importance of legs.

  Legs made it simple to climb ladders, to run from station to station, to stand and work.

  At lunchtime he stood in front of an exhibit for visitors and watched videos of astronauts at work in space. The Skylab astronauts used their legs quite a bit—to propel themselves from one wall to another, to anchor themselves, to exercise for their health. The astronauts aboard the cramped shuttle, on the other hand, twisted and turned to weasel their bodies in and out of narrow hatchways, tight turns, and crowded decks. They constantly yanked their legs along as cumbersome appendages.

  He wandered back to work, as uncertain as before. Then, toward the end of the day, the announcement came through.

  Wenders’s supervisor—a short, balding man who had been with NASA since its Apollo glory days—pulled his team off their station and gathered them together on the scaffolding. From where he stood, Joe could gaze ten stories down at the activity on the floor. He caught a glimpse of the rolling silver that was Terry far below.

  “We’ve just heard,” the supervisor said, “that Congress failed to override the president’s veto. For all intents and purposes, that cancels any further launches pertaining to the space station for the next fiscal year.”

  “Oh, great,” muttered one of the workers. Sounds of anger and frustration reverberated elsewhere through the VAB.

  “On the plus side,” the supervisor continued, “that eases us up on pressure to meet the ten-launch schedule and puts us back to six for the next year. On the downside, of course, is this . . .”

  He waved a handful of envelopes.

  “Most of you are used to this yo-yo by now. For you recent hires, though, well, suffice to say that NASA’s a political football these days. Always has been. Senator Thurgood, though, has assured us that he will promptly introduce a bill next session mandating a significant expansion in the program.” He glance down at the names on the envelopes. “Bailey, Carlton, Edwards, Hazeltine . . .”

  Joe Wenders, furloughed rocketman, sat on his couch—feet up, bourbon in hand—and stared at the photographs on his wall. Earthrise over the Moon. Ed White taking a space walk a few years before his death in Apollo 1. Buzz Aldrin standing on the lunar surface like a friendly polar bear. Judy Resnik in orbit, her lovely dark hair flowing weightlessly about, a free-fall mermaid oblivious to her ultimate fate aboard Challenger.

  He wanted to live in space. He realized with a sickening clarity that the shuttle would never be the space truck NASA had once touted. It was not a Conestoga to the stars, but a finicky luxury limousine that demanded constant pampering lest it become a death trap.

  He had listened to the reports given that night by the clandestine astronauts—they sounded more professional and far less jaded than NASA personnel. They sounded as if they could actually do it.

  But they were insane!

  He spent a long time considering the fanaticism that would impel seemingly intelligent, driven people to cut their bodies in two. An involuntary shudder passed through him. He took another drink.

  It was the same as the religious fanaticism that drove people to renounce worldly possessions and move to communes. The mark of kinship here, though, was not a certain costume, or a tattoo, or a circumcision, or a brand—it was an irrevocable crippling. Even the settlers who traveled to America centuries ago had done nothing so radical. Some may have known they could never afford to return to their native lands. Some may even have sold themselves to indentured servitude in exchange for passage. But they never turned themselves into something less than human . . .

  That’s wrong, Wenders thought. She’s still human. She proves that every day she survives as she is. He could tell that the liquor was getting to him—his thoughts turned inward. The memory came of her in his bed. She was right. She did not need legs to be a complete human being or a total woman. And legs really were useless to someone living permanently in space. Anything a leg could do, an arm could do better in zero-g. And it would allow more people to go up—

  Joe realized what he was doing: he was rationalizing. Convincing himself. He countered that with another slug of whiskey and an attempt to visualize Terry convincing Shaka to cut off his legs. Then he imagined her with the others he had met. He made her a seductress, a trickster, a lying slut. He made her the image of maniacal evil.

  The image, though, refused to jell. This was the woman who built model rockets, who wanted to build a new world in space. She was not a destroyer. She was a force of creation.

  He tried to envision what her legs might have looked like. Were they long and slender? Short and thick-ankled? That image would not appear, either; he could not imagine her whole. With legs, she would not be the woman she was. She would not be Terry Delbert.

  He shuddered and swallowed the rest of his drink.

  “We have to talk,” he told her through the door. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  Terry unlocked the door to let him in. “You’ve been drinking.”

  He turned to stare at her. He had obviously awakened her, for she wore nothing but a sheer black robe. Every line of her body was visible: her shoulders, her breasts, her waist, her hips. Even the scars where her legs ended.

  He spoke quickly, his speech a little slurred. “I hate what you’ve done to those people. What you’ve convinced them to do to themselves. I hate this whole insane plan!”

  “You’re drunk,” she said, grasping her robe at the neckline. “Please leave.”

  “And I hate NASA for the screwups and the lies and the kickbacks. I hate the way they strangled private ventures so that you had to come up with this mad, secret scheme.”

  “It’s not mad!” she suddenly shouted. “Madmen don’t concern themselves with trivia such as lift-off mass. They don’t consider the consequences of their actions. I have! We all have! So should you. Think of the consequences of staying on this planet.”

  He stared down at her angry, defiant face. It was not madness he saw, but a grim determination, an intransigence that someone healthy and whole could never fully understand.

  He bent to one knee and put his hands on the arms of her wheelchair. His voice weakened. “I hate the idea of you leaving me, of risking your life and dying in space . . .

  He paused for a long moment, searching her emerald eyes for some sign. He took a shallow breath. “Most of all, I hate the idea of you surviving, of you living there, forever out of my reach.”

  “You’re not making sense,” she said. “Are you saying you’d rather see me dead?”

  “No,” he whispered, laying his head on her lap and weeping. “I’d rather see me dead than be alive without you.”

  The rumble began quietly, the sound damped by the surrounding seawater. As the engines throttled up, the water appeared to boil furiously with the erupting gases that rushed to the surface. Like an angry dog, the rocket strained at its leash until explosive bolts cut the cable that held the spacecraft to its anchor weight.

  Free now—four engines and three solid boosters all at full power—the rocket rose upward. Its tail broke the surface, the plume of fire suddenly blasting steam and flame outward across the placid waters. In the early dawning light, it outshone the rising sun for one brief moment. It climbed faster, ever higher toward the half-moon overhead. Then it rolled and pitched, assuming an attitude that would take it into orbit.

  Inside, Terry Delbert sat in her acceleration couch and broadcast a steady stream of announcements on a wide variety of radio frequencies, declaring to the world that they were a pe
aceful crewed spaceship posing no military threat. Her hair was cut short, as was the hair of the others, to lighten their payload weight by that many ounces.

  Shaka Verwoerd, to her left, scanned radar to watch for hostile missiles or aircraft. None were visible—they had caught the government by surprise as intended.

  “Passing max-Q,” a voice called out as the ship shuddered.

  It endured the period of maximum dynamic pressure beautifully, and responded to throttleup with a hearty pressure on the passengers as the hybrid solid fuel/liquid oxidizer engines blazed at full rated power.

  Terry continued to repeat her long-rehearsed lines. All the while she, along with the others, thought about what they were heading toward—and what they had abandoned. She thought mostly of the people she had left behind. How long would they think about her, about the fact that she would pass two hundred miles above them every ninety minutes for the rest of their lives? How soon till this marvel became ordinary and accepted, perhaps even forgotten? She thought about old friends, old loves, of an old life slipping away from her at seven miles a second.

  Without breaking the pattern of her radio speech, she reached a hand over to touch that of a man to her right.

  Looking up through the viewing port, his skull clamped to the headrest by the force of their ascent, Joe Wenders gazed in frightened awe at the darkening sky. When stars suddenly appeared—bright, sharp, and ablaze with color—he forgot all about the acceleration and how it caused a mad tingling in the stitches beneath his bandages. He grasped Terry’s hand firmly, sharing his tearful wonder and terrified joy.

  He no longer thought of what he had given to go into space—he thought only of what he had gained.

  LANDFALL

  Alexis Glynn Latner

  Knowledge will be essential in colonizing a new world—but so will a proper attitude!

  Three. Two. One. Zero. The Earth shrank as Joe Norden watched through a window in a starship’s hull, thick glass and a steel-walled hole as deep as a well. And Joe knew with wrenching finality that he would never see Earth again. The ship had begun its long journey, and he with it, never to return to the home planet.

  Earth dwindled to a gleaming disk, a silver coin in a well full of stars. Joe wished for a new planet on the other side of stars and stasis.

  Zero stayed. Cold and timeless zero, silent, insensate nothingness went on and on.

  Until now.

  “One.” The voice was hoarse, cracked, and his own. “Two. Three.”

  “Good,” said the tall blonde woman. “What comes after three?”

  A hissing tinnitus in his ears sounded like a spring thaw, a rushing melt of blood in his brain. It distracted him.

  “Come on. Count to ten. Please, Joe,” The woman sounded very worried.

  “Four. Five.”

  Behind her, above a doorway, he saw: 3, 2, 1, 0. He studied the numbers with great interest. “Four, three, two, one, zero. Breakaway from Earth orbit.”

  “How do you feel?”

  Homesick. Sick, remembering that the home planet was as good as gone for him. “Hung over.” Joe made a weak attempt at a grin.

  “Well, that’s the right idea.” She spoke softly and clearly. “Your body is steeped in exotic chemicals. The chemicals kept your body fluids from freezing—crystallizing and destroying your tissues—while you were in stasis.”

  “I know. You put me to sleep, doctor, once upon a time.”

  “Yes. A very long time ago.”

  “Time enough to cross the stars to a new planet?”

  She nodded.

  Overwhelmed, he put his face in his hands and said, “Christalmighty.” She reached for his pulse, but instead Joe grasped her hand. Her skin felt warmer than his. “The terraforming—what stage?” he demanded.

  “It hasn’t begun,” she said tersely. “We woke you up early, because we need you now.”

  He sat up straight. “I’m ready. Where to?”

  “How do you feel?”

  “I said where to, Catharin.”

  “Let’s see if you can walk, or if I’ll have to call for a wheelchair.” She helped him to stand up, then shamble back and forth alongside the rumpled bed. The bed was labeled TORONTO, J. “All right, Joe, I think you can make it to the assembly room. Let’s go out into the corridor.”

  Joe steadied himself with one hand on Catharin’s shoulder. His legs cooperated, but his whole torso felt as though it were stuffed with cold stiff cotton. She guided him along the corridor—it curved upward, making him think that he was walking uphill—then into a room full of people. Their voices surged around his ears and seemed to smell of coffee. He let himself be helped into a chair beside a table. Then she left. He felt lost.

  Another man was sitting at the table with him—a youngish Asian, who drank tea, one deliberate sip after another, while studying him sidelong. So he stared back. The Asian finally said, “Good morning, Mr.—?”

  Joe went blank for the duration of three sips while he groped for an answer, his mind as dim and disordered as an abandoned warehouse, until he found the item that he wanted. “Toronto. Joe Toronto. First Tier.”

  Asian eyebrows arched up. “I take it that you renamed.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “For a Chinese individual, San Francisco is too long a surname. Mine is Wing. I am Carlton Wing, of the Sixth Tier. Most of those here,” Wing added, “are Vanguard.”

  Joe recognized some of them. Recognition came too easily. They looked the same as before. According to the mission plan, the Vanguard should have aged by a decade, begun remaking a new planet, reestablishing civilization, while he still slept. And the Sixth Tier was supposed to have stayed in stasis for a century longer than the First. Joe Toronto felt confused and disliked the feeling. “Sixth?” he asked sharply.

  Wing pointed over Toronto’s shoulder, to a deep window low on the wall.

  Long ago, in just such a window-well, Joe had watched Earth shrink as the starship accelerated. Now, as the ship rotated in space, a new world slipped into view: a cloud-glazed, blue world with alien green continents.

  “I am a field botanist,” said Wing. “They revived me before my time when they saw the abundance of plants down there!”

  Catharin returned with a glass of pinkish water. Finding his grip weak, she wrapped both of Joe’s hands around the glass. Joe sputtered, “That planet’s too green!” Belatedly, he noticed that he had become the center of attention in the room. People clustered around his table.

  “So it is.” said Catharin. “That’s why we had to revive you, among others.”

  Several agitated voices said, “It’s a complex ecosystem!”

  “Jungles . . .”

  “. . . insects . . .”

  “ ‘—microorganisms!”

  Catharin continued, “We, by which I mean the Vanguard, quickly realized that we were lucky enough to have one of Earth’s most distinguished biologists on the ship.”

  Joe heard a murmer of assent, someone whispering about the Nobel prize. Meanwhile, the Asian eyebrows arched again. “I did not recognize you. Dr. Nord—Toronto,” Wing murmured.

  “We revived you out of sequence,” Catharin repeated quietly, making sure he got the picture. “Would you be willing to chair an advisory committee to assess the biological hazards involved in colonizing that planet?”

  Joe began nodding before she finished speaking. “That’s what we’re all here for,” he said. “To do what has to be done to colonize the target.”

  Wing said softly, “This is not the target planet.”

  “Huh?”

  “We don’t know all that went wrong.” Catharin grimaced. “The ship traveled to the destination star, and the stasis machines revived the astronaut crew—myself, Captain Bixby and Commander Atlanta—as scheduled. The target world was not there. We reprogrammed the autopilot, changed course, and put ourselves back into stasis. And the ship went on and on until the autopilot found this world.”

  Before he could ask
questions, she pushed the glass in his hands up to his lips. “Now drink!”

  Commander Atlanta was leaning against a table behind Catharin. Toronto recognized him, a tall black man. The starship’s second-in-command. “We programmed the autopilot to search for a world with some green on it,” said Atlanta. “Primitive plant life, enough to where there’d be oxygen in the atmosphere.” He glanced at the world now spinning out of sight beyond the window and shook his head in amazement. “Autopilot overdid it!”

  Joe struggled to drink the pink, bitter medicine. The other people watched him. In the corner of the room, incongruous by its presence, a green parrot shifted its feet on a makeshift perch. Sulky and ruffled, the parrot watched Joe too, with one beady eye.

  “He’ll be all right,” declared a voice. Joe vaguely recognized the authoritative ring: it was the colonial governor speaking. “So will we. This ship is more than fully equipped to terraform a desolate planet, to make it habitable. By the same token, we can. if necessary. unmake one. Sterilize it, if the native forms of life are inimical to us.”

  “Surely that will not be necessary!” exclaimed Wing. “What of our other options here?”

  “Options?” Joe asked.

  “Watch the window,” said Catharin. To Joe’s vast astonishment, another planet rolled into sight. This globe had no land masses at all, just the water of a sea as wide as the world, under swirling clouds. “It’s a moon—or rather, the planets are moons for each other,” she said. “Somebody turn off the lights—?”

  The artificial lighting flicked out. In its place, an eerie blue radiance flooded the room. “Sea-moonlight,” said Catharin.

  “Pretty,” the Governor said drily. “But those clouds are hurricanes, worse than any of Earth’s. It’s an uninhabitable world.”

  “But there is yet a third planet in this solar system’s habitable zone,” said Wing. “There, the red-brown star . . . this system’s Mars, more or less.”

  “More sizable than Mars back home.” Commander Atlanta said without enthusiasm. “Less circular orbit.”