Overruled

by Hank Davis

  He was born in Königsberg in East Prussia. His family identified as Lithuanian, and his father was sent to New York in 1936 to serve as Consul General for Lithuania. Later in 1940, thanks to the Russians, and because the U.S. never recognized the Soviet takeover, continued as Lithuanian consul until 1964. Before the departure, the youngster witnessed apparently rational, stable adults going ecstatically berserk when Adolf Hitler paid a visit to his neighborhood. Budrys later wrote that he then discovered that he had been living surrounded by “werewolves,” which may have something to do with how many of his stories include intelligent characters who yet rationalize their self-destructive behavior. He was thoroughly Americanized, though he did not become an American Citizen until the 1990s. After the striking production of short sf and novels in the 1950s, two decades followed in which he mostly did other things, being an editor for Playboy Press, working for the advertising company Young & Rubicam, and was the book reviewer for Galaxy. While his reviews were knowledgeable, incisive, and entertaining (even if I sometimes disagreed with them), I wish that his short story production had not diminished to a trickle in the 1960s. Critic John Clute (with whom I frequently disagree, but not this time) called Budrys’ short work “incisive, intellectually challenging and highly professional,” and yet, aside from some e-gatherings of stories now in public domain, only four English language collections of his shorter fiction have been published: The Unexpected Dimension, Budrys’ Inferno (later reprinted as The Furious Future), Blood & Burning, and the limited circulation Entertainment, which is actually a reissue of The Unexpected Dimension with three extra stories added. While it is good to have these volumes, some of my favorites, such as “Nobody Bothers Gus,” “The Edge of the Sea,” and “Die, Shadow!” are not included in them.

  In a career which received far too few of the awards and trinkets handed out to lesser writers, at least his decades of reviews, in Galaxy and later in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, won him the 2007 Pilgrim Award of The Science Fiction Research Association. Fortunately, the reviews have been collected in the three volumes of Benchmarks. It’s way past time for proper recognition of a grand master. In the meantime, you owe it to yourself to read Rogue Moon (reprinted as The Death Machine), either the novella version in Volume 2B of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, or, better, the full-length novel.

  LICENSE TO LIVE

  Sarah A. Hoyt & Laura Montgomery

  Never mind the universe, the Solar System alone is a big place on a human scale, with all those planets, planet wannabes, and moons hurtling around without a single permit authorizing their activity. And not observing any speed limits, either. It’s enough to give a career bureaucrat a nervous breakdown. And if anyone wants to put a colony on the red planet, they better handle the red tape first. Never mind that the U.S. Congress has passed no laws for space colonies, regulatory agencies are laws unto themselves…

  •

  The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty.

  —Outer Space Treaty, Art. VI

  Caleb Newgate stood at the ship’s upper deck railing and felt, as he had for days, the taste of salt on his lips. Salt didn’t fill just the ocean at the equator. It filled the air, his skin, his mouth. He wore shorts and a loose-fitting cotton collared shirt with a tiny penguin embroidered over his heart. There was salt in his clothes, too.

  They didn’t need him in the control room. He was just the lawyer, not an engineer, not a technician, and certainly not one of the settlers. And maybe he was the fall guy, not that it was some big secret from him. If anyone could figure that out, it was the Long Shot’s lawyer.

  He had done his time in the control room—purely as an observer—with his sole role being to have his stomach consume the rest of him from the inside out. It had worked, and now with the wind layering more salt onto his skin, he watched through his binoculars the liquid oxygen boil off the mighty rocket on its platform some two miles distant from the ship.

  The winds had to be just right. He’d learned all about the winds after the crew had finished ballasting the platform, flooding its pylons with water to lower it and increase its stability. There had been wind criteria just to roll the vehicle from its hangar to the pad and erect it. And now, upper atmospheric winds had to be high enough to be measurable by the rawinsonde balloons sent aloft. High winds and wind shears at altitude could put unacceptable loading on the vehicle during flight. Long skinny, fragile things with lots of surface area—like rockets—travelling at a high velocity tended not to do well when experiencing lateral loading.

  They didn’t measure salt aloft, but he wondered how high it went.

  Maybe they’d look for him after everyone had gone, if there were any balloons left.

  Wave height mattered, too. The rocket, with its several dozen families jammed aboard, didn’t need wave heights in excess of what the platform could compensate for, and the swells had been too high, the direction wrong, for days. Until now.

  They broadcast the count over the ship, and there was a small screen set into the little room behind him here on the upper deck. He could hear the GO/NO GO criteria called out, red, yellow, green down the line. They were coming to the waves. He had the litany memorized, and he knew all that came before the waves. The waves had turned the range red for days.

  The waves were green.

  The range was green.

  Caleb had watched his fair share of launches from land. Clients would take him out as a treat. He waited for the familiar rush, the reverberation in his bones, the noise and glow that filled the sky, and the moment of glory as man or one of his machines wrenched free of planet Earth.

  It happened again, all the same this time, but humanity’s glory took second place this time, second place to a longing that he could go, too, that he, like those on board, had gathered his family and was about to start a new life on Mars.

  * * *

  Even knowing what would happen when they disembarked in Long Beach, even knowing that air traffic control, the enforcers of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the State Department would all have an interest in what was going on, he had expected to be spending more time with the press than with the many U.S. government agencies. He had been wrong.

  One condition of Caleb Newgate’s participation in the Long Shot had been that there be no lying to the government. The timings of the filings might have left the regulators feeling rushed, but he had been careful to request waivers of the deadlines when he’d hit send minutes after the control room had said the wave height criteria had a ninety percent probability of being met that day. Like his more technical colleagues, he had done what he could to mitigate risk.

  That part of the ocean was not a big air route, but his Notices to Airmen had gone to Oakland and Mexico for the Pacific, and air traffic would have had to scramble but Long Shot would pay the fine. The FAA’s Space Office was another matter. Caleb was pretty sure that if the FAA had been able to commandeer a suborbital rocket, its inspectors would have shown up at the launch site. But there were still places on Earth that were hard to get to, and the equator on the Pacific a couple hundred miles from Kiribati was one of them.

  As it was, they were talking civil penalties against his client, and he’d pointed out that he had filed the license application two hours before the launch. There’d been a heated discussion about whether he had good cause for the late filing, but Caleb had maintained steadfastly that the FAA’s public position that the Outer Space Treaty was self-executing in all relevant aspects was good cause enough, especially because the FAA was wrong. When you thought about it, he’d saved the FAA from a terrible mistake: the FAA might have unlawfully tried to stop the launch.

  The compliance monitor looked like he
wanted to grind his teeth and pointed out that Caleb’s client had launched without a payload review.

  “The list of objects is in the application, but people aren’t payloads,” Caleb said.

  “They sure are,” the man from the FAA said. The Port Authority had loaned the federal agencies an empty office, and they were all taking turns with Caleb Newgate, Vice President and General Counsel to Long Shot, LLC, formed under the laws of Delaware.

  Caleb didn’t say that he’d hoped the man would know his own statute better than that, but he wanted to. Instead he’d said only, “The law defines payload as objects. People aren’t objects.”

  “They’re all U.S. citizens,” the compliance monitor said.

  “True,” Caleb agreed unhelpfully, and waited for the other man to appreciate the irrelevancy of his observation.

  “So the U.S. is responsible for them.”

  And there it was. Caleb’s stomach dropped.

  He had been most frightened, as any sensible space lawyer was, by the ITAR’s criminal penalties. If he messed up, he could go to jail. But he’d dealt with that by ruthlessly excluding all foreigners from the project so that no precious U.S. launch technology was released to the enemies of the United States—or even any of its allies. Whenever the business people had pushed for foreign involvement Caleb threatened to exercise his prerogative to go, too, and they had subsided. It wasn’t that they wanted to keep lawyers out of space. They wanted to keep him out of space because they needed him here on the ground to make sure their next launches happened. As for the launch itself, the law was clear: launch was not an export under ITAR. The lack of a launch license would be covered by fines, and Long Shot was ready to pay those.

  But this fellow was alluding to the Outer Space Treaty. Caleb had feared that.

  The Treaty said that the activities in outer space of nongovernmental entities like the Long Shot required authorization and continuing supervision. The Long Shot didn’t have the former and explicitly didn’t want the latter. Caleb was ready to point out that that part of the Treaty wasn’t self-executing, which meant it didn’t apply to nongovernmental entities until Congress passed a law, but that wasn’t something that seemed to persuade the FAA. He knew that from dealings with the agency on behalf of other clients.

  The FAA inspector ground his teeth again. “If only I could arrest you.”

  The statute not being a criminal one, he couldn’t.

  * * *

  When Caleb got home, he picked up his children from their mother’s house. Maria, the eldest, was thirteen, and just starting to outgrow her baby fat. Tobias was eleven, dark-haired, and thin. They had both been mortified by their father’s appearance all over the web, of course, and the things said about his involvement with Long Shot. Their friends were asking if he was a criminal. Their mother had suggested they continue to stay with her.

  Curiosity and embarrassment had warred in Maria in equal measures, but Toby was ready to take his father’s side still, so long as Caleb didn’t mess up.

  They were quiet for several minutes after he finished asking them about school and soccer. He took the car into a cathedral nave of trees over Glebe Road. He’d kept the house and the children when they’d split up and their mother had gone to find herself. He wanted to give them that stability.

  As they drove, Maria spoke first. She was in the front passenger seat and he could see her face and the dark cloud on it. “Did you have to talk to the press?”

  Caleb grinned. Embarrassment had won. “It’s part of the job, sweetheart.”

  “The government thinks you’re wrong,” his daughter pointed out.

  “And I think that part of the government is wrong,” he said serenely. “That happens. When we disagree we go to court.”

  “Is the court part of the government?” Toby asked. He had drawn certain reasonable inferences. A glance in the rearview mirror showed his thin face with dark brows drawn down in worry.

  “It’s a different part,” Caleb hastened to reassure his son. “The court tells the part that thinks I’m wrong—the FAA—which of us is right. The FAA is in the executive branch. Which of you remembers what job the executive branch has under the Constitution?”

  Maria hated it when he did his quasi-Socratic questioning. She glared. “It carries out the laws,” she muttered, but making it obvious she answered only so he would get on with his point.

  “Can it create new laws?” he asked.

  “No,” she cried impatiently. “Dad!”

  “Who creates the laws?” Caleb addressed this question to Toby.

  “Congress.” Even Toby was getting impatient.

  “Well, Congress hasn’t passed a law saying you need a license to start a settlement on Mars.” It was, of course, more complicated than that. Congress delegated its lawmaking power to the agencies in the executive branch all the time. The FAA had oodles of mandatory regulations on the books. Now it was trying to use its payload reviews to stop unregulated private people from going to space, claiming the treaty made it unlawful. But he’d save the nuances for the courts. His children might kill him if he went there now.

  “Dad.” Maria’s voice shook. “Isn’t a treaty the supreme law of the land?” It was really shaking now, and rising. “And doesn’t the treaty say your people need a license? Or something?”

  He was proud. “Very good, Maria. You’ve remembered a lot from school.”

  She sniffed, and a quick glance showed him her eyes were watering. “My teacher told all of us yesterday.”

  So that was the way it was. Hard on a teen to be humiliated in front of all her classmates. He felt a surge of anger at the teacher and tamped it down. He hadn’t been there to deal with it, so it was his fault too. He was good at controlling his voice. “Did she ask you for my theory?”

  “No.”

  “So she wasn’t trying to tell both sides?”

  “No.” Maria gulped the word.

  “Some teachers aren’t as good as others,” he said gently. He was careful. He didn’t need to be quoted back to the teachers. “They don’t remember to be fair and look at both sides. But she’s right. A treaty is the supreme law of the land, and it does say activities in space need government approval. But it doesn’t say which activities. In our country, Congress decides which activities those are.”

  “Oh.” Maria nodded and got her voice back to normal. “She didn’t explain that part.”

  “It’s okay. Lots of people don’t know it.”

  Toby, however, had had enough of the law. “Dad, if you’d gone with them, you wouldn’t be in trouble.”

  “I’m not in trouble. I’m defending my client.”

  “But why didn’t you go?”

  Caleb still didn’t know the answer to that one. He had longed to go, to be one of the first people on Mars, an original settler, and if he hadn’t had his family, he might have gone. But there was one other obstacle. “Someone has to protect them here.”

  “From what? They’re gone. They don’t need us anymore.” Toby was smart enough, but not well informed, and tended to assume a lot from science fiction movies that skipped the grindingly dull legal issues about forming a settlement in space.

  “They do need us. They’ll need supplies—food, machinery, medicine, chemicals. They took some of all those things, but they’ll always need more. From Earth. We don’t want anyone saying they can’t have them.”

  “Why would anyone say that?” Maria demanded.

  “Because the government hasn’t authorized their actions,” Caleb said. It sounded so wrong when he said it out loud, but it was the issue.

  Maria tossed her head. But she had a different agenda, and tried again for the answer he should have given the first time. “Was it because of us?”

  He nodded stiffly. The divorce had been strained, formal, courteous, and resulted in joint custody, but he still worried they would rather be with their mother, the parent who didn’t travel so much. “It was totally because of you.”


  “Why didn’t you say that?” Maria whispered.

  “It’s hard to say those things,” he said.

  She smiled. He was a little confused. She was growing into her womanly feelings, an ability to sense more than what he told her. But there were other things, too. It seemed she required him to explain things that he didn’t wish to explain or didn’t know how to.

  He’d never been good at dealing with people’s feelings. He liked the realm of law, where things were sure. Did Maria want him to go to space? If so, wouldn’t it sadden her that he stayed because of her? Wouldn’t she feel guilty? Instead she seemed pleased, and he felt a twinge of confusion and misgiving, hoping that, as his children grew he wouldn’t lose them the way he’d lost their mother: without noticing something was wrong in the relationship until it ended.

  He turned onto their street and into another tunnel of living trees exhaling oxygen.

  “But dad, we would totally have gone with you,” Toby said.

  Maria agreed, surprising him. “It would have been such an adventure.”

  “I couldn’t take you from your mother,” he said. “She loves you too, you know?”

  He couldn’t have done it to Lucy. Take her children from her. Despite everything, he remembered he’d loved her once. He knew taking her children would hurt her. Taking them to another planet was a little like killing them, or at least killing their relationship with her, making it impossible for her to ever see them or maybe even communicate with them again.

  Never mind how it would have violated the divorce settlement, which would have bothered him as a professional—even if the force of law would not be able to reach into space to remove them from his care.

  “I couldn’t have done it to your mother,” he said again. Was what he read in their eyes disappointment or incomprehension? He didn’t know.