Analog SFF, July-August 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The day prior to the attack, Marshall Foster, publicly a practicing small-town pathologist, but in fact a covert top government biowarfare consultant, had been requested to go to Washington to discuss the deteriorating world situation. Since Washington was one of the few locations on the planet where surface-targeted missiles were used in quantity, Foster was assumed to have been killed outright, along with everyone else within about a thirty-mile radius.

  Learning after the attack that she was herself a Homo post hominem, Candy set out across a depopulated America to find us, the now-grown young adults of Teacher's AA group.

  At this point it occurs to me that, while I've used the term, AA group, several times already, I have yet to clarify what it means.

  As a result of Teacher's exposure, early in his career, to the mixed results obtained by those attempting to rehabilitate children lost, adopted, and raised in the wild by animals of various species (real-world examples of Kiplingesque children like Mowgli, the wolf-boy), Teacher found himself drawn to the age-old debate about “nature versus nurture.” He wondered whether ordinary parents, upon producing markedly superior children, might somehow tend to prevent the kids’ development from exceeding their own attainments; and if that occurred, to what extent the child would in fact be limited.

  He began a study directed toward identifying gifted children shortly after birth, before this theoretical environmental retardation could begin to have its effect. Various factors were isolated which, encountered as group, proved intrinsic to potentially superior children.

  Once a sufficient population of them had been identified, the study shifted to phase two. The “positives” were assigned to two of four study groups.

  AAs (positive/advantaged) were potentially gifted children whose parents were subsidized, guided, and assisted in every possible way to provide an optimum learning and developmental environment. The ABs (positive/nonadvantaged) were potential geniuses whose parents weren't told of their children's potential: controls, in other words.

  At the other end of the scale were the BA (negative/advantaged) group: ordinary babies whose parents were encouraged to believe their offspring were geniuses. They, too, received the benefits of AA-type parental support and coaching—but of course the study was double-blind: None of the coaches knew whether they were dealing with AA or BA children.

  And, of course, the fourth group were the BBs (negative/nonadvantaged); the true controls: ordinary babies raised by ordinary parents, without interference.

  As expected, the AAs did well in school; their progress tended to triple national norms. Further, AA children were well adjusted, with happy, well-integrated personalities.

  The BAs did well, too; however, they exceeded national figures by only fifteen percent. Most were happy, but isolated individuals demonstrated behavioral symptoms suggesting they might be being pushed close to or even beyond their capabilities.

  Perhaps more intriguing were the ABs, who produced very spotty results: The best of them were extremely good, equaling AAs’ figures in certain cases. However, the worst were very bad: The ABs had the highest proportion of academic failures, behavioral problems, and patently maladjusted personalities. Apparently conventional upbringing and education reduced many of them to pathological levels of boredom.

  The BBs, of course, showed no variation at all from national curves; they were “just kids.”

  Thereafter, from the AAs and ABs, we Homo post hominems were identified.

  Ultimately, following a series of vague clues, Candy located us AAs, ostensibly by “coincidence": having managed to place herself in a location where, when she heard the sonic boom and glanced up, she saw the contrail of one of the few air expeditions to have been sent out, which led her straight to us.

  As an aside, during subsequent testing Candy has demonstrated a much higher percentage of successful “coincidental” trackings-down of hidden people and/or objects than mere luck would explain. This has led Teacher to postulate the existence of a “tracker” gene. Given the largely unknown commodity that we represent at this point, that probably is as good an explanation as any. In any event, when Candy refers to switching on her “stalker mode,” once again, she's probably only about half kidding.

  Following that contrail, she found us all gathered at the Vandenberg space shuttle complex, feverishly working to launch the Nathan Hale, one of H. sapiens' space shuttles, which we had renamed to reflect the tone of its mission.

  We had learned that the Holocaust had been a product of Russian-based nested conspiracies:

  First, the Bratstvo, or Brotherhood, whose devastatingly successful plot to use the Russian military's bionuclear capabilities to wipe out all Homo sapiens other than their own membership—as a mere collateral benefit of the nearly successful effort to eliminate us Homo post hominems before our new species could get a toehold and emerge from its endangered status.

  Then the Khraniteli, or Guardians: a group of suicidally fanatical Homo sapiens, “true human beings,” of whose existence we had never had a clue until Candy uncovered them and warned us, dedicated to the proposition that, not only were hominems not to be permitted to supplant H. sapiens, but only humans of the Khraniteli's own ideologically pure membership would be allowed to survive. Concealed and working within Bratstvo organization, the Khraniteli subtly misdirected their puppets’ efforts, leaked their locations, and ensured that the United States’ thermonuclear response to the initial attack would eliminate every Bratstvo installation and operative.

  This left the Earth to the tender mercies of the Khraniteli's own, much more sweeping follow-up purge: Operating through the Bratsvos, they had left a doomsday device in orbit—an unprecedentedly powerful strontium-90 bomb, programmed to commence reentry upon failing to receive a periodic coded signal, the next of which, according to intelligence reports, was due eleven days from then. Unfortunately, it seemed, the contents and radio frequencies were known only to the long-dead fanatics who had triggered the holocaust in the first place.

  The Hale had been modified extensively in order to reach geosynchronous orbit, twenty-two thousand five hundred miles above the Earth—seventy-five times higher than it had been designed for. The changes left it unable to return to Earth. The crew would reach the missile, disarm the bomb, and thereafter die. Hence the renaming: Nathan Hale—"My only regret is that I have but one life...”

  At almost the last moment, however, it was discovered that the small, powerful, homegrown robot handler that we had been developing to penetrate the missile and disarm the bomb was not up to the challenge. And because the missile's nine-by-fourteen-inch internal hatches were too small to permit an adult in a spacesuit to reach the detonator and disarm it, suddenly it appeared that our species was destined to join the dinosaurs almost before it had emerged.

  At that point, however, Candy stunned us all by volunteering to go on the suicide mission. She demonstrated that her diminutive stature allowed her effortless access to the warhead, and that her mastery of hysterical strength, gained during Teacher's karate training, would enable her to disarm it.

  Obviously, there was a chorus of protests over the notion of sending a child on a suicide mission, but even more obviously, if our species were to survive, there was no alternative.

  Mission personnel totaled three: Besides Candy, there was NASA astronaut Harris Gilbert, the mission commander, and Kyril Svetlanov, a Russian Bratstvo defector. Having participated in the design and construction of the bomb, Svetlanov had apparently experienced a change of heart. He was going up to help disarm it, thereafter to die—a most persuasive gesture of atonement.

  However, once they arrived at geosynchronous orbit and matched orbits with the bomb, the Russian's true colors emerged: He knifed Harris in the back, killing him instantly. Svetlanov was in fact a Khranitel.

  We hominems had been fed persuasive false intelligence about the missile, a delta-winged dart similar in appearance to our own space shuttles, but constructed of the Khraniteli's wondrou
sly strong new material: Purportedly it was programmed to reenter the atmosphere, belly-land on the open ocean, sink to the bottom of the Murray Fracture Zone, seven hundred miles west-southwest of San Francisco, and detonate. This would set off a worldwide paroxysm of earthquakes, volcanoes, and a lethal rain of strontium-90 fallout on all unprotected H. sapiens and hominems alike.

  In fact, however, the missile was targeted to land just offshore of the Vandenberg launch facility. And though the warhead was smaller than advertised, it was more than powerful enough to trigger a tsunami certain to wipe out all the Homo post hominems of Teacher's AA group, assembled to launch the Hale—yes, the misinformation had been tailored specifically to draw us there.

  Unfortunately, the data regarding the strontium-90 fallout was accurate: Earth would indeed be uninhabitable by unprotected humans of either variety for the next two hundred years. Only the Khraniteli, in their huge Serdtsevina Rasovyi shelter under the Ural Mountains, massively constructed of the new material and provisioned for the duration, would survive.

  Day-by-day, however, and despite her hominem heritage, Svetlanov's admiration for Candy's self-sacrificing courage and determinedly cheerful spirit had mounted during the week of intensive prelaunch training. With Harris dead, and after having disabled the radios, he felt reluctant to murder her as well, since he could envision no way that Candy alone could possibly complete the mission and block the Khraniteli's plan from achieving fruition.

  But Harris had never entirely trusted the Russian; he had deliberately kept him in the dark regarding Candy's karate skills. And within moments of the mission commander's death, she had distracted and disarmed the Khraniteli agent with tears—in her words, “surely most abjectly pitiable performance since Bambi calling for Mother in forest fire"—broken his neck, and resolutely assumed responsibility for the fate of all remaining Humankind.

  First, of course, she had to disable the bomb. This was the element of the mission for which she had trained, so—apart from the challenge of navigating a five-mile spacesuited orbital transit between the Hale and the missile, for which she had not trained—that was not a major problem.

  But thereafter, somehow, she had to figure out how to warn us, on the ground, of the Khraniteli's existence and their continuing genocidal intentions. The first solution to occur to her was to retarget the missile's landing site and send a handwritten message down inside it, wrapped in three nested spacesuits for protection against reentry heat.

  Incredibly, however, to that point she had been so utterly focused upon warning us that she hadn't even considered her own survival. Only after safeguarding the message did it occur to her that, by riding down inside the missile herself, she might have an outside chance of survival.

  Naturally, given the missile's lack of heat shielding, and programmed-in, high-g evasive maneuvering, she barely lived through the heat and battering. Only the fact that Adam and Kim had belatedly realized that Terry's increasingly nonstop, almost weeklong “spaceflight news coverage” monologue was in fact a direct line into Candy's thoughts enabled them to follow the reentry drama and be there when the missile touched down at Edwards Dry Lake.

  Braving significant scorching themselves, they extracted her from the still smokingly hot vehicle. In-flight pounding against the missile's internal structure had severed her spacesuit's life-support lines halfway through reentry, and she was clinically dead by that point: Both her respiration and heartbeat had stopped.

  They removed her from the nested spacesuits and began resuscitation efforts. Ultimately, only Adam's utter refusal to stop performing CPR, when it had become obvious to everyone else that she was past any hope of revival, saved her. Even Teacher, whose launch-site radar had picked up the missile coming in over the Pacific, and who, with his team of AAs, arrived in helicopters shortly after the reentry vehicle had touched down, tried to tell him that she was gone. But Adam persisted, and, to everyone's astonishment, eventually her heart restarted.

  Of course, in addition to clinical death, Candy had suffered multiple broken bones and extensive first- and second-degree burns. Months of treatment, physical therapy, and resumed karate training led to her complete recovery...

  And to the situation in which we found ourselves at the point at which the current journal commences: Candy had “borrowed” an airplane, and embarked upon what any reasonable person (lacking knowledge of her determination and skills) would regard as a Quixotic quest to find and rescue her adopted father.

  * * * *

  Volume II

  Grand Theft Aero

  Candy's Journal:

  Arguably, Posterity, descriptives borrowed, departed, perhaps oversimplify circumstances surrounding expedition's commencement. But needed plane. And needed at least as much not to be noticed, stopped.

  Now, historical record amply demonstrates Plucky Girl Aviatrix's world-class ultralight piloting skills. Not to mention multidozenteen hours logged “flying” shuttle simulator prior to suicide mission to geosynchronous orbit, plus checkout flights in most ships in AAs’ air fleet—okay, not the C-17s...

  More pertinently, however, only two weeks previously had availed self of propinquitous opportunity to accumulate just shy of two hours’ pilot-in-command Stallion time when Lennel Palindrome (how can parents be so cruel?) delivered Adam, Kim, Lisa, Terry, Tora-chan (Adam's cat), Plucky Girl Explorer herself, up to Sequoia National Forest to retrieve my unstoppably Adam-breathed-upon, four-wheel-drive van, boy's own luxurious, much-modified travel-trailer, our various camping/travel gear—including (oh, frabjous day!) his favorite gourmet cooking pots, pans, utensils, plus collection of herbs, spices, other possibly alchemy-based additives which may explain some of the difference between his offerings, those of other, merely world-class chefs.

  After intense coaxing, cajoling, wheedling, and persuasion (whining imputation, however, rejected as undiluted calumny), Lennel let me fly takeoff, outbound cross-country leg; even coached me through float-down-like-leaf, short-field-mode, practice landing on turf next to runway at destination airfield.

  * * * *

  Historiographer's note: To ensure accurate Record for Ages (not to mention quell malicious gossip), Lennel's decision to yield controls prompted exclusively by lad's own big-hearted impulses, innately magnanimous nature. Completely unconnected to my rumored promise not to hurt him next time I conducted his Second-Degree Black Belt karate classes....

  Mere coincidence, also, that, since equity demanded helping with preflight inspection, refueling upon arrival, postflight maintenance, etc., such activities enabled concurrent sucking of Lennel's brain generally regarding Stallions’ care, feeding, idiosyncrasies, etc.

  Now, unlikely as may seem in hindsight, at that point your Humble Historiographer actually had nothing more devious in mind than wallowing in adrenaline rush stemming from controlling big, powerful new toy. Ultralight's maximum takeoff weight, 525 pounds; with full fuel plus Intrepid Girl Aviatrix aboard, tips scales at barely 400. Stallion, on other hand, grosses 6100. Not to mention unmitigated epinephrine thrill—at full throttle, big bird accelerates like rocket, climbs as if laws of physics suspended.

  However, at least as compelling, like Mr. Kipling's Elephant's Child, Yours Truly always on lookout for opportunities to feed ‘satiable curiosity. Pursuit of knowledge never wasted effort.

  Which maxim's truth never more conclusively demonstrated than today....

  * * * *

  Recently reresurrected Helio Aircraft Company's latest edition of Stallion bushplane is big, gangly, awkward-looking bird: only a whisker less than forty feet from prop spinner to strobe-capped tail cone, wingspan slightly wider still. Towers nine feet high on extra-tall, so-called conventional tail-dragger landing gear, supported in front by two huge, fat, soft-terrain-flotation tires.

  (Clearly, conventional reference in this context purest anachronism: Nosewheel-based tricycle gear, as seen on jetliners, military aircraft, etc. [including ultralight, aboard which Plucky Girl Aviatrix acquired
initial experience], has long since replaced tail-dragger layout as norm; but two-big-tires-in-front/small-one-at-rear configuration still preferred by experienced bush pilots for soft, rough, short, unimproved fields.)

  Technically, Stallions rated for two-person flight crew plus eight passengers; in fact, since solo pilot suffices for operation, can transport nine actual passengers.

  For this trip, however, prior to departure, unlocked, took out, left behind six rearmost seats in favor of resultant unobstructed floor space, bulk cargo room, extra payload weight allowance.

  On downside, seat removal provided convenient access to cargo-drop belly doors. When opened, yawning void useful for air-delivering supplies, etc., should such activities appear on agenda. However, on occasions when must walk across, stand on them in flight, doors’ presence underfoot generates very real (regardless how psychosomatic) sweaty, achy sensation in soles of feet, palms of hands. (Odd reaction, given fact am not particularly phobic about heights per se.)

  From Plucky Girl Aviatrix's perspective, however, Stallion's primary benefit is advanced aerodynamic technology: Pop-out Fowler slats extending virtually entire length of wings’ leading edges, combined with root-to-tip flaperons (ailerons doubling as flaps) produce astonishing slow-flight qualities: Minimum controllable maneuvering speed only 37 knots, or 42.5 mph; actual stall lower still. Most planes that size already falling out of sky at 70 or better.

  Which slow-flight characteristics, when combined with 750-horsepower turboprop engine, huge, variable-pitch, reversible, three-blade prop, produce incredibly short takeoff/landing ground runs: just under length of football field; hardly more than needed by tiny ultralight. STOL: Short TakeOff/Landing—indeed.