Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  He recognized me at once. He might have even been waiting for me. I wanted to turn and walk away. But then he said my name, and I stayed. I sat down on the windowsill next to his chair, and listened to a dying old man.

  He said …

  (Sighs). I’m sorry. I can’t go on. Will you turn off the recorder now, please?

  I’ve been asked, “Why did you try, when you knew ninety-nine percent of the people wouldn’t believe you?” My reply, when it wasn’t self-incriminating to answer the question, was simple. “You’re missing the point,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if ninety-nine percent of the people won’t believe you. It only takes the remaining one percent to make you a rich man.”

  I have done many terrible things to become rich, and I won’t apologize for all of them. The New Hampshire hoax was only the first of many. I have deceived and manipulated countless people. I have no regrets about bilking total strangers for their money. If they were silly enough to send me money for the privilege of hearing more of my lies, then they deserved what they received. You get what you pay for.

  Yet, for those whose friendship I betrayed, I feel a vast, unspeakable shame. The wealth I reaped is a poor substitute for the friends I have lost. The debt I owe them can never be repaid, even by the division of my estate.

  The greater part of my estate, though, I bequeath to Minnesota State University, for the continuance of its English department’s science fiction research program. My actions have tarnished the genre. Perhaps this will help to make amends. However, there is no reason why the program should be blackened by the name of a liar, which is why this donation will be made anonymously.

  As for my three UFO books, I commend them to death. I have appointed Margo Croft to be my literary executor, and she has been instructed to make sure that they are never again reprinted. They will follow me into the grave, never again to rot anyone’s mind.

  As for my remaining work … Margo, you may do with them as you please.

  —Harold L. Hapgood, Jr.

  Last Will and Testament

  (Recorded July 28, 1966)

  Lawrence Bolger:

  Shortly after Harry Hapgood’s funeral, the University sent a couple of graduate researchers from the SF program down to Mexico, to visit Hapgood’s mansion. They went along with Margo Croft, who had yet to set foot in Harry’s house, even though the two of them had reached sort of a reconciliation just before he died. Both our students and Margo were interested in the same thing, the vague reference to “remaining work” Hapgood had alluded to in his will.

  Outside the high walls of the compound, a few of Harry’s remaining followers were still holding vigil—wild-haired old ladies clutching frayed copies of Abducted to Space, intense young men with madness lurking behind their eyes, a smiling married couple wearing aluminum foil spacesuits, waiting for Harry’s space ark to arrive and carry them to the promised land in the sky. Within the mansion, men were packing in crates his furniture and belongings—jade and porcelain vases, Spanish iron sculptures, Elizabethan tapestries—in preparation for Sotheby’s auction of the estate. As Hapgood had directed, the house itself and its grounds would be donated to Mexico for a mental institute. Perhaps this was a final, wry joke on his part.

  Margo and the researchers found Harry’s office virtually untouched. Only the lawyers had been in there, to retrieve the file cabinets containing Harry’s financial records. There was another file cabinet in the office, though, and a desk; in the drawers, they found the last literary work of H.L. Hapgood, Jr.

  They counted sixty-four short stories and three novels; meticulously typed, almost all completed, and none previously published. All had been written since the early 1950s, most in the last few years of his life, when Harry was fighting his cancer. All science fiction … not a UFO book in the whole bunch. Enough writing to fill a career.

  Yet there were no rejection slips in the files, nor were there copies of cover letters. No indication that Harry had ever submitted any of these stories to magazine or book publishers. It was as if he would write a story, then simply stash it away and start another one. Hapgood had lived alone; there had been no one to read his work.

  Why? (Shrugs.) Who knows? Maybe he couldn’t face rejection … he didn’t want to see any of those stories come back in the mail. But they were good stories, nonetheless. Hapgood had obviously learned something about writing in the intervening years.

  You know the rest, of course. Margo brought the manuscripts back to New York, and one of her clients culled the best short stories from the stack, edited them into a posthumous collection, and managed to get it published. The damn thing’s been selling like crazy ever since. (Laughs.) Perhaps Harry’s legion of UFO cultists is still out there, loyally buying multiple copies from the bookstores. That’s the only explanation I have for the new book getting on the New York Times bestseller list last week. And now the same publisher is going to issue his novels in a uniform edition. They’ll probably become bestsellers, too. So go figure …

  So who got the last laugh? Maybe this is Harry’s final revenge. His place in the genre’s history has been revised, and hardly anyone out there remembers the New Hampshire hoax. That’s the conventional wisdom. But, y’know, he didn’t survive to see his new acceptance in the field. Literary success doesn’t do you much good if you’re dead, right?

  Look at it this way. Harry always said that the UFOs were coming back to get him. And he was right. The flying saucers got him in the end.

  On the Road: Waiting for the End of the World

  (NOTE: IN THE 1993 REPRINT, the first names of the sources were changed, and their last names were never used. They are, however, real people—AMS.)

  “You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.”

  —Robert A. Heinlein

  Sam and Regina are a young couple living in a middle-class section of Worcester. Sam’s the supervisor of a machine shop; Regina works as a shipping clerk. They share a small apartment with a couple of cats, one of which is a not completely housebroken kitten. Regina likes Stephen King’s novels and they’ve got all the film versions on videotape to play on their VCR. Both are amiable: Regina is the more soft-spoken of the two, and Sam has a good sense of humor and likes to laugh. They are, all in all, among the nicer married couples one could expect to meet in the city. You would never worry if they moved in upstairs from you.

  They keep a large supply of canned goods and both are adept at first aid. They’re learning how to preserve and can foods as well as the fundamentals of home gardening. They have studied numerous combat manuals, information packets from Civil Defense, and books on survival after nuclear war.

  They are also well-armed. When they were married, Sam gave Regina a gold-plated Colt .22 revolver in a trophy box and Regina gave Sam an Uzi semi-automatic submachine gun. In a large closet, along with a large assortment of camping equipment, are two 30.06 hunting rifles with telescopic sights, four compound bows, a large crossbow with a telescopic sight and razor-tipped bolts, a hand-size crossbow, a Chinese AKS semi-automatic carbine with a folding stock, an AR-15 semi-auto carbine (the civilian version of the U.S. Army’s standard combat weapon), two 20-gauge shotguns and enough ammunition to get them through the next World War. They also keep a loaded pistol beneath their bed.

  Sam and Regina are survivalists, two of a number of people in the country who have decided that the future may be a dangerous place in which to live, and they have taken measures to prepare themselves for the worst.

  “It was one of those things where you wake up one day and you start realizing that everything’s not the way it should be, and you can more or less see things going downhill,” Sam says, sitting on the couch in their apartment, holding Regina’s hand with one hand and scratching behind the Siamese kitten’s ear with the other. “You get flashbacks from the stuff you learned in history class and everything’s pointing to the decline of civilization.”

  While Sam believes that glo
bal nuclear war is the most immediate threat, he also thinks that it’s possible that the United States and the Soviet Union may resolve their differences. Social collapse in the United States is a future he sees as happening right now, with the government losing touch with the citizens and the police being unable to prevent crime or protect the public.

  “There’s a lot of [scenarios] which could happen,” he says, “anywhere from nuclear warfare to economic decline to governmental breakdown, where even the police are saying, ‘Every man for himself.’ Hopefully it will never happen. The thing with survivalism is that it could happen anytime, that nobody wants it to happen, not even the hardcore survivalists.”

  At the same time, Sam considers himself to be more realistic about survivalism than the types he calls “closet mercenaries,” those just looking for an excuse to play out a fantasy role, who “want to go out and load that gun up and run out into the street—‘There’s the enemy, shoot!’” He says that at one time he stockpiled food relentlessly and had weapons all over the house. He had also been a member of a survivalist group in Westborough, but had quit when he realized that most of the group were simply venting personal frustration by indulging in war games in the woods. His extremism had leveled off when he realized that “it’s not going to happen all at once.”

  “I had heard of it before I met Sam,” Regina says, “and when I first started going out with him I thought he was a nut.” Sam laughs. “I mean, he’s got cupboards loaded with canned vegetables, all dated on the bottom with the month, day, and year, and I went, ‘Whoa!’”

  But then she started getting interested in staying alive if the worst were to happen. Sam has since trained her in the use of firearms and in hand-to-hand combat, and she has trained herself to handle first aid and outdoor skills. “I’m hoping nothing does happen,” she says earnestly, “but if something were to happen and he were to get killed, I would have to learn to take care of myself.”

  The most visible factor, which most people focus upon when thinking about survivalism, is defense. Sam acknowledges that survivalism has attracted its share of gun nuts and paranoids, but at the same time he believes firearms are necessary. “If something ever did happen,” he says, “the first major priority would be defense. It’ll be a matter of supply and demand. If you have it, everyone else is going to want it, and if you want it bad enough to keep it you’re going to have to defend it.”

  Sam says that even though his beliefs don’t faze his friends, “My mother thinks I’m psychotic. She really thinks, ‘If I’m going to die, I’m going to die.’ I have a totally opposite opinion. I figure that, if you are given the idea to survive, you’ve got a fighting instinct to stay alive. Some people would just rather give up. They say, ‘If the bombs drop, I’d rather be dead.’”

  He believes that preparing for social collapse or nuclear war is essentially like taking along a first aid kit on a road trip—but a step further. “A lot of people are survivalists and just don’t realize it,” he says. “If they can see far enough into the future to see that a problem could happen and they prepare for it, then they’re survivalists.”

  Regina takes an upbeat view toward their preparations for an uncertain future. “Some people look at a survivalist as being someone who is waiting for the worst to happen, someone who has a pessimistic view of the future,” she says. “But if you look at it the other way around, it’s more of an optimistic view of the future, because we’re at least preparing to survive, and we have a better view of the future in saying that, ‘Okay, we’re prepared to live in what’s going to happen in the future, and we’re strong enough to do this.’”

  Winter Scenes of the Cold War

  “ARE YOU COMFORTABLE, MR. SHAW?”

  “Umm … yeah, Ì guess.”

  “Good. We’ll try not to take very long with this, but we need to find out exactly what happened up there.”

  “Is this my debriefing?”

  “Not in a formal sense, no. We just need to find out some details for the final report to the Director.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “I’ve heard it was rough.”

  “You could say that, yes.”

  The wind was picking up now, making the black, greasy cable over his head sing. The ski lift creaked as each sudden gust caused his chair to violently sway. Shaw, huddled on the wooden seat, looked down between his legs and watched the snow-covered mountainside passing by fifty feet below him. He clutched his skis, the poles, and the long Mylar bag containing his rifle closer to him. It was nearly impossible, but he briefly imagined the wind picking the chair off its runners, hurling it down, dashing him on the ice and rocks below.

  “Tango Station to Frosty One, come in, please.” He heard Brim’s voice in the two-way radio headset he wore underneath his wool cap. “Come in please, Frosty One, over.”

  Frosty the Snowman. You’re cute, Brim. “Frosty One, Tango Station,” he replied between chattering teeth into the tiny mike dangling in front of his mouth. “We copy, over.”

  “How are you doing there? Over.”

  He was cold as hell, but that was nothing he was going to admit to Brim. “We’re copacetic, Tango. What’s the word? Over.”

  “No news, Frosty One. Big Bird report on Geronimo is negatory. Repeat, negatory. We’re still green-for-go with your run. Do you copy? Over.”

  Shaw gazed through his yellow-tinted goggles at the line of empty chairs preceding him up Wachusett Mountain. He was almost at the summit now; it was visible as an opaque blur, barely discernable through the snow which sheeted around him. “Big Bird” was the Bell AB47G which had made a couple of fast, low-level passes over the slopes before the nor’easter had forced the helicopter away from the mountain, where the unpredictable wind patterns made flying especially dangerous. He was not surprised that the chopper had not spotted Geronimo. Even if the snow were not so thick, Weyler would have the sense to hide if he spotted the helicopter.

  “We copy, Tango,” he said to his headset mike. “Green-for-go. Frosty One over and out.”

  The chair dipped lower to the ground, passed a line of trees, and suddenly Shaw was at the summit, passing the lift station on his left. He spotted the red-jacketed lift operator through the window. He swung up the metal safety bar and jumped off, his boots crunching through several inches of new snow before resting on the packed ice beneath. He floundered out of the way of the chairs, dropped his equipment on the ground, and knelt to stick his booted feet into the snap-down bindings of the Rossignol telemark skis. The lift operator ran out to help him.

  “I’m okay,” he shouted to the kid, waving him away. “I’m fine.” The lift operator—a college boy with an eager, innocent face—stopped and stared at him. Look, it’s James Bond arriving to save the world. “Clear out!” Shaw yelled over the howling wind.

  The kid backed away, then hurried to catch the next chair going down the mountain. Down to the base lodge, where there was a warm fire, Irish coffee, dry socks and perhaps a comely ski bunny with whom to cuddle. From up here, Shaw could not even see the foot of the mountain.

  Shaw locked the heels of his boots down against the long, slender skis; now he had the leverage to make good turns on the sharp, steep curves just ahead. He stuck the tips of his poles deep into the packed snow—the wind buffeted against them, but didn’t send them sailing—and unzipped the cover of his weapon: a Heckler and Koch G-11 sniper rifle, complete with an integrated Starlight scope, looking like something from a science fiction movie. Good FBI equipment.

  He checked the fifty-round clip, then slung it by its strap over his left shoulder and under his right arm. Standing up, yanking his poles out of the snow, Shaw paused to check his bearings. To his left, at the edge of the treeline, was the top of Summit Loop, leading around the mountaintop to the Administration Road trail which, in turn, led to the North Road cut-off trail connecting to Balance Rock Road. Somewhere along those steep, winding trails was Charles Weyler.

  “Okay, Charlie,” he muttered.
“Let’s go skiing.”

  “Tell me about Charles A. Weyler.”

  “You mean it isn’t in your files?”

  “I want to hear what you have to say about him, please. For the record.”

  “Okay. Charlie Weyler was a Soviet sleeper, employed by the GRU. Your typical Harvard MBA yuppie type, except that he decided on an original approach to making himself a millionaire before age thirty. We first found out about him when he paid a discreet visit to the Soviet consulate in Boston in May, 1984, where he apparently made an offer to sell his services to the Russians. They checked him out, found that he wasn’t doubling for us, and decided to take him up on his offer. They were interested in some work that a company called Biocybe Resources was doing, and they managed to …”

  “Back up a step, please. What is Biocybe Resources and what has it been doing?”

  “Hey, I know this is in your files already.”

  “Please answer the question, Mr. Shaw.”

  “Jeez … all right. Biocybe is a small company based at the Worcester Biotech Research Park which has been working in nanotechnology. Essentially, they’ve been developing a biochip. …”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sort of an organic computer chip. That is, a microchip which isn’t manufactured like a printed circuit, but grown in an organic culture, so that it resembles a human brain cell. Very advanced stuff. The point is, if something like this could be perfected and mass-produced, it would make computers smaller, faster, and cheaper to produce, and leave everything that we now call ‘state of the art’ in the dust.”