Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  “As I understand, we have yet to locate the Oz Chip or the diskette.”

  “That’s correct. My guess is that Weyler managed to conceal them somewhere on the mountain before I found him.”

  “Hmmm. Why do you think he did that?”

  “Well, he probably figured that, with the nor’easter coming in, his handler wouldn’t be able to make it to the summit. So he must have dead-dropped them somewhere on Wachusett for another agent to retrieve later. Like I said, in a tree knoll or under a rock … God knows where they are now. They weren’t found on his body.”

  Then, as Shaw anticipated, Weyler suddenly lunged to his left, bringing up his Ingram to fire in the direction of Shaw’s voice.

  Shaw never gave him the chance to shoot. Keeping the cross-hairs centered on Weyler as he moved, Shaw squeezed the trigger of his rifle. The Heckler and Koch growled and ten rounds slammed into Charlie Weyler’s chest. Blood sprayed, and Charles A. Weyler, former director of marketing for Biocybe Resources and double-agent for the People’s Republic of China, was hurled backwards. His dead body hit the trail and rolled downhill several feet, leaving a bloody streak along the virgin snow. The echo of the gunfire was lost in the woodland before his corpse came to rest.

  “He fired first?”

  “That’s correct, yes.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “I warned him to stop, but he was armed with an Ingram MAC-10 and he immediately commenced to fire. I managed to reach a boulder off the trail, and I fired back once I was able to get a clear shot. I’m sorry, but I was not able to take him alive.”

  “I see. You then searched his body and were not able to find the stolen items?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I then followed his path down the mountain, trying to find where he might have hidden them, but by this time it was getting dark and the snow had buried his tracks. In fact, I consider myself lucky that I managed to get down to the lodge without getting lost up there.”

  “Yeah, that is lucky.”

  “Has anyone found the Oz Chip yet?”

  “No. We still have a team searching the mountain, but like you said, it could be anywhere. Four feet of snow buried everything.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s unfortunate. But since he’s dead, the opposition can’t find it either.”

  “That’s the upshot, isn’t it? Nobody gets the thing.”

  “That’s right.”

  Shaw slung the rifle back over his shoulder, picked up his skis and poles, and tramped out of the woods to the trail. He stopped next to where Weyler had been shot, knelt and picked up the Oz Chip and the computer diskette. He opened his parka and slid them both into an inside pocket where they were well-hidden by the jacket’s thick padding, then closed his parka and bent to put on his skis. It would take him only about an hour to return to the base of the mountain. By then it would be completely dark, and the snow was still coming down. His alibi would be perfect.

  He latched down his heels, carefully stood and picked up his poles, then pushed off, gliding down the hill past Weyler’s body. He barely glanced at the other GRU sleeper as he passed, but favored him with a final piece of advice.

  “Don’t mess around with Moscow, pal,” he murmured.

  “I think that’s all for my questions, Mr. Shaw. Thanks for your cooperation.”

  “My pleasure. I hope it’s been helpful.”

  “It has been. Oh, and by the way, congratulations on your commendation. I understand you’re flying to Washington tomorrow to receive it from the Director.”

  “Thanks. Yeah, it’s quite an honor.”

  “Is there anything that goes along with it?”

  “No pay raise, if that’s what you’re asking, but I am going to take a little vacation once I get through in DC I need to take a break.”

  “I’m sure you deserve it. Any place special?”

  “Italy. I’ve always wanted to see Venice.”

  On the Road: Can You Count the Angels Dancing on a Pin?

  OCCASIONALLY, ONE STUMBLES ACROSS some fact about the natural world that boggles the mind, a fact which is not at all obscure, but still more overwhelmingly impressive than any manmade construct on the face of the earth. Suddenly, our own existence—which at times seems to fill the entire universe, distorting Galilean physics so that Sun, planets and stars revolve around the great Me—is put in its proper perspective.

  An example of this is the distance between our planet and the nearest star besides the Sun, Alpha Centauri. The distance is 4.3 light-years, an easily graspable sum … until one realizes that this translates to approximately 25,800,000,000,000 miles. It means that even if a starship could travel at the speed of light (an impossibility according to the theory of relativity), it would take that ship more than four years to get to our solar system’s neighbor. When one further finds that the Milky Way galaxy, which we inhabit in a remote region of one spiral arm, is 100,000 light-years in diameter, and that this translates to approximately 600,000,000,000,000,000 miles … well, the ten trips that men have taken to the Moon, which is only about 240,000 miles away, no longer seem quite so impressive.

  On the opposite end of the scale, there is the microscopic universe.

  In the basement of one of the ten laboratory buildings at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology is a means of seeing into the micro-universe, just as radio telescopes allow us to peer at the galaxy. This is a transmission electron microscope; it is used by the research scientists at the foundation to study a variety of organisms which exist on a range of size below that which normal optical microscopes can detect.

  The electron microscope looks, and works, nothing like a normal microscope. It is a large cylinder, about a foot in diameter and about six feet in height, which is mounted above a wraparound console where the operator sits. Unlike an optical microscope, which focuses light onto a specimen, in an electron microscope a stream of electrons is shot from the top of the cylinder down through the specimen to be studied, which is mounted on a slide inserted in the middle of the scope. An image of the specimen is thus transmitted to a screen at the base of the microscope and can be studied through a magnifying eyepiece mounted in front of the screen. There is also a camera attached to the microscope so that photos may be taken of the specimen.

  During a public tour of the foundation’s facilities given one afternoon to a handful of visitors, a postdoctoral fellow in cellular biology, Dr. Harold Hoops, demonstrates the massive instrument. The object of the demonstration is a cross section of a sample of Cilia flagella, a microorganism which is, as Hoops put it, “a plant which thinks it’s an animal.” Cilia flagella is grown in the labs at the foundation by scientists because its cellular makeup closely resembles human cells, yet it is far less expensive to whip up and study a batch of microflora than it is to obtain and study human cells. It also has a hair-like structure which is easy to observe, Hoops explains. A drawing of the microorganism resembles a grape with a long, skinny tail.

  As Hoops explains the function of the electron microscope, he passes around the slide on which the specimen is placed. This is the visitor’s first encounter with the dynamics of size associated with this kind of work. The specimen is mounted on a metal grid in the slide which is permeated with hundreds of holes. The diameter of the grid is almost exactly the diameter of the character “o” printed on this page; it has about three hundred holes per inch. The specimen placed on this grid appears as a barely perceptible mote of dust, so tiny that even when the slide is held up to the light it is practically invisible.

  Hoops slips the slide with the grid and specimen into a slot halfway up the trunk of the microscope, then briefly works the pushbutton controls on the console until the image appears on the microscope’s screen, a small oval surface behind a Plexiglass cover. He then adjusts the magnifier, which is much like a conventional microscope, until he is able to make out the Cilia flagella. Then he lets his visitors peer through the lens.

  Now the dust mote has expanded to the
apparent size of a small discus, magnified one-half million times by the microscope. What is seen is a roughly oval-shaped collection of cells: a single large, tan oval surrounded by a cluster of tiny, bubble-like cells. It almost looks like an alien creature brought back to Earth by an interstellar probe, not like something born on this planet.

  The visitors step up, one at a time, to peer at the tiny critter, and someone finally asks how big it is. Hoops calmly says that the Cilia flagella measures about 200 nanometers in diameter; each bubble-like cell lining its epidermis measures about 25 nanometers.

  Now, one has to stop and realize just how big a nanometer is: one billionth of a meter. Compared to the size of an atom, of course, something 25 nanometers in diameter is roughly comparable to the diameter of Earth compared to the diameter of the solar system. The most powerful electron microscope in existence has only recently photographed the shadowy outlines of an atom. So, in comparison to an atom, an object 25 nanometers in diameter is a big, fat bull’s-eye.

  But, on the other hand, to be able to see something about 25,000,000,000 times smaller than the length of a meterstick is nothing to sneeze at. It’s a feat inversely equivalent to radio astronomers’ recent accomplishment of being able to detect a planet orbiting a star some hundreds of light-years away. One stares down the lens at a specimen of Cilia flagella and wonders just how in the hell anything that small can possibly be alive.

  A matter of scale, that’s all. Sometimes we, as a race, are a bit too intellectually self-centered for our own good. Everything “real” is that which is at our eye-level or within our personal reach. “Big” is the height of the John Hancock Building. “Little” is something you have to get tweezers to pick up. “Far away” is, say, a drive from Worcester to a relative’s house in New York; “very far away” is a plane trip to London. Therefore, distances such as light-years or sizes like nanometers are beyond our everyday perspective. The mind can hardly grasp the fact that vast universes exist just outside the safe confines of our own solar system … or in a speck on the tip of your fingernail.

  This is, perhaps, what science is ultimately good for: putting things in their proper proportions, for stealing away from us our blind, self-aggrandizing delusions of our importance in the space of things. After all, little Cilia flagella doesn’t know, or care, that vastly larger, more “important” creatures exist all around it, just as we are ignorant of its existence.

  Kinda takes you down a notch, doesn’t it?

  Trembling Earth

  “OKEFENOKEE SWAMP, ALSO SPELLED Okefinokee, primitive swamp and wildlife refuge in southeastern Georgia and northern Florida … The swamp’s name probably is derived from the Seminole Indian word for ‘trembling earth,’ so called because of the floating islands of the swamp.”

  —Encyclopedia Britannica

  1. The Mesozoic Express

  A high-pitched chop of helicopter rotors from somewhere high above the treetops, the faint invisible perception of drifting on still waters, hot sunlight on his face and cold water on his back. An amalgam of sensations awakened Steinberg, gradually pulling him from a black well. Awake, but not quite aware; he lay in the muddy bottom of the fiberglass canoe and squinted up at the sunlight passing through the moss-shrouded tree branches. His clothes were soaked through to the skin and even in the midday sun he was chilled, but somehow that didn’t register. All that came through his numbed mind was the vague notion that the canoe was drifting downstream, bobbing like a dead log in the current of the …

  Where was he? What was the name of this place? “Suwannee Canal,” a voice from the fogged depths of his mind informed him. Yeah. Right. The Suwannee Canal. How could he have forgotten? “Up Shit Creek and no paddle,” another voice said aloud. It took him a moment to realize that the voice was his own.

  The helicopter seemed to be getting closer, but he couldn’t see it yet. Well, if I’m drifting, maybe I need to find a paddle. Steinberg sat up on his elbows and his eyes roamed down the length of the canoe. Muddied backpacks, soaked and trampled sleeping bags, a rolled-up tent, a propane lantern with a broken shield, a black leather attache case which for some reason looked entirely appropriate for being here … but no paddle. Must have fallen out somewhere back there. Yes, Denny, you’re definitely up Shit Creek …

  “That’s a joke, kid.” The new voice in his head belonged to Joe Gerhardt. “Laugh when the man tells you a joke …”

  No. Don’t think about Joe. Don’t think about Pete. He shook his head and instantly regretted it; it felt as if someone had pounded a railroad spike through his brain. He winced, gasping a little at the pain. Aspirin. Tiffany has the aspirin bottle …

  Where’s Tiffany? The thought came through in a rare instant of clarity. Where’s Tiffany? She was right behind me when we were running, she was right behind when …

  Something bumped the bottom of the canoe, behind his head. He slowly looked around, his gaze travelling across sun-dappled water the color of tea, and saw the long, leathery head of an alligator just below the gunnel of the canoe, slit-pupilled green eyes staring up at him. Startled, Denny jerked upward a little and the gator disappeared beneath the water without so much as a ripple. If his hand had been dangling in the water the gator could have chomped it off, yet somehow Denny wasn’t frightened. Just Old Man Gator, coming by to visit his canoe without a paddle here on Shit Creek …

  Where’s Tiffany?

  Now the sound of rotors was much louder. The exertion and the headache had drained him; feeling as if all life had been sucked from his bones, Steinberg sank back into the bottom of the canoe, the back of his throbbing head finding a cool puddle of water. Mosquitos purred around his ears and before his eyes, but he couldn’t find the strength to swat them away. He stared back up at the blue sky and listlessly watched as the twin-prop Osprey hove into view above the treetops. I know that thing, he thought. I was in it just yesterday. Me … and Joe Gerhardt … and Pete Chambliss …

  And now he really didn’t want to think about them. Especially not about what happened to them, because if he did he might remember the sound of jaws tearing into flesh, of screams that go on and on and on … and if that happened he might just jump right out of the canoe and take his chances with Mister Old Man Alligator, because even if he didn’t know what happened to Tiffany, he knew what happened to Gerhardt and the senator. And that’s not a joke, kid. That’s not funny at all …

  He watched as the Osprey grew closer and found to his relief that there was a little mercy to be found in Shit Creek, because his eyes closed and he rediscovered the bliss of oblivion.

  Transcript of the Kaplan Commission Hearings on the Assassination of Senator Petrie R. Chambliss; Washington, DC, July, 2004. George Kaplan, former United States Attorney General, presiding. From the testimony of Daniel Steinberg, former legislative aide to Sen. Chambliss.

  KAPLAN: Thank you for being here with us today, Mr. Steinberg. The Commission realizes that you’re involved in serious litigation in regards to this incident, so we’re especially appreciative of the effort you’ve taken to speak to us.

  STEINBERG: Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.

  KAPLAN: Many of the facts of this case are already known to us, Mr. Steinberg, both from public accounts and from the testimony of witnesses before you. However, there has been a great deal of confusion and … might I add for the benefit of the press pool reporters in the hearing room … obfuscation on the part of the media. There has also been some lack of corroboration among the testimonies of prior witnesses. It’s important for this Commission to get the facts straight, so some questions we might ask you may seem redundant. So I hope you don’t mind if … well, please bear with us if we seem to be beating the same ground that’s been beaten before.

  STEINBERG: Not at all, sir … I mean, yes, sir. I understand completely.

  KAPLAN: Good. To start with, Mr. Steinberg, can you tell us why you and the late Senator Chambliss went to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Reserve last April?

  STEINB
ERG: Well, the senator felt as if he needed to take a vacation, sir. We … that’s his staff and the senator, sir … I mean, his Washington staff, not the campaign committee …

  KAPLAN: We understand that. Please, just relax and take your time.

  STEINBERG: Uhh … yes sir. Anyway, Pete … that is, the senator … had just come back from Moscow, after his discussions with the new government regarding the unilateral nuclear disarmament treaty. Everyone had been burning the candle at both ends, both with the Moscow arms talks and the presidential campaign. The campaign for the Super Tuesday primaries was coming up and the Senate had gone into recess, so Pete … I’m sorry if I’m so informal, Mr. Kaplan …

  KAPLAN: That’s quite all right. We understand that you were on a first-name basis with the senator. Carry on.

  STEINBERG: Anyway, Pete wanted to take some time off, do something just for fun. Well, he is … I’m sorry, he was … an avid outdoorsman, and he had taken an interest in the paleontological research being done at the Okefenokee Wildlife Refuge because of his position on the Senate Science Committee, so he decided that he wanted to take a canoe trip through the refuge and …

  KAPLAN: Excuse me, Mr. Steinberg. The chair recognizes Dr. Williams.

  FREDERICK WILLIAMS, Ph.D; Chancellor, Yale University: Mr. Steinberg, you say the senator wanted to visit the Okefenokee Swamp. I can understand that he might have wanted to take a break by taking a canoe trip, since I’m an aficionado of the sport myself, but I’m still not sure of his intent. Was it because he wanted to paddle where he had not paddled before, or was it because he wanted to see the dinosaurs?

  STEINBERG: Well, it was both, sir. I mean, he could have taken a raft trip down the Colorado River, but he had done that a couple of times before already. And he did want to see the dinosaur project and it was going to be in a Super Tuesday state besides, so the exposure couldn’t hurt … well, he just came to me and said, “Denny, what do you say to a little canoe trip down South?”