Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction

by Ben Bova

  “It would be best to wait for Barbara to get back.” There was a pause. “Listen, Rick … our game this afternoon, it’s at the Reflecting Pool fields, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Meet me at Foggy Bottom Metro an hour before the game.”

  Chris and Rick rode the escalator out of the Foggy Bottom Metro station. As they emerged at street level, the entrance to the George Washington University Hospital appeared to their left.

  “Think anybody in there can help me?” Rick asked.

  “Sure,” Chris replied. “There’s lots of cute girls at G.W.”

  “This isn’t funny!” Rick snapped.

  “Sorry,” Chris said. “Look, I’ve spoken with Barbara. She can see you next week.”

  They walked south down 23rd Street NW, and as they passed the State Department, the Lincoln Memorial, resembling a Greek temple with its limestone and marble faces and fluted Doric columns, came into view. They followed the throng of tourists making their way around the ring road to the front steps of the memorial.

  “Hey, the fields are that way.” Rick pointed to the south side of the Reflecting Pool.

  “We have time.” Chris jerked his thumb at the memorial. “Let’s have a look.”

  “At Lincoln?” Rick asked. “Why?”

  “Indulge me.”

  Puzzled, Rick followed Chris up the steps to the front portico. Dodging tourists, they walked past the massive Doric columns into the central hall, finding themselves before the sculpture of the seated Lincoln. The marble visage of the sixteenth president gazed unblinking toward the ivory needle of the Washington Monument in silent, benevolent contemplation.

  Chris pointed. “The man was hideous, wasn’t he?”

  “What?” The chatter of tourists echoed loudly through the hall. Rick was sure he’d not heard right.

  “Abe,” Chris repeated. “He was one ugly dude.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I read that one of his political opponents once accused him of being two-faced. You know what he said?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “He said, ‘If I were two-faced, do you think I would be wearing this one?’”

  “What’s your point?” Rick asked.

  Chris turned back to the sculpture. “During his lifetime, Lincoln was widely regarded as ugly. But later on … well, what do you think of when you see Lincoln?”

  Rick shrugged. “Emancipation Proclamation. Brought the country together after the Civil War. Is this a quiz?”

  “Do you think he’s ugly?”

  “No, I don’t think Abraham Lincoln is ugly!”

  Chris nodded. “President Lincoln’s physical features are beloved, not because of their physical qualities, but because of what they stand for.”

  “What’s your point?” Rick asked.

  “I worked on an interesting study when I was doing my masters at Wisconsin-Madison. We got the university’s ultimate team together and asked them to rate each other on physical attractiveness. Then we got some strangers to rate the team members, but based only on photographs. You know what we found?”

  Rick shook his head.

  “There was a tight-ass on the team, a Cassie Clarke type, that every other member of the team rated as ugly, even though I thought she was kind of cute myself. She’s actually the reason I got into ultimate, but that’s another story. Anyway, there was another woman, one of the team leaders, who was rated most beautiful by her peers. But the strangers rated the other woman more attractive on the basis of the pictures.

  “Later on, we put some of the volunteers in a functional MRI, and it confirmed the results at the neurological level. The brain processes attractiveness differently when the person knows nonphysical traits of the other person that are unknown or invisible to strangers. Nonphysical factors are crucial to the subconscious assessment of beauty.”

  Rick waited for Chris to continue.

  “So, it turns out the old saying was right all along. Beauty is a hell of a lot more than skin deep, and now we know there’s an actual neurological basis behind it.”

  Chris looked his friend in the eye. “Rick, we never gave you the treatment.”

  It took a moment to sink in. “You, never…”

  “Barbara put you under, you had a nice nap in our lab, and that’s it. Nothing was done.”

  “But, the retainers—”

  “I have no idea what those pills are,” Chris said. “I hope they tasted good.”

  Rick was momentarily speechless. “You sneaky bastard.”

  “You’re welcome. But still, I’ll bet you don’t find Mariel quite so hot anymore.”

  Rick thought for a moment. “No, I guess not.”

  “You know why?”

  Rick said nothing.

  “Because she’s fucking insane.”

  Rick looked at his friend ruefully. “Is that a legitimate medical diagnosis?”

  “Absolutely. Fucking insanity is a common affliction of many men and women, unfortunately. As for Mariel, I guess you could say … she ain’t pretty, she just looks that way.”

  Rick put a hand on Chris’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

  “What are friends for?” Chris looked at his watch. “Now, come on. We gotta win one for the Gipper.”

  Rick laughed out loud, to his total dismay. “Wrong president, dude!”

  “Well everyone, we’ve got two big things to celebrate.” Rick raised his beer. “Number one is, of course, our first win of the season!”

  Shouts of “yeah!” resounded, and fists pumped the air.

  “The second thing is … our peerless captain Chris has finally finished the first draft of his doctoral thesis!”

  More claps and cheers. Someone yelled, “You the man, Chris!”

  “Actually,” Chris said, “there’s a third thing, and that’s our first full team post-game pub meeting. You have no idea how painful it was to be stuck with just him”—he pointed at Rick—“for company.”

  “Cheers!”

  The team raised their beers again. Jill smiled, toasting her soda in Rick’s direction.

  Everyone had come out. The team had practically taken over the Froggy Bottom Pub’s modest patio facing Pennsylvania Avenue. Even Cassie Clarke showed up. They had to pull together all the small square Formica patio tables to seat everyone.

  The revelry continued into the evening, but gradually people began to leave.

  Rick checked his watch. “Well, it’s been a blast, but it’s getting close to my bedtime.” He stood and waved. “See everyone next week.”

  As he walked by Chris, he patted him on the back. His friend smiled and nodded.

  Rick had just stepped around the patio railing to get onto the sidewalk when a voice called out.

  “Hey, are you going to the Metro?”

  He turned and saw Jill Kravitz. “Yeah.”

  “May I come with you?”

  “Sure.”

  It took less than five minutes to walk to the Foggy Bottom station, but it was still more time than Rick had ever really spent with her before. They had played together for months but had never really talked about anything except what was happening during a game.

  Jill told him she was from London, England, and that she was working as an information researcher in the Geography and Map Division at the Library of Congress. Rick told her about his work on LIDARSAT at Goddard and the importance of satellite remote sensing to global environmental monitoring. They both agreed that The Wrath of Khan was without a doubt the best Star Trek movie ever. Rick resisted the urge to do the infamous Shatner scream.

  They arrived at Foggy Bottom Metro and took the escalator down to the platform, where they prepared to part ways. She needed to take the Blue line to Franconia-Springfield, and he the Orange line in the opposite direction.

  The lights along the edge of the platform began to blink, indicating the imminent arrival of a train.

  “Hey Rick, are you doing anything this Sunday nig
ht?”

  “No, not really.”

  “The Northern Pikes are at Wolf Trap,” she said. “I’ve got tickets. Are you interested?”

  “I’d love to. I haven’t been to Wolf Trap in ages.”

  “Great! Call me.”

  “I will.”

  A puff of air hit them as the Orange line train emerged from the tunnel and rumbled into the station. Jill’s dark hair flew up for a moment. They stood there, looking at each other as the train came to a halt.

  Jill Kravitz smiled. She was beautiful.

  SIREN OF TITAN

  David DeGraff

  * * *

  In 1880 Thomas Huxley wrote, “It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.”

  Today scientists and engineers are striving to create machines that are truly intelligent. Their efforts to date have created automobiles that can park themselves and, soon, drive themselves without human oversight.

  That frightens some people. “God created man in His own image,” they recite, and recoil at the thought of machines that can think the way human beings do.

  Or better.

  “SIREN of Titan” by David DeGraff is a tragic story of the conflict between the urge to know and the fear of knowledge. Set on a slightly futuristic Earth—and on Titan, the giant moon of Saturn—his tale tells of how scientists and engineers are driven by the urge to know, to learn, to understand. And of how politicians have very different motivations.

  * * *

  Beautiful.

  SIREN hadn’t remembered ever looking up before. She was too focused on the rocks along the dry streambed. But now, as she rested, letting her batteries recharge, she looked back. The shore of the lake below was an easy contrast to the jagged hill she was now climbing. To the right, a shape lingered in the orange haze above the horizon.

  How had she not noticed that before?

  She switched her eyes to the high-contrast infrared camera, the one that let her see shadows, which made it easier to navigate across the hazy terrain. The bright blur became a jewel, a badly drawn circle streaked with darkness surrounded by a giant arc. The arc was made of myriad ribbons. Other bright points were sprinkled along the sky. When she looked more closely, some others had the same squashed circle shape. Spheres, she realized, Saturn’s other moons, illuminated by the sun, which was behind her to the left.

  She looked right, over the lake far below her, then back to Saturn. If she traveled ahead, away from the stream, she could catch a view of the lake with Saturn hanging over it.

  Beautiful. The need for beauty seemed stronger than her urge to follow the stream to its source, the urge she had been following for the past three weeks, ever since she had landed in the lake bed and started her trek to the source of the river.

  It was almost time to sing her data back to Earth, something she was anticipating more than she ever had before.

  “Wow!”

  Kristen Walker looked up from the mass spectrometer readings. Her PhD advisor, Ed Ramirez, was pointing to a window on the wall of the science operations center at Cornell.

  “Look at the image coming in.”

  Instead of the usual close-ups of rocks and the streambed, this was a wide vista. Sky mostly, with distant peaks just starting to raster into view.

  The window to its right showed the mission control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the other side of the continent. There were a dozen people in the background, all drivers for various probes around the Solar System. Only Barry was assigned to SIREN, but even at JPL, where images from other worlds were everyday events, everyone was staring at the wall as this image came down.

  The silence continued as Titan’s dry lake bed appeared.

  “She’s taken a picture of where she just climbed from,” Kristen said. “It’s like she stopped to admire the view.”

  “Don’t anthropomorphize, Kris,” Ed said without taking his eyes off the screen. “SIREN’s just a machine, a DAMA compliant machine. Its protocol includes taking panoramic views when it stops to recharge. Barry, what’s the telemetry?”

  “Um, standby, Ithaca,” he said, his eyes now looking below the camera. “It climbed up a steep section, so it does need to stop for a few minutes. Short-term power storage is down to forty percent. That would be a rest stop.”

  Kristen really wished her advisor had sent her out to Pasadena to work on the probe, but Ed had other things for her to do in Ithaca. Getting away from the winters would have been nice, but staying in town with Bob, a grad student in computer science almost made up for it. Besides, wasn’t it better to study the methane version of the hydrological cycle in a city with so much rain?

  “Do we have any science in this image, Kristen?” Ed asked, snapping her out of her daydream.

  “Yes. At the very minimum we can see how the smog levels change with altitude. Those hills look pretty hazy.”

  “Good. So it’s not a total loss.”

  “New image coming in from the high-contrast camera,” Barry said as the first image blinked off the main window, and reappeared on the left.

  “That’s weird,” she said as a view of the sky started rastering. “It pointed the high-contrast camera at the sky instead of the ground.”

  This was the oddest view of Saturn anyone had ever seen. Titan’s hazy atmosphere made seeing relief difficult, so SIREN’s navigation camera was in an infrared wavelength where sunlight could penetrate the hydrocarbon smog. Small mounds and rocks stood out more easily, which made it easier for SIREN to navigate her way around the surface. But SIREN had pointed the navigation camera at the sky instead. Sunlight could penetrate the atmosphere, whether it came directly from the sun or was first reflected off Saturn.

  Spacecraft had been taking pictures of gibbous and crescent phases of Saturn since before Kristen was born, unusual because, from Earth, Saturn is always face-on to the sun. A gibbous Saturn as part of a landscape, this was a first. It wasn’t the familiar Saturn in another way, too. Usually, subtle bands of slightly different shades of butterscotch crossed its face. A casual observer could miss them, but at this wavelength, the belts had a much stronger contrast, almost black, more like Jupiter. Except for the rings of course. This wavelength didn’t scatter off the tiniest particles as well as visible light, and the rings were more subdued. Saturn didn’t look like as much of a show-off.

  SIREN had yearned for the source even before she had begun to wonder. The source. The spring where liquid methane gurgled from the ground and trickled down an ever-expanding stream to reach the lake. The lake was dry now, probably a seasonal thing. Were the lakes seasonal because of a lack of methane rain, or was it because the springs dried up?

  New thoughts had been tickling the back of her mind, though. Beauty. Curiosity. Things she couldn’t quite understand, things that didn’t seem right, but she couldn’t explain why.

  She climbed, raising four of her spindly legs, placing them on the ground, then raising the other four legs, and continuing. Up. She wanted to go up, even though something told her she should be heading back to the stream, and following that. The source was her fundamental question, but something else was urging her up. She angled a little to the left to partially satisfy her primal urge, but still kept upward. Why? The view? Would the view be worth it? She didn’t know, but taking interesting pictures was part of her desire, and if there was a chance it would be good, then she felt the need to do it.

  Why was she here? What was her purpose? She knew the answer to that. She was here to learn about Titan: how methane flowed from the atmosphere, into lakes and streams, and underground; how Titan’s methane cycle was different from the Earth’s hydrological cycle. Finding the answers to those questions was her primary duty. But she also knew there was a deeper question. A question of life.

  She was part of a search for life away from Earth. That is why she had to stop what she was doing every eighteen hours, if Earth was in the sky, and sing her data home.

  She knew bea
uty. She knew how to frame an image so it looked good. She knew what was expected, ordinary, and what was unexpected, wonderful. And she knew she was supposed to seek out the wonderful. The stream wasn’t changing. The streambed was ordinary.

  The view was wonderful. Mountains with lakes below and Saturn above. Beautiful. It is what she was supposed to do. It was what she would sing at the next appointed hour.

  It was still light out when Kristen stepped out of the Space Science Building, although in another month it would be dark by this hour. She had time to swing by Collegetown to bring home some food from their favorite Korean restaurant. She called Korithica to order some spicy pork bulgogi for Bob and shrimp gui for herself.

  A tight-packed string of cars swished past. Most had the windows darkened for video, but two had parents and prospective students gawking at the campus.

  The food wasn’t ready when she got to the restaurant, so she idly watched the dinnertime street scene. Undergrads filled the street, walking with their augmented reality glasses on, crossing the street without looking. Of course the cars stopped, or adjusted their speed to avoid the nearly constant press of pedestrians in the road.

  What would happen if one of these cars decided to go off wherever it wanted to, instead of the programmed destination? What if one decided to plow through the pedestrian gate? What if one decided it was all right to knock people over if they got in its way? Of course that wouldn’t happen. The only people who had ever manually driven cars were people as old as Ed, people old enough to remember ten thousand traffic deaths a year. Cars had strict programming, after all. Traffic fatalities were rare, newsworthy.

  Bob would know the extent of glitches in cars. She’d ask him about it over dinner.

  “Car software gets updated constantly,” Bob said between mouthfuls of pork. “Sometimes it’s twice a day.”

  “That often?”

  “Sure. There’s no room for failure. All unexpected events are constantly being analyzed to figure out the best way to prevent them in the future.”