Julian started his car, pulling forward. “If I do tell you . . . where we are . . . they’ll think that I’ve betrayed them . . .!”
The Buick’s anti-collision system engaged, bringing them to an abrupt stop.
“Listen,” said Blaine. “You’ve got only a few seconds to decide—”
“I know . . .”
“Where, Mr. Winemaster? Where?”
“Julian,” he said, wincing again.
“Julian.”
A glint of pride showed in the eyes. “We’re not . . . in the car . . .” Then the eyes grew enormous, and Julian tried shouting the answer . . . his mind suddenly losing its grip on that tiny, lovely mouth . . .
Blaine swung with his right fist, shattering a cheekbone with his first blow, killing the body before the last blow.
By the time the Marines had surrounded the car, its interior was painted with gore, and in horror, the soldiers watched the madman—he couldn’t be anything but insane—calmly rolled down his window and smiled with a blood-rimmed mouth, telling his audience, “I had to kill him. He’s Satan.”
A hardened lieutenant looked in at the victim, torn open like a sack, and she shivered, moaning aloud for the poor man.
With perfect calm, Blaine declared, “I had to eat his heart. That’s how you kill Satan. Don’t you know?”
###
For disobeying orders, the President declared Julian a traitor, and she oversaw his trial and conviction. The entire process took less than a minute. His quarters were remodeled to serve as his prison cell. In the next ten minutes, three separate attempts were made on his life. Not everyone agreed with the court’s sentence, it seemed. Which was understandable. Contact with the outside world had been lost the instant Winemaster died. The refugees and their lifeboat were lost in every kind of darkness. At any moment, the Tech specialists would throw them into a decontamination unit and they would evaporate without warning. And all because they’d entrusted themselves to an old DNA-born human who never really wanted to be Transmutated in the first place, according to at least one of his former lovers . . .
Ostensibly for security reasons, Julian wasn’t permitted visitors.
Not even his young son could be brought to him, nor was he allowed to see so much as a picture of the boy.
Julian spent his waking moments pacing back and forth in the dim light, trying to exhaust himself, then falling into a hard sleep, too tired to dream at all, if he was lucky . . .
Before the first hour was finished, he had lost all track of time.
After nine full days of relentless isolation, the universe had shriveled until nothing existed but his cell, and him, his memories indistinguishable from fantasies.
On the tenth day, the cell door opened.
A young man stepped in, and with a stranger’s voice, he said, “Father.”
“Who are you?” asked Julian.
His son didn’t answer, giving him the urgent news instead. “Mr. Blaine finally made contact with us, explaining what he is and what’s happened so far, and what will happen . . .”
Confusion wrestled with a fledging sense of relief.
“He’s from between the stars, just like you guessed, Father. And he’s been found insane for your murder. Though of course you’re not dead. But the government believes there was a Julian Winemaster, and it’s holding Blaine in a Detroit hospital, and he’s holding us. His metabolism is augmenting our energy production, and when nobody’s watching, he’ll connect us with the outside world.”
Julian couldn’t imagine such a wild story: It had to be true!
“When the world is safe, in a year or two, he’ll act cured or he’ll escape—whatever is necessary—and he’ll carry us wherever we want to go.”
The old man sat on his bed, suddenly exhausted.
“Where would you like to go, Father?”
“Out that door,” Julian managed. Then a wondrous thought took him by surprise, and he grinned, saying, “No. I want to be like Blaine was. I want to live between the stars, to be huge and cold, and slow . . .
“Not today, maybe . . .
“But soon . . . definitely soon . . .”
MORE ADVENTURES ON OTHER PLANETS
Michael Cassutt
Sometimes the problem with going beyond flesh is that even going millions of miles away, to the frozen surface of a hostile alien world, is not going nearly far enough . . .
As a print author, Michael Cassutt is mostly known for his incisive short work, but he has worked intensively in the television industry over the past few decades, where he is a major mover and shaker. He was co-executive producer for Showtime’s The Outer Limits—which won a CableAce Award for best dramatic series—and also served in the same or similar capacities for series such as Eerie, Indiana and StrangeLuck, as well as having worked as the story editor for Max Headroom, as a staff writer on The Twilight Zone, and having contributed scripts to Farscape, Stargate SG-1, and many other television series. He also contributes a regular column on science fiction in films and television to Science Fiction Weekly. His books include the novels Star Country, Dragon Season, and Missing Man; the anthology Sacred Visions, co-edited with Andrew M. Greeley; and a biographical encyclopedia, Who’s Who in Space: the First 25 Years. He also collaborated with the late astronaut Deke Slayton on Slayton’s autobiography, Deke! His most recent book is the historical thriller Red Moon.
###
This is what they used to call a cute meet, back when movies were made by people like Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder, when movies had plots and dialogue, when life and love had rules, back in the last century. A handsome officer in the Soviet embassy (does that tell you how long ago?) picks up the phone one day and hears a lilting female voice asking him if he can tell her, please, what is Lenin’s middle name. “It’s for my crossword puzzle.”
Affronted, the officer snaps, “To dignify that question would be an insult to the Soviet Union!” And slams down the phone.
But not before he hears a lovely laugh.
That evening the officer goes to the British Embassy for some reception, and hears that same laugh emerging from the oh so luscious mouth of an English woman who should probably be Audrey Hepburn. Smitten, the officer walks up to Miss Hepburn, bows, and says, “Ilyich.”
And so the story begins.
And so our story begins. Only—
Look, you’re going to have to be patient with me. Because the couple is not just a couple. It’s more of a quartet. And two of the individuals aren’t even people.
Picture the surface of Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter. It is midday, local time, but the sky is black: What little atmosphere Europa possesses is insufficient to scatter enough light to give it a color. The combination of ice, snow, and rock create a patchwork of white and gray, something like a chessboard with no straight lines.
Europa is tectonically active, about ten times as bouncy as any place on earth, so the landscape is marked by jagged upthrusts and creepy fissures known as cycloids.
But forget the landscape and the color of the sky. What really catches your attention is the striped ball that is Jupiter, looming overhead like a gigantic jack-o’-lantern. It actually seems to press down on the snowy landscape. What makes it a little worse is that since Europa is tide-locked, always keeping the same face toward its giant mother, if you happen to be working on that side of Europa, Jupiter is always there!
And so are several elements of the J2E2, the Joint Jupiter-Europan Expedition, three tiny rovers that have been operating on the icy plains for two years, scouting the site for the “permanent” Hoppa Station and erecting such necessary equipment as a shelter (even machines get cold on Europa), a radiothermal power plant, and the communications array.
On this particular day, rover element one, also known as “Earl,” is approximately seven kilometers north of Hoppa when he receives a query from a source in motion (his comm gear is sophisticated enough to detect a slight Doppler effect) for range-rate data.
; Element Earl can’t see the source: His visual sensor is a hardy multispectral charged-couple device that is excellent for showing a view forward and all around. It lacks, however, a tilt mechanism that will let it see up.
Nor, given the priorities in his guidance system, can he presently provide range-rate data. In the burst of bits that made up rover-speak, Element Earl says, more or less, “I’m a Pathfinder-class rover element. You should be talking to the base unit at Hoppa Station.”
He would think no more about the contact, except that there is a message of sorts embedded in the acknowledgment that suggests . . . compatibility. More than seems to exist between the Dopplering radio source and the base unit at Hoppa, in any case.
The Dopplering source is, in fact, a series of follow-up J2E2 packages designed to conduct the search for life in the dark, frigid ocean under Europa’s icy crust.
All of these elements are wrapped inside a landing bag dropped from a mission bus launched from Earth two years after the initial bunch that included Element Earl and propelled Europa-ward by lightsail. The bus has burned into orbit around Europa, then waited for a command from La Jolla to separate the bag and its retro system.
The follow-up flight has been marred by software glitches, some of them due to undetected programming lapses back in the avionics lab in La Jolla, others to the assault of Jupiter’s magnetic field. After all, the chips are only hardened against electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon, not the steady and relentless assault of charged Jovian particles. Like a human trained to withstand a stomach punch only to find himself dragged behind a truck, the bus has suffered some damage.
Which is why one of its four elements, soon to be known as “Rebecca,” goes on-line during the descent phase as a backup to the lander’s systems, which are having a tough time locking on to the signal from Hoppa Station. Not to prolong the suspense, the landing package arrives safely, bouncing half a dozen times on the icy plain, punching holes in itself by design, and eventually disgorging four new elements.
It is only a week later when Element Earl, returning to station for thermal reasons, happens to detect (not see: His visual sensor is usually turned off to conserve power and he was simply retracing his original route) four new arrivals—the drilling, cargo, submersible, and portable power rover elements that will soon begin the search for life.
He passes close enough to the drilling rover, which is currently deploying its array, since diagnostics show it to have been damaged in the rolling, rocking landing. It so happens that the array wasn’t damaged. But in the stream of bits flowing from the drilling rover to the Hoppa central unit and splashing from one rover to another, Element Earl notes the familiar signature of Element Rebecca.
As a bit of a joke, he aims his dish at hers, and feeds her the range-rate data she had asked for earlier.
###
Mission control for J2E2 is in a crumbling three-story structure in the bad part of La Jolla, south of the Cove and bordering on the aptly named Mission Beach. The building formerly housed an Internet service provider. The ISP had purchased and remodeled the place in 1998, hoping for business from the San Diego and North County high-tech communities, which were then wallowing in an unprecedented economic boom.
And did so for the better part of a decade, until a series of mergers closed the node. Then the AGC Corporation, newly formed by three researchers from UC-SD, just over the hill in La Jolla proper, leased the building for tests for their first real-time Superluminal Light Pulse Propogation/Emulation Regime (usually known as SLIPPER) on the 2012 asteroid Neva flyby. What the hell: The facility was already wired for fiber-optic and extreme bandwidth, and was configured for electrical and thermal support of AGC’s ten-petaflop computer.
That was eighteen years and five interplanetary missions ago, and while the guts of what is now the J2E2 mission control have continued to evolve, the exterior has been left alone. Which presents the staff with a problem. The ISP operation had never employed more than a dozen people, while the AGC SLIPPER project has thirty or more in the building at all times.
The parking lot is simply inadequate, and with public transport in this part of La Jolla (remember, this is California) limited to the occasional bus, with working hours staggered, with rents and home prices in La Jolla among the highest in the country . . . well, disputes are inevitable.
Earl Tolan pulls his battered Chevy pickup into the gated lot and drives up to space eleven, only to find a brand-new Volvo already there.
Tolan is fifty-nine, a senior operator on the J2E2 project after moving to AGC from Lockheed Martin, where he led teams through good times and bad for twenty years. He is not one to lose his temper without reason.
But today he happens to be returning to work after what should have been a quick visit to the doctor, a checkup which wound up taking four hours and has left him in a bad mood. So the site of this impudent little Volvo taking up his space launches him into a state of only theoretically controlled fury.
He squeals the truck around so that its tailgate backs up to the Volvo. This is a bit of a trick, given the confined space. Tolan has to drive up and over a curb and sidewalk median just to get into position.
Once on station, as ops guys are fond of saying, he drops the tailgate, hauls out a length of chain and a hook he usually uses for attaching the smaller of his two boats to a trailer, wedges the hook in the Volvo’s rear bumper, and loops the chain around his trailer hitch.
Then he gets into the truck, puts it in low, and hauls the Volvo out of his space, a maneuver which takes him up and onto the sidewalk and into the driveway beyond. The Volvo, its gear in park and its brake set, makes a screeching sound with its tires, followed by an ominous undercarriage scraping, before fetching up onto the sidewalk median.
Where Tolan leaves it.
Wallowing in momentary self-satisfaction, he pulls around into his space. He is still quite angry, in fact, when he emerges from the truck and heads for the building entrance, where he brushes shoulders with a woman going the other way.
Had his mood been anything less than ultraviolet anger and disgust, Tolan would certainly have managed to sidestep the charging woman while simultaneously noting her looks. Which, allowing for a certain air of growing confusion, are barely worth noting: She is a little over five feet, but adding stature with heeled sandals. A pair of gray slacks suggest muscular legs, and a vest worn over a J2E2 polo shirt does nothing to conceal the solidity within. Her hair is shoulder-length, dark, with a few lighter streaks, appropriate to her age, which is fiftyish. He thinks the eyes are green, but needs a closer look.
Not that he’s inclined to give one. Twice-divorced, his sexual relationships are generally with women who would register as more attractive than this one on any visual scale.
What actually gets Tolan’s attention is this woman’s voice, which has what used to be called (in the days when people still consumed both) a whiskey and cigarette tone, tinged with some kind of Euro accent. Or perhaps it is the words she uses: “I’m gonna kill the son of a bitch who did this.” Meaning haul her Volvo onto the median.
The woman calmly walks up to the vehicle, which still quivers in the aftermath of its relocation. She folds her arms, smiles with what could have been a touch of amusement.
Tolan can still make a clean escape, though he knows it won’t be long before someone connects the evidentiary dots between Tolan’s parking space, the skid marks from it to the Volvo’s resting place. Besides, he is curious about the color of those eyes—so curious, he forgets his anger over the momentary theft of a parking place, and his frustration over two hours of unwarranted medical tests.
“I’m the son of a bitch,” Tolan said.
She looks at him. Yes, green, with a charming set of smile lines. “Aren’t you old enough to know better?”
This strikes Tolan as unfair, given that he is staring at sixty on his next birthday and has just had a medical experience all too appropriate for that age. “Apparently not.”
&n
bsp; To her great credit, she laughs. “I assume this was your space.” He nods. “Well, I’m so new, I don’t have an assigned one. And the guard did tell me you weren’t likely to return today.”
“Surprises all around.” He holds out his hand. “Earl Tolan.”
“Rebecca Marceau.”
“I think we’ve met before.”
“Cologne?” she says, then realizes where. She blushes. “Oh! Hoppa Station.” Operators like Earl and Rebecca are often brought into the program without prior introductions. After all, they are usually mature professionals.
“Actually, about twelve klicks away,” Earl says, wondering why he feels the need to be so precise.
###
You have to forget everything you think you know about space flight. The SLIPPER operators aren’t astronauts. In fact, there are damned few astronauts here in 2026, just a few poor souls stuck going round and round the earth for months at a time in the crumbling EarthStar space station, hoping their work will somehow overcome the bone loss or radiation exposure or even psychological barriers that prevented a manned mission to Mars, not to mention even more distant locales such as Europa.
But exploration of the solar system continues, using unmanned vehicles which can be controlled from distances of tens of millions of miles, more or less in real-time, by human beings. The advantages are many: The vehicles can be smaller, they need only be built for a one-way trip, and using SLIPPER-linked human operators allows spacecraft builders to skip the lengthy and unpredictable development of artificial intelligence systems.
J2E2’s mission control in La Jolla, then, is more like a virtual reality game den than a Shuttle-era firing room. Yes, there are the basic trajectory and electrical support stations, complete with consoles, and there is a big screen that displays telemetry from all of the many separate elements, along with selected camera views.
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