Writers of the Future 32 Science Fiction & Fantasy Anthology (L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future)

by L. Ron Hubbard

  “Liz, I am trying to save man, not destroy him! I offer him the gift of immortality, without the decrepitude and senility of aging. People will make sacrifices for such an opportunity. If need be, we can make sterility a condition of treatment, and people will accept it as a small price to pay for eternal life.”

  Liz shook her head. “You overestimate people. They already know the consequences of overpopulation, yet they continue to pop out hordes of children.”

  Nicolas threw up his hands. “But that won’t matter any longer! Overpopulation is only an issue because Earth has finite space and resources. Imagine what the greatest minds of our time will accomplish if they have five, ten, even hundreds of lifetimes to solve humanity’s problems, and with no cognitive deterioration! Near-light speed space travel? Done in a few generations. We’ll be colonizing not just other planets, but other solar systems, other galaxies! With the inevitable technologic developments, and with life spans suited to extrasolar travel, we’ll have hundreds of exoplanets to choose from. The worries of this little rock will be a memory.

  “Liz, right now you can play a role in ushering in the greatest era of human history. All you need to do is open that Quarantainer.”

  Liz looked down at the cube in her hands. “Möbius is in here?”

  Nicolas nodded. “The rest was in my lab. Your people undoubtedly tested what they found, and just as surely failed to recognize its significance. This is all I could salvage while getting you and Arthur out.”

  The Quarantainer’s entry screen timed out, Liz once again entered her thumbprint and passcode. Two options presented themselves: OPEN or INCINERATE.

  Liz envisioned the probable consequences of each choice. With OPEN, she saw inequality and destruction—a world where only the wealthy could afford Möbius, leaving the poor to become subjects of immortal gods. She saw Earth stripped of its resources, other worlds stripped of theirs, and a mass of writhing human bodies spreading unchecked through space like a cancer. With incinerate, she at least saw some hope.

  “I’ve devoted my entire life to stopping everything this represents.” Her finger hovered over INCINERATE.

  “Wait, Liz—there will be very real consequences if you destroy those vials.”

  “How’s that?”

  Arthur answered. “You will kill me.”

  “You’re full of shit. He,” Liz said derisively, nodding at her father, “already brought you back.”

  “Yes, I revived Arthur and repaired the physical damage. But the virus that killed him is still in his system. Möbius does not eradicate other viruses, it simply repairs damage. And neither does Möbius replicate—if Arthur does not receive boosters, there will be nothing to repair the damage done by his virus, and he will die.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Show her, Arthur.”

  Arthur lifted his shirt and turned. On the skin of his back, above his kidneys, were dark, raised blotches surrounded by red, inflamed skin.

  “Symptoms of my virus,” Arthur said, pulling his shirt back down. “And these are just the early signs. If I don’t get that,” he pointed to the box in Liz’s hands, “I’m dead in a week. Eaten by a virus, inside and out, just as when you saw me the first time.”

  “But you’re already dead!” Liz shouted. “You had your chance at life and you chose gene-tweaking! You deserve death—you’re no different from the man who killed my mother.”

  Arthur bit his lip.

  Liz looked into his welling eyes and understood. She staggered back, turned to her father. “No . . . you brought back the man—the monster—that killed Mom?”

  “That was an accident, Liz. He was developing that virus to one day cure cancer, not cause it. Your mother was working on the same project.”

  Like frost spreading across a window, a cold desire to hurt built within Liz. She re-entered her print and passcode, and moved her finger to INCINERATE.

  “Wait, Liz,” her father pleaded.

  “I’ve heard enough.”

  “Arthur is not the only one to die if you press that button.”

  “Who else, then?”

  “You.”

  Liz probed her father’s face, saw only truth.

  “You’re too overwhelmed to process all this, I know, but I already told you, the memory of Arthur killing you in the lab, that memory is true. An acute stress response is common when I revive a patient. I’m sure you remember your own rage and confusion when you woke this morning.”

  Liz remembered—a phantom of the fear and desire to strike out shuddered through her.

  “It’s why I gave you a paralytic, the same one I was about to give Arthur when you raided my lab. Once your team barged in, I only had time to hide under Arthur’s slab—the hidden outlet to the access tunnel I built, the tunnel I used to slip you and Arthur out.”

  Liz looked at the Quarantainer in her hands. “But if the only remaining copies of Möbius are in here, how could you have brought me back?”

  Nicolas tapped the fine chain around his neck. “I didn’t wear the Rod of Asclepius for good luck, Liz. The staff and snake contained both blank versions of Möbius. I wore it as a precaution, as a way to revive someone if I ever lacked access to my lab.”

  “If you’d let me die,” Liz said, realization washing over her, “you’d still have a copy you could rebuild from, and you wouldn’t need this.” She held up the Quarantainer.

  Nicolas nodded. “I had a choice, and I chose family. Now you must make the same decision. Before you do, you must know that when Arthur attacked you, he gave you the virus that killed him. If you destroy that box, you destroy yourself.”

  Liz rocked back and forth, the Quarantainer quaking in her hands. Arthur looked at her pleadingly; her father’s face was stoic. Don’t let them get to you. You don’t know if they’re telling the truth. And even if they are, it doesn’t change what you have to do.

  “I cannot forgive what you’ve done. If I have to die to stop this abomination . . . well, I made an oath to do that the day I joined GeneCrime.”

  Nicolas lurched forward, his palms to his daughter. “Stop, Liz! You have conviction, I’ll give you that. But before you kill Arthur and throw away your own life, I need you to see one more thing. I know you are not ready for this, but you’ve forced my hand.” He opened the door leading to his patient exam room and gestured for Liz to follow.

  On the exam table lay the woman who’d stood over Liz that morning. She was about Liz’s own age, pretty even through her obvious illness, and very, very familiar. She sat up, smiled, and pushed her hair behind her ear.

  Recognition struck like lightning. Liz turned, incredulous, to her father.

  He spoke softly. “It was your mother’s cancer that fueled me through sleepless years of development. She was the first patient Möbius brought back. I wasn’t sure if it was ready, the day she died, but at that point I had nothing to lose. My joy when it worked was quickly replaced by terror of what GeneCrime would do if they found out. They would destroy it, and probably us as well. I’ve had to keep your mother in hiding all these years. But she’s alive, Liz, and every booster repairs her genome to the state Möbius knows—her genome at thirty-one.”

  “Hi, Liz,” her mother said, straining to smile through pain. “There’s so much I want to share with you, but I was due for my booster the day you raided your father’s lab. For us to enjoy the years we should have had, I need that.” She pointed to the Quarantainer. “My life, as they say, is in your hands.”

  A torrent of clashing emotions raged within Liz, swelling until the maelstrom grew too strong to contain, until it overflowed in twin streams down her cheeks. Liz gazed into her mother’s face, now blurred through tears, then down at the box of life—or death—in her trembling hands. She pressed her thumb to the screen, her index finger to the passcode keys, G . . . C . . . T . . . A. The Quarantainer posed its questio
n: OPEN or INCINERATE?

  And Liz entered her answer.

  How to Drive a Writer Crazy

  by L. Ron Hubbard

  * * *

  Since its inception, L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest has become the single most effective means for an aspiring author to break into the ranks of publishing professionals.

  The Contest, of course, was created by L. Ron Hubbard, who Publishers Weekly proclaimed as, “one of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century.” He was a bestseller as a young man, with his stories gracing the covers of the hottest popular fiction magazines of the 1930s and 40s. Ron published nearly 250 works of fiction in all the popular genres of his day, including mystery, adventure, thriller, western, romance, horror, and fantasy. Ultimately, he helped to usher in Science Fiction’s Golden Age with such genre-creating stories as Final Blackout, Fear and To the Stars.

  His broad understanding of the field, along with his proven techniques for generating tales quickly and gracefully, made him one of the most qualified people in the world to launch the Writers of the Future.

  He knew the rigors of a writer’s life and how the publishing industry worked. He also recognized the vital elements a tale needed to be publishable, from story ideas to research to that intangible known as suspense. He pondered the depths of story vitality, and addressed the importance of an author researching his topic deeply, so that he understands the intricacies of his tale. He also understood the importance of the relationship between the writer and his editor.

  Among the more revealing notes on this business of writing and of particular significance to anyone who has faced a fickle editor is Hubbard’s “How to Drive a Writer Crazy.” What he describes is not just amusing, it is also the ruin of many a young literary talent.

  How to Drive a Writer Crazy

  1. When he starts to outline a story, immediately give him several stories just like it to read and tell him three other plots. This makes his own story and his feeling for it vanish in a cloud of disrelated facts.

  2. When he outlines a character, read excerpts from stories about such characters, saying that this will clarify the writer’s ideas. As this causes him to lose touch with the identity he felt in his character by robbing him of individuality, he is certain to back away from ever touching such a character.

  3. Whenever the writer proposes a story, always mention that his rate, being higher than other rates of writers in the book, puts up a bar to his stories.

  4. When a rumor has stated that a writer is a fast producer, invariably confront him with the fact with great disapproval, as it is, of course, unnatural for one human being to think faster than another.

  5. Always correlate production and rate, saying that it is necessary for the writer to do better stories than the average for him to get any consideration whatever.

  6. It is a good thing to mention any error in a story bought, especially when that error is to be editorially corrected as this makes the writer feel that he is being criticized behind his back and he wonders just how many other things are wrong.

  7. Never fail to warn a writer not to be mechanical as this automatically suggests to him that his stories are mechanical and, as he considers this a crime, wonders how much of his technique shows through and instantly goes to much trouble to bury mechanics very deep—which will result in laying the mechanics bare to the eye.

  8. Never fail to mention and then discuss budget problems with a writer as he is very interested.

  9. By showing his vast knowledge of a field, an editor can almost always frighten a writer into mental paralysis, especially on subjects where nothing is known anyway.

  10. Always tell a writer plot tricks as they are not his business.

  The Last Admiral

  written by

  L. Ron Hubbard

  illustrated by

  iRVIN RODRIGUEZ

  * * *

  about the STORY

  In the introduction to Battlefield Earth, L. Ron Hubbard recalls a now legendary meeting “of old scientist and science-fiction friends” he attended in 1945, in the very infancy of the Space Age. “The meeting was at the home of my dear friend, the incomparable Bob Heinlein. And do you know what was their agenda? How to get man into space fast enough so that he would be distracted from further wars on Earth.”

  It was indeed a greater vision of man in space, of the stars as mankind’s destination, and intrinsically, of science fiction as the imaginative catalyst for the journey, that L. Ron Hubbard under the nom de plume Rene Lafayette brought to his Conquest of Space future history series.

  It was Marion Zimmer Bradley—later author of The Mists of Avalon and other books—who, in a letter to the editor, characterized “The Last Admiral” and its suicide mission against the first pirate colony in space as “the finest story you have printed in many and many a day!”

  about the illustrator

  Irvin was born in the Bronx, New York in 1988. He graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology with a BFA in Illustration in 2010. While attending FIT, he studied simultaneously at the Grand Central Academy of Art with an emphasis on academic drawing. In 2011, Irvin was the Golden Brush Award winner for the 27th L. Ron Hubbard’s Illustrators of the Future Contest. He has also been featured in various publications such as Spectrum 17, Creative Quarterly, 3x3 and CMYK Magazine. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

  The Last Admiral

  Admiral Barnell sat at his desk, chin upon his threadbare chest, and read his final orders: “Complete dismantling of last surface craft and Portsmouth Naval Station. Disband all crews and personnel. When duties assigned are complete, report to Secretary General of Military Defense for final retirement.”

  He had been sitting where he was for two hours reading that somber message but now he straightened and put it on the desk before him. He was a fighting man, a deck officer used to all weather. Defeat, he told himself, was something a sailor had to learn to face. But it was very hard facing this.

  The Navy was no more. He was the last of it: the last of a race which had started with John Paul Jones and Biddle. He was the last admiral, as David Glasgow Farragut had been the first. It was hard to take, hard to be the last man to be piped over the side of a gleaming man-o’-war, hard to know that after him the traditions of the blue and gold were dead.

  He stood up and pulled his boat cloak from the rack and wrapped it around him. The offices were empty as it was late, but the sight of these desks chilled him with their bare expanses, clean of all work. These desks would be serving tailors and bonfires in another week.

  He went into the yard, walking slowly over the wet and grimy cobblestones, holding his boat cloak up against the steady rain which drummed on Portsmouth. He should have gone home but he did not and wandered instead down toward the fingers of light which reached to him across the water from the town. The docks were deserted. Half a dozen men-o’-war, all but one of them decommissioned and all of them scheduled for scrap, lay in their berthings, silent, gloomy in the downpour.

  These were the last ships: a cruiser, three submarines, a tanker, and an old destroyer, unseaworthy and eaten up with rust, foul with barnacles and salt rime. Soon they would be ships no more but twisted metal plates at so much the pound.

  “An indulgence of a sentimental and conservative society,” General of the Air Gonfallon had called this ghost of a Navy, and Admiral Barnell, sitting in the dark and rain, stirred uneasily as he remembered those words. They had somehow included himself, yet he was only fifty-four.

  The scene of the final hearings rose before him out of the mists. The politicians, the generals, and only himself from the Navy. The lofty, grating patronage of them had eaten into him deeply. They humored him. They laughed “understandingly” about his “hobby,” and they cut the Navy off from all appropriation of any kind whatever.

  He had faced them then like a badge
red old sea lion. “You tell me,” he had said, “that the day of navies is done, that man has transferred all his fighting techniques to the air! I want to remind you, gentlemen, that there is yet another arena of battle about which you have no thought. The Army has placed satellites spinning around Earth to guard her from illegal atomic manufacture. Airplanes can land in any weather and carry any troops to any scene of action in a matter of hours. But, gentlemen, there is this one thing on which you have not thought: space.”

  They had looked at him with pleasant smiles. They could understand the reluctance of a “battleship admiral” to see his service vanish forever from the eyes of men. A few words from him could do no harm; he was entitled to say them, of course.

  “Two hundred years ago,” he continued, “the Navy attempted to carry out a project of a voyage to the Moon. Private researches and Army jealousies forestalled that effort; but it was naval research data which actually made space flight possible. You are entered now upon a period of space conquest. Every few weeks explorational expeditions return from the stars to tell us of even wider horizons for man. Daily, exploitational vessels put out from our major spaceports. And five major colonies have been planted on as many planets. The significance of these things should not be lost upon you.

  “Far colonies mean commerce. Commerce will come to mean piracy. The day is already over when the mere fact of being a space voyager makes one a noble hero. There are lawless elements already adrift among the far planets and there will come a time when these constitute a real menace to our expansion into the stars.”