“Boring,” Kevin mused. “Haven’t been able to say that for a while.”
“I know. I got so bored I seriously considered bending mission rules, foregoing the next stop, and ordering a course change to Beta Crucis from here.”
“I wouldn’t, sir. Our crew needs the downtime after the past month.”
“Hence why I didn’t do it.”
“So, still being bored, you then resorted to randomly sterilizing thousands of star systems throughout the galaxy by playing with Science’s GRB sim.”
“Somebody’s having issues about letting go,” Bob teased. He swiveled the repeater toward Kevin and continued, “I was actually playing with the initial conditions of the neutron star collision to see what would happen with the beams.”
“Anything interesting?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. Did you know that a difference of two kilometers in lateral separation during initial orbital capture yanks the beam fifteen degrees to spinward?”
“So?”
“On a direct heading to the Solar System?” Bob prompted further.
After a long pause, Kevin simply said, “Ah.”
“There but for two kilometers and the grace of God goes Humanity. With that humbling thought, I bid you good night.” Bob stood, stretched, and yawned before continuing, “This is the Captain, the Executive Officer has the conn.”
“Bridge aye,” the crew chorused.
“This is the Executive Officer, I have the conn,” and Kevin sat down at the captain’s station.
“Bridge aye.”
Kevin ran some quick status checks across the station repeaters as he got himself settled in the captain’s chair. He then looked at the simulation Bob had been running for a long moment. Curiosity fought with “letting go” and the more practical impulse to clear the repeater.
Curiosity won.
Afterword:
Comments from Kevin Grazier: When I was asked to consider writing a science fiction story that also served as an astronomy lesson, my thoughts instantly bifurcated with both paths eventually re-converging to create “Planet Killer”. I had recently had lunch with Phil Plait, author of Death from the Skies: These are the Ways the World Will End. One of the topics we discussed, because wholesale death and carnage always makes a Denny’s lunch more palatable, was what would happen to planet Earth were we in one of the polar “beams” of a nearby gamma ray burster. “Nearby”, in this case, means “anywhere within the Milky Way Galaxy”. In short, life on Earth would be largely exterminated in less time than it took us to finish our lunch: a mass extinction that would put to shame anything that has happened in Earth’s history to date. As we discussed the gory details, I couldn’t help but think that the scenario was so dramatic that Hollywood has overlooked the ultimate in disaster flicks.
At the same time, my mind also raced to “I have got to include Ges!” Ges Seger and I met as undergraduates at Purdue University, and had written several things together over the years. Most notably, we wrote a script for the series Star Trek: Voyager that resulted in an invitation for us to pitch story lines at the Hart Building — the Star Trek offices at Paramount Studios. We work very synergistically and often come up with ideas and scenarios together that are better than what either of us come up with independently. I also really quite enjoyed the characters from his novel, The Once and Future War, and thought that it would be a whole lot of fun to let the crew of Procyon tell us the tale of a murder mystery of planetary proportions.
Comments from Ges Seger: Kevin and I have been friends since we were in the same residence hall at Purdue University, and writing partners for almost as long. This generally means I sometimes have access to writing opportunities of which I would not normally be aware. Planet Killer was one of those opportunities.
About the same time Kevin approached me for contributing to the book The Science of Dune, he mentioned he had been invited to contribute to an anthology that would consist of science fiction stories based on specific concepts in modern astronomy and astrophysics. We kicked some ideas around for a couple of emails before he made the inspired simultaneous choice of both concept and story seed — an astronomical “murder mystery” which would serve as either a prequel or sequel to The Once and Future War.
As I read that email I realized that of the two possibilities (prequel or sequel), the prequel made far more sense. The backstory of the Martian starship Procyon, her first crew, and her first mission were very well-developed in my fictional universe thanks to an aborted attempt to write a novel on it in the early 1990’s. As I realized this, I got this vivid mental image of Bob Keith looking at a holotank showing the path of the gamma ray burster’s beam and saying, “Yep, there’s your problem.”
That’s when the Muse hit. Hard.
The first draft of Planet Killer literally wrote itself in three hours, spread over seven nights hammering away at a laptop between shuttling children back and forth to dance class. I was a bit afraid I hadn’t left Kevin much to do, but those fears proved groundless as we co-wrote/co-edited the second draft together and added a lot more material. Kevin and I just seem to mesh as a writing team in ways that I can’t explain easily, and that came through in spades as the final version of the story got hammered into the form you see now.
And truth to tell? It was kind of fun having him play in my universe with my characters and ships. No pressure, Kevin, but I hope we can do it again.
© Ges Seger and Kevin Grazier
The Listening Glass
by Alexis Glynn Latner
Acrophobia. It always hit him here, midway on the catwalk. He let his gloves slide along the guidewires. Within the bulky gloves his palms sweated profusely. Ahead of him and even higher up, the catwalk ended at the antenna suspended on the convergence of three sets of immensely long cables. There was nothing under the antenna. Nothing. Hard vacuum, underlined with a thin, curved shell of material that gleamed coldly in the downward periphery of his vision. He dared not look down. If he did he would freeze.
The antenna’s present position left too much slack in the catwalk for his liking. Every step caused a ripple to propagate up the catwalk ahead of his boots. In the confines of his suit helmet, his breathing sounded too quick and ragged. He tore his eyes away from the alarming frailty of the catwalk and fixed them on the motionless horizon, the tangle of crater rims on the dark gray edge of the world. The horizon reminded him that this was the Moon. It had only one-sixth of the gravity of Earth. Fact: the catwalk was rated to carry twice the mass represented by himself plus spacesuit. Doggedly he kept going.
The antenna resembled a large leggy spider, hanging upside down on flimsy strands of web. Appearances were deceiving on the Moon. The cables could easily support the antenna plus a work crew in spacesuits. Had done so during the construction phase. Making the structure sturdy enough for Earth gravity would have been over-designing to a ludicrous extent. Nevertheless, he was acutely aware of the vertical vacuum under the antenna, exceeding the height of the towering rocket that brought the first men to the Moon five decades ago. He made a quick and rather morbid mental calculation. You could stack one and a half Saturn Fives under the antenna.
His mouth felt very dry. And he detested the scratchy inorganic tang on his tongue. He could taste the gray indifference of this world. The acrophobia had never been this bad before. But then he’d never gone up to the antenna alone. At night. Stars, unsympathetic, icily burning, filled the black sky. Starlight thousands of years old rained down, and it pooled far below his feet. He resisted the urge to look down into the vast, cold, mesmerizing shimmer of it. People could freeze up here, in such a paralytic state of fright that somebody had to come up and retrieve them. He could, and probably should, turn around, go back to the habitat, and not mention this abortive excursion. No. Take another step, another, another: he was not going to let the acrophobia get to him.
This trip up to the antenna seemed to be taking a lifetime, as if the catwalk were as long as his life span. In a
way, it was.
The catwalk began in the fifth grade, to be exact, with a report card that included a glaring D in Science. Bright and bored in classes taught by mediocre teachers to pupils of average intelligence, he had been indifferent to grades. But the D stung. The class started an astronomy unit. Reports were assigned, prepared, presented. The others read silly little pages about The Moon or The Planet Jupiter — childish, inept transcriptions from the encyclopedia. But he really researched his topic, at the public library. In front of the class, he drew a line down the whole length of the chalkboard to represent the electromagnetic spectrum; he showed them the small fraction of the spectrum taken up by visible light, and the far greater span of radio. He explained how radio telescopes revealed the invisible mysteries of the universe. He showed them. The next report card featured an A-plus in Science. And he had done astronomy ever since, from the backyard telescope to the vast machine on which he treaded now.
He checked his position. Fifty feet from where the catwalk ended at the antenna. The antenna was mobile within a volume of space of some hundreds of cubic meters. And when it moved, the end of the catwalk moved with it. Of course he had put the safety switch on. Hadn’t he? He should not have thought about that. He froze. The moonsuit had a radio. Maybe he should tell someone what he was up to. His throat constricted. He felt his motor muscles congealing too.
With an angry act of will, he started going again. He reached the antenna platform.
Then he let it happen, impulsively looked down, through the grate of the platform floor, and past the wide wheel with the azimuth arm hanging on it; down, into the crater full of radio telescope. The edge of it marked an immense circle like an inverse horizon. Triumphant and vertiginous, he clung to the platform’s guard rail. The last steps were the hardest. It was just that simple.
There had been dreary years of delay, constipation of funds, and design compromise. And then the last and hardest part. Construction. The fact that the site was on the far side of the Moon had amplified every difficulty, every mistake, by at least an order of magnitude. But now it was finished, real, and ready to be tested, first thing tomorrow. He had come up here tonight to make sure that one last detail was put right before the big day. As a manager, people said, he was too detail-oriented.
In the center of the platform stood a dog-house sized metal box which housed the equipment, which contained the detail that he was after. Making himself let go of the rail, he strode toward the housing. There was nothing to hold onto between the guardrail and the equipment housing.
Then he noticed the lights on the corners of the platform. They flashed a red warning strobe. The antenna was being repositioned. Shocked, he stared. It wasn’t supposed to happen with someone up here! But the structure slewed under his feet. He made a panic lunge, launched himself toward the equipment housing.
Colliding with the housing, he failed to secure a handhold on the slick box, and ricocheted off. The platform dropped underneath him. He could not find stopping traction as he skidded toward the far edge of the platform. Desperately he grabbed at the guardrail, with the full force of his Earth-powered muscles, misdirected. He reached too high and jackknifed over the rail. He flailed. Then he started falling.
The azimuth arm wheeled around. It went by at the limits of his desperate reach; his glove brushed the metal frame. The arm moved away. He tumbled. Across his sight swung the azimuth arm’s wheel, stars, the silver chasm of dish.
He fell slowly and realized it. A hammer and a feather have the same acceleration on the Moon and so does a man falling to his death. He had time to think. Not necessarily death. If the dish stopped him cold, it would definitely kill him. If the dish broke instantly, it would barely slow him down, and hitting the crater floor would kill him. But if the dish broke slowly it might actually break his fall.
The sides of the dish rose up with the ominous leisure of a mounting tidal wave. Just before the wave broke, he tried to fold the bulky spacesuit, cannonball, as though he were falling into a net.
His swaddled shoulder took the impact. The shocked dish gave way, slowly. Then it tore, letting him drop to the crater floor. He hit the floor bone-bruisingly hard, bounced, and finally sprawled on his back.
To his surprise, he was not dead. But he had the wind knocked out of him. He gasped for air. From the jagged hole in the dish above him, fragments drifted down, tumbling. He couldn’t breathe. Darkness with red veins closed in on him. Faintly he heard a clamor in his suit radio. “John! John!” Somebody sounded hysterical. He tried to answer. All he could get out was a broken wheeze.
* * *
The ongoing clamor in his ears bothered John. Garbled words. Verbal static. Finally, something intelligible. “ETA twenty minutes. Keep the victim immobile.”
“Roger, Yuegong Base, hurry!”
He took inventory of his body. Dull pain here and there. He rolled over with a pained grunt.
A young man jumped in front of John and he recognized Edward. The computer engineer. Edward waved his hands. “Don’t move!”
There was a woman whirling away from the radio station where she had been standing. He knew her too. Jennifer said, “Good Lord!”
“Good morning,” he said thickly. “Tell ‘em to turn back. I’m all right.” With an effort, John sat up.
Edward pleaded, “Please don’t move!”
John tried an exaggerated shrug, then rolled his head. Didn’t feel too bad, considering. If this had been Earth and Earth’s weighty gravity, he would have been dead.
Jennifer hurried over. “Lie back down! You’re hurt even if you don’t have enough sense to know it!”
“I want to know who moved the antenna,” he said.
“I’m terribly sorry!” Edward blurted. “Your colleague sent a message saying that it was very important to look at the supernova right away without even waiting for tomorrow morning, so I entered the coordinates, I didn’t know you were up there!”
“What colleague?”
“Baltazar,” said Jennifer. “Just what were you doing up there?”
“What supernova?” John asked.
“You forgot to put the safety on.”
John frowned. “I put it on.”
“The antenna won’t move with the safety on.”
“I put it on! Edward, check the safety switch!”
“Yes sir.” Edward scuttled to the control panel. He called back, “It’s on!” A very young, very honest man, he went on to say, “This is my fault too — I never once thought to test the safety switch circuit!”
“Not your job,” John said.
“Oh, but I should have—”
“No, not you.” Jennifer shook her head. “So it’s faulty. What a way to find out.”
Vindicated, John swung his feet around. They had deposited him on the overnight cot here in the control room. His moonsuit lay in the corner, sadly dirty and disassembled. Jennifer’s Chinese colleague, Zheng, crouched there, staring at the suit. The drift of his thoughts was easy to guess. Scuffs and scrapes marred the moonsuit’s outer fabric. The cranium of the helmet had a terrible dent in it. John felt a strange internal quiver that must have been a shudder. Anxiously he inventoried his body once more. All dull pains, except one tiny sharp one needling the base of his head. “I’m OK,” he said shakily. “You can all go to bed or whatever.”
“Not after having the living daylights scared out of us like this!” Jen retorted, and she added, “This isn’t some hotel to go sauntering around alone at night, you old fool!”
That wasn’t fair. He hadn’t been sauntering. And she had as many gray hairs as he did.
She refused to tell the medical rescue team from Yuegong Base to turn back.
The team, two men, thundered in through the airlock with a medivac cocoon, ready to stuff an unconscious victim into it and bundle him away. John pointed out that he could move all of his limbs and digits and felt basically intact.
The doctor, with the red cross on the arm of his coverall, frowne
d. “Internal injuries are very deceptive under conditions of low gravity. You need to be examined in the hospital.”
“Take him!” Jennifer said emphatically.
* * *
At least they let him sit up, belted into a cramped seat behind the pilot. Moondust sprayed past the porthole at his shoulder as the moonhopper took off. The dust cleared as the hopper gained altitude. Then he could see Sand Lake with its rim wall around a wide pale plain. There lay a patch of silver threads, an incongruous cross-stitch on the hoop of lunar plain: the Lunar Far-Side Very Low Frequency Array, LFSVLFA, Jennifer’s project.
The hopper looped around to its intended course. John glimpsed the radio dish, filling the crater Bolton on the edge of Sand Lake. He ought to have been inspecting the damage instead of going to the hospital at Yuegong Base.
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