Year’s Best SF 16

by Hartwell, David G. ; Cramer, Kathryn

  A baritone voice informed me I had reached the NASA Storage Facility. “Sgt. Saber speaking.”

  I couldn’t resist smiling at the name, but I knew he’d heard all the jokes. I identified myself. Then: “Sergeant, you have a listing for the Cassandra Project.” I gave him the number. “Can I get access to the contents?”

  “One minute, please, Mr. Carter.”

  While I waited, I glanced around the office at the photos of Neil Armstrong and Lawrence Bergman and Marcia Beckett. In one, I was standing beside Bergman, who’d been the guy who’d sold the President on returning to the Moon. In another, I was standing by while Marcia spoke with some Alabama school kids during a tour of the Marshall Space Flight Center. Marcia was a charmer of the first order. I’ve always suspected she got the Minerva assignment partially because they knew the public would love her.

  “When were you planning to come, Mr. Carter?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Within the next week or so.”

  “Let us know in advance and there’ll be no problem.”

  “It’s not classified, then?”

  “No, sir. I’m looking at its history now. It was originally classified, but that was removed by the Restricted Access Depository Act more than twenty years ago.”

  I had to get through another round of ceremonies and press conferences before I could get away. Finally, things quieted down. The astronauts went back to their routines, the VIPs went back to whatever it was they normally do, and life on the Cape returned to normal. I put in for leave.

  “You deserve it,” Mary said.

  Next day, armed with a copy of the Restricted Access Depository Act, I was on my way to Los Angeles to pay another visit to a certain elderly retired astronaut.

  “I can’t believe it,” Frank Allen said.

  He lived with his granddaughter and her family of about eight, in Pasadena. She shepherded us into her office—she was a tax expert of some sort—brought some lemonade, and left us alone.

  “What can’t you believe? That they declassified it?”

  “That the story never got out in the first place.” Frank was back at the desk. I’d sunk into a leather settee.

  “What’s the story, Frank? Was the dome really there?”

  “Yes.”

  “NASA doctored its own Cassegrain imagery? To eliminate all traces?”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “So what do you know?”

  “They sent us up to take a look. In late 1968.” He paused. “We landed almost on top of the damned thing.”

  “Before Apollo 11.”

  “Yes.”

  I sat there in shock. And I’ve been around a while, so I don’t shock easily.

  “They advertised the flight as a test run, Jerry. It was supposed to be purely an orbital mission. Everything else, the dome, the descent, everything was top secret. Didn’t happen.”

  “You actually got to the dome?”

  He hesitated. A lifetime of keeping his mouth shut was getting in the way. “Yes,” he said. “We came down about a half mile away. Max was brilliant.”

  Max Donnelly. The lunar module pilot. “What happened?”

  “I remember thinking the Russians had beaten us. They’d gotten to the Moon and we hadn’t even known about it.

  “There weren’t any antennas or anything. Just a big, silvery dome. About the size of a two-story house. No windows. No hammer and sickle markings. Nothing. Except a door.

  “We had sunlight. The mission had been planned so we wouldn’t have to approach it in the dark.” He shifted his position in the chair and bit down on a grunt.

  “You okay, Frank?” I asked.

  “My knees. They don’t work as well as they used to.” He rubbed the right one, then rearranged himself—gently this time. “We didn’t know what to expect. Max said he thought the thing was pretty old because there were no tracks in the ground. We walked up to the front door. It had a knob. I thought the place would be locked, but I tried it and the thing didn’t move at first but then something gave way and I was able to pull the door open.”

  “What was inside?”

  “A table. There was a cloth on the table. And something flat under the cloth. And that’s all there was.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Not a thing.” He shook his head. “Max lifted the cloth. Under it was a rectangular plate. Made from some kind of metal.” He stopped and stared at me. “There was writing on it.”

  “Writing? What did it say?”

  “I don’t know. Never found out. It looked like Greek. We brought the plate back home with us and turned it over to the bosses. Next thing they called us in and debriefed us. Reminded us it was all top secret. Whatever the thing said, it must have scared the bejesus out of Nixon and his people. Because they never said anything, and I guess the Russians didn’t either.”

  “You never heard anything more at all?”

  “Well, other than the next Apollo mission, which went back and destroyed the dome. Leveled it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I knew the crew. We talked to each other, right? They wouldn’t say it directly. Just shook their heads: Nothing to worry about anymore.”

  Outside, kids were shouting, tossing a football around. “Greek?”

  “That’s what it looked like.”

  “A message from Plato.”

  He just shook his head as if to say: Who knew?

  “Well, Frank, I guess that explains why they called it the Cassandra Project.”

  “She wasn’t a Greek, was she?”

  “You have another theory?”

  “Maybe Cassegrain was too hard for the people in the Oval Office to pronounce.”

  I told Mary what I knew. She wasn’t happy. “I really wish you’d left it alone, Jerry.”

  “There’s no way I could have done that.”

  “Not now, anyhow.” She let me see her frustration. “You know what it’ll mean for the Agency, right? If NASA lied about something like this, and it becomes public knowledge, nobody will ever trust us again.”

  “It was a long time ago, Mary. Anyhow, the Agency wasn’t lying. It was the Administration.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Good luck selling that one to the public.”

  The NASA storage complex at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville is home to rockets, a lunar landing vehicle, automated telescopes, satellites, a space station, and a multitude of other devices that had kept the American space program alive, if not particularly robust, over almost seventy years. Some were housed inside sprawling warehouses; others occupied outdoor exhibition sites.

  I parked in the shadow of a Saturn V, the rocket that had carried the Apollo missions into space. I’ve always been impressed with the sheer audacity of anybody who’d be willing to sit on top of one of those things while someone lit the fuse. Had it been up to me, we’d probably never have lifted off at Kitty Hawk.

  I went inside the Archive Office, got directions and a pass, and fifteen minutes later entered one of the warehouses. An attendant escorted me past cages and storage rooms filled with all kinds of boxes and crates. Somewhere in the center of it all, we stopped at a cubicle while the attendant compared my pass with the number on the door. The interior was visible through a wall of wire mesh. Cartons were piled up, all labeled. Several were open, with electronic equipment visible inside them.

  The attendant unlocked the door and we went in. He turned on an overhead light and did a quick survey, settling on a box that was one of several on a shelf. My heart rate started to pick up while he looked at the tag. “This is it, Mr. Carter,” he said. “Cassandra.”

  “Is this everything?”

  He checked his clipboard. “This is the only listing we have for the Cassandra Project, sir.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “My pleasure.”

  There was no lock. He raised the hasp on the box, lifted the lid, and stood back to make room. He showed no interest in the contents. He
probably did this all the time, so I don’t know why that surprised me.

  Inside, I could see a rectangular object wrapped in plastic. I couldn’t see what it was, but of course I knew. My heart was pounding by then. The object was about a foot and a half wide and maybe half as high. And it was heavy. I carried it over to a table and set it down. Wouldn’t do to drop it. Then I unwrapped it.

  The metal was black, polished, reflective, even in the half-light from the overhead bulb. And sure enough, there were the Greek characters. Eight lines of them.

  The idea that Plato was saying hello seemed suddenly less far-fetched. I took a picture. Several pictures. Finally, reluctantly, I rewrapped it and put it back in the box.

  “So,” said Frank, “what did it say?”

  “I have the translation here.” I fished it out of my pocket but he shook his head.

  “My eyes aren’t that good, Jerry. Just tell me who wrote it. And what it says.”

  We were back in the office at Frank’s home in Pasadena. It was a chilly, rainswept evening. Across the street, I could see one of his neighbors putting out the trash.

  “It wasn’t written by the Greeks.”

  “I didn’t think it was.”

  “Somebody came through a long time ago. Two thousand years or so. They left the message. Apparently they wrote it in Greek because it must have looked like their best chance to leave something we’d be able to read. Assuming we ever reached the Moon.”

  “So what did it say?”

  “It’s a warning.”

  The creases in Frank’s forehead deepened. “Is the sun going unstable?”

  “No.” I looked down at the translation. “It says that no civilization, anywhere, has been known to survive the advance of technology.”

  Frank stared at me. “Say that again.”

  “They all collapse. They fight wars. Or they abolish individual death, which apparently guarantees stagnation and an exit. I don’t know. They don’t specify.

  “Sometimes the civilizations become too vulnerable to criminals. Or the inhabitants become too dependent on the technology and lose whatever virtue they might have had. Anyway, the message says that no technological civilization, anywhere, has been known to get old. Nothing lasts more than a few centuries—our centuries—once technological advancement begins. Which for us maybe starts with the invention of the printing press.

  “The oldest known civilization lasted less than a thousand years.”

  Frank frowned. He wasn’t buying it. “They survived. Hell, they had an interstellar ship of some kind.”

  “They said they were looking for a place to start again. Where they came from is a shambles.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It says that maybe, if we know in advance, we can sidestep the problem. That’s why they left the warning.”

  “Great.”

  “If they survive, they say they’ll come back to see how we’re doing.”

  We were both silent for a long while.

  “So what happens now?” Frank said.

  “We’ve reclassified everything. It’s top secret again. I shouldn’t be telling you this. But I thought—”

  He rearranged himself in the chair. Winced and rotated his right arm. “Maybe that’s why they called it Cassandra,” he said. “Wasn’t she the woman who always brought bad news?”

  “I think so.”

  “There was something else about her—”

  “Yeah—the bad news,” I said. “When she gave it, nobody would listen.”

  Jackie’s-Boy

  Steven Popkes

  Steven Popkes (www.stevenpopkes.com) lives in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. “I became serious about writing in 1972. I attended the Clarion SF Workshop in 1978. When I left biology for computing (that was in 1979) it was with the idea that the engineering would support my writing habit. After all, it was just a 9-to-5 job, right? (Gales of hysterical laughter).” He has published forty SF stories over the last twenty years, four of them in 2010, and two novels, Caliban Landing (1988) and Slow Lightning (1991), both dealing with the complexities of alien contact.

  “Jackie’s-Boy” appeared in Asimov’s. It is a post-catastrophe tale set in the American midwest and south, after world civilization collapsed from the combined weight of natural disasters, bio-terrorism and plague, and global warming. Michael is a young boy, one of the survivors, who sneaks into the heavily-fortified local zoo after the death of his last surviving relative, and there befriends the sole remaining elephant—who can speak to him. They are soon forced to leave the zoo on a quest across the strange landscapes of the collapsed civilization, and the story of that quest is one of the finest SF stories of the year.

  Part 1

  Michael fell in love with her the moment he saw her.

  The Long Bottom Boys had taken over the gate of the Saint Louis Zoo from Nature Phil’s gang. London Bob had killed in single combat, and eaten, Nature Phil. That, pretty much, constituted possession. The Keepers didn’t mind as long as it stayed off the grounds. So the Boys waited outside to harvest anyone who came out or went in. They just had to wait. Somebody was always drawn to the sight of all that meat on the hoof, nothing protecting it from consumption save a hundred feet of empty air and invisible, lethal, automated weaponry. People went in just to look at it and drool.

  Michael knew their plans. He’d been watching them furtively for a week, hiding in places no adult could go, leaving no traces they could see. The Boys had caught a woman a few days ago and a man last night. They were still passing the woman around. What was left of the man was turning on the spit over on Grand. He sniffed the air. A rank odor mixed with a smell like maple syrup. Corpse fungus at the fruiting body stage. Somewhere nearby there was a collection of mushrooms that yesterday had been the body of a human being. Michael wondered if it was someone who had spoiled before the Boys had got to them or if it was the last inedible remnants of the man on the spit. By morning there would be little more than a thin mound of soil to show where the meat had been.

  This dark spring morning, just when the gates unlocked, one of the guards remained asleep. Michael held his backpack tightly to his chest so he made no sound. The man started in his sleep. For a moment, Michael thought he would have to take up one of the fallen bricks and kill the guard before he woke up. But the guard just turned over and Michael slipped furtively past him. He was just as happy. The only thing that got the Boys more riled than meat was revenge.

  He stayed out of sight even past the gate. If the Boys knew he was here, they’d be ready at closing time when the Keepers pushed everyone outside. Michael had never been in the Zoo, but he was hoping a kid could find places to hide that an adult wouldn’t fit. Inside the Zoo was safe; outside the Zoo wasn’t. It was as simple as that.

  Now, he was crouching in the bushes outside her paddock in the visitor’s viewing area, hiding from any Keepers, looking for a place to hide.

  She came outside, her great rounded ears and heavy circular feet, her wise eyes and long trunk. As she came down to the water, Michael held his breath and made himself as small as an eleven-year-old boy could be. Maybe she wouldn’t see him.

  Except for the elephant, Michael saw no one. The barn and paddock of one of the last of the animals was the worst place to hide. He’d be found immediately. Everyone had probably tried this. Even so, when the elephant wandered out of sight down the hill, Michael sprang over the fence and silently ran to the barn, his backpack bouncing and throwing him off balance, expecting bullets to turn him into mush.

  Inside, he quickly looked around and saw above the concrete floor a loft filled with bales of hay. He climbed up the ladder and burrowed down. The hay poked through his shirt and pants and tickled his feet through the hole in his shoe. Carefully, through the backpack, he felt for his notebook. It was safe.

  “I see you,” came a woman’s voice from below.

  Michael froze. He held tight to his pack.

  Something slapped the hay bale beside him
and pulled it down. The ceiling light shone down on him.

  It was the elephant.

  “You’re not going to hide up there,” she said.

  Michael leaned over the edge. “Did you talk?”

  “Get out of my stall.” She whipped her trunk up and grabbed him by the leg, dragging him off the edge.

  “Hold it, Jackie.” A voice from the wall.

  Jackie held him over the ground. “You’re slipping, Ralph. I should have found his corpse outside hanging on the fence.” She brought the boy to her eyes and Michael knew she was thinking of smashing him to jelly on the concrete then and there.

  “Don’t,” he whispered.

  “We all make mistakes.” The wall again.

  “Should I toss him out or squish him? This is your job. Not mine.”

  “Let him down. Perhaps, he’ll be of use.”

  The moment stretched out. Michael stared at her. So scared he couldn’t breathe. So excited the elephant was right there, up close and in front of him, he couldn’t look away.

  Slowly, reluctantly, she let him down. “Whatever.”

  A seven-foot metal construction project—a Zoo Keeper—came into the room from outside. Three metal arms with mounted cameras, each with their own gun barrel, followed both Jackie and Michael.

  “Follow me.” This time the voice came from the robot.

  Michael stared at Jackie for a moment. She snorted contemptuously and turned to go back outside.

  Michael slowly followed the Keeper, watching Jackie leave. “Elephants talk?”

  “That one does,” said the Keeper.

  “Wow,” he breathed.

  “Open your backpack,” the Keeper ordered.

  Michael stared into the camera/gun barrel. He guessed it was too late to run. He opened the backpack and emptied it on the floor.

  The Keeper separated the contents. “A loaf of bread. Two cans of tuna. A notebook. Several pens.” The lens on the camera staring at him whirred and elongated toward him. “Yours? You read and write?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take back your things. You may call me Ralph, as she does,” said the Keeper as it led him into an office.