The Last Science Fiction Writer

by Allen Steele

  “Aw, c’mon. That’s…”

  “That’s the truth. Take it or leave it…” Tyler started to turn away, then stopped. “Thanks for rescuing me,” he added. “I appreciate it. So here’s my payback…2337.”

  “Huh?” I shook my head. “What does that…?”

  “2337,” Tyler repeated. “That’s the year we left Mars.”

  A little less than two hours later, we reached the Moon.

  Stop and think about that for a moment. The Moon is approximately 240,000 miles from Earth. The first men to go there were Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders; in 1968, it took three days for them to make the journey—from December 21, 7:51 a.m., when Apollo 8 lifted off from Merritt Island, to December 24, 7:30 a.m., when they transmitted the first close-up TV pictures of the lunar surface—and during that time they established a new world speed record of 24,200 MPH.

  I didn’t have a watch, so I don’t know what exactly time it was when we made our getaway from Narragansett Point, with three A-10s in hot pursuit. All I know is that, when I woke up from a brief nap, I gazed out the window to behold the same awesome sight that Borman, Lovell, and Anders had first seen nearly forty years ago. I didn’t ask anyone what time it was, so I have to assume that Hsing had obeyed Mickey’s order to get us there in two hours.

  How fast had we traveled? Do the math, if you want; I didn’t. I was too busy staring out the window beside my seat, watching the barren grey landscape as it rushed past only a few hundred miles below us. Down there were mountains, hills, and craters that only twenty-seven men had ever seen before with their own eyes. A brief glimpse of Mare Tranquillitatis, where Armstrong and Aldrin planted the flag back in ’69, then we slingshot around the limb of the Moon and were hurtling toward deep space beyond the lunar farside.

  I didn’t realize Mickey was standing beside me until she said something “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked, keeping her voice low as she gazed past me.

  “Yeah,” I replied, feeling something pinch my throat. “It’s…it’s awesome.”

  “Uh-huh.” Only then did I notice that her hand lay lightly upon my arm. “This means something to you.” she murmured. “Not just seeing the Moon…it’s personal, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I…” I stopped myself. I didn’t want to lay my life story on her; this wasn’t the time or place. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” I said. “Y’know, be an astronaut. But I never thought I…I mean, I didn’t think I…”

  I halted, looked away. “Never thought what?” Mickey asked. “That you could?”

  “Yeah.” Then I shook my head. “I mean, no…naw, I mean…” Tongue-tied, I let out my breath, struggled to articulate myself. “Look, it’s something that…y’know, I once thought I could do, but…”

  “You gave up?”

  I didn’t answer that because I couldn’t. Whoever these guys were—Mickey, Tyler, Hsing, Libbie, Deke, even Alex—they’d come from a time and place where the impossible had become easy. You don’t tell a girl who just stolen a few tons of spent fuel rods from a heavily-guarded nuclear power plant that you quit believing that you could become an astronaut just because your father’s dead, your mother works two lousy jobs, and your brother’s a pothead.

  Mickey waited a moment for me to answer. When I didn’t, her hand left my arm. “Better strap in,” she said, returning to her own seat. “We’re coming in for rendezvous with the Vincennes.”

  “Rendezvous with the…?” I was about to ask what she meant when I looked forward, and saw something that made the Moon seem like a minor attraction.

  Fifty-five thousand miles beyond the far side of the Moon, parked in lunar stationary orbit and concealed from all the telescopes and radar systems of Earth, was a starship.

  Nearly four hundred feet long, illuminated by red and green formation lights on either side of its sleek grey hull, the SCS Vincennes was a leviathan in space. Streamlined from the slender cone of its bow to the stunted wings of its stern, it retained the same basic design of its shuttlecraft, including the vertical stabilizers that rose on either side of aft-section bulge. Yet there were significant differences: open-end nacelles, vaguely resembling intakes of enormous jet engines, lay on either side of the hull just forward of the wings, while a superstructure that looked somewhat like a submarine conning tower was elevated above the cylindrical mid-section leading to the bow.

  An enormous hatch yawned open within the upper side of the vessel’s aft section; I didn’t need anyone to tell me that this was the shuttle bay. Yet as we glided closer, I noticed that most of the portholes along the ship’s slender forward section were dark; only a few were lit, along with those on the forward tower. The Vincennes had gone dark; somehow, it looked less like a starship than a derelict in space.

  “Oh, boy,” Tyler murmured from behind us. “They’ve gone to low-power mode.”

  “Roger that.” Hsing gently coaxed the shuttle closer, swinging it in a broad arc above the darkened vessel. “Command reports all major systems except life-support and station-keeping have been shut down. Docking will be manual.”

  “Copy that.” Libbie’s hands moved across her console. “Coming in on manual. All hands, stand-by.”

  “Does that mean we’re in trouble?” I asked Mickey.

  “Don’t worry,” She grasped the bars of her harness. “Just means that Vincennes won’t be guiding us in on autopilot. Hsing’s a good pilot, though. He’ll get us down safely.”

  She knew what she was talking about, of course, but nonetheless I gripped the armrests of my seat. As the shuttle glided into position above the hangar, I looked down to see a broad circle blinking red upon the deck. A moment later, Libbie cut the inertial dampeners; I felt my guts lurch a bit as we became weightless once more. There was a thump beneath our feet, signifying that the landing gear had been lowered, then the shuttle began to slowly descend into the mothership.

  However, we didn’t touch down. Since the Vincennes’ own dampeners had been shut down as well, the shuttle was unable to land in a conventional sense. Instead, Hsing guided the craft until it was just a couple of meters above the deck, then held position. Several crewmembers, wearing the same type of skin-tight spacesuits I’d seen earlier, floated toward us, using backpack maneuvering units to haul mooring lines into place. Once the shuttle had been secured, the hangar doors began to close. From my window, I watched while an enclosed gangway telescoped out from the hangar walk. There was a hollow thump against the hull as a crewman mated it with the shuttle’s side hatch.

  “All right, we’re down.” Hsing let out his breath; he reached up to push buttons along the overhead console. “Give us a second to match pressure, then we’ll pop the hatch. Remember, we’re on emergency discipline, so you know what that means.”

  “What does that mean?” I whispered to Mickey.

  “Zero-g,” she said softly, raising her seat bar, her hair floating around her. “Just follow me, and try not to bump into anything.”

  “Mickey, Tyler…” Hsing gazed back at us. “Skipper wants to see you both on the bridge, soon as possible.” He paused, listening to his headset, then glanced at me. “And bring your guest, too. The old man wants to meet him.”

  “I bet he does.” Tyler had already pushed himself out of his seat. Grasping a rail running along the ceiling, he pulled himself toward the hatch, his feet dangling in midair. “Sorry, but I’m not taking the heat for this.”

  “I don’t expect you to.” Mickey’s voice was cool, and for a second they shared a look of mutual animosity. Then Tyler twisted the hatch’s lockwheel and pulled it open.

  Cold air flooded the shuttle, and I felt my ears pop. Mickey waited patiently while I pushed my seat bar upward; still, I found myself reluctant to leave the safety of my seat. “Come on,” she said, extending a hand to me while holding onto the ceiling rail with the other. “It’s not that hard. You might even like it.”

  “Sure. Whatever you say.” But it wasn’t weightlessness that bothered me. It w
as meeting the captain.

  Mickey was right: zero-gee is wicked cool.

  I’ll admit, I floundered around for the first few minutes, feeling like a little kid in swim class who’d been taken out of the baby pool and tossed into the deep end for the first time. The difference is that you’re operating in air, not water, and there’s nothing like zero-g to teach you some respect for Newton’s third law.

  Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. That means, when you bump into a bulkhead to your left, you bounce to the right, and when you grab a railing above your head, if you’re not careful with your feet, they might swing around and kick the guy in front of you.

  To make matters worse, the Vincennes’ passageways were narrow. Even when there was internal gravity, there was barely enough room to two people to pass one another without sucking in your gut; in microgravity, it was like being inside a pinball machine. So I bruised my shoulders and elbows a couple of times, and also put a lump on my head and put my foot against Mickey’s behind before I finally got the hang of it.

  But I can’t lie; it was fun. At some point, words like up, down, left, and right lost their meaning; once I got used to that, then everything else was a hoot. Crewmen who passed us in the corridors stared in bafflement at the guy in blue jeans and hooded sweatshirt who was laughing out loud as he performed somersaults that would have put him in the hospital back home. Mickey finally had to grab my shoulders and get me under control; several yards ahead, Tyler regarded at me with disgust, as if I was a country bumpkin who’d just used toilet paper for the first time.

  Once I got over that, though, I noticed a couple of things.

  First, the lighting within the passageways was dim. Much dimmer that it should have been; ceiling panels were dark, leaving only recessed amber lamps here and there to guide our way. Not only that, but as we passed hatches leading various compartments, I saw through their slot windows that they were without light. Not only that, but the entire ship felt cold; it couldn’t have been more than sixty-five degrees. I was born and raised in New England, where temperatures like that mean it’s time to put away to put away the snow-shoes and start wearing T-shirts and shorts, but everyone I saw wore jackets above their jumpsuits, and some were wearing light gloves. If these guys were from Mars, then Mars in the 24th century must have the climate of Daytona Beach.

  And that brings me to the second point: they were young.

  By young, I mean that almost no one I saw was older than twenty-one, with the median age somewhere between fifteen and seventeen. I passed one or two crewmen in their mid-thirties, and spotted one geezer with a few threads of white in his mustache and crows-feet around his eyes. Otherwise, though, the guys looked as if they just learned how to shave, and the girls…well, not to be too specific, but most of them weren’t exactly women yet.

  A starship full of teenagers. Martian teenagers, at that.

  “What’s so funny?” Mickey saw the expression on my face.

  “I dunno. I think I just fell into a Sci-Fi Channel movie.” She gave me a puzzled look, not getting the joke. “Never mind,” I added. “What I’m trying to say is…um, is everyone aboard a kid?”

  “No. The captain and senior officers are all adults.” She paused to let another crewman slide past us; he couldn’t have been than fifteen, yet was as serious as someone twice his age. “But, yes, most of the crew are between fourteen and twenty. By Earth reckoning, that is…about half that if you use the Martian calendar.” She smiled. “That makes me eight years old, where I come from.”

  “Eight. Right…” I was having trouble dealing with this. “Look, where I come from, you can’t even drive a car until you’re sixteen…eighteen, in some states. So you’re telling me…”

  By now we’d come to a ladder leading up a narrow shaft. Without looking back at us, Tyler was already ascending it, barely touching the rungs as he floated upward. “It’s a long story,” Mickey said quietly. “I’ll tell you the rest later…if the captain lets me.”

  “But…”

  “Eric…” Mickey paused at the bottom of the ladder. “Do me a favor and keep your mouth shut. Don’t speak unless the captain speaks to you first…and be careful what you say. Understand?”

  I made a zipping motion with finger across my lips. Mickey nodded, then led me up the shaft. We ascended about thirty feet, passing a closed hatch leading to another deck, and emerged through an open manhole. And that’s when I found myself on the bridge of the Vincennes.

  In many ways, it resembled pictures I’d seen of the control rooms of nuclear submarines: a long, narrow compartment, with officers seated at consoles on either side of a central aisle. What appeared to be a plotting table rested in the middle of the compartment, except this one displayed a holographic wire-frame image of the Earth-Moon system, with a tiny replica of the Vincennes positioned beyond the lunar farside. On the far side of the compartment, wrapped in a 180-degree arc, were five large portholes; the center one looked out over the ship’s bow, and it was in front of this window that I saw the commanding officer of SCS Vincennes.

  If I was expecting someone more heroic—James T. Kirk, maybe, or even Jean-Luc Picard—then I was disappointed. Captain Van Owen looked no more intimidating than my high school geometry teacher; short and narrow-shouldered, with barely enough brown hair to keep his head from getting cold. He would have looked better if he had glasses and maybe a mustache. One look at his eyes, though, and I knew that this one guy you didn’t throw a spit wad at while his back was turned to you.

  “Mr. Ionesco, Ms. McGyver…” His voice was low, yet demanding respect. He was standing upright, and it took me a second to realize that the toes of his shoes were tucked into stirrups on the deck. “Welcome back. I see that your mission has been a success…for the most part, at least.”

  “Yes, sir.” Tyler grasped the handrail surrounding the plotting table; Mickey and I had to settle for rungs here and there along the low ceiling. “We’ve retrieved a cache of uranium fuel rods from the objective, and have transported them to…”

  “Yes, I know. I can see that.” The captain gestured to a flatscreen above a console to our left. Looking at it, I saw an image of the hangar deck. Several spacesuited figures were guiding the stolen fuel rod canister from the shuttle, allowing its weightless condition to do most of the heavy-lifting for them. At the aft end of the hangar, another crewman hovered near an open hatch, apparently waiting for them to pass through. “Well done. But…”

  He paused, then looked past Tyler at both Mickey and me. “Apparently there were some unforeseen difficulties.”

  “Yes, sir, there were.” Mickey moved a little closer. “Captain, we had problems almost as soon as we entered the vicinity.” She glanced back at me. “However, if it hadn’t been for…”

  “Sir, I must protest.” Tyler interrupted her. “Midshipman McGyver overstates the situation…”

  “She does, does she?” Van Owen raised an eyebrow; he hadn’t missed the way Tyler have emphasized her rank. “She hasn’t even told me what that is…and as I recall, she was in charge of the retrieval phase, not you.”

  “Yes, but…” Tyler’s face colored. “Sir, she allowed an indigenous native to observe the operation.” The way he said native made it sound as if I wore a loin cloth and had a bone in my nose. “She then brought him aboard, despite my objections…”

  “Sir, with all due respect, the native observed the operation on his own initiative.” Mickey spoke as if I wasn’t beside her. “There was nothing we could do to prevent his intervention…”

  “No, sir, that’s not true.” Tyler jabbed a finger at me. “When I had an opportunity to stun him, she deliberately intervened, and when I insisted that he be left behind…”

  “Tell him what happened when we almost had to leave you behind.” Letting go of the ceiling rail, she pushed herself closer to Tyler. “Tell him what he did after you fell off the ladder.”

  “That’s enough, both of you.” Although Van Owen’s vo
ice remained low, both Mickey and Tyler clammed up. “Lt. Ionesco, I’ll remind you that it my order, relayed to Lt. Wu, that this person be brought aboard. Ms. McGyver was simply following my instructions.”

  That settled Tyler’s hash. “Yes, sir,” he murmured. “I didn’t understand that, sir.”

  “Now you do.” Ignoring both him and Mickey for a moment, the captain looked straight at me. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Eric…Eric Cosby, sir.” My mouth felt dry. “Captain, sir, I didn’t mean to…I mean, I wasn’t trying to…”

  “Easy, boy. You were just caught up in something you don’t understand.” He paused, studying all three of us. “Nonetheless, this is a serious situation…and Tyler, you’ve made some serious charges. I’ll speak to you alone.”

  Tyler nodded, not looking back at Mickey and me. The captain gestured toward the hatch behind us. “Ms. McGyver, please escort Mr. Cosby to the observation lounge. Remain there and keep him company until I summon you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The captain hesitated. “And while you’re at it, tell him whatever he needs to know.” A wry smile appeared on his face. “He’s come this far…might as well let him learn the rest.”

  The observation lounge was located on the deck below the bridge. Barely wide enough for three people to stand abreast, it had two circular portholes, each six feet in diameter, on either side of the compartment, with chairs anchored to the floor in front of them. Like the rest of the ship, the lounge was almost totally dark, save for a red emergency glowing above the hatch.

  “This is my favorite place on the ship.” Grasping a ceiling rail, Mickey led me to the two chairs facing the starboard viewport. “I don’t get a chance to come here very often, though…usually too busy. Would you like to sit, or…?”