The Last Science Fiction Writer

by Allen Steele

  He had a point. Ever since 9/11, the news media had come up with scenarios for future terrorist actions that sounded as if they’d come straight from a bad movie. If you believed everything you read in the magazines or saw on TV, al-Qaeda wasn’t a gang of Islamist fanatics led by geek named Osama bin Laden, but SPECTRE itself, with Blofelt in charge. A group of teenage space cadets—from the future, no less—making off with nuclear material to refuel a stranded starship? How absurd could you possibly get?

  “I think I see what you mean,” I said. “Sir.”

  “Of course you do.” Van Owen gave me a sly wink as he turned back around. “I wouldn’t have risked this if I thought otherwise.” Then he frowned. “But we still have one loose end…”

  “That’s me, isn’t it?”

  The captain slowly nodded. “You’re the one thing we never expected…a witness too valuable to simply knock out and leave behind. You helped my people escape from Earth, and now we have to decide what to do with you.”

  Leaning against his desk, he raised his fingers one at a time. “First option…we kill you.” Seeing my expression, he quickly shook his head. “Don’t worry, that’s out of the question. We’re not barbarians.” He raised a second finger. “Second option…we take you back to Earth, but drop you off in an area so remote that it’s unlikely that you’ll ever make your way back to civilization.”

  I had no doubt who’d suggested this one. Before I could object, though, the captain shook his head. “That’s also out of the question, for that’s almost as bad as the first option…and I’m making it a point to officially reprimand the cadet who made it. He’s in enough hot water with me already, so this won’t look good on his service record.”

  Oh, boy. Tyler was in a lot of trouble once he got home. I tried not to smile. “The third option,” Van Owen continued, “is that we take you back to where we found you, drop you off, and trust that you’ll never, ever breathe a word to anyone about what you’ve seen. Not now, not tomorrow, not in ten or twenty or fifty years, not ever.” He stared at me. “Do you know what I’m asking, Eric? Complete and utter secrecy, for as long as you live.”

  I swallowed when I heard that. Sure, I can keep a secret…but about something like this? It’s one thing not to let anyone know that your brother sells dope, or that your best friend wears boxer shorts printed with the Superman logo. It’s another to promise that you’ll never reveal that you’ve been to the Moon, or seen the inside of starship from the 24th century…

  Yet who’d ever believe me? At best, they’d simply think I was making it up, and then I’d be a liar, and a bad one at that. At worst, they’d assume I was delusional; then I’d be sent to a state mental hospital, and spend the next few years playing checkers with all the other guys who’d spent quality time with space aliens.

  “I don’t have a problem with that,” I said.

  “All right.” Van Owen nodded. “I think I can trust you to keep your word…but you still haven’t heard the fourth option.”

  “There’s one?”

  “Yes, there is,” he said, and this time he didn’t bother to raise a finger. “You can come with us.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just stared at him, and waited for my heart to start beating again.

  “As I said,” he went on, “if you were a member of my crew, your conduct would be considered outstanding. You have a quick mind, you’re quick to adapt to a crisis situation…and most of all, you’ve displayed true heroism, under circumstances that would’ve caused ninety-nine out of a hundred men to run for their lives.”

  The captain paused, then folded his arms together. “Son, you’ve got what it takes to be a spacer. I don’t say that lightly, and neither does Midshipman McGyver. Come with us, and I’ll personally recommend you to the academy…and I’d be proud to have you aboard the Vincennes once you pass basic training.”

  Not knowing what to say, I didn’t say anything. Instead, I walked over to the porthole and looked out at the stars.

  I was tempted. Damn, but I was tempted. Everything I’d ever wanted in my life, within reach of my fingertips. I wouldn’t even have to worry about graduating high school; trigonometry would be a thing of the past, because I’d be studying quantum mechanics instead. And not long after that, a berth aboard this very ship, and a chance to see things no one in my time had ever dreamed of seeing…

  And meanwhile, my mother would be left wondering what had happened to her son, who’d disappeared one October night without a trace. She’d already lost my father; now she’d lose me as well. That would kill her. And did I really want to be the kid brother whose picture Steve would see printed on the side of milk cartons he restocked at Speed-E-Mart? Smokin’ Steve was a jerk, but I didn’t want to leave her and Mom alone together, trying to put together the pieces after I was gone.

  Sometimes, the galaxy can wait. If only just a little while longer…

  “Thank you, sir.” My voice was a dry rasp. “I appreciate the offer, but…”

  “You’ll go for the third option.” Captain Van Owen nodded, and smiled. “Somehow, I thought you would.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, I did.” Then he offered his hand. “Because you’re that sort of person…sir.”

  I returned to Earth that same night, arriving shortly before dawn. The sun was still below the horizon when the shuttle descended upon a cow pasture about three miles from town. Mickey dropped the ladder overboard; we shared a brief moment in the airlock, then I hastily climbed down the ladder. My feet barely touched ground before she pulled the ladder up behind me. A last wave, then she closed the hatch.

  I watched the shuttle as it sprinted into the starlit sky. This time, there were no Warthogs in hot pursuit; I guess the Massachusetts Air National Guard had enough UFO-chasing for one night. In any case, the shuttle vanished within seconds, and then I began the long walk home.

  I’d hoped to slip in through the kitchen door without waking anyone, but my luck wasn’t with me; Mom had stayed up all night, watching TV in the living room while she waited for me to come home. I couldn’t tell whether she was mad or relieved: both, probably. She sniffed my breath, looked closely at my eyes to see if they were bloodshot, then demanded where I’d been.

  I was too tired to come up with a decent lie, so I told her that I’d been abducted by men from Mars. She stared at me for a long moment, then apparently decided that, since I obviously hadn’t been drinking or smoking dope, she’d let me have my little secrets. Maybe she figured that I’d been out with a girl. And that wasn’t too far from the truth either…

  Anyway, she had worse things to think about. As if turned out, Steve had been busted earlier that night. Officer Beauchamp spotted his Mustang tearing down the highway a few miles from Narragansett Point, so he pulled my brother over, and when Steve cranked down his window, Bo caught a strong whiff of reefer smoke. Bo called for backup, and when the cops searched Steve’s car, they found all the stuff that had made me so nervous. Mom got the call from the police shortly after she got home from work, but before she went downtown to spring him from jail, she first went downstairs to visit his room.

  And that’s how my brother lost his car, a pound of marijuana, and his status as Smokin’ Steve, all in the same evening. The pot was flushed down the pot, the ’stang was sold to repay Mom for the bail she had to post for him, and Steve spent his free time for the next twelve months picking up roadside trash on behalf of the Honor Court. He didn’t call me a twerp after that, either; Mom let him know that he was on probation so far as she was concerned, too, and that if he didn’t treat us both with a little more respect, he’d find just how far his Speed-E-Mart paycheck went toward paying for rent, utilities and groceries.

  Not that I got off scott-free. Mom grounded me for a month, which meant that I didn’t spend much time that fall hanging out in front of Fat Boy’s Music. I didn’t mind, though, because now I had a new interest in life.

  Just as Captain Van Owen predicted, no one ever learn
ed the truth what really happened at Narragansett Point that night. There was nothing about it in the news media, although a couple of days later Homeland Security escalated the Terror Alert to Code Orange, and Fox News made a squawk about civilian nuclear power plants being put under increased vigilance. As always, no one paid much attention to all this—you’ve heard one duet-tape alert, you’ve heard ’em all—although I couldn’t help but wonder if my friends hadn’t done us a favor, albeit unintentionally.

  When I saw Ted at school the next Monday, he didn’t want to talk about what he’d seen. In fact, he even denied that we’d done anything after we had pizza at Louie’s. It took me a few days to get his part of the story out of him, and then only in hushed tones, under the seats of the football field bleachers during gym class. Once he’d escaped from my brother and his friends, Ted beat it to the nearest gas station, where he used the pay phone to call the state police. But what he didn’t get were Vermont smokies, but instead two guys from the FBI field office in Burlington. They put him on the griddle for a couple of hours, then told him that if he ever breathed a word about what he’d seen, he’d find that his ambition to become a comic book writer would be limited to doing funnies for a federal prison newspaper. So, as far as he was concerned, our little adventure together was something that never happened.

  I didn’t object. Ted was right. Nothing significant happened that night, except that my brother got his comeuppance, my best friend became a little more cautious, and my mother stopped spending so much time away from the house.

  And me…?

  I hit the books as hard as I could. Every minute I had left in the day, I spent doing my homework, trying to jack up my grades so that I could qualify for a scholarship. The Air Force Academy was my first choice; if not that, then Annapolis. And if those options failed, then MIT, or Stanford, or CalTech. Any school that might lead me, in the long run, to NASA astronaut training, and—if I was lucky—a seat aboard the first ship to Mars.

  I’d rediscovered my dreams, sure. I’d also learned that I didn’t have to live in Bellingham for the rest of my life. High school is just something you get through, and the corner of Main and Birch is just a temporary resting place along the way. But that’s not all. The perfect girl is out there, waiting for me. And when we shared our last kiss aboard the shuttle just before she dropped me off, she told me how to find her again.

  I won’t tell you how this is going to be done, only to say that we worked it out on the way back from far side of the Moon. Time isn’t an obstacle; it’s just an inconvenience. Besides, you wouldn’t give out your girlfriend’s phone number, would you?

  And, like I said, I always wanted to be an astronaut.

  THE WAR OF DOGS AND BOIDS

  This is the story of how the dogs of Coyote chased the boids from Liberty, and thereby saved the lives of their human companions. It is a tale of bravery and sacrifice, of courage and vigilance…and no human will ever know it, for only the dogs are aware of all the facts, and they speak in ways that transcend human awareness.

  Dogs have their own society. From since the time before the beginning of recorded history, when wolf cubs who lurked around the refuse pits of human encampments overcame their primal instincts to allow themselves to be approached by the nomads who’d entered their domain, canines have roamed together as pack animals, forming their own hierarchies, their own mores and social codes. They have communicated with one another through growls and yips, barks and howls, yet their means of expression has never been limited to mere language. A certain gleam in the eye is all that separates friend from foe, just as a squirt of urine upon a tree trunk is a more effective means of asserting territory than a hundred-page treaty. Humans spend vast amounts of time and energy trying to determine sexual availability; for dogs, a quick sniff of the hindquarters is all that it takes for one to decide if the other is of the opposite gender and whether they’re receptive for mating. The rules of the pack are simple. The old and weak are protected by the young and healthy. Offspring are protected at all costs. Loyalty is lifelong; treachery is unforgiven.

  Little has changed after the long-forgotten day, countless millennia ago, when the first orphaned wolf cub, wary yet famished, allowed himself to be lured into camp by a two-legger intelligent enough to see the potential benefit in befriending a wild animal. Over the course of time, descendants of that lonesome cub were domesticated, crossbred, trained, and beloved by their two-legged patrons; in exchange, they received food, warmth, shelter, and companionship. And yet, even then, the dogs have been a breed apart. In ways seldom understood by their human companions, they’ve continued their ancient ways, obeying primal instincts that have confounded the best efforts of scientific observers. The rules of the pack.

  So dogs traveled across oceans and continents, bearing silent witness as their mentors explored and settled the distant frontiers of the planet they shared. And when humankind went to the stars, they brought dogs with them.

  Which is how Star came to Coyote. A medium-size mutt—part Rhodesian ridgeback, part pit bull—he’d never known life on Earth, save as an fetus removed from his mother’s womb during her last month of pregnancy, to be placed in hibernation for the long journey to 47 Ursae Majoris aboard the URSS Alabama. Star wasn’t the only dog to be selected for humankind’s first interstellar voyage, nor were dogs the only animals to make the trip; also placed within biostasis were fetal-stage sheep and goats, along with dozens of embryonic chicken eggs. Mission planners determined that cats were much too dependent to be useful to a fledgling colony, just as cattle consumed too much grazing land for such relatively little return. But dogs…oh, yes, dogs had long-since earned their right to settle a new world.

  So Star left Earth as little more than an unborn pup, suspended within a milky fluid inside the aluminum tube that bore his original name: ST7456-R. It took the Alabama 230 years to make the journey to the fourth moon of the third planet of the 47 Ursae Majoris, and nearly a year after that before the commanding officer, R.E. Lee, determined that the colony was stable enough to support livestock. Yet the day eventually became when the small cell containing ST7456-R was loaded into the machine that decanted his tiny form, combined it with biosynthesizers, and eventually produced a small, squealing puppy. Someone noted the tiny white splotch at the tip of his tail and the comet-like streak at the end of his nose, and so he was given his name.

  But Star was just a word by which two-leggers chose to address him. He eventually learned to answer to it, yet among the six other dogs who also survived the long voyage to Coyote—three didn’t—he was known as something else. His true name, his dog-name, was impossible to translate into any human language, for it was communicated not by sound or written alphabet, but rather by odor: a complex chain of organic acids and proteins, relayed by sweat, piss and anal odor, that was as unique among his kind as fingerprints were among humans. In human language, other dogs might have called him Short-Fur-Barks-Loud-Runs-Fast, but even that was only an approximation. For lack of better elucidation, his name was Star; he liked the sound of it, even if he had no idea what it meant.

  For the first eight weeks of his life, Star lived in a pen with the other puppies, none of whom looked like one another, yet who regarded themselves as litter-mates. The humans who fed them with squeeze-bottles of reconstituted milk during their infancy had given them names; there was Geronimo, a German shepherd, and Trixie, a white lab, and Dexter, a border collie, and Sally, an English terrier, and Barney, a golden retriever-collie mix, and Rayn, a beautiful Irish setter who was the favorite among the humans. Among the dogs, of course, they had their own names, and as usual within a pack, there was some initial feuds and fights until they sorted out who was the leader. To no one’s surprise, that turned out to be Geronimo, mainly because he was the largest and most aggressive of the males. However, Sharp-Teeth-Howls-At-Night wasn’t a bully; once he marked his territory by peeing in the corner of the pen that caught the most sunlight during the day, he was willing to make fr
iends with the others. Star and Geronimo became close pals, and spent their free time playing dog games: chasing each other around the colony’s log cabins, splashing through the creek that lay near the settlement, having contests to see who could bark the loudest.

  Yet their lives were not carefree forever. Coyote was an Earth-like world, yet it wasn’t Earth. Although the colony of Liberty had become self-sustaining by the time Captain Lee allowed the dogs to be decanted, food was still scarce; more often than not, the dogs survived on a gruel of corn mash, nutritious but not the carnivorous fare their bodies instinctively desired. And as soon as they were old enough, the dogs began to be trained for their principal task, protecting the farm fields from the native creatures that emerged from the surrounding savannah to feed upon the crops.

  The last wasn’t so much a job as it was a game. Swampers were easy; little more than large rodents, they were defenseless against dogs that could sniff out their whereabouts from fifty feet away and kill them with a single bite to the back of the neck. And they were good to eat, too; Rayn was the best hunter, and she quickly became plump from all the ones she knocked off (which only added to her desirability, for among male dogs nothing is more sexually attractive than a fat hitch in heat). Swoops were more difficult; large, broad-winged birds, they’d long-since preyed upon swampers, and more than once tried to do the same with the puppies until they grew too large for them to carry away. None of the pack ever managed to kill a swoop, yet they learned how to scare them away by barking and baring their teeth while they circled above the fields. The hardest opponents were creek cats; even after the dogs grew to full size, they were still only slightly larger than the felines, who’d back down only if they were circled by two or three dogs. The humans didn’t like creek cats any more than the dogs did, though, and after awhile the dogs learned that all they had to do was use their snouts to point out where a cat was lurking in the high grass until a human could dispatch it with a rifle.