Frantically, Arthur scanned the horizon. Seeing the flashing red beacon of the lander off in the distance, he felt relief and also an inexplicable sense of disappointment. “Well, the lander's still there,” he said. “I wonder why they commanded the buggy to return."
"Where the goddamned hell have you guys been?” came Commander Drummond's voice shouted over the radio link.
Arthur stiffened.
"Exploring the cave, sir,” said Yevgeny.
"What? For eighteen damned hours?"
Arthur and Yevgeny stared at each other. The nondazed part of Arthur's mind speculated that the alien ship's planet probably had a day of seventeen or eighteen hours.
"Zhukov, Davidson. Do you read me?” said Drummond after about ten seconds of silence.
"Yeah,” said Arthur absently, his mind occupied with the planetarium.
"Why didn't you obey my orders?” Commander Drummond barked.
"What orders, sir?” said Yevgeny.
"We thought you were dead,” Drummond went on. “We brought back the buggy to see if you were inside. Goddamn it. We were going crazy here."
"Sorry, sir,” said Yevgeny, showing by his smile that he wasn't in the least sorry.
"Sorry!” Drummond's sigh sounded loudly in Arthur's helmet. “How's your oxygen?"
"Fine, sir,” said Yevgeny.
"And you, Davidson?"
Arthur glanced at the suit dials. “About twelve hours remaining."
"That's impossible!"
"Sorry,” said Arthur.
Arthur heard another sigh. “I don't know what's going on,” said Drummond, “but stay put. I'll send the buggy to you at full speed."
"No hurry,” said Yevgeny. “We happy to wait for taxi."
"There is an extreme hurry,” said Drummond in an angry voice. “The New Arabia mission will land near you in four hours. And their mission may be armed."
"Armed?” The word sounded alien to Arthur; the Moon should be free of that kind of idiocy. It felt like sacrilege. I don't believe it.
"Mission Control was nice enough to tell me that a few hours ago.” Drummond's voice oozed with sarcasm. “We've been ordered to return to the orbiter while Mission Control explores our options."
"What options?” said Arthur.
"You don't have a need to know.” Drummond paused. “They might be monitoring our frequencies. So stay put and stay quiet. I've got work to do. Drummond, out."
Arthur fumed. He could well guess the options. There was a control panel on the orbiter that only Drummond had access to. Arthur didn't think anything of it then, but now he was sure it was a weapon firing system. Idiocy. “Defending the freedom of the Moon.” I can hear it now.
Arthur looked back toward the cave entrance. “It looks very inviting.” He spoke softly, as if by doing so, his conversation with Yevgeny could be private.
"I thought you had faith in future,” said Yevgeny equally softly and in Russian.
"Da"—Arthur switched to Russian as well—"but not the immediate future.” He made a snap decision. “I'm going back."
"I not surprised.” Yevgeny nodded. “If I not have wife and child I might—"
"What's going on?” Commander Drummond's voice thundered in Arthur's helmet. “And speak English, damn it."
"I'm going back,” said Arthur, “into the cave to ... to do a little more exploring."
"No. I order you to stay where you are."
"Sorry."
"What?"
"I have to go."
"Zhukov,” Drummond bellowed, “stop him. That's an order."
"Yes, sir,” said Zhukov while at the same time making go away motions with his hand. “I stop him."
Arthur smiled, waved farewell, and started for the cave. As he walked, he heard sounds of a struggle punctuated by Yevgeny's commentary. Again, Arthur smiled; he seemed to be acquitting himself rather well considering that Yevgeny was taller and heavier. “Take your hands off me,” said Arthur, helpfully, as he passed into the cave. A few seconds later, he heard Yevgeny say, “He got away, Commander. You want me go after him?” There was a few second pause before Drummond said in a resigned voice, “No. I can't afford to lose you both. Stay where you are."
Just as Arthur got to the limit of the radio reception, he heard Yevgeny whisper, “Arthur, my friend. Good luck."
"Good-bye, Zhenya."
As he ventured deeper along the passage, he began to entertain second thoughts; had he just effectively committed suicide—on a whim? He paused and thought about going back. He shrugged, shook his head, and continued on. Yes, he'd taken the decision on impulse, but he'd hold to it because of stubbornness. His mother had often told him he'd inherited that trait from his father.
Darkness greeted him as he reentered the chamber. The beam of his helmet lamp only served to emphasize the lack of light—and his loneliness. “Probably an inactivity timer,” he said aloud to break the silence. He padded to the pedestal, pushed the button and, as bluish stars filled the sky, switched off his lamp.
He looked down at the pedestal panel display. “And an auto reset,” he said, seeing that the display showed the same readings as when he'd first seen it. He pressed the leftmost button and pushed the slider leftward until the stars turned from blue to white and all motion stopped. He stared hard at the sky but couldn't tell if it showed the eighteen-hour advance of time since his first encounter.
Bracing himself against the pedestal for the expected dizziness, he pressed and held down the rightmost button, then pushed the slider.
It wasn't as bad this time, probably because he'd expected it. Arthur looked at the sky. It had changed and no doubt another eighteen hours or so had gone by. He felt very isolated; the lander had probably launched by now, leaving him the only man on the Moon. Then he remembered; the New Arabia mission should have already landed. He thought briefly about going out and finding it. But, relatively speaking, the Moon was a big place. Without at least a moon buggy, a working buggy, the chances of locating the mission was minuscule. Arthur shook his head. He knew he was temporizing—and anyway, if he did locate the mission, he'd probably be arrested on the spot. The space-faring nations weren't exactly the best of friends at the moment.
Arthur gritted his teeth, pressed and held the leftmost button, then closed his eyes and pushed the slider.
The dizziness seemed no worse than before, and had about the same duration. He'd expected something much more dramatic. Opening his eyes, he clutched the pedestal in reaction to another kind of dizziness—vertigo. As if in a hall of mirrors, Arthur saw multiple, superimposed copies of the chamber. At the center of each, he could see a spacesuited figure. The figures, clearly astronauts, grabbed, clutched, or staggered back from one of the central pedestals that vanished to infinity, like telephone poles along a Texas highway.
Then a doorway appeared in the dome—or domes—on the opposite side from the original entrance. Arthur noticed that the spacesuit technology seemed more advanced the farther away he looked—going from his clunky-looking outfit to sleek, almost form-fitting clothing with all but invisible helmets.
An idea was forming. Arthur examined the panel display; the pointer hugged the left vertical line. Yes, the astronauts must all be explorers who, like himself, had discovered the planetarium and had used it to travel to the same point in the future. But a part of his mind questioned his sanity; Zhenya had maintained that this was impossible—and he was right.
Feeling detached, like a performer in a pageant, he turned his gaze to the chambers.
The astronaut who seemed to be the farthest away started for the doorway. The other astronauts followed in a line. Arthur joined the procession and walked toward the entrance. Apparently, last in, first out.
When Arthur got to the entrance, he saw that it was night on the Moon, but the crater was brightly lit. There were people waving, clearly a welcoming committee—and they weren't wearing spacesuits. Arthur thought he could make out a hint of a clear dome over the crater.
Just then, the talking and laughing stopped. People stopped and gazed up to where a spacecraft, an enormous icosahedron-shaped vessel, had suddenly appeared. Although it was night in the crater, but just barely, the ship was high enough to catch the rays of the sun. It looked magnificent: polished metal, angular surfaces with large viewports, blue auroralike plumes from the engines.
Observing the craft coming to a landing outside the domed crater, Arthur felt as if he were watching a sci-fi epic. He could almost hear the music.
"That must be it!” Arthur realized the purpose of the planetarium; it had to be a recruiting booth for explorers—explorers with a talent for languages. Maybe not a ability for languages so much as a flair for solving puzzles—or an aptitude for solving anything. Or all of the above.
Then he saw the sun peek above the horizon, sending the terminator across the crater at about the speed a man could run. Night turned abruptly to day. In the Moon's gentle gravity, Arthur felt like jumping and cavorting out of sheer excitement. It looked as if it was going to be a nice day. It would be great if he had someone to share it with.
Arthur heard a sound from behind and spun around. Having thought he was the last in the line, he was surprised to see a figure in an older-style spacesuit. As the figure began to remove his helmet, Arthur sucked in a breath. He let his helmet thud to the ground and rushed forward. The figure appeared startled for an instant, then flung off his helmet and spread his arms.
Copyright ©2007 Carl Frederick
[Back to Table of Contents]
THE ALTERNATE VIEW: ROBERT HEINLEIN TURNS 100 by Jeffery D. Kooistra
Had life imitated art to the extent that Robert Heinlein had lived just a slightly larger percentage of the life span of his beloved character Lazarus Long, he would have been celebrating his 100th birthday next month, on 7/7/7 (the “number of the Best," in my opinion). Since life didn't, we're just going to have to have a party without him, and, indeed, a big one is planned.
If you haven't heard about the party yet, then make all haste to your computer and check out the following website,—www.heinleincentennial.com—. Granted, the party takes place over the weekend of July 6—8, and this is the June issue, but publishing schedules being what they are, I figure you're probably reading this sometime in April or May, so there's still plenty of time to join in the festivities yourself. I'm certainly planning on being there.
If you attend you can hang out with such luminaries as Dr. Michael Griffin, the current administrator of NASA; X Prize Chairman and Heinlein Prize Winner Dr. Peter Diamandis; Brian Binnie, pilot of SpaceShipOne; authors Spider and Jeanne Robinson; and a bunch of others—the list keeps growing. There will be events, there will be shows, there will be tours—I'm not going to tell you what all of them are, since I'm writing in December and, well, details can change.
I'm also not going to tell you much about Heinlein. I never met the man, and he died before I published anything. He's just always been one of my all time favorites. If you want to know about Heinlein, go get yourself a copy of his Expanded Universe (ISBN 0-441-21883-0). Therein you can read Heinlein stories and also read what Heinlein had to say about Heinlein. You can also easily find books written by others about Heinlein, people who knew him and people who didn't, people who know what they're talking about, and people who don't. And then there's the Internet.
What I am going to tell you is my own cute little Heinlein related story, one that I think is unique in the SF world (and if it isn't, one of you will be sure to tell me), but I'll save that for the end.
I credit Heinlein for helping to turn me into an Alternate View sort of author. Some of my earliest memories of adult science fiction involve seeing Heinlein's name on books in my elementary school library. I can still picture those exciting illustrations in the juvenile novels, and summon up the feelings they gave me then. Granted, the juveniles aren't exactly adult, but they did serve to forever link the name of Heinlein with the concept of “stuff I'm going to enjoy reading."
In preparation for writing this column, I felt the need to reread Heinlein's novella “Waldo.” I hadn't read it since high school, but I recalled there was some aspect to it that had deeply influenced how I think. The story appeared in Astounding back in 1942, and it was clear upon rereading it that Heinlein was going for word count as well as quality when he wrote it, for it is bloated. Still, it is immensely entertaining. The relevant plot point for my purposes revolves around Waldo's (he's a high-paid consultant genius) attempts to understand a mysterious phenomenon. It seems that the broadcast power system the world relies upon is breaking down. Power receptors stop working for no apparent reason. However, one man had the power-receiving antenna on his flying car repaired by a backcountry “witch doctor” of sorts. The problem is not that the repaired antenna doesn't work—it works perfectly. But the formerly stiff elements of the antenna now writhe and sway and move around like a hand grasping power from the void.
Heinlein was very well educated in both science and engineering, and understood better than most how scientists think and work, or at least how they are supposed to. And in this story he presents his hero with a phenomenon flagrantly unexplainable via known science. Indeed, it looks and acts like magic.
What Heinlein understood was that an ordinary scientist would have written the effect off as a trick, and probably sight unseen. (Judging from the reaction I get whenever I bring up cold fusion or flying saucers, they also get obnoxious and disdainful.) But in this story he has Waldo proceed in a different way. First Waldo validates the reality of the phenomenon, both its existence and its inexplicability within the confines of known science. He then goes ahead methodically investigating the phenomenon even though it requires him to abandon concepts about reality that he knows to the core of his being must be true.
I won't spoil the story for those of you who have never read it. The point, and the value of this story for me, is that Waldo provided for me an early model of how one should approach the unknown, with a skeptical but open mind, not a skeptical and closed one.
* * * *
My second published story I owe almost entirely to Heinlein. Prior to writing it, I had been reading the collection Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A. Heinlein and Tributes to the Grand Master edited by Yoji Kondo (ISBN 0-312-85523-0), and had recently reread the actual story “Requiem.” That is the story of how D. D. Harriman, the man who sold the Moon in the story “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” finally made it to the Moon himself and died there. One night as I was leaving my girlfriend's apartment (Dorothy and I weren't even engaged yet), I walked out into the parking lot and saw this most beautiful crescent moon hanging low on the horizon—a thin line of light, like two horns pointing upward. I was so struck by the view that I felt compelled to pause and drink it in.
A story idea came to me as I entered my car.
Fortunately, the drive out of the apartment complex was mostly into the west, so I got to look at the Moon the entire time. It wasn't a long drive—maybe a third of a mile—but by the time I got out to the main road, I had the entire story plotted in my mind. Then it just remained to go home and write it, and the result was “The Return of the Golden Age” which appeared in the March 1993 issue of Analog. In it, I had my protagonists Max and Jimmy (Max was named after the character in Starman Jones) take a special grave marker similar to that described in “Requiem” to the Moon as a way of thanking Heinlein for inspiring so many. Never before, nor since, has a story appear so precisely in my mind, nor worked itself out so well when I wrote it down.
But th
is story became linked with Mr. Heinlein even more closely than I had intended.
I had been very careful to make sure my protagonists landed their ship in the same place on the Moon that Heinlein had his heroes bring Harriman, and this was in the area of Mare Fecunditatis, the Sea of Fecundity. How shocked and confused was I when the issue bearing my story arrived and I discovered that Mare Fecunditatis had been changed to Mare Imbrium. Why in the hell would anyone make a change like that? This made no sense to me at all. It didn't really make any difference to the enjoyment of the story, but this was just the sort of inconsistency with the original that I disdain.
As it happens, I was in New Orleans that year for the Nebula Awards Banquet, and to pick up the Analytical Laboratory Award for best short story of 1992 for my first published story, “Love, Dad.” I met Stan Schmidt for the first time, and one of the first things I asked him was why the names of the seas had been switched in my recent story. Even more confused was I when he answered that “they” (meaning the Analog editorial staff) had wondered why it was that I'd switched seas from what was in the original story. For some reason, someone had been rooting around in the Astounding/Analog cellar and had noted the original incarnation of the story in the pages of Astounding, and seen that therein Heinlein had placed the landing in Mare Imbrium. Subsequently, the appropriate changes were made to my manuscript.
But the mystery didn't remain a mystery for long. At least I don't think so. I suppose there could be another explanation for what happened, but I really doubt it.
I was sitting around talking with some other writers, amongst them Poul Anderson and his wife Karen, when I related my curious story of the landing site name change. And then Karen Anderson looked up from what she was doing (which I think was knitting, but it could have been needlepoint), her eyes alight and said words to this effect: “I bet it has something to do with Kay Tarrant."
By way of explanation, Kay Tarrant worked for years with John Campbell as assistant editor of Astounding and Analog. (Note that in the earliest issue of Analog that I have, August 1973, she is listed as assistant editor Kay Tarrant. I've also heard her referred to as “Katie” and “Kate” and “Katherine,” and I don't know if her title was assistant editor back in the Golden Age.) Over the years a sort of game developed amongst the writers and Kay. You see, as guardian of the public morality, Kay would edit out or change morally suspect phraseology in stories prior to their seeing print. So of course, Astounding and Analog authors would go out of their way to include morally suspect double-entendres in their stories, but written in such clever and stealthy ways that Kay Tarrant would miss them. One of the most famous examples of a naughty expression that got by Kay is from a George O. Smith story in which he referred to “the original ball-bearing mousetrap,” by which he meant a tomcat.
Analog SFF, June 2007 Page 15