Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2014: A Tor.Com Original

by Various Authors

  “He’s a physicist, isn’t he?” asks June.

  Chet nods. “Eisenhower asked Disney to do a series about space and science last year. Disney Studios has a good reputation—they made a lot of shows for the army and US Treasury during the war. Not that we don’t have brilliant American physicists, but the government is in love with these Nahzees.” He’s pronounced “Nazi” as “Nahzee” ever since he heard it in Churchill’s “blood, sweat, and tears” speech. “Oh, that’s right—none of them were Nahzees. We went to a lot of trouble to get them. Got to show them off to the Russians, I guess. Grabbed them right under their noses.”

  June teases, “You’re just jealous you’re not on TV. All of you at the jet lab and NAA.”

  “Don’t push it, June.”

  June decides not to—in fact, she’s sorry she said a word. Chet had been in the group of Army scientists that tracked down and captured the German scientists (although “captured” is probably not the right word, as the Germans were quite eager to go to America rather than to Russia). When in Germany, Chet saw atrocities that he claimed these German TV scientists knew about, war crimes that they had committed. Technically, he should not even have told her; it was all top secret, completely suppressed by the Office of Strategic Services, which had cleansed their records and made them look as if they were angels.

  June takes Chet’s hand. “Sorry, honey.”

  He shrugs. “Oh, anything for a laugh.”

  Now he’ll be broody. Oh, well.

  At the entrance of Tomorrowland, Haber holds a Ping-Pong ball, which represents an atom of uranium, delicately between his thumb and forefinger. “These contain energy,” he says gravely. In front of him stands a table covered with other “atoms” loaded into mousetraps. His son tosses a Ping-Pong ball into their midst, which starts a chain reaction, a wild flurry of snaps and flying white balls, each of which sets off even more traps. Haber holds up a cardboard picture of an atomic pile, which he says will soon provide us with all the energy we will ever need. We will no longer even need hydroelectric dams. It will all be like magic. “Use it wisely,” he admonishes.

  This is only a small sample of the show Carol will see on TV a few months later. Ward Kimball, Disney’s right-hand man, using a loose style that is new at the studio, is collaborating with Dr. Haber to create “Our Friend the Atom.” A towering, threatening genie—atomic energy—will emerge from a bottle, arms crossed, while the skinny, hapless man who released him skitters about on the beach, terrified, until he tricks the genie back into the bottle, ensuring that atomic energy will be used in medical applications and for electrical power. Carol will remember the show her entire life, though after the dark twist she will not recall it for years. But the dark twist comes later.

  “Carol, drink your milk or I’ll put it back in the icebox,” says her mother.

  “It’s 1986, where a trip to the moon is an everyday event,” announces Art Linkletter ebulliently, as the Rocket to the Moon ride appears on the screen in the world’s first glimpse of Tomorrowland. “In Tomorrowland, you can travel to the moon on the Moonliner. The passenger cabin is in the bottom, between the fins, and you can watch the huge top television screen there to see where you’re going, and the bottom one to see where you’ve been.”

  Danny Thomas and his children, including Marlo, the future That Girl, rush with unfeigned eagerness into 1986 (her show will have come and gone by then) and into the Moonliner, welcomed by a shapely stewardess. The ship blasts off, in 1986, and soon the arteries of Anaheim are like tiny diagrams far below.

  “Not bad,” admits Chet, grudgingly. “Kind of like a bombing run over Germany.”

  Carol is silent for a few minutes, her eyes wide. Finally she says, “I want to go to the moon.”

  “So do I. It could be done, but that’s not what would really happen. For one thing, that rocket part would fall off after it boosts the capsule out of the atmosphere, and you’d probably need at least three stages. And then—”

  “And then you go to the space station on the way! That’s what the man said.”

  “Right. That’s Wernher’s plan.”

  “Who’s Wernher?”

  “A war criminal.”

  June says, “Oh, honey, just let it be.”

  “If you’d seen—”

  “It’s Sunday,” she says. “Carol is right here.”

  He lights a Chesterfield cigarette. Even at this age, Carol knows that it’s his favorite brand. “Okay, okay. How about another martini?”

  “It’s definitely a two-martini show,” says June, unwinding her long legs and rising from the couch.

  “Chock-full of fun.” He glances longingly at Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night, dog-eared at page ninety-seven, next to him on the end table, but he promised June that he’d watch the show with Carol.

  “I want to go to Frontierland, Tomorrowland, and Fantasyland,” says Carol.

  “Not Adventureland?”

  “And Adventureland.”

  “That Disney is a real moneymaker. Too bad I can’t get a job with him. But he’s anticomm…”

  “That’s enough!” June, who has just returned, slams down Chet’s martini on the side table, and it splashes over the edge of the glass. June stalks from the room.

  “What’s wrong with Mom?”

  “Guess she doesn’t like Walt Disney.” Chet is silent for a moment, then says, “That’s not fair, honey. It’s my fault. I said something wrong.” He follows June.

  * * *

  Carol closes her eyes for a moment as some boring man talks, seeing four little purple tops spinning through space, a distant Earth behind them, and then the strange, multicolored creatures that live on Mars. Her head is always full of pictures. Right now, she is remembering the “Man in Space” show, in which Wernher von Braun narrates his plan for going into space, and the other shows that are about the moon and Mars. The plan uses a space shuttle and a space station. It is a plan that von Braun has worked on for several decades and published in Collier’s magazine in 1952. Of course Carol has not read it, but this is its introduction:

  By Dr. Wernher von Braun

  Technical Director, Army Ordnance, Guided Missile Development Group, Huntsville, Alabama

  “Scientists and engineers now know how to build a station in space that would circle the earth 1,075 miles up. The job would take 10 years and cost twice as much as the atom bomb. If we do it, we can not only preserve the peace, but we can take a long step toward uniting mankind.”

  Collier’s, March 22, 1952

  The US space program will manifest the German’s plan to the letter, except for actually going to Mars. Perhaps we are not enthused about going once Soviet and US probes show us that Mars is not inhabited by one-eyed creatures, but, at the most, life invisible to the naked eye. What would be the point?

  “And now—” says someone on TV.

  Carol opens her eyes. Her parents have not returned. She stabs the carpet repeatedly. She stabs her leg. The point of the blade on her thigh makes her taste peanut butter. This doesn’t seem strange to her. She runs to the kitchen, climbs onto a stool, and gets the jar from the cupboard.

  * * *

  A few months later, Chet succumbs, as he must, and they are all at Disneyland. At Tomorrowland, in fact.

  “Look, Daddy! It’s the Moonliner!” Carol leans forward, pulling on her father’s arm relentlessly, until they are right next to it.

  “At least it’s not a Nahzee rocket,” he says, looking at the big red TWA insignia, hands in his pockets. “Except for the fin design.”

  June takes Carol’s hand firmly. “Chet, can’t we ever just have some good plain fun?”

  “I thought we were.”

  “You know what I mean. Why does everything have to be such a dark conspiracy?”

  “Because it is? Look around! Germans, Germans, everywhere.”

  “GE? TWA?”

  “Volkswagen? Krupp? Von Braun?”

  “Chet, much as you
despise it, we do live in a capitalistic nation. Maybe it’s time you got used to it.”

  “Maybe it’s time the land of the free got used to me.”

  Carol’s mother blinks fast, and her voice is low. “It’s marvelous how you take it upon yourself to remind me every single day that just because a man is brilliant does not mean he can get along with people. I mean, it’s like you can’t be smart and kind at the same time. Maybe you’d explode if you tried. That would be like igniting liquid oxygen. Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It’s jet-propelled Chet Hall! Good-bye, Chet! He’s off to a perfect world.”

  “You think that’s funny, don’t you? I spent the war fighting these monstrous people.”

  “I know, Chet. Don’t raise your voice.”

  “And now I’m the one who’s anti-American! Because I believe in human rights and wasn’t afraid to say so!”

  Mothers herd their kids past Chet with sidelong glances. An astronaut with a bubble helmet strides toward him. “Now this death-dealing born-again Nahzee is on TV while I may not even be able to support my wife and kid! He’s not that smart, June. He’s just frigging wily. He follows the money.”

  “Sir,” says the astronaut, “would you mind stepping away from the Moonliner?”

  “I sure as hell would mind!” shouts Chet.

  When things get heated, it’s Carol’s cue to step in.

  “I want to go to the moon,” says Carol. She takes her father’s hand. “Daddy, can you please take me to the moon?”

  Chet shrugs off the astronaut’s tight grip on his shoulder and swoops her up. “Of course, honey. And do me a favor. Always remember that I love you more than anything in the world.”

  “Even more than the moon? The moon’s not in this world, is it?”

  “I love you more than anything in the universe. More than anything we know and more than anything we might ever know.”

  “I love you too, Daddy.”

  How do kids learn to do this?

  Years later, recalling this in the Pacific Coast “encounter group” where she is soon to meet her future husband, Carol remembers sticking out her tongue at the astronaut. At least, she thinks she does.

  It sounds good, anyway. It sounds the way one would like to have been.

  And something else hits Carol as she poaches in the mud pit in the future (though not as far ahead in the future as the Moonliner). She re-hears those desperate words she heard one night through the air-conditioning vent. Her parents never knew she could hear them.

  “June, it’s a very good offer.”

  “In France.”

  “A lot of women would consider this an adventure. Carol could grow up there.”

  “And never come back.”

  “Come on. Of course she could. Your parents would love to visit France. They could even live with us.”

  “I hate to mention it, but you may have noticed that we don’t speak French.”

  “I don’t have to know it for the job, but it would be good to learn.”

  “You aren’t happy here, Chet. I don’t think you’d be any happier there.”

  “I want to be able to support my family. I’m sick and tired of going from job to job.”

  “Lay it all out for me. Get guarantees from the government. That at least Carol and I can come back any time we want. And, preferably, you too. I want to know exactly how much money you’ll make. How long the contract is for. I want paid return tickets in my hand before I uproot my family.”

  “I don’t know if—”

  “That’s right. You don’t know. They may well revoke our passports.”

  A sigh. “This is a great country, isn’t it.”

  “It’s a country, like any other.”

  “That’s not how the story goes. This is an extraordinary country! A magical country!”

  “It’s rotten to the core in so many ways.”

  “I can hardly believe my ears! My sweet little wife from Kansas just said—”

  “But here, there’s the possibility of change. That makes all the difference. People can make changes.”

  “Without my top-security clearance, I’ll never be able to work on what I love. What I was born to do.”

  “I guess I was born to run a vacuum cleaner.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “What do you think I mean? If you would help out around here I could get a job.”

  “A secretarial job.”

  “A chemistry degree is not nothing, Chet. I might even land a job somewhere else in the country and we could move there. Oh, that’s right—I did land a job somewhere else, but you wouldn’t leave your precious jet lab.”

  “Look, maybe they’d help you find a job you really like in France. Let’s see about that.”

  “Would you do that?”

  “June? Are you crying?”

  “I’m just happy.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “I love you. Even though you’re a functional idiot.”

  1957:

  October: Soviets launch Sputnik.

  December: US Vanguard rocket burns on launchpad, failing to launch first US satellite.

  One evening when he actually gets home in time for dinner, Chet looks up from his meatloaf and says, “This is an exciting day! Mary Morgan figured out how to fuel von Braun’s Jupiter rocket.”

  “Mary Morgan?”

  “You remember—at the picnic? Her husband is the one with the bright red hair. Carol played with their little boy. I don’t think Mary finished her degree, but she’s pretty damned smart. Von Braun’s team was completely baffled so they tossed the job over to North American. Mary’s boss was under some pressure because…”

  “Because Mary’s a woman.”

  “Right. And doesn’t have a degree. Had two years of chem engineering, then went to work at Plum Creek making explosives for the war.”

  June looks keenly at her husband. “Kind of what I did, for GE. Except I finished my degree. Listen, I’ve been thinking that I might take an evening course at Caltech, if you could watch Carol. I guess I don’t have time for a job until she’s older.” Chet’s mother’s dark prediction of Carol’s utter ruin should June go to work rings in her ears. She thinks it’s hogwash, but then again …

  Chet shovels in a forkful of whipped potatoes, nodding. “Mmm. That’s a good idea, except that I have to work late an awful lot. Maybe your sister could watch her?”

  Carol remembers the picnic, the little boy, and the man, who smiled at her.

  * * *

  Wernher von Braun, at a North American Aviation picnic given to celebrate his rare appearance, sees a little girl and boy tossing a ball back and forth under a cottonwood tree. The boy’s redheaded father says something to him, and the boy and girl look in von Braun’s direction. He smiles and waves. That girl may live on Mars someday, he thinks, as the wife of an engineer. She might live in one of the habitats that he himself designed last month. Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary to iron clothes on Mars? The fine-grained future is beginning to come into focus. Maybe they should include Monsanto’s Kitchen of the Future, the housewife’s dream, in the Mars plan. It would definitely be an attraction for women.

  January 1958

  Chet, working for the Jet Propulsion Lab, helps design the Jupiter-C rocket that will launch Explorer-1, America’s first answer to Sputnik. Chet wrangles passes for his family to view the launch.

  They fly to Cape Canaveral, where Chet proudly takes them right up next to the enormous rocket. Mary Sherman Morgan, who had worked at NAA when Chet started there (“But I guess she’s retired to have babies, now.”) developed the fuel for the Jupiter-C rocket after von Braun’s -’s team failed repeatedly. “Mary wanted to name the fuel Bagel, so that we could say that the rocket was fueled by LOX—liquid oxygen—and Bagel, but they have no sense of humor. They’re calling it Hydyne.”

  Chet, June, and Carol are allowed into the launch room, with its fascinating dials, meters, and ongoin
g technical chatter.

  As the ground and room and very air vibrate with the power of ignited Hydyne, the rocket separates from the launchpad, borne on a vast slice of fire that slowly—much too slowly, it seems—rises, then hovers, as if it might subside back onto the launchpad, crumple majestically, and explode on national television. Then, as if waking from a deep sleep the rocket gains speed and altitude and is gone, leaving a trail of white vapor.

  At the Atomic Motel in Cocoa Beach that night, Carol writes in her diary, “My soul vibrated too when the Jupiter-C rose from the launchpad and the scaffold fell away. That is not scientific, but that is how it felt. The rocket was in outer space very quickly. When I said I wanted to go into space, and go to Mars like Dr. von Braun plans, the men who heard me laughed, all except my father. He said, ‘Why not?’ They did not seem to know why, exactly, but they seemed sure that I just couldn’t.”

  Many years later, Carol reads that when von Braun was asked about women in space, he had responded that 110 pounds of “essential recreational equipment” might eventually be included in space flights. Apparently, that too got a big laugh.

  1959

  During Carol’s summer vacation, Chet takes her to the Jet Propulsion Lab at least once a week so she can “see what goes on there.” On the weekends, they start building rockets. June is enthused about the idea and spends her days thinking about how to present the material to Carol, how to show her the chemistry in very small steps. She loves gathering odds and ends that they’ll need to make the rockets. She begins to think about writing a book for children Carol’s age about rockets. The grandparents think they are crazy.

  In general, rockets are simple. Fuel in a tube, a hole through which force can be expelled when the fuel is ignited, a fuse by which to ignite the fuel, a nosecone, and a safe place from which to watch.

  If you have anything specific in mind—speed, distance, lift, a payload, a target—then rockets are really complicated. The engineer’s world is not one of airy speculation. It all comes down to what works: test, refine; test, refine. Endless iterations and interlocking of systems until you have something that works. Every time.