Faye’s frown had softened considerably. “And I suppose you want to have a camera there so you can show their conversation on television?”
Wallace shook her head: “I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t occurred to us. But we’re not asking for that. Under the circumstances, we’re just passing on the message.”
Faye looked at Alexander. “It’s up to you, son. I won’t push you either way.”
Alexander’s response was immediate: “Can we go right after breakfast?”
Cue me.
Space Boy Visits Invalid!
Promises Cure for All Human Illness
Alexander later said that walking into my room was like returning to his own. The obsessions on display were the same: identical posters of Buzz Aldrin vying for attention among mockups of the Saturn V, the lunar module, skylab and the space shuttle. The only real difference was that there was more of it: in part because my family had a lot more money than Alexander’s, in part because I was eight years older and had been nursing my obsession for that much longer, in part because I didn’t have any of the other distractions of childhood. I had about a thousand more books just in this room alone, and a much faster computer than the secondhand model Faye had been able to afford. And I also had one puzzling decoration, hanging in what appeared to be a place of honor, that Alexander would have to ask me about: a poster of my personal hero, an emaciated, grimacing, but oddly buoyant man in a wheelchair. (He hadn’t heard of Stephen Hawking yet.)
Of course, he also had me to look at.
Like Alexander, I can be a pretty startling sight. Because my condition manifested itself at a very young age, my arms and legs never really had a chance to develop: they’re flabby, childish things too small for the torso that connects them. Because of these proportions, I can’t use a normal wheelchair; instead, I lie strapped in a recliner that holds me much like an egg held in the palm of a hand. The brace on my neck keeps my head from lolling to the side, and my face, framed by long greasy hair and marked by what is usually two or three days of stubble, makes me look like a degenerate infant. All in all, I look like a cartoon drawn by somebody with no knowledge of anatomy. Most people seeing me for the first time avert their eyes at once; I can judge their characters by how quickly they manage to steel themselves for a second try.
Alexander, who was used to that look himself, didn’t avert his eyes at all. “Hi,” he said.
My speech synthesizer responded, “Hello. Come…in. Sit down…on the bed.”
He obliged. On his way over he didn’t go out of his way to maintain eye contact. But he wasn’t fighting it either; I think he was just fascinated by all my stuff. I can usually tell if I’m going to have anything in common with somebody by how frequently they glance at my bookcase. Some folks only pretend to look because they find it preferable to looking at me. But I can tell who’s faking and who’s genuinely interested. Alexander clearly saw a dozen books he wanted in the time he took just crossing the room. Then he lowered the railing on the bed, sat down, and smiled at me.
“Thanks…for coming,” I said.
That’s the last sentence I’ll write that way. It’s there only because it’s the way I sound. The synthesizers make my voice comprehensible, but it still takes most of my lung capacity just to get out a few short syllables, so my sentences are always filled with pauses. These days, when my words are often reported for the printed page, some reporters waste entire manuscripts putting ten sets of ellipses in each sentence. It’s a cute trick, but it tends to get on the nerves awfully fast. And it’s unnecessary, too. My friends and family mentally edit out the pauses. If you absolutely need my cadences, add them yourself with a ballpoint.
Alexander said, “Well, I don’t get to meet a lot of other people interested in space. Most people think the space stuff is just me being weird because of the way I look. Even my Mom, I think.”
“And your Dad?”
Alexander answered a bit too quickly. “I have no Dad.”
I said, “Too bad. I have a Mom and a Dad, and they’re pretty good people, most of the time. But I didn’t call you here to talk about them. I wanted to ask. Have you ever read Heinlein?”
“Not yet,” Alexander said. “I’ve seen the books around, though. The last thing I read was The Hobbit, and…”
I must have grimaced more than usual. “Elf Crap! God save me from Elf Crap! I’m talking about the real stuff! Science Fiction, not Elf Crap!”
Alexander was a little startled by my vehemence. “Uh…you mean like Asimov?”
“Or Niven or Barnes or Brunner. Any of those guys. But I’m specifically thinking of Heinlein. A story he wrote called ‘Waldo.’ All about somebody like me, with a body barely strong enough to pick up a pencil on Earth, who coped by living on a satellite in free fall. With no gravity holding him down, he could move around and do what he wanted and be as independent as he wanted to be. Of course, he also needed to be obscenely rich just to afford it. My parents are rich, Space Boy. But I don’t think they’ll ever be that rich. And I’m not exactly astronaut material, so I don’t think anybody’s ever going to send me on a mission. So that’s one dream that won’t ever come true. Not for me.” I hesitated, just long enough for Alexander to know it was deliberate, and not a pause created by the speech program. “But you. Were you really serious about wanting to be an astronaut?”
Alexander blinked. It was the first time anybody had ever asked him that without adult condescension, giving it the weight of a real question. He actually had to think about it. But once he did, the resolve just clicked right into place, like one crucial piece of a puzzle he’d been assembling all his life. I could hear the surprise in his own voice as he said it: “Yeah. I was.”
“You picked a hard career,” I said. “There are no astronauts anymore. Even the Israelis pulled back.”
“So people keep telling me.”
“And so they tell me, too. What they fail to realize is that we’ve been going into space prematurely. We went before we had all the tools. We went when we knew so little that we had to spend billions just to get there and back. We went with a technology so primitive that only a miracle prevented us from having more Challenger explosions. But we went. And the more time passes, the more inevitable the second try. Because everything else we’re developing in the meantime, without even trying—more and more advanced computers, more and more advanced insulation materials, stronger plastics, more and more efficient fuel delivery systems—is going to make it cheaper and easier to go again. Before long, space will belong to corporations instead of governments.” I lifted a finger for emphasis, which is about as much as I can manage. “I’ve been keeping track of those developments, Space Boy. Very close track. And my most conservative guess is that this country will be returning to space in a big way within at most the next fifteen years…which just happens to be my life expectancy.”
Alexander blinked several times in rapid succession, as our shared dream took shape in the air between us. “Wow.”
“So I ask again. Do you really want to go? Are you really willing to work hard and do whatever’s necessary?”
He was ten years old, but he grew up in that moment. “Yeah. Whatever it takes.”
This time I smiled widely before I spoke.
“You just hired a manager. Do what I say and we’ll get you there.”
Space Boy Shocker:
“I’m Gay,” He Announces At Breakfast
We didn’t see much of each other for the first few years after that. Alexander still had grade school to finish, and I couldn’t travel without compelling reason. We racked up some big phone bills, though, making plans, keeping our mutual enthusiasm high, setting up supplemental courses of study, setting up an exercise regimen designed to put him in the top ten percentile by the time he reached adulthood, and—too often, for me—averting the crises that may seem like life or death at the time but are just, for most people, part of the cost of growing up. There were times, in those years, that I cursed Ale
xander’s absent father, not out of sympathy for my friend, but self-pity for the amount of time I had to spend giving the heart-to-hearts that a Dad would have.
Once, when Alexander blew two math tests in a row, he called me up all in a sweat to say that he was washed up. He couldn’t be an astronaut, let alone read all the tougher stuff I kept sending him, if he couldn’t even understand algebra!
I pointed out that Einstein had failed math in school, and added, “How many of the other kids in your class blew these tests?”
“About half of them. But they don’t study. I studied! I studied hard!”
“That’s your problem,” I told him. “You psyched yourself out. You were so afraid of blowing it, you left yourself no other option.”
“Huh?” he asked.
“Elementary psychology, Space Boy. The self-fulfilling prophecy. You were so worried about learning it, you couldn’t concentrate on what you were studying. So relax already. Go fishing or hiking or whatever you do out there in boonie-land. Take it a little at a time, and you’ll eventually pick it up.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You already know everything.”
There is nothing more sobering than the discovery that you’ve influenced an impressionable young mind into worshipping you. I looked at the clutter of books and papers on my desk, which I couldn’t even read unless I could first get somebody to clamp them to the book-holder attached to my chair, and at the unfinished document on my word processor, which had been mired on page fifteen since early the previous morning. “Yeah, right,” I said, damning the voice-synthesizer for its inability to convey sarcasm. “I’m just writing my doctoral thesis to prove how brilliant I am.”
He laughed, but it was an uneasy laugh that trailed off fairly quickly. “What if I flunk the next test, too?”
“Then it’ll be time to find yourself a girlfriend,” I told him. “A smart girlfriend who can teach you math while you’re distracted.”
“Yuck!” he said, and I smiled. Right on target. Now he had something else to worry about—something not related to becoming an astronaut. The stick to go with his carrot. That particular stick would only work for another year or two, of course—at which point I was sure another one would come into play—but that was the nature of our relationship. Being motivated was his job. Keeping him motivated was mine.
The threat of having to study with a girl pushed him through basic algebra, and his renewed self-confidence pushed him right back into the straight-A track he’d been on since he started school. I sent him off a fresh batch of assigned reading and went back to my thesis (a feasibility study of nuclear-powered ion rockets for a manned mission to Mars).
My advice to go fishing had unexpected consequences. He asked his Uncle George to take him, and caught half a dozen brook trout on his first time out. In the process he discovered that he liked the outdoors. He became quite the fly-fisherman, in the most remote locations he could find, enjoying it in large part because it was one place he was able to pretend, at least for a little while, that there was no difference between him and the rest of humanity. It didn’t stop him joking on the phone that his big head scared the trout the moment they saw him. I told him it proved fish had more intelligence than we gave them credit for. He threatened to use me as bait. When he sent me a picture of himself wearing a floppy hat Faye had made for him, one of those vests with a bizillion pockets on it, and hip waders, I told him he looked like a redneck.
“What’s a redneck?” he asked.
He’d lived in Wyoming for a decade and didn’t know the term. People had apparently been too busy calling him names. “A redneck is the exact opposite of a space alien,” I told him.
It made his day.
Seventh grade wasn’t much trouble for him. He had to ride a bus twenty miles into Sheridan to attend junior high, but most of the kids there already knew him, or at least knew about him, so he didn’t have to face more than the usual amount of idiocy. He studied on the bus, went fishing on weekends, continued to work on improving his time for the mile, and generally enjoyed himself.
Then he really did get a girlfriend. Actually, Sally Watkins, the same girlfriend he’d had since first grade…but it meant something different now.
You’d have thought he’d invented teenage angst. I got phone calls at all hours of the night. He was on Mountain time and I was on Eastern, so I had two time zones working against me, but he didn’t care. He called up to report every new development, from hand-holding all the way through his first kiss to their first argument after that.
“Look,” I told him one Sunday at about five A.M. “She’s a girl. You’re not supposed to understand her.”
“That’s comforting.”
He whined about how she was all smiles and friendly when they were alone, but hardly spoke to him at school.
“Be glad it’s not the other way around,” I told him. “Now go to bed.”
“That’s the problem. She wants to go to bed with me.”
He sounded so forlorn I had to laugh. “This is a problem? You’re what, fifteen? And bouncy little Sally wants to jump your bones? No offense, but the way you look you’re probably not going to get a whole lot of other offers.” (I was wildly wrong about that, but then I had no real experience myself and had no idea how much certain women would be attracted to novelty—let alone to the increasingly remarkable person behind the strange looks.) “I’d go for it,” I told him.
“You know what’ll happen if anybody finds out,” he said.
“What? Her daddy’ll come after you with a shotgun?”
“I wish. No, half a dozen tabloids will come after me with reporters. I can see it now: ‘Alien Monster Wants Our Women!’ or ‘Kill it Before it Multiplies!’ They’ll mess up my life again, and probably hers too.”
It was the first time I’d heard him complain about the press. It was the first time he’d even indicated they bothered him. I took it as a sign he was growing up. “Hmm. So you’ll have to be careful. Shouldn’t be that difficult out there. There’s all those woods, right?”
“It’s October,” he reminded me. “Hunting season.”
He may not have been an alien, but he definitely lived in an alien land. The image of Alexander stuffed and mounted on somebody’s wall flitted through my head—not entirely unpleasantly, given what he was putting me through. I sighed and said, “Then borrow your mother’s car and use the back seat. Or sneak her into your bedroom. I don’t know; do I look like the sort of guy who knows this kind of stuff?”
There must have been an edge to my voice. After all, the sort of gymnastics he and his sweetie wanted to do would probably have killed me. Not that I stood much of a chance of ever finding out…
He must have suddenly remembered that he was not the only person in this conversation with problems. “Sorry, Colin,” he said. “I shouldn’t have bothered you. Not with this. I’m just all confused about it and don’t know what to do.” He paused, then asked, “You really think it’s okay if I—?”
“Yes, yes, go get your ashes hauled, Space Boy!” I said. “I don’t care what else you are; you’re a teenager. Now that Sally’s brought it up, so to speak, your not going to be able to rest until you’ve learned what it’s all about. So do it already, or we can both kiss your ability to concentrate goodbye.”
“All right, all right,” he said. “Sorry I asked.”
“Stop apologizing!”
“Uh…okay. Sor…I mean, thanks.”
He was about to hang up when one last thought intruded. “Hey. Remember to wear a condom.”
“Uhh…that’s a problem.” He turned all sheepish: “I’m not sure I could walk into the store and ask for a pack without causing a riot. Forget the tabloids. The news would get out, and the parents of every teenage girl within fifty miles of here would lock their daughters in their rooms.”
He had a point. “Sit tight, then,” I said. “Don’t do anything stupid until you hear from me again.”
And so the next morn
ing I took one of my infrequent forays out of my room, down the street in my electric scooter to the corner market, to buy a box of condoms. I bought the giant economy sized box, and grinned my silly spastic grin when the cashier gave me a “what could you possibly want these for?” look. Let her wonder.
Face on Mars Speaks!
It’s Crying for Help, Experts Say
Alex and Sally were apparently discreet. I didn’t see anything but the usual drivel in the tabloids, and I didn’t get any more frantic calls in the night for a while. Of course when they broke up a few months later I heard all about that, but it wasn’t as big a crisis as it might have been; Alex was beginning to discover that looking like an alien was a distinct advantage in the world of curious women. By the time he entered high school and started playing the “been there, done that” sophisticate, he was ten times more insufferable than he’d ever been as an anguished virgin. I hated him, and let him know it frequently.
Of course, I would have hated him even more if he hadn’t made valedictorian, let alone gotten the full scholarship I helped him apply for.
His speech was about Taking Back The Moon. He’d read it to me a week earlier. It was stirring, emotional, eloquent, and absolutely designed to get front-page attention from the tabloids. The local papers said it was brilliant. The video chip he sent me confirmed that it was. The tabloids ignored it entirely—I like to say because it was intelligent, but more likely because that happened to be the week a fifth-generation member of a certain well-known political family got caught sharing a Memphis hotel room with half a dozen bed-partners of assorted sexes and species. You know the one…and I’m happy to report that Alexander, being of the proper age, made as many foul jokes about the incident as everybody else did. It may not have been nice, but it was human.
My doctoral thesis was published, and I even made sure copies of it got to the right people, but only one guy had ever returned my letters. He was very enthusiastic, and I felt a brief thrill at the thought that NASA might actually do something with it, until he told me that he had rescued it out of the wastebasket in the administrator’s office. He was a janitor. He had wanted to be an astronaut, too, but that was the closest he had come.
The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Science Fiction Stories Page 18