The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  “You’re too old.”

  “I did real good out on the Coast in the Orbit-O-Rama.”

  “A milk run,” Barney said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What was the apogee?”

  “Three hundred and forty miles,” Bell said.

  “Yeah, kid stuff.” Barney nodded his head. “How many moon landings have you had, kid?”

  “Two.”

  Barney shook his head. “You’re too old, Jack. Why don’t you throw away the G-suit?”

  “I just want to get up and out, Barney. I just want one more try. Up and out. I know a way.”

  “A way what?”

  “A way to beat ‘em to Mars.”

  “Sure, Jack. The thing you’ll be riding won’t get you past five hundred...”

  “You haven’t seen me lately, Barney.”

  “I’ve seen you, Jack, I’ve seen you plenty. I seen you one night, Jack, I’d rather forget it.”

  Bell stared at Barney. “All right, I was stewed. Jesus Christ. Haven’t you ever gotten stewed? You were with me. You dressed me. You checked me out. We rode over together in the van. Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “Don’t think I haven’t thought about that night plenty.”

  “Well, why didn’t you stop me?”

  “I didn’t know you was loaded. What the hell were you drinking? Vodka?”

  Bell nodded.

  “I couldn’t smell a thing on you. I thought you was tense, that’s all. How the hell can you tell about a guy? You’re lying on that chair in the van. We took the elevator up the gantry. I strapped you in. You were still lying there.”

  “Well, I walked away from it, didn’t I?”

  “Sure.” Barney nodded. “But the senator riding with you never saw home again.”

  “I know,” Bell said. “I already got punished for it. I just asked you a question. Forget it.”

  “How much they paying you for the blast tomorrow?”

  “Two hundred.”

  “Well, I get more than that for dressing.”

  “That settles it then, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I guess it does.”

  The two men sat silently and alone.

  “What time’s countdown?” Barney asked.

  “Six-thirty.”

  “Get a tank of oxygen, and I’ll meet you. Let me feel your suit.”

  Bell reached for his duffelbag, loosened the strings, and pulled out an arm of his space suit. Barney picked up the empty sleeve and expertly kneaded the rubberlike material in his big sea-scarred hands. “Getting pretty stiff.”

  “She’ll hold,” Bell said eagerly.

  “Yeah,” Barney said. “She’ll hold.” He got up and left two dollars for his whiskey. “Old G-suit. Old space jockey, old missile. It’ll hold. Yeah.” He left the bar.

  * * * *

  Bell arrived in the dressing shack of the circus grounds at five o’clock the next afternoon. A few minutes later, a boy knocked on the door. ‘This your oxygen?” he asked, lowering a tank to the floor.

  “Yes.”

  “Four-forty.”

  Bell paid him, and the boy started to leave.

  “Hey, kid,” Bell said.

  “Yeah?”

  “What kind of bird they got here?”

  “A surplus Redstone.”

  “Recovered?”

  The kid laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Bell asked.

  “Recovered? That thing’s been recovered twenty times.”

  Bell remembered dimly the lectures on metal fatigue at the Cape. ‘Thanks, kid. Will you be watching the blastoff?”

  “Nah. I gotta date. Gung-ho.”

  The boy left, and Bell, sitting down on the wooden bench, unpacked his G-suit and his boots and his helmet. He laid out the tubing nice and straight, and unlaced the boots; then he unpacked the long woolen underwear and stripped naked to put it on. He scratched the tattoo mark where they used to tape on the first sensor. He felt his heart beat below it. Well, nobody cares how my ticker’s working now, he thought, laughing to himself. Up and out, he thought. One more try. He slipped on the woolen underwear, then zipped it shut and sat there on the bench waiting for Barney.

  The door opened, and the circus manager came in. “Bell.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Let me smell your breath.”

  “Oh, can it.”

  “You dry?”

  “Dry as a blotter.”

  “O.K. Now, listen. Straight shot. Blastoff, apogee three hundred miles, retrojet, land in the lake behind us. Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, just remember it. She’s loaded to the hilt. She takes a lot to get her off. But don’t go wasting the spare stuff. No fancy ideas. Get it?”

  “Check.”

  “Who’s dressing you?”

  “Barney.”

  “Good.”

  Barney walked in and told the circus manager to beat it.

  “Touchy little guy, ain’t you?” the manager said.

  “You want to listen to the leaks?” Barney asked. “I ain’t getting nothing out of this.”

  “O.K. O.K. Blastoff at seven-thirty. I want him to shake a few hands at seven-fifteen. Press. Stuff like that.”

  “Ask him,” Barney said. “He ain’t got his helmet on.”

  “O.K.,” Bell said. “O.K.”

  The manager left, and Barney helped Bell get into the G-suit. Carefully, Bell stepped into one leg, then the other. Barney started pulling zippers, and then Bell’s torso slipped into the suit, and finally Barney strapped down the helmet. He attached a hose from the suit to the oxygen tank; then he attached a smaller hose to the suit and taped the other end of it behind his own ear.

  “O.K., Jack. Here goes.” Slowly, Barney turned the knob on the oxygen tank and waited for the suit to inflate. He heard the gas flow out of the tank, but no air reached his ear. “The sucker’s leaking like a sieve,” he said.

  “Give it more juice!” Bell shouted.

  Barney increased the pressure on the valve, and the astronaut’s suit inflated slowly. Barney’s eyes watched the tarnished silver material lose its creases, and he listened to the exhaust behind his ear. He knew there were leaks; he could tell by the lack of pressure behind his ear. He ran his hands over the suit. He knew where to look for the leaks —the armpits, under the neck, at the seat. Sure. They were there. Big leaks. “She’ll never hold,” Barney said.

  “She’ll hold!” Bell shouted. “Just glue them.”

  Barney reached into his pocket and pulled out a tube of liquid rubber and slowly mended each hole, waiting for the rubber to harden, repressurizing the suit, listening, feeling, listening, gluing.

  “I’ve got you tight at ten G’s,” Barney yelled. “You get any cute ideas and you’ll turn into a jigsaw puzzle.”

  “Run ‘er up,” Bell said.

  “What for? You ain’t goin’ nowhere past three hundred miles.”

  “Run ‘er up, Barney.”

  Barney increased the pressure. He watched the G-meter. Eleven Gs, twelve, thirteen—then he heard the leaks again. “See?” he said, pointing to one of them.

  “Glue it,” Bell said.

  Barney glued and reduced the pressure. He held up both hands. “Ten Gs is all she’ll take. And you’ll be lucky at that.”

  The circus manager came to the door. “Ready?”

  “Yeah,” Barney said.

  The circus manager looked at Barney, then at Bell, and led the way as they walked the two hundred yards to the missile, past the snake show, the belly dancers, the penny pitches, a hot-dog stand, a wheel of fortune.

  Heavy ropes held back about a hundred spectators. There was no press. Bell knew there’d be no press. He stepped over the ropes and looked at the missile. It was an old-timer. The markings “U.S. Army” had been crudely painted out, and the words “Kingsley Shows” ran up the length of the missile, the paint faded and scorched.

  Bell felt better when he was knee-de
ep in vapor at the base of the missile. There was no elevator, just a steel ladder. He mounted the ladder, and Barney trailed behind him. There were sixty-five steps, and on the fiftieth Bell stopped and looked at the corroding seams of the missile’s skin. He pointed to them for Barney to see and continued his climb until he reached the hatch of the capsule. There he did not hesitate, but stepped in and lay down on the well-worn leather couch. He spread his arms and waited for Barney to strap him in.

  Barney puffed heavily and sat down on the floor of the capsule. He made a thumbs-down gesture in front of Bell’s helmet, but Bell yelled, “Strap on!”

  “She ain’t safe!” Barney yelled. “Forget it. Well go fishing.”

  “She’ll go,” Bell said.

  “Ditch the ride,” Barney pleaded. “Let’s go fishing.”

  “Count down!” Bell shouted.

  Barney mechanically strapped the shoulder braces and leg braces. He took a last pressure reading of the suit, then started to step out.

  “Jack, for Christ’s sake. Eject. Go up and eject.”

  “Count down, Barney.”

  Barney reached in his pocket and pulled out the tube of liquid rubber. He squeezed the tube and poured a small mound of rubber on the instrument panel in front of Bell. “Just watch the rubber, Jack,” Barney said. “If she starts to bubble—” He pointed down. “Retrojet. Do you hear me?”

  Bell watched Barney and smiled. “Cut bait!” Bell shouted, and Barney left the capsule, sealed it, and descended the long steel ladder. He joined the circus manager in the control wagon.

  “You sure that jockey was sober, Barney?” the manager asked.

  “What do you want for two hundred bucks?”

  “I want my missile back in one piece.”

  “Did you ever shake the President’s hand?” Barney asked.

  The manager looked at him. “He don’t go around shaking carnies’ hands.”

  “No, I guess he don’t.”

  Barney left the control wagon and heard the loudspeaker. “Ladies and gentlemen, at the count of zero you will witness a manned space flight. At the controls—Jack Bell, the second man to reach the moon. Are you ready now? Count down... ten—nine—eight—seven—”

  Barney could barely hear the countdown, and yet, out of habit, he counted to himself as he walked down the highway. He saw, over his shoulder, the lights dim behind him as the circus generators ignited die fuel, and then he saw his shadow clearly ahead of his body as the blastoff lit the countryside. He could not bring himself to look back and see whether his friend lifted off the pad. He walked on, and his right hand played nervously with the tube of rubber cement in his pocket. Then he yanked it out and threw it into the gully at one side of the road.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE BEAT CLUSTER

  by Fritz Leiber

  The latest thing in subnuclear theory (I learned from an article in The Saturday Evening Post) is that the sub-particles have subparticles—and those subparticles have . . . ad infinitum. That is, it may be impossible to reach the ultimate submicroscopic unit of the atom.

  A similar likelihood has been evident for some time in the case of scholarly-literary distinctions. For instance: science fiction is a subform of science fantasy, which is a subform of fantasy, which is a subform of fiction—and still, within s-f, the afficionado subdivides repeatedly.

  The subspecies most widely identified with the field as a whole is, of course, the space story: this is what is commonly considered the “science fiction” that “science has caught up with.” Science fiction (meaning: the space story) is dead— they say—because it has become true-adventure; and they would be right, if science fiction (or even the space story) were limited to speculation about rockets and orbits. But when we consider the people in those now so-nearly-true-adventure orbits ...

  * * * *

  When the eviction order arrived, Fats Jordan was hanging in the center of the Big Glass Balloon, hugging his guitar to his massive black belly above his purple shorts.

  The Big Igloo, as the large living-Globe was more often called, was not really made of glass. It was sealingsilk, a cheap flexible material almost as transparent as fused silica and ten thousand times tougher—quite tough enough to hold a breathable pressure of air in the hard vacuum of space.

  Beyond the spherical wall loomed the other and somewhat smaller balloons of the Beat Cluster, connected to each other and to the Big Igloo by three-foot-diameter cylindrical tunnels of triple-strength tinted sealingsilk. In them floated or swam about an assemblage of persons of both sexes in informal dress and undress and engaged in activities suitable to freefall: sleeping, sunbathing, algae tending (“rocking” spongy cradles of water, fertilizer and the green scummy “guk”), yeast culture (a rather similar business), reading, studying, arguing, stargazing, meditation, space-squash (played inside the globular court of a stripped balloon), dancing, artistic creation in numerous media and the production of sweet sound (few musical instruments except the piano depend in any way on gravity).

  Attached to the Beat Cluster by two somewhat larger sealingsilk tunnels and blocking off a good eighth of the inky, star-speckled sky, was the vast trim aluminum bulk of Research Satellite One, dazzling now in the untempered sunlight.

  It was mostly this sunlight reflected by the parent satellite, however, that now illuminated Fats Jordan and the other “floaters” of the Beat Cluster. A huge sun-quilt was untidily spread (staying approximately where it was put, like all objects in freefall) against most of the inside of the Big Igloo away from the satellite. The sun-quilt was a patchwork of colors and materials on the inward side, but silvered on the outward side, as turned-over edges and corners showed. Similar “Hollywood Blankets” protected the other igloos from the undesirable heating effects of too much sunlight and, of course, blocked off the sun’s disk from view.

  Fats, acting as Big Daddy of the Space Beats, received the eviction order with thoughtful sadness.

  “So we all of us gotta go down there?”

  He jerked a thumb at the Earth, which looked about as big as a basketball held at arms’ length, poised midway between the different silvers of the sun-quilt margin and the satellite. Dirty old Terra was in half phase: wavery blues and browns toward the sun, black away from it except for the tiny nebulous glows of a few big cities.

  “That is correct,” the proctor of the new Resident Civilian Administrator replied through thin lips. The new proctor was a lean man in silvery gray blouse, Bermuda shorts and sockassins. His hair was precision clipped—a quarter-inch blond lawn. He looked almost unbearably neat and hygienic contrasted with the sloppy long-haired floaters around him. He almost added, “and high time, too,” but he remembered that the Administrator had enjoined him to be tactful—”firm, but tactful.” He did not take this suggestion as including his nose, which had been wrinkled ever since he had entered the igloos. It was all he could do not to hold it shut with his fingers. Between the overcrowding and the loathsome Chinese gardening, the Beat Cluster stank.

  And it was dirty. Even the satellite’s precipitrons, working over the air withdrawn from the Beat Cluster via the exhaust tunnel, couldn’t keep pace with the new dust. Here and there a film of dirt on the sealingsilk blurred the star-fields. And once the proctor thought he saw the film crawl.

  Furthermore, at the moment Fats Jordan was upside-down to the proctor, which added to the latter’s sense of the unfitness of things. Really, he thought, these beat types were the curse of space. The sooner they were out of it the better.

  “Man,” Fats said mournfully, “I never thought they were going to enforce those old orders.”

  “The new Administrator has made it his first official act,” the proctor said, smiling leanly. He went on, “The supply rocket was due to make the down-jump empty this morning, but the Administrator is holding it. There is room for fifty of your people. We will expect that first contingent at the boarding tube an hour before nightfall.”

 
; Fats shook his head mournfully and said, “Gonna be a pang, leavin’ space.”

  His remark was taken up and echoed by various individuals spotted about in the Big Igloo.

  “It’s going to be a dark time,” said Knave Grayson, merchant spaceman and sun-worshiper. Red beard and sheath-knife at his belt made him look like a pirate. “Do you realize the nights average twelve hours down there instead of two? And there are days when you never see Sol?”