Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19

by Gardner Dozois

  He lit up and shook his head.

  “Werner von Braun died a very disappointed man,” he said. “Unlike the rocket scientists the Russians got. They got to see their infernal researches put to use all right, with dire consequences for our side — mostly civilian targets, I might add, since you seem so upset about bombing civilians. At least our bomber pilots risk their own lives, unlike the Russian missilemen who deal out death from hundreds of miles away.”

  I could see what he was doing, deflecting our moral dispute into a purely intellectual, historical debate, and I was having none of it.

  “Yeah, I wonder if the Yanks are still sending children up to fly the bombers.”

  He almost choked on his sip of whisky. Through the open door of the living-room came the sound of the iron crashing to the floor and my mother’s shout of annoyance. A moment later she said, sharply: “James! Margaret! Off to bed!” A faint protest, a scurry, a slam. She bustled through, hot in her pinny, and closed the door and sat down. Her flush paled in seconds. My father glanced at her and said nothing.

  They both looked so frightened that I felt scared myself.

  “What’s — what did — ?”

  My mother leaned forward and spoke quietly.

  “Listen, Johnny,” she said. I bristled; she hadn’t called me that for years. She sighed. “John. You’re old enough to do daft things. You could go off and join the Army tomorrow, or you could get married, and there’s not a thing we could do about either. And it’s the same with listening to Communists and repeating their rubbish. It’s a free country. Ruin your prospects if you like. But there’s one thing I ask you. Just one thing. Don’t ever, ever, ever say anything about what you and your father saw in Aird. Don’t even drop a hint. Because if you do, you’ll ruin us all.”

  “You never said this to me before!”

  “Never thought we had to,” Malcolm said gruffly. “You kept your mouth shut when you were a wee boy, as you promised, and good for you, and I thought that maybe over the years you had forgotten all about it.”

  “How could I forget that?” I said.

  He shrugged one shoulder.

  “All right, all right,” I said. “But I don’t understand why it’s such a big secret. I mean, surely the age or is it the size of the —”

  My father leaned across the table and put his hand across my mouth — not as a gesture, as a physical shutting up.

  “Not one word,” he said.

  I leaned back and made wiping movements.

  “OK, OK,” I said. “Leave that aside. What were we talking about before? Oh yes, you were saying it wasn’t the Nazis who invented the flying disc. So who do you think did?”

  “Who knows? The Allies had Einstein and Oppenheimer and Turing and a lot of other very clever chaps, and it’s all classified anyway, so, as I said — who knows?”

  “How do you know it wasn’t the Germans, then?”

  “They weren’t working along these lines.”

  “Oh, come on!” I said. “I’ve seen pictures of the things from during the war.”

  “These were experimental circular airframes with entirely conventional propulsion,” he said. “That doesn’t describe the bombers, now does it? Have you ever heard of Nazi research into anti-gravity?”

  “Have you ever heard of American?”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s all classified, of course. But it was obviously a bigger breakthrough than the atomic bomb. Consider the Manhattan Project and all the theory that led up to it.” He paused to let this sink in. “What I’d like you to do, John, is to use your head as well as keep your mouth shut. By all means rattle off the standard lefty rant about Nazi scientists, but do bear in mind that you’re talking nonsense.”

  I was baffled. My mother was looking worried.

  “But,” I said, “the Americans say it was German scientists who developed it.”

  “They do indeed, John, they do indeed.”

  He looked quite jovial; I think he was a little bit drunk.

  “I think you’ve said enough,” my mother told him.

  “That I have,” he said. “Or too much. And you, too, John. You have homework to do tonight and school to go to tomorrow. Goodnight.”

  The following day I felt rather flat, whether as a result of the unaccustomed glass of whisky or my father’s successful deflection of my moral outrage. After school I walked straight to the public library. My parents never worried if I didn’t come home from school directly, so long as I phoned if I wasn’t going to be home for my tea. The library was a big Georgian-style pile in the town center. I stepped in and breathed the exhilarating smell of dark polished wood and of old and new paper. It took me only a minute to Dewey-decimal my way around the high stacks to the aviation section. Sheer nostalgia made me reach for the first in the row of tiny, well-worn editions of the Observer’s Book of Aircraft. I still had that 1960 edition somewhere at home. Flicking past the familiar silhouettes of Lancaster and Lincoln and MiG, I looked again at the simplest outline of the lot: the circular plan and lenticular profile of the Advanced High Altitude Bomber, Mark 1. The description and specifications were understandably sparse (‘outperforms all other aircraft, Allied and enemy’), the history routine: first successful test flight, from White Sands to Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico, July 1947; first combat use, Operation Dropshot, September 1949; extensive use in all theatres since.

  I replaced the volume and pulled out the fresh 1970 edition, its cover color photo of a Brabant still glossy. The AHAB’s description, specs, and history were identical, and identically uninformative, but the designation had changed. Checking back a couple of volumes, I found that the AHAB-2 had come into service in 1964.

  It didn’t take me much longer to find that the biggest military innovation of the previous year had been the Russian MiG-24, capable of reaching a much higher altitude than its predecessors. I sought traces of the AHAB in more detailed works, one of which stated that none had ever been shot down over enemy territory. All of that got me thinking, but what struck me even more was that after more than twenty years there wasn’t a dicky-bird about the machine’s development, beyond the obviously (now that it was pointed out) misleading references to wartime German experimental aircraft. Nor were there any civilian or wider military applications of the revolutionary physical principles behind its anti-gravity engine.

  I tried looking up anti-gravity in other stacks: physics, military history, biography. Beyond the obvious fact that it was used in the AHAB, there was nothing. No speculation. No theory. No big names. No obscure names. Nothing. Fuck all.

  I walked home with a heavy load of books and a head full of anti-gravity.

  “Outer space,” said Ian Boyd, confidently. Four or five of us were sitting out a free period on our blazers on damp grass on the slope of the hill above the playing field. Below us the fourth-year girls were playing hockey. Now and again a run or swerve would lift the skirt of one of them above her knees. We were here for these moments, and for the more reliable sight of their breasts pushing out their crisp white shirts.

  “What d’ye mean, outer space?” asked Daniel Orr.

  “Where they came frae. The flying discs.”

  “Oh aye. Dan Dare stuff.”

  “Don’t you Dan Dare me, Dan Orr.”

  This variant on a then-popular catch phrase had us all laughing.

  “We know there’s life out there,” Ian persisted. “Astronomers say there’s at least lichens on Mars, they can see the vegetation spreading up frae the equator every year. An it’s no that far fetched there’s life on Venus an a,” underneath the cloud cover.”

  “No evidence of intelligent life, though,” Daniel said.

  “No up there,” said Colin NcNicol. “There is down there.”

  “Aye, there’s life, but is it intelligent?”

  We all laughed and concentrated for a while on the hockey-playing aliens, with their strange bodies and high-pitched cries.

  “It
’s intelligent,” said Ian. “The problem is, how dae we communicate?”

  “No, the first problem is, how do we let them know we’re friendly?”

  “Tell them we come in peace.”

  “And we want to come inside.”

  “If,” I said, mercilessly mimicking our Classics teacher, “you gentlemen are quite ready to return the conversation to serious matters —”

  “This is serious a” right!”

  “Future ae the entire human race!”

  “Patience, gentlemen, patience. Withhold your ejaculations. Your curiosity on these questions will soon be fully satisfied. The annual lecture on ‘Human Reproduction In One Minute’ will be prematurely presented to the boys later this year by Mr. Hughes, in his class on Anatomy, Physiology, and Stealth. The girls will simultaneously and separately receive a lecture on ‘Human Reproduction In Nine Months’ as part of their Domestic Science course. Boys and girls are not allowed to compare notes until after marriage, or pregnancy, whichever comes sooner. Meanwhile, I understand that Professor Boyd here has a point to make.”

  “Oh aye, well, if it wisni the Yanks an” it wisni the Jerries, it must hae come frae somewhere else —”

  “The annual prize for Logic —”

  “— so it must hae been the Martians.”

  “— has just been spectacularly lost at the last moment by Professor Boyd, after a serious objection from Brother William of Ockham —”

  “Hey, nae papes in our school!”

  “— who presents him, instead, with the conical paper cap inscribed in memory of Duns Scotus, for the non sequitur of the year.”

  Near the High School was a park with a couple of reservoirs. Around the lower of them ran a rough path, and its circumambulation was a customary means of working off the stodge of school dinner. A day or two after our frivolous conversation, I was doing this unaccompanied when I heard a hurrying step behind me, and turned to see Dan Orr catch up to me. He was a slim, dark, intense youth who, though a month or two younger than me, had always seemed more mature. The growth of his limbs, unlike mine, had remained proportionate, and their movements under the control of the motor centers of his brain. His father was, I believe, an engineer at the Thompson yard.

  “Hi, Matheson.”

  “Greetings, Orr.”

  “Whit ye were saying the other day.”

  “About the bombers?”

  “Naw.” He waved a hand. “That’s no an issue. We’ll never find out, anyway, and between you an me I couldni give a flying fuck if they were invented by Hitler himsel, or the Mekon of Mekonta fir that matter.”

  “That’s a point of view, I suppose.” We laughed. “So what is the issue?”

  “Come on, Matheson, ye know fine well whit the issue is. It isnae where they came frae. It’s where they go, and whit they dae to folk.”

  “Aye,” I said cautiously.

  “Ye were at that meeting, right?”

  “How would you know if I was?”

  “Yir face is as red as yir hair, ya big teuchter. But not as red as Willie Scott of the AEU, who was on the platform and gave a very full account o the whole thing tae his Party branch.”

  “Good God!” I looked sideways at him, genuinely astonished, “You’re in the CP?”

  “No,” he said. “The Human Front.”

  “Well kept secret,” I said.

  He laughed. “It’s no a secret. I just keep my mouth shut at school for the sake o the old man.”

  “Does he know about it?”

  “Oh, aye, sure. He’s Labor, but kindae a left winger. Anyway, Matheson, what did you think about what Dr. Lynch had tae say?”

  I told him.

  “Well, fine,” he said. “The question is, d’ye want tae dae something about it?”

  “I’ve already put my name down to raise money for Medical Aid.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “But it’s no enough.”

  We negotiated an awkward corner of the path, leaping a crumbled culvert. Orr ended up ahead of me.

  “Dr. Lynch,” he said over his shoulder, “had some other things tae say, about what people can do. And we’re discussing them tonight.” He named a cafe. “Back room, eight sharp. Drop by if ye like. Up tae you.”

  He ran on, leaving me to think.

  Heaven knows what Orr was thinking of, inviting me to that meeting. The only hypothesis that makes sense is that he had shrewdly observed me over the years of our acquaintance, and knew me to be reliable. I need not describe the discussion here. Suffice it to say that it was in response to a document written by Lin Piao that Dr. Lynch had clandestinely distributed during his tour, and which was later published in full as an appendix to various trial records. I was not aware of that at the time, and the actual matters discussed were of a quite elementary, and almost entirely legal, character, quite in keeping with the broad nature of the Front. It was only later that I was introduced to the harsher regimens in Dr. Lynch’s prescription.

  We started small. Over the next few weeks, what time I could spare from studying for my Highers, in evenings, early mornings, and weekends, was taken up with covering the town’s East End and most of Port Glasgow with the slogans and symbols of the Front, as well as some creative interpretations of our own.

  FREE DUBCEK, we wrote on the walls of the Port Glasgow Municipal Cleansing works, in solidarity with a then-famous Czechoslovakian guerrilla leader being held incommunicado by NATO. To the best of my knowledge it is still there, though time has worn the “B” to a “P.”

  And, our greatest coup, on the enormous wall of the Thompson yard, in blazing white letters and tenacious paint that no amount of scrubbing could entirely erase:

  Forget King Billy and the Pope Uncle Joe’s Our Only Hope

  The Saturday after the last of my Higher exams, I happened to be in the car with my father, returning from a predictably disastrous Morton match at Cappielow, when we passed that slogan. He laughed.

  “I must say I agree with the first line,” he said. “The second line, well, it takes me back. Good old Uncle Joe, eh? I must admit I left ‘Joe for King’ on a few shit-house walls myself. Amazing that people still have faith in the old butcher.”

  “But is it really?” I said. I told him of my long-ago (it seemed — seven years, my god!) playground scrap over the memory of Stalin.

  “It’s fair enough that he killed Germans,” Malcolm said. “Or even that he killed Americans. The problem some people, you know, have with Stalin is that he killed Russians, in large numbers.”

  “It was a necessary measure to prevent a counter-revolution,” I said stiffly.

  Malcolm guffawed. “Is that what they’re teaching you these days? Well, well. What would have happened in the SU in the 30s if there had been a counterrevolution?”

  “It would have been an absolute bloody massacre,” I said hotly. “Especially of the Communists, and let’s face it, they were the most energetic and educated people at the time. They’d have been slaughtered.”

  “Damn right,” said Malcolm. “So we’d expect — oh, let me see, most of the Red Army’s generals shot? Entire cohorts of the Central Committee and the Politburo wiped out? Countless thousands of Communists killed, hundreds of thousands sent to concentration camps, along with millions of ordinary citizens? Honest and competent socialist managers and engineers and planners driven from their posts? The economy thrown into chaos by the turncoats and time-servers who replaced them? A brutal labor code imposed on the factory workers? Peasants rack-rented mercilessly? A warm handshake for Hitler? Vast tracts of the country abandoned to the fascist hordes? That the sort of thing you have in mind? That’s what a counter-revolution would have been like, yes?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “That’s exactly what happened, you dunderheid! Every last bit of it! Under Stalin!”

  “How do we know that’s not just propaganda from our side?”

  “Here we go again,” he sighed. “It’s like arguing with a Fre
e Presbyterian minister.”

  “Come on,” I said. “We know that a lot of what we’re told in the press is lies. Look at the rubbish they were writing about how France was pacified, right up until the May Offensive! Look at —”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. He pulled the car to a halt in the comfortable avenue where we lived, up by the golf course. He leaned back in his seat, took off his driving gloves, and lit a cigarette.

  “Look, John, let’s not take this argument inside. It upsets your mother.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “You were saying about the press. Yes, it’s quite true that a lot of lies are told about the war. I’ll readily admit that, however much I still think the war is just. It was the same in the war with Hitler. Only to be expected. Censorship, misguided patriotism, wishful thinking — truth is the first casualty, and all that. So tell me this — who, in this country, has done the most to expose these lies?”

  “Russell, I guess,” I said. After that I could only think of exiles and refugees from the ravaged Continent. “And there’s Sartre, and Camus, and Deutscher —”

  “That’s the man,” he said. “Deutscher. Staunch Marxist. Former Communist. Respected alike by the Daily Worker and the Daily Telegraph. Man of the Left, man of integrity, right?”

  “Yes,” I said, suspecting that he was setting me up for another fall. He was. When we went inside he handed me a worn volume from his study’s bowed bookshelves.

  Deutscher’s Stalin, published in 1948, was a complete eye-opener to me. I had never before encountered criticism of Stalin or his regime from the Left, nor so measured a judgment and matchless a style. It seemed to come from a vanished world, the world before Dropshot, before the Fall.

  “Fuck that,” said Dan Orr. “Deutscher’s a Trotskyite, for all that he’s all right on the war. And Trotskyites are scum. I don’t give a fuck how many o them Stalin killed. He didnae kill enough. There were still some alive tae be ministers in the Petrograd puppet government, alang wi all the Nazis and Ukrainian nationalists and NTS trash that the Yanks scraped out o the camps where they belonged.”