by Ben Bova
TALES
OF THE
GRAND
TOUR
TOR BOOKS BY BEN BOVA
As on a Darkling Plain
The Astral Mirror
Battle Station
The Best of the Nebulas (editor)
Challenges
Colony
Cyberbooks
Escape Plus
Gremlins Go Home (with Gordon R. Dickson)
Jupiter
The Kinsman Saga
The Multiple Man
Orion
Orion Among the Stars
Orion and the Conqueror
Orion in the Dying Time
Out of the Sun
Peacekeepers
The Precipice
Privateers
Prometheans
The Rock Rats
Saturn
Star Peace: Assured Survival
The Starcrossed
Tales of the Grand Tour
Test of Fire
To Fear the Light (with A. J. Austin)
To Save the Sun (with A. J. Austin)
The Trikon Deception (with Bill Pogue)
Triumph
Vengeance of Orion
Venus
Voyagers
Voyagers II: The Alien Within
Voyagers III: Star Brothers
The Winds of Altair
TALES
OF THE
GRAND
TOUR
BEN BOVA
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
TALES OF THE GRAND TOUR
Copyright © 2004 by Ben Bova
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 0-765-30722-7
First Edition: January 2004
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my colleagues of the Arizona Astronomy Board, with special thanks to Peter Wehinger
CONTENTS
Introduction
Sam and the Flying Dutchman
Monster Slayer
Fifteen Miles
Muzhestvo
Red Sky at Morning
Greenhouse Chill
High Jump
Death on Venus
The Man Who Hated Gravity
Appointment in Sinai
Sepulcher
Leviathan
Afterword: The Roads Ahead
INTRODUCTION
The land was ours before we were the land’s . . .
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
—Robert Frost
“The Gift Outright”
For the past fifteen years I have been writing a series of novels about humankind’s expansion through the solar system, a saga about the people who move out into space: who they are, why they leave Earth, their loves and fears and hopes and rivalries. Readers have dubbed the series the Grand Tour.
It began in 1988, when I started living on Mars.
Well, not exactly Mars. My wife and I moved to northern New Mexico because the dry, mountainous country there reminded me of the pictures of the Martian landscape sent back by the Viking spacecraft that had landed on the surface of the red planet a dozen years earlier.
I wanted to write a novel about Mars, a completely realistic novel about the first human explorers of that strange yet familiar world. For weeks on end I soaked up the clear dry atmosphere, the sun-baked desert, the feel of the region. I learned a bit about the Navaho, and that peculiar blend of Hispanic, Navaho, and Anglo traditions that makes up the Southwestern culture.
Yet, try as I might, I could not get the novel properly started. Every morning I sat at my keyboard and worked at it. The pages that accumulated were dull, lifeless. Only after many weeks of struggle did I realize that the protagonist of my novel, Jamie Waterman, had to be part Navaho. I was trying to make him an ordinary “white bread” geologist. He isn’t. Jamie’s father was Navaho, his mother a descendant of the Mayflower pilgrims. The two planets, Earth and Mars, the blue world and the red one, represent the two conflicting sides of Jamie’s soul. Only when I finally understood this could I begin to write the novel in earnest.
What I didn’t realize, even then, was that I had started on a journey that is still unfinished, even after more than fifteen years, a journey that has taken me to Mars twice (so far), that would make me partake in the founding of the first permanent human settlement off-Earth (Moonbase, later to become the nation of Selene), that would send me to Venus, to Jupiter, Saturn, and to the Asteroid Belt several times.
This interrelated series of novels is now known as the Grand Tour. And that’s what they are: a grand tour of the solar system, as it is, and as it will be.
In each of the Grand Tour novels, the background setting is as accurate and up-to-date as today’s Internet news. Thanks to modern communications and to many good and patient friends both within NASA and outside the space agency, the physical settings of my novels are based solidly on what is known about the other worlds in our solar system.
But these are works of fiction, so they go beyond the scientists’ current knowledge to explore what humans will find when they venture back to the Moon and outward to Mars, Venus, and beyond. And what they will find is not restricted to scientific facts and figures. For they will learn that they bring their human passions along with them, no matter how far they travel: love and fear, greed and heroism, hatred and heart-stopping adventure accompany us wherever we dare to go, because they are inside us, part of the human condition.
The Grand Tour novels are actually an extensive, multihued, vibrant canvas on which I am painting the vast saga of the human race’s expansion across the breadth of the solar system. These are the stories of who goes to these strange and alien new worlds, and why; who remains back on Earth, and why; how human consciousness changes as we expand our habitat beyond the confines of the world that gave us birth.
That question of why is what novels are all about. What would motivate people to journey hundreds of millions of miles to a strange and inhospitable world, where quick death awaits the slightest error in judgment or competence?
In my Grand Tour novels, this question of motivation takes on two different but complimentary facets:
What attracts certain men and women to explore the unknown, to seek their fortunes and risk their lives in strange and alien places? Is it the excitement? The thrill of being the first, of literally going where no one has gone before? Could it be the lure of fame, or wealth, or just plain egotism?
On the other hand, what drives explorers and entrepreneurs away from the safe and comfortable world in which they were born and nurtured? What forces them to leave the normal life and head off for parts unknown?
Attraction and repulsion. Pull and push. It takes both to make an explorer, a risk-taking entrepreneur, a believable character in a realistic novel. In my Grand Tour novels we journey to distant worlds, but we keep one eye on Earth, as well, because what happens on Earth determines to a major extent how far our space-farers are willing to go, how far they
are driven to go.
It might seem strange to think of a novel about worlds as unknown as Jupiter or Venus as being realistic, but I have tried my best to show these worlds as accurately as possible. I want my characters to face these alien planets as they really are, no punches pulled, no tricks of fantasy to ease their problems. The worlds in my novels are based on what planetary astronomers have learned about them. I’ve invented plenty, because we really don’t know anywhere near enough to write a good novel about those distant worlds. But everything I’ve invented is consistent with what is known.
These stories are called science fiction, but I prefer to think of them as historical fiction—history that has not yet happened. But it surely will.
The human race will expand through the solar system. It is as inevitable as the European expansion into the New World, starting five hundred years ago. And it will happen for much the same reason.
There are about six billion people on Earth today, with a quarter-million more born every day. The tensions, the wars, the terrorism, the ecological degradation that we see today are all rooted in the fact that the human race is growing faster than our ability to feed, house, clothe, and educate its growing numbers.
When will the breaking point come? At seven billion? Ten? Has it already come, and we simply haven’t recognized its knell?
If population continues to grow, wars and terrorism will continue and even worsen. More frightening, perhaps, is the damage that our growing numbers are doing to the global environment. Tropical forests are being stripped away. Fisheries that once fed whole continents are now depleted. Global warming is threatening climate disasters that could flood coastal cities and alter climate everywhere in the world.
How can we stop global population growth? By government restrictions? By force? By asking the wealthy nations to reduce their consumption so that their resources can be shared with the poor?
The Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson estimated that in order to bring the standard of living for everyone in the world up to the level of the average American’s, we would need the natural resources of four planet Earths. He regarded that as manifestly impossible, and urged that the wealthy cut back and share their riches with the poor. Yet even if this could be accomplished it would inevitably make everyone equally poor.
The time-proven way to slow population growth is to make people rich. Wealthy people do not have as many children as poor people. But where could we find the resources to make everyone wealthy? How can we create such an abundance to equal four times planet Earth’s natural resources?
It’s out there.
We have seen, photographed, even measured thousands of times the resources of planet Earth. Enormous wealths of energy and natural resources lie waiting for us in space. We have only to go out there and begin developing them.
That is what the Grand Tour novels are all about: expanding the human race’s habitat throughout the solar system, developing those resources, and changing human society.
This will happen. It has already begun, although in a very small way. As the decades of this new century unfold, though, the human race will reach into space to tap the incredibly rich resources of energy and raw materials that wait for us on those distant, fascinating, alien worlds: all the true wealth we need to build a flourishing, fair, and free interplanetary society.
Thus will we continue the old, old struggle against humankind’s ancient and remorseless enemies: hunger, poverty, ignorance, and death. We will continue this struggle for one brutally simple reason: survival.
The Grand Tour novels portray this struggle and the coming era of humankind’s expansion through the solar system.
The shorter tales that are in this book are part of the Grand Tour, as well. Some of these stories have been excerpted from the novels. Others were written independently of the novels. All of them are collected in this one volume for the first time.
Here you will visit Mars, Venus, the Moon, and other worlds—including Earth. Here you will meet the men and women who are driven to go farther, to dream larger dreams, driven to push the frontier of human daring and human achievement outward, toward the stars.
Welcome to these Tales of the Grand Tour.
Ben Bova
Naples, Florida
December 2002
THE GRAND TOUR NOVELS
Mars, Bantam Books, 1992
Empire Builders, Tor Books, 1993
Moonrise, Avon Books, 1996
Moonwar, Avon Books, 1998
Return to Mars, Avon Books, 1999
Venus, Tor Books, 2000
Jupiter, Tor Books, 2001
The Precipice:
Book I of the Asteroid Wars, Tor Books, 2001
The Rock Rats:
Book II of the Asteroid Wars, Tor Books, 2002
Saturn, Tor Books, 2003
TALES
OF THE
GRAND
TOUR
Sam Gunn has appeared in many of my shorter works of fiction. 1 Sam is a “little guy,” a sawed-off, fast-talking rogue, a rascal, a womanizing scoundrel who just happens to have a heart as big as the solar system. He’s charming, loyal to his friends, and the first true entrepreneur in space. He is constantly making fortunes—and losing them—as he battles the “big guys” of the government and the multinational corporations.
Sam was crazy enough to go out to the Asteroid Belt before anyone else did, an escapade that cost him two years of grief and left him broke. But he showed that it was possible to begin developing the vast resources of the Belt. Others followed, in time, which eventually led to the Asteroid Wars.
In this story, Sam returns to the Belt for reasons other than business. In fact, Sam has several reasons for leaving his bride-to-be waiting for him on Earth while he tries to find the solar system’s most dangerous man—all in the service of the solar system’s most beautiful woman.
1. Sam’s tales have been collected in two books, Sam Gunn, Unlimited (Bantam 1993) and Sam Gunn Forever (Avon 1998).
SAM AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN
Iushered her into Sam’s office and helped her out of the bulky dark coat she was wearing. Once she let the hood fall back I damned near dropped the coat. I recognized her. Who could forget her? She was exquisite, so stunningly beautiful that even irrepressible Sam Gunn was struck speechless. More beautiful than any woman I had ever seen.
But haunted.
It was more than her big, soulful eyes. More than the almost frightened way she had of glancing all around as she entered Sam’s office, as if expecting someone to leap out of hiding at her. She looked tragic, lovely and doomed and tragic.
“Mr. Gunn, I need your help,” she said to Sam. Those were the first words she spoke, even before she took the chair that I was holding for her. Her voice was like the sigh of a breeze in a midnight forest.
Sam was standing behind his desk, on the hidden little platform back there that makes him look taller than his real 165 centimeters. As I said, even Sam was speechless. Leather-tongued, clatter-mouthed Sam Gunn simply stood and stared at her in stupified awe.
Then he found his voice. “Anything,” he said, in a choked whisper. “I’d do anything for you.”
Despite the fact that Sam was getting married in just three weeks’ time, it was obvious that he’d tumbled head over heels for Amanda Cunningham the minute he saw her. Instantly. Sam Gunn was always falling in love, even more often than he made fortunes of money and lost them again. But this time it looked as if he’d really been struck by the thunderbolt.
If she weren’t so beautiful, so troubled, seeing the two of them together would have been almost ludicrous. Amanda Cunningham looked like a Greek goddess, except that her shoulder-length hair was radiant golden blond. She wore a modest knee-length sheath of delicate pink that couldn’t hide the curves of her ample body. And those eyes! They were bright china blue, but deep, terribly troubled, unbearably sad.
And there was Sam: stubby as a worn old pencil, with a bristle of red hair and his
gap-toothed mouth hanging open. Sam had the kind of electricity in him that made it almost impossible for him to stand still for more than thirty seconds at a time. Yet he stood gaping at Amanda Cunningham, as tongue-tied as a teenager on his first date.
And me. Compared to Sam I’m a rugged outdoorsy type of guy. Of course, I wear lifts in my boots and a tummy tingler that helps keep my gut flat. Women have told me that my face is kind of cute in a cherubic sort of way, and I believe them—until I look in the mirror and see the pouchy eyes and the trim black beard that covers my receding chin. What did it matter? Amanda Cunningham didn’t even glance at me; her attention was focused completely on Sam.
It was really comical. Yet I wasn’t laughing.
Sam just stared at her, transfixed. Bewitched. I was still holding one of the leather-covered chairs for her. She sat down without looking at it, as if she were accustomed to there being a chair wherever she chose to sit.
“You must understand, Mr. Gunn,” she said softly. “What I ask is very dangerous. . . .”
Still standing in front of his high-backed swivel chair, his eyes never leaving hers, Sam waved one hand as if to scoff at the thought of danger.
“It involves flying out to the Belt,” she continued.
“Anywhere,” Sam said. “For you.”
“To find my husband.”
That broke the spell. Definitely.
Sam’s company was S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited. He was involved in a lot of different operations, including hauling freight between the Earth and Moon, and transporting equipment out to the Asteroid Belt. He was also dickering to build a gambling casino and hotel on the Moon, but that’s another story.
“To find your husband?” Sam asked her, his face sagging with disappointment.
“My ex-husband,” said Amanda Cunningham. “We were divorced several years ago.”
“Oh.” Sam brightened.
“My current husband is Martin Humphries,” she went on, her voice sinking lower.