by Ben Bova
“Sam! Do you read me? We can see your craft!” It was Judge Myers. I was so overjoyed that I would have married her myself.
Her ship was close enough so that our suit radios could pick up her transmission.
“We’ll be there in less than an hour, Sam,” she said.
“Great!” he called back. “But hold your nose when we start peeling out of these suits.”
Judge Myers laughed and she and Sam chatted away like a pair of teenagers. But then Sam looked up at me and winked.
“Jill, I’m sorry this has messed up the wedding,” he said, making his voice husky, sad. “I know you were looking forward to—”
“You haven’t messed up a thing, Sam,” she replied brightly. “After we’ve picked you up—and cleaned you up—we’re going back to ‘The Rememberer’ and have the ceremony as planned.”
Sam’s forehead wrinkled. “But haven’t your guests gone back home? What about the boys’ choir? And the caterers?”
She laughed. “The guests are all still here. As for the entertainment and the caterers, so I’ll have to pay them for a few extra days. Hang the expense, Sam. This is our wedding we’re talking about! Money is no object.”
Sam groaned.
In a matter of hours we were aboard Judge Myers’s ship, Parthia, showered, shaved, clothed, and fed, heading to ‘The Rememberer’ and Sam’s wedding. Sam was like Jekyll and Hyde: While he and I were alone together he was morose and mumbling, like a guy about to face a firing squad in the morning. When Judge Myers joined us for dinner, though, Sam was chipper and charming, telling jokes and spinning tall tales about old exploits. It was quite a performance; if Sam ever goes into acting he’ll win awards, I’m sure.
After dinner Sam and Judge Myers strolled off together to her quarters. I went back to the compartment they had given me, locked the door, and took out the chip.
It was easier this time, since I remembered the keys to the encryption. In less than an hour I had Amanda’s hauntingly beautiful face on the display of my compartment’s computer. I wormed a plug into my ear, taking no chances that somebody might eavesdrop on me.
The video was focused tightly on her face. For I don’t know how long I just gazed at her, hardly breathing. Then I shook myself out of the trance and touched the key that would run her message.
“Lars,” she said softly, almost whispering, as if she were afraid somebody would overhear her, “I’m going to have a baby.”
Holy mother in heaven! It’s a good thing we didn’t deliver this message to Fuchs. He would’ve probably cut us into little pieces and roasted them on a spit.
Amanda Cunningham Humphries went on, “Martin wants another son, he already has a five-year-old boy by a previous wife.”
She hesitated, looked over her shoulder. Then, in an even lower voice, “I want you to know, Lars, that it will be your son that I bear, not his. I’ve had myself implanted with one of the embryos we froze at Selene, back before all these troubles started.”
I felt my jaw drop down to my knees.
“I love you, Lars,” Amanda said. “I’ve always loved you. I married Martin because he promised he’d stop trying to kill you if I did. I’ll have a son, and Martin will think it’s his, but it will be your son, Lars. Yours and mine. I want you to know that, dearest. Your son.”
Humphries would pay a billion for that, I figured.
And he’d have the baby Amanda was carrying aborted. Maybe he’d kill her, too.
“So what are you going to do about it, Gar?”
I whirled around in my chair. Sam was standing in the doorway.
“I thought I locked—”
“You did. I unlocked it.” He stepped into my compartment and carefully slid the door shut again. “So, Gar, what are you going to do?”
I popped the chip out of the computer and handed it to Sam.
He refused to take it. “I read her message the first night on our way to the Belt,” Sam said, sitting on the edge of my bed. “I figured you’d try to get it off me, one way or another.”
“So you gave it to me.”
Sam nodded gravely. “So now you know what her message is. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”
I offered him the chip again. “Take it, Sam. I don’t want it.”
“It’s worth a lot of money, Gar.”
“I don’t want it!” I repeated, a little stronger.
Sam reached out and took the chip from me. Then, “But you know what she’s doing. You could tell Humphries about it. He’d pay a lot to know.”
I started to reply, but to my surprise I found that I had to swallow hard before I could get any words out. “I couldn’t do that to her,” I said.
Sam looked squarely into my eyes. “You certain of that?”
I almost laughed. “What’s a few hundred million bucks? I don’t need that kind of money.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes, dammit, I’m certain!” I snapped. It wasn’t easy tossing away all that money, and Sam was starting to irritate me.
“Okay,” he said, breaking into that lopsided smile of his. “I believe you.”
Sam got to his feet, his right fist closed around the chip.
“What will you do with it?” I asked.
“Pop it out an airlock. A few days in hard UV should degrade it so badly that even if somebody found it in all this emptiness they’d never be able to read it.”
I got up from my desk chair. “I’ll go with you,” I said.
So the two of us marched down to the nearest airlock and got rid of the chip. I had a slight pang when I realized how much money we had just tossed out into space, but then I realized I had saved Amanda’s life, most likely, and certainly the life of her baby. Hers and Fuchs’s.
“Fuchs will never know,” Sam said. “I feel kind of sorry for him.”
“I feel sorry for her,” I said.
“Yeah. Me, too.”
As we walked down the passageway back toward my compartment, curiosity got the better of me.
“Sam,” I asked, “what if you weren’t sure that I’d keep her message to myself? What if you thought I’d sneak off to Humphries and tell him what was on that chip?”
He glanced up at me. “I’ve never killed a man,” he said quietly, “but I’d sure stuff you into a lifeboat and set you adrift. With no radio.”
I blinked at him. He was dead serious.
“I wouldn’t last long,” I said.
“Probably not. Your ship would drift through the Belt for a long time, though. Eons. You’d be a real Flying Dutchman.”
“I’m glad you trust me.”
“I’m glad I can trust you, Gar.” He gave me a funny look, then added, “You’re in love with her, too, aren’t you?”
It took me a few moments to reply, “Who wouldn’t be?”
So we flew to “The Rememberer” with Judge Myers and all the wedding guests and the minister and boys’ choir, the caterers and all the food and drink for a huge celebration. Six different news nets were waiting for us: The wedding was going to be a major story.
Sam snuck away, of course. He didn’t marry Jill Myers after all. She was so furious that she . . .
But that’s another story.
While the Grand Tour novels are set on other worlds, for the most part, the driving force behind these stories comes from what is happening on Earth. Here is a tale of one fairly ordinary man, driven to extraordinary deeds—literally driven off the Earth, in order to help save the world.
MONSTER SLAYER
This is the way the legend began.
He was called Harry Twelvetoes because, like all the men in his family, he was born with six toes on each foot. The white doctor who worked at the clinic on the reservation said the extra toes should be removed right away, so his parents allowed the whites to cut the toes off, even though his great-uncle Cloud Eagle pointed out that Harry’s father, and his father’s fathers as far back as anyone could remember, had gone through life pe
rfectly well with twelve toes on their feet.
His secret tribal name, of course, was something that no white was ever told. Even in his wildest drunken sprees Harry never spoke it. The truth is, he was embarrassed by it. For the family had named him Monster Slayer, a heavy burden to lay across the shoulders of a little boy, or even the strong young man he grew up to be.
On the day that the white laws said he was old enough to take a job, his great-uncle Cloud Eagle told him to leave the reservation and seek his path in the world beyond.
“Why should I leave?” Harry asked his great-uncle.
Cloud Eagle closed his sad eyes for a moment, then said to Harry, “Look around you, nephew.”
Harry looked and saw the tribal lands as he had always seen them, brown desert dotted with mesquite and cactus, steep bluffs worn and furrowed as great-uncle’s face, turquoise blue sky and blazing Father Sun baking the land. Yet there was no denying that the land was changing. Off in the distance stood the green fields of the new farms and the tiny dark shapes of the square houses the whites were building. And there were gray rain clouds rising over the mountains.
Refugees were pouring into the high desert. The greenhouse warming that gutted the farms of the whites with drought also brought rains that were filling the dry arroyos of the tribal lands. The desert would be gone one day, the white scientists predicted, turned green and bountiful. So the whites were moving into the reservation.
“This land has been ours since the time of First Man and First Woman,” Great-uncle said. “But now the whites are swarming in. There is no stopping them. Soon there will be no place of our own left to us. Go. Find your way in the world beyond. It is your destiny.”
Reluctantly, Harry left the reservation and his family.
In the noisy, hurried world of the whites jobs were easy to find, but good jobs were not. With so many cities flooded by the greenhouse warming, they were frantically building new housing, whole new villages and towns. Harry got a job with a construction firm in Colorado, where the government was putting up huge tracts of developments for the hordes of refugees from the drowned coastal cities. He started as a lowly laborer, but soon enough worked himself up to a pretty handy worker, a jack-of-all-trades.
He drank most of his pay, although he always sent some of it back to his parents.
One cold, blustery morning, when Harry’s head was thundering so badly from a hangover that even the icy wind felt good to him, his supervisor called him over to her heated hut.
“You’re gonna kill yourself with this drinking, Harry,” said the supervisor, not unkindly.
Harry said nothing. He simply looked past the supervisor’s ear at the calendar tacked to the corkboard. The picture showed San Francisco the way it looked before the floods and the rioting.
“You listening to me?” the supervisor asked, more sharply. “This morning you nearly ran the backhoe into the excavation pit, for chrissake.”
“I stopped in plenty time,” Harry mumbled.
The supervisor just shook her head and told Harry to get back to work. Harry knew from the hard expression on the woman’s face that his days with this crew were numbered.
Sure enough, at the shape-up a few mornings later the super took Harry aside and said, “Harry, you Indians have a reputation for being good at high steel work.”
Harry’s head was thundering again. He drank as much as any two men, but he had enough pride to show up on the job no matter how bad he felt. Can’t slay monsters laying in bed, he would tell himself, forcing himself to his feet and out to work. Besides, no work, no money. And no money, no beer. No whiskey. No girls who danced on your lap or stripped off their clothes to the rhythm of synthesizer music.
Harry knew that it was the Mohawks back East who were once famous for their steelwork on skyscrapers, but he said nothing to the supervisor except, “That’s what I heard, too.”
“Must be in your blood, huh?” said the super, squinting at Harry from under her hard hat.
Harry nodded, even though it made his head feel as if some old medicine man was inside there thumping on a drum.
“I got a cousin who needs high steel workers,” the super told him. “Over in Greater Denver. He’s willing to train newbies. Interested?”
Harry shuffled his feet a little. It was really cold, this early in the morning.
“Well?” the super demanded. “You interested or not?”
“I guess I’m interested,” Harry said. It was better than getting fired outright.
As he left the construction site, with the name and number of the super’s cousin in his cold-numbed fist, he could hear a few of the other workers snickering.
“There goes old Twelvetoes.”
“He’ll need all twelve to hold onto those girders up in the wind.”
They started making bets on how soon Harry would kill himself.
But Harry became a very good high steel worker, scrambling along the steel girders that formed the skeletons of the new high-rise towers. He cut down on the drinking: Alcohol and altitude didn’t mix. He traveled from Greater Denver to Las Vegas and all the way down to Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico had swallowed up Galveston and half of Houston.
When he’d been a little boy, his great-uncle had often told Harry that he was destined to do great things. “What great things?” Harry would ask. “You’ll see,” his great-uncle would say. “You’ll know when you find it.”
“But what is it?” Harry would insist. “What great things will I do?”
Cloud Eagle replied, “Every man has his own right path, Harry. When you find yours, your life will be in harmony and you’ll achieve greatness.”
Before he left his childhood home to find his way in the world, his great-uncle gave him a totem, a tiny black carving of a spider.
“The spider has wisdom,” he told Harry. “Listen to the wisdom of the spider whenever you have a problem.”
Harry shrugged and stuffed the little piece of obsidian into the pocket of his jeans. Then he took the bus that led out of the reservation.
As a grown, hard-fisted man, Harry hardly ever thought of those silly ideas. He didn’t have time to think about them when he was working fifty, sixty, seventy stories high with nothing between him and the ground except thin air that blew in gusts strong enough to knock a man off his feet if he wasn’t careful.
He didn’t think about his great-uncle’s prophecy when he went roaring through the bars and girlie joints on the weekends. He didn’t think about anything when he got so drunk that he fell down and slept like a dead man.
But he kept the spider totem. More than once his pockets had been emptied while he slept in a drunken stupor, but no one ever took the spider from him.
And sometimes the spider did speak to him. It usually happened when he was good and drunk. In a thin, scratchy voice the spider would say, “No more drinking tonight, Harry. You’ve had enough. Sleep all through tomorrow, be ready for work on Monday.”
Most of the time he listened to the totem’s whispers. Sometimes he didn’t, and those times almost always worked out badly. Like the time in New Houston when three Japanese engineers beat the hell out of him in the alley behind the cat house. They didn’t rob him, though. And when Harry came to, in a mess of his own blood and vomit and garbage, the spider was wise enough to refrain from saying, “I told you not to get them angry.”
He bounced from job to job, always learning new tricks of the trades, never finding the true path that would bring him peace and harmony. The days blurred into an unending sameness: crawl out of bed, clamber along the girders of a new high-rise, wait for the end of the week. The nights were a blur, too: beer, booze, women he hardly ever saw more than once.
Now and then Harry wondered where he was going. “There’s more to life than this,” the spider whispered to him in his sleep. “Yeah, sure,” Harry whispered back. “But what? How do I find it?”
One night, while Harry was working on the big Atlanta Renewal Project, the high steel cre
w threw a going-away party for Jesse Ali, the best welder in the gang.
“So where’s Jesse going?” Harry asked a buddy, beer in hand.
The buddy took a swig of his own beer, then laughed. “He’s got a good job, Harry. Great job. It’s out of this world.” Then he laughed as if he’d made a joke.
“But where is it? Are they hiring?”
“Go ask him,” the buddy said.
Harry wormed his way through the gang clustered at the bar and finally made it to Jesse’s side.
“Gonna miss you, Jess,” he said. Shouted, actually, over the noise of the raucous crowd.
Ali smiled brightly. “Christ, Harry, that’s the longest sentence you ever said to me, man.”
Harry looked down at the steel-tipped toes of his brogans. He had never been much for conversation, and his curiosity about Jesse’s new job was butting its head against his natural reticence. But the spider in his pocket whispered, “Ask him. Don’t be afraid. Ask him.”
Harry summoned up his courage. “Where you goin’?”
Ali’s grin got wider. He pointed a long skinny finger straight up in the air.
Harry said nothing, but the puzzlement must have shown clearly on his face.
“In space, man,” Ali explained. “They’re building a great big habitat in orbit. Miles long. It’ll take years to finish. I’ll be able to retire by the time the job’s done.”
Harry digested that information. “It’ll take that long?”
The black man laughed. “Naw. But the pay’s that good.”
“They lookin’ for people?”
With a nod, Ali said, “Yeah. You hafta go through a couple months’ training first. Half pay.”
“Okay.”
“No beer up there, Harry. No gravity, either. I don’t think you’d like it.”
“Maybe,” said Harry.
“No bars. No strip joints.”
“They got women, though, don’t they?”
“Like Yablonski,” said Ali, naming one of the crew who was tougher than any two of the guys.
Harry nodded. “I seen worse.”
Ali threw his head back and roared with laughter. Harry drifted away, had a few more beers, then walked slowly through the magnolia-scented evening back to the barracks where most of the construction crew was housed.