The Moon had become the Everest of the Cold War-era space race, a political more than scientific goal. But more distant goals beckoned, too.
For me, the summer of 1968 was for riding bikes through field of dandelions, catching dragonflies in coffee cans, and firing Estes rockets to puncture the blue heavens. Summers, it seems, are not for fathers. Along with an army of engineers and scientists scattered across the US, Dad was working on designs for a balloon probe to drift on the winds of Venus. While other dads were contemplating their next career move, or how to fix the plumbing in the second bathroom, or when to get the lawn mowed, my father—who was also doing those practical things—was busy figuring out how fast one must drive a 1965 Plymouth Fury station wagon, at the air pressure in Colorado's mile-high-city, to simulate conditions in the Venusian stratosphere. He used a slide rule, as no one had handheld calculators back then. Heady times.
The Earth's simmering sister provided great mystery. Covered in opaque, acid-laden clouds, its surface conditions mystified the scientists. Were there carbonated oceans of Perrier lurking down there? Did desiccated deserts stretch across its face? Was it a world blessed with jungles to rival Earth's Carboniferous?
To unlock Aphrodite's secrets, NASA called upon teams of engineers to design probes. A stream of wild, creative, out-of-the-box prototypes flowed from the best minds in aerospace. Some made it off the paper and onto the factory floor for preliminary experiments, tests to see if these contraptions would ever get off the ground. One concept envisioned a probe that, slowed by billowing chute, would inflate a balloon. The craft would sail aloft in the Venusian skies, far above the heat, for days or weeks.
It was a concept that hearkened back three centuries, when a great blue balloon drifted above the French countryside as the first inhabited sky vessel. The airship was the invention of brothers Jacques Etienne and Joseph Michel Montgolfier. In September of 1783, as the chill of autumn was in the French air, the Aerostat Reveillon ascended with the first air travelers: a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. The animals had no baggage to check, and flew majestically into the air before an audience at the royal palace in Versailles. Among the enthralled crowd were King Louis XVI of France and Queen Marie Antoinette. The eight-minute adventure took the three intrepid creatures up 1500 feet, and gently deposited them two miles away. No one knows what the animals thought of their outing, but the human audience must have been filled with awe, and perhaps envy. Here was freedom, liberty from terrestrial chains sunk deep into the molten core.
But could what the Montgolfiers did be redone on another world, a cosmic encore? Aerospace engineers had to be creative in their approaches, sometimes using unconventional tools.
Like a station wagon.
So Dad did his figuring. At the altitude under study, and the speed the probe would be descending, the flow of air pressure on Venus was equivalent to a 35-mph gale in Colorado. Dad quietly brought home a sheet of Kevlar, a bundle of expensive, high-tech material with the feel of cheap plastic. He handed me an 8-mm movie camera containing less than four minutes of film and stationed me—trembling with excitement and trepidation—in the back of the car, tailgate down. County Line Road was at the southernmost end of Denver's suburbs. Brimming with wheat fields and pheasants, the route would see little traffic. As Dad brought the car up to speed, he yelled, “Deploy!” With one end of his precious Kevlar tied to the door handle, I tossed.
We rolled down the thoroughfare with visions of white-hot clouds and sulfuric acid rains, Kevlar streaming from the rear like a Roman charioteer's victory banner. No Steven Spielberg, I filmed the best I could. We'd get no Oscars, but the test showed that the material could hold up under a Venusian gale. I was filled with exhilaration. For one precious, glorious moment that day, I was part of the space adventure, a cog in the wheel of humanity's journey into the new frontier. I was more than a kid holding a plastic sheet. I was Prometheus.
Much to Dad's disappointment, the French engineers at CNES, the French space agency, eventually decided to team with the Soviet Space Research Institute, as the Soviets were going to Venus sooner. There were delays, but political and technological. It wasn't until 1984 that a Soviet VEGA probe carried a French balloon to the hothouse world. Two “aerostats” piggybacked aboard Venera-style landers, while the carrier vehicles flew on to encounter Halley's comet. The balloons floated on westerly alien breezes, sending electronic weather reports back for nearly two Earth days. The probes finally exhausted their batteries and faded away. And through the sun-baked Venusian skies, one could almost hear the Montgolfiers applaud.
People have dedicated more than careers so that we might know the things we know today. Some have given their lives. In 1967, our family lost a friend. Along with Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee, Ed White died in the Apollo 1 fire on the launch pad. The brave trio was the first crew to perish in a space-related accident. My father and White had been high school buddies, and had kept in touch over the years. I had various cards and letters from the astronaut. The loss touched us deeply. Tragedy like that, or like the Challenger and Columbia disasters, makes one wonder: is it worth it? We lost good people trying to get to the Moon. But we made it. We did it for reasons of politics, which are sometimes very good reasons. Even during the deepest, darkest periods of the Cold War, scientists on both sides still talked to each other (sometimes very quietly). Lines of communication remained open during such crises as the Vietnam War, Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the shooting down of an American U2 spy plane over the Soviet Union, and many other incidents. Often, the scientists were more interested in knowledge than in politics.
We also did it for reasons that share heritage with Tensing Norgay and Edmund Hillary's conquest of Everest. We got far more out of it than cell phones and laptops, though those would not have come when they did without Apollo. Apollo didn't just give us widgets. It gave us ways of creating complex systems. It taught industry how to make quality things for a quality life. More than that, it gave us a new way of looking at ourselves. It's a positive life perspective that says, “Even if it looks impossible, we can do this."
I watched the first steps of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in my pajamas, on the couch in our family room, curled up beside Mom, Dad, and my sister. I was nearing the end of childhood, entering adolescence. My fourteen years had seen the advent of Sputnik, the first people in space, and the first human visits to the Moon. In the coming years I would witness the first close views of Jupiter's moons, the discovery of rings around the outer gas giants, the first views of volcanoes on other planets and moons, and the coming and going of Comet Halley. I watched as Soviets and Americans shook hands in orbit, built space stations together, and flew joint missions to the planets. When I was a very young child, Venus was a distant point of light and the Moon was green cheese. Twenty years form now, humans may well have a permanent community on the Moon, based upon the model of Antarctica's international outposts.
And nothing will ever be the same again.
Copyright © 2009 Michael Carroll
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Short Story: THE CALCULUS PLAGUE by Marissa K. Lingen
"Show, don't tell” is good advice for more than storytelling....
The Calculus Plague came first. Almost no one took offense at it. In fact, it took a while for anyone to find out about it at all. No one had any reason to talk about a dim memory of their high school math teacher, whose face didn't seem familiar somehow, and what was her name again? His name? Well, what did it matter?
It wasn't until Dr. Leslie Baxter, an economics professor at the U, heard her four-year-old son ask, “What's Newton's Method, Mommy?” that anyone began to notice anything wrong. At first Leslie assumed that Nicholas's most recent babysitter had been talking about his calculus assignment over the phone when sitting for Nicholas, but when she confronted the young man, he admitted that he had taken part in a viral memory experiment that was aimed at teaching calculus through transmission of memories.
Young Nicholas Baxter was living proof that it did no good to remember something if you couldn't understand it to begin with. Leslie assured Nicholas that she would explain the math when he was older. Then she went to the faculty judicial board to discuss forming a committee to establish ethical guidelines for faculty participation in viral memory transfer research.
They were still deciding who would be on the committee—from which departments, in which proportions, and was Dr. So-and-so too junior for the responsibility? Was Prof. Such-and-such too senior to agree to take it on?—when the second wave hit.
"I know I have never taken George's seminar on Faulkner,” said Leslie furiously. “Never! I hate Faulkner, and George wasn't on faculty anywhere I've studied."
"But what does it hurt to remember some kids sitting around talking about The Sound and the Fury, Les?” asked her friend and colleague Amy Pradhan.
"Easy for you to say. You didn't catch it."
Amy shrugged. “I don't think I'd be making a fuss if I had."
Leslie shook her head. “Don't take this wrong, but you don't even like it when people drop by your house without calling first. But somehow it'd be better if it was your head?"
"It's not like they can read your thoughts, Les."
"No, they can make my thoughts. And that's worse."
"They're not making you like Faulkner,” said Amy. “I know someone else who caught it and loved Faulkner, and she doesn't hate it now. You can still respond as yourself."
"Mighty big of them, to let me respond as myself."
Amy grimaced. “Can we talk about something else, please?
"Okay, okay. How's Molly? Are you still seeing her?"
Amy blushed and the conversation moved on to friends and family, books and movies, campus gossip, and other things that had nothing to do with Leslie coming down with a stuffy nose and Faulkner memories.
The usual people wrote their editorials and letters to the editor, but most people could not bother themselves to get excited about a virally transmitted memory of a lecture on Faulkner. Even the Faulkner-haters in the English department shrugged and moved on. Leslie found herself alone in confronting the project head, Dr. Solada Srisai. Srisai was tidy in the way of women who have had to fight very hard and very quietly for what they have. The warm red of her suit went perfectly with the warm brown of her skin. Leslie felt tall and chilly and ridiculous.
"I don't think anyone will be hurt by knowing calculus, do you?” Solada murmured, when Leslie explained why she was there.
"You're a biologist,” said Leslie. “You know how many forms you have to fill out to do human experimentation. If I want to ask a dozen freshmen whether they'd buy a cookie for a dollar, I have to fill out forms."
"Our experimental subjects filled out their forms,” said Solada. “The viruses fell slightly outside our predicted parameters and got transmitted to a few people close to the original test subjects and then a few people close to them. This is a problem we will remedy in future trials, I assure you."
A grad student with wire-rimmed glasses poked her head around the door. “Solada, we've got the people from the Empty Moon here."
"Start going over their parameters,” said Solada. “I'll be done with this in a minute."
"Empty Moon?” asked Leslie.
"It's a new café,” said Solada. “We've come to an agreement with them about marketing. Volunteers—who have all the forms filled out, Dr. Baxter—will be infected with positive memories of the food at the Empty Moon Café, and we'll track their reports of how often they eat there and what they order compared to what they remember."
"Don't you have an ethical problem with this?” Leslie demanded.
Solada shrugged. “Not everybody likes the same food. If they go to the Empty Moon and have a terrible sandwich or the service is slow, they'll figure their first memory was a fluke. They'll go somewhere else. Or if they're in the mood for Mexican, they'll go for Mexican. We'll make sure that this virus is far less mutative and virulent than the others—which were really not bad considering how colds usually spread on a college campus. Well within the error range one might expect."
"Not within the error range I'd expect,” said Leslie. “I'll be conveying this to a faculty ethics committee, Dr. Srisai."
Solada shrugged and smiled dismissively. “You must do as your conscience dictates, of course."
The business at the Empty Moon Café was booming. Leslie told herself very firmly that her memory of the awesome endive salad she'd had there was a snare and a delusion; she stayed away even when Amy wanted to meet there for coffee.
No one else seemed to care when she tried to tell them about the newest marketing ploy.
A few weeks later, Leslie was doing the dishes while her husband put Nicholas to bed. Her doorbell rang three times in quick succession, and then there was a pounding on the door. Wiping her hands on the dishtowel, she went to answer it. Amy was standing on the doorstep, an ashen undertone to her dark skin.
"There's been—” Amy swallowed hard, and managed to get a strangled, “Oh, God,” past her lips.
"Come in. Sit down. I'll get you tea. What's happened?"
"Tom Barras—he's—"
"Deep breaths,” said Leslie, putting the kettle on.
"You know I've been one of the faculty advisors to the GLBT group on campus,” said Amy. “There's been an attack. A member of the group—Tom Barras—a nice bi boy, civil engineering major—is in the hospital."
"What happened?"
"We don't know! I thought we were—I know gay-bashing still happens, but I thought we were better than that here.” Leslie bit back a comment about illusions of the ivory tower. Her friend needed a listening ear, not a lecture. Amy got herself calmed down, gradually, and Leslie went to bed feeling faintly ill. She and her husband insisted on putting Amy's bike in the back of their car and driving her home, just in case.
The story of the assault came out gradually: Tom's attacker, Anthony Dorland, said he had previously been set upon behind Hogarth Hall by a group of men. One of them had groped him repeatedly, making suggestive personal comments, while the others looked on and laughed. “I couldn't do anything about it,” Anthony told campus security in strangled tones. “I was alone. But then I was out last night, and I heard his voice. It was the same voice, I know it. I would know it anywhere. He was coming out of his meeting, and so I waited until he was alone. I don't care what he does with people who like it, but I'm not that way! He shouldn't force himself on people like that! It's not right! So I thought, well, let's see how you like it when you're all alone and someone jumps on you."
When campus security asked Dorland why he had not fought back immediately or reported the incident, he looked confused. “He was so much bigger than me, and he had all his friends—I don't know—I just felt like I couldn't. Like no one would believe me.” Pressed for a time of incident, he said, “I don't know. A while ago. A few weeks ago, maybe? I don't know."
The police officers looked from one young man to the other. Tom was several inches shorter than Anthony and slightly built.
Tom returned to consciousness a day later, to the great relief of his family and friends, including Amy. A few days after that, the faculty started hearing rumors of other students who had experienced the same thing but could not say when it had happened. Some of them had roommates who said they didn't remember their roommate coming in beaten up or upset; others had roommates with identical memories—and identical sniffles.
Scores on calculus midterms shot up by an average of fifteen points.
Leslie noticed a few students wearing surgical masks on campus one morning. The next day it was a few more. She took Nicholas to get one at the campus bookstore and encountered Solada Srisai coming out with a bag. Without thinking, she grabbed Nicholas close to her.
"Mommy!” Nicholas protested.
"That false memory of sexual assault,” Leslie hissed. “My son caught calculus. What would you have done if he'd caught danger and f
ear like that? What would you have done to keep him from having nightmares that a bunch of adult men were—” She looked down at Nicholas and chose her words carefully. “Were hurting him. Personally. What would you have done about that?"
"That one wasn't mine,” said Solada.
"They are all yours,” said Leslie. “The minute you taught your grad students that it was okay to release these things without trials, without controls, without testing—the minute you taught them that it was okay to skip all that, because it was holding back progress, you earned all of this. All of it."
"Mommy,” said Nicholas, and Leslie realized that her hands were shaking.
"Let me tell you what the alternative was,” said Solada, steering Leslie and Nicholas toward a bench. “Do you want to know what my alternative was?"
"Another project completely?"
"Yes. Sure. Another project completely.” Solada glared at her. “And do you know what that would mean? It would mean that the person who developed virally contagious memories would not have done so out in the open. You would never have heard about it. Your son wouldn't have been at risk for catching a memory of calculus—or, okay, a memory of sexual assault because an overzealous grad student decided it would be a good idea for potential rapists to know what it felt like.
"No. Your son would have been at risk for catching memories that told him that the Republican Party was the only one he could trust. Or that if he truly loved you, he would always trust exactly what the Democratic Party had to say. Or that our government would never fight a war without a darn good reason. Or that he should buy this cola, or drive this car, or wear those sneakers. Do you see what I mean? It was me now or a secret project two years from now."
Analog SFF, July-August 2009 Page 28