The Best of Bova: Volume 1

by Ben Bova

  The admiral disappeared. As suddenly as a light blinking out, one instant he was there staring solemnly at Konda, the next he was gone back to his own time.

  “Banzai,” Konda whispered.

  His finger hovered, trembling, over the key that would break the stasis and return him to the mainstream of spacetime. If all has gone well, this will be the end of me. Saito Konda will no longer exist. He pulled in a deep, final breath, almost savoring it, and then leaned savagely hard on the key.

  And nothing happened. He blinked, looked around. His chamber was unchanged. His equipment hummed to itself. The display screens showed that everything was quite normal. The comm unit was blinking its red message light.

  A terrible fear began to worm its way up Konda’s spine. He called out to the comm unit, “Respond!”

  The station commander’s face took form on the screen. “When will you begin your experiment, sir?” she asked.

  Konda saw the digital clock numbers on the screen: hardly ten seconds had passed since he had first put his chamber in stasis.

  “It didn’t work,” he mumbled. “It’s all over for now. You can return my module to the low-gravity mode.”

  The commander nodded once and the screen went dark. Konda felt a lurch in the pit of his stomach and then a sinking, falling sensation. He floated up out of his chair like a man in a dream.

  Was I dreaming? he asked himself. Did it actually happen? Why hasn’t the world changed? Why am I still alive?

  Puzzled, almost dazed, he activated the rewind of the cameras that had recorded every instant of his experiment. When the recorder stopped, he pressed the PLAY button.

  And there was Yamamoto in the chamber with him. Konda stared, put the tape in fast forward. Their voices chittered and jabbered like a pair of monkeys’, they sped through their days together in a jerky burlesque of normal movement. But it was Yamamoto. It had really happened.

  Konda sank onto his bed, suddenly so totally exhausted that he could not stand even in the low gravity. The experiment had worked. He had shown Yamamoto everything and sent him back to win his war against the Americans and save Japan’s soul. Yet nothing seemed changed.

  He wanted to sleep but he could not. Instead, in a growing frenzy he began to tune in to television broadcasts from Earth. One channel after another, from Japan, China, the Philippines, Australia, the United States, Europe. Nothing had changed! The world was just the way it had been before he had snatched Yamamoto out of the past.

  Konda beat his frail fists on his emaciated thighs in utter frustration. He tore at his hair. Why? Why hasn’t anything changed?

  Frantically he searched through his history discs. It was all the same. The war. Japan’s defeat. The humiliation of achieving world economic power at the sacrifice of all that the Japanese soul had held dear in earlier generations.

  I still live, Konda cried silently. My mother was born and grew up and plied her filthy trade and gave birth to a diseased, unclean son.

  In desperation, he went back to the tapes of Yamamoto’s assassination. It was all the same. Exactly, precisely the same. Either the experiment had not worked at all, and Konda had hallucinated his days with Yamamoto, or . . .

  He saw one thing on one of the tapes that he did not recall being there before. The screen showed the twin-engine plane that would carry the admiral and his staff from the base at Rabaul to the island of Bougainville. The narrator pointed out Yamamoto’s insistence on punctuality, “ . . . as if the admiral knew that he had an appointment with death.”

  A moment or two later, while the screen showed American planes attacking the Japanese flight, the narrator quoted Yamamoto as saying, “I have killed many of the enemy . . . I believe the time has come for me to die, too.”

  “He did it deliberately!” Konda howled in the emptiness of his chamber. “He knew and yet he let them kill him!”

  For hours Konda raved and tore through his quarters, pounding his fists against the walls and furniture until they bled, smashing the equipment that had fetched the greatest warrior of history to his presence, raging and screaming at the blankly immobile robots.

  Finally, totally spent, bleeding, his chest heaving and burning as if with fever, he sat in the wreckage of his laboratory before the one display screen he had not smashed and called up the tape of Yamamoto’s visit. For hours he watched himself and the doughty old admiral, seeking the answer he desperately needed to make sense out of his universe.

  He should have gone back and changed everything, Konda’s mind kept repeating. He should have gone back and changed everything.

  For days he sat there, without eating, without sleeping, like a catatonic searching for the key that would release him.

  He came to the very end of the tape, with Yamamoto standing at attention and gravely returning his own salute.

  He heard himself say to the admiral, “Go back and win the war.”

  He saw Yamamoto’s lips move, and then the old man disappeared.

  Konda rewound the tape and replayed that last moment, with the sound volume turned up high enough to hear the admiral’s final words.

  “Go back and win the war,” his own voice boomed.

  Yamamoto replied, “We did win it.”

  Haggard, breathless, Konda stared at the screen as the old admiral disappeared and returned to his own time, his own death. Willingly.

  Tears misted his eyes. He went to his powered chair and sank wearily into it. Yamamoto did not understand anything. Not a thing!

  Or perhaps he did. Perhaps the old warrior saw and understood it all. Better than I have, thought Konda. He sees more clearly than I do.

  In the warrior’s code there is only one acceptable way for a man to deal with the shame of defeat. Konda leaned his head back and waited for death to take him, also. He did not have to wait very long.

  SAM GUNN

  Back when I was the Editor of Analog Science Fiction magazine (1971-78), one of my tasks was to feed story ideas to writers.

  For years I tried to get one writer after another to write a story for the magazine around a certain idea. All I ever got for my efforts was a series of blank stares and muttered promises to “give it a shot.”

  When I finally stopped being an editor and began to write short fiction again, I tackled the idea myself. “Sam Gunn” is the result. Sam is inventive and irreverent, feisty and tough, good-hearted and crafty, a womanizer, a little guy who is constantly struggling against the “big guys” of huge corporations and government bureaucracies.

  Ed Ferman, who was then the editor and publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, not only bought the story, he published it in his magazine’s 34th anniversary issue, which pleased me no end.

  Over the years since then I’ve written dozens of stories about Sam. Here’s what he looked like when I first set my inner eye on him.

  * * *

  The spring-wheeled truck rolled to a silent stop on the Sea of Clouds. The fine dust kicked up by its six wheels floated lazily back to the mare’s soil. The hatch to the truck cab swung upward, and a space-suited figure climbed slowly down to the lunar surface, clumped a dozen ponderously careful steps, then turned back toward the truck.

  “Yeah, this is the spot. The transponder’s beeping away, all right.”

  Two more figures clambered down from the cab, bulbous and awkward-looking in the bulky space suits. One of them turned a full three hundred sixty degrees, scanning the scene through the gold-tinted visor of the suit’s bubble helmet. There was nothing to be seen except the monotonous gray plain, pockmarked by craters like an ancient, savage battlefield that had been petrified into solid stone long eons ago.

  “Christ, you can’t even see the ringwall from here.”

  “That’s what he wanted—to be out in the open, without a sign of civilization in sight. He picked this spot himself, you know.”

  “Helluva place to want to be buried.”

  “That’s what he specified in his will. Come on, let’s ge
t to work. I want to get back to Selene City before the sun sets.”

  It was a local joke: the three space-suited workers had more than two hundred hours before sunset.

  Grunting even in the general lunar gravity, they slid the coffin from the back of the truck and placed it gently on the roiled, dusty ground. Then they winched the four-meter-high crate from the truck and put it down softly next to the coffin. While one of them scoured a coffin-sized hole in the ground with the blue-white flame of a plasma torch, the other two uncrated the big package.

  “Ready for the coffin,” said the worker with the torch.

  The leader of the trio inspected the grave. The hot plasma had polished the stony ground. The two workers heard him muttering over their helmet earphones as he used a hand laser to check the grave’s dimensions. Satisfied, he helped them drag the gold-filigreed coffin to the hole and slide it in.

  “A lot of work to do for a dead man.”

  “He wasn’t just any ordinary man.”

  “It’s still a lot of work. Why in hell couldn’t he be recycled like everybody else?’

  “Sam Gunn,” said the leader, “never did things like everybody else. Not in his whole cursed long life. Why should he be like the rest of us in death?”

  They chattered back and forth through their suit radios as they uncrated the big package. Once they had removed all the plastic and the bigger-than-life statue stood sparkling in the sunlight, they stepped back and gaped at it.

  “It’s glass!”

  “Christ, I never saw anything so damned big.”

  “Must have cost a fortune to get it here. Two fortunes.”

  “He had it done at Island One, I hear. Brought the sculptor up from Earthside and paid enough to keep her at L-4 for two whole years. God knows how many times he tried to cast a statue this big and failed.”

  “I didn’t know you could make a glass statue so big.”

  “In zero gee you can. It’s hollow. If we were in air, I could ping it with my finger and should hear it ring.”

  “Crystal.”

  “That’s right.”

  One of the workers, the young man, laughed softly.

  “What’s so funny’?” the leader asked.

  “Who else but Sam Gunn would have the gall to erect a crystal statue to himself and then have it put out in the middle of this godforsaken emptiness, where nobody’s ever going to see it? It’s a monument to himself, for himself. What ego. What monumental ego.”

  The leader chuckled. too. “Yeah, Sam had an ego, all right. But he was a smart little guy, too.”

  “You knew him?” the young woman asked.

  “Sure. Knew him well enough to tell you that he didn’t pick this spot for his tomb just for the sake of his ego. He was smarter than that.”

  “What was he like?”

  “When did you know him?”

  “Come on, we’ve still got work to do. He wants the statue positioned exactly as he stated in his will, with its back toward Selene and the face looking up toward Earth.”

  “Yeah, okay, but when did you know him, huh?”

  “Oh golly, years ago. Decades ago. When the two of us were just young pups. The first time either of us came here, back in—Lord, it’s thirty years ago. More.”

  “Tell us about it. Was he really the rascal that the history tapes say he was? Did he really do all the things they say?” asked the young woman.

  “He was a phony!” the young man snapped. “Everybody knows that. A helluva showman, sure, but he never did half the stuff he took credit for. Nobody could have, not in one lifetime.”

  “He lived a pretty intense life,” said the leader. “If it hadn’t been for a faulty suit valve he’d still be running his show from here to Titan.”

  “A showman. That’s what he was. No hero.”

  “What was he like?” the young woman repeated.

  So, while the two youngsters struggled with the huge, fragile crystal statue, the older man sat himself on the lip of the truck’s cab hatch and told them what he knew about the first time Sam Gunn came to the Moon.

  The skipper used the time-honored cliché—he said—“Houston, we have a problem here.”

  There were eight of us, the whole crew of Artemis IV, huddled together in the command module. After six weeks of living on the Moon the module smelled like a pair of unwashed gym socks.

  With a woman President the space agency figured it would be smart to name the second round of lunar explorations after a female: Artemis was Apollo’s sister. Get it?

  But it had just happened that the computer who picked the crew selections for Artemis IV picked all men. Six weeks without even the sight of a woman, and now our blessed-be-to-God return module refused to light up. We were stranded. No way to get back home.

  As usual, capcom in Houston was the soul of tranquility. “Ah, A-IV, we read you and copy that the return module is no-go. The analysis team is checking the telemetry. We will get back to you soonest.”

  It didn’t help that capcom, that shift, was Sandi Hemmings, the woman we all lusted after. Among the eight of us, we must have spent enough energy dreaming about cornering Sandi in zero gravity to propel each of us right back to Houston. Unfortunately, dreams have a very low specific impulse and we were still stuck on the Moon, a quarter-million miles from the nearest woman.

  Sandi played her capcom duties strictly by the book, especially since all our transmissions were taped for later review.

  She kept the traditional Houston poker face, but managed to say, “Don’t worry, boys. We’ll figure it out and get you home.”

  Praise God for small favors.

  We had spent hours checking and rechecking the cursed return module. It was an engineer’s hell: everything checked but nothing worked. The thing just sat there like a lump of dead metal. No electrical power. None. Zero. The control board just stared at us as cold and glassy-eyed as a banker listening to your request for an unsecured loan. We had pounded it. We had kicked it. In our desperation we had even gone through the instruction manual, page by page, line by line. Zip. Zilch. The bird was dead.

  When Houston got back to us, six hours after the skipper’s call, it was the stony, unsmiling image of the mission coordinator who glowered at us as if we had deliberately screwed up the return module. He told us:

  “We have identified the problem, Artemis IV. The return module’s main electrical power supply has malfunctioned.”

  That was like telling Othello that he was a Moor.

  “We’re checking out bypasses and other possible fixes,” Old Stone Face went on. “Sit tight, we’ll get back to you.”

  The skipper gave him a patient sigh. “Yes, sir.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” said a whispered voice. Sam Gunn’s, I was certain.

  The problem, we finally discovered, was caused by a micrometeoroid, no less. A little grain of sand that just happened to roam through the solar system for four and a half billion years and then decided to crash-dive itself right into the main fuel cell of our return module’s power supply. It was so tiny that it didn’t do any visible damage to the fuel cell: just hurt it enough to let it discharge electrically for most of the six weeks we had been on the Moon. And the other two fuel cells, sensing the discharge through the module’s idiot computer, tried to recharge their partner for six weeks. The result: all three of them were dead and gone by the time we needed them.

  It was Sam who discovered the pinhole in the fuel cell, the eighteenth time we checked out the power supply. I can remember his exact words, once he realized what had happened:

  “Shit!”

  Sam was a feisty little guy who would have been too short for astronaut duty if the agency hadn’t lowered the height requirements so that women could join the corps. He was a good man, a whiz with a computer and a born tinkerer who liked to rebuild old automobiles and then race them on the abandoned freeways whenever he could scrounge up enough old-fashioned petrol to run them. The Terror of Clear Lake, we used to c
all him. The Texas Highway Patrol had other names for him. So did the agency administrators; they cussed near threw him out of the astronaut corps at least half a dozen times.

  But we all loved Sam, back in those days, as we went through training and then blasted off for our first mission to the Moon. He was funny, he kept us laughing. And he did the things and said the things that none of us had the guts to do or say.

  The skipper loved Sam a little less than the rest of us, especially after six weeks of living in each other’s dirty laundry. Sam had a way of almost defying any order he received; he reacted very poorly to authority figures. Our skipper, Lord love him, was as stiff-backed an old-school authority figure as any of them. He was basically a good Joe, and I’m cursed if I can remember his real name. But his big problem was that he had memorized the rule book and tried never to deviate from it.

  Well, anyway, there we were, stranded on the lunar surface after six weeks of hard work. Our task had been to make a semi-permanent underground base out of the prefabricated modules that had been, as the agency quaintly phrased it, “landed remotely on the lunar regolith in a series of carefully-coordinated unmanned logistics missions.” In other words, they had dropped nine different module packages over a fifty-square-kilometer area of Mare Nubium and we had to find them all, drag them to the site that Houston had picked for Base Gamma, set them up properly, scoop up enough of the top layers of soil to cover each module and the connecting tunnels to a depth of 0.3048 meter (that’s one foot, in English), and then link in the electric power reactor and all the wiring, plumbing, heating and air circulation units. Which we had done, adroitly and efficiently, and now that our labors were finished and we were ready to leave—no go. Too bad we couldn’t have covered the return module with 0.3048 meter of lunar soil; that would have protected the fuel cells from that sharpshooting micrometeoroid.

  The skipper decided it would be bad procedure to let us mope around and brood.

  “I want each of you to run a thorough inventory of all your personal supplies: the special foods you’ve brought with you, your spare clothing, entertainment kits, the works.”