The Best of Bova: Volume 1

by Ben Bova

  Patton nodded. “I was going to. I’ve checked the information sent up by Earthbase: you’ve been cleared by the White House, the AEC, NASA and even the Pentagon.”

  “So?”

  “Okay. The plain truth of the matter is . . .” A soft chime from a small clock on Patton’s desk interrupted him. “Oh. Excuse me.”

  Torgeson sat back and watched as Patton carefully began clearing off all the articles on his desk: the clock, calendar, phone, IN/OUT baskets, tobacco can and pipe rack, assorted papers and reports—all neatly and quickly placed in the desk drawers. Patton then stood up, walked to the filing cabinet, and closed the metal drawers firmly. He stood in the middle of the room, scanned the scene with apparent satisfaction, and then glanced at his wristwatch.

  “Okay,” he said to Torgeson. “Get down on your stomach.”

  “What?”

  “Like this,” the colonel said, and prostrated himself on the rubberized floor.

  Torgeson stared at him.

  “Come on! There’s only a few seconds.”

  Patton reached up and grasped the UN man by the wrist. Unbelievingly, Torgeson got out of the chair, dropped to his hands and knees and finally flattened himself on the floor, next to the colonel.

  For a second or two they stared at each other, saying nothing.

  “Colonel, this is embar—”

  The room exploded into a shattering volley of sounds.

  Something—many somethings—ripped through the walls. The air hissed and whined above the heads of the two prostrate men. The metal desk and file cabinet rang eerily.

  Torgeson squeezed his eyes shut and tried to worm into the floor. It was just like being shot at!

  Abruptly, it was over.

  The room was quiet once again, except for a faint hissing sound. Torgeson opened his eyes and saw the colonel getting up. The door was flung open. Three sergeants rushed in, armed with patching disks and tubes of cement. They dashed around the office sealing up the several hundred holes in the walls.

  Only gradually, as the sergeants carried on their fevered, wordless task, did Torgeson realize that the walls were actually a quiltwork of patches. The room must have been riddled repeatedly!

  He climbed slowly to his feet. “Meteors?” he asked, with a slight squeak in his voice.

  Colonel Patton grunted negatively and resumed his seat behind the desk. It was pockmarked, Torgeson noticed now. So was the file cabinet.

  “The window, in case you’re wondering, is bulletproof.”

  Torgeson nodded and sat down.

  “You see,” the colonel said, “life is not as peaceful here as you think. Oh, we get along fine with the Russians—now. We’ve learned to live in peace. We had to.”

  “What were those . . . things?”

  “Bullets.”

  “Bullets? But how . . . “

  The sergeants finished their frenzied work, lined up at the door and saluted. Colonel Patton returned the salute and they turned as one man and left the office, closing the door quietly behind them.

  “Colonel, I’m frankly bewildered.”

  “It’s simple enough to understand. But don’t feel too badly about being surprised. Only the top level of the Pentagon knows about this. And the president. of course. They had to let him in on it.”

  “What happened?”

  Colonel Patton took his pipe rack and tobacco can out of a desk drawer and began filling one of the pipes. “You see,” he began, “the Russians and us, we weren’t always so peaceful here on the moon. We’ve had our incidents and scuffles, just as you have on Earth”

  “Go on.”

  “Well . . .” he struck a match and puffed the pipe alight “. . . shortly after we set up this dome for moonbase HQ, and the Reds set up theirs, we got into some real arguments.” He waved the match out and tossed it into the open drawer.

  “We’re situated on the Oceanus Procellarum, you know. Exactly on the lunar equator. One of the biggest open spaces on this hunk of airless rock. Well, the Russians claimed they owned the whole damned Oceanus, since they were here first. We maintained that the legal ownership was not established, since according to the UN Charter and the subsequent covenants—”

  “Spare the legal details! Please, what happened?”

  Patton looked slightly hurt. “Well . . . we started shooting at each other. One of their guards fired at one of our guards. They claim it was the other way around, of course. Anyway, within twenty minutes we were fighting a regular pitched battle, right out there between our base and theirs.” He gestured toward the window.

  “Can you fire guns in airless space?”

  “Oh, sure. No problem at all. However, something unexpected came up.”

  “Unexpected? What?”

  “Only a few men got hit in the battle, none of them seriously. As in all battles, most of the rounds fired were clean misses.”

  “So?”

  Patton smiled grimly. “So one of our civilian mathematicians started doodling. We had several thousand very-high-velocity bullets fired off. In airless space. No friction, you see. And under low-gravity conditions. They went right along past their targets—”

  Recognition dawned on Torgeson’s face. “Oh, no!”

  “That’s right. They whizzed right along, skimmed over the mountain tops, thanks to the curvature of this damned short lunar horizon, and established themselves in rather eccentric satellite orbits. Every hour or so they return to perigee . . . or, rather, periluna. And every twenty-seven days, periluna is right here, where the bullets originated. The moon rotates on its axis every twenty-seven days, you see. At any rate, when they come back this way, they shoot the living hell out of our base—and the Russian base, too, of course.”

  “But can’t you . . . ?”

  “Do what? Can’t move the base. Authorization is tied up in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and they can’t agree on where to move it to. Can’t bring up any special shielding material, because that’s not authorized, either. The best thing we can do is to requisition all the computers we can and try to keep track of all the bullets. Their orbits keep changing, you know, every time they go through the bases. Air friction, puncturing walls, ricochets off the furniture—all that keeps changing their orbits enough to keep our computers busy full time.”

  “My God!”

  “In the meantime, we don’t dare fire off any more rounds. It would overburden the computers and we’d lose track of all of ’em. Then we’d have to spend every twenty-seventh day flat on our faces for hours.”

  Torgeson sat in numbed silence.

  “But don’t worry,” Patton concluded with an optimistic, professional grin. “I’ve got a small detail of men secretly at work on the far side of the base—where the Reds can’t see—building a stone wall. That’ll stop the bullets. Then we’ll fix those warmongers once and for all!”

  Torgeson’s face went slack. The chime sounded, muffled, from inside Patton’s desk.

  “Better get set to flatten out again. Here comes the second volley.”

  FOEMAN, WHERE DO YOU FLEE?

  I’ve never liked the title to this story, which was supplied by Frederik Pohl, who was editor of Galaxy magazine when I wrote it. The only good thing about the title is that it’s better than my original title, which was so forgettable that now I can’t remember it!

  This story is the only one I’ve written in response to a cover drawing, which Fred supplied together with a request for a “strong lead novelette.” Well, it’s a novelette and it led that issue of the magazine. You can judge its strength for yourself.

  * * *

  Deep in cryogenic sleep the mind dreams the same frozen dreams, endlessly circuiting through the long empty years. Sidney Lee dreamed of the towers on Titan, over and again, their smooth blank walls of metal that was beyond metal, their throbbing, ceaseless, purposeful machines that ran at tasks that men could not even guess at. The towers loomed in his darkened dreams, standing menacing and alien above the frozen wastes of Tita
n, utterly unmindful of the tiny men that groveled at their base. He tried to scale those smooth, steep walls and fell back. He tried to penetrate them and failed. He tried to scream. And in his dreams, at least, he succeeded.

  He didn’t dream of Ruth, or of the stars, or of the future or the past. Only of the towers, of the machines that blindly obeyed a builder who had left Earth’s solar system countless millennia ago.

  He opened his eyes.

  “What happened?”

  Carlos Pascual was smiling down at him, his round dark-skinned face relaxed and almost happy. “We are there . . . here, I mean. We are braking, preparing to go into orbit.”

  Lee blinked and sat up. “We made it?”

  “Yes, yes,” Pascual answered softly as his eyes shifted to the bank of instruments on the console behind Lee’s shoulder. “The panel claims you are alive and well. How do you feel?”

  That took a moment’s thought. “A little hungry.”

  “A common reaction.” The smile returned. “You can join the others in the galley.”

  The expedition’s medical chief helped Lee to swing his legs over the edge of the couch, then left him and went to the next unit, where a blonde woman lay still sleeping. With an effort, Lee recalled her: Doris McNertny, primary biologist, backup biochemist. Lee pulled a deep breath into his lungs and tried to get himself started. The overhead light panels, on full intensity now, made him want to squint.

  Standing was something of an experiment. No shakes, Lee thought gratefully. The room was large and circular, with no viewports.

  Each of the twenty hibernation couches had been painted a different color by some psychology team back on Earth. Most of them were empty now. The remaining occupied ones had their lids off and the lifesystem connections removed as Pascual, Tanaka and May Connearney worked to revive the people. Despite the color scheme, the room looked uninviting, and it smelled clinical.

  The galley, Lee focused his thoughts, is in this globe, one flight up. The ship was built in globular sections that turned in response to g-pulls. With the main fusion engines firing to brake their approach to final orbit, “UP” was temporarily in the direction of the engines’ thrusters. But inside the globes it did not make much difference.

  He found the stairwell that ran through the globe. Inside the winding metal ladderway the rumbling vibrations from the ship’s engines were echoing strongly enough to hear as actual sound.

  “Sid! Good morning!” Aaron Hatfield had stationed himself at the entrance to the galley and was acting as a one-man welcoming committee.

  There were only a half dozen people in the galley. Of course, Lee realized. The crew personnel are at their stations. Except for Hatfield, the people were bunched at the galley’s lone viewpoint, staring outside and speaking in hushed, subdued whispers.

  “Hello, Aaron.” Lee didn’t feel jubilant, not after a fifteen-year sleep. He tried to picture Ruth in his mind and found that he couldn’t.

  She must be nearly fifty by now.

  Hatfield was the expedition’s primary biochemist, a chunky, loud-speaking overgrown kid whom it was impossible to dislike, no matter how he behaved. Lee knew that Hatfield wouldn’t go near the viewport because the sight of empty space terrified him.

  “Hey, here’s Doris!” Hatfield shouted to no one. He scuttled toward the entrance as she stepped rather uncertainly into the galley.

  Lee dialed for coffee. With the hot cup in his hand he walked slowly toward the viewport.

  “Hello Dr. Lee,” Marlene Ettinger said as he came up alongside her. The others at the viewport turned and muttered their greetings.

  “How close are we?” Lee asked.

  Charnovsky, the geologist, answered positively, “Two days before we enter final orbit.”

  The stars crowded out the darkness beyond their viewport. They shone against the blackness like droplets from a paint spray. In the faint reflection of the port’s plastic, Lee could see six human faces looking lost and awed.

  Then the ship swung, ever so slightly, in response to some command from the crew and computers. A single star—close and blazingly powerful—slid into view, lancing painfully brilliant light through the polarizing viewport. Lee snapped his eyes shut, but not before the glare burned its afterimage against his closed eyelids. They all ducked back instinctively.

  “Welcome to Sirius,” somebody said.

  Man’s fight to the stars was made not in glory, but in fear.

  The buildings on Titan were clearly the work of an alien intelligent race. No man could tell exactly how old they were, how long their baffling machines had been running, what their purpose was. Whoever had built them had left the solar system hundreds of centuries ago.

  For the first time, men truly dreaded the stars.

  Still, they had to know, had to learn. Robot probes were sent to the nearest dozen stars, the farthest that man’s technology could reach. Nearly a generation passed on Earth before the faint signals from the probes returned. Seven of the stars had planets circling them. Of these, five possessed Earthlike worlds. On four of them, some indications of life were found. Life, not intelligence. Long and hot were the debates about what to do next. Finally, manned expeditions were dispatched to the Earthlike ones.

  Through it all, the machines on Titan hummed smoothly.

  “They should have named this ship Afterthought,” Lee said to Charnovsky. The ship’s official name was Carl Sagan.

  “How so?” the Russian muttered as he pushed a pawn across the board between them. They were sitting in the pastel-lighted rec room. A few others were scattered around the semicircular room, reading, talking, dictating messages that wouldn’t get to Earth for more than eight years. Soft music purred in the background.

  The Earthlike planet—Sirius A-2—swung past the nearest viewport. The ship had been in orbit for nearly three weeks now and was rotating around its long axis to keep a half-g feeling of weight for the scientists.

  “We were sent here as an afterthought,” Lee continued. “Nobody expects us to find anything. Most of the experts back on Earth didn’t really believe there could be an Earthlike planet around a blue star.”

  “They were correct, “ Charnovsky said. “Your move.”

  Picture our solar system. Now replace the sun with Sirius A, the Dog Star: a young, blue star, nearly twice as hot and big as the sun. Take away the planet Uranus, nearly two billion kilometers from the sun, and replace it with the white dwarf Sirius B, the Pup: just as hot as Sirius A, but collapsed to a hundredth of a star’s ordinary size. Now sweep away all the planets between the Dog and the Pup except two: a bald chunk of rock the size of Mercury orbiting some 100 million kilometers from A, and an Earth-sized planet some seven times farther out.

  Give the Earth-sized planet a cloud-sprinkled atmosphere, a few large seas, some worn-down mountain chains, and a thin veneer of simple green life clinging to its dusty surface. Finally, throw in one lone gas giant planet, far beyond the Pup, some 200 billion kilometers from A. Add some meteoroids and comets and you have the Sirius system.

  Lehman, the psychiatrist, pulled up a webchair to the kibitzer’s position between Lee and Charnovsky.

  “Mind if I watch?” He was trim and athletic looking, kept himself tanned under the UV lights in the ship’s gym booth.

  Within minutes they were discussing the chances of finding anything on the planet below them.

  “You sound terribly pessimistic,” the psychiatrist said.

  “The planet looks pessimistic,” Charnovsky replied. “It was scoured clean when Sirius B exploded, and life has hardly had a chance to get started again on its surface.”

  “But it is Earthlike, isn’t it?”

  “A-hah!” Charnovsky burst. “To a simple-minded robot it may seem Earthlike. The air is breathable. The chemical composition of the rocks is similar. But no man would call that desert an Earthlike world. There are no trees, no grasses, it’s too hot, the air is too dry . . .”

  “And the planet’s too you
ng to have evolved an intelligent species,” Lee added, “which makes me the biggest afterthought of all.”

  “Well, there might be something down there for an anthropologist to puzzle over,” Lehman countered. “Things will look better once we get down to the surface. I think we’re all getting a touch of cabin fever in here.”

  Before Lee could reply, Lou D’Orazio—the ship’s geophysicist and cartographer—came bounding through the hatchway of the rec room and, taking advantage of the half-gravity, crossed to their chess table in two jumps.

  “Look at this!”

  He slapped a still-warm photograph on the chess table, scattering pieces over the floor. Charnovsky swore something Slavic, and everyone in the room turned.

  It was one of the regular cartographic photos, crisscrossed with grid lines. It showed the shoreline of one of the planet’s mini-oceans. A line of steep bluffs followed the shore.

  “It looks like an ordinary—”

  “Aspertti un momento . . . wait a minute . . . see here.”

  D’Orazio pulled a magnifier from his coverall pocket. “Look!”

  Lee peered through the magnifier. Fuzzy, wavering, gray.

  “It looks like—”

  Lehman said, “Whatever it is, it’s standing on two legs.”

  “It’s a man,” Charnovsky said flatly.

  * * *

  Within minutes the whole scientific staff had piled into the rec room and crowded around the table, together with all the crew members except the two on duty in the command globe.

  The ship’s automatic cameras took twenty more photographs of the area before their orbit carried them over the horizon from the spot. Five of the pictures showed the shadowy figure of a bipedal creature.

  The spot was in darkness by the time their orbit carried them over it again. Infrared and radar sensors showed nothing.

  They squinted at the pictures, handed them from person to person, talked and argued and wondered through two entire eight-hour shifts. Crewmen left for duty and returned again. The planet turned beneath them, and once again the shoreline was bathed in Sirius’s hot glow. But there was no trace of the humanoid. Neither the cameras, the manned telescopes, nor the other sensors could spot anything.