The Eagle Has Landed

by Neil Clarke

  He looks at the speedometer and sees with shock the needle at 100. He slows, the Thruway slows beneath him, and he drives calmly all the rest of the way back to Teaneck.

  That week his book proposal is returned with a polite letter; his name at least has brought him the courtesy of a personal response. The editor explains how interesting the poetry looks, how intrigued he is by the prospects, but why he must reluctantly refuse. The letter goes on to state that an account of his voyage would be of interest, but he is no longer assured of selling even that on the strength of his name.

  The next day he gets his renewal notice from the Air Force. He thinks of his $2,500 a month, he thinks of Kevin’s college, he thinks of his $20,000 in the bank. He has two days to decide. He thinks of four years ahead of him, of retirement and pension at forty-four.

  For some reason he goes to the typewriter. He sits at it for a long time, silent. Minutes pass, and then with great definiteness, he types his name, slowly and precisely. J. O. H. N. John, I have needs too. C. H. R. I. S. T. Christ, if you knew what you looked like. I. What am I? E. A. N. D. And the fear of God that had come on him in the capsule. R. E. W. S. The key strokes echo through the house.

  With Kevin, he watches the last Apollo unfold on television. They have been in orbit for two days now. NBC shows film of the launch. He hears Mission Control count down in its clear passionless voice. Andrews tenses, remembering the rocket’s thrust, that great fist crushing him, solid ground falling from him, the horizon canting in the window, blue sky fading to black, the noise of the booster dwindling, gravity abating, and then the slow silent dance of Earth below. On the screen, smoke curls, cables fall, but the rocket is still, even past zero. In the cabin it feels like liftoff starts ten seconds early; from the ground it appears ten seconds late.

  Now the rocket moves. The Saturn V has generated sufficient force, and it rises, slowly, majestically disencumbering itself of gravity. What sexual energy a rocket had. Charlotte had been at the lunar liftoff and she said later it was so sensual, so compelling, that warm sympathetic pulsings had started within her. When it was over, she said, people hurried away, awed and embarrassed by that immense potency.

  Or, rather, force: for NASA had stripped rockets of potency. The first rockets delivered missiles. They flew, fell, exploded. Their trajectories were dramatic curves. But at science’s imperative, now they flew straight up, out, dropped stages to hurl a payload of men at a weightless point in the sky. There was no arc to that, no climax. Andrews sees now that drama and sex are inextricably linked, that the rise and curve of one is the same as the other. Anything without a climax is ultimately disappointing. Give us missiles, not spaceships.

  NBC is live again. The two ships orbit. The screen is dark with static and crackling voices. They are positioning a camera to follow the docking. The Earth rolls slowly beneath, Apollo roams the skies. Over the far curving horizon is a dot, a hint of movement. Soyuz approaches, gaining dimension. It elongates. There is a garbled interchange of static, Russian, and English mixed.

  “Can you understand it, Dad?”

  “Shh.”

  The Russian manned program will continue, he has heard. So, imagining himself in space, he feels vaguely threatened by the sight of Soyuz. Perhaps he projects his own tension into the voice of the American pilot, but it seems to Andrews as jauntily nervous as a virgin on his first date.

  The far craft inclines in its approach. The two ships whisper through vast statics, they make minor adjustments as their trajectories close. The radio energy is dense as they make ready to touch. Electrons move, patterns shift. Data flickers in great networks around the world.

  Kevin is leaning forward, his breath coming quick and shallow. In the moment before contact he hunches, feeling the shadow of contacts to come in this one. In the screen’s light Andrews sees everything embedded in its moment: blue flickers on the wet brown beer bottle he has not touched, Kevin’s rapt face washed pale, his own reclining posture, a roll of fat at his once-solid belly.

  The ships link. Apollo mates with Soyuz. The gates are open, static floods between them, the astronauts and cosmonauts can move between vessels. The mission is consummated, the program is over. The camera drifts and Earth swims slowly under it. Ochres, blues, whites, haloed in static. The moon forgotten.

  Something recedes in Andrews.

  It is his fortieth birthday.

  In the yard he studies the moon, and the empty blackness where the two vessels reel and clasp each other. The crews will shuttle between crafts for a bit, trade dull laborious jokes and dry paste meals, then disengage and return to Earth, nothing reached, nothing resolved. The first time America pulled back from a frontier.

  When he goes in, Kevin is gone. He turns off the television. On impulse he goes to the attic to get the heavy binoculars he bought years ago in Okinawa. There is the smell of time behind the attic door, a musty wasting smell that makes him feel heartsick and lost. The attic is neat and orderly, but he cannot find the binoculars. Finally he steps back out, shuts the door.

  He stands in the hall, feeling the house’s emptiness. He listens to its hums and murmurs. Downstairs in the dark the refrigerator turns on. He is numb. He stands in a paralyzed panic at the top of the long dim stairway, unmoving for several minutes.

  There is a ringing in his ears now and his hands are cold. He drifts down the hall into Kevin’s room. It is dark, with only a pale illumination flooding from one window. The moon is gibbous again, waning back through all its phases. It is very late, after midnight; a new day has started.

  Kevin lies angled back on the bed, binoculars propped by thin white arms bent double against his chest. Andrews enters but does not sit on the bed for fear of breaking the view. Nor does he speak. A minute drags by. Andrews is trembling. He says, “What do you see?”

  His son shrugs. “Craters.”

  He looks and sees the blurred patches of gray against white. Copernicus, Ptolemy, Clavius . . . the dead. He feels remote and cold and untouchable. Kevin looks at him.

  “Dad? Are we ever going back there?”

  He sighed, tired, or on the edge of sorrow, though sorrow was a pointless thing. Waves receded from him. Each word broke a vast illimitable silence. “I don’t know, son. I don’t know.”

  1988

  Kim Stanley Robinson is a bestselling author and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, and 2312. In 2008, he was named a Hero of the Environment by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. His latest novel is Red Moon.

  THE LUNATICS

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  They were very near the center of the moon, Jakob told them. He was the newest member of the bullpen, but already their leader.

  “How do you know?” Solly challenged him. It was stifling, the hot air thick with the reek of their sweat, and a pungent stink from the waste bucket in the corner. In the pure black, under the blanket of the rock’s basalt silence, their shifting and snuffling loomed large, defined the size of the pen. “I suppose you see it with your third eye.”

  Jakob had a laugh as big as his hands. He was a big man, never a doubt of that. “Of course not, Solly. The third eye is for seeing in the black. It’s a natural sense just like the others. It takes all the data from the rest of the senses, and processes them into a visual image transmitted by the third optic nerve, which runs from the forehead to the sight centers at the back of the brain. But you can only focus it by an act of the will—same as with all the other senses. It’s not magic. We just never needed it till now.”

  “So how do you know?”

  “It’s a problem in spherical geometry, and I solved it. Oliver and I solved it. This big vein of blue runs right down into the core, I believe, down into the moon’s molten heart where we can never go. But we’ll follow it as far as we can. Note how light we’re getti
ng. There’s less gravity near the center of things.”

  “I feel heavier than ever.”

  “You are heavy, Solly. Heavy with disbelief.”

  “Where’s Freeman?” Hester said in her crow’s rasp.

  No one replied.

  Oliver stirred uneasily over the rough basalt of the pen’s floor. First Naomi, then mute Elijah, now Freeman. Somewhere out in the shafts and caverns, tunnels and corridors—somewhere in the dark maze of mines, people were disappearing. Their pen was emptying, it seemed. And the other pens?

  “Free at last,” Jakob murmured.

  “There’s something out there,” Hester said, fear edging her harsh voice, so that it scraped Oliver’s nerves like the screech of an ore car’s wheels over a too-sharp bend in the tracks. “Something out there!”

  The rumor had spread through the bullpens already, whispered mouth to ear or in huddled groups of bodies. There were thousands of shafts bored through the rock, hundreds of chambers and caverns. Lots of these were closed off, but many more were left open, and there was room to hide—miles and miles of it. First some of their cows had disappeared. Now it was people too. And Oliver had heard a miner jabbering at the low edge of hysteria, about a giant foreman gone mad after an accident took both his arms at the shoulder—the arms had been replaced by prostheses, and the foreman had escaped into the black, where he preyed on miners off by themselves, ripping them up, feeding on them—

  They all heard the steely squeak of a car’s wheel. Up the mother shaft, past cross tunnel Forty; had to be foremen at this time of shift. Would the car turn at the fork to their concourse? Their hypersensitive ears focused on the distant sound; no one breathed. The wheels squeaked, turned their way. Oliver, who was already shivering, began to shake hard.

  The car stopped before their pen. The door opened, all in darkness. Not a sound from the quaking miners.

  Fierce white light blasted them and they cried out, leaped back against the cage bars vainly. Blinded, Oliver cringed at the clawing of a foreman’s hands, searching under his shirt and pants. Through pupils like pinholes he glimpsed brief black-and-white snapshots of gaunt bodies undergoing similar searches, then blows. Shouts, cries of pain, smack of flesh on flesh, an electric buzzing. Shaving their heads, could it be that time again already? He was struck in the stomach, choked around the neck. Hester’s long wiry brown arms, wrapped around her head. Scalp burned, buzzz all chopped up. Thrown to the rock.

  “Where’s the twelfth?” In the foremen’s staccato language. No one answered.

  The foremen left, light receding with them until it was black again, the pure dense black that was their own. Except now it was swimming with bright red bars, washing around in painful tears. Oliver’s third eye opened a little, which calmed him, because it was still a new experience; he could make out his companions, dim redblack shapes in the black, huddled over themselves, gasping.

  Jakob moved among them, checking for hurts, comforting. He cupped Oliver’s forehead and Oliver said, “It’s seeing already.”

  “Good work.” On his knees Jakob clumped to their shit bucket, took off the lid, reached in. He pulled something out. Oliver marveled at how clearly he was able to see all this. Before, floating blobs of color had drifted in the black; but he had always assumed they were afterimages, or hallucinations. Only with Jakob’s instruction had he been able to perceive the patterns they made, the vision that they constituted. It was an act of will. That was the key.

  Now, as Jakob cleaned the object with his urine and spit, Oliver found that the eye in his forehead saw even more, in sharp blood etchings. Jakob held the lump overhead, and it seemed it was a little lamp, pouring light over them in a wavelength they had always been able to see, but had never needed before. By its faint ghostly radiance the whole pen was made clear, a structure etched in blood, redblack on black. “Promethium,” Jakob breathed. The miners crowded around him, faces lifted to it. Solly had a little pug nose, and squinched his face terribly in the effort to focus. Hester had a face to go with her voice, stark bones under skin scored with lines. “The most precious element. On Earth our masters rule by it. All their civilization is based on it, on the movement inside it, electrons escaping their shells and crashing into neutrons, giving off heat and more blue as well. So they condemn us to a life of pulling it out of the moon for them.”

  He chipped at the chunk with a thumbnail. They all knew precisely its clayey texture, its heaviness, the dull silvery gray of it, which pulsed green under some lasers, blue under others. Jakob gave each of them a sliver of it. “Take it between two molars and crush hard. Then swallow.”

  “It’s poison, isn’t it?” said Solly.

  “After years and years.” The big laugh, filling the black. “We don’t have years and years, you know that. And in the short run it helps your vision in the black. It strengthens the will.”

  Oliver put the soft heavy sliver between his teeth, chomped down, felt the metallic jolt, swallowed. It throbbed in him. He could see the others’ faces, the mesh of the pen walls, the pens farther down the concourse, the robot tracks—all in the lightless black.

  “Promethium is the moon’s living substance,” Jakob said quietly. “We walk in the nerves of the moon, tearing them out under the lash of the foremen. The shafts are a map of where the neurons used to be. As they drag the moon’s mind out by its roots, to take it back to Earth and use it for their own enrichment, the lunar consciousness fills us and we become its mind ourselves, to save it from extinction.”

  They joined hands: Solly, Hester, Jakob and Oliver. The surge of energy passed through them, leaving a sweet afterglow.

  Then they lay down on their rock bed, and Jakob told them tales of his home, of the Pacific dockyards, of the cliffs and wind and waves, and the way the sun’s light lay on it all. Of the jazz in the bars, and how trumpet and clarinet could cross each other. “How do you remember?” Solly asked plaintively. “They turned me blank.”

  Jakob laughed hard. “I fell on my mother’s knitting needles when I was a boy, and one went right up my nose. Chopped the hippocampus in two. So all my life my brain has been storing what memories it can somewhere else. They burned a dead part of me, and left the living memory intact.”

  “Did it hurt?” Hester croaked.

  “The needles? You bet. A flash like the foremen’s prods, right there in the center of me. I suppose the moon feels the same pain, when we mine her. But I’m grateful now, because it opened my third eye right at that moment. Ever since then I’ve seen with it. And down here, without our third eye it’s nothing but the black.”

  Oliver nodded, remembering.

  “And something out there,” croaked Hester.

  Next shift start Oliver was keyed by a foreman, then made his way through the dark to the end of the long, slender vein of blue he was working. Oliver was a tall youth, and some of the shaft was low; no time had been wasted smoothing out the vein’s irregular shape. He had to crawl between the narrow tracks bolted to the rocky uneven floor, scraping through some gaps as if working through a great twisted intestine.

  At the shaft head he turned on the robot, a long low-slung metal box on wheels. He activated the laser drill, which faintly lit the exposed surface of the blue, blinding him for some time. When he regained a certain visual equilibrium—mostly by ignoring the weird illumination of the drill beam— he typed instructions into the robot, and went to work drilling into the face, then guiding the robot’s scoop and hoist to the broken pieces of blue. When the big chunks were in the ore cars behind the robot, he jackhammered loose any fragments of the ore that adhered to the basalt walls, and added them to the cars before sending them off.

  This vein was tapering down, becoming a mere tendril in the lunar body, and there was less and less room to work in. Soon the robot would be too big for the shaft, and they would have to bore through basalt; they would follow the tendril to its very end, hoping for a bole or a fan.

  At first Oliver didn’t much mind the shif
t’s work. But IR-directed cameras on the robot surveyed him as well as the shaft face, and occasional shocks from its prod reminded him to keep hustling. And in the heat and bad air, as he grew ever more famished, it soon enough became the usual desperate, painful struggle to keep to the required pace.

  Time disappeared into that zone of endless agony that was the latter part of a shift. Then he heard the distant klaxon of shift’s end, echoing down the shaft like a cry in a dream. He turned the key in the robot and was plunged into noiseless black, the pure absolute of Nonbeing. Too tired to try opening his third eye, Oliver started back up the shaft by feel, following the last ore car of the shift. It rolled quickly ahead of him and was gone.

  In the new silence distant mechanical noises were like creaks in the rock. He measured out the shift’s work, having marked its beginning on the shaft floor: eighty-nine lengths of his body. Average.

  It took a long time to get back to the junction with the shaft above his. Here there was a confluence of veins and the room opened out, into an odd chamber some seven feet high, but wider than Oliver could determine in every direction. When he snapped his fingers there was no rebound at all. The usual light at the far end of the low chamber was absent. Feeling sandwiched between two endless rough planes of rock, Oliver experienced a sudden claustrophobia; there was a whole world overhead, he was buried alive . . . He crouched and every few steps tapped one rail with his ankle, navigating blindly, a hand held forward to discover any dips in the ceiling.