The Best of Bova

by Ben Bova

  Suddenly Jimmy wanted to cry. He held back the tears, just barely. But he sank his head into his hands.

  “My best buddy,” he heard himself say, his voice sounding all choked up. “I stabbed him.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Donna said gently.

  “Maybe he’ll die . . .”

  “You didn’t do it on purpose. It was an accident.”

  Jimmy straightened up and looked at her. She reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault,” she repeated.

  “Yes, it was,” Jimmy knew. “I was goofing off. Just like I always do. If I hadn’t been such a jerk . . .”

  A doctor pushed through the double doors. He looked very serious, almost angry. Mr. Martinez went over from the receptionist’s desk to the white-jacketed intern.

  “You brought in the boy with the laceration under his arm?” the doctor asked.

  “Yes,” Mr. Martinez said. “His lung . . .”

  The doctor shook his head. “He tasted blood in his mouth?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s because he bit his tongue. There’s nothing wrong with his lung.”

  Mr. Martinez’ jaw dropped open. Then he smiled. Jimmy felt himself take a deep, relieved breath.

  “He’s just got a scratch,” the doctor said. “He’ll be out in a minute.”

  Jimmy wanted to laugh, to jump to his feet and shout. But he felt too weak to move.

  In a few minutes Paul came back out into the waiting room, grinning sheepishly. There was a bandage under his right arm. They all clustered around him.

  “Where’s my jacket?” he asked.

  Jimmy started to make a teasing answer, then realized that this was no time for being funny. “We must’ve left it back in the gym.”

  “We’ll have to walk back to the Y dressed like this?” Donna looked aghast.

  Jimmy realized that they were an odd-looking crew: wearing knee-length fencing pants, or shorts, or sweatshirts, or chest protectors.

  Mr. Martinez grinned. “I guess we’ll have to walk the two blocks dressed this way, all right. We’d better stick close together.”

  “Maybe we should’ve brought our foils,” one of the kids said. They all laughed and started for the door of the waiting room.

  “All for one, and one for all,” somebody shouted.

  Mr. Martinez pulled up beside Jimmy. “Do you still think fencing is for sissies?”

  Jimmy could feel his face go red. “Naw, I guess not. It’s a tough game. I’ll have to work real hard at it.”

  “You’re coming back next week?” Paul asked.

  Jimmy nodded, and inside his head he realized that something good had come out of all this. “Yep. I’ll be back. And no more goofing off. I want to see if I can really become a good fencer.”

  “Good!” said Mr. Martinez. “We have our first competition against another team at the end of the month. I want to be able to depend on both you boys for our team.”

  “You can,” they said together, then laughed at how much alike they sounded.

  THE SHINING ONES

  If you have read my book of advice to writers, Notes To a Science Fiction Writer, then you have seen a structural analysis of this story, The Shining Ones. Rather than repeat that analysis here, let me tell you how censorship affects the publishing business .

  The Shining Ones was originally written at the request of a publishing house which wanted to start a series of short novels for “reluctant readers:” that is, people of young adult age who had not learned to read much beyond the grammar-school level. The basic ideas in the plot, and the characterizations of the main personages in the story, were carefully reviewed and approved by the book company’s editor. When I delivered the manuscript the editor reported, at first, that she liked it very much. But she had to get approval from a board of “experts” that the publisher had hired: a group of teachers and psychologists whose main function, as I understood it, was to decide if the story would be readable by its intended audience.

  The “experts” approved the story, but with a catch. They felt that the hero’s fatal disease was too depressing; that part of the story should be dropped. When I was informed of this by the editor, I pointed out that Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol would hardly be the memorable story it is if Tiny Tim had suffered merely from acne, instead of a crippling, life-threatening disease. No use. The “experts” were adamant. Although I was not allowed to meet them or argue my case with them, their decision was final: Change the story or have it rejected.

  I withdrew the story and published it elsewhere. As far as I know, no one has ever suffered mental or emotional disability because of this story. Particularly if they read to the end of it!

  1

  Johnny Donato lay flat on his belly in the scraggly grass and watched the strangers’ ship carefully.

  It was resting on the floor of the desert, shining and shimmering in the bright New Mexico sunlight. The ship was huge and round like a golden ball, like the sun itself. It touched the ground as lightly as a helium-filled balloon. In fact, Johnny wasn’t sure that it really did touch the ground at all.

  He squinted his eyes, but he still couldn’t tell if the ship was really in contact with the sandy desert flatland. It cast no shadow, and it seemed to glow from some energies hidden inside itself. Again, it reminded Johnny of the sun.

  But these people didn’t come from anywhere near our sun, Johnny knew. They come from a world of a different star .

  He pictured in his mind how small and dim the stars look at night. Then he glanced at the powerful glare of the sun. How far away the stars must be ! And these strangers have travelled all that distance to come here. To Earth. To New Mexico. To this spot in the desert.

  Johnny knew he should feel excited. Or maybe scared. But ail he felt right now was curious. And hot. The sun was beating down on the rocky ledge where he lay watching, baking his bare arms and legs. He was used to the desert sun. It never bothered him.

  But today something was burning inside Johnny. At first he thought it might be the sickness. Sometimes it made him feel hot and weak. But no, that wasn’t it. He had the sickness, there was nothing anyone could do about that. But it didn’t make him feel this way.

  This thing inside him was something he had never felt before. Maybe it was the same kind of thing that made his father yell in fury, ever since he had been laid off from his job. Anger was part of it, and maybe shame, too. But there was something else, something Johnny couldn’t put a name to.

  So he lay there flat on his belly, wondering about himself and the strange ship from the stars. He waited patiently, like his Apache friends would, while the sun climbed higher in the bright blue sky and the day grew hotter and hotter.

  The ship had landed three days earlier. Landed was really the wrong word. It had touched down as gently as a cloud drifts against the tops of the mountains. Sergeant Warner had seen it. He just happened to be driving down the main highway in his State Police cruiser when the ship appeared. He nearly drove into the roadside culvert, staring at the ship instead of watching his driving.

  Before the sun went down that day, hundreds of Army trucks and tanks had poured down the highway, swirling up clouds of dust that could be seen even from Johnny’s house in Albuquerque, miles away. They surrounded the strange ship and let no one come near it.

  Johnny could see them now, a ring of steel and guns. Soldiers paced slowly between the tanks, with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. Pretending that he was an Apache warrior, Johnny thought about how foolish the Army was to make the young soldiers walk around in the heat instead of allowing them to sit in the shade. He knew that the soldiers were sweating and grumbling and cursing the heat. As if that would make it cooler. They even wore their steel helmets; a good way to fry their brains.

  Each day since the ship had landed, exactly when the sun was highest in the sky, three strangers would step out of the ship. At least, that’s what the people were saying back in t
own. The newspapers carried no word of the strangers, except front-page complaints that the Army wouldn’t let news reporters or television camera crews anywhere near the star ship.

  The three strangers came out of their ship each day, for a few minutes. Johnny wanted to talk to them. Maybe—just maybe—they could cure his sickness. All the doctors he had ever seen just shook their heads and said that nothing could be done. Johnny would never live to be a full-grown man. But these strangers, if they really came from another world, a distant star, they might know how to cure a disease that no doctor on Earth could cure.

  Johnny could feel his heart racing as he thought about it. He forced himself to stay calm.Before you can get cured , he told himself, you’ve got to talk to the strangers. And before you can do that, you’ve got to sneak past all those soldiers .

  A smear of dust on the highway caught his eye. It was a State Police car, heading toward the Army camp. Sergeant Warner, most likely. Johnny figured that his mother had realized by now he had run away, and had called the police to find him. So he had another problem: avoid getting found by the police.

  He turned back to look at the ship again. Suddenly his breath caught in his throat. The three strangers were standing in front of the ship. Without opening a hatch, without any motion at all. They were justthere , as suddenly as the blink of an eye.

  They were tall and slim and graceful, dressed in simple-looking coveralls that seemed to glow, just like their ship.

  And they cast no shadows!

  2

  The strangers stood there for several minutes. A half-dozen people went out toward them, two in Army uniforms, the others in civilian clothes. After a few minutes the strangers disappeared. Just like that. Gone. The six men seemed just as stunned as Johnny felt. They milled around for a few moments, as if trying to figure out where the strangers had gone to. Then they slowly walked back toward the trucks and tanks and other soldiers.

  Johnny pushed himself back down from the edge of the hill he was on. He sat up, safely out of view of the soldiers and police, and checked his supplies. A canteen full of water, a leather sack that held two quickly made sandwiches and a couple of oranges. He felt inside the sack to see if there was anything else. Nothing except the wadded-up remains of the plastic wrap that had been around the other two sandwiches he had eaten earlier. The only other thing he had brought with him was a blanket to keep himself warm during the chill desert night.

  There wasn’t much shade, and the sun was getting really fierce. Johnny got to his feet and walked slowly to a clump of bushes that surrounded a stunted dead tree. He sat down and leaned his back against the shady side of the tree trunk.

  For a moment he thought about his parents.

  His mother was probably worried sick by now. Johnny often got up early and left the house before she was awake, but he always made sure to be back by lunchtime. His father would be angry. But he was always angry nowadays—most of the time it was about losing his job. But Johnny knew that what was really bugging his father was Johnny’s own sickness.

  Johnny remembered Dr. Pemberton’s round red face, which was normally so cheerful. But Dr. Pemberton shook his head grimly when he told Johnny’s father:

  “It’s foolish for you to spend what little money you have, John. It’s incurable. You could send the boy to one of the research centers, and they’ll try out some of the new treatments on him. But it won’t help him. There is no cure.”

  Johnny hadn’t been supposed to hear that. The door between the examination room where he was sitting and Dr. Pemberton’s office had been open only a crack. It was enough for his keen ears, though.

  Johnny’s father sounded stunned. “But. . . he looks fine. And he says he feels okay.”

  “I know.” Dr. Pemberton’s voice sounded as heavy as his roundly overweight body. “The brutal truth, however, is that he has less than a year to live. The disease is very advanced. Luckily, for most of the time he’ll feel fine. But towards the end. . .”

  “These research centers,” Johnny’s father said, his voice starting to crack. “The scientists are always coming up with new vaccines. . .”

  Johnny had never heard his father sound like that: like a little boy who had been caught stealing or something, and was begging for a chance to escape getting punished.

  “You can send him to a research center,” Dr. Pemberton said, slowly. “They’ll use him to learn more about the disease. But there’s no cure in sight, John. Not this year. Or next. And that’s all the time he has.”

  And then Johnny heard something he had never heard before in his whole life: his father was crying.

  They didn’t tell him.

  He rode back home with his father, and the next morning his mother looked as if she had been crying all night. But they never said a word to him about it. And he never told them that he knew.

  Maybe it would have been different if he had a brother or sister to talk to. And he couldn’t tell the kids at school, or his friends around the neighborhood. What do you say? “Hey there, Nicko. . . I’m going to die around Christmas sometime.”

  No. Johnny kept silent, like the Apache he often dreamed he was. He played less and less with his friends, spent more and more of his time alone.

  And then the ship came.

  It had to mean something. A ship from another star doesn’t just plop down practically in your back yard by accident.

  Why did the strangers come to Earth?

  No one knew. And Johnny didn’t really care. All he wanted was a chance to talk to them, to get them to cure him. Maybe—who knew?—maybe they were here to find him and cure him!

  He dozed off, sitting there against the tree. The heat was sizzling, there was no breeze at all, and nothing for Johnny to do until darkness. With his mind buzzing and jumbling a million thoughts together, his eyes drooped shut and he fell asleep.

  “Johnny Donato!”

  The voice was like a crack of thunder. Johnny snapped awake, so surprised that he didn’t even think of being scared.

  “Johnny Donate! This is Sergeant Warner. We know you’re around here, so come out from wherever you’re hiding.”

  Johnny flopped over on his stomach and peered around. He was pretty well hidden by the bushes that surrounded the tree. Looking carefully in all directions, he couldn’t see Sergeant Warner or anyone else.

  “Johnny Donato!” the voice repeated. “This is Sergeant Warner. . .”

  Only now the voice seemed to be coming from farther away. Johnny realized that the State Police sergeant was speaking into an electric bullhorn.

  Very slowly, Johnny crawled on his belly up to the top of the little hill. He made certain to stay low and keep in the scraggly grass.

  Off to his right a few hundred yards was Sergeant Warner, slowly walking across the hot sandy ground. His hat was pushed back on his head, pools of sweat stained his shirt. He held the bullhorn up to his mouth, so that Johnny couldn’t really see his face at all. The sergeant’s mirror-shiny sunglasses hid the top half of his face.

  Moving still farther away, the sergeant yelled into his bullhorn, “Now listen, Johnny. Your mother’s scared half out of her mind. And your father doesn’t even know you’ve run away—he’s still downtown, hasn’t come home yet. You come out now, you hear? It’s hot out here, and I’m getting mighty unhappy about you.”

  Johnny almost laughed out loud. What are you going to do, kill me?

  “Dammit, Johnny, I know you’re around here! Now, do I have to call in other cars and the helicopter, just to find one stubborn boy?”

  Helicopters! Johnny frowned. He had no doubts that he could hide from a dozen police cars and the men in them. But helicopters were something else.

  He crawled back to the bushes and the dead tree and started scooping up loose sand with his bare hands. Pretty soon he was puffing and sweaty. But finally he had a shallow trench that was long enough to lie in.

  He got into the trench and pulled his food pouch and canteen in with him. Then he
spread the blanket over himself. By sitting up and leaning forward, he could reach a few small stones. He put them on the lower corners of the blanket to anchor them down. Then he lay down and pulled the blanket over him.

  The blanket was brown, and probably wouldn’t be spotted from a helicopter. Lying there under it, staring at the fuzzy brightness two inches over his nose, Johnny told himself he was an Apache hiding out from the Army.

  It was almost true.

  It got very hot in Johnny’s hideout. Time seemed to drag endlessly. The air became stifling; Johnny could hardly breathe. Once he thought he heard the drone of a helicopter, but it was far off in the distance. Maybe it was just his imagination.

  He drifted off to sleep again.

  Voices woke him up once more. More than one voice this time, and he didn’t recognize who was talking. But they were very close by—they weren’t using a bullhorn or calling out to him.

  “Are you really sure he’s out here?”

  “Where else would a runaway kid go? His mother says he hasn’t talked about anything but that weirdo ship for the past three days.”

  “Well, it’s a big desert. We’re never going to find him standing around here jabbering.”

  “I got an idea.” The voices started to get fainter, as if the men were walking away.

  “Yeah? What is it?”

  Johnny stayed very still and strained his ears to hear them.

  “Those Army guys got all sorts of fancy electronic stuff. Why don’t we use them instead of walking around here frying our brains?”

  “They had some of that stuff on the helicopter, didn’t they?”

  The voices were getting fainter and fainter.

  “Yeah—but instead of trying to find a needle in a haystack, we ought to play it smart.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Johnny wanted to sit up, to hear them better. But he didn’t dare move.

  “Why not set up the Army’s fancy stuff and point it at the ship? That’s where the kid wants to go. Instead of searching the whole damned desert for him. . .”