The Best of Bova

by Ben Bova

  “It’s already working,” he said. “We’re on our way now, baby. All around the world. We’ll get those impotent old bastards so dependent on these machines that they’ll be too busy to do anything else.”

  “While those of us who don’t need the machines take over the world.”

  “Why not?” He broke into a broad grin. “After all, those who can, do.”

  THE MASK OF THE RAD DEATH

  This one was written purely as an exercise.

  Edgar Allan Poe is one of the best American writers and poets. He made seminal contributions to the genres of horror and the detective story, as well as to science fiction. His poetry often has a darkly brooding character that is at once menacing and pathetic.

  One of his most chilling short stories is “The Masque of the Red Death.” If you have not read it, you should. If you have read it, you remember it. I have no doubt of that; it is a powerful tale of the futility of trying to avoid death.

  It struck me that Poe’s story could be converted into a modern scene of nuclear holocaust by changing only a few words. The “red death,” for example, becomes the “rad death,” with rad standing both for radioactivity and the unit that physicists and physicians use to measure how much radioactivity a living organism receives.

  So I deliberately rewrote Poe’s story into a modern nuclear-war setting, to see how many words had to be changed. Only a couple of dozen.

  The exercise gave me a new appreciation for the ways in which Poe achieved his morbid effects. I do not recommend this kind of exercise to every person who is interested in learning to write, although there is much to be learned from it.

  I do recommend that the beginning writer spend as much time reading as writing, or even more. And read widely! Do not limit yourself to reading science fiction alone. There is a tremendous world of literature, the memories of the English-speaking peoples and more. Tap into that treasury of knowledge and experience. To ignore it is akin to submitting to a lobotomy.

  If you want to write, read. If you want to write well, read as widely as you can. Writers are generalists, of necessity. Specialization is for insects.

  The “rad death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and the slow bleedings of the gums and the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim were the pest ban which shut him out from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease were the incidents of an agonizing length of weeks, or often, months.

  But Senator Prosper was determined and dauntless and sagacious. When Washington was half depopulated by the bombs and their fallout, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and equally determined friends from among the military officers and bureaucrats of the city, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his well-prepared underground shelters. This was the senator’s own eccentric yet practical taste. A strong and hidden gateway was its entrance, embedded in the burnt-out wilds of a national park. The gateway had a hatch of incorruptible metal.

  The officers and bureaucrats, having entered, brought acetylene torches and brilliant lasers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave no means of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair from without or of frenzy from within. The shelter was amply provisioned. With such precautions the inmates might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime, it was folly to grieve, or to think.

  The senator had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons (some of them former media commentators), there were improvisatori (many from the Congress), there were live rock dancers, there were musicians (on tape), there were video games, there was Beauty, there was wine. There was plentiful electrical power, ironically provided by a nuclear generator buried even deeper than the underground place itself. All these and the security were within. Without was the “Rad Death.”

  It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the fallout seethed most furiously abroad, that Senator Prosper entertained his thousands of friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.

  It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven—an imperial suite carved out of bedrock far below the hellish surface of the world. In many places, such suites form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different, as might have been expected from the senator’s love of the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards (for reasons of redundancy in radiation protection), and at each turn a novel effect.

  To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite. These windows were of leaded glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue—and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and litten with orange—the fifth with white—the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet—a deep blood color.

  Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod, bearing an electric lamp cunningly fashioned to resemble a brazier of fire that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illuminated the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But in the western or black chamber the effect of the firelight that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood- tinted panes was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all.

  It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall a gigantic clock of ebony. Its digital readout flickered with a dull, monotonous blink, and when the minutes had accumulated to a new hour, there came forth from the electronic amplifiers within the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the music tapes were programmed to pause, momentarily, so that all could harken to the sound; and thus the dancers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the dancers looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies), there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then there were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.

  In spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel. The tastes of
the senator were peculiar. He had a fine eye for colors and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric luster. There were some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was not.

  He had directed, in great part, the movable embellishments of the seven chambers, upon the occasion of this great fete, and it was his own guiding taste which had given character to the costumes of the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm—much of what has been seen in discos. There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams—writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms and causing the wild music of the laserdisk to seem as the echo of their steps.

  And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, momently, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away—they have endured but an instant—and a light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many tinted windows through which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture; for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-colored panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appalls; and to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulge in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.

  But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there was sounded the twelfth hour upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the dancers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of the thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who reveled. And thus, again, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure that had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumor of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive at first of disapprobation and surprise—then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust.

  In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade license of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the senator’s indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be properly made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed.

  The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the silver habiliments of a radiation suit. The helmet and face of the mask which concealed the visage was made up so nearly to resemble an actual suit of the type used in hellish high-rad environments that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revelers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to begrime his suit and tear it to tatters, as if he had been up on the surface where the fires of death still burned. His vesture glowed with an unnatural light—and it was sprinkled with the scarlet horror of blood.

  When the eyes of Senator Prosper fell upon this spectral image (which with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked uncertainly, almost staggering, to and fro among the dancers) he was seen to be convulsed, in the first moment with a strong shudder of either terror or distaste; but, in the next, his brow reddened with rage.

  “Who dares?” he demanded hoarsely of the group that stood around him—“who dares thus make a mockery of our woes? Uncase the varlet—that we may know whom we have to expel to the surface. Will no one stir at my bidding?—stop and strip him, I say, of those reddened vestures of sacrilege!”

  It was in the eastern or blue chamber in which stood Senator Prosper as he uttered these words. They rang throughout the seven rooms loudly and clearly—for the senator was a bold and robust man, and the music had become hushed at the waving of his hand.

  It was in the blue room where stood the senator, with a group of pale courtiers by his side. At first as he spoke, there was a slight rushing of movement in the direction of the intruder, who at the moment was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate, slow steps, made closer approach to the speaker. But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole party, there were found none who put forth hand to seize him; so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the senator’s person; and, while the vast assembly, as if with one impulse, shrank from the centers of the rooms to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same halting and nearly staggering step which had distinguished him from the first, through the blue chamber to the purple— through the purple to the green—through the green to the orange—through this again to the white—and even thence to the violet where a decided movement had been made to arrest him.

  It was then, however, that Senator Prosper, maddening with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him on account of the deadly horror that had seized upon all. He bore aloft a drawn pistol, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned slowly around and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry—and the pistol dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death Senator Prosper. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revelers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall black figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the ripped cerements and bloodied face mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by a living form.

  And now was acknowledged the presence of the Rad Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with the last of them. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay of the Rad Death held illimitable domination over all.

  (With gratitude, and apologies, to Edgar Allan Poe.)

  THY KINGDOM COME

  In 1991 Charles Sheffield, Frederik Pohl, Jerry Pournelle, and I were commissioned by The World & I magazine to write nonfiction scenarios depicting what the world might look like in the year 2042. The scenarios were to be based on reports written by world-recognized leaders in various technological fields such as transportation, energy, space exploration, oceanography, etc.

  Each of us was asked to slant his scenario either positively or negatively. I was given the “slightly pessimistic” slant. The scenario I wrote is included in this book, after the story that follows this introduction.


  “Thy Kingdom Come” is a work of fiction based on my scenario for The World & I assignment. Charles Sheffield got the idea of combining our nonfiction scenarios with four novelettes by the four of us and packaging the whole shebang in a book titled Future Quartet. Fine idea, and a good example of how professional writers use the materials they generate to develop new markets (i.e., money) for themselves.

  While the original scenario was based on a global view, and inputs from top technologists, I decided that the story would work best if it showed the same world of 2042 from the bottom of the heap: a worm’s-eye view, if you will. For that, I returned to my roots.

  I grew up in the narrow streets and row houses of South Philadelphia. Born at the nadir of the Great Depression of the 1930s, I saw as early as junior high school that there were some guys who preferred stealing to honest work, preferred violence to cooperation.

  We return to what I told you earlier in this book: Write about what you know. “Thy Kingdom Come” is about some of the wiseguys I grew up with. Most of them are dead now; most of them died young. More than that, though, the story is about the longing that even the snottiest of these wiseguys have for a normal, decent life. And it’s about how some of them struggle to break free of the vicious circle of ignorance and violence, to climb out of the cesspool and into the sunlight. A few succeed. Very few.

  “Thy Kingdom Come” is about two of those kids: one who succeeds (maybe) and one who comes close, but misses. In a way, it’s a true story. At least, it’s as true as I could make it.

  Audio transcript of testimony of Salvatore (Vic) Passalacqua

  I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I figured I hadda at least try. Y’know? The [deleted] Controllers had grabbed her in one of their swoops and I hadda get her back before they scrambled her [deleted] brains with their [deleted] sizzlers.