by Anthology
He punched an entry on the computer’s keyboard at his side, then turned to face her. “Linda, I haven’t really had time to figure out what I feel. You’re a complicated girl; maybe too complicated for me. Life’s got enough twists in it.”
Her mouth drooped a little.
“On the other hand,” he added, “we WASPS ought to stick together. Not many of us left.”
That brought a faint smile. “I’m not a WASP. My real name’s Szymanski . . . I changed it when I started modeling.”
“Oh. Another complication.”
She was about to reply when the radio speaker crackled, “AF-9, this is Cheyenne. Cheyenne to AF-9.”
Kinsman leaned over and thumbed the transmitter switch. “AF-9 to ; Cheyenne. You’re coming through faint but clear.”
“Roger, Nine. We’re receiving your telemetry. All systems look green from here.”
“Manual check of systems also green,” Kinsman said. “Mission profile ; okay, no deviations. Tasks about ninety percent complete.”
“Roger. Ground control suggests you begin checking out your spacecraft on the next orbit. You are scheduled for reentry in ten hours.”
“Right. Will do.”
“Okay, Chet. Everything looks good from here. Anything else to report, ol’ Founding Father?”
“Mind your own business.” He turned the transmitter off.
Linda was smiling at him.
“What’s so funny?”
“You are. You’re getting very touchy about this whole business.”
“It’s going to stay touchy for a long time to come. Those guys’ll hound me for years about this.”
“You could always tell lies.”
“About you? No, I don’t think I could do that. If the girl was anonymous, that’s one thing. But they all know you, know where you work . . .”
“You’re a gallant officer. I suppose that kind of rumor would get back to New York.”
Kinsman grinned. “You could even make the front page of the National Enquirer.”
She laughed at that. “I’ll bet they’d pull out some of my old bikini pictures.”
“Careful now,” Kinsman put up a warning hand. “Don’t stir up my imagination any more than it already is. I’m having a hard enough time being gallant right now.”
They remained apart, silent, Kinsman sitting at the control desk, Linda drifting back toward the galley, nearly touching the curtain that screened off the sleeping area.
The ground control center called in and Kinsman gave a terse report. When he looked up at Linda again, she was sitting in front of the observation port across the aisle from the galley. Looking back at Kinsman, her face was troubled now, her eyes . . . he wasn’t sure what was in her eyes. They looked different: no longer ice-cool, no longer calculating; they looked aware, concerned, almost frightened.
Still Kinsman stayed silent. He checked and double-checked the control board, making absolutely certain that every valve and transistor aboard the lab was working perfectly. Glancing at his watch: Five more minutes before Ascension calls. He checked the lighted board again.
Ascension called in exactly on schedule. Feeling his innards tightening, Kinsman gave his standard report in a deliberately calm and mechanical way. Ascension signed off.
With a long last look at the controls, Kinsman pushed himself out of the seat and drifted, hands faintly touching the grips along the aisle, toward Linda.
“You’ve been awfully quiet,” he said, standing over her.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said a while ago.” What was it in her eyes? Anticipation? Fear? “It . . . it has been a damned lonely life, Chet.”
He took her arm and lifted her gently from the chair and kissed her.
“But . . .”
“It’s all right,” he whispered. “No one will bother us. No one will know.”
She shook her head. “It’s not that easy, Chet. It’s not that simple.”
‘Why not? We’re here together . . . what’s so complicated?”
“But—doesn’t anything bother you? You’re floating around in a dream. You’re surrounded by war machines, you’re living every minute with danger. If a pump fails or a meteor hits . . .”
“You think it’s any safer down there?”
“But life is complex, Chet. And love . . . well, there’s more to it than just having fun.”
“Sure there is. But it’s meant to be enjoyed, too. What’s wrong with taking an opportunity when you have it? What’s so damned complicated or important? We’re above the cares and worries of Earth. Maybe it’s only for a few hours, but it’s here and now, it’s us. They can’t touch us, they can’t force us to do anything or stop us from doing what we want to. We’re on our own. Understand? Completely on our own.”
She nodded, her eyes still wide with the look of a frightened animal. But her hands slid around him, and together they drifted back toward the control desk. Wordlessly, Kinsman turned off all the overhead lights, so that all they saw was the glow of the control board and the flickering of the Computer as it murmured to itself.
They were in their own world now, their private cosmos, floating freely and softly in the darkness. Touching, drifting, coupling, searching the new seas and continents, they explored their world.
Jill stayed in the hammock until Linda entered the bunkroom, quietly, to see if she had awakened yet. Kinsman sat at the control desk feeling, not tired, but strangely numb.
The rest of the flight was strictly routine. Jill and Kinsman did their jobs, spoke to each other when they had to. Linda took a brief nap, then returned to snap a few last pictures. Finally they crawled back into the spacecraft, disengaged from the laboratory, and started the long curving flight back to Earth.
Kinsman took a last look at the majestic beauty of the planet, serene and incomparable among the stars, before touching the button that slid the heat shield over his viewport. Then they felt the surge of rocket thrust, dipped into the atmosphere, knew that air heated beyond endurance surrounded them in a fiery grip and made their tiny craft into a flaming, falling star. Pressed into his seat by the acceleration, Kinsman let the automatic controls bring them through reentry, through the heat and buffeting turbulence, down to an altitude where their finned craft could fly like a rocketplane.
He took control and steered the craft back toward Patrick Air Force Base, back to the world of men, of weather, of cities, of hierarchies and official regulations. He did this alone, silently; he didn’t need Jill’s help or anyone else’s. He flew the craft from inside his buttoned-tight pressure suit, frowning at the panel displays through his helmet’s faceplate.
Automatically, he checked with ground control and received permission to slide the heat shield back. The viewport showed him a stretch of darkening clouds spreading from the sea across the beach and well inland. His earphones were alive with other men’s voices now: wind conditions, altitude checks, speed estimates. He knew, but could not see that two jet planes were trailing along behind him, cameras focused on the returning spacecraft. To provide evidence if I crash.
They dipped into the clouds and a wave of gray mist hurtled up and covered the viewport. Kinsman’s eyes flicked to the radar screen slightly off to his right. The craft shuddered briefly, then they broke below the clouds and he could see the long black gouge of the runway looming before him. He pulled back slightly on the controls, hands and feet working instinctively, flashed over some scrubby vegetation, and flared the craft onto the runway. The landing skids touched once, bounced them up momentarily, then touched again with a grinding shriek. They skidded for more than a mile before stopping.
He leaned back in the seat and felt his body oozing sweat.
“Good landing,” Jill said.
“Thanks.” He turned off all the craft’s systems, hands moving automatically in response to long training. Then he slid his faceplate up, reached overhead and popped the hatch open.
“End of the line,” he said tiredly. “Everybody
out.”
He clambered up through the hatch, feeling his own weight with a sullen resentment, then helped Linda and finally Jill out of the spacecraft. They hopped down onto the blacktop runway. Two vans, an ambulance, and two fire trucks were rolling toward them from their parking stations at the end of the runway, a half-mile ahead.
Kinsman slowly took his helmet off. The Florida heat and humidity annoyed him now. Jill walked a few paces away from him, toward the approaching trucks.
He stepped toward Linda. Her helmet was off, and she was carrying a bag full of film.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said to her. “That business about having a lonely life . . . You know, you’re not the only one. And it doesn’t have to be that way. I can get to New York whenever . . .”
“Now who’s taking things seriously?” Her face looked calm again, cool, despite the glaring heat.
“But I mean . . .”
“Listen Chet. We had our kicks. Now you can tell your friends about it, and I can tell mine. We’ll both get a lot of mileage out of it. It’ll help our careers.”
“I never intended to . . . 1 didn’t . . .”
But she was already turning away from him, walking toward the men who were running up to meet them from the trucks. One of them, a civilian, had a camera in his hands. He dropped to one knee and took a picture of Linda holding the film out and smiling broadly.
Kinsman stood there with his mouth open.
Jill came back to him. “Well? Did you get what you were after?”
“No,” he said slowly. “I guess I didn’t.”
She started to put her hand out to him. “We never do, do we?”
Afterword
Chet Kinsman has been with me for a long time. This is the third story about him to be published. In terms of Kinsman’s own life history, this is the earliest story, the first part of his awakening to the real world. Or the first step in his fall from grace.
Kinsman was the star of a Great Unpublished Novel, written in 1950–51, which predicted the US vs. USSR space race with amazing accuracy. At least, I’ve been amazed. Unluckily, though, in those early fifties there; was a Senator McCarthy running loose. Not Gene. Publishers were distinctly unhappy about a book wherein the Russians got ahead of us in space. Obvious trash. And unhealthy. So that early version of Kinsman had to wait for the Russians to make his story believable. (In all honesty, the writing in that novel was pretty damned bad. Maybe it wasn’t all Holy Joe’s fault.)
The Mile High Club, incidentally, is no fiction. It was described to me by a man very much like Cy Calder. The windburn and fogged goggles, however, are reasonable extrapolations of the story as I originally heard it, and I offer them as an example of the hallmark of science fiction: accurate technical detail that lends credibility and pathos to the characters and their problems.
A MOUSE IN THE WALLS OF THE GLOBAL VILLAGE
Dean R. Koontz
Introduction
Watching a writer mature through examination of the body of the work as it grows, is an interesting pastime. A writer who begins as a bright and promising innovator, frequently plays out his song in three or four books and begins either repeating themes and approaches, or capitalizes on early success by giving the audience more of the same. Contrariwise, a writer who learns the craft through contemporary analogues of the “pulp school”—inexpensive paperbacks, men’s magazines of the lower orders, several of the lesser sf periodicals—and starts off as little better than a hack, can find a voice and a growing muscularity and develop into an important talent. There are numerous examples, they spring to mind almost unbidden, of both species of writer.
Dean Koontz represents the latter. His early work, for instance Star Quest (Ace, 1968), reads like typical, average, not-particularly-outstanding action-adventure of the 1940’s Amazing Stories variety. His recent novels—notably the brilliant Beastchild, The Dark Symphony, and Hell’s Gate (all Lancer, 1970)—demonstrate a vigorous fluency of imagination, a strengthening grasp of concept and plot-material, and an emerging style very much of his own making.
Until 1969, the name Koontz was considered by many to be simply one of those mortar-in-the-chinks names that filled the spaces between Zelazny, Delany, Moorcock and Spinrad, writers who were then drawing considerable attention with a volume of unusual and arresting stories. Koontz was just coming on the scene (when DV was assembled, his name was not even considered). But within just three years he has so solidified his position as a writer to watch, that when A,DV was on the drawing-boards, the Koontz solicitation was made a matter of immediacy. His contribution more than lives up to expectations.
If he continues as he has, the next five to seven years should see Dean Koontz rise to the enviable pinnacle of One-Mansmanship: the perch where he is the only man doing Dean Koontz stories, where he has the corner on a market demanding Koontz fiction.
Personally, Koontz is a very winning fellow. Met him in Pittsburgh in 1970. What’s in a name? Well, seeing the cold name Dean R. Koontz in print, one gets the impression—God knows why—that he is a venerable gentleman of stooped manner and crypt breath. Not only is he a very hip and well-dressed dude in his middle twenties, but the only thing more attractive than the unseemly-named Koontz is his extravagantly beautiful wife, Gerda—which is a name I associated till meeting her with thick-ankled hausfrau living in Punxsutawney or possibly Przemków—with; whose collaboration he wrote the scathing non-fiction attack on The Pig Society (Aware Press, 1970).
In addition to the previously-noted books, Dean has also produced: Fear That Man and The Fall of the Dream Machine (Ace, 1969), Dark of the Woods and Soft Come the Dragons (Ace, 1970), and Anti-Man, (Paperback Library, 1970). By way of disillusioned autobiography, Dean I submits the following:
“I am somewhere around 26. I was born in a small Pennsylvania town, raised in a traditional lower-middle class home, and went to a small, traditional Pennsylvania college. I graduated after three years of intensified study and began teaching under the Appalachian Program in a small coal mining town which, unfortunately, no longer had any operative coal mines. During that first year of idealism when public service meant more to me than money, I became quickly disillusioned. Politicians talked loudly about how much was put into the poverty program. I discovered that, once the budget was approved, the President, then a Texan whose name I have forgotten, quietly but ruthlessly halved the poverty budget. My school would be promised 20,000 dollars for work with the poverty-stricken—and receive ten. To get nine dollars worth of paperback books for use in my classes, I had to do everything but sign away both legs to guarantee I would not split with the six dollars. Meanwhile, several thousand dollars earmarked for instructional materials in the Title III poverty classes was rerouted into the school’s fund for construction of a new gymnasium. Somehow, the priorities seemed screwed up to me.
“As my idealism slowly drained away, I began to become more conscious of the need for money. We lived the first three months of our married life in a six room rented house—with only a studio couch for a bed and a kitchen table and chairs. Oh, a used refrigerator and a hot plate (no stove). There was certainly no hope of getting rich through teaching—even if I moved to a nice, urban school district and gave up the poverty program. How to get a little extra cash? While I had been a senior at college, my creative writing teacher had advised me to send a story to Readers And Writers, a new magazine aimed at college literature majors. I did. The story sold and brought a check for fifty dollars. Now, a year later, I began earnestly to try to sell more work. My first professional sale in the field was ‘Soft Come the Dragons’ to F&SF. When Ed Ferman bought a second story and Joe Ross at Amazing-Fantastic bought two more, I was hooked.
“The following year, I took a job teaching English at an urban school district outside Harrisburg. In the poverty program, the students put in my classes were all the discipline problems and the kids with police records, those the other teachers didn’t want, not really those whom I could help. In th
is new urban situation, the students were better behaved, though generally as apathetic as they had been in the small coal-mining town. A year and a half later, disillusioned altogether, and earning enough writing to at least pay the rent, I decided to become a full time freelancer. At this supposedly advanced, upper-middle class school district, I had been constantly on the carpet for what I taught and had been accused of teaching obscene books. Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein, was one of those judged obscene. So was Catch-22. No one of the administration would read the books in question. They merely assumed the parents were right and asked me not to teach the novels in question. In one instance, an administrator told me the book was obviously obscene because the cover drawing depicted a partially disrobed girl (all strategic areas, though, were covered). Aside from this incident, I found that the younger generations were no more liberal, no more aware than the older. It was just that the small percentage that has always been aware was more vocal than ever before. One or two enlightened kids in a class of thirty, however, didn’t make for enjoyable teaching. On January 27, 1969, I became a full-fledged writer.
“Thus far, I have sold over two dozen magazine stories and forty novels. I have seven other novels with my agent and have begun to branch into mainstream novels and suspense novels as well as science fiction.
“ASSORTED TRIVIA THAT MAY BE USEFUL: I stand slightly over 5′ 10″, weigh 160 pounds. I am madly addicted to movies and would one day like to see some of my suspense and mainstream work on film. I detest almost all sports. Married. No children. No religion. Read anywhere from four to six books a week. Think quite highly of John D. MacDonald. Paint and draw to relax and have actually sold some of my work to people who, apparently, were poor judges of art. Am highly interested in classical music and some modern rock (including The Beatles) and have written an sf novel structured like a i9th Century symphony The Dark Symphony. Have worked as a stock and bag boy in a grocery store, a cleaner (by high pressure steam) of engines, a forest ranger (one full summer) in a state park, and as the aforementioned English teacher. Have played in a rock combo and have written some rock ballads. Am planning on doing at least one—and hopefully a series—of science fiction books in collaboration with Vaughn Bode, the artist-illustrator. They will be multimedia art-and-text compilations that will go beyond mere illustration. Am presently collecting background for a mammoth mainstream novel about members of the paramilitary Minutemen and expect to spend six months of this year on the final writing of the book. That is all. Over and out.”
