Escape from Earth: New Adventures in Space

by Jack Dann

  Ford rolled over, thinking he might have to throw up again. He got painfully to his hands and knees. Bill was already rolling the tire toward Beautiful Evelyn, so Ford struggled to his feet and followed.

  He held the tire upright, standing well clear of the axle when Bill fired off the burst one. It shot all the way over to the wreck. Then Bill got back down, and, together, they lifted the tire up and slammed it into place. They drove down to the road, between two boulders, and turned north again.

  * * *

  “Look, you need to get over it,” said Bill, who had been watching Ford. “It’s not like you meant to kill him.”

  “It’s not that,” said Ford, who was gray-faced and sweating. “My stomach really hurts, is all.”

  Bill leaned close and looked at him.

  “Your psuit says something’s wrong,” he said.

  “It does?” Ford looked down at himself. How had he missed that flashing yellow light? “It’s like it’s shrinking or something. It’s so tight I can almost not breathe.”

  “We have to stop,” said Bill.

  “Okay,” said Ford. Beautiful Evelyn coasted to a stop and sat there in the middle of the road, as Bill climbed over and stared intently at the diagnostic panel on the front of Ford’s psuit. He went pale, but all he said was:

  “Let’s trade places.”

  “But you can’t drive her,” Ford protested.

  “If we’re on the straightaway and there’s no wind, I can sort of drive,” said Bill. He dove into the back, as Ford crawled sideways into his seat, and came out a moment later with one of the little tube-bags. “Stick your arm up like this, okay?”

  Ford obeyed, and watched as Bill plugged the tube into the psuit’s port. “So that’ll make me feel better?”

  “Yeah, it ought to.” Bill swung himself into the console seat and sent Beautiful Evelyn trundling on.

  “Good.” Ford sighed. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Psuit says you’ve ruptured something,” said Bill, staring at the monitor. He accelerated.

  “Oh. Well, that’s not too bad,” said Ford, blinking. “Jimmy Linton got a rupture and he’s okay. Better than okay, actually. The medic said he couldn’t work with a shovel anymore. So . . . they made him official secretary for the Council, see? All he has to do is record stuff at meetings and post notices.”

  “Really.”

  “So if I have a rupture, maybe my dad won’t take it so hard that I want to be a Hauler. Since that way I get out of working in the methane plant and the cow sheds. Maybe.”

  Bill gave him an incredulous look.

  “All this, and you still want to be a Hauler?”

  “Of course I do!”

  Bill just shook his head.

  They drove in a dead calm, at least compared to the weather before. Far off across the plains they saw dust devils here and there, twirling lazily. The farther north they drove, the clearer the air was, the brighter the light of the sun, shining on standing outcroppings of rock the color of rust, or milk chocolate, or tangerines, or new pennies.

  “This is so great,” said Ford, slurring his words as he spoke. “This is more beautiful than anything. Isn’t the world a big place?”

  “I guess so,” said Bill.

  “It’s our place,” said Ford. “They can all go back to Earth, but we never will. We’re Martians.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you see, I have hair growing in?” Ford swung his hand up to pat his scalp. “Red like Mars.”

  “Don’t move your arm around, okay? You’ll rip the tube out.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right. Maybe you should mask up, you know?

  You could probably use the oxygen.”

  “Sure ...” Ford dragged his mask into place.

  After a while, he smiled and said: “I know who I am.”

  He murmured to himself for a while, muffled behind the mask. The next time Bill glanced over at him, he was unconscious.

  And Bill was all alone.

  Billy wasn’t there to be yelled at, or blamed for anything. He might never be there again., He couldn’t be argued with, he couldn’t be shamed or ignored or made to feel anything Bill wanted him to feel. Not if he was dead.

  But he’d been like that when he’d been alive, too, hadn’t he?

  The cold straight road stretched out across the cold flat plain, and there was no mercy out here, no right or wrong, no lies. There was only this giant machine hurtling along, that took all Bill’s strength to keep on the road.

  If he couldn’t do it, he’d die.

  Bill realized, with a certain shock, how much of his life he’d wanted an audience. Someone else to be a witness to how scared and angry he was, to agree with him on how bad a father Billy had been.

  What had he thought? That someday he’d stand up in some kind of giant courtroom, letting the whole world know how unfair everything had been from the day he’d been born?

  Out here, he knew the truth.

  There was no vast cosmic court of justice that would turn Billy into the kind of father Bill had wanted him to be. There was no Marswife to swoop down from the dust clouds and guide a lost boy home. The red world didn’t care if he sulked; it would casually kill him, if it caught him Outside.

  And he had always known it.

  Then what was the point of being angry about it all the time?

  What was the point of white-knuckled fists and a knotted-up stomach if things would never change?

  His anger would never force anybody to fix the world for him. But. . .

  There were people who tried to fix the world for themselves. Maybe he could fix his world, just the narrow slice of it that was his.

  He watched the monitors, watched the wind driving sand across the barren stony plain, the emptiness that he had hated ever since he could remember. What would it take to make him love it, the way Billy or Ford loved it?

  He imagined water falling from the sky, bubbling up from under the frozen rock. Maybe it would be blue water. It would splash and steam, the way it did in the bathhouse. Running, gurgling water to drown the dust and irrigate the red sand.

  And green would come. He couldn’t get a mental image of vizio acres over the whole world, tenting in greenness even up here; that was crazy. But the green might creep out on its own, if there was enough water. Wiry little desert plants at first, maybe, and then . . . Bill tried to remember the names of plants from his lesson plans. Sagebrush, right. Sequoias. Clover. Edelweiss. Apples. A memory came back to him, a nursery rhyme he’d had on his Buke once: I should like to rise and go, where the golden apples grow . . .

  He blurred his vision a little and saw himself soaring past green rows that went out forever, that arched over and made warm shade and shelter from the wind. Another memory floated up, a picture from a lesson plan, and his dream caught it and slapped it into place: cows grazing in a green meadow, out under a sky full of white clouds, clouds of water, not dust.

  And, in the most sheltered places, there would be people. Families. Houses lit warm at night, with the lights winking through the green leaves. Just as he had always imagined. One of them would be his house. He’d live there with his family.

  Nobody would give him a house, or a family, or a safe world to live in, of course. Ever. They didn’t exist. But. . .

  Bill wrapped it all around himself anyway, to keep out the cold and the fear, and he drove on.

  At some point—hours or days later, he never knew—his strength gave out and he couldn’t hold Beautiful Evelyn on the road anymore. She drifted gently to the side, clipping the boulders as she came, and rumbled to a halt just inside Thousand-K Station.

  Bill lay along the seat where he had fallen, too tired and in too much pain to move. Ford still sat, propped up in his corner, most of his face hidden by his mask. Bill couldn’t tell if he was still alive.

  He closed his eyes and went down, and down, into the green rows.

  ***

  He was a
wakened by thumping on the cab, and shouting, and was bolt upright with his mask on before he had time to realize that he wasn’t dreaming. He crawled across the seat and threw the release switches. The hatch swung down, and red light streamed in out of a black night. There stood Old Brick, granddaddy of the Haulers, with his long beard streaming sideways in the gale and at least three other Haulers behind him. His eyes widened behind his mask as he took in Bill and Ford. He reached up and turned up the volume on his psuit.

  “CONVOY! WE GOT KIDS HERE! LOOKS LIKE TOWNSEND’S RIG!”

  10

  Bill was all right after a couple of days, even though he had to have stuff fed into his arm while he slept. He was still foggy-headed when Mother came and sat by his bed, and very gently told him about Billy.

  Bill mustn’t worry, she said; she would find Billy a warm corner in the Empress, with all the food and drink he wanted the rest of his days, and surely Bill would come talk to him sometimes? For Billy was ever so proud of Young Bill, as everyone knew. And perhaps take him on little walks round the Tubes, so he could see Outside now and again? For Billy had so loved the High Road.

  ***

  Ford wasn’t all right. He had to have surgery for a ruptured spleen, and almost bled to death once they’d cut his psuit off him.

  He still hadn’t regained consciousness when Bill, wrapped in an outsize bathrobe, shuffled down to the infirmary’s intensive care unit to see him. See him was all Bill could do; pale as an egg, Ford lay in the center of a mass of tubes and plastic tenting. The only parts of him that weren’t white were his hair, which was growing in red as Martian sand, and the greenish bruise where Bill had punched him in the eye.

  Bill sat there staring at the floor tiles, until he became aware that someone else had entered the room. He looked up.

  He knew the man in front of him must be Ford’s father; his eyes were the same watery blue, and his ears stuck out the same way. He wore patched denim and muddy boots, and a stocking cap pulled down almost low enough to hide the bandage over his left eyebrow. There was a little white stubble along the line of his jaw, like a light frost.

  He looked at Ford, and the watery eyes brimmed over with tears. He glanced uncertainly at Bill. He looked down, lined up the toes of his boots against a seam in the tile.

  “You’d be that Hauler’s boy, then?” he said. “I have to thank you, on behalf of my Blatchford.”

  “Blatchford,” repeated Bill, dumfounded until he realized whom the old man meant. “Oh.”

  “That woman explained everything to me,” said Ford’s dad. “Wasn’t my Blatchford’s fault. Poor boy. Don’t blame him for running off scared. Your dad did a good thing, taking him in like that. I’m sorry about your dad.”

  “Me, too,” said Bill. “But For— Blatchford’ll be all right.”

  “I know he will,” said Ford’s dad, looking yearningly at his son. “He’s a strong boy, my Blatchford. Not like his brother. You can raise somebody up his whole life and do your best to teach him what’s right, and—and overnight, he can just turn into a stranger on you.

  “My Sam did that. I should have seen it coming, him walking out on us. He never was any good, really. A weakling.

  “Not like my little Blatchford. Never a word of complaint out of him, or whining after vanities. He knows who he is. He’ll make the Collective proud one day.”

  Bill swallowed hard. He knew that Ford would never make the Collective proud; Ford would be off on the High Road as soon as he could, in love with the wide horizon, and the old man’s angry heart would break again.

  The weight of everything that had happened seemed to come crashing down on Bill at once. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt so miserable.

  “Would you tell me something, sir?” he said. “What does it take to join the MAC?”

  “Hm?” Ford’s dad turned.

  “What do you have to do?”

  Ford’s dad looked at him speculatively. He cleared his throat. “It isn’t what you do. It’s what you are, young man.”

  He came and sat down beside Bill, and threw back his shoulders.

  “You have to be the kind of person who believes a better world is worth working for. You can’t be weak, or afraid, or greedy for things for yourself. You have to know that the only thing that matters is making that better world, and making it for everyone, not just for you.

  “You may not even get to see it come into existence, because making the world right is hard work. It’ll take all your strength and all your bravery, and maybe you’ll be left at the end with nothing but knowing that you did your duty.

  “But that’ll be enough for you.”

  His voice was thin and harsh; he sounded as though he was reciting a lecture he’d memorized. But his eyes shone like Ford’s had, when Ford had looked out on the open sky for the first time.

  “Well—I’m going to study agriculture,” said Bill. “And I thought, maybe, when I pass my levels, I’d like to join the MAC. I want that world you talk about. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

  “Good on you, son,” said Ford’s dad, nodding solemnly. “You study hard, and I’m sure you’d be welcome to join us. You’re the sort of young man we need in the MAC. And it does my heart good to know my Blatchford’s got a friend like you. Gives me hope for the future, to think we’ll have two heroes like you working in our cause!”

  He shook Bill’s hand, and then the nurse looked in at them and said that visiting hours were over. Ford’s dad went away, down the hill. Bill walked slowly back to his room.

  He didn’t climb back into bed. He sat down in a chair in the corner, and looked out through Settlement Dome at the cold red desert, at the far double line of boulders where the High Road ran off into places Billy would never see again. He began to cry, silently, tears burning as they ran down his face.

  He didn’t know whether he was crying for Billy, or for Ford’s dad.

  The world was ending. The world was beginning.

  DERELICT

  Geoffrey A. Landis

  * * *

  At one time or another, every kid has been told to stay away from dangerous places, from that rotting old pier on the lake to that spooky old abandoned house to the high railroad trestle over the river—and generations of kids have ignored those stern admonishments and headed right for the danger spot, drawn like iron filings to a magnet by the lure of the forbidden. The kids who live in the orbital space-colonies of the future, though, will have to go a lot further for an illicit thrill, and face dangers considerably worse than a railroad bridge when they get there.

  A physicist who works for NASA, and who has recently been working on the Martian Lander program, Geoffrey A. Landis is a frequent contributor to Analog and to Asimov's Science Fiction, and has also sold stories to markets such as Interzone, Amazing, and Pulphouse. Landis is not a prolific writer—by the high-production standards of the genre— but he is popular. His story "A Walk in the Sun," won him a Hugo Award in 1992, his story "Ripples in the Dirac Sea" won him a Nebula Award in 1990, and his story "Elemental" was on the Final Hugo Ballot in 1985. His first book was the collection Myths, Legends, and True History and in 2002 he published his first novel. Mars Crossing. He lives with his wife, writer Mary Turzillo, in Brook Park, Ohio.

  * * *

  WHEN IT was built, it had been the largest object ever made by human beings, a small city in space. They named it for a hero, the son of a god: Hercules. It was a wheel a kilometer across, with mirrors angling sunlight through enormous transparent panes set in the bright aluminum.

  Hercules had been a bubble of Earth floating in space, only better—utopia, or as close to utopia as human beings had ever dared approach. Fifty thousand people lived inside it. A handful of them had a secret, and perhaps that secret made them a little smug, a little self-satisfied and swaggering. But most of the people living in Hercules knew nothing about secrets.

  The end came with, perhaps, a few seconds warning. The first impact, a particle no larger than a coin
, hit at nearly orbital velocity, seventeen thousand miles an hour. At that speed a particle does not impact so much gs it explodes. The noise was like a grenade going off, a blue-white fireball that was too bright to look at.

  On the kilometer-wide colony, such an impact was like a gnat attacking an elephant. The hole was the size of a fist: a minor leak, which would be patched in a day or two. A few people, in the wide parks down at the outermost spin levels, looked across the wheel toward the impact, a trail of fire piercing upwards toward the metal sky.

  And then, all at once, the real firestorm started. A thousand impacts. A million, all at once.

  In five minutes, fifty thousand people died.

  That was long ago.

  ***

  On the wheels and the loops and grape-clusters that swarm in thousands of orbits around the Earth, lives are regulated, and the kids—us—have strict limits on freedom. Space is hard, cold, and unforgiving.

  But Malina colony had been founded on principles of freedom and intellectual daring, and it was the guiding ethos of our founders that everyone should have as much liberty as they could handle, even children. So we kids learned to take as much advantage of that as we dared. It was, after all, a way to learn common sense—the hard way to learn, the adults told us. But the teachers always said that nobody really learns how to do something right until they’ve learned it by trying all the wrong ways first. Each of us has to learn things our own way. So they gave us a certain amount of freedom, to allow us to learn.

  Oh, we had rules, of course, rules and rules on rules, all to be memorized and quizzed on at any moment without warning. Every time you put on a space suit, each and every item in the fifty-three point vacuum safety check had to be acknowledged aloud by your buddy, for example. And if one of the grown-ups catches you trying to slide by some item on- the list without checking it! Well! That would lose you a bit of freedom, for sure. Get you iced—earn you a month of staying inside, minimum, and another six months of only going outside under supervision, and being watched pretty darn closely every time, too. And when you protest, “Hey, I know what I’m doing,” you would only get a reply of “Evidently not, young man. I think you’d best be watched, until you prove you do.” And your back talk would probably get you a snap quiz on safety regulations.