by Bob Mauldin
“I know, Mom,” Lucy said, looking at her brother as he sat down on the arm of the couch. She was surprised not to hear either parent order him down onto the cushion. “I guess what scares me is that I get to be the one who oversees the next step in human evolution,” she said, astonished at the words coming out of her mouth. “I don’t mean mutants or anything like that, Mom. I mean, we’ve been looking at the stars since we stepped out of the caves, and now we have a chance to go there. A lot sooner than we would if we’d had to invent this technology ourselves.”
“So, what’s it like out there?” Bruce got in.
“Wide, empty, scary, dark, exhilarating, deadly, and full of promise all at the same time,” she answered. “We can go to the stars now, although none of us have done so yet. Partway to Alpha Centauri is all we do on our training cruises, so far.”
“How about the moon and Mars and stuff?”
“Well, we haven’t had any reason to go there yet. They’re kinda like steppingstone for a race just starting out, and we’ve started out past that. Oh, there’ll be reasons to go there—colonization and such—but it brings up one of the things we find so... unusual about the ship and its database.”
“What’s that, daughter,” John asked quietly.
“There are... disparities. For example, they have these fields built into their ships to capture an asteroid and move it from one place to another. We adapted those fields to be used inside the ship. We also have blueprints on board for some pretty powerful missiles, but we converted the principles behind our engines and made missiles even more powerful than even the Builders imagined. They can speed up healing and even clone body parts, but it still requires a skilled surgeon to replace a bad organ or whatever. Our radios operate on principles we still don’t understand, which helps to prevent being overheard, but a lot of information is still delivered by old-fashioned fiber optics. Kinda weird actually. But what Brucie said made me think about it again. We don’t have spacesuits. Never have. We have these things we call construction pods that let us move around outside the ship but not on a planet’s surface. It’s like the Builders never conceived of going to a planet that has a hostile environment. So, no exploration of the moon or Mars, not yet. Hey, Brucie, go get my bag from upstairs. I’ve got a present for you.”
Leave it to a mother to get to the heart of the matter while her son sprinted for Lucy’s bedroom. “Why do you need missiles at all? Much less more powerful ones, Dear?”
“Mom, it’s like somebody having a gun. You should have one, too, just to make sure they don’t try to use it on you.”
“Mutually assured destruction,” John said, absently. He huffed into his mustache. Letting me dig my own grave, she thought, not knowing how to prevent it.
“But if you didn’t have a gun in the first place, there wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Mom, the problems with that statement are so many that I don’t have enough days left to go into all of them. But let me give you just two reasons.” Bruce arrive with Lucy’s bag and sat down expectantly. “First, if there were no guns and I had something somebody wanted, they’d hit me over the head with a stick, or stab me, or something else. I know you don’t like to hear this stuff, but it leads to reason number two. There are people out there, on Earth and elsewhere, who will go to any lengths to get what they want. I know it’s simplistic, but there’s no other way to look at it.”
“Well, I don’t have to think about it. There’re people who are paid to think like that, and I’m not happy with my little girl being one of those people. Why don’t you just come home and get married like that nice Buffy Barton did? She married a doctor, you know.”
“And had a kid, a tummy-tuck, a nose job, and a boob job by the tender young age of twenty-five. No thanks. Not right now, Mom. I don’t see how I could, even if I wanted to. Can you understand the thrill of being the first person to do something? Or being the person who goes somewhere first? I swear, it’s... intoxicating.”
“I wish you wouldn’t glorify this in front of your brother,” Darla Grimes said, finally. “He’s been talking about nothing else since we found out about your travels. I won’t have him following you into outer space, do you hear me?” Her voice rose a full octave, and she stood up. “I won’t have it!”
“Mom! Pop, tell her. I’m over eighteen. That’s the age they were cutting recruits off at when they got started. Luce, you tell her!” Bruce implored.
“Not another word about it!” Darla stormed out of the room and the sound of clattering pots began to emanate from the kitchen.
John looked each of his children in the eye and mouthed the word “porch.” Aloud, he said, “I’m going to see your mother.”
The siblings picked up their glasses and quietly let themselves out of the house onto the covered, oversized porch, Lucy carrying the bag Bruce had brought down.
“What do you think he’ll say to her?” Bruce asked.
“How should I know?” Lucy set her glass on the porch rail hard enough to splash tea out of the glass. “I’m the one who’s been gone for almost four years, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Bruce said with irritation. “Off saving the universe, right? Which is cool, don’t get me wrong, but did you know I made All State?”
“That’s great, Brucie! Really. Sorry I wasn’t there. I missed you guys a lot, though. It’s hard not knowing what’s going to happen next,” she said, looking deep into her glass. “I guess I missed a lot, huh?”
“You missed Mom going into the hospital last year. She got diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.”
Lucy’s head shot up as his words struck like lightning. “Oh, God!”
Bruce looked up from the spot on the floor he’d been studying. “They say it’s not your common, ordinary kind, though. Treatable with medication. She just forgets stuff, sometimes. They had to take her driver’s license. I think that hurt her the worst, not being able to just get up and go to the store or whatever. She tries to joke about it. Calls it ‘part-timers,’ but you can see how she hurts when she forgets something.”
“She seemed so…”
“Normal?” Bruce said, finishing her sentence for her. “Today’s one of her better days. Just so you know, okay? I was almost a father last year, too,” he said, changing the subject. The shocks just kept coming. The idea of herself as an aunt brought a small smile to her face. Misunderstanding the smile, Bruce said, “I’d have married her, too, but her folks thought she was even less ready for parenthood than I was. As soon as she told me, we went to see her parents together. I offered to marry her, but they thought it best if she was shipped off to ‘boarding school.’”
“I know George Cook sent his daughter off to boarding school last year,” their dad said as he walked around the corner of the wraparound porch. “Should I talk to him?”
“No, Pop. I handled it. Was about the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Her folks were pretty upset, of course, but I guess I got points for taking responsibility for my actions. At least they didn’t kill me. We got the ‘kids and raging hormones’ lecture and then were told we weren’t allowed to see each other for a while. Then they shipped her off. They even invited me over for dinner to say goodbye.”
“Was this just before graduation when your grades dropped?” John asked his son.
“Yeah. I was kind of a mess there for a while.”
“I don’t know whether to be more upset that you didn’t tell me or that you didn’t need to tell me. Would you really have married her?”
“I asked her father to let me when we went to see him. I told him I was ready to accept responsibility for my actions and that I really did love her, but...” His voice trailed off and he began studying the same spot on the floor again.
“This appears to be a day for surprises.” John sat down in his favorite chair, set two cans of beer on the small table, and asked, “Do you drink these days, Luce?”
“Only off duty,” she
said with a smile.
“Mother has gone to bed,” John said quietly, “so I guess the floor belongs to you.”
“So, I guess the best way is to start from the beginning.” She popped the top off her beer can, took a swig, and said, “We had a few weeks to go before midterms, and there was this sci-fi convention in Denver. I went with a few of my friends, mainly to look at the crazy costumes some people can come up with, you know? But there weren’t as many as I thought. Then we saw this seminar advertisement. It was about transporter technology in the here and now. We all knew it had to be some kind of gag, but we went in just to see what kind of special effects they had...”
“So you assumed command as senior line officer due to the incapacitation of your superiors,” Lucy’s dad said, boiling it down to its basics.
“Assumed, hell!” she exclaimed. “Sorry, Pop. I didn’t assume anything. I got shanghaied! All three of the base commanders refused, saying they were ‘just engineers,’ and the other captains kept saying, ‘You got promoted first so you’re in charge.’ Then it was, ‘Tell us what to do,’ as if I had any idea. I was winging it just as hard as the rest of them.”
Bruce stood up and headed into the house. “Bathroom,” was all he said by way of explanation. “Two more beers?” When both father and sister declined, he went inside, making sure not to slam the door.
“We each have to bear up under the loads we’re given, daughter,” her father advised. “I can deal with the burdens here at home, and you have the unique opportunity to advance the human condition in a positive way that few will ever have in history. I know that’s preachy and really doesn’t comfort you, but how can I advise you on something like this?” He spread his hands helplessly. “Tell me, do you think things would be better if the ship had been turned over to the government?”
“Of course not, Pop, but I can’t tell the whole world to go to hell! I’m just plain Lucy Grimes from Cincinnati, Ohio! And bearing up under the load is just what I’m doing. Barely. And that with a full team of advisers. It’s not like I asked for any of this.”
“Your Simon sounds like an interesting individual, Luce. What did you say that he said? ‘These are things no human has done before, so everyone is equally qualified’? It seems to me that you’ve acquired more qualifications than anyone else at the moment, so it falls on you to do the job.” He sat quietly for a time, packing the old briar pipe that sat beside his chair. “Unless you want to chuck it all and move back home?”
Bruce stuck his head out the door. “Uh, Luce, I hate to interrupt, but your bag is making noises.” He handed it out the door and slipped back inside.
The bag was chirping insistently. “My comm unit. Uh, can you excuse me for a minute, Pop?” she asked, digging into the offending luggage. Not waiting for a response, she activated the unit. “Grimes.” Lucy looked at her father and shrugged.
“Lt Commander James aboard the Niven, First Captain. I have a message here. Captain Morgan advised that you be informed.”
Lucy looked at her father. “Go ahead.”
“Message reads: Daily report overdue. Contact Commander Ross at Training Command.”
“Set me up a link, please, Commander.”
“I anticipated your request, First Captain. Link established... now.”
Lucy recognized the change-over from direct connection to an assisted link and said, “Diana?”
“Yes, Captain. Your daily report is overdue. Are you all right?” The anxiety in her voice came through the connection.
“I’m sorry, Di. Things are a little intense here at home, but I’m as right as rain. I’m in the middle of a discussion with my father at the moment. Can we do this tomorrow, or is there something else?”
Relief evident in her voice, Diana signed off with only a perfunctory, “No, ma’am. Tomorrow will be fine. I’ll be expecting your call at about four p.m. local time. Ross out.”
John Grimes smiled around the stem of his pipe. “I guess I can give you one piece of advice now. It’s my firm belief that bosses are as much at the mercy of their subordinates as the other way around. That one sounded worried, and you just brushed her off.”
“Not really, Pop. The ‘right as rain’ part was our code for everything’s fine. If I hadn’t said it, there would have been a flight of Mambas here within fifteen minutes, homing in on this,” she said holding up her wristband.
John looked down as Lucy slid her comm unit back into her bag. “Is that a gun? I saw you wearing it when you arrived but didn’t have time to ask.”
“Not your garden-variety pistol, Pop,” Lucy said, affirming his suspicion. “It’s a laser pistol. Wanna see it?”
“You know I do. A piece of alien technology sitting right beside me? I think I’m getting the same bug Bruce has.”
Lucy pulled the pistol out of the bag. “You don’t have to worry about firing it accidentally, Pop. You can’t fire it at all without one of these,” she said, indicating her wristband again. “We’ve made modifications to a lot of the technology. Things like that safety, for instance. And the same system on shuttles and Mambas now, after... We had to modify them to fit human hands, too.” She handed the weapon over to him as Bruce came back onto the porch.
“Too cool! What’s it do?”
“It’s a death ray,” Lucy said jokingly. “Actually, it is that in the technical sense, but it’s actually just a laser pistol.”
“‘Just’ isn’t a word I’d use, Luce,” her father said. “What can it do? What kind of range does it have?”
“It can burn a hole through six inches of steel plate at five hundred yards in about two seconds if it’s set on needle beam. It has the capacity to do that about seven times before it needs to be recharged. If you think of it as a regular pistol, you can get about two hundred shots out of it if it’s set on a wider dispersal,” Lucy said, reciting from a manual printed for trainees.
“A variable focus laser beam in a handheld weapon,” he said to himself as he studied the pistol. To his daughter he said, “I can see why the government was after you and why they gave us so much trouble trying to get to you. But I’m glad you held out. I believe your Simon is right. Things like this don’t need to be spread out on Earth. We’re not ready for them yet.”
“Thanks, Pop. You don’t know how much I needed to hear that.” Her father handed the weapon back to her, and she weighed it in her hand for a second before holding it out to Bruce as he sat back down. “Here, squirt. See what a laser pistol feels like.”
The remainder of Lucy’s vacation was, on balance, uneventful, considering her situation. Reporters, getting wind of her presence, haunted the area around her house until a call to the police ran them off. The more persistent and inventive ones found ways to follow Lucy to the mall when the old Futura pulled up to take her shopping on her second day home. A reporter and cameraman bedecked with all the paraphernalia of their trade cornered her outside a Foot Locker.
Lucy, tired and caught off guard, tried to duck the pair by slipping away into the masses of people swirling around her but to no avail. As a crowd formed to see what the commotion was all about, a vaguely familiar figure stepped between the two groups. Facing the reporters, the huge man said, “The lady wants to be left alone! If you two don’t beat it right now, I’m gonna sit on the both of you!”
Recognizing the voice and knowing that the threat would never be carried out, Lucy watched with amusement as the team slunk off. When the man turned around, Lucy punched him in the stomach as hard as she could, with no visible result. “Just as buff as ever, Jackpot. But you’ve grown!”
“Late growth spurt,” he said sheepishly. “Now I’m better suited to be a lineman.” Jackson Potter, once the star quarterback for their football team, had been a big boy even in high school. His agility and speed had earned him the top spot on the squad, and he led his team to All State their senior year with an unbroken string of victories, a record never before achieved. Those tackles he cou
ldn’t break, he just rolled over. Now he’d added at least six inches and fifty pounds to his already massive frame, and the difference between their heights was giving Lucy a sore neck just looking up at him.
The small crowd began to disperse as Lucy and her friends ignored the incident and moved off as a group.
“Carmen, go buy me a bat, will you? I need to whup this boy, big time.” Lucy crooked a finger at the big man and walked over to a bench bolted to the mezzanine floor, climbing up on it. She still had to look up at her old friend. “When Carmen gets back, you are in such trouble! Why didn’t you stick around yesterday? I wanted to talk to you.”
“Aw, come on Angel,” the huge man said, actually scuffing his foot on the floor. He was the only person outside of her family with the right to call her by her middle name, save Martello. “You were busy giving a speech and meeting old friends. I knew I’d get my chance. You three never could resist a chance to shop.”
“So you admit to stalking me today?” she asked, getting a sheepish nod. “And it was a speech you called for! I looked for you the rest of the evening. Where were you?”
“In the little room Martello uses to spy on his banquet guests. I heard everything, and then I left.”
Martello’s room, known only to his employees, past and present, allowed him to know when something needed to be done for his guests, and the instant and unasked for service had earned him the reputation that kept him head and shoulders above his competition to this day.
Lucy reached up and pulled Jackpot’s head down by his ears, kissing him soundly. “That should cover the kiss I promised you on prom night,” she said. Never given, the kiss had gone wanting when the two graduates had come around a corner in Jackpot’s GTO to find the mangled wreckage of George Beacon’s restored ‘69 ‘Cuda wrapped around a tree. Both George and his date, Millie Scott, had died in the collision, and no reason had ever been found. Lucy remembered that the coroner had finally issued a report saying that neither alcohol nor drugs were related to the accident.
