Analog Science Fiction and Fact 03/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  He heard the sound of footsteps, the rustle of more than one body pushing through shrubbery too fast to really be quiet. The two boys appeared, walking quickly and hunched over to keep low profiles. They went to Betty’s window and peered inside. Once again the larger one carried a knife.

  Sitting still then was the hardest thing that Jim had ever done. Whoever these guys were, they had to be caught in the act, unmistakably guilty, after hopefully being led into saying who they were and why they were after people like Betty.

  But that meant Jim had to sit, watching as the larger one used his knife to pry open Betty’s window. As the large boy scrambled inside, Jim took advantage of the noise to shift his own position so that he had his feet under him, ready to move in an instant. They won’t kill her in her room. They didn’t and they won’t. He kept repeating that to himself while his heart pounded with growing fear.

  Betty appeared at the window, moving slowly as she came over the sill and dropped to the ground, the large boy right behind her with his knife out. The other boy grabbed her arm and led Betty away, but she dug in her heels only a few feet from Jim’s hiding place. “Who are you?” she whispered.

  “We’re friends from 2039,” the big one mumbled in an unconvincing way.

  “Friends? You had that knife at my throat when I woke up! You threatened to kill me if I didn’t keep quiet and come with you! But I’m not going any farther until you tell me who you are.”

  The smaller boy spoke quickly. “It was for your own protection. We are from 2039, just like you are, but we can’t talk now. It’s not safe. Keep moving, don’t make any noise and you won’t be hurt.”

  Betty stared at the smaller boy, who was trying to look away. “Professor Oldham,” she said. “Professor Conrad Oldham. It’s you, isn’t it?”

  Conrad Oldham straightened his fourteen-year-old body and tried to look down on her, which didn’t succeed since Betty had a couple of inches of height on him at this age. “For once in your life, Doctor Knox, listen to someone else. If you come along quietly, we’ll explain what’s happening and—”

  “You’re not part of the project. You argued against the project.”

  Jim saw the white flash of a reassuring smile on Conrad Oldham’s face. “The situation changed. Everything will be fine once I have a chance to tell you about it. Haven’t you missed the opportunity to speak with someone else who understands what it’s like to be here? We can share all that if you come along.” Oldham said the last as if expecting that would dissolve all resistance from Betty.

  But she shook her head. “What are you doing here?” Betty asked.

  “It’s critical that I give you important new information. Why else would the project have sent me back here?”

  “Why would the project send someone I had no reason to trust?”

  Her failure to cooperate must have perplexed Oldham, because he just repeated his earlier argument. “I’ll explain when we’re away from here.”

  “Like you explained to Paul Davidson and Charlie Bennet?” Betty asked.

  Oldham didn’t respond, seeming lost for words, and the larger one brandished his knife, dropping the pretense of comradeship. “Do it now!” he insisted.

  “No!” Oldham told the larger boy. “There’ll be too much to remove from the records if they find—” He stopped speaking.

  “My body?” Betty demanded. “Why, professor? And who is this assassin?”

  “Your only chance—” Oldham began in a conciliatory tone.

  “Why? We disagreed. We argued. But murder—”

  This time Oldham interrupted, his voice growing heated. “You and those like you wouldn’t listen. The answers are in scientific research and technological applications. If you tie the hands of science, then the problems will only be worse, and your project sought not just to bind science but to label it the cause of all of our problems! Humanity can’t afford that kind of solution!”

  “You never listened!” Betty shot back with the same anger. “That was never true, but all you saw was what you wanted to see. How scientific is that, professor?”

  “You can twist my words any way you want, but the facts are that you would doom humanity, and I have to save it.”

  The large boy made a noise of derision. “Humanity is doomed. The end is upon us all, and those who would deny the will of the Almighty must be stopped.”

  Even in the dark Jim could see Betty’s eyes widen. “You allied yourself with them?”

  Oldham shrugged. “If Hitler invaded Hell, I’d find something good to say about the devil. Churchill said that. I had access to the required equipment and that group had access to the required funding. It’s sometimes necessary to find allies where you can.”

  “Allies willing to kill, you mean. To do the dirty work for you.” Betty’s voice broke. “You murdered them? You knew those men. How could you... ?”

  Oldham looked away once more. “I didn’t kill anyone. Neither did Gordon here. How can you murder someone in 1964 when they lived until 2039? That’s a logical impossibility.”

  “Is that how you’re rationalizing it?”

  “They lived long, full lives,” Oldham insisted. “How can you tell me that someone who was a great-grandfather in 2039 died in 1964? It’s absurd and obviously violates causality. Therefore, it didn’t happen.”

  “You son of a bitch. You cold-blooded—”

  “Shut up.” Gordon raised the knife again. “We need to shut her up now, whether you want it or not,” he told Oldham.

  Jim launched out of his hiding place, his legs propelling him forward in a leap that brought him to Gordon before either of the other two boys realized what was happening. Gordon had just begun to turn when Jim’s right fist punched hard into his side over the kidneys. As the large boy staggered with pain, Jim caught his knife hand and twisted the weapon free, then swung the hand and arm behind Gordon and slammed him face first into the grass, bringing his own body down on him hard enough to stun the boy and drive the wind from his lungs.

  Oldham was staring open-mouthed toward Jim, then one hand dove for his pocket. Before it could reach its destination, the heel of Betty’s palm smashed into Oldham’s nose. As he reeled backwards, both hands to his face, Betty kicked him in the groin. “I’ve wanted to do that to you for years,” she said as Oldham collapsed.

  Jim had whipped off Gordon’s belt and was using it to hogtie him, then jumped up and went to Oldham. “Don’t move or I’ll kill you,” he told Oldham, and something in his voice must have made it clear that he wasn’t bluffing because the other lay still. Pulling out his handkerchief, Jim covered his hand with it before reaching into Oldham’s pocket and pulling out a switchblade that he tossed to one side.

  “Betty,” Oldham gasped. “Dr. Knox. Listen. I can help. You’re the last, you know. Our sources inside the project gave us all the names, and we got a few more that weren’t on the list but were obviously working with the others. It’ll be too hard for you alone. But with my assistance perhaps you can still have a chance to succeed. Gordon did all the killing. I swear it. I didn’t want that. Let me go and we can work together—”

  “You actually think that I’d be dumb enough to trust you?” Betty asked. “You never did think much of women, did you, professor? And since it’s apparently escaped your own keen powers of observation, I’ll point out that I’m not alone.”

  “What are we going to do with these guys?” Jim asked. “If we let them go, they’ll just keep trying to get us. But we can’t imprison them.” That left one ugly alternative, one that he shied from.

  Betty looked at him, a humorless smile slowly spreading across her face. “You’re right. We can’t imprison them. And I won’t do what these two would have done to us. But these two juvenile delinquents must be runaways. And the justice system in 1964 doesn’t look kindly on criminal juvenile delinquent runaways.” She knelt, pinning the handle of Gordon’s knife to the ground with a knee and then, wincing, drew her arm across the edge of the knife. S
tanding up, the shallow cut dripping blood that she smeared across one cheek, Betty took a deep breath.

  Betty’s scream, long and laden with terror, echoed through the night, bouncing off the walls of the suburban houses as lights began flaring behind windows and doors banging open throughout the neighborhood.

  By the time the first men arrived, some bearing handguns or improvised weapons, Betty was clinging to Jim, quivering, with tears streaming down her face. “Those two got into my room!” she yelled, pointing at Oldham and Gordon. “They threatened me with that knife and said they were going to do... terrible things to me! They said they’d killed other kids too! Oh, but Jim was worried about me and he came by to look at my window and saw them pulling me out, and he attacked them even though they had knives and he was sooooo brave.”

  Betty stopped her semi-hysterical account long enough to gaze at Jim with such feigned but fervent admiration and gratitude that he nearly broke into laughter, which might have caused someone to question her story. But then some of the men were pounding Jim on the back and calling him a real man, while others were grabbing Oldham, who seemed frozen with horror, and Gordon, who was shouting out that they were all damned until someone rocked his head back with a hard blow.

  The police officers who showed up were big men who didn’t seem to worry about inflicting bruises as they handcuffed Oldham and Gordon and then bundled them into the back seat of the police car. “Runaways. Armed assault. Burglary. Kidnapping,” one of the officers said to Betty’s father. “And, uh...” The officer glanced toward Betty and lowered his voice. “Attempted rape and murder. Don’t worry. The judge will take care of these two. They’ll be locked up for a long time.”

  “Betty said they mentioned two other boys by name,” Mr. Knox said, “and boasted of having killed them. I had her write down the names and the cities where the boys lived.”

  The police officer took the paper, then turned a very hard look on Oldham and Gordon. “Murders. If what they told your daughter is true, they’ll never come out of prison, sir, juveniles or not.”

  “The smaller one is yelling something about being from the future,” the other police officer commented. “He’s a little young to be a homicidal maniac, but you know kids these days.”

  “It’s that Dr. Spock,” the first officer said.

  “And their music. Have you heard that ‘Louie, Louie’ song?” the second officer said as they climbed into their car.

  Mr. Knox offered his hand to Jim as the police drove away. “Mrs. Knox and I were a little concerned about Betty getting too serious with you, but from this night forward you’re okay with us, son. I can’t imagine a better man for my daughter.”

  “How was Christmas?” Jim asked as he sat down beside Betty on her porch steps.

  “Better than I expected.” Betty held up a large magazine. “I wrote a story about what happened with Oldham and Gordon, and I just got a letter saying this magazine’s editor bought it. Only, instead of changing the names to protect the innocent, I used all our real names.”

  “What magazine—” Jim stopped when he saw the cover. “Analog Science Fact and Science Fiction ? You sold a story to John W. Campbell?” “Yeah. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “I... I...”

  “And,” Betty continued, “I used our names, like I said. There will be thousands of copies printed of that story. It will be in the databases. Back in 2040, any search of past documents will ping on that story for certain because it has both of our names, and then the project’s researchers will see Oldham’s and Gordon’s names and characters and know what took place.”

  “You used the real events?” Jim asked, thumbing through the magazine quickly. “I mean, the time travel and everything?”

  “Of course I did. It’s part of getting our message out, and I had to be certain that in 2040 they’d understand what had occurred, what had actually happened to all those other poor people who came back when I did. And I wanted them to know that James Jones is a hero.”

  “Betty, I didn’t—”

  “Did I tell you yet that I’m going to marry you someday, Dictionary Jones? And we’ll write more books and stories that contain what we want to say in ways that people today can accept, and you’ll publish your game, and I’ll nudge researchers to aim them in the right directions, and someday I’ll officially be Doctor Knox again and we’ll be conducting the research. We’re going to do this thing.”

  Jim grinned at her. “Yes, we are. I wonder how many people reading that story will realize it’s true? Science fact, not fiction.”

  “I had to use what really happened,” Betty said, pointing to the magazine. “You can’t make this stuff up.”

  Copyright © 2010 John G. Hemry

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  On the third day, Youngha caught one of the aliens watching her. The ever-present prairie wind blew her hair into her eyes. She set her pen down next to her tablet of notes about the planet’s insectoid fauna and stood up slowly. She met the alien’s gaze over the tops of the tall grass.

  The alien sat on its oversized haunches, out past the swirled circle of flattened grass made days ago by the lander’s exhaust. The alien’s long tail wrapped around its body, the end tipped with a brush of white then black fur. A braided strap across its chest held its gear. Youngha recognized a knife, a rod, and something that might be a quiver. Its hide was mottled brown, and its long, ovine face was surrounded by wooly white fur.

  Youngha met its gold eyes across the distance and raised a hand in what she hoped the alien would take as a friendly greeting. Look, I have no weapons. She wished that she and her team knew more about the aliens. Of the three humans on the planet, she was as close as any of them had gotten to one.

  Youngha’s heart pounded. No matter what the alien made of her gesture, she was unarmed. She shifted her feet and wished their agoraphobic captain
hadn’t dragged Thom back inside the lander. The alien whistled, a long, low sound, then vanished into the tall grass, bounding away on its powerful hind legs.

  “What do you think of them?” Youngha asked.

  “Who?” Thom said.

  “The aliens.” She poked him with her chopstick. “What else?”

  Thom stuck his chopsticks in his bowl and leaned back, resting against the leg of the lander. As the astronomer-specialist, he was her complement on the survey team. The ship’s astrogator. The grounded one. As linguist-generalist, it was her job to ask him annoying, open-ended questions.

  “I don’t know. There was that xenobiology lecture, back in training.” He shrugged. “The worlds in the catalog are supposed to be human colonies, and odds are a human colony will outcompete any native sentients.”

  “You think so?”

  “Sure. Especially here. This world is supposed to be a colony from the Three Suns Technocracy. All their delicious nanotech... Never mind that they completely failed to grasp the realities of interstellar travel. How many dead rocks did they try to seed?”

  “We’ve seen three.”

  “Exactly. Who knew we’d find aliens? Not that it really matters. Survey doesn’t care about exciting advances in sharp rocks tied to sticks. I just want to find the seed ship and see if we’ve caught a live one. I know it’s around here somewhere.”