Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  . . . heart attack,”the old man was saying. Sarah wondered if he had had one when he got his parking ticket or if he intended to have one now.

  Sarah tried to get to Robert, but two students were blocking the door. She recognized one of the freshmen from Dr. Othniel’s class. “Oh, Todd,” she was saying to a boy in a tank undershirt and jeans, “I knew you’d help me. I tried to get Traci to come with me—I mean, after all, it was her car—but I think she had a date.”

  “A date?” Todd said.

  “Well, I don’t know for sure. It’s hard to keep track of all her guys, I couldn’t do that. I mean,” she lowered her eyes demurely, “if you weremy boyfriend, I’d never even think about other guys.”

  “Excuse me,” Sarah said, “but I need to talk to Dr. Walker.”

  Todd stepped to one side, and instead of stepping to the other, the freshman from Dr. Othniel’s class squeezed over next to him. Sarah slid past, and worked her way up to Robert, ignoring the nasty looks of the other people in line.

  “Don’t tell me you got a ticket, too,” Robert said.

  “No,” she said. “We have to do something about Dr. King.”

  “We certainly do,” Robert said indignantly.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you feel that way. Dr. Othniel’s useless. He doesn’t even realize what’s going on, and Dr. Albertson’s giving a lecture on ‘The Impactization of Microscopic Fossils on Twentieth Century Society.’ ”

  “Which is what?”

  “I have no idea. When I was in there he was showing a videotape ofThe Land Before Time.”

  “I had a coronary thrombosis!” the old man shouted.

  “Unauthorized vehicles are not allowed in permit lots,” the Hitler Youth said. “However, we have initiated a preliminary study of the incident.”

  “A preliminary study!” the old man said, clutching his left arm. “The last one you did took five years!”

  “We need another meeting with Dr. King,” Sarah said. “We need to tell him relevance is not the issue, that paleontology is important in and of itself, and not because brontosaurus earrings are trendy. Surely he’ll see reason. We have science and logic on our side.”

  Robert looked at the old man at the counter.

  “What is there to study?” he was saying. “You ticketed the ambulance while the paramedics were giving me CPR!”

  “I’m not sure reason will work,” Robert said doubtfully.

  “Well, then, how about a petition? We’ve got to do something, or we’ll all be showing episodes of “The Flintstones”. He’s a dangerous man!”

  “He certainly is,” Robert said. “Do you know what I just got? A citation for parking in front of the Faculty Library.”

  “Will you forget about your stupid parking tickets for a minute?” Sarah said. “You won’t have any reason to park unless we get rid of King. I know Albertson’s students would all sign a petition. Yesterday he made them cut the illustrations out of their textbooks and make a collage.”

  “The Parking Authority doesn’t acknowledge petitions,” Robert said. “You heard what Dr. King told the dean at the reception. He said, ‘I’m parked right outside.’ He left a note on his windshield that said the Paleontology Department had given him permission to park there.” He waved the green paper at her. “Do you know whereI parked? Fifteen blocks away. And I’m the one who gets a citation for improperly authorizing parking permission!”

  “Good-bye, Robert,” Sarah said.

  “Wait a minute! Where are you going? We haven’t figured out a plan of action yet.”

  Sarah worked her way back through the line. The two students were still blocking the door. “I’m sure Traci will understand,” the freshman from Dr. Othniel’s class was saying, “I mean, it isn’t like you two wereserious or anything.”

  “Wait a minute!” Robert shouted from his place in line. “What are you going to do?”

  “Evolve,” Sarah said.

  On Wednesday there was another memo in Paleontology’s boxes. It was on green paper, and Robert snatched it up and took off for the Parking Authority office, muttering dark threats. He was already there and standing in line behind a young woman in a wheelchair and two firemen when he finally unfolded it and read it.

  “Iknow I was parking in a handicapped spot,” the young woman was saying when Robert let out a whoop and ran back to the Earth Sciences building.

  Sarah had a one o’clock class, bat she wasn’t there. Her students, who were spending their time erasing marks in their textbooks so they could resell them at the bookstore, didn’t know where she was. Neither did Dr. Albertson, who was making a papier-mâché foraminifer.

  Robert went into Dr. Othniel’s class. “The prevalence of predators in the Late Cretaceous,” Dr. Othniel was saying, “led to severe evolutionary pressures, resulting in aquatic and aeronautical adaptations.”

  Robert tried to get his attention, but he was writing “birds” in the chalk tray.

  He went out in the hall. Sarah’s T.A. was standing outside her office, eating a bag of Doritos.

  “Have you seen Dr. Wright?” Robert asked.

  “She’s gone,” Chuck said, munching.

  “Gone? You mean, resigned?” he said, horrified. “But she doesn’t have to.” He waved the green paper at Chuck. “Dr. King’s going to do a preliminary study, a-what does he call it?-a preinitiatory survey of prevailing paleontological pedagogy. We won’t have to worry about him for another five years at least.”

  “She saw it,” Chuck said, pulling a jar of salsa out of his back pocket. “She said it was too late. She’d already paid her tuition.” He unscrewed the lid.

  “Her tuition?” Robert said. “What are you talking about? Where did she go?”

  “She flew the coop.” He dug in the bag and pulled out a chip. He dipped it in the sauce. “Oh, and she left something for you.” He handed Robert the jar of salsa and the chips and dug in his other back pocket. He handed Robert the flight brochure and a green plastic square.

  “It’s her parking sticker,” Robert said.

  “Yeah,” Chuck said. “She said she won’t be needing it where she’s going.”

  “That’s all? She didn’t say anything else?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, dipping a chip into the salsa Robert still held. “She said to watch out for falling rocks.”

  “The predatory dinosaurs flourished for the entire Late Cretaceous,” Dr. Othniel said, “and then, along with their prey, disappeared. Various theories have been advanced for their extinction, none of which has been authoritatively proved.”

  “I’ll bet they couldn’t find a parking place,” a student who had written one of the letters to the Parking Authority and who had finally given up and traded his Volkswagen in on a skateboard, whispered.

  “What?” Dr. Othniel said, looking vaguely around. He turned back to the board. “The diminishing food supply, the rise of mammals, the depredations of smaller predators, all undoubtedly contributed.”

  He wrote:

  1.FOOD SUPPLY

  2.MAMMALS

  3.COMPETITION

  on the bottom one-fifth of the board.

  His students wrote, “I thought it was an asteroid,” and “My new roommate is trying to steal Todd away from me! Can you believe that?”

  “The demise of the dinosaurs—” Dr. Othniel said, and stopped. He straightened slowly, vertebra by vertebra, until he was nearly erect. He lifted his chin, as if he were sniffing the air, and then walked over to the open window, leaned out, and stood there for several minutes, scanning the clear and empty sky.

  A WALK IN THE SUN

  Geoffrey A. Landis

  The pilots have a saying: a good landing is any landing you can walk away from.

  Perhaps Sanjiv might have done better, if he'd been alive. Trish had done the best she could. All things considered, it was a far better landing than she had any right to expect.

  Titanium struts, pencil-slender, had never been designed to take the force
of a landing. Paper-thin pressure walls had buckled and shattered, spreading wreckage out into the vacuum and across a square kilometer of lunar surface. An instant before impact she remembered to blow the tanks. There was no explosion, but no landing could have been gentle enough to keep Moonshadow together. In eerie silence, the fragile ship had crumpled and ripped apart like a discarded aluminum can.

  The piloting module had torn open and broken loose from the main part of the ship. The fragment settled against a crater wall. When it stopped moving, Trish unbuckled the straps that held her in the pilot's seat and fell slowly to the ceiling. She oriented herself to the unaccustomed gravity, found an undamaged EVA pack and plugged it into her suit, then crawled out into the sunlight through the jagged hole where the living module had been attached.

  She stood on the grey lunar surface and stared. Her shadow reached out ahead of her, a pool of inky black in the shape of a fantastically stretched man. The landscape was rugged and utterly barren, painted in stark shades of grey and black.

  "Magnificent desolation," she whispered. Behind her, the sun hovered just over the mountains, glinting off shards of titanium and steel scattered across the cratered plain.

  Patricia Jay Mulligan looked out across the desolate moonscape and tried not to weep.

  First things first. She took the radio out from the shattered crew compartment and tried it. Nothing. That was no surprise; Earth was over the horizon, and there were no other ships in cislunar space.

  After a little searching she found Sanjiv and Theresa. In the low gravity they were absurdly easy to carry. There was no use in burying them. She sat them in a niche between two boulders, facing the sun, facing west, toward where the Earth was hidden behind a range of black mountains. She tried to think of the right words to say, and failed. Perhaps as well; she wouldn't know the proper service for Sanjiv anyway. "Goodbye, Sanjiv. Goodbye, Theresa. I wish--I wish things would have been different. I'm sorry." Her voice was barely more than a whisper. "Go with God."

  She tried not to think of how soon she was likely to be joining them.

  She forced herself to think. What would her sister have done? Survive. Karen would survive. First: inventory your assets.

  She was alive, miraculously unhurt. Her vacuum suit was in serviceable condition. Life-support was powered by the suit's solar arrays; she had air and water for as long as the sun continued to shine. Scavenging the wreckage yielded plenty of unbroken food packs; she wasn't about to starve.

  Second: call for help. In this case, the nearest help was a quarter of a million miles over the horizon. She would need a high-gain antenna and a mountain peak with a view of Earth.

  In its computer, Moonshadow had carried the best maps of the moon ever made. Gone. There had been other maps on the ship; they were scattered with the wreckage. She'd managed to find a detailed map of Mare Nubium--and a small global map meant to be used as an index. It would have to do. As near as she could tell, the impact site was just over the eastern edge of Mare Smythii--"Smith's Sea." The mountains in the distance should mark the edge of the sea, and, with luck, have a view of Earth. She checked her suit. At a command, the solar arrays spread out to their full extent like oversized dragonfly wings and glinted in prismatic colors as they rotated to face the sun. She verified that the suit's systems were charging properly, and set off.

  Close up, the mountain was less steep than it had looked from the crash site. In the low gravity, climbing was hardly more difficult than walking, although the two-meter dish made her balance awkward. Reaching the ridgetop, Trish was rewarded with the sight of a tiny sliver of blue on the horizon. The mountains on the far side of the valley were still in darkness. She hoisted the radio higher up on her shoulder and started across the next valley.

  From the next mountain peak the Earth edged over the horizon, a blue and white marble half-hidden by black mountains.

  She unfolded the tripod for the antenna and carefully sighted along the feed. "Hello? This is Astronaut Mulligan from Moonshadow. Emergency. Repeat, this is an emergency. Does anybody hear me?"

  She took her thumb off the transmit button and waited for a response, but heard nothing but the soft whisper of static from the sun.

  "This is Astronaut Mulligan from Moonshadow. Does anybody hear me?" She paused again. "Moonshadow, calling anybody. Moonshadow, calling anybody. This is an emergency."

  "--shadow, this is Geneva control. We read you faint but clear. Hang on, up there." She released her breath in a sudden gasp. She hadn't even realized she'd been holding it.

  After five minutes the rotation of the Earth had taken the ground antenna out of range. In that time after they had gotten over their surprise that there was a survivor of the Moonshadow--she learned the parameters of the problem. Her landing had been close to the sunset terminator: the very edge of the illuminated side of the moon. The moon's rotation is slow, but inexorable. Sunset would arrive in three days. There was no shelter on the moon, no place to wait out the fourteen-day-long lunar night. Her solar cells needed sunlight to keep her air fresh. Her search of the wreckage had yielded no unruptured storage tanks, no batteries, no means to lay up a store of oxygen.

  And there was no way they could launch a rescue mission before nightfall.

  Too many "no"s.

  She sat silent, gazing across the jagged plain toward the slender blue crescent, thinking.

  After a few minutes the antenna at Goldstone rotated into range, and the radio crackled to life. "Moonshadow, do you read me? Hello, Moonshadow, do you read me?"

  "Moonshadow here."

  She released the transmit button and waited in long silence for her words to be carried to Earth.

  "Roger, Moonshadow. We confirm the earliest window for a rescue mission is thirty days from now. Can you hold on that long?"

  She made her decision and pressed the transmit button. "Astronaut Mulligan for Moonshadow. I'll be here waiting for you. One way or another."

  She waited, but there was no answer. The receiving antenna at Goldstone couldn't have rotated out of range so quickly. She checked the radio. When she took the cover off, she could see that the printed circuit board on the power supply had been slightly cracked from the crash, but she couldn't see any broken leads or components clearly out of place. She banged on it with her fist--Karen's first rule of electronics: if it doesn't work, hit it--and re-aimed the antenna, but it didn't help. Clearly something in it had broken.

  What would Karen have done? Not just sit here and die, that was certain. Get a move on, kiddo. When sunset catches you, you'll die.

  They had heard her reply. She had to believe they heard her reply and would be coming for her. All she had to do was survive.

  The dish antenna would be too awkward to carry with her. She could afford nothing but the bare necessities. At sunset her air would be gone. She put down the radio and began to walk.

  ----------

  Mission Commander Stanley stared at the X-rays of his engine. It was four in the morning. There would be no more sleep for him that night; he was scheduled to fly to Washington at six to testify to Congress.

  '"Your decision, Commander," the engine technician said.

  "We can't find any flaws in the X-rays we took of the flight engines, but it could be hidden. The nominal flight profile doesn't take the engines to a hundred twenty, so the blades should hold even if there is a flaw."

  "How long a delay if we yank the engines for inspection?"

  "Assuming they're okay, we lose a day. If not, two, maybe three."

  Commander Stanley drummed his fingers in irritation. He hated to be forced into hasty decisions. "Normal procedure would be?"

  "Normally we'd want to reinspect.

  "Do it."

  He sighed. Another delay. Somewhere up there, somebody was counting on him to get there on time. If she was still alive. If the cut-off radio signal didn't signify catastrophic failure of other systems.

  If she could find a way to survive without air.

 
----------

  On Earth it would have been a marathon pace. On the moon it was an easy lope. After ten miles the trek fell into an easy rhythm: half a walk, half like jogging, and half bounding like a slow-motion kangaroo. Her worst enemy was boredom.

  Her comrades at the academy--in part envious of the top scores that had made her the first of their class picked for a mission--had ribbed her mercilessly about flying a mission that would come within a few kilometers of the moon without landing. Now she had a chance to see more of the moon up close than anybody in history. She wondered what her classmates were thinking now. She would have a tale to tell--if only she could survive to tell it.

  The warble of the low voltage warning broke her out of her reverie. She checked her running display as she started down the maintenance checklist. Elapsed EVA time, eight point three hours. System functions, nominal, except that the solar array current was way below norm. In a few moments she found the trouble: a thin layer of dust on her solar array. Not a serious problem; it could be brushed off. If she couldn't find a pace that would avoid kicking dust on the arrays, then she would have to break every few hours to housekeep. She rechecked the array and continued on.

  With the sun unmoving ahead of her and nothing but the hypnotically blue crescent of the slowly rotating Earth creeping imperceptibly off the horizon, her attention wandered. Moonshadow had been tagged as an easy mission, a low-orbit mapping flight to scout sites for the future moonbase. Moonshadow had never been intended to land, not on the moon, not anywhere.

  She'd landed it anyway; she'd had to.

  Walking west across the barren plain, Trish had nightmares of blood and falling, Sanjiv dying beside her; Theresa already dead in the lab module; the moon looming huge, spinning at a crazy angle in the viewports. Stop the spin, aim for the terminator at low sun angles, the illumination makes it easier to see the roughness of the surface. Conserve fuel, but remember to blow the tanks an instant before you hit to avoid explosion.