The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack
Page 19
The turnaround, when it happened, came from the last place I would ever have expected: the tabloid-reading public. Regular newspapers had long since become indistinguishable from tabloids, so that included just about everybody. Even daily papers ran articles on Elvis or Madonna sightings right beside the national news…and occasionally they would do a piece on Space Aliens. Alexander still got a lot of press, since he was a constant source of new photographs for them, but the article that tipped the scales for the space program was something else entirely.
Some poor drudge of a reporter, stumped for material and facing a deadline, must have been digging through back issues looking for something he could plagiarize when he ran across an article on the Martian pyramid and the mysterious face that supposedly looked out from the regolith beside it. Of course he didn’t know that the Mars Orbiter program in the nineties had pretty much debunked the whole idea with detailed photos from a hundred miles up, but if he did he wouldn’t have cared. He had an article to write, and suddenly he had a topic.
When the paper came out, demanding that the U.S. go back to Mars and find out what the face was trying to communicate to us, nothing much would have come of it if the reporter hadn’t found an ingenious way to eat up twelve more column-inches of space. He had printed a clip-out form for people to sign and send to the President.
He had no doubt intended it as a simple gag, but he had underestimated his audience’s credulity. A flood of clip-outs poured into the White House, many of them accompanied by long letters from people who couldn’t resist the chance to tell the President just why this was so important. A sizeable number of people were of the opinion that the face was Jesus. As other papers, not to be outdone, joined in with clip-outs of their own, the issue, stupid as it was, became the talk of the nation. When the President ignored the letters, papers printed more articles crying “coverup!” and exhorting their readers to send even more letters. Within a week they were arriving by the ton.
The President was no fool. He knew the controversy was ridiculous. But an election was coming up, and the economy was in the middle of a long downward slide, brought on at least in part because we weren’t fighting any wars to pump money into the big defense contractors. He needed something to toss money at. Something that would capture the public’s imagination in terms people could understand. If the public wanted to go to Mars, well then, he would lead them to Mars.
He called an old college buddy of his who worked for NASA, a former janitor who had gotten his Ph.D. and worked his way into the mission planning office, and he suggested that a Mars proposal would receive serious consideration in congress. But he would have to work fast. The election was only a month away, and the President wanted to drop a real proposal on the public at the last moment. His buddy said, “I already know how to do it,” and dusted off his copy of my doctoral thesis.
Then the President called a dozen of the most influential senators and representatives into his office and showed them the piles of mail.
They were no fools either. Or maybe they were just fools enough. They were certain that a mission to Mars was a big waste of time and money, but they were willing to support it if it would get them reelected. So in a resounding speech on the night before the polls opened—way too late for a rebuttal from the opposition—NASA suddenly got its first new mandate in decades: Landing an American on Mars.
Space Boy Threatens Murder!!
Heroic Photog Captures Full Scope of Rampage
Political correctness may not be the worst affliction of the twenty-first century, but it’s certainly the silliest. Even when I was a kid people grew uncomfortable if someone called me “crippled” rather than “differently abled,” but nobody could actually be fined for it. Nowadays I could pull mandatory counselling time for calling myself a crip, much less a gimp or a spaz. At the very worst I am “moto-neurally challenged,” and even that has a negative connotation that makes people uncomfortable.
It also opens doors. Wide open. In their pathetic attempts to ignore reality, the arbiters of morality and sentimentality in our culture have decreed that people are not to be discriminated against in any way, not for reasons of race, creed, color, age, gender, sexual preference, marital status, economic condition—or ability. Especially not ability. Goodness no; that would mean someone was actually better at something than someone else, and that flew directly in the face of conventional wisdom.
Combine that with (a) affirmative action, which came back with a vengeance after its repeal at the turn of the century, and (b) Alex’s own marks, which now put him on the Dean’s List for the fourth straight semester, in precisely the course of study that I’d mapped out for him, and (c) my own appointment to the Project Development Committee—and Alex suddenly had a perfect shot at his dream. Every minority of any sort had to be hired in proportion to their prevalence in society, which meant that NASA had to hire the handicapped, even for a wildly inappropriate job like “astronaut.”
And Alex was one of very few people who qualified as handicapped without actually being handicapped. Considering their other options, NASA was glad to accept him the moment he mailed in his application. It didn’t matter that he was still a couple of years away from graduation. In fact it helped them immensely. They had no training program in place and wouldn’t for at least two years. They had nothing really for their new astronauts to do until they created one. And in Alexander’s case, since he was merely hired as a placeholder anyway, they were happy to put him on the payroll and let him stay in school. Besides, they figured, even if he was only an astronaut in name, his very presence would keep the masses interested.
I called him up the day the news broke. It was, by the way, one of the last times I’d ever call him from the old house in Georgetown; I already had handicap-design specialists fixing up my new place in Cocoa Beach. It would require spending all my salary and much of my trust fund on attendants, drivers, custodial workers, and increased medical costs, but there was no way I’d be able to handle the job offsite—and there was no way I’d ever want to. My clock was still ticking. Still, when I called, it was Alexander’s triumph I was thinking about. My voice synthesizer chirped out a greeting as ebullient as it could manage: “Congratulations, Space Boy.”
“Don’t call me that,” he said. “Don’t call me that ever again.”
That set me back in my anti-bedsore harness. I had called him Space Boy ever since we met. “What’s the matter? Tabloid reporters getting you down?”
“Christ yes. I—just a minute.” I heard some scuffling, then he shouted, “Get the fuck out of my room!” and there was a loud bang.
“Alex?” I asked. My voice synthesizer wouldn’t shout. “Alex?”
He came back to the phone. “A couple of ’em got past the dorm’s security system.”
“What was that noise? You didn’t shoot one of them, did you?”
He laughed. “I may be from Wyom-ing, but I don’t solve everything with a gun, no matter how good it would feel. No, I just kicked one of them in the balls, grabbed the other one by her tits and shoved her out of my room, and slammed the door in their faces.”
“Ouch. That’s getting kind of personal, don’t you think?”
“And they’re not? I’m tired of being called ‘Space Boy.’ I’m tired of being called a freak. I’m the only guy in the world those bastards can make fun of because of the way I look, and they’re driving me crazy.”
I heard more pounding as he said that, but I couldn’t tell if it was on the door or him banging on his desk. “Are you going to be safe there?” I asked.
He sighed. “I saw two big security guards coming down the hallway. I’ll be all right.”
I thought about it for a minute. He was used to me pausing to catch my breath; he waited patiently until I said, “You may not want to—you should excuse the expression—alienate the press. They’re in charge of public opinion these days.”
“They’re a bunch of sadistic leeches,” Alexander replied.
“What, now you want me to let ’em in?”
“No. Never let them close to you. No interviews, nothing like that. Never even have a direct conversation with them. It would be too easy for them to twist your words around. But you can still communicate with them, and you can make them say what you want them to say.”
“How?”
I was thinking out loud, but I had plenty of time to do it while I paused for breath. “Send out press releases. All the papers will receive the same text, so we can say what we want without worrying about it being misquoted.” I laughed, and my stupid speech synthesizer said, “Ha, ha, ha.”
“Did I ever tell you that you sound like Boris Karloff when you do that?” he asked.
“Fuck Boris Karloff,” I said. “And fuck the press, too. We can feed those bastards anything we want to, and as long as it makes good copy they’ll be happy to print it.”
“So what do we want to say, besides ‘Leave me alone’?”
“How about, ‘Making a bold move in support of handicapped people everywhere, Alex Drier, the so-called ‘Space Boy,’ has accepted an offer to become one of NASA’s new generation of astronauts. Despite the barrage of tasteless taunts he will surely endure because of his unusual deformity, he has chosen to take this step to demonstrate that public humiliation should not stop anyone who is truly determined to blah blah blah.’”
“Brilliant,” he said, his tone of voice making it clear that I was anything but. “I especially like the ‘blah, blah, blah’ part. Truly inspired.”
“Thank you. So what sucked about the rest of it?”
“You used ‘Space Boy’ yourself. And you called me deformed.”
“Better we say it than the press. The way I said it, you’ll get sympathy. It’ll make the press look like the bullies they are. And the only way they can fight back is to quit printing articles about you, which is all we really want anyway.”
“Well, that’s a point,” he said after a moment’s thought. “Did you save that?”
Everything I say is held in a temporary scroll-back buffer. I recalled my impromptu press release and saved it permanently, then said, “Let me work on this for a few minutes, then I can transmit it to you and you can print it out and take it to the reporters.”
“I thought you said I shouldn’t ever—”
“Right. Have one of your security guards take it to the reporters. Print out only ten copies, and make them fight over ’em like the snarling dogs they are.” I laughed again. “Ha, ha, ha. It’s time we took the high road, metaphorically as well as physically.”
Space Boy Starts Training
“He’s a Natural,” Says NASA
It didn’t work as well as we’d hoped it would, at least not right away. The tabloids weren’t bothered by inconsistencies between their stories and anyone else’s; in their world that simply proved that everyone else was lying. We did manage to direct the stories a little bit, though, and over the next couple of years we got better at it. Enough so that the media attention at least didn’t grow any worse as Alexander became more of a public figure.
Even so, America’s first four Mars astronauts were as whitebread as the Mercury seven. And so were the second crew, and the third, and the fourth. NASA may have had to hire minorities and the handicapped and the gay-lesbian-old-Baha’i—they even hired me, as a designer, before they realized I actually knew more than the rest of them put together—but they weren’t about to staff their missions that way.
I fought it as best I could from within, but I didn’t have that much power. They were using my design for the Earth-Mars transfer vehicle, but that didn’t mean squat in the long run. If I made too big a stink, they would have thrown me right off the project without shedding a tear, and I wasn’t willing to lose that for anything.
We began testing the ion drive and the crew habitat. The lander was still mired in design snafus, but it was beginning to look like we could actually send four people to Mars and bring them back alive even if we couldn’t land them when they got there. I was busier than I’d ever been in my life, and happier, too, even if the stress was taking its toll on my wasted stamina. By the time Boeing actually delivered the lander, I could barely talk at all, and was thinking of switching over to a neural implant—one of the new generation of voice-synths that could read the electrical impulses in my brain so I didn’t have to eyeball words off a computer screen. Direct interface was becoming fairly common by that point, but it seemed like a further retreat into infirmity, and I did not look forward to taking that step.
The lander was basically an updated Lunar Module, with separate descent and ascent rockets to cut down on the weight we had to carry back into space on the return trip. That meant the crew couldn’t use it to jump from site to site on Mars, but they carried ultralight aircraft for that. It was more efficient to use airplanes anyway. We managed to squeeze two of them on board, along with enough food and shelter for a year’s stay.
The clock was ticking. Rumors started flying as to who would crew the mission, even though the selection wouldn’t be made for over a year. But Alex was out in the cold. NASA hadn’t even given him an orbital flight, and it was conventional wisdom that nobody would be sent to Mars without at least one space flight under their belt.
“What can we do?” he asked me one evening after another request for a mission had been turned down on the grounds that he was needed more in a support capacity than in space. “If I don’t get a flight soon, I’ll never even get on the backup crew for Mars.”
“True enough,” I said, slowly and with great difficulty. “I know how frustrating it must feel to come this far and then hit the glass ceiling, but the crew selection is out of my control.”
“That’s what I keep hearing from everybody I talk to,” he growled. “Except that bastard Ferris in the Assoff—” (that was what we called the Astronaut Office, where the crew selections were made) “—who just laughs.”
“I’ll think of something,” I told him.
“What?”
“I don’t know. Something. There’s got to be a way to show them you’re not a threat. That’s what Ferris is afraid of, after all. He knows you’re a good astronaut, but he’s afraid of the kind of publicity you’ll get if he actually sends you into space.”
“Publicity!” Alex shouted. “Everywhere I turn, publicity is standing between me and my life!” He began pacing the tiny space between my desk and the door. “I hardly even left the house until I was five because my Dad was afraid of what the crazies would do. Hell, that’s why he left. Well, if NASA hired me because of the way I look, I am not going to let them use it to stop me from getting a mission!”
I wish I could say his little rant sparked me into action, gave me the brilliant idea that salvaged his career. I’d love to take credit for it, but that’s not how it happened. What happened was that he stomped out, mad, and I sat in my office until well after dark, thinking with the lights out until I fell asleep.
Alex went home and trashed out his apartment, drinking beer and getting angrier and angrier by the minute.
Space Boy’s Secret Mission in California!
Is Killer Earthquake on the Way?
He should have died in a fiery crash somewhere over New Mexico. That he didn’t stands as testament to his skill as a pilot, but not to his calm reasoning ability while intoxicated, because what he did when he got mad enough was check out a T-38—the training jet the astronauts use to fly back and forth from Houston to the Cape—and roar off in a sentimental blaze of glory for San Francisco.
I don’t know who was the more surprised when they met. Alex unannounced at your door in the middle of the night could scare the piss out of practically anybody, even his dad. On the other hand, Mark Drier had aged quite a bit since Alex had last seen him. Eighteen years of straight time, the salt air o
f Fisherman’s Wharf, and a lifetime of regrets had all left their mark on him. Alex was taller, too, so it looked to him like his father had shrunk to hobbit size and wrinkled like an apple left in the sun.
To hear him tell it, neither one of them blinked an eye.
“Hi,” Alex said.
“Hi,” said Mark.
They looked at each other for a moment, then, “Can I come in?”
“Sure.” His dad stood aside and Alex entered his one-bedroom apartment. It was lit by a single light in the kitchen, which revealed a reasonably tidy bachelor’s home. Dirty dishes on the counter, but not more than a couple days’ worth. Newspapers and magazines on the metal table and all but one of the creaky wooden chairs around it. Full bookshelves in the living room, and a big ship in a bottle on top of a console TV.
“You make that?” Alex asked.
“Yep.”
“Looks nice. I’ve always wondered how people get the masts and sails and stuff to fit through that little hole. And how they manipulate it once it’s inside.”
“Patience,” Mark said. “And long sticks with tape on the end.”
“You never struck me as a patient sort of guy,” Alex said.
It might have been an accusation. His father chose not to interpret it that way. He just shrugged and said, “I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands. You learn.”
“I guess you could.” Alex sat down in the gray naugahyde recliner facing the TV. His dad sat on the couch off to the side. “Of course, I’ve never had much patience either. I guess I got that from you.”
Mark Drier’s hands were shaking. “Listen, Alex, I—”
“No,” Alexander said. “That’s not why I came here.” He removed a tabloid from his jacket pocket. The headline read: CITY OF IMMORTALS DISCOVERED ON THE MOON. “You never did go to the press, not even after you left home. Why not?”