Mark studied the blank TV screen. “Your mother didn’t want me to.”
“I doubt if she wanted you to leave, either.”
“She wouldn’t have wanted me to stay, with what I was becoming.” Mark looked back at his son. “I was never built to live inside a goldfish bowl. I could feel myself becoming something I didn’t want to be. I think I was actually going crazy. That would have been a disaster for you, and for her.”
“You too,” Alex said.
His dad snorted. “Yeah, for me too. So I did the only thing I had guts enough to do. I took myself out of the picture. Completely out, and that meant no stories in the paper, not even when I couldn’t find a job at first.” He shook his head incredulously. “Did you know that your Uncle George sent me money for three months until I got my feet under me again?”
Alex felt as if he’d fallen into ice water. Uncle George had never had a good word for Mark. “He did?”
“Yep. Wouldn’t let me pay him back, either. He wrote me letters for the first couple of years to let me know how you were doing, but I—I finally asked him to stop.”
“Why?” asked Alex.
“I’d already cut myself off from you,” Mark said. “I’d already failed you. Every letter reopened the wound.”
There was an uncomfortable silence while each man thought whatever fathers and sons think at times like these. Then Alex cleared his throat and said, “I have no problem with that, Dad. I really don’t. The only thing I have a problem with is how the media attention screwed up your life. So this may sound kind of crazy, but I want you and Mom to sell your story to the press. Auction an exclusive to the highest bidder. Run the price up into the millions and retire on the proceeds.”
Mark laughed. “Nobody’d pay for our story now.”
Alex leaned forward in his chair. “They would if you told them they were right about me all along.”
Space Boy Confirmed Alien!
Parents Reveal All
Next stop, Wyoming.
Insert a picture of Faye screaming at the top of her lungs. Alex said his ears actually rang afterward. She nearly threw him out of the house, and it was two hours before she allowed Mark to cross the threshold. Only because the idea had come from Alex did she even listen, and only because Mark said he didn’t want to do it either did she finally decide to go ahead with it.
“I certainly hope you know what you’re doing,” she told Alex. “This could kill your career faster than a spacesuit failure.”
“Mom, my career is already dead. This is a last-ditch effort to pump some life into it.”
“Last ditch effort to make fools of us all,” Mark said softly, but he was beyond arguing at this point. He had cast his fate to the winds long ago, and was happy to drift wherever they took him. He was looking around at the house he had left nearly two decades earlier, noting that it needed paint and wondering how the roof was holding up. He had carefully avoided looking too long at Faye, because every time he did that he felt something go wonky in his chest.
“I’m trying to make fools of NASA,” Alex protested. “If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears. Metaphorically speaking, of course.” He tweaked the tiny little flaps on the sides of his head. Mark looked away; Faye laughed.
“I still don’t see how it’s going to help,” she said.
“Leave that up to me. You just make up the most outrageous story you can think of. Abduction, genetic experiments, off-planet meetings with the Imperial Space Command—even Elvis—whatever you want.”
“I don’t want to have anything to do with it,” Faye protested, but she was already weakening. Twenty years of stubborn rationality in the face of rampant crackpottery had left her creative side screaming for release. She actually yearned for a chance to play the loon, at least once. And if it helped her son, she would make sure it was a doozy. The promise of a couple of million dollars didn’t hurt her creativity, either.
Alex was back in Houston by the time the story came out. He’d spent his final day of relative obscurity briefing the other astronauts, so when Ferris called him into his office to express his false condolences for the unfair treatment he was getting in the press, Alex was ready for him.
“No, they’re absolutely right,” Alex said. “I’m a space alien.”
Ferris nearly split a seam. “What?”
“Well, I must be.” Alex walked over to the window and looked out at the lush grounds three floors below. “I mean, why else would NASA be holding back a perfectly good astronaut? They’ve got to be afraid of what’ll happen if they send him into space. And the only possible reason for that—”
“You’re insane!”
“—is because they’re afraid he’ll steal the spaceship and go home.” He turned back from the window. “Or could it be that NASA’s simply afraid the press will make fun of them? Well, welcome to the world of Alex Drier. Now my problem is your problem.”
“You can’t seriously think this…this circus is going to get you a mission,” Ferris said, snapping his index finger against the headline.
“I have no idea what will get me a mission,” Alex said. “Hard work and determination certainly wasn’t good enough. Busting my butt to help train every other astronaut in the corps wasn’t good enough. Keeping a low profile to allay your paranoid fear wasn’t enough. So I decided to let my parents make some money while they still could. If that means taking some media heat again for a while, well, what’s the harm in it? I’ve survived it before. And I’m grounded anyway, aren’t I?”
Ferris loosened his collar. “Look, I’ve told you a million times—”
“Are you or are you not afraid of the publicity?” Alex demanded. “If you can sit there behind your desk and tell me with a straight face that the media attention doesn’t scare you—while you’ve got a copy of the Times right there on top of the heap—then I’ll go pack my bags and join a freak show. But if that’s why you’ve been holding me back, I and every other astronaut in the project will tell the press not only that I’m a space alien, but that this whole project is the result of rays beamed into our heads from the mothership orbiting the north pole of the Moon.”
“You can’t orbit a pole,” Ferris said contemptously.
“Damn right you can’t. And I’m not a space alien, either, but that’s what everyone has agreed to say until you stop treating me like one.”
“This is blackmail!” Ferris shouted.
“This is a fucking wake-up call,” Alex shouted back. “I’m the best damned astronaut this project has got and everybody knows it. I’m the most dedicated, the most coordinated, the most physically fit, and with the exception of Mary Paiz, I’m the smartest. If you don’t believe me, look at the reports from your own doctors and shrinks. There’s only one reason I haven’t been in orbit yet, and one reason why I’m being shoved off the Mars mission, and that’s because you’re afraid the press will make fun of you for sending a guy with a big head into space.” He snatched up the newspaper and flung it into the wastebasket. “Well, that’s where your fear belongs, and that—” he pointed straight upward “—is where I belong. It’s your call. But this most assuredly is not blackmail, because your worst nightmare has already happened.”
Space Boy Stonewalls Parents’ Shocking Testimony!
Is NASA In On the Coverup?
Ferris suspended him, of course.
He was still free to do what he wanted on-site; he just didn’t have any official responsibilities any more. So he spent the next couple of days in the simulators, practicing launch and landing and docking maneuvers. He even spent long hours in the ultralight scout simulator, learning how to fly the ungainly fabric-covered jets in Mars’s thin atmosphere. He told me later he figured it was the closest he would ever get, so he wanted to spend as much time there as he could before he was fired.
Ferris noted what he was doing, and took it as another example of arrogant pride. Drier was so damned sure of himself he kept training even when he was suspended! But the t
echs kept feeding Ferris the performance ratings, and the numbers spoke for themselves. Alex successfully landed on Mars with three thrusters out and a fourth one stuck at full throttle. He correctly diagnosed and shut down a leaking fuel pump in mid-ascent before it could explode, and finished the launch and docking with only two out of three engines. He rode out a duststorm in an ultralight, conserving power and fuel by gliding in the updraft on the windward side of Mons Olympus until the weather cleared enough for him to land. And he survived the death mission, the one that was supposed to end with a headlong crash into Mars no matter what the astronauts did to compensate for all the malfunctions on the way down.
“How did he do that?” Ferris demanded of me when he saw the results. I was the engineering genius; I was supposed to have designed the simulation to be foolproof.
“I didn’t think about deploying the scout planes after the parachutes failed,” I said. My delight was so great that I spoke at almost normal speed. “Sure, doing that adds drag, but it also means jettisoning both thruster quads on the lower stage and burning up the fuel you need for the return mission in the upper stage quads just to stay upright. He landed it all right, but he would never have gotten it back into orbit.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Ferris said. “That bugeyed bastard did this while his oxygen supply was down to practically zip and the cabin was shaking like a box falling downstairs. The T-handle broke off in his hand—which was NOT part of the simulation—and he fixed it with duct tape without letting the lander pitch over in the process. If there’s a way to fix the damage after he got down, I’ll bet he’d find it.”
“Changing our tune, are we?” I asked him.
He glowered at me. “My tune is none of your damned business. But yes, it’s conceivable that I might have made a mistake regarding him. I just hope it’s not too late to correct it.”
“We don’t launch for eleven months,” I reminded him.
“I’m aware of the launch window,” he replied. He left my office without saying goodbye.
Space Boy Goes to Space
“It’s my destiny,” He says
His first mission was nothing special. I say that with such aplomb, knowing that anyone who goes into space for even the most routine mission thinks it’s the most fantastic thing that ever happened to them. Alex was no exception, even though he got spectacularly sick the first day.
His was the first landing mission. The mission before his had tested the Mars Descent and Ascent Module, known affectionately as MADAM, in low Earth orbit. Docking and flight maneuvers had gone well, so the next logical step was to try landing it somewhere. Earth was out of the question, since the engines only developed three-quarters of a g of thrust, but that didn’t mean they had to take it all the way to Mars untested, either. There’s a perfect testing ground only 240,000 miles away.
It’s so perfect a person might even be tempted to say God put it there to help us on our way to greater things. That was one theory proposed when the Middle Eastern fundamentalists raised a stink about us returning to profane the Moon they had so recently cleaned up, but it did little to pacify them. The US government didn’t really care. By then we were so tired of the constant squabbling that came from that part of the world that we just ignored them and went on about our business.
Alex didn’t get to actually land on the Moon. That would have been too much publicity even for a repentant Ferris to handle. But he did get to ride along in the Earth-Mars transfer module and test out its recreation facilities while the lander crew did their thing below.
He had fun playing with the entertainment and exercise equipment, the scientific instruments, and so forth. That stuff had all been tested a million times on the ground, but he dutifully put it all through its paces so we could detect any on-site problems before we sent a crew out with it for a two-year mission. About the only thing he found out of spec was a warble in the CD player, which sent Pioneer into a tizzy for a couple of days until the problem was traced to a power supply drain from the gyroscopic stabilizers.
When he tested the surround-sound theatre system, he of course played Communion Part Six. Of the alien hysteria movies that came out when he was young, that was the one that most closely paralleled his actual life. It was also the cheesiest and most embarrassingly bad one, with the aliens stomping around flatfooted like Frankenstein monsters and sucking the blood from the poor residents in the fictitious town of Rattlesnake, Montana. Alex had always loved that one, and he hooted and laughed through all two hours and seven minutes of it while Mission Control listened in on the hab module’s live audio feed. When word got out that that’s what he was watching, it started a minor stampede to the video stores to rent copies of it, and the movie even enjoyed a brief comeback in theatres.
It also reminded people how stupid their fears over his appearance had been. An embarrassed America quietly returned a lot of DVDs to the video stores, and the nostalgia theatres switched over to Batman Seventeen in mid-week.
The guys on the Moon landed without a hitch, got out and did a walk-around inspection, practiced a few of the things they would need to do on Mars, then gathered up some rocks for the geologists back home, climbed back inside, and blasted off for rendezvous again. They didn’t leave any beer cans behind to intentionally irritate the Saudis, but the lower half of the lander and an inflatable dome are still sitting there doing a fine job of that. And they did deploy and assemble one of the ultralight aircraft for practice at doing it in low gravity with spacesuits on, so now there’s a fully assembled airplane sitting on the airless Moon, fueled and ready to puzzle the hell out of anybody who comes along after humanity has vanished into history.
The ascent stage took them back into orbit without mishap, and they flew the hab module back to Earth on a long spiral that took them another two weeks, just to test out the recyclers and fuel cells and so forth. When they finally splashed down, three weeks after they left, Alex was beaming from tiny little ear to tiny little ear. He’d made it to space.
And he was on the backup crew for Mars. When the announcement came out, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Backup crew. This was a one-shot mission; unless the first crew discovered underground cities or something like it, he wouldn’t get another chance.
“Cheer up,” I told him. “Maybe somebody on the prime crew will get hit by a bus.”
Some days I look back on that moment and wonder if there really is something behind all the superstitions people have developed since we learned how to rub sticks together to make fire. Don’t say your dreams out loud or they’ll never come true, don’t break a mirror or you’ll get seven years of bad luck, and most assuredly don’t say anything that will tempt fate, at least without knocking on wood when you say it.
I’m practically paralyzed, okay? I couldn’t knock on wood if my life depended on it. I don’t believe in that crap anyway. But that didn’t stop Randy Parker from stepping out into traffic on a busy London street—instinctively looking to the left instead of the right for approaching traffic—and winding up under a tour bus filled with tennis fans on their way to Wimbledon.
It was the first time I ever allowed myself to think—even for a moment, even as grim whimsy—that maybe this Space Boy stuff had some substance after all. Maybe there was a mothership, manipulating things Alexander’s way. Maybe that was the only way to account for the way things had always seemed to work out for him.
The difference between me and the UFO nuts is that I’m capable of looking at that hypothesis and saying “Naaaah.”
And besides, I don’t consider Alex preternaturally lucky anymore.
Not at all.
Mars Crew Stops Invasion Fleet
Epic Laser Battle Ends in Victory!
Randy Parker’s death put Alex on the mission, along with Dave Anderson, Mary Paiz, and Shawnee Sanders, three straight arrows with test scores and simulator records almost as high as his. The press had fun with the idea of sending two couples to Mars. They weren’t couples, but nob
ody denied the probability that they would become couples on the way. It was even worked into the mission profiles, albeit secretly. And if you want me to talk about who did what to whom, you’re reading the wrong account. I bring it up because some people have suggested that sexual dynamics led to what eventually happened on Mars; it makes good tabloid fodder, I suppose, but that’s not what happened.
As for me, I had plenty of engineering snafus to take care of. The hardware worked amazingly well, which for a project this complex meant we still had one or two major complications a day. Most of them were simple malfunctions that we could fix and forget about, but a few turned out to be design flaws and those had to be reengineered. Those were the scary ones, because you never knew if your changed design would work any better than the first one, or if the different configuration would have a ripple effect that would knock out something else. Toward the end I felt like we were sending four people out into space in a vehicle made more of hope and prayers than of hard metal.
They say a painting is never finished, only abandoned. It shouldn’t be that way with spaceships, but the sad truth is that you can always improve the design. Launch windows won’t wait for a perfect ship, though, and funding is a finite resource, so all you can do is make the best ship you can with the time and materials you’ve got, and then trust the astronauts to keep it working throughout the mission.
We didn’t do a bad job. I can say with great pride that the spaceship didn’t kill anyone. Technically neither did the scout planes, though when a man’s body lies a few hundred feet from a crash site it’s hard to say that the plane didn’t kill him. But even if we’d known about the takeoff instability, we’d still have sent the planes along and hoped for the best. It was too late to redesign them, too late to change the mission profile, too late to do anything but light the rockets and go.
On launch day, the Cape was packed for a dozen miles in every direction, and every television in the country was tuned to the NASA channel. I think it was finally soaking in to a whole generation of people that we were once again doing something great, that there was more to life than just the day-to-day grind. We were about to explore another planet!
The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack Page 20
