The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

by Isaac Asimov

  “I’m taking Grandma to the beach again tomorrow,” said Lily. “She liked it last time. And I have astronomy homework.”

  “Are you enjoying astronomy?” Hannah tried not to hold her breath for the answer. Astronomers traveled too much to keep close ties to their families on colony worlds; time dilation made it impossible.

  “It’s fine. Biology’s better,” said Lily. “Biology looks back at you.”

  “I think the astronomers would say that about astronomy.”

  Lily shrugged. “Then I guess I’m not an astronomer.”

  Hannah laughed and hugged her. “Have a good time at the beach with Grandma, then.”

  Lily smiled her self-contained little smile. “Oh, we will.”

  Later that night, when Lily was off typing homework answers into her handheld, Hannah sat down on the couch across from her mother’s armchair. Dee paused her book and looked expectant.

  “Do you remember that microscope you got me when I was a kid? Maybe five years younger than Lily, maybe more,” said Hannah dreamily. Dee made an encouraging noise, so Hannah went on: “It came with one of those books showing what you would expect to see, and I looked at a drop of water—we were on Alpha Moncerotis Six then, remember? And it was so different from in the book. The little unicellular creatures swimming around on Alpha Mon Six were totally different from the Earth ones.

  “And I loved it, I just loved it. I begged cultures from anybody who’d give me one. Cheek cells, hairs from whatever animal they were studying, plants from the colony, anything. It was the best present.”

  “Funny, you remembering that after all these years.”

  Hannah glanced down automatically, but her mother followed her gaze. “No, the unit’s fine. I really think the solder will hold it awhile longer. I just don’t remember. I didn’t before the injury, and I never will. I’m sorry I’ve forgotten it, because you sound like it was a hugely important piece of your childhood—I wish I could remember. But it’s like that, honey. There’ll be something Lily thinks is the worst thing you ever did to ruin her life, or the best thing you ever did to make it work, and you will blink at her and say, ‘I did? Did I? Oh.’”

  “I suppose that’s how it works,” said Hannah. “I remember her first steps, and of course she doesn’t. Why shouldn’t there be things that are the other way around.”

  “There have to be, or she wouldn’t be her own person,” said Dee.

  “Well, she’s certainly that,” said Hannah ruefully.

  “Oh yes,” said Dee. “She’ll surprise you. That’s what children are for.”

  A few weeks later, Hannah looked up from the cephalid tank and its computer and found Lily and Dee standing there watching her.

  “We have a surprise for you,” said Lily.

  “Can it wait, honey?” Hannah cast her mother an imploring glance, but Dee looked as implacable as Lily. “I’m in the middle of work here.”

  “Is it going well?” asked Dee.

  Hannah glared at her. “You know it’s not.”

  “A break will be good for you. Come.”

  Hannah walked with her mother through their ocean-side research complex. Lily danced ahead of them like a much younger child. Hannah sighed. “You know I like to spend time with both of you, Mom, but—”

  “Hush, dear. Watch Lily.”

  Lily was peeling off her clothes; she had her wetsuit underneath. She climbed onto the lip of one of the cephalid tanks. Hannah and Dee caught up with her.

  “Lil,” said Hannah, “I don’t think now’s the time.”

  “This is what I wanted to show you, Mom.”

  Dee passed a tiny flashlight and a little black box up to her granddaughter, who jumped in the tank with it. Hannah stepped forward ineffectually, knowing she couldn’t stop her. “Oh, Mom.”

  “It’s not my unit, it’s the spare,” said Dee. “They’re waterproof. Lily’s tried this before.”

  “And if the spare gets damaged—”

  “Relax. This is important. We knew you wouldn’t approve right away, or we wouldn’t have done it without you.”

  Hannah shook her head. “That my mother and my daughter should use that line against me, yy.”

  Dee rolled her eyes. “It’s not against you, it’s for you. Just watch.”

  A curious cephalid was approaching Lily. She held out the leads to the memory unit. He probed them with one slender tentacle. Lily gently guided the leads into the cephalid’s mouth orifice.

  “It’s got a light display,” said Dee. “I’ve been working on getting it connected to the output.”

  “A light display?”

  The cephalid engulfed the leads, and the light display made itself known: every diode in it blazed. Then they rippled in a random-looking series of patterns.

  “We think he’s trying to remember how to work it,” said Dee. “We’re not sure. We thought you could figure it out.”

  “An external memory unit with built-in communications,” said Hannah. “Oh my.”

  “It was Lily’s idea. I told the nanites where to solder.”

  Hannah took a breath and spoke gently. “Mom, you know that the cephalid may not be able to use your device as memory as we would understand it, right? Being able to light up the panel doesn’t necessarily mean being able to store thoughts as memory.”

  “Oh, I know, dear. We thought of that. But we thought at least it’d be something to find out.”

  “Oh yes,” Hannah agreed. “Definitely something to find out.”

  Lily flashed the flashlight at the cephalid, three times. It recoiled. She flashed again, and the light display went dark. Then it lit up with a blue pattern, three times. Lily repeated it.

  “She’s a natural,” said Hannah.

  “Nature, nurture, whatever!” said Dee, grinning.

  After a few more flash-patterns, Lily swam back to the lip of the tank. The cephalid made a green pattern at her, but she climbed out anyway.

  “You can do it like a real experiment,” she said, shaking her black hair out. “You know how to design that sort of thing. Granny and I just got it together for you.”

  “I’ll want to have a light bank set up,” said Hannah thoughtfully.

  Lily pressed the tiny diode flashlight into her hand. “To begin with.”

  Hannah turned to the cephalid and squeezed the trigger on the flashlight twice.

  Two ripples of light appeared on the modified implant’s screen: first the blue pattern and then the green. “Hello again,” said Hannah aloud.

  They had no idea what they’d done, she thought. If the cephalid could deal with an external electronic system, there had to have been something in their past that allowed for it. Something evolved? More likely something created and lost—and perhaps not by themselves? There would have to be a lot more xenoarchaeology before they would know who had been there before, and what they had taught the cephalids about the use of these tools.

  But there would be time for that later. For now there was a conversation Hannah had wanted to have for a long time. Smiling at the retreating backs of her mother and daughter, she flashed the little flashlight in response.

  TOP SECRET, by David Grinnell

  I cannot say whether I am the victim of a very ingenious jest on the part of some of my wackier friends or whether I am just someone accidentally “in” on some top-secret business. But it happened, and it happened to me personally, while visiting Washington recently, just rubbernecking you know, looking at the Capitol and the rest of the big white buildings.

  It was summer, fairly hot, Congress was not in session, nothing much was doing, most people vacationing. I was that day aiming to pay a visit to the State Department, not knowing that I couldn’t, for there was nothing public to see there unless it’s the imposing and rather martial lobby (it used to be the War Department building, I’m told). This I did not find out until I had blithely walked up the marble steps to the entrance, passed the big bronze doors, and wandered about in the huge lobby,
wherein a small number of people, doubtless on important business, were passing in and out.

  A guard, sitting near the elevators, made as if to start in my direction to find out who and what the deuce I wanted, when one of the elevators came down and a group of men hustled out. There were two men, evidently State Department escorts, neatly clad in gray double-breasted suits, with three other men walking with them. The three men struck me as a little odd; they wore long, black cloaks, big slouch hats with wide brims pulled down over their faces, and carried portfolios. They looked for all the world like cartoon representations of cloak-and-dagger spies. I supposed that they were some sort of foreign diplomats and, as they were coming directly toward me, stood my ground, determined to see who they were.

  The floor was marble and highly polished. One of the men nearing me suddenly seemed to lose his balance. He slipped; his feet shot out from under him and he fell. His portfolio slid directly at my feet.

  Being closest to him, I scooped up the folio and was the first to help raise him to his feet. Grasping his arm, I hoisted him from the floor—he seemed to be astonishingly weak in the legs; I felt almost that he was about to topple again. His companions stood about rather flustered, helplessly, their faces curiously impassive. And though the man I helped must have received a severe jolt, his face never altered expression.

  Just then the two State Department men recovered their own poise, rushed about, and, getting between me and the man I had rescued, rudely brushed me aside and rushed their party to the door.

  Now what bothers me is not the impression I got that the arm beneath that man’s sleeve was curiously woolly, as if he had a fur coat underneath the cloak (and this in a Washington summer!), and it’s not the impression that he was wearing a mask (the elastic band of which I distinctly remember seeing amidst the kinky, red, close-cropped hair of his head). No, it’s not that at all, which might be merely momentary misconstructions on my part. It’s the coin that I picked up off the floor where he’d dropped his portfolio.

  I’ve searched through every stamp and coin catalogue I can find or borrow, and I’ve made inquiries of a dozen language teachers and professors, and nobody can identify that coin or the lettering around its circumference.

  It’s about the size of a quarter, silvery, very light in weight but also very hard. Besides the lettering on it, which even the Bible Society, which knows a thousand languages and dialects, cannot decipher, there is a picture on one side and a symbol on the other.

  The picture is the face of a man, but of a man with very curiously wolfish features: sharp canine teeth parted in what could be a smile; a flattened, broad, and somewhat protruding nose, more like a pug dog’s muzzle; sharp, widely spaced, vulpine eyes, and definitely hairy and pointed ears.

  The symbol on the other side is a circle with latitude and longitude lines on it. Flanking the circle, one on each side, are two crescent-shaped moons.

  I wish I knew just how far those New Mexico rocket experiments have actually gone.

  LIVING UNDER THE CONDITIONS, by James K. Moran

  As the early April sun made his cheeks flush, Michael didn’t know what to believe in anymore.

  The birds bitched in the trees as he crossed through the middle of the park, which smelled of mud, dry grass, and strong marijuana. Two men wearing shirts and ties sat on a nearby bench on the rectangular perimeter, eating take-out lunches in Styrofoam boxes. A middle-aged blond man threw a Frisbee to his retriever in the centre of the park. Mid-morning traffic rushed by on all sides.

  All this meant nothing to Michael, who glanced at his watch and sped up. The birds might vanish or change into other animals, the smells of spring might change to fall, the people might float away if the gravitational constant ended, and the speeding cars might suddenly have no traction.

  He had spent enough time getting used to it but had never liked it. When Michael was growing up, he and other kids shared stories about where their parents were when the Wormhole Incident happened. Civilians didn’t know the details even now, except that scientists had discovered a wormhole in space, not far from Earth. Various interstellar agencies around the world had rushed in to study and capitalize on the discovery, but something had happened. One day, morning became night, and since then, things were always changing—time, eras, laws—the Conditions, as they called them. That was why Michael had checked the Weathering Change network before leaving the house, in case anything came up. The forecast had looked clear, but he knew they were rarely right.

  But right now, he had only 15 minutes before his job interview and he was in a white-hot panic. That wasn’t enough time to walk the eight blocks to the office, and there wasn’t a bus around. Michael’s heart pounded faster. Sweat covered his knit brow, palms, and already-sweaty armpits. A smell of aftershave and cologne rose from him like steam.

  Michael glanced down at his freshly ironed black dress pants to make sure he had not stepped in a puddle. They looked fine. The growling engine of an approaching bus made him look up.

  Michael bore down on the far corner of the park where the bus pulled up to pick up a half-dozen passengers. Maybe he had finally had a lucky break. He quickly joined the line, boarded, paid, and shuffled with the crowd toward the rear of the bus.

  The bus pulled away, passing the beer store and parking lot across the street.

  A billboard at the far end of the lot advertised a tall, frosty mug full of ale that threatened to spill voluptuous foam over the lip of the glass. The ad read “In these times of change, remember that change is a good thing. Try Reef’s Crimson Ale.”

  Michael wasn’t so sure that change was a good thing. But he needed rent money badly and hadn’t worked in a month. Now in his early 30s, the career crisis of finding a day job hit him each morning. This was his first interview call in months.

  Michael jostled past a seated, overweight woman with a hair lip. Her dirty beige jogging pants had a stripe along each side. With her right foot, covered in a running shoe, she gently nudged a pudgy baby dressed in a red jumper and stuffed into a stroller. Michael narrowly avoided tripping over both of them. The woman coughed, her stale breath wafting up to him over the smells of sweat and soiled diapers.

  Michael stumbled past a tall, black man with long dreadlocks listening to a yellow MP4 player. The man nodded and swayed his slim, muscular shoulders as Michael navigated to the back door and grabbed a metal railing with his right hand.

  “Excuse me,” someone said timidly behind him.

  Michael tried to stay to the right side of the door. A short Chinese man in a beige bomber vest squeezed by, brushing Michael with his pot belly.

  A pressure loosened in Michael’s ears as though he had just come down from a higher altitude. He shook his head, squinted his eyes shut and opened them again.

  The Chinese man rose into the air, a look of wide-eyed wonder on his face, scuffing Michael in the chest with his right shoe and flailing his hand against Michael’s cheek. The man latched onto the railing. Michael felt his own feet rise from the floor.

  “That’s just the gravitational constant,” the voice of the bus driver crackled on the PA system in a thick Francophone accent. “Hold onto a bar and keep moving towards the back. Keep moving towards the back, please.”

  As if to affirm the news, many passengers floated upward. The man listening to his MP4 did not notice, his thick dreadlocks rising around him like an umbrella. A skinny teenaged boy snored in the back, leaning over a side seat with his arms crossed and his jaw slack, oblivious to the fact that he would soon thud against the ceiling with the small of his back. A brunette with her hair tied back jostled to the door, chatting on her silver cell phone, which slipped from her hand and rose above her head.

  The baby at the front of the bus giggled. Michael spotted the boy in the jumper floating feet-first toward the bus driver above everyone’s heads. His mother yelped, clutched his foot and yanked him back.

  The bus stopped. The doors sighed open.

  Michael pushed
the stranger out by his wet soles. A few more passengers floated after him, clearing the space by the doors.

  Two tall, fat men in their 40s floated into Michael’s field of vision.

  “I’m telling you, Ralph,” said the man with a round, plump face, and a head of white and brown hair, wagging an index finger at Ralph. “I cannot believe Foreman still has the heavyweight title. Oh! Excuse me.”

  Michael and the man traded a curt nod as Michael pulled himself up to the doors, and then traded a “Thank you” and a “You’re welcome.”

  “The fight was pathetic!” the man continued. “The challenger was all over him the entire 12 rounds.”

  Ralph, even larger than his companion, with a head of red hair, hovered toward a young couple sitting across from Michael. He tapped the metal bars on the top of the bus seats to keep moving.

  “Didn’t he have the time problem?” asked Ralph.

  The first man nodded. They hovered further toward the back, their baritone voices louder than the murmur of other conversations. “Halfway through the fight, it was the tenth round, then the ninth, then the eleventh. When they got back to round seven, Foreman looked rougher than ever. He’s just too old. They should’ve tested him for time steroid use.”

  “I don’t know,” said Ralph, drifting toward the ceiling, much to the dismay of the seated passengers beneath him, who visibly stiffened at the sight of a 250-pound man hovering overhead. “He got the title for a reason.”

  The bus turned north up a main street and toward the downtown business district. Michael rang the bell clumsily using the string by the door. The bus stopped, the doors opened, and he floated out above the street, which was like a busy river in a canyon of tall, glassy office buildings. A mob of bus passengers boarded around him, a shadow passing across them.

  Michael looked up.

  A small sports car, a red Jetta, floated overhead, probably an older model without non-gravity adjusters. People who buy used cars that aren’t safetied don’t understand the gravity of the situation, he thought.