Analog SFF, June 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Computers—and efforts to portray realistic computer security and hacking—often play a role in his fiction ("You can't break into an alien computer in minutes, like Jeff Goldblum did in the movie Independence Day,” he says.) But to date, architecture hasn't figured directly.

  Still, that early interest might not be completely dormant. “The idea of building an environment for other people to live in was always something I wanted to do,” he says. Which, when you think about it, sounds a lot like science-fictional worldbuilding.

  As for the Mars station? “It was like an Analog/Astounding story from the 1950s,” he says. “The commander was an Air Force guy. The astronomer was a college football player. The biologist was our smoldering Latin lover. The nurse was the only girl. And the journalist [myself] was the newbie who had to explain everything to the audience [by blogging].”

  The experience fueled this month's story “Citizen-Astronaut.” “One of the most important things I learned is that in space, everything is improvised,” he says. “You are thrust back on your own resources and required to improvise because things are always breaking and unexpected situations always coming up.”

  Copyright © 2011 Richard A. Lovett

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: TAKE ONE FOR THE ROAD

  by Jamie Todd Rubin

  The most important part of a spacecraft—and the hardest to control—is the crew.

  There was only one person on Earth who knew what really happened on that mission to Mercury. So shrouded in mystery was it, that I didn't even know there was a mission. It had happened a few years before I was born, and I didn't learn about it until a few years back when my wife and I bought our first home. We'd moved into a picturesque small town in upstate New York, where a real postman still delivered the mail and where our next-door neighbor turned out to be none other than Simon Hollander, sole surviving member of the crew that once walked on the surface of that innermost planet.

  I got to know Simon pretty well after we moved in. For years, he and I would spend Sunday evenings on his back porch, drinking beer and gabbing about small-town gossip. He was a neighborly fellow, more than twice my age and probably twice my weight. He ran a local handyman business and was nothing like the image you'd expect of someone who'd bounded across the plains of the Caloris basin. I'd found out about that through the town rumor mill not long after I'd moved in, but I quickly got the sense that it wasn't something Simon wanted to talk about and so I never brought it up and neither did he.

  Not, at least, until one memorable Sunday evening a few months back.

  It was on that evening, sitting on Simon's rickety back porch and sipping bottles of Old Specked Hen that Simon told me he was dying.

  “Cancer,” he said finishing off his bottle and jettisoning it like a spent rocket into the plastic bin to one side of the porch. It clanked softly against its empty siblings, each one a mission of exploration and discovery.

  “Jesus Christ, Simon,” I said, “when did you find out?”

  “Monday.”

  “And it's that bad? They can't do anything?”

  Simon opened another bottle between the splintered railings. “They'd like to, but their treatment will only slow things down, it won't prevent the inevitable.”

  “Jesus,” I said again, sipping my beer. It tasted bitter. “How long—?”

  “Six months with the treatments, one month without.”

  “When do the treatments start?”

  “They don't,” he said, looking at the trees that lined the edge of his property. “I'm not going through that for an extra five months.” He polished off the beer and discarded the bottle. “I've made my peace with it, and I don't want to spend whatever time I've got left in some anonymous hospital bed being poked and prodded by overeager interns. I've been through that shit once before.”

  He was referring to his training prior to the Mercury landing, a subject he usually avoided.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “When the time comes, I'll take care of things myself. Got that Springfield over the fireplace that never gets used. You can't go wrong with a rifle like that, now, can you?”

  I started at Simon, speechless. In that moment, he reminded me of my grandfather, strong, certain, and stubborn. Considering our age difference, I was surprised I'd never made that connection before. Granddad fought valiantly against the Alzheimer's, but in the end the disease consumed him, and like a star spiraling into a black hole, all his strength and certainty, all his mulish pride, everything that made him who he was was ripped apart and sucked away until all that remained was a dark, empty husk. There had been no Springfield above granddad's mantle, and even if he'd had one, he'd have forgotten how to use it.

  “Of course, I'll need someone to look after Nelson and Jeanette,” Simon said, referring to the pair of greyhounds he'd raised from pups. “Think you could do that for me, Rick?”

  “Certainly,” I said. What else could I say? It's not like I could have begged off in order to check with Anna. And besides, I'd admired the old man's courage in the face of this unfortunate situation.

  “There's one other thing I'd like to ask of you, if you don't mind my imposing,” he said, “but for this you will require another beer.” And like magic he produced one for me, cold and fresh.

  “It's about Mercury,” he said.

  * * * *

  After the rumor mill turned me onto the Mercury debacle, I tried to learn as much about it as I could. I made use of the library at the small university where Anna worked as a professor, and despite having the best resources at hand, there wasn't very much to learn.

  The mission took place a few years before I was born. It was listed as a science expedition carrying a crew of four into orbit around Mercury, where they would then land on the surface to explore, set up some equipment, and return with samples. But somewhere along the way something went wrong. The ship successfully put into orbit, the crew descended to the surface of the planet and even walked around down there. But then they left abruptly. Only three crew members returned to Earth. And in perhaps the most bizarre twist of all, the surviving crew would not talk about what happened. Each one of them resigned from the program, refusing to speak of the mission, refusing to speak even to one another.

  And there had been no more manned spaceflights to other worlds in all of the years since.

  But that was it. No matter how much I dug, that was all of the information I could get. Conspiracy theories were rampant, of course, but I ignored those. Instead, I tried some older sources.

  I called an uncle and asked him what he remembered from the year of the mission.

  He laughed at me, gave me a wink, and said, “Ah, you must be talking about when the Cubbies went back-to-back on the World Series.” It's true. The same year that Simon Hollander walked on Mercury, the Cubs won their second Series in a row. It was an enormous upset and led to major changes in the algorithms for predictive baseball models.

  I called a friend of my father, a lawyer specializing in post-mortem digital avatar rights. At the time of the Mercury mission, he was a prosecutor in Arlington, Virginia. “That's a long time ago,” he said, tugging at his white mustache, “but if memory serves, that was the year that some serial killer was going around knocking off the elderly and infirm. Had some kind of crazy name for him, but I don't remember what it was. Heck, I can't even recall if they caught the sonofabitch.”

  It was like that with everyone I spoke to. Other news events loomed large, and people only recalled the Mercury mission when I mentioned it to them, and then with only the most elliptical recollections. The only ones really willing to talk about it were the conspiracy theorists, but I avoided them. I'd read some of their ideas on what happened on the mission, and while some were interesting, there was not a shred of evidence in favor of their theories. Forty years later, only one man knew what really happened out there, and that man was my next-door neighbor.


  * * * *

  “It was not our intention to derail the space program,” Simon said. The Sun had gone down and in the crisp air, the beer gave me chills. “In fact it was just the opposite. We were trying to protect it.

  “The entire point of the mission was to test out a solar sail, but the media ignored that and focused on the fact that these brave astronauts were conquering another world in the name of God, country, and Coca-Cola. The original profile didn't even have us leaving orbit, but someone in media relations said that we'd never sell the mission unless we walked on the goddamn surface.”

  By now I had a pleasant buzz. Simon seemed completely unaffected, although he'd put away an entire six-pack. He sat there in the encroaching darkness, his considerable corpulence placing an audible strain on his lawn chair. If anything, he seemed calm, and that Springfield 30-06 mounted on the wall of his living room seemed about as far away as Mercury.

  “Thing you've got to understand, Rick, is that it's a pain in the ass getting to Mercury. It's common knowledge among the rocket scientists that it takes more energy to escape the solar system than it does to put in orbit around that planet. You're approaching ever closer to the Sun's gravity well and fighting a losing battle. Think of it like riding a bike without any brakes down an ever-steepening hill. At the bottom of the hill you've got a wall of thermonuclear fire and a few meters before the fire is a flag pole. Your job is to ride the bike down the hill and end up pedaling a tight circle around the flag pole without zipping off into the flames.

  “That's where the solar sail comes in. The Sun, she puts out a lot of solar wind. This solar wind could, in principle, carry a properly designed spacecraft out to the edge of the solar system, requiring the vessel to carry substantially less fuel. We were testing out just such a solar sail, using the solar wind to slow us down as we approached Mercury, and don't think the irony of the situation was lost on us: going so close to the Sun in order to see just how far away from the Sun we could get.

  “So we unfurl our sail, gyrate through elaborate maneuvers to get us into a stable orbit, and for an encore, we drop down onto the surface and perform a goddamn entrechat like a bunch of circus performers.” Simon shook his head, smacking his lips as if he suddenly acquired a bad taste in his mouth. “It's got risks, but what endeavor doesn't? You get the right crew involved, people you trust, and let physics take care of the rest.”

  “And you had the right crew?”

  He snorted gently, looking up into the nighttime sky. “Me, Ezekiel Cartwright, and Oliver Wynton.”

  But there was one missing. What information was known about the mission was that four people were sent and three returned. He'd named three of the four. With what courage I could muster, I said, “That's three. There was a fourth.”

  In the darkness an owl screeched as if prodding Simon along. Simon's face was hidden in shadow.

  “Maggie Estrada.” He whispered the name, and I recognized it as soon as he spoke. She was the one who never came back.

  A series of short barks from within the kitchen broke the silence. Nelson and Jeanette stood there, tails wagging, tongues drooping. Simon pulled himself up. “Time to take the dogs out before they grow cross with me. Looks like we'll have to continue this discussion. See you next week, my friend.” He slid open the door and the dogs jumped him. He pointed to the tub of beer, and said, as always, “Take one for the road.”

  I said nothing to Anna about the conversation, but that night, while she was fast asleep, I thought about what Simon had told me and was reminded of a conversation I'd once had with my granddad. It was just after my Aunt Ruth had died. She'd been in a coma for months, and it seemed to unsettle him. “Don't ever let that happen to me,” he said, his breath issuing the rich scent of cigar smoke. “If I'm ever incapacitated like that, I want you to roll me to the nearest window and push me out.”

  Simon was the same way, and I thought once again of that Springfield mounted above his fireplace. That damn disease had incapacitated granddad, and I never once thought of pushing him out a window like he'd asked. I felt as if I'd somehow let him down. It made me feel better knowing that Simon could take care of himself. At least he wouldn't suffer.

  But when would that time come?

  I lay there most of the night looking forward to next Sunday the way you look forward to a long-anticipated vacation. I didn't get much sleep. I was too busy worrying I'd hear the devastating report of a gunshot before I learned the whole truth of what happened on Mercury.

  * * * *

  There was no gunshot that night and the following Sunday, Simon and I took up our respective positions on his porch, a fresh bucket of Old Speckled Hen between us and a crisp autumn chill in the air. Simon didn't look well. His skin had a pastiness to it, as if he was molting. His eyebrows were like wild vines. He seemed to move more slowly, but perhaps it was all my imagination. I was hypersensitive to his condition and maybe I was looking for things that weren't really there.

  He cracked open a beer and gestured toward the sky. “Maggie Estrada,” he said as if toasting her, and it was eerily like watching my granddad toast my dead aunt. “That's where we left off last week. With Maggie, right?”

  I nodded, sipping at my own beer and shivering from its chill.

  “Maggie was perhaps the smartest person I've ever met, but to this day I don't know how she managed to qualify for the space program.

  “Now, Zeke, he came up through the military ranks and we never saw eye-to-eye on anything, but he never disobeyed an order and there was no one in the world that had more space experience than Ezekiel Cartwright.

  “Ollie, on the other hand, he and I got along famously. He was a deeply religious fellow and prone to quiet reflection in times of crisis, but he was just about the best damn pilot I'd ever seen and the shit he could pull off with a lander convinced me he had some kind of personal connection to God.

  “But Maggie, bright as she was, didn't really have the . . . instinct for spaceflight. She was what they called a mission specialist, and what I called a freeloader. Whereas Zeke, Ollie, and I all had formidable responsibilities on the mission, Maggie didn't. She was in charge of mission science and had lots of little responsibilities, none of which were particularly relevant to the safety of the mission, except maybe the data collection for the solar sail.

  “The biggest problem was that she missed out on crew bonding. Me, Zeke, and Ollie spent most of training at mission headquarters running simulation after simulation of critical mission events. It was us against the simulators, and we bonded in our efforts to defeat whatever those bastards could throw at us. Maggie, on the other hand, was running off to facilities all over the country, getting trained on this experiment, learning how to deploy that experiment, taking crash courses in surface geology and God knows what else. She was always off somewhere, and the only time she was with us was for a couple of weeks getting trained in mission recovery. That she missed out on all of that bonding was key in what was to happen later.”

  Simon paused to get himself a fresh bottle. He seemed to be going through the beer faster than normal and I tried not to read anything into that. Despite the cold air, his skin looked clammy and I could see the sheen of a mild sweat on his forehead. He swallowed half of the beer in a gulp and shook his head as if in disgust. “That's not true. I'm not even sure why I just said that. Even if Maggie had been there for all of the training, she wouldn't have bonded with us. Something was off with her. I'd get this feeling around her, the kind of feeling you get around a dog that's turned mean with rabies. One minute she's sweet, tail wagging, eyes bright—and the next minute her ears are back, teeth are bared, and she's issuing forth an unearthly growl from some dark place inside.

  “I made excuses for her. We were all married men at the time, but Maggie was single. Her file said that she'd been married once, for a short period when she was quite young, to a much older man. Her husband died shortly after they were married, and she'd been single ever since. I figured that had
to affect someone and I tried to cut her some slack. It didn't help.

  “On the way to Mercury, Maggie and Zeke got into some flap about something or other—I honestly can't remember what it was about—but it ended with Zeke calling her a small-town whore. After that, there was a glimmer in Maggie's eyes and she turned mean like those dogs we were talking about. She grew passive aggressive. It was subtle at first, but some of her antics started to put the mission at risk. It was always little things, never big things. The solar sail unfurled perfectly and Ollie maneuvered us into just the orbit we were hoping for. But we all had to work harder than we should have because of Maggie.

  “It was there, in orbit around Mercury, that things began to fall apart and I suppose I should have seen it coming. I—” All at once Simon lurched forward and vomited in a series of spastic convulsions across the weather-worn floorboards. There was blood in his vomit, and the pungent smell of beer, bile, and iron came floating up on the autumn air, engaging my own stomach in a churn of sympathy.

  I grabbed an elbow and started to pull him up. “Simon, we've got to get you to a doctor.”

  “No!” he said, pulling away from me. His face looked like blank paper, his eyes tiny beads. He wiped pink foam from his chin and said, “Look, I'm fine. It's this goddamn disease. I don't need a doctor to tell me what's happening. I just need some rest. Can we call it a night?”

  “Of course,” I said. I tried to follow him into the house, but he shooed me away.

  “Go home to your wife, Rick. And take one for the road. I'll see you next week.”

  * * * *

  When I arrived at Simon's the next Sunday he was not out on the porch and all at once I grew concerned. I peered into the sliding glass door, but it was dark inside. I tapped on the glass and was immediately greeted by the sound of barking, followed by nails scampering across tile. In a moment both Nelson and Jeanette stood on the other side of the door, wagging their tails.

  “That you, Rick?” Simon's voice came from somewhere out of sight. “Door's open, come on in.”