Analog SFF, June 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Relieved, I made my way into the house. I found Simon in the living room. He sat on the couch facing the front windows, wrapped in blankets, sweating and shivering. He looked like he'd dropped twenty pounds. There was a pained smile on his face, and he motioned me to the empty chair, next to which sat a small bucket of beer. It was the last thing I felt like drinking, seeing Simon as he was, but Simon merely grinned and pulled a glass of his own out from beneath his blankets.

  “Home remedy,” he said, swallowing the golden liquid. He pulled out a bottle—some kind of cheap scotch—and poured himself another glassful. “Just a cold,” he said.

  I tried to protest, but he waved his hand at me and changed the subject.

  “You once told me that your granddaddy died of Alzheimer's, isn't that right?”

  His question stopped me in my tracks. “That's right,” I said.

  “Did you know that around the time I went to Mercury there was a big to-do about someone going around killing off folks like your granddad, merely because they were old or sick?”

  It was the serial killer my dad's lawyer friend had mentioned to me. “What about him?” I asked.

  “How would you have felt if someone had offed your granddad like that? Now think about it before you go answering, Rick. Knowing what he was going through, knowing that maybe you wanted to put him out of his misery but just didn't have the guts to go through with it, how would you feel if someone else did it for you?”

  I felt a sudden rush of adrenaline. I glanced at the Springfield over the fireplace, which I hadn't noticed until that very moment. Simon must have seen my glance because he coughed out a short laugh and said, “I'm only asking because it's got everything to do with what happened down there on Mercury—and nothing to do with that.” His eyes shifted to the rifle.

  “I suppose I'd be horrified,” I said.

  “But you'd be relieved, too, wouldn't you?”

  I couldn't bring myself to say it, so I just nodded: yes.

  “Of course you would,” Simon said, “You'd be free of the guilt of having to do something to end his suffering—and free of the guilt of having done nothing to stop it. Of course you'd be relieved.”

  We sat there in silence, the three of us, Simon, myself, and the Springfield.

  “By the time we were in orbit, I didn't trust Maggie, and that's when I made my first bad decision. Each time we went down to the surface, one person was to stay aboard the spacecraft in case we couldn't make it back. It would be their job to head back to Earth without us. There were three landings planned and we'd rotate. Maggie was first on the list to stay behind.

  “'We're all going down together,’ I said, ‘or we're aborting the mission and not going down at all.'

  “'Breaks protocol,’ Zeke said in his brusque, direct way.

  “'Noted,’ I replied, and then added, ‘But it's an order. For everyone's safety.’ I glanced at Maggie and there was hate in her eyes.

  “We made it down to the surface safely, had a good landing spot in the shade of a long sloping hill. It was morning and the Sun—more than twice as large as what we see here in the morning—was peeking halfway above the horizon. Given the length of a day on Mercury, we'd spend our entire stay in the relative shade of those long shadows.

  “We were getting ready for the scheduled rest period. That's when Maggie said something that changed everything, the crew, the mission. Hell, I'm affected by it right down to this very day, and yet I still don't know why she confessed what she did. Had she kept her mouth shut, we might not be having this conversation right now, and people might be walking on Mars and Mercury and a dozen other worlds instead of robots.

  “On the other hand, more people would have died.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She killed that husband of hers,” Simon said, and when he said it, I felt as if I knew it all along. “He was much older than her and, like your granddaddy, had the Alzheimer's. I guess she couldn't take it, because one night, while he was asleep, she just covered his face with a pillow. . . .

  “She told us all this with an almost whimsical smile on her face, and that served only to make it all the more terrible. That someone like her could have slipped through the screening process and made it out to the surface of Mercury—and that wasn't the end of it.

  “'There was something comfortable about killing him,’ she said to us. That was the word she used, ‘comfortable.’ She'd eased his pain. And she grew to like it. He was her first but not her last.”

  All at once I saw where this was going and I felt the hairs on my neck vibrate electrically. "She was the serial killer?”

  Simon nodded.

  “But how—?”

  “The killings took place all over the country and other than the fact that the victims were always old or infirm, there was no discernible pattern. But remember that during our training, Maggie was being trained at various facilities throughout the country. And she was a brilliant girl. Each of the murders took place in a small town, one or two towns away from a facility where Maggie was trained. In searching for patterns, I guess the detectives never thought to look for nearby space program facilities.”

  At that point I made another realization: “She was never caught,” I said.

  And Simon smiled—and for a brief moment, he had the strength and vitality of the Simon Hollander that I met years ago. “Oh, she was caught,” he said. “Maybe not by the police, but she was caught. But that's a story for another time. This medication makes me sleepy. I need to rest.”

  I rose to leave and Simon stopped me.

  “Can you do me a solid and let Nelson and Jeanette into the back yard. I'll let them back in later.”

  “Of course,” I said. “You look better, you know.”

  “It's a weight off my chest,” Simon said.

  I took one for the road. That was the last time I ever saw Simon Hollander alive.

  * * * *

  I woke the next morning from a night of dreamless sleep to Anna's voice. “What's going on over at Simon's?” she said.

  The Sun was shining brightly into the room, making it difficult to open my eyes. “What you mean?” I said.

  “There's an ambulance in the driveway and two police cruisers out front.”

  I dashed to the window, but of course, I knew what had happened. Despite the fact that I never heard the gunshot, I knew that Simon was gone.

  * * * *

  Two days later I received the letter, hand-delivered by the postman. It had a canceled stamp and the return address was my next door neighbor's. I waited until Sunday evening and then I stuffed it into my jacket pocket, along with a couple of bottles of Old Speckled Hen, and took Nelson and Jeanette for their evening walk. I let the dogs loose in Simon's back yard and settled into my chair. Simon's chair remained empty. I took out the letter.

  Simon wrote the way he spoke, and the letter read as if he sat in that empty chair next to me, just like any other Sunday evening.

  “Rick,” he said, “I'm sorry I never got to finish the story in person, but I think you can guess the rest. I was worried that Zeke wouldn't go along with me, but for a wonder, he and I were on the same page. Ollie wouldn't have understood, and so we never let him in on what we had planned.

  “While Maggie was out on the surface collecting soil samples, I initiated an emergency abort-to-orbit. Ollie wanted to know what the hell was going on. ‘What about Maggie?’ he kept saying, ‘She's still out there.’ He pleaded with us, but Zeke and I just looked at one another and rushed through the abort-launch checklist. Maggie was somewhere over the horizon by the time we lifted off and made our way back to the command module.

  “I thought I was preventing a double tragedy. I knew that Maggie would never kill anyone else again, and at the same time, I hoped that I was saving the human spaceflight program from a PR disaster from which it might never recover. Ollie was furious with us, but I think he eventually understood. He never spoke to either of us again by choice. Zeke and I n
ever spoke again either, but that was by necessity. I was a murderer and he was an accomplice. And just like Maggie, I found that one murder was not enough for me. I destroyed the ship's AI. It recorded everything that went on during the mission and even if we didn't talk, it would have had to.

  “It didn't work out as I had hoped. I look at this damn disease as my penance for what I have done, and now it's time for me to face the firing squad. While Ollie and Zeke were still alive we didn't dare tell the story. Now that all of us are gone, maybe the time has come for the world to know. I'll let you decide that.

  “Thanks for taking care of Nelson and Jeanette. I know they've got a good home with you and Anna. You're a good man, Rick. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.”

  He signed the note, “Cheers, Simon Hollander.”

  There was still only one person who knew what really happened on that mission. Whether it would stay that way, I couldn't yet say. I pulled out a beer, cracked it open, and gestured toward Simon's empty chair. “Cheers, Simon. Safe travels.” I took a swig and up-ended the beer on the floorboards just in front of where Simon used to sit.

  “Take one for the road, my friend.”

  Copyright © 2011 Jamie Todd Rubin

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: STONE AGE

  by Alastair Mayer

  Sometimes the really big things are little things. . . .

  “We've found something!”

  Dr. Hannibal Carson looked up over the heads of his men to see a ridge, or perhaps a wall, extending into the jungle on either side of the trail they had hacked from their landing spot. The vegetation was thick here on the southern continent of Delta Pavonis III. The wall, perhaps four meters high, was overgrown with moss and vines. A scattering of pale blue starbursts of tiny flowers punctuated the green. Carson pushed his way to the front. “Let's clear a wider space here. Let's get a good look.” Together the four men cut away at the tree branches until they'd made a small clearing.

  “Is this it?” asked Brian, one of the two workers Carson had hired back in Verdigris City. The eager note in his voice reflected Carson's own hope.

  Carson's gaze took in the wall curving away on either side, the upper surface arching over into a dome. His shoulders slumped. “This has curved sides. There's nothing unusual about it.” He slipped his omni off his wrist and unfolded it into a slate, then accessed the radar map. He checked it, then looked up and around. The thick vegetation made it impossible to see more than a few meters. “We're a bit off course.” He faded the slate and held it up at arm's length, looking through it at the virtual track projecting through the jungle. “All right, the one we want is about forty meters that way.” He gestured at an angle from the path they'd come. “Sorry, gentlemen. Not much farther now.”

  He closed his omni and wrapped it back around his wrist as Brian and Gregor, the other hired hand, powered up their machetes again. Rajesh Gupta, their ship's pilot, came over and fell in beside him to talk.

  “So it is the shape, isn't it?” Gupta said. “The square tomb. That's why we're out here two-hundred klicks from the city when there are plenty of ruins closer.”

  “That's part of it. Close to the city the structures have already been explored. Most have been picked over and looted.”

  “And the shape?”

  Carson paused, debating how much to tell. “I think it's a pyramid. Pyramids have been found on nearly every planet that ever showed signs of intelligent natives, but most of the burial structures here are round.”

  “But the pyramid is a basic shape. Is it not just coincidence?”

  “No, I don't think it is. I don't believe in coincidence. Tetrahedral pyramids, a triangular base, would be a more basic shape, and no planet has them. Nobody constructs cubes, or cones. And the dating—all the pyramids we've found on other planets are ten to twenty thousand years old.” As he spoke, Carson noticed a slim green ribbon ripple out of the jungle canopy ahead. It glided toward them and settled on Gupta's shoulder. A jade ribbon snake.

  Carson reached over and flicked it to the ground, then stomped on its head, hard.

  Gupta flinched, then looked down. “Flying snakes are only mildly toxic to humans. You didn't need to do that.”

  “Flying snakes on Earth, perhaps,” said Carson. “This is a jade. Its venom compares to that of a krait, or a taipan.”

  Gupta paled. “That deadly?”

  “Only if you let them bite you. Come on.”

  Gupta looked up at the branches above them, then down at the body of the snake. He shook his head. “Thank you, Hannibal.”

  “Nothing,” Carson said.

  “You were talking about pyramids,” Gupta reminded him a few moments later.

  “Only that we've seen their like on many different planets, with not a lot of difference in age. There must be a connection.”

  “Spacefarers?” Gupta shook his head. “Come on, I like a good story as much as the next person, but there's no evidence for them.”

  “Says the man walking on a planet that was terraformed long before humans got here,” Carson said, and grinned.

  “The Terraformers have been gone for over sixty million years. They don't have anything to do with ten-thousand-year-old pyramids.”

  “No, of course not.” Carson took a moment to wave away a tiny flying insect that whined around his head, then cursed and swatted one that was biting his neck. “Speaking of Terraformers, what possessed them to import mosquitoes to this planet?”

  Gupta just shrugged.

  “Anyway,” Carson continued, “I have a theory, but I'm looking for more evidence. My dean will have me back cataloging arrowheads if I don't turn up something concrete.” Dean Matthews had been emphatic about that at their last meeting, calling Carson's theory of a recent, non-human spacefaring species “crackpot” and even “Von Danikenism.” He'd threatened dire consequences if word of it tarnished the university's reputation.

  “So what do you think was the reason for making this tomb a pyramid?” Gupta said. “If that's what it turns out to be.” The thick canopy blocked any direct view from the air, and on the mapping radar image their target showed as little more than a blurred square.

  “I don't know. There may have been something special about the person it was built for.” That was Carson's hope, anyway.

  “Ah. I just wondered . . .” Gupta's voice trailed off.

  “Wondered what?”

  “Oh, nothing. When pilots get together they swap tall stories, some of them quite strange.”

  “Like what?”

  “Nonsense stories, old spacer tales. Seeing ghosts out the window in warp, signs of a spaceship landing too big for any possible ship, flying pyramids. Most of it bullshit.”

  “Flying pyramids?” Carson wasn't sure he'd heard that right.

  “As I said, bullshit stories,” said Gupta, straight-faced.

  Carson was trying to figure out if Gupta was serious or just pulling his leg when Gregor, now in the lead, called out, “I think this is it!”

  Carson came forward to the wall Gregor had reached. This too was covered with a growth of vine and moss, but it had straighter, flatter sides. Could it be?

  “Let's take a look.” Carson eased a patch of moss away from the sloping surface to reveal mottled stone beneath. “So far, so good.” He peeled away another strip of moss, then another and another. His heart beat faster when one of the patches lifted to reveal that the chiseled edge of one stone abutted the next perfectly. Constructed, not natural.

  By the time he'd uncovered about half a square meter of the underlying stone, it was obvious that this was part of a larger stonework wall. The individual blocks had been carefully shaped and fitted together. “Yes, this is it.”

  The others surged forward and began to rip vegetation from the wall, their earlier fatigue gone.

  “Wait, stop!” Carson waved them back. “Take it easy, we don't want to damage anything. Spread out. Remove it in str
ips, just enough to see what's underneath.”

  They did so, every man moving a meter or so from his neighbor, removing a handful of vegetation, enough to see the smooth rock beneath, then moving further along the wall. After some minutes of this, there was a shout from Gregor.

  “Dr. Carson, here! I've found a carving.”

  The group scrambled over. Carson examined the sculpted surface of the bared patch of stone.

  “Gupta, would you set up the recorder? The rest of you, when he's set up, we will carefully peel back the moss.” He gestured to outline an area about two meters square. “Let's say this area here.”

  With the recorder running, they set to it with such enthusiasm that several times Carson had to remind them to slow down. He was as eager as they were, but training and experience forced him to be methodical. When they'd cleared the section, they all paused and stepped back to look at what they'd unveiled.

  “Wow!” someone said in a hushed tone.

  “Excellent!” said Carson, as he gazed at the relief carving of a face. The face was humanoid in that it had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, but then so did any vertebrate. The eyes were too far apart, and wide open, showing slit pupils like a cat's. The nose was a pair of thin vertical ovals. The effect would have been reptilian if it weren't for the mouth, which opened in a big “O” nearly a meter across.

  Carson pulled out his omni and panned its camera across the face, speaking his observations into it as he did so. As he closed the omni and stuck it back on his wrist again, he looked around at his team and saw that Brian had his own omni out.

  “Hey, Dr. C.” Brian called. “Stand beside it and I'll take your picture.”

  “You don't need to . . .” Carson began, then yielded. “All right. Make it quick, though.” He was impatient to get to work.

  When Brian was done, Carson called to get the others’ attention. “All right!” He pointed to the tangled vines and moss that still adorned the wall and said, “Let's get some more of this stuff cleared away and see what we've got.”