Analog SFF, January-February 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Copyright © 2006 Franklin Cocks

  * * * *

  References:

  1. S. R. Hawkins, “A Six-foot Laboratory Superconducting Magnet System for Magnetic Orbital Satellite Shielding,” International Advances in Cryogenic Engineering, vol. 10, section P-6, pp. 124-136, Plenum Press (1965).

  2. C. Sussingham, S. A. Watkins, and F. H. Cocks, “Forty Years of Development of Active Systems for Radiation Protection of Spacecraft", The Journal of the Astronautical Sciences, vol. 47, pp. 165-175 (1999).

  3. G. Heiken, D. Vaniman, and B. M. French, Lunar Sourcebook, Cambridge University Press (1991).

  4. J. G. Bednorz and K. A. Müller, “Possible High Tc Superconductivity in the Ba-La-Cu-O System” Zeitschrift für Physik B, vol.64, pp. 189-193 (1986).

  5. H. C. Urey, The Planets, Their Origin and Development, Yale University Press (1952).

  6. F. H. Cocks, P. A. Klenk, S. A. Watkins, W. N. Simmons, J. C. Cocks, E. E. Cocks and J. C. Sussingham, “Lunar Ice: Adsorbed Water on Subsurface Polar Dust", Icarus, vol. 160, pp. 386-397 (2002).

  7. D. B. J. Bussey, P. D. Spudis, M. S. Robinson, “Illumination Conditions at the Lunar South Pole,” Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 26, pp.1187-1190 (1999).

  8. I. J. Wittenberg,, J. F. Santarius, and G. L. Kulcinski, “Lunar Source of Helium 3 for Commercial Fusion Power,” Fusion Technology (A Journal of the American Nuclear Society and the European Nuclear Society), vol. 10, pp. 167-178 (1987).

  9. C. Störmer, The Polar Aurorae, Oxford, The Clarendon Press (1955).

  * * * *

  About the Author

  Franklin Cocks is a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke University. He has published numerous technical papers in fields ranging from metallurgy and ceramics to cryobiology, lunar science, and radiation shielding. His ultra-light foamed-metal experiment was launched aboard the shuttle Challenger in June, 1991, and was described in that year's November issue of Omni magazine.

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  * * *

  THE FACE OF HATE

  by STEPHEN L. BURNS

  Illustration by Bill Warren

  * * * *

  People can learn from experience, but often only by small and painful steps...

  Certain images can shake and remake worlds. The best of them can be nearly universally comprehensible, bullets of meaning snapping through the foggy barriers of language and culture and predisposition to strike a bulls-eye of revelation.

  When I teach classes, I often use Stuart Franklin's classic Tiananmen Square photograph of the man with the shopping bag facing down a tank—a line of tanks. Show it to a rain forest tribesman who has never seen a tank before, and still he understands what he is seeing: a small, fragile, exquisitely courageous man facing down a monstrous power he cannot hope to stop, and yet who has, at least for a fleeting moment, stopped it.

  Some images can imprint themselves on us deeper than scars, more indelibly than tattoos. They wind themselves into our brains, some even growing into fixation. This is an occasionally black magic perfected by religious iconographers, and still afoot in our own digital age.

  A life-long photojournalist, luck put me in the right place at the right time to take one particular image that swept around the world, one image from a series documenting one of the most crucial turning points in human history, the first visitation of beings from another world. I ended up being official photographer to those beings and that visit, and a witness to history.

  Although in some ways that one early image was superceded by others that followed, many of them taken by me, it has come to haunt and obsess me more than any of the others. Not even the one taken by an orbiting telescope, the one that shows the fiery bloom of our world being saved, is in my mind half as often.

  Five years had passed since I took that picture, and I could no longer live with the questions it raised.

  So I went seeking answers.

  * * * *

  The face of Marlene Jennings was famous, but now very few remember her name, five years was close to forever in a public memory constantly barraged and overwritten with new names and faces. Her name was out there when her picture first appeared, but like that Chinese man facing down a tank, the name of the person in the image was not the point of the image. I made her face famous—or infamous—but she herself slipped back to being a nameless nobody as more famous faces took up her shrill cry.

  My picture shows her screaming.

  Not the anguished wail of a naked napalmed Vietnamese girl, or of a young woman crouched over the body of a fellow student in Ohio. Hers was the sort of screaming face so often seen in pictures from an earlier era, the sort of howling rabble face you saw spewing furious poison at black children being escorted into newly integrated schools.

  But these are not solemn black children in their go-to-school best she screams at, braided pigtails and determinedly shined shoes, notebooks clutched to their chests like shields to keep their pounding hearts from being pierced by slurs hurled like spears.

  These were the Draconi. Five beings from another star whose ship's stardrive failed, and who took temporary, unhappy refuge on Earth.

  * * * *

  I could have called ahead. That would have been the polite thing to do.

  News photographers quickly learn that there is a time for being polite, and a time to hunt.

  I was hunting. I had flown from Maryland to Kentucky, rented a car. I was prepared to stay as long as necessary to get the answers I sought. Did I have a right to those answers? Maybe. Maybe not.

  My anticipation and apprehension had me alternately sipping coffee and Maalox as I drove toward a small farm on the edge of town.

  * * * *

  My rental car was an electric, perfect transportation for a stalker. My quarry didn't seem to hear me pull over on the shoulder across from her driveway and get out. I took a moment to stand there and watch her, sizing her up.

  Marlene Jennings was out in her front yard, wrestling bags of mulch off the tailgate of a battered pickup truck and into a four-wheeled garden cart. She looked older than I expected, as if for her the past five years had taken the toll of at least ten. The years since the Draconi came and then departed haven't been particularly kind to me, either.

  She was thinner than I remembered, even stringy. She wore a loosely buttoned shirt with the sleeves cut off, her sun-browned arms all knotty muscle and sinew. She heaved the bags easily, and with an almost robotic fixity of purpose. Her jeans were grubby, she wore work boots, and a broad-brimmed straw hat covered her face.

  Now wishing some of that coffee had been whiskey that might have soothed nerves gone jumpy, I headed toward her fenced-in front yard. When I reached the gate I cleared my throat, and called, “Excuse me?"

  She turned around slowly, reluctantly. There was no sign of recognition in her eyes when she saw me. No surprise there. Very few photographers are as recognized or recognizable as their work. Besides, I had shed fifty pounds and most of my hair.

  “Ms. Jennings? Marlene Jennings?"

  Her face was thin and weathered, her mouth seamed and pinched, her hair looking bleached from either sun or age. Even the blue of her eyes seemed faded. Barely forty, she looked well over a decade older. “Yes,” she said grudgingly. “That's me."

  I made myself smile. “I'm Carl Brown."

  The lines of her face drew into a frown as my name registered.

  “I'd like to talk with you if I could,” I continued, managing to sound offhand in spite of how much rode on her response.

  “What about?"

  I met her gaze. “I think you know."

  She only stared, all expression wiped away. I'm pretty good at reading faces, but on hers I couldn't find one single line of intention. For all I could tell she was about to reach into her jeans, pull out a gun, and shoot me dead.

  That would be an answer of a sort, but not the kind I had come hoping to find.

  “I'm not—” she began
, then shook her head.

  “Not what?"

  Another shake of her head, then a long sigh. “I don't suppose you'll just go away if I ask you to."

  My turn to shake my head. “I really need to talk to you."

  “Why?” Still no expression, but a plaintive note in her voice.

  The why was complicated, but I tried to give her a simple, painfully honest answer that might make her willing to talk. “Because ... because for me in some ways, all of what happened is still happening. It's not over.” I took a deep breath, and pitched a dangerous question. “Is it over for you?"

  A flicker of pain showed before her gaze dropped to the ground and the brim of her hat hid her face. Her bare shoulders, stiff from the moment she first saw me, now slumped.

  After what seemed like an hour but was really less than a minute, she turned her back on me.

  “Come,” she said brusquely, heading for her house.

  * * * *

  Jennings led me to a flagstone patio off the back of her house and left me there, promising to return quickly.

  It was obvious that this wasn't the patio of someone who entertained very often. There were only two battered chairs at a sagging table half covered with pots and tools; the umbrella was threadbare. The patio was clearly base of operations for work in her backyard. Everywhere I looked there were garden carts loaded with composted manure and peat moss, shovels and hoes and rakes, coils of hose, and other such paraphernalia.

  As for the backyard it looked out over, that was enormous, at least a couple of acres. The entire space was jam-packed with garden after garden. Some were laid out in straight lines and circles, other were made into what looked like complex mazes. Gazing out over the riot of shrubs and flowers, I could see that if she had a life—maybe even an obsession—this was it.

  I stood up when she returned carrying a tray with a carafe, two mugs, sugar and creamer and the like. After leading me back to the table she had excused herself, saying she was going to make coffee and come right back. The offered coffee was either good manners, a chance to poison me, or a way for her to have some time to compose herself.

  “Cream or sugar?” she asked as she put the tray down.

  “Black, thanks.” My preference, and a way to avoid bug-killer-laced creamer.

  She tried to smile as she began pouring. “Well, there's a subject we can agree on.” A quick, hopeful glance my way. “I don't suppose we could stick to that topic and let the rest go?"

  I smiled back. “Could we really?"

  Her mouth drew down. “I suppose not.” She put a full cup in front of me, then sat down across from me, her gaze sliding off toward her gardens.

  “Do you ever talk about it with anyone?” I asked quietly.

  She shook her head, gaze still off on her flowers. “Not since they left. Not since ... you know."

  I knew. Not since the moment that a flash of distant light had stopped the world.

  “But you'll talk to me now,” I prompted.

  A slow nod, then she faced me once more. “But there are rules. I have to work on my gardens, so I can only give you half an hour. I will answer only if I want to. I will not be interrogated, and demanding that I tell you something will end our talk."

  “That's fine,” I said. “Thank you."

  “Just get it over with. I have work to do."

  But now that I had Marlene Jennings in front of me, and theoretically ready to talk, I felt strangely lost. There were so many questions, and they were so tangled in each other that each one was a piece of another. This woman had played only a small part at the very beginning of what had happened with the Draconi, and yet in some way the image of her I had captured made her, at least in my mind, the primal enduring symbol of the whole arc of events.

  Was that fair? Probably not. Life and people rarely are.

  I decided to begin at the beginning. “Why, um, what made you react so violently to the Draconi when they arrived?"

  Jennings peered at me a moment, then her gaze went out to her garden. She stood up abruptly and headed toward one flowerbed. Once there she scanned the ground, bent down, then reached out and snatched something up.

  When she turned back, a snake with long yellow stripes, what I had always called a garden snake, was trapped in her fist. It wriggled and writhed, tail lashing like a whip.

  “Are you afraid of snakes, Mr. Brown?” she asked as she returned to the table.

  “I'm, um, not a big fan,” I answered uneasily, shrinking back from it.

  “Many people fear and hate snakes. Work in a garden long enough and you have to make peace with them.” She stroked the creature's head with her free hand. “The same with spiders and worms. And bees.” She peered at me and smiled. “Would you like to hold him?"

  “Thanks, no."

  “Has any snake ever harmed you?"

  “No."

  “Yet you are afraid of it. Instinctively afraid."

  “Distinctly afraid, anyway,” I said, keeping a wary eye on the snake. “Are you telling me that you had the same sort of reaction when you saw the Draconi?"

  “Being afraid was only a part of it. I was horrified. I was repelled.” She bent down and let the snake go. It slithered back toward the bed it had been taken from. “Some people kill snakes on sight. Others react the same way to spiders."

  “Was it in any way an, um, Christian thing?” In the picture, she has a cross clutched in one fist as she shakes the other. From where I sat, I could see a small silver cross on a short chain around her neck, bright against the brown skin of her neck and chest.

  “Maybe some,” she admitted, sitting down again. “My whole life I'd been told and shown what devils looked like."

  “Like them. The Draconi."

  “Yeah. To me they looked ugly and evil."

  From the very first I had found them strangely beautiful, though Marlene Jennings was certainly not the only one unnerved by their lean and wolfish faces, with their chillingly sharp teeth, their curling horns, their hard, glossy, red skin, their gaunt, unnervingly articulated limbs, their goatish feet and barbed tails. But to see one in person was to be awed by their air of solemn dignity, their otherworldly gravitas.

  “Was that all?"

  “They looked so smug."

  “The Draconi didn't show emotion with their faces. They weren't grinning, that was just the way they were made."

  “Still. Then there were the things they said."

  That the Draconi looked like devils co-imagined by Bosch and the creator of the Alien was one strike against them. Strike two was that they were unfailingly—even brutally—honest about how appalled they were about what they found here on Earth.

  “I read that book the Dalai Lama wrote,” I said quietly. “The one comparing what they said to the teachings of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed. To statements and writings made by King and Gandhi and many other spiritual teachers. They were all saying the same things."

  Her gaze had strayed back to her gardens. “Maybe so. But I didn't think they had any right to call us brutes."

  That was a misconception purposely spread by certain people, then and now. “They never called us that. They said that it was a travesty and a tragedy that we chose to live like brutes."

  A shrug. I couldn't help noticing that her brown, callused hands were rarely still, as if itching to go back to her weeding and digging. As if to prove that, she picked a trowel off the table and turned it over and over in her lap, tracing its lines like prayer beads.

  “So why protest them? Why scream at them to go home? You must have known that their ship's stardrive failed, leaving them marooned in our system, unable to go home."

  “That was what they said. How could I be sure they weren't lying? The Devil is the Father of Lies."

  “Did you think they had come here to invade? To take over the planet?” A sarcastic edge crept into my voice. “All five of them?"

  Still her attention remained on her gardens. “They did kill people here on the ground w
hen they landed."

  I sighed at this seemingly ineradicable half-truth. “No, two people were killed when their ship crashed. The same way people on the ground are sometimes killed when a plane crashes. Twenty people died just this week when that commuter flight came down on a church."

  “Maybe it was an accident. I don't know. It doesn't matter now."

  “Still, why such hate?"

  “It was just there, I guess. The way they looked. The things they said. People dying because of them. Because they were alien."

  “Were you listening to people telling you that you should hate and fear and despise them? People on the radio or TV? Wingnuts on the web?” The most viciously xenophobic, rabidly fundamentalist elements of society had declared war on the Draconi, branding them baby-eating, world-destroying monsters, and worse. As tools of Satan, as Satan himself, pretending to be from another star as a way to swindle us all into Hell. As was usual with such garbage, a certain percentage of the population gobbled it down, and once they had a burning bellyful, grabbed their guns and pitchforks and declared holy war.

  “I suppose I was."

  “Why did you believe them?"

  “I just did."

  “Why act on your hate?"

  “Because I had to.” All her responses in a colorless monotone, as unemotional as a recitation of her mailing address and Social Security number.

  “Did you think that if you screamed loudly enough, they would just disappear?"

  “I don't know what I thought,” she admitted wearily. “It wasn't about thinking, it was about taking action."

  “By becoming part of a mob."