The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  When he left town for university, Jack majored in Engineering Physics. He hadn’t decided whether he’d ever analyze the ray-gun’s inner workings, but he couldn’t imagine taking courses that were irrelevant to the weapon. The ray-gun was the central fact of Jack’s life. Even if he wasn’t a hero, he was set apart from other people by this evidence that aliens existed.

  During freshman year, Jack lived in an on-campus dormitory. Hiding the ray-gun from his roommate would have been impossible. Jack left the weapon at home, hidden near the pond. In sophomore year, Jack rented an apartment off campus. Now he could keep the ray-gun with him. He didn’t like leaving it untended.

  Jack persuaded a lab assistant to let him borrow a Geiger counter. The ray-gun emitted no radioactivity at all. Objects blasted by the gun showed no significant radioactivity either. Over time, Jack borrowed other equipment, or took blast debris to the lab so he could conduct tests when no one was around. He found nothing that explained how the ray-gun worked.

  The winter before Jack graduated, Great-Uncle Ron finally died. In his will, the old man left his twenty acres of forest to Jack. Uncle Ron had found out that Jack liked to visit the pond. “I told him,” said big sister Rachel. “Do you think I didn’t know where you and Kirsten went?”

  Jack had to laugh – uncomfortably. He was embarrassed to discover he couldn’t keep secrets any better than his sister.

  Jack’s father offered to help him sell the land to pay for his education. The offer was polite, not pressing. Uncle Ron had doled out so much cash in his will that Jack’s family was now well-off. When Jack said he’d rather hold on to the property “until the market improves”, no one objected.

  After getting his bachelor’s degree, Jack continued on to grad school: first his master’s, then his Ph.D. In one of his courses, he met Deana, working toward her own doctorate – in Electrical Engineering rather than Engineering Physics.

  The two programs shared several seminars, but considered themselves rivals. Engineering Physics students pretended that Electrical Engineers weren’t smart enough to understand abstract principles. Electrical Engineers pretended that Engineering Physics students were pie-in-the-sky dreamers whose theories were always wrong until real Engineers fixed them. Choosing to sit side by side, Jack and Deana teased each other every class. Within months, Deana moved into Jack’s apartment.

  Deana was small but physical. She told Jack she’d been drawn to him because he was the only man in their class who lifted weights. When Deana was young, she’d been a competitive swimmer – “Very competitive,” she said – but her adolescent growth spurt had never arrived and she was eventually outmatched by girls with longer limbs. Deana had quit the competition circuit, but she hadn’t quit swimming nor had she lost the drive to be one up on those around her. She saw most things as contests, including her relationship with Jack. Deana was not beyond cheating if it gave her an edge.

  In the apartment they now shared, Jack thought he’d hidden the ray-gun so well that Deana wouldn’t find it. He didn’t suspect that when he wasn’t home she went through his things. She couldn’t stand the thought that Jack might have secrets from her.

  He returned one day to find the gun on the kitchen table. Deana was poking at it. Jack wanted to yell, “Leave it alone!” but he was so choked with anger he couldn’t speak.

  Deana’s hand was close to the trigger. The safety was off and the muzzle pointed in Jack’s direction. He threw himself to the floor.

  Nothing happened. Deana was so surprised by Jack’s sudden move that she jerked her hand away from the gun. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Jack got to his feet. “I could ask you the same question.”

  “I found this. I wondered what it was.”

  Jack knew she didn’t “find” the gun. It had been buried under old notebooks inside a box at the back of a closet. Jack expected that Deana would invent some excuse for why she’d been digging into Jack’s private possessions, but the excuse wouldn’t be worth believing.

  What infuriated Jack most was that he’d actually been thinking of showing Deana the gun. She was a very very good engineer; Jack had dreamed that together, he and she might discover how the gun worked. Of all the women Jack had known, Deana was the first he’d asked to move in with him. She was strong and she was smart. She might understand the gun. The time had never been right to tell her the truth – Jack was still getting to know her and he needed to be absolutely sure – but Jack had dreamed . . .

  And now, like Kirsten at the pond, Deana had ruined everything. Jack felt so violated he could barely stand to look at the woman. He wanted to throw her out of the apartment . . . but that would draw too much attention to the gun. He couldn’t let Deana think the gun was important.

  She was still staring at him, waiting for an explanation. “That’s just something from my Great-Uncle Ron,” Jack said. “An African good-luck charm. Or Indonesian. I forget. Uncle Ron travelled a lot.” Actually, Ron sold insurance and seldom left the town where he was born. Jack picked up the gun from the table, trying to do so calmly rather than protectively. “I wish you hadn’t touched this. It’s old and fragile.”

  “It felt pretty solid to me.”

  “Solid but still breakable.”

  “Why did you dive to the floor?”

  “Just silly superstition. It’s bad luck to have this end point toward you.” Jack gestured toward the muzzle. “And it’s good luck to be on this end.” He gestured toward the butt, then tried to make a joke. “Like there’s a Maxwell demon in the middle, batting bad luck one way and good luck the other.”

  “You believe that crap?” Deana asked. She was an engineer. She went out of her way to disbelieve crap.

  “Of course, I don’t believe it,” Jack said. “But why ask for trouble?”

  He took the gun back to the closet. Deana followed. As Jack returned the gun to its box, Deana said she’d been going through Jack’s notes in search of anything he had on partial differential equations. Jack nearly let her get away with the lie; he usually let the women in his life get away with almost anything. But he realized he didn’t want Deana in his life anymore. Whatever connection she and he had once felt, it was cut off the moment he saw her with the ray-gun.

  Jack accused her of invading his privacy. Deana said he was paranoid. The argument grew heated. Out of habit, Jack almost backed down several times, but he stopped himself. He didn’t want Deana under the same roof as the ray-gun. His feelings were partly irrational possessiveness, but also justifiable caution. If Deana got the gun and accidentally fired it, the results might be disastrous.

  Jack and Deana continued to argue: right there in the closet within inches of the ray-gun. The gun lay in its box, like a child at the feet of parents fighting over custody. The ray-gun did nothing, as if it didn’t care who won.

  Eventually, unforgivable words were spoken. Deana said she’d move out as soon as possible. She left to stay the night with a friend.

  The moment she was gone, Jack moved the gun. Deana still had a key to the apartment – she needed it until she could pack her things – and Jack was certain she’d try to grab the weapon as soon as he was busy elsewhere. The ray-gun was now a prize in a contest, and Deana never backed down.

  Jack took the weapon to the university. He worked as an assistant for his Ph.D. supervisor, and he’d been given a locker in the supervisor’s lab. The locker wasn’t Fort Knox but leaving the gun there was better than leaving it in the apartment. The more Jack thought about Deana, the more he saw her as prying and obsessive, grasping for dominance. He didn’t know what he’d ever seen in her.

  The next morning, he wondered if he had overreacted. Was he demonizing his ex like a sitcom cliché? If she was so egotistic, why hadn’t he noticed before? Jack had no good answer. He decided he didn’t need one. Unlike when he broke up with Kirsten, Jack felt no guilt this time. The sooner Deana was gone, the happier he’d be.

  In a few days, Deana called to say she’d found
a new place to live. She and Jack arranged a time for her to pick up her belongings. Jack didn’t want to be there while she moved out; he couldn’t stand seeing her in the apartment again. Instead, Jack went back to his home town for a long weekend with his family.

  It was lucky he did. Jack left Friday afternoon and didn’t get back to the university until Monday night. The police were waiting for him. Deana had disappeared late Saturday.

  She’d talked to friends on Saturday afternoon. She’d made arrangements for Sunday brunch but hadn’t shown up. No one had seen her since.

  As the ex-boyfriend, Jack was a prime suspect. But his alibi was solid: his home town was hundreds of miles from the university, and his family could testify he’d been there the whole time. Jack couldn’t possibly have sneaked back to the university, made Deana disappear, and raced back home.

  Grudgingly, the police let Jack off the hook. They decided Deana must have been depressed by the break-up of the relationship. She might have run off so she wouldn’t have to see Jack around the university. She might even have committed suicide.

  Jack suspected otherwise. As soon as the police let him go, he went to his supervisor’s lab. His locker had been pried open. The ray-gun lay on a nearby lab bench.

  Jack could easily envision what happened. While moving out her things, Deana searched for the ray-gun. She hadn’t found it in the apartment. She knew Jack had a locker in the lab and she’d guessed he’d stashed the weapon there. She broke open the locker to get the gun. She’d examined it and perhaps tried to take it apart. The gun went off.

  Now Deana was gone. Not even a smudge on the floor. The ray-gun lay on the lab bench as guiltless as a stone. Jack was the only one with a conscience.

  He suffered for weeks. Jack wondered how he could feel so bad about a woman who’d made him furious. But he knew the source of his guilt: while he and Deana were arguing in the closet, Jack had imagined vaporizing her with the gun. He was far too decent to shoot her for real, but the thought had crossed his mind. If Deana simply vanished, Jack wouldn’t have to worry about what she might do. The ray-gun had made that thought come true, as if it had read Jack’s mind.

  Jack told himself the notion was ridiculous. The gun wasn’t some genie who granted Jack’s unspoken wishes. What happened to Deana came purely from her own bad luck and inquisitiveness.

  Still, Jack felt like a murderer. After all this time, Jack realized the ray-gun was too dangerous to keep. As long as Jack had it, he’d be forced to live alone: never marrying, never having children, never trusting the gun around other people. And even if Jack became a recluse, accidents could happen. Someone else might die. It would be Jack’s fault.

  He wondered why he’d never had this thought before. Jack suddenly saw himself as one of those people who own a vicious attack dog. People like that always claimed they could keep the dog under control. How often did they end up on the evening news? How often did children get bitten, maimed or killed?

  Some dogs are tragedies waiting to happen. The ray-gun was too. It would keep slipping off its leash until it was destroyed. Twelve years after finding the gun, Jack realized he finally had a heroic mission: to get rid of the weapon that made him a hero in the first place.

  I’m not Spider-Man, he thought, I’m Frodo.

  But how could Jack destroy something that had survived so much? The gun hadn’t frozen in the cold of outer space; it hadn’t burned up as it plunged through Earth’s atmosphere; it hadn’t broken when it hit the ground at terminal velocity. If the gun could endure such punishment, extreme measures would be needed to lay it to rest.

  Jack imagined putting the gun into a blast furnace. But what if the weapon went off? What if it shot out the side of the furnace? The furnace itself could explode. That would be a disaster. Other means of destruction had similar problems. Crushing the gun in a hydraulic press . . . what if the gun shot a hole in the press, sending pieces of equipment flying in all directions? Immersing the gun in acid . . . what if the gun went off and splashed acid over everything? Slicing into the gun with a laser . . . Jack didn’t know what powered the gun, but obviously it contained vast energy. Destabilizing that energy might cause an explosion, a radiation leak, or some even greater catastrophe. Who knew what might happen if you tampered with alien technology?

  And what if the gun could protect itself? Over the years, Jack had read every ray-gun story he could find. In some stories, such weapons had built-in computers. They had enough artificial intelligence to assess their situations. If they didn’t like what was happening, they took action. What if Jack’s gun was similar? What if attempts to destroy the weapon induced it to fight back? What if the ray-gun got mad?

  Jack decided the only safe plan was to drop the gun into an ocean – the deeper the better. Even then, Jack feared the gun would somehow make its way back to shore. He hoped that the weapon would take years or even centuries to return, by which time humanity might be scientifically equipped to deal with the ray-gun’s power.

  Jack’s plan had one weakness: both the university and Jack’s home town were far from the sea. Jack didn’t know anyone with an ocean-going boat suitable for dumping objects into deep water. He’d just have to drive to the coast and see if he could rent something.

  But not until summer. Jack was in the final stages of his Ph.D. and didn’t have time to leave the university for an extended trip. As a temporary measure, Jack moved the ray-gun back to the pond. He buried the weapon several feet underground, hoping that would keep it safe from animals and anyone else who happened by.

  (Jack imagined a new generation of lovesick teenagers discovering the pond. If that happened, he wanted them safe. Like a real hero, Jack cared about people he didn’t know.)

  Jack no longer practised with the gun, but he maintained his physical regimen. He tried to exhaust himself so he wouldn’t have the energy to brood. It didn’t work. Lying sleepless in bed, he kept wondering what would have happened if he’d told Deana the truth. She wouldn’t have killed herself if she’d been warned to be cautious. But Jack had cared more about his precious secret than Deana’s life.

  In the dark, Jack muttered, “It was her own damned fault.” His words were true, but not true enough.

  When Jack wasn’t at the gym, he cloistered himself with schoolwork and research. (His doctoral thesis was about common properties of different types of high-energy beams.) Jack didn’t socialize. He seldom phoned home. He took days to answer email messages from his sister. Even so, he told himself he was doing an excellent job of acting “normal.”

  Jack had underestimated his sister’s perceptiveness. One weekend, Rachel showed up on his doorstep to see why he’d “gone weird”. She spent two days digging under his skin. By the end of the weekend, she could tell that Deana’s disappearance had disturbed Jack profoundly. Rachel couldn’t guess the full truth, but as a big sister she felt entitled to meddle in Jack’s life. She resolved to snap her brother out of his low spirits.

  The next weekend Rachel showed up on Jack’s doorstep again. This time, she brought Kirsten.

  Nine years had passed since Kirsten and Jack had seen each other: the day they both graduated from high school. In the intervening time, when Jack had thought of Kirsten, he always pictured her as a high-school girl. It was strange to see her as a woman. At twenty-seven, she was not greatly changed from eighteen – new glasses and a better haircut – but despite similarities to her teenage self, Kirsten wore her life differently. She’d grown up.

  So had Jack. Meeting Kirsten by surprise made Jack feel ambushed, but he soon got over it. Rachel helped by talking loud and fast through the initial awkwardness. She took Jack and Kirsten for coffee, and acted as emcee as they got reacquainted.

  Kirsten had followed a path close to Jack’s: university and graduate work. She told him, “No one makes a living as a poet. Most of us find jobs as English professors – teaching poetry to others who won’t make a living at it either.”

  Kirsten had earned her doctorat
e a month earlier. Now she was living back home. She currently had no man in her life – her last relationship had fizzled out months ago, and she’d decided to avoid new involvements until she knew where she would end up teaching. She’d sent her résumé to English departments all over the continent and was optimistic about her chances of success; to Jack’s surprise, Kirsten had published dozens of poems in literary magazines. She’d even sold two to The New Yorker. Her publishing record would be enough to interest many English departments.

  After coffee, Rachel dragged Jack to a mall where she and Kirsten made him buy new clothes. Rachel bullied Jack while Kirsten made apologetic suggestions. Jack did his best to be a good sport; as they left the mall, Jack was surprised to find that he’d actually had a good time.

  That evening, there was wine and more conversation. Rachel took Jack’s bed, leaving him and Kirsten to make whatever arrangements they chose. The two of them joked about Rachel trying to pair them up again. Eventually Kirsten took the couch in the living room while Jack crawled into a sleeping bag on the kitchen floor . . . but that was only after talking till three in the morning.

  Rachel and Kirsten left the next afternoon, but Jack felt cleansed by their visit. He stayed in touch with Kirsten by email. It was casual: not romance, but a knowing friendship.

  In the next few months, Kirsten got job interviews with several colleges and universities. She accepted a position on the Oregon coast. She sent Jack pictures of the school. It was directly on the ocean; it even had a beach. Kirsten said she’d always liked the water. She teasingly reminded him of their times at the pond.

  But when Jack saw Kirsten’s pictures of the Pacific, all he could think of was dumping the ray-gun into the sea. He could drive out to visit her . . . rent a boat . . . sail out to deep water . . .

  No. Jack knew nothing about sailing, and he didn’t have enough money to rent a boat that could venture far offshore. “How many years have I been preparing?” he asked himself. “Didn’t I intend to be ready for any emergency? Now I have an honest-to-god mission, and I’m useless.”