Jim Baens Universe-Vol 1 Num 6

by Eric Flint

  "Have you seen the public opinion polls?" asked Bob Haldeman.

  The President exhaled forcefully. He swirled the tumbler half full of scotch and melting ice and settled into his leather chair. A TV screen built into the bookcase showed Tom Paine, NASA's administrator, reassuring reporters that Michael Collins was doing fine. "Yeah, Bob, I have." Nixon drained the glass with a swift flick of his wrist. The ice cubes tinkled softly.

  "Americans don't like failure, Mister President."

  "No, they don't. We have some difficult choices to make." He swirled the rounded ice cubes in his glass tumbler.

  "We could back pedal and make a statement about letting the technology mature."

  "The technology is sufficient, we all know that. So now we have a choice to make," said Nixon.

  "Vietnam or the Moon?"

  "It's not quite that simple," said Nixon.

  "Which way are you leaning?"

  "Vietnam is a pissant jungle hole. The moon is, well, the moon is the moon. That bitch has only killed two people. How many has Vietnam taken?"

  "Too many," said Bob.

  "Anyway, if we cut NASA's budget even further and offer up some excuse as to how we need some time to review the program the public will see right through our cowardice. They'll crucify us at the polls. The Democrats are fools if they don't use this as an issue."

  "They'll make it an issue either way you go. Incremental reductions in the NASA budget over a period of years and maybe increased funding for social programs could make it more palatable."

  Nixon grunted in agreement.

  "Not to mention the Russians."

  Nixon grimaced. The muscles in his jaw worked side to side. "Those damn Russians, even worse than Democrats. Have they said anything?"

  "Empty condolences followed by the announcement that they are increasing their space budget and that they will put a man on the moon and return him before we do."

  "Do they have any credibility?"

  "Some. Our failure seems to have re-energized their program on a political level. The CIA is revising their '67 National Intelligence Estimate. I don't know all the particular details. But their lander has reached a preliminary hardware stage and they have resumed production of another N-1 booster."

  "Determined bastards, aren't they? How long will it take us to get back in the game?"

  "It will take us . . . uh . . . I don't know . . . maybe twelve to eighteen months to put another Saturn on the pad, after the special committees, internal reviews, and mishap investigation. The Russians could make an attempt in about the same time frame if they go all out. It is entirely possible that they could scoop us." Bob Haldeman drained the remainder of his glass. "What are you thinking, Mister President?"

  "I'm thinking we can't afford to give the damn moon to the communists. I'm wishing that they made it back. It would have been glorious." Nixon paused for a moment and looked into his own cut crystal tumbler before setting it down. "Bob, I'm inclined to finish what we started and show some backbone. I'm wondering what the hell went wrong."

  * * *

  The capsule buffeted violently. Caris and Tevin looked at each other briefly in response to the turbulence and then back to their consoles. Soft metal fiber straps cut into their shoulders as the ship boosted hard along a steep probability curve. An ephemeral slurry of white hot chronoton foam boiled from the hull pulling away fibrous swaths of spun clever metal and honeycombed power cells. Silvered scorch marks from weapons fired seven hundred years uptime scarred the outer hull.

  The ship emerged into local time with a shrieking vibration that fogged their thoughts. Both men slammed hard against their harnesses as probability reached infinite. The chronographic turbulence abated. Caris, the module pilot, took a moment to make sense of the display. His head felt slow and thick. He wiped blood from his nose with the back of his sleeve. His vision blurred and then focused as his thoughts caught up to him. "Are you okay, Tevin?"

  "Yes, yes I think so," responded Tevin.

  Caris glanced at the holographic displays. They indicated sufficient energy to reach the surface and adequate hull integrity. He smiled and muttered a prayer. They had successfully broken the seven hundred year quarantine of man. Both men looked through the single open window. The lunar surface, three thousand meters below, scrolled past. A cursory ESM sweep indicated that they were clear of uptime scanning beams from the aliens or the vastly more primitive current time sensors.

  "Switching to AI control," said Caris. The limited capacity of the machine intelligence could handle the touchdown far better than he could. Both men adjusted themselves in their couches. The Eagle II pirouetted opposite its orbital flight path and braked with a spine bending firing of its engine. The module descended towards the Aristarchus plateau.

  Tevin, the tactical officer, looked down at the empty moon. A pristine gray surface untouched by man, or the hated invaders, coursed through the window. This new moon was wild and unclaimed and startling in its desolation. A vast frightening emptiness stretched to the curved horizon. He marveled briefly at the monochromatic frontier and wondered how his ancestors missed the very first rung of the ladder and ceded it to the unnamed beings that constrained humanity to its own thin biosphere. He pulled himself from distraction and checked his tactical display. "We're shedding nuetrinos and tachyons at 140% nominal."

  "Enough to trace?"

  "No . . . No, I don't think so. No one left to follow anyway." Tevin reached to clear the last recorded images of Earth from the secondary screen.

  "Wait, let me see." Caris unlocked his harness and stretched forward to peer at the tactical officer's secondary screen. A continent sized bulls-eye of molten crust, surrounded by super storms of vaporized ocean, glowed malevolently. A dim outline of a stretched European landmass could be seen falling into the same gravitic abyss that launched the Eagle II across probability paths of folded time and space. The image panned out to include the shattered moon and the bright fusion flares of alien vessels attempting to escape the ferocious gravitic maelstrom.

  Tevin stabbed at the holographic space with a gloved hand and the horrific image changed to power readings and ship status displays. Neither man mourned a family.

  Caris sat back and locked his harness. "One thousand meters, standby for touchdown."

  The only survivors of the human race braced for landing. A surge of vertigo accompanied the landing as the engine twisted local gravity. The empty moon rushed towards them and the engine fired again in a sustained vibration that blurred his vision.

  "Lunar contact," said Caris as the module settled gently. Its struts compressed as the engine hum faded to a dull infrasonic buzz. The module powered down to standby mode. She would never lift from the surface again.

  "Congratulations. We're the first men on the moon in over seven hundred years," said Tevin. "Or we're the first on the moon ever. It really depends on your point of view."

  Caris did not care. He did not worry over paradox theory and split time ramifications. "What is the status of your system?"

  "Preheat sequence initiated. Once it's warm, I'll leave it in hot standby and passive acquisition mode." The AI spoke its soft machine language through the consensus link.

  Tevin checked a display. "We are picking up S-band transmissions. Our target is local."

  "That's good. We're on profile then, right?"

  "Yes, on profile. We have about six hours. You might as well get comfortable." Tevin lay down on the narrow bunk and directed the AI to wake him in two hours. With his index finger he traced a window into the bulkhead. The programmable matter became transparent. He gazed out at the pristine lunar surface and marveled unrestrained by the fatigue he felt. He breathed in a slow and measured cadence. His body and mind relaxed. He closed his eyes.

  Caris traced a circle on the hull interior and it became transparent. He did not share Tevin's ability to seize opportunistic sleep. He pushed his head against the window he had made and it bulged outward far enough so that he co
uld see the scarring traceries left on the hull from the assault of time and exotic alien weaponry.

  The silver reflective scars of near hits, the last shots fired in the coldest war, raked the hull from bow to stern. He turned his eyes back to a lunar surface wondrously devoid of light and activity. The invaders claimed the moon and used it as a staging area for the rest of the system. Mined helium 3 powered their occupation of the solar system and quarantine of man. They had cleared Venus of its clouds and the seasonal blooming of Mars, an ancient Earthly notion, had become reality. He pulled his head back into the module and touched the center of the window and it became opaque. He busied himself with pointless housekeeping chores.

  * * *

  "Caris, I have target acquisition," said Tevin.

  A raw image of the Apollo 11 Command Service Module and Lunar Module tracked across a holographic targeting window. The image of the primitive vessel froze on the screen as the actual vanished over the sensor horizon. Tactical symbols that detailed orbital parameters and target attitude floated beneath the spacecraft image.

  "Beautiful, isn't it?" said Caris.

  "Yes. Enough power for one shot." Tevin ran an integrity check on the AI to insure it had adapted to the temporal discontinuity. The machine had. He configured the weapon for automatic tracking and manual firing.

  * * *

  "Two minutes till target acquisition. Weapons hot," said the AI. The particle beam projector extruded and traversed to the horizon where the Columbia and Eagle would appear.

  The view zoomed into the ascent portion of the Lunar Module and Tevin sub-vocalized commands to the AI. Targeting icons tracked and Tevin activated the trigger. The holographic sliding bar display turned from green to amber and red as the bar diminished.

  An invisible beam lanced the sky, bored through the thin hull, and struck the Eagle's ascent engine fuel injectors. The beam tracked momentarily. The fuel injectors fused solid under the particle onslaught. The AI reported success.

  "It's done," said Caris. The cabin lights dimmed.

  "So are we," replied Tevin. The cabin grew colder as he spoke the words. He called up the systems display. Ship power registered at two percent. The weapon drained almost all of their reserves. When the power cell's energy dwindled to nothing the clever metals would die and rapidly decay to dust and gas and blow away in the solar wind.

  "Our fate was sealed the moment those guys got their ticker tape parade," said Caris.

  "What's a ticker tape?"

  "Never mind. Do you want a drink?" Caris pulled out a bottle of wine and pulled away the soft aerogels wrapped around the bottle. "Look." He held the bottle out label forward. The date read 1969. "It's not very old, but it's a good year." He smiled at his joke and turned the label back towards him.

  "The best," said Tevin.

  "Do you want the drink or not?" Caris pulled the cork out and dropped it to the deck.

  "Of course."

  Caris poured the red wine to the brim of the cut crystal wine glass and handed it to Tevin. He poured his own and they both touched their glasses gently. "To the moon."

  "To Armstrong and Aldrin." Tevin raised his glass.

  "Armstrong and Aldrin," repeated Caris, with a smile. They sipped the wine in silence.

  "It's coming. Can you feel it?"

  Caris felt the approaching inevitability. The sound of thunder filled his ears. He smiled anyway. He reached into a compartment and pulled out a polished rock from a compartment and cradled it close to his chest. "Good bye, Tevin." Caris closed his eyes as the vibration grew stronger. He could see a liquid pattern of color and light through his own eyelids. The time wave raced across centuries realigning the local chronography in response to the new stimulus. Established patterns dissolved into a miasma of quantum foam and a new organization emerged from nothing. The capsule's clever metals disintegrated to dust, and vanished under chronoton tides. The quantum AI computer's mind sublimated. I feel, thought the mind, as it vanished. The new moon inherited four bodies.

  * * *

  Ken Mattingly and Fred Haise sweated profusely in their second generation suits. They had been digging the shallow graves for the better part of a day. The lunar regolith was unreasonably stubborn. Earthbound scientists complained briefly and bitterly over the marginalization of the Apollo 20 mission.

  The high endurance LM carried the most scientific equipment of any lunar mission and so far not a single experiment had been set up or sample collected. The only mission objectives accomplished had been the retrieval of the Hasselblad camera that had documented the first two hours of the first two men on the surface of the moon and re-erecting the U.S. flag with a custom made stand.

  Mattingly paused and leaned on the hideously expensive shovel. A complicated assemblage of tension bands and wires assisted his grasp on the tool. He wondered briefly about the unknown astronauts discovered by Anders at the Aristarchus plateau during the Apollo 19 mission.

  He turned his thoughts back to the men he knew and resumed digging, careful not to throw the hard soil onto the original footprints, which were just as crisp as the day they were made six years ago. Some scientists argued for the return of the bodies but not a single astronaut agreed to that particular mission objective. Mattingly hoped the Tranquility site would be the most sacred of lunar graveyards.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Colonel Jeremy Owens ran through the module fueling checklist on the Mars Lander One vehicle. Three Landers clung to a seven hundred foot long open lattice spine just behind the crew and flight modules of the spacecraft Aries. Far aft, the blunt cylinder of the nuclear thermo-electric engine idled with radioactive decay. Fully fueled upper stages of Nova transports filled the space between the engine and the landers.

  Major Ivana Tevenko, the first woman on the moon, tucked a stray wisp of blond hair beneath her skull cap. She sat next to him monitoring the fuel transfer operation.

  Jeremy stopped his checklist when the collision alarm sounded. He keyed the intercom mike. "Leslie . . . Leslie, what's the alarm?" He glanced at Ivana who looked just as confused.

  "I don't know Jer," replied Leslie's voice through his headset. She sat far forward in the flight module running her own checklist. "The proximity alarm detected an object off our bow."

  "A NORAD registered object?" he asked.

  "No, it was traveling at thirteen million miles per hour. Nothing goes that fast. It must be a glitch," she replied. Leslie Nakagawa, ships navigator, and third in command, cleared the alarm and looked out at the Nova fuel transport drifting into view.

  Ivana Tevenko smiled at Jeremy. "This is the third time we have this glitch. It is another mystery, like our poor lost cosmonauts." Her accented English was sensual and her breath was sweet. Good hygiene was polite in space. She enjoyed teasing the American by claiming that the Russians had made it to the moon first.

  "How exactly did they get there? Did they walk? If they walked, where are their footprints? Where is their spaceship and what the hell were they doing with a bottle of wine?"

  Apollo 19 was a military mission designed to survey the first Russian landing site on the Aristarchus plateau. After evaluating the Russian equipment, Anders had discovered two bodies, one of which clutched a polished sphere of rock carved into a relief map of Mars. Six stars marked positions on the sphere. Aries was going to one of those sites.

  "Their lander left without them on automatic pilot and they tread lightly so they would not defile the scenery."

  "Well, if that's the case . . ."

  She leaned over and kissed him to end the debate. Their mouths parted. He pulled away refusing to be distracted. "So tell me how your cosmonaut was found with a Martian map," he continued. He couldn't surrender with just a kiss for a prize. Détente required a bit more.

  "When we get to Mars we will be welcomed by our Martian socialist brothers and then we can ask them."

  It was his turn to kiss her.

  * * *

  The Colony Commander read the dat
a from his sacrificial probes and consulted the ship's mind. The imaged infrastructure was primitive and limited to the third planet and its moon but it was a clear indication of audacity and intelligence that met the criteria for sentience.

  With reluctance, he negated the ship's braking sequence and targeted another star to investigate. An opposed system colonization was immoral and dangerous. He made a notation in the ship's logs and transmitted orders to the other ships' commanders. The computer calculated a new course on the selected star and transmitted instructions to the other ships.

  He pressed the "Proceed" button and prepared to cycle himself back into stasis.

  * * *

  Genre Getaways on Earth

  Written by Carol Pinchefsky

  Science fiction and fantasy films have some fabulous locations: the United Federation of Planets, a galaxy far, far away, and Middle Earth, to name a few. But because these worlds exist only in the imagination—and a studio lot—you can't get there from here.