Analog SFF, April 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  To Parque sitting up, eyes widening as he saw Benny crouched over him. He started to raise his hand—

  Benny went for Parque's throat, teeth clamping down hard. Blood spurted around his teeth, flooding his mouth with heat.

  Parque's hands beat at his head, at his muzzle. Benny's claws scrabbled at the bomber's chest, tearing the sheet, shredding skin.

  Back at the door Spike watched, waited. Following orders.

  Benny wrenched and tore at Parque's throat, growling now deep in his own throat, able to feel the buzzing scream trying to get past the knot of tissue his teeth were clamped around. Parque had to die. Parque had to die. The imperative tolled in his head.

  Benny bore down, grinding his teeth deeper. He did not see the bomber reach out and paw at the table beside the bed, did not see Parque's grasping fingers close around the pistol there. He ripped and tore at the man's throat, unaware of the gun coming up.

  Spike bared his teeth and started forward, but went no more than a step closer, chained by his own orders.

  Parque got the gun pointed at Benny's head, the finger he had curled around the trigger tightening.

  Spike faded back out the door.

  As he reached the top of the stairs there was a muffled report, soon followed by a strangled, bubbling cry.

  He raced down the stairs, through the house, and out the back door. A single leap carried him over the wall into the yard of the house next door, and his four feet carried him away faster than the furious clamor the gunshot brought to the house he had just left.

  * * * *

  Spike knew that even if Benny hadn't managed to tear Parque's throat out before he died, the bomber was a dead man. Even if he got medical attention fast enough to stop the bleeding and repair the damage, the genetically engineered rabies variant Benny carried would deal the man a fast, ugly, and painful death.

  Parque had been killed by a dog, just as had others of his ilk. That was guaranteed to further raise hackles in this part of the world where his kind were despised. The how of it would have them guessing—and sweating—for some time to come.

  They would probably never know that this devil dog could talk. Could read.

  Or that he was friendly, brave, and heartbreakingly naive, less of an animal than Parque or his masters.

  Retracing his path brought Spike to the place where Benny had saved his bacon, keeping him from finding that unexploded shell the hard way.

  Benny had been a good dog.

  He was a good dog. He followed orders and obeyed his masters, even when those orders meant that this was the fifth time he'd escorted some poor unsuspecting SOB to his or her death.

  The Devil Dogs. Word was out there, whispers of dread. Just as his masters wanted.

  Spike slowed, thinking hard about taking a small detour. About going and finding that unexploded bomb and setting it off so he wouldn't ever have to do this again.

  But he went past without slowing.

  He would faithfully return to his masters.

  Good dog, they would tell him. Good soldier. Hero in the war against terror.

  Good dog.

  Spike was learning to hate the sound of those two words.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Stephen L. Burns

  * * * *

  We welcome your letters, which should be sent to Analog, 475 Park Avenue South, Floor 11, New York, NY 10016, or e-mail to analog@dellmagazines.com. Space and time make it impossible to print or answer all letters, but please include your mailing address even if you use e-mail. If you don't want your address printed, put it only in the heading of your letter; if you do want it printed, please put your address under your signature. We reserve the right to shorten and copy-edit letters. The email address is for editorial correspondence only—please direct all subscription inquiries to: 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855.

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  * * *

  Poem: GOOD MORNING, CLASS....

  by Robert Lundy

  I spent an hour looking for

  The glasses perched upon my head.

  Because I could not see my feet

  I stubbed my toe against the bed.

  —

  My lower back is killing me;

  The chiropractor soon will dine

  In luxury from what I pay

  To have him reconstruct my spine.

  —

  My shoulder has been hurting

  since I tried to lift that heavy box.

  My knee is an impediment

  To motion: now and then it locks.

  —

  My carpal-tunnel syndrome

  Makes it difficult to write each line.

  The School Board mandates we believe

  “Intelligent Design."

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  * * *

  Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE HOSPITAL OF THE FUTURE

  by Jeffery D. Kooistra

  “What will the future look like?” Good question. If you're a writer setting a story in the future, you need to picture the stuff of the future. What are the cars like? What are the houses like? What are the weapons like? What does a political map of the Earth look like? You get the idea.

  Once you start writing about the future, and imagining what people are doing in that future, if you're like me you begin to worry about the details, particularly if you're writing anything set in the relatively near term. I'm pretty sure that if I check some of my own stories written in the ‘90s, I'll be embarrassed at how badly I missed the ubiquity of the cell phone and universality of the Internet. What is even worse is to write a story set in the future, therein to discuss, say, some sort of fantastic new invention, only to discover after publication that said invention exists now and you'd just never heard of it.

  Suppose you want to write a story about a new kind of plague that strikes a city or country in the near future. When you describe the nature of the disease, you'd better be sure that its cause and symptoms aren't too closely mirrored by a disease that's already known. If your story revolves around some fictional form of treatment for that disease, you need to be certain that treatment doesn't already exist. If you're going to have your characters wind up as patients in a hospital, you'll need to provide some details about what a future hospital will look like, inside and out.

  Let's do the exercise of imagining the hospital of the future. We're sticking to the near-term, so it's no fair to posit that surgeries are done by robots or that everyone has access to an “autodoc” or that injuries and illnesses are cured by filtering out the bad stuff in the beam of a matter transmitter. Nor are we going to invoke nanotechnology as a way to cure everything, even though current progress in nanotech is affecting medicine today, just as is affecting everything else.

  For this exercise I will make you, the reader, a character in a story. You are going to visit a friend stricken with a mystery ailment, currently undergoing testing in the hospital of the future.

  You are driving down the highway. It is near a major Midwestern city, though most of the countryside is fairly rural. You see barns and cows and cornfields. But off to your right is a beautiful squat pyramid of a building, reminiscent of an old Analog cover (January 1974, cover art by Kelly Freas for William E. Cochrane's “The Horus Errand").

  Soon you spot the sign by the exit ramp to the hospital. It is not a small sign with the word “hospital” on it and a single arrow pointing either left or right. Rather, it is a large sign, on a tall pole, in lights, flashing messages—you can't miss it, which is the point. The hospital is in a suburban setting; the largest building in what is best described as a “health village.” As you drive down the road to the parking lot, you notice a coffee shop, a pharmacy, a health food store, and a gym.

  You park your car in the parking lot and get out. At first you think this parking lot was never quite finished. It is divided into several sections by shallow ditches choked with weeds. But then you look more closely and see that there is a bit too muc
h uniformity about those ditches. They are a design feature of the parking lot. The ditches are actually bio-retentive swales, also called rain gardens. They are there to help filter out contaminants from the rainwater that runs off the lot. The so-called weeds are just plants native to the area that can live without need for care.

  You turn your attention to the hospital itself. It doesn't look a bit like the intimidating institution you oftentimes still see in movies. It looks much more like a fancy corporate headquarters, designed with the intent of setting current and future customers at ease. You note the landscaping; fountains, flowers, shrubs, and swathes of grass crossed by broad sidewalks. You see ponds, and stone garden walls, and you wish you had enough time to do the scene justice while capturing it on camera. The building itself boasts broad expanses of glass across the convex front of the main tower. You wonder what prompted the design, and look forward to walking the halls and exploring the floor plan. You notice classy flourishes of lenticular décor near the entrances, echoing the shape of the tower.

  Upon entering the building, nothing says “hospital.” It doesn't smell like a hospital. It doesn't look like a hospital. The lobby is wide and deep, with a cascading water display at the far end. Again, the lens-like décor is repeated throughout in the designs of the hanging ceiling panels and entryway desks. Over on the right is a coffee bar with a gift shop beyond that. To the left and to the right, through huge panes of glass, you see atriums filled with pools and grass and paths, with low walls to sit on. These are healing gardens for quiet relaxation and meditation. Of necessity, hospitals are places of plastic and glass and stainless steel and antiseptics. But what your senses tell you is that this hospital is much more than that. This is a place of earth and wind and water and sunshine, the blue and the green and the terra cotta of life.

  You continue through the lobby and enter a curved hallway. To your left the wall is all window looking out on the healing garden. You can't see around the curve in front of you, but you feel as if just a few steps will bring you to where you want to go. You know in your head that this is a big hospital, but the feeling you get is one of coziness. There are no seemingly infinite cold corridors in this place. Everything is in earth tones, and though it doesn't show, the paint, carpets, glues, and fabrics were all chosen to maintain the cleanest possible interior air quality.

  As you draw near the elevators you see the hospital cafeteria. It too is open and airy, with enormous windows looking out on the healing garden from the other end. The tables are populated with people eating and talking and laughing. Some are obviously members of the hospital staff for they share the same color uniforms, some in navy blue, some in beige, some in plum. Others could be either visitors or other staff members, until you notice that all staff members are wearing name badges. You watch as a pair of pretty young women in blue walk to a door. One waves her badge at a sensor and the door unlocks and they go through.

  You ride the elevator up to the sixth floor. As you walk down the crescent hallway, you almost feel like you're on the Starship Enterprise. Ahead of you a doctor steps out of a room—no, the doors didn't slide apart. But he speaks into a pendant. “Where is Dr. Petkus?” he asks. “Dr. Petkus is in the Pathology laboratory.” “Call Dr. Petkus.” A moment later: “Hello, Tom. What can I do for you?” asks Dr. Petkus. In the hospital of the future, doctors and nurses and other caregivers will be able to communicate with each other instantly and reliably from anywhere in the building.

  You pass several rooms on the way to visiting your friend. You notice that all of them are identical in layout and much larger than is traditional. You enter her room. Talking to your friend isn't a part of this exercise, so we'll assume she's sleeping. There is a sofa in the room. You could fall asleep on it yourself since it converts into a bed. Your friend fell asleep with the TV on. It is flat panel LCD HDTV, not the biggest in the world, but a pretty good midsize. There is one in every room, with high speed Internet access thrown in. The program showing is from the hospital's own video archives. It's an informational piece about the surgical procedure rooms. It shows you an octopus-like piece of equipment attached to the ceiling, with many arms each holding different pieces of equipment. You are told that each surgical light has a built in camera so the doctors can record and photograph a surgery as it happens. And while a surgery is going on, there is an air curtain surrounding the surgeons, nurses, and patient to keep airborne contamination away.

  You wander over to the large windows and look out. Down below you spot the healing gardens, but what is this other garden you see? You didn't notice that on the way in, but there it is, and it's easily an acre in size. Then you look closer and realize that the reason you didn't see the garden before is because it is on the roof. Even more than that, it is the roof, a green roof. Later, after your friend wakes up, you'll watch a program together on the TV. It will discuss this roof. You'll learn that the roof has over 100,000 plants growing in four inches of soil. The sedum and allium plants will minimize storm water runoff and help cool the surrounding air. They will also bloom all year around in assorted shades of amber, pink, purple, and burgundy. Even the surrounding green spaces about the health village are irrigated from retained rainwater instead of from the city water supply.

  You will learn that at this hospital of the future, the health of the environment is as integral to her mission as is the health of the patients. Cleaning solvents are non-toxic. The dinnerware in the cafeteria is biodegradable, made from corn and sugarcane. Computers and light bulbs, paper and cardboard, batteries and x-ray film, all are recycled.

  But for now, you turn from the window and decide to let your friend sleep a bit longer. You remember that coffee bar in the lobby. You step back into the hallway, but hesitate. You were going to go to the elevator, but why not take the stairs? You know this hospital will have windows in the stairwells. And there is so much more you want to see.

  * * * *

  So ends the exercise.

  My regular readers may wonder why I've made my hospital of the future such a “green” place since you know I'm a global warming skeptic and not prone to accepting hysterical environmentalist propaganda. But clean air is to be preferred over dirty air regardless of whether or not you think it is a major problem. And many of the things the global warming crowd would like to see done are worth doing whether or not you think catastrophic climate change is on the way. And regardless of what I think, the current trends are all toward greater use of green technology and design, so we will find buildings of the near term designed with that in mind.

  Though the exercise is over, there is one additional detail about the hospital I should add. It is not actually the hospital of the future, but the hospital of the present. I know because I work there. Nothing of my account was fictional (not even the pyramid on the drive there).

  Remember that when you set your own story in the hospital of the future.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Jeffery D. Kooistra

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  * * *

  Probability Zero: HOW I SAVED THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

  by Robert Scherrer

  I slouched in the captain's chair of my yacht, the Fallow Earth, watching seagulls on the Captiva dock spear french fries from abandoned plates outside Cap'n Al's Restaurant. I closed my eyes and leaned back to feel the warm Florida sunshine, then swiveled my chair to face the man from the FBI. “So it's a crime these days to make money?” I asked.

  “Not at all, Dr. McCarthy.” The FBI agent smiled. “But when a government employee strikes it rich ... well, questions get asked."

  “Look,” I said, “I wasn't a government employee—not really. I was what they called a ‘rotator’ at the National Science Foundation—rotated in for a couple years and then went back to Ohio State before I retired."

  “All the more reason for us to be concerned.” The agent's eyes flickered around the yacht. “Someone comes in for two years, gets rich, and retires. Surely you can see—"


  “Okay, okay,” I said, “I get your point. But there's a simple explanation. Give me ten minutes."

  “No problem.” The agent leaned back against the sun-bleached wooden railing of my yacht and folded his arms. “I've got as much time as you need. Tell me all about it."

  I followed Mark Sanders through the stacks of the science library in the basement of NSF headquarters. A sickly fluorescent bulb flickered overhead, and I studied the back of Mark's head in the pale blue light. I had known Mark since we were graduate students together—he had slowly shed his facial hair over the decades as he climbed the administrative ladder. He lost his beard when he became Department Chair at Princeton. The moustache went when he became Dean. And now that he was a Division Head at the National Science Foundation, he was starting to go bald.

  Mark stopped to pull an ancient bound volume off the shelves. He handed it to me—Physical Review, 1937. I riffled through the yellowed pages, which crackled and smelled of mildew.

  “We're drowning in words,” Mark said. He gestured toward the shelves of weathered journals, which stood at attention like soldiers from some long-forgotten war. “The number of published pages of scientific research doubles every decade. In the 1930s, Physical Review published a couple thousand pages a year. By the 1990s, it was up to 70,000 pages, and it's still climbing."

  “Who cares, Mark? Nobody uses libraries anymore.” I slammed shut the journal and glanced around. “Jeez, this place is deserted—you could grow mushrooms down here. Everything's online now."

  “And that just makes the problem worse,” said Mark. “Now we have to sort through gigabytes of digital drivel to find anything of importance."

  “Hey, don't blame me.” I pointed the spine of the Physical Review volume at Mark. “You NSF guys started it. You gave money to people for publishing a lot of papers, and so they did. Big surprise, eh?"

  “I know, and now I want to control the problem,” said Mark. “I brought you here as ‘Assistant for Special Projects.’ Now I've got a special project."