by Greg Mellor
“So David Hansen had nothing to do with it?”
How to answer that? It was too complicated. I said, “Mom—is the council really never going to open that alien thing?”
She stared at me. “What’s that got to do with David Hansen?”
“Nothing—I just—never mind. How is he?”
“Doing really well. His brain blight might even be in remission. There are a few rare cases of that on record. If he’s one, it’s a great chance for up-close study, maybe even to learn something significant about the immune system. DNA is infinitely adaptable.”
My linkcom sounded. When I accessed the message, David Hansen’s face stared at me, surrounded by waist-high plants. I recognized them: my mother’s genemod wheat, modified for nutrient-enhanced Martian soil. David was out in the farm.
Instead of speaking, he used the linkcom’s text function, which no one ever does except for data transmission. I had to squint at the tiny letters: “Come right now and alone or bishop to e7.”
I stood, my legs shaky, and said, “Barb wants me. See you later?”
“Sure,” Mom said. “Have fun.”
I made myself not run out of the mess. Bishop to e7 was the last move in Anderssen’s immortal game with Kieseritzky. David’s words filled my head: “He used a suicide tactic. Kill everything he has to get all the way home.”
I raced along the underground tunnel from Level 5 to the farm, then up the stairs instead of taking the elevator to the air lock. The farm is pressurized, but the atmospheric mix is different from the town, with more CO2 to aid plant growth. People can breathe it, but just barely and not for too long. Suits hang along the wall beside the air lock. I hesitated, knowing I should put one on, but I didn’t want to take the time. Instead I just grabbed a helmet and rushed into the air lock. It filled agonizingly slowly with the farm air. Come on come on fill . . .
Dusk filled the hot air of the farm, steamy and rich with the scents of plants, loam, water. No one else was around at this hour, and without a suit I had no headlamp. It didn’t matter. I had played here, taken botany lessons here, done work shifts here my entire life. Mom was a plant geneticist. I knew every inch of the farm, and I raced sure-footed over the narrow paths between crop beds and mini-fields and hydroponic vats and dwarf fruit trees. The sky beyond the low plastic dome was clear, and Phobos shone above me amid the earliest and brightest stars.
David stood, also unsuited, between two mini-fields of Mom’s wheat, where the path ended at the far dome wall. Beyond the dome the Martian surface, rock and fines, was shrouded in shadows. David’s back was to the wall. He held the detached cutting arm of a bot, sharper than any razor.
“David,” I said softly, as if sound might somehow jar him into action.
“Don’t try to stop me.”
“You want me to stop you, or you wouldn’t have linked me. You’d have just done it.”
He laughed. The laugh shivered along my bones. “Is that what you think, Gina? You’re wrong. I linked you because I hate you, hate this place, hate all you bugs—do you know how repulsive you look to me? I can never belong here, never, and I can’t . . . can’t go . . . home . . .”
He started to cry. I moved faster than I have ever moved before. Somehow—how?—I knew that he could not let me see him cry.
Time seemed to stop, quiver, slow down. I had the weird sensation of seeing us both from the outside, each movement as clear and distinct as a coming-of-age dance: Gina leaps forward. David thrusts the cutter behind him at the dome wall. Gina closes the distance between them. The wall of tough piezoelectric plastic rips and air rushes out. Gina is upon David. He screams and whips around the arm holding the cutter. He’s clumsy in this gravity. She clutches his body in her big arms, so much stronger than his. Her small arms grasp at the cutter. She feels it slice deep into her thigh before he drops it. Gina screams. They both drop to the ground.
Time returned to normal. Alarms shrieked. A repair bot threw itself at the hole where the air whooshed out. With my small arms I clamped the helmet over David’s head and the emergency seal molded itself roughly to his shoulders. Then I saw my own blood streaming down my thigh, and everything went dark.
“Shock,” Barb said. “Your mom said it was only shock.” Her face was as white as the sheet that lay over me in the infirmary. She was my first visitor except for Mom, but I knew all my other friends would come as soon as they were allowed.
“David?” I croaked. My lungs needed more time to fully recover, but they would. You’re not supposed to run and fight and bleed while breathing that much CO2.
Barb grimaced. “His father took the fucker to Kasei. They have psychiatric facilities there, you know, that we don’t. If you ask me, he doesn’t need psychiatric help, he needs—”
“Don’t.”
“All right.” She leaned closer. “But why did you do it, Gina? Why save his life? You could have been killed, and he’s worthless scum.”
“No.” I couldn’t say more. So we sat in silence, my friend and I, and she held my hand, and I could still feel my mother’s arms around me from before she left for her work shift, and I knew why the aliens, or their biologicals, or their machines, stayed inside the dull gold artifact.
It’s the same reason we won’t ever open it: Whatever is inside might cause contamination because it does not belong here. No one else believes this theory. “Gina, sweetheart,” Mom said gently when I’d croaked this out to her an hour ago, “think. If that were true, the aliens wouldn’t have taken all the trouble to come here in the first place. They must have meant to establish some sort of presence on Mars, or why bother?”
My throat wouldn’t let me reply, but I think I know the answer. The aliens did mean to establish themselves here. But once they arrived, they discovered that they couldn’t. It was not home. It would never be home. They discovered that they were not as adaptable as they’d hoped, and so they committed a sort of suicide, an act of despair.
Or maybe that isn’t it at all. Maybe it wasn’t an act of despair but of altruism. They landed and discovered they could not survive on Mars. Their craft was damaged, or there weren’t the right resources here, or they didn’t have the right science to adapt Martian resources to their needs. So they took the only kind of victory they could achieve: leaving Mars uncontaminated for those who could adapt to it. “A suicide tactic. Kill everything he has to get all the way home.” Maybe the aliens, too, gained a kind of win, that of doing the right thing for us, who would travel here from Earth so much later. Put yourself in their place.
I don’t know which idea is true, anymore than I know what will happen to David Hansen. His mind is indeed diseased, but not with brain blight. Maybe they can fix his hatred of us, maybe not. Maybe fix is the wrong word. DNA might be infinitely adaptable, but I don’t know if human minds are. If he returns to Mangala, I’ll play chess with him and take him places and try to help him adjust. Carefully. However, no matter what any of us do, David might always feel like an alien on Mars.
But I am a Martian, and this is my home, and I am in my right place.
“Oh, I meant to tell you,” Barb says, “the animal wizards have designed the next generation of mebios, and you won’t believe how cute they are.”
“Yes,” I croaked. “I would.”
First published in Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier, edited by Jonathan Strahan.
About the Author
Nancy Kress began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-seventies. Her books include the novel version of her Hugo and Nebula-winning story, Beggars in Spain, and a sequel, Beggars and Choosers, as well as The Prince Of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, Brain Rose, Oaths & Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light, Crossfire, Nothing Human, The Floweres of Aulit Prison, Crossfire, Crucible, Dogs, and Steal Across the Sky, as well as the Space Opera trilogy Probability Moon, Probability Sun, and Probability Space. Her short work has been collected in Trinity And Other Stories, The Aliens of Ea
rth, Beaker’s Dozen, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories, The Fountain of Age, Future Perfect, AI Unbound, and The Body Human. Her most recent book is the novel Flash Point. In addition to the awards for “Beggars in Spain,” she has also won Nebula Awards for her stories “Out Of All Them Bright Stars” and “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2003 for her novel Probability Space, and another Hugo in 2009 for “The Erdmann Nexus.” Most recently, she just won another Nebula Award in 2013 for her novella “After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall.” She lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead.
Aliens, Robots, Spaceships and . . . Popsicles?
SF on American Radio, Then and Now
Mark Cole
It took a long time to heat up. It was nothing special, just an old plastic GE radio. First silence, then crackling and hissing static, and then—if you were very lucky, if the weather conditions were perfect, if the stars were in the right conjunctions, who knows—then came the faint strains of a familiar theme song and a voice crying “Johnny Chase . . . Secret Agent of Spaaaaaaace!”
What wonders then awaited a young listener back in 1978—a majestic space borne palace, time travel, aliens, a smug ship’s AI named Dante—and even a brief and highly debatable appearance by William Shakespeare himself. Perhaps it never quite took itself seriously, perhaps it wasn’t the best space opera ever written, but the combination of acting, sound effects and, yes, imagination made it far more vivid, far more fantastic, than any short story or television show.
It was this combination that made radio drama almost ideal for SF: a hint of description, a rush of stirring effects, and the listener saw vast interstellar vistas, gigantic spacecraft, and strange creatures. And yet these visions could be thrown on the screen of the viewer’s imagination for a fraction of what the most primitive visual effects would have cost.
Perhaps this is why in the early days of radio, when few people had yet encountered print SF and even fewer had seen SF in the theaters, SF found a home on the air.
Like the early days of radio drama itself, however, little is known about the birth of radio SF. Perhaps the legendary Carlton E. Morse, creator of I Love a Mystery, was the first to introduce SF elements into some of his stories, on the NBC Mystery Serial (1930-1932).
Then there are a few elusive references to what some claim was the first SF series: Ultraviolet. Supposedly it came from Detroit’s powerhouse radio station, WXYZ, and the pen of Fran Striker, creator of The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet. It appears to have been a children’s show, but you won’t find anything about it in most of what’s been written about WXYZ, Striker, or station owner George W. Trendle.
It was another children’s show that is generally considered the first real SF radio show: Buck Rogers. It started its long run in 1932.
Buck was born in Amazing Stories, and his comic strip finally freed SF from the pulp magazine ghetto. While aimed at children, it was complex enough to attract adults and tried to keep its super-science believable. The same, however, cannot be said about the radio series.
The radio Buck Rogers was a fairly typical children’s serial. It had the familiar fifteen minute a day weekday format used by so many other shows, and an almost unhealthy obsession with Popsicles. As with most of these serials, the sponsor got almost as much airtime as the hero did, and their spokesman, Popsicle Pete, undoubtedly ranks as the most annoying corporate mascot ever.
Listeners unfamiliar with these shows would probably be surprised at the glacial pace. Very little happens, and it usually takes a week for any major development. The sound effects were minimal and there’s a lot of talk. Fortunately for CBS, children seemed to love it anyway, and it lasted off and on, in various formats, until 1947.
SF showed up in quite a few other children’s serials, most notably Jack Armstrong, All American Boy; Captain Midnight and the Secret Squadron; and Superman.
In 1935, Mutual launched their version of the year-old Flash Gordon strip. Vastly superior to Buck Rogers, its quarter-hour weekly episodes faithfully adapt the stories in the comics, with Gale Gordon (Mr. Mooney on The Lucy Show) as Flash. Oddly, the show moves far too rapidly, jumping from one incident borrowed from the strip to another. Twenty-six episodes later, Flash and his friends return to Earth and meet Jungle Jim (the hero of Flash’s “top strip”) just in time to launch Jim on his own radio show. Flash returned the next year, in original stories in a daily serial format.
But SF was not stuck in the narrow confines of children’s shows: adaptations of SF stories soon followed. Everyone remembers Orson Welles and the exaggerated stories told of the panic caused by his The War of the Worlds(1938), but few remember the 1932 serial adaptation of Frankenstein. Despite memorable efforts like the 1944 version of Donovan’s Brain on Suspense, however, SF remained rare throughout the forties.
SF did find a foothold in the horror shows, like The Witches Tale, Lights Out and Quiet Please, even though most of their stories dealt with the supernatural. SF remained rare, often poorly presented, and sometimes merely a decorative flourish. Perhaps The Mysterious Traveler (1943-1952) made the greatest contributions, thanks to the efforts of its two masterful scriptwriters, Robert A. Arthur and David Kogan (who, according to Arthur, wrote most of the SF). The variety of SF elements—from robots and computers to aliens, distant planets, environmental disasters and even apocalyptic destruction—was astounding, and the shows were among the best written on the air.
While most of them retained the familiar structure of the twist ending (found on horror shows long before the advent of The Twilight Zone), the surprises never came at the expense of the story. Some of these stories would reappear on other series, particularly on CBS’s Suspense in its later years. Most of them would have been right at home between the pages of Weird Tales (which ran many of Arthur’s stories).
The two produced several similar if less famous series (including Dark Destiny, The Strange Dr. Weird, and The Sealed Book), creating hundreds of wonderful stories, many of which still survive today—as do many SF stories from other horror shows.
And then the Fifties changed everything.
1950, of course, launched Destination Moon, and the surge of SF film that followed. But it also marked the debut of the first serious SF radio shows. While Dimension X is perhaps the best known of these shows, Mutual’s 2000 Plus actually aired two weeks earlier.
It is hard to judge the quality of 2000+ as so few shows have survived. They seem a wild potpourri of Fifties SF, everything from flying saucers, time travel, rockets, aliens, ancient Egypt, and even a journey into the “germ world”. It was well produced, and the scripts were reasonably intelligent—if nowhere near as good as those of the shows that followed. It was not particularly successful, running for two seasons—but then neither were any of the SF shows of the era. They all managed to attract loyal viewers, but never enough to keep them alive.
With legendary editor John W. Campbell Jr. of Astounding Magazine onboard as an advisor, CBS’s Beyond Tomorrow, officially debuted next, although an audition episode actually predates 2000+. However, no one is sure whether the three shows recorded ever aired.
Dimension X, while it wasn’t first, did something far greater: in an era when SF on the theater screen remained largely unaffected by the golden age of SF, it tore stories right out of the pages of Astounding Magazine and put them on the air.
Its special arrangement gave it access to Astounding’s best stories. Dimension X’s list of authors reads like a who’s who of golden age SF: Jack Williamson, Kurt Vonnegut, Fredric Brown, Murray Leinster, L. Ron Hubbard, Donald A. Wollheim, Robert Bloch, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, William Tenn, Clifford D. Simak, H. Beam Piper, and Isaac Asimov among others. The show’s staff writers did create a handful of originals, and adapted a few stories from other sources, but the bulk came from Astounding.
It was a remarkable achievement, one which later shows copied. But, despite its
quality it would only last two seasons.
Not all the SF radio of the fifties aimed for adult listeners—although even children’s fare like The Planet Man and Captain Starr of Space failed to stay on the air for more than a year. Even radio versions of the popular TV shows Space Patrol and Tom Corbett: Space Cadet fared no better.
However, one of radio’s best SF shows actually came from television. Tales of Tomorrow—a half-hour anthology show—first flickered into life in 1951, in the midst of a host of simple children’s shows pretending to be SF. In one titanic leap, the electronic wasteland gained an SF show that was intelligent, serious and adult—and had access to the more than 2000 stories written by members of The Science Fiction League.
Two years later, in partnership with Galaxy Magazine, Tales of Tomorrow launched on radio. While it boasted some of the best SF writing on the air, it still lasted a mere fifteen episodes and was divided between two different networks!
Galaxy Magazine was also involved in what many consider the best SF show of the era, X Minus One. Essentially a 1955 revival of Dimension X, its first fifteen episodes recycled earlier scripts. With many of the same people involved, it is often hard to remember which series ran any given episode. It tended (particularly in its later seasons) towards more humorous episodes than its predecessor.
Sadly, while it lasted longer than any other SF radio show of the era and managed to produce 126 episodes, it found itself increasingly pressured by falling budgets. This forced them to make painful cuts and eventually left its writers and actors seriously underpaid. Radio drama had begun its slow death and advertising dollars became harder and harder to find. But somehow, thanks to the dedication of everyone involved, the later episodes still sound as good as the earliest ones.
After its untimely death in 1958, NBC would try to revive it in 1973 with a single new episode (“The Iron Chancellor”, by Robert Silverberg) and sporadic rebroadcasts of the originals. But it failed to generate enough interest for a full revival, thanks largely to NBC’s erratic scheduling.
