Bado can see a small town, laid out with the air of a military barracks.
Staff are coming out of the town on little trucks to meet them. They are processed efficiently; the crew of the Prometheus gives details of where each passenger was picked up, and they are all assigned little labels and forms, standing there in the baking sunlight of the desert.
The spindly lunar children are lowered to the ground and taken off in wheelchairs. Bado wonders what will happen to them, stranded at the bottom of Earth's deep gravity well.
Williams points. "Look at that. Another Prometheus."
There is a launchb rail, like a pencil line ruled across the sand, diminishing to infinity at the horizon. A silver dart clings to the rail, with a slim bullet shape fixed to its back. Another Beta and Alpha. Bado can see protective rope barriers slung around the rail.
Taine comes to greet Bado and Williams. "I'm afraid this is goodbye," he says. He sticks out a hand. "We want to get you people back as quickly as we can. You alternates, I mean. what a frightful mess this is. But the sooner you're out of it the better."
"Back where?" Bado asks.
"Florida." Taine looks at them. "That's where you say you started from, isn't it?"
Williams shrugs. "Sure."
"And then back to your own world." He mimes stirring a pot of some noxious substance. "We don't want to muddy the time lines, you see. We don't know much about this alternating business; we don't know what damage we might do. Of course the return procedure's still experimental but hopefully we'll get it right. Well, the best of luck. Look, just make your way to the plane over there."
He points.
The plane is a ramjet, Bado sees immediately.
Taine moves on, to another bewildered-looking knot of passengers.
The Russian cosmonaut is standing at Williams' side. He is hauling his stiff pressure suit along the ground; it scrapes on the sand like an insect's discarded carapace. Out of the suit the Russian looks thin, young, baffled, quite ill. He shakes Bado's hand. "Dos vidanya."
"Yeah. So long to you too, kid. Hope you get home safely. A hell of a ride, huh."
"Mnye nada k zoobnomoo vrachoo." He clutches his jaw and grins ruefully.
"Schastleevava pootee. Zhilayoo oospyekhaf."
"Yeah. Whatever."
A British airman comes over and leads the Russian away.
"Goddamn," Williams says. "We never found out his name."
He got a report in from his meteorite studies group.
Yes, it turned out, there was a large object on its way. It would be here in a few years' time. Bado figured this had to be this universe's edition of that big old Imbrium rock, arriving a little later than in the Moon Five world.
But this rock was heading for Earth, not the Moon. Its path would take it right into the middle of the Atlantic, if the calculations were right. But the margins of error were huge, and, and ... Bado tried to raise public awareness. His money and fame got him onto TV, even, such as it was. But nobody here took what was going on in the sky very seriously anyhow, and they soon started to think he was a little weird.
So he shut up. He pushed his money into bases at the poles, and at the bottom of the oceans, places that mightn't be so badly affected. Somebody might survive. Meanwhile he paid for a little more research into that big rock in space, and where and when, exactly, it was going to hit.
The ramjet takes ten hours to get to Florida. It is a military ship-more advanced than anything flying in Bado's world. It has the bull's-eye logo of the RAF painted to its flank, just behind the gaping mouth of its inlet.
As the ramiet rises, Bado glimpses huge atomic aircraft, immense ocean-going ships, networks of monorails. This is a gleaming world, an engineer's dream.
Bado has had enough wonders for the time being, though, and, before the shining coast of Australia has receded from sight, he's fallen asleep.
They land at a small airstrip, Bado figures somewhere north of Orlando. A thin young Englishman in spectacles is there to greet them. He is wearing Royal Air Force blue coveralls. "You're the alternates?"
"I guess so," Williams snaps. "And you're here to send us home. Right?"
"Sorry for any inconvenience you've been put through," he says smoothly. "If you'll just follow me into the van.. ."
The van turns out to be a battered diesel-engined truck that looks as if it is World War II vintage. Williams and Bado, with their bulky gear, have to crowd in the back with a mess of electronic equipment.
The truck, windowless, bumps along badly finished roads.
Bado studies the equipment. "Look at this stuff," he says to Williams. "More vacuum tubes."
Williams shrugs. "They've got further than we have. Or you. Here, they've built stuff we've only talked about."
"Yeah." Oddly, he's forgotten that he and Williams have come from different worlds.
The roads off the peninsula to Merritt Island are just farmers' tracks, and the last few miles are the most uncomfortable. They arrive at Merritt Island in the late afternoon. There is no Kennedy Space Center.
Bado gets out of the van. He is on a long, flat beach; he figures he is a way south of where, in his world, the lunar ship launch pads will be built. Right here there will be the line of launch complexes called ICBM Row.
But he can't see any structures at all. Marsh land, coated with scrub vegetation, stretches down toward the strip of beach at the coast. Farther inland, toward the higher ground, he can see stands of cabbage palm, slash pine, and oak.
The place is just scrub land, undeveloped. The tracks of the British truck are dug crisply into the sand; there is no sign even of a road near here.
And out to the east, over the Atlantic, he can see a big full Moon rising. Its upper left quadrant, the fresh Imbrium scar, still glows a dull crimson. Bado feels vaguely reassured. That is still Moon Five; things seem to have achieved a certain stability.
In the back of the truck, the British technician powers up his equipment. "Ready when you are," he calls. "Oh, we think it's best if you go back in your own clothes. Where possible." He grins behind his spectacles. "Don't want you "Muddying up the time lines," Williams says. "We know."
Bado and Williams shuck off their coveralls and pull on their pressure suits. They help each other with the heavy layers, and finish up facing each other, their helmets under their arms, Bado holding his battered tool carrier with its Baggies full of Moon rocks.
"You know," Bado says, "when I get back I'm going to have one hell of a lot of explaining to do."
"Yeah. Me too." She looks at him. "I guess we're not going to see each other again."
"Doesn't look like it."
Bado puts down his carrier and helmet. He embraces Williams, clumsily.
Then, on impulse, Bado lifts up his helmet and fits it over his head. He pulls his gloves over his hands and snaps them onto his wrists, completing his suit.
Williams does the same. Bado picks up his tool carrier.
The Brit waves, reaches into his van, and throws a switch.
There is a shimmer of heat haze.
Williams has gone. The truck has vanished.
Bado looks around quickly.
There are no ICBM launch complexes. He is still standing on an empty, desolate beach.
The Moon is brightening, as the light leaks out of the sky. There is no ancient Imbrium basin up there. No recent impact scar, either.
"Moon Six," Bado says to himself. "Oh, shit."
Evidently those British haven't ironed out all the wrinkles in their "experimental procedures" after all.
He takes off his helmet, breathes in the ozone-laden ocean air, and begins to walk inland, toward the rows of scrub pine.
On the day, he drove out to Merritt Island.
It was morning, and the sun was low and bright over the ocean, off to the east, and the sky was clear and blue, blameless.
He pulled his old Moon suit out of the car, and hauled it on: first the cooling garment, then the pressure layer, and
finally the white micrometeorite protector and his blue lunar overshoes. It didn't fit so well any more, especially around the waist-well, it had been fitted for him all of a quarter-century ago-and it felt as heavy as hell, even without the backpack. And it had a lot of parts missing, where he'd dug out components and samples over the years. But it was still stained gray below the knees with lunar dust, and it still had the NASA logo, his mission patch, and his own name stitched to the outer garment.
He walked down to the beach. The tide was receding, and the hard-packed sand was damp; his ridged soles left crisp, sharp prints, just like in the lunar crust.
He locked his helmet into place at his neck.
To stand here, as close as he could get to ground zero, wasn't such a dumb thing to do, actually. He'd always remembered what that old professor at Cornell had told him, about the rocks bearing life being blasted from planet to planet by meteorite impacts. Maybe that would happen here, somehow.
Today might be the last day for this Earth. But maybe, somehow, some piece of him, fused to the glass of his visor maybe, would finish up on the Moon-Moon Six-or Mars, or in the clouds of Jupiter, and start the whole thing over again.
He felt a sudden, sharp stab of nostalgia, for his own lost world. He'd had a good life here, all things considered. But this was a damn dull place. And he'd been here for twenty-five years already. He was sure that back home that old Vietnam War wouldn't have dragged on until now, like it had here, and funds would have got freed up for space, at last. Enough to do it properly, by God. By now, he was sure, NASA would have bases on the Moon, hundreds of people in Earth orbit, a couple of outposts on Mars, plans to go on to the asteroids or Jupiter.
Hell, he wished he could just look through the nonlinear curtains separating him from home. just once.
He tipped up his face. The sun was bright in his eyes, so he pulled down his gold visor. It was still scuffed, from the dust kicked up by that British nuclear rocket. He waited.
After a time, a new light, brighter even than rocket light, came crawling down across the sky, and touched the ocean.
We Will Drink a Fish Together. . .
Bill Johnson
In the suspenseful but rather quirky story that follows, an alien ambassador travels down from the stars to go to someplace really alien: Summit, South Dakota. Where he receives an entertaining, eccentric, and pleasantly offbeat lesson about the value of interpersonal ties that may well broaden your own definition of "family"...
Bill Johnson is a forty-year-old engineering manager, who works on advanced multimedia hardware and software development for Motorola. A graduate of Clarion, he has sold stories to Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, and elsewhere. Originally from South Dakota, he and his wife and two children now live in Illinois. Whether he drinks fish or not, he doesn't say.
"I'm sorry to call you at work, Tony," my brother said, "but Sam died about an hour ago."
Sweet Jesus, I thought. I could never get time to go see him, and now there's no time left. What have I done?
"Was it easy on him? Did he go quick?" I asked. Steve shook his head.
"It wasn't good, Tony. They think he fainted or something and fell while he was getting a shirt out of his closet. Probably hit his head against the door frame on his way down. His roommate was out walking with the nurses and nobody noticed Sam was missing. They found him later. He was unconscious and bleeding."
"Damn," I said softly. "Did they take him to the hospital?"
Steve shook his head again. "Doctor was there already at the home for someone else, so they put Sam back in his bed and sewed up his head. Then he started to complain about pain in his gut." He looked down and away from the camera. I heard a high-pitched voice and laughter and the sound of little running feet. Elizabeth, fresh from her second birthday party, crawled up in Steve's lap.
"Hi, hi, hi," she said in a sing-song voice. She reached up and kissed her daddy, her face and fingers still sticky and speckled with pink icing. "Elizabeth!"
Elizabeth's mother, Rose, appeared briefly on-screen behind her. She grabbed Elizabeth around the middle and swung her up to rest on one hip, then glanced at me and smiled. She handed Steve a brightly colored paper napkin with "Happy Birthday" printed on it in fluorescent pink and blue with the other hand.
"Elizabeth, Daddy's trying to talk with Uncle Tony," she said. She was a short woman, medium build, with strong arms and blonde hair cut in a shag. She turned quickly to face me. "Hello, Tony. I'm sorry to hear about Sam." She turned back to Elizabeth. "Let's go back to the party, honey. It's time to open presents."
"Open presents!" Elizabeth said with enthusiasm. She wiggled off her mother's hip and headed for the kitchen, her mother dragging behind her.
Steve brushed crumbs off his clothes and icing off his face and looked up at me. We both smiled. "She gets worse after this," I warned. "Two year olds are very busy people."
"Like she isn't already," Steve said ruefully. "So, what happened?" I asked. "Was it his abdominal aorta again?"
"Probably, but there's no way to tell without an autopsy, and I don't think we need one of those," Steve said. He took a deep breath and looked away from me. He did not look happy. "Tony, he didn't want to go through the hospital routine again. After his last attack he put himself on a DNR."
DNR. Do Not Resuscitate. A big red flag written in dry medical language. In ordinary English it meant the patient was ready to die, and wanted to go quickly and easily, without massive intervention. I tried to imagine Sam hooked up to monitors and tubes and needles, a thin, frail figure lost among the machines. Sam never lived like that, and it hurt to even imagine him dying that way. DNR was one hell of a better way to go. Especially for Sam.
"Dissected aorta hurts a little bit," I said with careful understatement. Like a red-hot charcoal burning in your stomach, Sam told me after his last stay in the hospital. Like a cramp that never ends, and just gets tighter and tighter until it's a digging rat bite that never goes away.
"They gave him morphine like water," Steve said. "As much as he wanted."
"Did it work?"
"They said it did," Steve said. He sounded doubtful. He was a respiratory therapist at the University of Nebraska Hospitals. He knew all about DNR's and aortas and how hard it was to die. "There's always a first time for something to work."
"When's the funeral?" I asked.
"Bob and I are going up to Dakota tomorrow. We've got to deal with the bankers and the lawyers," Steve said with distaste. "Funeral will be on Saturday."
I thought quickly about work and schedules and how fast I could re-arrange my life. Luckily, or unfortunately, I didn't have much of a life to re-arrange. Just this once that was an advantage.
"How about you fly in to Omaba on Thursday and drive up with Rose on Friday morning?" Steve said. "Rose's sister will come to take care of Elizabeth but she can't get free until Thursday night. That will also give us two cars up there."
"However you want to do it, little brother. You're in charge on this one," I said.
"Thanks. I feel so lucky."
"I'm sorry, Steve. It doesn't seem fair ... .. "But I'm a lot closer and I'm executor of the estate," Steve finished for me. He hesitated. "Are you sure you can get away? I watch the news. I've seen you in the background around the alien."
I thought about my orders to keep everything confidential, and mentally said screw it. Steve wasn't in the media and he knew how to keep his mouth shut. "Yeah, I'm on security detail for the ambassador."
"Can you get away? I mean, we can handle this if you can't. Everybody will understand."
I stiffened. Something must have shown on my face because Steve winced slightly.
"This is family business, Steve. I know what I've got to do. I'll be there. You don't have to worry about me."
"We'll see you at the house on Friday, then," Steve said. "Visitation starts at three in Milbank."
I killed the call and leaned back in my chair. The holster around my shoulders tugged at me a
nd I absently took it If and laid it on the desk. I rubbed my shoulders and looked out the window. Spring was well advanced in the District, and the trees were heavy with buds and a few leaves. The cherry trees were in full bloom.
I checked the weather forecast for Dakota. Sleet, mixed with snow. Just about what I expected. It could be a full greenhouse summer everywhere else in the country, and Dakota would get a blizzard.
Enough delay. I took a deep breath and made the call.
"Carole? Tony. I need to take a few personal leave days.. .
"No," she said.
Five minutes after I called her, and got my first "No," I was in her office.
"Not a chance. No way. You're in charge of the security detail for the ambassador. You can take time off later, when the negotiations are all over, but not now. I'm sorry," Carole said.
I stared at the wall behind and above her. Everything in her office, from the standard-issue metal desk to her green, plastic-covered swivel chair to the leadlined anti-surveillance curtains that tightly covered the windows, was standard government issue. The same government that helped get me the hell out of Dakota, that gave me a career, that told me I was important and gave me a job that was important. I took a deep breath. "Then I quit. You'll have my resignation letter in an hour."
"You can't resign!"
"I just did."
Carole stood behind her desk and glared up at me. She was trim and athletic, but she couldn't have weighed more than 130 pounds. She was medium height for a woman, which meant the top of her head came to just below my sternum.
In other words, I could have picked her up, tucked her under my arm and carried her around without any trouble. She scared the hell out of me. "You'll give up everything to go to a damn funeral?"
"Carole, he raised my Dad. He was the closest thing to a grandfather I had," I pleaded.
"I understand," she said softly. "I really do. I wish you could go. I want you to go. But not now. Not after last Monday."
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection Page 28
