Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Edison's sermons, about how he would reform government by bringing in scientific management, went almost unheard.

  Yet when Sam Clemens came (walking right past the receptionist who but a month ago had told him that Edison would never be available to see him), Edison was remarkably cheerful. "Mr. Mark Twain!" he said in a loud voice. "I am a great admirer of yours!"

  "Thank you," Clemens said.

  Edison turned his head. "Could you talk a little more distinctly? I have to admit, I have a slight difficulty in hearing."

  Clemens cleared his throat and said more loudly, "I said, thank you."

  "Ah, that's what I expected you'd say. Say, the way I heard things, you and Miss Bernhardt were the ones worked out inventing this tele-videon thing. Any truth to that rumor?"

  "Maybe a tiny bit of truth, Mr. Edison," Clemens said. "Not so much."

  "Truth, you say? Ah—that's a wonderful bit of inventing. Took me almost a week to match it. If you ever need a job, come up to my factory, I'll have Charles fix you up with a job. Tell him I sent you."

  "I'm not in the inventing business these days," Clemens said. "I confess Nikola did the electrical part."

  "Eh? Nikola? Ah, my erstwhile employee. Well, he's a tinkerer, reckon I have to give him that, but not much of a practical man." Edison's manner changed abruptly to business. "So, Mr. Twain, what is your purpose in coming to visit? I'm a busy man, I must say."

  "Well, Mr. Edison, I'm here on business," Sam said. "Got something to sell, what turns out to be just exactly what I figure you need."

  "And what, exactly, is this I need?"

  "You have an invention, I see, but you don't rightly know just what to do with it, I reckon," he said. "The tele-what-is-it, that is."

  "The fluorovision."

  "That's the whatsit. You can send moving pictures out over the wires to everybody from Petunia Flats to East Hell, but you can't find anything to get them to watch."

  Edison waved his hands. "My corporation is making films right now. Let Bryan use his tele-videon for superstition. The Edison fluorovision will bring education to the masses."

  "And will this win the campaign for you, Mr. Edison?"

  "No," Edison said emphatically. "No, that it will not."

  "You need an entertainer. A performer. A showman."

  Edison seemed about to object, but then paused a moment and said, "Perhaps I do. And you propose?"

  "The best." Samuel Clemens smiled and bowed. "Myself, of course."

  "And?"

  "I will thrill the masses and bring laughter and music and culture to the people. And make them watch and listen … and, in so doing, put them in a mood to hear your message."

  "And you call this?"

  Samuel Clemens smiled. "I will call it The Mark Twain Variety Hour."

  · · · · ·

  "And that's the story, every word of it unvarnished truth," Mark Twain said. "Or anyway, that's the way I heard it told, and now I'm telling you."

  The live audience howled its laughter, and Clemens bowed and smiled. He dropped out of his Mark Twain voice and turned to the camera.

  "This wraps up today's Variety Hour," he said in his finest lecturing voice. "Turn to us next week, same time, same place, when we will bring you the celebrated vaudevillians Fields and Weber. Let me assure you, they're the funniest things on four legs. And we'll have the famous soliloquy from Shakespeare's masterpiece "Hamlet," acted out by the magnificent Mam'selle Bernhardt of Paris. We'll have the musical genius John Philip Sousa, and, last and, well, least," he paused for the laugh, "yours truly just perhaps might be convinced to read you a new story from Calaveras county.

  "This will be a show you won't want to miss, gentlemen and ladies. Until then, try Cleveland Soap, it keeps you clean. And finally, tell all your friends: A vote for Edison is a vote for America."

  The camera came in for its final close-up, and he gave it his famous wink and a smile and then signaled with his hands for the cut. Immediately his crew rushed in with a glass of whisky and a cigar, and he dropped into his easy chair.

  "How'd I do?"

  "You were great, Mr. Twain!" the camera boy said. "The best ever!"

  It was an unnecessary question. He knew the show had done well today. He had put in two of Edison's messages and had managed to mention Cleveland Soap five times and Lydia Pinkham's Elixir for Ladies six times. Each mention was a hundred dollars in his pocket.

  He was flush, he was in his stride, and he loved every minute of it. With the new televideon broadcasting, Samuel Clemens had found his element and was on top of the world. Did Mr. Bryan think he could hold them with his tele-evangelism? He would give Mr. Bryan a lesson on how to grab an audience, that he would, that he would indeed.

  · · · · ·

  Horovitz leaned forward and shut off the televideon. (It was an Edison fluorovision, of course, not the crude Tesla tele-videon, but the word televideon had somehow stuck.)

  Mr. Westinghouse promised that within the year, he would have his improved televideons in the home of every man with ten dollars in his pocket—and now that Westinghouse was making a profit on them, he made sure that the programs sent out over the telegraph wires were compatible with both.

  For all his hard work, the election was going to be too close to call, Horovitz knew, but already he was thinking far beyond that. Forget the election-- it didn't even matter any more, he reckoned. It was going to be the man on the televideon, not the president, who would be the real leader of this coming generation.

  It was time to leave politics. He was tired of it anyway. Twain's variety show proved that people would watch, and Horovitz thought that this was just the beginning. Over the years, he had learned how to tell people what they wanted. If they would watch Mr. Twain tell jokes, would not people watch, say, a game of baseball on the televideon? Or perhaps football? Wrestling? Which one would play better on the screen? Could he dramatize some of the penny-dreadful novels, perhaps some western gunfighter stories? The eyes of America were eagerly waiting.

  Ah, the twentieth century! So many possibilities! He leaned back and lit his cigar. Barely three years old, and already it was turning out to be a doozy. He could hardly wait to find out what would come next.

  A Walk In The Sun, by Geoffrey A. Landis

  Hugo for Best Short Story 1992

  Hard science fiction proceeds from a fidelity to both the facts and attitudes of science, into the murkier landscape of the human soul. In this crisply constructed story, Landis hedges his hero in with inescapable constraints, then demands that solution come from facing the hard facts of the airless moon. His way out demands an extreme of endurance and cleverness, but all along the game is played fairly—no miracles pop out of hats.

  Geoff Landis is uniquely qualified to play this exacting game, for he is a trained physicist working for NASA. His career is built on solidly made short stories, making him a member of a small band, perhaps no more than thirty, who make up the hard sf community.

  I have sat in convention bars and tossed ideas back and forth with Geoff for hours, and always found his instincts for technical matters on the mark. You will find this tale of adroitly conceived constraint up to his highest standard, and richly deserving its award. A tale of survival in desperate, strange circumstances, it stands in a long sf tradition, and quite matches the classics.

  The pilots have a saying: a good landing is any landing you can walk away from.

  Perhaps Sanjiv might have done better, if he'd been alive. Trish had done the best she could. All things considered, it was a far better landing than she had any right to expect.

  Titanium struts, pencil-slender, had never been designed to take the force of a landing. Paper-thin pressure walls had buckled and shattered, spreading wreckage out into the vacuum and across a square kilometer of lunar surface. An instant before impact she remembered to blow the tanks. There was no explosion, but no landing could have been gentle enough to keep Moonshadow together. In eerie silence, the fragile shi
p had crumpled and ripped apart like a discarded aluminum can.

  The piloting module had torn open and broken loose from the main part of the ship. The fragment settled against a crater wall. When it stopped moving, Trish unbuckled the straps that held her in the pilot's seat and fell slowly to the ceiling. She oriented herself to the unaccustomed gravity, found an undamaged EVA pack and plugged it into her suit, then crawled out into the sunlight through the jagged hole where the living module had been attached.

  She stood on the grey lunar surface and stared. Her shadow reached out ahead of her, a pool of inky black in the shape of a fantastically stretched man. The landscape was rugged and utterly barren, painted in stark shades of grey and black. "Magnificent desolation," she whispered. Behind her, the sun hovered just over the mountains, glinting off shards of titanium and steel scattered across the cratered plain.

  Patricia Jay Mulligan looked out across the desolate moonscape and tried not to weep.

  First things first. She took the radio out from the shattered crew compartment and tried it. Nothing. That was no surprise; Earth was over the horizon, and there were no other ships in cislunar space.

  After a little searching she found Sanjiv and Theresa. In the low gravity they were absurdly easy to carry. There was no use in burying them. She sat them in a niche between two boulders, facing the sun, facing west, toward where the Earth was hidden behind a range of black mountains. She tried to think of the right words to say, and failed. Perhaps as well; she wouldn't know the proper service for Sanjiv anyway. "Goodbye, Sanjiv. Goodbye, Theresa. I wish—I wish things would have been different. I'm sorry." Her voice was barely more than a whisper. "Go with God."

  She tried not to think of how soon she was likely to be joining them.

  She forced herself to think. What would her sister have done? Survive. Karen would survive. First: inventory your assets. She was alive, miraculously unhurt. Her vacuum suit was in serviceable condition. Life-support was powered by the suit's solar arrays; she had air and water for as long as the sun continued to shine. Scavenging the wreckage yielded plenty of unbroken food packs; she wasn't about to starve.

  Second: call for help. In this case, the nearest help was a quarter of a million miles over the horizon. She would need a high-gain antenna and a mountain peak with a view of Earth.

  In its computer, Moonshadow had carried the best maps of the moon ever made. Gone. There had been other maps on the ship; they were scattered with the wreckage. She'd managed to find a detailed map of Mare Nubium—useless—and a small global map meant to be used as an index. It would have to do. As near as she could tell, the impact site was just over the eastern edge of Mare Smythii—"Smith's Sea." The mountains in the distance should mark the edge of the sea, and, with luck, have a view of Earth.

  She checked her suit. At a command, the solar arrays spread out to their full extent like oversized dragonfly wings and glinted in prismatic colors as they rotated to face the sun. She verified that the suit's systems were charging properly, and set off.

  Close up, the mountain was less steep than it had looked from the crash site. In the low gravity, climbing was hardly more difficult than walking, although the two-meter dish made her balance awkward. Reaching the ridgetop, Trish was rewarded with the sight of a tiny sliver of blue on the horizon. The mountains on the far side of the valley were still in darkness. She hoisted the radio higher up on her shoulder and started across the next valley.

  From the next mountain peak the Earth edged over the horizon, a blue and white marble half-hidden by black mountains. She unfolded the tripod for the antenna and carefully sighted along the feed. "Hello? This is Astronaut Mulligan from Moonshadow. Emergency. Repeat, this is an emergency. Does anybody hear me?"

  She took her thumb off the transmit button and waited for a response, but heard nothing but the soft whisper of static from the sun.

  "This is Astronaut Mulligan from Moonshadow. Does anybody hear me?" She paused again. "Moonshadow, calling anybody. Moonshadow, calling anybody. This is an emergency."

  "—shadow, this is Geneva control. We read you faint but clear. Hang on, up there." She released her breath in a sudden gasp. She hadn't even realized she'd been holding it.

  After five minutes the rotation of the Earth had taken the ground antenna out of range. In that time after they had gotten over their surprise that there was a survivor of the Moonshadow—she learned the parameters of the problem. Her landing had been close to the sunset terminator: the very edge of the illuminated side of the moon. The moon's rotation is slow, but inexorable. Sunset would arrive in three days. There was no shelter on the moon, no place to wait out the fourteen-day-long lunar night. Her solar cells needed sunlight to keep her air fresh. Her search of the wreckage had yielded no unruptured storage tanks, no batteries, no means to lay up a store of oxygen.

  And there was no way they could launch a rescue mission before nightfall.

  Too many "no"s.

  She sat silent, gazing across the jagged plain toward the slender blue crescent, thinking.

  After a few minutes the antenna at Goldstone rotated into range, and the radio crackled to life. "Moonshadow, do you read me? Hello, Moonshadow, do you read me?"

  "Moonshadow here."

  She released the transmit button and waited in long silence for her words to be carried to Earth.

  "Roger, Moonshadow. We confirm the earliest window for a rescue mission is thirty days from now. Can you hold on that long?"

  She made her decision and pressed the transmit button. "Astronaut Mulligan for Moonshadow. I'll be here waiting for you. One way or another."

  She waited, but there was no answer. The receiving antenna at Goldstone couldn't have rotated out of range so quickly. She checked the radio. When she took the cover off, she could see that the printed circuit board on the power supply had been slightly cracked from the crash, but she couldn't see any broken leads or components clearly out of place. She banged on it with her fist—Karen's first rule of electronics: if it doesn't work, hit it—and re-aimed the antenna, but it didn't help. Clearly something in it had broken.

  What would Karen have done? Not just sit here and die, that was certain. Get a move on, kiddo. When sunset catches you, you'll die.

  They had heard her reply. She had to believe they heard her reply and would be coming for her. All she had to do was survive.

  The dish antenna would be too awkward to carry with her. She could afford nothing but the bare necessities. At sunset her air would be gone. She put down the radio and began to walk.

  Mission Commander Stanley stared at the X-rays of his engine. It was four in the morning. There would be no more sleep for him that night; he was scheduled to fly to Washington at six to testify to Congress.

  "Your decision, Commander," the engine technician said. "We can't find any flaws in the X-rays we took of the flight engines, but it could be hidden. The nominal flight profile doesn't take the engines to a hundred twenty, so the blades should hold even if there is a flaw."

  "How long a delay if we yank the engines for inspection?"

  "Assuming they're okay, we lose a day. If not, two, maybe three."

  Commander Stanley drummed his fingers in irritation. He hated to be forced into hasty decisions. "Normal procedure would be?"

  "Normally we'd want to reinspect."

  "Do it."

  He sighed. Another delay. Somewhere up there, somebody was counting on him to get there on time. If she was still alive. If the cut-off radio signal didn't signify catastrophic failure of other systems.

  If she could find a way to survive without air.

  On Earth it would have been a marathon pace. On the moon it was an easy lope. After ten miles the trek fell into an easy rhythm: half a walk, half like jogging, and half bounding like a slow-motion kangaroo. Her worst enemy was boredom.

  Her comrades at the academy—in part envious of the top scores that had made her the first of their class picked for a mission—had ribbed her mercilessly a
bout flying a mission that would come within a few kilometers of the moon without landing. Now she had a chance to see more of the moon up close than anybody in history. She wondered what her classmates were thinking now. She would have a tale to tell—if only she could survive to tell it.

  The warble of the low voltage warning broke her out of her reverie. She checked her running display as she started down the maintenance checklist. Elapsed EVA time, eight point three hours. System functions, nominal, except that the solar array current was way below norm. In a few moments she found the trouble: a thin layer of dust on her solar array. Not a serious problem; it could be brushed off. If she couldn't find a pace that would avoid kicking dust on the arrays, then she would have to break every few hours to housekeep. She rechecked the array and continued on.

  With the sun unmoving ahead of her and nothing but the hypnotically blue crescent of the slowly rotating Earth creeping imperceptibly off the horizon, her attention wandered. Moonshadow had been tagged as an easy mission, a low-orbit mapping flight to scout sites for the future moonbase. Moonshadow had never been intended to land, not on the moon, not anywhere.

  She'd landed it anyway; she'd had to.

  Walking west across the barren plain, Trish had nightmares of blood and falling, Sanjiv dying beside her; Theresa already dead in the lab module; the moon looming huge, spinning at a crazy angle in the viewports. Stop the spin, aim for the terminator at low sun angles, the illumination makes it easier to see the roughness of the surface. Conserve fuel, but remember to blow the tanks an instant before you hit to avoid explosion.