Asimov's SF, Sep 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Finally, he called me, and I unhitched myself and scooted over to his seat. I held onto a strap with one hand and with my free hand helped him to try to turn the wheel.

  "I could see Mr. Seaton begin to sweat. After a while he told me to go back to my seat. It seemed like forever, but in a few minutes the wheel finally began to turn. But I didn't feel no difference in the rocket. And then I noticed my straps were starting to coil around me like a snake!

  "The alcohol and liquid air was all burned up, so the roaring sound had let up. But then we both heard a hissing sound. I thought maybe it was something outside, so I looked through the mica window again.

  "I couldn't believe my eyes. It looked like I was looking down at a big billiard ball, but it was blue and fuzzy. It also had brown and white scum all over it.

  "The hissing sound got louder. I looked down and saw I was floating two inches above my seat, like a Hindu fakir!

  "I looked over to Mr. Seaton, who had his head in his hands.

  "'Doomed,’ was all he said.

  "Then I realized what had gone wrong. Because he couldn't steer, we didn't make a big looping curve like he showed me on a piece of paper once. We were supposed to make a big lazy curve up from Texas and come down in Philadelphia—like a rainbow.

  "But instead we shot straight the hell up! That billiard ball down there was the earth, the blue was the ocean and the brown and white scum was the ground and clouds.

  "I knew that our doors were tight and the rivets solid, but the air outside must have been thinner than the air on top of the highest Rocky Mountain, and so our air was hissing out the seams. I guess it was because our air began to get thin that we started to float around.

  "I knew it was curtains for us, so I cleared my throat and told Mr. Seaton I was honored to have been his employee.

  "’ Thank you, James,” was all he said.

  "I began to get real light-headed and it was hard to breathe, when I saw a bright light in the window. I thought for a second we were heading into the sun, but then the light passed us. A minute later, the rocket jolted like a giant baby had just grabbed a play pretty. Then the levers on the door began to pop. I got a buzzing in my head and just as I passed out I saw the door open."

  * * * *

  "Well, as you can imagine, I thought it was the angels come for me, but when I woke up I wiggled my toes and fingers and saw I still was alive, and in the softest feather bed I ever had seen.

  "The room was plain, clean and white. I propped myself up on my elbow. Then Mr. Seaton walked in a door I hadn't noticed along with this strange fellow.

  "He was tall and looked like he could be a Chinaman, but his slanted eyes were too large and he was as pale as a ghost. Mr. Seaton was smiling now and he gave me his hand so I could get off the bed. He explained that the other fellow and his posse lived on another world, like ours but far away, and they used rockets not only to go between cities but worlds.

  "'You mean like Mars?’ I asked.

  "'Yes, like Mars,” he said, ‘but much farther away.'

  "He said these fellows had like a lighthouse, I guess, out there between worlds, and the lighthouse keeper had seen us come adrift and sent out a lifeboat rocket ship.

  "When I understood this, I turned and bowed with my hands together like I had seen a Chinee do once. The tall fellow bowed, too, and I thought he kinda smiled.

  "Mr. Seaton said although his plan for a rocket railroad had come a cropper, he was happier now because of meeting his new friends, and during the days we were in their rocket, he spent almost the whole time talking to them.

  "They were civil to me, too. I talked to them, and when they talked back at me, for some reason their voice always seemed to come from a pillbox on their arm. I don't know why they had to throw their voices.

  "I think they knew I didn't have any book learning. Anytime we talked about anything very complicated, I would lose the rabbit I was chasing. Mr. Seaton tried to explain things to me simple-like so I could understand better.

  "Sometimes we could look out a window—a real big one, bigger than a window in a New Orleans whorehouse—and see the world turning below us like a gristmill. When the clouds were sparse, Mr. Seaton would point out whole countries.

  "'See that boot? That's Italy.'

  "The pale fellows told me I could go wherever I wanted in their rocket—which was pretty damn big, I tell you.

  "One day I went by a door and saw a glow like from a fireplace, ‘cept it was blue instead of red. I thought that was peculiar and I went inside. The blue fire glow was coming out from some filigree on the walls.

  "Wasn't but a minute later a passel of the pale fellows came running in the door and they grabbed me like they was hogs and I was a pumpkin. Mr. Seaton came running in, too.

  "The pale fellows tossed me right quick into a bed and stuck needles into me like I was an old woman's pincushion. In a corner some of them talked to Mr. Seaton, who looked more worried. After all the hoo-rah died down, Mr. Seaton told me what the problem was.

  "These fellows had a special coal that burned blue instead of red. Problem was, the blue fire was just as ‘hot’ as regular fire—but you couldn't feel it! It was just like I had stepped into a furnace, when I went in that room with the blue glow.

  "He said that although I didn't feel anything then, in a few minutes I would have shriveled up like bacon and died.

  "Later Mr. Seaton told me the pale fellows realized, after I had the accident with the blue furnace, that maybe it was better I go back home.

  "Truth be told, I was getting homesick myself. Mr. Seaton said he wanted to stay with his new friends. He told me they could set me down right back where we started and soon, Mr. Seaton and I and a few of the pale fellows got into a kind of round lifeboat rocket and floated like a balloon in the middle of the night down to the farm.

  "Mr. Seaton shook my hand like a brother and told me where the strongbox was with all his papers. He said I could have everything he left behind as my due for being such a good employee.

  "I bounded down the steel gangplank and waved good-bye. They left like a mist in the night. There was a full moon and I found my way to the farmhouse. I lit the whale oil lamp and got ready for bed and slept in real late the next day, almost until nine.

  * * * *

  "I thought we had been with the pale fellows in their rocket for weeks, but the windup clock in Mr. Seaton's room showed we were only gone two days. The barn was still smoldering.

  "I was totally flummoxed when I went through Mr. Seaton's papers. He left me a wealthy man. He had thousands of dollars in banks in New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. Over the next few years I used the money to hire some help and got the place fixed up better than ever.

  "In ‘45 news came the U.S. had annexed the Republic, which is what most people wanted all along. A widder woman who lost her husband in an Indian raid caught my eye and I took her as my wife. We had neighbors now, and when some of the people saw the books and tools that Mr. Seaton had left me, they suggested that they be used for an academy.

  "We set up an academy in the first floor of the new Masonic lodge and hired a schoolmaster. With the academy and all, folks began to calling the settlement Science Hill. I reckon Mr. Seaton would've liked that.

  "Of course, I never told no one about the rocket and the pale fellows. I never got into details. People heard stories about the barn and assumed Mr. Seaton done blowed himself up. I never told otherwise.

  "My wife and I never had no children, which was probably just as well. When the war started, I was fifty-seven, but I was strong and healthy and I enlisted. I guess I always felt guilty somehow about missing Jim Bowie when he visited the ferry crossing.

  "During the Battle of Chickamauga I took a minie ball clean through the chest. They laid me out to die. But three days later I got off my pallet and started the long walk home.

  "Everyone said it was a miracle, but I knew when I was lying there I felt my ribs and muscles knitting up. I figured the do
ctoring the pale fellows done to me when I had that accident in their rocket must have stuck with me for good somehow.

  "I came back to Science Hill, but a lot of other men didn't—so many that the settlement began to die. It happened in many other places. By ‘72 the academy had closed and the Masonic Lodge had its charter taken back.

  "My wife died in ‘85. By then the railroad made it to Henderson County, but it ran through Athens and Eustace and skipped clear of Science Hill. That was the end of it.

  "I knew by then, after having a few accidents with a knife or chisel over the years, that I healed up quick. I also saw that I was holding up well.

  "Over time, everyone died or moved on, and I was left alone in Science Hill. No one noticed I was just out here by myself. I kept up the farm fine, there was enough for me to do.

  "One time, when I was almost a hundred, I was at the feed store in Malakoff getting grain for the chickens. One old boy said, ‘You can't be James Reid, you're too young.'

  "Another old boy said, ‘Don't be ignorant, you're his son, right?'

  "I agreed. Nobody knew any better.

  "So over the years, I've used a hair dye and chin whiskers to fool people. But in nineteen hundred and forty-two, when I was in Athens, I was buttonholed by an old boy about registering for the draft. Rather than arguing, I filled out the form, straight, birthplace and all, but I put down 1903 instead of 1803.

  "I reckon those records went to the historical society after the war, which is why they have me down as a hundred now. I guess it got back to you, Mr. Editor.

  "When I buried my second wife—I never told her what happened with the rocket and all—I said to myself, if I live to be one hundred, I'll never tell anyone what happened.

  "Well, here I am at two hundred, so I guess it was about time to come clean, huh?

  "You know, I heared the last time I was in town the folks down in Houston are ready to shoot off more rockets like they did forty years ago. I wonder if they'll run into Mr. Seaton and them pale fellows. I'd sure like to hitch a ride, and meet Mr. Seaton again, and shake his hand. Maybe I'll ask ‘em to shoot me up there. Ain't nothing I ain't done before.

  "Shut your mouth, son, you'll swallow something."

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  Copyright © 2005 by Lou Antonelli.

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  Verse

  What I Learned Playing Marathon Solitaire on My PC

  what I learned playing marathon solitaire on my PC

  when I should have been trying to write this poem,

  and wearing only my underwear and a flannel shirt:

  not a damn thing, and my eyes hurt.

  —W. Gregory Stewart

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  Epithalamion

  You pull me out of the darkness, Sun of Morning,

  and I warm to your regard. It is a long journey

  out of cold which bunches me into a fist.

  You are only the brightest star of many for a long time,

  then you are the star of my centering.

  I grow hair; my volatiles warm; you draw me

  and I yearn toward you like an eager virgin,

  flying, flying.

  A glint on one of your retinue gives me his name:

  Hyakutake.

  I do not know this. I do not regard

  small devices of carbon.

  My hair grows; I am your queen,

  my love for you is measured in miles per second.

  It's been a long time, love.

  Shall we dance? Shall it be a wedding dance?

  I race down the aisle past your attendants,

  flaunting my beauty. My veil is diaphanous, flowing,

  glowing, nuptial raiment fit for a cosmic wife.

  Now I am hot! Now I am alight!

  I fling myself around you,

  driven, pulled on gravity's ribbon

  heart-racing close to the furnace of your huge love.

  Then away.

  Must I leave? My momentum says:

  Go, girl, back to the cloud, back to the old neighborhood,

  lurk shyly for ten thousand years, until another time.

  The master will call you again.

  No other star will draw you, ignite you, pull you away.

  Love will not be denied;

  I am Sun's bride.

  —Mary A. Turzillo

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  The Fallen Angels’ Song

  Dead angels, sleeping on our sides, the blackened stumps twitch idly in our sleep until we dream

  then oars to well-oiled oarlocks gently fit,

  our wings return

  in long-poled pulls they beat,

  we lift and rise in widening spirals

  up the skies

  of near forgotten bliss,

  until we wake

  to the burned knobs’

  ache.

  —William John Watkins

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  On the Net: SETI and Such

  no ufos

  Pardon me, but I feel a rant coming on.

  So I'm at a party and in the normal course of chitchat about the weather and the Red Sox and the sorry state of politics, it comes up that I'm a writer. Several utterly predictable questions will follow. “What do you write?” Answer: Science fiction and fantasy. “Have you been published?” Answer: Yes. “Have I read your work?” Answer: Probably not. “Do you make a living at it?” Answer: Sort of. Then comes a significant pause. The next question might well be, “How weird are you?” except that most people are far too polite to ask outright. Instead what they will often ask is, “So, do you believe in UFOs?"

  Answer: NO, I DO NOT BELIEVE IN UFOS. I HAVE NEVER SEEN A UFO AND NEITHER HAVE YOU. IF YOU DID SEE SOMETHING THAT YOU THOUGHT WAS A UFO, YOU WERE EITHER MISTAKEN, DELUSIONAL, OR HIGHER THAN THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION.

  There. I feel much better now, thank you.

  Except that according to a Roper Poll www.scifi.com/ufo/roper taken in 2002, almost half of America believes that we earthlings have been visited by UFOs. And in 1997 a CNN/Time Poll www.cnn.com/US/9706/15/ufo.poll found that “80 percent of Americans think the government is hiding knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life forms."

  So yes, I fully expect to get hate mail.

  This isn't to say that I don't believe that there's life on other planets, because I do. And it may well be that there is intelligent life in the universe—in fact, I would be really, really disappointed if someone somehow proved that there wasn't. Luckily for me, such a proof, if it ever comes, isn't likely to occur in my lifetime. But as we saw when we considered Faster-than-light travel www.jimkelly.net/pages/ftl.htm several installments ago, zipping from star to star is a very tall order indeed. It boggles my mind to think that any thinking entity would go to all that trouble just to lurk—and lurk ineptly, as the UFO apologists would have it. But if you do see a silver pie plate hurtling through the sky, feel free to notify The National UFO Reporting Center www.nuforc.org. Just don't tell them that Jim sent you.

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  the equation

  In 1961 Dr. Frank Drake www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=178943& proposed his famous equation N = R* fp ne fl fi fc L www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=179073 as a tool to estimate the number (N) of advanced alien civilizations in the Milky Way. For those who are still a bit fuzzy on the Drake variables, here's a quick recap: (R*) is the rate of formation of stars capable of supporting intelligent life times the fraction (fp) of those stars that have planets times the number (ne) of planets per star capable of supporting life times the fraction (fl) of those planets where life evolves times the fraction (fi) of those livable planets where intelligence evolves times the fraction (fc) of intelligent species that bother to communicate times the longevity (L) of those chatty civilizations. For an accessible overview of the thinking behind the equation, try The Chance of Finding Aliens skyan
dtelescope.com/resources/seti/article2441.asp by Alan M. MacRobert and Govert Schilling.

  Now typing “Drake Equation” into Google www.google.com yields almost half a million hits, which is certainly one measure of fame in this age of the internet. Many of these sites allow you to play with Drake's variables to come up with your own estimate of the number of communicating civilizations in our galactic neighborhood. For example, try this one at the Extrasolar Planetary Foundation www.planetarysystems.org/drakeequation.html. However, the problem with the Drake Equation is that we have no clue as to what numbers we should plug in for some of the key variables, since we have but one example of intelligent life—ourselves. For example, how often does intelligence arise? And what is the lifespan of the average communicating civilization? Given our woeful lack of understanding of these matters, what the Drake Equation actually calculates is one's optimism—or pessimism—about the chances of finding intelligence elsewhere in the universe.

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  searching

  About the same time that Frank Drake was developing his equation, Phillip Morrison web.mit.edu/physics/facultyandstaff/faculty/philipmorrison.html and Giuseppe Cocconi www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/C/Cocconi.html were writing their seminal paper "Searching for Interstellar Communications" www.coseti.org/morris0.htm published in Nature www.nature.com/index.html in 1959. Morrison and Cocconi proposed to search for signals from alien civilizations in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, specifically around 1420 MHz, the spectral frequency of hydrogen. Most regard this paper as the true beginning of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Morrison and Cocconi knew their ideas would be controversial; at the conclusion of their paper they wrote: “The reader may seek to consign these speculations wholly to the domain of science-fiction. We submit, rather, that the foregoing line of argument demonstrates that the presence of interstellar signals is entirely consistent with all we now know, and that if signals are present the means of detecting them is now at hand. Few will deny the profound importance, practical and philosophical, which the detection of interstellar communications would have."