Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

by Jack McDevitt

  And I knew also that the woman in the cockpit was terrified of what she had done. It had been a good performance, but she’d failed to conceal the fear that looked out of her eyes. I watched her face as Amity’s engines ignited, and we began to draw away. Like McGuire, she seemed paralyzed, as though the nature of the calamity which she’d embraced was just becoming clear to her. Then she was gone.

  “What happened to the picture?” snapped Bender.

  “She turned it off,” I said. “I don’t think she wants us to see her just now.”

  He glared at me, and spoke to Mac. “Why the hell,” he demanded, “couldn’t he have brought her back with him?” His fists were knotted.

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “How could I know?” And I wondered, how could I not?

  When the burn ended, the distance between the two ships had opened to only a few kilometers. But it was a gulf beyond crossing.

  Bender called her name relentlessly. (We knew she could hear us.) But we got only the carrier wave.

  Then her voice crackled across the command center. “Good,” she said. “Excellent. Check the recorders: make sure you got everything on tape.” Her image was back. She was in full light again, tying up her hair. Her eyes were hooded, and her lips pursed thoughtfully. “Rob,” she continued, “fade it out during Ed’s response, when he’s calling my name. Probably, you’ll want to reduce the background noise at that point. Cut all the business about who’s responsible. We want a sacrifice, not an oversight.”

  And I realized, at that moment, that she’d acted, not to prolong her life, but to save the Program. “My God, Cathie.” I stared at her, trying to understand. “What have you done?”

  She took a deep breath. “I meant what I said. I have enough food to get by here for eight years or so. More if I stretch it. And plenty of fresh air. Well, relatively fresh. I’m better off than any of us would be if six people were trying to survive on Amity.”

  “Cathie!” howled McGuire. He sounded in physical agony. “We didn’t know for sure about life support. The converters might have kept up. There might have been enough air! It was just an estimate!”

  “This is a hell of a time to tell me,” she said. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. Listen, I’ll be fine. I’ve got books to read, and maybe one to write. My long-range communications are kaput, Rob knows that, so you’ll have to come back for the book, too.” She smiled. “You’ll like it, Mac.” The command center got very still. “And on nights when things really get boring, I can play bridge with the computer.”

  McGuire shook his head. “You’re sure you’ll be all right? You seemed pretty upset a few minutes ago.”

  She looked at me and winked. “The first Cathie was staged, Mac,” I said.

  “I give up,” McGuire sighed, “Why?” He swiveled round to face the image on his screen. “Why would you do that?”

  “That young woman,” she replied, “was committing an act of uncommon valor, as they say in the Marines. And she had to be vulnerable.” And compellingly lovely, I thought. In those last moments, I was realizing what it might mean to love Cathie Perth. “This Cathie,” she grinned, “is doing the only sensible thing. And taking a sabbatical as well. Do what you can to get the ship built. I’ll be waiting. Come if you can.” She paused. “Somebody should suggest they name it after Victor.”

  This is the fifth Christmas since that one on Callisto. It’s a long time by any human measure. We drifted out of radio contact during the first week. There was some talk of broadcasting instructions to her for repairing her long-range transmission equipment. But she’d have to go outside to do it, so the idea was prudently shelved.

  She was right about that tape. In my lifetime, I’ve never seen people so singlemindedly aroused. It created a global surge of sympathy and demands for action that seem to grow in intensity with each passing year. Funded partially by contributions and technical assistance from abroad, NASA has been pushing the construction of the fusion vessel of which Victor Landolfi dreamed.

  Bender was assigned to help with the computer systems, and he’s kept me informed of progress. The most recent public estimates had anticipated a spring launch. But that single word September in Bender’s card suggests that one more obstacle has been encountered; and it means still another year before we can hope to reach her.

  We broadcast to her on a regular basis. I volunteered to help, and I sit sometimes and talk to her for hours. She gets a regular schedule of news, entertainment, sports, whatever. And, if she’s listening, she knows we’re coming.

  She also knows that her wish that the fusion ship be named for Victor Landolfi has been disregarded. The rescue vehicle will be the Catherine Perth.

  If she’s listening. We have no way of knowing. And I worry a lot. Can a human being survive six years of absolute solitude? Bender was here for a few days last summer, and he tells me he is confident. “She’s a tough lady,” he has said, any number of times. “Nothing bothers her. She even gave us a little theater at the end.”

  And that’s what scares me: Cathie’s theatrical technique. I’ve thought about it, on the long ride home, and here. I kept a copy of the complete tape of that final conversation, despite McGuire’s instructions to the contrary, and I’ve watched it a few times. It’s locked downstairs in a file cabinet now, and I don’t look at it anymore. I’m afraid to. There are two Cathie Perths on the recording: the frightened, courageous one who galvanized a global public; and our Cathie, preoccupied with her job, flexible, almost indifferent to her situation. A survivor.

  And, God help me, I can’t tell which one was staged.

  TO HELL WITH THE STARS

  Christmas night.

  Will Cutler couldn’t get the sentient ocean out of his mind. Or the creature who wanted only to serve man. Or the curious chess game in the portrait that hung in a deserted city on a world halfway across the galaxy He drew up his knees, propped the book against them, and let his head sink back into the pillows. The sky was dark through the plexidome. It had been snowing most of the evening, but the clouds were beginning to scatter. Orion’s belt had appeared, and the lovely double star of Earth and Moon floated among the luminous branches of Granpop’s elms. Soft laughter and conversation drifted up the stairs.

  The sounds of the party seemed far away, and the Space Beagle rode a column of flame down into a silent desert. The glow from the reading lamp was bright on the inside of his eyelids. He broke the beam with his hand, and it dimmed and went out.

  The book lay open at his fingertips.

  It was hard to believe they were a thousand years old, these stories that were so full of energy and so unlike anything he’d come across before: tales of dark, alien places and gleaming temples under other stars and expeditions to black holes. They don’t write like that anymore. Never had, during his lifetime. He’d read some other books from the classical Western period, some Dickens, some Updike, people like that. But these: what was there in the last thousand years to compare with this guy Bradbury?

  The night air felt good. It smelled of pine needles and scorched wood and bayberry. And maybe of dinosaurs and rocket fuel.

  His father might have been standing at the door for several minutes. “Goodnight, Champ,” he whispered, lingering.

  “I’m awake, Dad.”

  He approached the bed. “Lights out already? It’s still early.” His weight pressed down the mattress.

  Will was slow to answer. “I know.”

  His father adjusted the sheet, pulling it up over the boy’s shoulders. “It’s supposed to get cold tonight,” he said. “Heavy snow by morning.” He picked up the book and, without looking at it, placed it atop the night table.

  “Dad.” The word stopped the subtle shift of weight that would precede the press of his father’s hand on his shoulder, the final act before withdrawal. “Why didn’t we ever go to the stars?”

  He was older than most of the other kids’ dads. There had been a time when Will was ashamed of that. He couldn’t play b
all and he was a lousy hiker. The only time he’d tried to walk out over the Rise, they’d had to get help to bring him home. But he laughed a lot, and he always listened. Will was reaching an age at which he understood how much that counted for. “It costs a lot of money, Will. It’s just more than we can manage. You’ll be going to Earth in two years to finish school.”

  The boy stiffened. “Dad, I mean the stars. Alpha Centauri, Vega, the Phoenix Nebula—.”

  “The Phoenix Nebula? I don’t think I know that one.”

  “It’s in a story by a man named Clarke. A Jesuit goes there and discovers something terrible—.”

  The father listened while Will outlined the tale in a few brief sentences. “I don’t think,” he said, “your mother would approve of your reading such things.”

  “She gave me the book,” he said, smiling softly.

  “This one?” It was bound in cassilate, a leather substitute, and its title was written in silver script: Great Tales of the Space Age. He picked it up and looked at it with amusement. The names of the editors appeared on the spine: Asimov and Greenberg. “I don’t think we realized, uh, that it was like that. It was one of the things they found in the time vault on the Moon a couple of years ago. Your mother thought it would be educational.”

  “You’d enjoy it, Dad.”

  His father nodded and glanced at the volume. “What’s the Space Age?”

  “It’s the name that people of the classical period used to refer to their own time. It has to do with the early exploration of the solar system, and the first manned flights. And, I think, the idea that we were going to the stars.”

  A set of lights moved slowly through the sky. “Oh,” his father said. “Well, people have had a lot of strange ideas. History is full of dead gods and formulas to make gold and notions that the world was about to end.” He adjusted the lamp, and opened to the contents page. His gray eyes ran down the list, and a faint smile played about his lips. “The truth of it, Will, is that the stars are a pleasant dream, but no one’s ever going out to them.”

  “Why not?” Will was puzzled at the sound of irritation in his own voice. He was happy to see that his father appeared not to have noticed.

  “They’re too far. They’re just too far.” He looked up through the plexidome at the splinters of light. “These people, Greenberg and Asimov: they lived, what, a thousand years ago?”

  “Twentieth, twenty-first century. Somewhere in there.”

  “You know that new ship they’re using in the outer System? The Explorer?”

  “Fusion engines,” said the boy.

  “Yes. Do you know what its top recorded speed is?”

  “About two hundred thousand kilometers an hour.”

  “Much faster than anything this Greenberg ever saw. Anyhow, if they’d launched an Explorer to Alpha Centauri at the time these stories were written, at that speed, do you know how much of the distance they would have covered by now?”

  Will had no idea. He would have thought they’d have arrived long ago, but he could see that wasn’t going to be the answer. His father produced a minicomp, pushed a few buttons, and smiled. “About five percent. The Explorer would need another nineteen thousand years to get there.”

  “Long ride,” said Will, grudgingly.

  “You’d want to take a good book.”

  The boy was silent.

  “It’s not as if we haven’t tried, Will. There’s an artificial world, half-built, out beyond Mars someplace. They were going to send out a complete colony, people, farm animals, lakes, forest, everything.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s, too far. Hell, Will, life is good here. People are happy. There’s plenty of real estate in the solar system if folks want to move. In the end, there weren’t enough volunteers for the world-ship. I mean, what’s the point? The people who go would be depriving their kids of any kind of normal life. How would you feel about living inside a tube for a lifetime? No beaches. Not real ones anyhow. No sunlight. No new places to explore. And for what? The payoff is so far down the road that, in reality there is no payoff.”

  “In the stories,” Will said, “the ships are very fast.”

  “I’m sure. But even if you traveled on a light beam, the stars are very far apart. And a ship can’t achieve an appreciable fraction of that kind of velocity because it isn’t traveling through a vacuum. At, say a tenth of the speed of light, even a few atoms straying in front of it would blow the thing apart.”

  Outside, the Christmas lights were blue on the snow. “They’d have been disappointed,” the boy said, “at how things came out.”

  “Who would have?”

  “Benford. Robinson. Sheffield.”

  The father looked again at the table of contents. “Oh,” he said. He riffled idly through the pages. “Maybe not. It’s hard to tell, of course, with people you don’t know. But we’ve eliminated war, population problems, ecological crises, boundary disputes, racial strife. Everybody eats pretty well now, and for the only time in its history, the human family stands united. I suspect if someone had been able to corner, say—” he flipped some pages, “—Jack Vance, and ask him whether he would have settled for this kind of world, he’d have been delighted. Any sensible person would. He’d have said to hell with the stars!”

  “No!” The boy’s eyes blazed. “He wouldn’t have been satisfied. None of them would.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose it matters. Physical law is what it is, and it doesn’t take much account of whether we approve or not. Will, if these ideas hadn’t become dated, and absurd, this kind of book wouldn’t have disappeared. I mean, we wouldn’t even know about Great Tales of the Space Age if someone hadn’t dropped a copy of the thing into the time capsule. That should tell you something.” He got up. “Gotta go, kid. Can’t ignore the guests.”

  “But,” said the boy, “you can’t really be sure of that. Maybe the time was never right before. Maybe they ran out of money. Maybe it takes all of us working together to do it.” He slid back into the pillows. His father held up his hands, palms out, in the old gesture of surrender he always used when a game was going against him. “We could do that now, Dad,” Will continued. “There’s a way to build a Space Beagle. Somehow.”

  “Let me know if you figure it out, son.” The lights died, and the door opened. “You’ll have to do it yourself, though. Nobody else is giving it any thought. Nobody has for centuries.”

  The snow did not come. And while Will Cutler stared through the plexidome at the faraway stars, thousands of others were also discovering Willis and Swanwick and Tiptree and Sturgeon. They lived in a dozen cities across Will’s native Venus. And they played on the cool green hills of Earth and farmed the rich Martian lowlands; they clung to remote shelters among the asteroids, and watched the skies from silver towers beneath the great crystal hemispheres of Io and Titan and Miranda.

  The ancient summons flickered across the worlds, insubstantial, seductive, irresistible. The old dreamers were bound, once again, for the stars.

  THE MISSION

  They were looking down on a dust storm racing across the Martian surface when the transmission came in. “Venture, we are losing control of the situation here. The plague is everywhere. I don’t know how much longer we can keep the station open. Abort and return.”

  Status lamps blinked in the darkened cockpit. Alice looked at him, her eyes sad, but for a long time nobody said anything.

  “Tommy.” The distant voice lost its impersonal tone. “We’ll try to stay with this—.” And the transmission exploded in a burst of static.

  Tommy glanced around at the others. “What do you think?” he asked.

  Frank stared at the radio. “Make the landing. We can’t go back without making the landing.”

  Alice nodded. “Yes.” Her eyes gleamed in the light thrown off by the instruments. “Do it.”

  Tommy took a deep breath. Below them the storm swirled across the lower latitudes.

  “It came in over the
river, out of the east. Right over there, Tommy, just beyond Harpie’s place. And it came right past where we’re standing now and touched ground maybe there, near the barn. It kept going, of course, because it was going hell-bent, fastest thing I ever saw, all lit up.

  “You never saw an airplane, I guess, did you? Well, they’re really something, especially at night. And especially this one because it wasn’t really an airplane at all. It was somethin’ they kept up on the station, it was in orbit, and when the Mars mission came back it was the only way they could get home.”

  “Because,” said Tommy, “everything was shut down by then.”

  “That’s right. The Death had been running eight months and there just wasn’t nobody left.”

  Tommy looked the length of the plain, tracing the glide path from the woods on the east past Harpie’s, past the crumbling hangars and maintenance buildings that everybody said were haunted, past the place where they sat on their horses. On into the night. The sky was cold and damp and threatening.

  “It was a night like this,” Uncle Harold said. “Chilled. Rain just beginning to fall.”

  He imagined it coming in, full of light, the three astronauts inside, feeling for the ground like they weren’t sure it was there.

  “Why’d they come here to land, Uncle Harold?” Tommy had heard bits and pieces of the story before, how it had come to Warner-Robbins, and how people had ridden out from the town and the astronauts had gotten out and just walked away and nobody ever saw them again. But it had never meant much to him until he actually came to live in Warner-Robbins a few days before. After his mother died. And came out here to see the place where the lander came down.

  “Nobody really knows, Tommy,” said Uncle Harold. “I mean, they just rolled to a stop. Well, they didn’t exactly roll. They sort of bounced up and down a lot and busted a wing and they finally swung around and tipped over.”