“Did it catch fire?”
“No. It just laid out there in the dark like a big dead bird.”
“And the astronauts—?”
“Well, like I said, they got out, the three of them—.”
“What happened to the fourth? Mrs. Taylor said there were four on the mission.”
“That’s what the books say, but only three got out. And they walked off west. Toward Macon.”
“Macon’s a long way. Why’d you let them do it?”
“I didn’t let them do it, Tommy. They pretty much done it on their own. Horace Kittern and Mack Willoughby, they rode after them. Asked whether they was hurt. Whether they could do anything. But the astronauts, they never slowed down, just waved and said everything was fine. Said they’d be back later for the lander. I thought at the time maybe they were afraid of us. Afraid we were infected.”
“And they really never came back?”
“Nope. Never seen ’em again.”
“How about over in Macon?”
“Wasn’t nobody in Macon by then, Macon went early.”
“The whole town?”
“Far as we know.”
Tommy imagined them walking into the night. Into the rain.
Uncle Harold was riding Montie. The horse was cold. It breathed out a cloud of frost and he patted the animal’s flank. “Tommy, I wasn’t as old as you at the time. Wasn’t nothin’ I could do. Or anybody else.”
Tommy shifted his weight. Poke stirred under him, and a cold wind blew down out of the trees. It began to rain. “What happened to the lander?” he asked.
Harold turned Montie around. Started for home. “What happened to the lander?” he said, as if the question puzzled him. “Let’s go back to the house and I’ll show you.”
He was glad to get into the barn and out of the wind. They unsaddled the horses, gave them water, and closed them up in their stalls. Then Uncle Harold picked up the lantern and led him to the back door where they kept the equipment. “There.” He pointed to a plow.
“And there.” A spade.
“And here.” A yoke for the team.
“And over here.” Braces for the wagon. “We used some of the Teflon to wire the main house. For insulation.”
Tommy didn’t understand at first. And Uncle Harold kept right on going. “You can still see the tiles. They’re from the outside of the lander. We used them to line the smelter down at Jimmy’s. And the town freezer that used to be over at Casey’s place but that we moved to Hazlett’s after Casey died. They were put on the outside of refrigerators from one end of town to the other. Saved energy at a time when we hardly had any.
“They salvaged the computers and kept them going for a while, as long as somebody thought they’d be useful. Turned out they didn’t really need computers anymore.
“We took the radios. The kids. I got one, but it wasn’t no use because there wasn’t anything on it except an Atlanta station where they just kept playing the same music and asking whether there was anybody out there until we got into January and I guess it got too cold. They stopped broadcasting and we never heard from them again.
“One of the fuel pumps runs the water system at your Uncle Tim’s. They took something off the wings that helped keep the town generators going for a while. And the chairs. They’re scattered around. Pete Baydecker’s got one. It’s the most comfortable chair I’ve ever sat in—.” He seemed to run down, like a clock that needed to be wound.
“You just took it apart?” Tommy asked. “And used it to make stuff?” He remembered the legend, recalled vividly in that moment Mrs. Taylor’s description of what it must have been like as the astronauts, three Americans and a Russian, had neared Mars, and they heard the news, that a virus had broken loose at home, was killing everyone.
“And eventually their radios must have gone quiet.” She had said the words and Tommy had imagined himself with them out in the cold dark night between the worlds, a million miles from the ground.
“You have to understand what it was like then,” Uncle Harold was saying. He opened the door that would take them across to the house. “We were caught with no power, except what we could produce ourselves. One night the lights and the TV’s just went out. They came back on long enough for us to go to bed. But it got cold during the night and we all had to go down and sleep by the fire.
“What ran the lights also ran the tractors and the milking machines and the combines. And suddenly none of it was there anymore. They had all that equipment but they didn’t have gas to make it run.”
“You could have gotten other people to help you.”
Uncle Harold shook his head. “The plague was everywhere. There was nowhere to go. Nobody to help. People were scared to leave town. You never seen anything like the way people behaved when a stranger came up the road. They were bad times. We were lucky to survive.”
He turned the lantern out, signaling that it was time to go into the house. Candles burned brightly in the windows. But Tommy didn’t move. “You took everything? And melted it down?”
“I didn’t. The town did. Everything we had went, Tommy. The pick-ups and the cars that nobody had any use for anymore, and the tractors, and the lander. We needed raw materials to keep alive. I can tell you, Tommy, it was a near thing. We had our hands full just getting through the winter. People died. Half the town died. Not from the plague. Thank God it never came here. But people died from exposure and sheer exhaustion. We’d forgotten how to live without supermarkets and electricity. But we survived.
“For six years we even managed to light the town. I have to tell you, the people here saw the lander as a God-given miracle.”
Tommy felt his heart beat. He looked down at his footprints in the snow, watched the flakes filling them in almost as quickly as he made them. “Frank doesn’t know that,” he said. His voice had a catch in it. “It wasn’t right.”
“It’s what we had to do.”
“And Alice doesn’t know it either.”
Frank and Alice had befriended him after he arrived last week. After Mom died, Tommy had locked onto the lander as if it were part of the world he’d left behind. As if it were connected with his mother and the life over in Milledgeville, which hadn’t been as lucky as Warner-Robbins. And Uncle Harold had seen an opportunity to distract him, had talked to him about the Mars mission, had shown him pictures of the Columbia, photographs of it under construction and later docked to the space station, artists’ drawings of it in Martian skies. He’d asked whether the astronauts had landed on Mars.
Nobody knew.
He was aware of that, of course, but he asked the question anyway. It was required, somehow. Part of the ceremony. “Did they ever get to the ground?” It seemed not right that they had gone all the way out there and not gotten to the surface. So he and Alice and Frank had invented their game, had taken the Columbia to Mars, listened to the terrible news, orbited the planet, and landed.
They walked across the red sands and sometimes they found turtles and sometimes lizards and once they even found tall red-skinned natives with saucer eyes who’d chased them while they yelped and ran for their lives.
“Frank and Alice,” said Harold, “probably never asked about the lander. It’s no secret that it kept us all going. There’s not a house or a farm that doesn’t have a piece of it out in its barn, or holding its windows together, or keeping its furnace running. You want the lander, son? It’s all around you.”
They were racing above the southern hemisphere, gazing down on an ocher desert that stretched out forever when Tom raised the question. “Yeah,” said Frank. “I knew that.”
Mars vanished, and Tommy looked with dismay at his copilot.
“Sure, Tommy. Everybody here knows. Right, Alice? We’ve got some pieces of it in our kitchen. Or is it the furnace? I forget.”
They were in the living room at Alice’s house and suddenly Tommy could smell the oil lamps. Without moving, Alice pointed to a cushion on the sofa. It was old and worn and
black, but it was soft like leather except that it wasn’t leather. “That came out of the lander,” she said. “My ma wants to toss it because she says it doesn’t look right. But Pa won’t hear of it.”
Tommy stared at them. “You knew? All this time you knew what they did?”
“What’s the big deal?” Frank asked. “I thought you knew. Everybody knows.”
“They should have kept it,” said Tommy. “They should have taken care of it.”
“It was out on the runway.” Alice was getting annoyed. “It would have rusted out. What difference does it make?”
And Tommy couldn’t explain. They should have kept it because one day we’ll be going back. Because it was part of something important and you don’t just tear things like that apart to make hoes and rakes. Because they didn’t know whether the astronauts would come back or not and suppose they had?
Alice was the tallest of the three. She had freckles and red hair and blue eyes. And she tried to tell him he was making too much of it, that what else would you do with a wreck sitting in the middle of the runway? That they just flat out needed the metal.
They didn’t play the Mars game anymore after that. And a couple of days later Alice tried to kiss him but he didn’t let her.
The freeze came early. Tommy helped with the horses, chopped firewood, brought in water, and occasionally took the wagon over to Rob’s feed store to pick up supplies.
They had a few books in the house, some novels that he read over and over, David Copperfield and Northanger Abbey and one about the end of the Civil War. There was a history of the United States, which everybody insisted still existed out there somewhere, and a Bible, a book on needlecraft that had belonged to Aunt Emma, and the book that Tommy especially liked, a big volume called Galaxies, with lots of pictures.
They’d had only a Bible at his mother’s house and he hadn’t even realized there were other books until Uncle Harold had come after Ma’s death and brought him here.
He understood that the galaxies were very far, and that the Columbia could never have reached them. But he liked to imagine going out to them anyhow, taking a right turn at Mars, and snuggling warm and happy in the cockpit while he watched the stars grow in number and size.
Columbia is still up there. Docked at the station. And on nights when it’s clear, you can see it, a bright light in the south that never moves, that keeps its place while the stars race past.
Out of reach now. Forever.
We should have saved the lander
He rode out on Poke one night close to Christmas, back to the place where he’d sat with Uncle Harold. It was unseasonably warm, the stars were bright, and there was no moon in the sky. The station sparkled in its accustomed place, above the old interstate.
Uncle Harold didn’t like him riding out here alone after dark. Minutes after he’d left, he heard the outside kitchen door slam and knew his uncle had missed him, knew he’d follow pretty soon.
He looked back toward the east and watched the lander drop slowly out of the sky, brighter than any star. Brighter even than the station. It had four lights, one on each wingtip, one on its belly, and one atop the tail. He didn’t really know whether that had been so, and nobody he’d asked knew either. But it didn’t matter. That was the way he imagined it, so it had become the only truth there was.
It came in slow and the lights were visible the whole time. A few people rode out of town to see what was happening. He could hear them talking, asking one another whether help was coming at last. From the government.
The lander dropped down through the night, and the blaze of its lights silhouetted Uncle Harold, coming easy on Monty. Its engines roared and the wings waggled slightly as a gust of wind hit them. The airstrip lay open and clear before the descending spacecraft.
Tommy inched up in his saddle so he could see better. Poke dug at a piece of sod with his front hoof.
It touched down and rolled along the runway, maybe jouncing a bit because it was coming too fast and braking too hard.
The riders watched it slow and tip over and stop. For a long time nothing happened. A few of the horsemen approached and hatches popped open. The lights went off, first the ones on the wingtips, and then the others. Three astronauts climbed out and stood looking around.
“You okay, Tommy?” Uncle Harold was still riding slow.
There were tears in the boy’s eyes. “You shouldn’t have taken it apart,” he said.
His uncle came up alongside him, clamped a big hand down on his shoulder, and squeezed. “Tommy, it’s time to let it go.”
Tommy just sat on his horse.
Uncle Harold nodded. “You warm enough, son?”
“You think they did the right thing. That makes you just as bad.”
“Why is it so important? That the lander was broken up?”
“Because of where it’s been. Because maybe we can go back one day. Because we need it.” Tommy was trying to keep his voice level, to keep the strangled sounds out of it.
“Tommy.” Harold held out a kerchief, and waited while the boy took it and blew his nose and wiped his eyes. “Tommy, people here did what they had to. I’m not saying we wouldn’t have made it otherwise, but the rest of the world was dead, as far as we knew. Everything that would give us an edge, we had to use.”
“Not the lander. That’s what takes us back.”
Harold looked up at the sky. At the station. “No,” he said, “it’s not the lander. We can make a new one when the time comes. What we have to have, what we absolutely cannot do without, is you. And Alice. And Frank.” He pulled his collar up around his neck. The temperature was starting to drop. “We survived, boy. That’s what matters. First things first.”
Tommy was silent.
“We will go back. Maybe you will. But you’ve got to be alive to do it.”
“No. It’s not going to happen.”
Uncle Harold pulled his scarf up around his face. His gaze moved past Tommy and fastened on the house. They could see the glow of the oil lamp in the living room. He tugged gently on Tommy’s reins and started back. Tommy pressed Poke’s flank and followed.
Uncle Harold glanced back up at the sky. “Which one’s Mars?” he asked.
Tommy showed him.
“Duller than I thought,” he said.
Poke picked up the pace and they trotted at a leisurely clip beneath the stars.
PART III
FAR TRAVELING
REPORT FROM THE REAR
It now appears that the Scorpions are in full retreat.”
Those words, delivered with professional aplomb by WBC anchor Margaret Parker from the deck of the Caesar, ignited wild celebrations around the world: drums in Beijing, rockets in New York and London, light shows in Paris, parades in Moscow, hallelujahs at the Vatican.
The Scorpions are in full retreat.
It was over.
The only truly critical war in the history of the species had been fought and won out near Sirius in a single lightning engagement.
First contact.
It was supposed to be the culminating achievement in our expansion beyond home. But the old dreams had died in the face of starfaring creatures of relentless hostility, invaders whose ferocity seemed inconsistent with their technological achievements. Beings who neither gave nor accepted quarter.
The war, measured from the opening assault by the Rainbow Squadron to Parker’s final comment, spanned thirty-two hours and eleven minutes. Now we were raising our glasses and toasting the Fleet. And feeling very lucky.
I was sitting in a bar in a San Francisco hotel while church bells rang, strangers bought drinks for the house, and holoworks brightened the skies. The bar and the adjoining lobby exploded with laughter and tears. And the wine, as they say, flowed.
Up on the screen, Margaret Parker’s cheeks were wet. Someone wearing a headset stepped into the picture and hugged her, and I knew instinctively that on-air hug of the usually aloof Parker would become one of the lasting symbols
of the war.
The picture switched to Ransom McKay standing beside an empty rostrum at the WBC situation room. We couldn’t hear him, there was too much noise around us, but he was walking us through the initial tactical dispositions. The Rainbow here; the Legion there; the Nelson on this wing, the Geronimo on that. Lights moved, and coded arrows began the action, feint here, counterattack there, breakthrough in the center.
Yeah. In the center. That was where we took them, the battle cruisers tearing through their ordered squadrons, supported by waves of TLB’s and frigates. Edward Basildorf, in his flag gray, became the hero of the hour by observing, during a briefing, that the “sorry sons-of-bitches were being sent home with their tails between their legs,” an observation that might quite literally have been accurate.
I was in town for the annual Carbury Awards, which are given by the Press Association for outstanding journalism. The big prize this year, for lifetime achievement, had gone to Max Hopkin, essayist, editor, destroyer of the comfortable, two-time Pulitzer winner. But word of the first shots of battle had leaked into the dining room just as he thanked the emcee and stepped behind the microphone. Everyone scrambled for an HV, and poor Hopkin was left standing with his “thank you, ladies and gentlemen” fading into dead air.
It was one of those times when I was proud to be a journalist. WBC’s correspondents did a hell of a job: Mark Everett at the Net’s operations desk, Julie Black outside the staff room of the Combined Chiefs at Moonbase, Sakal Singh on the Berlin, Leonard Edward at World Council.
I was surprised a few hours later to spot Hopkin sitting gloomily in a corner of the bar. If anybody was the journalistic godfather of this night, it was he. It was, after all, his magnificent reporting during the almost equally brief Sikh-Chinese War twenty-seven years before, specifically his description of the Battle of Malacca Strait, that had set the standard for modern combat reporting, and incidentally launched his career.
His must have been the only sad face in the city that evening, and I assumed he was still irritated at being crowded out of the headlines. In the face of events, it struck me as a particularly selfish attitude.
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