Asimov's SF, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Hayden wondered why Zarkov's video-image didn't sway from side to side, given the swaying of the cube-men's bodies.

  Khrushchev reared back in a fit of laughter, unable to see a look of worry appear, with melodramatic swiftness, on Simms Zarkov's face. Lenny and Lydia, backing up to the pit blindly, slipped and fell into the fiery hole.

  “Tune in next week...”

  Hayden began to return to consciousness.

  “Strings and sparklers!” he heard Simms saying. He kept his eyes closed.

  “And how does Emperor Ming think he's going to conquer the universe with minions as fat as that?”

  Hayden opened one eye and scanned for Lenny, who sat across from Simms. Lenny glared at Simms.

  The old teacher rolled his eyes, but Lenny kept his gaze set on Simms.

  “I thought you were smarter than that,” Lenny said, with remarkable restraint.

  Simms stopped in mid-eye roll, his mouth wide open. He stared at Lenny like a blackface actor playing “Sambo Caught by Surprise.”

  “Really,” Lenny twisted the knife, “you should have known better than to be fooled by the sparks and the wires.”

  “But, I...” Simms protested.

  “No, you were fooled like any fourth grader. You thought that the flash-bang-zing was the important part of the show, so you make fun of it. You missed the point. If you wanted to make fun of something, you should have made fun of Flash Gordon's bravery, or the human concern of Doctor Zarkov for his friend. You were caught up in lights and camera tricks, but you missed the heart of the matter. The heart!”

  “Oh, look, the news is on,” Lydia interjected pleasantly, keeping the argument from escalating.

  “...inquest into the death of actress Marilyn Monroe continues, with questions being raised about the apparent suicide...” the TV newscaster spoke in near-monotone.

  “That'll put JFK in a snit,” Lenny quipped.

  “...Mariner Two spacecraft is launched toward Venus, one month after Mariner One was destroyed by the range safety officer after the rocket veered off course. The aborted flight was thought...”

  “Bad omens,” Lenny shook his head. “Just this morning, one of my tin walking robots started sparking and smoking, which it's supposed to do, then caught fire, which it's not.”

  “Omens?” Simms had recovered from Lenny's previous assault. “These things have nothing to do with each other.”

  Hayden spoke up. “You have to admit, though, it is pretty strange and all.”

  Simms seemed angry. “I don't have to admit anything of the sort. There is absolutely no connection between a floozy's suicide, bad telemetry, and a poorly built toy taking fire!”

  Hayden was hurt by the tone of Simms’ voice, and it showed on the boy's face.

  Simms lowered his voice, but did not back down. “Look, bad things happen, sometimes in rapid succession, it's a chaotic universe we live in. But to connect all these things is entirely illogical. It's just a way for your mind to compartmentalize uncomfortable things so they're easier to deal with.”

  “So logic is a fake cage around your thoughts, like the wires on Flash Gordon?” Hayden challenged the teacher

  Simms began to speak, but Hayden continued. “When I was healing,” he looked toward the door to his little bedroom, behind which the H4000 helmet was kept, “I heard voices, transmissions. Not in English or Russian or Spanish. I, I can't explain,” he paused, looking bewildered. “Another language. I didn't understand all the words, but I understood the feeling. And it made me scared.” He turned to look at Lenny. “They don't want us going out there, into space.”

  The others waited for him to continue.

  “As I got better, when the cancer went into remission, I heard them less and less.”

  “Son,” Simms said, “you were under a lot of stress back then, your mind...”

  “The transmissions,” Hayden interrupted, “the voices, they're coming back. They don't want us out there.” He stood, then went into his room. The last thing the others could see was Hayden reaching for the helmet as he closed the door with his foot.

  The newscast droned on for a moment as the remaining three avoided eye contact with each other. Finally, Lydia spoke in a soft voice.

  “Mr. Simms, Lenny. The doctors told us last week that the cancer is back. It will be three full months before they can get him back in for treatments.”

  Simms thought on the heart of the matter as he walked home.

  Lenny thought of the comfort of a cage made with logical wires.

  Hayden donned the H4000 helmet and listened. The voices became more and more clear with each passing day.

  * * * *

  September

  It was warm, so far as late September in Wisconsin went. Still, the trees smelled a little different, as if they were warming themselves up and sweating one last time before their autumn rest. The water in the creek out behind the trailer park was colder than it had been all summer. Perhaps winter would seep up from the ground, Hades’ icy grip reaching up from the dirt to claw away the balmy winds from the south.

  Simms was more relaxed than Hayden had ever seen him before. The old teacher might have been sleeping. His hat was low, almost covering his thin-lidded eyes.

  Occasionally, Hayden would look past the worm that he was busy threading on a hook and notice that Simms’ eyes would move, lazily following the bobber that floated on a slow spot in the creek. When Simms finally spoke, it startled the boy so much that he nearly hooked his finger.

  “You probably think your mother asked me to take you fishing.”

  “I probably do,” Hayden's voice hinted of world-weariness. He sucked the blood out of the tiny hole in his finger.

  “Sorry,” Simms shifted to his side, the hat spilling on the bank to reveal his smiling face, “this wasn't your mother's idea.”

  For some reason that he couldn't identify, Hayden was pleased with this fact. He smiled and cast his line into the water with a plunk.

  “And I'm not trying to get your mind off your illness, either.” Simms shot a glance at Hayden to see his response. He took the boy's silence as an all-clear to speak openly.

  “No, I think you should tackle the cancer head-on. Of course, you can't cure yourself,” he paused, noting that Hayden was fidgeting uneasily. He suspected the boy's discomfort had little to do with the hook wound. “But you can go on living.”

  Hayden's brow furrowed, deep in thought.

  “This is an amazing time to be alive, Hayden. After all our best efforts to egg on the Soviets, they're saying that there's no reason to put missiles up in Cuba. If Kennedy's a smart man, and I think he is, he'll pull our missiles out of Turkey and find a way to convince East Germany to bring down the wall. Think about it, world peace. Maybe this whole Cuban thing was a blessing in disguise, something to get our minds off of Berlin and get us talking to each other.”

  He stopped, guessing that Hayden was becoming bored with the political banter.

  “And did you hear the news yesterday? President Kennedy said that we'll put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade.” He grew wistful and a touch misty-eyed. “I wish your father was here to see it.”

  Hayden turned to look at him as if suddenly woken out of a sleep-walking episode.

  “Yeah,” Hayden said, looking up into the blue sky, “I wish he was here to see it, too.”

  “But he's not,” Simms said in a matter of fact voice.

  A surge of anger rose in Hayden. Simms saw it in the sudden stiffening of the boy's body, the flush of red in his young cheeks.

  “Yes,” Simms smiled, “you've got fight in you! That's good. Now you've got to keep that fighting spirit. You've got to fight to stay alive, son!”

  Hayden sat utterly confounded with frustration and flattery.

  “It's what your father would have wanted from you,” Simms said.

  A tug and a splash announced to the pair that a trout had been caught on Hayden's line. He quickly reeled in the fish and
, after watching it struggle for air for a few brief moments, un-hooked it and gently put it back in the creek, slowly moving it back and forth to force water through its gills. He had never put a caught trout back in the creek before. It filled him with a thrilling lightness of being when the fish began to thrash, then darted off into deeper water.

  * * * *

  October

  The raygun's erstwhile chrome-plated shine had dulled with time. The metal was scratched and pitted, the Buck Rogers logo barely recognizable as such, as if etched by the impurities of the old black and white film cells in which the original made its appearances.

  “The XZ-38 pistol,” Lenny proclaimed with solemnity.

  Hayden lifted the gun up, aiming it at the window of Lenny's trailer. The warm smell of gunpowder wafted up from the cap gun. He slowly squeezed the trigger...

  “Careful!” Lenny ripped the gun from the boy's hand. “You don't know what that thing is capable of !”

  “But it's just a cap gun,” Hayden said in frustration.

  Lenny gave him a sidelong glare, and Hayden instantly regretted his words. The scent of the gunpowder, along with the way that Lenny had looked at him, left Hayden feeling wary and ill at ease.

  “Here. Try this. It's heavier, might make you think twice before pulling the trigger.”

  The old man reached into a small box that sat at his feet. He pulled out a bulbous raygun, also made of die-cast metal, like the XZ-38. He handed it to his young compatriot.

  Hayden reached out and took the gun by its bright red handle. It was substantial, its heft surprising, even for a metal toy of its size. Cogs, a rectangular-block heat sink, and a semi-circular indicator gauge on the side of the gun gave it an industrial look, like something the Soviets would make. The indicator arrow pointed to just below “400” on the 500-unit scale. He wondered what that meant, and decided that the implications were too ominous to test indoors. He rolled the gun over in his hand and read the raised letters on the side.

  “Atomic Disintegrator. What's it do?”

  Lenny looked at the gun as if he were sizing up a rattlesnake or eyeing a cup of poison. “Just what it says it does. You be careful with that thing, hear? Thought I'd give it to you as a gift, a confidence booster. But don't get overconfident, or you'll boost your mom's kitchen into oblivion. Speaking of which, I should be getting you home.”

  They walked slowly across the trailer park lawn, savoring the coolness of the autumnal air.

  “So how's this thing supposed to boost my confidence?” Hayden asked, still testing the weight of the disintegrator.

  “It's a focus for your faith, Hayden. I know you've got a lot of faith, but sometimes faith needs a boost, a little something to believe in. You're going to need it when your Martians finally get fed up with all the space junk we're throwing at them.”

  “My Martians?”

  “They're on your bubblegum cards.”

  Hayden's face screwed up into a perplexed half-smile.

  “You really think they're coming, don't you, Mister Lenny?”

  Lenny smiled. “Call it a premonition. Call it a sinister faith. They'll be here.” The smile faded with the last proclamation.

  A yell erupted from a nearby trailer, startling the pair and causing visions of marauding Martians to flood into Hayden's mind.

  “Lenny! Hayden!” It was Simms, and he was more worked up than either of the two had ever seen him. “Quick! Get inside!” Simms grabbed both of them by the arm, ushering them toward Hayden's trailer as quickly as he could, given his aged legs and Lenny's bulk. He didn't even knock, just barged right in through the front door yelling “turn the TV on!” to which Lydia responded with more consternation than Hayden had thought possible from her. “I see it, Mister Simms! It's already on, now pipe down!”

  Lenny was annoyed. “What the Sam Hill are you people on about? It can't ... uh-oh.”

  President Kennedy spoke into a battery of microphones. He looked like he hadn't slept in days.

  “...in addition, jet bombers, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, are now being uncrated and assembled in Cuba, while the necessary air bases are being prepared.”

  The television flickered and fuzzed. For a brief moment, through the static, the nearly incomprehensible outline of a head flashed on screen, the quickly fading features of its latent image superimposed over the president's face.

  “Khrushchev!” Simms blurted out.

  “The Martians!” Lenny gasped.

  “...neither the United States of America nor the world community of nations can tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation...”

  The picture blurred again.

  “The Soviets are jamming the transmissions,” Simms said, more calmly than before. “That's the first sign of impending war, jamming communications.”

  “It's not the Russkies,” Lenny said. “That ... thing was not Khrushchev, or any other human.”

  “I didn't see anything in particular,” Lydia said. She walked up to the television and banged on its side.

  Hayden grabbed his head. A dull ache had begun when he sat down, and the banging felt like nails being driven into his temple.

  “What do you think, Hayden?” Lenny asked as Lydia banged the TV into clarity.

  “I don't know, I...”

  “Shh!” Simms tried to quiet them.

  “...greatest danger of all would be to do nothing. The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. But it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world. The cost of freedom is always high—and Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission. Our goal is not...”

  Again the picture broke up. Lenny and Simms squinted, trying to decipher the indistinct shape that may or may not have appeared behind the snow. Hayden squinted in pain, pressing the heels of his hands into his temples, trying to massage away the pressure in his head. He suddenly stopped, his eyes widening, lips parting, his breathing rapid, panting.

  Simms noticed him first. “Hayden, what's wrong?” He looked to the screen, then back to Hayden. “What do you see?”

  “I see...” Hayden began to cry.

  Lenny cut in “Don't do that to the boy...” He turned the TV off, then sat back in the chair.

  “I see...” Hayden continued, not hearing Lenny “...the cancer.”

  He broke into sobbing. Lydia walked to where he was, knelt down beside him, and held him as he shook from crying.

  Simms and Lenny looked at each other, unsure of what to do. They stood at the same time, preparing to leave. But as Lenny headed for the door, Simms broke rank and walked over to Lydia and Hayden. He put his hand on Lydia's shoulder, trying to console her. The mother and child trembled together so that neither Simms nor Lenny, who had stopped with his hand on the door to watch the touching scene, could tell which was weeping and which was comforting.

  “Lydia,” Simms said softly, “let's all go out for a walk.”

  She nodded, sniffling, then rose with Hayden. Lenny held the door open as the three of them, Lydia, Hayden, and Simms, walked outside into the night. The air was cool, but calm. The waxing crescent moon was lit from the underside like an immense celestial lantern with the shade barely opened.

  Lenny took up the rear as they walked out on to the highway, heading southeast through the low hills. The autumn leaves, still attached to the trees, occasionally shifted with a steady, smooth breeze that increased the further they walked, shuffling like a dossier of secret papers about to be revealed to the world, the impending revelation of the menace that would bring on the apocalypse, be it nuclear, extraterrestrial, or cell-borne.

  They came upon a flat area, a recently harvested cornfield by a bend in the road where the night sky opened its expanse to their eyes.

  They stopped and looked up. Two dozen or more faint white lines streaked the sky from northeast to so
uthwest, like Lucifer's claw marks on the face of God.

  “Contrails,” Simms said. “B-52s, no doubt, flying from Minot to Havana. That could be the beginning of the end.”

  They looked toward the southern horizon, trying to discern the planes’ lights from the stars, but they were camouflaged by the light pollution glowing up from Milwaukee and Chicago.

  “I suppose,” said Lenny, unable to hide the amusement in his voice, “that one of us should say something profound.”

  Hayden grew dizzy, unsure if the sensation came from the vastness of the universe or from some failure of his proper body function due to the disease that was eating him from the inside out. His mother steadied him with her hands on his shoulders.

  A car horn in the distance broke the silence. The sound of an engine whined higher as the vehicle approached. By the time the car whipped around the bend, the only noise louder than the car was the yelling of the vehicle's occupants, half a dozen college-age kids screaming the Wisconsin fight song while swerving across all the lanes of the highway. A pair of beer cans, thrown from the car, clattered on the road and into the cornfield as the noise faded off into the distance.

  “Stupid kids,” Simms said. “They won't know what hit them when it comes.”

  “When they come,” Lenny corrected him.

  Hayden groaned, putting a hand on his head.

  Lydia spoke for the first time since they left her trailer. “They might not have long to wait.”

  The other three turned their gaze to her, then followed her pointing finger to a pulsating group of lights high in the air, approaching from the direction of the contrails’ ultimate destination. The lights grew brighter, the moments stretching to lifetimes.z

  Hayden wondered if the cancer was affecting his sight, wondered if this is what it feels like when you are about to die.

  Lenny, still looking at the lights, turned his head just enough that Hayden knew that it was he that the old man was speaking to.