The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  Fumes were pushing their way out from under the garage door, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I thought it was funny, smelling a car but not seeing one. Then I turned and marched off toward third grade. Which saved me. I didn’t have to discover something truly awful. And because I was saved from one horrific pain, the rest of my life has been spent struggling with a relentless, almost unbearable sense of guilt.

  Lifting the garage door would have done nothing, of course.

  By then, it was too late, and I’m an idiot to blame myself. Donnie and his mother and his four-year-old brother and the twin baby sisters were sitting in the station wagon that was parked in that darkened garage, all dead, along with that dog that he didn’t care about and a bunch of cats too.

  On occasion, inauspicious beginnings lead to large accomplishments.

  As I grew older, I cultivated an unsuspected talent for designing castles and other fortifications. Most of my early projects can’t be discussed, since they involved military bunkers hiding at undisclosed locations. But a few public buildings wear my handiwork, each structure brawny yet elegant, special concretes and reinforced stone peppered with a minimum of windows, all wrapped around internal skeletons designed to withstand fertilizer bombs and baby nukes.

  After retiring from government work, I made a tidy fortune building mansions for wealthy clients. My largest job was never finished. Just a few months after we broke ground on the King’s new palace, there was a sudden shift in Arabian politics. But then the Israelis came to my rescue, snatching me up as a consultant, wanting my help with their constantly evolving East Wall. It was lucrative work, challenging and endless, and that was one of the reasons why I said, “No thank you,” when my government showed up at my door.

  “But you haven’t heard the offer,” their representative said. Then she smiled winsomely, adding, “I think you’ll find it intriguing.”

  “All right. Try me,” I said.

  Her name was Colonel Sutter, although she had given me permission to call her Katherine. With a crisp, practised tone, Katherine mentioned a significant project, and then she offered an address that was sure to pique my interest.

  Most definitely, I heard the word, “Moon”.

  Six bases were established on our sister planet. China and the EU, Japan and Russia each had their one. And there were two American facilities, one dedicated to science while the other was being built by the military.

  “Craig,” she said, “we would love your help.” Katherine used my name with that false familiarity salesmen employ while praying for a commission. “You’re one of the finest structural engineers in the world,” she told me. “You’re first on my list, and frankly, I don’t even know who I’d rank number two.”

  She was lying. I learned that soon afterwards. Two former colleagues had already been approached. But one had a young family he didn’t want to abandon, while the other poor man was freshly diagnosed with liver cancer.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You want to hire me – ”

  “At a very competitive rate, Craig. Yes.”

  “And to earn my money, I’ll live at the lunar base . . . and do what? Help finish the base construction, I’m guessing.”

  “And what would be wrong with that?”

  I couldn’t see anything wrong. But she hadn’t answered my question either, which set off alarms.

  “Here’s the problem,” I explained. “Much as I’d love to travel in space, and in particular, bounce across another world, I also know that building habitats on the moon is relatively simple work. You drag prefabricated structures up where you want them and then bury your new city under the regolith. A few meters of packed ground protect people and machines from the solar and cosmic radiation, which are the important hazards. Basically, you need to be about as sophisticated as a kid with a plastic shovel and beach full of sand. And that’s why I have to ask: Why would you have any use for me?”

  Katherine said nothing, but she smiled in a certain way. And that’s when I noticed that she was handsome, at least for a woman who had spent her vital years inside a uniform.

  Finally, I admitted, “Of course, I’ve heard some interesting rumors.”

  “About?”

  “Our new base.”

  “Really?” she replied, feigning surprise.

  I nodded. “We’ve got some stubborn international treaties down here. Nations aren’t free to test whatever new and theoretical weapon systems they want to test. But those rules might not apply on the moon. At least according to certain government lawyers, they don’t.”

  “Is that what you’ve heard?”

  Looking at Katherine’s gray eyes, I admitted, “I still know a few bodies at the Pentagon. One or two have mentioned plans to melt mountains and blast new craters. With gamma-ray lasers or super-clean nukes. Or we’ve developed an easy way to make antimatter bombs, and you’re digging some very deep holes to set them off in safe, out-of-view places.”

  Only the gray eyes smiled.

  “Is that what you want from me? You want help building secret, robust test chambers?”

  “Not at all,” she promised.

  “Really?” I was honestly surprised.

  Once again, Katherine said, “Craig,” with that best-of-friends voice. “You’re an exceptionally qualified structural engineer.”

  “And you’re still not making much sense,” I complained.

  “Maybe we don’t want you to build anything.”

  “Then what good am I?”

  The smiling eyes waited.

  “Okay, how’s this.” Then I fired the last round in my arsenal. “I know how to construct strong, durable structures. So maybe you’re hoping that I can make my expertise run backwards.”

  “Which means what?”

  “It’s happened in the past,” I confessed. “Military boys come to me wanting clues how to destroy a Korean or Pakistani bunker. Is that the kind of game we’re playing? Are you deciding how best to hit the Chinese facilities?”

  “An interesting speculation, and no.” Katherine shook her head while grinning. “We don’t necessarily want to attack anybody. But we would appreciate your help gaining access to a particularly difficult structure.”

  “What structure?”

  “But now how can I tell you that?” she asked. Then she leaned close enough to feel too close, saying, “Some secrets are too large, even to somebody with your security clearance.”

  My heart was hammering, my breath quickening.

  “When?” I asked.

  “You’ll leave for the moon as soon as you pass your physical.”

  “No. I mean when do I get told the truth?”

  Katherine sat back, her eyes filling that handsome, early-middle-aged face. “When you’re standing beside your target . . . then we’ll tell you everything we know. Which, I have to warn you, is not very much at all . . .”

  My religious upbringing was decidedly minimal. In our household, Christ wasn’t a religious figure so much as a political one, and my parents would never have voted for Him. Religious holidays were either ignored, or in the case of Christmas, drained of their history and passion – with a few presents thrown at my sister and me as a bribe. Other cultures seemed to have their own ideas about God, but it was hard to hold opinions when you doggedly ignored everyone else. Only in exceptional cases did we visit churches. Weddings were one excuse, but only if they involved close friends or the immediate family. And with funerals, the same restrictions applied. Plus my parents had to actually like the deceased. Which meant that a peculiar family living down the block, and even the boy who was briefly my best friend, were not worthy of suits and nice dresses and a visit to anyone’s house of worship.

  I wanted to attend the service. “We can sit in back, like we did at my cousin’s wedding,” I promised. “And we don’t even have to pretend to pray, or talk in tongues, or anything.”

  But my folks shared a different opinion.

  “Do you know wh
y she did what she did?” my father asked. “Donnie’s mother . . . do you know what she wrote in her suicide note . . . ?”

  “God,” Mom snapped. “She wrote that God wanted her and her children to come live in Heaven. That’s why she killed everybody.”

  Dad said, “The woman was profoundly depressed.”

  “There’s nothing profound about any of this,” Mom told us.

  “Well, I won’t go inside their stupid, stupid church,” my sister piped in. She was sixteen and relentlessly opinionated, assuring everyone at the dinner table, “I hate everything about that idiot religion of theirs. The paternalistic tone, and all that mind-control crap . . . I don’t want anything to do with those crazy people . . .”

  “You’re talking about my friend,” I mentioned.

  Mom noticed the discomfort on my face. “I’m sorry, Craig. This is an awful situation, and Donnie was just unlucky. Nothing was his fault. He just had the misfortune of being born to a couple exceptionally crazy parents.”

  I used to think my folks were crazy. But in the midst of negotiations, I knew better than mention that possibility.

  “Do you know what his dad’s doing now?” my sister asked.

  I’d heard that Donnie’s father returned to town on the next flight, but I hadn’t seen him yet.

  “He’s living inside that awful house,” she reported. “Can you believe it? With all those ghosts running around?”

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Father corrected her.

  “You know what I mean.” Then she shook her head scornfully, adding, “I read it in the paper. He says everything that happened was God’s will. Everything everywhere is God’s will. He’s a creature of faith, and he can’t question God’s design, and since he knows that his family is in a better place . . .”

  “Underground,” Mom blurted. “In boxes.”

  “He can sleep, and he can pray, and he feels God’s good hand.”

  On her mellowest day, my sister was a passionate creature. Eight years my senior, we were never confused for being close. Yet there was something about that moment – listening to her words, feeling her barely restrained rage – that makes the rest of her life even more memorable, ominous and ironic.

  Two years later, during her freshman year at college, my atheistic sister converted to a West Coast cult. Our parents promised themselves it was a rebellious stage – her blatant, clumsy attempt to hurt them in the worst possible way. For years and years, they maintained that dogged faith of theirs. My sister contacted them only when she needed money, and they always gave her some lesser amount. That’s how they convinced themselves they were strong, solid people. And just to be safe, they kept one bedroom waiting for my sister, since someday, sure as the sun comes and goes, she was going to realize her mistake and break free of that evil, money-grubbing sect.

  Our parents died before I turned forty, within weeks of each other.

  My middle-aged sister was still avoiding the funerals, it seemed. But shortly after the final scattering of ashes, she called me. She needed an infusion of cash. There were vague living expenses and ill-defined debts, and when that particular hymn didn’t work, she claimed that she was seriously ill and desperate for an unmentionable operation.

  My response was a godly silence, and after a few blistering curses, she hung up. After several more failed solicitations, the calls ceased.

  As far as I know, my sister still wears the odd robes of her contrived faith, living as part of a thriving commune tucked into the backmost portion of Wyoming. Though perhaps I’m the fool here and the mother ship finally arrived, the Believers now streaking happily towards the holy temple orbiting Alpha Centauri.

  My own journey into space was spellbinding – as close to transcendence as this old atheist will ever achieve, I kept telling myself – and the moon proved to be a wonderland, spectacularly dead and gorgeously drab. Within the hour, my hosts took me out to see their mysterious structure. Katherine drove the buggy with me sitting beside her, Pentagon suits plus three of the mission’s top scientists filling the seats behind us. The others were speaking with familiar, slightly bored voices. Our destination was a low lump of some exceptionally smooth material that happened to wear the same general grayness as the surrounding moonscape. Most of the object was subsurface – a spherical body a little less than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a child’s toy ball buried and forgotten on a very dry beach. It was by no means an impressive sight, but what amazed me was the array of tools and weapons that had been left scattered across the scene. I saw broken drills and burnt-out lasers, at least two plasma guns, plus abandoned railguns and their shattered projectiles, and rocket casings, and an assortment of bomb-making supplies. There was even somebody’s broken ball peen hammer lying on the sterile dust. Judging by the boot prints and wheel marks, every person who lived at the base had taken his or her crack at the target, and everybody eventually gave up, standing aside while others wasted their inventiveness and all that useless muscle trying to crack a shell that refused to break.

  Katherine parked beside the slick gray body, and with a nod, she signaled the team’s leader to come forward.

  Dr Nathan Peck was half my age – a tall gawky and unhandsome polymath. On his worst day, he was relentlessly brilliant. I soon learned enough about the man to feel sure that I’d never met anyone with half his intellectual gifts. He was a world-class physicist with a strong grounding in both information technologies and biology, and he knew enough mathematics to teach it to professors in the Ivy League. And make no mistake about it, Peck saw no need to bring a simple nuts-and-bolts engineer into his playground. He told me as much. Kneeling beside me, he began by shaking my hand and remarking, “Of course you aren’t my idea. I really don’t see how you could even hope to help us.”

  “Maybe I’ll surprise you,” I offered.

  His response was a rolling of the eyes and a hard stare at our shared conundrum.

  I asked him for details, but it was Katherine who supplied answers. She recited the object’s dimensions and total volume, plus some very broad estimates of its mass and density. Meteorites had left no mark in its surface. Human beings had pumped fabulous amounts of energy onto its face, oftentimes in the same few square centimeters; yet the only credible result was a slight increase in the body’s overall temperature.

  “The entire structure warms up?” I asked.

  “It’s highly conductive to heat, we think.” She risked a glance in Peck’s direction. “Isn’t that what you told me, Doctor?”

  “Something like that.” The young man nodded, and with a grudging tone added, “Maybe you’ve got ideas about this thing’s composition. A fresh perspective would be helpful. Unless it isn’t, of course.”

  Usually it takes me an entire day to dislike somebody. But Peck wasn’t a creature who wasted time.

  I asked obvious questions.

  “We can’t analyse what we can’t sample,” he responded.

  “We haven’t even gotten a taste?”

  He shook his head.

  Lasers and plasma beams should have kicked loose individual atoms. I brought this up, and with a palatable frustration, Peck said, “Don’t you think we’d have thought of that?”

  “Sorry,” I said with a distinctly unsorry tone. Then aiming for humor, I asked, “So what do you call it? The Sentinel?”

  It was an old joke apparently. “That would be a poor official name,” Katherine warned. “Since it contains what might be useful information.”

  Standard military thinking.

  “Castle Rock,” said the resident general. “That’s its official designation, at least for moment. And we’re actively leaking misinformation, keeping people thinking about weapons tests and that sort of bullshit.”

  Everybody was pressed against the windows, watching an object that refused to notice our existence.

  “What about the surrounding ground?” I asked nobody in particular. “Does the land tell us anything about the object’s ag
e? Or give clues about who could have placed it here?”

  “We’ve used every available tool,” Katherine promised. “Nothing about the regolith is unusual. Or the bedrock beneath it, for that matter. There is no credible trace of excavations or disruptions of any significant kind.”

  “We’re still doing a full survey of the deepest rock,” Peck added. “Half a dozen angled shafts are being dug, as manpower and machinery allow. And we’re naturally studying the sphere’s surface – ”

  “In case you find a doorway,” I interjected.

  Peck had a grating way of lifting one side of his mouth, snarling at the world. But his voice was soft and hopeful when he admitted, “That would be nice. Or if not a doorway, at least some kind of guidepost.”

  Another fifteen minutes were spent retracing the project’s brief, frustrating history. Then we drove back to the buried base. I have gone for rides on nuclear submarines, and they offer their crews more spacious quarters than we enjoyed in that camp. I was escorted to a tiny cabin that I’d share with three military boys, each of whom fortunately worked staggered twenty-hour shifts. For the moment, I was alone. So I took the chance to lie down. Drifting toward sleep, my head began playing with the information that I’d been fed. There were little moments when it seemed as if intuition was working. Some creative portion of me was feeling confident that I’d soon figure this problem out. Fate or my own relentless talent would decipher the perfect solution, I kept telling myself, and of course as a consequence I would earn a hero’s pleasures.

  Then I was asleep, dreaming about nothing important.

  A hand shook me awake, and my first thought was that one of my bunkmates was home. But as I sat up, a woman’s voice said my name. I heard, “Craig,” wrapped inside an important tone. And then Katherine knelt closer, happily telling me, “You brought us luck, Craig. We just found our doorway. It’s not large, but it’s not that difficult to reach, either. And from what we can tell, it leads all the way inside.”