by Ben Bova
Copyright © 2020 by Ben Bova
E-book published in 2020 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover by Kathryn Galloway English
Book design by Amy Craig
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced
or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the
publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental
and not intended by the author.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-09-400094-7
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-09-400093-0
Fiction / Science Fiction / General
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Blackstone Publishing
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Ashland, OR 97520
www.BlackstonePublishing.com
To Rashida, the light of my life
And for the little, little span
The dead are borne in mind,
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind.
—Rudyard Kipling
Foreword
A dullard once asked Dizzy Gillespie his opinion of Charlie Parker. With admirable economy, Diz said, “No him: no me.” Full disclosure: that describes my professional relationship to Ben Bova. As editor of Analog, in 1972 he bought my very first submission to any market—a miracle!—but far more important, he rejected the next thirteen stories I sent him, every time with a standard form rejection to which he’d added a single brief sentence by hand. Those thirteen sentences formed a complete course in how to write commercial fiction, and have made it possible for me to earn a living scribbling for nearly half a century.
But that doesn’t explain why I’m here recommending this book. It’s because my gratitude made me take a very close look at Ben’s own fiction—with the result that to this day, he is one of my favorite living writers in our genre. Every Ben Bova story I’ve ever read has been a trifecta: it taught me something interesting about science, and something important about us, the people science happens to, and also, something illuminating about the nature and practice of heroism. And made it look easy.
This book is a perfect example: a majority of these stories are old favorites of mine too, yarns that penetrated the fog of my own thoughts deeply enough, decades ago, that today I recognized them within a few paragraphs, and reread them with great pleasure. In another forty-odd years, I’m confident you will too.
—Spider Robinson
INTRODUCTION
I can hear you muttering, “Another anthology? Why?”
After all, I’ve written more than a hundred works of short fiction, and nearly 150 novels, anthologies, and books of nonfiction. Why another anthology?
Because the stories I write are like my children. I want them to see the light of day, to sparkle in the sunshine, to please the men and women who read them.
Is that too much to ask? I hope not.
So here are fourteen stories. From among all the short fiction I’ve written, these are my favorites.
I wish that they please you.
Ben Bova
Naples, Florida
2019
Introduction to
“Monster Slayer”
They say that there are only three (or maybe seven) basic themes to all fiction. Take your pick.
Which one is the theme of “Monster Slayer”? Darned if I know. Harry Twelvetoes’s story didn’t come to me in a flash, complete, all neatly categorized and set to be put into words. Most of the creative process for his story was buried deep in my subconscious and only came to the surface as I worked on the tale, day by day, scene by scene, sentence by sentence.
I don’t think this story can be neatly fitted into one of those academicians’s categories. I think of it as Harry’s story, uniquely the tale of an individual man trying to find his place in the world.
And succeeding—although he never realizes he has.
MONSTER SLAYER
This is the way the legend began.
He was called Harry Twelvetoes because, like all the men in his family, he was born with six toes on each foot. The white doctor who worked at the clinic on the reservation said the extra toes should be removed right away, so his parents allowed the whites to cut the toes off, even though his great-uncle Cloud Eagle pointed out that Harry’s father, and his father’s fathers as far back as anyone could remember, had gone through life perfectly well with twelve toes on their feet.
His secret tribal name, of course, was something that no white was ever told. Even in his wildest drunken sprees Harry never spoke it. The truth is, he was embarrassed by it. For the family had named him Monster Slayer, a heavy burden to lay across the shoulders of a little boy, or even the strong young man he grew up to be.
On the day that the white laws said he was old enough to take a job, his great-uncle Cloud Eagle told him to leave the reservation and seek his path in the world beyond.
“Why should I leave?” Harry asked his great-uncle.
Cloud Eagle closed his sad eyes for a moment, then said to Harry, “Look around you, nephew.”
Harry looked and saw the tribal lands as he had always seen them, brown desert dotted with mesquite and cactus, steep bluffs worn and furrowed as great-uncle’s face, turquoise-blue sky and blazing Father Sun baking the land. Yet there was no denying that the land was changing. Off in the distance stood the green fields of the new farms and the tiny dark shapes of the square houses the whites were building. And there were gray rain clouds rising over the mountains.
Refugees were pouring into the high desert. The greenhouse warming that gutted the farms of the whites with drought also brought rains that were filling the dry arroyos of the tribal lands and making flowers bloom. The desert would be gone one day, the white scientists predicted, turned green and bountiful. So the whites were moving into the reservation.
“This land has been ours since the time of First Man and First Woman,” great-uncle said. “But now the whites are swarming in. There is no stopping them. Soon there will be no place of our own left to us. Go. Find your way in the world beyond. It is your destiny.”
Reluctantly, Harry left the reservation and his family.
In the noisy, hurried world of the whites, jobs were easy to find, but good jobs were not. With so many cities flooded by the greenhouse warming, they were frantically building new housing, whole new villages and towns. Harry got a job with a construction firm in Colorado, where the government was putting up huge tracts of developments for the hordes of refugees from the drowned coastal cities. He started as a lowly laborer, but soon enough worked himself up to a pretty handy worker, a jack of all trades.
He drank most of his pay, although he always sent some of it back to his parents.
One cold, blustery morning, when Harry’s head was thundering so badly from a hangover that even the icy wind felt good to him, his supervisor called him over to her heated hut.
“You’re gonna kill yourself with this drinking, Harry,” said the supervisor, not unkindly.
Harry said nothing. He simply looked past the supervisor’s short-bobbed blondish hair to the calendar tacked to the corkboard. The picture showed San Francisco the way it looked before the floods and the rioting.
“You listening to me?” the supervisor asked, more sharply. “This morning you nearly ran the backhoe into the excavation pit, for chrissake.”
“I stopped in plenty time,” Harry mumbled.
The supervisor just shook her head and tol
d Harry to get back to work. Harry knew from the hard expression on the woman’s face that his days with this crew were numbered.
Sure enough, at the shape-up a few mornings later, the super took Harry aside and said, “Harry, you Indians have a reputation for being good at high steel work.”
Harry’s head was thundering again. He drank as much as any two men, but he had enough pride to show up on the job no matter how bad he felt. Can’t slay monsters laying in bed, he would tell himself, forcing himself to his feet and out to work. Besides, no work, no money. And no money, no beer. No whiskey. No girls who danced on your lap or stripped off their clothes to the rhythm of synthesizer music.
Harry knew that it was the Mohawks back East who were once famous for their steelwork on skyscrapers, but he said nothing to the supervisor except, “That’s what I heard too.”
“Must be in your blood, huh?” said the super, squinting at Harry from under her hard hat.
Harry nodded, even though it made his head feel as if some old medicine man was inside there thumping on a drum.
“I got a cousin who needs high steel workers,” the super told him. “Over in Greater Denver. He’s willing to train newbies. Interested?”
Harry shuffled his feet a little. It was really cold, this early in the morning.
“Well?” the super demanded. “You interested or not?”
“I guess I’m interested,” Harry said. It was better than getting fired outright.
As he left the construction site, with the name and number of the super’s cousin in his cold-numbed fist, he could hear a few of the other workers snickering.
“There goes old Twelvetoes.”
“He’ll need all twelve to hold onto those girders up in the wind.”
They started making bets on how soon Harry would kill himself.
But Harry became a very good high steel worker, scrambling along the steel girders that formed the skeletons of the new high-rise towers. He cut down on the drinking: alcohol and altitude didn’t mix. He traveled from Greater Denver to Las Vegas and all the way down to Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico had swallowed up Galveston and half of Houston.
When he’d been a little boy, his great-uncle had often told Harry that he was destined to do great things. “What great things?” Harry would ask. “You’ll see,” his great-uncle would say. “You’ll know when you find it.”
“But what is it?” Harry would insist. “What great things will I do?”
Cloud Eagle replied, “Every man has his own right path, Harry. When you find yours, your life will be in harmony, and you’ll achieve greatness.”
Before he left his childhood home to find his way in the white world, his great-uncle gave Harry a totem, a tiny black carving of a spider.
“The spider has wisdom,” he told Harry. “Listen to the wisdom of the spider whenever you have a problem.”
Harry shrugged and stuffed the little piece of obsidian into the pocket of his jeans. Then he took the bus that led out of the reservation.
As a grown, hard-fisted man, Harry hardly ever thought of those silly ideas. He didn’t have time to think about them when he was working fifty, sixty, seventy stories high with nothing between him and the ground except thin air that blew in gusts strong enough to knock a man off his feet if he wasn’t careful.
He didn’t think about his great-uncle’s prophecy when he went roaring through the bars and girlie joints over weekends. He didn’t think about anything when he got so drunk that he fell down and slept like a dead man.
But he kept the spider totem. More than once his pockets had been emptied while he slept in a drunken stupor, but no one ever took the spider from him.
And sometimes the spider did speak to him. It usually happened when he was good and drunk. In a thin, scratchy voice, the spider would say, “No more drinking tonight, Harry. You’ve had enough. Sleep all through tomorrow, be ready for work on Monday.”
Most of the time he listened to the totem’s whispers. Sometimes he didn’t, and those times almost always worked out badly. Like the time in New Houston when three Japanese engineers beat the hell out of him in the alley behind the cathouse. They didn’t rob him, though. And when Harry came to, in a mess of his own blood and vomit and garbage, the spider was wise enough to refrain from saying, “I told you not to get them angry.”
He bounced from job to job, always learning new tricks of the trades, never finding the true path that would bring him peace and harmony. The days blurred into an unending sameness: crawl out of bed, clamber along the girders of a new high-rise, wait for the end of the week. The nights were a blur, too: beer, booze, women he hardly ever saw more than once.
Now and then Harry wondered where he was going. “There’s more to life than this,” the spider whispered to him in his sleep. “Yeah, sure,” Harry whispered back. “But what? How do I find it?”
One night while Harry was working on the big Atlanta Renewal Project, the high steel crew threw a going-away party for Jesse Ali, the best welder in the gang.
“So, where’s Jesse going?” Harry asked a buddy, beer in hand.
The buddy took a swig of his own beer, then laughed. “He’s got a good job, Harry. Great job. It’s out of this world.” Then he laughed as if he’d made a joke.
“But where is it? Are they hiring?”
“Go ask him,” the buddy said.
Harry wormed his way through the gang clustered at the bar and finally made it to Jesse’s side.
“Gonna miss you, Jess,” he said. Shouted, actually, over the noise of the raucous crowd.
Ali smiled brightly. “Christ, Harry, that’s the longest sentence you ever said to me, man.”
Harry looked down at the steel-tipped toes of his brogans. He had never been much for conversation, yet his curiosity about Jesse’s new job was butting its head against his natural reticence. But the spider in his pocket whispered, “Ask him. Don’t be afraid. Ask him.”
Harry summoned up his courage. “So, where you goin’?”
Ali’s grin got wider. He pointed a long, skinny finger straight up in the air.
Harry said nothing, but the puzzlement must have shown clearly on his face.
“In space, man,” Ali explained. “They’re building a great big habitat in orbit. Miles long. It’ll take years to finish. I’ll be able to retire by the time the job’s done.”
Harry digested that information. “It’ll take that long?”
The black man laughed. “Nah. But the pay’s that good.”
“They lookin’ for people?”
With a nod, Ali said, “Yeah. You hafta go through a couple months’ training first. Half pay.”
“Okay.”
“No beer up there, Harry. No gravity, either. I don’t think you’d like it.”
“Maybe,” said Harry.
“No bars. No strip joints.”
“They got women, though, don’t they?”
“Like Yablonski,” said Ali, naming one of the crew who was tougher than any two of the guys.
Harry nodded. “I seen worse.”
Ali threw his head back and roared with laughter. Harry drifted away, had a few more beers, then walked slowly through the magnolia-scented evening back to the barracks where most of the construction crew was housed.
Before he drifted to sleep, the spider urged him, “Go apply for the job. What do you have to lose?”
It was tough, every step of the way. The woman behind the desk where Harry applied for a position with the space construction outfit clearly didn’t like him. She frowned at him and she scowled at her computer screen when his dossier came up. But she passed him on to a man who sat in a private cubicle and had pictures of his wife and kids pinned to the partitions.
“We are an equal opportunity employer,” he said, with a brittle smile on his face.
Then he
waited for Harry to say something. But Harry didn’t know what he should say, so he remained silent.
The man’s smile faded. “You’ll be living for months at a time in zero gravity, you know,” he said. “It effects your bones, your heart. You might not be fit to work again when you return to Earth.”
Harry just shrugged, thinking that these whites were trying to scare him.
They put him through a whole day of physical examinations. Then two days of tests. Not like tests in school; they were interested in his physical stamina and his knowledge of welding and construction techniques.
They hired Harry, after warning him that he had to endure two months of training at half the pay he would start making if he finished the training okay. Half pay was still a little more than Harry was making on the Atlanta Renewal Project. He signed on the dotted line.
So Harry flew to Hunstville, Alabama, in a company tilt-
rotor plane. They gave him a private room, all to himself, in a seedy-looking six-story apartment building on the edge of what had once been a big base for the space agency, before the government sold it off to private interests.
His training was intense. Like being in the army, almost, although all Harry knew about being in the army was what he’d heard from other construction workers. The deal was, they told you something once. You either got it or you flunked out. No second chances.
“Up there in orbit,” the instructors would hammer home, time and again, “there won’t be a second chance. You screw up, you’re dead. And probably a lot of other people get killed too.”
Harry began to understand why there was no beer up there. Nor was there any at the training center. He missed it, missed the comfort of a night out with the gang, missed the laughs and the eventual oblivion where nobody could bother him, and everything was dark and quiet and peaceful and even the spider kept silent.
The first time they put him in the water tank, Harry nearly freaked. It was deep, like maybe as deep as his apartment building was high. He was zipped into a white spacesuit, like a mummy with a bubble helmet on top, and there were three or four guys swimming around him in trunks and scuba gear. But to a man who grew up in the desert, this much water was scary.
