Read The Best of Bova: Volume 1 Online
Authors: Ben Bova
The Best of Bova: Volume 1 (47 page)
He looked away, out to the too-close horizon and the uncompromising stars beyond. Then he remembered the rest of it:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Like an automaton, Kinsman turned back to the jumper. His mind was blank now. Without thought, without even feeling, he rigged a line from the jumper’s tiny winch to the metal lugs in the canister-suit’s chest. Then he took apart the platform railing and wedged three rejoined sections into the fissure above the fallen man, to form a hoisting angle. Looping the line over the projecting arm, he started the winch.
He climbed down into the fissure and set himself as solidly as he could on the bare, scoured-smooth rock. He grabbed the priest’s armored shoulders, and guided the oversized canister up from the crevice, while the winch strained silently.
The railing arm gave way when the priest was only partway up, and Kinsman felt the full weight of the monstrous suit crush down on him. He sank to his knees, gritting his teeth to keep from crying out.
Then the winch took up the slack. Grunting, fumbling, pushing, he scrabbled up the rocky slope with his arms wrapped halfway round the big canister’s middle. He let the winch drag them to the jumper’s edge, then reached out and shut the motor.
With only a hard breath’s pause, Kinsman snapped down the suit’s supporting legs, so the priest could stay upright even though unconscious. Then he clambered onto the platform and took the oxygen line from the rocket tankage. Kneeling at the bulbous suit’s shoulders, he plugged the line into its emergency air tank.
The older man coughed once. That was all.
Kinsman leaned back on his heels. His faceplate was fogging over again, or was it fatigue blurring his sight?
The regenerator was hopelessly smashed, he saw.
The old bird must’ve been breathing his own juices.
When the emergency tank registered full, he disconnected the oxygen line and plugged it into a special fitting below the regenerator.
“If you’re dead, this is probably going to kill me, too,” Kinsman said. He purged the entire suit, forcing the contaminating fumes out and replacing them with the oxygen that the jumper’s rocket needed to get them back to the base.
He was close enough now to see through the canister’s tinted visor. The priest’s face was grizzled, eyes closed. Its usual smile was gone; the mouth hung open limply.
Kinsman hauled him up onto the railess platform and strapped him down on the deck. Then he went to the controls and inched the throttle forward just enough to give them the barest minimum of lift.
The jumper almost made it to the crest before its rocket died and bumped them gently on one of the terraces. There was a small emergency tank of oxygen that could have carried them a little farther, Kinsman knew. But he and the priest would need it for breathing.
“Wonder how many Jesuits have been carried home on their shields?” he asked himself as he unbolted the section of decking that the priest was lying on. By threading the winch line through the bolt holes, he made a sort of sled, which he carefully lowered to the ground. Then he took down the emergency oxygen tank and strapped it to the deck section, too.
Kinsman wrapped the line around his fists and leaned against the burden. Even in the moon’s light gravity, it was like trying to haul a truck.
“Down to less than one horsepower,” he grunted, straining forward.
For once he was glad that the scoured rocks had been smoothed clean by micrometeors. He would climb a few steps, wedge himself as firmly as he could, and drag the sled up to him. It took a painful half-hour to reach the ringwall crest.
He could see the base again, tiny and remote as a dream. “All downhill from here,” he mumbled.
He thought he heard a groan.
“That’s it,” he said, pushing the sled over the crest, down the gentle outward slope. “That’s it. Stay with it. Don’t you die on me. Don’t put me through this for nothing!”
“Kinsman!” Bok’s voice. “Are you all right?”
The sled skidded against a yard-high rock. Scrambling after it, Kinsman answered, “I’m bringing him in. Just shut up and leave us alone. I think he’s alive. Now stop wasting my breath.”
Pull it free. Push to get it started downhill again. Strain to hold it back . . . don’t let it get away from you. Haul it out of craterlets. Watch your step, don’t fall.
“Too damned much uphill in this downhill.”
Once he sprawled flat and knocked his helmet against the edge of the improvised sled. He must have blacked out for a moment. Weakly, he dragged himself up to the oxygen tank and refilled his suit’s supply. Then he checked the priest’s suit and topped off his tank.
“Can’t do that again,” he said to the silent priest. “Don’t know if we’ll make it. Maybe we can. If neither one of us has sprung a leak. Maybe . . . maybe . . .”
Time slid away from him. The past and future dissolved into an endless now, a forever of pain and struggle, with the heat of his toil welling up in Kinsman drenchingly.
“Why don’t you say something?” Kinsman panted at the priest. “You can’t die. Understand me? You can’t die! I’ve got to explain it to you. I didn’t mean to kill her. I didn’t even know she was a girl. You can’t tell, can’t even see a face until you’re too close. She must’ve been just as scared as I was. She tried to kill me. I was inspecting their satellite . . . how’d I know their cosmonaut was a scared kid. I could’ve pushed her off,
didn’t have to kill her. But the first thing I knew I was ripping her air lines open. I didn’t know she was a girl, not until it was too late. It doesn’t make any difference, but I didn’t know it, I didn’t know . . .”
They reached the foot of the ringwall and Kinsman dropped to his knees. “Couple more miles now . . . straightaway . . . only a couple more . . . miles.” His vision was blurred, and something in his head was buzzing angrily.
Staggering to his feet, he lifted the line over his shoulder and slogged ahead. He could just make out the lighted tip of the base’s radio mast.
“Leave him, Chet,” Bok’s voice pleaded from somewhere. “You can’t make it unless you leave him!”
“Shut . . . up.”
One step after another. Don’t think, don’t count. Blank your mind. Be a mindless plow horse. Plod along, one step at a time. Steer for the radio mast . . . Just a few . . . more miles.
“Don’t die on me. Don’t you . . . die on me. You’re my ticket back. Don’t die on me, priest . . . don’t die . . .
It all went dark. First in spots, then totally. Kinsman caught a glimpse of the barren landscape tilting weirdly, then the grave stars slid across his view, then darkness.
“I tried,” he heard himself say in a far, far distant voice. “I tried.” For a moment or two he felt himself falling, dropping effortlessly into blackness. Then even that sensation died and he felt nothing at all.
A faint vibration buzzed at him. The darkness started to shift, turn gray at the edges. Kinsman opened his eyes and saw the low, curved ceiling of the underground base. The noise was the electrical machinery that lit and warmed and brought good air to the tight little shelter.
“You okay?” Bok leaned over him. His chubby face was frowning worriedly.
Kinsman weakly nodded.
“Father Lemoyne’s going to pull through,” Bok said, stepping out of the cramped space between the two bunks. The priest was awake but unmoving, his eyes staring blankly upward. His canister suit had been removed and one arm was covered with a plastic cast.
Bok explained. “I’ve been getting instructions from the Earthside medics. They’re sending a team up; should be here in another thirty hours. He’s in shock, and his arm’s broken. Otherwise he seems pretty good . . . exhausted, but no permanent damage.”
Kinsman pushed himself up to a sitting position on the bunk and leaned his back against the curving metal wall. His helmet and boots were off, but he was still wearing the rest of his pressure suit.
“You went out and got us,” he realized.
Bok nodded. “You were only about a mile away. I could hear you on the radio. Then you stopped talking. I had to go out.”
“You saved my life.”
“And you saved the priest’s.”
Kinsman stopped a moment, remembering. “I did a lot of raving out there, didn’t I?”
Bok wormed his shoulders uncomfortably.
“Any of it intelligible?”
“Sort of. It’s, uh . . . it’s all on the automatic recorder, you know. All conversations. Nothing I can do about that.”
That’s it. Now everybody knows.
“You haven’t heard the best of it, though,” Bok said. He went to the shelf at the end of the priest’s bunk and took a little plastic container. “Look at this.”
Kinsman took the container. Inside was a tiny fragment of ice, half melted into water.
“It was stuck in the cleats of his boots. It’s really water! Tests out okay, and I even snuck a taste of it. It’s water all right.”
“He found it after all,” Kinsman said. “He’ll get into the history books now.”
And he’ll have
to
watch his pride even more.
Bok sat on the shelter’s only chair. “Chet, about what you were saying out there . . .”
Kinsman expected tension, but instead he felt only numb. “I know. They’ll hear the tapes Earthside.”
“There’ve been rumors about an Air Force guy killing a cosmonaut during a military mission, but I never thought . . . I mean . . .”
“The priest figured it out,” Kinsman said. “Or at least he guessed it.”
“It must’ve been rough on you,” Bok said.
“Not as rough as what happened to her.”
“What’ll they do about you?”
Kinsman shrugged. “I don’t know. It might get out to the news media. Probably I’ll be grounded. Unstable. It could be nasty.”
“I’m . . . sorry.” Bok’s voice trailed off helplessly.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Surprised, Kinsman realized that he meant it. He sat straight upright. “It doesn’t matter anymore. They can do whatever they want to. I can handle it. Even if they ground me and throw me to the media . . . I think I can take it. I did it, and it’s over with, and I can take what I have to take.”
Father Lemoyne’s free arm moved slightly. “It’s all right,” he whispered hoarsely. “It’s all right. I thought we were in hell, but it was only purgatory.”
The priest turned his face toward Kinsman. His gaze moved from the astronaut’s eyes to the plastic container, still in Kinsman’s hands. “It’s all right,” he repeated, smiling. Then he closed his eyes and his face relaxed into sleep. But the smile remained, strangely gentle in that bearded, haggard face; ready to meet the world or eternity.
A SLIGHT MISCALCULATION
It is not often that a writer has the pleasure of seeing one of his short stories dramatized. “
A Slight Miscalculation”
was so honored by the Penn State Readers’ Theater as one of the highlights of Paracon VI, the 1983 convention of the Penn State science fiction fans. It was great fun to see the characters of the story come to life, and even though most of the audience already knew the story, the final punch line achieved the desired gasp of surprise and laughter.
This story originated over a bowl of Mulligatawny soup in an Indian restaurant in mid-town Manhattan. Judy-Lynn Benjamin (she had not yet married Lester Del Rey), was then the managing editor of
Galaxy
magazine. She and I threw a few ideas back and forth and came up with “the ultimate California earthquake story.” Unfortunately, the top editor at
Galaxy,
whose tenure was brief but not brief enough, failed to see the humor in the piece and asked me what scientific foundation I had for the story’s premise. I sent the manuscript to Ed Ferman at
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
He bought it with no questions asked, proving that he has not only a delicately-tuned sense of humor but a high standard of literary values, as well. Or so it seems to me.
* * *
Nathan French
was a pure mathematician. He worked for a research laboratory perched on a California hill that overlooked the Pacific surf, but his office had no windows. When his laboratory earned its income by doing research on nuclear bombs, Nathan doodled out equations for placing men on the moon with a minimum expenditure of rocket fuel. When his lab landed a fat contract for developing a lunar flight profile, Nathan began worrying about air pollution.
Nathan didn’t look much like a mathematician. He was tall and gangly, liked to play handball, spoke with a slight lisp when he got excited and had a face that definitely reminded you of a horse. Which helped him to remain pure in things other than mathematics. The only possible clue to his work was that, lately, he had started to squint a lot. But he didn’t look the slightest bit nervous or highstrung, and he still often smiled his great big toothy, horsey smile.
When the lab landed its first contract (from the State of California), to study air pollution, Nathan’s pure thoughts turned—naturally—elsewhere.
“I think it might be possible to work out a method of predicting earthquakes,” Nathan told the laboratory chief, kindly old Dr. Moneygrinder.
Moneygrinder peered at Nathan over his half-lensed bifocals. “Okay, Nathan my boy,” he said heartily. “Go ahead and try it. You know I’m always interested in furthering man’s understanding of his universe.”
When Nathan left the chief’s sumptuous office, Moneygrinder hauled his paunchy little body out of its plush desk chair and went to the window.
His
office had windows on two walls: one set overlooked the beautiful Pacific; the other looked down on the parking lot, so the chief could check on who got to work at what time.
And behind that parking lot, which was half-filled with aging cars (business had been deteriorating for several years), back among the eucalyptus trees and paint-freshened grass, was a remarkably straight little ridge of ground, no more than four feet high. It ran like an elongated step behind the whole length of the Laboratory and out past the abandoned pink stucco church on the crest of the hill. A little ridge of grass-covered earth that was called the San Andreas Fault.
Moneygrinder often stared at the Fault from his window, rehearsing in his mind exactly what to do when the ground started to tremble. He wasn’t afraid, merely careful. Once a tremor had hit in the middle of a staff meeting. Moneygrinder was out the window, across the parking lot, and on the far side of the Fault (the eastern, or “safe” side) before men half his age had gotten out of their chairs. The staff talked for months about the astonishing agility of the fat little waddler.
A year, almost to the day, later the parking lot was slightly fuller and a few of the cars were new. The pollution business was starting to pick up, since the disastrous smog in San Clemente. And the laboratory had also managed to land a few quiet little Air Force contracts—for six times the amount of money it got from the pollution work.
Moneygrinder was leaning back in the plush desk chair, trying to look both interested and noncommittal at the same time, which was difficult to do, because he never could follow Nathan when the mathematician was trying to explain his work.
“Then it’s a thimple matter of transposing the progression,” Nathan was lisping, talking too fast because he was excited as he scribbled equations on the fuchsia-colored chalkboard with nerve-ripping squeaks of the yellow chalk.
“You thee?” Nathan said at last, standing beside the chalkboard. It was totally covered with his barely legible numbers and symbols. A pall of yellow chalk dust hovered about him.
“Um . . .” said Moneygrinder. “Your conclusion, then . . . ?”
“It’s perfectly clear,” Nathan said. “If you have any reasonable data base at all, you can not only predict when an earthquake will hit and where, but you can altho predict its intensity.’’
Moneygrinder’s eyes narrowed. “You’re sure?”
“I’ve gone over it with the CalTech geophysicists. They agree with the theory.”
“Hmm.” Moneygrinder tapped his desktop with his pudgy fingers. “I know this is a little outside your area of interest, Nathan, but . . . ah, can you really predict actual earthquakes? Or is this all theoretical?”
“Sure you can predict earthquakes,” Nathan said, grinning like Francis, the movie star. “Like next Thursday’s.”
“Next Thursday’s?”
“Yeth. There’s going to be a major earthquake next Thursday.”
“Where?”
“Right here. Along the Fault.”
Nathan tossed his stubby piece of chalk into the air nonchalantly, but missed the catch and it fell to the carpeted floor.
Moneygrinder, slightly paler than the chalk, asked, “A major quake, you say?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did . . . did the CalTech people make this prediction?”
“No, I did. They don’t agree. They claim I’ve got an inverted gamma factor in the fourteenth set of equations. I’ve got the computer checking it right now.”
Some of the color returned to Moneygrinder’s flabby cheeks. “Oh . . . oh, I see. Well, let me know what the computer says.”
“Sure.”
The next morning, as Moneygrinder stood behind the gauzy drapes of his office window, watching the cars pull in, his phone rang. His secretary had put in a long night, he knew, and she wasn’t in yet. Pouting, Moneygrinder went over to the desk and answered the phone himself.
It was Nathan. “The computer still agrees with the CalTech boys. But I think the programming’s slightly off. Can’t really trust computers, they’re only as good as the people who feed them, you know.”
“I see,” Moneygrinder answered. “Well, keep checking on it.”
He chuckled as he hung up. “Good old Nathan. Great at theory, but hopeless in the real world.”
Still, when his secretary finally showed up and brought him his morning coffee and pill and nibble on the ear, he said thoughtfully:
“Maybe I ought to talk with those bankers in New York, after all.’’
“But you said that you wouldn’t need their money now that business is picking up,” she purred.
He nodded, bulbously. “Yes, but still . . . arrange a meeting with them for next Thursday. I’ll leave Wednesday afternoon. Stay the weekend in New York.”
She stared at him. “But you said we’d . . .”
“Now, now . . . business comes first. You take the Friday night jet and meet me at the hotel.”
Smiling, she answered, “Yes, Cuddles.”
Matt Climber had just come back from a Pentagon lunch when Nathan’s phone call reached him.
Climber had worked for Nathan several years ago. He had started as a computer programmer, assistant to Nathan. In two years he had become a section head, and Nathan’s direct supervisor. (On paper only. Nobody bossed Nathan, he worked independently.) When it became obvious to Moneygrinder that Climber was heading his way, the lab chief helped his young assistant to a government job in Washington. Good experience for an up-and-coming executive.
“Hiya Nathan, how’s the pencil-pushing game?” Climber shouted into the phone as he glanced at his calendar-appointment pad. There were three interagency conferences and two staff meetings going this afternoon.
“Hold it now, slow down,” Climber said, sounding friendly but looking grim. “You know people can’t understand you when you talk too fast.”
Thirty minutes later, Climber was leaning back in his chair, feet on the desk, tie loosened, shirt collar open, and the first two meetings on his afternoon’s list crossed off.
“Now let me get this straight, Nathan,” he said into the phone. “You’re predicting a major quake along the San Andreas Fault next Thursday afternoon at two-thirty Pacific Standard Time. But the CalTech people and your own computer don’t agree with you.”
Another ten minutes later, Climber said, “Okay, okay sure, I remember how we’d screw up the programming once in a while. But you made mistakes too. Okay, look—tell you what, Nathan. Keep checking. If you find out definitely that the computer’s wrong and you’re right, call me right away. I’ll get the President himself, if we have to. Okay? Fine. Keep in touch.”
He slammed the phone back onto its cradle and his feet on the floor, all in one weary motion.
Old Nathan’s really gone ‘round the bend,
Climber told himself.
Next Thursday, Hah! Next Thursday. Hmmm.
He leafed through the calendar pages. Sure enough, he had a meeting with the Boeing people in Seattle next Thursday.
If there
is a
major ‘quake, the whole damned West Coast might slide into the Pacific. Naw
. . .
don’t be silly. Nathan’s cracking up, that’s all. Still
. . .
how far north does the Fault go?
He leaned across the desk and tapped the intercom button.
“Yes, Mr. Climber?” came his secretary’s voice.
“That conference with Boeing on the hypersonic ramjet transport next Thursday,” Climber began, then hesitated a moment. But, with absolute finality, he snapped, “Cancel it.’’
Nathan French was not a drinking man, but by Tuesday of the following week he went straight from the laboratory to a friendly little bar that hung from a rocky ledge over the surging ocean.
It was a strangely quiet Tuesday afternoon, so Nathan had the undivided attention of both the worried-looking bartender and the freshly-painted whore, who worked the early shift in a low-cut, black cocktail dress and overpowering perfume.
“Cheez, 1 never seen business so lousy as yesterday and today,” the bartender mumbled. He was sort of fidgeting around behind the bar, with nothing to do. The only dirty glass in the place was Nathan’s, and he was holding on to it because he liked to chew the ice cubes.
“Yeah,” said the hooker. “At this rate, I’ll be a virgin again by the end of the week.”
Nathan didn’t reply. His mouth was full of ice cubes, which he crunched in absent-minded cacophony. He was still trying to figure out why he and the computer didn’t agree about the fourteenth set of equations. Everything else checked out perfectly: time, place, force level on the Richter scale. But the vector, the directional value—somebody was still misreading his programming instructions. That was the only possible answer.
“The stock market’s dropped through the floor,” the bartender said darkly. “My broker says Boeing’s gonna lay off half their people. That ramjet transport they was gonna build is getting scratched. And the lab up the hill is getting bought out by some East Coast banks.” He shook his head.
The prostitute, sitting beside Nathan with her elbows on the bar and her Styrofoam bra sharply profiled, smiled at him and said, “Hey, how about it, big guy? Just so I don’t forget how to, huh?”
With a final crunch on the last ice cube, Nathan said, “Uh, excuse me. I’ve got to check that computer program.”
By Thursday morning, Nathan was truly upset. Not only was the computer still insisting that he was wrong about equation fourteen, but none of the programmers had shown up for work. Obviously, one of them—maybe all of them— had sabotaged his program. But why?
He stalked up and down the hallways of the lab searching for a programmer, somebody, anybody—but the lab was virtually empty. Only a handful of people had come in, and after an hour or so of wide-eyed whispering among themselves in the cafeteria over coffee, they started to sidle out to the parking lot and get into their cars and drive away.
Nathan happened to be walking down a corridor when one of the research physicists—a new man, from a department Nathan never dealt with—bumped into him.
“Oh, excuse me,” the physicist said hastily, and started to head for the door down at the end of the hall.
“Wait a minute,” Nathan said, grabbing him by the arm. “Can you program the computer?”
“Uh, no, I can’t.”
“Where is everybody today?” Nathan wondered aloud, still holding the man’s arm. “Is it a national holiday?”
“Man, haven’t you heard?” the physicist asked, goggle-eyed. “There’s going to be an earthquake this afternoon. The whole damned state of California is going to slide into the sea!”
“Oh, that.”
Pulling his arm free, the physicist scuttled down the hall. As he got to the door he shouted over his shoulder, “Get out while you can! East of the Fault! The roads are jamming up fast!”
Nathan frowned. “There’s still an hour or so,” he said to himself. “And I still think the computer’s wrong. I wonder what the tidal effects on the Pacific Ocean would be if the whole state collapsed into the ocean?”
Nathan didn’t really notice that he was talking to himself. There was no one else to talk to.
Except the computer.
He was sitting in the computer room, still poring over the stubborn equations, when the rumbling started. At first it was barely audible, like very distant thunder. Then the room began to shake and the rumbling grew louder.
Nathan glanced at his wristwatch: two-thirty-two.
