Lights in the Deep (11 page)

I smiled at her. Genuinely, and with great enthusiasm.

“So,” I said, rubbing hands eagerly together, “you’re going up with us on the shuttle.”

“Only if you approve, I am told.”

“I think I might be convinced to allow it, but under one condition.”

“And that is?”

“Dinner. Just the two of us. Tonight.”

“What about your wife?”

“Cheney will be thrilled to find out what’s happened to you. I told her all about you when I got back the first time.”

“A partner in silence, she is?”

“Yes. But she’ll want to know everything. And so will I.”

“It is a
date
, Amerikanyetz. If so, you must tell me all about walking on the moon.”

“It was gray and it was flat.”

She slugged me so hard in the chest I coughed and spilled my coffee.

“Sorry,” I said, laughing. “I’ll tell you all about it. I promise.”

▼ ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼

Stan Schmidt told me this was a very good story. He also said he wasn’t going to buy it. Why? Because
Analog
didn’t do a lot of alternate history, and when
Analog
did do alternate history, it had to be extraordinarily alternate. Which Gemini 17 isn’t. Or at least, I don’t think it is. I didn’t change much about the 1960s, save for one important thing: I kept John F. Kennedy alive. Once I did that, I extrapolated a raft of potential results. Such as a second Cold War front in Cuba, to match that in Vietnam. Which would of course tax the resources of the United States such that the big Saturn V boosters might have seemed like an unnecessary “pie in the sky” expense. But the U.S. was still desperate to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon.

What might have happened?

I am an enormous fan of the movie
The Right Stuff.

I pictured a sequel to
The Right Stuff
, with President Kennedy alive, and all of my speculations coming into play.

How would NASA have tackled the challenge of going to moon if the U.S. government did not create a budget for an Apollo program?

There are actual notes left over from that era, delineating a proposed solution using extant Project Gemini boosters and spacecraft—with a few modifications.

Once I got a look at those, my imagination was off and running.

Also: how topical could I be, given the timeframe?

We came close to having some black American astronauts during the Apollo era. What if one lonely black pilot were promoted into a vacant slot in one of the early Astronaut Groups? And what if at the same time he were desperately trying to prove himself to NASA and to America as a whole, an entirely different, equally desperate cosmonaut—female, Jewish—were trying to do the same thing in Russia?

The huge Soviet N1 booster never put a capsule into Earth orbit, much less around Earth’s moon. But what if the squabbling and competitiveness between the Soviet Bureaus hadn’t crippled the N1-L3 program? And what if the Soviets had managed to come within striking distance of Earth’s moon, using their own version of the Apollo program?

These are the kind of irresistible domino questions that demanded answering in my mind. So I wrote the story—to satisfy my curiosity.

And though Stan Schmidt couldn’t use it, I did send the story to the Jim Baen Memorial Contest, wherein it placed 2
nd
for its year, and eventually won a spot in a Baen books anthology compiling many Jim Baen Memorial Contest winners and runners-up.

Influences: Allan Cole & Chris Bunch

Up until age 15, almost all of the science fiction I read was related to either the
Star Wars
or
Star Trek
franchises. The
Sten
novels by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch were the first non-
Wars
, non-
Trek
books I picked up from the sci-fi section at my local bookstore. I bought them precisely because I’d previously read Bunch and Cole’s Pulitzer-nominated Vietnam war novel,
A Reckoning For Kings.
Being a fan of technothrillers and military fiction in general—hat tip to Tom Clancy—I was curious to see what might happen if the sardonically-humored characters and delightfully rich settings of a Bunch and Cole war story like
Reckoning
were adapted to a
Star Trek
-like future history setting.

I was not disappointed.

Sten
is the eponymous saga of a boy at war with his fate: a factory slave, destined to live a short, brutal life in the belly of a planet created specifically for hellish forms of industry. There are eight books in all, detailing how that factory slave beat the odds, went out into the wider galaxy, grew to manhood, had many adventures, and reluctantly attained much glory and greatness—a hero with cement shoes, in the words of Sten’s creators.

You can therefore blame Bunch and Cole for my unconscious tendency to write about ordinary men and women—even boys and girls—who find themselves capable of doing extraordinary things under often terrible and difficult circumstances.

I also think that a lot of the literary flavor—specific word choices and style of word usage—in the
Sten
series, and also in
A Reckoning For Kings
, seeps around the edges in my own stories. At an almost unconscious level. Which makes sense. When you read and re-read and greatly enjoy over a million words of prose from the same pair of authors, it’s practically inevitable that they’re going to rub off on you; assuming you too are a writer.

It was only natural that Allan Cole became the first bona fide professional I sought advice from, when I was barely into my twenties and tinkering with my first original stories. I still have yellowed printouts of our e-mail conversations, almost two decades after they occurred. Allan may not know this, but when I was at my worst—down in the dumps, rejected, and barely producing any new prose at all—I would pull out those e-mails and re-read them. As a reminder to myself that a real pro still believed in me.

I was particularly proud, then, to inform Allan of my first professional fiction sale. It’d taken me a lot longer than I’d expected, but I was thankful to be able to point to that story—my winning entry in the 26
th
annual L. Ron Hubbard presents Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contest—and announce that Allan hadn’t helped me in vain. His investment in time and shared wisdom had at last paid off.

I’ve kept Allan abreast of almost every publishing success I’ve had since.

To make sure he knows it’s
still
paying off.

Something I’d have cheerfully done with Chris Bunch, too, had he not died in 2005.

The suspected culprit was exposure to and complications resulting from Agent Orange: the infamous deforestation chemical rained on the jungles of Vietnam, back when Chris Bunch had been a Ranger patrolling those jungles. It was Bunch’s experience—in the Army—which infused much of his work with an undeniable air of military authenticity. Something I found strong and compelling as a teen, but which later grew to screaming volume when I myself entered the service.

Chris won’t ever read these words, but I’d like to write them anyway.

Hey Bunch, you know all that stuff, about the military?

Those things you wrote?

It was all true. Every last fucking bit of it.

Thank you. For the stories. And for your service.

And thank you, Allan Cole, for taking the time to coach a hopeful young man who was rough around the edges, but had a lot of big dreams.

Now, some of those dreams are coming true.

The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project

There were four of them when they came, driving a nondescript government-white minivan. The moon was full and there wasn’t a cloud in the late August night sky, so I could see them perfectly through the slant-paned windows of the broadcast booth: two men and two women, in suits, and wearing sunglasses.

Sunglasses? At two in the morning?

I’d had visits from the FCC before, but never at this hour.

Something was very wrong.

When they knocked, I put my headphones on the mic boom and potted down the monitor. Standing, I stretched—my sixty-something bones making a series of complaining sounds—and shuffled to the trailer’s front door. Opening it, I saw one of the women directly in front of me, her hands clasped at her narrow waist.

“What??” I said. No need to be cordial. The FCC didn’t like me and I didn’t like them.

“Mister Kelly?”

“Yah.”

“Would you step outside please?”

“Look, I’m on the air. Is this about Andy? Shit, that bastard told me the lawyers took care of it. Shouldn’t you be talking to them?”

“No.”

“Station’s not automated, so I can’t leave the booth unattended, Miss…?”

“Spingath.”

“Spingath. Right. Got an ID to prove to me you’re you?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’? FCC always carries. It’s in the regs.”

“Maybe it’d be easier if I showed you.”

I waited expectantly, flicking my eyes to the other three who were arrayed in a formation at the bottom of the trailer’s steps. They hadn’t moved, nor said a word.

I looked back to Spingath’s pallid, generically Caucasian face. She reached up and took off the glasses.

It took a second or two for the horror to register in my brain.

Then I screamed.

• • •

K-Powell originally broadcast on FM at just eight hundred watts. We ran straight out of an air-conditioned double-wide set on a half-acre lot just off the shoulder of Utah Highway 276, en route to the Glen Canyon Reservoir. That trailer was also my home, with a partition running down the middle separating the studios from my personal residence. Most days the door in that partition hung wide open, the line between my private and professional lives having long since blurred. On the air people know me as Red Sands, the Voice of the Lake, but all my friends just call me Ron.

The antenna tower is still anchored into the concrete pad I poured for the trailer, and shoots six stories into the scorching desert sun. Back in the late 90s it took a PBS grant and all my early retirement to pay for the land, trailer, pad, tower, second-hand equipment, and government fees. Since K-Powell was a community station, I had to rely on whatever meager donations I could scrape off the locals, and for the first few years it was just enough dough to keep the transmitter warm and my cupboards from going bare.

Times were hard, even for an ascetic like me.

Which is why I couldn’t turn down Andy Chang when he ultimately came knocking.

An avid Powell boater, Andrew Chang was a precocious Californian from the Bay Area who had made a lot of money on stocks, being one of the prescient few who cashed out before the crash. After the crash he had been seen on and around Powell in one of his many expensive cabin cruisers or his lavish house boat—a somewhat flamboyant but still welcome lake denizen with a bulging wallet and an itch to spend.

Before Andy built the dish, he lived exclusively on the water, only occasionally pulling in to gas up, stock up, or check on his finances. While most in his class opted for more traditional haunts, Andy liked the stark natural contrasts of blue water and red desert down at the bottom of Utah. I would eventually find out he loved Powell for its night skies most of all, a view undiluted by man-made light pollution and stretching a gorgeous 360-degrees from horizon to horizon.

One summer evening, presumably while gazing at the faint sparkle-scatter of the Milky Way from the top of his houseboat, Andy had been struck by an idea. No science-lover by any means, he had simply wondered if somewhere out there, around one of those other suns, maybe some other being was resting on top of its houseboat on its lake, staring up at its night sky. What would such a creature have to say to Andy? Moreover, what might Andy have to say to it?

Perhaps the hearty Green River bud—rolled with a helping of Four Corners peyote and clipped to Andy’s ashtray—had had something to do with it. Perhaps he had merely been like a lot of American rich: possessed of great wealth yet lacking a Great Dream to go along with it. In any case, on that fateful night, an idea got itself firmly lodged in Andy’s soul, eventually launching the craziest Glen Canyon project since the Robert Stanton gold dredge.

Within a week Chang motored into Bullfrog and made some phone calls. By the following week he was entertaining the necessary contractors and technicians on his house boat, plus two professors Andy had had flown in from the University of Utah. He spent the next month finding appropriate land and haggling with the government for it, then bought a hundred-acre parcel not far from my trailer and set his contractors to work. By the end of the year the dish was complete: a concave metal circle set into a natural bowl in the sandstone, and stretching in diameter almost the length of a football field. Four three-story steel masts sat at opposite edges of the disc and suspended a square cage over the dish’s center, using steel cables. The cage was festooned with a variety of odd-looking gear, the likes of which few of us—even an old radio-hack like me—had ever seen before.

One of the marina shop owners who volunteered at K-Powell and had spent some time in Puerto Rico in the late seventies commented that Chang’s pet project looked not just a little like the famous Aricebo radio telescope, only at quarter scale. Soon afterward the term
minicebo
was coined and circulated widely around the lake.

Though Andy never officially said so, we all pretty much assumed that minicebo had one and only one purpose: to listen for signals from outer space.

None of us locals dared to wonder how much it had cost to build the thing. Nobody really cared. The extra business and money brought by the contractors kept us all happy.

And it got better. Pretty soon word got out around the rest of the Western United States. By the next summer almost as many people were coming to see minicebo as were coming for the lake itself, and we were enjoying double the regular number of tourist dollars, at least until Andy set up the barbed wire fences and threatening signs.