Hugo awards the short st.., p.184
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 184
The midnight shuttle was being fueled at the far end of the strip, gleaming pink-white in the last light from the setting sun. Its image twisted and danced in the shimmering heat that radiated from the tarmac. The smell of the soft tar was indelibly associated in his mind with leave-taking, relief.
He walked to the middle of the strip and checked his watch. Five minutes. He lit a cigarette and threw it away. He rechecked his mental calculations: the flight would start low in the southwest. He blocked out the sun with a raised hand. What would 150 bombs per second look like? For the media they were called fuel capsules. The people who had carefully assembled them and gently lifted them to orbit and installed them in the tanks, they called them bombs. Ten times the brightness of a full moon, they had said. On L-5 you weren't supposed to look toward it without a dark filter.
No warm-up: it suddenly appeared, an impossibly brilliant rainbow speck just over the horizon. It gleamed for several minutes, then dimmed slightly with a haze, and slipped away.
Most of the United States wouldn't see it until it came around again, some two hours later, turning night into day, competing with local pyrotechnic displays. Then every couple of hours after that, Charlie would see it once more, then get on the shuttle. And finally stop having to call it by the name of a dead politician.
September 2076
There was a quiet celebration on L-5 when Daedalus reached the mid-point of its journey, flipped, and started decelerating. The progress report from its crew characterized the journey as "uneventful." At that time they were going nearly two tenths of the speed of light. The laser beam that carried communications was redshifted from blue light down to orange; the message that turnaround had been successful took two weeks to travel from Daedalus to L-5.
They announced a slight course change. They had analyzed the polarization of light from Scylla/Charybdis as their phase angle increased, and were pretty sure the system was surrounded by flat rings of debris, like Saturn. They would "come in low" to avoid collision.
January 2077
Daedalus had been sending back recognizable pictures of the Scylla/Charybdis system for three weeks. They finally had one that was dramatic enough for groundhog consumption.
Charlie set the holo cube on his desk and pushed it around with his finger, marvelling.
"This is incredible. How did they do it?"
"It's a montage, of course." Johnny had been one of the youngest adults left behind: heart murmur, trick knees, a surfeit of astrophysicists.
"The two stars are a strobe snapshot in infrared.Sort of. Some ten or twenty thousand exposures taken as the ship orbited around the system, then sorted out and enhanced." He pointed, but it wasn't much help, since Charlie was looking at the cube from a different angle.
"The lamina of fire where the atmospheres touch, that was taken in ultraviolet. Shows more fine structure that way."
"The rings were easy. Fairly long exposures in visible light. Gives the star background, too."
A light tap on the door and an assistant stuck his head in. "Have a second, Doctor?"
"Sure."
"Somebody from a Russian May Day committee is on the phone. She wants to know whether they've changed the name of the ship to Brezhnev yet."
"Yeah. Tell her we decided on `Leon Trotsky' instead, though."
He nodded seriously. "'Okay." He started to close the door.
"Wait! Charlie rubbed his eyes. "Tell her, uh… the ship doesn't have a commemorative name while it's in orbit there. They'll rechristen it just before the start of the return trip."
"Is that true?" Johnny asked.
"I don't know. Who cares? In another couple of months they won't want it named after anybody." He and Ab had worked out a plan — admittedly rather shaky — to protect L-5 from the groundhogs' wrath: nobody on the satellite knew ahead of time that the ship was headed for 61 Cygni. It was a decision the crew arrived at on the way to Scylla Charybdis; they modified the drive system to accept matter-antimatter destruction while they were orbiting the double star. L-5 would first hear of the mutinous plan via a transmission sent as Daedalus left Scylla/Charybdis. They'd be a month on their way by the time the message got to Earth.
It was pretty transparent, but at least they had been careful that no record of Daedalus' true mission be left on L-5. Three thousand people did know the truth, though, and any competent engineer or physical scientist would suspect it.
Ab had felt that, although there was a better than even chance they would be exposed, surely the groundhogs couldn't stay angry for 23 years — even if they were unimpressed by the antimatter and other wonders…
Besides, Charlie thought, it's not their worry anymore.
As it turned out, the crew of Daedalus would have bigger things to worry about.
June 2077
The Russians had their May Day celebration — Charlie watched it on TV and winced every time they mentioned the good ship Leonid I. Brezhnev — and then things settled back down to normal. Charlie and three thousand others waited nervously for the "surprise" message. It came in early June, as expected, scrambled in a data channel. But it didn't say what it was supposed to:
"This is Abigail Bemis, to Charles Leventhal.
"Charlie, we have real trouble. The ship has been damaged, hit in the stern by a good chunk of something. It punched right through the main drive reflector. Destroyed a set of control sensors and one attitude jet.
"As far as we can tell, the situation is stable. We're maintaining acceleration at just a tiny fraction under one gee. But we can't steer, and we can't shut off the main drive.
"We didn't have any trouble with ring debris when we were orbiting since we were inside Roche's limit. Coming in, as you know, we'd managed to take advantage of natural divisions in the rings. We tried the same going back, but it was a slower, more complicated process, since we mass so goddamn much now. We must have picked up a piece from the fringe of one of the outer rings.
"If we could turn off the drive, we might have a chance at fixing it. But the work pods can't keep up with the ship, not at one gee. The radiation down there would fry the operator in seconds, anyway.
"We're working on it. If you have any ideas, let us know. It occurs to me that this puts you in the clear.We were headed back to Earth, but got clobbered. Will send a transmission to that effect on the regular comm channel. This message is strictly burn-before reading.
"End it."
It worked perfectly, as far as getting Charlie and L-5 off the hook and the drama of the situation precipitated a level of interest in space travel unheard-of since the 1960's.
They even had a hero. A volunteer had gone down in a heavily shielded work pod, lowered on a cable, to take a look at the situation. She'd sent back clear pictures of the damage, before the cable snapped.
Daedalus: A.D. 2081
Earth: A.D. 2101
The following news item was killed from Fax & Pix, because it was too hard to translate into the "plain English" that made the paper so popular:
SPACESHIP PASSES 61 CYGNI
SORT OF
(L-5 Stringer)
A message received today from the spaceship Daedalus said that it had just passed within 400 astronomical units of 61 Cygni. That's about ten times as far as the planet Pluto is from the Sun.
Actually, the spaceship passed the star some eleven years ago. It's taken all that time for the message to get back to us.
We don't know for sure where the spaceship actually is, now. If they still haven't repaired the runaway drive, they're about eleven light-years past the 61 Cygni system (their speed when they passed the double star was better than 99% the speed of light).
The situation is more complicated if you look at it from the point of view of a passenger on the spaceship. Because of relativity, time seems to pass more slowly as you approach the speed of light. So only about four years passed for them, on the eleven light year journey.
L-5 Coordinator Charles Leventhal points out that the spaceship has enough antimatter fuel to keep accelerating to the edge of the Galaxy. The crew then would be only some twenty years older—but it would be twenty thousand years before we heard from them…
(Kill this one. There's more stuff about what the ship looked like to the people on 61 Cygni, and how cum we could talk to them all the time even though time was slower there, but its all as stupid as this.)
Daedalus: A.D. 2083
Earth: A.D. 2144
Charlie Leventhal died at the age of 99, bitter. Almost a decade earlier it had been revealed that they'd planned all along for Daedalus to be a starship. Few people had paid much attention to the news. Among those who did, the consensus was that anything that got rid of a thousand scientists at once, was a good thing. Look at the mess they got us in.
Daedalus. 67 light-years out, and still accelerating.
Daedalus. A.D. 2085
Earth: A.D. 3578
After over seven years of shipboard research and development — and some 1500 light-years of travel — they managed to shut down the engine. With sophisticated telemetry, the job was done without endangering another life.
Every life was precious now. They were no longer simply explorers; almost half their fuel was gone. They were colonists, with no ticket back.
The message of their success would reach Earth in fifteen centuries. Whether there would be an infrared telescope around to detect it, that was a matter of some conjecture.
Daedalus: A.D. 2093
Earth: ca. A.D. 5000
While decelerating, they had investigated several systems in their line of flight. They found one with an Earth-type planet around a Sun-type sun, and aimed for it.
The season they began landing colonists, the dominant feature in the planet's night sky was a beautiful blooming cloud of gas that astronomers had named the North American Nebula.
Which was an irony that didn't occur to any of these colonists from L-5 — give or take a few years, it was America's Trimillennial.
America itself was a little the worse for wear, this three thousandth anniversary. The seas that lapped its shores were heavy with a crimson crust of anaerobic life; the mighty cities had fallen and their remains, nearly ground away by the never-ceasing sandstorms.
No fireworks were planned, for lack of an audience, for lack of planners; bacteria just don't care. May Day too would be ignored.
The only humans in the Solar System lived in a glass and metal tube. They tended their automatic machinery, and turned their backs on the dead Earth, and worshiped the constellation Cygnus, and had forgotten why.
.
TIME-SHARING ANGEL
James Tiptree
It's not true there are no angels; the young woman named Jolyone Schram spoke to one, with results that have astounded us all.
Whether what Jolyone talked to was actually an angel in the classic sense, we'll never know, of course; unless it returns, which seems unlikely. Certainly it was a space-borne Something of great power, a principle of the outer void, perhaps, a wandering sentience—possibly even, as some might claim, an interstellar commuter out of his usual way. Whatever it may have been, it heard Jolyone, and this is the manner of that event.
On the night it happened Jolyone was trying not to cry, while her teeth played music.
She was at her nightly job of news clipper and general gofer on the fifth floor of WPNQ's new building. Far up above her head towered WPNQ's new transmitter, which had just been erected on what had been the last wooded ridge behind L.A. The new transmitter was powered up to cut through everything near it on the L.A. bands. It was so strong that while Jolyone stapled Telex flimsies, the big filling in her right molar clearly brought in Stevie Smith.
"I was much farther out than you thought, and not waving but drowning," sang her tooth. Jolyone's eyes blinked tears and her chin trembled, but it wasn't the song doing it.
The fact is that right there in Hal Hodge's office Jolyone was passionately mourning the death of Earth, which she had just foreseen.
She was nineteen years old.
The day before she had taken off to drive up the coast and over to the piney-woods valley where she'd spent a lot of happy time as a kid. Her semiroommate had just split, semiamiably, and she needed some peace. She felt she'd been away from earth and woods too long.
It was dark before she got close, but she couldn't help noticing that there seemed to be a lot more houses than on her last trip. Finally the misty trees closed around her headlights, and the road was its bad old self. By midnight she drove over the ridge and pulled onto the verge. The mist was so thick she decided to nap till dawn and see the sunrise. All around was the peaceful smell of woods. A hoot owl called and was answered. As Jolyone drifted off to sleep, she could just hear the little brook purling through a cave she used to hide out in when she was little. She smiled, remembering.
Jolyone never saw the sun rise there.
In the first pale light she was jolted awake by the starting roar of a big diesel not a hundred yards away. It was joined by another, and another, and another—and before she was sure she wasn't in a nightmare, from the other side the high wicked yowl of chain saws burst out.
Hands on her ears, Jolyone peered out at the thinning mist. Treetops were waving and crashing. She saw a line of giant earth movers advancing past her straight across the valley. A horrifying great misty mountain of trees, rocks, earth, everything was spewing out of the monsters' blades. Behind them stretched raw gravel.
Aghast, Jolyone whirled in her seat, trying to disbelieve the devastation. From nowhere a back-hoe bucket rose up beside her, so close that she could see a small dusty body still struggling in the rocks. A kit fox, her eyes noted numbly.
With a wordless moan she threw the VW in gear and shot back over the ridge. As she went she saw she had spent the night under a huge signboard painted with a man's grinning face:
A THOUSAND MORE HAPPY HOMES BY HAPPY HARRY JOEL.
"Oh no, oh no," Jolyone wept to herself as she drove shakenly down toward the coast. The darkness had fooled her coming in, she saw. There weren't just a few more houses among the trees. From horizon to horizon the foothills were covered by houses, houses, houses everywhere, with only a thin line of dried trees by the old road. Her valley had been the last patch of woods left.
"How could they, it was so, so—" she whispered incoherently, trying to find a word for all lost defenseless beauty, for all that she had loved deeply without really knowing it, and believed would always endure.
When she finally got onto the freeway approaches, the hurt was calmer. It was a fine sunny day. As she sailed up the ramp into the southbound lanes, she noticed something else she had missed the night before. The sea up north had a funny black-looking scum edge on it An oil slick?
"It's the biggest one yet," the girl at the Burgerchef rest stop told her, nodding proprietarily. "They say it killed all those seal otters or whatever—hey, don't you want your Supercheese?"
Jolyone drove on back to her job, trying to lose herself in the long thrumming hypnosis of the freeway traffic. The sun shone whitely on her from the thickening veils of the sky; trucks, cars, vans roared beside her, ahead, behind. The grief that had shaken her calmed to the rhythm of driving on and on. But, somewhere underneath, her mind kept chewing on it.
A thousand new homes, on top of all those other thousands… Jolyone had once heard her generation described as "the baby boom's baby boom." She'd always intended, in a vague way, to have kids. But now all the bits and pieces of her standard education began to add up. The "ecology"—it wasn't something distant, somewhere else with strip mines. It was the awful devastation of her lovely valley, the broken little body in the back-hoe bucket. And that oil slick... she herself was driving a car right now. Probably she would have used some of the oil that spilled. It was being brought for people like her. For thousands, millions of people just like her.
To get away from the idea she tuned the radio to catch the end of Hal Hodge's news break. Nothing but a filler about some mountains in Nepal that had slid down because the people had used up all the trees for firewood. Then she switched to WPNQ's Pop Hour, and she thankfully let thought go with the dreamy beat Twenty-nine colors of blue…
The miles passed.
Finally she was turning into the station parking lot. Mimi Lavery was subbing for Hal on the evening news; Jolyone listened critically, hoping Mimi would pitch her voice low. Mimi ended with another filler, something about how the population was going up again and was expected to double in thirty years, and cut to a taped ad for condominiums in the Rockies.
And right then, all in the second between parking the Volks and pulling out her car keys, it happened.
Jolyone Schram knew.
It came to her as a vision of a billion-headed monstrous wave, a huge spreading flood of multiplying people, people unending, forming in their billions a great devouring mindless incubus that spread around the green ball of Earth—blotting out everything, eating everything, using everything, expanding and destroying without limit on a finite surface. Hordes of individually innocent people made frightful by their numbers bulged out into and under the oceans, tunneled underground, flowed over the mountains, surging and covering everything everywhere. Billions of heads gaped, grinned at her, billions of hands reached and grasped blindly as the torrent of bodies flooded over the world.
That was what was happening, slower or faster, all around her. And it would continue, faster and faster, to the oncoming end.
Jolyone gasped, falling back into the car seat. She was a gentle girl, unsuited to apocalyptic visions. But she had also an innocent fact-mindedness; she actually believed in numbers. All in that terrible instant she saw what the numbers meant. Doubling in thirty years—and then doubling again and again, quicker each time. It was happening. Not somewhere else in some remote lifetime, but right here and now. She was seeing it begin. With all the singleness of her nineteen-year-old mind she suddenly, totally believed.
