Short fiction complete, p.72
Short Fiction Complete, page 72
Three more ground stations and then we’re over the Indian Ocean, with world enough and time.
But he didn’t look up from the control panel; he tested each system aboard the lab, fingers flicking over control buttons, eyes focused on the red, amber and green lights that told him how the laboratory’s mechanical and electrical machinery was functioning.
“Chet?”
“Yes.”
“Are you . . . sore at me?”
Still not looking at her, “No, I’m busy. Why should I be sore at you?”
“Well, not sore maybe, but . . .”
“Puzzled?”
“Puzzled, hurt, something like that.”
He punched an entry on the computer’s keyboard at his side, then turned to face her. “Linda, I haven’t really had time to figure out what I feel. You’re a complicated girl; maybe too complicated for me. Life’s got enough twists in it.”
Her mouth drooped a little.
“On the other hand,” he added, “we WASPS ought to stick together. Not many of us left.”
That brought a faint smile. “I’m not a WASP. My real name’s Szymanski . . . I changed it when I started modeling.”
“Oh. Another complication.”
She was about to reply when the radio speaker crackled, “AF-9, this is Cheyenne. Cheyenne to AF-9.”
Kinsman leaned over and thumbed the transmitter switch. “AF-9 to ; Cheyenne. You’re coming through faint but clear.”
“Roger, Nine. We’re receiving your telemetry. All systems look green from here.”
“Manual check of systems also green,” Kinsman said. “Mission profile ; okay, no deviations. Tasks about ninety percent complete.”
“Roger. Ground control suggests you begin checking out your spacecraft on the next orbit. You are scheduled for reentry in ten hours.”
“Right. Will do.”
“Okay, Chet. Everything looks good from here. Anything else to report, ol’ Founding Father?”
“Mind your own business.” He turned the transmitter off.
Linda was smiling at him.
“What’s so funny?”
“You are. You’re getting very touchy about this whole business.”
“It’s going to stay touchy for a long time to come. Those guys’ll hound me for years about this.”
“You could always tell lies.”
“About you? No, I don’t think I could do that. If the girl was anonymous, that’s one thing. But they all know you, know where you work . . .”
“You’re a gallant officer. I suppose that kind of rumor would get back to New York.”
Kinsman grinned. “You could even make the front page of the National Enquirer.”
She laughed at that. “I’ll bet they’d pull out some of my old bikini pictures.”
“Careful now,” Kinsman put up a warning hand. “Don’t stir up my imagination any more than it already is. I’m having a hard enough time being gallant right now.”
They remained apart, silent, Kinsman sitting at the control desk, Linda drifting back toward the galley, nearly touching the curtain that screened off the sleeping area.
The ground control center called in and Kinsman gave a terse report. When he looked up at Linda again, she was sitting in front of the observation port across the aisle from the galley. Looking back at Kinsman, her face was troubled now, her eyes . . . he wasn’t sure what was in her eyes. They looked different: no longer ice-cool, no longer calculating; they looked aware, concerned, almost frightened.
Still Kinsman stayed silent. He checked and double-checked the control board, making absolutely certain that every valve and transistor aboard the lab was working perfectly. Glancing at his watch: Five more minutes before Ascension calls. He checked the lighted board again.
Ascension called in exactly on schedule. Feeling his innards tightening, Kinsman gave his standard report in a deliberately calm and mechanical way. Ascension signed off.
With a long last look at the controls, Kinsman pushed himself out of the seat and drifted, hands faintly touching the grips along the aisle, toward Linda.
“You’ve been awfully quiet,” he said, standing over her.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said a while ago.” What was it in her eyes? Anticipation? Fear? “It . . . it has been a damned lonely life, Chet.”
He took her arm and lifted her gently from the chair and kissed her.
“But . . .”
“It’s all right,” he whispered. “No one will bother us. No one will know.”
She shook her head. “It’s not that easy, Chet. It’s not that simple.”
“Why not? We’re here together . . . what’s so complicated?”
“But—doesn’t anything bother you? You’re floating around in a dream. You’re surrounded by war machines, you’re living every minute with danger. If a pump fails or a meteor hits . . .”
“You think it’s any safer down there?”
“But life is complex, Chet. And love . . . well, there’s more to it than just having fun.”
“Sure there is. But it’s meant to be enjoyed, too. What’s wrong with taking an opportunity when you have it? What’s so damned complicated or important? We’re above the cares and worries of Earth. Maybe it’s only for a few hours, but it’s here and now, it’s us. They can’t touch us, they can’t force us to do anything or stop us from doing what we want to. We’re on our own. Understand? Completely on our own.”
She nodded, her eyes still wide with the look of a frightened animal. But her hands slid around him, and together they drifted back toward the control desk. Wordlessly, Kinsman turned off all the overhead lights, so that all they saw was the glow of the control board and the flickering of the Computer as it murmured to itself.
They were in their own world now, their private cosmos, floating freely and softly in the darkness. Touching, drifting, coupling, searching the new seas and continents, they explored their world.
Jill stayed in the hammock until Linda entered the bunkroom, quietly, to see if she had awakened yet. Kinsman sat at the control desk feeling, not tired, but strangely numb.
The rest of the flight was strictly routine. Jill and Kinsman did their jobs, spoke to each other when they had to. Linda took a brief nap, then returned to snap a few last pictures. Finally they crawled back into the spacecraft, disengaged from the laboratory, and started the long curving flight back to Earth.
Kinsman took a last look at the majestic beauty of the planet, serene and incomparable among the stars, before touching the button that slid the heat shield over his viewport. Then they felt the surge of rocket thrust, dipped into the atmosphere, knew that air heated beyond endurance surrounded them in a fiery grip and made their tiny craft into a flaming, falling star. Pressed into his seat by the acceleration, Kinsman let the automatic controls bring them through reentry, through the heat and buffeting turbulence, down to an altitude where their finned craft could fly like a rocketplane.
He took control and steered the craft back toward Patrick Air Force Base, back to the world of men, of weather, of cities, of hierarchies and official regulations. He did this alone, silently; he didn’t need Jill’s help or anyone else’s. He flew the craft from inside his buttoned-tight pressure suit, frowning at the panel displays through his helmet’s faceplate.
Automatically, he checked with ground control and received permission to slide the heat shield back. The viewport showed him a stretch of darkening clouds spreading from the sea across the beach and well inland. His earphones were alive with other men’s voices now: wind conditions, altitude checks, speed estimates. He knew, but could not see that two jet planes were trailing along behind him, cameras focused on the returning spacecraft. To provide evidence if I crash.
They dipped into the clouds and a wave of gray mist hurtled up and covered the viewport. Kinsman’s eyes flicked to the radar screen slightly off to his right. The craft shuddered briefly, then they broke below the clouds and he could see the long black gouge of the runway looming before him. He pulled back slightly on the controls, hands and feet working instinctively, flashed over some scrubby vegetation, and flared the craft onto the runway. The landing skids touched once, bounced them up momentarily, then touched again with a grinding shriek. They skidded for more than a mile before stopping.
He leaned back in the seat and felt his body oozing sweat.
“Good landing,” Jill said.
“Thanks.” He turned off all the craft’s systems, hands moving automatically in response to long training. Then he slid his faceplate up, reached overhead and popped the hatch open.
“End of the line,” he said tiredly. “Everybody out.”
He clambered up through the hatch, feeling his own weight with a sullen resentment, then helped Linda and finally Jill out of the spacecraft. They hopped down onto the blacktop runway. Two vans, an ambulance, and two fire trucks were rolling toward them from their parking stations at the end of the runway, a half-mile ahead.
Kinsman slowly took his helmet off. The Florida heat and humidity annoyed him now. Jill walked a few paces away from him, toward the approaching trucks.
He stepped toward Linda. Her helmet was off, and she was carrying a bag full of film.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said to her. “That business about having a lonely life . . . You know, you’re not the only one. And it doesn’t have to be that way. I can get to New York whenever . . .”
“Now who’s taking things seriously?” Her face looked calm again, cool, despite the glaring heat.
“But I mean . . .”
“Listen Chet. We had our kicks. Now you can tell your friends about it, and I can tell mine. We’ll both get a lot of mileage out of it. It’ll help our careers.”
“I never intended to . . . I didn’t . . .”
But she was already turning away from him, walking toward the men who were running up to meet them from the trucks. One of them, a civilian, had a camera in his hands. He dropped to one knee and took a picture of Linda holding the film out and smiling broadly.
Kinsman stood there with his mouth open.
Jill came back to him. “Well? Did you get what you were after?”
“No,” he said slowly. “I guess I didn’t.”
She started to put her hand out to him. “We never do, do we?”
Afterword:
Chet Kinsman has been with me for a long time. This is the third story about him to be published. In terms of Kinsman’s own life history, this is the earliest story, the first part of his awakening to the real world. Or the first step in his fall from grace.
Kinsman was the star of a Great Unpublished Novel, written in 1950–51, which predicted the US vs. USSR space race with amazing accuracy. At least, I’ve been amazed. Unluckily, though, in those early fifties there; was a Senator McCarthy running loose. Not Gene. Publishers were distinctly unhappy about a book wherein the Russians got ahead of us in space. Obvious trash. And unhealthy. So that early version of Kinsman had to wait for the Russians to make his story believable. (In all honesty, the writing in that novel was pretty damned bad. Maybe it wasn’t all Holy Joe’s fault.)
The Mile High Club, incidentally, is no fiction. It was described to me by a man very much like Cy Calder. The windburn and fogged goggles, however, are reasonable extrapolations of the story as I originally heard it, and I offer them as an example of the hallmark of science fiction: accurate technical detail that lends credibility and pathos to the characters and their problems.
1973
The Secret Life of Henry K.
This late at night, even the busiest corridors of the Pentagon were deserted. Dr. Young’s footsteps echoed hollowly as he followed the mountainous, tight lipped, grim-faced man. Another equally large and steely-eyed man followed behind him, in lockstep with the first.
They were agents, Dr. Young knew that without being told. Their clothing bulged with muscles trained in murderous Oriental arts, other bulges in unlikely places along their anatomy were various pieces of equipment: guns, two-way radios, stilettos, Bowie knives... Young decided his imagination wasn’t rich enough to picture all the equipment these men might be carrying.
After what seemed like an hour’s walk down a constantly curving corridor, the agent in front stopped abruptly before an inconspicuous, unmarked door.
“In here,” he said, barely moving his lips.
The door opened by itself, and Dr. Young stepped into what seemed to be an ordinary receptionist’s office. It was no bigger than a cubicle, and even in the dim lighting—from a single desk lamp, the overhead lights were off—Young could see that the walls were the same sallow depressing color as most Pentagon offices.
“The phone will ring,” the agent said, glancing at a watch that looked absolutely dainty on his massive hairy wrist, “In exactly one minute and fifteen seconds. Sit at the desk. Answer when it rings.”
With that, he shut the door firmly, leaving Dr. Young alone and bewildered in the tiny anteroom.
There was only one desk, cleared of papers. It was a standard government-issue battered metal desk. IN and OUT boxes stood empty atop it. Nothing else on it but a single black telephone. There were two creaky-looking Straight-backed metal chairs in front of the desk, and a typist’s swivel chair behind it. The only other things in the room were a pair of file cabinets, side by side, with huge padlocks and red SECURE signs on them, and a bulletin board that had been miraculously cleared of everything except the little faded fire-emergency instruction card.
Dr. Young found that his hands were trembling. He wished that he hadn’t given up cigarettes: after all, oral eroticism isn’t all that bad. He glanced at the closed hallway door and knew that both the burly agents were standing outside, probably with their arms folded across their chest in unconscious imitation of the eunuchs who guarded sultans’ harems.
He took a deep breath and went around the desk and sat on the typist’s chair.
The phone rang as soon as his butt touched the chair.
He jumped, but grabbed the phone and settled himself before it could ring again.
“Dr. Carlton Young speaking.” His voice sounded an octave too high, and quavery, even to himself.
“Dr. Young, I thank you for accompanying the agents who brought you there without questioning their purpose. They were instructed to tell you who sent them, and nothing else.”
He recognized the voice at once. “You—you’re welcome, Mr. President.”
“Please! No names! This is a matter of utmost security.”
“Ye—yessir.”
“Dr. Young, you have been recommended very highly for the special task I must ask of you. I know that, as a loyal, patriotic American, you will do your best to accomplish this task. And as the most competent man in your highly demanding and complex field, your efforts will be crowned with success. That’s the American way, now isn’t it?”
“Yessir. May I ask, just what is the task?”
“I’m glad you asked that. I have a personnel problem that you are uniquely qualified to solve. One of my closest and most valued aides—a man I depend on very heavily—has gone into a tailspin. I won’t explain why or how. I must ask you merely to accept the bald statement. This aide is a man of great drive and talent, high moral purpose, and enormous energy. But at the moment, he’s useless to himself, to this Administration, and to the Nation. I need you to help him find himself.”
“Me? But all I do is—”
“You run the best computer dating service in the nation, I know. Your service has been checked out thoroughly by the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Defense Intelligence Agency—”
“Not the CIA?”
“I don’t know, they won’t tell me.”
“Oh.”
“This aide of mine—a very sincere and highly motivated man—needs a girl. Not just any girl. The psychiatrists at Walter Reed tell me that he must find the woman who’s perfect for him, his exact match, the one mate that can make him happy enough to get back to the important work he should be doing. As you know, I have a plan for stopping inflation, bridging the generation gap, and settling the Cold War. But to make everything perfectly clear, Dr. Young, none of these plans can be crowned with success unless this certain aide can do his part of the job, carry his share of the burden, pull his share of the load.”
Dr. Young nodded in the darkness. “I understand, sir. He needs a woman to make him happy. So many people do.” A fleeting thought of the bins upon bins of punchcards that made up his files passed through Dr. Young’s mind. “Even you, sir, even you need a woman.”
“Dr. Young! I’m a married man!”
“I know—that’s what I meant. You couldn’t be doing the terrific job you’re doing without your lovely wife, your lifetime mate, to support and inspire and you.”
“Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, of course. Well, Dr. Young, my aide is in the office there with you, in the inner office. I want you to talk with him, help him, find him the woman he truly needs. Then we can end the war in Indochina, stop inflation, bridge—well, you know.”
“Yes sir. I’ll do my best.”
“That will be adequate for the task, I’m sure. Good night, and God bless America!”
Dr. Young found that he was on his feet, standing at ramrod attention, a position he hadn’t assumed since his last Boy Scout jamboree.
Carefully he replaced the phone in its cradle, then turned to face the door that led to the inner office. Who could be in there? The Vice President? No, Young told himself with a shake of his head; that didn’t fit the description the President had given him.
Squaring his shoulders once again, Dr. Young took the three steps that carried him to the door and knocked on it sharply.
“Come in,” said an equally sharp voice.
The office was kept as dark and shadowy as the anteroom, but Dr. Young recognized the man sitting rather tensely behind the desk.
“Dr. Kiss—!”
