Fourth Planet from the Sun, page 13
“Suppose,” Quail said, “once my authentic memories have been canceled, something more vital than standard memories are implanted. Something which would act to satisfy my craving,” he said. “That’s been proved; that’s probably why you initially hired me. But you ought to be able to come up with something else—
something equal. I was the richest man on Terra, but I finally gave all my money to educational foundations. Or I was a famous deepspace explorer. Anything of that sort; wouldn’t one of those do?”
Silence.
“Try it,” he said desperately. “Get some of your top-notch military psychiatrists; explore my mind. Find out what my most expansive daydream is.” He tried to think. “Women,” he said. “Thousands of them, like Don Juan had. An interplanetary playboy—a mistress in every city on Earth, Luna and Mars. Only I gave that up, out of exhaustion. Please,” he begged. “Try it.”
“You’d voluntarily surrender, then?” the voice inside his head asked. “If we agreed to arrange such a solution? If it’s possible?”
After an interval of hesitation, he said, “Yes.” I’ll take the risk, he said to himself. That you don’t simply kill me.
“You make the first move,” the voice said presently. “Turn yourself over to us. And we’ll investigate that line of possibility. If we can’t do it, however, if your authentic memories begin to crop up again as they’ve done at this time, then—” There was silence, and then the voice finished, “We’ll have to destroy you. As you must understand. Well, Quail, you still want to try?”
“Yes,” he said. Because the alternative was death now—and for certain. At least this way he had a chance, slim as it was.
“You present yourself at our main barracks in New York,” the voice of the Interplan cop resumed. “At 580 Fifth Avenue, floor twelve. Once you’ve surrendered yourself, we’ll have our psychiatrists begin on you; we’ll have personality-profile tests made. We’ll attempt to determine your absolute, ultimate fantasy wish—and then we’ll bring you back to Rekal, Incorporated, here; get them in on it, fulfilling that wish in vicarious surrogate retrospection. And—good luck. We do owe you something; you acted as a capable instrument for us.” The voice lacked malice: if anything, they—the organization—felt sympathy towards him.
“Thanks,” Quail said. And began searching for a robot cab.
“Mr. Quail,” the stern-faced, elderly Interplan psychiatrist said, “you possess a most interesting wish-fulfilment dream fantasy. Probably nothing such as you consciously entertain or suppose. This is commonly the way; I hope it won’t upset you too much to hear about it.”
The senior ranking Interplan officer present said briskly, “He better not be too much upset to hear about it, not if he expects not to get shot.”
“Unlike the fantasy of wanting to be an Interplan undercover agent,” the psychiatrist continued, “which, being relatively speaking a product of maturity, had a certain plausibility to it, this production is a grotesque dream of your childhood; it is no wonder you fail to recall it. Your fantasy is this: You are nine years old, walking alone down a rustic lane. An unfamiliar variety of space vessel from another star system lands directly in front of you. No one on Earth but you, Mr. Quail, sees it. The creatures within are very small and helpless, somewhat on the order of field mice, although they are attempting to invade Earth; tens of thousands of other such ships will soon be on their way, when this advance party gives the go-ahead signal.”
“And I suppose I stop them,” Quail said, experiencing a mixture of amusement and disgust. “Single-handed I wipe them out. Probably by stepping on them with my foot.”
“No,” the psychiatrist said patiently. “You halt the invasion, but not by destroying them. Instead, you show them kindness and mercy, even though by telepathy—their mode of communication—you know why they have come. They have never seen such humane traits exhibited by any sentient organism, and to show their appreciation they make a covenant with you.”
Quail said, “They won’t invade Earth as long as I’m alive.”
“Exactly.” To the Interplan officer the psychiatrist said, “You can see it does fit his personality, despite his feigned scorn.”
“So by merely existing,” Quail said, feeling a growing pleasure, “by simply being alive, I keep Earth safe from alien rule. I’m in effect, then, the most important person on Terra. Without lifting a finger.”
“Yes indeed, sir,” the psychiatrist said. “And this is bedrock in your psyche; this is a lifelong childhood fantasy. Which, without depth and drug therapy, you never would have recalled. But it has always existed in you; it went underneath, but never ceased.”
To McClane, who sat intently listening, the senior police official said, “Can you implant an extra-factual memory pattern that extreme in him?”
“We get handed every possible type of wish-fantasy there is,” McClane said. Frankly, I’ve heard a lot worse than this. Certainly we can handle it. Twenty-four hours from now he won’t just wish he’d saved Earth; he’ll devoutly believe it really happened.”
The senior police official said, “You can start the job, then. In preparation we’ve already once again erased the memory in him of his trip to Mars.”
Quail said, “What trip to Mars?”
No one answered him, so, reluctantly, he shelved the question. And anyhow a police vehicle had now put in its appearance; he, McClane and the senior police officer crowded into it, and presently they were on their way to Chicago and Rekal, Incorporated.
“You had better make no errors this time,” the police officer said to heavy-set, nervous-looking McClane.
“I can’t see what could go wrong,” McClane mumbled, perspiring. “This has nothing to do with Mars or Interplan. Singlehandedly stopping an invasion of Earth from another star-system.” He shook his head at that. “Wow, what a kid dreams up. And by pious virtue, too; not by force. It’s sort of quaint.” He dabbed at his forehead with a large linen pocket handkerchief.
Nobody said anything.
“In fact,” McClane said, “it’s touching.”
“But arrogant,” the police officer said starkly. “Inasmuch as when he dies, the invasion will resume. No wonder he doesn’t recall it; it’s the most grandiose fantasy I ever ran across.” He eyed Quail with disapproval. “And to think we put this man on our payroll.”
When they reached Rekal, Incorporated the receptionist, Shirley, met them breathlessly in the outer office. “Welcome back, Mr. Quail,” she fluttered, her melon-shaped breasts—today painted an incandescent orange—bobbing with agitation. “I’m sorry everything worked out so badly before; I’m sure this time it’ll go better.”
Still repeatedly dabbing at his shiny forehead with his neatly folded Irish linen handkerchief, McClane said, “It better.” Moving with rapidity he rounded up Lowe and Keeler, escorted them and Douglas Quail to the work area, and then, with Shirley and the senior police officer, returned to his familiar office. To wait.
“Do we have a packet made up for this, Mr. McClane?” Shirley asked, bumping against him in her agitation, then coloring modestly.
“I think we do.” He tried to recall; then gave up and consulted the formal chart. “A combination,” he decided aloud, “of packets Eighty-one, Twenty, and Six.” From the vault section of the chamber behind his desk, he fished out the appropriate packets, carried them to his desk for inspection. “From Eighty-one,” he explained, “a magic healing rod given him—the client in question, this time Mr. Quail—by the race of beings from another system. A token of their gratitude.”
“Does it work?” the police officer asked curiously.
“It did once,” McClane explained. “But he, ahem, you see, used it up years ago, healing right and left. Now it’s only a memento. But he remembers it working spectacularly.” He chuckled, then opened packet Twenty. “Document from the U.N. Secretary General thanking him for saving Earth; this isn’t precisely appropriate, because part of Quail’s fantasy is that no one knows of the invasion except himself, but for the sake of verisimilitude we’ll throw it in.” He inspected packet Six, then. What came from this? He couldn’t recall; frowning, he dug into the plastic bag as Shirley and the Interplan police officer watched intently.
“Writing,” Shirley said. “In a funny language.”
“This tells who they were,” McClane said, “and where they came from. Including a detailed star map logging their flight here and the system of origin. Of course it’s in their script, so he can’t read it. But he remembers them reading it to him in his own tongue.” He placed the three artifacts in the center of the desk. “These should be taken to Quail’s conapt,” he said to the police officer. “So that when he gets home he’ll find them And it’ll confirm his fantasy. SOP—standard operating procedure.” He chuckled apprehensively, wondering how matters were going with Lowe and Keeler.
The intercom buzzed. “Mr. McClane, I’m sorry to bother you.” It was Lowe’s voice; he froze as he recognized it, froze and became mute. “But something’s come up. Maybe it would be better if you came in here and supervised. Like before, Quail reacted to the narkidrine; he’s unconscious, relaxed and receptive. But—”
McClane sprinted for the work area.
On a hygienic bed Douglas Quail lay breathing slowly and regularly, eyes half-shut, dimly conscious of those around him.
“We started interrogating him,” Lowe said, white-faced. “To find out exactly when to place the fantasy-memory of him singlehandedly having saved Earth. And strangely enough—”
“They told me not to tell,” Douglas Quail mumbled in a dull drug-saturated voice. “That was the agreement. I wasn’t even supposed to remember. But how could I forget an event like that?”
I guess it would be hard, McClane reflected. But you did—until now.
“They even gave me a scroll,” Quail mumbled, “of gratitude. I have it hidden in my conapt; I’ll show it to you.”
To the Interplan officer who had followed after him, McClane said, “Well, I offer the suggestion that you better not kill him. If you do they’ll return.”
“They also gave me a magic invisible destroying rod,” Quail mumbled, eyes totally shut, now. “That’s how I killed that man on Mars you sent me to take out. It’s in my drawer along with the box of Martian maw-worms and dried-up plant life.”
Wordlessly, the Interplan officer turned and stalked from the work area.
I might as well put those packets of proof-artifacts away, McClane said to himself resignedly. He walked, step by step, back to his office. Including the citation from the U.N. Secretary General. After all—
The real one probably would not be long in coming.
Hellas Is Florida
Gordon Eklund and Gregory Benford
After the moon landing in 1969 (as Gardner Dozois points out in his anthology The Good New Stuffy it was no longer possible to write the same sorts of science-fiction stories as before. Planetary adventures and tales of intergalactic empires were still possible, but they had to be set farther afield . . . and in their wake grew a new set of science-fiction stories based on more accurate knowledge about our neighborhood in the cosmos. We had touched the cold vacuum of space; it was harder to pretend that vacuum brimmed with life.
One thing that happened in the 1970s is that a new generation of writers—largely influenced by veterans like Arthur C. Clarke, Ben Bova, and Poul Anderson—began to find different sorts of adventure and romance among the stars. The stories used new data from which to extrapolate, and extrapolate they did.
Gordon Eklund and Gregory Benford both started publishing regularly in the 1970s. (Dr. Benford actually started publishing in the 1960s—his third published story, “Flattop,” was also about a Mars expedition, as was bis 1999 novel The Martian Race J Mr. Eklund has gone on to write such novels as A Trace of Dreams, All Times Possible, and A Thunder on Neptune. Gregory Benford has published several dozen novels, including the classic Timescape and most recently The Sunborn. “Hellas Is Florida” is a continuation of the authors’ awardwinning novelette “If the Stars Are Gods”; these-stories were eventually combined with others to form the novel of the same name.
I
It was a fact, Major Paul Smith reasoned affirmatively, as he gazed at the cratered terrain now sweeping past, that life existed on the planet Mars.
No, not just the present landing party—Kastor, McIntyre, Reynolds, and Morgan—who were surveying the northern reaches of the basin of Hellas, but native Martian life. Up to and most definitely including a number of related varieties of complex spores. The proof was there. For two decades, a succession of robot probes, both American and Russian in origin, had relayed the evidence to a supposedly stunned Earth populace.
It resembled the assassination of a famed political or religious leader: A person never forgot his own first experience. For Smith, the moment chanced upon his final year at the academy. A physics course, the instructor, a former NASA technician, halted the class in midsession, while he scurried to huddle with three beaming colleagues. “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” announced the instructor, spinning free to face the class. (His hands actually shook; Smith envisioned them trembling now.) “I have just been informed that apparent evidence has been received at Pasadena which tends to indicate the possible presence of life on Mars.”
Fear. He recollected the sweep of emotion like a bitter taste on his tongue. Fear crawled up his spine, held taut and secure in the stiff-backed chair. We are not alone. Green men. Flying saucers. Slitherly lizardly fiends. Are they watching us? Smith grinned now (in embarrassment?), remembering the automatic assault of old clichés. In spite of the instructor’s carefully placed qualifiers, his soul had quivered fearfully.
The evening headline, with no place for apparents, tends, or possibles, had screamed bluntly:
LIFE ON MARS!
And, even though Smith by then knew that “life” as yet indicated nothing more frightening than the presence of organic matter in the Martian soil, the icy fingers clutched.
Life on Mars. For the hell of it, Smith uttered the phrase aloud into the tomblike silence of the orbiting command chamber. “Life on Mars.” Three such simple little words. Substitute most any other word for that final noun, and the result ranged between banality and silliness.
“Life on Mars,” Paul Smith said. A big crater, the circling slopes standing like the spiny ridges on a horntoad’s back, drifted past the window. Sure, there was life down there, but the old fear had long ago been eroded. Even the continuing reports from the landing party in Hellas of new and remarkable strains of life failed to stir Smith much. The human mind, he realized, possessed an awe-inspiring talent for converting in remarkable time the most fantastic truths into the most banal facts.
Speaking of time, he guessed he ought to prepare. Smith hung curled in the command chamber nook nearest the window that presently overlooked the passing Martian surface. This vehicle, the Tempest, orbited at a mean distance of some two hundred kilometers above Mars. Each successive orbit occupied slightly more than one hour. Except in cases of dire emergency, the landing party below (Nixon Base, Colonel Kastor had named them, supposedly in honor of the man who had served as president during the first manned lunar expeditions, but more likely as a stroking device aimed at soothing the present administration) transmitted every fourth pass. This, as Smith well knew, was number four.
The transmissions, dull and impersonal as Kastor normally made them, served to snap the monotony, but they also forced Smith to move. God, he hated Mars. An incredible truth, not yet banal. Paul Smith, who had given up five years of his life and journeyed through some sixty million kilometers of space only to discover that he passionately loathed the objective of all these efforts. Mars seemed to mock his own world. The mountains climbed higher—he passed the dome of Olympus Mons each orbit and now refused even to glance that way—the canyons plowed deeper, the plains swept wider. And the life—life on Mars!—mocking life. Life that may have once been spawned amid relative beauty (some scientists theorized) but which now certainly existed in infernal ugliness. That’s why he hated the damn planet—it was ugly. Through no lack of his own imagination, either—ugly, ugly, ugly! Smith remembered the view of Earth seen from space, a sight familiar to him (but never monotonous) after nearly a full year of preparatory experiments and maneuvers in the orbital lab. The Earth shook the breath right out of your chest. Green and azure blue, brown and puffy white. Not this—not red. He studied the cratered terrain. This was part of the Southern Hemisphere, and the North, more volcanically active, was less tedious. Still, he sometimes guessed that Kastor understood his real attitude, which helped explain why, in an unanticipated, unexplained change of plans, Kastor had elected to take young Reynolds down to the surface instead of the more experienced Smith, who had not disputed the decision at the time. Kastor insisted it was because they needed experience in orbit, when there was already plenty of that below in Morgan and McIntyre. Smith said nothing. Kastor pointed out that Reynolds, as astronomer, already knew more about Martian life-forms than Smith, a military officer. Smith didn’t argue. Much later, while the others slept, Smith asked young Reynolds if he’d ever read A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. When Reynolds looked blank, Smith laughed and said, “Then I guess you don’t know so damn much about Martian life as Kastor thinks.”
Paul Smith forced himself to move. Releasing the straps that bound him, he floated gently up, then kicked out. He drifted across the length of the command chamber, struck a wall softly, then slipped straight on the ricochet into the chair fronting the radio. He checked his altitude and confirmed his location in terms of the Martian surface. Hellas itself would not come into view for another ten minutes. He decided to call now. He spoke softly, but his voice boomed. “Nixon Base, this is Tempest. Nixon Base, this is Tempest. Nixon Base, this is Tempest.”
