Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (466 page)

Hmmm. I never put it quite that way before. The next question, I now see, is obvious.

So what?

A smile? Is that what my answer is? A smile?

Yeah. So what? I want to shout. Who cares if they catch me? All they can do is kill me!

Why, in god’s name, have I been making myself so miserable?

Wow.

All right, then. Chuck is a little bit overdone. Hiding as a macho motorcycle repairman is smart, sure. But Chuck doesn’t have to belch in disgust every time a snatch of classical music comes on over the radio. He doesn’t have to watch motorcross on the TV or make snide remarks every time Elise makes a pathetic little attempt at philosophizing.

Amazing I didn’t think of this before. All I have left to lose is my worthless life. Small potatoes. Maybe I really can ease up a bit. Why didn’t I think of this before?

The clouds part and suddenly there is the moon. It is beautiful, like an opal in the night. I can play subjective tricks with it, make it small, a pearl held up at arm’s length, or go zooming in with my imagination, filling the sky with craters and maria much as…much as it might look from the portal of a ship.

I can see the Lunar Appenines, trace one of the ridges all the way to a little valley that twists and turns and dives into rocky depth. I can follow that cleft to the lip of a cave, a cave where there’s buried…

Where there’s buried…

No!

I refuse! Uh-uh! No fair.

I’ve done enough this evening, now leave me alone! I’ve agreed to be more reasonable, to let myself relax a bit and enjoy what’s left of my life. But you can’t make me remember, Brad. I won’t do it!

Chuck hunches his shoulders and shoves his hands into his pockets. He shakes his head vigorously and walks toward the sound of drums and guitars, toward the door to the Yankee Dollar.

* * * *

Imagine a blockade…a quarantine.

The stars are as numerous as specks of pollen blowing across a prairie. Life blossoms everywhere, and yet the glimmer of intelligence is rare.

Imagine an ancient civilization that cherishes the openness, the emptiness. They are reflective and refined—and selfish. They do not want space filled with clamorous young neighbors.

Imagine that one day a new species emerges, bright, curious, vigorous. The Old Ones set up a blockade as they have done in the past. With a severe kindness the fact of the quarantine is kept secret from the newcomers. A merciful discretion.

But now, imagine a traitor, an Old One who disagrees with Policy…And imagine a few precocious natives…

* * * *

The set is over. A slow song plays over the FM and Elise waits at our table, moving her lips to the words of the song. I watch her as I walk along the dim bar and motion for Joey to give me a fresh beer.

Every so often, when I let her, Elise sings to me. Softly, holding my head on her lap and running her hands through my thinning hair, she croons her gentle country melodies and helps me sleep.

Right now her eyes are focused out beyond the bandstand somewhere. I suppose she’s just staring out into space, but there’s something in her expression…She does that sometimes. When she’s puttering with her plants and I’m trying to adjust a jammed sprocket, suddenly she’ll stop and look intently at nothing. At times like that I worry that she might actually be thinking.

Then she snaps out of it and makes some reassuringly benign remark about a stupid woman who wanted to buy azaleas out of season.

She is nervous, though she’s calmed down considerably lately. I don’t know where the nervousness comes from and I’ve avoided thinking about it. There was a time when I could have tried…but Chuck doesn’t know anything about psychology. He thinks it’s bullshit.

Hell, I give her strength and stability and loving and a good deal more. It’s a fair trade.

* * * *

Gray eyes, her eyes, laughing at me over her bright silver flute, making me grin and stumble over the chords—my fingers made schoolboy clumsy by the lightness of my heart…

Gray eyes—cool ivory keys and a silvery flute…

Duet…

* * * *

As I approach the table she looks up and smiles shyly. “Did you have a nice walk?”

“Yeah, it was fine.”

There are questions in her brown eyes. No denying I did act unusual, earlier. But now I realize that I don’t have to explain anything. Give it a rest and in a few days or weeks I’ll start giving in a little to her curiosity. Chuck will explain a little. Minor stuff. No hurry.

Why not?

We talk about little things and spend a lot of time not talking at all. I check IDs and make sure nobody’s molesting anyone in the men’s room.

The Boys are back on stage playing quiet songs, as I return from one of my rounds and find Elise talking to Alan Fowler at our table.

Damn.

Alan’s a nice, friendly grad student who’s much too bright for his own good. He met Chuck at a dirt-bike race and sort of adopted him and Elise. Chuck insults him all the time, calling him a useless egghead, but he never seems to get the hint.

I come up behind Elise. She is very animated.

“… not sure I understand what they hope to accomplish, Alan. You mean you could actually mine asteroids efficiently enough to make a profit selling refined metals back to Earth?”

“That’s what the figures show, Lise.” Alan winks at me but Elise doesn’t notice.

“You mean even after transportation costs are taken into account? Can you amortize costs over a reasonable period?”

Chuck frowns. What is this? He doesn’t like hearing words like these from Elise. Who does she think she’s fooling?

Alan grins. “Easily, Lise. Less than a decade, I’d guess. Of course, in the beginning it’ll be water for propellants we’ll be after. But later? Well, imagine twenty years’ worldwide platinum production coming from just one small asteroid! Why, we could easily go back to the days of the sixties and seventies when there was so much of a surplus that liberal ideas could flower …”

I can’t help snorting in disgust. Chuck votes redneck.

* * * *

The secret Ark Project was responsible for over half of the mysterious inflation that hit the nation in the late seventies…Big endeavors, pipelines, bombers, space shuttles, went through design change after design change, all attributed to poor planning.

And yet the engineers involved were the very same who had brought the Apollo Program in ahead of schedule and under budget.

How could such incompetence appear out of nowhere? Bungled, rebuilt nuclear power plants, reworked and retooled factories, new equipment wasted and tossed away.

Nobody bothered to check what happened to the original parts…the “flawed” equipment that had to be replaced…no one knew but a few in the highest places that the leftovers were taken to a cavern in Tennessee. Pieces of experimental windmills and redesigned submarines, prototype bombers and cancelled shuttles, the bits all cleverly fitted together into…into great globes…into beauty and eventually…

Sure, Alan, look to space for salvation from economic woes.

The Project was responsible for most of the mysterious inflation that hit in the late seventies…A great nation’s wealth, thrown in secret down a rat hole.

Dream on…

* * * *

Elise notices me and her words stumble to a stop. But she recovers quickly. She grabs my arm as I sit down beside her.

“Why didn’t you tell me Alan got accepted!” She tries to sound accusing but is too excited to make it stick.

I shrug. The kid had only told me about his “good luck” this morning. Chuck had offered perfunctory congratulations but had better things to do than spend all day gushing over the young idiot’s long-range suicide plan.

“Aw, come on, Lise.” Alan grins. “It’s only a preliminary acceptance. They’re going to put me through a wringer like boot camp and final exams put together. Probably the only result will be three months lost from my research, and a permanent empathy with my experimental rats!”

“Don’t be silly!” Elise glances at me quickly and gives in to her natural instinct to touch his sleeve in encouragement. “You’ll make it all the way. Just think how proud we’ll all be to say we knew you when!”

Alan laughs. “I’ll tell you what would help. What I really need is some coaching from the Zen master here.”

He jerks his thumb in my direction.

Elise takes a fraction of a second to check the expression on my face. To me it feels stony, numb. I’m irked by this need of hers to constantly worry about my reaction, even if she’s been doing it less lately.

I’ve never abused her. So Chuck growls! So what! She can do or say anything she wants, for crissake!

She laughs a bit nervously. “My bear, a Zen master? What do you mean, Alan?”

Alan grins. “I mean that one of the reasons I hang around this big grump is because he’s the closest thing to a real guru I’ve ever met.” Alan looks at Elise. “Have you ever watched him while he’s fixing bike?”

“Are you kidding? He has a Harley torn apart in the living room. I’ve tried and tried—“

“No. I mean really watched him! Closely! He touches every piece and meditates on it before he does anything at all to it. No part is in its place out of tempo. I used to ask him to describe what he feels when he’s in that state, but he’d just get mad and tell me to go away. Finally, I realized that the yelling was a sermon! It’s suchness he’s concentrating on. Or Tao or Wu or whatever you want to name it, only naming isn’t where it’s at, either.”

I shake my head, muttering, “Crock of shit.” And I mean it, too. Chuck and I are in total agreement.

Alan just laughs. “I once read a book about a meditation system just like the one Chuck uses. It was pretty popular about a decade or so back. Only I never believed it until I met Chuck. I don’t suppose he ever read the book. He just does it.”

Alan sighs. “And that’s what I have to learn, to pass those tests in Houston. If I could move with grace and concentration like he does when he’s fixing bikes, I’d be a shoo-in. I tell you, Chuck should be the one trying for astronaut!”

* * * *

And that will be quite enough! Elise’s smile fades as I growl.

“What a load of bull, Alan. I’m no…Zan master, if that’s what you call it, and I sure have better things to do than get fried in one of those money-wasting, man-killing bombs they keep setting off down at Vandenberg! If you want to be popped up like a piece of toast you just go right ahead, but don’t “enthuse” all over me, okay?”

The damned kid just keeps grinning.

“There! There it is again! That expression on his face. It’s the same one he had this morning when I stopped by to tell him I might get a crew slot on the space station.”

Alan’s expression turns inward a bit, puzzled and not afraid at all to show it.

“It’s as if he knew something I didn’t,” he murmurs. “As if he though all that was somehow child’s play.”

If Alan were sitting just a little closer, I know I’d strangle him. If a bright young idiot like Alan Fowler can see through Chuck…what about Them?

My face is made of sleet-swept granite. I don’t move, but let the world turn beneath me.

Child’s play. Indeed.

* * * *

Imagine a year of rumors…of strange lights in the sky…

The supermarket magazines carry a spate of UFO headlines. Several famous psychics report getting severe headaches along with alternating feelings of claustrophobia and exaltation.

An amateur astronomer reports another of those mysterious “ventings” on the moon…

Imagine flashes in the sky…

* * * *

The mental processes are slow. I feel tired and cranky. It’s been a long night and only at intervals have I had relief from this ridiculous internal monologue…describing everything I think or feel to an unseen audience. It’s an audience I’d rather show my backside, but that’s physiologically impossible.

It’s just past one. I help Joey close up while over by the door Elise flirts with Dan and Jase of the band. Thank heavens the role never required that Chuck be the jealous sort. It’s good to hear her laugh. She has a nice laugh.

When I’ve finished, I say good night to Joey and meet her at the door. The fog has disappeared, leaving a starry night that’s cool and slightly damp. I sniff, picking up the faintest strange touch of musk from the street.

We walk slowly to my car, around back past the garbage cans. I let her in and like clockwork she leans over to unlock my side. The cold upholstery squeaks as I slide across the bench seat to put my arm around her. She shivers slightly, slipping down a little and looking up at me as if all the world depends upon my kissing her here and now.

Her lips are soft and they move with an infectious hunger, drawing passion out of me. My hands have a volition all their own, and she responds to every caress—matching the effect on me with the little things she does with her fingernails on my back.

Our loving has been good in the past, but never quite like this. Even with Janie it was different, but…

I jerk my head up and moan, squeezing her against me. I pray that she thinks it’s the loving.

My eyes squeeze shut to block out memory. Yet they fail even to stop simple tears.

* * * *

Imagine flashes in the sky…