Analog SFF, June 2011 (19 page)

Also by this time, anyone who was at all interested in the mystery had seen the video on the Internet, and excerpts of it were still being shown on every news outlet in the country. Along with the video, numerous experts were called in to offer their cogent comments on the true nature of the mystery missile. On one network I heard Michio Kaku, physicist and science explainer extraordinaire, expound very convincingly that, appearances to the contrary, this really was just an airplane contrail seen from such an angle that it looked like a missile launch. One fact he brought out that I personally hadn't heard from others was that the so-called missile wasn't accelerating, as freshly launched missiles are prone to do. But then later that day I heard on another network from a general whose opinions I had come to trust over the years from his analyses of assorted military issues. He said he'd seen hundreds of missile launches, was absolutely sure this was a missile, and pointed to a “kink” in the contrail and said it was the obvious telltale of a course correction.

There was also much discussion about the missile amongst my fellow SIGMAns. (Learn about SIGMA at /www.sigmaforum.org/.) I, having grown up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, never having seen a missile or rocket launch not framed by the sides of a TV screen, stayed in my cyber-corner with my cyber-mouth shut and just listened. Some of those folks have spent their lives in and around aerospace, military and civilian, and seen lots of missile and rocket launches. All of them are accomplished, none of them are stupid, and all of them understand both logical and critical thinking. Yet even this esteemed group of deep, creative thinkers failed to arrive at a consensus about what the missile was. Some were absolutely certain it was a missile, basing this on their real life experiences with real missiles launched from where they could see them. Others with the same experience were just as convinced that it must be an airplane contrail. A few thought it was likely a secret test that the military (for assorted reasons) didn't want to admit to.

But other experiences also played a part in the analyses. A writer living in the Los Angeles area pointed out that apparently none of the millions of potential eyewitnesses reported seeing anything strange. Catalina Island is populated and no one reported seeing a nearby missile launch. It was rush hour in L.A., yet nobody on the highways saw a contrail enough out of the ordinary to report it. This led another writer to chime in that his experience with L.A. rush hour traffic was such that looking at the sky was precluded. But my experience with that traffic is that it often isn't actually moving, during which time looking around is exactly what I did.

Such point and counter-pointing could go on forever. Who do you trust when the people you are used to trusting disagree with each other?

Is there a fair witness in the house?

I assume most
Analog
readers know what a fair witness is, but if you don't, Heinlein described a fair witness in
Stranger in a Strange Land
. Heinlein had his character Jubal Harshaw ask his secretary (and fair witness) Anne, “That new house on the far hilltop—can you see what color they've painted it?” To which she replied, “It's white on this side.” Most people would look at that house and say it was a white house, even though the basis for that assertion exists in their own minds and not necessarily in reality. But a fair witness is trained to
not
infer from the observation, but to report reliably exactly what she observed.

Returning to the mystery missile, the real problem in identifying it was not a lack of people with great experience observing missile launches, but that none of them had actually observed a missile launch. What they observed was a video of a contrail, still in the process of being created, purported to be a missile launch. Relevant questions about lighting conditions, where the sun was, the angle of the camera, the specs of the specific camera used, and so on, were not asked nor answered prior to the headline being written and the video shown. Most of the on-air experts proceeded on the assumption that the video and the words surrounding it faithfully presented the reality they would have encountered had they been there in person to witness the event.

And that is an assumption as yet invalidated.

Personally, I was rather quickly won over to the airplane contrail explanation. Some airplane contrails do look like a missile made them, and you can find lots of nice contrail images at contrailscience.com/, and even a discussion about the mystery missile. Kaku's pointing out that the supposed rocket wasn't accelerating, and the dearth of eyewitness accounts, cinched that explanation for me.

The old adage is right; when you hear of something alarming or controversial, you must always “consider the source.” But frequently, you must also consider the source's sources.

Copyright © 2011 Jeffrey D. Kooistra

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David Levine has been toastmaster of the Nebulas and spent two weeks on Mars. He's also won a Hugo, been nominated for a Nebula, and won the Endeavor Award for best Pacific Northwest science fiction book of 2008. Not to mention a smorgasbord of other honors.

Okay, so the Mars visit was in a simulated Mars station in the Utah desert. But the others are real.

If someone was ever born to write science fiction, it has to be Levine. “My father was an avid science fiction reader,” he says, “and the stories he told me growing up turned out to be the plots of Hal Clement's
Mission of Gravity
and
A Fall of Moondust
by Arthur C. Clarke."

As the son of a physicist turned computer professor, Levine was also exposed early to science and computers. “My father gave me calculus lessons when I was a little kid,” he says. “I didn't know it was calculus, but I recognized it when I was in college."

In college, he initially majored in theater then switched to architecture—though he also took a science-fiction writing class where Algis Budrys was a guest lecturer. Graduating during a recession, however, he found few opportunities in architecture, so he took a job as a technical writer. For the first fifteen years, he wrote computer documentation, not fiction. “Writing fiction was too much like my day job,” he says.

Then in 2000 his employer offered a seven-week sabbatical . . . which he took at the Clarion West writing workshop. A year later, he sold his first story. Since then, he's averaged about four a year.

"The thing that makes an
Analog
story,” he says, “is that somewhere buried in it is an equation. It doesn't necessarily appear on the page, but there is that sense that, as with nature itself, deep down underneath are equations that explain how it works. The universe is logical and comprehensible, and the fact of that is an important part of the story."

Computers—and efforts to portray realistic computer security and hacking—often play a role in his fiction ("You can't break into an alien computer in minutes, like Jeff Goldblum did in the movie
Independence Day
,” he says.) But to date, architecture hasn't figured directly.

Still, that early interest might not be completely dormant. “The idea of building an environment for other people to live in was always something I wanted to do,” he says. Which, when you think about it, sounds a lot like science-fictional worldbuilding.

As for the Mars station? “It was like an
Analog/Astounding
story from the 1950s,” he says. “The commander was an Air Force guy. The astronomer was a college football player. The biologist was our smoldering Latin lover. The nurse was the only girl. And the journalist [myself] was the newbie who had to explain everything to the audience [by blogging]."

The experience fueled this month's story “Citizen-Astronaut.” “One of the most important things I learned is that in space, everything is improvised,” he says. “You are thrust back on your own resources and required to improvise because things are always breaking and unexpected situations always coming up."

Copyright © 2011 Richard A. Lovett

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The most important part of a spacecraft—and the hardest to control—is the crew.

There was only one person on Earth who knew what really happened on that mission to Mercury. So shrouded in mystery was it, that I didn't even know there
was
a mission. It had happened a few years before I was born, and I didn't learn about it until a few years back when my wife and I bought our first home. We'd moved into a picturesque small town in upstate New York, where a real postman still delivered the mail and where our next-door neighbor turned out to be none other than Simon Hollander, sole surviving member of the crew that once walked on the surface of that innermost planet.

I got to know Simon pretty well after we moved in. For years, he and I would spend Sunday evenings on his back porch, drinking beer and gabbing about small-town gossip. He was a neighborly fellow, more than twice my age and probably twice my weight. He ran a local handyman business and was nothing like the image you'd expect of someone who'd bounded across the plains of the Caloris basin. I'd found out about that through the town rumor mill not long after I'd moved in, but I quickly got the sense that it wasn't something Simon wanted to talk about and so I never brought it up and neither did he.

Not, at least, until one memorable Sunday evening a few months back.

It was on that evening, sitting on Simon's rickety back porch and sipping bottles of Old Specked Hen that Simon told me he was dying.

"Cancer,” he said finishing off his bottle and jettisoning it like a spent rocket into the plastic bin to one side of the porch. It clanked softly against its empty siblings, each one a mission of exploration and discovery.

"Jesus Christ, Simon,” I said, “when did you find out?"

"Monday."

"And it's that bad? They can't do anything?"

Simon opened another bottle between the splintered railings. “They'd like to, but their treatment will only slow things down, it won't prevent the inevitable."

"Jesus,” I said again, sipping my beer. It tasted bitter. “How long—?"

"Six months with the treatments, one month without."

"When do the treatments start?"

"They don't,” he said, looking at the trees that lined the edge of his property. “I'm not going through that for an extra five months.” He polished off the beer and discarded the bottle. “I've made my peace with it, and I don't want to spend whatever time I've got left in some anonymous hospital bed being poked and prodded by overeager interns. I've been through that shit once before."

He was referring to his training prior to the Mercury landing, a subject he usually avoided.

"So what are you going to do?"

"When the time comes, I'll take care of things myself. Got that Springfield over the fireplace that never gets used. You can't go wrong with a rifle like that, now, can you?"

I started at Simon, speechless. In that moment, he reminded me of my grandfather, strong, certain, and stubborn. Considering our age difference, I was surprised I'd never made that connection before. Granddad fought valiantly against the Alzheimer's, but in the end the disease consumed him, and like a star spiraling into a black hole, all his strength and certainty, all his mulish pride, everything that made him who he was was ripped apart and sucked away until all that remained was a dark, empty husk. There had been no Springfield above granddad's mantle, and even if he'd had one, he'd have forgotten how to use it.

"Of course, I'll need someone to look after Nelson and Jeanette,” Simon said, referring to the pair of greyhounds he'd raised from pups. “Think you could do that for me, Rick?"

"Certainly,” I said. What else could I say? It's not like I could have begged off in order to check with Anna. And besides, I'd admired the old man's courage in the face of this unfortunate situation.

"There's one other thing I'd like to ask of you, if you don't mind my imposing,” he said, “but for this you will require another beer.” And like magic he produced one for me, cold and fresh.

"It's about Mercury,” he said.

After the rumor mill turned me onto the Mercury debacle, I tried to learn as much about it as I could. I made use of the library at the small university where Anna worked as a professor, and despite having the best resources at hand, there wasn't very much to learn.

The mission took place a few years before I was born. It was listed as a science expedition carrying a crew of four into orbit around Mercury, where they would then land on the surface to explore, set up some equipment, and return with samples. But somewhere along the way something went wrong. The ship successfully put into orbit, the crew descended to the surface of the planet and even walked around down there. But then they left abruptly. Only three crew members returned to Earth. And in perhaps the most bizarre twist of all, the surviving crew would not talk about what happened. Each one of them resigned from the program, refusing to speak of the mission, refusing to speak even to one another.