Analog SFF, June 2011 (20 page)

And there had been no more manned spaceflights to other worlds in all of the years since.

But that was it. No matter how much I dug, that was all of the information I could get. Conspiracy theories were rampant, of course, but I ignored those. Instead, I tried some older sources.

I called an uncle and asked him what he remembered from the year of the mission.

He laughed at me, gave me a wink, and said, “Ah, you must be talking about when the Cubbies went back-to-back on the World Series.” It's true. The same year that Simon Hollander walked on Mercury, the Cubs won their second Series in a row. It was an enormous upset and led to major changes in the algorithms for predictive baseball models.

I called a friend of my father, a lawyer specializing in post-mortem digital avatar rights. At the time of the Mercury mission, he was a prosecutor in Arlington, Virginia. “That's a long time ago,” he said, tugging at his white mustache, “but if memory serves, that was the year that some serial killer was going around knocking off the elderly and infirm. Had some kind of crazy name for him, but I don't remember what it was. Heck, I can't even recall if they caught the sonofabitch."

It was like that with everyone I spoke to. Other news events loomed large, and people only recalled the Mercury mission when I mentioned it to them, and then with only the most elliptical recollections. The only ones really willing to talk about it were the conspiracy theorists, but I avoided them. I'd read some of their ideas on what happened on the mission, and while some were interesting, there was not a shred of evidence in favor of their theories. Forty years later, only one man knew what really happened out there, and that man was my next-door neighbor.

"It was not our intention to derail the space program,” Simon said. The Sun had gone down and in the crisp air, the beer gave me chills. “In fact it was just the opposite. We were trying to protect it.

"The entire point of the mission was to test out a solar sail, but the media ignored that and focused on the fact that these brave astronauts were conquering another world in the name of God, country, and Coca-Cola. The original profile didn't even have us leaving orbit, but someone in media relations said that we'd never sell the mission unless we walked on the goddamn surface."

By now I had a pleasant buzz. Simon seemed completely unaffected, although he'd put away an entire six-pack. He sat there in the encroaching darkness, his considerable corpulence placing an audible strain on his lawn chair. If anything, he seemed calm, and that Springfield 30-06 mounted on the wall of his living room seemed about as far away as Mercury.

"Thing you've got to understand, Rick, is that it's a pain in the ass getting to Mercury. It's common knowledge among the rocket scientists that it takes more energy to escape the solar system than it does to put in orbit around that planet. You're approaching ever closer to the Sun's gravity well and fighting a losing battle. Think of it like riding a bike without any brakes down an ever-steepening hill. At the bottom of the hill you've got a wall of thermonuclear fire and a few meters before the fire is a flag pole. Your job is to ride the bike down the hill and end up pedaling a tight circle around the flag pole without zipping off into the flames.

"That's where the solar sail comes in. The Sun, she puts out a lot of solar wind. This solar wind could, in principle, carry a properly designed spacecraft out to the edge of the solar system, requiring the vessel to carry substantially less fuel. We were testing out just such a solar sail, using the solar wind to slow us down as we approached Mercury, and don't think the irony of the situation was lost on us: going so close to the Sun in order to see just how far away from the Sun we could get.

"So we unfurl our sail, gyrate through elaborate maneuvers to get us into a stable orbit, and for an encore, we drop down onto the surface and perform a goddamn
entrechat
like a bunch of circus performers.” Simon shook his head, smacking his lips as if he suddenly acquired a bad taste in his mouth. “It's got risks, but what endeavor doesn't? You get the right crew involved, people you trust, and let physics take care of the rest."

"And you had the right crew?"

He snorted gently, looking up into the nighttime sky. “Me, Ezekiel Cartwright, and Oliver Wynton."

But there was one missing. What information was known about the mission was that four people were sent and three returned. He'd named three of the four. With what courage I could muster, I said, “That's three. There was a fourth."

In the darkness an owl screeched as if prodding Simon along. Simon's face was hidden in shadow.

"Maggie Estrada.” He whispered the name, and I recognized it as soon as he spoke.
She
was the one who never came back.

A series of short barks from within the kitchen broke the silence. Nelson and Jeanette stood there, tails wagging, tongues drooping. Simon pulled himself up. “Time to take the dogs out before they grow cross with me. Looks like we'll have to continue this discussion. See you next week, my friend.” He slid open the door and the dogs jumped him. He pointed to the tub of beer, and said, as always, “Take one for the road."

I said nothing to Anna about the conversation, but that night, while she was fast asleep, I thought about what Simon had told me and was reminded of a conversation I'd once had with my granddad. It was just after my Aunt Ruth had died. She'd been in a coma for months, and it seemed to unsettle him. “Don't ever let that happen to me,” he said, his breath issuing the rich scent of cigar smoke. “If I'm ever incapacitated like that, I want you to roll me to the nearest window and push me out."

Simon was the same way, and I thought once again of that Springfield mounted above his fireplace. That damn disease had incapacitated granddad, and I never once thought of pushing him out a window like he'd asked. I felt as if I'd somehow let him down. It made me feel better knowing that Simon could take care of himself. At least he wouldn't suffer.

But when would that time come?

I lay there most of the night looking forward to next Sunday the way you look forward to a long-anticipated vacation. I didn't get much sleep. I was too busy worrying I'd hear the devastating report of a gunshot before I learned the whole truth of what happened on Mercury.

There was no gunshot that night and the following Sunday, Simon and I took up our respective positions on his porch, a fresh bucket of Old Speckled Hen between us and a crisp autumn chill in the air. Simon didn't look well. His skin had a pastiness to it, as if he was molting. His eyebrows were like wild vines. He seemed to move more slowly, but perhaps it was all my imagination. I was hypersensitive to his condition and maybe I was looking for things that weren't really there.

He cracked open a beer and gestured toward the sky. “Maggie Estrada,” he said as if toasting her, and it was eerily like watching my granddad toast my dead aunt. “That's where we left off last week. With Maggie, right?"

I nodded, sipping at my own beer and shivering from its chill.

"Maggie was perhaps the smartest person I've ever met, but to this day I don't know how she managed to qualify for the space program.

"Now, Zeke, he came up through the military ranks and we never saw eye-to-eye on anything, but he never disobeyed an order and there was no one in the world that had more space experience than Ezekiel Cartwright.

"Ollie, on the other hand, he and I got along famously. He was a deeply religious fellow and prone to quiet reflection in times of crisis, but he was just about the best damn pilot I'd ever seen and the shit he could pull off with a lander convinced me he had some kind of personal connection to God.

"But Maggie, bright as she was, didn't really have the . . . instinct for spaceflight. She was what they called a mission specialist, and what I called a freeloader. Whereas Zeke, Ollie, and I all had formidable responsibilities on the mission, Maggie didn't. She was in charge of mission science and had lots of little responsibilities, none of which were particularly relevant to the safety of the mission, except maybe the data collection for the solar sail.

"The biggest problem was that she missed out on crew bonding. Me, Zeke, and Ollie spent most of training at mission headquarters running simulation after simulation of critical mission events. It was us against the simulators, and we bonded in our efforts to defeat whatever those bastards could throw at us. Maggie, on the other hand, was running off to facilities all over the country, getting trained on this experiment, learning how to deploy that experiment, taking crash courses in surface geology and God knows what else. She was always off somewhere, and the only time she was with us was for a couple of weeks getting trained in mission recovery. That she missed out on all of that bonding was key in what was to happen later."

Simon paused to get himself a fresh bottle. He seemed to be going through the beer faster than normal and I tried not to read anything into that. Despite the cold air, his skin looked clammy and I could see the sheen of a mild sweat on his forehead. He swallowed half of the beer in a gulp and shook his head as if in disgust. “That's not true. I'm not even sure why I just said that. Even if Maggie had been there for all of the training, she wouldn't have bonded with us. Something was off with her. I'd get this feeling around her, the kind of feeling you get around a dog that's turned mean with rabies. One minute she's sweet, tail wagging, eyes bright—and the next minute her ears are back, teeth are bared, and she's issuing forth an unearthly growl from some dark place inside.

"I made excuses for her. We were all married men at the time, but Maggie was single. Her file said that she'd been married once, for a short period when she was quite young, to a much older man. Her husband died shortly after they were married, and she'd been single ever since. I figured that had to affect someone and I tried to cut her some slack. It didn't help.

"On the way to Mercury, Maggie and Zeke got into some flap about something or other—I honestly can't remember what it was about—but it ended with Zeke calling her a small-town whore. After that, there was a glimmer in Maggie's eyes and she turned mean like those dogs we were talking about. She grew passive aggressive. It was subtle at first, but some of her antics started to put the mission at risk. It was always little things, never big things. The solar sail unfurled perfectly and Ollie maneuvered us into just the orbit we were hoping for. But we all had to work harder than we should have because of Maggie.

"It was there, in orbit around Mercury, that things began to fall apart and I suppose I should have seen it coming. I—” All at once Simon lurched forward and vomited in a series of spastic convulsions across the weather-worn floorboards. There was blood in his vomit, and the pungent smell of beer, bile, and iron came floating up on the autumn air, engaging my own stomach in a churn of sympathy.

I grabbed an elbow and started to pull him up. “Simon, we've got to get you to a doctor."

"No!” he said, pulling away from me. His face looked like blank paper, his eyes tiny beads. He wiped pink foam from his chin and said, “Look, I'm fine. It's this goddamn disease. I don't need a doctor to tell me what's happening. I just need some rest. Can we call it a night?"

"Of course,” I said. I tried to follow him into the house, but he shooed me away.

"Go home to your wife, Rick. And take one for the road. I'll see you next week."

When I arrived at Simon's the next Sunday he was not out on the porch and all at once I grew concerned. I peered into the sliding glass door, but it was dark inside. I tapped on the glass and was immediately greeted by the sound of barking, followed by nails scampering across tile. In a moment both Nelson and Jeanette stood on the other side of the door, wagging their tails.

"That you, Rick?” Simon's voice came from somewhere out of sight. “Door's open, come on in."

Relieved, I made my way into the house. I found Simon in the living room. He sat on the couch facing the front windows, wrapped in blankets, sweating and shivering. He looked like he'd dropped twenty pounds. There was a pained smile on his face, and he motioned me to the empty chair, next to which sat a small bucket of beer. It was the last thing I felt like drinking, seeing Simon as he was, but Simon merely grinned and pulled a glass of his own out from beneath his blankets.

"Home remedy,” he said, swallowing the golden liquid. He pulled out a bottle—some kind of cheap scotch—and poured himself another glassful. “Just a cold,” he said.

I tried to protest, but he waved his hand at me and changed the subject.

"You once told me that your granddaddy died of Alzheimer's, isn't that right?"

His question stopped me in my tracks. “That's right,” I said.

"Did you know that around the time I went to Mercury there was a big to-do about someone going around killing off folks like your granddad, merely because they were old or sick?"

It was the serial killer my dad's lawyer friend had mentioned to me. “What about him?” I asked.

"How would you have felt if someone had offed your granddad like that? Now think about it before you go answering, Rick. Knowing what he was going through, knowing that maybe you wanted to put him out of his misery but just didn't have the guts to go through with it, how would you feel if someone else did it for you?"

I felt a sudden rush of adrenaline. I glanced at the Springfield over the fireplace, which I hadn't noticed until that very moment. Simon must have seen my glance because he coughed out a short laugh and said, “I'm only asking because it's got everything to do with what happened down there on Mercury—and nothing to do with that.” His eyes shifted to the rifle.

"I suppose I'd be horrified,” I said.

"But you'd be relieved, too, wouldn't you?"

I couldn't bring myself to say it, so I just nodded: yes.

"Of course you would,” Simon said, “You'd be free of the guilt of having to do something to end his suffering—and free of the guilt of having done nothing to stop it. Of course you'd be relieved."