Rude Astronauts (2 page)

It’s all been done piecemeal, one story or novel at a time, with no prearranged outline or blueprint. Although I’ve tried to keep each tale self-contained, I make references to characters and events in other stories; over time, a loosely related chronology has emerged, although I skip back and forth in the timeline as I write the books and stories. So, while there are characters, institutions and occurrences repetitively mentioned here and there, there is no grand scheme.

Frankly, it’s been more interesting for me to write it this way. All I’ve done is try to keep the thing consistent; sorry, but there’s no chronological chart that will make things easier to understand, and I’m loath to create one anyway. However, if you’re just dying to know, the five stories in
Rude Astronauts
which are part of “Ralph” or “near-space” or “Steele’s Universe” or whatever the hell you want to call it take place between the events described in
Orbital Decay
and my third novel,
Lunar Descent
.

Likewise, “Goddard’s People” and “John Harper Wilson” are two stories in a series which concerns an alternate history of space exploration. Here, I was inspired by the non-fiction books Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestell wrote for Viking Press in the 1950s, the grand old visions of space travel immortalized in works like
Across the Space Frontier
,
The Conquest of Space
,
The Conquest of the Moon
and
The Exploration of Mars
. No formal name for this sequence either—let’s call it “alternate-space” or “Chesley” and be done with it.

Will there be more stories or novels in either series? Probably. Or maybe not. We’ll keep you posted.

Also included in this volume are a few non-fiction pieces. Most were written during the mid-’80s when I was a staff writer and investigative reporter for
Worcester Magazine
, a weekly alternative newspaper in Worcester, Massachusetts. The paper featured a back-page, shared-author column called “On the Road” (shades of Jack Kerouac); my greatest pleasure during that back-breaking, stressed-out, underpaid and overworked two-year tenure at
Worcester Magazine
was writing journalistic essays for this section of the paper.

Why? Believe me, if you spent each day covering random violence, environmental destruction, teenage suicide, AIDS, and last Tuesday night’s city council meeting, you’d want to write about the subjects covered in these columns, even when they were as grim as the
Challenger
disaster. I’m quite proud of these columns; since some pertained to scientific or science fictional topics, I’ve included a few of them in this collection. Portrait of a yet-unpublished SF writer as media scum.

After I quit
Worcester Magazine
and went freelance, I often wrote for a now-defunct city slick which was also published in Worcester. One of the short stories in this collection, “Winter Scenes of the Cold War,” was originally published in
Worcester Monthly
; so was the feature-length non-fiction piece about SETI research, which has been restored to its original title, “LGM.” In fact, it was the research behind “LGM” which led directly to
Labyrinth of Night
.

There is a seldom-acknowledged yet nonetheless distinct relationship between journalism and science fiction. Many SF writers, including Ben Bova, Frank Herbert, Robert Silverberg, Clifford Simak, Harlan Ellison, Gardner Dozois, Bruce Sterling, Gene Wolfe, William Tenn, G. Harry Stine, Daniel Hatch and A.J. Austin, among others, have functioned at one time or another as journalists and have rarely-mentioned bodies of non-fiction behind them which, one might think from the fact of their omission, the field has treated as skeletons in the closet.

True, some of these skeletons are best left in the closet. I’d rather not discuss the article I once freelanced for a supermarket tabloid, even if it was the easiest $800 I ever made in my life; nor is the article about snowmobiles I hacked out for a business rag in Vermont for fifty bucks worth more than a passing mention. Yet the connection between journalism and science fiction remains one of the genre’s best-kept secrets, and I wonder why that is, despite the current atmosphere of media-bashing. I value my own experience as a reporter; the years I spent on the streets as a reporter were far more valuable than all the creative writing workshops and lit classes I attended while in college.

This is what it all comes down to in my stories: a ceaseless friction between real life and the imagination, an uneasy symbiosis between the fictional and the factual. Many people prefer stories about talking dragons and galactic empires; they are discomfited by any close association between the fantastic and the real. “If I want this kind of thing,” they say, “I’ll read a newspaper” … but you’d be surprised how many of them don’t read newspapers, simply because they don’t want to be reminded how weird or wonderful their own world has become.

Yet one of the many functions of science fiction is to hold up a warped mirror to our present reality, distorting the image so that reality is seen in a different way. Science fiction, in this sense, isn’t as much about the future as it is about the present.

Events sweep past us so quickly that we barely have time to assimilate the changes. When I wrote “Live from the Mars Hotel” in 1987, for instance, vinyl LPs and singles were still the preferred format of most music buyers and even radio stations, and the CD was still a novelty many people, including myself, thought was a passing fad. Five years later, you can’t find vinyl singles in a retail music store, except as—ahem—a fad item.

Likewise, several stories in this book make reference to the USSR, reflecting a time when the Soviet Union still represented a real or imagined threat to the West. Much has been written elsewhere about how the collapse of Soviet communism affected fiction writers; all I can plead in my defense is that I, too, thought the Iron Curtain would stay up much longer. Although I was tempted to revise these stories to reflect present-day political realities, I decided instead to let things stand as they were. Those references represent a different time, different politics, a different world—even if that world is now less than a half-decade behind us and its remembrance now brings a sour taste to everyone’s mouth—which should not be forgotten.

In one sense, we’re all rude astronauts, getting ripped on a strange beach near the edge of space and time.

Your guess is as good as mine as to how the future will be. A few years from now, swamps in southern Georgia may indeed be roamed by genetically recreated dinosaurs; on the other hand, the Okefenokee could be soon populated by clones of Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Dan Quayle. Stories about near-future space colonization are currently considered to be unfashionably optimistic; a reviewer for a British SF magazine once spent most of her time mocking the cover blurb of one of my novels for invoking the “dream” of space exploration, leaving me to wonder if she reads newspapers, for anything I’ve written about space may seem as quaint and old-fashioned as Arthur C. Clarke’s projection that communication satellites would be placed in orbit sometime shortly before the end of the 20th century.

There are two great lessons which science fiction teaches us, each contradicting the other one. Anticipate the best, prepare for the worst; that’s the most obvious lesson. Yet the second is more subtle, although it is the exact opposite: when you expect the worst to happen, things will likely become much better than you believed they would be. It’s the old philosophical test. Is the glass half empty or half full? What does this random ink blot mean to you?

And what did you dream about last night?

It’s midnight. I’ve got a six-pack of ice-cold beer in the refrigerator and a pack of cigarettes. There’s nothing on the tube worth watching except an old
Dr. Who
episode we’ve all seen a dozen times. Everything around us looks dull and stupid …

But just past this horizon, over on the next block, I can hear one hell of a blowout going on. Liquor, loud music, lewd women … might be worth checking out.

Let’s go.

The party’s just getting started. Want a beer?

—The Rocket Farm, St. Louis, Missouri January 31, 1993

I
N THE END, FOR
everyone, there was the image which was replayed endlessly, both in TV news film-clips and as a memory, like an afterimage ghostly printed on the retina of the mind’s eye: a fireball, a great blossom of smoke shot through with yellow and crimson, followed by two forking trails of solid-rocket boosters and tiny contrails of debris falling toward the ocean below. The image was played over and over, both on television and in the individual imaginations of those who were stunned by the occurrence. Everyone affected by that image has given it a label: the day the space shuttle
Challenger
blew up.

A few hours after it happened, I was having a cigarette in the company’s lunchroom when I had a sudden, vivid recollection. The year before, I had been a news correspondent in Washington, D.C., writing for a couple of daily papers in Missouri and Vermont. Because I had always been a fan of the space program, I managed to talk the editors of those papers into letting me cover a space shuttle launch from Cape Canaveral. In this instance it was Mission 51-D on the shuttle
Discovery
, the one famous for sending Sen. Jake Garn into orbit. Two days before the launch, however, I had watched the shuttle
Challenger
being rolled from its hangar in the Orbiter Processing Facility to the mammoth Vehicle Assembly Building.

It was pushed out backwards by a tractor on that morning in April while a dozen or so photographers snapped pictures from the roadside nearby. It was a routine event, overshadowed by the upcoming launch of the
Discovery
, and the early morning hour in which the roll-out occurred accounted for the scarcity of reporters at hand, but for those of us who were there, it was a stirring moment.
Challenger
still bore the marks of its last mission; its re-entry tiles looked worn, its overall color was off-white, but it was still a majestic space vehicle. You couldn’t help but be awed by its beauty, its grace. Another orange tractor hooked up to its forward landing gear and began to pull it slowly toward the VAB a couple of hundred feet away, and as it was towed at a walking pace toward the massive building where it would be mated with its external fuel tank and solid-propellant boosters, I strode alongside it for awhile. I remember feeling a thrill when its right wing tip passed over my head, and thinking: this is a creature which has gone into space, felt starlight on its skin … this is what it feels like to be so close to a piece of history. It was a moment which I would not have forgotten even if it had not been later marred by horror and sudden death.

Many months later, on the afternoon after the fireball, that moment would come back to me even as I tried to pull together a localized account of the disaster’s impact on the community. Few people seemed to be in their offices when I called. In a strange moment, I found myself on the phone with Worcester mayor John Anderson—a young reporter and the top city official conversing—with both of us shocked, saying to each other, “Oh, my God, what happened?” I remember walking through the Galleria at Worcester Center, noting that the usual midday crowd had thinned, and those who were there looked as if each had been given news of a sudden death in their families. On the Park Avenue bus going home from work, riders either pored over evening newspaper accounts of the event or stared out the windows. There were not even the usual paranoid glances at the passengers on either side, or the socially acceptable instant gazes into nothingness. Everyone had something on their minds that night, and it was not hard to see that behind the thoughtful eyes gazing at the passing streetlights was the image of a supersonic fireball arching over the Atlantic. New England, the United States, the world mourned its passage, along with the deaths of six NASA astronauts and a New Hampshire schoolteacher. The extent of the shock was enough to reach even a hardened city like Worcester, which was not the hometown of any member of the crew.

In the long run, perhaps this is what makes us worthy, as a species, of reaching out beyond our own planet. We can empathize with the deaths of those whom we’ve never personally known. We can dream of going places even though we, as individuals, may never, ever go there ourselves. Perhaps this is how we’ve come to the point of building spaceships instead of squatting in mud huts by firelight. We’ve learned how to reach out with our hearts and minds, and we’ve learned how to hurt in an existential way from the deaths of others. Our town felt part of that pain.

It hurts, but it’s better than feeling like you’ve had nothing to lose.

O
VER THE NEXT COUPLE
of decades, the three of them would get together once every few years, usually with their families for an afternoon or an evening. Once they had moved away from the Cape, all three had relocated to different parts of the country, so their reunions were normally arranged during vacations. They would spend a few hours in each other’s company, eating, drinking, telling funny stories, trading business tips, admiring each other’s wives and children, sometimes reminiscing about the glory days. They rarely, however, talked about walking on the Moon.

A year after Roy and Irene moved to rural New Hampshire following Roy’s early retirement from Citicorp, Roy put out phone calls to Dick and Howard, inviting them to come up next Fourth of July for a barbecue. Both men agreed, naturally. It had been a little over two years since the last time they had seen each other during a ceremony in Washington, D.C., at the National Air and Space Museum, not really a get-together for them since they had been surrounded, and kept apart, by NASA brass, congressmen, various dignitaries and reporters. Roy figured that it was time for another, more private reunion.

Howie and Beth were living in Syracuse, New York, so New Hampshire was only a half-day drive away. Howie wasn’t teaching any classes during the university’s summer semester, so he simply had to pack Beth, the twins Jackson and Veronica, and their outdoor gear into the Bronco; the stop at Roy’s lakeside cabin would be on their way to a camping trip in the White Mountains.