I was debating whether to post at all this week, I decided I could fill out an off week, which means more of the Space Guys. Here's the chapter I've really had the most fun with, featuring alternate history pop culture. Again, I have a table of contents at the end.
Jason and Alek were
smiling and laughing as they returned to his cabin. Jax looked up from a card
game with Sarip. His eyes locked on a box Jason was carrying. “What’s this?” he
asked.
“I just met with Dad at Deimos base,” Jason said. “He and the folks put together a box of our things. The captain cleared it.”
Jason had grown accustomed enough not to shudder as Moxon approached. “Actually, he sent me to inspect the contents,” he said. “It’s regulations. Strictly a formality, of course.”
Jason set it down and opened it. Right on top were 3 small stuffed toys, a Sparky the Space Squirrel doll, based on an earlier and more stylized version of the character, a weedy birdlike creature known as Tweel the Martian and a well-loved gorilla. His eyes flicked to Moxon, half-expecting him to destroy Sparky on sight. In fact, his lip merely curled in amusement. Beneath that was a mesh bag of what looked like tin soldiers; in fact, it was a circus set, with the clowns, acrobats and animals made from sheet steel. The rest was records, both audio and video, and a collection of microform books. Alek picked up Tweel. “Ooh, I love Tweel,” she said. “I read all the Weinbaum stories.”
She looked through the
movies. “Sparky the Space Squirrel on Venus, Sparky On The Moons Of Jupiter…
I’m sure we have these in the ship library,” she said. She furrowed her
eyebrows at a set. “King Kong, Son of Kong, The Return of Kong, Kong Unchained,
Queen Kong, Wrath of Kong… You have the whole set?”
“Everybody loves Kong,” Jax said. He was looking through the audio records. “Okay, we got Spike Jones, Duke Ellington, Elvis Presley… whatever happened to him?”
Alek had reached the books. Each one was a cardboard folio that held a sheaf of strips printed with pages the size of small postage stamps, meant to be loaded in a hand-held magnifier which someone had included three of. The outsides of the folios bore vivid and colorful artwork. The one in her hand showed a tracked vehicle the size of a light naval craft, built around an equally enormous cannon. The text read, Last Stand of the Landcruisers by Martin Caidin. “History?” she said. She picked up another. It showed a man with a broad-brimmed hat facing a bat-faced, hunchbacked ghoul in what might have been either a crypt or a sewer. The title read, Solomon Kane In The Catacombs, by L. Sprague De Campe. She set it down and picked up another. It showed a bare-chested barbarian fighting what looked like a carnivorous stegosaurus. Its title read, The Adventures of Conan by Robert E. Howard. A smaller caption read, “From the creator of Solomon Kane.”
“The stories are not as
good as Conan, but I like Kane better,” she said. She picked through more of
the books. One showed a biplane in a dogfight with a dragon. The title read, Dragons
Over Verdun by Leigh Brackett. Another showed soldiers firing desperately
from the ruins of a factory. It bore the title Last Stand At Leningrad
and the byline Cyril Kornbluth. A third
showed another barbarian staring into a magic mirror at a city of graceful
spires. The text declared, The Wizard of Otherworld by Philip K. Dick.
“All this fantasy,” she said after looking through several more titles. “Is
this what they read on Mars?”
Jason shrugged. “We all
have our tastes, same as everybody,” he said. “But yeah, we usually go for
fantasy over the space stories. It’s about people living with nature, not
technology.” He held up a single book with a picture of a rocket descending on
a village of tentacled aliens. “This is just kids’ stuff.”
“Hey, it’s what got us where we are,” Jax said. He indignantly took away the book. “Hey, show her your trick.”
Alek looked at Jason.
“What is trick?” she said.
Jason gave a defensive shrug.
“It’s no big deal,” he said. “It’s just… I can read the cards without the
magnifier.”
Alek looked at one of the
strips from the Solomon Kane folio. The print was just large enough for a keen
eye to see it as separate words and characters rather than lines and blocks.
“Show me,” she said.
“Fine,” Jason said. He held up the strip. “`Solomon Kane was a Puritan at heart. But his heart could not contain his lust to wander, nor the rage that drove him to avenge the evils he had witnessed…’”
He gave the card back to
Alek. She loaded it into a viewer, which was compact enough to hold up by a
small handle like an opera glass. “You read it right,” she said. She looked at
Jax. “Can you do it? Can other Martians do it?”
This time, Jax squirmed
defensively. “Maybe,” he said. “I know other people who can. Most of them can’t
get through more than a few words. I’ve seen Jason read two pages. They all say
the real problem is staying focused…”
Alek shook her head. “I wouldn’t have thought a human could do it,” she said succinctly.
“Let me see,” Moxon said. “Hand me the Landcruiser book.” Alek gave it to him. “`The Landkreuzer 1500 was the largest land vehicle ever used in combat. It might never have existed if not for its gun, an 800mm cannon intended to demolish the fortifications of France…” He gave his usual smile. “See? No big deal.”
There was an awkward
silence. Jason finally broke it with another question. “What do people really
like, back on Gaia?” he asked. “What do they watch, read, whatever?”
Alek pondered. “I don’t
go to many movies,” she said. “And I mostly read scientific papers, or old
books like these.” She held up the Conan folio.
Moxon spoke up. “I go to lots of movies,” he said. “I see them in all kinds of places, too. So, fantasy’s popular, you know, stories about Hercules and King Arthur and Kane. The real money is in war movies, leastways on the studio side. They’re usually about the Second Great War, what a lot of people will call the Last War. A lot of them have been coming out of the Federation They get big budgets, the big stars will line up to appear in them, and enough people will come out to see them to earn their money back. It’s really the same as fantasy movies, just with more prestige. They all give people heroes, adventures, battles, and other places and times, so nobody worries about the here and now.”
He leaned against a bulkhead. “If you ask me, though,” he continued, “the biggest thing is horror movies. A lot of it has been coming out of Edo and Indo-Malaya. The fans call it `real horror’. The critics call it tenement pornography. You Martians probably wouldn’t go for it. One of the last ones I saw was about a gangster. He goes around beating up people, making ladies of the night give him the goods for free, but he loves his girl. Then another gangster kills her. So he goes to a witch, then she gives him a medallion that lets him turn into a leopard, or leastways, a cross between a leopard and a man. He uses it to start murdering the other guy’s gang, except when he finally gets to the boss, it turns out he has his own amulet that turns him into a tiger. They fight, he kills the boss but he gets hurt and dies. So yeah, not your thing.”
“I see that one,” Alek
said. “It was called Man-Cat. They make two more.”
Moxon just laughed. “So
maybe I haven’t been seeing as many movies as I used to,” he said. With that,
he moved to excuse himself.
“Wait,” Jax said. “Do you
know what really happened, in the Last War?”
Moxon looked back, with
just a hint of a smile. “It was really before my time,” he said. “It’s all in
the books, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, sure,” Jax said. He remained silent as Moxon left.
“Funny,” Alek said. “How
do you do that trick reading the cards? And how do he do it too?”
Jason looked at Jax, who
shook his head. “We all have our talents,” he said. Then they were all silent
for a while.
The day of the launch quickly approached. The only thing that caught them off guard was the announcement of a wedding, which proved to be between two of the engineering crew. There was a ceremony and an informal reception in the captain’s cabin. Alek and Jason came slightly late. The Malays weren’t there, nor to his relief was Moxon, but Jax and Dr. Cahill were sitting with Harrison at the captain’s table, and Raeder was on the couch leading three Edonians in an ale house song. Alek hung from his arm as they entered. “There they are,” Alek said. She pointed to a pair in the kitchen area.
8 out of the 12 engineering crew was there, and it was evident that Alek knew most of them. The newly married couple were Anne Baxter and David Carlson. Their peers included one other married couple, an Edonian man named Yukio and a Shen woman named Chyou, and a woman from the Federation named Natasha. The rest, present or not, were all men, mostly well over 30. Alek pointed out the nominal chief, a short man named Potts, and the youngest of them, an American named Donald Johnson, a student of a super genius who had perfected fusion, at the moment trying to talk to Anastasia. Fortunately, she stayed on the opposite side of the passage from Alek.
When Alek introduced
Jason to the pair, he casually asked if they had known each other before the
mission. Anne had immediately laughed. “No, we met when we got here,” she said.
“We did a shift together in the reactor room, we got to talking, then we
decided to get engaged. It just made sense.”
“It’s an 8-hour shift,” David added. “The way it really works is, one of us is in the reactor room in a radiation suit, one of us is on the other side of the door, and two more are on the other side monitoring the output to the fusion vessel. That’s really because of how heavy our gear is. After four hours, we’re supposed to take it off.”
“So you talked to each
other through a door?” Jason said.
“Yeah,” Anne said. She
pressed against her groom. “It was very romantic. We completely
connected.”
“Like Pyramus and Thisbe,” Alek said with a bemused glance at Jason.
By then, Johnson had come
over. Jason asked the question, “So just one person controls the power to the
whole ship?”
The engineers all laughed at that. “Oh, no, the reactor systems are completely automated,” David said. "It’s a fission-fusion system, so it’s really two reactors. We only service the fission component. All we can do is turn it off.”
“Even that’s not really how it sounds,” Donald said. "The set up is, we have a bank of instruments and a few controls in the reactor room, plus a sort of peephole to inspect the reaction chamber directly. We aren’t even supposed to use it unless the reactor is shut down. The controls are two buttons, one set in the reactor room and a redundant pair in the outer chamber. One executes an emergency shutdown. The other continues operations. If three hours go by without someone pushing the second button, the shutdown is executed automatically.”
Jason pondered that for a
moment. “So it’s a dead man switch, right?” he said. That drew stern silence
from the engineers. “And you’re just canaries in a coal mine, aren’t you?”
“Well, you can look at it like that,” David said. “I say, if we can go at any time, live life to the fullest. Seize the day!” He gave his bride a long, passionate kiss.
As they left, Jason
turned to Alek. “What do you think?” he said. “Do you want to get married? Soon,
I mean?”
She was silent for a moment. “No,” she said. “I have told you, I am an enlightened woman. Rushing to get married would make me look ashamed of having a man. Besides, we need to do it right. First, you propose; I know we have understanding, but it is not the same. Then we marry. So, maybe… 6 months?”
“I can live with that,”
Jason said.
Alek put an arm around his waist. “Of course, we are making love…”
Table of contents
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