Gridlock and Other Stories Part 29

Petrov stopped at his son's door and steeled himself for the nightly ordeal. The hinges squealed softly as he slowly opened the door and stared into the gloomy room. Mischa was seated in his customary chair, gazing out a dirty window at an equally dirty brick wall some ten meters distant. His bright blue eyes, once so alive with intelligence, were vacant and staring. Spittle ran down his chin and a familiar odor announced that Elena had neglected him for too long."Mischa?" Petrov asked gently as he watched his son for some sign of recognition. As he had for nearly a thousand days and nights, Mikhail Vladimirovich Petrov failed to respond to his father's entreaties. He merely sat and stared out into the cold gray light of dusk.

"I swear he seemed to know me," Elena said plaintively as Petrov shouldered his way past her and out of the bedroom.

"Clean him up before you go home, please," he muttered over his shoulder. His jaw was set hard as he strode swiftly to the door that hid the ladder leading down into what had once been a potato cellar.

He had cleaned the place up and had installed a desk in there. Unlike the museum piece at which he sat in the office, this was an honest desk, well scarred and solid.

Emotion overcame him as it often did when he allowed himself to think that one day Mischa's oxygen starved brain would awake from its slumber. However, grief for his son was not the only cause for his turmoil. If only Grigoriy had not been such a d.a.m.ned fool today!

Petrov's anger at his aide had not been completely grounded in socialist fervor. Indeed, young Comrade Sokolov would have been shocked to learn how closely his ideas came to those of his boss.

Many times over the past three years, Petrov had wondered if Grigoriy and the imperialists might not be right. What if Lysenkoism was indeed a fraud? What of all those people who had been killed in its name these past five decades? What of his son, who had sacrificed his intelligence at the altar of what might well be a false G.o.d?

There had been successes, of course. The Taman Guards, children who reached maturity in only fourteen years, cows that gave twice the pre-Lysenko quota of milk -- all were successes to which the Inst.i.tute constantly pointed. However, there had been failures as well. Too many of them! Lysenko Adaptation took place in only a fraction of one percent of subjects. With such a low rate, it was impossible to tell if a Lysenko gene was responsible for the successes, or if they were the result of the vigorous natural selection process imposed by the regimen of the camps.

What sort of science was it that could not make a prediction about even the simplest of its experiments?he wondered. This question had haunted Petrov for more nights than he cared to remember. Were the changes they wrought in humanity the result of environmental stimulus, or merely caused by the simple process of killing off everyone who did not possess the desired trait? Were they changing individuals for the better or merely engaged in the human equivalent of developing a new breed of dogs?

Momentarily, his mind rebelled at the awfulness of the thought. Of course, the Great Lysenko had been right! Otherwise, his life and that of his son had been wasted. Neither Christian G.o.d nor Soviet Saint could be so cruel ... could they?

Then reality a.s.serted itself and Petrov did what he had done so many nights over these past three years. He put his head in his hands and began to sob softly. The former potato cellar reverberated with the sound, cries made even more pitiable by the fact that they were barely audible. Indeed, it was so quiet in the cellar that he had no difficulty hearing the sc.r.a.ping of chair legs on the floor above. It was the most pitiable sound of all. The noise signified that his beautiful 23-year-old son -- the heir for whom he had had so many hopes -- was about to have his diapers changed.

Author's note forLysenko's Legacy : Zdrastvwitcha, Tovareeshie! Kak dela?

The end of the Cold War brought with it many changes in my life. One of the most far-reaching was that after a life engaged in building things to shoot down Russian airplanes, I enrolled in a cla.s.s at my local community college and learned to speak Russian.

Not that I am any great linguist, but I can read Cyrillic and generally make myself understood in conversations composed of sentences of no more than three words each.

For 25 years as an engineer, I worked on everything from the F-15 jet engine to the Sidewinder missile. I am now engaged in an effort to form a joint venture with a Russian aeros.p.a.ce company. In the past five years I have been to Russia eight times - so often, in fact, that when it comes time to run the standard Kremlin tour at the end of each trip (for the benefit of first time visitors), I generally mutter, "Not the d.a.m.ned Kremlin again!"

What I have learned from my travels is that I like Russians. They are very similar to Americans in many respects. Unlike some Europeans, they are straightforward in their relationships. When they do not like something, they will come out and tell you to your face.

And when they like you ... well, a friend named Achille Pekhov and I have a running joke in which I explain to him that American men don't kiss each other for any reason whatever!

That does not stop me from being kissed from time to time - in that platonic Russian way, of course.

In 1994, I went to the Moscow Air Show, where they lined up all of their airplanes at the Zhukovsky Air Force Base (formerly known as "a secret airfield somewhere in Russia") for easy photographing. When the Russians visited us last spring, we took them to see the t.i.tan Missile Museum south of Tucson, Arizona, and the Pima Air Museum next to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. A fun time was had by all. I currently hold the corporate record for the lowest per capita business dinner expense ever turned in to the accounting department. I fed 11 people for $32.00 - we were running late, so we stopped at McDonald's.

An interesting thing happened in April 1995, during a visit to Moscow. We always stay in one of the western-style hotels on Tverskaya Street about a mile from the Kremlin. We do this both for the western standard accommodations and for reasons of security. Late one night, I heard a rumbling out in the street. Glancing down from my window, I saw a T-82 tank go past at high speed. It was followed by 50 others, and some really big rocket launchers and self propelled artillery. (One of them ran over a manhole cover and snapped it like a twig.) Because it had been less than a year since the Russian army shot up the Russian White House, I naturally became concerned. When CNN had no reports about unrest in Russia, I realized that we were coming up on the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. What I was watching was the return to barracks by the units practicing for the big military victory parade. Two nights later, they did it again. I and my companions stood out on the curb, watched them go by this time, and took pictures.

You don't have to tell me the world has changed!

Lysenko's Legacyis the result of my many trips to Russia. The locales are real and I have been to all of them. The story is obviously a member of the alternate universe genre. I began to write the story based on the premise that a world existed where T. D. Lysenko's ideas about evolution had proven to be correct. It was a grim place. However, no matter how much I ma.s.saged the story, I could not bring myself to totally embrace the premise. So, I wrote about a world where those in power merely think his theories work. It is a pretty grimplace, too.

Stan Schmidt ata.n.a.log read the story, corrected my pidgin Russian, and said that it was too much of a downer for his taste. At that point, I began casting about for another market. Kim Mohan atAmazing wrote to tell me that he was pleased to hear from me, but thatAmazing was temporarily suspending publication. Omni appears not to be with us any longer. After more than a decade of concentrating on novel writing, I found that the old, traditional markets for short SF were drying up.

The world, it would appear, is changing again, but not necessarily for the worse. For the same ma.s.s communications revolution that is strangling the print magazines has opened a range of new possibilities. This book is an example of that. Lysenko's Legacy is being published on Sci Fi - Arizona for the first time anywhere (? 1996, Michael McCollum. All rights reserved). We appear to be heading for a world where the writers are the publishers.

It may not be any better, but it is certainly going to be different! When you purchased this book and protected my intellectual property rights by not reproducing it wholesale, you helped yourself. If Sci Fi - Arizona is successful, then many more writers will deliver their work to you directly via the INTERNET and your reading choices will be multiplied a hundred-fold.

WELCOME TO THE REVOLUTION!.

GIBRALTAR STARS.

An Excerpt

Recently I have been working on Gibraltar Earth, the first book in the Gibraltar Stars Trilogy.

Human beings have just begun to colonize the stars when they encounter a ship of a race that rules a million sun galactic empire. This race of alien overlords does not allow potential compet.i.tors the freedom of the stars. If they become aware of humanity's existence, their invasion fleet will quickly fill Earth's sky. We know about them, but they do not know we exist ... yet. The problem facing humanity is very simple: What are we going to do about this intolerable situation?

And now, for a bonus, Chapter 1 ofGibraltar Earth :

CHAPTER 1.

Captain Dan Landon of the Survey ShipMagellan sat strapped in his desk and gazed at the large holoscreen that dominated the far bulkhead. It was filled by a blue-white planet bordered by a patch of ebon sky. Stretched out before him to the curving planetary limb was a panorama of fleecy-white clouds and seas of royal blue. To the right lay a sprinkling of green islands; each surrounded by aquamarine shoals. At the top of the screen, just coming into view, was the jagged coastline of one of the major continents. Soon they would be sweeping over amber plains blackened by herds of six-legged beasts, mountain ranges capped by snowfields, forests of deep green, and a river network that was equal to the Nile, the Amazon, and the Mississippi combined.

In the two generations since humanity had won free to the stars, the race had found but twelve worlds sufficiently like the Mother of Men to be considered even marginally habitable. This was the thirteenth, and so far, the best. Preliminary results gave it double the highest habitability index previously recorded. A solid month of orbital scanning, laboratory tests, and on-the-ground exploration had revealed a paradise. For that reason, Landon scowled as he watched the scenery float by far below. A life spent in the service of the Stellar Survey had left him with a philosophy that mirrored the organization's unofficial motto: "If things are going well, you have obviously overlooked something!"

As he gazed at New Eden, the crew's unofficial name for their find, he wondered what they were overlooking. Even after a month of study by a thousand talented specialists, they had only scratched the surface of what there was to know. A world was just too large and too varied a place to be surveyed by a single shipload of scientists. To understand New Eden completely would be the work of generations.

Where lurked the microorganism that would ultimately prove fatal to humans, the environmental factor that would render colonists sterile, or the million-and-one other deadly possibilities that would turn this beautiful new world into a pestilential h.e.l.lhole?

Landon knew that his current black mood was a defense mechanism against the high hopes that New Eden had sp.a.w.ned in him. It was easy to remain detached when the system to be surveyed consisted totally of sterile rocks and gas giants, as most of them were. There was no love in his breast for the usual dust b.a.l.l.s, volcano fields, and oceans of hydrochloric acid. However, to find this beautiful world and then lose it because of some innocuous-seeming environmental factor would be too great a disappointment. Better to keep expectations low until they knew more about it. Sighing, he moved to retrieve a bulb of steaming hot tea from its microgravity holder.

There was a quiet rattle as the cabin around him shivered. Landon froze for a long second as his brain a.n.a.lyzed what he had sensed largely on a subconscious level. A chill had gone up his spine as it sometimes did when he was thrilled or frightened. Yet, it had not been just him. There had been a subdued clatter from the storage lockers that lined every unused centimeter in his cabin. The holoscreen had flickered with static, hadn't it?

The introspection took less time than it takes to gulp. A moment later, his hand reached out of its own volition and slapped down on the intercom plate inset into the desk.

"Report!" he snapped as the duty officer, a pimple-faced ensign, stared back at him.

"Don't know, Captain," the boy squeaked. "We are getting reports from all over the ship. Wait a second. Scout Three is reporting that they felt it, too!"Scout Three was Jani Rykand's ship, en route back from exploring the larger of the two moons of the planet. The fact that she was ten thousand kilometers fromMagellan eliminated the thought that whatever had happened was a problem only with his ship.

"Sound general quarters, Mr. Grandstaff."

"Aye aye, Captain."

Landon was already out of his seat, pulling himself hand over hand toward the control room as the alarms began to bleat. A thousand past drills provided him with a mental picture of the organized bedlam that was taking place all over the ship. Before the alarms lapsed into silence, he was strapped into his control console at the heart of the big survey craft, surrounded by dozens of screens, none of which told him what he wanted to know.

"What was it, Doc?" he asked a white-haired man in his personal screen after keying for the ship's chief scientist.

"Whatever it was," Raoul Bendagar replied, "it wreaked holy h.e.l.l with our instruments. Half of them lost calibration at the same precise moment we felt the shock."

"You must have some idea," Landon persisted.

"Wait a second while I check something," Bendagar answered. He stooped to manipulate a screen on which a series of glowing red lines were superimposed on a polar coordinate grid. "Well I'll be d.a.m.ned."

"Don't keep me in suspense."

Bendagar glanced up at the captain, a look of shock on his face. "We just experienced the Grand Hooting Monster of all gravity waves, Captain. No wonder it knocked everything out of alignment."

Landon frowned. He knew that gravity waves existed, of course. For more than a century, a trio of satellites had orbited between Earth and Mars at a precise one thousand kilometers from one another.

They used laser beams to maintain their s.p.a.cing to twelve digits of accuracy, forming a vast right triangle that detected the microscopic distortions caused by the collapse of distant stars and other more catastrophic events. The largest gravity wave ever detected had distorted s.p.a.ce by an amount less than the width of a proton. This one had been heavy enough to rattle Landon as he sat in his cabin.

"Come off it, Doc. Couldn't have been."

"The instruments recorded a distortion wave traveling from Equipment Lock Two to the boat deck at the speed of light. Call it what you will, but I say it was a gravity wave."

"Captain," the communicator on duty reported, "Scout Three has a sighting report."

"Put her through."

As usual, Jani Rykand's features were framed in a tousled copper explosion of hair. Unlike most women who lived and worked in microgravity, she refused to bob her mane, or to keep it bound in a hair net. On her, it looked good.

"Report!"

"Something weird going on out here, Captain. I am getting energy readings from a point thirtydegrees aft of my orbital path."

Landon glanced at Bendagar.

"We've got them, too," the chief scientist reported.

"What do you make of it, Scout Three?"

"Hirayama's got the scope focused on it, Captain. It looks like a couple of ships."

"Patch your view through to us," Landon snapped.

An instant later, Jani Rykand's features dissolved to show the blackness of s.p.a.ce. In the background were the usual constellations of stars, subtly or drastically altered from the familiar constellations of home by the hundred light-yearsMagellan had crossed to reach this world. At first, there was nothing to see. This changed when a violet flash of light sparked the darkness. It put Landon in mind of summer lightning back home in B.C. Except this lightning managed to illuminate two shapes in the blackness, one of which glowed for long seconds after the bolt.

"Give us a tighter view, Hirayama," the captain ordered. Onboard the scout the geologist who was operating the scope controls moved to comply. The distant stars jerked back and forth a few times as the telescope zoomed to maximum magnification. When it stopped, there was no doubt that they were looking at two vessels and that one of them seemed intent on destroying the other.

The prey was the larger of the two, a squat cylinder - it looked remarkably like the pressurized cans in which ground coffee was shipped to prevent vacuum damage. The ship was obviously intended to be spun to produce artificial gravity. Its tormentor was a thin cylinder with a variety of mechanisms jutting from a central core. While they watched, the attacker again sent a beam of violet to splash against the hull of its larger prey. They watched as a geyser of plasma spewed away from the strike in a wide-angled vacuum expansion cone.

"All recorders to maximum," Landon ordered without being aware of it. "Hirayama, track them!"

Even with the telescope focused on the battling duo, it was obvious that the larger ship was doing everything in its power to escape. It jinked one way, then the other, always trying to stay ahead of its tormentor. The effort was futile. The small warcraft matched each violent maneuver with one of its own, hanging onto its prey like a small terrier harrowing a large bull. Every few seconds another violet beam would splash across the hide of the larger craft, leaving an ugly, glowing scar in its wake. Yet, if the small ship were attempting to disable the larger, it was having little luck. After each hit, the target changed course and tried to flee.

"They're headed this way!" Jani Rykand's excited voice said over the intercom. Sure enough, the larger ship had changed course and was now headed directly for the scout. As the observers aboard Magellan watched, the squat cylinder became a perfect circle and began to grow on the screen.

Whatever drive principle the two unknowns were using was not obvious. There were no flares or other emissions to suggest they moved by means of reaction engines.

"Scout Three, take evasive action!"

"Any particular ideas?" the young woman pilot asked. "They both look as though they can fly rings around this tub of mine. My G.o.d, look at them come!"

She was right. Both ships were growing at an unbelievable rate on the screen. Soon Hirayama was backing off on the magnification to keep them in view. It took less than a minute before both ships werewithin naked eye range of Scout Three. The larger prey flashed past at a range of ten kilometers with the small war craft in hot pursuit.

Then it happened.

Dan Landon had been dividing his time between the view from Scout Three and several long-range views of the battle fromMagellan 's own telescopes, which showed only an occasional spark of violet against the ebon backdrop of s.p.a.ce. As it pa.s.sed the scout, the warship fired another of its violet beams.

The beam reached out and momentarily bathed Scout Three in a violet corona of light. The signal from the scout cut off abruptly.

"Scout Three!" Landon screamed. "Report. Jani, how badly are you damaged?"

The answer was obvious on the screen. Where a moment earlier there had been a tiny human s.p.a.cecraft too small to be seen against the blackness of s.p.a.ce, now there was a tiny speck of radiance, a glowing cloud of plasma that cooled as it expanded.

Landon felt a sudden surge of rage. His vision was clouded by the memory of a laughing face framed in wild red hair. Then, as quickly as it arrived, the rage was gone. He felt nothing as he watched the larger ship again foreshorten until it was a half-lit circle of light expanding on the screen. It was the same as the view from Scout Three's cameras, but with the difference that this time,Magellan was drawing the battle to it.

"Prepare message probe."

"Captain, we can't do that," Grandstaff said beside him. "We are too deep in the planet's gravity well. The generators will never stand the strain."

"Load message probe, d.a.m.n you!"

A moment later, Grandstaff reported, "Message probe prepared for launch."

Crammed with power reactors and a star drive generator, a message probe was a small, unmanned starship.Magellan carried a dozen of the five-meter diameter spherical craft. They were used for sending reports back to Earth. Not only did they obviate the need to return home after each system; they were insurance against the loss of valuable data should the ship meet with an accident.

Landon watched the oncoming pair while monitoring a display that showed their speed, course, and relative bearing. Since no one had ever expected to fight a s.p.a.ce battle out among the stars,Magellan was ill equipped to defend itself. The ship's entire armory consisted of rifles, machine guns, and a few heavier weapons to take care of pesky carnivores. Still, they had one potential weapon onboard that might prove useful in stopping an alien marauder.

The two craft came on, with the smaller continuing to chew away at the larger. The damage was beginning to take its toll. Chunks of the prey were being shot off as a cloud of gas and vapor issued forth from dozens of rips in the hull.

Dan Landon set up the probe's coordinates himself, not trusting anyone else to do it. As the warship neared the distance from which it had destroyed Scout Three, Landon keyed the control that would send the tiny unmanned starship racing for Earth. Except, its target was not Earth this time. Landon sent it directly toward the alien warship.

Ensign Grandstaff was right. They were far too deep inside the planet's gravity well for a star drive generator to remain stable. The message probe disappeared from its launching cradle and moved ahundred kilometers at superlight velocity. Those few nanoseconds of operation were sufficient to overload the probe's generators. They exploded, hurling the probe back into normal s.p.a.ce. The excess energy was converted to velocity. The rapidly expanding cloud of debris that returned to normal s.p.a.ce moved at 0.6c. There was no time for the unknown warship to react. An instant after the cloud of debris appeared, one or more of its particles struck the small warship, turning it into a star that rivaled the system primary for a few seconds.