Adam Troy Castro & Jerry Oltion - Astronaut From Wyoming

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Adam-Troy Castro & Jerry Oltion: The Astronaut from Wyoming

To understand Alexander, you must first understand his time.

It was an age when the universe had been opened for us. We knew how to look at objects a

thousand light years away, and map the molecules that gave them form; we knew how

things were put together and how they could be taken apart; we knew how the universe

began and how it was likely to end. We knew how to reason, and how to discover, and how

to add new pages to our increasing store of information.

It was also an age when ignorance was enshrined over knowledge. Every local newspaper

contained a horoscope. World leaders consulted astrologers; psychic hotlines made

millions; and a United States Senator gained ten points in the polls by claiming to have

been in contact with Ancient Aztecs. We knew what comets were, where they came from,

and what they didn’t foretell . . . but in a compound in San Diego, thirty-seven intelligent,

college-educated people took poison because they believed that a comet called Hale-Bopp

would take them to heaven if they did.

In Alexander’s age, we had knowledge . . . and we had delusion. And we preferred the

delusion.

You cannot understand Alexander Drier’s life without understanding that.

You cannot understand his final gesture without understanding that.

Of course, Alexander’s time is still our time. Which is why some of you are most interested

in reading about a high-ranking government coverup of alien experiments on pregnant human

women.

I can’t help what you want. I knew that going in.

But that’s not what happened.

SPACE BABY SPEAKS FIRST WORDS AT BIRTH!

Warns of Threat From Space, Parents Say

The first tabloid reporter arrived in town one day after the birth, the first delegation from the

networks right behind him. Not long after it hit the web, the pilgrims showed up. They came

in motor homes, in vans, on motorcycles, and on foot: the four-man Sweethaven Sheriff’s

Office had to import a couple of dozen state police just to keep the kooks and the loonies

and the just plain curious at bay. Most just wanted a glimpse of the child. A few–thankfully,

very few–had darker things in mind; gene-splicing their mythologies, they arrived with rifles

and pamphlets and hate-filled eyes, muttering black fantasies about an Antichrist seeded

from the nonexistent Dark Side of the Moon.

I didn’t get to meet him until his tenth birthday, but I can only imagine how frightening a time

it must have been: Alexander’s parents and the rest of the immediate family barricading

themselves behind drawn curtains, looking out upon the steadily increasing madness of a

crowd that seemed to represent all the rest of the world.

Alexander’s mother, Faye, was so serene about the whole thing that she seemed to be in

denial. She just held the baby and sang to him, making almost no reference to the mad

scene just beyond the driveway.

"It’s funny," she said at one point. "We don’t know him, really. We don’t know whether he’ll

be good or bad, smart or dumb, brave or afraid . . . the kind of things he’ll be interested in or

the kind of things that’ll bore him silly. He’s a stranger to us. An alien, for real."

Mark Drier winced as he glanced at the window. The blinds were drawn, but he could still

see the crowds, growing larger every hour; some of them chanting, some of them singing,

some of them shouting in rage. "Better not let them hear you say that."

Many years later, telling me the story, Alexander’s Uncle George shook his head with awe

as he remembered what Faye said at that moment: "Them? Who cares about them? They’ll

go away."

She was right, of course; the crowds began to diminish as soon as even the dimmest

pilgrims began to realize that they weren’t about to get beamed aboard any orbital crockery.

And the tabloids went after fresher stories the first time a Sheen misbehaved in Hollywood.

But her prophecy couldn’t have seemed likely to Mark Drier that morning . . . not with the

house being monitored by ten TV networks, the phone unplugged to keep it from ringing off

the hook, and Grandma having a quiet mental breakdown in the bedroom upstairs. At the

moment, he knew only that nothing would ever be all right again.

Alexander wasn’t deformed, at least, not in the sense that I’m deformed. He had two of

everything he needed two of and one of everything he needed one of. And it was all

functional. It all worked. He was even beautiful, in the sense that all healthy babies are

beautiful. But his head was unusually large: it mushroomed above the temples, bulging up

and out like a sack stuffed with more than it was designed to hold. (The doctors had feared

water on the brain, but it just happened to be the shape of the kid’s head; the only problem

it caused was in delivery, and that had been handled by the caesarian.) His eyes were about

three times larger, proportionally, than the norm for a baby of that size; and they were all

black, with no whites showing at all. His nose, as if to compensate, was unusually small,

little more than a nostrilled wrinkle in the center of his face. His mouth was a slit with thin,

pursed lips. His ears were little round buds with holes. His hands were odd too: there were

five fingers and a thumb on each, with the fingers all disproportionately long.

Still, that, by itself, wasn’t the problem. At least, not as Mark Drier saw it. He was not a

weak man. He could have dealt with birth defects.

The problem was that everybody in America had already seen that face. They’d seen it

staring at them from movie posters, from bestselling books, from artist’s renditions on the

covers of supermarket tabloids. It was a face so frequently depicted in the mass media that

even people who refused to subscribe recognized it as a well-known inhabitant of our shared

popular culture: the face described by the growing subculture of folks who claimed to have

been abducted and experimented upon–usually in the form of anal probes–by creatures from

outer space.

It was, in short, the face of a Roswell Alien.

Mark Drier peered out through the curtains again. The view out there was just as disturbing.

Even as he watched, a flyspecked yellow schoolbus crammed with doughy, pasty-faced

adults pulled up at the curb. An inordinate number of the faces at the windows had open

mouths. He couldn’t quite tell whether they were shouting, or just chronic mouth-breathers.

Their expressions were both ecstatic and dull: like sheep having a party. He shuddered. "I

don’t know, Faye. That’s a mob. We may have to start planning escape routes, in case they

rush us."

"They won’t," Faye said placidly.

"They’ll do what they want," Mark said. "Don’t you see? Some of them came all the way

across the country! They’re not going to let a front yard and a few closed doors stop them

now!"

She considered that. "Then we’ll just have to go outside and tell them they’re disturbing the

baby."

"And what makes you think they’ll listen to that?"

"If they think he’s a space baby, capable of shooting deathrays from his fingers, they just

might. But I don’t think it’ll be a problem. They’ll get tired. They’ll feel silly. They’ll go home.

And they’ll leave us to the business of being a family." She smiled, and touched noses with

the baby. "It’ll work out. He’s beautiful."

Nobody said anything to that.

Then Faye looked at them, and in a voice filled with soft sweet steel, a voice that damned

them for not responding, repeated, "He’s beautiful."

The gathered Uncles and Aunts hastened to assure Faye that they agreed. Mark joined in

last–reluctantly, and unpersuasively, and with what must have been shame for not being

able to feel it the way she did.

SPACE BABY FORETOLD IN BIBLE!

Will He Start World War Three?

I’m going to have to take a break to ward off the expectations of an unfortunately large

percentage of the people reading this account of Alexander’s life.

Alexander was not an alien. He was not a half-human, half-alien. He was not the result of

genetic manipulation by aliens who wanted an emissary on Earth. He was not the spawn of

a UFO abduction his mother repressed. He learned to speak at about the same rate all

children do. And he wasn’t the harbinger of a message from space, though come to think of

it that eventually turned out to be a little closer to the truth. He was a boy: one who may

have been a little different from the rest of us, but one whose genetic birthright, however

bent, was still entirely Homo sapiens. He came out the way he did because of an extremely

rare, but identifiable and very well-documented genetic condition that affected his fetal

development, subtly distorting his body in ways that mirrored the by-then well-established

folklore of the UFO conspiracy buffs. A search of medical literature was able to find six other

cases within the past three centuries: even photos of one poor boy from the early 1900s who

spent most of his short life in a freak show in South America. Of course, in today’s

media-conscious age, there was no way that the malady in question would continue to go

unnamed, and so Alexander got the honor of being immortalized in the medical textbooks

before he was even old enough to recognize his mother’s face. Drier’s Syndrome, they

called it: and if there was any upside to the public’s insistence on believing that the child

was somehow a visitor from outer space, it was the degree to which that rescued him from a

lifetime of being known as the kid with the disfiguring disease.

But he was human, all right. Gloriously human. There will not, at any point in this narrative,

be a surprise revelation that he was ever, wholly or in part, anything but.

So those of you who followed the various events of Alexander’s life in the kind of newspapers

that run front-page headlines about miraculous chocolate diets, can go indulge your little

fantasies elsewhere. Because that’s not what happened.

SPACE BABY TURNS TOYS INTO GOLD!

Parents Now Wealthy, Friends Say

Alexander occupied such an important part of my life that I find it hard to feel anything but

contempt for anybody who had trouble loving him. I suppose that’s the main reason I’ve

always been so hard on his father: why I still automatically think of him as a cold and

distant man, unable to forgive his son for being less than normal. I’m also aware that it’s the

way some biographers have portrayed him–some of them, God help me, even using

interviews with me as a primary source.

But it wasn’t like that. In the lonely, hysterical days immediately following Alexander’s birth,

Mark Drier was a frightened man, desperately searching for the plan that would render

everything all right–and who can’t be hated for coming up with the wrong idea when nobody,

with the possible exception of Alexander’s mother, knew what the right idea was.

He found her in the upstairs den, which was the brightest room in the house: a perfect place

for a young mother to breastfeed her baby. The baby was, like all babies, trusting, hungry,

squirming, and needful. I’d like to think that as Mark looked at his child that day, he felt not

instinctive revulsion, but also the awe fit for all new life abroad in the world. He may even

have felt the joy of fatherhood. But he was a practical man, and love must always make

room for practicality . . . especially with buses of UFO-Abduction Faithful still converging on

town from every direction.

Again: I wasn’t there. I can’t re-create the conversation precisely. But I know the people.

And it happened something like this:

Mark said, "We’re going to need money."

Faye smiled. "Well, we knew that going in, hon."

His hands curled into fists. "Please. Babe. I’m not talking about Diapers and Dip-Tet money.

I’m talking about independent wealth. I’m talking about guard dogs and chain-link fencing:

the kind of money capable of keeping out the wackos for the rest of our lives."

"We can handle the wackos," she said softly. "They’ll get bored. Didn’t you hear what

Sheriff Dooley said? Some of them are going home already."

Mark shook his head. "Some of them, maybe. Maybe even most of them–if they behave the

way mobs usually don’t. But all of them? At home and in school and for the rest of his life?

How do we stop some especially dangerous nut, who may be just getting the idea today,

from coming after our boy with a gun maybe fifteen years from now? Do you honestly think

that everybody who’s run out of money or vacation time, and has to go back home to East

Calabash or whatever, is just going to forget this kid they were so sure came from outer

space? Be real! They’ll be back when you least expect them–and if not them, then

somebody else. We can’t live an ordinary life that way. Hell, I won’t be able to hold onto my

job as it is–we can’t expect me to just go on selling hardware when every yahoo in the

country’s going to flock to my store to see if I have antennae hidden under my hairline. We

need money, babe. If only to protect us from what he’s going to bring."

Faye remained as perfectly serene as before, but there was an edge to it now: a willful

defiance of the places this conversation was headed. "So what do you suggest?"

He was unable to meet her eyes. "The Enquirer’s willing to pay us five million for an

exclusive interview–as long as we tell them what they want to hear."

"That your son’s a creature from outer space."

"Don’t get me wrong," Mark pleaded. "I hate the bastards. But I can’t think of any other way.

And if they’ll be saying it anyway . . . we might as well get paid for it, so we can get the boy

what he needs."

"Chain-link fence," she said, without raising her voice. "Guard dogs. Isolation from other

children."

"Safety," he countered.

She considered that for several seconds, glancing from the earnest face of her husband to

the oddly-shaped head of her child. She’d been raised on a small family farm. She’d seen

her parents struggling through droughts; she’d lived through foreclosures and years of lean,

grinding poverty. She’d even had to quit the university after only two years, when her student

loans were cut. She knew what it meant to need money and not have it. Nobody can say

how much the idea tempted her; nobody would have blamed her for going along with it.

But then she said, "No."

"Come on, Faye. Be realistic–"

"I am being realistic. I’m refusing to lie."

"It’s a white lie."

"It’s a cruel lie," she snapped. "He’s our child. Our human child. And it’s our job as his

parents to stand up for what he is, not for what some trash newspapers want him to be. I

want him to grow up knowing we defended him!" She took the now-sleeping child from her

breast, handed him to her husband, and for the first time, spat out her anger, "You want

realistic? Call him by name. I haven’t heard you do that yet. You want realistic, call him by

name!"

FACE OF SPACE BABY FOUNDON MOON!

Is He Reincarnation of Ancient Lunar Pharoah?

Alexander was lucky, in some ways. Some places would have put the kid in a museum and

charged visitors admission to see him–and if you think that’s overstating the situation, kindly

look up the case of the Dionne Quints. But that’s not what happened.

Sweethaven came to see the hordes of morbidly curious as invaders–uncouth, unwanted

barbarians who parked on lawns, peered in windows, and dropped their garbage in the

streets. What’s more, they came to see the Driers as hometown heroes being victimized by

outsiders. There may have been a few voices raised against the child, at first (most of them

taking refuge in the fiction that he was brain-damaged, and that he’d have been better off in

an institution anyway), but as the months went on, and most of the nine hundred people of

Sweethaven got to see him up close, even that faded away to silence, replaced by the

determination to protect him at all costs.

Mark Drier did not lose his job at the hardware store; he had to miss a lot of time at first,

whenever the Nuts and the Media got too obnoxious, but his boss covered for him, and paid

him full wages even when Mark couldn’t make it in more than one or two days at a time.

Nobody denounced Alexander from the pulpit. At least, not in Sweethaven: there were some

churches down south that preached about him as if he had 666 stamped on his head, but

Sweethaven’s Reverend Wallace Vukcevich assured his flock that he’d seen the boy and

that he seemed a perfectly fine baby, odd looks and all.

In the early months, there were two, and only two, acts of serious violence directed against

the Drier family. One time, a mentally disturbed woman from Boca Raton, Florida, pulled out

a gun and started shooting at the house–but she got off exactly one very wild shot before

being wrestled to the ground. It didn’t even hit the house. Another time, when Faye was

taking Alexander to the doctor for a routine examination, a car filled with tabloid reporters

deliberately sideswiped the car so they could force her to stop and get a close-up picture of

the baby. The good people of Sweethaven took both incidents very personally. The Boca

Raton woman was charged with Attempted Murder, Illegal Possession of a Firearm,

Reckless Endangerment, Trespassing, and everything else the local courts could think of;

she got the maximum penalty on every count and was awarded a long string of consecutive

sentences. The reporters would have been lucky to get off with just that: this was only a few

years after the similar incident that caused Princess Diana’s death in France, and the small

mob of local boys on the scene had a pretty poor opinion of the kind of louts capable of

taking that kind of risk with the life of a baby. The tabloid stringers spent almost as much

time in the hospital as they later did in jail.

As ugly and upsetting as both incidents were, they only served to cement the town’s

resolve: Alexander may have been one strange-looking kid, but he was one of theirs . . . a

feeling that only grew as he developed a personality, and turned out to be pretty normal after

all. He was a child. He learned to smile, to giggle, to say his first words, to crawl, to walk, to

manipulate his parents with well-placed tantrums . . . and that most human of all skills, to

ask questions.

Which brings us to the moment he’d later describe as his earliest memory.

Like most of the rest of us, he saw it on television.

He’d watched TV before, of course. His Mommy was not above occasionally using it as a

babysitter. He liked cartoons. He didn’t understand why grownups watched the things they

watched, which mostly seemed to be other grownups bantering in living rooms. He certainly

didn’t understand the attention his Mommy and Daddy and Uncle and Aunt gave the

program on TV now, which was mostly a bunch of serious-looking people speaking in grim,

measured tones. Why was this fascinating enough to keep the grownups from playing with

him?

"The arrogance of it," Mark Drier said. "The infernal . . . gall."

"It’s just symbolic," Uncle George said. "They’re not actually erasing the accomplishment."

"Oh, come on, George! They’re doing worse! They’re pissing on it! They’re telling the whole

world that the whole thing was nothing more than a big joke!"

Alexander, who was too young to understand any of this, who was indeed frustrated by his

family’s helpless fascination for something beyond his comprehension, merely wandered

from one relative to another, trying to interest them in more enjoyable activities . . . until the

network commentary switched over to the live feed, and something truly interesting showed

up on-screen.

It was a strange-looking man in a chubby suit, with a big box on his back and a gleaming

mirror instead of a face. There was something irresistably puppetlike about the way the man

bounced up and down when he walked: something that struck the young Alexander as both

comical and graceful at the same time.

Alexander struggled free of his Mommy’s lap, toddled over to the TV, and pointed a single

questing finger at the funny man. "Who dat?"

"Get away from the screen, son," Mark said. "We’re trying to watch."

Alexander complied as much as his curiosity would allow him, backing up all of two inches.

"Who dat, Daddy? Who dat?"

"Alex, why won’t you listen to me? We’re trying to watch. Be nice."

"You could answer his question," Faye said. She was, by this point, hypersensitive to

slights of her son, especially where her husband was concerned: especially in light of the

little subliminal flinch that sometimes passed across Mark’s face when Alexander fixed

those oversized black eyes on his. She didn’t give Mark a chance to redeem himself, but

instead turned to Alexander and said, "That’s an astronaut, honey."

Alexander blinked doubtfully, and repeated the unfamiliar word, "As’not?"

Faye repeated it with exaggerated care, "As-tro-naut. That’s what we call somebody who

goes to outer space. That man on the TV is walking on the Moon."

Alexander knew what the Moon was. He saw it in the sky all the time, both day and night,

and his Mommy had taught him what it was called. But up until this moment, it had never

occured to him that it was more than a pale round ball just out of reach . . . that it was an

actual place, so far away that there had to be a special name for the people who went there.

He stabbed his finger at the astronaut’s helmet. "Dat?"

"That’s his space suit. He needs that to breathe."

Alexander later told me how his toddler mind processed this information. He thought

astronauts wore their space suits all the time, even when they weren’t on the Moon, even

when they were home in bed, even when they were in the bathtub. It didn’t make much

sense to him.

Mark Drier said something that couldn’t have been any help endearing him to his wife, "He’s

too young, hon. He can’t possibly understand this."

Despite his confusion about the spacesuits, Alexander resented that. He understood more

than his Mommy and Daddy gave him credit for. Like most toddlers, his comprehension

vocabulary was already far ahead of his deceptively primitive speech, and he’d used it to

figure out a lot of things they couldn’t even begin to guess he knew: among them that his

Daddy was a very sad man.

Then the astronaut on TV hopped over a small rock in his path, both rising and falling with

unnatural slowness, and Alexander found himself smiling. He turned toward his mother. "I go

dere? I be ast-not?"

The assembled grownups met each other’s eyes.

And Mark Drier said, "No. You won’t."

"Dat man ast-not."

"Yeah . . . well . . . it’s different for him."

Alexander asked the dreaded Next Question always asked by children, "Why?"

Mark Drier silently appealed to one relative after another, imploring them to rescue him.

"Because . . . nobody has the wrong idea about where he comes from."

"That does it," Faye said.

She rose from her easy chair, picked up her son, and carried him from the room, leaving

Mark enveloped by a silence echoing with all the words that would have emerged from a

perfect man’s mouth.

SPACE BOY DRAWS CIRCLES IN SANDBOX!

UFO Scientists Note Uncanny Similarities To Crop Circles In Europe!

The young Alexander couldn’t understand why something as wondrous as an astronaut

made the grownups around him so upset.

He was too young to know that he’d been watching the live coverage of the First Saudi

Expedition to the Moon.

In the wake of the Third Gulf War, the Saudis, flush with their apparent invincibility, had

grown rich enough and fanatical enough and crazy enough to sink an obscene amount of

petrodollars into their very own space program–mostly staffed, in a particularly cruel irony,

by unemployed veterans of the moribund Japanese and United States space programs. Like

Projects Mercury through Apollo, and the Golden Dawn expeditions sponsored by the late

emperor, this particular project took the better part of a decade to achieve its stated goal:

and though there’d been some who said that the Saudis would change their minds before

they got that far, the day had finally come, and the rest of the world could do little but watch

as the Saudis did just what they’d said they would do.

Many Islamic factions had never liked the idea of a Western Moon. The Saudis had therefore

taken the position that Armstrong, Aldrin, and those who followed them had profaned it with

their presence. The entire purpose of their space program was to remove, and destroy,

everything that the Americans and the Japanese had left behind during their various

missions–starting with Tranquility Base, which they now dismantled before a television

audience of two billion people.

Reactions to this varied, depending upon where in the world you were. In some parts of the

world, anything that humiliated America was reason to cheer. In others, it was considered a

sad victory of barbarians. Even Americans weren’t united in their reaction. Some wept for

triumphs long-gone. Some were so outraged by the slap in the face they advocated military

action against the Saudis. Some thought the whole space program a waste of money better

spent elsewhere, and applauded the symbolic burial of Kennedy’s folly.

All too many people simply didn’t care–it was too far away, and had nothing to do with their

lives. Their vote was heard in the form of over ten thousand phone calls to the TV networks,

protesting not the desecration of Tranquility Base but the preemption of their favorite

sitcoms. Most of those were of the opinion that the landing on the Moon had been a hoax

anyway. The Japanese, and the Saudis, had simply leased parts of Arizona to film their

sequels.

I know how I reacted. I was eight years older than Alexander. I cursed at the set with all the

rage of a boy who considered the desecration a personal assault, thinking the world a place

ruled only by madmen and fools.

I still believe that.

As for Alexander, he never did make it to the Moon. The universe didn’t have anything that

obvious in mind for him. I didn’t make it there, either. It was a world that would never be part

of our futures, either shared or separate. But I do look at it sometimes: still just as

mysterious, still just as bright in the night sky. And I wonder, in light of everything that’s

happened since, if the Saudis succeeded only in keeping the dream alive for us.

NEW SPACE BOY SHOCKER: MIRRORS DON’T REFLECT HIM!

Will Parents Still Deny His Origin?

The year Alexander turned four, the science scores of America’s high school students hit an

all-time low. The President of the United States was caught making major policy decisions

on Tarot readings. The newest cult to claim one million converts preached poverty,

abstinence, and the worship of the planet Jupiter. And two different prime-time newscasts

began devoting five minutes of each program to the astrological readings of singers and

movie stars.

I still have a copy of the reading one of those shows gave for the Space Boy himself. "This is

a time of growth and learning. Expect major changes in the coming year. But don’t forget to

depend on those close to you."

A brilliantly prescient horoscope for any four-year-old child.

It wasn’t surprising they got around to him. He was, after all, still a frequent topic of the

tabloids, and even the comparatively respectable media ran updates on the various

milestones of his life. The Driers had even allowed Life magazine to do a photospread of him

attending the birthday party of one of his little friends–the theory being that pictures of

Alexander with pink cake smeared on his chin were the only possible antidote for stories

claiming that his real parents were the ancient astronauts personally responsible for the

Pyramid of Cheops. Alas, they only helped to keep him in the public eye–and though the

good people of Sweethaven kept direct intrusion to a minimum, coverage of Alexander’s life

was still so ubiquitous that the Driers actually put their TV set in storage to save him from

being traumatized by accidental exposure to Space Boy shtick.

No, he had to suffer different traumas entirely.

Take the night he spent one full hour making faces in the mirror. It wasn’t one of his favorite

games–not because he hated his face, as he hadn’t been raised to have such a poisonous

feeling, but because his smooth masklike features simply weren’t very good at the comical

art of grinning. Alexander smiling looked a lot like Alexander frowning, and Alexander calm

looked a lot like Alexander angry: there were subtle differences which his family could read,

but anybody else had to rely on context or body language. Genuinely funny faces were so

hard to make that even Alexander, who was at this point just beginning to get a grasp of

how truly odd he looked, knew he just wasn’t very good at making them.

Today was different, though. Today he was practicing a trick he’d discovered not very long

before: i.e. making the world appear to jump side to side by opening and closing each eye in

turn. The phenomenon, which also has application in astronomy, is known as parallax, and

every child with two functional eyes takes a turn being fascinated by it. He was most

enthralled by the way it looked in the mirror–the way his whole head flickered back and

forth, just like a bouncing ball . . .

Somebody at the door said, "Alex."

Alexander jumped before he saw who it was. "Oh. Daddy."

Many years later, he’d have to grope for the words to describe his childhood feelings for

Mark Drier. There was love involved, of course; Mark had been a good and gentle man, who

might have been a fine father for a less unusual son. He’d certainly tried to be a fine father to

Alexander, saying the things he was supposed to say, doing the things he was supposed to

do, never being deliberately cruel. But he was also a man whose affection seemed forced, a

man who couldn’t quite conquer that little subliminal flinch he demonstrated whenever his

son entered a room . . . a man who had very little to say to Alexander and by this point not

much more to say to Faye.

Without ever being struck, without ever being abused, Alexander couldn’t help being always

just a little bit afraid of him.

And his father knew it, "Sorry. Did I scare you?"

"Maybe a little bit," Alexander said self-consciously. "I was making faces."

Mark flashed a little wan smile at that. "Any good ones?"

"Not really. I think maybe I need a moustache."

Another wan smile. "I think maybe I could use one, too." He held the expression for all of

ten seconds before seeming to remember something that pained him–then gathered up his

strength, and with a joviality that rang false, said, "Hey, Sport? I know it’s near your

bedtime, but how’d you like to take a walk with your old man? Just for a few minutes?"

Alexander glanced at the window beside the shower stall. The little sliver of sky visible

between the mostly drawn curtains was a shade of purple-blue not very far removed from

black; it would not be long before the heavens got the news that the sun was gone for

another day. He spoke with caution: "It’s dark."

"That’s okay. We won’t be going far."

"Is Mom coming?"

"Not tonight," Mark Drier said. "But don’t worry. She already knows we’re going."

He took Alexander downstairs, zipped him up in his jacket, took his hand, and walked him

into the backyard. They had a big backyard. They were at the edge of town, just south of the

hills, on a slope that was the first of a long bumpy ride to the horizon. Their property was

entirely surrounded by chain-link fence, not high enough to keep away determined intruders,

but enough to discourage the merely curious. Alexander had seen folks with cameras

scramble over once or twice; he’d also seen his Dad chase them away, shouting words that

Alexander himself was not permitted to speak. But there hadn’t been an incident like that

since his last birthday.

Mark unlocked the back gate and walked Alexander to the top of the first hill, home of a

jutting slab of rock that the boy was allowed to climb only when his parents were watching.

It was a big rock for a kid Alexander’s age, almost as tall as his Dad. Mark didn’t give him a

chance to climb it–just picked him up and put him there, before climbing the rock himself

and taking his place by Alexander’s side.

They sat without speaking for the several minutes it took the last light of day to surrender to

the blackness of night. Mark said nothing because he was a smoker, and a sedentary man,

who did not climb hills easily; his ragged breaths burst from him like little explosions.

Alexander said nothing because his father was holding his hand, which was in and of itself

such an unusual thing that he was scared to disturb it with the sound of his own voice.

Time passed. Mark’s breathing slowed to normal.

The stars came out.

It was a clear night over a very small town, and the lights burning down below were not

enough to force many stars into hiding. Some of them shone like pinprick flames. And as

the night grew darker above Sweethaven, and Alexander searched his father’s face for the

reason they’d hiked all the way up here, Mark seemed less and less a recognizable

presence and more and more a man-shaped shadow eclipsing the lights in the sky above

him.

Forever came and went before Mark spoke. "You cold?"

"No," Alexander said.

"Tired?"

How could Alexander be tired, when all this was going on? "No."

"Good," Mark said, still without looking at him.

More time passed. So much time that Alexander thought they were supposed to sit here,

holding hands, all the way to morning.

Then Mark’s profile shifted slightly, and he spoke in a strange, faraway voice that didn’t

sound like he knew who he was talking to. "You know . . . I used to love the stars. Not

astronomy; I was never any good at that. But once upon a time, when I was a kid, I used to

pitch a tent on a hilltop not far from here. I didn’t sleep in the tent unless it was raining,

though. When it was a nice, clear night, like tonight, I laid out my sleeping bag and slept in

the open . . . just looking up at the constellations. Some of those nights, time just seemed

to stop." He hesitated, glanced at his son, and turned his gaze back to the sky.

"Sometimes I wish it did."

"You can wish on stars," Alexander said knowledgably.

"I’ve heard that. But by the time somebody told me I was too old to believe it." He sighed. "It

took me a long time to learn that even if you do wish on stars, you don’t always get what

you want from them."

Alexander said, "You can still wish."

"That’s right. You can."

And because Mark seemed even sadder now than he’d ever managed to seem before,

Alexander came right out and asked, "What do you wish, Daddy?"

The shadow in the shape of Alexander’s father shifted, no longer a profile turned up but a

black oval looking down at the boy. Alexander didn’t have enough light to see his

expression; the oval contained nothing but darkness. In the silence, Alexander was terribly

afraid that he’d said something wrong.

Then Mark squeezed his hand extra tight. "We better get you back to the house. It’s getting

late, and your mother’s going to want to tuck you back in."

Alexander could only be relieved that the strange interlude was over. "Sure." He allowed his

father to help him down from the rock, even though he knew he could climb down by himself,

and followed him back to the house.

Something else happened late that night, long after he went to bed. Though somewhere

deep within the land of sleep, he realized he was not alone. He opened his great black eyes

a slit and looked across the pitch-black room to a shape barely visible in the doorway. It

was his father, standing with slumped shoulders, one arm braced against the doorframe.

Alexander shouldn’t have been able to see him at all, since the hall was dark, too, but there

was just enough ambient light coming from elsewhere in the house to render Mark Drier’s

outline crisp and sharp. Too sleepy to get up, Alexander fell back to sleep before it occurred

to him to wonder just what his father wanted now. When he opened his eyes again, still

surrounded by darkness, the doorway was empty.

The divorce was uncontested. Mark Drier moved to San Francisco, where he got a one-room

apartment and a job behind the counter in a souvenir shop on Fisherman’s Wharf. He didn’t

aspire to anything else, he didn’t marry again, and he didn’t get a phone. The few times he

received visits from journalists desiring inside gossip about his son, he simply ejected them,

always silently, and never with unnecessary force.

Father and Son didn’t see each other again for almost two decades.

SPACE BOY GOES TO SCHOOL!

Teaches Classmates Orbital Mechanics

The year Alexander Drier entered first grade, the Jupiter Cult boasted over three million

members nationwide. A couple with a million-dollar home in Texas was driven to personal

bankruptcy by the wife’s seven-digit debt to the Home Astrology Network. Three colleges

offered their first courses in UFO abductions during the twentieth century. Psychic surgeons

opened successful clinics in New York, Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago–curing nobody

but building a sizeable clientele among inoperable cancer patients who had nothing left to

lose. And a certain best-selling book, written by the kind of writer who specializes in such

things, declared that photographs of the stone face on Mars taken over the past ten years

proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that its lips were moving. He claimed that the

government was trying to prevent the rock formation from delivering its truly momentous

message to humanity–his chief proof an allegation that there were no deaf lip-readers

working at NASA.

I own a crayon drawing Alexander made at about this age. His mother gave it to me–no big

sacrifice on her part, since she saved all his drawings, and had hundreds of them. It’s about

as impressive as you’d expect from a drawing made by a six-year-old: stick figures, lollipop

trees, lopsided houses, garish color that refuses to accept the authority of the lines meant

to hold it in check. Faye Drier stands at one side of the picture, with exaggerated curlycue

hair that seems to be made out of wildly askew Slinkies. She is clearly smiling, clearly a

figure meant to be seen with love. The rest of Alexander’s extended family is also in the

picture, though harder to identify. The bald man with the tie is probably Uncle George. The

woman standing next to him, a smaller version of Faye, would then have to be Aunt Jude.

Aunt Wendy, who lived on the east coast now but visited at least twice a year, stands next

to her, identifiable by her big hoop earrings. Then there’s a blob of color that must have been

intended to represent Alexander’s dog, Arnold . . . .

. . . and next to Arnold, Alexander himself, the whole reason the drawing is so important.

Because, once you take his limited drafting skills into account, it’s an accurate drawing. It

shows a boy with a big round head that seems too large for his body, and big long fingers

disproportionately long for their hands, and big black eyes shaped like almonds.

In the picture, he’s smiling. That’s important. Alexander wasn’t very good at smiling; his

facial muscles weren’t really built for it. He couldn’t maintain the expression for long. But in

the drawing he’s smiling, and waving: like for all the world a still from one of those old-time

Spielberg movies.

The picture’s important because it shows that Alexander, at that age, already understood

just how different he looked. He just wasn’t self-conscious about it, that’s all.

Not even the day Faye brought him to his first day at the local elementary school–a small

brick building midway between Sweethaven and Monarch, a somewhat larger town that sat

fifteen miles up the road.

Sweethaven and Monarch shared the school between them, in order to make the classes

large enough to support a teacher for every grade. That was still an average of only ten or

eleven children per class. Six of the kids in Alexander’s class were natives of Monarch and

three of those would now be meeting the Space Boy for the very first time.

On the school’s insistence, Alexander was ushered in half an hour late, after his teacher,

Mrs. Hirschman, had a chance to deliver her little speech about what to expect. The speech

included the standard warning that he might look a little scary, but he shouldn’t be treated

any differently than anybody else. As a result, the five children who knew Alexander from

Sweethaven, and the three children from Monarch who had met him already, were now

reminded to consider him odd, and the three children who’d never seen him before watched

his entrance with the awed fascination they would have awarded a strange and colorful new

species of bug.

As he took his seat, the girl in the desk next to him, Sally Watkins, said the first thing that

came to mind. "He looks like a spaceman."

Mrs. Hirschman was scandalized. "Sally! That’s rude!"

"That’s okay," Alexander said. "I do look like a spaceman."

"That may be true, but we don’t like to make fun of the way people look in this class."

"But everybody says it. . . ."

Mrs. Hirschman now definitely had the look of a woman who feared losing control. "It’s still

not a subject we’re going to discuss here. Is that clear?"

Alexander hesitated. "Okay. Sure."

"Thank you, Alexander."

She turned her back, to write something on the blackboard.

He simply followed her with his big black eyes, bemused by her reaction, and wondering

just what he’d said to get her so upset.

He looked around at his classmates to see what they thought–and was startled to find

several of them staring at him with expressions ranging from loathing to morbid fascination.

Those who were looked away quickly as soon as he made eye contact, afraid to admit their

interest, scared that he’d notice them as they’d noticed him. He’d seen such reactions

before (notably from his dad, and by at most a couple of other people in Sweethaven), but he

was treated so normally by his mom and the rest of his family that he’d just written that off

as something that strangers happened to do.

Now, looking at the faces of his classmates, it occurred to him for the very first time that

this was the way some people looked at boys who looked like spacemen.

It’s a tribute to the Drier family and the people of Sweethaven that Alexander, a remarkably

bright kid, didn’t have enough experiential data to reach this seemingly obvious conclusion

until he was almost six. But it still hurt. In this, the first moment where he really had a taste

of what it meant to be a freak, he felt so tremendously self-conscious that he actually

considered bolting from the room in tears.

Then he noticed Sally Watkins, the little girl who’d called him a spaceman, sticking out her

tongue at him.

He blinked, unsure how to react.

She looked away, then turned back, and stuck out her tongue again.

Experimentally, because it was the only response that seemed to make sense, he stuck

out his own tongue in kind.

She crossed her eyes.

And he felt better.

Popularity, it seemed, was not going to be a serious problem.

SPACE BOY’S SECRET MISSION ON EARTH!

Veni, Vidi, Vici

In a particularly frightening nationwide poll, astrology became the only "science" seventy

percent of Americans could identify by name. A certain national news magazine ran a cover

story about the prophecies of Nostradamus, and how they’d all come true, sorta. There was

another evolution debate in the Department of Education, with Darwin evicted from over half

the nation’s schools and creationism installed as the officially recognized curriculum.

Reports of UFO abductions reached an all-time high, to the point where they were reportedly

taking place out in the open, on crowded city streets, with nobody ever managing to get one

on film.

Somehow, Alexander learned. He was so anxious to get back into Mrs. Hirchman’s good

graces that he paid attention to her boring lectures and did all his homework, and before

long he realized he was enjoying it.

There was a problem with a couple of local adults who objected to having their kid go to the

same school as Alexander. They actually picketed the school, declaring it, "OFF LIMITS TO

ALIENS." It was ugly, and stupid . . . but it also died down once the idiots in question

realized that nobody was going to buy it. Alexander was the local celebrity. He was the

reason the world knew Sweethaven and Monarch existed. They were proud of him. Plus the

owners and employees of the half dozen businesses in town owed their increased sales to

him, and they knew it.

Time passed.

When Alexander was eight he surprised his mother by announcing that he wanted to

become a spaceman. Faye deserves credit for immediately understanding what he meant.

"Maybe you better say ‘astronaut,’ dear."

That seemed reasonable enough to him. "Astronaut," he agreed.

Uncle George, who was listening, said, "You know, son, that’s a pretty hard thing to want to

grow up to be."

"Why?" Alexander wanted to know.

"Because, right now, there aren’t any astronauts."

"There are the Israelis."

Uncle George shook his head. "They’ll quit soon. That always happens. We got tired and

quit. The Russians got tired and quit. The Japanese got tired and quit. The Saudis got tired

and quit. Pretty soon the Israelis will get tired too. I don’t know if anybody will still be doing

it by the time you grow up."

Alexander was at the stage of life where historical precedent didn’t mean a damn thing to

him. "That’s okay. I’m still going to be an astronaut."

"How?" Uncle George wanted to know. "You gonna build a rocket ship in your backyard?"

Alexander shrugged. "If I have to."

"And where are you going to go?"

"Venus. Saturn. Pluto. One of those places."

"Pluto," Uncle George repeated dubiously.

"It’s cold there," Alexander said. "It’s cold and Mercury’s hot. But I’ll go anywhere they want

to send me. It doesn’t matter where as long as I get to go."

Faye, who was digging up a clog in the sink, grunted, "And as long as you also get to come

back."

"Well, duh," Alexander said.

Much later, when the boy was watching Gilligan, Uncle George took Faye aside to bring up

a concern last expressed by Mark Drier during the Saudi moon landing. "Listen, are you

sure it’s a good idea to encourage him to talk about that kind of thing? Let the wrong person

hear him talking about going off into space, and they’ll turn it into E.T. wanting to go home."

Faye said, "I don’t care what they turn it into. I care what my son turns it into."

"Oh, come on–"

"No, you come on. He’s eight years old. Are you going to tell him not to dream?"

"He can dream all he wants," Uncle George said. "But you have to teach him to keep some

things secret. He has too many people listening to him . . . some of whom would love to

hear him talk about wanting to be an astronaut. Don’t you see that they could twist that into

anything? Don’t you understand that he’s gotten to the age where we’re going to have to

keep a tight rein on the kind of things that come out of his mouth?"

Faye sighed. "I’m not going to keep him gagged, George."

"It’s not as simple as that–"

"I’m sorry," Faye said. "But it’s as simple, or as complicated, as my son and I choose to

make it."

SPACE BOY’S PLOT TO HYPNOTIZE THE WORLD ON TV!

Don’t Watch His Eyes, Experts Warn

When Alexander was ten, he was interviewed on TV. He’d actually appeared on television

any number of times before that–starting with his birth, and continuing throughout his

childhood, whenever enterprising newspeople went back to Sweethaven for regular updates.

But that was just news footage. This was a fully authorized, in-depth interview, promoted on

prime time and aired on the highest-rated, most influential TV news magazine of its time. It

was considered a coup by all involved–not only by the network and the newspeople, but also

by Faye and Alexander Drier.

This was because Faye’s refusal to exploit her son’s notoriety had prevented the Driers from

earning any of the millions that might have been raised by Space Boy merchandise. In

supporting him, she’d been helped not only by regular checks from Alexander’s absent

father, but also by her family, which had helped her maintain their home, and by her

community, which had determinedly kept her employed and protected from the worst of the

UFO-abduction crazies. But that hadn’t provided for much more than necessities, birthdays,

and Christmases. And when Alexander, whose interest in astronautics had not faded, and

whose bedroom was now overflowing with Saturn V models, Armstrong and Aldrin posters,

and models of the solar system, announced that the one birthday present he wanted more

than any other was a day at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, Faye

had felt her back forced against a wall.

And so she finally let it be known that she was amenable to an interview. As long as

whoever performed the interview did it in Washington, providing security and travel expenses

for herself, Alexander, one of Alexander’s school friends (he chose Sally Watkins), the

parents of the child he chose, and two relatives to be named later. So many news

organizations leaped on this offer that she’d needed almost two weeks just to decide which

one was least likely to provide unpleasant surprises; she chose the one she did, despite its

decades-old confrontational stance toward corrupt businessmen and politicians, because it

was also a fairly honorable enterprise that could be trusted to take it easier on a kid.

As a result, Alexander enjoyed several firsts: his first trip outside Wyoming, his first airplane

flight, his first journey among strangers whose reactions to him could not be safely

predicted, his first time speaking for himself on television . . . and one other thing, which he

wouldn’t find out until two days after the interview aired.

From all accounts, he acquitted himself admirably.

There was the incident on the connecting flight to Philadelphia, when a fifteen-year-old kid

across the aisle elbowed his sister and said: "Hey, look. We’ve been abducted."

"Shut up!" the sister hissed. "You’re awful!"

Instead of ignoring them, Alexander leaned over and responded in a spooky voice that

carried throughout that entire section of the plane: "Actually, he’s right. And we’re not really

landing in Philadelphia . . . Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!"

That made a hit. So did his unannounced appearance at the Air and Space Museum, where

he found himself attracting more attention than any of the exhibits. He might have ignored

the people who gathered around him to gawk. He might have gotten frightened and asked

them to leave him alone. He did neither. Instead, armed with his own intense interest in the

subject, he became a tour guide: pointing out the Apollo capsule, the Space Shuttle,

Skylab, and everything else he recognized from his own reading, explaining what they were

and where they had gone in a loud, clear voice that communicated more enthusiasm than

factual accuracy. (He was, after all, a ten-year-old.) Midway through his presentation, a local

news team arrived and filmed him describing how astronauts went to the bathroom in

space–scooping the interview show he was slated to do in three days, but capturing for the

very first time on national television his declaration that he was going to be an astronaut

himself.

There was more. He went to Arlington, the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, the

Clinton Museum, the Memorial for the Victims of the Toxic Spill in Honolulu. He spent one

sad morning in the National Holocaust Museum, silently moving from one exhibit to another,

speaking only when he encountered the Nazis’ own footage of a dwarf executed for his

deformities. Alexander’s response upon realizing just how doomed his own life could have

been (an angry "Were all these people stupid, or what?") made the news that night. The

local anchorman joked about comments from an alien visitor. I remember wanting to kill him.

Alexander’s live interview turned out to be more than a way to cadge a free trip to

Washington; it was also a masterstroke of public relations on the part of his mother.

Because it was the last thing the UFO fanatics had expected: nothing more than a friendly

conversation with a bright, articulate ten-year-old. Alexander talked about his favorite

teachers at school, what TV shows he liked, the things he’d seen in Washington, even his

dinner with the President (breaking up the host by taking that opportunity to wave at the

camera and say "Hi".)

At one point the conversation turned to how Alexander got along with other kids.

Q: Do your friends make a big deal about you being famous?"

A: Sometimes.

Q: Does it change the way they treat you?

A: I don’t know. I’ve never been any different, so I don’t have any other experience to

compare with.

Q: Well, let’s put it this way. When you play Star Trek, do they always make you play the

alien?

A: No. We take turns.

Q: Do you play Kirk?

A: Sometimes. But everybody says I look more like Picard.

By the first commercial break, most people who’d tuned in to see the Space Boy were

already realizing that this was just a smart and likeable kid. Unfortunately, most was not all,

and polls revealed that there were still twenty million Americans more convinced of his

extraterrestrial origins than ever before.

Part of that may have had something to do with the third segment, which turned out to be

Alexander’s eulogy for the space program. He talked about John Glenn and he talked about

the walk on the Moon and he talked about the space shuttle and he talked about wanting to

be an astronaut and he talked about how everybody told him that wouldn’t happen and he

talked about how he wanted to make sure it happened anyway. He talked about the planets

and what they were like and which ones he’d like to visit if he only got a chance. He was, as

it happens, particularly enthused about Mars, and he said he’d rather go there than just

about anywhere else.

The final segment culminated in the moment of self-description that defined Alexander for

millions of Americans:

Q: Do you really think you’ll be an astronaut when you grow up?

A: One way or another.

Q: What does that mean?

A: It means that I’ll do whatever I have to to make it happen.

Q: And then you’ll really be the boy from space.

A: No. I’ll never be the boy from space. I’ll be . . . (groping for a phrase) . . . the astronaut

from Wyoming.

I was on the phone to the studio thirty seconds later.

WHAT WAS SPACEBOY’S REAL MISSION IN WASHINGTON?

Congressional Leaders Refuse to Comment

Two days later, the Driers were surprised in their hotel suite by their network liason, Ms.

Wallace. The woman’s manner was so hesitant that Faye Drier, who answered the door,

immediately assumed that something terrible had happened back home.

"Oh, no," Ms. Wallace colored. "I’m sorry. It’s just . . . well, it turns out that there’s

something else we’d like to ask Alexander to do for us. . . ."

Faye was on guard at once. "The deal was for one interview. Not two."

"I know, and we appreciate that . . . but this isn’t about an interview. We don’t even need

him to appear on TV again. It’s . . . well, it’s somewhat special . . ." The woman peered over

Faye’s shoulder, saw the pajama-clad Alexander emerge from his bedroom, and spoke

more quickly, "We would have told you before, but we got almost five thousand phone calls

during the broadcast . . . and, well, it took a while before this one was reported to somebody

with authority to make a decision . . . "

Faye, still suspecting the worst, unchained the door and ushered the poor woman in. Ms.

Wallace sat on the couch, said hi to Alexander, looked at her hands, and went on: "The call

came from an . . . unfortunate young man in Georgetown. That’s a residential neighborhood

here . . . "

"I know," Alexander said.

"Well, we checked this out very carefully, and he’s real. His name’s Colin Forsythe. He’s . .

. well, an almost complete shut-in. Severe muscular dystrophy, can’t walk, can’t do much

with his arms. He was five years old before his parents and his doctors realized he wasn’t

hopelessly retarded. But he’s far from that–he got his high school equivalency at fifteen, and

he’s now working on an on-line physics doctorate, through a special curriculum devised at

George Washington University. He’s also a big fan of the space program, just like you. And

when he saw the show, he called and asked if it was possible for you to visit him."

Faye’s frown had softened considerably. "And I suppose you want to have a camera there

so you can show their conversation on television?"

Wallace shook her head: "I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t occurred to us. But we’re not asking

for that. Under the circumstances, we’re just passing on the message."

Faye looked at Alexander. "It’s up to you, son. I won’t push you either way."

Alexander’s response was immediate: "Can we go right after breakfast?"

Cue me.

SPACE BOY VISITS INVALID!

Promises Cure for All Human Illness

Alexander later said that walking into my room was like returning to his own. The

obsessions on display were the same: identical posters of Buzz Aldrin vying for attention

among mockups of the Saturn V, the lunar module, skylab and the space shuttle. The only

real difference was that there was more of it: in part because my family had a lot more

money than Alexander’s, in part because I was eight years older and had been nursing my

obsession for that much longer, in part because I didn’t have any of the other distractions of

childhood. I had about a thousand more books just in this room alone, and a much faster

computer than the secondhand model Faye had been able to afford. And I also had one

puzzling decoration, hanging in what appeared to be a place of honor, that Alexander would

have to ask me about: a poster of my personal hero, an emaciated, grimacing, but oddly

buoyant man in a wheelchair. (He hadn’t heard of Stephen Hawking yet.)

Of course, he also had me to look at.

Like Alexander, I can be a pretty startling sight. Because my condition manifested itself at a

very young age, my arms and legs never really had a chance to develop: they’re flabby,

childish things too small for the torso that connects them. Because of these proportions, I

can’t use a normal wheelchair; instead, I lie strapped in a recliner that holds me much like

an egg held in the palm of a hand. The brace on my neck keeps my head from lolling to the

side, and my face, framed by long greasy hair and marked by what is usually two or three

days of stubble, makes me look like a degenerate infant. All in all, I look like a cartoon

drawn by somebody with no knowledge of anatomy. Most people seeing me for the first time

avert their eyes at once; I can judge their characters by how quickly they manage to steel

themselves for a second try.

Alexander, who was used to that look himself, didn’t avert his eyes at all. "Hi," he said.

My speech synthesizer responded, "Hello. Come . . . in. Sit down . . . on the bed."

He obliged. On his way over he didn’t go out of his way to maintain eye contact. But he

wasn’t fighting it either; I think he was just fascinated by all my stuff. I can usually tell if I’m

going to have anything in common with somebody by how frequently they glance at my

bookcase. Some folks only pretend to look because they find it preferable to looking at me.

But I can tell who’s faking and who’s genuinely interested. Alexander clearly saw a dozen

books he wanted in the time he took just crossing the room. Then he lowered the railing on

the bed, sat down, and smiled at me.

"Thanks . . . for coming," I said.

That’s the last sentence I’ll write that way. It’s there only because it’s the way I sound. The

synthesizers make my voice comprehensible, but it still takes most of my lung capacity just

to get out a few short syllables, so my sentences are always filled with pauses. These

days, when my words are often reported for the printed page, some reporters waste entire

manuscripts putting ten sets of ellipses in each sentence. It’s a cute trick, but it tends to

get on the nerves awfully fast. And it’s unnecessary, too. My friends and family mentally edit

out the pauses. If you absolutely need my cadences, add them yourself with a ballpoint.

Alexander said, "Well, I don’t get to meet a lot of other people interested in space. Most

people think the space stuff is just me being weird because of the way I look. Even my

Mom, I think."

"And your Dad?"

Alexander answered a bit too quickly. "I have no Dad."

I said, "Too bad. I have a Mom and a Dad, and they’re pretty good people, most of the time.

But I didn’t call you here to talk about them. I wanted to ask. Have you ever read Heinlein?"

"Not yet," Alexander said. "I’ve seen the books around, though. The last thing I read was

The Hobbit, and . . ."

I must have grimaced more than usual. "Elf Crap! God save me from Elf Crap! I’m talking

about the real stuff! Science Fiction, not Elf Crap!"

Alexander was a little startled by my vehemence. "Uh . . . you mean like Asimov?"

"Or Niven or Barnes or Brunner. Any of those guys. But I’m specifically thinking of Heinlein.

A story he wrote called ‘Waldo.’ All about somebody like me, with a body barely strong

enough to pick up a pencil on Earth, who coped by living on a satellite in free fall. With no

gravity holding him down, he could move around and do what he wanted and be as

independent as he wanted to be. Of course, he also needed to be obscenely rich just to

afford it. My parents are rich, Space Boy. But I don’t think they’ll ever be that rich. And I’m

not exactly astronaut material, so I don’t think anybody’s ever going to send me on a

mission. So that’s one dream that won’t ever come true. Not for me." I hesitated, just long

enough for Alexander to know it was deliberate, and not a pause created by the speech

program. "But you. Were you really serious about wanting to be an astronaut?"

Alexander blinked. It was the first time anybody had ever asked him that without adult

condescension, giving it the weight of a real question. He actually had to think about it. But

once he did, the resolve just clicked right into place, like one crucial piece of a puzzle he’d

been assembling all his life. I could hear the surprise in his own voice as he said it: "Yeah. I

was."

"You picked a hard career," I said. "There are no astronauts anymore. Even the Israelis

pulled back."

"So people keep telling me."

"And so they tell me, too. What they fail to realize is that we’ve been going into space

prematurely. We went before we had all the tools. We went when we knew so little that we

had to spend billions just to get there and back. We went with a technology so primitive that

only a miracle prevented us from having more Challenger explosions. But we went. And the

more time passes, the more inevitable the second try. Because everything else we’re

developing in the meantime, without even trying–more and more advanced computers, more

and more advanced insulation materials, stronger plastics, more and more efficient fuel

delivery systems–is going to make it cheaper and easier to go again. Before long, space will

belong to corporations instead of governments." I lifted a finger for emphasis, which is about

as much as I can manage. "I’ve been keeping track of those developments, Space Boy.

Very close track. And my most conservative guess is that this country will be returning to

space in a big way within at most the next fifteen years . . . which just happens to be my life

expectancy."

Alexander blinked several times in rapid succession, as our shared dream took shape in the

air between us. "Wow."

"So I ask again. Do you really want to go? Are you really willing to work hard and do

whatever’s necessary?"

He was ten years old, but he grew up in that moment. "Yeah. Whatever it takes."

This time I smiled widely before I spoke.

"You just hired a manager. Do what I say and we’ll get you there."

SPACE BOY SHOCKER:

"I’m Gay," He Announces At Breakfast

We didn’t see much of each other for the first few years after that. Alexander still had grade

school to finish, and I couldn’t travel without compelling reason. We racked up some big

phone bills, though, making plans, keeping our mutual enthusiasm high, setting up

supplemental courses of study, setting up an exercise regimen designed to put him in the

top ten percentile by the time he reached adulthood, and–too often, for me–averting the

crises that may seem like life or death at the time but are just, for most people, part of the

cost of growing up. There were times, in those years, that I cursed Alexander’s absent

father, not out of sympathy for my friend, but self-pity for the amount of time I had to spend

giving the heart-to-hearts that a Dad would have.

Once, when Alexander blew two math tests in a row, he called me up all in a sweat to say

that he was washed up. He couldn’t be an astronaut, let alone read all the tougher stuff I

kept sending him, if he couldn’t even understand algebra!

I pointed out that Einstein had failed math in school, and added, "How many of the other

kids in your class blew these tests?"

"About half of them. But they don’t study. I studied! I studied hard!"

"That’s your problem," I told him. "You psyched yourself out. You were so afraid of blowing

it, you left yourself no other option."

"Huh?" he asked.

"Elementary psychology, Space Boy. The self-fulfilling prophecy. You were so worried about

learning it, you couldn’t concentrate on what you were studying. So relax already. Go fishing

or hiking or whatever you do out there in boonie-land. Take it a little at a time, and you’ll

eventually pick it up."

"That’s easy for you to say. You already know everything."

There is nothing more sobering than the discovery that you’ve influenced an impressionable

young mind into worshipping you. I looked at the clutter of books and papers on my desk,

which I couldn’t even read unless I could first get somebody to clamp them to the

book-holder attached to my chair, and at the unfinished document on my word processor,

which had been mired on page fifteen since early the previous morning. "Yeah, right," I said,

damning the voice-synthesizer for its inability to convey sarcasm. "I’m just writing my

doctoral thesis to prove how brilliant I am."

He laughed, but it was an uneasy laugh that trailed off fairly quickly. "What if I flunk the next

test, too?"

"Then it’ll be time to find yourself a girlfriend," I told him. "A smart girlfriend who can teach

you math while you’re distracted."

"Yuck!" he said, and I smiled. Right on target. Now he had something else to worry

about–something not related to becoming an astronaut. The stick to go with his carrot. That

particular stick would only work for another year or two, of course–at which point I was sure

another one would come into play–but that was the nature of our relationship. Being

motivated was his job. Keeping him motivated was mine.

The threat of having to study with a girl pushed him through basic algebra, and his renewed

self-confidence pushed him right back into the straight-A track he’d been on since he

started school. I sent him off a fresh batch of assigned reading and went back to my thesis

(a feasibility study of nuclear-powered ion rockets for a manned mission to Mars).

My advice to go fishing had unexpected consequences. He asked his Uncle George to take

him, and caught half a dozen brook trout on his first time out. In the process he discovered

that he liked the outdoors. He became quite the fly-fisherman, in the most remote locations

he could find, enjoying it in large part because it was one place he was able to pretend, at

least for a little while, that there was no difference between him and the rest of humanity. It

didn’t stop him joking on the phone that his big head scared the trout the moment they saw

him. I told him it proved fish had more intelligence than we gave them credit for. He

threatened to use me as bait. When he sent me a picture of himself wearing a floppy hat

Faye had made for him, one of those vests with a bizillion pockets on it, and hip waders, I

told him he looked like a redneck.

"What’s a redneck?" he asked.

He’d lived in Wyoming for a decade and didn’t know the term. People had apparently been

too busy calling him names. "A redneck is the exact opposite of a space alien," I told him.

It made his day.

Seventh grade wasn’t much trouble for him. He had to ride a bus twenty miles into Sheridan

to attend junior high, but most of the kids there already knew him, or at least knew about

him, so he didn’t have to face more than the usual amount of idiocy. He studied on the bus,

went fishing on weekends, continued to work on improving his time for the mile, and

generally enjoyed himself.

Then he really did get a girlfriend. Actually, Sally Watkins, the same girlfriend he’d had

since first grade . . . but it meant something different now.

You’d have thought he’d invented teenage angst. I got phone calls at all hours of the night.

He was on Mountain time and I was on Eastern, so I had two time zones working against

me, but he didn’t care. He called up to report every new development, from hand-holding all

the way through his first kiss to their first argument after that.

"Look," I told him one Sunday at about five a.m. "She’s a girl. You’re not supposed to

understand her."

"That’s comforting."

He whined about how she was all smiles and friendly when they were alone, but hardly

spoke to him at school.

"Be glad it’s not the other way around," I told him. "Now go to bed."

"That’s the problem. She wants to go to bed with me."

He sounded so forlorn I had to laugh. "This is a problem? You’re what, fifteen? And bouncy

little Sally wants to jump your bones? No offense, but the way you look you’re probably not

going to get a whole lot of other offers." (I was wildly wrong about that, but then I had no real

experience myself and had no idea how much certain women would be attracted to

novelty–let alone to the increasingly remarkable person behind the strange looks.) "I’d go for

it," I told him.

"You know what’ll happen if anybody finds out," he said.

"What? Her daddy’ll come after you with a shotgun?"

"I wish. No, half a dozen tabloids will come after me with reporters. I can see it now: ‘Alien

Monster Wants Our Women!’ or ‘Kill it Before it Multiplies!’ They’ll mess up my life again,

and probably hers too."

It was the first time I’d heard him complain about the press. It was the first time he’d even

indicated they bothered him. I took it as a sign he was growing up. "Hmm. So you’ll have to

be careful. Shouldn’t be that difficult out there. There’s all those woods, right?"

"It’s October," he reminded me. "Hunting season."

He may not have been an alien, but he definitely lived in an alien land. The image of

Alexander stuffed and mounted on somebody’s wall flitted through my head–not entirely

unpleasantly, given what he was putting me through. I sighed and said, "Then borrow your

mother’s car and use the back seat. Or sneak her into your bedroom. I don’t know; do I look

like the sort of guy who knows this kind of stuff?"

There must have been an edge to my voice. After all, the sort of gymnastics he and his

sweetie wanted to do would probably have killed me. Not that I stood much of a chance of

ever finding out . . .

He must have suddenly remembered that he was not the only person in this conversation

with problems. "Sorry, Colin," he said. "I shouldn’t have bothered you. Not with this. I’m just

all confused about it and don’t know what to do." He paused, then asked, "You really think

it’s okay if I–?"

"Yes, yes, go get your ashes hauled, Space Boy!" I said. "I don’t care what else you are;

you’re a teenager. Now that Sally’s brought it up, so to speak, your not going to be able to

rest until you’ve learned what it’s all about. So do it already, or we can both kiss your ability

to concentrate goodbye."

"All right, all right," he said. "Sorry I asked."

"Stop apologizing!"

"Uh . . . okay. Sor . . . I mean, thanks."

He was about to hang up when one last thought intruded. "Hey. Remember to wear a

condom."

"Uhh . . . that’s a problem." He turned all sheepish: "I’m not sure I could walk into the store

and ask for a pack without causing a riot. Forget the tabloids. The news would get out, and

the parents of every teenage girl within fifty miles of here would lock their daughters in their

rooms."

He had a point. "Sit tight, then," I said. "Don’t do anything stupid until you hear from me

again."

And so the next morning I took one of my infrequent forays out of my room, down the street

in my electric scooter to the corner market, to buy a box of condoms. I bought the giant

economy sized box, and grinned my silly spastic grin when the cashier gave me a "what

could you possibly want these for?" look. Let her wonder.

FACE ON MARS SPEAKS!

It’s Crying for Help, Experts Say

Alex and Sally were apparently discreet. I didn’t see anything but the usual drivel in the

tabloids, and I didn’t get any more frantic calls in the night for a while. Of course when they

broke up a few months later I heard all about that, but it wasn’t as big a crisis as it might

have been; Alex was beginning to discover that looking like an alien was a distinct

advantage in the world of curious women. By the time he entered high school and started

playing the "been there, done that" sophisticate, he was ten times more insufferable than

he’d ever been as an anguished virgin. I hated him, and let him know it frequently.

Of course, I would have hated him even more if he hadn’t made valedictorian, let alone

gotten the full scholarship I helped him apply for.

His speech was about Taking Back The Moon. He’d read it to me a week earlier. It was

stirring, emotional, eloquent, and absolutely designed to get front-page attention from the

tabloids. The local papers said it was brilliant. The video chip he sent me confirmed that it

was. The tabloids ignored it entirely–I like to say because it was intelligent, but more likely

because that happened to be the week a fifth-generation member of a certain well-known

political family got caught sharing a Memphis hotel room with half a dozen bed-partners of

assorted sexes and species. You know the one . . . and I’m happy to report that Alexander,

being of the proper age, made as many foul jokes about the incident as everybody else did.

It may not have been nice, but it was human.

My doctoral thesis was published, and I even made sure copies of it got to the right people,

but only one guy had ever returned my letters. He was very enthusiastic, and I felt a brief

thrill at the thought that NASA might actually do something with it, until he told me that he

had rescued it out of the wastebasket in the administrator’s office. He was a janitor. He had

wanted to be an astronaut, too, but that was the closest he had come.

The turnaround, when it happened, came from the last place I would ever have expected: the

tabloid-reading public. Regular newspapers had long since become indistinguishable from

tabloids, so that included just about everybody. Even daily papers ran articles on Elvis or

Madonna sightings right beside the national news . . . and occasionally they would do a

piece on Space Aliens. Alexander still got a lot of press, since he was a constant source of

new photographs for them, but the article that tipped the scales for the space program was

something else entirely.

Some poor drudge of a reporter, stumped for material and facing a deadline, must have been

digging through back issues looking for something he could plagiarize when he ran across

an article on the Martian pyramid and the mysterious face that supposedly looked out from

the regolith beside it. Of course he didn’t know that the Mars Orbiter program in the nineties

had pretty much debunked the whole idea with detailed photos from a hundred miles up, but

if he did he wouldn’t have cared. He had an article to write, and suddenly he had a topic.

When the paper came out, demanding that the U.S. go back to Mars and find out what the

face was trying to communicate to us, nothing much would have come of it if the reporter

hadn’t found an ingenious way to eat up twelve more column-inches of space. He had

printed a clip-out form for people to sign and send to the President.

He had no doubt intended it as a simple gag, but he had underestimated his audience’s

credulity. A flood of clip-outs poured into the White House, many of them accompanied by

long letters from people who couldn’t resist the chance to tell the President just why this

was so important. A sizeable number of people were of the opinion that the face was Jesus.

As other papers, not to be outdone, joined in with clip-outs of their own, the issue, stupid as

it was, became the talk of the nation. When the President ignored the letters, papers printed

more articles crying "coverup!" and exhorting their readers to send even more letters. Within

a week they were arriving by the ton.

The President was no fool. He knew the controversy was ridiculous. But an election was

coming up, and the economy was in the middle of a long downward slide, brought on at

least in part because we weren’t fighting any wars to pump money into the big defense

contractors. He needed something to toss money at. Something that would capture the

public’s imagination in terms people could understand. If the public wanted to go to Mars,

well then, he would lead them to Mars.

He called an old college buddy of his who worked for NASA, a former janitor who had gotten

his Ph.D. and worked his way into the mission planning office, and he suggested that a

Mars proposal would receive serious consideration in congress. But he would have to work

fast. The election was only a month away, and the President wanted to drop a real proposal

on the public at the last moment. His buddy said, "I already know how to do it," and dusted

off his copy of my doctoral thesis.

Then the President called a dozen of the most influential senators and representatives into

his office and showed them the piles of mail.

They were no fools either. Or maybe they were just fools enough. They were certain that a

mission to Mars was a big waste of time and money, but they were willing to support it if it

would get them reelected. So in a resounding speech on the night before the polls

opened–way too late for a rebuttal from the opposition–NASA suddenly got its first new

mandate in decades: Landing an American on Mars.

SPACE BOY THREATENS MURDER!!

Heroic Photog Captures Full Scope of Rampage

Political correctness may not be the worst affliction of the twenty-first century, but it’s

certainly the silliest. Even when I was a kid people grew uncomfortable if someone called

me "crippled" rather than "differently abled," but nobody could actually be fined for it.

Nowadays I could pull mandatory counselling time for calling myself a crip, much less a

gimp or a spaz. At the very worst I am "moto-neurally challenged," and even that has a

negative connotation that makes people uncomfortable.

It also opens doors. Wide open. In their pathetic attempts to ignore reality, the arbiters of

morality and sentimentality in our culture have decreed that people are not to be

discriminated against in any way, not for reasons of race, creed, color, age, gender, sexual

preference, marital status, economic condition–or ability. Especially not ability. Goodness

no; that would mean someone was actually better at something than someone else, and

that flew directly in the face of conventional wisdom.

Combine that with (a) affirmative action, which came back with a vengeance after its repeal

at the turn of the century, and (b) Alex’s own marks, which now put him on the Dean’s List

for the fourth straight semester, in precisely the course of study that I’d mapped out for him,

and (c) my own appointment to the Project Development Committee–and Alex suddenly had

a perfect shot at his dream. Every minority of any sort had to be hired in proportion to their

prevalence in society, which meant that NASA had to hire the handicapped, even for a wildly

inappropriate job like "astronaut."

And Alex was one of very few people who qualified as handicapped without actually being

handicapped. Considering their other options, NASA was glad to accept him the moment he

mailed in his application. It didn’t matter that he was still a couple of years away from

graduation. In fact it helped them immensely. They had no training program in place and

wouldn’t for at least two years. They had nothing really for their new astronauts to do until

they created one. And in Alexander’s case, since he was merely hired as a placeholder

anyway, they were happy to put him on the payroll and let him stay in school. Besides, they

figured, even if he was only an astronaut in name, his very presence would keep the masses

interested.

I called him up the day the news broke. It was, by the way, one of the last times I’d ever call

him from the old house in Georgetown; I already had handicap-design specialists fixing up

my new place in Cocoa Beach. It would require spending all my salary and much of my trust

fund on attendants, drivers, custodial workers, and increased medical costs, but there was

no way I’d be able to handle the job offsite–and there was no way I’d ever want to. My clock

was still ticking. Still, when I called, it was Alexander’s triumph I was thinking about. My

voice synthesizer chirped out a greeting as ebullient as it could manage: "Congratulations,

Space Boy."

"Don’t call me that," he said. "Don’t call me that ever again."

That set me back in my anti-bedsore harness. I had called him Space Boy ever since we

met. "What’s the matter? Tabloid reporters getting you down?"

"Christ yes. I–just a minute." I heard some scuffling, then he shouted, "Get the fuck out of

my room!" and there was a loud bang.

"Alex?" I asked. My voice synthesizer wouldn’t shout. "Alex?"

He came back to the phone. "A couple of ’em got past the dorm’s security system."

"What was that noise? You didn’t shoot one of them, did you?"

He laughed. "I may be from Wyom-ing, but I don’t solve everything with a gun, no matter

how good it would feel. No, I just kicked one of them in the balls, grabbed the other one by

her tits and shoved her out of my room, and slammed the door in their faces."

"Ouch. That’s getting kind of personal, don’t you think?"

"And they’re not? I’m tired of being called ‘Space Boy.’ I’m tired of being called a freak. I’m

the only guy in the world those bastards can make fun of because of the way I look, and

they’re driving me crazy."

I heard more pounding as he said that, but I couldn’t tell if it was on the door or him banging

on his desk. "Are you going to be safe there?" I asked.

He sighed. "I saw two big security guards coming down the hallway. I’ll be all right."

I thought about it for a minute. He was used to me pausing to catch my breath; he waited

patiently until I said, "You may not want to–you should excuse the expression–alienate the

press. They’re in charge of public opinion these days."

"They’re a bunch of sadistic leeches," Alexander replied.

"Powerful sadistic leeches," I countered. "Don’t piss them off if you can help it. NASA

learned long ago that public opinion is what launches rockets."

"What, now you want me to let ’em in?"

"No. Never let them close to you. No interviews, nothing like that. Never even have a direct

conversation with them. It would be too easy for them to twist your words around. But you

can still communicate with them, and you can make them say what you want them to say."

"How?"

I was thinking out loud, but I had plenty of time to do it while I paused for breath. "Send out

press releases. All the papers will receive the same text, so we can say what we want

without worrying about it being misquoted." I laughed, and my stupid speech synthesizer

said, "Ha, ha, ha."

"Did I ever tell you that you sound like Boris Karloff when you do that?" he asked.

"Fuck Boris Karloff," I said. "And fuck the press, too. We can feed those bastards anything

we want to, and as long as it makes good copy they’ll be happy to print it."

"So what do we want to say, besides ‘Leave me alone’?"

"How about, ‘Making a bold move in support of handicapped people everywhere, Alex Drier,

the so-called "Space Boy," has accepted an offer to become one of NASA’s new generation

of astronauts. Despite the barrage of tasteless taunts he will surely endure because of his

unusual deformity, he has chosen to take this step to demonstrate that public humiliation

should not stop anyone who is truly determined to blah blah blah.’"

"Brilliant," he said, his tone of voice making it clear that I was anything but. "I especially like

the ‘blah, blah, blah’ part. Truly inspired."

"Thank you. So what sucked about the rest of it?"

"You used ‘Space Boy’ yourself. And you called me deformed."

"Better we say it than the press. The way I said it, you’ll get sympathy. It’ll make the press

look like the bullies they are. And the only way they can fight back is to quit printing articles

about you, which is all we really want anyway."

"Well, that’s a point," he said after a moment’s thought. "Did you save that?"

Everything I say is held in a temporary scroll-back buffer. I recalled my impromptu press

release and saved it permanently, then said, "Let me work on this for a few minutes, then I

can transmit it to you and you can print it out and take it to the reporters."

"I thought you said I shouldn’t ever–"

"Right. Have one of your security guards take it to the reporters. Print out only ten copies,

and make them fight over ’em like the snarling dogs they are." I laughed again. "Ha, ha, ha.

It’s time we took the high road, metaphorically as well as physically."

SPACE BOY STARTS TRAINING

"He’s a Natural," Says NASA

It didn’t work as well as we’d hoped it would, at least not right away. The tabloids weren’t

bothered by inconsistencies between their stories and anyone else’s; in their world that

simply proved that everyone else was lying. We did manage to direct the stories a little bit,

though, and over the next couple of years we got better at it. Enough so that the media

attention at least didn’t grow any worse as Alexander became more of a public figure.

Even so, America’s first four Mars astronauts were as whitebread as the Mercury seven.

And so were the second crew, and the third, and the fourth. NASA may have had to hire

minorities and the handicapped and the gay-lesbian-old-Baha’i–they even hired me, as a

designer, before they realized I actually knew more than the rest of them put together–but

they weren’t about to staff their missions that way.

I fought it as best I could from within, but I didn’t have that much power. They were using my

design for the Earth-Mars transfer vehicle, but that didn’t mean squat in the long run. If I

made too big a stink, they would have thrown me right off the project without shedding a

tear, and I wasn’t willing to lose that for anything.

We began testing the ion drive and the crew habitat. The lander was still mired in design

snafus, but it was beginning to look like we could actually send four people to Mars and

bring them back alive even if we couldn’t land them when they got there. I was busier than

I’d ever been in my life, and happier, too, even if the stress was taking its toll on my wasted

stamina. By the time Boeing actually delivered the lander, I could barely talk at all, and was

thinking of switching over to a neural implant–one of the new generation of voice-synths that

could read the electrical impulses in my brain so I didn’t have to eyeball words off a

computer screen. Direct interface was becoming fairly common by that point, but it seemed

like a further retreat into infirmity, and I did not look forward to taking that step.

The lander was basically an updated Lunar Module, with separate descent and ascent

rockets to cut down on the weight we had to carry back into space on the return trip. That

meant the crew couldn’t use it to jump from site to site on Mars, but they carried ultralight

aircraft for that. It was more efficient to use airplanes anyway. We managed to squeeze two

of them on board, along with enough food and shelter for a year’s stay.

The clock was ticking. Rumors started flying as to who would crew the mission, even though

the selection wouldn’t be made for over a year. But Alex was out in the cold. NASA hadn’t

even given him an orbital flight, and it was conventional wisdom that nobody would be sent

to Mars without at least one space flight under their belt.

"What can we do?" he asked me one evening after another request for a mission had been

turned down on the grounds that he was needed more in a support capacity than in space.

"If I don’t get a flight soon, I’ll never even get on the backup crew for Mars."

"True enough," I said, slowly and with great difficulty. "I know how frustrating it must feel to

come this far and then hit the glass ceiling, but the crew selection is out of my control."

"That’s what I keep hearing from everybody I talk to," he growled. "Except that bastard

Ferris in the Assoff–" (that was what we called the Astronaut Office, where the crew

selections were made) "–who just laughs."

"I’ll think of something," I told him.

"What?"

"I don’t know. Something. There’s got to be a way to show them you’re not a threat. That’s

what Ferris is afraid of, after all. He knows you’re a good astronaut, but he’s afraid of the

kind of publicity you’ll get if he actually sends you into space."

"Publicity!" Alex shouted. "Everywhere I turn, publicity is standing between me and my life!"

He began pacing the tiny space between my desk and the door. "I hardly even left the house

until I was five because my Dad was afraid of what the crazies would do. Hell, that’s why he

left. Well, if NASA hired me because of the way I look, I am not going to let them use it to

stop me from getting a mission!"

I wish I could say his little rant sparked me into action, gave me the brilliant idea that

salvaged his career. I’d love to take credit for it, but that’s not how it happened. What

happened was that he stomped out, mad, and I sat in my office until well after dark, thinking

with the lights out until I fell asleep.

Alex went home and trashed out his apartment, drinking beer and getting angrier and angrier

by the minute.

SPACE BOY’S SECRET MISSION IN CALIFORNIA!

Is Killer Earthquake on the Way?

He should have died in a fiery crash somewhere over New Mexico. That he didn’t stands as

testament to his skill as a pilot, but not to his calm reasoning ability while intoxicated,

because what he did when he got mad enough was check out a T-38–the training jet the

astronauts use to fly back and forth from Houston to the Cape–and roar off in a sentimental

blaze of glory for San Francisco.

I don’t know who was the more surprised when they met. Alex unannounced at your door in

the middle of the night could scare the piss out of practically anybody, even his dad. On the

other hand, Mark Drier had aged quite a bit since Alex had last seen him. Eighteen years of

straight time, the salt air of Fisherman’s Wharf, and a lifetime of regrets had all left their

mark on him. Alex was taller, too, so it looked to him like his father had shrunk to hobbit

size and wrinkled like an apple left in the sun.

To hear him tell it, neither one of them blinked an eye.

"Hi," Alex said.

"Hi," said Mark.

They looked at each other for a moment, then, "Can I come in?"

"Sure." His dad stood aside and Alex entered his one-bedroom apartment. It was lit by a

single light in the kitchen, which revealed a reasonably tidy bachelor’s home. Dirty dishes

on the counter, but not more than a couple days’ worth. Newspapers and magazines on the

metal table and all but one of the creaky wooden chairs around it. Full bookshelves in the

living room, and a big ship in a bottle on top of a console TV.

"You make that?" Alex asked.

"Yep."

"Looks nice. I’ve always wondered how people get the masts and sails and stuff to fit

through that little hole. And how they manipulate it once it’s inside."

"Patience," Mark said. "And long sticks with tape on the end."

"You never struck me as a patient sort of guy," Alex said.

It might have been an accusation. His father chose not to interpret it that way. He just

shrugged and said, "I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands. You learn."

"I guess you could." Alex sat down in the gray naugahyde recliner facing the TV. His dad

sat on the couch off to the side. "Of course, I’ve never had much patience either. I guess I

got that from you."

Mark Drier’s hands were shaking. "Listen, Alex, I–"

"No," Alexander said. "That’s not why I came here." He removed a tabloid from his jacket

pocket. The headline read: CITY OF IMMORTALS DISCOVERED ON THE MOON. "You

never did go to the press, not even after you left home. Why not?"

Mark studied the blank TV screen. "Your mother didn’t want me to."

"I doubt if she wanted you to leave, either."

"She wouldn’t have wanted me to stay, with what I was becoming." Mark looked back at his

son. "I was never built to live inside a goldfish bowl. I could feel myself becoming something

I didn’t want to be. I think I was actually going crazy. That would have been a disaster for

you, and for her."

"You too," Alex said.

His dad snorted. "Yeah, for me too. So I did the only thing I had guts enough to do. I took

myself out of the picture. Completely out, and that meant no stories in the paper, not even

when I couldn’t find a job at first." He shook his head incredulously. "Did you know that your

Uncle George sent me money for three months until I got my feet under me again?"

Alex felt as if he’d fallen into ice water. Uncle George had never had a good word for Mark.

"He did?"

"Yep. Wouldn’t let me pay him back, either. He wrote me letters for the first couple of years

to let me know how you were doing, but I–I finally asked him to stop."

"Why?" asked Alex.

"I’d already cut myself off from you," Mark said. "I’d already failed you. Every letter reopened

the wound."

There was an uncomfortable silence while each man thought whatever fathers and sons

think at times like these. Then Alex cleared his throat and said, "I have no problem with

that, Dad. I really don’t. The only thing I have a problem with is how the media attention

screwed up your life. So this may sound kind of crazy, but I want you and Mom to sell your

story to the press. Auction an exclusive to the highest bidder. Run the price up into the

millions and retire on the proceeds."

Mark laughed. "Nobody’d pay for our story now."

Alex leaned forward in his chair. "They would if you told them they were right about me all

along."

SPACE BOY CONFIRMED ALIEN!

Parents Reveal All

Next stop, Wyoming.

Insert a picture of Faye screaming at the top of her lungs. Alex said his ears actually rang

afterward. She nearly threw him out of the house, and it was two hours before she allowed

Mark to cross the threshold. Only because the idea had come from Alex did she even listen,

and only because Mark said he didn’t want to do it either did she finally decide to go ahead

with it.

"I certainly hope you know what you’re doing," she told Alex. "This could kill your career

faster than a spacesuit failure."

"Mom, my career is already dead. This is a last-ditch effort to pump some life into it."

"Last ditch effort to make fools of us all," Mark said softly, but he was beyond arguing at

this point. He had cast his fate to the winds long ago, and was happy to drift wherever they

took him. He was looking around at the house he had left nearly two decades earlier, noting

that it needed paint and wondering how the roof was holding up. He had carefully avoided

looking too long at Faye, because every time he did that he felt something go wonky in his

chest.

"I’m trying to make fools of NASA," Alex protested. "If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears.

Metaphorically speaking, of course." He tweaked the tiny little flaps on the sides of his

head. Mark looked away; Faye laughed.

"I still don’t see how it’s going to help," she said.

"Leave that up to me. You just make up the most outrageous story you can think of.

Abduction, genetic experiments, off-planet meetings with the Imperial Space

Command–even Elvis–whatever you want."

"I don’t want to have anything to do with it," Faye protested, but she was already weakening.

Twenty years of stubborn rationality in the face of rampant crackpottery had left her creative

side screaming for release. She actually yearned for a chance to play the loon, at least

once. And if it helped her son, she would make sure it was a doozy. The promise of a

couple of million dollars didn’t hurt her creativity, either.

Alex was back in Houston by the time the story came out. He’d spent his final day of

relative obscurity briefing the other astronauts, so when Ferris called him into his office to

express his false condolences for the unfair treatment he was getting in the press, Alex was

ready for him.

"No, they’re absolutely right," Alex said. "I’m a space alien."

Ferris nearly split a seam. "What?"

"Well, I must be." Alex walked over to the window and looked out at the lush grounds three

floors below. "I mean, why else would NASA be holding back a perfectly good astronaut?

They’ve got to be afraid of what’ll happen if they send him into space. And the only possible

reason for that–"

"You’re insane!"

"–is because they’re afraid he’ll steal the spaceship and go home." He turned back from the

window. "Or could it be that NASA’s simply afraid the press will make fun of them? Well,

welcome to the world of Alex Drier. Now my problem is your problem."

"You can’t seriously think this . . . this circus is going to get you a mission," Ferris said,

snapping his index finger against the headline.

"I have no idea what will get me a mission," Alex said. "Hard work and determination

certainly wasn’t good enough. Busting my butt to help train every other astronaut in the

corps wasn’t good enough. Keeping a low profile to allay your paranoid fear wasn’t enough.

So I decided to let my parents make some money while they still could. If that means taking

some media heat again for a while, well, what’s the harm in it? I’ve survived it before. And I’m

grounded anyway, aren’t I?"

Ferris loosened his collar. "Look, I’ve told you a million times–"

"Are you or are you not afraid of the publicity?" Alex demanded. "If you can sit there behind

your desk and tell me with a straight face that the media attention doesn’t scare you–while

you’ve got a copy of the Times right there on top of the heap–then I’ll go pack my bags and

join a freak show. But if that’s why you’ve been holding me back, I and every other astronaut

in the project will tell the press not only that I’m a space alien, but that this whole project is

the result of rays beamed into our heads from the mothership orbiting the north pole of the

Moon."

"You can’t orbit a pole," Ferris said contemptously.

"Damn right you can’t. And I’m not a space alien, either, but that’s what everyone has

agreed to say until you stop treating me like one."

"This is blackmail!" Ferris shouted.

"This is a fucking wake-up call," Alex shouted back. "I’m the best damned astronaut this

project has got and everybody knows it. I’m the most dedicated, the most coordinated, the

most physically fit, and with the exception of Mary Paiz, I’m the smartest. If you don’t

believe me, look at the reports from your own doctors and shrinks. There’s only one reason I

haven’t been in orbit yet, and one reason why I’m being shoved off the Mars mission, and

that’s because you’re afraid the press will make fun of you for sending a guy with a big head

into space." He snatched up the newspaper and flung it into the wastebasket. "Well, that’s

where your fear belongs, and that–" he pointed straight upward "–is where I belong. It’s your

call. But this most assuredly is not blackmail, because your worst nightmare has already

happened."

SPACE BOY STONEWALLS PARENTS’ SHOCKING TESTIMONY!

Is NASA In On the Coverup?

Ferris suspended him, of course.

He was still free to do what he wanted on-site; he just didn’t have any official responsibilities

any more. So he spent the next couple of days in the simulators, practicing launch and

landing and docking maneuvers. He even spent long hours in the ultralight scout simulator,

learning how to fly the ungainly fabric-covered jets in Mars’s thin atmosphere. He told me

later he figured it was the closest he would ever get, so he wanted to spend as much time

there as he could before he was fired.

Ferris noted what he was doing, and took it as another example of arrogant pride. Drier was

so damned sure of himself he kept training even when he was suspended! But the techs

kept feeding Ferris the performance ratings, and the numbers spoke for themselves. Alex

successfully landed on Mars with three thrusters out and a fourth one stuck at full throttle.

He correctly diagnosed and shut down a leaking fuel pump in mid-ascent before it could

explode, and finished the launch and docking with only two out of three engines. He rode out

a duststorm in an ultralight, conserving power and fuel by gliding in the updraft on the

windward side of Mons Olympus until the weather cleared enough for him to land. And he

survived the death mission, the one that was supposed to end with a headlong crash into

Mars no matter what the astronauts did to compensate for all the malfunctions on the way

down.

"How did he do that?" Ferris demanded of me when he saw the results. I was the

engineering genius; I was supposed to have designed the simulation to be foolproof.

"I didn’t think about deploying the scout planes after the parachutes failed," I said. My

delight was so great that I spoke at almost normal speed. "Sure, doing that adds drag, but it

also means jettisoning both thruster quads on the lower stage and burning up the fuel you

need for the return mission in the upper stage quads just to stay upright. He landed it all

right, but he would never have gotten it back into orbit."

"Don’t bet on it," Ferris said. "That bugeyed bastard did this while his oxygen supply was

down to practically zip and the cabin was shaking like a box falling downstairs. The T-handle

broke off in his hand–which was NOT part of the simulation–and he fixed it with duct tape

without letting the lander pitch over in the process. If there’s a way to fix the damage after he

got down, I’ll bet he’d find it."

"Changing our tune, are we?" I asked him.

He glowered at me. "My tune is none of your damned business. But yes, it’s conceivable

that I might have made a mistake regarding him. I just hope it’s not too late to correct it."

"We don’t launch for eleven months," I reminded him.

"I’m aware of the launch window," he replied. He left my office without saying goodbye.

SPACE BOY GOES TO SPACE

"It’s my destiny," He says

His first mission was nothing special. I say that with such aplomb, knowing that anyone who

goes into space for even the most routine mission thinks it’s the most fantastic thing that

ever happened to them. Alex was no exception, even though he got spectacularly sick the

first day.

His was the first landing mission. The mission before his had tested the Mars Descent and

Ascent Module, known affectionately as MADAM, in low Earth orbit. Docking and flight

maneuvers had gone well, so the next logical step was to try landing it somewhere. Earth

was out of the question, since the engines only developed three-quarters of a g of thrust, but

that didn’t mean they had to take it all the way to Mars untested, either. There’s a perfect

testing ground only 240,000 miles away.

It’s so perfect a person might even be tempted to say God put it there to help us on our way

to greater things. That was one theory proposed when the Middle Eastern fundamentalists

raised a stink about us returning to profane the Moon they had so recently cleaned up, but it

did little to pacify them. The US government didn’t really care. By then we were so tired of

the constant squabbling that came from that part of the world that we just ignored them and

went on about our business.

Alex didn’t get to actually land on the Moon. That would have been too much publicity even

for a repentant Ferris to handle. But he did get to ride along in the Earth-Mars transfer

module and test out its recreation facilities while the lander crew did their thing below.

He had fun playing with the entertainment and exercise equipment, the scientific

instruments, and so forth. That stuff had all been tested a million times on the ground, but

he dutifully put it all through its paces so we could detect any on-site problems before we

sent a crew out with it for a two-year mission. About the only thing he found out of spec was

a warble in the CD player, which sent Pioneer into a tizzy for a couple of days until the

problem was traced to a power supply drain from the gyroscopic stabilizers.

When he tested the surround-sound theatre system, he of course played Communion Part

Six. Of the alien hysteria movies that came out when he was young, that was the one that

most closely paralleled his actual life. It was also the cheesiest and most embarrassingly

bad one, with the aliens stomping around flatfooted like Frankenstein monsters and sucking

the blood from the poor residents in the fictitious town of Rattlesnake, Montana. Alex had

always loved that one, and he hooted and laughed through all two hours and seven minutes

of it while Mission Control listened in on the hab module’s live audio feed. When word got

out that that’s what he was watching, it started a minor stampede to the video stores to rent

copies of it, and the movie even enjoyed a brief comeback in theatres.

It also reminded people how stupid their fears over his appearance had been. An

embarrassed America quietly returned a lot of DVDs to the video stores, and the nostalgia

theatres switched over to Batman Seventeen in mid-week.

The guys on the Moon landed without a hitch, got out and did a walk-around inspection,

practiced a few of the things they would need to do on Mars, then gathered up some rocks

for the geologists back home, climbed back inside, and blasted off for rendezvous again.

They didn’t leave any beer cans behind to intentionally irritate the Saudis, but the lower half

of the lander and an inflatable dome are still sitting there doing a fine job of that. And they

did deploy and assemble one of the ultralight aircraft for practice at doing it in low gravity

with spacesuits on, so now there’s a fully assembled airplane sitting on the airless Moon,

fueled and ready to puzzle the hell out of anybody who comes along after humanity has

vanished into history.

The ascent stage took them back into orbit without mishap, and they flew the hab module

back to Earth on a long spiral that took them another two weeks, just to test out the

recyclers and fuel cells and so forth. When they finally splashed down, three weeks after

they left, Alex was beaming from tiny little ear to tiny little ear. He’d made it to space.

And he was on the backup crew for Mars. When the announcement came out, he didn’t

know whether to laugh or cry. Backup crew. This was a one-shot mission; unless the first

crew discovered underground cities or something like it, he wouldn’t get another chance.

"Cheer up," I told him. "Maybe somebody on the prime crew will get hit by a bus."

Some days I look back on that moment and wonder if there really is something behind all

the superstitions people have developed since we learned how to rub sticks together to

make fire. Don’t say your dreams out loud or they’ll never come true, don’t break a mirror or

you’ll get seven years of bad luck, and most assuredly don’t say anything that will tempt

fate, at least without knocking on wood when you say it.

I’m practically paralyzed, okay? I couldn’t knock on wood if my life depended on it. I don’t

believe in that crap anyway. But that didn’t stop Randy Parker from stepping out into traffic

on a busy London street–instinctively looking to the left instead of the right for approaching

traffic–and winding up under a tour bus filled with tennis fans on their way to Wimbledon.

It was the first time I ever allowed myself to think–even for a moment, even as grim

whimsy–that maybe this Space Boy stuff had some substance after all. Maybe there was a

mothership, manipulating things Alexander’s way. Maybe that was the only way to account

for the way things had always seemed to work out for him.

The difference between me and the UFO nuts is that I’m capable of looking at that

hypothesis and saying "Naaaah."

And besides, I don’t consider Alex preternaturally lucky anymore.

Not at all.

MARS CREW STOPS INVASION FLEET

Epic Laser Battle Ends in Victory!

Randy Parker’s death put Alex on the mission, along with Dave Anderson, Mary Paiz, and

Shawnee Sanders, three straight arrows with test scores and simulator records almost as

high as his. The press had fun with the idea of sending two couples to Mars. They weren’t

couples, but nobody denied the probability that they would become couples on the way. It

was even worked into the mission profiles, albeit secretly. And if you want me to talk about

who did what to whom, you’re reading the wrong account. I bring it up because some people

have suggested that sexual dynamics led to what eventually happened on Mars; it makes

good tabloid fodder, I suppose, but that’s not what happened.

As for me, I had plenty of engineering snafus to take care of. The hardware worked

amazingly well, which for a project this complex meant we still had one or two major

complications a day. Most of them were simple malfunctions that we could fix and forget

about, but a few turned out to be design flaws and those had to be reengineered. Those

were the scary ones, because you never knew if your changed design would work any better

than the first one, or if the different configuration would have a ripple effect that would knock

out something else. Toward the end I felt like we were sending four people out into space in

a vehicle made more of hope and prayers than of hard metal.

They say a painting is never finished, only abandoned. It shouldn’t be that way with

spaceships, but the sad truth is that you can always improve the design. Launch windows

won’t wait for a perfect ship, though, and funding is a finite resource, so all you can do is

make the best ship you can with the time and materials you’ve got, and then trust the

astronauts to keep it working throughout the mission.

We didn’t do a bad job. I can say with great pride that the spaceship didn’t kill anyone.

Technically neither did the scout planes, though when a man’s body lies a few hundred feet

from a crash site it’s hard to say that the plane didn’t kill him. But even if we’d known about

the takeoff instability, we’d still have sent the planes along and hoped for the best. It was too

late to redesign them, too late to change the mission profile, too late to do anything but light

the rockets and go.

On launch day, the Cape was packed for a dozen miles in every direction, and every

television in the country was tuned to the NASA channel. I think it was finally soaking in to a

whole generation of people that we were once again doing something great, that there was

more to life than just the day-to-day grind. We were about to explore another planet!

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when the clock ticked down to zero and the Saturn VI

bellowed its liftoff roar across the palmettos. Even the people who thought it was a waste of

money were whispering, "Go, baby, go!" while the rocket struggled to lift the spaceship into

orbit. I was in the control center, and people later told me that my speech synthesizer was

saying, "Don blah huh," over and over again, but what I was really saying was, "Don’t blow

up, don’t blow up!"

Miraculously, it didn’t. The Saturn put them into orbit, the final stage launched them out past

the Moon for a gravity assist, and the ion rocket kicked in and propelled them gently on

toward Mars.

The tabloids went especially nuts during the eight months it took our guys to get there; the

grinning vacuousness that seems to affect all astronaut transmissions meant for public

consumption–even Alexander’s, I’m sorry to say–palled after only a couple of weeks, and

was replaced in the headlines by rampant speculation over the "real" reason for the mission.

Surely it was a humanitarian gesture to take Alexander home! Or a rendezvous with the

Aztecs known to inhabit Olympus Mons! And just what kind of torrid romantic doings were

really going on when the cameras weren’t rolling? The most amusing of the stories were

faxed to the crew until Mary Paiz, speaking for them all, sent back a transmission asking us

to stop. If Alexander had a reaction, he didn’t show it.

After that they lived in their own private little world. Their recycling equipment kept them alive

and healthy, and the entertainment system and scientific instruments (indistinguishable

from their point of view) kept them sane, and before they knew it they were braking into orbit

around Mars.

They spent a few days sending out communications satellites so they would be in constant

contact with each other no matter how far apart they got on the ground, mapping their

landing site, and making sure the automatic instruments would continue to take pictures

and other readings while they were gone. Then when they were sure their transfer vehicle

would be warm and waiting for them when they got back, they climbed into the lander and

headed down.

No waiting in orbit for one poor astronaut like the Apollo guys had done. All four went to the

surface, and all four would contribute equally to the exploration. We had enough missions

planned for everybody to have their fill.

They landed in the Valles Marineris, down at the lower end where there would be lots of

flood debris and erosion would have exposed plenty of geological strata for them to study

without digging. The valley was so wide at that point that the sides were over the horizon,

and all of it was flood plain. The ultralight airplanes would allow them to range farther afield,

but that’s where everyone expected the action to be.

Except the tabloid-reading public, of course. They wanted to know about the face and the

pyramid. Never mind that photos from orbit showed two unassuming hills and a few eroded

craters; people were sure that an on-site investigation would turn up alien artifacts by the

truckload. When they learned that NASA had scheduled an ultralight flyby only after all the

other mission objectives had been met, the ruckus could be heard all the way to Mars.

NASA didn’t budge. We released new photos from orbit showing the same thing we already

knew from the last orbital survey, and the crew went on about the business of setting up

their dome and making their first cautious forays into the Martian wilderness.

Cautious was the word. Mars is barely more habitable than the Moon. The air is thin and

mostly carbon dioxide, so the astronauts had to wear pressure suits at all times, but there’s

just enough of it for a cold wind to suck the heat out of a suit in practically no time. A single

mistake could be fatal, and everyone made their share of mistakes. Not long after they got

there, Mary slipped with a rock hammer and punctured her pressure suit, but Alex dragged

her back to the dome and tossed her inside before she ran out of air. Dave didn’t reinstall

one of the dome’s two air recycling canisters properly after he recharged it and nearly

asphyxiated them all in their sleep. Shawnee stayed out too long after dusk and nearly froze

to death before she could make it back to the dome.

And the ultralight airplanes turned out to be much trickier to fly than we had hoped. The

problem was mostly on takeoff and landing, when they made the transition from hovering on

their jet exhaust to actually flying. Mars’s atmosphere is too thin to make a rolling takeoff

practical, especially on rocky ground, so the ultralights were designed like Harrier jets, with

vectored thrust engines that could be rotated downward for takeoff and landing. Problem

was, at inbetween angles they really affected the wings’ lift, and there was a configuration in

the middle where the engines didn’t have enough thrust for the plane to hover anymore and

the wings didn’t have enough lift for it to fly, so if you weren’t moving fast enough when you

went through that phase you fell like a rock.

Alex found out about it the first time he took one of the planes up for a test flight. He was

going through the checklist, calling out his actions as he rose to about fifty feet, brought the

nose up, and increased the thrust for flight, when he crossed through the dead zone.

"Throttle up to eighty percent, engines running smooth, tilting forward to–shit!" The stall

warning buzzer overrode his voice for a moment, then his words became intelligible again as

he said, "–nose down, throttles to full, gaining speed. Starting to feel some response to the

controls. Okay, I think I’m flying now, but that didn’t feel right at all. I’m going to bring it

around for a visual."

"Roger," Dave said. "I’ve got the binks on you. Don’t see anything wrong from here, but

maybe when you come around. You sure you don’t want to land?"

"Not until I find out what happened," Alex said. He had the pilots’ almost instinctive urge to

put air rather than rock beneath him when he had a problem. He banked the plane around

and did a slow pass over the dome–slow being about a hundred miles an hour in the thin

Martian air.

Dave gave him a close inspection with binoculars, but didn’t see anything wrong. "Looks

copacetic, ol’ boy," he said.

The ultralights were mostly wing, since Mars’s atmosphere is so thin. Alex waggled them a

little, then jounced the plane up and down a bit with the elevator. "Flies like a pregnant cow,"

he reported. "Just like it did in the simulator. But I never felt anything like that dropout

before. I’m going to take it up a ways and see if I can repeat it."

"You sure you want to do that?" Dave asked him.

"I don’t want to try landing until I know what happened," Alex replied.

Back home at mission control we were all pulling our hair out. We had a man in the air with

a problem–a hundred and fifty million miles away. What we were hearing had happened

thirteen minutes ago. Alex could have been dead already and we wouldn’t know it until the

radio signal carrying his last words caught up to us. We had people in the simulator trying

to figure out what had happened up there the moment we heard there was a problem, but

even if they figured it out instantly, it would be thirteen more minutes before their solution

helped Alex any.

So we hung onto our butts and gritted our teeth while we listened to Alex calmly describe

everything he did. "Climbing through eight thousand. I can see quite a ways from up here.

Man oh man, a hell of a lot of water must have come through this canyon. It looks like it was

cut with a fire hose. Okay, I’m at ten oh and slowing. Bringing the engines backward to

hover. Angle at ten, twenty, thirty–there it goes! Get back here, you bastard! Throttling up

and tilting on back to forty, fifty, sixty. Airspeed down to forty, thirty, twenty. It’s looking

stable now. Hovering like a balloon. Plenty of control. It’s just in that transitional phase

where it all goes to hell for a second."

He tried switching back over to forward flight, and sure enough the same thing happened, so

he brought it to a stop again and tried it over and over until he learned how to compensate

for it. "All right, here’s what we’re going to have to do," he said as he dropped back down

toward the base for a landing. "It’ll suck fuel like a tank rupture, but we’ve got to go up and

down like an elevator for at least a thousand feet before we switch flight modes, ’cause we’re

going to lose a couple hundred feet in transition."

Mary said, "Why the hell didn’t they figure that out back home?"

"Who knows?" Alex said. "Planes always act squirrelly at low speed. They couldn’t test

these things in partial vacuum for more than a few seconds at a time, ‘cause they don’t have

a vacuum pump that’ll keep up with a wind tunnel. And they sure as hell couldn’t test it at a

third of a gee." He laughed. "I’ll bet they’re scurrying to figure it out now."

He was right about that. Everybody involved in the ultralight design ran for days without

sleep trying to understand what had happened and how to correct for it with materials the

Mars crew had on hand. They figured it out, too, and cobbled together a fix out of an empty

fuel tank and duct tape that reduced the instability to about half what it was originally, but

that was the best they could do. The problem was inherent in the wing design, and there

wasn’t anything they could do on site to correct for that.

So the crew went on with their jobs, flying planes that were ready to smash them into the

ground at a moment’s notice. It was either that or forget about ninety percent of the mission

objectives, but this was our only shot at Mars. There was no money for another mission,

and even if the money miraculously showed up in the budget, these four wouldn’t be going

back. There wasn’t any question what they would do. I’d have done the same thing in their

place.

I keep telling myself that.

MARS MISSION A COVERUP!

Why NASA Won’t Ask the Questions YOU Want Answered!

For months nobody had any more problems with the planes. All four astronauts flew them

dozens of times each, and they got so used to the instability that we nearly forgot it was

there. With all the new discoveries the crew were making about Mars we had so much else

to think about that the airplane problem faded into the background.

When we lost the first plane it had nothing to do with the flight problem anyway. A dust

storm got it during the night, plucked it away like it had never been there. Alex said the crew

never even heard a noise. They just looked out in the morning after a hard blow and saw that

it was gone, and the other plane was missing a couple feet of fabric at the end of its left

wing.

They were able to fix that easily enough and go on flying. Fortunately there weren’t that

many flights left in the mission plan. They had accomplished all the major objectives, and

now they were working their way down the "wish list," the extra projects that they could do if

there was time before their launch window opened for the return trip to Earth.

One of those was a long-range flight to check another site on the planet for signs of life.

They had found dozens of tantalizing clues, including rocks like the one found in Antarctica

that contained what might have been fossilized microbes, and colored layers of sediment

that had unusually high concentrations of carbon, but they hadn’t found proof that life had

ever existed on the planet, much less that it existed now. That was the one big question

everyone wanted an answer to, and it was looking like the crew was going to come home

empty-handed.

They had already flown the two-thousand-mile length of the canyon, so when Alex proposed

taking a flight of similar length northward to check out another site, nobody argued that the

distance was too great. Nobody argued much at all until he revealed his intended landing

site: the pyramid and face in Cydonia.

Maybe it was his idea of a practical joke. Or maybe it was revenge. He knew that actual

video footage of the area taken from a low-flying plane would ruin the site forever as an

object of new-age pseudoscience. Maybe he wanted to get back at the tabloids that had

made his life miserable. We’ll never know. All we know for sure is that he justified his choice

by pointing out that the geology at Cydonia was different from what they had been studying,

so since they had come up empty-handed on the search for life where they were, it made a

good candidate for further exploration.

And going there incidentally fulfilled the wishes of a large portion of the population who had

paid for the mission.

Nobody missed the irony of sending the "space alien" to check out the site. I think Alex

probably enjoyed that. And he certainly enjoyed the idea of getting out by himself for a few

days. With the prospect of another eight months in a can with his three crewmates coming

up, he wanted as much solitude as he could soak in before they left.

So he packed his toothbrush and enough food and water for a week, and took off for

Cydonia. He would have to spend a couple of cramped nights sleeping in the cockpit of the

plane, but he didn’t care about that. He had camped out plenty of times in pup tents on

fishing trips in Wyoming; he was used to sleeping in tight quarters.

This had to be the happiest time in his life. Here was a kid from a small western town, a

strange-looking kid that practically the whole world had made fun of–making a solo flight a

sixth of the way around Mars. He was exactly where he wanted to be, and he’d gotten there

despite all the superstitious, credulous, and downright malicious people who stood in his

way. And not only that, but he had made his mother proud. Hell, he had made his father

proud, and that’s saying something.

A straight route would have taken him to the east of the Chryse site where Viking 1 had

landed, but he took the extra time to fly over it, swooping low and circling around to take

pictures of the fragile little lander sitting there on the boulder-strewn plain.

Everyone back home had grown familiar with images of the habitat site from the air. Its

bubble and lander and power generator provided a comforting picture of home away from

home, a place we could all imagine ourselves living in our dreams. The Viking probe had the

exact opposite effect. It looked lost down there among the rocks, a tiny speck of technology

amid a vast, forbidding landscape, its dish antenna still pointing into the sky like a hand

reaching for the planet it could never touch again.

"That’s, um, the Viking probe," Alex said quietly after his third circle around it. "I guess I’ll

be going on to Cydonia now."

By the time he got there, hours later, his sense of humor had returned. As he approached

the pyramid and the face, his onboard video camera showed the now-familiar rounded hills

and craters that we know them to be, but he talked as if an entire Martian city were

unfolding beneath him.

"Oh my God!" he said, "there it is. Look at the buildings, and the elevated walkways, and

the flags waving from the tops of the towers. They look like–yes, yes, they’re Buffalo on a

field of blue! They’re Wyoming flags! Proof positive that this is the site of a massive

government coverup. And there’s the face. Is it a space alien? Sorry to say it doesn’t look a

thing like me. In fact it looks more like my dad. Hi, Dad." He banked the plane around so

the bumpy hill was right in front of him. "Look, it’s speaking! What’s it saying? Looks like,

‘Nyah, nyah, fooled you!’ And now it’s fading away. Yes, it’s turning into just an ordinary hill

with craters in it. Oh, what cruel fate!"

He banked away. "Well, what a disappointment that was, eh? I guess I’ll just land over there

by what used to be its chin and see about doing some real science."

Mary, who had been monitoring his signal over the satellite link, was laughing out loud. Most

of us at Mission Control were, too, but a few people weren’t. Space flight was a popularity

game, and Alex had just cost us some supporters.

He didn’t care. I never got the chance to ask him, but I know what he thought of that kind of

support anyway.

He brought the plane in high, making his customary "Yee-ha!" yell as he went through the

roller coaster moment, then set it down light as a feather on the rocky ground at the base of

the hill. He jumped out and tied down the wings so a stray gust of wind wouldn’t blow away

his ride home, then turned around and trudged through the rocks to see what he could see.

He did not send another transmission for seventeen minutes.

When he did, there was a peculiar strained quality to his voice. "Mary," he said. "Houston.

I’ve found something."

The tone of Mary Paiz’ answering transmission clearly showed that she expected another

joke announcement. "Copy, Buck."

"No kidding, Wilma. Hold on. Going to visual." He switched on his video camera and

broadcast an image of a jagged stone in a field of other stones. "See this?"

"Wonderful rock, Alexander."

"Not the rock. This patch here." His finger prodded a shadowy area. "See this? Well, close

up it looks like velvet."

"Velvet?" asked Mary.

"Yeah. It’s fuzzy, and I can’t get light to reflect from it, not even from my helmet lamp. It

looks like–" He paused.

"Like what?" Mary said.

"I was going to say ‘lichen,’ but it’s soft," he said. "Springy. Like some kind of . . . " His

reluctance to say the word was palpable.

After about five seconds of dead silence–which seemed like the longest hesitation in the

history of the solar system–Mary prompted him again. "Alex? Come in, Alex."

The broadcast image grew as Alexander zoomed in. He described the image out loud in

case the transmission wasn’t getting through. "Okay. Reality check. At ten power I see little

stalks with cup-shaped ends, all packed together so there’s hardly any space between

them. They’re stuck to the rock by more little cups that look quite a bit like the ones on top.

I’m trying not to be too credulous here, but that’s definitely an organized structure. A

biological structure."

"Are you shittin’ me?" Mary asked.

"Live transmission," Alex reminded her. "But no, I’m not. This is for real. They look like

plants of some sort."

"Holy . . . . Wow. And us with less than a week left on the planet."

"Well, you know how it is. You don’t find the souvenirs you want until the end of your

vacation."

"Do you see any more?"

"Let me look." Alex stood up and panned around at the other rocks. "Yeah," he said. "Five

or six patches of it. No, more than that. Oh, there’s a big one. Must be three inches

across."

"Get samples," Mary told him.

"Duh," he said. His voice barely betrayed the excitement he had to be feeling, but the

biomonitors in his suit told a different story. His heart was racing, and his skin temperature

had risen a couple of degrees. He knew he’d just made the history books again, and this

entry would dwarf the one about Drier’s syndrome or even the first mission to Mars. He was

now the man who had discovered the first indisputable evidence of extraterrestrial life.

He spent the next two days scraping stuff off rocks, digging in the ground for other

organisms, and climbing up and down the hill looking for anything else he could find. He

even bagged up one entire rock a couple of feet across because it had four different kinds of

growth on it and he thought maybe it would provide some idea of how the Martian

ecosystem worked.

And then it was time to head back. He packed his samples in the plane, strapped

everything down, and lifted off for home. He took the plane up a few hundred feet, tilted the

engines forward–and dropped like a rock.

And kept dropping. Long after the wings should have caught enough air to start flying, the

plane still generated no lift. "Shit," Alex said, "there must be a downdraft. Increasing thrust

to max."

The plane kept dropping. In one-third gee, he had plenty of time to watch the ground come

up at him, but his biomonitors showed his pulse rate barely rising. "It’s not going to work in

flight mode," he said. "Transitioning back to hover mode." He angled the engines back.

"Come on, you dirty bitch. Come on, come on!"

We heard the impact. It sounded like someone had dropped a dictionary on a beer can.

"Alex?" Mary called out. "Alex, are you okay?"

"Well, I’m down," he said, "but I wouldn’t say I’m okay. Both engines broke loose in the

crash. They’re doing cartwheels across the rocks now. There, one of ‘em stopped. The other

one’s still rolling around like a pinwheel." He coughed. "Damn. Bit my tongue."

"Are you . . . can you . . . ?"

"Fix the plane? I don’t see how. Even if the engines still work, the wings are crumpled like

tin foil. But it looks like I’m going to have to figure something out, doesn’t it?" He didn’t state

the obvious: there was no backup plane to come get him.

He got out of the wreckage and hiked through the rocks to the closest engine. It had been

battered so badly that it was barely recognizable. The other one had tried to suck in a rock

as it was winding down, and what was left of the turbine lay scattered all around it.

"Looks like time for plan B," Alex said.

SPACE BOY MUTINY!!

Did He Intend to Stay on Mars All Along?

There was no plan B. Everyone wracked their brains for a way to get an astronaut two

thousand miles back to base without a plane, but there just wasn’t any. He wouldn’t make a

tenth that distance on foot. Dave suggested going for him in the landing vehicle, but Alex

vetoed that idea right away.

"It’s not designed for suborbital flight," he said. "Besides, even if you could restart the lower

stage and fly it, you’d have to rob fuel from the upper stage, and then all four of us would be

stuck on the ground until our food and air ran out. If we don’t get back into orbit within the

week we’ll miss our launch window."

"We can’t just leave you there," Dave said.

"I’m all for rescue if you’ve got a realistic plan, but using the lander isn’t going to work."

At Mission Control, we had to concur. That was the hardest decision I ever made in my life,

even though I was just part of the engineering group and even though I knew there wasn’t a

real decision. We might have risked the other three for a chance to save Alex, but we

wouldn’t doom all four of them just to make a vain attempt.

I wasn’t the capcom on this mission, but I was Alex’s best friend, so I got to deliver the bad

news. There was no way to hold a conversation with the speed of light lag what it was, so I

just made a short speech and had my voice synthesizer remove all the pauses before

transmitting it. I won’t transcribe it here; all the radio messages from the mission are on file

for the curious. There’s only one thing to say in a situation like that anyway. You say you’re

sorry that things worked out the way they did, and you’re going to miss your best friend very

much, but you want your other friends to come back home safe, dammit, so don’t try

anything stupid.

There were a lot of tearful goodbyes. Alex’s mom and dad talked with him a couple of times,

and he told them not to worry, that he’d had a pretty full life and no regrets. "I’d have come

here even if I knew in advance that this was how it would end," he said. The newspapers

made quite a deal out of that, and for the first time since Alex was born some of them ran an

entire article without once mentioning his physical appearance.

Mary wasn’t ready to give up. She cursed us all, including Alex, and tried to convince Dave

and Shawnee to defy orders and try the lander anyway, but Dave had backed off from that

idea after he’d seen how impossible it was, and Shawnee merely said, "Over my dead body.

No offense, Alex."

Alex said, "None taken."

Launch time came, and with a great deal of argument but no real hope left, Mary and Dave

and Shawnee climbed aboard the lander and rode it back into orbit. The transfer vehicle was

still waiting, snug and warm, to take them back to Earth.

And Alex? He did the only thing left for him to do. He studied the lifeforms he had found and

transmitted his findings back to us. He told us how the organisms’ cupped tops followed the

sun, how they closed up at night, and how the whole colony moved, ever so slowly, around

the face of the rocks over the course of the day. They weren’t quite plants, and they weren’t

quite animals. They were something else entirely. Alex’s description of them was incredible,

exciting like nothing else humanity had ever experienced, but we couldn’t forget that we

were learning it from a man whose time was rapidly running out.

He couldn’t either. Occasionally his voice would crack, and he would stay quiet for a few

minutes while he got his emotions under control again. Those of us listening were sniffling

and wiping our eyes as well. By then we numbered at least half the people on Earth, since

the TV networks as well as the NASA channel had started live coverage. I was pissed that

they hadn’t bothered until someone was about to die, but that’s the way the media do

things. Science by itself isn’t interesting; human drama is what gets the ratings.

Alex knew that. He hadn’t spent a lifetime under the media bug-lens without learning what

played well and what didn’t. He must have been planning his final speech since the moment

he knew he was stranded. It wasn’t a long one–he knew the average viewer’s attention span,

too–but he said what he wanted to say at the one moment in his life when he knew people

would hear it. And maybe even listen.

It came in the middle of day five. He had had a hard time the previous night, nearly freezing

in the crumpled ultralight’s tiny cabin when the outside temperature had dropped to

minus-sixty. The plane’s batteries were dead and his suit batteries were nearly gone as

well; he kept from freezing by exercising constantly, which burned up air faster than his

recycler could keep up with it. He was down to practically nothing by morning; it was clear

he wouldn’t survive another night.

He spent half the day finishing up what observations he could make, describing what

microscopic details of the "planimals" he could see with the portable sampling kit, but just a

little after noon, Cydonia time, he stopped and said, "I think it’s time we all had a little talk."

The video camera was dead by then, so all we have to go on are the radio signals and the

orbital camera’s pictures of his footprints, but it seems apparent that he climbed up the flank

of the hill above the ultralight, stopping at the "chin" and looking south as he spoke.

"I am standing here on an alien world," he said. "I’ve been called an alien myself over the

years, so maybe it’s appropriate that this is where I wound up. I certainly can’t ignore the

irony of my final resting place, a hill with some craters on it that made so many people think

there was life on Mars. And so there is, but it has nothing to do with mysterious monuments

to anthropocentric thinking."

He laughed softly. "Anthropocentric. Look it up. It’s a dirty word, but it’s in the dictionary."

He must have sat down on a rock; we could hear his pressure suit creak. "I wish each and

every one of you could see what I see here. Mars is nothing like Earth. It’s got a volcano the

size of the United States and a canyon so wide that you can stand in the bottom and not

see either side. When I woke up this morning there was dry ice on the ground. Frozen

carbon dioxide. The air froze here last night. It’s like that everywhere I turn. There are more

wonders here than we could even begin to imagine . . . and I’m here to see them because

we were crazy enough to come look."

He sighed. "Why can’t that be the thing that excites our imaginations? Why must we waste

our minds and our energy on delusions that we should have put aside long ago? Faces on

Mars. Alien abductions. Imaginary beings dictating our lives at every turn. What’s wrong with

us? We have brains, we have senses; why can’t we use them to understand the universe

around us rather than make up elaborate fantasies and pretend they’re the truth?

"Well, here’s a truth for you. I am Alexander Drier. Like the rest of you, I’m a human being.

And from this moment on, like the rest of you, I’m a Martian. We all became Martians the

second humanity set foot on this world, and because of what we’ve learned here we’ll all

carry a little bit of Mars around with us for the rest of our lives.

"Does that somehow diminish our humanity? Of course not. It means we’re more human.

Because only human beings could have gotten here. We dreamt it, we wanted it, we built it,

and we did it. And Mars will always be here, a beckoning light in the sky for anyone else

with a dream and the determination to see it through.

"I want you to remember that, when you look at the new face on Mars." He stood up and

walked back down the hill, out into the sandy plain beyond.

"New face?" asked Mary, in equatorial orbit a third of the way around the planet.

"You’ll see," Alex replied.

They didn’t see for several hours, until the polar mapping satellite made its pass over him.

By then he’d made most of one circuit and he was well into a second one, scuffing up the

soil with his boots like a kid making designs in fresh snow.

It was a bit lopsided, as patterns drawn on the ground without surveying instruments often

are, but it was perfectly recognizable. A long oval, ballooning out on one end and narrowing

down to a pointy chin on the other. Big, almond-shaped eyes filling nearly half the enclosed

space. Two little dots for a nose and a single line for a mouth, bent upward at the ends in a

goofy grin. Alexander Drier’s own caricature.

"Alex, what the hell is that for?" Mary asked when she saw it.

"A . . . reminder," he said. His voice was ragged and he was panting hard. "Besides, people

wanted . . . a face. Who am I to deny them?"

She laughed, but it turned into a sob. "I’m sorry, Alex. I’m sorry it has to end like this."

"Me too," he said, "but believe me, it’s better than it might have been. At least I got here.

Oof!" There was a thump over the radio.

"Alex?"

"S’all right. Tripped on a rock. It’s getting hard to see. Look, I don’t have much daylight left,

or air either, and I don’t really want to make people listen to me die, so I’m going to shut off

my radio."

"No! Alex, you don’t have to die alone."

"I’m not alone. I’ve got you, and Mom and Dad, and Colin, and Uncle George, and

everybody. I’ve got all these little whatever-they-ares growing on the rocks all around me. I’ve

got the whole universe right over my head. I’m not alone."

"That’s not what I meant. I meant–"

"I know what you meant, but that’s not the way I want to go. Look, it’s time. Everyone out

there, I love you. Try to love each other, too, okay? This is Alexander Drier, signing off."

There was a click as he switched off his radio.

MARS MISSION A HOAX!

Space Boy Spotted Pumping Gas In Wyoming

The next pass showed where he had fallen. He had made it back around to the chin, and

had lain down with his arms and legs outstretched, a tiny body to go with the face he had

drawn. The orbital camera’s resolution wasn’t good enough to tell if he had opened his suit

or not, but he wouldn’t have lasted long either way. With night falling and the temperature

plummeting, he would have frozen to death in minutes.

The face didn’t last a month, of course. The next windstorm obliterated his tracks, leaving

only his body and the crumpled remains of the ultralight airplane as evidence that anyone

had ever been there.

But we knew. Alex’s last days wouldn’t fade from our memory, not for as long as anyone

looked up in the night sky and wondered what was out there.

Mary and Dave and Shawnee made it back to Earth with only the usual harrowing

adventures. Congress cut NASA’s budget the next year, but not as bad as we had been

afraid they would, so we cautiously began work on our next phase in exploring our solar

system: an orbital habitat that people can actually live in long enough to travel to the outer

planets. The first prototype will be tested for a couple of years in Earth orbit, then leased out

to the highest bidder for living space. I figure I might just survive long enough to rent some

cubic there myself. It won’t be Heinlein’s Waldo, but it’ll be something for an old man who

can barely move here on Earth.

In the meantime, life lurches along the way it usually does. The newspapers still carry

horoscopes, but they’re not on the front page anymore. Government scandals and student

unrest have taken up that space again.

And of course the latest Alien Shocker.

Three months ago a boy was born in Mississipi with Drier’s Syndrome. His parents are good

but simple people who hadn’t expected a media feeding frenzy at their front door, but they

knew opportunity when they saw it. They’ve been portrayed as country hicks who ran afoul

of an alien mad scientist, but they’ve already bought a house on fifty acres, fenced and

guarded by a dozen rent-a-cops until they can find enough rottweilers and dobermans to do

the job for free.

That solved their external problem, but internally they’re still going through the same thing

Mark and Faye went through nearly thirty years ago.

The Driers aren’t answering their mail, so the mother wrote me a plaintive letter, begging me

to help her understand her child. Among the things she asked was a simple, straightforward

question: Is my son a spaceman?

I intend to answer with the only truth I know, taught to me by my friend, the astronaut from

Wyoming.

That’s up to him.

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Adam Troy Castro & Jerry Oltion - Astronaut From Wyoming

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