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  Other Books by Allen M. Steele

  Novels

  Near-Space Series

  Orbital Decay

  Clarke County, Space

  Lunar Descent

  Labyrinth of Night

  A King of Infinite

  The Jericho Iteration

  The Tranquillity Alternative

  Oceanspace

  Chronospace

  Coyote Trilogy

  Coyote

  Coyote Rising

  Coyote Frontier

  Coyote Chronicles

  Coyote Horizon

  Coyote Destiny

  Coyote Universe

  Spindrift

  Galaxy Blues

  Hex

  Collections

  Rude Astronauts

  All-American Alien Boy

  Sex and Violence in Zero-G

  American Beauty

  The Last Science Fiction Writer

  Non-Fiction

  Primary Ignition

  © 1998, 2010 by Allen M. Steele

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this collection of stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

  Pages 512-513 represent an extension of this copyright page.

  Fantastic Books

  1380 East 17 Street, Suite 2233

  Brooklyn, New York 11230

  www.FantasticBooks.biz

  Print ISBN 10: 1-61720-358-0

  Print ISBN 13: 978-1-61720-358-9

  First Fantastic Books Edition

  v1.1

  Table of Contents

  Introduction (1999): The Coming of the Space Age

  Introduction (2010): Return to Near-Space

  Walking on the Moon

  The Diamondback Jack Quartet

  Free Beer and the William Casey Society

  The Return of Weird Frank

  Sugar’s Blues

  The Flying Triangle

  The Zoo Team

  Live from the Mars Hotel

  The War Memorial

  Moreau2

  The Great Galactic Ghoul

  The Emperor of Mars

  Zwarte Piet’s Tale

  The Weight

  Kronos

  The Captain Future Duet

  The Death of Captain Future

  The Exile of Evening Star

  0.0G Sex: A User’s Guide

  Working for Mister Chicago

  High Roller

  Shepherd Moon

  Appendix 1: “Near Space” Timeline

  Appendix 2: Spacecraft and Space Station Designs

  INTRODUCTION (1999):

  The Coming of the Space Age

  Night on Mars.

  On an ancient, rock-strewn flood plain just north of the equator, nothing moves in the chill predawn darkness. Nighttime on this desert world is dense and black; if you could hear anything in the thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere, it would be only the thinnest and most lonely of winds, barely strong enough to shift red sand around the rust-colored boulders. By any standard, this is a brutal and uncompromising land: quiet, cold, apparently lifeless, the only light comes from the gentle stars above.

  A tiny reddish-orange fireball races across the sky. Visible for only a few moments, it quickly disappears.

  Dark silence again. Disturbed from its long slumber, Mars goes back to sleep.

  Then something descends from the dark heavens: a cluster of silver grapes suspended beneath a broad parachute, its momentum braked only by the sparse atmosphere. The grapes sway back and forth on the long tether until, a hundred feet above the surface, a signal from a computer nestled deep within the cluster causes the cable to detach itself. Released from the parachute, the object plummets down, down, down…

  The probe hits the ground, but its airbags don’t break; instead, the probe bounces fifty feet into the air as it hurtles across the desert floor, rebounding at least fifteen more times as it hits rocks and boulders, until gravity and inertia take their toll and the probe finally rolls to a halt.

  As the airbags gradually begin to deflate, a radio signal is transmitted to a bright blue star high in the Martian sky. In this place called the Ares Vallis, for the first time in twenty-one years, the presence of humankind is once again felt on Mars.

  In California, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, it’s a little after ten o’clock on the morning of July 4, 1997—Independence Day in the United States—when the first surface signals from Mars Pathfinder probe are received. The following day, the New York Times will publish a front-page photo of JPL mission controllers, their fists raised and yelling like sports fans, as the downlink is displayed on their computer screens. Touchdown. The crowd goes wild.

  At the same instant, on the other side of the country, I was returning to my new house in New England. My wife and I have just moved to a small town deep within the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. The day before, a sixteen-wheeler driven by a guy named Delmar had delivered our belongings from our old place in St. Louis, and now our ridgetop home was filled with boxes stacked on boxes. Books alone took up the entire guest room; everything we owned was still packed away, and we needed to go shopping just to acquire the bare necessities for the next few days.

  Yet this wasn’t the foremost thought on my mind. Several months earlier, I’d received a formal invitation from the Planetary Society to witness the Mars Pathfinder landing in Pasadena. I accepted the invitation, until it became apparent that Mars Pathfinder would touch down just after I had unloaded about 16,000 pounds of stuff from a moving van. Sure, I could have hopped a jet to California the day the truck arrived, but that would have left my wife alone in a new town with only three dogs for company and our furniture scattered all over the place. Linda said it was okay, but I felt it wouldn’t have been fair to her, so I cancelled the trip.

  Coming back from the supermarket, though, I found myself regretting the decision. I had counted on being able to follow the landing through the news media, but the TV cable wasn’t connected yet, the local radio stations delivered only music, and a glitch in the rural phone lines meant that my computer modem was unable to dial up computer networks which, in turn, would have connected me to NASA’s web page. So I had no clue as to what was going on. My colleagues Gregory Benford, David Brin, Greg Bear, and Kim Stanley Robinson had accepted invitations to be at JPL for the arrival; Geoffrey Landis was on the Pathfinder rover team, so he was even closer to the center of the action than they were. John Varley and Spider Robinson were doubtless wired into NASA’s Pathfinder web page, as were dozens of other SF authors I knew. Sir Arthur C. Clarke…hell, Sir Arthur was probably receiving telemetry straight from Mars, via a monolith he had arranged to be parked there.

  The best Fourth of July party in twenty years, and I was buying dog food and beer. I glanced at my watch just as Linda turned off Route 116 onto Route 5-10. “Well, I guess it’s down now,” I murmured.

  “Honey, I’m sorry.” She gave me a sympathetic look. “You missed it.”

  “Yeah, well, so am I.” Then I smiled to myself. “No, not really. I haven’t missed a thing.”

  Soon there would be other robotic missions. Not only that, but I also had no doubt in my mind that I would see people walking on Mars before too many years had gone by. I had only missed the prologue; the real story had yet to be told.

  July 4, 1997, may be remembered by future historians as the first day of the Space Age.

  That term is not new, of course. No one remembers today who first coined i
t—I suspect it was probably a newspaper columnist or a political speechwriter—but it came into popular usage in the mid-1950s, just before the first satellites were launched into orbit. It was bandied about for a couple of decades before it fell out of favor at approximately the same time the public lost interest in space exploration itself.

  Indeed, it may have been premature to call mid-to-late 20th Century the “Space Age.” The Pre-Space Age is probably a better phrase. Mars wasn’t the next major objective after the Apollo landings, nor did we get the lunar bases prophesied by Wernher von Braun. NASA’s short-lived Skylab was the closest we came to having a space station until the former Soviet Union placed Mir in orbit, and although NASA’s shuttle fleet was envisioned to be spaceplanes which would ferry people into orbit on a weekly basis, the Challenger disaster almost spelled the end of manned space exploration. For a long time, it appeared as if the only folks who seriously foresaw the human race taking up residence in the solar system were science fiction authors Even in SF, that idea temporarily became unpopular, replaced for a while by grim visions inspired by the mean and sour-heartedness of the Reagan Eighties: Cold Wars in space, with shuttles serving no higher purpose than to ferry high-energy lasers into low orbit.

  Yet no one counted on there being a few people…a few million, really, although their ranks often seemed much smaller…who weren’t yet willing to surrender one of humankind’s oldest and most noble ambitions. Sometimes acting much as if they were part of an underground conspiracy, they met the foothills of the Rockies, on the streets of Moscow, on the beaches of Florida, in hotel rooms at science fiction conventions. They exchanged information over the Internet and during poster sessions at academic conferences, collected signatures on thousands of petitions, relentlessly lobbied government officials, wrote countless articles for publications as diverse as the Smithsonian, Time, and Analog, debated and argued and harangued until their vocal chords were raw…

  And finally, at long last, their efforts were rewarded. It seems as if the Space Age—the real Space Age—has come around at last.

  The Mars Pathfinder landing was the biggest event of July 4, 1997, but it wasn’t the only one which mattered. On the Mir space station, two Russians and an American were struggling to recover from a near-catastrophe which occurred only a week earlier when an unmanned Progress cargo rocket collided with the station during a docking exercise, breaking one of the solar panels and causing a blowout in the science module. For several days they worked by flashlight to repair the damage, and for a while it appeared they might have to evacuate the station, yet by July 4 they had stabilized the situation, and another Progress was already on the launch pad, ready to bring them emergency supplies. Another space milestone had been achieved: a major accident aboard an orbital station had been overcome, seemingly against all odds…and in the face of widespread predictions of failure.

  The NASA space shuttle Columbia was also in orbit that same day, carrying the same crew which had been aboard the same vessel only a month earlier when a malfunctioning oxygen cell caused them to prematurely end their mission and return to Earth. A few years earlier, they might have had to wait a couple of years or so for a chance to take another ride, yet semi-privatization of NASA’s shuttle program had led streamlining of launch operations and quicker turnaround. In fact, shuttle flights have become so commonplace that most people barely notice them anymore; all the same, thousands of people show up at Merritt Island for each launch, and you have to look hard to find a congressman with enough gall to suggest that space exploration is a waste of money. If you live in Wisconsin, lay your ear to the ground; you may hear William Proxmire screaming from his grave (hey, you elected him…).

  Far beyond Mars, out where you’d have to strain your eyes to catch a glimpse of Earth, the NEAR space probe roams the asteroid belt. Galileo glides through the Jovian system, mapping worlds as strange as any of those found in science fiction. The Cassini probe is on its way to Saturn, and NASA’s Lunar Prospector has recently found ice within shadowed craters on the Moon’s south pole, a discovery which has given spurs to the old dream of a permanent lunar base. And now there’s a half-dozen private companies vying to develop single-stage manned orbital spacecraft, the most ambitious competition since the race to cross the Atlantic by airplane.

  Independence Day, indeed.

  We’re on the verge of a new era. Over the next hundred years, we will range farther out into the solar system, exploring—and, yes, colonizing—new worlds to an extent which only a relative handful have previously dared to imagine. We know how to get there, at least in terms of hardware requirements; we’ve assessed the risks (or at least the ones we know about—there’s bound to be some unpleasant surprises) and we’re rapidly learning how to deal with them. Most importantly; we’ve come to recognize the ultimate objective of our efforts: the establishment of humankind as a spacefaring species.

  The past is prelude. The Space Age is about to begin.

  A reviewer once called me a “space romantic.” Whether or not it was intended as a compliment, I don’t care, for it’s a fair assessment of my work. A realistic romantic, perhaps, but no more or less than Herman Melville was when he wrote Moby-Dick while working as a customs inspector in Marblehead, Massachusetts. When I visited the rooftop cupola of the customs house where Melville watched for tall ships to appear on the horizon, I realized that I was engaged in much the same thing, for Melville’s New England seacoast was the Cape Canaveral of its day. Indeed, many of the motives remain the same: exploration, commerce, adventure. Indeed, I like to think that Melville would have been a SF author if he were alive today.

  This collection is the complete short fiction of my “Near Space” series, a future history I began developing over a decade ago with my first novel. Orbital Decay was originally intended to be a one-shot endeavor which would stand by itself, but when I finished the book in June, 1987, I realized that I had more to say on the subject of space exploration. Three more novels—Clarke County, Space, Lunar Descent, and Labyrinth of Night—and about a half-dozen short stories followed Orbital Decay, all set in what I eventually came to call “Near Space,” in homage to Larry Niven’s “Known Space” series.

  I didn’t map out this future history in advance, so the stories and novels weren’t written in chronological order; I made things up as I went along, using short fiction to fill in the gaps between novels. An odd approach, perhaps, in this era of trilogies and never-ending epics. One former British editor, frustrated that I couldn’t tell her exactly what I intended to do next, told my agent that I wasn’t “serious about my career” when I rejected her advice to write a multi-generation interstellar saga—Star Wars meets The Waltons, something like that. I don’t enjoy reading that sort of thing, though, so why should I want to write one? My agent, bless her, let me follow my instincts.

  The first story of the sequence, “Walking on the Moon,” is a prelude to Orbital Decay. The next three—“Free Beer and the William Casey Society,” “The Return of Weird Frank,” and “Sugar’s Blues”—comprise a mini-trilogy set in a fictional bar on Merritt Island, set in the same period as that novel. The last, “Live from the Mars Hotel,” was actually my first short-fiction sale, and refigures events in “Red Planet Blues,” the only story not included in this collection; it was later revised and expanded to become Labyrinth of Night.

  The last story of this first sequence was The Weight, a short novel which makes its first American publication in this book. It was originally published in England as a slender hardcover which hardly anyone bought or read (although the film rights were briefly optioned); had it appeared thirty years ago, it might have been one-half of an Ace Double. Yet because long novellas are no longer as popular as they once were, I was unable to find an American publisher interested in publishing it on its lonesome, and it’s had to wait until now for it to be reprinted in the U.S.

  After I finished The Weight, there were no more ideas for “Near Space” stories I thought were worth
writing—save for one, something I was fooling around with but hadn’t quite gelled yet—so I put the chronology on ice and turned my attention to other matters. Yet I found myself edging back into “Near Space” when I wrote “Shepherd Moon” and “The War Memorial” on the spur of the moment; the idea left kicking around before I consciously stopped doing “Near Space” stories eventually became “The Death of Captain Future.” It took nearly two years to commit this novella to paper, but it was worth the effort: it received a Hugo Award and a Science Fiction Weekly Reader Appreciation Award in 1996, and was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1997.

  Furthermore, when it was done I discovered that I’d inadvertently developed the background for a new set of “Near Space” stories, this one covering the second half of the 21st century. The only exception was “The Flying Triangle,” a continuation of the Diamondback Jack trilogy which I wrote as an excuse to visit an old hangout, if only to settle some unfinished business. The trilogy is now a quartet, but I doubt it’ll become a quintet…unless, of course, I get another idea.

  Which raises a question: will there be more “Near Space” stories?

  I once intended to write a story or novel for every planet and major satellite in the solar system. Although the stories in this collection have Venus, Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, Jupiter, and Saturn as their settings, I find this notion longer interests me; the solar system is so vast, and some locales don’t easily lend themselves to stories. Those who’ve read A King of Infinite Space (for which “Working for Mister Chicago” is a prelude) know that I set the stage for interstellar exploration at the novel’s end. If I ever take this chronology beyond the solar system, this would make the very term “Near Space” something of an oxymoron. Space, yes, but “near?”…no way. In astronomical terms, “near” stops as soon as you’ve crossed the heliopause. Therefore, the next logical step would be to start writing stories set beyond the solar system, right?

  However, in order to maintain internal consistency while writing A King of Infinite Space, I found it necessary to create the very thing which I’d steadfastly refused to do earlier: a timeline of key events in this future history. So I sat down at my desk with a stack of novels, short stories, maps, diagrams, and loose-leaf notebooks and, over the course of the next several days, tied together all the major developments of a chronology which started in 2010 and ended in 2101. When I was finished, I looked at what I had done and realized, to mixed horror and delight, that I still hadn’t written about half of the events I’d charted out.