Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

And so, as the shadow of Earth—the shadow of that crazy planet, with its frustrating people, beings timid when it came to exploration but endlessly belligerent toward each other—moved across the moon’s landscape, I prepared. And once the computer told me that the whole of the side of the moon facing Earth was in darkness, I activated my starbird’s laser beacons, flashing a ruby light that the humans couldn’t possibly miss, on and off, over and over, through the entire period of totality.

They had to wait eight of Earth’s days before the part of the moon’s face I had signaled them from was naturally in darkness again, but when it was, they flashed a replying beacon up at me. They’d clearly held off until the nearside’s night in hopes that I would shine my lasers against the blackness in acknowledgment.

And I did—just that once, so there would be no doubt that I was really there. But although they tried flashing various patterns of laser light back at me—prime numbers, pictograms made of grids of dots—I refused to respond further.

There was no point in making it easy for them. If they wanted to talk further, they would have to come back up here.

Maybe they’d use the same name once again for their ship: Columbia.

I crawled back into my cryostasis nest, and told the computer to wake me when humans landed.

“That’s not really prudent,” said the computer. “You should also specify a date on which I should wake you regardless. After all, they may never come.”

“They’ll come,” I said.

“Perhaps,” said the computer. “Still …”

I lifted my wings, conceding the point. “Very well. Give them …” And then it came to me, the perfect figure … “until this decade is out.”

After all, that’s all it took the last time.

Mikeys

This one is sort of a companion piece to the preceding story, “The Eagle Has Landed,” in that it shares a certain wistfulness about the history of manned spaceflight.

I wrote the first draft of this story back in 1978, when I was eighteen, and it was one of the very first that I submitted to magazines. It was quite rightly rejected in its then-current form, but when I was asked by Martin H. Greenberg and John Heifers to contribute to an anthology called Space Stations, I remembered my old story, dusted it off, and rewrote it, finally—/ hope!—making it work.

“Mikeys” was a finalist for the Aurora Award—Canadas highest honor in SF—for best English story of the year.

* * *

Damn, but it stuck in Don Lawson’s craw—largely because Chuck Zakarian was right. After all, Zakarian was slated for the big Mars surface mission to be launched from Earth next year. He never said it to Don’s face, but Don knew that Zakarian and the rest of NASA viewed him and Sasim as Mikeys—the derisive term for those, like Apollo 11’s command-module pilot Mike Collins, who got to go almost all the way to the target.

Yes, goddamned Zakarian would be remembered along with Armstrong, whom every educated person in the world could still name even today, seventy years after his historic small step. But who the hell remembered Collins, the guy who’d stayed in orbit around the moon while Neil and Buzz had made history on the lunar surface?

Don realized the point couldn’t have been driven home more directly than by the view he was now looking at. He was floating in the control room of the. Asaph Hall, the ship that had brought him and Sasim Remtulla to Martian space from Earth. If he looked left, Don saw Mars, giant, red, beckoning. And if he looked right, he saw—

They called it the Spud. The Spud, for Christs sake!

Looking right, he saw Deimos, the outer of Mars’s two tiny moons, a misshapen hunk of dark, dark rock. How Don wanted to go to Mars, to stand on its sandy surface, to see up close its great valleys and volcanoes! But no. As Don’s Cockney granddad used to say whenever they passed a fancy house or an expensive car, “Not for the likes of us.”

Mars was for Chuck Zakarian and company. The A-team.

Don and Sasim were the B-team, the also-rans. Oh, sure, they had now arrived at the vicinity of Mars long before anyone else. And Don supposed there would be some cachet in being the first person since Apollo 17 left the moon in 1972 to set foot on another world—even if that world was just a 15-kilometer-long hunk of rock.