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Novels by William Walling
Novels by William Walling
Category:
Science Fiction
Publisher: © 2003 by William Walling
ISBN-10: 1589394127
Type: Fiction
Pages: 240
Copyright: © 2003 by William Walling
ISBN-13: 9781589394124
Price: $7.95 (eBook)
The advent of starflight presents serious problems both domestic (Solar System) and alien extraterrestrial to the innovators, a select group of scientists and technicians laboring in the asteroid base in Ceres.
Perplexed after a series of inexplicable appearances by a tall, mysterious individual Cosmologist Roger Shore is dismayed when the same unearthly stranger materializes aboard orbiting Galileo Observatory and pointedly questions him about faster-than-light spacecraft development. Further baffled when only his own voice registers on a recording of the “verbal” exchange, Shore is fascinated to hear Galileo’s director reveal the exisence of a clandestine program to make interstellar flight a reality.
Sponsored by Alexis Lemmon, the wealthy daughter and sole heir of the late, revered Nobelist in physics who “fathered” controlled nuclear fusion power generation, Project Demeter was inaugurated by and obscure Chinese physicist. Invited to join the project personnel and lend their expertise, Roger and a colleague are included in the intrepid crew transiting to Demeter’s far-flung base in the astroid belt, far from prying eyes among the sunward planets, where Third World “have nots” would violently oppose a profligate waste of resources on some fairy tale-like “starflight” project. The base’s total isolation leaves Demeter’s scientific and technical crew vulnerable to hindrance and eventual near-lethal interference from a malicious, dedicated alient entity, and during one encounter Shore and his associates learn the stakes of achieving starflight arfe infinitely greater than they had imagined.
Reaching the nearest star system, a culture-defining benchmark as well as a triumph of technology, will apparently qualify humanity for inclusion in a vast, unnamed forum of intergalactic intelligences.
Excerpt
Tomorrow, the Stars
William Walling
“In night and wretchedness, per
aspera ad astra, God grant it!”
Richard Wagner, upon completing
Der Fliegende Holländer, 1841
1 - Mister Smith
His quip typically droll, Dr. Jefferson Belal Das cracked the hermetic hatch of my cubbyhole office. “Bunking here tonight, Roger? Last call, unless you’ve a lonely weekend in mind.”
“Uh, oh!” The bulkhead digital chronometer displays twenty-four-hour Zulu time; it let me know that without the warning I would’ve missed the late bus. “Thanks. Wait up, okay?”
A stellar physics specialist, Das says he wraps his head in a turban only to please his mother, a Bangladeshi Muslim who reveres the Sunnah Mu'akkadah tradition, but readily admits it a matter of indifference to his Hindu father, a high mucky-muck government lawyer. I happen to know that even on a visit to Delhi his “raghead” pose is a concession to early baldness, not family harmony or anything else. Between timeshare stints in orbiting Galileo Observatory, or lecturing Princeton grad students, his passion is restoring antique autos — five at last count, including a red hybrid that looks freshly escaped from some extinct auto agency showroom.
Hastily rearranging the clutter, I clipped a few loose notes in the desk’s hold-down fixture and caught up with Das floating topsy-turvy in the passageway. We pulled ourselves in tandem along tightly strung freefall safety lines “up” two levels to the zenith airlock, zipped through the chamber open on both sides, tugged our way through the umbilical tube’s claustrophobic tunnel, and found our regular steward in the act of prepping the bus for departure.
“Hold it!” I called, earning a surly look due to our tardiness.
“Ahoy the weather deck!” hailed the Raja, giving a fair imitation of the Ancient Mariner with a severe head cold. “Stand by t’weigh anchor ‘n unreef yer mizzen sheets.”
The steward pouted while cycling shut the airlock hatches, retracting the umbilical tube.
There were plenty of empty seats; many if not most staffers had fled Galileo on the “early bird” shuttle, which runs only on Fridays. Spotting Director Mattingly, I leveraged myself into a facing seat — yes, the Sir John Mattingly, O.B.E., F.R.A.S., with an rasher of alphabet soup tacked on at the end. A celebrity astronomer whose youthful brilliance had won him a Hawking Fellowship at Cambridge, he’d been knighted by HRH Charles VII shortly after publication of his incisive analyses of data returned from the Centaurus Probe.
Dr. Mattingly looked up from the London Times elex edition in his viewer. “Ah, there you are, Shore. Hullo, Jefferson. Thought perhaps we’d left you two behind.”
Jeff latched his seat’s safety harness. “TGIF, Sir John. Working late?”
“Yes, confound it! Far too few hours in any given day.” Crow’s feet crinkled pleasantly around Mattingly’s light blue eyes, enhancing his authentic British charm — something I’ve learned it’s impossible to counterfeit. His curmudgeonly reputation is largely undeserved; there’s much more to our director than the tweedy, muddling-through “Colonel Blimp” facade he presents when confronted by media news hounds and boorish interviewers.
Das plugged a coin-sized disc into the seat-back viewer in front of him, and was soon lost in an elex edition of a day-old Delhi newspaper.
The director didn’t return his attention to the newspaper. Eyeing me analytically, he went through the throat-clearing preamble I was accustomed to hearing. “Rather hoped I’d bump into you on the ride home, Shore. If you and . . . a friend have nothing better to do this evening perhaps you’d care to attend the theater with us? Chap I once knew rather well is playing Holofernes in a live transmission of Love’s Labour’s Lost from the New Globe down in London. He was kind enough to send along four tickets.”
“That’s . . . gracious of you, Sir John, but I, uh . . .”
“Come, Shore! At least some Americans must be Shakespeare buffs.”
“I, well . . . It’s Friday,” I said lamely. “Not sure I can round up a date at this late hour.”
The director’s lip curled. “Cosmologists!” he said with a twinkle. “Every ruddy one of you shares the same identical outlook: no interest whatever in anything closer than a few billion parsecs.” He turned to Das. “How about you, Jefferson?”
The query roused Jeff from his newspaper. He begged off, doing his best to sound ingenuous, and dodged the issue in typical fashion by changing the subject. “You’re acquainted with a stage actor, Sir John?”
“Once was, I daresay, in the long ago and far away. Geoff and I were raised in Stratford Commune; grew up together, actually. A fellow Wark, he was a neighbor I’ve neither seen nor heard from since we tramped the Cotswolds together as boys. Surprised me no end popping up from nowhere so to speak by sending us four holotheater invitations.”
I perked up. “Stratford Commune . . ? Shakespeare’s village?”
“Capital, Shore!” There was no condescension in Mattingly’s chuckle, only a sublimated, chiding sense of humor that occasionally surfaces. “Stratford’s an excellent locale in which to steep oneself in Shakespearean lore, but no longer a ‘village.’ Margaret and I revisited Warwickshire three summers ago during my sabbatical. Few locals underfoot, but gaggles of tourists. Dreadful! Couldn’t wait to be shut of the place. Anyhow, do think over my invitation.”
“Oh, I will,” I promised.”
Conversation lagged. Mattingly was soon engrossed in his newspaper. A while later, as the bus maneuvered to co-orbit and rendezvous with Earth-Luna Station he gave it a last try, bearing down on the invitation to accompany him and his wife to the holotheater.
Feeling cornered, I hedged, hemmed and hawed, waffled, backed and filled, and eventually wilted under his penetrating blue-eyed stare, assuring him I’d try to round up a date the minute we docked at Earth-Luna. About then the thrusters rumbled to life, not loud enough to drown out speech, yet making back-and-forth conversation not worth the effort.
Our “bus” is a relic, a second- or third-generation Aerospaceplane upper-stage orbiter. Due to wear, tear and obsolescence, GrossEuropa Raumschiff, GmbH, had judged the clunker no longer worth the rework and stringent qualification testing required to meet atmospheric re-entry safety standards, and taken it out of service. After knocking around on-orbit quite a spell, the dorsal clamshell doors had been welded shut, the spacious cargo bay vacuum-proofed. Having somehow or other found their way out to Earth-Luna Station, surplus lightweight airliner seats of mid-twenty-first century vintage had been installed in the barn-like interior. No one would dream of returning the rattletrap to atmosphere, but for the short orbit-change of our daily commute to and from Galileo it served its purpose nicely.
Sir John dozed, a diurnal habit, while the Raja finished his newspaper, ejected the disc and replaced it with what looked like a day-old elex Washington Post bulldog edition.
The instant ambient readouts matched between the docked bus and E-L, the hatch opened and my Eustachian tubes popped as the pressures equalized. I led the others through the airlock soon as it cycled open, tugged through the umbilical tube using the freefall safety line, and emerged in the complex’s nadir berthing stack. Dodging into the nearest convenience booth, I called Clarice, a GrossEuropa Raumschiff stewardette I’d dated on occasion.
Disappointed to see the image of Clarice’s scratchy-voiced roommate jell in the vidicom display, my hasty request to speak to Clarice earn a funny look. “Rog, you’re getting forgetful. She’s working aboard Asgard, outbound to the trans-Jovian satellites.”
I confessed to owning an often faulty memory.
Clarice’s aggressive young friend spent a minute hinting none too subtly that she herself just might maybe be available if I could sweet-talk her into it. I managed to pass on the offer less than graciously. Three more calls netted zilch; it was like I had explained to Sir John: Friday evening, and weekends are hopeless unless there’s been an arrangement in advance. Every gal I knew was either busy, or her answering service invited me to leave a message.
Using Radial Lift Three, I rode home to my two-room bachelor’s quarters, showered quickly, got into a newly-pressed dark jumpsuit, and grab a cultured turkey and Swiss sandwich and squeezetube of beer in the Earthview Room’s crowded snack bar.
Promptly at twenty minutes to eight outside the holotheater, I met Sir John and Dame Margaret Mattingly, herself a DBE. Lady Margaret had been rewarded for her outstanding career in the performing arts, principally on the holographic stage. As we approached the marquee, Sir John clucked in mock sympathy at my dearth of popularity. He gave away the fourth ticket to a sad-faced lady at the end of the box office queue.
From curtain rise at the New Globe to the third curtain call by the cast principals, Love’s Labour’s Lost impressed me as a witty, colorful, well-produced comedy, although the archaic language made it damned difficult to follow. Sir John’s boyhood pal did exceptionally well as Schoolmaster Holofernes. Between acts, Dame Margaret told me how the King’s Men had formed under Charles VII’s sponsorship to recreate the tradition and atmosphere of the Elizabethan-Jacobean Stage. E-L’s main holotheater, just off the midway, near the base of Radial Five, is larger than the one in spoke three; for whatever reason, the holographic stage reproduced there fluoresces less obviously when actors emote vigorously, and move or gesture abruptly.
Can’t say Shakespeare is exactly my cup of tea, but even a neophyte couldn’t help but endorse the production. It was diverting, entertaining, thoroughly enjoyable.
Applause accompanying the final curtain call continued sporadically after the virtual actors had taken their virtual bows of the last time. Raising his voice above the ragged, slowly tailing off applause Sir John told us he meant to post a congratulatory e-letter to his former chum, the actor who’d played Holofernes. By unspoken mutual consent, we three hung back on the fringe of the crush, waiting for the theater to empty out. I was chatting with Lady Margaret about nothing in particular when I heard Dr. Mattingly grunt loudly.
I turned, found him confronting an exceptionally tall, pipe-stem-slender stranger.
* * *
As I said, this individual was very tall, far and away the tallest person I had ever seen. His complexion was dark, but not Negroid, more like the flushed coloring of someone too long in the sun, though mottled in an unseemly way as if the pigments had washed in splotches and then run together. He wore a close-fitting, off-white jumpsuit that looked new, expensively tailored in a severe, close-fitting way I thought of as uncommon. Heavily tinted dark glasses obscured his eyes, lending him a demi-sinister appearance. Something about his hair also looked wrong, though, too, although I couldn’t put my finger on a reason for the “wrongness”
In a resonant, uninflected monotone sounding very much like an artificial computer-generated voice, the too-tall stranger said, “Director Mattingly.” It was a directed statement, not a question.
“Why, er . . . Don’t believe we’ve met, have we, sir?”
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