Before They Were Giants (6 page)

As with just about everything I’ve written, by the time I’m forced to let go of it, it feels like it’s become what it is. I never think about revising published work. While it’s being written, it’s a process. On publication, it becomes an object.

What inspired this story? How did it take shape? Where was it initially published?

I was taking a course in science fiction at the University of British Columbia, in my senior undergraduate year. The teacher was Dr. Susan Wood. We were about the same age, and knew one another socially. I tried to get out of writing a term paper, and she cunningly suggested I turn in a piece of fiction instead. It proved hugely more difficult than any paper. She then insisted I submit it for publication.

I remember discovering that I could write very detailed, sometimes oddly evocative descriptions of objects relatively easily. I had to build on that.

It was published in a short-lived amateur magazine called
UnEarth,
which only considered unpublished writers. I think they paid $2.7.

Where were you in your life when you published this piece, and what kind of impact did it have?

I was married, not yet a parent, about to graduate, no idea as to future career other than definitely not wanting to teach. Given
UnEarth’s
great obscurity, nothing at all happened upon publication. I was somewhat underwhelmed, and didn’t try writing any more fiction for a couple of years.

How has your writing changed over the years, both stylistically and in terms of your writing process?

It’s gotten longer! Otherwise, I have a sneaking suspicion that it more closely resembles this first story, the longer I keep writing.

What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

Robert Sheckley gave me two very specific pieces of advice, on taking me to lunch in New York after buying “Johnny Mnemonic” for
OMNI
magazine. Never, he said, sign a multi-book contract. And never buy that big old house that writers all seem to want to buy.

Any anecdotes regarding the story or your experiences as a fledgling writer?

If Susan Wood hadn’t tricked me into writing this one, I’m not certain I’d have taken the step. I had a number of friends, early in my career, who did things like submitting story manuscripts behind my back, to markets I’d have been frightened to submit to (Susan was one of those as well, later) and I’m very grateful for that, as much as it made me want to scream at the time.

<>

~ * ~

A Long Way Back

by Ben Bova

om woke slowly, his mind groping back through the hypnosis. He found himself looking toward the observation port, staring at stars and blackness.

The first man in space,
he thought bitterly.

He unstrapped himself from the acceleration seat, feeling a little wobbly in free fall.

The hypnotic trance idea worked, all right.

The last thing Tom remembered was Arnoldsson putting him under, here in the rocket’s compartment, the old man’s sad soft eyes and quiet voice. Now 22,300 miles out, Tom was alone except for what Arnoldsson had planted in his mind for post-hypnotic suggestion to recall. The hypnosis had helped him pull through the blastoff unhurt and even protected him against the vertigo of weightlessness.

Yeah, it’s a wonderful world,
Tom muttered acidly.

He got up from the seat cautiously, testing his coordination against zero gravity. His magnetic boots held to the deck satisfactorily.

He was lean and wiry, in his early forties, with a sharp angular face and dark, somber eyes. His hair had gone dead white years ago. He was encased up to his neck in a semi-flexible space suit; they had squirmed him into it Earthside because there was no room in the cramped cabin to put it on.

Tom glanced at the tiers of instrument consoles surrounding his seat—no blinking red lights, everything operating normally.
As if I could do anything about it if they went wrong.
Then he leaned toward the observation port, straining for a glimpse of the satellite.

The satellite.

Five sealed packages floating within a three-hundred-foot radius of emptiness, circling the Earth like a cluster of moonlets. Five pieces sent up in five robot rockets and placed in the same orbit, to wait for a human intelligence to assemble them into a power-beaming satellite.

Five pieces orbiting Earth for almost eighteen years; waiting for nearly eighteen years while down below men blasted themselves and their cities and their machines into atoms and forgot the satellite endlessly circling, waiting for its creators to breathe life into it.

The hope of the world,
Tom thought.
And little Tommy Morris is supposed to make it work. . . and then fly home again.
He pushed himself back into the seat.
Jason picked the wrong man.

~ * ~

“Tom! Tom, can you hear me?”

He turned away from the port and flicked a switch on the radio console.

“Hello Ruth. I can hear you.”

A hubbub of excitement crackled through the radio receiver, then the girl’s voice: “Are you all right? Is everything. . .”

“Everything’s fine,” Tom said flatly. He could picture the scene back at the station—dozens of people clustered around the jury-rigged radio, Ruth working the controls, trying hard to stay calm when it was impossible to, brushing back that permanently displaced wisp of brown hair that stubbornly fell over her forehead.

“Jason will be here in a minute,” she said. “He’s in the tracking shack, helping to calculate your orbit.”

~ * ~

Of course Jason will be here,
Tom thought. Aloud he said, “He needn’t bother. I can see the satellite packages; they’re only a couple of hundred yards from the ship.”

Even through the radio he could sense the stir that went through them.

Don’t get your hopes up,
he warned silently.
Remember, I’m no engineer. Engineers are too valuable to risk on this job. I’m just a tool, a mindless screwdriver sent here to assemble this glorified tinkertoy. I’m the muscle, Arnoldsson is the nerve link, and Jason is the brain.

Abruptly, Jason’s voice surged through the radio speaker, “We did it, Tom! We did it!”

No,
Tom thought,
you did it, Jason. This is all your show.

“You should be able to see the satellite components,” Jason said. His voice was excited yet controlled, and his comment had a ring of command in it.

“I’ve already looked,” Tom answered. “I can see them.”

“Are they damaged?”

“Not as far as I can see. Of course, from this distance . . .”

“Yes, of course,” Jason said. “You’d better get right outside and start working on them. You’ve only got forty-eight hours worth of oxygen.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Tom said into the radio. “Just remember your end of the bargain.”

“You’d better forget that until you get back here.”

“I’m not forgetting anything.”

“I mean you must concentrate on what you’re doing up there if you expect to get back alive.”

“When I get back we’re going to explore the bombed-out cities. You promised that. It’s the only reason I agreed to this.”

Jason’s voice stiffened. “My memory is quite as good as yours. We’ll discuss the expedition after you return. Now you’re using up valuable time…and oxygen.”

“Okay, I’m going outside.”

Ruth’s voice came back on: “Tom, remember to keep the ship’s radio open, or else your suit radio won’t be able to reach us. And we’re all here ... Dr. Arnoldsson, Jason, the engineers... If anything comes up, we’ll be right here to help you.”

~ * ~

Tom grinned mirthlessly
Right here: 22,300 miles away.

“Tom?”

“Yes Ruth.”

“Good luck,” she said. “From all of us.”

Even Jason?
he wanted to ask, but instead said merely, “Thanks.”

He fitted the cumbersome helmet over his head and sealed it to the joints on his suit. A touch of a button on the control panel pumped the compartment’s air into storage cylinders. Then Tom stood up and unlocked the hatch directly over his seat.

Reaching for the handholds just outside the hatch, he pulled himself through, and after a weightless comic ballet managed to plant his magnetized boots on the skin of the ship. Then, standing, he looked out at the universe.

Oddly, he felt none of the overpowering emotion he had once expected of this moment. Grandeur, terror, awe—no, he was strangely calm. The stars were only points of light on a dead-black background; the Earth was a fat crescent patched with colors; the sun, through his heavily tinted visor, was like the pictures he had seen at planetarium shows, years ago.

As he secured a lifeline to the grip beside the hatch, Tom thought that he felt as though someone had stuck a reverse hypodermic into him and drained away all his emotions.

Only then did he realize what had happened. Jason, the engineer, the leader, the man who thought of everything, had made Arnoldsson condition his mind for this. No gaping at the universe for the first man in space, too much of a chance to take! There’s a job to be done and no time for human frailty or sentiment.

Not even that,
Tom said to himself.
He wouldn’t even allow me one moment of human emotion.

But as he pushed away from the ship and floated ghost-like toward the largest of the satellite packages, Tom twisted around for another look at Earth.

I wonder if she looked that way before the war?

~ * ~

Slowly, painfully, men had attempted to rebuild their civilization after the war had exhausted itself. But of all the things destroyed by the bombs and plagues, the most agonizing loss was man’s sources of energy.

The coal mines, the oil refineries, the electricity-generating plants, the nuclear power piles ... all shattered into radioactive rubble. There could be no return to any kind of organized society while men had to scavenge for wood to warm themselves and to run their primitive machines.

Then someone had remembered the satellite.

It had been designed, before the war, to collect solar energy and beam it to a receiving station on Earth. The satellite packages had been fired into a 24-hour orbit, circling the Earth over a fixed point on the Equator. The receiving station, built on the southeastern coast of the United States, saw the five units as a single second-magnitude star, low on the horizon all year, every year.

Of course the packages wavered slightly in their orbits, but not enough in eighteen years to spread very far apart. A man could still put them together into a power-beaming satellite.

If he could get there.

And if they were not damaged.

And if he knew how to put them together.

Through months that stretched into years, over miles of radioactive wilderness, on horseback, on carts, on foot, those who knew about the satellite spread the word, carefully, secretly, to what was left of North America’s scientists and engineers. Gradually they trickled into the once-abandoned settlement.