Don reluctantly left the Martian and glided over to Sas, who was pointing through an open archway.
The underground complex went on and on. And Martian bodies were everywhere.
“Wow,” said Sas. “Wow.”
Don tried to activate the radio circuit to Earth, but he wasn’t able to pick up the beacon signal from Mission Control. Of course not: this facility had operated a massive radio telescope; it would be shielded to prevent interference with the antenna. Don and Sas made their way up the airlock tube and out to the surface. There they had no trouble acquiring the beacon.
“Mission Control,” said Don. “Tell Chuck Zakarian we hope he has a good time down on Mars’s surface—although, given all the wind erosion that goes on there, I doubt he’ll find much. But that’s okay, Houston; we’ll make up for that. You see, it seems we’re not the first crew to occupy …” He paused, the perfect name coming to him at last. “… Mike Collins Station.”
The Good Doctor
There’s a tradition in science fiction of short-short stories that build up to a horrendous pun in the last line; the most famous of these are the “Ferdinand Feghoot” tales by Reginald Bretnor (written under the anagrammatic pen name Grendel Briarton). In the late 1980s, I perpetrated one of these myself, and it was published as my third appearance in Amazing Stories, the world’s oldest SF magazine, which was founded by Hugo Gernsback, after whom the Hugo Awards are named.
“There’s a new patient here to see you, Dr. Butcher,” said the pleasant contralto over the intercom.
Shaggy eyebrows above craggy countenance lifted in mild irritation. “Well, what is it? Human? Dolphin? Quint?”
“It’s a Kogloo, sir.”
“A Kogloo! Send it in.” A Kogloo on Earth was about as rare as a current magazine chip in Butcher’s waiting room. The hunched human ushered the barrel-shaped being into his office. “What can I do for you?”
“Doctor, doctor, I is terrible problem.” The words were thick, but, to its credit, the Kogloo was working without a translator. “I try to writing Skience Fiction, no?”
“So?”
“So this!” The Kogloo upended a satchel over Butcher’s already cluttered desk. Countless cards and pieces of paper cascaded out.
“Rejection slips?” Butcher grunted. He had his own collection from The Lancet. “Unless you’ve got writer’s cramp, I can’t help you.”
“No, please.” The alien’s tripartite mandible popped the P. “I write good, in mine own language, no?” Butcher had heard that the big four SF chips had Kogloonian editions now. “I send novella to Amazing—they love it! They even buy! Effing SF is eating out of my foot. Analog, the same. But that other one—!” The Kogloo waved its antennae expressively. “Bah, they no want.”
“Look,” said Butcher, annoyance honing his words. “I’m an M.D., a medical doctor. This is out of—”
“Please! I decide to come to Earth. I want to meet man whose name is in the title, no? But trip out is very, very bad!”
“Now see here!” Dr. Butcher’s doctor had warned him to watch his blood pressure. “I’m a busy man—”
“But here is even worse! Flyer, boat, tram, tube train, is all the same.”
Butcher exploded. “This is not a travel agency! I’m a doctor, understand. A doctor! I treat sickness and injuries. Now, unless you have a medical problem—”
The Kogloo bashed its forehead on the desktop in the traditional gesture of excitement. “Yes! Yes! Every time I get into vehicle, I very uncomfortable. I embarrass myself and anger driver.” A sigh. “I afraid I never get to where that title man is.”
Butcher’s eyes widened in comprehension. “I think I see what’s causing your troubles …”
The Kogloo nodded vigorously. “Doctor, I sick as I move!”
Ineluctable
In November 2000, I was Guest of Honor at Contact 4 Japan, a conference devoted to potential first contact with extraterrestrial life. For that conference, I was asked to devise a role-playing scenario involving the receipt of a series of alien radio messages; teams would try to decode the messages and provide appropriate responses. The conference was one of the most enjoyable events I’ve ever attended, and it also afforded me an opportunity to meet the staff of Hayakawa, my Japanese publisher.
After the conference, I decided to expand my first-contact scenario into a full-fledged SF story, and sent it off to Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog. Now, by this point, I’d had 300,000 words of fiction in Analog but it had all been in the form of novel serializations: The Terminal Experiment (which Analog ran under my original title, Hobson’s Choice), Starplex, and Hominids. When Stan bought this story—at 8,800 words, technically a novelette—it became my first short-fiction sale to Analog. “Ineluctable” went on to win the Aurora Award for best English story of the year.
What to do? What to do?
Darren Hamasaki blew out air, trying to calm down, but his heart kept pounding, a metronome on amphetamines.
This was big. This was huge.
There had to be procedures in place. Surely someone had thought this through, had come up with a—a protocol, that was the word.
Darren left the observatory shed in his backyard and trudged through the snow. He stepped up onto the wooden deck and entered his house through the sliding-glass rear doors. He hit the light switch, the halogen glow from the torchiere by the desk stinging his dark-adapted eyes.
Darren took off his boots, gloves, tuque, and parka, then crossed the room, sitting down at his computer. He clicked on the Firefox icon. Of course he had Internet Explorer, too, but Darren always favored the underdog. His search engine of choice was also the current underdog: Yahoo. He logged on to it and stared at the dialog box, trying to think of what keywords to type.
Protocol was indeed appropriate, but as for the rest—
He shrugged a little, conceding the magnitude of what he was about to enter. And then he pecked out three more words: contact, extraterrestrial, and intelligence.
He’d expected to have to go spelunking, and, indeed, there were over thirteen hundred hits, but the very first one turned out to be what he was looking for: “Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” a document on the SETI League web site. Darren scanned it, his eyes skittering across the screen like a puck across ice. As he did so, he rolled his index finger back and forth on his mouse’s knurled wheel.
“We, the institutions and individuals participating in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence …”
Darren frowned. No one had sought his opinion, but, then again, he hadn’t actually been looking for aliens.
“… inspired by the profound significance for mankind of detecting evidence …”
Seemed to Darren that “mankind” was probably a sexist term; just how old was this document?
“The discoverer should seek to verify that the most plausible explanation is the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence rather than some other natural or anthropogenic phenomenon …”