Before your life ends, you will have visited a few of the stars nearest to your own world.
«When they said you,» Johnny whispered again, «I thought they meant us, the human race. But—maybe they really meant me! Me! I’m going to be an interstellar astronaut!»
For the first time, Johnny realized that the excitement in his life hadn’t ended. It was just beginning.
THE SIGHTSEERS
While we are thinking about how best to defend the nation, it is good also to think about the condition of the nation we want to defend. «The Sightseers» is a rather dark vision of some of the disturbing trends that you can see in almost any of our largest cities.
Actually, this short-short story is the result of an embarrassment of riches.
Years ago, when the Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference was actually held in Milford, Pennsylvania, I found myself in a quandary. It was a week before the conference started. To participate in the conference, you had to bring an unpublished piece of fiction and submit it to the workshop. I did not have any unpublished fiction on hand. Everything I had written, at that point in time, had been bought.
So I sat down and dashed off this short-short, based on a vague idea that was gestating in the back of my mind.
The idea is this: large cities and large stars exhibit the same kind of life cycle.
As massive stars burn up their energy fuels, they swell gigantically while their cores get hotter and denser and finally become the kind of matter that astronomers call «degenerate.» As large cities use up their energy sources (taxpaying citizens and corporations, who eventually leave the city), the city swells into urban sprawl while its core degenerates into ghettos.
For massive stars, the ultimate outcome of this evolutionary track is a catastrophic explosion. We have already seen serious riots in many of our large cities. Will a city-wrecking explosion occur one fine day?
As I recall that Milford workshop twenty-some years ago, most of the participants did not think much of this story. Except for Gordon Dickson, canny pal that he is. «This looks to me like the germ of an idea for a novel,» he suggested.
How right he was. The novel is called City of Darkness. It attracted a fair amount of attention in Hollywood after it was published, but no firm offers were made. A few years later, somebody produced a film called Escape from New York, which bothered me somewhat. It seemed to have certain elements from City of Darkness. But plagiarism laws do not protect ideas; if they did, Hollywood would have starved to death long ago. Still, the producers of that film may well have come on their ideas independently.
The film does have one element that «The Sightseers» and City of Darkness could only hint at: Adrienne Barbeau’s bosom. That is one of the great advantages of film over print.
My heart almost went into fibrillation when I saw the brown cloud off on the horizon that marked New York City. Dad smiled his wiser-than-thou smile as I pressed my nose against the plane’s window in an effort to see more. By the time we got out of the stack over LaGuardia Airport and actually landed, my neck hurt.
The city’s fantastic! People were crowding all over, selling things, buying, hurrying across the streets, gawking. And the noise, the smells, all those old gasoline-burning taxis rattling around and blasting horns. Not like Sylvan Dell, Michigan!
«It’s vacation time,» Dad told me as we shouldered our way through the crowds along Broadway. «It’s always crowded during vacation time.»
And the girls! They looked back at you, right straight at you, and smiled. They knew what it was all about, and they liked it! You could tell, just the way they looked back at you. I guess they really weren’t any prettier than the girls at home, but they dressed … wow!
«Dad, what’s a bedicab?»
He thought it over for a minute as one of them, long and low, with the back windows curtained, edged through traffic right in front of the curb where we were standing.
«You can probably figure it out for yourself,» he said uncomfortably. «They’re not very sanitary.»
Okay, I’m just a kid from the north woods. It took me a couple of minutes. In fact, it wasn’t until we crossed the street in front of one—stopped for a red light—and I saw the girl’s picture set up on the windshield that I realized what it was all about. Sure enough, there was a meter beside the driver.
But that’s just one of the things about the city. There were old movie houses where we saw real murder films. Blood and beatings and low-cut blondes. I think Dad watched me more than the screen. He claims he thinks I’m old enough to be treated like a man, but he acts awfully scared about it.
We had dinner in some really crummy place, down in a cellar under an old hotel. With live people taking our orders and bringing the food!
«It’s sanitary,» Dad said, laughing when I hesitated about digging into it. «It’s all been inspected and approved. They didn’t put their feet in it.»
Well, it didn’t hurt me. It was pretty good, I guess … too spicy, though.
We stayed three days altogether. I managed to meet a couple of girls from Maryland at the hotel where we stayed. They were okay, properly dressed and giggly and always whispering to each other. The New York girls were just out of my league, I guess. Dad was pretty careful about keeping me away from them … or them away from me. He made sure I was in the hotel room every night, right after dinner. There were plenty of really horrible old movies to watch on the closed-circuit TV; I stayed up past midnight each night. Once I was just drifting off to sleep when Dad came in and flopped on his bed with all his clothes on. By the time I woke up in the morning, though, he was in his pajamas and sound asleep.
Finally we had to go. We rented a sanitary car and decontaminated ourselves on the way out to the airport. I didn’t like the lung-cleansing machine. You had to work a tube down one of your nostrils.
«It’s just as important as brushing your teeth,» Dad said firmly.
If I didn’t do it for myself, he was going to do it for me.
«You wouldn’t want to bring billions of bacteria and viruses back home, would you?» he asked.
Our plane took off an hour and a half late. The holiday traffic was heavy.
«Dad, is New York open every year … just like it is now?»
He nodded. «Yes, all during the vacation months. A lot of the public health doctors think it’s very risky to keep a city open for more than two weeks out of the year, but the tourist industry has fought to keep New York going all summer. They shut it down right after Labor Day.»
As the plane circled the brown cloud that humped over the city, I made up my mind that I’d come back again next summer. Alone, maybe. That’d be great!
My last glimpse of the city was the big sign painted across what used to be the Bronx:
NEW YORK IS A SUMMER FESTIVAL OF FUN!
THE SUPERSONIC ZEPPELIN
I worked for a number of years in the aerospace industry, most of that time at a high-powered research laboratory in Massachusetts. Our lab specialized in studying the physics of high-temperature gases. We were known world-wide as hot air specialists.
I saw firsthand how great ideas can be shot down for totally dumb reasons. And how dumb ideas can gain a momentum of their own and cost the taxpayers billions of dollars while they accomplish nothing.
«The Supersonic Zeppelin» is somewhere in-between those extremes. It’s a fully feasible piece of technology that will never get to fly. But it was fun writing the story and thinking about those fabulous days of yesteryear when we were going to the Moon and thinking great thoughts.