Hard Landing Read online

  CAMUS: This guy is a mammal.

  HENSHAW: Well, yeah. You put him in a raincoat and boots, he can stand a short-arm check with everybody else in the platoon, no doubtin’ that.

  CAMUS: What’s next, Doctor?

  HENSHAW: No sense goin’ any further here. He checks out for type. And I’ve got my tissue and blood samples to take back to my lab, so I’d better get goin’. Somebody’ll be around to pick him up in a couple of hours. They’ll give you a receipt for him. I don’t think you’ll get any grieving relatives. If anybody does come around and ask for him, stall and call the hotline. You’ll get quick relief.

  CAMUS: I have to have the coroner’s okay before I can give him to you.

  HENSHAW: No problem. I brought a letter with me.

  CAMUS: Now what?

  HENSHAW: How do you mean? What do I have to sign? What sort of

  CAMUS: oath do I swear?

  HENSHAW: Hell, you’re not going to mess up. You’ve got yourself a nice position here, lots of contacts with the local politics; family, property … all that good shit.

  CAMUS: I suppose so. You, wouldn’t happen to have an opening in your department?

  HENSHAW: My department?

  CAMUS: Wherever you really come from.

  HENSHAW: I really come from the NRPA, and I’m all the medical talent they need. This doesn’t come up every day, you know. Besides, they wouldn’t consider you qualified. Sorry.

  CAMUS: I don’t believe I’ve read any of your papers, Doctor. Or run into you at pathology convention seminars. Where’d you get your training?

  HENSHAW: Iowa. University of Iowa School of Veterinary Medicine, Doctor.

  LATER EVENTS ON A MARCH NIGHT

  It was a nice condominium apartment: four and one-half rooms high enough up, with gold, avocado, and persimmon carpeting, French provincial furnishings from John M. Smythe, a patio balcony with sliding glass doors, swag lamps, and a Tandberg Dolby cassette system which he switched on automatically for warmth. Barbra Streisand sang ‘I’ll Tell the Man in the Street.’

  Margery wasn’t home. Mullica got some ice in a rocks glass, picked up the scotch decanter, and sat in the living room with the lights down. He sipped and looked out through the glass doors and past the wrought-iron balcony railing, at the lake. Below his line of sight were the tops of the as yet unbudded famous elms of Shoreview. Far down the lake shore curving out to his extreme right were the tall lighted embrasures of the Gold Coast high rises in Chicago.

  He took a deep breath. What will happen? he thought. Let’s put it together. He began systematically reviewing the events on the Borrow Street platform. Then he pictured a detective in his trenchcoat kneeling beside the facedown body in the headlight from the stopped five-fifty train. He put dialogue in the detective’s head to indicate what the detective might make of what there was to see. He listened critically. The ice cubes were cold against his upper lip.

  The detective saw that Selmon had been electrocuted. He saw nothing to show that the dead man had been the victim of an assault. So it was clearly something that had happened by itself, an accident or suicide, and there was no need for an autopsy. Now the detective went through the dead man’s pockets. If he’d done that to Jack Mullica, he wouldn’t have found any connection to any abandoned bog iron works.

  Selmon’s identity wouldn’t be particularly thin. He’d have a Social Security card so he could work, and probably a driver’s license. He surely had a checking account, and it was practically impossible to convert checks into spot cash without a driver’s license, even if you never drove.

  Now the detective moved to Selmon’s apartment. Again, there’d be nothing of any significance. Unless Selmon still had parts of his first-aid kit and was stupid enough to store them where he lived. But after more than twenty-five years, what would he have left, no matter how healthy he looked? No, it wouldn’t be the presence of anything that bothered the detective. It would be absence. No military service records, no school diplomas.

  Would that matter so much? It was just a routine investigation into a casual accident. What the hell? Still, they might get curious and push it some.

  Barbra Streisand sang ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’ Mullica refilled his glass.

  If they were curious, how long would curiosity persist? Selmon hadn’t been shot, or robbed, or hit behind the ear. All he was, really, was one of what had to be thousands of perfectly settled-down citizens who had chopped themselves free of something in their pasts that might make them unemployable. It seemed to Mullica that in a society where a high school marijuana bust or a college Red affiliation could haunt you to your grave, a lot of that had to be going on. Once you had figured a way of getting a set of papers in a new name – crime novels were full of ways that worked – you rarely had to stand up to a real bedrock investigation. Ordinarily they didn’t check your identity; just your identity’s credit.

  The wife. Selmon’s wife. Would he have talked to her? Would he have told this woman he was Engineering Officer Selmon, and that Navigator Arvan lived right up the tracks?

  Well, did Margery have any inkling that Engineering Officer Selmon was riding the train with Navigator Arvan? And if she did, could she put a face to either name? No – Mullica shook his head – it was Jack Mullica that Margery knew dangerous things about.

  Barbra Streisand sang ‘Soon It’s Gonna Rain.’

  Mullica swallowed, and the cold, sweet scotch made his palate tingle. He refilled his glass.

  Out beyond the elms and the floodlit, strut-supported balls of the Lindheimer Observatory on the Northwestern University lakefront campus were stars whose names he did not know in constellations he had never learned. From where Arvan sat now, he could see that the Shieldmaiden was as lanky as a Vogue model and the Howler’s paws were awkwardly placed. All of those suns blazing in the night out there had names and catalog numbers in the local astronomy tables, but he had never learned them, except for the little bits that everyone knew. He knew the Big Dipper, and he knew how to find what they called Polaris. But let the locals come and wring him for how to find the places of his folk. If they ever became aware enough to do that, let them also learn to translate.

  Jack Mullica felt that he looked out into the night sky only at controlled times.

  Who said there was even a Mrs Selmon? Would a married Selmon have moved so easily from Oakland just like that? Oh, hell, he’d even said he was alone in Oakland, hadn’t he, and the Selmon trying to make himself invisible on Loop CTA platforms didn’t seem the type to go courting around here.

  Funny how the mind had registered that and yet not registered it. Face it, it was only because Mullica was married, of all unlikely things, that he had put his mind on that track. He couldn’t imagine how one of them could get married except under the most extraordinary circumstances. It was funny the tricks your mind could play … Oh, shit! Eikmo was married, too! – Eikmo and his fish-store lady – Mullica, what the hell good does your mind do you? But the important thing was they were probably in the clear – Navigator Arvan, and Hanig Eikmo, and Ditlo Ravashan, all three. Ravashan, he thought, would be in the clear in a cage full of tigers.

  Barbra Streisand sang ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’

  Still, he thought briefly of taking a personal ad in the Denver and San Francisco papers. ‘Olir Selmon RIP Chicagoland. All O.K. Dwuord Arvan.’ Something like that.

  But when he thought about it some more, his lips and the tip of his nose pleasantly numb, it became clear that he was playing with his mind again. All he was trying to do was give the poor bastard an obituary notice, and none of them could have that.

  He could point a high-frequency antenna upward and broadcast the news; all he had to do was go to Radio Shack and buy the hardware, with a promise to apply for the FCC license. And then if there happened to be somebody along the line of transmission, it might be one of his people who heard it, instead of a Methane-Breather or a local in the local ‘space program’ monitoring a loca
l satellite.

  No, it was going to happen to each of them, in its own time, silently far from home and in a land of coolblooded foreigners.

  Poor clumsy bastard. Engineering trades graduate, exploration volunteer, parents living at last report, farm boy, originally – didn’t like shoveling manure, one would guess, and turned his mind to ways of getting out of it. If you weren’t in one of the academies, the only way to make officer status and then have some hope of getting up the promotion ladder was to go the route they’d all gone. And the bonus pay made a difference. But you didn’t have much to talk about in letters home from the slick, modern metropolitan training center to the rural little outpost of your birth. Still, the parents were there at the graduation ceremony. Stolid folk with callused hands, their eyes wet and alive in the lights from the podium where you came up in your brand-new dress reds and held out your hand for the certificate. And now he was an accident among people who couldn’t ship the body home.

  Well, have another scotch alcohol, Jack Mullica, he said to himself, and turned up the light beside his chair.

  Margery came home about eight o’clock. She was a good-looking, slim, long-legged frosted brunette just past forty but didn’t look it, pointy-breasted, and she seemed a little flushed and swollen-lipped. She found Mullica sitting in the den with glossy photographs of a car model line spread on his desk beside the rocks glass.

  ‘Hello. Did you eat?’ she asked.

  ‘I thawed something. You?’

  ‘I’ll make a hamburger, I guess. See the paper?’

  ‘Read it on the train.’

  ‘They found something in the bog near where you first turned up.’

  ‘I saw that.’ He looked at her and let his smile widen crazily. ‘It’s a piece of flying saucer, all right. For you see, darling, as I slip off this outer skin, you will know that you have come to love a being from another Solar System.’

  She snorted. ‘Oh, God.’ She came forward and tousled his hair. ‘I do love you, you know,’ she said fondly. ‘I really do.’ She raised an eyebrow, then looked at the pictures on his desk and the blank piece of paper in his typewriter. ‘Will you be up late?’

  He nodded. ‘Detroit’s having a rash of midyear models. Low-displacement engines, stick shifts, high rear-axle ratios. Arab-fighter product. Won’t carry luggage, won’t climb a hill, but we’ll talk gas mileage. Detroit wants all the stops out with the local press; I’ve got to flange up some release copy, here, and start planning a junket out to a test track. Be in bed about midnight, I guess.’

  ‘All right. I’ll watch TV for a while and go to sleep.’

  ‘Fine.’

  She stayed in the doorway for a moment. ‘When will the press conference be?’

  ‘Soon. Has to be, if it’s going to do any good for the summer. Do it up at Lake Geneva, probably – Playboy Hotel.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘Be gone four, five days. Finish up on a Friday.’ He waited.

  She said: ‘I asked because Sally and I were talking about going out to Arizona to that ranch she talks about. If you were going to be out of town anyway, that would be—’

  ‘A good time for it. Right. I’ll let you know as soon as we have firm dates.’

  She’d look good in tight jeans and a western shirt. Not as good as she’d have looked in her twenties, but there was a limit to how soon promotional copywriting could lead a man’s wife into the habits of affluence. And it was immaterial how she might look in a Playboy Hotel room on a Friday night with a good week’s work under your belt. ‘Good night. See you in the morning,’ he said.

  ‘Night.’ When she turned to go, he could see that her petticoat was twisted under her tailored black skirt, and the eyelet at the top of her zipper was unhooked at her neck. Her gleaming hair almost hid that.

  He had met Margery’s only woman friend, Sally. She was all right – a steady-eyed keypunch pool supervisor with a four-martini voice – and she was the type who always returned favors. Sally had a lot of contacts, a busy social schedule, and a life plan that wasn’t anything Margery couldn’t cover for her with a few alibi phone calls to Sally’s various fiancés and good friends.

  He went back to culling together specifications and making notes on a scratch pad. After a while, he turned to his typewriter and wrote, ‘Sporty but thrifty, the exciting new mid-year XF-1000 GT features the proven inline 240 C.I.D. six-cylinder Milemiser engine with …’

  With what? With the simple fuel-saving carburetor and the uneven mixture distribution in the intake manifold, or with the space-age solid-state ignition that was the only thing that let the engine run at all with all those emission controls fucking over the power curve? He frowned and decided to list the electronics ahead of the single barrel; after a tongueful like Milemiser you wanted to come back fast with something sexy.

  He went on with his work. He concentrated on being the best there was in Chicago. In his trade, the name of Jack Mullica meant something.

  ‘Designed to take the Chicagoland family to even the most far-flung summer destination with a minimum of fuel cost, the XF-1000 GT’s comfort features sacrifice nothing …’

  THE RATIONALE*

  We don’t retrieve people. It’s a good policy. You have to assume the down vehicle was being tracked. If another one now goes in after it, you’re liable to lose both. There are things that happen to delay the locals – your grounding field disables their spark-gap engine ignition systems and often knocks out utility power. But if you then go ahead and lay a lot of additional technology on the locals to hold them back beyond that, that could escalate on you.

  Once you’ve gotten that tough, you might as well start in with your armed landing parties, your bridgeheads, garrisons, embassies or armies of occupation or both, and the next thing you know, the Methane-Breathers want Jupiter, to ‘maintain the balance of power.’ And for what? What’s the power?

  These people have nothing for us except potential. Someday, yes, they’re going to be valuable, and that’s why the Methane-Breathers keep hanging around, too, refilling their air tanks in the petroleum swamps at night and making funny lights when they’re not careful. This is going to be a highly civilized manufacturing center someday, with factories all over the asteroid belt and on some of the bigger natural satellites, like the Moon, that’ll have really significant installations. There’ll be freighters and businessmen coming and going. Once you start getting that kind of traffic, you almost have to have a dockyard and maybe an actual military base – the Moon would be good for that, too – to keep a little order. There’s always maintenance and repair work to be done, and there’s always contraband to check for.

  I keep thinking how cannabis will grow almost anywhere; one shipload of seed could make you a fortune in half a dozen places I can think of, and I don’t even have a criminal mind. But the minute that kind of thing starts, you’re into a commerce-regulating and immigration service kind of thing, and that’s armed vehicles and men. That disturbs the Methane-Breathers, and it would disturb me if I were them. It’s too easy to call a battleship just a coast guard cutter, and a regiment an inspection team. And there you go again; next thing, you’ve got two fleets eyeball to eyeball. And that stinks; any time you get the career armed services faced off, you’re going to get actions in aid of prestige. That produces debris.

  And that’s apart from the fact that if the locals get on to you and resent you, you’re into a big thing with them. A slug thrower may not kill you as elegantly as a laser, but it will kill you, and these locals also have lasers. And fission and fusion and demonstrated willingness.

  Then there’s the fact that the tactical position of a planet-sited military force fighting off an attempted landing from space is both hopeless and unbeatable. They can’t do much to you while you’re aloft, but the moment you start landing they can lob all sorts of stuff at you from too many places to suppress. If you keep coming, they throw more. Pretty soon, what you’re trying to land on can’t be lived in. It’s no good to them anymore, ei
ther, but that scores no points for you.

  The same sort of thing applies if you try to destroy their military resources beforehand. At about the point where their industries might be worth taking over, locals are generally in possession of a well-dispersed, well-dug-in arsenal. That’s a lot of firepower, and it takes tons more to knock out a ton of it. If we could afford to bring that much suppression to someplace out on the ass end of nowhere, we wouldn’t need their damned industry in the first place.

  So we don’t shoot. That leaves you two alternatives. One is to poison them off – short-lived radioactives, or biologicals. Could be done, no problem with the delivery systems. Then you’ve got a lot of real estate, free for the burying of an entire ecological system, including the management and the work force you thought was going to sell you the produce of the factories. What you’ve got for your efforts is something that’s turning hand over fist into a planetary desert. Thank you very much. And I, for one, would keep looking over my shoulder, and hearing whispers.

  The only choice, really, is the one we make. You hang around as inconspicuously as possible, learning as much as you can from listening to and watching their electronics and so forth. You can learn a lot, by direct observation and by inference. Any intelligent race you can hope to someday relate to is going to have come up essentially the same developmental roads and dealt with the physical laws of the Universe in about the same way. So you keep tabs on them until they come out to meet you; then you can sit down right away and work things out; draw up your contracts.

  If they’re Methane-Breather types, of course, that’s one thing; that’s strictly business, and no hanging out together after working hours. If they’re anthropomorphic, that’s another, and welcome, brethren, into the family of spacefaring, oxygenbreathing, aspiring intelligent life, granted that’s more true if it doesn’t nauseate us to look at you. You also want to consider there’s a lot of evidence – they say – that both the Methane-Breathers and we have found traces of some other types nosing around our corner of the Galaxy. Under those circumstances, everybody wants to be as friendly and businesslike as possible with anybody that’ll have you. It could be a funny feeling to be trying to go it alone while something really exotic was undermining your back fences.