Heinlein's Children

“So, they’re finally coming after me, after all these years?” I say to my wife, who is standing over my patio lounge chair, awaiting my reaction to the news she’d just seen on the video. I turn my head to hide my tremulous emotional reactions from her view. I’ve always heard the expression, not knowing whether to laugh or cry; only now do I realize what it means. A knot forms in my throat. It’s been worth it, but now that it’s over.... Hell, I admit to myself, I’m still afraid. After all these years.

Joyce, however, can’t hold back the tears. “It was just on the news, honey. They’re looking for you. ‘The Trillion Dollar Thief’ they’re calling you,” she sobs. “Is it—” she can’t bring herself to ask, knowing I’ll tell the truth no matter what. She bites her lower lip, at the same time brushing away a wisp of long gray hair with a graceful movement of her left hand. I’ve always admired her girlish shrug that follows, an unconscious but erotic motion that sets her long, long curls into sinuous movement. Once those locks were dark, dark red; now devoid of color, they mark her years—somewhere in the middle of the seventh decade of an eventful life. My own remaining skull covering, thin and sparse, matches that gray, year for earned year. I’ve kept hoping for the nano-medical revolution to come home, but so far the PacRimmers haven’t dropped their prices enough that we can afford rejuve-jobs, not on my retirement pay.

Joyce regains her composure and says, “Then it is true. What they’re saying. You did deceive the whole world.”

Shrugging, I nod. “You know it is true,” I admit. Unsurprised, resigned, she sighs and returns inside to watch the rest of the claims against me, me the criminal Dreamer.

Outside, police sirens shriek, the warning calls of a suborned State, the wails of disappointed children. Angry children.

Dangerous children.

It began, unlike most stories, in the White House. Yeah, that one, the one that used to be where Pennsylvania Avenue used to be—where downtown Washington, New Columbia, used to be. Where the Bessarab Crater is, right next to the Mall Dome. Oh, excuse me—“The Martyr’s Crater” is the Preferred Consensus, isn’t it. I must have forgotten the most recent PC. Which martyr? I ask myself, thinking of the dozens of Secret Service, those thousands of Army troops who stayed behind while that physical coward of a President tried to run away to Camp David, getting swat-fried in midair for all his efforts. Oh well, just one more secret from the Thought Police in the Land of the Semi-Free, Twenty-First Century version.

Anyway, in those days a couple of speculative fiction writers wound up by pure chance assigned to the President’s Science and Technology Office, technological consultants occupying adjacent desks in the Old Executive Office Building, which, though now a puddle of molten rust, was once a grand and glorious remnant of the Second Empire Style of architecture. (Not the Second Soviet, the Second French—Napoleonic. Look that up on the verch channels. Those New Reds have no more taste than their butcherous ancestors.) I was one of those consultants; the other, to remain unnamed until the neuroprobes do their nano-surgery, is now retired from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and, I would wish, beyond suspicion and reproach. Until they mine my mind…

I smile at the memory of Dub. If only we had known where our idle speculations would wind up. I rather wish I had taken him up on that government job offer in one of the spook shops years later, but at the time the verch channel installations were under way and there was money to be made for creative sci-fi types.

“Dub,” I said in all innocence, all those many years ago, “so what’s with NASA these days?” He’d just returned from a briefing on the Mars Observer Mission from the space directorate, and was looking thoughtful. Glum, really. The new administration had recently canceled the Space Exploration Initiative, something Dub and his team had worked on for almost a year; their final report had recommended returning to the Moon and going on to Mars. But neither of those was ever going to happen, not in our lifetime. I would have thought a camera probe to Mars was the next best thing, but he was really P-O’ed at something.

“I don’t understand those guys!” he snorted, slamming down the thin blue vinyl notepad. “I thought science—that’s Science, with a Capital S—was supposed to be open, a free flow of information, all that easy access stuff.” I nodded; something was really bugging him.

“But—?” I asked, prodding him on.

“But for some damned reason, those NASA bureaucrats have decided to encrypt all the data from the Mars Observer!”

I laughed, “What’s the matter? They afraid of finding out the Face on Mars is really a face?” Dub flashed a meaningful look at me, as if he might have believed my off the wall comment.

He rolled out his swivel chair, plopped down into it, remained quiet for a full minute. Outside, the real national anthem of Washington, D.C.—the full-throated police siren—wailed past the Old Executive Office Building. The place had not been built to minimize noise—how much noise had there been from carriages and horses anyway? The muggy May afternoon reminded me that the magnificent building had been constructed long before air conditioning, too. Dub said, “Might be so, Arlan. Why else would they encode the stuff?”

I blurted out, “Boy, that would be something. We’d have a space program again, for sure.” Somewhere in those next few milliseconds both our sci-fi minds zeroed in on the obvious solution: “What if—” we said simultaneously, then stopped, laughing.

“You can find out the encryption codes, Dub?” He nodded; as we had both discovered long ago, in the government business there are sci-fi fans and fans of space infiltrated simply everywhere, and their allegiances belong to higher concepts than petty bureaucratic rules.

“And, Arlan, you know the folks at JPL who will handle the data?” I nodded. We rolled our swivel chairs over to the center of the room and slapped a “high five.” He swung around, opened a little-used lower drawer in his desk, pulled out a half-full bottle of some Scotch he’d brought back from an Air Force symposium in Scotland, years back. He poured an inch of the golden liquid in each of our empty coffee cups. We toasted ourselves, our future.

“To Space!” Dub said with a smile.

“Fuck the State!” I whispered.

Wasn’t really that hard to do what had to get done, back there in the early ’90s, even though our first attempt turned out rather poorly, at first. Folks didn’t carry around Know-It-Alls to record every damned thing they did, or every conversation they had. No, not even criminals had to carry them—we didn’t even have KIAs, you must recall they weren’t even invented yet. So, anyhow, it was fairly easy to get committed, yet anonymous, people to do what was necessary to help the human race get into Space.

There was John at JPL, and Chuck at Orbital Corporation, and Kijo at NASA and Mike at NSA and Alyta out in Tucson with her multitude of friends of all ages, all over the scattered remnants of the fast-disappearing Space Program. And Dub’s Air Force connections helped all along the line; those SSTO guys were anxious to have a mission before they were zeroed out of Congress’ budget. With Harry out near the VLA and Ralph and Fred and Creve at Sandia, and the hacker FreeNet gangs at Bell Labs and Intel and BDM, why pretty soon we had the whole thing fairly well scoped out, coordinated and encrypted via the Internet link. We’d intercept the real Mars Observer data in real-time, erase it, overlay it with our own digitally-produced stuff, blow some minds, freak out the world, and get us all back on track, out toward the stars where we belonged.

Afraid of leaks? Why no, we weren’t—we were all dedicated to The Dream, and any traitor would have been shunned forever, banned from The Dreamers, and that would have been punishment too severe to contemplate.

So that’s what we did, our little-but-growing band of techno-conspirators: we diddled around with the data so that it would show The Face and The Pyramids and The City on Mars. This caused a bit of trouble, at first—our initial attempt to test our data-bait-and-switch accidentally screwed up the Mars Observer, and NASA lost a billion-dollar probe. We were all pretty bummed out for a while, but then the new “faster-better-cheaper” philosophy swung into play, and with Single-Stage-To-Everywhere rockets, a lot of probe stuff was soon en route to Mars. So we gave it to them, to the whole world—a reason to go.

On to Mars!

There really never was a problem; for twenty years now, I’ve worried about it, but there really never was a problem. No technical snafus, no traitors to The Dream. Hell, I tell myself, we gave them Mars. So it cost over Nine Hundred Billion dollars; that’s about what it cost us to stabilize southern Africa, when they refused to pay up their share of the international Mars fleet. Mars is a lot prettier than the habitable parts of SwAfrikaa, and a lot more hospitable!

NASA helped too, of course. Not just the NASA Dreamers who went along with my deception, but the whole friggin’ thing wouldn’t have been possible without the government’s paranoia, without them encrypting the Mars Observer video data, for God’s sake! I mean, the Reds were out of business back then (at least in their first incarnations), so who were we trying to protect the data from?

So Mars Observer II (actually a half-dozen smaller, faster, cheaper ones) observed Mars in 1996, and we Dreamers, a lot more cautiously this time, diddled the data on every damned one of them.

With The Face and The Pyramids and The City beckoning Humynkind, We Went.

The first time was two years later, with a small fleet of miniature robot probes, the Purvises. Fixing all that surface-generated data proved a little bit trickier, but we Dreamers and our clandestine data diddling progressed as fast as Establishment Science did, so we were able to provide detailed photos—alien skulls, decayed machinery, tantalizing stuff that whetted the appetites of The Powers That Be. A couple of tragedies—one on the launch pad at White Sands, a tanker mishap—dimmed the glory, but we Dreamers sighed: Pioneers are always at risk, but the Humyn race lives on! We hadn’t planned on the Afrikaan situation, nor the years of sacrifice that broke a couple of nations economically. (The U.S., for one.)

But today, twenty years after it all began, the USNA ships landed just hours before the NippHan fleet, weeks ahead of the ragtag SwAfrikaaners. Nine minutes after touchdown adjacent to the wind-sculpted, Sun-shadowed stone mountain that is “The Face,” the fleet’s video signals reached old Earth here, revealing the truth of Mars for all. (Yeah, I know, the video during the orbital approach kept showing the same old Face and City, etc.; some of us Dreamers kept the charade going up until the last minute.) I didn’t watch the landing, feeling a mixture of joy for the event, a little sickness at my heart for having had to fool the whole world for two decades, trepidation over what the reaction would be, hopes for forgiveness.

Joyce had stayed on to watch them land on Mars, while I settled down in my easy chair on the back patio, waiting for the inevitable reporters, the outrage, finally, eventually, the respect for helping Humynkind achieve a true interplanetary civilization.

Hearing the first accusations, she had come outside to listen to my side; leaving me to return to the video set.

The doorbell rings, followed seconds later by a loud banging on the door. Now Joyce is opening the front door, now she is speaking to someone, now the tromp and tread of the FedPolice echoes through the house. Now they are confronting me on the patio. I lift my beer and smile. Joyce is crying.

“Don’t worry, hon,” I say to her, acting more bravely than I feel. “One day they’ll understand that I did it all for them.” Paincuffs slither from one agent’s hands and lock around my extended wrists. They hurt as much as advertised, but I grit my teeth and continue smiling.

Joyce shakes her head, a mixture of tired sadness and disgust. “No, hon,” she whispers, “It’s you who doesn’t understand. Those men just told me. Your little plot hid the real truth from us all—The Face, The Pyramid, all of it—it’s real!” I look at her, unbelieving.

One of the cops looks at me and nods. “It’s true—you screwed up really bad!” I shrug. So it’s real, so we would have gone anyway. Big deal! Her demeanor leaves me confused.

“You don’t understand, hon,” Joyce is saying. “I finally heard the whole thing, why they’re so mad at you. The Galactic Community of Civilizations built those huge structures there just sixty years ago, when we—the Russians, I mean—launched the first satellites.” I blink at her, not comprehending her meaning.

“They knew we were coming into space, so they got ready to admit us to their community. They have been waiting at The Face all these years, hoping for one of our probes to verify their presence, so they could establish communication. The first Mars Observer, the one you and your people screwed up, would have been the link—twenty years ago! And the data you did erase carried their messages.” My heart is pounding furiously; I think I want to die.

The FedPolicePerson says solemnly, “You are charged with defrauding the human race of over nine hundred billion dollars for a space program that was obsolete before it was built—and you cost our world twenty years of Galactic Civilization!”

Joyce wipes away a tear. “We didn’t have to wait, Arlan! The Galactics have light-speed ships, for God’s sake! They have waited an extra twenty years for an invitation to come here!”

Overhead, the sky dims. Half the size of the sky, a graceful ship from heaven slips down from the clouds, angelic, awesome.