Nova 3 Read online

  Nothing would’ve tasted good the way I felt, but the sandwiches we got for breakfast, lunch and supper tasted like they had a dash of oil in them. Engine oil, I mean. The head honcho, he’s eighty if he’s a day, says his recs tell him they’re derived from petroleum. The oil is converted into a kind of protein and then flavoring and stuff is added. Oil-burgers, they call them.

  Tonight, before lights-out, we watched the prez give a speech. He said that, within a month, Project Toro will be finished. One way or the other. And all this memory loss should stop. I can’t quite get it even if I was briefed this morning. Men on the moon, unmanned ships on Venus and Mars, all since I was eleven years old. And The Black Ball, the thing from outer space. And now we’re pushing asteroids around. Talk about your science fiction!

  12.

  September 4, 1988

  Today’s the day.

  Actually, the big collision’ll be tomorrow, ten minutes before 1:00 a.m . . . but I think of it as today. Toro, going 150,000 miles an hour, will run head-on into The Ball. Maybe.

  Here I am again, Mark Franham, recording just in case The Ball does dodge out of the way and I have to depend on my recs. It’s 7:00 p.m. and after that raunchy supper of oil-burgers, potato soup and canned carrots, fifty of us gathered around set No. 8. There’s a couple of scientists talking now, discussing theories about just what The Ball is and why it’s been taking our memories away from us. Old Doctor Charles Presley—any relation to Elvis?—thinks The Ball is some sort of unmanned survey ship. When it finds a planet inhabited by sentient life, sentient means intelligent, it takes specimens. Specimens of the mind, that is. It unpeels people’s minds four days’ worth at a time, because that’s all it’s capable of. But it can do it to billions of specimens. It’s like it was reading our minds but destroying the mind at the same time. Presley said it was like some sort of Heisenberg principle of the mind. The Ball can’t observe our memories closely without disturbing them.

  This Ball, Presley says, takes our memories and stores them. And when it’s through with us, sucked us dry, it’ll take off for another planet circling some far-off star. Someday, it’ll return to its home planet, and the scientists there will study the recordings of our minds.

  The other scientist, Dr. Marbles—he’s still got his, ha! ha!—asked why any species advanced enough to be able to do this could be so callous? Surely, the extees must know what great damage they’re doing to us. Wouldn’t they be too ethical for this?

  Doc Presley says maybe they think of us as animals, they are so far above us. Doc Marbles says that could be. But it could also be that whoever built The Ball have different brains than we do. Their mind-reading ray, or whatever it is, when used on themselves doesn’t disturb the memory patterns. But we’re different. The extees don’t know this, of course. Not now, anyway. When The Ball goes home, and the extees read our minds, they’ll be shocked at what they’ve done to us. But it’ll be too late then.

  Presley and Marbles got into an argument about how the extees would be able to interpret their recordings. How could they translate our languages when they have no references—I mean, referents? How’re they going to translate chair and recs and rock and roll and yucky and so on when they don’t have anybody to tell them their meanings. Marbles said they wouldn’t have just words; they’d have mental images to associate with the words. And so on. Some of the stuff they spouted I didn’t understand at all.

  I do know one thing, though, and I’m sure those bigdomes do, too. But they wouldn’t be allowed to say it over TV because we’d be even more gloomy and hopeless-feeling. That is, what if right now the computers in The Ball are translating our languages, reading our minds, as they’re recorded? Then they know all about Project Toro. They’ll be ready for the asteroid, destroy it if they have the weapons to do it, or, if they haven’t, they’ll just move The Ball into a different orbit.

  I’m not going to say anything to the other guys about this. Why make them feel worse?

  It’s ten o’clock now. According to regulations posted up all over the place, it’s time to go to bed. But nobody is. Not tonight. You don’t sleep when the End of the World may be coming up.

  I wish my Mom and Dad were here. I cried this morning when I found they weren’t in this dump, and I asked the chief where they were. He said they were working in a city nearby, but they’d be visiting me soon. I think he lied.

  Stinky saw me crying, but he didn’t say anything. Why should he? I’ll bet he’s shed a few when he thought nobody was looking, too.

  Twelve o’clock. Midnight. Less than an hour to go. Then, the big smash! Or, I hate to think about it, the big flop. We won’t be able to see it directly because the skies are cloudy over most of North America. But we’ve got a system worked out so we can see it on TV. If there’s a gigantic flash when the Toro and The Ball collide, that is.

  What if there isn’t? Then we’ll soon be just like those grown-up kids, some of them twenty years old, that they keep locked up in the big building in the northwest corner of this place. Saying nothing but Da Da or Ma Ma, drooling, filling their diapers. If they got diapers, because old Rogers says he heard, today, of course, they don’t wear nothing. The nurses come in once a day and hose them and the place down. The nurses don’t have time to change and wash diapers and give personal baths. They got enough to do just spoon-feeding them.

  Three and a half more hours to go, and I’ll be just like them. Unless, before then, I flip, and they put me in that building old Rogers calls the puzzle factory. They’re all completely out of their skulls, he says, and even if memloss stops tonight, they won’t change any.

  Old Rogers says there’s fifty million less people in the United States than there were in 1980, according to the recs. And a good thing, too, he says, because it’s all we can do to feed what we got.

  Come on, Toro! You’re our last chance!

  If Toro doesn’t make it, I’ll kill myself! I will! I’m not going to let myself become an idiot. Anyway, by the time I do become one, there won’t be enough food to go around for those that do have their minds. I’ll be starving to death. I’d rather get it over with now than go through that.

  God’ll forgive me.

  God, You know I want to be a minister of the gospel when I grow up and that I want to help people. I’ll marry a good woman, and we’ll have children that’ll be brought up right. And we’ll thank You every day for the good things of life and battle the bad things.

  Love, that’s what I got, Lord. Love for You and love for Your people. So don’t make me hate You. Guide Toro right into The Ball, and get us started on the right path again.

  I wish Mom and Dad were here.

  Twelve-thirty. In twenty minutes, we’ll know.

  The TV says the H-bombs are still going off all around The Ball.

  The TV says the people on the East Coast are falling asleep. The rays, or whatever The Ball uses, aren’t being affected by the H-bomb radiation. But that doesn’t mean that its sensors aren’t. I pray to God that they are cut off.

  Ten minutes to go. Toro’s got twenty-five thousand miles to go. Our sensors can’t tell whether or not The Ball’s still on its original orbit. I hope it is; I hope it is! If it’s changed its path, then we’re through! Done! Finished! Wiped out!

  Five minutes to go; twelve thousand five hundred miles to go.

  I can see in my mind’s eyes The Ball, almost half a mile in diameter, hurtling on its orbit, blind as a bat, I hope and pray, the bombs, the last of the five thousand bombs, flashing, and Toro, a mile and a half long, a mile wide, millions of tons of rock and nickel-steel, charging toward its destined spot.

  If it is destined.

  But space is big, and even the Ball and Toro are small compared to all that emptiness out there. What if the mathematics of the scientists is just a little off, or the rocket motors on Toro aren’t working just like they’re supposed to, and Toro just tears on by The Ball? It’s got to meet The Ball at the exact time and place, it’s just got
to!

  I wish the radars and lasers could see what’s going on.

  Maybe it’s better they can’t. If we knew that The Ball had changed course . . . but this way we still got hope.

  If Toro misses, I’ll kill myself, I swear it.

  Two minutes to go. One hundred and twenty seconds. The big room is silent except for kids like me praying or talking quietly into our recs or praying and talking and sobbing.

  The TV says the bombs have quit exploding. No more flashes until Toro hits The Ball—if it does. Oh, God, let it hit, let it hit!

  The unmanned satellites are going to open their camera lenses at the exact second of impact and take a quick shot. The cameras are encased in lead, the shutters are lead, and the equipment is special, mostly mechanical, not electrical, almost like a human eyeball. If the cameras see the big flash, they’ll send an electrical impulse through circuits, also encased in lead, to a mechanism that’ll shoot a big thin-shelled ball out. This is crammed with flashpowder, the same stuff photographers use, and mixed with oxygen pellets so the powder will ignite. There’s to be three of the biggest flashes you ever saw. Three. Three for Victory.

  If Toro misses, then only one flashball’ll be set off.

  Oh, Lord, don’t let it happen!

  Planes with automatic pilots’ll be cruising above the clouds, and their equipment will see the flashes and transmit them to the ground TV equipment.

  One minute to go.

  Come on, God!

  Don’t let it happen, please don’t let it happen, that some place way out there, some thousands of years from now, some weird-looking character reads this and finds out to his horror what his people have done to us. Will he feel bad about it? Lot of good that’ll do. You, out there, I hate you! God, how I hate you!

  Our Father which art in Heaven, fifteen seconds, Hallowed be Thy name, ten seconds, Thy will be done, five seconds, Thy will be done, but if it’s thumbs down, God, why? Why? What did I ever do to You?

  The screen’s blank! Oh, my God, the screen’s blank! What happened? Transmission trouble? Or they’re afraid to tell us the truth?

  It’s on! It’s on!

  YAAAAAAY!

  13.

  July 4, A.D. 2002

  I may erase this. If I have any sense, I will. If I had any sense, I wouldn’t make it in the first place.

  Independence Day, and we’re still under an iron rule. But old Dick the Dictator insists that when there’s no longer a need for strict control, the Constitution will be restored, and we’ll be a democracy again. He’s ninety-five years old and can’t last much longer. The vice-president is only eighty, but he’s as tough an octogenarian as ever lived. And he’s even more of a totalitarian than Dick. And when have men ever voluntarily relinquished power?

  I’m one of the elite, so I don’t have it so bad. Just being fifty-seven years old makes me a candidate for that class. In addition, I have my Ph.D. in education and I’m a part-time minister. I don’t know why I say part-time, since there aren’t any full-time ministers outside of the executives of the North American Council of Churches. The People can’t afford fulltime divines. Everybody has to work at least ten hours a day. But I’m better off than many. I’ve been eating fresh beef and pork for three years now. I have a nice house I don’t have to share with another family. The house isn’t the one my recs say I once owned. The People took it over to pay for back taxes. It did me no good to protest that property taxes had been canceled during The Interim. That, say the People, ended when The Ball was destroyed.

  But how could I pay taxes on it when I was only eleven years old, in effect?

  I went out this afternoon, it being a holiday, with Leona to Springdale. We put flowers on her parents’ and sisters’ graves, none of whom she remembers, and on my parents’ and Carole’s and the children’s graves, whom I know only through the recs. I prayed for the forgiveness of Carole and the boys.

  Near Carole’s grave was Stinky Davis’s. Poor fellow, he went berserk the night The Ball was destroyed and had to be put in a padded cell. Still mad, he died five years later.

  I sometimes wonder why I didn’t go mad, too. The daily shocks and jars of memloss should have made everyone fall apart. But a certain number of us were very tough, tougher than we deserved. Even so, the day-to-day attack by alarm syndromes did its damage. I’m sure that years of life were cut off the hardiest of us. We’re the shattered generation. And this is bad for the younger ones, who’ll have no older people to lead them in the next ten years or so.

  Or is it such a bad thing?

  At least, those who were in their early twenties or younger when The Ball was smashed are coming along fine. Leona herself was twenty then. She became one of my students in high school. She’s thirty-five physically but only fifteen in what the kids call “intage” or internal age. But since education goes faster for adults, and all those humanities courses have been eliminated, she graduated from high school last June. She still wants to be a doctor of medicine, and God knows we need M.D.’s She’ll be forty-two before she gets her degree. We’re planning on having two children, the maximum allowed, and it’s going to be tough raising them while she’s in school. But God will see us through.

  As we were leaving the cemetery, Margie Oleander, a very pretty girl of twenty-five, approached us. She asked me if she could speak privately to me. Leona didn’t like that, but I told her that Margie probably wanted to talk to me about her grades in my geometry class.

  Margie did talk somewhat about her troubles with her lessons. But then she began to ask some questions about the political system. Yes, I’d better erase this, and if it weren’t for old habits, I’d not be doing this now.

  After a few minutes, I became uneasy. She sounded as if she were trying to get me to show some resentment about the current situation.

  Is she an agent provocateur or was she testing me for potential membership in the underground?

  Whatever she was doing, she was in dangerous waters. So was I. I told her to ask her political philosophy teacher for answers. She said she’d read the textbook, which is provided by the government. I muttered something about, “Render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s,” and walked away.

  But she came after me and asked if I could talk to her in my office tomorrow. I hesitated and then said I would.

  I wonder if I would have agreed if she weren’t so beautiful?

  When we got home, Leona made a scene. She accused me of chasing after the younger girls because she was too old to stimulate me. I told her that I was no senile King David, which she should be well aware of, and she said she’s listened to my recs and she knew what kind of man I was. I told her I’d learned from my mistakes. I’ve gone over the recs of the missing years many times.

  “Yes,” she said, “you know about them intellectually. But you don’t feel them!”

  Which is true.

  I’m outside now and looking up into the night. Up there, out there, loose atoms and molecules float around, cold and alone, debris of the memory records of The Ball, atoms and molecules of what were once incredibly complex patterns, the memories of thirty-two years of the lives of four and a half billion human beings. Forever lost, except in the mind of One.

  Oh, Lord, I started all over again as an eleven-year-old. Don’t let me make the same mistakes again.

  You’ve given us tomorrow again, but we’ve very little past to guide us.

  Tomorrow I’ll be very cool and very professional with Margie. Not too much, of course, since there should be a certain warmth between teacher and pupil.

  If only she did not remind me of . . . whom?

  But that’s impossible. I can remember nothing from The Interim. Absolutely nothing.

  But what if there are different kinds of memory?

 

 

 
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