June 27 @ 9:00 pm EST Far Future Fiction Nancy Kress and Sean McMullen. Find out more.

The Astronaut from Wyoming	Adam-Troy Castro & Jerry Oltion
"The Astronaut from Wyoming" first appeared in the July/August 1999 issue.

To understand Alexander, you must first understand his time.

It was an age when the universe had been opened for us. We knew how to look at objects a thousand light years away, and map the molecules that gave them form; we knew how things were put together and how they could be taken apart; we knew how the universe began and how it was likely to end. We knew how to reason, and how to discover, and how to add new pages to our increasing store of information.

It was also an age when ignorance was enshrined over knowledge. Every local newspaper contained a horoscope. World leaders consulted astrologers; psychic hotlines made millions; and a United States Senator gained ten points in the polls by claiming to have been in contact with Ancient Aztecs. We knew what comets were, where they came from, and what they didn’t foretell . . . but in a compound in San Diego, thirty-seven intelligent, college-educated people took poison because they believed that a comet called Hale-Bopp would take them to heaven if they did.

In Alexander’s age, we had knowledge . . . and we had delusion. And we preferred the delusion.

You cannot understand Alexander Drier’s life without understanding that.

You cannot understand his final gesture without understanding that.

Of course, Alexander’s time is still our time. Which is why some of you are most interested in reading about a high-ranking government coverup of alien experiments on pregnant human women.

I can’t help what you want. I knew that going in.

But that’s not what happened.

The first tabloid reporter arrived in town one day after the birth, the first delegation from the networks right behind him. Not long after it hit the web, the pilgrims showed up. They came in motor homes, in vans, on motorcycles, and on foot: the four-man Sweethaven Sheriff’s Office had to import a couple of dozen state police just to keep the kooks and the loonies and the just plain curious at bay. Most just wanted a glimpse of the child. A few–thankfully, very few–had darker things in mind; gene-splicing their mythologies, they arrived with rifles and pamphlets and hate-filled eyes, muttering black fantasies about an Antichrist seeded from the nonexistent Dark Side of the Moon.

I didn’t get to meet him until his tenth birthday, but I can only imagine how frightening a time it must have been: Alexander’s parents and the rest of the immediate family barricading themselves behind drawn curtains, looking out upon the steadily increasing madness of a crowd that seemed to represent all the rest of the world.

Alexander’s mother, Faye, was so serene about the whole thing that she seemed to be in denial. She just held the baby and sang to him, making almost no reference to the mad scene just beyond the driveway.

"It’s funny," she said at one point. "We don’t know him, really. We don’t know whether he’ll be good or bad, smart or dumb, brave or afraid . . . the kind of things he’ll be interested in or the kind of things that’ll bore him silly. He’s a stranger to us. An alien, for real."

Mark Drier winced as he glanced at the window. The blinds were drawn, but he could still see the crowds, growing larger every hour; some of them chanting, some of them singing, some of them shouting in rage. "Better not let them hear you say that."

Many years later, telling me the story, Alexander’s Uncle George shook his head with awe as he remembered what Faye said at that moment: "Them? Who cares about them? They’ll go away."

She was right, of course; the crowds began to diminish as soon as even the dimmest pilgrims began to realize that they weren’t about to get beamed aboard any orbital crockery. And the tabloids went after fresher stories the first time a Sheen misbehaved in Hollywood. But her prophecy couldn’t have seemed likely to Mark Drier that morning . . . not with the house being monitored by ten TV networks, the phone unplugged to keep it from ringing off the hook, and Grandma having a quiet mental breakdown in the bedroom upstairs. At the moment, he knew only that nothing would ever be all right again.

Alexander wasn’t deformed, at least, not in the sense that I’m deformed. He had two of everything he needed two of and one of everything he needed one of. And it was all functional. It all worked. He was even beautiful, in the sense that all healthy babies are beautiful. But his head was unusually large: it mushroomed above the temples, bulging up and out like a sack stuffed with more than it was designed to hold. (The doctors had feared water on the brain, but it just happened to be the shape of the kid’s head; the only problem it caused was in delivery, and that had been handled by the caesarian.) His eyes were about three times larger, proportionally, than the norm for a baby of that size; and they were all black, with no whites showing at all. His nose, as if to compensate, was unusually small, little more than a nostrilled wrinkle in the center of his face. His mouth was a slit with thin, pursed lips. His ears were little round buds with holes. His hands were odd too: there were five fingers and a thumb on each, with the fingers all disproportionately long.

Still, that, by itself, wasn’t the problem. At least, not as Mark Drier saw it. He was not a weak man. He could have dealt with birth defects.

The problem was that everybody in America had already seen that face. They’d seen it staring at them from movie posters, from bestselling books, from artist’s renditions on the covers of supermarket tabloids. It was a face so frequently depicted in the mass media that even people who refused to subscribe recognized it as a well-known inhabitant of our shared popular culture: the face described by the growing subculture of folks who claimed to have been abducted and experimented upon–usually in the form of anal probes–by creatures from outer space.

It was, in short, the face of a Roswell Alien.

Mark Drier peered out through the curtains again. The view out there was just as disturbing. Even as he watched, a flyspecked yellow schoolbus crammed with doughy, pasty-faced adults pulled up at the curb. An inordinate number of the faces at the windows had open mouths. He couldn’t quite tell whether they were shouting, or just chronic mouth-breathers. Their expressions were both ecstatic and dull: like sheep having a party. He shuddered. "I don’t know, Faye. That’s a mob. We may have to start planning escape routes, in case they rush us."

"They won’t," Faye said placidly.

"They’ll do what they want," Mark said. "Don’t you see? Some of them came all the way across the country! They’re not going to let a front yard and a few closed doors stop them now!"

She considered that. "Then we’ll just have to go outside and tell them they’re disturbing the baby."

"And what makes you think they’ll listen to that?"

"If they think he’s a space baby, capable of shooting deathrays from his fingers, they just might. But I don’t think it’ll be a problem. They’ll get tired. They’ll feel silly. They’ll go home. And they’ll leave us to the business of being a family." She smiled, and touched noses with the baby. "It’ll work out. He’s beautiful."

Nobody said anything to that.

Then Faye looked at them, and in a voice filled with soft sweet steel, a voice that damned them for not responding, repeated, "He’s beautiful."

The gathered Uncles and Aunts hastened to assure Faye that they agreed. Mark joined in last–reluctantly, and unpersuasively, and with what must have been shame for not being able to feel it the way she did.

I’m going to have to take a break to ward off the expectations of an unfortunately large percentage of the people reading this account of Alexander’s life.

Alexander was not an alien. He was not a half-human, half-alien. He was not the result of genetic manipulation by aliens who wanted an emissary on Earth. He was not the spawn of a UFO abduction his mother repressed. He learned to speak at about the same rate all children do. And he wasn’t the harbinger of a message from space, though come to think of it that eventually turned out to be a little closer to the truth. He was a boy: one who may have been a little different from the rest of us, but one whose genetic birthright, however bent, was still entirely Homo sapiens. He came out the way he did because of an extremely rare, but identifiable and very well-documented genetic condition that affected his fetal development, subtly distorting his body in ways that mirrored the by-then well-established folklore of the UFO conspiracy buffs. A search of medical literature was able to find six other cases within the past three centuries: even photos of one poor boy from the early 1900s who spent most of his short life in a freak show in South America. Of course, in today’s media-conscious age, there was no way that the malady in question would continue to go unnamed, and so Alexander got the honor of being immortalized in the medical textbooks before he was even old enough to recognize his mother’s face. Drier’s Syndrome, they called it: and if there was any upside to the public’s insistence on believing that the child was somehow a visitor from outer space, it was the degree to which that rescued him from a lifetime of being known as the kid with the disfiguring disease.

But he was human, all right. Gloriously human. There will not, at any point in this narrative, be a surprise revelation that he was ever, wholly or in part, anything but.

So those of you who followed the various events of Alexander’s life in the kind of newspapers that run front-page headlines about miraculous chocolate diets, can go indulge your little fantasies elsewhere. Because that’s not what happened.

Alexander occupied such an important part of my life that I find it hard to feel anything but contempt for anybody who had trouble loving him. I suppose that’s the main reason I’ve always been so hard on his father: why I still automatically think of him as a cold and distant man, unable to forgive his son for being less than normal. I’m also aware that it’s the way some biographers have portrayed him–some of them, God help me, even using interviews with me as a primary source.

But it wasn’t like that. In the lonely, hysterical days immediately following Alexander’s birth, Mark Drier was a frightened man, desperately searching for the plan that would render everything all right–and who can’t be hated for coming up with the wrong idea when nobody, with the possible exception of Alexander’s mother, knew what the right idea was.

He found her in the upstairs den, which was the brightest room in the house: a perfect place for a young mother to breastfeed her baby. The baby was, like all babies, trusting, hungry, squirming, and needful. I’d like to think that as Mark looked at his child that day, he felt not instinctive revulsion, but also the awe fit for all new life abroad in the world. He may even have felt the joy of fatherhood. But he was a practical man, and love must always make room for practicality . . . especially with buses of UFO-Abduction Faithful still converging on town from every direction.

Again: I wasn’t there. I can’t re-create the conversation precisely. But I know the people. And it happened something like this:

Mark said, "We’re going to need money."

Faye smiled. "Well, we knew that going in, hon."

His hands curled into fists. "Please. Babe. I’m not talking about Diapers and Dip-Tet money. I’m talking about independent wealth. I’m talking about guard dogs and chain-link fencing: the kind of money capable of keeping out the wackos for the rest of our lives."

"We can handle the wackos," she said softly. "They’ll get bored. Didn’t you hear what Sheriff Dooley said? Some of them are going home already."

Mark shook his head. "Some of them, maybe. Maybe even most of them–if they behave the way mobs usually don’t. But all of them? At home and in school and for the rest of his life? How do we stop some especially dangerous nut, who may be just getting the idea today, from coming after our boy with a gun maybe fifteen years from now? Do you honestly think that everybody who’s run out of money or vacation time, and has to go back home to East Calabash or whatever, is just going to forget this kid they were so sure came from outer space? Be real! They’ll be back when you least expect them–and if not them, then somebody else. We can’t live an ordinary life that way. Hell, I won’t be able to hold onto my job as it is–we can’t expect me to just go on selling hardware when every yahoo in the country’s going to flock to my store to see if I have antennae hidden under my hairline. We need money, babe. If only to protect us from what he’s going to bring."

Faye remained as perfectly serene as before, but there was an edge to it now: a willful defiance of the places this conversation was headed. "So what do you suggest?"

He was unable to meet her eyes. "The Enquirer’s willing to pay us five million for an exclusive interview–as long as we tell them what they want to hear."

"That your son’s a creature from outer space."

"Don’t get me wrong," Mark pleaded. "I hate the bastards. But I can’t think of any other way. And if they’ll be saying it anyway . . . we might as well get paid for it, so we can get the boy what he needs."

"Chain-link fence," she said, without raising her voice. "Guard dogs. Isolation from other children."

"Safety," he countered.

She considered that for several seconds, glancing from the earnest face of her husband to the oddly-shaped head of her child. She’d been raised on a small family farm. She’d seen her parents struggling through droughts; she’d lived through foreclosures and years of lean, grinding poverty. She’d even had to quit the university after only two years, when her student loans were cut. She knew what it meant to need money and not have it. Nobody can say how much the idea tempted her; nobody would have blamed her for going along with it.

But then she said, "No."

"Come on, Faye. Be realistic–"

"I am being realistic. I’m refusing to lie."

"It’s a white lie."

"It’s a cruel lie," she snapped. "He’s our child. Our human child. And it’s our job as his parents to stand up for what he is, not for what some trash newspapers want him to be. I want him to grow up knowing we defended him!" She took the now-sleeping child from her breast, handed him to her husband, and for the first time, spat out her anger, "You want realistic? Call him by name. I haven’t heard you do that yet. You want realistic, call him by name!"

Alexander was lucky, in some ways. Some places would have put the kid in a museum and charged visitors admission to see him–and if you think that’s overstating the situation, kindly look up the case of the Dionne Quints. But that’s not what happened.

Sweethaven came to see the hordes of morbidly curious as invaders–uncouth, unwanted barbarians who parked on lawns, peered in windows, and dropped their garbage in the streets. What’s more, they came to see the Driers as hometown heroes being victimized by outsiders. There may have been a few voices raised against the child, at first (most of them taking refuge in the fiction that he was brain-damaged, and that he’d have been better off in an institution anyway), but as the months went on, and most of the nine hundred people of Sweethaven got to see him up close, even that faded away to silence, replaced by the determination to protect him at all costs.

Mark Drier did not lose his job at the hardware store; he had to miss a lot of time at first, whenever the Nuts and the Media got too obnoxious, but his boss covered for him, and paid him full wages even when Mark couldn’t make it in more than one or two days at a time.

Nobody denounced Alexander from the pulpit. At least, not in Sweethaven: there were some churches down south that preached about him as if he had 666 stamped on his head, but Sweethaven’s Reverend Wallace Vukcevich assured his flock that he’d seen the boy and that he seemed a perfectly fine baby, odd looks and all.

In the early months, there were two, and only two, acts of serious violence directed against the Drier family. One time, a mentally disturbed woman from Boca Raton, Florida, pulled out a gun and started shooting at the house–but she got off exactly one very wild shot before being wrestled to the ground. It didn’t even hit the house. Another time, when Faye was taking Alexander to the doctor for a routine examination, a car filled with tabloid reporters deliberately sideswiped the car so they could force her to stop and get a close-up picture of the baby. The good people of Sweethaven took both incidents very personally. The Boca Raton woman was charged with Attempted Murder, Illegal Possession of a Firearm, Reckless Endangerment, Trespassing, and everything else the local courts could think of; she got the maximum penalty on every count and was awarded a long string of consecutive sentences. The reporters would have been lucky to get off with just that: this was only a few years after the similar incident that caused Princess Diana’s death in France, and the small mob of local boys on the scene had a pretty poor opinion of the kind of louts capable of taking that kind of risk with the life of a baby. The tabloid stringers spent almost as much time in the hospital as they later did in jail.

As ugly and upsetting as both incidents were, they only served to cement the town’s resolve: Alexander may have been one strange-looking kid, but he was one of theirs . . . a feeling that only grew as he developed a personality, and turned out to be pretty normal after all. He was a child. He learned to smile, to giggle, to say his first words, to crawl, to walk, to manipulate his parents with well-placed tantrums . . . and that most human of all skills, to ask questions.

Which brings us to the moment he’d later describe as his earliest memory.

Like most of the rest of us, he saw it on television.

He’d watched TV before, of course. His Mommy was not above occasionally using it as a babysitter. He liked cartoons. He didn’t understand why grownups watched the things they watched, which mostly seemed to be other grownups bantering in living rooms. He certainly didn’t understand the attention his Mommy and Daddy and Uncle and Aunt gave the program on TV now, which was mostly a bunch of serious-looking people speaking in grim, measured tones. Why was this fascinating enough to keep the grownups from playing with him?

"The arrogance of it," Mark Drier said. "The infernal . . . gall."

"It’s just symbolic," Uncle George said. "They’re not actually erasing the accomplishment."

"Oh, come on, George! They’re doing worse! They’re pissing on it! They’re telling the whole world that the whole thing was nothing more than a big joke!"

Alexander, who was too young to understand any of this, who was indeed frustrated by his family’s helpless fascination for something beyond his comprehension, merely wandered from one relative to another, trying to interest them in more enjoyable activities . . . until the network commentary switched over to the live feed, and something truly interesting showed up on-screen.

It was a strange-looking man in a chubby suit, with a big box on his back and a gleaming mirror instead of a face. There was something irresistably puppetlike about the way the man bounced up and down when he walked: something that struck the young Alexander as both comical and graceful at the same time.

Alexander struggled free of his Mommy’s lap, toddled over to the TV, and pointed a single questing finger at the funny man. "Who dat?"

"Get away from the screen, son," Mark said. "We’re trying to watch."

Alexander complied as much as his curiosity would allow him, backing up all of two inches. "Who dat, Daddy? Who dat?"

"Alex, why won’t you listen to me? We’re trying to watch. Be nice."

"You could answer his question," Faye said. She was, by this point, hypersensitive to slights of her son, especially where her husband was concerned: especially in light of the little subliminal flinch that sometimes passed across Mark’s face when Alexander fixed those oversized black eyes on his. She didn’t give Mark a chance to redeem himself, but instead turned to Alexander and said, "That’s an astronaut, honey."

Alexander blinked doubtfully, and repeated the unfamiliar word, "As’not?"

Faye repeated it with exaggerated care, "As-tro-naut. That’s what we call somebody who goes to outer space. That man on the TV is walking on the Moon."

Alexander knew what the Moon was. He saw it in the sky all the time, both day and night, and his Mommy had taught him what it was called. But up until this moment, it had never occured to him that it was more than a pale round ball just out of reach . . . that it was an actual place, so far away that there had to be a special name for the people who went there. He stabbed his finger at the astronaut’s helmet. "Dat?"

"That’s his space suit. He needs that to breathe."

Alexander later told me how his toddler mind processed this information. He thought astronauts wore their space suits all the time, even when they weren’t on the Moon, even when they were home in bed, even when they were in the bathtub. It didn’t make much sense to him.

Mark Drier said something that couldn’t have been any help endearing him to his wife, "He’s too young, hon. He can’t possibly understand this."

Despite his confusion about the spacesuits, Alexander resented that. He understood more than his Mommy and Daddy gave him credit for. Like most toddlers, his comprehension vocabulary was already far ahead of his deceptively primitive speech, and he’d used it to figure out a lot of things they couldn’t even begin to guess he knew: among them that his Daddy was a very sad man.

Then the astronaut on TV hopped over a small rock in his path, both rising and falling with unnatural slowness, and Alexander found himself smiling. He turned toward his mother. "I go dere? I be ast-not?"

The assembled grownups met each other’s eyes.

And Mark Drier said, "No. You won’t."

"Dat man ast-not."

"Yeah . . . well . . . it’s different for him."

Alexander asked the dreaded Next Question always asked by children, "Why?"

Mark Drier silently appealed to one relative after another, imploring them to rescue him. "Because . . . nobody has the wrong idea about where he comes from."

"That does it," Faye said.

She rose from her easy chair, picked up her son, and carried him from the room, leaving Mark enveloped by a silence echoing with all the words that would have emerged from a perfect man’s mouth.

The young Alexander couldn’t understand why something as wondrous as an astronaut made the grownups around him so upset.

He was too young to know that he’d been watching the live coverage of the First Saudi Expedition to the Moon.

In the wake of the Third Gulf War, the Saudis, flush with their apparent invincibility, had grown rich enough and fanatical enough and crazy enough to sink an obscene amount of petrodollars into their very own space program–mostly staffed, in a particularly cruel irony, by unemployed veterans of the moribund Japanese and United States space programs. Like Projects Mercury through Apollo, and the Golden Dawn expeditions sponsored by the late emperor, this particular project took the better part of a decade to achieve its stated goal: and though there’d been some who said that the Saudis would change their minds before they got that far, the day had finally come, and the rest of the world could do little but watch as the Saudis did just what they’d said they would do.

Many Islamic factions had never liked the idea of a Western Moon. The Saudis had therefore taken the position that Armstrong, Aldrin, and those who followed them had profaned it with their presence. The entire purpose of their space program was to remove, and destroy, everything that the Americans and the Japanese had left behind during their various missions–starting with Tranquility Base, which they now dismantled before a television audience of two billion people.

Reactions to this varied, depending upon where in the world you were. In some parts of the world, anything that humiliated America was reason to cheer. In others, it was considered a sad victory of barbarians. Even Americans weren’t united in their reaction. Some wept for triumphs long-gone. Some were so outraged by the slap in the face they advocated military action against the Saudis. Some thought the whole space program a waste of money better spent elsewhere, and applauded the symbolic burial of Kennedy’s folly.

All too many people simply didn’t care–it was too far away, and had nothing to do with their lives. Their vote was heard in the form of over ten thousand phone calls to the TV networks, protesting not the desecration of Tranquility Base but the preemption of their favorite sitcoms. Most of those were of the opinion that the landing on the Moon had been a hoax anyway. The Japanese, and the Saudis, had simply leased parts of Arizona to film their sequels.

I know how I reacted. I was eight years older than Alexander. I cursed at the set with all the rage of a boy who considered the desecration a personal assault, thinking the world a place ruled only by madmen and fools.

I still believe that.

As for Alexander, he never did make it to the Moon. The universe didn’t have anything that obvious in mind for him. I didn’t make it there, either. It was a world that would never be part of our futures, either shared or separate. But I do look at it sometimes: still just as mysterious, still just as bright in the night sky. And I wonder, in light of everything that’s happened since, if the Saudis succeeded only in keeping the dream alive for us.

The year Alexander turned four, the science scores of America’s high school students hit an all-time low. The President of the United States was caught making major policy decisions on Tarot readings. The newest cult to claim one million converts preached poverty, abstinence, and the worship of the planet Jupiter. And two different prime-time newscasts began devoting five minutes of each program to the astrological readings of singers and movie stars.

I still have a copy of the reading one of those shows gave for the Space Boy himself. "This is a time of growth and learning. Expect major changes in the coming year. But don’t forget to depend on those close to you."

A brilliantly prescient horoscope for any four-year-old child.

It wasn’t surprising they got around to him. He was, after all, still a frequent topic of the tabloids, and even the comparatively respectable media ran updates on the various milestones of his life. The Driers had even allowed Life magazine to do a photospread of him attending the birthday party of one of his little friends–the theory being that pictures of Alexander with pink cake smeared on his chin were the only possible antidote for stories claiming that his real parents were the ancient astronauts personally responsible for the Pyramid of Cheops. Alas, they only helped to keep him in the public eye–and though the good people of Sweethaven kept direct intrusion to a minimum, coverage of Alexander’s life was still so ubiquitous that the Driers actually put their TV set in storage to save him from being traumatized by accidental exposure to Space Boy shtick.

No, he had to suffer different traumas entirely.

Take the night he spent one full hour making faces in the mirror. It wasn’t one of his favorite games–not because he hated his face, as he hadn’t been raised to have such a poisonous feeling, but because his smooth masklike features simply weren’t very good at the comical art of grinning. Alexander smiling looked a lot like Alexander frowning, and Alexander calm looked a lot like Alexander angry: there were subtle differences which his family could read, but anybody else had to rely on context or body language. Genuinely funny faces were so hard to make that even Alexander, who was at this point just beginning to get a grasp of how truly odd he looked, knew he just wasn’t very good at making them.

Today was different, though. Today he was practicing a trick he’d discovered not very long before: i.e. making the world appear to jump side to side by opening and closing each eye in turn. The phenomenon, which also has application in astronomy, is known as parallax, and every child with two functional eyes takes a turn being fascinated by it. He was most enthralled by the way it looked in the mirror–the way his whole head flickered back and forth, just like a bouncing ball . . .

Somebody at the door said, "Alex."

Alexander jumped before he saw who it was. "Oh. Daddy."

Many years later, he’d have to grope for the words to describe his childhood feelings for Mark Drier. There was love involved, of course; Mark had been a good and gentle man, who might have been a fine father for a less unusual son. He’d certainly tried to be a fine father to Alexander, saying the things he was supposed to say, doing the things he was supposed to do, never being deliberately cruel. But he was also a man whose affection seemed forced, a man who couldn’t quite conquer that little subliminal flinch he demonstrated whenever his son entered a room . . . a man who had very little to say to Alexander and by this point not much more to say to Faye.

Without ever being struck, without ever being abused, Alexander couldn’t help being always just a little bit afraid of him.

And his father knew it, "Sorry. Did I scare you?"

"Maybe a little bit," Alexander said self-consciously. "I was making faces."

Mark flashed a little wan smile at that. "Any good ones?"

"Not really. I think maybe I need a moustache."

Another wan smile. "I think maybe I could use one, too." He held the expression for all of ten seconds before seeming to remember something that pained him–then gathered up his strength, and with a joviality that rang false, said, "Hey, Sport? I know it’s near your bedtime, but how’d you like to take a walk with your old man? Just for a few minutes?"

Alexander glanced at the window beside the shower stall. The little sliver of sky visible between the mostly drawn curtains was a shade of purple-blue not very far removed from black; it would not be long before the heavens got the news that the sun was gone for another day. He spoke with caution: "It’s dark."

"That’s okay. We won’t be going far."

"Is Mom coming?"

"Not tonight," Mark Drier said. "But don’t worry. She already knows we’re going."

He took Alexander downstairs, zipped him up in his jacket, took his hand, and walked him into the backyard. They had a big backyard. They were at the edge of town, just south of the hills, on a slope that was the first of a long bumpy ride to the horizon. Their property was entirely surrounded by chain-link fence, not high enough to keep away determined intruders, but enough to discourage the merely curious. Alexander had seen folks with cameras scramble over once or twice; he’d also seen his Dad chase them away, shouting words that Alexander himself was not permitted to speak. But there hadn’t been an incident like that since his last birthday.

Mark unlocked the back gate and walked Alexander to the top of the first hill, home of a jutting slab of rock that the boy was allowed to climb only when his parents were watching. It was a big rock for a kid Alexander’s age, almost as tall as his Dad. Mark didn’t give him a chance to climb it–just picked him up and put him there, before climbing the rock himself and taking his place by Alexander’s side.

They sat without speaking for the several minutes it took the last light of day to surrender to the blackness of night. Mark said nothing because he was a smoker, and a sedentary man, who did not climb hills easily; his ragged breaths burst from him like little explosions. Alexander said nothing because his father was holding his hand, which was in and of itself such an unusual thing that he was scared to disturb it with the sound of his own voice.

Time passed. Mark’s breathing slowed to normal.

The stars came out.

It was a clear night over a very small town, and the lights burning down below were not enough to force many stars into hiding. Some of them shone like pinprick flames. And as the night grew darker above Sweethaven, and Alexander searched his father’s face for the reason they’d hiked all the way up here, Mark seemed less and less a recognizable presence and more and more a man-shaped shadow eclipsing the lights in the sky above him.

Forever came and went before Mark spoke. "You cold?"

"No," Alexander said.

"Tired?"

How could Alexander be tired, when all this was going on? "No."

"Good," Mark said, still without looking at him.

More time passed. So much time that Alexander thought they were supposed to sit here, holding hands, all the way to morning.

Then Mark’s profile shifted slightly, and he spoke in a strange, faraway voice that didn’t sound like he knew who he was talking to. "You know . . . I used to love the stars. Not astronomy; I was never any good at that. But once upon a time, when I was a kid, I used to pitch a tent on a hilltop not far from here. I didn’t sleep in the tent unless it was raining, though. When it was a nice, clear night, like tonight, I laid out my sleeping bag and slept in the open . . . just looking up at the constellations. Some of those nights, time just seemed to stop." He hesitated, glanced at his son, and turned his gaze back to the sky. "Sometimes I wish it did."

"You can wish on stars," Alexander said knowledgably.

"I’ve heard that. But by the time somebody told me I was too old to believe it." He sighed. "It took me a long time to learn that even if you do wish on stars, you don’t always get what you want from them."

Alexander said, "You can still wish."

"That’s right. You can."

And because Mark seemed even sadder now than he’d ever managed to seem before, Alexander came right out and asked, "What do you wish, Daddy?"

The shadow in the shape of Alexander’s father shifted, no longer a profile turned up but a black oval looking down at the boy. Alexander didn’t have enough light to see his expression; the oval contained nothing but darkness. In the silence, Alexander was terribly afraid that he’d said something wrong.

Then Mark squeezed his hand extra tight. "We better get you back to the house. It’s getting late, and your mother’s going to want to tuck you back in."

Alexander could only be relieved that the strange interlude was over. "Sure." He allowed his father to help him down from the rock, even though he knew he could climb down by himself, and followed him back to the house.

Something else happened late that night, long after he went to bed. Though somewhere deep within the land of sleep, he realized he was not alone. He opened his great black eyes a slit and looked across the pitch-black room to a shape barely visible in the doorway. It was his father, standing with slumped shoulders, one arm braced against the doorframe. Alexander shouldn’t have been able to see him at all, since the hall was dark, too, but there was just enough ambient light coming from elsewhere in the house to render Mark Drier’s outline crisp and sharp. Too sleepy to get up, Alexander fell back to sleep before it occurred to him to wonder just what his father wanted now. When he opened his eyes again, still surrounded by darkness, the doorway was empty.

The divorce was uncontested. Mark Drier moved to San Francisco, where he got a one-room apartment and a job behind the counter in a souvenir shop on Fisherman’s Wharf. He didn’t aspire to anything else, he didn’t marry again, and he didn’t get a phone. The few times he received visits from journalists desiring inside gossip about his son, he simply ejected them, always silently, and never with unnecessary force.

Father and Son didn’t see each other again for almost two decades.

The year Alexander Drier entered first grade, the Jupiter Cult boasted over three million members nationwide. A couple with a million-dollar home in Texas was driven to personal bankruptcy by the wife’s seven-digit debt to the Home Astrology Network. Three colleges offered their first courses in UFO abductions during the twentieth century. Psychic surgeons opened successful clinics in New York, Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago–curing nobody but building a sizeable clientele among inoperable cancer patients who had nothing left to lose. And a certain best-selling book, written by the kind of writer who specializes in such things, declared that photographs of the stone face on Mars taken over the past ten years proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that its lips were moving. He claimed that the government was trying to prevent the rock formation from delivering its truly momentous message to humanity–his chief proof an allegation that there were no deaf lip-readers working at NASA.

I own a crayon drawing Alexander made at about this age. His mother gave it to me–no big sacrifice on her part, since she saved all his drawings, and had hundreds of them. It’s about as impressive as you’d expect from a drawing made by a six-year-old: stick figures, lollipop trees, lopsided houses, garish color that refuses to accept the authority of the lines meant to hold it in check. Faye Drier stands at one side of the picture, with exaggerated curlycue hair that seems to be made out of wildly askew Slinkies. She is clearly smiling, clearly a figure meant to be seen with love. The rest of Alexander’s extended family is also in the picture, though harder to identify. The bald man with the tie is probably Uncle George. The woman standing next to him, a smaller version of Faye, would then have to be Aunt Jude. Aunt Wendy, who lived on the east coast now but visited at least twice a year, stands next to her, identifiable by her big hoop earrings. Then there’s a blob of color that must have been intended to represent Alexander’s dog, Arnold . . . .

. . . and next to Arnold, Alexander himself, the whole reason the drawing is so important. Because, once you take his limited drafting skills into account, it’s an accurate drawing. It shows a boy with a big round head that seems too large for his body, and big long fingers disproportionately long for their hands, and big black eyes shaped like almonds.

In the picture, he’s smiling. That’s important. Alexander wasn’t very good at smiling; his facial muscles weren’t really built for it. He couldn’t maintain the expression for long. But in the drawing he’s smiling, and waving: like for all the world a still from one of those old-time Spielberg movies.

The picture’s important because it shows that Alexander, at that age, already understood just how different he looked. He just wasn’t self-conscious about it, that’s all.

Not even the day Faye brought him to his first day at the local elementary school–a small brick building midway between Sweethaven and Monarch, a somewhat larger town that sat fifteen miles up the road.

Sweethaven and Monarch shared the school between them, in order to make the classes large enough to support a teacher for every grade. That was still an average of only ten or eleven children per class. Six of the kids in Alexander’s class were natives of Monarch and three of those would now be meeting the Space Boy for the very first time.

On the school’s insistence, Alexander was ushered in half an hour late, after his teacher, Mrs. Hirschman, had a chance to deliver her little speech about what to expect. The speech included the standard warning that he might look a little scary, but he shouldn’t be treated any differently than anybody else. As a result, the five children who knew Alexander from Sweethaven, and the three children from Monarch who had met him already, were now reminded to consider him odd, and the three children who’d never seen him before watched his entrance with the awed fascination they would have awarded a strange and colorful new species of bug.

As he took his seat, the girl in the desk next to him, Sally Watkins, said the first thing that came to mind. "He looks like a spaceman."

Mrs. Hirschman was scandalized. "Sally! That’s rude!"

"That’s okay," Alexander said. "I do look like a spaceman."

"That may be true, but we don’t like to make fun of the way people look in this class."

"But everybody says it. . . ."

Mrs. Hirschman now definitely had the look of a woman who feared losing control. "It’s still not a subject we’re going to discuss here. Is that clear?"

Alexander hesitated. "Okay. Sure."

"Thank you, Alexander."

She turned her back, to write something on the blackboard.

He simply followed her with his big black eyes, bemused by her reaction, and wondering just what he’d said to get her so upset.

He looked around at his classmates to see what they thought–and was startled to find several of them staring at him with expressions ranging from loathing to morbid fascination. Those who were looked away quickly as soon as he made eye contact, afraid to admit their interest, scared that he’d notice them as they’d noticed him. He’d seen such reactions before (notably from his dad, and by at most a couple of other people in Sweethaven), but he was treated so normally by his mom and the rest of his family that he’d just written that off as something that strangers happened to do.

Now, looking at the faces of his classmates, it occurred to him for the very first time that this was the way some people looked at boys who looked like spacemen.

It’s a tribute to the Drier family and the people of Sweethaven that Alexander, a remarkably bright kid, didn’t have enough experiential data to reach this seemingly obvious conclusion until he was almost six. But it still hurt. In this, the first moment where he really had a taste of what it meant to be a freak, he felt so tremendously self-conscious that he actually considered bolting from the room in tears.

Then he noticed Sally Watkins, the little girl who’d called him a spaceman, sticking out her tongue at him.

He blinked, unsure how to react.

She looked away, then turned back, and stuck out her tongue again.

Experimentally, because it was the only response that seemed to make sense, he stuck out his own tongue in kind.

She crossed her eyes.

And he felt better.

Popularity, it seemed, was not going to be a serious problem.

In a particularly frightening nationwide poll, astrology became the only "science" seventy percent of Americans could identify by name. A certain national news magazine ran a cover story about the prophecies of Nostradamus, and how they’d all come true, sorta. There was another evolution debate in the Department of Education, with Darwin evicted from over half the nation’s schools and creationism installed as the officially recognized curriculum. Reports of UFO abductions reached an all-time high, to the point where they were reportedly taking place out in the open, on crowded city streets, with nobody ever managing to get one on film.

Somehow, Alexander learned. He was so anxious to get back into Mrs. Hirchman’s good graces that he paid attention to her boring lectures and did all his homework, and before long he realized he was enjoying it.

There was a problem with a couple of local adults who objected to having their kid go to the same school as Alexander. They actually picketed the school, declaring it, "OFF LIMITS TO ALIENS." It was ugly, and stupid . . . but it also died down once the idiots in question realized that nobody was going to buy it. Alexander was the local celebrity. He was the reason the world knew Sweethaven and Monarch existed. They were proud of him. Plus the owners and employees of the half dozen businesses in town owed their increased sales to him, and they knew it.

Time passed.

When Alexander was eight he surprised his mother by announcing that he wanted to become a spaceman. Faye deserves credit for immediately understanding what he meant. "Maybe you better say ‘astronaut,’ dear."

That seemed reasonable enough to him. "Astronaut," he agreed.

Uncle George, who was listening, said, "You know, son, that’s a pretty hard thing to want to grow up to be."

"Why?" Alexander wanted to know.

"Because, right now, there aren’t any astronauts."

"There are the Israelis."

Uncle George shook his head. "They’ll quit soon. That always happens. We got tired and quit. The Russians got tired and quit. The Japanese got tired and quit. The Saudis got tired and quit. Pretty soon the Israelis will get tired too. I don’t know if anybody will still be doing it by the time you grow up."

Alexander was at the stage of life where historical precedent didn’t mean a damn thing to him. "That’s okay. I’m still going to be an astronaut."

"How?" Uncle George wanted to know. "You gonna build a rocket ship in your backyard?"

Alexander shrugged. "If I have to."

"And where are you going to go?"

"Venus. Saturn. Pluto. One of those places."

"Pluto," Uncle George repeated dubiously.

"It’s cold there," Alexander said. "It’s cold and Mercury’s hot. But I’ll go anywhere they want to send me. It doesn’t matter where as long as I get to go."

Faye, who was digging up a clog in the sink, grunted, "And as long as you also get to come back."

"Well, duh," Alexander said.

Much later, when the boy was watching Gilligan, Uncle George took Faye aside to bring up a concern last expressed by Mark Drier during the Saudi moon landing. "Listen, are you sure it’s a good idea to encourage him to talk about that kind of thing? Let the wrong person hear him talking about going off into space, and they’ll turn it into E.T. wanting to go home."

Faye said, "I don’t care what they turn it into. I care what my son turns it into."

"Oh, come on–"

"No, you come on. He’s eight years old. Are you going to tell him not to dream?"

"He can dream all he wants," Uncle George said. "But you have to teach him to keep some things secret. He has too many people listening to him . . . some of whom would love to hear him talk about wanting to be an astronaut. Don’t you see that they could twist that into anything? Don’t you understand that he’s gotten to the age where we’re going to have to keep a tight rein on the kind of things that come out of his mouth?"

Faye sighed. "I’m not going to keep him gagged, George."

"It’s not as simple as that–"

"I’m sorry," Faye said. "But it’s as simple, or as complicated, as my son and I choose to make it."

When Alexander was ten, he was interviewed on TV. He’d actually appeared on television any number of times before that–starting with his birth, and continuing throughout his childhood, whenever enterprising newspeople went back to Sweethaven for regular updates. But that was just news footage. This was a fully authorized, in-depth interview, promoted on prime time and aired on the highest-rated, most influential TV news magazine of its time. It was considered a coup by all involved–not only by the network and the newspeople, but also by Faye and Alexander Drier.

This was because Faye’s refusal to exploit her son’s notoriety had prevented the Driers from earning any of the millions that might have been raised by Space Boy merchandise. In supporting him, she’d been helped not only by regular checks from Alexander’s absent father, but also by her family, which had helped her maintain their home, and by her community, which had determinedly kept her employed and protected from the worst of the UFO-abduction crazies. But that hadn’t provided for much more than necessities, birthdays, and Christmases. And when Alexander, whose interest in astronautics had not faded, and whose bedroom was now overflowing with Saturn V models, Armstrong and Aldrin posters, and models of the solar system, announced that the one birthday present he wanted more than any other was a day at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, Faye had felt her back forced against a wall.

And so she finally let it be known that she was amenable to an interview. As long as whoever performed the interview did it in Washington, providing security and travel expenses for herself, Alexander, one of Alexander’s school friends (he chose Sally Watkins), the parents of the child he chose, and two relatives to be named later. So many news organizations leaped on this offer that she’d needed almost two weeks just to decide which one was least likely to provide unpleasant surprises; she chose the one she did, despite its decades-old confrontational stance toward corrupt businessmen and politicians, because it was also a fairly honorable enterprise that could be trusted to take it easier on a kid.

As a result, Alexander enjoyed several firsts: his first trip outside Wyoming, his first airplane flight, his first journey among strangers whose reactions to him could not be safely predicted, his first time speaking for himself on television . . . and one other thing, which he wouldn’t find out until two days after the interview aired.

From all accounts, he acquitted himself admirably.

There was the incident on the connecting flight to Philadelphia, when a fifteen-year-old kid across the aisle elbowed his sister and said: "Hey, look. We’ve been abducted."

"Shut up!" the sister hissed. "You’re awful!"

Instead of ignoring them, Alexander leaned over and responded in a spooky voice that carried throughout that entire section of the plane: "Actually, he’s right. And we’re not really landing in Philadelphia . . . Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!"

That made a hit. So did his unannounced appearance at the Air and Space Museum, where he found himself attracting more attention than any of the exhibits. He might have ignored the people who gathered around him to gawk. He might have gotten frightened and asked them to leave him alone. He did neither. Instead, armed with his own intense interest in the subject, he became a tour guide: pointing out the Apollo capsule, the Space Shuttle, Skylab, and everything else he recognized from his own reading, explaining what they were and where they had gone in a loud, clear voice that communicated more enthusiasm than factual accuracy. (He was, after all, a ten-year-old.) Midway through his presentation, a local news team arrived and filmed him describing how astronauts went to the bathroom in space–scooping the interview show he was slated to do in three days, but capturing for the very first time on national television his declaration that he was going to be an astronaut himself.

There was more. He went to Arlington, the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, the Clinton Museum, the Memorial for the Victims of the Toxic Spill in Honolulu. He spent one sad morning in the National Holocaust Museum, silently moving from one exhibit to another, speaking only when he encountered the Nazis’ own footage of a dwarf executed for his deformities. Alexander’s response upon realizing just how doomed his own life could have been (an angry "Were all these people stupid, or what?") made the news that night. The local anchorman joked about comments from an alien visitor. I remember wanting to kill him.

Alexander’s live interview turned out to be more than a way to cadge a free trip to Washington; it was also a masterstroke of public relations on the part of his mother. Because it was the last thing the UFO fanatics had expected: nothing more than a friendly conversation with a bright, articulate ten-year-old. Alexander talked about his favorite teachers at school, what TV shows he liked, the things he’d seen in Washington, even his dinner with the President (breaking up the host by taking that opportunity to wave at the camera and say "Hi".)

At one point the conversation turned to how Alexander got along with other kids.

Q: Do your friends make a big deal about you being famous?"
A: Sometimes.

Q: Does it change the way they treat you?
A: I don’t know. I’ve never been any different, so I don’t have any other experience to compare with.

Q: Well, let’s put it this way. When you play Star Trek, do they always make you play the alien?
A: No. We take turns.

Q: Do you play Kirk?
A: Sometimes. But everybody says I look more like Picard.

By the first commercial break, most people who’d tuned in to see the Space Boy were already realizing that this was just a smart and likeable kid. Unfortunately, most was not all, and polls revealed that there were still twenty million Americans more convinced of his extraterrestrial origins than ever before.

Part of that may have had something to do with the third segment, which turned out to be Alexander’s eulogy for the space program. He talked about John Glenn and he talked about the walk on the Moon and he talked about the space shuttle and he talked about wanting to be an astronaut and he talked about how everybody told him that wouldn’t happen and he talked about how he wanted to make sure it happened anyway. He talked about the planets and what they were like and which ones he’d like to visit if he only got a chance. He was, as it happens, particularly enthused about Mars, and he said he’d rather go there than just about anywhere else.

The final segment culminated in the moment of self-description that defined Alexander for millions of Americans:

Q: Do you really think you’ll be an astronaut when you grow up?
A: One way or another.

Q: What does that mean?
A: It means that I’ll do whatever I have to to make it happen.

Q: And then you’ll really be the boy from space.
A: No. I’ll never be the boy from space. I’ll be . . . (groping for a phrase) . . . the astronaut from Wyoming.

I was on the phone to the studio thirty seconds later.

Two days later, the Driers were surprised in their hotel suite by their network liason, Ms. Wallace. The woman’s manner was so hesitant that Faye Drier, who answered the door, immediately assumed that something terrible had happened back home.

"Oh, no," Ms. Wallace colored. "I’m sorry. It’s just . . . well, it turns out that there’s something else we’d like to ask Alexander to do for us. . . ."

Faye was on guard at once. "The deal was for one interview. Not two."

"I know, and we appreciate that . . . but this isn’t about an interview. We don’t even need him to appear on TV again. It’s . . . well, it’s somewhat special . . ." The woman peered over Faye’s shoulder, saw the pajama-clad Alexander emerge from his bedroom, and spoke more quickly, "We would have told you before, but we got almost five thousand phone calls during the broadcast . . . and, well, it took a while before this one was reported to somebody with authority to make a decision . . . "

Faye, still suspecting the worst, unchained the door and ushered the poor woman in. Ms. Wallace sat on the couch, said hi to Alexander, looked at her hands, and went on: "The call came from an . . . unfortunate young man in Georgetown. That’s a residential neighborhood here . . . "

"I know," Alexander said.

"Well, we checked this out very carefully, and he’s real. His name’s Colin Forsythe. He’s . . . well, an almost complete shut-in. Severe muscular dystrophy, can’t walk, can’t do much with his arms. He was five years old before his parents and his doctors realized he wasn’t hopelessly retarded. But he’s far from that–he got his high school equivalency at fifteen, and he’s now working on an on-line physics doctorate, through a special curriculum devised at George Washington University. He’s also a big fan of the space program, just like you. And when he saw the show, he called and asked if it was possible for you to visit him."

Faye’s frown had softened considerably. "And I suppose you want to have a camera there so you can show their conversation on television?"

Wallace shook her head: "I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t occurred to us. But we’re not asking for that. Under the circumstances, we’re just passing on the message."

Faye looked at Alexander. "It’s up to you, son. I won’t push you either way."

Alexander’s response was immediate: "Can we go right after breakfast?"

Cue me.

Alexander later said that walking into my room was like returning to his own. The obsessions on display were the same: identical posters of Buzz Aldrin vying for attention among mockups of the Saturn V, the lunar module, skylab and the space shuttle. The only real difference was that there was more of it: in part because my family had a lot more money than Alexander’s, in part because I was eight years older and had been nursing my obsession for that much longer, in part because I didn’t have any of the other distractions of childhood. I had about a thousand more books just in this room alone, and a much faster computer than the secondhand model Faye had been able to afford. And I also had one puzzling decoration, hanging in what appeared to be a place of honor, that Alexander would have to ask me about: a poster of my personal hero, an emaciated, grimacing, but oddly buoyant man in a wheelchair. (He hadn’t heard of Stephen Hawking yet.)

Of course, he also had me to look at.

Like Alexander, I can be a pretty startling sight. Because my condition manifested itself at a very young age, my arms and legs never really had a chance to develop: they’re flabby, childish things too small for the torso that connects them. Because of these proportions, I can’t use a normal wheelchair; instead, I lie strapped in a recliner that holds me much like an egg held in the palm of a hand. The brace on my neck keeps my head from lolling to the side, and my face, framed by long greasy hair and marked by what is usually two or three days of stubble, makes me look like a degenerate infant. All in all, I look like a cartoon drawn by somebody with no knowledge of anatomy. Most people seeing me for the first time avert their eyes at once; I can judge their characters by how quickly they manage to steel themselves for a second try.

Alexander, who was used to that look himself, didn’t avert his eyes at all. "Hi," he said.

My speech synthesizer responded, "Hello. Come . . . in. Sit down . . . on the bed."

He obliged. On his way over he didn’t go out of his way to maintain eye contact. But he wasn’t fighting it either; I think he was just fascinated by all my stuff. I can usually tell if I’m going to have anything in common with somebody by how frequently they glance at my bookcase. Some folks only pretend to look because they find it preferable to looking at me. But I can tell who’s faking and who’s genuinely interested. Alexander clearly saw a dozen books he wanted in the time he took just crossing the room. Then he lowered the railing on the bed, sat down, and smiled at me.

"Thanks . . . for coming," I said.

That’s the last sentence I’ll write that way. It’s there only because it’s the way I sound. The synthesizers make my voice comprehensible, but it still takes most of my lung capacity just to get out a few short syllables, so my sentences are always filled with pauses. These days, when my words are often reported for the printed page, some reporters waste entire manuscripts putting ten sets of ellipses in each sentence. It’s a cute trick, but it tends to get on the nerves awfully fast. And it’s unnecessary, too. My friends and family mentally edit out the pauses. If you absolutely need my cadences, add them yourself with a ballpoint.

Alexander said, "Well, I don’t get to meet a lot of other people interested in space. Most people think the space stuff is just me being weird because of the way I look. Even my Mom, I think."

"And your Dad?"

Alexander answered a bit too quickly. "I have no Dad."

I said, "Too bad. I have a Mom and a Dad, and they’re pretty good people, most of the time. But I didn’t call you here to talk about them. I wanted to ask. Have you ever read Heinlein?"

"Not yet," Alexander said. "I’ve seen the books around, though. The last thing I read was The Hobbit, and . . ."

I must have grimaced more than usual. "Elf Crap! God save me from Elf Crap! I’m talking about the real stuff! Science Fiction, not Elf Crap!"

Alexander was a little startled by my vehemence. "Uh . . . you mean like Asimov?"

"Or Niven or Barnes or Brunner. Any of those guys. But I’m specifically thinking of Heinlein. A story he wrote called ‘Waldo.’ All about somebody like me, with a body barely strong enough to pick up a pencil on Earth, who coped by living on a satellite in free fall. With no gravity holding him down, he could move around and do what he wanted and be as independent as he wanted to be. Of course, he also needed to be obscenely rich just to afford it. My parents are rich, Space Boy. But I don’t think they’ll ever be that rich. And I’m not exactly astronaut material, so I don’t think anybody’s ever going to send me on a mission. So that’s one dream that won’t ever come true. Not for me." I hesitated, just long enough for Alexander to know it was deliberate, and not a pause created by the speech program. "But you. Were you really serious about wanting to be an astronaut?"

Alexander blinked. It was the first time anybody had ever asked him that without adult condescension, giving it the weight of a real question. He actually had to think about it. But once he did, the resolve just clicked right into place, like one crucial piece of a puzzle he’d been assembling all his life. I could hear the surprise in his own voice as he said it: "Yeah. I was."

"You picked a hard career," I said. "There are no astronauts anymore. Even the Israelis pulled back."

"So people keep telling me."

"And so they tell me, too. What they fail to realize is that we’ve been going into space prematurely. We went before we had all the tools. We went when we knew so little that we had to spend billions just to get there and back. We went with a technology so primitive that only a miracle prevented us from having more Challenger explosions. But we went. And the more time passes, the more inevitable the second try. Because everything else we’re developing in the meantime, without even trying–more and more advanced computers, more and more advanced insulation materials, stronger plastics, more and more efficient fuel delivery systems–is going to make it cheaper and easier to go again. Before long, space will belong to corporations instead of governments." I lifted a finger for emphasis, which is about as much as I can manage. "I’ve been keeping track of those developments, Space Boy. Very close track. And my most conservative guess is that this country will be returning to space in a big way within at most the next fifteen years . . . which just happens to be my life expectancy."

Alexander blinked several times in rapid succession, as our shared dream took shape in the air between us. "Wow."

"So I ask again. Do you really want to go? Are you really willing to work hard and do whatever’s necessary?"

He was ten years old, but he grew up in that moment. "Yeah. Whatever it takes."

This time I smiled widely before I spoke.

"You just hired a manager. Do what I say and we’ll get you there."

We didn’t see much of each other for the first few years after that. Alexander still had grade school to finish, and I couldn’t travel without compelling reason. We racked up some big phone bills, though, making plans, keeping our mutual enthusiasm high, setting up supplemental courses of study, setting up an exercise regimen designed to put him in the top ten percentile by the time he reached adulthood, and–too often, for me–averting the crises that may seem like life or death at the time but are just, for most people, part of the cost of growing up. There were times, in those years, that I cursed Alexander’s absent father, not out of sympathy for my friend, but self-pity for the amount of time I had to spend giving the heart-to-hearts that a Dad would have.

Once, when Alexander blew two math tests in a row, he called me up all in a sweat to say that he was washed up. He couldn’t be an astronaut, let alone read all the tougher stuff I kept sending him, if he couldn’t even understand algebra!

I pointed out that Einstein had failed math in school, and added, "How many of the other kids in your class blew these tests?"

"About half of them. But they don’t study. I studied! I studied hard!"

"That’s your problem," I told him. "You psyched yourself out. You were so afraid of blowing it, you left yourself no other option."

"Huh?" he asked.

"Elementary psychology, Space Boy. The self-fulfilling prophecy. You were so worried about learning it, you couldn’t concentrate on what you were studying. So relax already. Go fishing or hiking or whatever you do out there in boonie-land. Take it a little at a time, and you’ll eventually pick it up."

"That’s easy for you to say. You already know everything."

There is nothing more sobering than the discovery that you’ve influenced an impressionable young mind into worshipping you. I looked at the clutter of books and papers on my desk, which I couldn’t even read unless I could first get somebody to clamp them to the book-holder attached to my chair, and at the unfinished document on my word processor, which had been mired on page fifteen since early the previous morning. "Yeah, right," I said, damning the voice-synthesizer for its inability to convey sarcasm. "I’m just writing my doctoral thesis to prove how brilliant I am."

He laughed, but it was an uneasy laugh that trailed off fairly quickly. "What if I flunk the next test, too?"

"Then it’ll be time to find yourself a girlfriend," I told him. "A smart girlfriend who can teach you math while you’re distracted."

"Yuck!" he said, and I smiled. Right on target. Now he had something else to worry about–something not related to becoming an astronaut. The stick to go with his carrot. That particular stick would only work for another year or two, of course–at which point I was sure another one would come into play–but that was the nature of our relationship. Being motivated was his job. Keeping him motivated was mine.

The threat of having to study with a girl pushed him through basic algebra, and his renewed self-confidence pushed him right back into the straight-A track he’d been on since he started school. I sent him off a fresh batch of assigned reading and went back to my thesis (a feasibility study of nuclear-powered ion rockets for a manned mission to Mars).

My advice to go fishing had unexpected consequences. He asked his Uncle George to take him, and caught half a dozen brook trout on his first time out. In the process he discovered that he liked the outdoors. He became quite the fly-fisherman, in the most remote locations he could find, enjoying it in large part because it was one place he was able to pretend, at least for a little while, that there was no difference between him and the rest of humanity. It didn’t stop him joking on the phone that his big head scared the trout the moment they saw him. I told him it proved fish had more intelligence than we gave them credit for. He threatened to use me as bait. When he sent me a picture of himself wearing a floppy hat Faye had made for him, one of those vests with a bizillion pockets on it, and hip waders, I told him he looked like a redneck.

"What’s a redneck?" he asked.

He’d lived in Wyoming for a decade and didn’t know the term. People had apparently been too busy calling him names. "A redneck is the exact opposite of a space alien," I told him.

It made his day.

Seventh grade wasn’t much trouble for him. He had to ride a bus twenty miles into Sheridan to attend junior high, but most of the kids there already knew him, or at least knew about him, so he didn’t have to face more than the usual amount of idiocy. He studied on the bus, went fishing on weekends, continued to work on improving his time for the mile, and generally enjoyed himself.

Then he really did get a girlfriend. Actually, Sally Watkins, the same girlfriend he’d had since first grade . . . but it meant something different now.

You’d have thought he’d invented teenage angst. I got phone calls at all hours of the night. He was on Mountain time and I was on Eastern, so I had two time zones working against me, but he didn’t care. He called up to report every new development, from hand-holding all the way through his first kiss to their first argument after that.

"Look," I told him one Sunday at about five a.m. "She’s a girl. You’re not supposed to understand her."

"That’s comforting."

He whined about how she was all smiles and friendly when they were alone, but hardly spoke to him at school.

"Be glad it’s not the other way around," I told him. "Now go to bed."

"That’s the problem. She wants to go to bed with me."

He sounded so forlorn I had to laugh. "This is a problem? You’re what, fifteen? And bouncy little Sally wants to jump your bones? No offense, but the way you look you’re probably not going to get a whole lot of other offers." (I was wildly wrong about that, but then I had no real experience myself and had no idea how much certain women would be attracted to novelty–let alone to the increasingly remarkable person behind the strange looks.) "I’d go for it," I told him.

"You know what’ll happen if anybody finds out," he said.

"What? Her daddy’ll come after you with a shotgun?"

"I wish. No, half a dozen tabloids will come after me with reporters. I can see it now: ‘Alien Monster Wants Our Women!’ or ‘Kill it Before it Multiplies!’ They’ll mess up my life again, and probably hers too."

It was the first time I’d heard him complain about the press. It was the first time he’d even indicated they bothered him. I took it as a sign he was growing up. "Hmm. So you’ll have to be careful. Shouldn’t be that difficult out there. There’s all those woods, right?"

"It’s October," he reminded me. "Hunting season."

He may not have been an alien, but he definitely lived in an alien land. The image of Alexander stuffed and mounted on somebody’s wall flitted through my head–not entirely unpleasantly, given what he was putting me through. I sighed and said, "Then borrow your mother’s car and use the back seat. Or sneak her into your bedroom. I don’t know; do I look like the sort of guy who knows this kind of stuff?"

There must have been an edge to my voice. After all, the sort of gymnastics he and his sweetie wanted to do would probably have killed me. Not that I stood much of a chance of ever finding out . . .

He must have suddenly remembered that he was not the only person in this conversation with problems. "Sorry, Colin," he said. "I shouldn’t have bothered you. Not with this. I’m just all confused about it and don’t know what to do." He paused, then asked, "You really think it’s okay if I–?"

"Yes, yes, go get your ashes hauled, Space Boy!" I said. "I don’t care what else you are; you’re a teenager. Now that Sally’s brought it up, so to speak, your not going to be able to rest until you’ve learned what it’s all about. So do it already, or we can both kiss your ability to concentrate goodbye."

"All right, all right," he said. "Sorry I asked."

"Stop apologizing!"

"Uh . . . okay. Sor . . . I mean, thanks."

He was about to hang up when one last thought intruded. "Hey. Remember to wear a condom."

"Uhh . . . that’s a problem." He turned all sheepish: "I’m not sure I could walk into the store and ask for a pack without causing a riot. Forget the tabloids. The news would get out, and the parents of every teenage girl within fifty miles of here would lock their daughters in their rooms."

He had a point. "Sit tight, then," I said. "Don’t do anything stupid until you hear from me again."

And so the next morning I took one of my infrequent forays out of my room, down the street in my electric scooter to the corner market, to buy a box of condoms. I bought the giant economy sized box, and grinned my silly spastic grin when the cashier gave me a "what could you possibly want these for?" look. Let her wonder.

Alex and Sally were apparently discreet. I didn’t see anything but the usual drivel in the tabloids, and I didn’t get any more frantic calls in the night for a while. Of course when they broke up a few months later I heard all about that, but it wasn’t as big a crisis as it might have been; Alex was beginning to discover that looking like an alien was a distinct advantage in the world of curious women. By the time he entered high school and started playing the "been there, done that" sophisticate, he was ten times more insufferable than he’d ever been as an anguished virgin. I hated him, and let him know it frequently.

Of course, I would have hated him even more if he hadn’t made valedictorian, let alone gotten the full scholarship I helped him apply for.

His speech was about Taking Back The Moon. He’d read it to me a week earlier. It was stirring, emotional, eloquent, and absolutely designed to get front-page attention from the tabloids. The local papers said it was brilliant. The video chip he sent me confirmed that it was. The tabloids ignored it entirely–I like to say because it was intelligent, but more likely because that happened to be the week a fifth-generation member of a certain well-known political family got caught sharing a Memphis hotel room with half a dozen bed-partners of assorted sexes and species. You know the one . . . and I’m happy to report that Alexander, being of the proper age, made as many foul jokes about the incident as everybody else did. It may not have been nice, but it was human.

My doctoral thesis was published, and I even made sure copies of it got to the right people, but only one guy had ever returned my letters. He was very enthusiastic, and I felt a brief thrill at the thought that NASA might actually do something with it, until he told me that he had rescued it out of the wastebasket in the administrator’s office. He was a janitor. He had wanted to be an astronaut, too, but that was the closest he had come.

The turnaround, when it happened, came from the last place I would ever have expected: the tabloid-reading public. Regular newspapers had long since become indistinguishable from tabloids, so that included just about everybody. Even daily papers ran articles on Elvis or Madonna sightings right beside the national news . . . and occasionally they would do a piece on Space Aliens. Alexander still got a lot of press, since he was a constant source of new photographs for them, but the article that tipped the scales for the space program was something else entirely.

Some poor drudge of a reporter, stumped for material and facing a deadline, must have been digging through back issues looking for something he could plagiarize when he ran across an article on the Martian pyramid and the mysterious face that supposedly looked out from the regolith beside it. Of course he didn’t know that the Mars Orbiter program in the nineties had pretty much debunked the whole idea with detailed photos from a hundred miles up, but if he did he wouldn’t have cared. He had an article to write, and suddenly he had a topic.

When the paper came out, demanding that the U.S. go back to Mars and find out what the face was trying to communicate to us, nothing much would have come of it if the reporter hadn’t found an ingenious way to eat up twelve more column-inches of space. He had printed a clip-out form for people to sign and send to the President.

He had no doubt intended it as a simple gag, but he had underestimated his audience’s credulity. A flood of clip-outs poured into the White House, many of them accompanied by long letters from people who couldn’t resist the chance to tell the President just why this was so important. A sizeable number of people were of the opinion that the face was Jesus. As other papers, not to be outdone, joined in with clip-outs of their own, the issue, stupid as it was, became the talk of the nation. When the President ignored the letters, papers printed more articles crying "coverup!" and exhorting their readers to send even more letters. Within a week they were arriving by the ton.

The President was no fool. He knew the controversy was ridiculous. But an election was coming up, and the economy was in the middle of a long downward slide, brought on at least in part because we weren’t fighting any wars to pump money into the big defense contractors. He needed something to toss money at. Something that would capture the public’s imagination in terms people could understand. If the public wanted to go to Mars, well then, he would lead them to Mars.

He called an old college buddy of his who worked for NASA, a former janitor who had gotten his Ph.D. and worked his way into the mission planning office, and he suggested that a Mars proposal would receive serious consideration in congress. But he would have to work fast. The election was only a month away, and the President wanted to drop a real proposal on the public at the last moment. His buddy said, "I already know how to do it," and dusted off his copy of my doctoral thesis.

Then the President called a dozen of the most influential senators and representatives into his office and showed them the piles of mail.

They were no fools either. Or maybe they were just fools enough. They were certain that a mission to Mars was a big waste of time and money, but they were willing to support it if it would get them reelected. So in a resounding speech on the night before the polls opened–way too late for a rebuttal from the opposition–NASA suddenly got its first new mandate in decades: Landing an American on Mars.

Political correctness may not be the worst affliction of the twenty-first century, but it’s certainly the silliest. Even when I was a kid people grew uncomfortable if someone called me "crippled" rather than "differently abled," but nobody could actually be fined for it. Nowadays I could pull mandatory counselling time for calling myself a crip, much less a gimp or a spaz. At the very worst I am "moto-neurally challenged," and even that has a negative connotation that makes people uncomfortable.

It also opens doors. Wide open. In their pathetic attempts to ignore reality, the arbiters of morality and sentimentality in our culture have decreed that people are not to be discriminated against in any way, not for reasons of race, creed, color, age, gender, sexual preference, marital status, economic condition–or ability. Especially not ability. Goodness no; that would mean someone was actually better at something than someone else, and that flew directly in the face of conventional wisdom.

Combine that with (a) affirmative action, which came back with a vengeance after its repeal at the turn of the century, and (b) Alex’s own marks, which now put him on the Dean’s List for the fourth straight semester, in precisely the course of study that I’d mapped out for him, and (c) my own appointment to the Project Development Committee–and Alex suddenly had a perfect shot at his dream. Every minority of any sort had to be hired in proportion to their prevalence in society, which meant that NASA had to hire the handicapped, even for a wildly inappropriate job like "astronaut."

And Alex was one of very few people who qualified as handicapped without actually being handicapped. Considering their other options, NASA was glad to accept him the moment he mailed in his application. It didn’t matter that he was still a couple of years away from graduation. In fact it helped them immensely. They had no training program in place and wouldn’t for at least two years. They had nothing really for their new astronauts to do until they created one. And in Alexander’s case, since he was merely hired as a placeholder anyway, they were happy to put him on the payroll and let him stay in school. Besides, they figured, even if he was only an astronaut in name, his very presence would keep the masses interested.

I called him up the day the news broke. It was, by the way, one of the last times I’d ever call him from the old house in Georgetown; I already had handicap-design specialists fixing up my new place in Cocoa Beach. It would require spending all my salary and much of my trust fund on attendants, drivers, custodial workers, and increased medical costs, but there was no way I’d be able to handle the job offsite–and there was no way I’d ever want to. My clock was still ticking. Still, when I called, it was Alexander’s triumph I was thinking about. My voice synthesizer chirped out a greeting as ebullient as it could manage: "Congratulations, Space Boy."

"Don’t call me that," he said. "Don’t call me that ever again."

That set me back in my anti-bedsore harness. I had called him Space Boy ever since we met. "What’s the matter? Tabloid reporters getting you down?"

"Christ yes. I–just a minute." I heard some scuffling, then he shouted, "Get the fuck out of my room!" and there was a loud bang.

"Alex?" I asked. My voice synthesizer wouldn’t shout. "Alex?"

He came back to the phone. "A couple of ’em got past the dorm’s security system."

"What was that noise? You didn’t shoot one of them, did you?"

He laughed. "I may be from Wyom-ing, but I don’t solve everything with a gun, no matter how good it would feel. No, I just kicked one of them in the balls, grabbed the other one by her tits and shoved her out of my room, and slammed the door in their faces."

"Ouch. That’s getting kind of personal, don’t you think?"

"And they’re not? I’m tired of being called ‘Space Boy.’ I’m tired of being called a freak. I’m the only guy in the world those bastards can make fun of because of the way I look, and they’re driving me crazy."

I heard more pounding as he said that, but I couldn’t tell if it was on the door or him banging on his desk. "Are you going to be safe there?" I asked.

He sighed. "I saw two big security guards coming down the hallway. I’ll be all right."

I thought about it for a minute. He was used to me pausing to catch my breath; he waited patiently until I said, "You may not want to–you should excuse the expression–alienate the press. They’re in charge of public opinion these days."

"They’re a bunch of sadistic leeches," Alexander replied.

"Powerful sadistic leeches," I countered. "Don’t piss them off if you can help it. NASA learned long ago that public opinion is what launches rockets."

"What, now you want me to let ’em in?"

"No. Never let them close to you. No interviews, nothing like that. Never even have a direct conversation with them. It would be too easy for them to twist your words around. But you can still communicate with them, and you can make them say what you want them to say."

"How?"

I was thinking out loud, but I had plenty of time to do it while I paused for breath. "Send out press releases. All the papers will receive the same text, so we can say what we want without worrying about it being misquoted." I laughed, and my stupid speech synthesizer said, "Ha, ha, ha."

"Did I ever tell you that you sound like Boris Karloff when you do that?" he asked.

"Fuck Boris Karloff," I said. "And fuck the press, too. We can feed those bastards anything we want to, and as long as it makes good copy they’ll be happy to print it."

"So what do we want to say, besides ‘Leave me alone’?"

"How about, ‘Making a bold move in support of handicapped people everywhere, Alex Drier, the so-called "Space Boy," has accepted an offer to become one of NASA’s new generation of astronauts. Despite the barrage of tasteless taunts he will surely endure because of his unusual deformity, he has chosen to take this step to demonstrate that public humiliation should not stop anyone who is truly determined to blah blah blah.’"

"Brilliant," he said, his tone of voice making it clear that I was anything but. "I especially like the ‘blah, blah, blah’ part. Truly inspired."

"Thank you. So what sucked about the rest of it?"

"You used ‘Space Boy’ yourself. And you called me deformed."

"Better we say it than the press. The way I said it, you’ll get sympathy. It’ll make the press look like the bullies they are. And the only way they can fight back is to quit printing articles about you, which is all we really want anyway."

"Well, that’s a point," he said after a moment’s thought. "Did you save that?"

Everything I say is held in a temporary scroll-back buffer. I recalled my impromptu press release and saved it permanently, then said, "Let me work on this for a few minutes, then I can transmit it to you and you can print it out and take it to the reporters."

"I thought you said I shouldn’t ever–"

"Right. Have one of your security guards take it to the reporters. Print out only ten copies, and make them fight over ’em like the snarling dogs they are." I laughed again. "Ha, ha, ha. It’s time we took the high road, metaphorically as well as physically."

It didn’t work as well as we’d hoped it would, at least not right away. The tabloids weren’t bothered by inconsistencies between their stories and anyone else’s; in their world that simply proved that everyone else was lying. We did manage to direct the stories a little bit, though, and over the next couple of years we got better at it. Enough so that the media attention at least didn’t grow any worse as Alexander became more of a public figure.

Even so, America’s first four Mars astronauts were as whitebread as the Mercury seven. And so were the second crew, and the third, and the fourth. NASA may have had to hire minorities and the handicapped and the gay-lesbian-old-Baha’i–they even hired me, as a designer, before they realized I actually knew more than the rest of them put together–but they weren’t about to staff their missions that way.

I fought it as best I could from within, but I didn’t have that much power. They were using my design for the Earth-Mars transfer vehicle, but that didn’t mean squat in the long run. If I made too big a stink, they would have thrown me right off the project without shedding a tear, and I wasn’t willing to lose that for anything.

We began testing the ion drive and the crew habitat. The lander was still mired in design snafus, but it was beginning to look like we could actually send four people to Mars and bring them back alive even if we couldn’t land them when they got there. I was busier than I’d ever been in my life, and happier, too, even if the stress was taking its toll on my wasted stamina. By the time Boeing actually delivered the lander, I could barely talk at all, and was thinking of switching over to a neural implant–one of the new generation of voice-synths that could read the electrical impulses in my brain so I didn’t have to eyeball words off a computer screen. Direct interface was becoming fairly common by that point, but it seemed like a further retreat into infirmity, and I did not look forward to taking that step.

The lander was basically an updated Lunar Module, with separate descent and ascent rockets to cut down on the weight we had to carry back into space on the return trip. That meant the crew couldn’t use it to jump from site to site on Mars, but they carried ultralight aircraft for that. It was more efficient to use airplanes anyway. We managed to squeeze two of them on board, along with enough food and shelter for a year’s stay.

The clock was ticking. Rumors started flying as to who would crew the mission, even though the selection wouldn’t be made for over a year. But Alex was out in the cold. NASA hadn’t even given him an orbital flight, and it was conventional wisdom that nobody would be sent to Mars without at least one space flight under their belt.

"What can we do?" he asked me one evening after another request for a mission had been turned down on the grounds that he was needed more in a support capacity than in space. "If I don’t get a flight soon, I’ll never even get on the backup crew for Mars."

"True enough," I said, slowly and with great difficulty. "I know how frustrating it must feel to come this far and then hit the glass ceiling, but the crew selection is out of my control."

"That’s what I keep hearing from everybody I talk to," he growled. "Except that bastard Ferris in the Assoff–" (that was what we called the Astronaut Office, where the crew selections were made) "–who just laughs."

"I’ll think of something," I told him.

"What?"

"I don’t know. Something. There’s got to be a way to show them you’re not a threat. That’s what Ferris is afraid of, after all. He knows you’re a good astronaut, but he’s afraid of the kind of publicity you’ll get if he actually sends you into space."

"Publicity!" Alex shouted. "Everywhere I turn, publicity is standing between me and my life!" He began pacing the tiny space between my desk and the door. "I hardly even left the house until I was five because my Dad was afraid of what the crazies would do. Hell, that’s why he left. Well, if NASA hired me because of the way I look, I am not going to let them use it to stop me from getting a mission!"

I wish I could say his little rant sparked me into action, gave me the brilliant idea that salvaged his career. I’d love to take credit for it, but that’s not how it happened. What happened was that he stomped out, mad, and I sat in my office until well after dark, thinking with the lights out until I fell asleep.

Alex went home and trashed out his apartment, drinking beer and getting angrier and angrier by the minute.

He should have died in a fiery crash somewhere over New Mexico. That he didn’t stands as testament to his skill as a pilot, but not to his calm reasoning ability while intoxicated, because what he did when he got mad enough was check out a T-38–the training jet the astronauts use to fly back and forth from Houston to the Cape–and roar off in a sentimental blaze of glory for San Francisco.

I don’t know who was the more surprised when they met. Alex unannounced at your door in the middle of the night could scare the piss out of practically anybody, even his dad. On the other hand, Mark Drier had aged quite a bit since Alex had last seen him. Eighteen years of straight time, the salt air of Fisherman’s Wharf, and a lifetime of regrets had all left their mark on him. Alex was taller, too, so it looked to him like his father had shrunk to hobbit size and wrinkled like an apple left in the sun.

To hear him tell it, neither one of them blinked an eye.

"Hi," Alex said.

"Hi," said Mark.

They looked at each other for a moment, then, "Can I come in?"

"Sure." His dad stood aside and Alex entered his one-bedroom apartment. It was lit by a single light in the kitchen, which revealed a reasonably tidy bachelor’s home. Dirty dishes on the counter, but not more than a couple days’ worth. Newspapers and magazines on the metal table and all but one of the creaky wooden chairs around it. Full bookshelves in the living room, and a big ship in a bottle on top of a console TV.

"You make that?" Alex asked.

"Yep."

"Looks nice. I’ve always wondered how people get the masts and sails and stuff to fit through that little hole. And how they manipulate it once it’s inside."

"Patience," Mark said. "And long sticks with tape on the end."

"You never struck me as a patient sort of guy," Alex said.

It might have been an accusation. His father chose not to interpret it that way. He just shrugged and said, "I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands. You learn."

"I guess you could." Alex sat down in the gray naugahyde recliner facing the TV. His dad sat on the couch off to the side. "Of course, I’ve never had much patience either. I guess I got that from you."

Mark Drier’s hands were shaking. "Listen, Alex, I–"

"No," Alexander said. "That’s not why I came here." He removed a tabloid from his jacket pocket. The headline read: CITY OF IMMORTALS DISCOVERED ON THE MOON. "You never did go to the press, not even after you left home. Why not?"

Mark studied the blank TV screen. "Your mother didn’t want me to."

"I doubt if she wanted you to leave, either."

"She wouldn’t have wanted me to stay, with what I was becoming." Mark looked back at his son. "I was never built to live inside a goldfish bowl. I could feel myself becoming something I didn’t want to be. I think I was actually going crazy. That would have been a disaster for you, and for her."

"You too," Alex said.

His dad snorted. "Yeah, for me too. So I did the only thing I had guts enough to do. I took myself out of the picture. Completely out, and that meant no stories in the paper, not even when I couldn’t find a job at first." He shook his head incredulously. "Did you know that your Uncle George sent me money for three months until I got my feet under me again?"

Alex felt as if he’d fallen into ice water. Uncle George had never had a good word for Mark. "He did?"

"Yep. Wouldn’t let me pay him back, either. He wrote me letters for the first couple of years to let me know how you were doing, but I–I finally asked him to stop."

"Why?" asked Alex.

"I’d already cut myself off from you," Mark said. "I’d already failed you. Every letter reopened the wound."

There was an uncomfortable silence while each man thought whatever fathers and sons think at times like these. Then Alex cleared his throat and said, "I have no problem with that, Dad. I really don’t. The only thing I have a problem with is how the media attention screwed up your life. So this may sound kind of crazy, but I want you and Mom to sell your story to the press. Auction an exclusive to the highest bidder. Run the price up into the millions and retire on the proceeds."

Mark laughed. "Nobody’d pay for our story now."

Alex leaned forward in his chair. "They would if you told them they were right about me all along."

Next stop, Wyoming.

Insert a picture of Faye screaming at the top of her lungs. Alex said his ears actually rang afterward. She nearly threw him out of the house, and it was two hours before she allowed Mark to cross the threshold. Only because the idea had come from Alex did she even listen, and only because Mark said he didn’t want to do it either did she finally decide to go ahead with it.

"I certainly hope you know what you’re doing," she told Alex. "This could kill your career faster than a spacesuit failure."

"Mom, my career is already dead. This is a last-ditch effort to pump some life into it."

"Last ditch effort to make fools of us all," Mark said softly, but he was beyond arguing at this point. He had cast his fate to the winds long ago, and was happy to drift wherever they took him. He was looking around at the house he had left nearly two decades earlier, noting that it needed paint and wondering how the roof was holding up. He had carefully avoided looking too long at Faye, because every time he did that he felt something go wonky in his chest.

"I’m trying to make fools of NASA," Alex protested. "If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears. Metaphorically speaking, of course." He tweaked the tiny little flaps on the sides of his head. Mark looked away; Faye laughed.

"I still don’t see how it’s going to help," she said.

"Leave that up to me. You just make up the most outrageous story you can think of. Abduction, genetic experiments, off-planet meetings with the Imperial Space Command–even Elvis–whatever you want."

"I don’t want to have anything to do with it," Faye protested, but she was already weakening. Twenty years of stubborn rationality in the face of rampant crackpottery had left her creative side screaming for release. She actually yearned for a chance to play the loon, at least once. And if it helped her son, she would make sure it was a doozy. The promise of a couple of million dollars didn’t hurt her creativity, either.

Alex was back in Houston by the time the story came out. He’d spent his final day of relative obscurity briefing the other astronauts, so when Ferris called him into his office to express his false condolences for the unfair treatment he was getting in the press, Alex was ready for him.

"No, they’re absolutely right," Alex said. "I’m a space alien."

Ferris nearly split a seam. "What?"

"Well, I must be." Alex walked over to the window and looked out at the lush grounds three floors below. "I mean, why else would NASA be holding back a perfectly good astronaut? They’ve got to be afraid of what’ll happen if they send him into space. And the only possible reason for that–"

"You’re insane!"

"–is because they’re afraid he’ll steal the spaceship and go home." He turned back from the window. "Or could it be that NASA’s simply afraid the press will make fun of them? Well, welcome to the world of Alex Drier. Now my problem is your problem."

"You can’t seriously think this . . . this circus is going to get you a mission," Ferris said, snapping his index finger against the headline.

"I have no idea what will get me a mission," Alex said. "Hard work and determination certainly wasn’t good enough. Busting my butt to help train every other astronaut in the corps wasn’t good enough. Keeping a low profile to allay your paranoid fear wasn’t enough. So I decided to let my parents make some money while they still could. If that means taking some media heat again for a while, well, what’s the harm in it? I’ve survived it before. And I’m grounded anyway, aren’t I?"

Ferris loosened his collar. "Look, I’ve told you a million times–"

"Are you or are you not afraid of the publicity?" Alex demanded. "If you can sit there behind your desk and tell me with a straight face that the media attention doesn’t scare you–while you’ve got a copy of the Times right there on top of the heap–then I’ll go pack my bags and join a freak show. But if that’s why you’ve been holding me back, I and every other astronaut in the project will tell the press not only that I’m a space alien, but that this whole project is the result of rays beamed into our heads from the mothership orbiting the north pole of the Moon."

"You can’t orbit a pole," Ferris said contemptously.

"Damn right you can’t. And I’m not a space alien, either, but that’s what everyone has agreed to say until you stop treating me like one."

"This is blackmail!" Ferris shouted.

"This is a fucking wake-up call," Alex shouted back. "I’m the best damned astronaut this project has got and everybody knows it. I’m the most dedicated, the most coordinated, the most physically fit, and with the exception of Mary Paiz, I’m the smartest. If you don’t believe me, look at the reports from your own doctors and shrinks. There’s only one reason I haven’t been in orbit yet, and one reason why I’m being shoved off the Mars mission, and that’s because you’re afraid the press will make fun of you for sending a guy with a big head into space." He snatched up the newspaper and flung it into the wastebasket. "Well, that’s where your fear belongs, and that–" he pointed straight upward "–is where I belong. It’s your call. But this most assuredly is not blackmail, because your worst nightmare has already happened."

Ferris suspended him, of course.

He was still free to do what he wanted on-site; he just didn’t have any official responsibilities any more. So he spent the next couple of days in the simulators, practicing launch and landing and docking maneuvers. He even spent long hours in the ultralight scout simulator, learning how to fly the ungainly fabric-covered jets in Mars’s thin atmosphere. He told me later he figured it was the closest he would ever get, so he wanted to spend as much time there as he could before he was fired.

Ferris noted what he was doing, and took it as another example of arrogant pride. Drier was so damned sure of himself he kept training even when he was suspended! But the techs kept feeding Ferris the performance ratings, and the numbers spoke for themselves. Alex successfully landed on Mars with three thrusters out and a fourth one stuck at full throttle. He correctly diagnosed and shut down a leaking fuel pump in mid-ascent before it could explode, and finished the launch and docking with only two out of three engines. He rode out a duststorm in an ultralight, conserving power and fuel by gliding in the updraft on the windward side of Mons Olympus until the weather cleared enough for him to land. And he survived the death mission, the one that was supposed to end with a headlong crash into Mars no matter what the astronauts did to compensate for all the malfunctions on the way down.

"How did he do that?" Ferris demanded of me when he saw the results. I was the engineering genius; I was supposed to have designed the simulation to be foolproof.

"I didn’t think about deploying the scout planes after the parachutes failed," I said. My delight was so great that I spoke at almost normal speed. "Sure, doing that adds drag, but it also means jettisoning both thruster quads on the lower stage and burning up the fuel you need for the return mission in the upper stage quads just to stay upright. He landed it all right, but he would never have gotten it back into orbit."

"Don’t bet on it," Ferris said. "That bugeyed bastard did this while his oxygen supply was down to practically zip and the cabin was shaking like a box falling downstairs. The T-handle broke off in his hand–which was NOT part of the simulation–and he fixed it with duct tape without letting the lander pitch over in the process. If there’s a way to fix the damage after he got down, I’ll bet he’d find it."

"Changing our tune, are we?" I asked him.

He glowered at me. "My tune is none of your damned business. But yes, it’s conceivable that I might have made a mistake regarding him. I just hope it’s not too late to correct it."

"We don’t launch for eleven months," I reminded him.

"I’m aware of the launch window," he replied. He left my office without saying goodbye.

His first mission was nothing special. I say that with such aplomb, knowing that anyone who goes into space for even the most routine mission thinks it’s the most fantastic thing that ever happened to them. Alex was no exception, even though he got spectacularly sick the first day.

His was the first landing mission. The mission before his had tested the Mars Descent and Ascent Module, known affectionately as MADAM, in low Earth orbit. Docking and flight maneuvers had gone well, so the next logical step was to try landing it somewhere. Earth was out of the question, since the engines only developed three-quarters of a g of thrust, but that didn’t mean they had to take it all the way to Mars untested, either. There’s a perfect testing ground only 240,000 miles away.

It’s so perfect a person might even be tempted to say God put it there to help us on our way to greater things. That was one theory proposed when the Middle Eastern fundamentalists raised a stink about us returning to profane the Moon they had so recently cleaned up, but it did little to pacify them. The US government didn’t really care. By then we were so tired of the constant squabbling that came from that part of the world that we just ignored them and went on about our business.

Alex didn’t get to actually land on the Moon. That would have been too much publicity even for a repentant Ferris to handle. But he did get to ride along in the Earth-Mars transfer module and test out its recreation facilities while the lander crew did their thing below.

He had fun playing with the entertainment and exercise equipment, the scientific instruments, and so forth. That stuff had all been tested a million times on the ground, but he dutifully put it all through its paces so we could detect any on-site problems before we sent a crew out with it for a two-year mission. About the only thing he found out of spec was a warble in the CD player, which sent Pioneer into a tizzy for a couple of days until the problem was traced to a power supply drain from the gyroscopic stabilizers.

When he tested the surround-sound theatre system, he of course played Communion Part Six. Of the alien hysteria movies that came out when he was young, that was the one that most closely paralleled his actual life. It was also the cheesiest and most embarrassingly bad one, with the aliens stomping around flatfooted like Frankenstein monsters and sucking the blood from the poor residents in the fictitious town of Rattlesnake, Montana. Alex had always loved that one, and he hooted and laughed through all two hours and seven minutes of it while Mission Control listened in on the hab module’s live audio feed. When word got out that that’s what he was watching, it started a minor stampede to the video stores to rent copies of it, and the movie even enjoyed a brief comeback in theatres.

It also reminded people how stupid their fears over his appearance had been. An embarrassed America quietly returned a lot of DVDs to the video stores, and the nostalgia theatres switched over to Batman Seventeen in mid-week.

The guys on the Moon landed without a hitch, got out and did a walk-around inspection, practiced a few of the things they would need to do on Mars, then gathered up some rocks for the geologists back home, climbed back inside, and blasted off for rendezvous again. They didn’t leave any beer cans behind to intentionally irritate the Saudis, but the lower half of the lander and an inflatable dome are still sitting there doing a fine job of that. And they did deploy and assemble one of the ultralight aircraft for practice at doing it in low gravity with spacesuits on, so now there’s a fully assembled airplane sitting on the airless Moon, fueled and ready to puzzle the hell out of anybody who comes along after humanity has vanished into history.

The ascent stage took them back into orbit without mishap, and they flew the hab module back to Earth on a long spiral that took them another two weeks, just to test out the recyclers and fuel cells and so forth. When they finally splashed down, three weeks after they left, Alex was beaming from tiny little ear to tiny little ear. He’d made it to space.

And he was on the backup crew for Mars. When the announcement came out, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Backup crew. This was a one-shot mission; unless the first crew discovered underground cities or something like it, he wouldn’t get another chance.

"Cheer up," I told him. "Maybe somebody on the prime crew will get hit by a bus."

Some days I look back on that moment and wonder if there really is something behind all the superstitions people have developed since we learned how to rub sticks together to make fire. Don’t say your dreams out loud or they’ll never come true, don’t break a mirror or you’ll get seven years of bad luck, and most assuredly don’t say anything that will tempt fate, at least without knocking on wood when you say it.

I’m practically paralyzed, okay? I couldn’t knock on wood if my life depended on it. I don’t believe in that crap anyway. But that didn’t stop Randy Parker from stepping out into traffic on a busy London street–instinctively looking to the left instead of the right for approaching traffic–and winding up under a tour bus filled with tennis fans on their way to Wimbledon.

It was the first time I ever allowed myself to think–even for a moment, even as grim whimsy–that maybe this Space Boy stuff had some substance after all. Maybe there was a mothership, manipulating things Alexander’s way. Maybe that was the only way to account for the way things had always seemed to work out for him.

The difference between me and the UFO nuts is that I’m capable of looking at that hypothesis and saying "Naaaah."

And besides, I don’t consider Alex preternaturally lucky anymore.

Not at all.

Randy Parker’s death put Alex on the mission, along with Dave Anderson, Mary Paiz, and Shawnee Sanders, three straight arrows with test scores and simulator records almost as high as his. The press had fun with the idea of sending two couples to Mars. They weren’t couples, but nobody denied the probability that they would become couples on the way. It was even worked into the mission profiles, albeit secretly. And if you want me to talk about who did what to whom, you’re reading the wrong account. I bring it up because some people have suggested that sexual dynamics led to what eventually happened on Mars; it makes good tabloid fodder, I suppose, but that’s not what happened.

As for me, I had plenty of engineering snafus to take care of. The hardware worked amazingly well, which for a project this complex meant we still had one or two major complications a day. Most of them were simple malfunctions that we could fix and forget about, but a few turned out to be design flaws and those had to be reengineered. Those were the scary ones, because you never knew if your changed design would work any better than the first one, or if the different configuration would have a ripple effect that would knock out something else. Toward the end I felt like we were sending four people out into space in a vehicle made more of hope and prayers than of hard metal.

They say a painting is never finished, only abandoned. It shouldn’t be that way with spaceships, but the sad truth is that you can always improve the design. Launch windows won’t wait for a perfect ship, though, and funding is a finite resource, so all you can do is make the best ship you can with the time and materials you’ve got, and then trust the astronauts to keep it working throughout the mission.

We didn’t do a bad job. I can say with great pride that the spaceship didn’t kill anyone. Technically neither did the scout planes, though when a man’s body lies a few hundred feet from a crash site it’s hard to say that the plane didn’t kill him. But even if we’d known about the takeoff instability, we’d still have sent the planes along and hoped for the best. It was too late to redesign them, too late to change the mission profile, too late to do anything but light the rockets and go.

On launch day, the Cape was packed for a dozen miles in every direction, and every television in the country was tuned to the NASA channel. I think it was finally soaking in to a whole generation of people that we were once again doing something great, that there was more to life than just the day-to-day grind. We were about to explore another planet!

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when the clock ticked down to zero and the Saturn VI bellowed its liftoff roar across the palmettos. Even the people who thought it was a waste of money were whispering, "Go, baby, go!" while the rocket struggled to lift the spaceship into orbit. I was in the control center, and people later told me that my speech synthesizer was saying, "Don blah huh," over and over again, but what I was really saying was, "Don’t blow up, don’t blow up!"

Miraculously, it didn’t. The Saturn put them into orbit, the final stage launched them out past the Moon for a gravity assist, and the ion rocket kicked in and propelled them gently on toward Mars.

The tabloids went especially nuts during the eight months it took our guys to get there; the grinning vacuousness that seems to affect all astronaut transmissions meant for public consumption–even Alexander’s, I’m sorry to say–palled after only a couple of weeks, and was replaced in the headlines by rampant speculation over the "real" reason for the mission. Surely it was a humanitarian gesture to take Alexander home! Or a rendezvous with the Aztecs known to inhabit Olympus Mons! And just what kind of torrid romantic doings were really going on when the cameras weren’t rolling? The most amusing of the stories were faxed to the crew until Mary Paiz, speaking for them all, sent back a transmission asking us to stop. If Alexander had a reaction, he didn’t show it.

After that they lived in their own private little world. Their recycling equipment kept them alive and healthy, and the entertainment system and scientific instruments (indistinguishable from their point of view) kept them sane, and before they knew it they were braking into orbit around Mars.

They spent a few days sending out communications satellites so they would be in constant contact with each other no matter how far apart they got on the ground, mapping their landing site, and making sure the automatic instruments would continue to take pictures and other readings while they were gone. Then when they were sure their transfer vehicle would be warm and waiting for them when they got back, they climbed into the lander and headed down.

No waiting in orbit for one poor astronaut like the Apollo guys had done. All four went to the surface, and all four would contribute equally to the exploration. We had enough missions planned for everybody to have their fill.

They landed in the Valles Marineris, down at the lower end where there would be lots of flood debris and erosion would have exposed plenty of geological strata for them to study without digging. The valley was so wide at that point that the sides were over the horizon, and all of it was flood plain. The ultralight airplanes would allow them to range farther afield, but that’s where everyone expected the action to be.

Except the tabloid-reading public, of course. They wanted to know about the face and the pyramid. Never mind that photos from orbit showed two unassuming hills and a few eroded craters; people were sure that an on-site investigation would turn up alien artifacts by the truckload. When they learned that NASA had scheduled an ultralight flyby only after all the other mission objectives had been met, the ruckus could be heard all the way to Mars.

NASA didn’t budge. We released new photos from orbit showing the same thing we already knew from the last orbital survey, and the crew went on about the business of setting up their dome and making their first cautious forays into the Martian wilderness.

Cautious was the word. Mars is barely more habitable than the Moon. The air is thin and mostly carbon dioxide, so the astronauts had to wear pressure suits at all times, but there’s just enough of it for a cold wind to suck the heat out of a suit in practically no time. A single mistake could be fatal, and everyone made their share of mistakes. Not long after they got there, Mary slipped with a rock hammer and punctured her pressure suit, but Alex dragged her back to the dome and tossed her inside before she ran out of air. Dave didn’t reinstall one of the dome’s two air recycling canisters properly after he recharged it and nearly asphyxiated them all in their sleep. Shawnee stayed out too long after dusk and nearly froze to death before she could make it back to the dome.

And the ultralight airplanes turned out to be much trickier to fly than we had hoped. The problem was mostly on takeoff and landing, when they made the transition from hovering on their jet exhaust to actually flying. Mars’s atmosphere is too thin to make a rolling takeoff practical, especially on rocky ground, so the ultralights were designed like Harrier jets, with vectored thrust engines that could be rotated downward for takeoff and landing. Problem was, at inbetween angles they really affected the wings’ lift, and there was a configuration in the middle where the engines didn’t have enough thrust for the plane to hover anymore and the wings didn’t have enough lift for it to fly, so if you weren’t moving fast enough when you went through that phase you fell like a rock.

Alex found out about it the first time he took one of the planes up for a test flight. He was going through the checklist, calling out his actions as he rose to about fifty feet, brought the nose up, and increased the thrust for flight, when he crossed through the dead zone. "Throttle up to eighty percent, engines running smooth, tilting forward to–shit!" The stall warning buzzer overrode his voice for a moment, then his words became intelligible again as he said, "–nose down, throttles to full, gaining speed. Starting to feel some response to the controls. Okay, I think I’m flying now, but that didn’t feel right at all. I’m going to bring it around for a visual."

"Roger," Dave said. "I’ve got the binks on you. Don’t see anything wrong from here, but maybe when you come around. You sure you don’t want to land?"

"Not until I find out what happened," Alex said. He had the pilots’ almost instinctive urge to put air rather than rock beneath him when he had a problem. He banked the plane around and did a slow pass over the dome–slow being about a hundred miles an hour in the thin Martian air.

Dave gave him a close inspection with binoculars, but didn’t see anything wrong. "Looks copacetic, ol’ boy," he said.

The ultralights were mostly wing, since Mars’s atmosphere is so thin. Alex waggled them a little, then jounced the plane up and down a bit with the elevator. "Flies like a pregnant cow," he reported. "Just like it did in the simulator. But I never felt anything like that dropout before. I’m going to take it up a ways and see if I can repeat it."

"You sure you want to do that?" Dave asked him.

"I don’t want to try landing until I know what happened," Alex replied.

Back home at mission control we were all pulling our hair out. We had a man in the air with a problem–a hundred and fifty million miles away. What we were hearing had happened thirteen minutes ago. Alex could have been dead already and we wouldn’t know it until the radio signal carrying his last words caught up to us. We had people in the simulator trying to figure out what had happened up there the moment we heard there was a problem, but even if they figured it out instantly, it would be thirteen more minutes before their solution helped Alex any.

So we hung onto our butts and gritted our teeth while we listened to Alex calmly describe everything he did. "Climbing through eight thousand. I can see quite a ways from up here. Man oh man, a hell of a lot of water must have come through this canyon. It looks like it was cut with a fire hose. Okay, I’m at ten oh and slowing. Bringing the engines backward to hover. Angle at ten, twenty, thirty–there it goes! Get back here, you bastard! Throttling up and tilting on back to forty, fifty, sixty. Airspeed down to forty, thirty, twenty. It’s looking stable now. Hovering like a balloon. Plenty of control. It’s just in that transitional phase where it all goes to hell for a second."

He tried switching back over to forward flight, and sure enough the same thing happened, so he brought it to a stop again and tried it over and over until he learned how to compensate for it. "All right, here’s what we’re going to have to do," he said as he dropped back down toward the base for a landing. "It’ll suck fuel like a tank rupture, but we’ve got to go up and down like an elevator for at least a thousand feet before we switch flight modes, ’cause we’re going to lose a couple hundred feet in transition."

Mary said, "Why the hell didn’t they figure that out back home?"

"Who knows?" Alex said. "Planes always act squirrelly at low speed. They couldn’t test these things in partial vacuum for more than a few seconds at a time, ‘cause they don’t have a vacuum pump that’ll keep up with a wind tunnel. And they sure as hell couldn’t test it at a third of a gee." He laughed. "I’ll bet they’re scurrying to figure it out now."

He was right about that. Everybody involved in the ultralight design ran for days without sleep trying to understand what had happened and how to correct for it with materials the Mars crew had on hand. They figured it out, too, and cobbled together a fix out of an empty fuel tank and duct tape that reduced the instability to about half what it was originally, but that was the best they could do. The problem was inherent in the wing design, and there wasn’t anything they could do on site to correct for that.

So the crew went on with their jobs, flying planes that were ready to smash them into the ground at a moment’s notice. It was either that or forget about ninety percent of the mission objectives, but this was our only shot at Mars. There was no money for another mission, and even if the money miraculously showed up in the budget, these four wouldn’t be going back. There wasn’t any question what they would do. I’d have done the same thing in their place.

I keep telling myself that.

For months nobody had any more problems with the planes. All four astronauts flew them dozens of times each, and they got so used to the instability that we nearly forgot it was there. With all the new discoveries the crew were making about Mars we had so much else to think about that the airplane problem faded into the background.

When we lost the first plane it had nothing to do with the flight problem anyway. A dust storm got it during the night, plucked it away like it had never been there. Alex said the crew never even heard a noise. They just looked out in the morning after a hard blow and saw that it was gone, and the other plane was missing a couple feet of fabric at the end of its left wing.

They were able to fix that easily enough and go on flying. Fortunately there weren’t that many flights left in the mission plan. They had accomplished all the major objectives, and now they were working their way down the "wish list," the extra projects that they could do if there was time before their launch window opened for the return trip to Earth.

One of those was a long-range flight to check another site on the planet for signs of life. They had found dozens of tantalizing clues, including rocks like the one found in Antarctica that contained what might have been fossilized microbes, and colored layers of sediment that had unusually high concentrations of carbon, but they hadn’t found proof that life had ever existed on the planet, much less that it existed now. That was the one big question everyone wanted an answer to, and it was looking like the crew was going to come home empty-handed.

They had already flown the two-thousand-mile length of the canyon, so when Alex proposed taking a flight of similar length northward to check out another site, nobody argued that the distance was too great. Nobody argued much at all until he revealed his intended landing site: the pyramid and face in Cydonia.

Maybe it was his idea of a practical joke. Or maybe it was revenge. He knew that actual video footage of the area taken from a low-flying plane would ruin the site forever as an object of new-age pseudoscience. Maybe he wanted to get back at the tabloids that had made his life miserable. We’ll never know. All we know for sure is that he justified his choice by pointing out that the geology at Cydonia was different from what they had been studying, so since they had come up empty-handed on the search for life where they were, it made a good candidate for further exploration.

And going there incidentally fulfilled the wishes of a large portion of the population who had paid for the mission.

Nobody missed the irony of sending the "space alien" to check out the site. I think Alex probably enjoyed that. And he certainly enjoyed the idea of getting out by himself for a few days. With the prospect of another eight months in a can with his three crewmates coming up, he wanted as much solitude as he could soak in before they left.

So he packed his toothbrush and enough food and water for a week, and took off for Cydonia. He would have to spend a couple of cramped nights sleeping in the cockpit of the plane, but he didn’t care about that. He had camped out plenty of times in pup tents on fishing trips in Wyoming; he was used to sleeping in tight quarters.

This had to be the happiest time in his life. Here was a kid from a small western town, a strange-looking kid that practically the whole world had made fun of–making a solo flight a sixth of the way around Mars. He was exactly where he wanted to be, and he’d gotten there despite all the superstitious, credulous, and downright malicious people who stood in his way. And not only that, but he had made his mother proud. Hell, he had made his father proud, and that’s saying something.

A straight route would have taken him to the east of the Chryse site where Viking 1 had landed, but he took the extra time to fly over it, swooping low and circling around to take pictures of the fragile little lander sitting there on the boulder-strewn plain.

Everyone back home had grown familiar with images of the habitat site from the air. Its bubble and lander and power generator provided a comforting picture of home away from home, a place we could all imagine ourselves living in our dreams. The Viking probe had the exact opposite effect. It looked lost down there among the rocks, a tiny speck of technology amid a vast, forbidding landscape, its dish antenna still pointing into the sky like a hand reaching for the planet it could never touch again.

"That’s, um, the Viking probe," Alex said quietly after his third circle around it. "I guess I’ll be going on to Cydonia now."

By the time he got there, hours later, his sense of humor had returned. As he approached the pyramid and the face, his onboard video camera showed the now-familiar rounded hills and craters that we know them to be, but he talked as if an entire Martian city were unfolding beneath him.

"Oh my God!" he said, "there it is. Look at the buildings, and the elevated walkways, and the flags waving from the tops of the towers. They look like–yes, yes, they’re Buffalo on a field of blue! They’re Wyoming flags! Proof positive that this is the site of a massive government coverup. And there’s the face. Is it a space alien? Sorry to say it doesn’t look a thing like me. In fact it looks more like my dad. Hi, Dad." He banked the plane around so the bumpy hill was right in front of him. "Look, it’s speaking! What’s it saying? Looks like, ‘Nyah, nyah, fooled you!’ And now it’s fading away. Yes, it’s turning into just an ordinary hill with craters in it. Oh, what cruel fate!"

He banked away. "Well, what a disappointment that was, eh? I guess I’ll just land over there by what used to be its chin and see about doing some real science."

Mary, who had been monitoring his signal over the satellite link, was laughing out loud. Most of us at Mission Control were, too, but a few people weren’t. Space flight was a popularity game, and Alex had just cost us some supporters.

He didn’t care. I never got the chance to ask him, but I know what he thought of that kind of support anyway.

He brought the plane in high, making his customary "Yee-ha!" yell as he went through the roller coaster moment, then set it down light as a feather on the rocky ground at the base of the hill. He jumped out and tied down the wings so a stray gust of wind wouldn’t blow away his ride home, then turned around and trudged through the rocks to see what he could see.

He did not send another transmission for seventeen minutes.

When he did, there was a peculiar strained quality to his voice. "Mary," he said. "Houston. I’ve found something."

The tone of Mary Paiz’ answering transmission clearly showed that she expected another joke announcement. "Copy, Buck."

"No kidding, Wilma. Hold on. Going to visual." He switched on his video camera and broadcast an image of a jagged stone in a field of other stones. "See this?"

"Wonderful rock, Alexander."

"Not the rock. This patch here." His finger prodded a shadowy area. "See this? Well, close up it looks like velvet."

"Velvet?" asked Mary.

"Yeah. It’s fuzzy, and I can’t get light to reflect from it, not even from my helmet lamp. It looks like–" He paused.

"Like what?" Mary said.

"I was going to say ‘lichen,’ but it’s soft," he said. "Springy. Like some kind of . . . " His reluctance to say the word was palpable.

After about five seconds of dead silence–which seemed like the longest hesitation in the history of the solar system–Mary prompted him again. "Alex? Come in, Alex."

The broadcast image grew as Alexander zoomed in. He described the image out loud in case the transmission wasn’t getting through. "Okay. Reality check. At ten power I see little stalks with cup-shaped ends, all packed together so there’s hardly any space between them. They’re stuck to the rock by more little cups that look quite a bit like the ones on top. I’m trying not to be too credulous here, but that’s definitely an organized structure. A biological structure."

"Are you shittin’ me?" Mary asked.

"Live transmission," Alex reminded her. "But no, I’m not. This is for real. They look like plants of some sort."

"Holy . . . . Wow. And us with less than a week left on the planet."

"Well, you know how it is. You don’t find the souvenirs you want until the end of your vacation."

"Do you see any more?"

"Let me look." Alex stood up and panned around at the other rocks. "Yeah," he said. "Five or six patches of it. No, more than that. Oh, there’s a big one. Must be three inches across."

"Get samples," Mary told him.

"Duh," he said. His voice barely betrayed the excitement he had to be feeling, but the biomonitors in his suit told a different story. His heart was racing, and his skin temperature had risen a couple of degrees. He knew he’d just made the history books again, and this entry would dwarf the one about Drier’s syndrome or even the first mission to Mars. He was now the man who had discovered the first indisputable evidence of extraterrestrial life.

He spent the next two days scraping stuff off rocks, digging in the ground for other organisms, and climbing up and down the hill looking for anything else he could find. He even bagged up one entire rock a couple of feet across because it had four different kinds of growth on it and he thought maybe it would provide some idea of how the Martian ecosystem worked.

And then it was time to head back. He packed his samples in the plane, strapped everything down, and lifted off for home. He took the plane up a few hundred feet, tilted the engines forward–and dropped like a rock.

And kept dropping. Long after the wings should have caught enough air to start flying, the plane still generated no lift. "Shit," Alex said, "there must be a downdraft. Increasing thrust to max."

The plane kept dropping. In one-third gee, he had plenty of time to watch the ground come up at him, but his biomonitors showed his pulse rate barely rising. "It’s not going to work in flight mode," he said. "Transitioning back to hover mode." He angled the engines back. "Come on, you dirty bitch. Come on, come on!"

We heard the impact. It sounded like someone had dropped a dictionary on a beer can.

"Alex?" Mary called out. "Alex, are you okay?"

"Well, I’m down," he said, "but I wouldn’t say I’m okay. Both engines broke loose in the crash. They’re doing cartwheels across the rocks now. There, one of ‘em stopped. The other one’s still rolling around like a pinwheel." He coughed. "Damn. Bit my tongue."

"Are you . . . can you . . . ?"

"Fix the plane? I don’t see how. Even if the engines still work, the wings are crumpled like tin foil. But it looks like I’m going to have to figure something out, doesn’t it?" He didn’t state the obvious: there was no backup plane to come get him.

He got out of the wreckage and hiked through the rocks to the closest engine. It had been battered so badly that it was barely recognizable. The other one had tried to suck in a rock as it was winding down, and what was left of the turbine lay scattered all around it.

"Looks like time for plan B," Alex said.

There was no plan B. Everyone wracked their brains for a way to get an astronaut two thousand miles back to base without a plane, but there just wasn’t any. He wouldn’t make a tenth that distance on foot. Dave suggested going for him in the landing vehicle, but Alex vetoed that idea right away.

"It’s not designed for suborbital flight," he said. "Besides, even if you could restart the lower stage and fly it, you’d have to rob fuel from the upper stage, and then all four of us would be stuck on the ground until our food and air ran out. If we don’t get back into orbit within the week we’ll miss our launch window."

"We can’t just leave you there," Dave said.

"I’m all for rescue if you’ve got a realistic plan, but using the lander isn’t going to work."

At Mission Control, we had to concur. That was the hardest decision I ever made in my life, even though I was just part of the engineering group and even though I knew there wasn’t a real decision. We might have risked the other three for a chance to save Alex, but we wouldn’t doom all four of them just to make a vain attempt.

I wasn’t the capcom on this mission, but I was Alex’s best friend, so I got to deliver the bad news. There was no way to hold a conversation with the speed of light lag what it was, so I just made a short speech and had my voice synthesizer remove all the pauses before transmitting it. I won’t transcribe it here; all the radio messages from the mission are on file for the curious. There’s only one thing to say in a situation like that anyway. You say you’re sorry that things worked out the way they did, and you’re going to miss your best friend very much, but you want your other friends to come back home safe, dammit, so don’t try anything stupid.

There were a lot of tearful goodbyes. Alex’s mom and dad talked with him a couple of times, and he told them not to worry, that he’d had a pretty full life and no regrets. "I’d have come here even if I knew in advance that this was how it would end," he said. The newspapers made quite a deal out of that, and for the first time since Alex was born some of them ran an entire article without once mentioning his physical appearance.

Mary wasn’t ready to give up. She cursed us all, including Alex, and tried to convince Dave and Shawnee to defy orders and try the lander anyway, but Dave had backed off from that idea after he’d seen how impossible it was, and Shawnee merely said, "Over my dead body. No offense, Alex."

Alex said, "None taken."

Launch time came, and with a great deal of argument but no real hope left, Mary and Dave and Shawnee climbed aboard the lander and rode it back into orbit. The transfer vehicle was still waiting, snug and warm, to take them back to Earth.

And Alex? He did the only thing left for him to do. He studied the lifeforms he had found and transmitted his findings back to us. He told us how the organisms’ cupped tops followed the sun, how they closed up at night, and how the whole colony moved, ever so slowly, around the face of the rocks over the course of the day. They weren’t quite plants, and they weren’t quite animals. They were something else entirely. Alex’s description of them was incredible, exciting like nothing else humanity had ever experienced, but we couldn’t forget that we were learning it from a man whose time was rapidly running out.

He couldn’t either. Occasionally his voice would crack, and he would stay quiet for a few minutes while he got his emotions under control again. Those of us listening were sniffling and wiping our eyes as well. By then we numbered at least half the people on Earth, since the TV networks as well as the NASA channel had started live coverage. I was pissed that they hadn’t bothered until someone was about to die, but that’s the way the media do things. Science by itself isn’t interesting; human drama is what gets the ratings.

Alex knew that. He hadn’t spent a lifetime under the media bug-lens without learning what played well and what didn’t. He must have been planning his final speech since the moment he knew he was stranded. It wasn’t a long one–he knew the average viewer’s attention span, too–but he said what he wanted to say at the one moment in his life when he knew people would hear it. And maybe even listen.

It came in the middle of day five. He had had a hard time the previous night, nearly freezing in the crumpled ultralight’s tiny cabin when the outside temperature had dropped to minus-sixty. The plane’s batteries were dead and his suit batteries were nearly gone as well; he kept from freezing by exercising constantly, which burned up air faster than his recycler could keep up with it. He was down to practically nothing by morning; it was clear he wouldn’t survive another night.

He spent half the day finishing up what observations he could make, describing what microscopic details of the "planimals" he could see with the portable sampling kit, but just a little after noon, Cydonia time, he stopped and said, "I think it’s time we all had a little talk."

The video camera was dead by then, so all we have to go on are the radio signals and the orbital camera’s pictures of his footprints, but it seems apparent that he climbed up the flank of the hill above the ultralight, stopping at the "chin" and looking south as he spoke.

"I am standing here on an alien world," he said. "I’ve been called an alien myself over the years, so maybe it’s appropriate that this is where I wound up. I certainly can’t ignore the irony of my final resting place, a hill with some craters on it that made so many people think there was life on Mars. And so there is, but it has nothing to do with mysterious monuments to anthropocentric thinking."

He laughed softly. "Anthropocentric. Look it up. It’s a dirty word, but it’s in the dictionary." He must have sat down on a rock; we could hear his pressure suit creak. "I wish each and every one of you could see what I see here. Mars is nothing like Earth. It’s got a volcano the size of the United States and a canyon so wide that you can stand in the bottom and not see either side. When I woke up this morning there was dry ice on the ground. Frozen carbon dioxide. The air froze here last night. It’s like that everywhere I turn. There are more wonders here than we could even begin to imagine . . . and I’m here to see them because we were crazy enough to come look."

He sighed. "Why can’t that be the thing that excites our imaginations? Why must we waste our minds and our energy on delusions that we should have put aside long ago? Faces on Mars. Alien abductions. Imaginary beings dictating our lives at every turn. What’s wrong with us? We have brains, we have senses; why can’t we use them to understand the universe around us rather than make up elaborate fantasies and pretend they’re the truth?

"Well, here’s a truth for you. I am Alexander Drier. Like the rest of you, I’m a human being. And from this moment on, like the rest of you, I’m a Martian. We all became Martians the second humanity set foot on this world, and because of what we’ve learned here we’ll all carry a little bit of Mars around with us for the rest of our lives.

"Does that somehow diminish our humanity? Of course not. It means we’re more human. Because only human beings could have gotten here. We dreamt it, we wanted it, we built it, and we did it. And Mars will always be here, a beckoning light in the sky for anyone else with a dream and the determination to see it through.

"I want you to remember that, when you look at the new face on Mars." He stood up and walked back down the hill, out into the sandy plain beyond.

"New face?" asked Mary, in equatorial orbit a third of the way around the planet.

"You’ll see," Alex replied.

They didn’t see for several hours, until the polar mapping satellite made its pass over him. By then he’d made most of one circuit and he was well into a second one, scuffing up the soil with his boots like a kid making designs in fresh snow.

It was a bit lopsided, as patterns drawn on the ground without surveying instruments often are, but it was perfectly recognizable. A long oval, ballooning out on one end and narrowing down to a pointy chin on the other. Big, almond-shaped eyes filling nearly half the enclosed space. Two little dots for a nose and a single line for a mouth, bent upward at the ends in a goofy grin. Alexander Drier’s own caricature.

"Alex, what the hell is that for?" Mary asked when she saw it.

"A . . . reminder," he said. His voice was ragged and he was panting hard. "Besides, people wanted . . . a face. Who am I to deny them?"

She laughed, but it turned into a sob. "I’m sorry, Alex. I’m sorry it has to end like this."

"Me too," he said, "but believe me, it’s better than it might have been. At least I got here. Oof!" There was a thump over the radio.

"Alex?"

"S’all right. Tripped on a rock. It’s getting hard to see. Look, I don’t have much daylight left, or air either, and I don’t really want to make people listen to me die, so I’m going to shut off my radio."

"No! Alex, you don’t have to die alone."

"I’m not alone. I’ve got you, and Mom and Dad, and Colin, and Uncle George, and everybody. I’ve got all these little whatever-they-ares growing on the rocks all around me. I’ve got the whole universe right over my head. I’m not alone."

"That’s not what I meant. I meant–"

"I know what you meant, but that’s not the way I want to go. Look, it’s time. Everyone out there, I love you. Try to love each other, too, okay? This is Alexander Drier, signing off."

There was a click as he switched off his radio.

The next pass showed where he had fallen. He had made it back around to the chin, and had lain down with his arms and legs outstretched, a tiny body to go with the face he had drawn. The orbital camera’s resolution wasn’t good enough to tell if he had opened his suit or not, but he wouldn’t have lasted long either way. With night falling and the temperature plummeting, he would have frozen to death in minutes.

The face didn’t last a month, of course. The next windstorm obliterated his tracks, leaving only his body and the crumpled remains of the ultralight airplane as evidence that anyone had ever been there.

But we knew. Alex’s last days wouldn’t fade from our memory, not for as long as anyone looked up in the night sky and wondered what was out there.

Mary and Dave and Shawnee made it back to Earth with only the usual harrowing adventures. Congress cut NASA’s budget the next year, but not as bad as we had been afraid they would, so we cautiously began work on our next phase in exploring our solar system: an orbital habitat that people can actually live in long enough to travel to the outer planets. The first prototype will be tested for a couple of years in Earth orbit, then leased out to the highest bidder for living space. I figure I might just survive long enough to rent some cubic there myself. It won’t be Heinlein’s Waldo, but it’ll be something for an old man who can barely move here on Earth.

In the meantime, life lurches along the way it usually does. The newspapers still carry horoscopes, but they’re not on the front page anymore. Government scandals and student unrest have taken up that space again.

And of course the latest Alien Shocker.

Three months ago a boy was born in Mississipi with Drier’s Syndrome. His parents are good but simple people who hadn’t expected a media feeding frenzy at their front door, but they knew opportunity when they saw it. They’ve been portrayed as country hicks who ran afoul of an alien mad scientist, but they’ve already bought a house on fifty acres, fenced and guarded by a dozen rent-a-cops until they can find enough rottweilers and dobermans to do the job for free.

That solved their external problem, but internally they’re still going through the same thing Mark and Faye went through nearly thirty years ago.

The Driers aren’t answering their mail, so the mother wrote me a plaintive letter, begging me to help her understand her child. Among the things she asked was a simple, straightforward question: Is my son a spaceman?

I intend to answer with the only truth I know, taught to me by my friend, the astronaut from Wyoming.

That’s up to him.

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