Space Stations

Marta sat back in her chair and started to unseal her suit liner, thinking fondly of the gloriously wasteful bath to come. Maybe she would even let Estiban cover the gate survey while she ran over to L-5 for a few days to spoil her grandchildren. “The previous evening I'd beamed Director Tarrischall some new musical selections and we'd been talking about them over the director's channel just before we'd gone on duty. One of the songs was Glenn Miller's classic 'Seven O Five.' ”

“This gave time of cycle initiation,” Tarrischall added smugly. “Standard Human Earth song, standard Human Earth time, five minutes after seventh hour, Greenwich

Meridian.”

“Also the version of 'Seven O Five' I'd sent Tarrischall was exactly two minutes and fifty five seconds long. That gave us our cycling time.”

“I see.” The interviewer said slowly. “Ingenious. But that still leaves one question, Director Tarrischall. I understand that it was critical that one gate or the other had to start this magnetic cycling to clear the wormhole. Your team was the one that led off. How was that decided? Did you risk the communications between our words on a hunch, a guess?”

Tarrischall snort growled a nontranslatable profanity “_____guess! We knew! Easiest part of all. Friend-Marta and I have nice music, I am male, she female. We dance!”

“Dance?” The interviewer was totally bewildered now.

“Of course,” Marta Lane smiled a tired smile no one would see. “Back in the good old days the gentleman always led.”

MIKEYS

by Robert J. Sawyer

Dubbed “the dean of Canadian science fiction” by The Ottawa Citizen, Toronto's Robert J. Sawyer is the author of the Hugo Award finalists Starplex

, Frameshift, Factoring Humanity, and Calculating God, and the Nebula Award winner The Terminal Experiment. His story from the DAW anthology Sherlock Holmes in Orbit won France’s top SF award, Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and his story from the DAW anthology

Dinosaur Fantastic won Canada’s top SF award, the Aurora. Rob’s latest novel is Hybrids, third volume in his Hugo Award-winning “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy. His website at www.sfwriter.com has been called “the largest genre writer's home page in existence” by Interzone.

DAMN, but it stuck in Don Lawson's craw—largely because Chuck Zakarian was right.

After all, Zakarian was slated for the big Mars surface mission to be launched from Earth next year. He never said it to Don's face, but Don knew that Zakarian and the rest of NASA viewed him and Sasim as Mikeys—the derisive term for those, like Apollo 11's command-module pilot Mike Collins, who got to go almost all the way to the target.

Yes, goddamned Zakarian would be remembered along with Armstrong, whom every educated person in the world could still name even today, seventy years after his historic small step. But who the hell remembered Collins, the guy who'd stayed in orbit around the Moon while Neil and Buzz had made history on the lunar surface?

Don realized the point couldn't have been driven home more directly than by the view he was now looking at. He was floating in the control room of the Asaph Hall, the ship that had brought him and Sasim Remtulla to Martian space from Earth. If he looked left, Don saw Mars, giant, red, beckoning. And if he looked right, he saw—

They called it the Spud. The Spud, for Christ's sake!

Looking right, he saw Deimos, the outer of Mars' two tiny moons, a misshapen hunk of dark, dark rock. How Don wanted to go to Mars, to stand on its sandy surface, to see up close its great valleys and volcanoes! But no. As Don's Cockney granddad used to say whenever they passed a fancy house or an expensive car, “Not for the likes of us.”

Mars was for Chuck Zakarian and company. The A-team.

Don and Sasim were the B-team, the also-rans. Oh, sure, they had now arrived at the vicinity of Mars long before anyone else. And Don supposed there would be some cachet in being the first person since Apollo 17 left the Moon in 1972 to set foot on another world—even if that world was just a 15-kilometer-long hunk of rock.