Then a man screamed. A hideous sound: high-pitched, jagged, and brutal. Forrest looked wildly around the empty lab. But Sek
The naked man was Forrest.
Sek
“What’s he doing here?” snarled Esbwe, backing away and glaring at Forrest. “Now we’ll have to eliminate the bastard, and that wasn’t in the bargain.”
“I’ve been living under a madman’s heel,” said Sek
Esbwe howled in fury. “Don’t touch it! It’s mine!”
A lash of her tail sent him skidding into a wall. The knife plunged, violent and precise, into the hollow of the doll’s collarbone. She stared at the wet ruin.
“I don’t know why I never realized,” she murmured. “I don’t have to wait. I can seize power, I can make my own rules, give myself in place of Gemin if I must.”
“Don’t talk like that,” said Forrest. “Sek
“Why would you do that, man from somewhere else?”
Forrest, smiling with his eyes, drew her close, and kissed her brow—
But something was happening. Were the palace guards rushing in? No, it was his hands, they were breaking up, vanishing. He felt a shock, strangely familiar, this had happened to him before … It was PoTolo’s method. The sky raft must be over the drop zone.
“Sek
She laid her hand against his heart. “I know.”
3. THE BLACK STONE
WHEN THE ORBITS WERE ALIGNED ONCE MORE, JOHN FORREST returned to West Africa to repeat his stunt for a select group of scientists. He arrived before the guests and joined Dr. PoTolo, alone in the lab. Nothing much had changed, in the room with the big windows looking out to the sunset horizon. John Forrest, dressed as before in wilderness kit, also seemed unchanged; except that he was in a better temper.
“That thing,” he said, nodding at the oily black globe in its chamber. “Your time-travel gizmo. Does it have to be held like that, in the container?”
“No, it just has to be in the room.”
“What happens if I touch it? Sudden death? Radiation sickness?”
“You can touch it. I wouldn’t advise you to keep it in your pocket for a week,” said PoTolo, a little bolder, a little less intimidated, this time.
“You’re dispatching me to the exact place and time where you picked me up?”
“As requested, I’ll be using the complex of space-time values recorded during the successful retrieval. But you should know, Mr. Forrest, it isn’t that simple.”
On the previous occasion Forrest had disappeared at sunset and reappeared, mysteriously bedraggled, an hour before dawn. The interval (in local time, West Africa) did not, necessarily, indicate the length of his stay, or even prove that Forrest had arrived on the surface, and Forrest was no help. It was puzzling. But the proof that the probe had visited a habitable Ancient Venus was safely recorded in the data, and it was very, very convincing.
“You still remember nothing?”
Forrest puckered his lower lip and shook his head. “Nothing at all, alas.”
“We’ll do better this time. We have a memory-retrieval brain scanner on hand, we’ll pluck the images straight from your head before they can vanish.”
Forrest smiled politely, thinking of Sek
Her promise, which he was about to put to the test.
The guests assembled. There was some chatter, some flattery. He stood in the gate.
All eyes were on the human element in the apparatus. Nobody noticed that the globe had gone from its place. Hands in his pockets, he looked to the west, where Hawa herself was lost in cloud, but the stars that he would never see again were beginning to shine out.
The world disappeared.
JOE HALDEMAN
Here’s a pilot on a desperate rescue mission after a disaster on Venus who soon finds that he might need rescuing himself … and who makes a discovery that changes everything we know about life.
Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman took a B.S. degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland, and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. He sold his first story to Galaxy in 1969, and by 1976 had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the seventies. He took another Hugo Award in 1977 for his story “Tricentennial,” won the Rhysling Award in 1984 for the best science-fiction poem of the year (although usually thought of primarily as a “hard-science” writer, Haldeman is, in fact, also an accomplished poet, and has sold poetry to most of the major professional markets in the genre), and won both the Nebula and the Hugo Award in 1991 for the novella version of “The Hemingway Hoax.” His story “None So Blind” won the Hugo Award in 1995. His other books include a mainstream novel, War Year, the SF novels Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, There Is No Darkness (written with his brother, SF writer Jack C. Haldeman II), Worlds, Worlds Apart, Worlds Enough and Time, Buying Time, The Hemingway Hoax, Tools of the Trade, The Coming, the mainstream novel 1968, Camouflage (which won the prestigious James Tiptree, Jr., Award), Old Twentieth, The Accidental Time Machine, Marsbound, and Starbound. His short work has been gathered in the collections Infinite Dreams, Dealing in Futures, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, None So Blind, A Separate War and Other Stories, and an omnibus of fiction and nonfiction, War Stories. As editor, he has produced the anthologies Study War No More, Cosmic Laughter, Nebula Award Stories 17, and, with Martin H. Greenberg, Future Weapons of War. His most recent books are a new science-fiction novel, Earthbound, a big retrospective collection, The Best of Joe Haldeman, and a novel Work Done for Hire. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife, Gay, make their home.
Living Hell
JOE HALDEMAN
MAYBE I SHOULD HAVE STAYED ON MARS.
That’s a sentiment repeated so often here on Venus it’s right up there with “I should have read the fine print.” About a third of the people here first did a stint on Mars, and I guess we thought that Venus had to be better. Wrong as rain.