The Hercules Text

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

| | | FOREWORD | | |

When we first talked about reissuing The Hercules Text, I knew immediately that I’d have to update the original novel. Its computer technology was out-of-date. The Cold War, which fueled much of the narrative, was long over. Not only in the sense that the superpower confrontation has, if not ended, at least substantially cooled. But our national mind-set has also changed. Who today would believe that a major power might seriously consider launching a preemptive strike over a question of weapons development, a scenario that was front and center in the original Hercules Text? Somehow it seemed not entirely implausible in 1986.

It’s possible that my original perspective was simply deranged. But it didn’t feel that way then. I can still recall the nuclear-attack drills in high school, during which we descended, in an orderly manner, down to the basement cafeteria and sat under tables, which would presumably protect us when the bomb dropped. At home, left over from my father’s days as a WWII air-raid warden, we had a bucket of sand for tossing on fires. For some reason we never threw it out. It served as a reminder that terrible things were possible.

In 1962, at the height of the Berlin Crisis, I was driving home on the Baltimore–Washington Parkway, headed for Philadelphia. At the time there was major construction going on, crews building overpasses and widening highways, but catastrophe seemed so imminent it was difficult not to wonder why we were bothering. The night was thick with the conviction that it was all going to get knocked down in the near future.

It didn’t happen, of course, a reality for which we can be grateful to a series of U.S. presidents and Russian premiers who kept their heads. Had they not been there, today’s world might have been little more than a pile of smoldering ash.

But the current reading public has a different perspective, and so it seemed prudent to go back and reframe The Hercules Text in the light of these happier times. I’ve done that, and the experience has left me, as the original effort did in 1986, with the suspicion that we do not really want to hear from the stars. No matter how hard we root for SETI. And no matter what the outsiders may have to say to us. No news is good news.

| | | ONE | | |

Harry Carmichael sneezed. His eyes were red, his nose was running, and his head ached. It was mid-September, and the air was full of pollen from ragweed, goosefoot, and thistle. He’d already taken his medication for the day, the latest antiallergen. It seemed to accomplish little other than to make him drowsy.

Through the beveled stained-glass windows of the William Tell, he watched the Ramsay Comet. It was now little more than a bright smudge, wedged in the bare, hard branches of the elms lining the parking lot. Its cool, unfocused light was not unlike the cool glow of Julie’s green eyes, which seemed preoccupied with the long, graceful stem of her wineglass. She’d abandoned all attempts to keep the conversation going and sat frozen in a desperate solitude. She felt sorry for Harry. He could see it in the set of her jaw, in her tendency to gaze past him, as though a third person hovered behind his right shoulder. Years from now, he suspected, he would look back on this evening, remember this moment, recall the eyes and the comet and the packed shelves of old textbooks that, in the gloomily illuminated interior, were intended to create atmosphere. He would remember his anger and the terrible sense of impending loss and the numbing conviction that he was helpless. That nothing he could do would change anything. But most of all, it would be her sympathy that would sear his soul.

Comets and bad luck: It was an appropriate sky. Ramsay would be back in twenty-two hundred years, but it was coming apart. The analysts were predicting that on its next visit, or the one after that, it would be only a shower of rock and ice. Like Harry.

“I’m sorry.” She shrugged. “It’s not anything you’ve done, Harry.”

Of course not. What accusation could she bring against faithful old Harry, dull Harry, who’d taken his vows seriously, who could always be counted on to do the decent thing, and who’d been a reliable provider? Other than perhaps that he’d loved her too deeply.

He’d known it was coming. The change in her attitude had been gradual but constant. The things they’d once laughed over had become minor irritants, and the irritants scraped at their lives until she came to resent even his presence.

So it had come to this, two strangers carefully keeping a small round table between them while she used a shining knife and fork to slice methodically into beef that was cooked a little more than she would have preferred.

“I just need some time to myself, Harry. To think things over a bit. I’m tired of doing the same things, in the same way, every day.” I’m tired of you, she was saying, finally, with the oblique words and the compassion that peeled away his protective anger like the skin on a baked potato. She put the glass down and looked at him, for the first time, it might have been, during the entire evening. And she smiled. It was the puckish, good-natured grin that she traditionally used when she’d run the car into a ditch or bounced a check. My God, he wondered, how could he ever manage without her?

“The show wasn’t so good either, was it?” he asked drily. The William Tell was a dinner theater, and they’d just suffered through a dreary mystery-comedy. Although Harry could hardly be accused of having made an effort to follow the proceedings. Fearful of what was coming later, he’d spent the time trying to foresee and prepare for all eventualities, rehearsing responses, defenses, explanations. He’d have done better to watch the performance.

The final irony was that there were season tickets in his pocket.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t really care much for it.” She didn’t add anything that might have given him comfort, that she was distracted, that it was a difficult evening, that it was hard to keep her mind on anything so trivial while her marriage was disintegrating. Instead, she surprised him by reaching across the table to take his hand.

His love for her was unique, the only truly compelling passion he had ever known, the single element that fueled his days, that gave purpose to everything he did. The passing years had not dimmed it; had in fact seeded it with the shared experience of almost a decade, had so entwined their lives that no emotional separation would be possible, now or ever. Harry would not be able to leave her behind.

He took off his glasses, folded them deliberately, and pushed them down into their plastic case. His vision was poor without them. It was an act she could not misinterpret.

Bits and pieces of talk drifted from the next table, where two people, slightly drunk, whispered angrily at each other about money and relatives. Harry and Julie had never done anything like that. Relations between them had always been cordially correct. Even when, at last, the knife had come out.

A handsome young waiter, a college kid probably, hovered in the background, his red sash insolently snug round a trim waist. His name was Frank. It was odd that Harry, who usually forgot incidental names immediately, should remember that, as though the detail were important. Frank arrived every few minutes, refilling their coffee cups, asking whether he could get anything else for them. Near the end, he inquired whether the meal had been satisfactory.

It was hard now to remember when things had been different, before the laughter had ended and the silent invitations, which had once passed so easily between them, stopped. “I just don’t think,” she said abruptly, “we’re a good match anymore. We always seem to be angry with each other. We don’t talk—” She looked squarely at him now. Harry stared back at her with an expression that he hoped suggested his sense of dignified outrage. “Did you know that Tommy wrote an essay about you and that idiot comet last week? No?

“Harry,” she continued, “I don’t exactly know how to say this. But do you think, do you really believe, that if anything happened to Tommy, or to me, that it would have any real impact on you? That you’d even notice we were gone?” Her voice caught and she pushed the plate away and stared down into her lap. “Please pay the bill, and let’s get out of here.”

“It isn’t true,” he said, looking for Frank the waiter, not wanting to endure a scene in the restaurant. But Frank was preoccupied. Harry counted out some twenties, dropped them on the table, and stood up. Julie slowly pulled her jacket around her shoulders and, with Harry in her wake, strode between the tables and out the door.

Tommy’s comet hung over the parking lot, splotchy in the September sky, its long tail splayed across a dozen constellations. Last time through, it might have been seen by Socrates. The data banks at Goddard were loaded with the details of its composition, the ratios of methane to cyanogen and mass to velocity, of orbital inclination and eccentricity. Nothing exciting that he had been able to see, but Harry was only a layman, not easily aroused by cold gas. Donner and the others, however, had greeted the incoming telemetry with near ecstasy.

There was a premature chill in the air, not immediately evident perhaps because no wind blew. She stood on the gravel, waiting for him to unlock the car. “Julie,” he said, “ten years is a long time to just throw away.”

She watched a van pull into the lot. “I know,” she said.

—

Harry took Farragut Road home. Usually, he would have used Route 214, and they’d have stopped at Muncie’s for a drink, or possibly even gone over to the Red Limit in Greenbelt. But not tonight. Painfully, groping for words that would not come, he guided the Chrysler down the two-lane blacktop, through forests of elm and littleleaf linden. The road curved and dipped past shadowy barns and ancient farmhouses. It was the kind of highway Harry liked. Julie preferred expressways, and maybe therein lay the difference between them.

A tractor-trailer moved up behind, watched its chance, and hammered by in a spasm of dust and leaves. When it had gone, its red lights faded to dim stars against dark forest, Harry hunched forward, almost resting his chin on the steering wheel. Moon and comet rode high over the trees to his left. They would set at about the same time. (Last night, at Goddard, the Ramsay team had celebrated, Donner buying, but Harry, his thoughts locked on Julie, had gone home early. She seemed not to have noticed.)

“What did Tommy say about the comet?” he asked.

“That you’d sent a rocket out there and were bringing a piece of it back. He promised to take the piece in to show everybody.” She smiled. He guessed it took an effort.

“It wasn’t our responsibility,” he said. “Houston ran the rendezvous program.”

He felt the sudden stillness and sneezed into it. “Do you think,” she asked, “he cares about the administrative details?”

The old Kindlebride farm lay cold and abandoned in the moonlight. Three or four pickups and a battered Ford were scattered across its overgrown front yard. “So where do we go from here?”

There was a long silence that neither of them knew quite how to handle. “Probably,” she said, “it would be a good idea if I went to live with Ellen for a while.”

“What about Tommy?”

She was looking in her bag for something. A Kleenex. She snapped the bag shut and dabbed at her eyes. “Do you think you could find time for him, Harry?”

The highway went into a long S-curve, bounced across two sets of railroad tracks, and dipped into a tangled forest. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

She started to reply but her voice betrayed her, and she only shook her head and stared stonily through the windshield.

They passed through Hopkinsville, barely more than a few houses and a hardware store. “Is there somebody else?” he asked. “Someone I don’t know about?”

Her eyelids squeezed shut. “There’s nobody else. I just don’t want to be married anymore.” Her purse slid off her lap onto the floor, and when she retrieved it, Harry saw that her knuckles were white.

—

Bolingbrook Road was thick with leaves. He rolled over them with a vague sense of satisfaction. McGorman’s garage, third in from the corner, was brightly lit, and the loud rasp of his power saw split the night air. It was a ritual for McGorman, the Saturday night woodworking. And for Harry it was an energetic island of familiarity in a world grown slippery.

He pulled into his driveway. Julie opened her door, climbed smoothly out, but hesitated. She was tall, a six-footer, maybe two inches more in heels. They made a hell of a couple, people had said. A mating of giants. But Harry was painfully aware of the contrast between his wife’s well-oiled coordination and his own general clumsiness.

“Harry,” she said, with a hint of steel in her voice, “I’ve never cheated on you.”

“Good.” He walked by her and rammed his key into the lock. “Glad to hear it.”

The babysitter was Julie’s cousin, Ellen Crossway. She was propped comfortably in front of a flickering TV, a novel open on her lap, a cup of coffee near her right hand. “How was the show?” she asked, with the same smile Julie had shown him at the William Tell.

“A disaster,” said Harry. He didn’t trust his voice sufficiently to elaborate.

Julie hung her cardigan in the closet. “They did all the obvious gags. And the mystery wasn’t exactly a puzzle.”

Harry liked Ellen. She might have been a second attempt to create a Julie: not quite so tall, not quite so lovely, not nearly so intense. The result was by no means unsatisfactory. Harry occasionally wondered how things might have gone had he met Ellen first; but he had no doubt that he would in time have betrayed her for her spectacular cousin.

“Well,” she said, “it was a slow night on the tube, too.” She laid aside the book. The strained silence was settling into the room. She looked from one to the other. “It’s getting late,” she said. “Gotta go, guys. Tommy’s fine. We spent most of the evening with Sherlock Holmes.” That was a reference to a role-playing game. Tommy enjoyed being Watson and loved prowling the tobacco shops and taverns of 1895 London in the company of the great detective.

Harry could see that Ellen knew about their problem. It figured that Julie would have confided in her. Had she known that her cousin intended to end it tonight?

Ellen kissed him and held him a degree tighter than usual. Then she was out the door, Julie strolling casually behind, and he heard them talking in hushed tones on the walkway. Harry shut off the television, went upstairs, and looked into his son’s room.

Tommy was asleep, one arm thrown over the side of the bed, the other lost beneath a swirl of pillows. As usual, he’d kicked off the spread, which Harry adjusted. A couple of Peanuts books lay on the floor. And his basketball uniform hung proudly on the closet door.

He looked like a normal kid. But the upper right-hand drawer of the bureau contained a syringe and a vial of insulin. Tommy was a dia...