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the rest. Just too many old bastards like me, too few of them to look out for us, no decent jobs for
them to do.
Sometimes, though, he wished he'd just taken a T-38 up high over the Mojave, and gone onto the
afterburner, and augured in on those salt flats. Maybe after Geena had died, leaving him stranded here,
that would have been a good time. It would have been clean. A few winter rains dissolving that ancient
ocean surface; by now you wouldn't even be able to tell where he'd come down.
Outside the light was flat and hard. He squinted up, the sweat already starting to run into his eyes. Not a
shred of ozone up there. The home stood in the middle of a vacant lot. There was a freeway in the middle
distance, a river of metal he could just about make out. Maybe he could hitch a ride into town, find a bar,
sink a few cold ones. Screw the catheter. He'd pull it out in the john.
He worked his way across the uneven ground. He had to lean so far forward he was almost falling, just
to keep going ahead. Like before. You'd had to keep tipped forward, leaning on your toes, to balance
the mass of the PLSS. And, just like now, you were never allowed to take the damn thing off for a
breather.
The lot seemed immense. There were rocks and boulders scattered about. Maybe it had once been a
garden, but nothing grew here now. Actually the whole of the Midwest was dried out like this.
He reached the freeway. There was no fence, no sidewalk, nowhere to cross. He raised an arm, but he
couldn't keep it up for long. The cars roared by, small sleek things, at a huge speed: a hundred fifty, two
hundred maybe. And they were close together, just inches apart. Goddamn smart cars that could drive
themselves. He couldn't even see if there were people in them.
He wondered if anyone still drove Corvettes.
Now there was somebody walking towards him, along the side of the road. He couldn't see who it was.
The muscles in his hands were starting to tremble, with the effort of gripping the frame. Your hands
always got tired first.
There were two of them. They wore broad-rimmed white hats. 'You old bastard.' It was Bart, and that
other one who was worse than Bart. They grabbed his arms and just held him up like a doll. Bart got
hold of the walker, and, incredibly strong, lifted it up with one hand. 'I've had it with you!' Bart shouted.
There was a pressure at his neck, something cold and hard. An infuser.
The light strengthened, and washed out the detail, the rocky ground, the blurred sun.
He was in a big room, white walled, surgically sterile. He was sitting up in a chair. Christ, some guy was
shaving his chest.
Then he figured it. Oh, hell, it was all right. It was just a suit tech. He was in the MSOB. He was being
instrumented. The suit tech plastered his chest with four silver chloride electrodes. 'This won't hurt a bit,
you old bastard.' He had the condom over his dick already. And he had on his faecal containment bag,
the big diaper. The suit tech was saying something. 'Just so you don't piss yourself on me one last time.'
He lifted up his arm. He didn't recognize it. It was thin and coated with blue tubes, like veins. It must be
the pressure garment, a whole network of hoses and rings and valves and pulleys that coated your body.
Yeah, the pressure garment; he could feel its resistance when he tried to move.
There was a sharp stab of pain at his chest. Some other electrode, probably. It didn't bother him.
He couldn't see so well now; there was a kind of glassiness around him. That was the polycarbonate of
his big fishbowl helmet. They must have locked him in already.
The suit tech bent down in front of him and peered into his helmet. 'Hey.'
'It's okay. I know I got to wait.'
'What? Listen. It was just on the TV. The other one's just died. What was his name? How about that.
You made the news, one more time.'
'It's the oxygen.'
'Huh?'
'One hundred per cent. I got to sit for a half hour while the console gets the nitrogen out of my blood.'
The suit tech shook his head. 'You've finally lost it, haven't you, you old bastard? You're the last one.
You weren't the first up there, but you sure as hell are the last. The last of the twelve. How about that.'
But there was an odd flicker in the suit tech's face. Like doubt. Or, wistfulness.
He didn't think anything about it. Hell, it was a big day for everybody, here in the Manned Spacecraft
Operations Building. 'A towel.'
'What?'
'Will you put a towel over my helmet? I figure I might as well take a nap.'
The suit tech laughed. 'Oh, sure. A towel.'
He went off, and came back with a white cloth, which he draped over his head. He was immersed in a
washed-out white light. 'Here you go.' He could hear the suit tech walk away.
In a few minutes, it would start. With the others, carrying his oxygen unit, he'd walk along the hallways
out of the MSOB, and there would be Geena, holding little Jackie up to him. He'd be able to hold their
hands, touch their faces, but he wouldn't feel anything so well through the thick gloves. And then the
transfer van would take him out to Merritt Island, where the Saturn would be waiting for him, gleaming
white and wreathed in cryogenic vapour: waiting to take him back up to the lunar beach, and his father.
All that soon. For now, he was locked in the suit, with nothing but the hiss of his air. It was kind of
comforting.
He closed his eyes.
Afterword
The stories collected here date from 1987 to 1995.
The title story has a long history. I first drafted it in 1987 as a short action-adventure tale which didn't
really come off. After editorial comments I redrafted, and the story was accepted by a small press
magazine which folded without publishing my tale. I put it aside for a while, then redrafted the story totally
in 1990. Traces has some elements in common with my Xeelee Sequence tales the GUT drive, for
instance but it isn't part of that universe.
Many reviewers have commented on similarities between Traces and Arthur C. Clarke's great story The
Star. This was unconscious, but The Star is one of my favourite stories, by my favourite author, and
Traces is one of my own favourite pieces.
Lord Byron's poem Darkness reads like an apocalyptic vision of the future, but I wondered if it could
have some more intriguing explanation. I was inspired to work on this idea, incidentally, by a holiday near
Wordsworth's home in the Lake District.
My good friends Rob Holdstock and Christopher Evans, who bought The Droplet, had me change the
ending to spare George in the first draft he was killed. I think they were right.
No Longer Touch the Earth was inspired by the notion that if Aristotle had been right about all those
crystal spheres in the sky, it would have made no difference to anyone save a few dusty
astronomers until Scott reached the South Pole. Hermann Göring, star of No Longer, shows up again,
as a bit-part player in Mittelwelt.
A Journey to the King Planet grew out of some speculation I read about anti-matter comets. My first
notion was to give anti-ice to those great explorers the Carthaginians, but I couldn't make the ancillary
technology plausible. So Planet became a proto-steampunk romp, and as such was an important story
for me: my first try-out of a mode of writing which would lead to my novels Anti-Ice and The Time
Ships. Planet has some elements in common with Anti-Ice, but is not part of the same universe. I always
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