L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume 33 Read online

  The ceremony took several hours with the grand prize announced at the very last. To my surprise, I won the L. Ron Hubbard Golden Pen Award, and my life has never been quite the same since.

  After the awards ceremony, I had several editors—not just one—approach me and ask to see my first novel. I had prepared a novel outline, but I’d only brought a couple of copies, so I didn’t know which of the eight editors to give them to. I took their cards and then contacted a literary agent a few days later.

  By the end of the week, my agent had contacted several of those editors, and I was given my first three-novel contract.

  Well, that’s how the Contest goes. It has grown a lot in the past three decades. Now it is one of the largest writing contests in the world, and each quarter it seems to get even bigger. Thousands of new writers send in entries, and the Contest still provides the large prizes and the annual workshop taught by some of the most respected names in the field.

  Only two years after I won, the companion Illustrators of the Future Contest was also added, using a very similar format, with three winners added per quarter, and a grand prize winner selected each year.

  In the past thirty years the Contests have helped launch dozens of writers and illustrators to stardom, and I suspect that the Contests will continue to launch many more careers. At one time, I was one of the bedazzled entrants. Now I’m the lead judge for the writing Contest.

  Yet each time that I open a story to read it, I still feel hopeful. I’m hoping to find some young man or woman who is struggling to live their dreams, and help pull them into the spotlight where they can be discovered by thousands of others.

  That’s what this Contest is all about.

  So read on. There are some authors and illustrators in this book that I want you to meet. I guarantee that some of them will be around for many, many years. This is your chance to discover them along with me.

  Moonlight One

  written by

  Stephen Lawson

  illustrated by

  Jason Park

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Stephen Lawson lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, a rabbit, and a pair of bee colonies.

  Stephen spent five years on active duty with the Navy after high school and deployed three times. His carrier battle group deployed on September 19, 2001 as part of the immediate response to 9/11, which eventually became Operation Enduring Freedom.

  He has a business administration degree from Asbury University, and is currently pursuing an MBA.

  He divides his time between church, writing, education, and a career as an officer in the Kentucky Army National Guard.

  Stephen’s first publications were in Toasted Cheese Literary Journal’s Dead of Winter writing contest. He also won first place in On The Premises’ 25th contest with his story “Gifted.”

  He considers his biggest influences to be Michael Crichton, C. S. Lewis, Robert Heinlein, and team-writers Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Jason (Jihoo) Park was born in 1998, in Seoul, South Korea. From there he went on to study abroad in Canada for over six years.

  Ever since he was a child, Jason was curious about everything. He just had to ask what every single thing was, how it worked, and if he could have it. He has been enjoying and practicing many forms of art from a very young age. Influenced and supported by his family, Jason eventually decided what he was going to pursue. It happened one summer day, when Jason was watching a series of inspiring movies. It occurred to him that being part of the production of movies and games could be his future. It was something that he had always wanted, yet never known was possible.

  Now after two years of preparation and a lot of support, Jason will move forward by vigorously studying entertainment design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

  Moonlight One

  Now

  Gwen Kennedy dreamed that she lay on white sand, with the sun at just the right angle to warm her skin without burning it. Waves crashed ten yards away, sending foam rippling to just below the edge of her blanket. Ehrly lay next to her, reading one of his military history books. He flipped a page, then returned his bronzed arm to its place behind his head.

  “Isn’t this perfect?” she asked.

  In speaking, she broke the dream. It faded into nothingness as she slowly opened her eyes in their bedroom. She rolled over to see if Ehrly was awake so she could tell him about it, but her hand found an empty space where he slept.

  She looked up through the transparent aluminum dome that covered their bedroom. A vast, unfathomable sea of stars met her eyes, and there, low on the horizon—the Earth.

  Ehrly had considered putting a canopy over their bed for privacy.

  “The only people on Earth with telescopes powerful enough to spy on us here,” she’d said, “have more interesting things to look at than us making love or sleeping.”

  It and the bathroom were the only areas Mission Command didn’t have cameras.

  “I think our lovemaking is pretty interesting,” Ehrly had said.

  Now she had to pee, so she walked, naked, toward the bathroom across a Persian rug that had come on the last supply shuttle from Texas. She no longer bounced with every step, as she had when they first arrived. While she worked out every day to prevent muscle atrophy, her mind had adapted to lunar gravity. Her feet pushed lightly against the carpet. Ehrly had called it “getting our moon-legs.”

  “Ehrly?” she called softly.

  He didn’t answer.

  Even after three months, the view hadn’t gotten old—lush vegetation and the endlessness of space. The open floor plan with transparent aluminum canopies was necessary to growing their food in an enclosed biosphere without wasting space. They even slept in hammocks in the forest biome sometimes, with the tiny galagos looking down at them from the foliage overhead. The bush babies, unfettered by Earth’s gravity, would sail through the starlight overhead, leaping from limb to limb in the darkness. A galago could cross the main biome canopy—the rain forest—in about five seconds, without ever touching the ground.

  “Ehrly?” she called again, louder this time.

  He wasn’t in the bathroom. She stopped to relieve herself before grabbing her bathrobe from its hook.

  No need to give the boys at Mission Command a free peep show.

  She padded quietly through the edge of the grassland, taking a shortcut to the main relay closet. Ehrly sometimes went there when he couldn’t sleep to patch into amateur radio so that he could talk with hams on Earth.

  The grass grew higher and faster here than it did on Earth, needing less density to support its mass as it grew.

  She looked into the relay closet.

  Nope.

  “Ehrly?”

  She started to worry, wondering if he’d tripped and hurt himself. Both of them drank, but only in moderation. The couple had been selected for a variety of factors too numerous to elaborate. Among them was the fact that they de-stressed easily, but never overdid it. A glass or two of wine a night, retreating to get personal space when necessary, and they were good. They’d brought an exercise bike and a rowing machine with them, neither of which required Earth’s gravity for equal rigor. Ehrly had brought heavy resistance bands as well, which replaced his weights on Earth. Since their resistance was a product of elasticity rather than mass, they offered the same workout.

  When they had to fight, they fought, but the fights were always brief and readily forgiven.

  They were, with little room for debate, the perfect couple for Moonlight One.

  She peeked in the materials storage room, where they kept PVC and steel pipe, screws, sealants, replacement parts, and every other necessity to keep the biosphere inhabitable.

  No luck.

  Gwen smelled something unfamiliar lingering in the air—a
petroleum-based lubricant like WD-40, but not something they had in the supply room. She shrugged it off and kept searching.

  As she entered the rain forest, Gwen looked up at the stars. The tiny black silhouette of a galago leaped across them, blotting them out for an instant.

  Looks like somebody’s following me.

  She’d walked halfway across the rain forest when a tiny green tree frog leaped near her feet, startling her.

  Only when she looked down did she see the black spots on the grass. Her eyes widened as she crouched to get a closer look. In the pale starlight, red had appeared black, but now she saw the blood for what it was.

  She stepped off the path, seeing more black patches and a faintly defined path through the foliage. She moved faster now, ignoring the leaves that whipped at her legs.

  She saw the gap in the foliage, and knew before she looked into it that it was the shape of her husband. Gwen reached the place where the leaves had been crushed, and fell to her knees in speechless shock.

  Ehrly lay dead on the rain forest floor, his eyes staring blankly at the black-streaked leaves that surrounded him. His mouth hung open in a last, breathless gasp.

  Jonas Wren lay awake, staring at the reflected moonlight dancing on his ceiling. The water outside his houseboat rolled it gently under him, rocking him with what should have been sleep-inducing bliss.

  He felt through the sheets on his king-sized bed until he found his MacBook. He opened the screen and looked at the word count again.

  Thirty-eight thousand. Yesterday that said thirty-seven thousand, five hundred. At least I’m not on anybody’s day planner tomorrow.

  He rose, casting aside a single silk sheet and a technical journal that he’d dropped at some point in his dozing insomnia.

  Jonas stepped out onto the deck in his boxers and lit a cigarette, feeling what he knew would be a too-brief surge of calm and clarity.

  If I’m not going to sleep, I might as well write.

  Another boat, a cabin cruiser, rocked gently down the pier with a rhythm that didn’t match the waves.

  At least somebody’s having a good time being awake in the middle of the night.

  He’d just lit a second cigarette when a voice crackled from a speaker in his bedroom.

  “KK4AJC, this is N4SVP,” the feminine voice said. “KK4AJC, N4SVP.”

  He recognized the voice and call sign immediately—the voice causing a sudden pang that crept up through his heart to his brain, and downward to his toes.

  He inhaled smoke, looked at his watch, closed his eyes briefly, then glanced at his watch again.

  Time didn’t change.

  Not dreaming.

  He made it a practice not to smoke inside, but he really didn’t want to discard the burning comfort right now. He walked back into the bedroom, holding the cigarette near the door.

  “N4SVP, KK4AJC,” he said finally. He held the microphone at arm’s length while he exhaled out the open door.

  “Jonas?”

  “Hi Gwen,” he said, trying to keep the mixed bitterness and excitement out of his voice. “How’s lunar life?”

  “Jonas—you said if I ever needed you, I could reach you this way.”

  “I remember,” he said. He didn’t add, but that was a year before you married my roommate. “Where’s Ehrly?”

  “He’s …”

  “He’s what?”

  “He’s dead, Jonas.”

  Two people on the moon—and one of them’s dead?

  “Can you access the Internet up there?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “We can’t have this discussion in the open. Use TOR to open an encrypted chat.”

  Jonas stubbed out the cigarette and slid back into bed.

  He opened his laptop, minimized Pages, and opened a TOR browser. From there he logged into the same encrypted chat site he’d been using since college.

  Lady_Gwen-0-vere invited him to a private chat a moment later.

  “How did Ehrly die?” Jonas typed.

  “I don’t know,” Gwen answered. “I found him in the rain forest biome. I checked for a pulse, but he was already cold and stiff.”

  “Does your control center know about this yet?”

  “I radioed them ten minutes ago to ask what they’d seen on the video feed.”

  “And?”

  “They said the feed cut out in the entire rain forest and several other sections about four hours ago. They told me to put him in cold storage, Jonas.”

  “Don’t move him.”

  “Jonas—they’re sending a team here. I think they think I killed Ehrly.”

  “When will the team get there?”

  “Five days.”

  “I know you’re probably shaken up right now, Gwen, but I need you calm and collected when you send me pictures. Close your eyes, give yourself three minutes, and breathe deeply.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re going to need to be emotionally detached from his body since you’re the only other person on the moon. Repeat to yourself, ‘The body on the ground is not my husband. My husband is in a better place, and the best thing I can do for him now is to be strong and get through this.’ ”

  The cursor blinked on Jonas’s screen while he waited. He found a half-empty IPA on his bedside table and drank it down.

  What do I feel for Ehrly? What would a normal guy feel right now?

  Should I even care?

  “Okay,” Gwen typed.

  “When I worked in homicide,” Jonas said, “we took dozens of pictures before we moved the body. Since I can’t actually be there, pictures are all I’ll have, so I’ll need a lot of them. I need you to send me pictures of the body from every angle as it lays now. We need to do that before we move it or start looking at the surroundings.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

  Jonas picked up the copy of Advanced Robotics from the floor and noticed that it had reopened to the article on successful remote hacks of EOD and military surveillance robots. He closed the magazine and placed it back in the drawer of his bedside table.

  He wished he had another Curmudgeon IPA, but he was out, and he didn’t feel like putting on pants.

  Has Ehrly ever been seriously depressed?” Jonas typed. He scrolled through the photos slowly, having connected his MacBook to the projector he watched movies on.

  The photos had taken an hour to upload through the EHF relay. Jonas didn’t see any obvious trauma to Ehrly’s back, which meant the wound was probably in a potential self-inflicted area.

  “You lived together for four years, Jonas. You know how he got.”

  Then

  You guys could be brothers, you know that?” Gwen had said. It was their sophomore year at Wittenberg. She sat with her legs draped over Jonas’s lap in their apartment.

  “Why do you say that?” Jonas had asked.

  “You’re both so smart—so methodical.”

  “You got into Wittenberg at sixteen,” Jonas said.

  “But you’re also a pair of moody, sarcastic—”

  “Jolly fellows?” Jonas offered.

  “—assholes,” Gwen said. “‘Assholes’ is the word I was going to use.”

  “You’re the one dating me,” Jonas said, getting up to grab a third Curmudgeon Pilsner from the fridge.

  “Ignorance is bliss,” Gwen said. “I couldn’t date some fratty moron with a stupid grin on his face all the time.”

  “Yeah,” Jonas had said. “Ehrly’ll come down eventually. He always does. I think he just climbs up on the roof to clear his head.”

  “He just got dumped, Jonas, and got the rejection letter. You should go talk to him.”

  The wadded-up letter from NASA’s internship program still lay on the floor next to the couch. Neither of them had dare
d to touch it, since discarding it and saving it were equally hazardous. Jonas stared at it now.

  “He’s fine,” Jonas said. “He takes things hard, but he gets over them fast. He just needs to be alone. I write, he broods.”

  He’d taken a long pull of the pilsner.

  “How do you drink that much and still swim for an hour every day?” Gwen had asked.

  “This is how I get my carbs. Anyway, don’t worry about Ehrly. He just needs to learn how to turn down the volume.”

  “Maybe you turn it down too much.”

  Now

  We can reconstruct the scene if we need to with these pictures,” Jonas said. “It’s time to turn the body over, Gwen. Look for any obvious tears in his clothes. Look at the insides of his thighs, chest, sides, neck, and head. Then send me pictures from the same angles as before.”

  He’d followed Gwen’s career as much as she’d followed his:

  “Baltimore homicide cop Jonas Wren slings bestselling police thrillers,” from The New Yorker.

  “First woman to walk on the moon: LunarX’s Gwen Kennedy makes one giant leap for womankind,” the headline had said.

  “Cop-turned-novelist-turned … consulting detective? Wren solves murder that baffles Baltimore PD.”

  “The Marathoner and the Beauty Queen: Kennedys to be first couple in orbit together.”

  “Getting Away with Murder: Wren’s antihero cop walks a dark path from lawman to outlaw.”

  “Husband and wife team to be first long-term lunar residents.”

  When Gwen and Ehrly had shown up on the cover of Newsweek a month before the Oregon Trail launched, Jonas had marveled at how young they looked. He’d studied himself in the mirror, noting wrinkles that neither of them seemed to have.

  Was it the cigarettes or the dead bodies that put me in the time machine?

  More photos came through the chat window two hours later.