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

  “I found the wound when I flipped him over,” Gwen said. She’d sent several photos, zoomed in at various magnifications, of a deep puncture wound. “I took the first pics before I cleaned it. You can see in the later pics that it looks like the shape of a knife blade.”

  Indeed it does.

  Jonas grabbed a knife from the block in the kitchen, looked again at the picture of the wound under Ehrly’s left arm, between ribs five and six. He held it several ways, simulated several thrusts. If he’d been trying to kill himself quickly with a knife, he’d probably have gone for the heart. If he’d wanted punishment, he’d have committed seppuku. This wound didn’t match either frame of mind. If the blade was long enough, it had very likely hit Ehrly’s heart, but it had passed through his lung to do so.

  “Gwen,” Jonas typed, “have you been having trouble sleeping again?”

  Then

  Jonas had woken in the middle of the night with a sense that something was not right.

  He’d crashed on the couch, which was less than he’d been hoping for, at Ehrly’s family’s cabin. The two-hour scenic drive had allowed Gwen to chat with Ehrly’s new girlfriend, and they’d spent a relaxing evening by the lake.

  Gwen had been in a rare mood that night, flirting seductively, then locking Jonas out of the bedroom.

  Now Jonas heard the wind in the trees more clearly than he should have, and rose to find the back door of the cabin open.

  “Gwen?”

  She hadn’t answered. She just stood, barefoot in a T-shirt and pajama pants, staring into the forest.

  “Baby?”

  He’d stepped closer, put a hand on her shoulder, but she’d only mumbled something unintelligible.

  Jonas had looked into the wood-line, seen a pair of eyes watching their interaction. They were too far from the ground to be a bobcat—probably a bear. He’d cursed himself for leaving his .45 next to the couch.

  “Come on, Babe,” Jonas had said, gently nudging her toward the cabin. He kept glancing at the glowing orbs in the shadow, searching in the darkness for something he could use as a weapon.

  He had found a splitting axe next to the woodpile, but when he’d glanced back to the forest, the eyes had vanished.

  Wow,” Gwen had said the next morning. “I really don’t remember any of that.”

  “Did you sleepwalk when you were little?” Jonas had asked.

  “No—not that my parents ever told me about, anyway,” she’d said. “I’ve been having trouble sleeping this semester, though, so I started taking Ambien.”

  Jonas had spent a week reading articles about Ambien’s horrific side effects, and tried to convince Gwen to get a different prescription. She needed her sleep, though, and it wasn’t the last time it happened.

  Now

  In law enforcement,” Jonas said, “we’d call this an open-and-shut case. In the writing world, though, we’d call it an intriguing mystery.”

  The beer buzz had abandoned him an hour ago, and he now applied heat to his vacuum coffee brewer.

  “This isn’t a story, Jonas. It’s Ehrly’s life. It’s my life.”

  As the water began to evaporate and travel into the upper chamber, he popped two Tylenol in his mouth and drank a quart of water. The rising sun told him he wouldn’t be allowed to die of insomnia today.

  Time to turn the volume back up.

  “It’s still a story, though, and one I intend to capitalize on once we solve it. There are several things we need to look at next to determine if you did this in your sleep or whether we should keep looking.”

  “Okay.”

  “First, I need you to account for all of Ehrly’s and your clothing. If anything is missing, or has blood on it, I need to know. Second, examine your bathroom. If there’s still water on the floor of the shower, or blood on the floor of the bathroom, I need to know.”

  “You want to see if I stabbed him in my sleep, then cleaned up and got back into bed.”

  “Right. Third, account for all the knives in the station. If one of your monkeys or whatever got ahold of one, it will either be missing or have blood on it.”

  “I didn’t think about the galagos,” Gwen said. “I don’t even know if they could hold a kitchen knife.”

  “It’s a good thing I read Poe. While you’re looking at clothes and knives, though, I need to do some analysis here. Can you send me a detailed floor plan of the entire station, and a log of which areas lost their camera feeds last night?”

  “Sure,” she said. “It’ll only take about ten minutes.”

  While he waited for the floor plan, Jonas Googled LunarX competitors:

  SpaceCorp loses NASA contract for International Space Station resupply.

  He bookmarked the article and kept searching.

  Mars2050 loses venture capital funding to LunarX.

  Another bookmark.

  Ten minutes later, Gwen sent him the floor plan. He printed it, and pushed a thumbtack through the paper into the wall.

  It’s about time I spent money on something. If this pans out, I’ll buy a whole new houseboat.

  While Gwen went off to inventory clothes and knives, Jonas studied the layout, shading in areas where the log indicated the cameras had stopped working.

  He pictured one of the tiny galagos with a knife in its paw.

  Not likely, but we can’t start eliminating suspects just yet.

  Next, he printed the news clippings of LunarX’s competition.

  He hung an old, long-abandoned whiteboard next to the floor plan, and wrote:

  Ehrly—suicide? Where’s the knife?

  Gwen—Ambien? Most likely.

  LunarX Competition—How? Study the floor plan.

  Angry galagos?

  He smirked, hesitated, then wrote:

  Lunar natives?

  It wasn’t out of the question. The moon had some pretty dark cracks and crevices, which were the only places water could escape photolysis. Perhaps the natives, heretofore unmet by the Apollo missions or unmanned rovers, had decided that enough was enough and that they weren’t putting up with colonization.

  Jonas drew a gray man with big eyes on the white board.

  Is there anyone else?

  “Do you have maintenance robots?” Jonas typed. He knew Gwen wouldn’t respond while she was busy taking stock, but it was other information he didn’t have.

  When he’d re-examined the wound pictures at the highest magnification, he’d noticed something odd.

  It was a high-velocity strike without jagged rips on either side. This had been done with machine-like precision and withdrawn as fast as it had entered.

  He wrote robot likely—possible hack by a competitor on the whiteboard.

  He felt vibrant. He was back in action again, after months of letting dust settle on his eyelids. He’d been dead, rocked to sleep in a Viking funeral on his houseboat—now he was alive with problems, a murder, a mystery, albeit one too eerily close to home.

  Then

  You shouldn’t smoke,” the girl had said. “Smoking’s bad for you.”

  “You’re in a bar, trying to convince some guy to take you seriously enough to go home with. You’re in no place to lecture me,” Jonas had said.

  “Still, smoking’s an easy choice.”

  “Wren’s Gwen is Ehrly’s girlie,” Jonas had said. Little bits of literary wit came to him when he drank, but he only remembered a third of them when sober.

  “Hmm?” the girl asked. She’d stared at him with big green eyes surrounded by too much eyeliner, amused.

  “My fiancée called off our wedding. Now she’s dating my roommate.”

  “What—tonight?”

  “No, two months ago,” Jonas had said, “but I can’t write anymore. I just don’t have a story in me. I just … I want to see people die.”
>
  He’d bought the girl a rum and Coke. She smiled, entertained by his misery.

  “That’s dark, man. Are you going to be a serial killer?”

  He’d studied her. She was black and white, like every other girl he’d ever met. She was boring, mundane, bovine. Gwen had been the only one in color.

  “Maybe.”

  “Can I help?” the girl had asked.

  “I think I’ll be a cop for a while,” he’d said. “A cop is a good place to start.”

  It had been. Jonas had learned enough about police procedure to fill a series of cheap paperback novels, and earned enough to fund an M.F.A. in Writing when he’d gotten his nerve back.

  That girl had been the first in a series of relationships with black and white, ghostly, nothing-people that had lasted five years.

  Black and white, but with an amazing rack, Jonas had thought—just like granddad’s porn collection.

  They’d amused each other, but now she was just an inkblot in his memory.

  When Jonas awoke on his houseboat five years later, he didn’t even care about what he’d been chasing. He didn’t care about anything. The houseboat was black and white too.

  He’d looked down at the cover of Newsweek with Gwen smiling her supermodelly, perfect-white smile next to Ehrly in full color, and known he’d failed at some point.

  He was on the New York Times bestseller list, but he was a failure.

  Now

  Jonas finished what he felt was an exhaustive list of possibilities and a thorough crime-wall for visualizing the case. He sat in his swivel chair and glanced over the limited possibilities. After a moment, he picked up a paperback copy of his last novel, ripped off the back cover, and tacked his own picture under the list of suspects.

  Then, with the lack of sleep finally catching up to him, he turned up the volume on the chat window and settled into a nap.

  No bots,” Gwen said. “Mission Command figured it’d be one more thing that would break and require replacement parts. Some of the systems are automated, but not by anything with moving limbs.”

  There goes my best theory.

  “Did you find anything in the inventory?”

  “I accounted for all our clothes,” Gwen typed. “With limited living space, we were extremely detailed about what we brought. Nothing’s missing, and the floor in the shower is dry. I walked around the pond and the rice paddy too. No sign of blood.”

  “What about the knives?” Jonas asked.

  “The kitchen knives were all in the block. We have some box cutters and X-Acto knives, but they were all in the shop in the tool trays. We have cutouts for all the tools to make inventories easier.”

  “All clean?”

  “I looked at every single blade we have. No blood, and no water in the sink from washing. If I did this in my sleep, I was pretty thorough.”

  “Go through your machine shop and look for evidence of grinding. It’s unlikely, but maybe one of you made a shiv.”

  “Jonas …”

  “We have to eliminate possibilities, and I need to think,” he said.

  She could be using me to hide evidence before the team gets there. I was a cop, after all. I know where a cop would look. Maybe she wasn’t even asleep.

  Jonas pushed the thought from his mind.

  If someone killed Ehrly on purpose, I can’t really blame them.

  He stepped out onto the deck, squinting at the sun.

  “Hey Jonas,” a feminine voice called from the pier. He paused in the act of lighting a cigarette to wave at Sandy Robinson and her tiny white dog. “We haven’t seen you at the pool lately.”

  “I know,” he said sheepishly. “I’ve been in a mood.”

  “Nobody does laps like you do. I tell Stuart you’re part fish.”

  Jonas chuckled at this as Sandy walked her little dog off to crap on dry land. He caught the lyrics of a blaring song as a boat accelerated away from the marina into the open water.

  He nearly dismissed it, but something about the nineties song stuck in his mind. The cop part of him said not to ignore his gut. The writer part said he had to be more creative than he had been so far.

  It’s a song by Aerosmith, I think. It was from a movie—something about space.

  Jonas grabbed his laptop and brought it out to the deck. Before opening a tab for IMDB, he reread part of Wikipedia’s article on the moon. He skimmed it, and clicked a link to the article on Project Horizon.

  He stopped skimming, and took in every single word.

  Jonas stubbed out his cigarette. He went back into the bedroom, picked up a dry-erase marker, and began to draw.

  There’s nothing in the shop that would indicate someone made a shiv,” Gwen said.

  “I’m assuming you guys have spacesuits to do external repairs and for emergencies,” Jonas said.

  “We do.”

  “Is there some sort of computer log of when they’re used, or when your airlock is opened?”

  “Of course,” she said. “We talk to Mission Command every time we go out, too, so they have a record.”

  “Do you have some sort of wheeled vehicle?”

  “Yes. The truck’s electric. We use it to collect samples to send back on the resupply landers.”

  “Okay. This one’s important: Have your cameras ever gone out before?”

  “Well, yeah. Ehrly would always fix them. He said it was just a bad circuit board. It was usually just the one near the airlock, though. This is the first time the one in the rain forest went out.”

  “But he had to fix that same circuit board repeatedly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I need you to take pictures of your entire relay closet and send them to me. Then I need you to look through Ehrly’s books for anything handwritten that seems remotely out of place, especially anything that looks like coordinates.”

  It’s a pretty far-fetched solve, but it’s the only one that makes sense.

  Then, realizing the implications of what he was thinking, Jonas copied the text of the chats to a USB drive, along with the lunar station’s floor plan and the camera logs. He placed the flash drive in a Pelican case and set it on the bedside table.

  Gwen uploaded the images from the relay closet, and Jonas began scrolling through them. He wasn’t a technical wizard, but he had to search for anything out of place.

  “The radio on the second shelf down, on the far right, looks like a ham setup. Is that the one you called me on?” he asked.

  “Yes. It’s the only one that LunarX didn’t supply. It’s Ehrly’s rig. He could get any band on it. He built several of the antennas himself.”

  “Go through all the bands, and send me all the presets.”

  An hour later, Jonas had copied this list as well, and added it to the flash drive. Gwen had gone back to looking through their books and Ehrly’s personal effects, while Jonas started plugging repeater frequencies into Google.

  I found something,” Gwen typed.

  “Me too.”

  “It was in his little book that he wrote down ham call signs that had contacted him. Inside the back cover he’d written down a set of numbers. I looked up the grid in our atlas software.”

  “And?”

  “And those coordinates were in the darkest shadow of the Russell Crater. It’s a place that never gets direct sunlight. We’ve never collected samples from there.”

  “How long would it take to get there, in your electric truck?”

  “Probably an hour. We’ve never taken it that far.”

  “Ehrly did. You have a little over three days until that lander shows up with a team that won’t want to hear far-fetched conspiracy theories. Here’s what we need to do …”

  It happened that night, but not in the way Jonas had expected. He’d closed his eyes for another nap with his 1911 clo
se at hand. He’d always been a light sleeper, and knew that crunching footfalls on the broken glass he’d scattered on the deck would awaken him, or the blaring of the motion-sensor alarm, or the barking of the Robinsons’ little white yappy dog.

  Instead of bullets, though, an incendiary grenade landed on his deck, and his houseboat caught on fire.

  Of course they’d know I smoke.

  “Stupid author burns his stupid houseboat to the waterline with his stupid cigarettes. Stupid Jonas Wren drowns, burns, and dies of lead poisoning simultaneously. All this at the top of the hour.”

  Jonas had put enough murderers behind bars to know one of them might come looking for him someday. He kicked out the escape panel on the starboard side and stuffed the Pelican case, wallet, phone, 1911, a T-shirt, and athletic shorts into a dry bag.

  He’d planned for this and rehearsed it a hundred times, knowing that muscle memory would save him when the shit hit the fan. Even as his hands moved to save him though, he watched them shake. He took a moment to try to calm his nerves, but his hands still shook.

  Let them shake. I nearly pissed myself the first time I had to draw my duty weapon, but I walked out alive. The other guy didn’t.

  He clipped the dry bag to a carabiner, which he then clipped to a rope that descended from the side of the boat into the water. He pulled his mask over his eyes and nose, and did a quick check of the seal.

  Then, as quietly as he could, he eased himself over the side and into the darkness next to the dry bag. Flames crept slowly over the cabin, and he knew someone would be waiting in the shadows of the pier to ambush him. Instead of obliging them, he grabbed the dry bag in one hand and pulled it and himself hand over hand to the bottom of the bay.

  It was a nice boat. Good thing I didn’t spend my advance yet—not sure if I have assassin insurance.

  He found the regulator by feel and put it in his mouth, then pushed the button once to purge. With the survival problem solved, he took his time strapping on the two-tank rig and fins he’d practiced getting into a hundred times before.

  The best thing about a houseboat is the basement’s huge and nobody follows you down the stairs.

  Still, it was cold, and Jonas held the tritium wrist compass close to his mask. He could blame his shaking hands on the water when he got out.