“Then, the storm came too slow,” I screamed, to be heard above the thunder. “A nova would rip away the sky over half the planet. The shock wave would move around the night side with a sound to break all the glass in the world, all at once! And crack concrete and marble—and, Leslie love, it just hasn’t happened. So I started wondering.”
She said it in a mumble. “Then what is it?”
“A flare. The worst—”
She shouted it at me like an accusation. “A flare! A solar flare! You think the sun could light up like that—
“Easy, now—”
“—could turn the moon and planets into so many torches, then fade out as if nothing had happened! Oh, you idiot—”
“May I come in?”
She looked surprised. She stepped aside, and I bent and picked up the bags and walked in.
The glass doors rattled as if giants were trying to beat their way in. Rain had squeezed through cracks to make dark puddles on the rug.
I set the bags on the kitchen counter. I found bread in the refrigerator, dropped two slices in the toaster. While they were toasting I opened the foie gras.
“My telescope’s gone,” she said. Sure enough, it was. The tripod was all by itself on the balcony, on its side.
I untwisted the wire on a champagne bottle. The toast popped up, and Leslie found a knife and spread both slices with foie gras. I held the bottle near her ear, figuring to trip conditioned reflexes.
She did smile fleetingly as the cork popped. She said, “We should set up our picnic grounds here. Behind the counter. Sooner or later the wind is going to break those doors and shower glass all over everything.”
That was a good thought. I slid around the partition, swept all the pillows off the floor and the couch and came back with them. We set up a nest for ourselves.
It was kind of cozy. The kitchen counter was three and a half feet high, just over our heads, and the kitchen alcove itself was just wide enough to swing our elbows comfortably. Now the floor was all pillows. Leslie poured the champagne into brandy snifters, all the way to the lip.
I searched for a toast, but there were just too many possibilities, all depressing. We drank without toasting. And then carefully set the snifters down and slid forward into each other’s arms. We could sit that way, face to face, leaning sideways against each other.
“We’re going to die,” Leslie said.
“Maybe not.”
“Get used to the idea, I have,” she said. “Look at you, you’re all nervous now. Afraid of dying. Hasn’t it been a lovely night?”
“Unique. I wish I’d known in time to take you to dinner.”
Thunder came in a string of six explosions. Like bombs in an air raid. “Me too,” she said when we could hear again.
“I wish I’d known this afternoon.”
“Pecan pralines!”
“Farmer’s Market. Double-roasted peanuts. Who would you have murdered, if you’d had the time?”
“There was a girl in my sorority—”
—and she was guilty of sibling rivalry, so Leslie claimed. I named an editor who kept changing his mind. Leslie named one of my old girl friends, I named her only old boy friend that I knew about, and it got to be kind of fun before we ran out. My brother Mike had forgotten my birthday once. The fiend.
The lights flickered, then came on again.
Too casually, Leslie asked, “Do you really think the sun might go back to normal?”
“It better be back to normal. Otherwise we’re dead anyway. I wish we could see Jupiter.”
“Dammit, answer me! Do you think it was a flare?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Yellow dwarf stars don’t go nova.”
“What if ours did?”
“The astronomers know a lot about novas,” I said. “More than you’d guess. They can see them coming months ahead. Sol is a gee-naught yellow dwarf. They don’t go nova at all. They have to wander off the main sequence first, and that takes millions of years.”
She pounded a fist softly on my back. We were cheek to cheek; I couldn’t see her face. “I don’t want to believe it. I don’t dare. Stan, nothing like this has ever happened before. How can you know?”
“Something did.”
“What? I don’t believe it. We’d remember.”
“Do you remember the first moon landing? Aldrin and Armstrong?”
“Of course. We watched it at Earl’s Lunar Landing Party.”
“They landed on the biggest, flattest place they could find on the moon. They sent back several hours of jumpy home movies, took a lot of very clear pictures, left corrugated footprints all over the place. And they came home with a bunch of rocks.
“Remember? People said it was a long way to go for rocks. But the first thing anyone noticed about those rocks was that they were half melted.
“Sometime in the past, oh, say the past hundred thousand years; there’s no way of marking it closer than that—the sun flared up. It didn’t stay hot enough long enough to leave any marks on the Earth. But the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere to protect it. All the rocks melted on one side.”
The air was warm and damp. I took off my coat, which was heavy with rainwater. I fished the cigarettes and matches out, lit a cigarette and exhaled past Leslie’s ear.
“We’d remember. It couldn’t have been this bad.”
“I’m not so sure. Suppose it happened over the Pacific? It wouldn’t do that much damage. Or over the American continents. It would have sterilized some plants and animals and burned down a lot of forests, and who’d know? The sun is a four percent variable star. Maybe it gets a touch more variable than that, every so often.”
Something shattered in the bedroom. A window? A wet wind touched us, and the shriek of the storm was louder.
“Then we could live through this,” Leslie said hesitantly.
“I believe you’ve put your finger on the crux of the matter. Skol!” I found my champagne and drank deep. It was past three in the morning, with a hurricane beating at our doors.
“Then shouldn’t we be doing something about it?”
“We are.”
“Something like trying to get up into the hills! Stan, there’re going to be floods!”
“You bet your ass there are, but they won’t rise this high. Fourteen stories. Listen, I’ve thought this through. We’re in a building that was designed to be earthquake proof. You told me so yourself. It’d take more than a hurricane to knock it over.
“As for heading for the hills, what hills? We won’t get far tonight, not with the streets flooded already. Suppose we could get up into the Santa Monica Mountains; then what? Mudslides, that’s what. That area won’t stand up to what’s coming. The flare must have boiled away enough water to make another ocean. It’s going to rain for forty days and forty nights! Love, this is the safest place we could have reached tonight.”
“Suppose the polar caps melt?”
“Yeah … well, we’re pretty high, even for that. Hey, maybe that last flare was what started Noah’s Flood. Maybe it’s happening again. Sure as hell, there’s not a place on Earth that isn’t the middle of a hurricane. Those two great counterrotating hurricanes, by now they must have broken up into hundreds of little storms—”
The glass doors exploded inward. We ducked, and the wind howled about us and dropped rain and glass on us.
“At least we’ve got food!” I shouted. “If the floods maroon us here, we can last it out!”
“But if the power goes, we can’t cook it! And the refrigerator—”
“We’ll cook everything we can. Hard-boil all the eggs—”
The wind rose about us. I stopped trying to talk.
Warm rain sprayed us horizontally and left us soaked. Try to cook in a hurricane? I’d been stupid; I’d wait
ed too long. The wind would tip boiling water on us if we tried it. Or hot grease—
Leslie screamed, “We’ll have to use the oven!”
Of course. The oven couldn’t possibly fall on us. We set it for 400°–– and put the eggs in, in a pot of water. We took all the meat out of the meat drawer and shoved it on a broiling pan. Two artichokes in another pot. The other vegetables we could eat raw.
What else? I tried to think.
Water. If the electricity went, probably the water and telephone lines would too. I turned on the faucet over the sink and started filling things: pots with lids, Leslie’s thirty-cup percolator that she used for parties, her wash bucket. She clearly thought I was crazy, but I didn’t trust the rain as a water source; I couldn’t control it.
The sound. Already we’d stopped trying to shout through it. Forty days and nights of this and we’d be stone deaf. Cotton? Too late to reach the bathroom. Paper towels! I tore and wadded and made four plugs for our ears.
Sanitary facilities? Another reason for picking Leslie’s place over mine. When the plumbing stopped, there was always the balcony.
And if the flood rose higher than the fourteenth floor, there was the roof. Twenty stories up. If it went higher than that, there would be damned few people left when it was over.
And if it was a nova?
I held Leslie a bit more closely, and lit another cigarette one-handed. All the wasted planning, if it was a nova. But I’d have been doing it anyway. You don’t stop planning just because there’s no hope.
And when the hurricane turned to live steam, there was always the balcony. At a dead run, and over the railing, in preference to being boiled alive.
But now was not the time to mention it.
Anyway, she’d probably thought of it herself.
The lights went out about four. I turned off the oven, in case the power should come back. Give it an hour to cool down, then I’d put all the food in Baggies.
Leslie was asleep, sitting up in my arms. How could she sleep, not knowing? I piled pillows behind her and let her back easy.
For some time, I lay on my back, smoking, watching the lightning make shadows on the ceiling. We had eaten all the foie gras and drunk one bottle of champagne. I thought of opening the brandy, but decided against it, with regret.
A long time passed. I’m not sure what I thought about. I didn’t sleep, but certainly my mind was in idle. It only gradually came to me that the ceiling, between lightning flashes, had turned gray.
I rolled over, gingerly, soggily. Everything was wet.
My watch said it was nine-thirty.
I crawled around the partition into the living room. I’d been ignoring the storm sounds for so long that it took a faceful of warm-whipping rain to remind me. There was a hurricane going on. But charcoal-gray light was filtering through the black clouds.
So. I was right to have saved the brandy. Floods, storms, intense radiation, fires lit by the flare—if the toll of destruction was as high as I expected, then money was about to become worthless. We would need trade goods.
I was hungry. I ate two eggs and some bacon—still warm—and started putting the rest of the food away.
We had food for a week, maybe … but hardly a balanced diet. Maybe we could trade with other apartments. This was a big building. There must be empty apartments, too, that we could raid for canned soup and the like. And refugees from the lower floors to be taken care of, if the waters rose high enough …
Damn! I missed the nova. Life had been simplicity itself last night. Now … did we have medicines? Were there doctors in the building? There would be dysentery and other plagues. And hunger. There was a supermarket near here; could we find a scuba rig in the building?
But I’d get some sleep first. Later we could start exploring the building. The day had become a lighter charcoal-gray. Things could be worse, far worse. I thought of the radiation that must have sleeted over the far side of the world, and wondered if our children would colonize Europe, or Asia, or Africa.
The Illustrators of the Future
Looking Forward and Looking Back …
BY BOB EGGLETON
Bob Eggleton is a successful science fiction, fantasy, horror, and landscape artist, encompassing twenty years of putting brush to canvas or board. Winner of nine Hugo Awards—he has been nominated an amazing twenty-eight times over twenty-four years—plus twelve Chesley Awards, as well as various magazine awards, his art can be seen on the covers of magazines, books, posters and prints—and of late, trading cards, stationery, drink coasters, journals, and jigsaw puzzles. He is considered one of the most “commercially successful” artists in the fields of science fiction and fantasy.
He has also worked as a conceptual illustrator for movies and thrill rides, including Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas. He also did concept work for the feature film Sphere and for the Academy Award–nominated film Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.
Between demanding deadlines for book covers and movies, Bob has illustrated two books of experimental artwork about dragons: Dragonhenge and The Stardragons.
Other books of Bob’s artwork include: Alien Horizons: The Fantastic Art of Bob Eggleton, Greetings from Earth: The Art of Bob Eggleton, The Book of Sea Monsters, Primal Darkness: The Gothic and Horror Art of Bob Eggleton, Dragon’s Domain: The Ultimate Dragon Painting Workshop, and Tortured Souls a collaboration with Clive Barker. For Easton Press he has done the Centennial Edition of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Also he and his wife Marianne Plumridge have a children’s book: If Dinosaurs Lived in My Town available from Sky Pony Press.
Bob is a Fellow of the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA). His work has appeared in professional publications and books in the world of science fiction, fantasy and horror around the world. Spacewatch/NASA named asteroid 13562 Bobeggleton in his honor. Most importantly, he was a running extra in the 2002 film Godzilla Against MechaGodzilla.
The Illustrators of the Future
Looking Forward and Looking Back …
Back in 1987, on a dark autumn evening here on the east coast, my phone rang. Algis Budrys (regrettably no longer with us), coordinator for the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest was on the line. Algis had an idea.…
Some backstory on Algis and me. I had known Algis not just from science fiction (SF) conventions in general, but specifically from my interaction with the Writers of the Future Contest and its presence at major science fiction conventions, such as the World Science Fiction Conventions of the 1980s, and one of the WotF ceremonies at the World Trade Center, “Windows on the World.” I remember that event well, and it was my only time atop the World Trade Center, which sadly is also gone. Algis had made the Contest his passion, and in so many ways his life’s work. Algis Budrys was one of the “Old Guard” of SF writers, who’d left a path for all writers. Writers like that seem hard to find these days. I considered him a good friend. When he called me that autumn evening, Algis opened with his usual conversation starter. “So … heya,” he said. “We’d always had the intent as per L. Ron Hubbard’s wishes on starting another contest, that will run alongside of the Writers of the Future … it’s called, naturally … the Illustrators of the Future … and, well, we want you to be a judge!”
He explained to me that my friend and mentor, ten-time Hugo Award winner Frank Kelly Freas, was to head it all up, and draw up (no pun intended) the rules of how it worked. Kelly Freas would keep in touch because there was still a lot of legwork to do to make it all come to fruition. Aside from me, a host of other artists had been asked aboard as co-judges: Edd Cartier, Leo and Diane Dillon, Ron and Val Lindahn, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Paul Lehr, Moebius, Alex Schomburg, H.R. Van Dongen and the legendary Frank Frazetta. I was stunned to be in the company of such amazing and iconic talents. Feeling humble was an understatement. So in 1988, the first building blocks of the
competition’s structural information was sent out far and wide. There was no Internet at the time, so this was somewhat of a massive undertaking. Kelly Freas started the ball rolling, and he had made up a list of criteria and points that the art would be judged on.
He came to believe wholeheartedly that, “More young illustrators have been introduced to and entered the field by way of this Contest than anything that has happened in the field of illustration. It’s going to make a big difference in the immediate future. There is a real need for intelligent artists who can understand what has been written and illustrate it in a way that is related to the real world and means something. A piece of art that does that becomes a treasure beyond price. L. Ron Hubbard’s Contest is creating the men and women who will do this for us.”
The concept is simple: the entrant has nothing to lose because it doesn’t cost anything. In fact there is quite a lot to gain. An illustrator is asked to submit samples of his or her work and those samples are sent out en masse to a select panel of judges on a quarterly basis. Names are removed from the entries to level the playing field to just the art. Then the panel of judges, working independently of each other, with only several judges used at any given time, further narrow down the applicants. Feedback is usually given on the artists’ three submission samples as an overall commentary. Final compilation of scores and comments is done in-house at Author Services. Should someone be a winner or finalist in the Illustrators of the Future, they get to then illustrate a winning story written by the winners of the Writers of the Future, becoming a published illustrator in the annual anthology.
I can tell you something, and this comes from a person who had very little in terms of this type of encouragement in the ’70s and ’80s, that this Contest was a boon to anyone wishing to get kick-started into being an illustrator. I wish it had been there when I was starting out.