The Storm Fishers and Other Stories Read online

The Storm Fishers and Other Stories

  By

  Everitt Foster

  Copyright © Jason Everitt Foster, 2015

  All characters and events in these stories are fictional and no semblance including name or description is intended.

  Cover designed by Everitt Foster using GIMP and brushes by ObsidianDawn

  The author can be contacted on Twitter @everittfoster or via email: [email protected]

   

  For A.I.H.

  Table of Contents

  Gravity before Newton

  A View without Seasons

  Lomonosov’s Drift

  The Storm Fishers

  Sheep Bite

  GRAVITY BEFORE NEWTON

  When Martian society was still young there lived a boy in love with the greatest heroes of Earth. His mother taught him to read using his father’s biographies of Newton, Einstein, Faraday and Bohr. He didn’t speak often, and went outside even less. He loved stories from Martian Geologic Magazine and he saw himself on the cover, leading a cadre of natives across mountains and canyons of distant and dangerous planets. The boy was short even for his age, and his sandy cowlick bounced side to side when he tried to run. One day, while still learning to write, he took a cardboard binder and scribbled “The Lif of Digby Futter, Sientis” in red washable marker on the cover and placed it on the shelf next to his father’s biographies.

  Digby lived in the corner unit of an apartment building at the intersection of Heisenberg Lane and Pauling Avenue. His bedroom window overlooked the botanical gardens where his father worked. And every day after school, when he heard the whistle blow, he would rush to the window, smush his face against the clear acrylic, and watch as men and women in white coats flowed from every side of the gardens onto the river blue pavement below.

  His father, the garden’s herpetologist, Master Albert Futter the third, wore a suit colored like the navy-violet crown lighting the skyline at sunset. Before leaving work Albert folded his lab coat over his shoulder so his son could spot him like an amethyst veined pebble tumbling to the sea, finally vanishing beneath the balcony of their building. And that was the cue for Digby to rush past the smell of dinner and slam open the front door for his father.

  “Daaaaaaaad! I got a B- on my biology thingy. Tell me what I did wrong.” Digby handed his father the exam.

  “After dinner, okay?”

  “You go to sleep after dinner. I want it now!”

  Poor Albert sighed and took the exam to a cramped study. When dinner was set he came to the table, kissed Mrs. Sharon Futter good evening and sat forward so he could show Digby his mistakes.

  “I don’t feel like that was a mistake. I feel like you are wrong,” Digby said when his father showed him how to solve a problem.

  “Digby you know we respect your right to your own opinion and I’m thankful you question what you are told. But the fact is you’re not entitled to your own facts.”

  Sharon plopped a second helping on her son’s plate and before she could sit down the plate was empty and she was back at the stove to bring him a third. She sighed and her husband felt the frustration too.

  The garden closed forever shortly before Digby graduated from advanced school. Albert and Sharon found themselves living on their retirement twenty years early. With the news came the talk. “We heard from Martian U. You were accepted, but without scholarship.”

  “They don’t think I am able?” said Digby.

  “No that’s not it at all.”

  “Good. Because I know I am going to be great one day.”

  “We do too,” his mother said. Digby puffed his chest out, swallowed his pride (like a Yale man realizing he didn’t want to go to dumb old Harvard anyway) and said, “What about Newton?”

  “I’m sorry no.”

  “No scholarship either huh? Well when they come a begging Dr. Futter for-”

  “You weren’t accepted.” He cocked his jaw and drool ran down his mouth. His mommy wiped her boy’s chin with her handkerchief.

  “What about Faraday?”

  “We can’t afford the cost of living on a geosynched station.”

  “What about…” his eyes darted back and forth, “Mmmmm mmmm Martian Massive. It’s funded by some research grant from some pharma company.”

  “We think you should look for work and wait until you’re cerebral cortex has finished developing before you continue you’re studies,” his mother said.

  “Daaaaa-AAAAAA-aaaaaa-AAAAAAd!”

  “I’ll be taking a position with the quarry preservation service. Maybe I can get you on-”

  “No I am going to be a great scientist not a garbage man!”

  “Your mother found freelance work editing the Journal of Theoretical Cosmology, maybe she can get-”

  He shook his head slowly, winced, frowned and walked away, slamming his bedroom door behind him.

  “I’ll tell him when dinner is ready. I hoped he would eat something before we gave him the news” his mother said as she set the robotic chef to ‘Old Fashioned Terran Comfort Food.’

  After dinner Albert went to the balcony, resting his legs in his grandfather’s woodensque rocking chair and watched the moons eclipse the distant Sun.

  “Are you really going to take a job outside of the sciences?” The glass door slid too, hiding his mother’s ears. Digby sat next to his father.

  “No job is outside the sciences. I just won’t be wearing a lab coat to work every day.”

  “What am I supposed to do when everyone I know goes off to college and I end up working as a quantum mechanic at some reactor station? The girls’ll fly by and I’ll be stuck alone taking orders from some starborn businessman from the peanut gallery.”

  “Stop it. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. There are people on planets with a lot less than we have. I worked my way through college with night shifts as a volumetric meat and bun inspector for the Authority of Health and Diet.” Digby snickered and his father leaned forward, “It’s an important job.”

  “Yea, without you hotdogs wouldn’t have been bun length and burger patties would have been too big for the toppings.”

  “There is no such thing as undignified work.”

  “But I want to be a great scientist. I’ve got the plan all mapped out.” Digby took out his projection pad, pressed the archive button and before their eyes stood holograms of Digby and Albert ten years earlier.

  “First you’ll graduate near the top of your class,” said his father’s younger voice ringing with a metallic echo from the used projection pad’s crackling stereo.

  “Then you’ll go to either Newton or Faraday.”

  “Then will I be a great scientist?” Digby’s voice had changed little since he was a boy.

  “Greatness comes with perseverance, brilliance and a touch of luck. We control only the first.”

  The projection ended. Digby said again, “Are you going to give up on me?”

  “We haven’t given up on you. We believe in you-”

  “Good because I would hate to add you and mom to my enemies list.”

  “We should have named you Millhouse or Mortimer.”

  “I’m going to be great. I even know what field I’ll revolutionize first.”

  “It’s not whale-o-metrics is it?”

  “No it’s not whale-o-metrics.”

  “Good. Because ever since your grandfather’s experiments the government has forbid stacking whales end on end for the purpose of measuring mountain height.”

  Digby mumbled under his breath, “Then how are we supposed to measure the height of skyscrapers.”

  “Go to your room.”

  “Before I die, some corner
of science will be to Futter what gravity was to Newton.”

  Before bedtime Digby made a quick stop in the sanitation room. He drew a bath, filled it with bubbly soap and Epsom salts to sooth his agitated meat. He plopped down, his sides squeaking as they displaced water onto the floor, fitting snug as a plug in a jug. When he could no longer hear his parents chattering he pushed his hands past his love handles coated his palm with bubbles, imagined his trip to Sweden to accept the Nobel committee’s award for scientific discovery. He imagined gorgeous beaches, wonderfully quaint old town squares, chesty blonde women jealous of his statuesque wife, and relaxed for a whole two minutes before bedtime.

  Three months later Digby had found his own employment, and two weeks after he had rented a small apartment south of Forrest S. McCartney Starport. The flat-space engines caused a drone which was loud and regular and shook his tiny apartment, sometimes knocking his portrait gallery off the wall. Newton usually hit the ground before Leibniz.

  During one of the year end parties Digby had met a pretty accounting apprentice with sunburn colored hair named Aventine. She was starborn and fascinating to Futter’s colonist mind. He fell hard when she told him of her bug hunts growing up aboard the IRV ROBERT HOOKE, he fell deeper when she described her family’s vacations in the Kaiper Belt. But it was the funny stories from the scientific community of the Silicon Hills that ignited true love.

  Shortly after a hasty romance , well, Rosalind Franklin Marie Futter was a healthy 9lb 4oz baby girl. After the wedding ceremony Digby and Aventine found stable employment from Master Egbert Pud, a moonie from Phobos who never