Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks)

by Martin H Greenberg

  7. Lucky Man

  I saw a kid today who was wearing bell-bottom jeans and a buckskin jacket with a Smiley Face sewn onto its back, the words “Have a Nice Day” painted in Day-Glo colors underneath it.

  As he approached, I couldn’t help but look down at his left hand and, sure enough, he was wearing a Moon Ring that shone a deep azure-blue. I wondered if he’d gotten these antiques from a parent, an aunt or uncle, or if he’d shelled out a good portion of his savings account to purchase all this stuff at one of the retro shops that have been multiplying like bacteria since the middle of the ’90s. I stared in a combination of awe and embarrassment; my God, did we really look that absurd back then? Someone should have said something—we thought we looked good.

  The kid caught me staring at him and up came his middle and index fingers in the “peace” sign. I couldn’t help what I did next; I smiled at him and returned the gesture.

  “Outta sight man,” he said on his way past. “Groovy. Far Out.”

  “ ‘Keep on truckin’,’ ” I replied.

  “Huh?”

  I whispered the next as if it was some kind of secret code: “Dave’s not here, man.”

  For a second, those words managed to stop him in his tracks (obviously he’d never been exposed to the pot-haze whimsy of Cheech & Chong); if he said anything to me after that, I’ll never know: I was distracted by a voice calling, “Danny! Wait up!”

  I turned and waited for her to catch up with me.

  I smiled as the girl I loved more than anything in the world came up and took hold of my hand.

  “I thought you hated it when I held your hand like this.”

  “Nah,” said Blair. “I like it.” She playfully bumped her shoulder against mine. “I like having you for a brother.”

  “That’s sweet . . . but I’m still not buying you rollerblades.”

  “Thas’ okay. Where we goin’ today?”

  “That’s up to you. It’s your birthday.”

  “Wanna go see Laura?”

  “No, we didn’t call. We always call first. She has a husband and kids, you know. We can’t just show up like we used to.”

  “I know. I just . . . miss her sometimes.”

  “Me, too. But, hey, we have fun, right?”

  “We have all the fun.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “Go to the bookstore an’ then have some lemonade with Mr. Finney?”

  “Mr. Finney died last month, Blair. Remember we went to the funeral?”

  “Oh. . . .” She looked as if she were going to cry.

  “But he had a good life. He’s happy now. He’s with his wife.”

  “Thas’ good.”

  I squeezed her hand. “So, you want to go to your big brother’s bookstore, huh?”

  “Yes. When we get home, can we have some of that chocolate cake I found?”

  “You mean the one from the Birthday Cake Fairy? You bet.”

  And off we went, returning to the life I’d almost been stupid and selfish enough to throw away.

  There was a time when Ayds (spelled with a “y”) was a popular and surprisingly tasty dietetic candy that came in plastic bags containing individually-wrapped pieces. You could easily find it on store shelves right alongside Sweathog coffee mugs, The Wit and Wisdom of Archie Bunker, Kiss comic books, and Chico and the Man lunch boxes. There was a time when a nerdy kid at Cedar Hill High School dreamed of being an astronaut or rock star, maybe a famous author or great scientist—but whatever he became, he’d be married to the cheerleader he was in love with.

  There was a time when he looked at his new baby sister and wondered why her face was so weird.

  There was a time when the past seemed more real and desirable to him because he couldn’t stop looking behind him . . . until he stepped out into a dark hallway one night and realized that all he’d wanted from life was someone to love him unconditionally for as long as he lived, and that he’d been so busy looking back he never realized that someone had been with him all along.

  I let go of Blair’s hand and told her it was okay for her to walk on ahead.

  She waited at the light until it changed and the WALK signal shone. She crossed the street, then turned and waved at me. She smiled, so very pleased with having finally crossed a street on her own.

  I smiled and waved back, twice as proud of her as she was of herself.

  When I joined her, she took my hand and led me forward, slowly, with great dignity.

  Then I sneezed.

  “Kahoutek,” she said.

  “Foghat,” I replied.

  “Huh?”

  THE GIFT OF A DREAM

  by Dean Wesley Smith

  Dean Wesley Smith has sold over twenty novels and around one hundred short stories to various magazines and anthologies. He’s been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards, and has won a World Fantasy Award and a Locus Award. He was the editor and publisher of Pulphouse Publishing, and has just finished editing the Star Trek anthology Strange New Worlds’ll.

  Kendra Howard pulled herself slowing up to a sitting position, using the railing on her bed, then rubbed her old legs through her nightgown, slowly, as if doing so would bring back some of the long lost feeling to them. She had been dreaming again. Dreaming of dancing, as she and her husband used to do every Saturday night.

  Like him, and the use of her legs, those days were long gone.

  Yet every night, without fail, she dreamed of dancing. Around her the Shady Valley Nursing Home was quiet. The festive Christmas decorations filled the hall outside her door, and later today she knew there’d be ham for Christmas Eve dinner. Then turkey for Christmas dinner tomorrow. It had been the same every Christmas for years now, since she had moved in here and her only son had moved from Chicago to the West Coast. Now he could only afford an occasional holiday call and a once-a-year summer visit.

  She could hear the faint ticking of Brian Saber’s wall clock across the hall, but nothing more. It was now Christmas Eve, and for some reason, Christmas Eve always seemed to be quieter than any time of the year. Not even the snowstorm outside rattled the windows. The wind off Lake Michigan must have shifted as the weatherman on television had predicted it would. It was amazing what people could do these days with science stuff.

  She glanced at the blue numbers of her alarm clock. Two _ minutes after four in the morning. It would be at least another hour before the night nurse stopped in to check on her. She was going to need to use the bathroom before then. That’s what she got for having that second cup of tea. Now she was paying for it.

  She rolled over and eased down the bar on the side of her bed, then levered herself slowly to the edge, and made sure her wheelchair was in position. Using the muscles in her stomach to control her legs, as she had taught herself to do twenty-five years ago, after the car accident, she rolled on her side and moved her dead legs off the edge of the bed. Then with a twist she had made hundreds of times, she half-dropped, half-lowered herself into her wheelchair.

  The feeling made her smile. She often had the nurse or orderly help her out of bed, but still having the freedom to do it on her own was the most important thing she held onto. At eighty-eight years of age, freedom was everything.

  She wheeled her chair around and headed for the bathroom. She was halfway there when a cold draft whipped her nightgown around her legs, as if someone close by had I opened a door.

  Her window was closed and the drapes hung down limp. She could see that much in the faint light from the nurse’s station, so she glanced out and across the hall. There she saw a young man, shadowed and wearing some sort of dark uniform, pick ninety-one-year-old Brian Saber out of his bed and head for the room’s sliding glass door.

  At first she was stunned, then she was about to shout for help when she heard Brian’s distinctive laugh. Whatever was happening, Brian was a part of it. He wasn’t minding at all. Maybe it was some sort of Christmas gift from someone. It couldn’t be from any of his family, though.
As far as she knew, he didn’t have any left alive.

  After a moment the man carrying Brian had opened the sliding door to Brian’s room and the two of them had disappeared silently outside, leaving only a short draft of cold air behind.

  What was Brian up to? She talked with him a lot during lunches and dinners. In fact, she considered him her best friend in the place, yet he’d never mentioned doing anything like. this.

  She waited, almost holding her breath in the silence of the nursing home night, then eased out into the hallway. To her right was the brightly lit nurse’s station, decorated in red ribbons and white bows. She could see the night nurse’s head sticking up just above the top of the low counter. She was obviously bent over some paperwork and paying no attention at all.

  Taking a deep breath, Kendra silently wheeled her chair quickly the rest of the way across the hall and into Brian’s room. His bed was slept in, his wheelchair beside his nightstand, his wall clock ticked the seconds away.

  But there was no sign of Brian.

  She moved to the sliding glass door that led from his room out into a central courtyard. She pulled the curtain aside, not knowing what to expect.

  There was nothing out there.

  In the snow she could see a man’s tracks coming from the center of the courtyard to Brian’s door, then another set going back. But she couldn’t see where they had gone.

  She eased her chair away from the window and moved it so that she was sitting in the dark corner of the room beside the door to the bathroom. She had a sneaking hunch Brian would be back very shortly. And she didn’t plan on leaving until then, no matter how bad she needed to go to the bathroom.

  * * *

  Captain Brian Saber of the Earth Protection League slapped the two hot Proton Stunners into their holsters on his hips, ran a hand through his thick head of wavy hair, and smiled at the six dead bodies of Bocturian scum. “I don’t think you’ll be sabotaging any more slow-speed Earth supply ships.”

  They didn’t answer, for obvious reasons. They were dead.

  He felt proud, staring at the oil-smelling bodies, their tentacles twitching in the air, their six eyes fixed in their death stare. Around him the control room of their ship stank of a combination of fish and intense lilac perfume. Brothel jokes were common anytime anyone from the Earth Protection League had to board a Bocturian ship. He knew for a fact that it was going to take some time before the smell got out of his leather pants, silk shirt, leather pants, silk shirt, leather vest, and high boots. He hoped it washed out before his next mission, otherwise his crew was never going to let him forget it.

  “Captain?” Carl Turner, his second in command asked over the communications link. “Are you wrapped up there?”

  “Bows are tied and presents under the tree,” he said. “How about the rest of the Bocturian ships?” In this mission there had been ten Earth Protection League ships fighting a small fleet of Bocturian pirates. The pirates hadn’t stood a chance.

  “Cleaned up,” Turner said.

  Saber felt a slight tinge of regret. The mission was almost over. “Prepare to pick me up,” he ordered. “I’m going to need a good bath before we head back.”

  “I copy that,” Turner said. “I can smell you from here.”

  “Next time you do the boarding,” Saber said.

  “Uh, Captain,” Turner said, “we took a slight hit to the forward section of the ship.”

  “Anyone hurt?” The twisting in Saber’s gut told him the answer to his question. On this mission there had been ten of them on the ship. Sometimes there was just him and Turner, but they had needed the gunners and support crew this time. And two of that crew had been in the forward section.

  “Ben and Sarah,” Turner said. “Ben will survive. Sarah was killed.”

  “Damn, damn, damn,” Saber said. He hadn’t known Sarah that well. They had been on six missions together, with her working weapons for him on the two of the last three. He didn’t even know what part of Earth she was from, or how old she was back there. But if she did have some family, they weren’t going to have a happy Christmas Eve.

  “Inform command and medical,” Saber said.

  “Copy that,” Turner said.

  With one more glance at the dead pirates, Saber turned and headed for the air lock.

  Twenty minutes later, after a quick shower, he was standing over the coffinlike bed of his sleep chamber. He had already tossed his uniform into the cleaning bins to be laundered when they returned to Earth, and had pulled his nursing home nightshirt over his young body. It always felt weird doing that, yet he knew that on the other end of the flight having the nightshirt on was better than having one of the young soldiers dress him.

  He sighed and stared at the sleep chamber. The problems with Trans-Galactic flight were the reasons he was here. At top speeds, Trans-Galactic flight regressed a human body, so for quick T-G jumps to the outer limits of the Earth Protection League borders, they had to use old people to start.

  He was just about as old as they came.

  No one really understood exactly why T-G flight worked that way. Or why on the return flight, they returned to their original age. Or at least no one had been able to explain it to him in a way he understood. He knew it had something to do with relativity, the curved nature of space above the speed of light, all combined with the fixed nature of matter.

  None of it made any sense to him.

  All he knew was that on Earth he was a ninety-one-year-old cripple in a nursing home. Out here on the borders of the Earth Protection League space, he was a young man again. All thanks to the nature of Trans-Galactic flight.

  He climbed into the coffin-shaped sleep chamber and smoothed down his old nightshirt. Then he quickly pulled the lid down, triggering the departure and his quick nap. Fighting the alien pirates had taken him three days out here. He’d be back in his room on Christmas Eve morning, less than twenty minutes after he left. But he’d still have the three days of fresh memories.

  That was one of the good things about the relative nature of time and space and matter.

  With luck, there’d be another mission this week. Another chance to be young again, fight the good fight as a hero of the league on the very edges of civilized space.

  * * *

  The young soldier picked him out of the sleep chamber as if he weighed nothing. Actually, he didn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds these days in his ninety-one-year-old body.

  “How’d the mission go, Captain?” the soldier asked as the tractor beam released them in the center court of the nursing home and the soldier moved with sure steps through the soft snow.

  “Just about as good as could be hoped,” Saber said, his breath frosting up in the cold night air. Both he and the young soldier knew that was all Saber could tell him about the mission. Almost no one on Earth even knew about the Earth Protection League. It was just safer that way.

  The young soldier was a member of the League, of course, but unless he decided to spend twenty years on a slow shuttle that stayed under light speed, he’d never see anything beyond the moon until he got a lot older. So there was just no reason to tell him about the missions. The kid couldn’t go out there. He was just too young to survive the age and time regression.

  The soldier carried Saber through the sliding door into his room and laid him gently in the bed. Then the kid stepped back and saluted. “Great job, Captain. I’ll see you again soon. Have a Merry Christmas.”

  “Thank you. You, too.”

  The kid turned and then stopped, as if seeing a ghost.

  It took Saber a moment to understand what the problem was, then he saw Kendra, the woman who lived across the hall, as she wheeled her chair out of the shadows of the comer. Kendra was his best friend here in the nursing home. He’d often wished he could tell her about his missions.

  The young soldier glanced back at him, a look of fear on his face, his hand on his gun. Saber understood the reason for the kid’s fear. If the case warranted,
the young soldier was ordered to kill anyone who happened to get in the way of a mission. But Kendra wasn’t in the way. Tonight’s mission was over.

  “It’s all right, soldier.” Saber looked the young kid directly in the eyes and smiled. “She’s a friend.”

  The young man stood for a moment, then nodded. “Understood, Captain. Command will be expecting a report on this.”

  “They will have it in the morning.”

  The young soldier nodded to Kendra. “Good night, ma’am.” He then vanished through the door, closing it behind him.

  Saber lay on his back in his bed, his head turned, staring at Kendra. He couldn’t really see the expression on her face, and she said nothing.

  For the next few moments the silence in the room sounded like a roaring engine about to overwhelm them both, the ticking of his wall clock like the timer of a bomb.

  Then finally Kendra said, “Have I got you in some sort of trouble?”

  Saber remembered the pitched fight he’d just had with six alien pirates, the success they had had again in defending the Earth Protection League and its space. And the death of Sarah.

  That was trouble. Not this.

  He laughed. A hacking, coughing, old man’s laugh, that lasted for a good thirty ticks of his clock before he finally stopped and motioned Kendra closer to his bed to tell her the story of his mission tonight. After all the years of going out and coming back, of defending Earth against all odds, and all alien scum, he finally got to tell someone.

  And for the next hour it felt wonderful.

  Almost as good as killing those alien pirates.

  * * *

  Kendra Howard was more stunned than anything else. Brian’s wild story of being a Captain in the Earth Protection League, of fighting alien pirates in deep space as a young man, was outrageous to say the least. Yet she had seen him carried in and out of the room by a man who had called him Captain. More than likely it was all just some wild fantasy Brian had paid a kid to help him carry out as a Christmas present to himself. After all, he’d only been gone from the room for twenty minutes, not three days like he said.