Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks)

by Martin H Greenberg

  Yet a part of her had wanted to believe his wild dream.

  Especially the part about growing young again because of how time and space and matter worked. His explanation had almost been funny enough to laugh at. Yet when he had tried to explain it to her, she hadn’t laughed. Just listened, hoping to not break the fantasy world he lived in. She liked him enough to do that for him. Especially on Christmas Eve.

  It wasn’t until the end of his wild story that he asked her something that bothered her on a deep level. He asked if she was interested in joining up, being a solider in the Earth Protection League, of being young again to help Earth fight whatever threatened its borders.

  The question bothered her a great deal, but instead of saying so, she laughed and said, “Who wouldn’t like to be young again?”

  “Great,” he said. “I can’t promise anything, but it never hurts to ask.”

  At that moment the nurse poked her head in and smiled at them. She asked if Brian needed anything, then winked at Kendra and left.

  Kendra laughed and suddenly realized she hadn’t yet made it to the bathroom. “I’ll see you at breakfast,” she told Brian, heading for the door as fast as she could move her chair.

  “Can’t say anything about this to anyone,” Brian said.

  Again she laughed as she went into the hail. “Who would believe me?”

  * * *

  At breakfast Brian was all smiles, his wheelchair pulled up to a table in the corner of the festively decorated lunch room. No one else was sitting at the table. Beyond the window the Chicago weather had turned cold and clear, the sun bright off the white ground. All the snow was going to freeze solid. It was lucky she wasn’t going anywhere for Christmas. The roads would be awful.

  She wheeled herself over and joined him. “Good morning,” she said. “Going to get cold tonight out there.”

  He glanced at the window, them back at her, his smile growing even bigger. “I hadn’t honestly noticed.” He waited for the orderly to give her food and leave, then leaned over slightly and whispered, “There’s a mission tonight and League Command said that if I was willing to train you on the ship’s proton weapons, you could join up. Take Sarah’s place. You’d be a private, but there’s room for advancement.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Kendra asked, staring at him.

  There was a twinkle in his eye that she’d never seen before. “Not in the slightest,” he said.

  Then his expression got very serious and a coldness came into his eyes. “But it’s dangerous.” His voice was a low whisper. “I won’t kid you on that. You die out there and they bring your body back here and you’re found dead in your sleep in the morning. The time travel part of things just doesn’t revive anyone.”

  She hadn’t been so confused in years. Brian was seriously asking her to join in his delusions. And he was telling her it was dangerous. What were he and his friend going to do? Would Brian kill her if she went with them in the middle of the night?

  Brian reached across and touched her hand. She could feel the roughness of his hand against her brittle skin. It was the first time a man other than an aide had touched her in any way since her husband had died. “You said you wanted to be young again.”

  “I do,” she said, moving her hand away.

  “But you don’t trust me, do you?” Brian said, smiling. The boyish twinkle was back in his eyes.

  “Would you?” she asked. “You have to admit, your story is pretty wild stuff.”

  “I didn’t believe it either, my first night,” he said. Then he laughed. “To be honest with you, even after going on more than a hundred missions, I still don’t believe it.”

  “So I should just trust you?” she asked.

  “How old are you, Kendra?” he asked in return.

  “Eighty-eight,” she said, squaring her shoulders. No man had asked her that question in years.

  “I’m ninety-one,” he said. “This is a dream come true. At our age, what else do we have to live for but dreams?”

  At that moment, for some crazy reason, she decided he was right. Maybe it was because it was Christmas Eve. Or just maybe she really didn’t have anything to lose. Either way she’d play along with him and his wild fantasy, maybe even let herself believe that she might be young again for a short time.

  Every night she dreamed of dancing anyway. Why not join Brian in his dreams for a short time?

  “I’ll go,” she said, smiling at him.

  The light in his eyes was like a child seeing the presents under a Christmas tree. She knew she had made the right decision.

  By midnight that night, she wasn’t so sure.

  By three in the morning, Christmas morning, when the young woman dressed in black came across the hall from Brian’s room, she was scared out of her wits and ready to back out. But the fact that there was a young woman also involved calmed her a little.

  “Brian says you’re thinking of joining the League, Mrs. Howard,” the woman said. “I sure envy you.”

  Those words rocked Kendra completely out of her fear. She looked up into the young eyes and the smiling face of the woman over her bed. “Envy me? Why?”

  “Because you get to go out there, into space, to defend Earth. It will be years before I can go, even on a short-run mission.”

  Kendra only nodded. She still didn’t believe she was going into space, but at this point she really didn’t know what to believe was going to happen.

  “Are you ready?” the young woman asked as she moved in beside Kendra’s bed and lowered the railing.

  “Why not?” Kendra said. “After all, it’s Christmas.”

  The woman picked her up as easily as the orderly, then glanced down the hall to make sure the nurse wasn’t watching before going across and into Brian’s room. Brian was already gone and the young woman carrying her didn’t hesitate. She went right through Brian’s sliding glass door and out into the cold night air, her feet crunching on the frozen snow, her arms holding Kendra gently, but firmly.

  “Aren’t I going to be missed?” Kendra asked as the night air bit at her, sharp, pinlike.

  “You’ll be back in twenty minutes,” the young woman said. “Everything is taken care of on this end.”

  The rest went like a blur for Kendra. The floating up through the air into the ship was like a nightmare. The minute they lifted off the ground she started to really believe Brian’s story. And the sleep chamber in the small room was exactly like Brian had described.

  The woman laid her in the deep chamber, on the soft padding, and then pointed to a closet. “Your uniform is in there, made to fit you exactly. When you wake up, just shove the lid open and get dressed.”

  “How will I get out of this?” Kendra asked, indicating the sleep chamber. She knew without a doubt she was too weak to push herself over the edge of something this deep.

  The young woman laughed. “Just trust me, you won’t have any trouble.”

  With that the woman closed the lid and before Kendra could even think another thought, she was asleep.

  * * *

  Kendra didn’t dream, or at least didn’t remember dreaming. She awoke without opening her eyes. She was almost afraid to. She could feel the softness of the padding under her, so she knew she wasn’t in her own bed in the nursing home.

  Slowly she opened her eyes to see the top of the lid of the sleep chamber. She raised a hand and pushed the lid open, then stared at the skin on her bare arm.

  Young skin. Perfect skin, not the blemished, dried skin of an eighty-eight-year-old woman.

  Then she moved her leg.

  It was as if her heart stopped at that moment. Not since the accident that had killed her husband and crippled her had she been able to move her legs. Yet now she could.

  Both of them.

  She sat up and watched her legs move under her old nightgown, then quickly swung herself up and out of the sleep chamber, landing on the floor, on her feet, as if she’d done that every day for years.

&nbs
p; Brian had been right. Or this really was the most vivid dream she had ever had.

  She glanced around. She was alone in what looked to be a small cabin of a ship, the only furniture a bolted-down chair and the sleep chamber. The same room the woman had carried her into.

  Kendra quickly pulled off her nightgown and studied herself in a full length mirror. It was her young body, all right. From her eighty-eight-year-old mind, it looked perfect, even though she knew that at twenty, she had thought her body far from perfect.

  How little she had known then. She was one damn fine looking broad, as they used to say.

  She laughed, her voice higher and clearer to her ears than she remembered. Then she opened the closet and started to get dressed. As the woman who had carried her had said, the uniform fit perfectly. Brown leather pants, tall black boots, a silk blouse that fit loosely over the middle and tightly across her chest, and a leather vest with a triangle insignia on it that read EPL.

  Earth Protection League.

  She studied herself in the mirror one more time, then turned and headed for the door, smiling, enjoying the feel of her feet under her as she walked. It was time to see just exactly what this dream was all about before she woke up.

  The door to her room slid open. In the narrow corridor two men stood, leaning against the wall. One was short, with light-brown hair and an infectious grin. The other was a tall, square-shouldered, square-jawed man with a handsome face and a thick head of wavy, black hair. They both looked to be in their mid-twenties and had on the same uniform as her, only the tall, good-looking one had two weapons on his hips like an old gunslinger in the wild west.

  He pushed himself away from the wall with the ease of a man perfectly in touch with his body, then said, “Merry Christmas and welcome to my ship, Private Kendra Howard. This is Lieutenant Carl Turner, my second in command.”

  Carl stuck out his hand, smiling. “Glad you decided to join us.”

  She nodded as she shook his hand, then glanced at the one who had introduced them. She knew who he was, but for some reason her mind wasn’t letting her admit it. Finally she said, “Brian?”

  He laughed. “Of course, but I’m afraid we have to be a little more formal on board ship. You need to call me Captain when we’re on a mission.”

  She knew she was standing there, on her own two legs, her head shaking, completely stunned. More than likely her mouth was open, too. Both men had the decency to not laugh out loud at her.

  Captain Brian Saber smiled and touched her arm. “As I said, I still think this is all a dream, too. But I’m afraid it’s not.” His face got very serious and the cold, intense look she had seen in the nursing home was now in full force on this younger version. “You’re going to get a quick dunk in the deep end with this mission, I’m afraid. We don’t have much time.”

  “Why?” she managed to ask. “What do I need to do?”

  “I’ve got to get back to the command center,” he said. “Carl will get you checked out on the photon weapons and what the enemy ships look like, and how to destroy them.”

  “Enemy?” she asked. She had never fired a weapon before, and she didn’t know if she could ever do it, let alone kill something.

  He touched her shoulder in a reassuring way. “Good luck, and I’ll see you after it’s all over.”

  With that he turned and strode down the corridor, a man completely in charge of his world. She had no idea that Brian had such force inside of him. At the age of ninety-one, such force was often hidden, or pounded out of a person.

  She wondered how people saw her at eighty-eight.

  She took a deep breath and turned to Carl. “Well, show me what to do and how to do it, and I’ll see if I can carry my weight.”

  He laughed. “The Captain said you’d be a good addition to the crew. I just think he might be right.”

  “He did, huh?” she said as Carl led off in the opposite direction from the Captain. “Nice to know.” Then, all the way down the corridor she rejoiced in the feeling of actually walking again.

  * * *

  Captain Brian Saber flew his ship through and at the enemy as hard and as fast as he could. The Astra Warsticks were long, thin things that resembled a straw more than a spaceship. At full length, they were only one half the size of his ship, but still very deadly little things.

  He dove in again at one of them, twisting to give his gunners open shots, then quickly used evasive maneuvers to avoid getting hit by the Warstick Energy Beam weapons that shot from each end of their ships like orange fluid blown out of a drinking straw. He was trying to do everything in his power to make this a fight.

  “Damn,” Carl muttered under his breath beside him as Saber barely avoided flying directly into one of the Energy Beams from a Warstick.

  Damn was right. That had been too close. He swung the ship out wide and made a pass alone the length of a turning Warstick, letting his gunners hammer at it.

  No one at Earth Protection League Command thought he, or the other twenty ships sent to this battle, would survive. The Astra had decided to take six league systems, had given Earth ten hours to turn them over, and when Earth had said no, the Astra had sent two hundred War-sticks across the border. His job was simply to slow them down while the League mounted a better, and more powerful defense closer to the threatened systems.

  Saber guessed the League figured that twenty ships full of old nursing home residents were expendable when it came to defending Earth’s space. And he agreed.

  He and the rest were expendable when it came down to fighting off the alien scum.

  But he didn’t plan on getting killed just yet, especially by an alien that looked more like a piece of straw than an alien warrior. That would be like getting beaten up by the ninety-pound weakling in school.

  But at the moment, that was exactly what was happening. They had managed to destroy six of the Warsticks, but had lost three of their ships in the process. They were going to slow the Warstick fleet down, that was for sure, but they weren’t going to stop it by a long ways unless he came up with something fast.

  Suddenly the voice of Kendra came over the ship’s communications link. “Captain?”

  “Go ahead, Private,” he said. In the battle he had forgotten she was even on board. What a mission to be her first. And most likely her last. If they were killed, Shady Valley Nursing Home would have two deaths in one Christmas morning.

  “Our weapons are doing no good against the sides of these ships,” Kendra said. “But I have an idea that is pretty far-fetched.”

  “Anything at this point,” he said, moving the ship barely out of the way of two closing Warsticks trying to trap him between their open ends.

  “From what the Lieutenant told me,” she said, “the Warstick control room is near one end, their engine room is near the other, and weapons are fired from both ends.”

  “Got it right,” Saber said. “What’s your idea?”

  “I think if you cut one of those sticks in half,” she said, “you might put it out of business.”

  “And how would you suggest we do that?” Saber asked. Then almost before the question was out of his mouth, he knew the answer.

  “Ram it,” he said.

  At the same moment she said, “Ram it.”

  “Great idea, Private,” he said. “I want all weapons aimed forward and firing. On my mark.”

  The Warsticks were very thin right at the center, so the Earth ships had a complete advantage in size. And the Earth ships had great forward screens since they flew so fast through space with the Trans-Galactic drive.

  He swung the ship around and headed for the center of the nearest Warstick. One problem the sticks had was turning quickly and he stayed easily ahead of the Warstick’s evasive turn.

  “Asteroid deflectors on full!” he ordered.

  “Already on,” Carl said.

  “Brace for impact!”

  It was almost anticlimactic. The ship didn’t even bump. Saber had felt a worse impact running ove
r a jackrabbit with a car when he was younger.

  But the Warstick was cut in half.

  A moment later both ends of the enemy ship exploded in bright white flashes.

  “Well, I’d say that worked,” Carl said, looking over and smiling a Saber.

  “Inform the other ships,” Saber ordered. “Weapons crew keep firing forward. Let’s take out another one.”

  He swung the ship around and plowed through the center of another Warstick before it could even begin to turn out of his way.

  The same thing happened. They went through the alien ship as if it wasn’t even there, then the separated halves of the Warstick exploded.

  Maybe, just maybe, they had a chance in this fight. For the first time in a few hours, he was starting to hope he just might see one more Christmas turkey dinner.

  Two hours of hard fighting later, the Astra Warstick fleet, or what was left of it, turned and headed back for the border. There were still fifteen of the twenty Earth Protection League ships left.

  They had won and won easily.

  Saber reported to League Command what had happened, then sat back in his chair and took a long, deep breath. He had been sweating for hours and could desperately use a shower. But he hadn’t felt this good about a mission in a long, long time.

  “Nice flying, Captain,” Carl said, also slouching in his chair, clearly as exhausted as Saber felt.

  “Thanks,” Saber said. “I think this deserves a party, don’t you?”

  “I think the fact that we’re still alive deserves something,” Carl said, laughing.

  Saber flicked the communication switch to the eight members of his crew. “Congratulations people, on a job well done. And special thanks to our newest crew member, Private Kendra Howard. Party in one hour, everyone. Don’t be late.”

  * * *

  Kendra smiled at the Captain’s words and for the first time in two hours let go of the control stick for the Proton Beam weapon, then sat back in her padded chair. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so tired and so exhilarated at the same time. The battle had seemed to go on forever. Yet at the same time, it seemed it had just started and then it ended.