Sputnik's Children

by Terri Favro

  Duff tipped his head back and cracked his spine the way I’d seen him do at Cressie’s. “I miss the academic life. Before my draft card arrived, I was doing a double PhD in genetics and bioengineering.”

  Linda wrinkled her forehead. “Wow. I’m not even sure what that is.”

  “I’m not surprised. It won’t exist as a course of study ’til the 1980s,” said Duff, running his hand through his hair. “You see, Linda, I’ve come from the future.”

  seven

  Hotter Than Hell

  Apparently, Duff’s resemblance to Jesus made Linda believe anything he said.

  Kendal seemed skeptical. “What year did you come from?”

  “I was born in 1996,” answered Duff. “The year of my hop, adjusted for tidal changes, is 2019. Or rather, was. Or maybe, will be. Verb tenses are tricky when you’re jumping around in time.”

  Linda did the math. “You’re twenty-three,” she said, in a tone of voice that implied that this was the perfect age for any man to be.

  “So, what’s the future like, Duff?” interrupted Kendal, the sarcasm thick in his voice.

  “Hotter than hell, man,” said Duff, scratching his scalp. “That’s how I got these burns. See, I lost my solar armour during a sandstorm in the Great Massachusetts Desert. I figured I’d be burned to death before search-and-rescue found me. No choice but to do an emergency hop. It was the only way for me to get out of the sun fast enough.”

  Linda stepped closer to him and touched one of his scorched cheeks, causing him to flinch. “I think there’s some aloe vera in the medicine cabinet.”

  Upstairs, seated at the old vinyl-topped kitchen table, Linda dabbed paste from a jar onto Duff’s face. The pale green colour made his face look mossy.

  “Why’s it so hot in 2019, Duff?” I asked. “Will Earth move closer to the sun?”

  Duff shook his head. “Your atmosphere is thinning. You just don’t know it yet. Five, six or so years from now, the scientists will finally start to catch on and warn people that Earth is warming.”

  “What’s causing the atmosphere to thin out?” Linda asked.

  Duff looked at her very sadly. “I don’t know if I should tell you this, Linda. It might be too much for you to handle.”

  “You’ve got to tell us, Duff,” she said.

  His blue eyes seemed to be measuring her up. “Sometimes it’s best not to know what’s ahead of you.”

  Linda’s hands went to her face. “Oh no. They’re going to drop the Bomb, aren’t they?”

  Duff nodded. “Nuclear radiation is going to finish up what your parents’ generation started with their so-called Atomic War of Deterrence. Turns out it didn’t deter anything except your futures.”

  Linda put her head down in her arms.

  “But wait a minute, wait a minute,” protested Kendal. “You said that this was already happening. How’s that possible if the Bomb isn’t going to drop for years?”

  “You guys don’t get it, do you?” said Duff. “Eight years from now, World War Three will blast out a good chunk of our atmosphere and destroy the protective layer of ozone that keeps the sun from burning the Earth to a crisp. But the warming effect would be observable right now, if someone bothered looking for it. Look, the first atomic bombs were detonated in ’45, and there’ve been megatons of nuclear tests since then. You don’t think that has long-term consequences? Not to mention, Nixon’s about to start underground testing near the Aleutians. That’ll get the Soviets good and pissed off and start us on a road that’ll end real badly when they push the button in ’79.”

  “What’ll happen then?” I whispered, thinking of how Duff had warned me about the 1979 nuclear war while I was in the dentist’s chair.

  Duff closed his eyes. “First, firestorms sweep the entire planet. After that, there’s the Year of Atomic Rain. Nuclear fallout in the raindrops. Cities are turned into massive graveyards. New York, Paris, Los Angeles — ghost towns full of the dead and dying. Let’s see, what else. Animal extinction. Major crop failures. Anarchy. Birth defects.” He opened his eyes and looked around the table at the three of us. “You really want me to go on? You’re living in the end times, kids. Enjoy yourselves. By the time I was born — sorry, will be born — most of the big cities you know about exist only in the history books. Better see the Big Apple before it collapses into the Atlantic.”

  I thought of Nonna Peppy, back at our house with Mom, listening to the New York Metropolitan Opera live on the radio while she wiped the plates. She definitely couldn’t handle this piece of news.

  “I don’t get it,” persisted Kendal. “You said you were drafted. How does the government even know you exist if you haven’t been born yet? Where’d they mail your draft card?”

  Linda glanced at Kendal as she rubbed aloe into the backs of Duff’s hands. I could tell she was annoyed by Kendal’s persistent questions. But Duff stayed cool. “The government knows everything about us, man. Past, present and future. You can time hop but you can’t hide. Lots of people do it, trying to skip out on their taxes. They blow all their money in their own time, then jump to a time with lower prices, like this one. That’s where the Amazing Kreskin really comes from.”

  “I knew it!” I said. “Every time he shows up on Johnny Carson, you can see in his eyes that he knows what’s coming. Who else is here from the future, Duff?”

  Duff thought about it. “Evel Knievel, Howard Hughes, Dr. Christiaan Barnard, Martin Luther King Jr., until he was assassinated, of course . . . and that guy who bends spoons.”

  “Uri Geller,” supplied Linda.

  “Don’t girls ever time hop?” I interrupted, thinking of my own short jump forward in time.

  “Some, but it’s hard on the female reproductive system.”

  I crossed my arms over my breasts and glared at Duff. He hadn’t mentioned this little detail before he’d sent me rocketing through puberty.

  Kendal was sitting backwards in a kitchen chair, cowboy-style, staring at Duff.

  “What are you going to do next? Go back to 2019?” he asked in a tone that implied he hoped Duff would do that very thing.

  Duff shrugged. “Not sure I can. I didn’t have time to leave a trail of crumbs. Kind of screwed the pooch on that one. Worse comes to worst, I might be stuck here.”

  Linda frowned at Kendal and me. “It’s time to stop badgering Duff. He must be exhausted.”

  Duff yawned. “Yeah, I’m pretty wiped. Maybe I’ll just roll out my sleeping bag in the back of my car ’til I can buy a cot and such.”

  “There are empty beds right here,” said Linda. “Kendal will help you carry one downstairs, won’t you, Kendal?”

  And just like that, Duff, aka the Trespasser, ended up as our neighbour.

  * * *

  As night fell, after a light supper of sliced radishes with olive oil and crusty bread and a dandelion leaf salad, Duff, Linda, Kendal and I went out to the backyard with my telescope and a blanket. It was a warm, clear night, perfect for stargazing.

  “Holy shit, the Milky Way,” said Duff. “Too much atomic ash in the atmosphere in my day to see the sky so clearly. Mind if I have a look through your scope, little sister?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Amazingly, Duff knew all the constellations and pointed them out like an astronomer — he’d learned from books, he told us, since few except the very brightest stars were visible in the polluted night sky of 2019.

  I thought about what we’d always been told as kids. “If they blow up the Earth, can’t we go live on the moon?” I asked.

  Duff laughed sadly. “That was a fairy tale cooked up by NASA and Walt Disney, little sister. There’s way more money in making war than peace. Despite what you’re hearing, they’re building missile silos on the moon, not geodesic domes and hydroponic gardens. Anyway, even in 2019, living on the moon is just a dream. Time travel turned ou
t to be easier.”

  The air began to cool as night deepened. Stars crowded in, a shattered windshield against the blackness. Duff talked about the future, telling us how his parents had been in a hardened shelter that protected them from fallout. That’s why Duff was born healthy and intelligent enough to go to MIT, or what was left of it in the ruins of Boston. Most of his generation was born to parents whose genes had been horribly altered by radiation, causing their children to mutate into not-quite-normal humans.

  “I’m one of the Normals. A minority group,” explained Duff. “Most people my age are Twisties.”

  “How come?” I asked.

  “Their strands of DNA became twisted in unusual ways so they’re exceptions, which is actually the politically correct term for them. ‘Exceptionals.’”

  “We’ve got plenty of Exceptionals living on Z Street right now. We call them Twisties, too,” said Kendal. For the first time, it sounded as if he was actually weighing the possible truth of Duff’s words. “What are Exceptionals like in your time? Do they have superpowers?”

  Duff shook his head. “Not quite, although a subset of gene mutations did result in giftedness — psychics, shape-shifters, mind-readers. But most are underdeveloped or overdeveloped or just plain sick, Kendal. They die young, and painfully, usually of mitochondrial disorders. Some start off looking like Normals but as they age, they gradually get eaten by flesh-eating fungi or leprous moulds. Ninety percent of the world’s population suffers from some type of inherited radiation sickness, so ‘exceptional’ is hardly accurate. Being genetically damaged is actually the norm.”

  Linda’s voice broke the darkness. “The future sounds horrific. Isn’t there something you can do to stop this?”

  Duff cleared his throat. “We know every hop alters time in tiny ways, like wrinkles in a blanket. That’s why sometimes you remember things from your past differently from someone else who was there with you. But we’re concerned that an attempt to deliberately change history in a major way could have a slingshot effect. Even if I could figure out a way to stop the Bomb, some other disaster of equal magnitude would have to rush in to take its place. Could turn out to be even worse. Hard to say.”

  “How could anything be worse than a nuclear war?” I asked, my throat dry. It was starting to dawn on me that I might have only eight years to live as a Normal. I wasn’t sure I wanted to live at all as an Exceptional.

  Duff shook his head. “To be honest, the impact of changing history is purely speculative. No one’s actually done it. But we might be able to avoid future events, rather than change them, by collapsing the continuum we’re living in now and merging with an alternate timeline that’s similar to ours.”

  “Is that even possible?” asked Linda.

  Duff nodded. “Theoretically yes, according to quantum mechanics. We’ve detected a low-bandwidth television transmission from outside our world. We believe what we’re picking up to be alternate timelines, weakly coupled to ours, that were created by atomic blasts.”

  Kendal shrugged. “Big deal. I’ve been reading about alternate histories in comic books for years.”

  “I’m talking about science, not comic books,” said Duff. “We’ve found an alternate timeline on the spectrum closest to us. Earth Standard Time. It appears to be marginally more enlightened; as in, not destined to start World War Three, although they manage to screw up the planet in all sorts of other ways. Theoretically, someone who exists in our timeline but not in theirs could be able to merge the two, but this person would have to be non-existent in their new timeline. We call such an individual an Ion Tagger.”

  “If the Ion Tagger didn’t exist in the new timeline, what would happen to them?” I asked.

  “Hard to say. The IT might simply disappear into nothingness, or survive, but in a very degraded, unstable state.”

  I shivered at Duff’s clinical description of the fate he had been so eager to send me to.

  “Sounds like a shitty deal for the Ion Tagger,” I pointed out.

  Duff shrugged. “What’s one life when you consider the millions who would be saved? Yes, the Tagger might be sacrificed, but everyone else from Atomic Mean Time would carry their lives in Earth Standard Time, happily unaware of what had happened to them. Small price to pay, I’d say.”

  We lapsed into silence. Awed by the vast expanse of the sky, not to mention the mind-blowing magnitude of Duff’s story, I played connect-the-dots with the stars, trying to knit together the Bull, the Crab, the Bear, the Seated Woman and my astrological sign, the Scales of Justice. Duff had told me back in the dentist’s office that he’d established that I was the Ion Tagger, but this new, younger version of him seemed unaware of that discovery. Given the possibility of finding myself non-existent in the alternate timeline, I didn’t particularly feel like enlightening him. Especially now that I had so much to live for.

  I shifted my body closer to Kendal’s, leaning against his shoulder. He turned to brush my ear with his lips.

  Being in love didn’t feel the way Linda had described it — like being eaten alive. Kendal was a friend, someone I could trust. The idea that we might have only eight years together made our love feel doomed and urgent — epic lovers struggling against a backdrop of world events. We were Zhivago and Lara in the Russian Revolution, Tony and Maria on the west side of New York, Bonnie and Clyde in the Dust Bowl.

  There was no time to lose: I had to start living my life the way I’d been taught in duck-and-cover drills back at “St. Dismal’s” — as if there was no tomorrow. From that day on, I decided no new experience would pass me by.

  eight

  Seduction by Comic Book

  We called it Postapocalyptica, our bombed-out private planet with a population of two, if you didn’t count the mice. Kendal pried away a loose board from the back corner of the abandoned candy store and led me into the dusty interior.

  Although the wooden building was a burned-out wreck, the first floor stood. Piotr’s father had made a half-hearted attempt to reopen but, by 1971, pornography and popsicles were available at every corner store and highway stop — the derelict building was eventually boarded up. The walls and counter were the texture of charcoal; the cash register, a scorched chunk of steel with the final purchase rusted in place up top: $6.66, like a prop in a horror movie. A few mysterious cans with the labels burned off sat on sagging shelves. Turned out we were right when we were kids and looked out into the darkness beyond the candy store and thought, There be dragons.

  Old people on Tesla Road claimed the building was cursed. Kendal said its reputation made it the perfect make-out place. No one was inclined to trespass, outside of us. And unlike at Kendal’s house, there was no ShipCo Guardian Angel eavesdropping on every word we said.

  We lay side by side on top of a sleeping bag that Kendal had carried in and rolled out beneath a broken section of roof where the sun poured in. Kendal pulled off his shirt and I ran my hands over his chest and back and arms. I let him slide his under my shirt, inside my shorts, under my bra to brush my stiffened nipples. I couldn’t bring myself to undress.

  “Not yet, not yet,” I said.

  “Then when?” he’d groan, claiming the frustration was causing him extreme physical discomfort of a masculine nature unknown to me.

  “Just — not yet,” I’d answer.

  When we’d gone as far as we could — as far as I would let Kendal go — we lay on our backs holding hands, waiting for his hard-on to subside, so we could start all over again. Sometimes we’d share a bottle of Nonno Zinio’s wine I’d taken from the cellar or a bit of weed that he’d bought under the counter from one of the small-time Z Street milk stores.

  “I wish you weren’t so damn Catholic,” Kendal mumbled into my neck.

  “You’re Catholic, too,” I said.

  “Only by default.”

  “What are you really, then?”

 
“Pagan,” said Kendal. He rolled on top of me, kissing me, hard again through his cut-off shorts.

  Despite the frustration, the non-sex with Kendal was more exciting than most of the sexual encounters I would go on to have in the years to come, not just because we were friends in love but because of the danger of discovery. Postapocalyptica wasn’t much of a hiding place — my little chirps of pleasure might have easily been heard from the street, or Piotr’s father might have returned to check on his property. Unlikely, but the thought of being discovered with Kendal excited me. I had learned something new about what would be called my personal sexuality: I wanted to be seen, to be caught in the act, to be in a position of danger with my lover. I did not want to feel safe.

  One of the riskier topics we discussed in Postapocalyptica was the cause of Kendal’s injury. Away from the ShipCo Guardian Angel, he felt safe to tell me that he remembered nothing of the so-called accident and little of the weeks leading up to it.

  “Mom agreed to let me be hypnotized to make me forget,” he told me. “They’d promised her I’d heal better if I wasn’t having flashbacks.”

  Well, of course, I thought. Post-Traumatic Induced Amnesia by hypnosis: a psychological tool to help people who had been through physical trauma forget all about it. Used on torture and accident victims who wanted to put victimhood behind them and get on with their lives. Also, a handy way to make people forget inconvenient truths, like the possibility that living on the Z-Lands was making them sick. No wonder ShipCo had sent Kendal home with a ShipCo Guardian Angel to monitor his conversations for subversive content. He was no use to ShipCo as a rocket technician, but also no danger to them with his memory wiped clean of the secret I’d shared with him — that my dad had discovered that the Z-Lands was still dangerously contaminated by nuclear waste.

  I wondered why ShipCo hadn’t used the same brainwashing technique on me, or Linda or Dad. Then it occurred to me: maybe they had. Who knew what had happened during my lost year and a half? It would certainly explain why everyone in my family was so uncharacteristically upbeat.