In this reality, at her advanced age, she was far from a bird in any form.
Around her, the Shady Valley Nursing Home was quiet.
The Christmas festive decorations filled the hall outside her open door, and later today she knew there’d be ham for Christmas Eve dinner. She had enjoyed that ham dinner for years now and actually looked forward to it, since the ham was always moist and soft and allowed her old teeth to chew it easily.
Then there would be turkey tomorrow for Christmas dinner. Sometimes they overcooked the turkey and it was tough, other times it had been moist and the dressing wonderful. The same two meals every Christmas for years now, since she had moved in here and her only son had moved from Chicago to the west coast and no longer took her out for Christmas or Christmas Eve dinners. Now he could only afford an occasional holiday call and a once-a-year summer visit.
She knew he felt bad about missing holidays, but her time was almost gone and he had a family to spend the holidays with and enjoy. He did what he could for her, she understood that. She didn’t blame him at all and even had encouraged him to stay with his family at Christmas and let her enjoy her friends here.
She took a deep breath and kept rubbing her legs, slowly, trying to get any kind of feeling into them.
She could hear the faint ticking of Brian Saber’s old wall clock across the hall, but nothing more.
It was now Christmas Eve day, very early in the morning actually, 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 earlier 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.
“Oh, great, just great,” she said softly to herself. 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.
“Go slow,” she whispered, talking to herself.
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 and the brake locked. Last thing she would need on Christmas Eve was that thing rolling away from her and her falling and breaking an old brittle bone.
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 mostly dead legs off the edge of the bed. Then with a twist she had done hundreds of times, she half-dropped, half-lowered herself into her wheelchair.
She could still stand, still move her legs enough to shuffle, still walk in a very slow fashion with support and she did that as often as she could, but that took real focus and she felt better not trying to make it most places without sitting in the wheelchair.
Especially if she was alone like this.
The feeling of making it safely into the chair made her smile.
She often had the nurse or orderly help her out of bed just for safety, but still having the freedom to do it on her own was the most important thing she held onto.
At eighty-four years of age, freedom was everything. There sure wasn’t much else.
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 opened a door.
Her sliding door led out to the front garden of the nursing home. It was closed and the drapes hung down limp. Her room’s big metal door into the hallway was braced open as it always was at night.
She could see slightly in the faint light from the nurse’s station and her nightlight in her bathroom. Nothing was out of place.
She must have imagined that or a ghost had drifted past her. So many people had died in this nursing home over the years, it wouldn’t have surprised her if it was haunted.
She was about to continue on toward the restroom when she glanced out and across the hall.
There she saw a young man, shadowed and wearing some sort of dark uniform, pick eighty-five-year-old Brian Saber out of his bed and head for his room’s sliding glass door. That door led outside into the cold winter night and the center courtyard of the nursing home.
There was nothing out there.
No one even went out there until the spring and summer and early fall.
At first she was stunned at what she saw.
“Get help, you idiot,” she muttered. She was about to shout for the nurse when she heard Brian’s distinctive laugh.
Whatever was happening, Brian was a part of it. He didn’t seem to be minding at all.
Maybe it was some sort of Christmas gift from someone.
Maybe Brian’s son was giving him a treat of some kind.
She knew he had one son, but they hadn’t talked about him much at all, other than Brian was proud of him.
After a moment, the man carrying Brian had again 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 as the door slid silently closed.
What in the world 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, and if they had been younger by a few decades, she was sure they would have been having a fling, since Brian’s wife had died about the same time as her husband.
Yet Brian had never mentioned doing anything like this. He seemed so down-to-earth, solid. Something crazy didn’t make sense for him in her mind.
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 bright-lit nurse’s station, decorated in red ribbons and white bows. She could see the night-nurse’s head sticking 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, Dot silently wheeled her chair quickly the rest of the way across the hall and into Brian’s room.
His bed was slept in, the blankets and sheet pushed back, his wheelchair beside his nightstand, his old wall clock ticked the seconds away.
But there was no sign of Brian.
She sat for a moment, listening to the wall clock count down the remaining time in her life.
This was so strange.
She moved to the sliding glass door that opened from his room out into a central courtyard. She pulled the curtain aside, not knowing what to expect.
There was nothing out there.
A cold Chicago night. She could almost feel the cold radiating through the glass to her thin skin. She shivered and moved closer to see where Brian had gone.
In the snow, she could see a man’s tracks coming from the center of the courtyard to Brian’s door, another set going back. But she couldn’t see where they had gone.
Maybe through another door on the other side of the courtyard, but she had no idea why they would do that.
She had no idea why Brian would do any of this.
She eased her chair away from the window and moved it so she was sitting in the dark corner of the room.
She had a sneaking hunch Brian would be back very shortly. And she didn’t plan on leaving until then, no matter how badly she needed to go to the bathroom.
TWO
December 24th, 1958
Equivalent Earth Time
Location: Deep Space
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 brown 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 ob
vious reasons.
They were dead.
He felt proud, staring at the oil-smelling bodies, their tentacles twitching in the air, their six eyes staring in their death stare. They looked like a bad cross between an octopus and a pile of dog crap.
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 vest, and high boots. He hoped it washed out before his next mission, otherwise his crew was never going to let him forget it.
One of the pirates seemed to move and he shot it again just for good measure.
“Captain?” Carl Turner, his third in command asked over the communications link. “Are you wrapped up there?”
“Bows are tied and presents under the tree,” he said, kicking each pile of pirate scum to make sure it wasn’t alive. “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 to Earth.”
“I copy that,” Turner said. “I can smell you from here.”
“Next time you do the boarding,” Saber said, laughing.
Damn it felt good to be alive and needed to defend Earth.
“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 only ten of them on the ship instead of the normal thirty-eight to forty-two crew. Sometimes the ship held up to fifty crew members, but they had needed only the gunners and support crew this time, since the mission had been easy and designed to be quick.
But Saber knew that two of that small crew had been in the forward section.
“Ben and Sarah,” Turner said, his voice soft and low. “Ben will survive. Sarah was killed.”
“Damn, damn, damn,” Saber said.
He hadn’t known Sarah that well, but she had a great smile and an infectious laugh. She had barely topped five feet tall, but seemed really tough. They had been on six missions together, with her working weapons for him on 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 kick at the closest of the dead pirates, Saber turned and headed for the airlock.
Twenty minutes later, after a quick shower, he was standing over the coffin-like 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 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 an eighty-five-year-old cripple in a nursing home, trying to fight off more strokes. Out here on the borders of the Earth Protection League space, he was a young and healthy 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 with a sigh of resignation, 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 early Christmas Eve morning, less than twenty minutes after he had 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.
And then he would have another chance to be young again, fight the good fight as a hero of the Earth Protection League on the very edges of civilized space.
THREE
December 24th, 2018
Actual Earth Time
Location: Chicago
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. And he ate as much as he could, but couldn’t seem to put any weight on his 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. He used to love the cold, crisp Chicago nights. Now they just chilled him to his old bones, even only being out in it for fifteen seconds or so.
“Good to hear,” the young man carrying him said.
Both Saber 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 of the T-G flight.
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 Dot, the woman who lived across the hall, as she wheeled her chair out of the shadows of the corner.
Oh, no.
Saber didn’t know what to think or even do. This was something he had never imagined happening.
Dot was his best friend here in the nursing home. He’d often wished he could tell her about his missions. But he was restricted from doing so by regulations.
The EPL had a lot of very firm regulations. Considering the nature of the job and who was doing the fighting, it had to be strict and clear.
The young soldier glanced back at him, a look of fear on his face, his hand on his gun on his hip.
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.
Saber looked at his friend sitting there in her wheelchair clearly looking confused.
Dot 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.”<
br />
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 Dot. “Goodnight, 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 Dot. He couldn’t really see the expression on her face, and she said nothing.
He could feel his heart beating in his chest, and he hoped he still didn’t smell like those aliens he had killed.
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 Dot rolled a little closer to his bed and 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.
But he realized he was back in his old body and the laugh turned into a hacking, coughing, old man’s laugh that lasted for a good thirty ticks of his clock before he finally stopped.
“You want to know where I was?” he asked.
She nodded.
He motioned her closer to his bed.
“You won’t believe me, but I would love to tell you.”
“You never know what I might believe,” she said.
He laughed softly this time, avoiding the hacking cough.
“It’s going to feel good to finally be able to tell you about my missions.”
She nodded.
He couldn’t believe it. 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.
Almost.
FOUR
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