December 24th, 2018
Actual Earth Time
Location: Chicago
DOT 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.
He told her about how he had had to board a pirate ship, fight all six of them, and how bad they smelled. The details of the story were very clear, right down to how he kicked one of the dead bodies before he left the pirate ship.
She couldn’t believe any of it, yet she had seen him be carried in and out of the room by a man who had called him Captain. And who wore a gun and was upset that she was there.
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 had claimed.
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 of that 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, after telling her about the loss of his crewmate, Sarah, that he asked her something that bothered her on a deep level. He asked if she was interested in joining up, being a soldier in the Earth Protection League, of being young again to help Earth fight whatever threatened its space 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 the brass in charge of it all.”
At that moment, Joyce, the night nurse tonight, poked her head in and smiled at them. She asked if Brian needed anything, then winked at Dot and left.
Dot 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 behind her.
Again she laughed as she went into the hall.
“Who would believe me?”
She didn’t believe it.
Not one word of it.
But she wanted to.
FIVE
December 24th, 2018
Actual Earth Time
Location: Chicago
AT BREAKFAST ON Christmas Eve day, Brian was all smiles, his wheelchair pulled up to a table in the corner of the festively decorated lunchroom. No one else was sitting at the table.
Green and red garland hung from just about everything that wasn’t needed, and the room smelled of a combination of Christmas wreathes and pancakes. Actually a pretty good smell as far as Dot was concerned.
Beyond the window, the Chicago weather had turned cold and clear, the sun almost too bright off the white ground. All the snow was going to freeze solid by the time the day was done and it got dark. It was lucky she wasn’t going anywhere for Christmas tomorrow. The roads would be awful.
After all the years of living in this area, she knew that without a doubt. But she had no reason left in her life at this point to even step outside.
She had forced herself to do a little walking this morning, even though she was tired from being up so late and talking with Brian last night, so she moved along behind her wheelchair, slowing pushing it around the other tables so she could join him.
“Good morning,” she said, sitting with her back to the window so she wouldn’t be blinded from the bright sunlight. “Going to get cold tonight out there.”
He glanced at the window behind her, then back at her, his smile growing even bigger. “I hadn’t honestly noticed. But might be a problem for my son getting here later on.”
She knew Brian had a son in the area, but hadn’t met him in all the years they had known each other. Maybe today she would get a chance.
Brian waited for the orderly to give her some orange juice, ask if she would like her normal eggs and pancakes, and leave.
Then he 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. You would take Sarah’s place. You’d be a private, but there’s room for advancement.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Dot asked, staring at him.
He had shaved this morning, but his skin was still rough with light stubble, and 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.
That made her sit back, surprised.
“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. She took her red cloth napkin with some Christmas scene on it and unfolded it and put it on her lap to give her a moment to think.
Brian was seriously asking her to join in his delusions.
And he was telling her it was dangerous.
What were he and that friend that had carried him out 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 all those years ago.
“You said you wanted to be young again,” he said, staring into her eyes with those intense brown eyes of his.
“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, laughing and clearly remembering something since he seemed to be looking off into the distance. After a moment he went on. “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, Dot?” he asked in return.
“Eighty-four,” she said, squaring her shoulders. No man had asked her that question in years. She wasn’t sure she liked telling a man her age. She was still very old-fashioned that way.
“I’m eighty-five,” he said. “And this old body is getting worse by the day it seems. What I do for the League 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 and there was a faint Christmas song playing in the background and the sun was shining and she would have no family visiting today.
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 night?
“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.
With that the orderly brought their breakfast and they talked about family and Christmas memories.
And at lunch they sat together and did the same, sharing the past with each other. Dot learned more about Brian
that day than she had in years. It seemed that because she was willing to go with him, he felt more open with her.
And she felt more open with him for some reason.
She really had made the right decision, she knew that.
She went to bed at her normal time of eight and managed to doze, but awoke at midnight, worried that she had made a really stupid decision.
She could hear Brian’s clock ticking and not much else. The worry about what was going to happen kept her awake far too long and she kept waking up at any sound.
At one point she almost wheeled across the hall and told Brian to forget about her going along, but before she could get up enough energy to do that, she had just gone back to sleep, deciding she would deal with it in the morning.
It was three in the morning, Christmas morning, when the young woman dressed in black came across the hall from Brian’s room.
Dot heard her coming because Brian had laughed.
Dot was suddenly scared out of her wits.
But the fact that there was a young woman also involved calmed her a little. It wasn’t just Brian and some friend of his.
“My name is Lieutenant Sherri,” the woman said, stopping beside her bed and smiling. “Brian says you’re thinking of joining the League, Mrs. Leeds. I sure envy you.”
Those words rocked Dot completely out of her fear, which drained away like someone had pulled a plug in a sink.
She looked up into the young dark eyes and the smiling face of Lieutenant Sherri 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.”
Dot only nodded.
She had no idea what the young woman had said or meant. And 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. But at least the fear was gone.
“Are you ready?” the young woman asked as she moved in beside Dot’s bed and lowered the railing.
“Why not?” Dot said. “After all, it’s Christmas morning.”
The woman picked her up as easily as the orderly, stepped to the door and glanced down the hall to make sure the nurse wasn’t watching. Then quickly, she carried Dot across the hall and into Brian’s room.
Brian was already gone and the young woman carrying her didn’t hesitate. She went right through Brian’s open sliding glass door and out into the cold night air, her feet crunching on the frozen snow, her arms holding Dot gently, but firmly.
“Aren’t I going to be missed?” Dot asked as the night air bit at her, sharp, pin-like. Not in a million years had she expected to go out into this cold night air.
“You’ll be back in twenty minutes,” the young woman said. “Everything is taken care of on this end.”
“We won’t be outside that long, will we?” Dot asked, starting to shiver. The older she had gotten, the more sensitive she had become to the cold. This was like a knife cutting at her skin.
“Only a moment,” Lieutenant Sherri said.
The rest went like a blur for Dot.
One moment they were in the cold, then she and the woman carrying her were floating up through the air into something big above her in the night sky. That was a nightmare and Dot wanted to close her eyes, but didn’t.
The minute they lifted off the ground, she started to really believe Brian’s story.
And suddenly she was scared again.
The young Lieutenant Sherri walked her quickly down a hallway that looked like it could be a hallway on a cruise liner. Then she carried Dot into a single room.
The coffin-like sleep chamber in the small room was exactly like Brian had described.
Lieutenant Sherri 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?” Dot 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 lieutenant just laughed softly and then said with a smile, “Just trust me, you won’t have any trouble.”
With that the lieutenant closed the lid.
Before Dot could even think another thought or begin to panic, she was asleep.
SIX
December 25th, 1956
Equivalent Earth Time
Location: Deep Space
DOT DIDN’T DREAM, or at least she 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.
She could remember clearly the frightening moments of floating through the air above the Shady Valley Nursing Home and seeing the Chicago skyline out over the cold, clear winter’s night.
Slowly, she opened her eyes to see the top of the lid of the sleep chamber. There was a faint light coming from around the edge and the top seemed much farther away than it actually was, more than likely to keep down claustrophobia.
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-four year old woman.
Was that even possible?
Then she moved her leg.
It was as if her heart stopped at that moment.
Her breath caught and she wasn’t sure if she was going to burst into tears.
Not since the accident that had killed her husband and crippled her had she been able to move her legs without a lot of work after waking up.
Yet now she could.
Both of them.
Easily.
She sat up and watched her legs move under her old nightgown.
Not possible, but she needed to really test this.
Quickly, not allowing herself to think about it, she 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.
Now she really did feel like crying.
For a moment she just stood there shaking.
Brian had been telling the truth.
Or this really was the most vivid dream she had ever had.
She touched her own soft skin on her arms. It didn’t feel like she was dreaming.
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 coffin-like sleep chamber. This was the same room the woman had carried her into.
Dot quickly pulled off her nightgown and studied herself in a full-length mirror that was bolted to the back of the closet door.
It was her young body, all right. From her eighty-four year old mind, it looked perfect, even though she knew that in her twenties, 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.
That thought made her laugh. Her voice was higher and clearer to her ears than she remembered.
If she was going insane or this was some sort of trick, it was a great trick.
Then she opened the closet and started to get dressed.
As Lieutenant Sherri had said it would, the uniform fit perfectly.
How had anyone known her size when she was in her twenties?
The uniform consisted of undergarments that seemed very modern. White underwear and what seemed like a “sports bra” of some sort. She had never worn one, but she had heard of them. It felt far more comfortable than the old-fashioned things she wore most days.
There were 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.
So far everything Brian had
told her was coming true.
How was any of this possible?
She studied herself in the mirror one more time. Never in her faintest memory did she look this good.
Finally, she turned and headed for the door, smiling, enjoying the feel of her feet solidly under her as she walked. The boots fit her feet perfectly, almost like a second skin.
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 wide corridor on the other side two men stood, leaning against the wall. The corridor was painted a tan color with a rubber matting on the floor. Not like anything she had seen before.
One of the men 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, brown hair.
They both looked to be in their early twenties and had on the same uniform as she did, 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, The Bad Business, Private Dot Leeds. This is Lieutenant Carl Turner, my third 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.
Was it really possible?
Finally, she asked, “Brian?”
He laughed, deep and rich and full of power. “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 like this.”
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. His touch was almost shocking. Again, he was the only man except an orderly or nurse or doctor who had touched her in any way in decades.
Smith's Monthly #8 Page 11