A Cosmic Christmas 2 You

by Hank Davis

  “No,” he said, looking down at her, attempting a smile. “They’re sad because . . . because they’re leaving. Leaving and not coming back.”

  He saw the skin underneath her eyes quiver. “What?”

  “I’m sorry, honey. We didn’t tell you until now because we didn’t want you to be upset.”

  “But why?”

  “Well, there’s this asteroid that’s heading toward Earth—”

  “Jimmy across the street told me about that,” she said quickly. “Daddy said they shot it down with a laser. They said it won’t hurt anyone.” Her grip on his hand tightened.

  Alan nodded. “Your daddy told you that because he didn’t want you to worry about me. You see, dear, I’m not going with you.”

  Michelle stopped, looking at him with an expression of shock and hurt he wished immediately he had never seen. There was only one group ahead of them, a family of five, and the arch beeped as each child passed underneath.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You see, only a few people can go on the ship that’s going to take you to a new home. Old people like me don’t get to go, but you and your parents are lucky ones.”

  He was waiting for her to cry, but the tears didn’t come. Instead she looked furious, releasing his hand and clenching her fists.

  “But I don’t want to go without you!”

  “I’m sorry, dear.”

  “They can’t make me.”

  Katherine touched her daughter’s shoulder. “Honey,” she began, but Michelle pulled away.

  “No! I’m staying if Grandpa stays!” She grabbed Alan’s hands and looked up at him with a pleading expression. “Please don’t make me go, Grandpa! Please, I want to stay with you.”

  They were to the last arch; the plastic was bright yellow, like a children’s playground toy. The soldiers waited silently, but he could see the impatience in their eyes. He wondered why any of them were even bothering doing this, then he knew that they must have also been lucky ones. They just had one last job to do before they got to board a transport ship of their own.

  He bent down in front of Michelle and took her gently by the shoulders. “You know I love you,” he said.

  She swallowed. The tears still hadn’t come, but he knew they weren’t far away now. “I love you too, Grandpa.”

  “But you’ve got to go with your Mommy and Daddy. They need you very, very much. And I want you to grow up and be happy, and you can’t be happy here with me.”

  “Yes, I can—”

  He put a finger on her lips, quieting her. “Please, don’t argue. Just go.”

  She nodded, though she now looked dazed. He kissed her forehead, looking away so he wouldn’t see her crying. If he saw her crying, he knew his strength would desert him. He’d end up just like that woman throwing herself against the fence. He hugged Katherine, then Rick, said a few words of goodbye that had already been said, and then the three of them were ushered through the archway. Alan got to watch them for only a moment before a soldier escorted him out of the line and to a roped-off area where dozens of people stood along the fence. There were no lights in this area, and their faces were shadowy and dark. Alan wondered if it had been deliberate. He didn’t want to see these people’s faces.

  He took his place along side them, and by then Rick, Katherine, and Michelle were entering the ship. He saw Michelle looking around frantically. He waved, but she didn’t see him.

  “Michelle!” he shouted.

  She turned, perhaps not seeing exactly where he was, but definitely looking in his direction. Then she was in the ship. He knew he shouldn’t have done it, but he wasn’t the only one. Lots of people shouted. He heard a sound, a heavy thumping, and for a moment he thought it might be the asteroid crashing through the atmosphere, since he had no idea what that would sound like, and then he realized it was the pounding of his own heart. A few minutes later the rest of the passengers were in the ship. A woman in an orange jumpsuit was at the hatch, closing it. This is it, Alan thought. They’re really leaving.

  And then, before the hatch was closed, he saw the woman in orange stumble to the side. A figure emerged, short, dressed in a white jacket, running down the steps. When he recognized Michelle, he cried out, reaching as if he could grab her, his hand finding only the cold and damp metal fence. All around him others were crying out as well. It was as if she had fallen into an ocean full of sharks and they all stood helplessly on the boat.

  The two soldiers at the bottom, who had turned aside, now turned back, but Michelle was already at the bottom. She ran for Alan. “Grandpa! Grandpa!” she cried.

  She was surprisingly fast for such a little girl, so fast she may have surprised the soldiers, because she was halfway to Alan before they broke into a run. They gained on her quickly, but she was nearly to Alan already, slowing when she got close to the fence.

  “Grandpa?” she said.

  He hesitated for a second, but then his resolve broke. “Here,” he said. “Here, Michelle, here!”

  She dashed to the fence with the soldiers, two thin men with assault weapons slung over their shoulders, close behind. Other soldiers were also approaching. Alan bent down to meet her, reaching to embrace her, forgetting that there was a fence in the way. His fingers closed around the gaps, and then her smaller fingers were over his own.

  “Grandpa!”

  The light was bad, but he saw the grim horror on her face, the desperation. All of these soldiers here to prevent the unexpected, he thought, and all it took was a six year-old girl to disrupt them. The first two soldiers grabbed her and began to pull, but she released Alan’s fingers and grabbed onto the fence, screaming. Try as they might, they couldn’t pull her away. They had her whole body in the air and still they couldn’t pry her off the fence.

  “Damn kid,” one of them muttered.

  “Don’t hurt her!” Alan said.

  “Grandpa! Grandpa!” Michelle cried.

  The other soldiers had reached them now, a half dozen of them all looking the same in the dark. A tall, bald man with a silver mustache stepped between the two who were holding Michelle. “Put her down,” he said.

  The two obeyed, putting Michelle back on her feet. Her white-fingered grip on the fence didn’t slack, and she pressed up against the metal.

  “I won’t go!” she said.

  “Please, Michelle,” Alan said.

  “No!”

  “If you don’t go,” the man with the silver mustache said, “you’ll be left behind.”

  “I want to stay with Grandpa!”

  “Don’t you want to be with your parents?”

  “I want to stay with Gandpa!”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” the man with the silver mustache said. “We don’t have time—”

  “Wait,” Alan said. “Let me come over there. I’ll walk her up.”

  The man with the silver mustache looked at him skeptically. All those guns, Alan thought.

  “Please,” he begged.

  The man with the silver mustache looked at him a moment more, then nodded back toward the gate. As Alan ran, some of the soldiers on the other side jogged along side him. There was a moment of fuss at the arch, a few words spoken on radios, and then he was ushered through the beeping mechanism, the soldiers on the other side guiding him back to Michelle. He was still a few steps away from her when she turned and threw herself into his arms.

  “I don’t want to go!”

  He stroked her hair, feeling the warmth of her face through his damp sweater. He knew there was nothing now he could say to comfort her. The truth was what it was. With his own private army accompanying him, he turned and headed for the plane. Two people in orange jumpsuits, a man and a woman, watched him from the top of the steps. Michelle’s body shook with each breath. The yelling and shouting from the spectators had stopped; he knew they were all watching. When he started up the stairs, feet clanging on the metal, the soldiers stopped and gathered at the bottom.

  With each step, his legs seemed heav
ier. He wasn’t sure he was going to make it, but then there he was, at the top, placing Michelle on her feet between the two people in orange.

  “There now,” he said, his throat constricting.

  She looked up at him with wet eyes, cheeks glistening. He steadied her with a hand on her shoulder.

  “Grandpa,” she said.

  “It’s for the best, honey. Please do it for me.”

  “But—”

  “I know.”

  “I want—”

  “Yes, but you still have to go.”

  Her chin dropped, and she looked down for a moment before turning toward the ship. Then she turned back suddenly, her hand reaching into her jacket pocket and emerging with the amber-like keepsake. She thrust it at him.

  “I want you to have this,” she said.

  “But it’s yours.”

  “But I want you to have it.”

  He nodded and took it from her, kissing the back of her hand when he did so. She turned, not a trace of emotion on her face, and the two people in orange closed in behind her. He placed the keepsake in his pocket, then without waiting, turned and started back down the steps. He had to go quickly. He would not even wait for the ship to take off. He had to get out of there.

  When the hatch clanged shut, he jumped. The soldiers watched him as if he was the walking dead, and he knew that to them perhaps he was. When he reached the bottom, a few patted him on the shoulder. The man with the silver mustache personally saw him back to the viewing area, shaking his hand and saying something inaudible before turning and leaving. Some people in the crowd asked him questions, but he didn’t listen. He moved close to the fence, pressing his face up against the cool metal, and watched the plane.

  The regular engines started turning, rumbling; the plane lurched forward. Even where he stood, he felt the frigid air pushing against him. He knew when it was up higher, the rocket engines would take over for the last leg of the journey. Science, his old friend, would see his family into space.

  “Some Christmas,” he heard Janis say behind him.

  The plane taxied along the runway, gathering speed. As he watched the ungainly white bird sail up into the darkness, he thought about Christmases past and Christmases future. He thought about a huge hunk of rock hurtling toward the Earth. He thought about little girls with microscopes and insects encased in amber. He thought about the meaning of the word hope.

  “The best ever,” he said.

  INTRODUCTION

  SPACE ALIENS SAVED MY MARRIAGE

  AS I WROTE IN A Cosmic Christmas, S.N. Dyer has a brilliantly twisted sense of humor. Last time, she gave us two tales of vampires, a witch, and a werewolf for Christmas. This time, she wonders what things would be like if The Weekly World News (no longer with us, alas) and similar supermarket tabloids were reporting nothing but the real, incontrovertible truth. And at Christmas time, too . . .

  Beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the 1990s, S. N. Dyer wrote an amazing number of hysterically funny sf and fantasy stories under more than one name. The author now pursues a medical career, and fiction’s loss is medicine’s gain, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who hopes Dyer will someday return to writing her strikingly individual bizarre tales.

  SPACE ALIENS SAVED MY MARRIAGE

  by S.N. Dyer

  WHEN I GOT HOME FROM WORK, Tim was still in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading the sports page. Construction’s slow in December. The kitten began rubbing up against my leg and purring the minute I came in.

  “What do you think, honey?” I asked, petting the kitten. “Shouldn’t we give Mittens two names? I mean, she does have two heads, and all.”

  Tim said, “Whatever you want,” but Stacy stopped splashing her spoon in her Count Chockula and pointed at each head. “Muffin. Tiffany.”

  “Good names,” I told her, pouring Muffin and Tiffany a saucer of milk. As usual, the two heads began squabbling over their treat.

  “Any newspapers, Bobby June?” asked Tim.

  When the new tabloids come out, I get to take home the old ones, along with the day-old bread and mushy bananas. I’d already read them all, of course. The Quik-Stop-Shop gets real slow after around 2 a.m. “Look here: HOUSE WIFE SEES ELVIS IN LAUNDROMAT. It happened in our town!”

  “Forget it,” said Tim. “People are always seeing Elvis. Didn’t that spaceship, Voyager or whatever it was, see his face on Mars?” This was the longest conversation we’d had since we were visiting my Aunt Martha in Austin and saw the ghost of Uncle Edgar in the closet. So I figured maybe this is the time to bring it up.

  “Tim honey, it’s Christmas Eve tomorrow. Don’t you have any relatives you’d like to invite for dinner, to meet me and Stacy and all?”

  “No,” he said, and went off to read the papers somewhere else.

  I have trouble sleeping when I work third-shift, so I took Stacy shopping for shoes. It’s incredible how quick she seems to outgrow them—she’s only four, and already in a grown-up size 6. She has her dad’s feet, I guess, but luckily she has my nose.

  Anyway, the mall was pretty crowded, what with it being the day before the day before Christmas. We did a little last-minute shopping for presents, and we were buying this cute little dog and cat salt and pepper set for Jesse, my friend-at-work, when a woman shrieked.

  “Oh, my god!” she yelled, pointing up at a black velvet painting of Elvis. Tears seemed to be pouring from his eyes.

  “Why’s he crying, Mommy?” asked Stacy.

  The clerk got up on a ladder and pulled down the painting, to check for leaks or something in the wall, but nothing else was wet.

  The woman who’d seen it first reached over and touched the tears, then raised her finger to her mouth. “It’s salty,” she said. “Those are real tears!”

  I looked at the painting, and it seemed that the wet eyes were staring deep into my own. And suddenly this thought was there, in my mind. You’d better go to County Mercy General. There’s been an emergency.

  When we got to the hospital, it seemed they’d been looking for me. Grannie had had this bad stomach ache, and they’d been worried she’d bled into a big old fibroid tumor she’d had for a long time, only they hadn’t wanted to operate before, what with her being so old and all, but now they’d had to operate after all, and her doctor wanted to talk with me, right outside the operating room.

  He was still wearing green clothes and a paper hat and booties, just like on TV. He didn’t mince words, just started right out. “Your grandmother’s had a baby.”

  “But that’s impossible,” I said. “Gran’s seventy-eight!”

  He got that narrow-eyed little look that doctors get when they think you don’t believe them, and said, “Of course it’s possible—it happened. It seems your grandmother had been pregnant with twins over fifty years ago, but only one of them actually got born.”

  Then he talked about ovulation, and hibernation, and a lot of other complicated stuff I didn’t get, cause I mean, I dropped out in eleventh grade to work and all. But the long and the short of it seemed to be that this baby had been in her womb for fifty-five years, and in fact was my late daddy’s twin. They’d compared footprints, and it was true.

  “But that’s not the end of it,” the doctor continued. “I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff—I’ve delivered babies wearing ancient Egyptian amulets, or tattooed with holy symbols, and once I saw a woman give birth to a Cabbage Patch Doll. But never in all my years of practicing has one of my newborns ever spoken in the delivery room before!”

  “What’d he say?”

  “When I slapped his little behind, he didn’t even cry, he just looked me in the eye and said ‘The Twin returns. Love him tender and don’t be cruel.’ He wouldn’t say anything more, and now he’s acting just like a regular baby.” The doctor took off his paper hat and scratched his head. “The Twin. Must be himself he means, right?”

  “No. No, it isn’t.” I didn’t know yet what he meant, back then, but I knew that something big
was going on, or about to happen.

  What with staying with Gran all afternoon, and then making dinner for Stacy and Tim, I only had a few hours’ sleep before going to work. I was a couple minutes late, but Ralph always covers for me—he’s a real good guy. He was this World War II veteran who they found after drifting alone in a life raft in the Bermuda Triangle for forty years, but he didn’t let that ruin his attitude.

  “Congratulate me, I’m gonna get hitched,” Ralph told me while he was putting on his muffler and overcoat.

  “Who to?” I didn’t even know he was dating. As far as I knew, his only real friend was this guy Eddy he’d known in basic training, who’d looked him up after seeing his picture in the paper.

  “I’ m marrying Eddy,” Ralph said, sort of blushing. “No really, it’s not like that. See, he was struck by lightning last year, and it turned him into a woman!”

  “Wow!” I remembered reading about it, but never realized who it had been. “Well, good luck and everything.” We’d have to put on a shower for them.

  Jesse had been in back, and now he came in to restock the chips. “Heard about Ralph and Eddy?” he asked. He’s got this real velvety deep voice, but I never could figure out his accent.

  “I hope they’ll be happy,” I said, started thinking about me and Tim, and choked a little. Jesse came over to hug me—we’re only friends, really—and I told him how me and Tim just didn’t seem to communicate anymore. Then I wiped away my tears, and looked at Jesse. “Hey! You’ve been losing weight.”