Analog SFF, July-August 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Dr. Jenkins,” he said, removing his hat and smoothing back the neatly cropped black hair held in place with a hint of gel. “Ready, sir?”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “Then why can't we just talk here?”

  He motioned to the door. “You'll want to come with me, sir.”

  Sometimes no answer is an answer you don't ignore.

  The animatronic offered a cheery good-bye as we passed and made our way to the unmarked car waiting by the front entrance. A female officer sat perched in the driver's seat. Cornell opened the back door and I ducked in. He shut it behind me and I instinctively tried the handle, which of course did nothing.

  On the way back to the station, he rode shotgun and didn't say another word to me. I could see the two of them conversing on the other side of the translucent barrier that separated us, but I don't know how to lip read. I only had the chatter of my own mind to keep me company.

  As I sat there, every possible scenario flashed through my mind. Maybe they spotted me casing the clinic that afternoon, but that wouldn't be enough to arrest me on. They must have seen me pull up that evening, almost go in. But they can't arrest you for almost, can they? Hell, they didn't have anything they could pin on me. I'd been a damn boy scout at the clinic all these years; I hated myself for it, but I never gave them anything to hang me with. And what did they have now? My name in Doug's phone, a call, a drive-by at the mall during clinic hours? Nothing. They had nothing. Still, they could make my life miserable if they wanted. I'd been a damn poster boy for the District Clinic System, ignored what I knew was right to spite the health of my psyche, and they were going to screw me anyway. Great.

  The flashes of panic were knocked from my thoughts by the sound of the car coming to a stop. We were parked outside the station. Cornell opened the door and escorted me into the building, where we wound our way through a maze of busy cubicles and into a sealed interrogation room. There was no mirrored glass, but there was no doubt we were being recorded.

  He sat across a polished steel desk, facing me, but staring intently at a computer screen to his right. His face remained expressionless as he read silently and periodically tapped on the screen.

  I cleared my throat, quite unintentionally, and was speared by a “don't do that again” look from across the table. A few minutes later, Officer Cornell sat back against his chair.

  “Doesn't look too good for you, Doctor.”

  “What doesn't look good? What are you accusing me of, being friends with Dr. Barnes?”

  “You should be more careful who you associate with.”

  “Since when did that become a crime?”

  He stared me further back into my seat, then stepped out of the room. I squinted in all directions trying to locate the camera. Christ, they can't lock me up just for thinking about going to that damn clinic, can they? I pulled a tissue out of my pocket and damped off my face. Stay calm, I coaxed, but my body wasn't listening. I tucked the fraying wet tissue into my pants pocket as the door popped open and Officer Cornell re-entered.

  He sat down and tapped on the screen, looked at me for an excruciatingly long three or four seconds, then focused his attention back on the monitor.

  I scooted around on the cold steel seat of my chair in a futile effort to get comfortable.

  Cornell looked up again. “Look, Doctor. Let me be blunt.”

  Finally. I'd have rather been arrested than have to sit in that seat any longer, staring at the machine that called himself Officer Cornell.

  “We've got video surveillance that shows you hanging out in front of Barnes’ clinic this afternoon, and then driving by again tonight, just before we got there.”

  I could feel the heat rising up from under my shirt and thanked my lucky stars he didn't have me hooked up to an autonomic monitor to graph my anxiety. Not that he needed one.

  “He was my friend. I was just curious.”

  “Don't insult me, Doctor.”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Look, we may not have anything damning on you, but with the video, the phone call, your connection to Doctor Barnes . . . well, let's just say it's pretty clear what your intentions were. You were more than a little tempted to join his party, weren't you?”

  Before I could answer that every-chamber-loaded question, he stopped me. “You were lucky as hell tonight, but don't count on luck to strike twice. That space you have been flying under the radar in has just gotten considerably smaller.”

  The tension permeating every fiber of my being had begun to ease. They were going to have to let me go. “So I'm your new assignment?”

  “Even if I had the time to stay on your ass, which I don't, I don't believe in entrapment. But I'm not the only one with this information. Consider tonight a friendly warning.”

  This kind of friendship I could do without. I felt a chill as the sweat began to cool against my skin.

  He stood. “You can see yourself out. I've got to get started on those damn reports. That's the penalty for working with the Federal Health Care Task Force; paperwork's a killer.” He pointed the way out. “We can have someone drive you home if you'd like.”

  “I'll cab it, thanks.”

  “Thought you might.” He started to walk toward a cubicle to the right of the interrogation room, then hesitated and turned. “Be smart, Doctor.”

  I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

  * * * *

  Monday morning came, as it inevitably did. I made my way up to the thirty-seventh floor where Ms. Johnson was waiting for me.

  “So you didn't take the bait,” she said wryly.

  “No. I did not. You know I don't go for that sort of thing.”

  “I do now, but I could have sworn you'd go for it and I'm usually pretty good at reading people.”

  My task had become doubly burdensome. I felt like I was working under even more of a microscope than I had before. But I endured. And I thought about Doug. Constantly.

  A couple of weeks later, Mr. Winthorp came by again on a Friday afternoon, still in pain and still begging me to examine his neck. There was nowhere else for him to go; I was his assigned provider. Once again, I turned him down and it ate me up inside.

  It was getting harder to look at myself in the mirror, harder to accept what I'd become after seeing that there was another way for those willing to do what needed to be done. Sure, they'd caught Doug, but there were dozens of clinics that managed to stay under the radar, if you believed the blogs. I never had. I desperately wanted to now.

  Still, it was tough to ignore Officer Cornell's warning.

  That night, the pros and cons played in my head a hundred times over as I lay in bed praying to be mercifully overtaken by sleep. For once in my life, I had a decision to make for which I wished there was an answer tree to guide me.

  At two AM, I awakened with a bolt. “Doc Tramer's place . . . of course.” The image was plain as day now, the obituary from last Saturday; my old family doctor, the one who used to see me at the office in his house, had passed away at the ripe old age of ninety-seven. A paragraph of accolades and a statement expressing how sad it was that he had no survivors; his house would be going up for sale.

  I pulled up the number of an old realtor friend of mine first thing in the morning, then jotted it down and left it on the table while I made some coffee. As I munched on a bagel and sipped my java, my gaze kept straying from the news on the monitor back to that little scrap of paper.

  But they're watching you.

  Bullshit. You really think you're that important? They don't have time to bother with you. It was just scare tactics.

  You willing to take that chance?

  I tilted my cup to get one last rush of caffeine, then started to rise from the table. “Ah, hell.” I spun back and grabbed the note.

  * * * *

  The realtor was already waiting in the driveway when I pulled up to the old Tramer place. Doc had been retire
d for a couple of decades, but his home office was still intact; a veritable shrine to the medical era I grew up in. It looked like he'd taken a lot of pride keeping it that way, until the past few years when he'd undoubtedly had to occupy his time just trying to survive.

  It was perfect. The office had been out of commission long before the District Clinic system was a glimmer in the eye of the jackasses who created it. The Feds wouldn't even know this place existed.

  A scent of mold hung in the air and the house looked like hell: faded paper peeling off the walls, archaic appliances, incandescent light fixtures—a realtor's nightmare. But mostly cosmetic stuff I could deal with myself. I made an offer on the spot. She couldn't get the contract to me fast enough.

  * * * *

  Weekends had always been my cherished time, the outdoors my playground. Whether it was people-watching in town, or escaping to the little park land that remained within commuting distance, I'd spend my days trying to commune with the things that made life worth living.

  But now, I had the perfect retreat. The quaint house was nestled next to a neighborhood park, with a beautiful view of the foliage from the second floor master bedroom window. I began spending my weekends there and the renovations went quickly. Within a month, I was ready for my first visitors.

  Boredom and security were about to be replaced by fulfillment and paranoia.

  I had kept the decor very retro. Faux-oak paneling warmed the walls in the foyer; the leather sofas were real. I admired my handiwork as I prepared for my first Sunday afternoon clinic. Taking a page from Doug's failed attempt, I was determined to fly solo on this.

  Easing back into a well-worn sofa cushion and relishing the faint moldy scent of the period throw rug scavenged at a flea market, I folded back the sports pages of the January issue of the New York Times, the last newspaper still printed in hard copy. The monthly edition didn't even try to keep up with the kind of breaking news coverage you could get on the Net, but the in-depth human interest stories were compelling, and there was no substitute for the satisfying feel of brittle pages of newsprint crinkling through your fingers.

  The nostalgia of a simpler time, a more humane time, soothed my soul.

  As I sat enjoying the moment, a mellifluous chime reminiscent of the period redirected my attention to the double front doors, where an adjacent monitor lit up with the familiar face of Mr. Winthorp.

  I smiled and buzzed him in.

  Copyright © 2010 Brad Aiken

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  * * *

  Novelette: FLY ME TO THE MOON

  by Marianne J. Dyson

  It's not exactly like riding a bicycle, but . . .

  Good afternoon, Mr. Smith,” I said as I plopped my backpack on an extra chair in the Lakewood Retirement Center's dining room.

  The white-haired gentleman looked up from his coffee and riveted his eyes on me like a security guard verifying my identity. I saw by the relaxing of his shoulders that I was recognized, and that he'd read my nametag. “Good to see you, George,” he said. “I wish you wouldn't call me Mr. Smith. Makes me feel old.” He smiled at his own joke. I didn't know his exact age, but I guessed he was in his late eighties.

  “Okay, Bob,” I said, returning his smile and adding a wink. We went through this same routine every day when I arrived for work as a volunteer caregiver. On one of my earliest visits, he surveyed the dining room as if looking for spies and whispered that Bob Smith was a fake name. He explained that he couldn't tell me his real name because the press (he never called them news media) might find out. I promised not to reveal his secret. I suspected he was an actor whose family wanted to hide him from the paparazzi. They had done a good job of it—or maybe he'd had plastic surgery? In any case, I hadn't been able to figure out who he really was. All the staff would tell me was that he had checked in after his wife died in a car crash in the late 2020s. He had some grandchildren and great-grandchildren, even great-great-grandchildren, but I was his only regular visitor. New treatments had slowed down the progression of his Alzheimer's disease, but I wondered how long it would be before he forgot that Bob Smith wasn't his real name?

  I pulled my laptop out of my backpack, connected the dual hand controllers, and set them on the table in front of Mr. Smith. “Got a new simulator to fly with you,” I said. This one was actually for little kids, but I had found that Mr. Smith enjoyed holding the hand controllers and flying various aircraft. Sometimes we flew against each other, and sometimes as pilot and copilot, me always the copilot. The only time I could out-fly him was in those games where spaceships could jump through wormholes or something that real aircraft could never do. He didn't like those games. He liked the simulators. I had told Mr. Smith that I was thinking of joining the military so I could become a pilot. That's when he'd told me he was a pilot, but that I shouldn't tell anyone because they might figure out who he was. Whether he really had been a pilot or not, I was happy to discover we both had an interest in flying.

  “This one is a simulator of the old Apollo lunar landers,” I said while booting the program. “You know you don't even have to be an astronaut to go the Moon now? You just have to be rich enough to buy a ticket from the Russians.”

  Mr. Smith frowned at me. “You don't know what you're talking about. We beat the Russians to the Moon!” He crossed his arms.

  His angry reaction startled me. Obviously this was a touchy subject for him. “Yes, of course you're right, Mr. Smith. We beat the Russians to the Moon.”

  “Darn right!” he said.

  “But that was a long time ago. Now lots of people go to the Moon.” I glanced to the lounge area of the dining hall. “Look, there's a scene from the Moon on the TV right now.”

  He stared at the big screen like it was the first time he'd seen it. “I remember that movie.”

  Now I was confused. “What movie?”

  “That movie about Apollo. The one with Tom Hanks.”

  I saw the “CBN LIVE” label in the corner. “No, sir, that's a live broadcast.” I read the captions and summarized for him. “There's been an accident at an old Apollo site. A lunar shuttle computer failed and shut down the engine just after liftoff. The pilot was killed on impact, and one passenger remains unconscious. The other passenger, a historian named Ms. Clara Phillips, is okay, but only has enough spacesuit battery power to last eight hours. A Russian rescue ship can't arrive for several days. Wow, get this,” I continued, “They're talking about launching the Apollo lunar ascent vehicle! The original one was used and discarded by the Apollo crew—this is a replica built by the Apollo Restoration Project that they claim is fully functional. Only trouble is, Ms. Phillips isn't a pilot, and they need someone to tell her how to fly it!”

  Mr. Smith looked down at his age-spotted hands. “I'm a little rusty, but I could do it,” he said.

  “You could? Where did you learn how to fly a lunar module?” Maybe he hada part in that Apollo movie. I'd have to check the credits when I got home.

  Mr. Smith ignored my questions and continued to watch the screen. He nodded. “Yes, I can do it,” he decided. He scooted his chair back and stood looking around the room. “We're in the cafeteria,” he stated. I nodded. “I have to get to Building 30,” he said.

  I didn't know they numbered the buildings at Lakewood. “Where is that?”

  He gave my nametag a puzzled look. “What kind of badge is that? Are you a reporter?”

  “No, sir. I'm George, remember? I was about to show you how to fly the new lunar simulator.”

  “Oh. A training instructor. Okay, then. We'd better get moving if we're going to save that crew. Can't let the Russians get there first.” He shuffled toward the exit somewhat bent over, but amazingly fast for someone his age. I caught the eye of the receptionist and nodded toward my game setup. She would watch it for me until I lured Mr. Smith back. She didn't need to remind me that Mr. Smith wasn't allowed to leave the grounds. My job was to redirect him somehow.

  “Mr. Smith, I think
we should take a different way to Building 30.”

  He stopped. “Why? Is there a media circus out there already?”

  “No, no,” I assured him quickly. “We just need to use the elevator to avoid all those stairs.”

  “I like the stairs. Keeps me in shape,” he said.

  “Yes, of course, Mr. Smith, but you had surgery on your knee a few months ago, remember?” He'd fallen trying to take the stairs two at a time—something he must have done a lot in his younger days. If he were an actor, he probably did his own stunts.

  Mr. Smith stopped and looked down at his knees and feet. “I can't wear these slippers outside. Mother will yell at me.” He paused, deep in thought. “Before I go, I need to call her. She always worries when I travel. Is there a phone in this building?”

  He'd obviously forgotten that he no longer had a mother, and that everyone used cell phones now. He had an old phone in his room, though. It was hooked up to the front desk. The staff was great at explaining that mothers and wives and other deceased loved ones were not home for one reason or another. But often, by the time we got to his room, he'd have forgotten he wanted to call someone. “There's a phone upstairs, sir,” I said.

  “All right,” he said. After he got his shoes on, I'd take him for a walk in the garden. We both enjoyed watching the birds.

  We got into the elevator. I waited for him to select the floor. If he had forgotten, then I'd remind him, but it was important to give him a chance to remember. He stared at the buttons. “This isn't the cafeteria,” he said. “Only Building 1 has nine floors.” He pressed the OPEN DOOR button and walked back out of the elevator.

  Now what? I wondered. It didn't hurt to ask questions. “Mr. Smith, what is it you want to do when we get to Building 30?”

  He scanned the hallways in both directions, I assumed checking for reporters. He said softly, “We're going to get those folks in Mission Control to set up a simulator run. We'll create the trajectory for the crew to get off the Moon.”