“Maybe you can make … new friends?” Tessa said.
Jimmy stared at his spork, then plunged it into the turkey on his plate, carved off a hunk of the meat, and stuck the hunk into his mouth.
When Jimmy didn’t speak further, Tessa’s smile slowly disappeared.
“Astronaut Nick comes the night of December 24,” she said primly.
“That’s in … four days?” Jimmy guessed.
“Two,” she said. “Olympus Mons uses the New Solar Calendar like all the other off-Earth colonies and stations, but I have an app on my desk computer that stays synchronized to the old Earth calendar.”
“What will he bring you, if you’re right?” Jimmy asked.
Now it was Tessa’s turn to be circumspect. She poked at her beef strips covered in brown gravy.
“I’m keeping my wish a secret,” she said. “Supposedly if you keep it secret, there’s a better chance it might come true.”
“Then how is Astronaut Nick ever supposed to find out what you want?” Jimmy asked, somewhat exasperated. He’d put his spork down and was staring across the table, directly into Tessa’s face. Her red hair fell across her forehead and partially obscured his view.
“Send him an e-mail,” Tessa said.
“Astronaut Nick has e-mail?”
“Of course,” Tessa said, as if it were common knowledge.
“Did you e-mail him what you want?” Jimmy asked.
“Not yet. I am trying to figure out how to word it just right. I’m using the school house net to do it. You can do the same.”
Jimmy thought about it. The whole idea sounded highly improbable. But the earnestness of Tessa’s words, the seriousness of her expression, had him halfway convinced.
“Can you share that e-mail?” Jimmy asked.
“Sure!” Tessa said, sitting up and grinning. “After lunch, come over to my desk and I will type it into a message I’ll send to you, and then you can use it to type your own message.”
“Seems like short notice,” Jimmy said. “I mean, two days. How can he possibly be ready to deliver anything without knowing far enough ahead of time? When my parents moved us from Ceres we knew months in advance that we were coming to live here, and the Olympus Mons people knew months in advance, too.”
“You just have to trust him,” Tessa said. “Astronaut Nick won’t let you down. If you’ve not been making trouble, and if you believe hard enough, Astronaut Nick will keep his promises.”
They ate quickly and in silence for the rest of the meal break, Jimmy’s head beginning to spin with the imagined possibilities.
The following day, Jimmy used all of his recess and lunch period to compose his note to Astronaut Nick. The address Tessa had given Jimmy seemed as legitimate as any, and since Tessa said she’d sent hers off in the morning, Jimmy felt compelled to get his sent as quickly as possible.
Only, he agonized over how to phrase his request. Composition had never been Jimmy’s strong suit, and every time he thought he had his message put together in a coherent fashioned, he saved it as a draft, came back to look at it later, and realized he wanted to change everything around.
Finally, as the school day came to a close, he pestered his teacher into letting him have an extra twenty minutes at his desk. He erased everything he’d written previously, typed in three succinct sentences, and clicked the SEND button on the message header, watching it vanish from his desk screen.
Jimmy went home that night, exhausted, and slept more fitfully than usual. Which was saying something, since Jimmy had not enjoyed a solid night’s rest since coming to Olympus Mons.
The next day, Tessa and Jimmy kept an eye on each other, but didn’t talk much. If there were other kids in their class who’d also sent e-mail to Astronaut Nick, nobody was saying so openly. Jimmy definitely got the impression that the older children found the whole idea preposterous, and this meant the younger kids were keeping a low profile—whether they actually believed in Astronaut Nick, or not.
Finally, when the day was over, and people were headed out the door to go find their parents in one of Olympus Mons’ many and various work labs, Tessa and Jimmy met in the same window bubble where they’d had their first conversation a few days before.
The tiny white water crystals were falling again. This time in what seemed to be record quantity. The rock and soil outside had already begun to turn white, and Tessa watched the natural display with a look of rapt fascination on her face.
“My Mom says that the snow on Earth gets so thick, you can ski on it,” Tessa said.
“What’s ski mean?” Jimmy asked.
“People go up in the mountains and put these long, thin, springy boards on their feet, and they sort of coast down the mountain riding on nothing but the snow.”
“It’s that deep?”
“Meters deep,” Tessa said.
“Wow,” Jimmy said, trying to imagine just how much snow would have to fall in order for it to heaped around the walls of their classroom to that level. He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it was possible, though he’d certainly seen the pictures of the great mountain ranges on Earth, such as the Grand Tetons and the Himalayas. If the snow didn’t melt every summer season, it would build up over thousands of years to form giant bodies of ice called glaciers.
Mars had some permanent ice at its poles, which Jimmy had also seen in pictures. But compared to some of Earth’s glaciers, Martian ice was puny. Though, maybe, if the terraforming worked as planned, that wouldn’t be true forever? Jimmy tried to imagine the slopes of Olympus Mons having enough snow on them for riding down, using nothing but a pair of thin boards strapped to the bottoms of his feet.
“Are you going to wait up to see him?” Jimmy asked.
“Who?” Tessa asked.
“Astronaut Nick,” Jimmy said.
“No, that’s a bad idea,” Tessa said. “Grandma says that you have to be asleep when Astronaut Nick visits, or you’re going to get passed by. He knows when you’re asleep, and when you’re awake.”
“How?” Jimmy asked.
“I don’t know,” Tessa said. “But he does.”
Jimmy kept staring at the falling snow.
“I hope you get what you want,” he told Tessa honestly, letting his mind drift over the brief words he’d written in his message.
“I hope you get what you want too,” Tessa said.
They exited the bubble window and went to find their separate families.
That night, Jimmy was even more restless than usual. He tossed and turned in his little bunk, his mind trying to unravel the trick of how any astronaut could land at Olympus Mons in a rocket sleigh, sneak into the center living complex without being seen, and leave gifts for those children who’d written him to ask for something. Tessa had told Jimmy that the old Earth legend of Saint Nicholas supposedly had the man sliding down the chimneys of fireplaces—in order to lay packages and toys beneath decorated conifer trees brought specifically into the house for the occasion.
Jimmy found the idea of trying to fit down something as narrow or as filthy as a chimney—the school library said it was equivalent to a spaceship exhaust—unnerving at best. Wouldn’t the man get claustrophobia? Wouldn’t he run out of air? How could his space suit possibly fit, especially with the bulky helmet?
The more Jimmy thought about it, the more he began to suspect that the entire idea was just a lot of wishful thinking, which made him even more homesick than usual. He scrunched his head into his pillow and quietly wept, so that his parents in the next compartment would not hear him. He was too big to be like a baby. This was his hurt, and his hurt alone, to deal with. It wasn’t fair that he’d had to leave Ceres, but he wasn’t going to let his parents know. They certainly weren’t going to change their minds—they’d talked non-stop about how exciting and wonderful Mars was.
At some point, he drifted off.
And at some point, Jimmy came wide awake again.
The hatch to his bunk compartment was slightly open, as it always wa
s. But this time there was a different sort of light streaming in. Not the usual pale yellow of the night light that illuminated the way to the tiny family latrine, but a more subtle green and red, alternating every few seconds, like the flashing of an emergency beacon. Only those tended to be orange, and this light was much more gradual. Green, slowly dimming and transforming to red, then brightening, then dimming, slowly transforming to green, then brightening, and so on and so forth.
Jimmy watched the light for a long time, his fuzzy senses not quite able to register what the light might mean.
Then he remembered that this was supposed to be Astronaut Nick’s night, and Jimmy’s heart instantly quickened its pace.
Could it be…?
Jimmy had to find out. He slid carefully out of his bunk, his feet resting on the deck. He slid his slippers on and padded deftly to the hatch, cracking it open on its hinge so that he could get a better look. Across the hatchway, from the direction of the family living and dining area, the red-to-green-to-red light emanated. Jimmy stared at the closed doorway to his parents’ compartment, and then at the small latrine, and then back to the open hatch to the living and eating area.
He padded forth, almost breathless in anticipation.
There was a single bubble window in the east wall of the eating and dining area that had an unobstructed view of the Olympus Mons landing facility—where the big shuttles from the orbital cargo and space liners would occasionally put down. Jimmy had ridden in just such a shuttle when they’d come down from orbit. The ship he now saw sitting on the nearest pad looked nothing like a shuttle.
It looked for all the world like an oversized sleigh—something from out of the history pictures of Earth. Only this sleigh had been extensively modified, to include a kind of canopy over the seat where a driver might sit at the front. There was no team of horses—not even reindeer, as Father Christmas was reputed to have used in legend. But the snow was falling more heavily than Jimmy had ever seen it since coming to Mars. Enough so that a little heap of it was crusted over the top of the window bubble, and the red and green running lights of the odd-looking ship on the pad reflected off a million little crystal mirrors as the flakes slowly fell.
Jimmy was transfixed. It couldn’t be. Could it?
He had to get a closer look.
Jimmy snuck to the main hatch to the family compartment and hesitated, wondering if his exit would trip an alarm. Back on Ceres, all of the family housing had alarms that activated if ever the children left their family quarters without being cleared by a parent first.
The craft on the pad beckoned.
Jimmy touched his hand to the palm reader at the door, and the hatch slid quietly to the side, no alarm to wake Jimmy’s parents.
Jimmy stepped out into the corridor beyond, his eyes still transfixed on the picture of the sleigh-like craft resting on the pad. Then the hatch slid shut, and Jimmy was left to contemplate whether what he’d just seen was real, or illusion.
He walked softly—but quickly—down the corridor, his ears keenly listening for the first hint of an adult’s footsteps. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was engaging in something illicit. As if being discovered would merit the severest of punishments. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to know, about the other-worldly craft he’d seen on the pad. He wasn’t even sure he wasn’t dreaming, or sleepwalking.
But his feet kept moving. Down the corridor, through an intersection, down another corridor, through yet another intersection, and on and on, until finally Jimmy found himself at the main observation dome that overlooked the landing pad proper.
Jimmy had not been imagining things. The sleigh still sat there, its red and green running lights slowly oscillating in a hypnotic fashion.
“Beautiful ship, isn’t she?” said a man’s deep voice.
Jimmy spun and flattened against the railing that ringed the interior deck of the dome—his heart in his throat.
The man was wearing a space suit with extra room in the middle, for his prodigious belly. The suit had shiny black boots, and the cuffs and waist ring and neck ring were bright white, while the suit itself was a deep, cheerful red. He had a similarly-colored helmet under one of his arms, and his face was covered in a very short, but also very dense layer of white beard, with an accompanying moustache under his nose. A pair of antique spectacles were drawn up close to his eyes, and he was bald on top, save for a ring of dense, closely-cut white hair that ran from one ear, around the back, to the other ear. His cheeks were pink and he seemed to be amused about something.
“Who—who—?” Jimmy tried to say, but his words came out in a cracked squeak.
“Who do you think, James?” the man said, his mouth splitting in a full grin.
“James?” Jimmy said, tasting the name on his tongue. Tessa had been right, only Jimmy’s Mom ever called him that—or occasionally, his Dad, when Dad was angry. Which seldom ever happened. Jimmy didn’t like to get in trouble.
“Ordinarily,” the man said, “I don’t like having you youngsters interrupt me in the middle of my business, but it just so happens that I was coming to find you—or, it seems you found me. Your request was definitely on the unusual side. I wanted to talk to you about it, to be sure you knew what you were asking me for.”
“You can … take me back home?” Jimmy whispered, his heart hammering at his ribs. “You can fly me to Ceres?”
“Ceres, or the moons of Jupiter, or even all the way to Pluto, if you want,” the man said. “Nothing’s impossible for Astronaut Nick, you know.”
“Then … you’re real!” Jimmy exclaimed, taking two steps away from the railing and examining his interrogator more closely. The man was obviously old, by the looks of him, but Nick radiated a decidedly youthful vibe that was difficult for Jimmy to put his finger on. The eyes behind the spectacles were somewhat crowded by folds of skin, but they sparkled with energy and hints of wisdom.
“Of course I’m real!” Astronaut Nick said, bursting out with a huge chuckle that seemed to begin at his belt and boom up and out through his throat. Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!
Jimmy glanced around, waiting for another adult to appear and ruin the magic. But no such adult—nor even another child—materialized.
“Now then, young man,” Nick said, “let’s get down to business, shall we? I’ve got a lot more to do before my work is through. And if you’re going to Ceres, there’s no time to lose. So, just to be clear, you really want to go back? That’s your wish? You wouldn’t like, say, a model space liner kit, or one of the new three-dee video game packs? Something like that?”
“No,” Jimmy said. “I miss home. I want to go home!”
“This isn’t your home?”
“No, it’s not. And it never will be. Please, Astronaut Nick, take me back to my friends on Ceres. Take me to where I belong!”
The man in the suit seemed to consider Jimmy for a moment, then he took a step towards Jimmy and slapped his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder.
“Fine, then. But first, you’ll have to climb into my sack.”
For the first time, Jimmy noticed that Astronaut Nick had a huge, red, velvet-fabric sack resting on the deck behind him. It appeared to be filled with square and rectangular items.
“Why?” Jimmy asked.
“How else are we going to get you to out of the airlock, and to my sleigh?” he said. “Do they have vacuum suits your size here?”
“They do,” Jimmy said. “But I am not sure I can just take one.”
“Exactly,” Nick said. “So, if you will simply crawl in, please, we’ll be on our way.”
Astronaut Nick opened the mouth of the sack as wide as he could, and Jimmy stepped hesitantly toward it. All he had on were his one-piece pajamas and a pair of slippers. He’d not thought seriously enough about what might happen if Astronaut Nick actually came to fulfill Jimmy’s wish. What would his parents think when they woke up in the morning and Jimmy was gone?
“Come on now,” Nick said, frowning with impatience. “If you’re g
etting cold feet, just say so, and I’ll let you be. Astronaut Nick is a busy guy, and there’s plenty of other children across the solar system who need my attention tonight.”
“No!” Jimmy said. “I don’t want to stay. Okay, I’ll climb into the sack. Just promise me this won’t hurt.”
“You won’t feel a thing,” Astronaut Nick said, keeping the mouth of the sack held open wide.
Jimmy stared at the sack, feeling himself teetering on the knife’s edge of his indecision, then practically threw himself at the sack, and was promptly swallowed up as he fell an unlikely distance down into a massive pile of wrapped packages.
Space wasn’t like Jimmy remembered it. There was no tedious countdown, no painful waiting as traffic control cleared the launch, then the shuttle ride, then the long period of docking. One moment Jimmy felt and saw the mouth of the sack close over his head, the next he felt himself being lifted and hefted, and then the next he was being set down, and the mouth of the sack opened back up.
Only, by the time he peeked out, he was staring at the cold blackness of the night sky, with stars all around. The sack was sitting on the floor of the upper deck of Astronaut Nick’s sleigh—the part which Jimmy had previously seen, and which was covered by a single-piece dome canopy. Nick himself was still clad in his space suit, this time with the helmet on, and he was rapidly waving his black gloves through a series of holographic control screens that floated in his lap.
“I didn’t even feel us take off,” Jimmy said.
“Nor should you,” Astronaut Nick said. “At the gees we pull, if you felt anything, you’d be turned to jelly!”
Jimmy stared open-mouthed.
Nick kept working, then noticed his companion’s horrified expression, and he burst out with another Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! which didn’t sound any less loud even though it was coming through Nick’s helmet speakers.
“Don’t worry, James,” Astronaut Nick said. “In three hundred years of doing this, I’ve never had so much as a single accident. Isn’t that right, Chief Engineer?”
An improbably small person—also clad in a space suit very similar to Nick’s—suddenly popped into view. From whence the person had come, Jimmy couldn’t tell, but the voice was that of a cartoon character.
A Fantastic Holiday Season Page 7