“So why Uranus?” she said.
“I read where someone worked it all out,” he said. “The speed we’ll be traveling, everything. There’s a window. People leaving during this window will just cross the orbit of Uranus in time to be captured by the gravity of the gas giant.”
“And what about the people who left before or leave later?”
“They go to Saturn,” he said, “or maybe Neptune. Who knows? Some might miss planets altogether.”
“And does this genius say why the gravity of Uranus and the other planets will be working any better than the gravity of Earth?”
“It just will be, that’s all,” Jack said. “What I want to talk about is figuring out a way to go together.” He took her hand. “If I miss Uranus, Molly, I could go to Pluto.”
Her suit would cover her shoulders soon. He still had only boots and pants not up to his knees.
“I’m already feeling light, Jack.” She squeezed his hand. “I don’t want to spend these last few days working on a problem we can’t solve.”
“But . . .”
“I can’t feel you,” she said. She pulled his hand up to her face. “Touch me here. I want to feel your skin.”
“Maybe I could buy an ordinary space suit,” Jack said. “And put it on and hold onto you. We both shoot into space and when my skin suit is finished, I just throw away the store-bought one?”
Molly had gotten her helmet that morning. Jack’s pants weren’t even done yet.
Now she snatched Ol’ Engine Number Nine from the kitchen table. “Hold me,” she said. “I think something’s happening.”
He pulled her in close, still muttering nonsense about his latest plan. Her faceplate snapped into place. The sound startled him and he nearly jumped away from her, but then he saw the fear in her eyes behind the glass and held on tight. She went weightless in his arms.
Then she was more than weightless. He could feel her tugging to get higher. He was having trouble holding her down. She slipped away from him and her head bounced lightly against the ceiling. She drifted toward the French doors. He grabbed her foot.
She dragged him toward the doors.
“It hurts.” She might have been shouting, but her voice was muffled. “I need to go up, Jack.”
“Not yet!”
She parted the French doors with both hands, threw them open wide, and dragged him out into the backyard. He took giant steps, dream leaps, as she pulled him off the ground. He would have to let her go.
Then he saw Sparky’s leash. He got a good grip on her ankle with one hand and stretched down for the leash. The grass had grown up around it. Had it been that long? Just a few more inches. No, he couldn’t reach it. Desperately he hopped toward the doghouse. The force pulling her into space was getting stronger. He would have only one more chance.
He got to the doghouse in another two big leaps and hooked his foot into the door and pulled down with his leg. He got the other foot hooked in too, and pulled with both legs. Molly came down. Jack reached down with one hand and grabbed Sparky’s leash. He maneuvered it through his fingers until he found the end. Her pull was very strong now. If he didn’t get her tied down in just the next few moments, he would lose her.
He looped the leash around her ankle and his other hand. He pulled himself closer and took the leash in his teeth. Then with his free hand and his teeth, he tied a clumsy knot. It wouldn’t hold, but it wouldn’t have to hold long. He let go of her leg and grabbed the leash with both hands and secured the knot.
Jack fell back onto the ground and Molly shot off for space. He heard her cry out when the leash stopped her with a snap. She floated above the backyard like a tethered balloon. He thought crazily that the neighbors would think this was some kind of advertising gimmick. What would they think he was selling?
When he noticed the doghouse lifting off the ground, he grabbed and secured the other end of Sparky’s leash to a water spout and left Molly tethered and moving one arm slowly up and down like she was pointing at something. She seemed bigger, bulging. He needed to talk with her.
The shortwave rig was in his office. He had thought she’d already be out of sight by the time he used it. He would be in his office surrounded by his books. He would read her things. They would talk. She would tell him what she saw. Now he needed the radio in the backyard. She was right there. He couldn’t just go into his office where he could not see her.
Molly hung motionless now at the end of the leash, and it was like looking down at her dangling from a cliff rather than stretching up toward space.
“Molly!” He yelled. No response.
Jack ran into the kitchen and got the long black extension cord they used to power the stereo when they had backyard parties. He hauled the radio gear out of his office and set it up on a TV tray and plugged it in.
He pulled up a chair and put on the big earphones. He pulled the microphone in its black plastic stand in close and turned the dial to Holy Frequency One. “Molly? Come in, Molly. Can you hear me, Molly? Come in.”
Nothing.
He tried Holy Frequency Two.
Still nothing.
If God did speak now, Jack would have to tell Him to get off the air. He needed to talk to Molly.
He stood up and yanked on the leash trying to get her attention. After maybe a dozen tugs, he saw her bend her head down to face the ground. The effort seemed monumental. He waved his arms at her and jumped up and down.
“Is your radio on?” he shouted and pointed at his ears. “Your radio!”
He sat back down in front of his microphone and put the earphones on again.
He found her on Holy Frequency Two.
“Molly!”
“Jack,” she gasped. “My foot. I think the pull is getting so hard it will pull my foot off. The prisoners. Remember? Flattened sticky goo on the ceiling. Did mother describe it to you? I think you’ll have to let me go, Jack.”
She gasped in pain again and dropped Ol’ Engine Number Nine. The miniature locomotive bounced onto the lawn.
“Oh, no, Jack.”
Jack leaned over and picked it up. He stood up and lobbed it back up at her. She snatched at it, but it slipped through her fingers and fell again.
“This can’t be happening,” he shouted into the microphone. “It can’t be real. The pieces don’t fit together quite right. There are too many loose ends! Nothing is working right. There must be something else to try. I can figure it out. Wait, Molly. Just hold on a little longer.”
He grabbed the train and threw it up at her.
She missed it again.
“Oh, cut me loose, Jack,” she said. “Just cut me loose.”
Then she screamed. She seemed to be elongating like a victim on the rack in an old movie, and he couldn’t stand the sound of her pain. He ripped off the earphones and ran to the end of the leash.
For an endless moment he couldn’t get it untied and didn’t know what to do. Then he took a deep breath, took out his Swiss Army knife and carefully opened the big blade.
He cut the leash.
Molly shot into the air.
Jack scrambled back to his earphones. “. . . love you, Jack.” And then she was gone.
Jack made careful preparations for his own departure. He would take her train, of course, but he also had a few other supplies. A flashlight for one thing. If you were going to be floating through the deep darkness to Uranus, you’d want to be able to shine a light around and see what was what. The Collected Works. And a small fire extinguisher.
“By the time we get to Uranus, there’ll be all this junk floating everywhere.” The Earth was a big wet blue marble, and he was already talking to himself. “All the stuff people grabbed when they floated away. We’ll need to assign clean up crews to pick it all up. Or maybe we can
just rearrange it. Who knows maybe someday there will be so much you can see the rings of Uranus from Earth not that there will be anyone on Earth by that time. But you know what I mean.”
“Do you know how far away Uranus is?” Not Jack. A voice on his suit radio.
“Well, now that I can no longer touch it . . .”
Hoots. Jeeze Louise. Who is this joker?
Then he saw them. Suited figures scattered around him, the closest waving his arms like a mechanical man maybe a hundred yards away, the sun gleaming in his faceplate.
“My name is Jack,” he said, “and like all of you, I’m on my way to Uranus.”
“I think we’re too late for Uranus,” someone said.
“So, here we are zooming along at what? Maybe a hundred miles an hour?” someone else said.
“Oh, surely much faster than that.”
“Do you have any idea of how long it would take to get to Uranus, Jack?”
“I really don’t think I want to know that,” Jack said.
He got a firm grip on Ol’ Engine Number Nine, switched on his flashlight, and activated the fire extinguisher which increased his velocity considerably.
The Barber’s Theme
Brenda shuddered when old Milo Durkovich lurched into the barbershop. She’d have to clip his nose hairs, and his nostrils were as big as her thumbs. She hated that. Harvey, her boss, beamed a tight-lipped glare her way, and she coerced a smile onto her face.
“Morning, Mr. Durkovich,” she said, dusting the red leather seat of her barber chair.
Durkovich made a sound, an East European snort, she thought, or maybe he’d just hacked up pieces of his lungs and then politely swallowed them. He shrugged out of his long black coat, and his sour smell rushed up at her, pushing away the pervasive odors of hair tonic, shaving lotion, and old magazines as he settled into her chair. He smelled like a dead man, she thought, a sweaty dead man, stuffed with garlic sausages and lately reanimated by Frankenstein’s spark so he could stumble into Harvey’s to have his thin black and white hair trimmed, the black holes of his nose snipped clean.
For one wild moment she thought of draping her green cloth over his head instead of his chest and lap. Call the paramedics! He just sat down in my chair and died, Officer. Can’t you smell him?
The picture of Mr. Durkovich sitting there, his head covered with her barber bib, wondering what the hell was going on, getting steamed, made her smile for real. No way she could do it, though. Harvey still had his eye on her. He’d made no bones when he’d hired her. It’s your butt, he’d said, my old farts will love your butt. Smile. Be friendly. She’d been that hungry, that broke. Most afternoons, a group of Harvey’s customers lounged around the shop, peeking over their magazines to see her stretch and bend, wiggling their bushy eyebrows up and down at her.
Maybe Durkovich would die before she had to pick around in his nose with her scissors.
“Little off the top and sides, Mr. Durkovich?”
“Why ask?”
Cosmetology! What a stupid word. Opportunities limited only by your imagination. Brenda supposed her imagination had hotfooted it to Kenya with Lyle, the poet, the bastard, when he left her with both halves of the rent to pay. I’m leaving you for purely philosophical reasons, he’d said. What could that possibly mean? She didn’t know, and she still owed over a thousand dollars on her beauty school tuition. Brenda couldn’t afford to lose this lousy job at Harvey’s Barbershop.
Something jumped out of Durkovich’s hair as she combed and clipped along the back of his neck. Brenda gasped and leaped back, shaking her hand. The man had bugs!
“What is it?” Harvey moved up close to her. Durkovich twisted his head around to stare at her.
“Nothing,” she said and moved back in on Durkovich. Time to bite the bullet. Bugs or not, Harvey would can her in a minute if she made Durkovich mad. Another old guy came into the shop, and Harvey put good cheer and baseball on his mean face and moved back to stand over his own chair.
Brenda gingerly lifted the hair at the back of Durkovich’s neck with her comb. Something moved down there, lots of somethings. Brenda bit her lip and moved her head in a little closer. She swooped down like a hawk to hover at treetop level over a tangled, charred jungle. She didn’t see the twisting white lice she’d expected. Instead, little brown monkeys swung from black and white branches and vines, and she could hear them chittering as they jumped from the trees she felled with her scissors. A bright swarm of tiny blue birds rose screeching and veered away from her face. The ground she’d cleared looked like old leather. Dead rivers and deep gullies ran this way and that, around puckered termite hills and ragged bomb craters. Would she find Lyle playing Jungle Jim down there? Her hand shook. He’d always treated her like she didn’t know any big words. She didn’t think she could stand to see that sad, superior look of his.
Brenda clipped quickly up through the forest, leaving the monkeys behind, and as she moved, the air cooled. The trees were not so thick up here. She heard a tiny roar, and when she’d created a clearing, she saw a crowd of students all waving angry fists and signs at buildings shaped like onions. Fires flickered in alleys. She saw the angry flash of gunfire, and the crowd surged screaming into the trees followed by shouting, shooting uniformed men on horseback. Brenda quickly followed with her scissors, north. She had to get out of town fast.
She left Moscow to its rioting and moved toward the top of the world. Up here the ground was dead white; it was, in fact snow, Brenda realized. The wasteland. Where they send you if you don’t know just the right things to say.
Her song, her theme, her favorite music from her all time favorite movie drifted in the frigid air. She snipped down trees across the top of the world in a frantic search for its source. She cut a swath sideways across the world. She cleared paths right down to the snow, some straight as interstate highways, others meandering paths.
Gray wolves followed and watched as two horses dragged a sleigh across a vast empty field of snow. Brenda could see Lara bundled in her white furs, her dark hair blowing around the bottom of her Russian hat. Lara. Brenda. They’d always been one, really. Brenda rubbed her cheek against the thick fur of her coat and looked from where she sat in the sleigh at the smoke rising from the chimney of a lonely cabin in the snow. A man stood in the doorway with his hand raised. She squinted through the blowing snow, her lips trembling and blue with cold.
“Yurii,” she whispered.
Siberia and Yurii. Yes. She’d come so far through the snow, endured so much to find him.
He ran through the deep drifts, his ragged coat flapping, his gray leg wrappings dragging at his feet.
“Lara!”
She leaped from the sleigh and rushed toward him. Her theme swelled, filling the air as they met, and he crushed her to his chest. She felt weak and would have fallen in the snow had not his strong arms held her. He pushed her back to look into her face.
He could use a good stylist, she noticed. His hair was a butchered mess. Of course, he had been sick. Long white trenches ran over the top of his head from front to back, from right to left. Sadly, his nose had gotten old. His mustache sprouted from his huge nostrils like evil black weeds.
He put his hands on her shoulders and shook her.
“What’s the matter with you!” he shouted in her face.
Brenda slipped from his chest and crumpled at his feet in the hair around her chair.
Yurii Andreievich ran his hands over his head. He looked bewildered. For a moment, she saw the young medical student who still hid inside that ravaged shell.
“Look what you’ve done to me, Brenda,” he said. “Just look what you’ve done.”
Harvey’s face rose like a bad moon behind Yurii’s shoulder, and Brenda scooted away from the two men and got to her feet.
She spoke to them wi
th her eyes, said, I have slapped you awake, Yurii, set you free. Take the hand of your new friend, and the two of you run free, laugh and play in the snow. Be happy children.
She slipped off her white barber’s smock and handed it to Harvey.
“Hey!”
“Hey!”
Let them spit and sputter. She grabbed her purse and headed for the sunshine.
Beatniks With Banjos
Kenneth was seized by invisible forces while he, Rebecca, and the cat they called Lord Byron were sorting socks and drinking eggnog and feeling blue on Christmas Eve. Kenneth had been turning a festive green and red plaid sock rightside out when the tremors hit. He lost all feeling in his hand, but the sock moved anyway, as if his hand were opening and closing and twisting on his wrist like the head of goose. Kenneth could see a quivering yellow tongue and the slick black void of a throat as the creature zoomed in to stop just inches from his face. Red eyes like blood blisters rose from what he supposed were still, at some level, his first and third knuckles, giving the thing an oddly unaesthetic asymmetry.
“I am,” said the goose sock, “the Ghost of Christmas Shifted Sideways in Time.”
“And I,” Rebecca said, “am the Ghost of Maybe We Should Have Gone To My Mother’s For Christmas!”
Kenneth looked over at her and saw that she had the mate to his red and green goose creature on her own hand, but on her the sock was just a puppet and the voice was coming from her own mouth. Couldn’t she see what was happening to him?
Rebecca grabbed Lord Byron and put a sock over his head. The cat staggered around pawing and singing like a Christmas drunk. “And this is the Ghost of Christmas With A Bad Attitude,” she said. Lord Byron hunkered down in the great pile of socks and made a deep and dangerous sound, and Rebecca relented and snatched the sock off his head. He reached out and swatted at the air a couple of times, but then he seemed to forgive and forget and rolled over on his back in the socks.
Meet Me in the Moon Room Page 2