Worlds Seen in Passing

by Irene Gallo

  “All of it, Easter, take it off. And throw them old nasty beads on the floor!”

  Easter did that too, Brother barking madly.

  Ma’am said, “Now—”

  Rifles stuttered thunderously and the dark wood door of the house lit up, splintering full of holes of daylight. In front of it Ma’am shuddered awfully and hot blood speckled Easter’s naked body even where she stood across the room. Ma’am sighed one time, got down gently, and stretched out on the floor. White men stomped onto the porch.

  Easter fell, caught herself on her hands, and the bad one went out under her so she smacked down flat on the floor. But effortlessly she bounded up and through the window. Brother was right there when Easter landed badly again. He kept himself to her swift limp as they tore away neck and neck through Ma’am’s back garden and on into the woods.*

  * Stop here, with the escape. Or no; I don’t know. I wish there were some kind of way to offer the reader the epilogue, and yet warn them off too. I know it couldn’t be otherwise, but it’s just so grim.

  —Dad

  Epilogue

  They were back! Right out there sniffing in the bushes where the rabbits were. Two great big ole dogs! About to shout for her husband, Anna Beth remembered he was lying down in the back with one of his headaches. So she took down the Whitworth and loaded it herself. Of course she knew how to fire a rifle, but back in the War Between the States they’d handpicked Michael-Thomas to train the sharpshooters of his brigade, and then given him one of original Southern Crosses, too, for so many Yankees killed. Teary-eyed and squinting from his headaches, he still never missed what he meant to hit. Anna Beth crept back to the bedroom and opened the door a crack.

  “You ’wake?” she whispered. “Michael-Thomas?”

  Out of the shadows: “Annie?” His voice, breathy with pain. “What is it?”

  “I seen ’em again! They’re right out there in the creepers and bushes by the rabbit burrows.”

  “You sure, Annie? My head’s real bad. Don’t go making me get up and it ain’t nothing out there again.”

  “I just now seen ’em, Michael-Thomas. Big ole nasty dogs like nothing you ever saw before.” Better the little girl voice—that never failed: “Got your Whitworth right here, honey. All loaded up and ret’ to go.”

  Michael-Thomas sighed. “Here I come, then.”

  The mattress creaked, his cane thumped the floor, and there was a grunt as his bad leg had to take some weight as he rose to standing. (Knee shot off at the Petersburg siege, and not just his knee, either…) Michael-Thomas pushed the door wide, his squinting eyes red, pouched under with violet bags. He’d taken off his half-mask, and so Anna Beth felt her stomach lurch and go funny, as usual. Friends at the church, and Mama, and just everybody had assured her she would—sooner or later—but Anna Beth never had gotten used to seeing what some chunk of Yankee artillery had done to Michael-Thomas’ face. Supposed to still be up in there, that chip of metal, under the ruin and crater where his left cheek … “Here you go.” Anna Beth passed off the Whitworth to him.

  Rifle in hand, Michael-Thomas gimped himself over to where she pointed—the open window. There he stood his cane against the wall and laboriously got down kneeling. With practiced grace he lay the rifle across the window sash, nor did he even bother with the telescopic sight at this distance—just a couple hundred yards. He shot, muttering, “Damn! Just look at ’em,” a moment before he did so. The kick liked to knock him over.

  Anna Beth had fingertips jammed in her ears against the report, but it was loud anyhow. Through the window and down the yard she saw the bigger dog, dirty mustard color—had been nosing round in the honeysuckle near the rabbit warren—suddenly drop from view into deep weeds. Looked like the littler one didn’t have the sense to dash off into the woods. All while Michael-Thomas reloaded, the other dog nudged its nose downward at the carcass unseen in the weeds, and just looked up and all around, whining—pitiful if it weren’t so ugly. Michael-Thomas shot that one too.

  “Ah,” he said. “Oh.” He swapped the Whitworth for his cane, leaving the rifle on the floor under the window. “My head’s killing me.” Michael-Thomas went right on back to the bedroom to lie down again.

  He could be relied on to hit just what he aimed for, so Anna Beth didn’t fear to see gore-soaked dogs yelping and kicking, only half-dead, out there in the untamed, overgrown end of the yard, should she take a notion to venture out that way for a look-see. Would them dogs be just as big, up close and stone dead, as they’d looked from far off and alive?

  But it weren’t carcasses nor live dogs, either, back there where the weeds grew thickest. Two dead niggers, naked as sin. Gal with the back of her head blown off, and buck missing his forehead and half his brains too. Anna Beth come running back up to the house, hollering.

  KAI ASHANTE WILSON was the 2010 Octavia Butler Scholar at Clarion Writing Workshop in San Diego. He won the Crawford Award for Best First Novel in 2016, and his works have been short-listed for the Hugo, Nebula, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. Most of his stories can be read at Tor.com, and the rest at Fantasy or in the anthology Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. His novellas, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and A Taste of Honey, are available from all fine ebook purveyors. He lives in New York City.

  A Short History of the Twentieth Century, or, When You Wish Upon a Star

  Kathleen Ann Goonan

  1901: H. G. Wells publishes The First Men in the Moon. 1912: Wernher von Braun, the first director fo NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, born. 1950: Carol Elizabeth Hall born. In post-1950s America, a world of war wounds, rocket scientists, and revolution, a girl grows up and goes to the moon. Edited by Ellen Datlow.

  Tomorrow can be a wonderful age. Our scientists today are opening the doors of the Space Age to achievements that will benefit our children and generations to come. The Tomorrowland attractions have been designed to give you an opportunity to participate in adventures that are a living blueprint of our future.

  —Walt Disney

  * * *

  1901:

  Walter Elias Disney born.

  H. G. Wells publishes The First Men in the Moon.

  1903:

  The Wright brothers make first manned flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

  Konstantin Tsiolkovsky publishes Exploring Space with Devices, a seminal technical text of rocketry.

  1912:

  Wernher von Braun, inventor of the V-2 rocket and first director of NASA, born.

  1914–1919:

  Robert Goddard granted two US patents for rockets using solid and liquid fuel, and several stages. He fires rockets for US Signal Corps and Army Ordnance at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

  1920:

  Timothy Leary born.

  1921:

  Chester Thaddeus Hall born.

  June Elizabeth Foster born.

  1923:

  Hermann Oberth publishes The Rocket into Interplanetary Space.

  1923:

  Wernher von Braun receives a telescope as his first communion present. He begins reading science fiction, including Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, and scientific rocket research.

  1927:

  Society for Space Travel founded in Germany.

  1928:

  Disney releases Steamboat Willie, the world’s first sound-synchronized animated film.

  Hermann Oberth is a scientific consultant for Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon. A publicity rocket built by Oberth blows up on the launchpad.

  1930:

  American Rocket Society founded in New York City.

  Von Braun is an assistant to Willy Ley and Hermann Oberth in launching liquid-fuel rockets.

  1930–1935:

  Germans, Russians, and Americans launch a variety of experimental rockets.

  1936:

  California Institute of Technology scientists begin testing rockets near Pasadena, California; this is the precursor of the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

  1937:

  Von Braun joins the Nazi party. His rocket group moves to Peenemünde.

  Goddard’s rocket reaches nine thousand feet.

  Leningrad, Moscow, and Kazan chosen as test sites for Russian rockets.

  1940:

  Disney Studios releases Fantasia.

  Von Braun joins the SS.

  1942:

  Timothy Leary, acquitted via court-martial for behavior infractions at West Point, receives an honorable discharge.

  The US Army moves into Disney’s studio, which produces US propaganda films during the war.

  1943:

  Von Braun begins using concentration-camp prisoners as slave labor at the V-2 Mittelwerk plant. Twenty to thirty thousand slave laborers die of starvation, exhaustion, and summary execution under von Braun’s supervision.

  Albert Hofmann discovers the psychoactive properties of LSD.

  1944:

  Over one thousand V-2 rockets launched against London.

  1945:

  Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency accepts the surrender of von Braun, Arthur Rudolph, and other important German scientists. American Army transports over one hundred V-2 rockets from Peenemünde and Nordhousen to White Sands, New Mexico. The Nazi past of the German scientists is expunged from their records, clearing their path to US citizenship.

  1949:

  Sandoz Laboratories brings LSD to United States for use in experimental trials.

  1950:

  Carol Elizabeth Hall born.

  1952:

  Collier’s publishes “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!,” von Braun’s vision of space exploration and settlement.

  July 17, 1955:

  Disneyland opens at Anaheim. Ninety million people watch live on television.

  * * *

  Carol Hall, five years old, is parked in front of the black-and-white television set an hour before the Disneyland grand opening television special is to begin. Chet, her father, a jet-propulsion engineer presently at North American Aviation, had wanted to go to the beach that beautiful Sunday, but when Carol had gotten wind of his plan she had thrown herself on the floor, sobbing, “We’ll miss the grand opening!”

  “How did she hear about this all-consuming event?” Chet asks as he rummages in the icebox for olives. Tall and loose limbed, Chet looks good in a suit and tie. His blond hair is cut in a flattop, his eyes are hazel, and he wears the heavy black glasses of his jet-propulsion-engineer tribe. Just now, he wears khaki slacks, sandals, and a short-sleeved sport shirt with the tail out. The windows of their new ranch house are open, and a breeze flows through the kitchen. From the boomerang pattern of the Formica countertop to the Eames chairs in the living room that they found, astonishingly enough, put out in the trash on Sunset Boulevard, the house and the lives of the Halls lean and yearn toward the sunny future and away from the war, the bomb, sacrifice, and uncertainty.

  June says, “I think the olives are behind the milk, honey. They’ve been talking about the grand opening on the Disney show for months.” June’s short blond hair falls in soft natural waves around her face. Her eyes are blue, her legs are long, she is tall and beautifully proportioned, and she has a BS in chemical engineering. She and Chet make a nice couple, as they have frequently been told since 1949, when they met and married. She rarely wears her expensive, fashionable suits any longer, but is still a knockout when she does. Carol likes to clunk around in the green snakeskin peep-toed shoes June wore on her honeymoon in Cuba. Now that June is a mother, she mostly wears white Keds.

  “You’re going to miss it!” yells Carol from the living room.

  June and Chet settle on the couch, armed with martinis. Though it’s early, they feel fully justified.

  Carol has a glass of milk____with a straw in it that makes it taste, distantly, like strawberries—which is getting warm on the coffee table behind her. She sits cross-legged on green wall-to-wall carpeting, coonskin hat jammed over blond braids. She holds her life-sized rubber bowie knife upright, as if she might be a grizzled frontiersman waiting for a slab of bear meat in a backwoods river tavern, or maybe she’s planning to stab Mike Fink in the gullet. Her knife has a gray blade and a green handle. She is forbidden to stab things with it, but when she thinks no one is looking she does a lot of stabbing—furniture, walls, dirt, trees—all to no avail, since the blade curls up, but it’s still entertaining. She also has a six-shooter cap gun and a holster, but she’s only allowed to play with it outside. It makes real smoke and noise.

  She jumps up. “Look! There’s Walt Disney! He’s the train engineer!”

  “Yup,” says Chet. “A man of many talents.” The camera follows a parade down idyllic Main Street. “Oh, boy! It’s Yesterdayland! We’re back in 1900! No world wars.”

  “I don’t think there’s a Yesterdayland,” says Carol doubtfully. The camera moves to another live grand opening scene. “Who is that man? He talks funny.”

  “Why, it’s good old Heinz Haber. I met him in Germany and saw him at a seminar just last week. Guess you have to have a German accent to get a job with Disney.”

  “He’s a physicist, isn’t he?” asks June.

  Chet nods. “Eisenhower asked Disney to do a series about space and science last year. Disney Studios has a good reputation—they made a lot of shows for the army and US Treasury during the war. Not that we don’t have brilliant American physicists, but the government is in love with these Nahzees.” He’s pronounced “Nazi” as “Nahzee” ever since he heard it in Churchill’s “blood, sweat, and tears” speech. “Oh, that’s right—none of them were Nahzees. We went to a lot of trouble to get them. Got to show them off to the Russians, I guess. Grabbed them right under their noses.”

  June teases, “You’re just jealous you’re not on TV. All of you at the jet lab and NAA.”

  “Don’t push it, June.”

  June decides not to—in fact, she’s sorry she said a word. Chet had been in the group of Army scientists that tracked down and captured the German scientists (although “captured” is probably not the right word, as the Germans were quite eager to go to America rather than to Russia). When in Germany, Chet saw atrocities that he claimed these German TV scientists knew about, war crimes that they had committed. Technically, he should not even have told her; it was all top secret, completely suppressed by the Office of Strategic Services, which had cleansed their records and made them look as if they were angels.

  June takes Chet’s hand. “Sorry, honey.”

  He shrugs. “Oh, anything for a laugh.”

  Now he’ll be broody. Oh, well.

  At the entrance of Tomorrowland, Haber holds a Ping-Pong ball, which represents an atom of uranium, delicately between his thumb and forefinger. “These contain energy,” he says gravely. In front of him stands a table covered with other “atoms” loaded into mousetraps. His son tosses a Ping-Pong ball into their midst, which starts a chain reaction, a wild flurry of snaps and flying white balls, each of which sets off even more traps. Haber holds up a cardboard picture of an atomic pile, which he says will soon provide us with all the energy we will ever need. We will no longer even need hydroelectric dams. It will all be like magic. “Use it wisely,” he admonishes.

  This is only a small sample of the show Carol will see on TV a few months later. Ward Kimball, Disney’s right-hand man, using a loose style that is new at the studio, is collaborating with Dr. Haber to create “Our Friend the Atom.” A towering, threatening genie—atomic energy—will emerge from a bottle, arms crossed, while the skinny, hapless man who released him skitters about on the beach, terrified, until he tricks the genie back into the bottle, ensuring that atomic energy will be used in medical applications and for electrical power. Carol will remember the show her entire life, though after the dark twist, she will not recall it for years. But the dark twist comes later.

  “Carol, drink your milk or I’ll put it back in the icebox,” says her mother.

  “It’s 1986, where a tri
p to the moon is an everyday event,” announces Art Linkletter ebulliently, as the Rocket to the Moon ride appears on the screen in the world’s first glimpse of Tomorrowland. “In Tomorrowland, you can travel to the moon on the Moonliner. The passenger cabin is in the bottom, between the fins, and you can watch the huge top television screen there to see where you’re going, and the bottom one to see where you’ve been.”

  Danny Thomas and his children, including Marlo, the future That Girl, rush with unfeigned eagerness into 1986 (her show will have come and gone by then) and into the Moonliner, welcomed by a shapely stewardess. The ship blasts off, in 1986, and soon the arteries of Anaheim are like tiny diagrams far below.

  “Not bad,” admits Chet, grudgingly. “Kind of like a bombing run over Germany.”

  Carol is silent for a few minutes, her eyes wide. Finally she says, “I want to go to the moon.”

  “So do I. It could be done, but that’s not what would really happen. For one thing, that rocket part would fall off after it boosts the capsule out of the atmosphere, and you’d probably need at least three stages. And then—”

  “And then you go to the space station on the way! That’s what the man said.”

  “Right. That’s Wernher’s plan.”

  “Who’s Wernher?”

  “A war criminal.”

  June says, “Oh, honey, just let it be.”

  “If you’d seen—”

  “It’s Sunday,” she says. “Carol is right here.”

  He lights a Chesterfield cigarette. Even at this age, Carol knows that it’s his favorite brand. “Okay, okay. How about another martini?”

  “It’s definitely a two-martini show,” says June, unwinding her long legs and rising from the couch.