Galaxy's Edge Magazine

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I hear him go out the front door. The wind had stopped, like it always does at sundown, and even though he was moving quiet as a deer, I’d been lying awake for this. My clock says 2:30 a.m. The hot darkness of my bedroom presses all around me. The front door closes and the motion-detector light on the porch comes on. We still have electricity. The light stays on ten full minutes, in case of robbers.

Like we have anything left to steal.

I’m ready. Shoes and jacket on, window open. After supper I took the sensor out of the motion light on the west side of the house. My father doesn’t notice. He’s headed the other way, toward the road.

Out the window, down the maple tree, around the house. He’d parked the truck way down the road, clear past the onion field. What used to be the onion field. Quietly I pull my bicycle, too old and rusty to sell, out from my mom’s lilac hedge. No flowers again this year.

The truck starts, drives away. I pedal along the dark road, losing him at the first rise. It doesn’t matter. I know where he’s going, where they’re all going, where he thought he could go without me. No way. I’m not a child, and this is my future, too.

Somewhere in the roadside scrub a small animal scurries away. An owl hoots. The night, so hot and dry even though it’s only May, draws sweat from me, which instantly evaporates off my skin. There are no mosquitoes. I pedal harder.

Allen Corporation has posted a guard at the construction site, where until now there has been no guard, nor a need for one. Did someone tip them off? Is the law out there, with guns? I’ve beaten my father to the site, which at first puzzles me, and then doesn’t. He would have joined up with the others somewhere, some gathering place to consolidate men and equipment. You couldn’t just roar up here in a dozen pickups and SUVs, leaving tracks all over the place.

A single floodlight illuminates the guard, throwing a circle of yellow light. He sits in a clear, three-sided shack like the one where my sister Ruthie waits for the school bus with her little friends. I can see him clearly, a young guy, not from here. At least, I don’t recognize him. He’s got on a blue uniform and he’s reading a graphic novel. He lifts a can to his mouth, drinks, goes back to the book.

Is he armed? I can’t tell.

A thrill goes through me, starting at my belly and tingling clear up to the top of my head. I can do this. My father and the others will be here soon. I can get this done before they arrive.

“Hey, man!” I call out, and lurch from the darkness. The guard leaps to his feet and pulls something from his pocket. My heart stops. But it’s not a gun too small. It’s a cell phone. He’s supposed to call somebody else if there’s trouble.

“Stop,” he says in a surprisingly deep voice.

I stop, pretend to stagger sideways, and then right myself and put on what Ruthie calls my “goofy head” weird grin, wide eyes. I slur my words. “Can I ha’ one o’ those beers? You got more? I’m fresh out!”

“You are trespassing on private property. Leave immediately.”

“No beer?” I try to sound tragic, like somebody in a play in English class.

“Leave immediately. You are trespassing on private property.”

“Okay, okay, sheesh, I’m going already.” Now I can make out the huge bulk of the pipeline, twenty feet beyond the guard shack. I stagger again and fall forward, flat on my face, arms extended way forward so he can see that my hands are empty. “Aw, fuck.”

The guard says nothing. At the edge of my vision I see him finger the cell. He doesn’t want to look like a fool, calling in about one drunken kid, waking up Somebody Important at three in the morning. But he doesn’t want to make a mistake, either. I help him decide. I turn my head and puke onto the ground.

This is a thing I learned to do when I was Ruthie’s age: vomit at will without sticking a finger down my throat. I practiced and practiced until I could do it anytime I wanted to impress my friends or get out of school. So I lay there hurling my cookies, and I’m not a big guy: five-nine and one hundred and forty-five pounds. Middle-weight wrestling class.

The guard makes a sound of disgust and moves closer. Clearly I’m no threat. “Get out of here, you fag. Now!”

I flail feebly on the ground.

“I said get out!” He yells louder, like that might sober me, and moves in for a kick. When he’s close enough, I spring. He’s bigger and older, but I was runner-up for state wrestling champion. Before he knows it, I’ve got him on the ground. Illegal hold, unnecessary roughness, unsportsmanlike conduct: two penalty points.

He shouts something and fights back, even though that increases his pain. I’m not sure I can hold him; he’s strong. I hear a truck in the distance.

The guy is going to get free.

My father will be here any minute.

Adrenalin surges through me like a tsunami.

The ground is littered with construction-site rubble. I pick up a rock and bash him on the head. He drops like a fifty-pound sack of fertilizer, and that throws me off balance. I go down, too, and my head strikes some random piece of metal. Everything blurs except the thought Oh God what if I killed the fucker? When I can see again, I drag myself over to him. Blood on his head, but he’s breathing. I’ve dragged myself through my own vomit. The truck halts.

Men rush forward. My father says, “Danny?”

“Christ, Larry, what is this?” Mr. Swenson, who farms next to us. Used to farm next to us.

I gasp, “Took.. out guard…for you.”

“Oh, fuck,” somebody else says. And then, “Kid, did he see your face?”

The answer must have been on my own face, because the man snaps, “You couldn’t have worn a ski mask?”

“Shut up, Ed,” Mr. Swenson says. I can’t get out my answer: I didn’t know there’d be a guard! Someone is bending over the guard, lifting him in a fireman’s carry. Someone else is pulling back my eyelids and peering at my eyes a doctor? Is Dr. Radusky here? No, he wouldn’t…he can’t…Things grow fuzzier. I lose a few minutes, but I know I’m not passed out because I’m aware of both my father kneeling beside me and parts of the argument floating above:

“— do it anyway!”

“—Larry’s kid screwed us and—”

“We came here to—”

“The law—”

“I’m not leaving until I do what I come for!”

They do it, all of them except Dad. Quick and hard, panting and grunting. The night shrieks with pick-axes, chain saws, welding torches. Someone moves the floodlight pole closer to the pipeline.

The huge pipe, forty-eight inches in diameter and raised above the ground on stanchions to let animals pass underneath, is being wrecked. Only a thirty-foot section of its monstrous and unfinished length, but that’s enough. For now. I hear a piece of heavy equipment, dozer or backhoe, start up, move. A moment later, a crash.

More pipe down.

It’s over in twenty minutes, during which I vomit once more, this time unwilled. Puking again blurs my vision. When it clears, my father is pulling me to my feet. I stagger against him. Before someone kills the floodlight, I see the Allen Corporation Great Lakes Water Diversion Pipeline lying in jagged pieces. I see dust covering everything to an inch thick and still falling from the sky, like rain. I see the farm the way it was when I was Ruthie’s age, the corn green and spiky, Mom’s lilacs in bloom, the horse pasture full of wildflowers. I see my dead grandfather driving the combine. I know then that my head hasn’t cleared at all, and that I am hallucinating.

But one thing I see with total clarity before I pass out: my father’s grim, tight-lipped face as he half-carries me to the pick-up full of men.

The law is at our house by 6:30 a.m.

Before that, Dr, Radusky came by. He made me do various things. “Concussion,” he said, “consistent with falling off his bicycle and hitting his head. Keep him awake, walking around as much as you can, and bring him to my office tomorrow for another look-see. No school today or tomorrow, and no wrestling for longer than that.” He didn’t look at my father, but Dr. Radusky knew, of course. The whole town knew.

“Larry,” my mother says in the hallway beyond my bedroom. They’re taking turns making sure I sit up, walk around, and don’t sleep. “Sheriff is downstairs.”

“Uh-huh.” My father leaves.

My mother comes into my room and snaps, not for the first time, “What in Christ’s name were you thinking?”

I don’t answer. If they don’t see that I’m a hero, the hell with them.

“I’m going downstairs,” she says. “Don’t lie down, Danny. Promise me.”

I nod sullenly. As soon as she’s gone, Ruthie slides in. She’s dressed for school in jeans and an old green blouse that used be Mom’s. It’s been cut down somehow to sort of fit her. “Danny,” she whispers, “what did you do?”

“Nothing, squirt.”

“But everybody’s mad at you!”

“I was out riding my bike and fell off it and hit my head. That’s all.”

“Out riding in the night? Why?”

“You wouldn’t understand.” My head throbs and aches.

“Were you going to see a girl?”

I wish. “None of your business.”

“Was it Jenny Bradford?”

“Beat it, squirt.”

“I’m going to go downstairs and listen.”

“No, you’re not!”

“If I don’t, then will you tell me another picture?”

Ruthie scavenges photographs. She ferrets them out of the boxes and envelopes where Mom has shoved them, hidden all over the house because Mom can’t bear to look at them anymore. I remember her doing it, crying as she ripped some from their frames there used to be a lot of framed pictures all over the place and tossed the silver frames into the box for the pawnshop. Now Ruthie finds them and brings them to me to identify things: That’s Great Uncle Jim in front of the barn we sold to the Allen people, that’s Grandpa driving the combine. She doesn’t remember any of it, but I do.

She pulls a picture from under her blouse and holds it out to me. This one is newer than most of her stash, printed on a color printer from somebody’s digital camera. I remember that printer. We sold it long ago, along with everything else: the antiques handed down from Great-Grandma Ann, the farm equipment, the land. None of it was enough. The house is in foreclosure.

I say, “That’s our old horse pasture.”

“We had horses?”

“One horse.” White Foot. He’d been mine.

“Where’s the horse?”

“Gone.”

“Where’s the pasture? Is it the dirt field over by the falling-down fence?”

“Yeah.”

“But what are those?” She points at the photograph.

In the picture the pasture, its fences whole and white-washed, is full of wildflowers, mostly daisies. Wave after wave of daisies in semi-close-up, their centers bright yellow like little suns, their petals almost too white, maybe from some trick of the camera. When was the last time I saw a daisy? Had Ruthie ever seen one?

I say, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“You just said bad words!”

“They’re called ‘daisies.’ Now go away, brat.”

“You said bad words! I’m telling!”

Heavy footsteps on the stairs. Ruthie, looking close to tears, thrusts the photo under her blouse and skitters out the door. It isn’t the tears that do me in, it’s the blouse.

My parents come in, with Sheriff Buchmann. The room is too full. I know from her face that Mom hates Buchmann seeing my patched bedspread, faded curtains, sparse furniture. Me, I just hate the sheriff.

He says, “Daniel, did you go last night to the site of the Allen Corporation’s pipeline?”

“No, sir.”

“How’d you get that bandage on your head?”

“Tripped in the dark and fell off my bike.”

“Where?”

“Corner of Maple and Grey.”

“And what were you doing down there?”

“I had a fight with my father and wanted to get away.”

“What was the fight about?”

“My grades. My teacher called yesterday. My math grade sucks.” Could Buchmann tell I’d been rehearsed? He’d check, but Mr. Ruhl did call yesterday, and my math grade does suck. My parents gaze at me steadily, without emotion. They’re good at that. So is Buchmann. I want to ask if the pipeline guard is okay, but I can’t. I wasn’t there. It never happened. Unless the guard can I.D. me.

I gaze back, emotionless, my father’s son.

Ruthie is drawing daisies. I don’t know where she got the paper. Her crayons are only what’s been hoarded for years, now stubby lengths of yellow and green laid carefully on the kitchen table. So far she’s covered three sheets of thin paper with eight daisies each, every flower in its own little box. They have yellow centers, green leaves, and petals that are the white of the paper outlined in green.

“Hi, Danny! Is your head better?”

“Yeah. What are these?”

“Daisies, stupid.”

“I mean, why are you making them?”

“I want to.” She looks up at me, crayon stub in her fist, her face all serious. “Do you know what my teacher taught us in school today?”

“How would I know? I’m not in the second grade.” Unlike me, Ruthie likes school and is good at it.

“She taught us about the pipeline. Some people broke it Monday night.”

My hand stops halfway to the fridge handle, starts again, opens the fridge door. Nothing to eat but bread, leftover potatoes, drippings, early strawberries Mom picked today. She will be saving those.

Ruthie says, “The pipeline people are fixing it. It’s supposed to carry water to ‘The Southwest.’” She says the words carefully, like she might say “Narnia” or “Middle Earth.”

“Is that so,” I say. I take bread and drippings from the fridge.

“Yes. The water will come from ‘Lake Michigan.’ That’s one of the Great Lakes.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“There are five Great Lakes, and they have four-fifths of the fresh water in the world. That means that if you put all the fresh water in the world into five humongous pots, then four ”

I stop listening to her math lesson. The guard couldn’t I.D. me. I watched him on TV we still have a TV, so old that nobody wants it, but no LinkNet for any good programs. The guard looked even younger than I remembered, no more than a few years older than me. He also looked more scared than I remembered. I spread drippings on my bread.

Ruthie is still reciting. “The water is supposed to go to farms around the ‘Great Lakes Basin,’ but it’s not. It’s going to go through the big pipe to ‘The Southwest.’ Danny, why can’t we have some of that water to make our farm grow again?”

“Bingo.”

“Answer me!” Ruthie says, sounding just like Mom.

“Because the Southwest can pay for it and we can’t.”

Ruthie nods solemnly. “I know. We can’t pay for anything. That’s why we have to move. I don’t wanna move. Danny where will we go?”

“I don’t know, squirt.” I no longer want my bread and drippings. And I don’t want to talk about this with Ruthie. It fills me with too much rage. I put the half-eaten bread in the fridge and go upstairs.

The next night, the pipeline is attacked in Fuller Corners, twenty miles to the south. There are two guards, both armed. One is killed.

“Daniel Raymond Hitchens, you are under arrest for destruction of property, trespass, and assault in the first degree. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in court. You have the right to an attorney—”

The two cops, neither from here, have come right into math class during final exams. They cuff me and lead me out, my test paper left on my desk, half the equations probably wrong. My classmates gape; Connie Moorhouse starts to cry. Mr. Ruhl says feebly, “See here, now, you can’t—” He shuts up. Clearly they can.

Outside the classroom they frisk me. I bluster, “Aren’t I supposed to get one phone call?”

“You got a phone?”

I don’t, of course gone long ago.

“You get your call at the station.”

They take me to the police station in Fuller Corners. There is a lot of talking, video recording, paperwork. I learn that I am suspected of killing the guard in the Fuller Corners attack. The surviving guard identified me. This is ridiculous; I have never even been to Fuller Corners. That doesn’t stop me from being scared. I know that something more is going on here, but I don’t know what. When I get my phone call to my father, I am almost blubbering, which makes me furious.

My parents come roaring down to Fuller Corners like hounds on a deer. Along with them come more TV cameras than I can count. More shouting. A lawyer. I can’t be arraigned until tomorrow. What is arraigned? It doesn’t sound good. I spend the night in the Fuller Corner lockup because I’m seventeen, not sixteen. The jail has two cells. One holds a man accused of raping his wife. The other has me and a drunk who snores, sprawling across the bottom bunk and smelling of booze and piss. He never wakes the entire time I’m there.

Dad drives me home after the arraignment. I am out on bail. More TV cameras, even a robocam. I recognize Elizabeth Wilkins, talking into a microphone on the courthouse steps. She looks hot. Everyone follows my every move, but in the truck it’s just my father and me, and he doesn’t look at me.

He doesn’t say anything, either.

We drive through the ruined land, field after field empty of all but blowing dust. The thing that gets me is how fast it happened. We learned in school about the possible desertification of the Midwest from global warming. But it was only one possibility, and it was supposed to take decades, maybe longer. Then some temperature drop somewhere in the Pacific Ocean the Pacific Ocean, for fuck’s sake changed some ocean currents, and that brought years of drought, ending in dust that blew around from dawn to sundown. Ending in grass fires and foreclosures and food shortages. Ending in Fuller Corners.

Finally my father says, “This is just the beginning.” He keeps his eyes on the road. “But not for you, Danny. You’re not going to prison. If that’s what you’re thinking, get it out of your mind right now. Not going to happen. They got nothing but made-up evidence that won’t hold up.”

“Then why was I arrested?”

“PR. Yeah, you’re the poster boy for this. Bastards.”

On the courthouse steps, Elizabeth Wilkins said into her microphone, “The protestors are even using their children in a shameful and selfish fight to stop the pipeline that will save so many lives in the parched and dying cities of Tucson and—”

I am not a child.

“Dad,” I blurt out, “were you at Fuller Corners?”

His eyes never leave the road, his expression never changes, he says nothing. Which is all the answer I need.

I thought I knew fear before. I was wrong.

At home, Mom is frying potatoes for dinner. It’s warm outside but all the windows are shut against the dust, and all the curtains are drawn tight against everything else. Ruthie lies on the kitchen floor, frantically coloring. I go upstairs and sit on the edge of my bed.

A few minutes later Ruthie comes into my room. She plants herself in front of me, short legs braced apart, hands clasped tight in front of her. “You were in jail.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Go away, squirt.”

“I can’t,” she says, and the odd words plus something in her voice make me focus on her. When she was littler, she used to go stand on her head in the pantry and cry whenever anyone wouldn’t tell her something she wanted to know.

“Danny, did you break the pipe?”

“No,” I say, truthfully.

“Are more people going to break the pipe more?”

“Yes, I think so.” Just the beginning.

“An ‘eviction notice’ came today while you were in jail. Does that mean we have to move right away?”

“I don’t know.” Is the timing of the eviction notice with my faked-up poster-boy arrest just coincidental? How would I even know? The people building the pipeline, which is going to be immensely profitable, are very determined. But so is my father.

Ruthie says, “Where will we go?”

“I don’t know that, either.” The Midwest is a dust plain, the Southwest desperate for water, the Great Lakes states and Northeast defending their great treasures, the lakes and the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Oregon and Washington have closed their borders, with guns. The South is already too full of refugees without jobs or hope.

Ruthie says, “I think we should go to Middle Earth. They have lots of water.”

She doesn’t really believe it; she’s too old. But she can still dream it aloud. Then, however, she follows it with something else.

“It will be a war, won’t it, Danny? Like in history.”

“Go downstairs,” I say harshly. “I hear Mom calling you to set the table.”

She knows I’m lying, but she goes.

I go into the bathroom and turn on the sink. Water flows, brown and sputtery sometimes, but there. We have a pretty deep well, which is the only reason we’re still here, the only reason we have electricity and potatoes and bread and, sometimes, coffee. I’ve caught Mom filling dozens of plastic gallon bottles from the kitchen tap. Even our small town, smaller now that so many have been forced out, has a black market.

I turn off the tap. The well won’t hold much longer. The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact won’t hold, either. Lake levels have been falling for more than a decade. There isn’t enough, won’t be enough, can’t be enough for everybody.

I go down to dinner.

Exhausted from two nights of sleeplessness and two days of fitful naps, I nonetheless cannot sleep. At 2:00 a.m. I go downstairs and turn on the TV. Without LinkNet, we get only two stations, both a little fuzzy. One of them is all news all the time. With the sound as low as possible, I watch myself being led from the jail to the courthouse, from the courthouse to our truck. I watch film clips of the dead guard. I watch an interview with the guard I clobbered with a rock. He describes his “assailant” as six feet tall, strongly built, around twenty-one years old. Either he has the worst eyesight in the county or else he can’t admit he was brought down by a high school kid who can’t do algebra.

Not that I’m going to need algebra in what my future was becoming.

When I can’t watch any more, I go into the kitchen. I gather up what I find there, rummage for a pair of scissors, and go outside. There is no wind. Dad’s emergency light, battery-run and powerful enough to illuminate the entire inside of the barn we no longer own, is in the shed. When I’ve finished what I set out to do, I return to the house.

Ruthie is deeply asleep. She stirs when I hoist her onto my shoulder, protests a bit, then slumps against me. When I carry her outside, she wakes fully, a little scared but now also interested.

“Where we going, Danny?”

“You’ll see. It’s a surprise.”

I’m forced to continue to carry her because I forgot her shoes. She grows really heavy but I keep on, stumbling through the dawn. At the old horse pasture I set her on a section of fence that hasn’t fallen down yet. I turn on the emergency light and sweep it over the pasture.

“Oh!” Ruthie cries. “Oh, Danny!”

The flowers are scattered all across the bare field, each now on its own little square of paper: yellow centers, white petals outlined in yellow, green leaves until the green crayon was all used up and she had to switch to blue.

“Oh, Danny!” she cries again. “Oh, look! A hundred hundred daisies!”

It will be a war, won’t it? Yes. But not this morning.

The sun rises, the wind starts, and the paper daisies swirl upward with the dust.

Galaxy's Edge Magazine

galaxysedge.com

Gordon Eklund is a Nebula winner, as well as the author of a few very early Star Trek books, a collaborative novel with our science columnist Gregory Benford, and a number of books and stories on his own. His most recent publication is Second Creation, the first of three projected volumes of his selected short fiction from Ramble House.

ANOTHER TRUE HISTORY
by
Gordon Eklund

With All Due Apologies: Lucian of Samosata

"The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it"—Oscar Wilde

When the sun came up August 7, 1945, the day after an atomic bomb exploded two thousand feet above Hiroshima, Japan, wiping out in the flick of an eye eighty thousand or so men, women, and children along with much of the bucolic seaport city they called home, a formation of nine (or perhaps eleven) cigar-shaped silver airships appeared hovering in the early morning sky over Washington, D.C.

Within minutes of the initial sighting reports began streaming in of similar formations of nine (or perhaps eleven) cigar-shaped silver airships observed hovering above London, Moscow, Berlin, and—although reports were initially sketchy owing to military censorship—Tokyo, Japan.

The airships were uniformly described as approximately thirty feet in length, ten-to-twelve feet in diameter at their widest, with sleek tapering ends and smooth metallic surfaces. There were no visible windows or portholes. No propellers, jet engines, rocket tubes, or other propulsive devices of any kind.

When approached by reconnaissance aircraft from nearby Bolling Field, the ships above Washington promptly vanished only to reappear moments later in a different portion of the sky. When approached again, the ships once more vanished and reappeared.

Knowledgeable Army Air Corps sources described the airships as distinctly “unearthly” and/or “alien” in appearance. No one in a position of authority seemed to have any definite notion as to what they were, who was operating them, or what if anything they might want.

With the U.S. government firmly entrenched on a wartime footing, official pronouncements seemed at first designed to minimize public panic. The mysterious airships offered no clear or present danger to the nation, its civilian population, or military forces, the American people were assured. Residents of the city of Washington were nevertheless cautioned to remain at home if at all possible, preferably indoors, until the ongoing situation could be fully evaluated and all due precautionary measures undertaken.

“Sounds to me like somebody’s out covering his own rump in advance,” opined Elmore “Speed” Garrity, Cubs baseball beat reporter for the Chicago Daily Graphic. The morning the airships appeared over Washington found Speed in the club car of a hurtling Twentieth Century Limited on his way home to Chicago from New York City, where a listless Cubs team had dropped three of four to the Giants and four of five to Brooklyn, thus seeing their National League lead over the three-time defending champion St. Louis Cardinals dwindle to a slim one-game margin.

“Doesn’t matter a screechy toot on a rusty trombone to me who they are or what they want as long as they don’t screw up the baseball season,” Speed informed the three Cub ballplayers with whom he was playing Hearts at a penny a point. “I’ve wasted seven good years covering you mugs waiting for another World Series, and I’m not letting any kamikaze Japs or atom bombs or mysterious airships from outer space deprive me of my justified reward.”

“You think that’s where they’re from, Garrity?” demanded Milo Detweiler, rival beat reporter for the Chicago Tribune, who was kibitzing the card game from afar since nobody would let him play anymore after Speed caught him with an extra queen of spades tucked in a vest pocket. “They’re from way out there in outer space, are they? Mars maybe, like that 4-F slacker Orson Welles tried to get the rubes in Jersey to believe. You get that scoop straight from the jackass’s mouth, Garrity, or from its fanny end where most of your crap comes out of?”

Speed lipped the unlit Old Gold dangling from a corner of his mouth and laid down the king of diamonds, collecting the current trick. “How in hell should I know, Detweiler? I’m playing mumbly-peg in the dark here same as the so-called pundits on that rag of yours who kept predicting FDR’s a goner come every election. I’ll tell you this much though. Anybody messes with baseball, wherever they’re from, fleas off Pluto the pup’s tail end for all I care, they better watch out. Baseball’s one of the things we’re fighting this war for. Mom, baseball, and fresh baked apple fritters. That’s what the Congress said when they voted the declaration of war. It was bad enough when that old coot Judge Landis cancelled the All-Star Game, but the World Series… people won’t stand for it. Looks like my lead again,” he added, tossing down the jack of diamonds.

“The way I heard it, it’s the Nazis up there,” one of the Cubs, a veteran pitcher recently acquired on waivers from the Yankees chimed in. “Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Max Schmeling, the whole slimy crew. They hightailed it out of Berlin ahead of the Russkies in an invisible submersible flying boat to their secret headquarters base underneath the North Pole, and now they’re up in the sky in their atomic-powered airships ready to hurl death bombs down on top of all of us.”

“Then what are they doing in the sky over Tokyo too?” Detweiler wanted to know. “Not to mention Berlin itself? And how come they didn’t use these secret airships of theirs months ago when they could’ve won them the war with them? And how come—?”

While Detweiler blathered on Speed continued running diamonds, collecting successive tricks until the suit was exhausted in his hand. Then he led with a lowball deuce of clubs and let the others fight it out while moron Detweiler prattled on about matters he knew less than a hill of beans about which was pretty much everything under the sun up to and including baseball.

A few hands later Speed deftly dropped the queen of spades on the ex-Yankee pitcher and mentally added up his points. He was already a buck and six bits ahead for the day, enough for a shot of Jameson’s Irish to wash down his regular morning breakfast of fried spam and soft-boiled eggs.

In the meantime in Washington D.C. four unmarked olive green 1942 Cadillac sedans flanked by a motorcycle escort exited the White House gates. Riding in the back seat of the lead vehicle sat Harry S Truman, President of the United States since Franklin Roosevelt’s death the previous April, along with the secretaries of state, war, and the Navy. In the trailing cars came the military chiefs of staff and their key aides along with several senior White House officials.

The presidential convoy moved at a brisk pace through the near empty streets of the capital city to Griffith Stadium, home field of the second-place Washington Senators, who were presently in St. Louis engaged in a showdown series with the defending American League champion Browns led by their one-armed leftfielder Pete Gray. In the home team’s absence the Washington Homestead Grays of the Negro National League were scheduled to play a doubleheader against their archrival Baltimore Elite Giants. But a detachment of U.S. Marines armed with M-1 carbines now stood blocking access to the stadium for those—primarily Negroes from nearby neighborhoods—who’d chosen to ignore official cautions and venture out for a few placid hours watching the national pastime without regard for mysterious cigar-shaped airships hovering overhead.

As the presidential vehicles pulled up next to the stadium, the waiting crowd expressed its annoyance at the delay with a chorus of robust catcalls, boos, and lusty Bronx cheers. “They must not realize it’s you, Mr. President,” said the young military aide, a naval junior lieutenant, cradling the president’s creased Panama hat in his lap.

“Keep thinking numbskull malarkey like that, son,” said Truman, “and I’ll find you a job working for Tom Dewey.”

As soon as he emerged from his limousine, with the keen instincts of an experienced politician, Truman faced the crowd and clasped his hands exuberantly overhead. In his by now familiar reedy Missourian twang he called out, “Sorry for the temporary hold-up, folks. The game will go on shortly, trust me. I just need to borrow your ballpark for a quick meeting with some unexpected visitors from out of town.”

With a few subdued cheers trailing in his wake—along with stray catcalls and boos—Truman marched into the stadium trailed by his official entourage. “Lucky for me nobody in this damn city can vote,” he confided to the young aide.

“I’m sure they’d be all for you, sir,” said the lieutenant. “The colored people love you like nobody else except Mrs. Roosevelt.”

“Just don’t let that son of a bitch Senator Bilbo hear you say that,” said Truman. “He’d try and have me impeached.”

Soon a persistent droning sound from above attracted everyone’s attention to the sky where one of the nine (or perhaps eleven) cigar-shaped silver airships could be observed drifting toward the ground below. It soon disappeared behind the high stadium wall where it settled down with a gentle whoosh on the neatly trimmed grass between second base and the pitcher’s mound. A peculiar odor reminiscent of wet tea leaves wafted through the air.

Truman, trailed by his chief aides, approached the ship. As they drew near, an aperture opened in the ship’s side, gradually dilating to form an entryway. Dipping his bare head, Truman stepped through the gap. Once the last of the others had followed—the young military aide clutching Truman’s Panama hat—the aperture closed behind them.

Eighteen tense minutes passed during which those in the presidential party waiting outside glanced worrisomely from their watches to the airship and back again. Eighteen anxious minutes during which armed Marines struggled to restrain the increasingly restless crowd.

At the end of this period the aperture in ship’s side opened again and Truman, now wearing his creased Panama hat tilted at a cocky angle, stepped out, followed in turn by those who’d accompanied him inside.

When the last of them exited, the aperture closed, the droning noise sounded again, the odor of wet tea leaves dissipated, and the cigar-shaped silver airship rose into the sky to rejoin the eight (or perhaps ten) others hovering above.

Truman stood beside his limousine, arms akimbo, as a bevy of eager reporters, who’d tracked police radio bulletins to the site, shouted questions:

Who are they, Mr. President?

What is it they want?

Is it an invasion from outer space as Orson Welles predicted?

How will it affect our ongoing war effort against the Japs?

What about the atom bomb, sir?

Are you going to drop more of them on those little yellow savages till they finally give up?

What are you doing to guarantee the safety of the American people?

Truman put up a hand. “Boys,” he said, leaning into a microphone flourished by an intrepid female NBC radio reporter, “I’ve brought damn good news to share. They’re friendly as all hell. Not only that, but they’ve come to Earth only to bring peace and good cheer to humankind everywhere.”

With that the president waved, ducked inside his car, and motioned to the driver to proceed. The presidential convoy drove off through the now hushed crowd. The armed Marines promptly withdrew, and the Negro League doubleheader soon proceeded on schedule.

Within minutes the president’s reassuring words could be heard reverberating coast to coast over the national airwaves (the forbidden words “damn” and “hell” coyly concealed under bursts of artificially induced static). Wire service reports soon confirmed similar meetings having taken place in London (with British Prime Minister Clement Attlee), Moscow (doddering Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin—Marshall Stalin, a notorious night person, said to be working assiduously in his austere Kremlin offices), Berlin (occupation authorities representing the three major Allied powers), and Tokyo. (Unconfirmed rumors placed a mute Emperor Hirohito among those present.)

In all instances, summaries of the meetings were identical: The visitors were friendly and wished nothing other than peace and good cheer for all humankind everywhere.

As a result, around the world that night people retired to their beds reassured that the matter of the mysterious silver airships in the sky was nothing to be fretted over. In a world in which upward of sixty million human beings had been methodically slaughtered during the course of a few recent years, a handful of alien spaceships seemed nothing worth losing precious sleep over.

When Speed Garrity hopped off the Twentieth Century Limited in Chicago’s downtown Union Station that night a pert young woman in a silver lame strapless evening gown with a camera and flash attachment slung over one freckled shoulder and a tangle of curly orange locks bouncing on her head came loping up to meet him. Knowledgeable bystanders recognized Speed’s longtime girlfriend, Goldie Malloy, the Daily Graphic’s prizewinning high society shutterbug. “Sorry for the high-hat get-up, Speedy sweet,” she said, “but they had me out covering the annual Cook County debutante ball.”

“Swell, doll,” said Speed, giving Goldie a moist bus on her lightly rouged cheek. “Since you’re all decked out in your swellest rags, what say we boogie on over to Club Kokomo Jake’s, catch the afterhours jam? The porters on the Limited were saying Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster are in town on break from the Duke’s band and primed to blow red hot and cool all night long.”

“Golly, Speed, didn’t you get enough of your jazz music when you were in New York?” sighed Goldie, whose dogs were killing her from scurrying around in high heels snapping photos at the ball.

“You kidding me, babe?” said Speed. “All they want to blow back there is those Chinese sounding bebop rifts nobody but the madman on the moon can dance to. Me, I’m dying to hear some lowdown blues, something with a Chicago gut bucket growl in it.”

As the two of them sped toward the Southside aboard Goldie’s 1940 baby blue Ford V-8 coupe, she dipped a hand inside her décolletage and pulled out the Mexicali reefer one of the debs at the ball had traded her in return for a flattering snapshot to run on the society page. “None for me right now,” she said as Speed fired up the joint with a flick of his Zippo. “I’m already too goshdarned pooped to pant.”

In the meantime, on the far side of the world on the tiny Pacific atoll of Tinian’s North Air Field a diligent Air Corps flight crew was readying the five-ton “Fat Boy” plutonium atomic bomb aboard the B-29 Superfortress Bockscar preparatory to its scheduled eight-hour pre-dawn flight to the southern Japanese target city of Kokura.

Minutes after takeoff, an ultra-high priority cable arrived at base headquarters directing the bombing mission be scrapped and the Bockscar diverted from its assigned flight path and ordered instead to deposit its nuclear cargo in the thirty-five thousand foot Challenger Deep southwest of Guam.

Subsequent congressional investigations were never able conclusively to determine the source of this early morning cable, only that it originated from somewhere in (or perhaps above) the city of Washington. What was known by a select few was that the Fat Boy bomb was the last of three nuclear devices in the U.S. arsenal, and estimates varied widely as to the time required to produce sufficient plutonium to arm further weapons.

At Chicago’s South Side Club Kokomo Jake’s that night Speed and Goldie were joined at their table by their old friend Professor Heinrich Ito of the University of Chicago physics department. Professor Ito had been denied the requisite security clearance to join his many colleagues in Los Alamos, New Mexico, working on the Manhattan Project to design and produce the atomic bomb which had flattened the city of Hiroshima. The confidential FBI memo denying his clearance cited Professor Ito’s questionable mixed German and Japanese ancestry as well as a maiden aunt suspected of being a onetime organizer for the subversive Industrial Workers of the World.

“As if I would have agreed to assist them in their awful endeavors,” the Professor told Speed and Goldie during a lull in the jam. “As it is my hands remain free of the stain of spilt blood unlike so many of my dearest friends.”

“But if the A-bomb forces the Japs to give up,” said Goldie, massaging her aching corns, “won’t it be worth it, Prof? I mean, what about all the American boys killed at Pearl Harbor and Okinawa and everywhere else too?”

“Or the Bataan Death March,” Speed put in. “How do you justify that?”

“I justify nothing, my young friends,” said the professor, shaking his head glumly. “The murder of one individual is universally condemned as a capital crime, is it not? Yet the murder of tens of millions can somehow be justified?”

“So you’re like a Conchie?” said Speed.

“A Communist? Never. The Communists are among the most cynical of justifiers.”

“Not a Commie, Prof. A Conchie. A conscientious objector. Somebody who’s opposed to all wars anytime anywhere on principle. A pacifist. Like Sergeant York before Gary Cooper got pissed off at the Krauts or that other Hollywood guy from All Quiet on the Western Front. You know, Dr. Kildare.”

“Lew Ayres,” said Goldie.

“Yeah, like him.”

“I oppose murder,” the Professor agreed. “And war is wholesale murder on the most enormous of criminal scales.”

Later as dawn creased the pale eastern sky and Goldie slept snuggled up with her head pillowed in her arms, Speed and Professor Ito joined a Negro tenor saxophonist and blind bass player out back in the alley behind Kokomo Jake’s.

Speed fired up the remnant of the Mexicali reefer, took a sharp hit to test its potency, and passed it along to the blind bassist, easing the smoldering roach neatly between his fingertips.

“So, Prof,” said Speed, letting out a thin stream of smoke, “what’s up with these weird airships in the sky over D.C.? You think they’re like the McCoy from outer space this time or not?”

“I would certainly tend to believe so,” said Professor Ito, accepting the muggle from the blind bassist and handing it on to the tenor saxophonist. The Professor eschewed intoxicants of any kind with the exception of sacramental buttons of the peyote cactus on the rare occasions he could obtain them from fellow members of the Native American Church in south-central New Mexico. “As my friend Fermi once remarked to me regarding the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos, if they’re out there, Ito, why are they not here? Now he has his answer. Enrico, I would say, look up in the sky. Here they are at last.”

“But what do they want?” said Speed. “I mean, sure, I know what Truman said about how friendly they are. But that doesn’t really explain anything, does it?”

“It may,” Professor Ito mused. “If their stated intentions are sincere. And I must admit to beseeching the God I rarely believe in that it will indeed prove to be the case.”

Had Professor Ito heard the latest radio bulletins or seen the screaming headlines on the early morning papers his lingering faith in the possibility of divine intervention might well have been shattered:

WASHINGTON D.C. GONE KAPUT!!!

cried the quarter-page headline on the bulldog Daily Graphic above an aerial photograph of what appeared to be either the badlands of Dakota or the high scrub desert of northern Mexico but was actually—as the caption below noted—all that remained of Washington D.C. as of dawn today Eastern Daylight War Time.

Where the majestic capital of American civil government once rose in all its democratic splendor, there now stood a flat featureless plain of desolate dust, dirt, and stone utterly bereft of life.

Overnight, it seemed the city of Washington and everything and everyone within the District of Columbia’s official one hundred fifty-eight square kilometers had—as the Daily Graphic headline succinctly put it—gone kaput.

As also, it soon turned out, had the bustling metropolises of London and Moscow, the fire-bombed ruins of Tokyo, the rubble of occupied Berlin.

Five once-great world cities now gone. Vanished in the wink of an eye.

In addition, the formations of nine (or perhaps eleven) cigar-shaped silver airships hovering above the five cities appeared to have vanished as well.

“Guess it ain’t gonna take no Sherlock Basil Rathbone Holmes to deduce who done the foul deed this time,” Speed told Goldie after she roused him from a deep drug-fueled slumber with a cup of tepid (due to wartime rationing)coffee and the morning Daily Graphic with its screaming headline and accompanying aerial photograph.

“So you think it’s those outer space creatures who done it, huh, Speed?”

“If it ain’t, sweetie,” he said, “then I’m the monkey’s uncle’s gorilla first cousin and you can call me Hairy.”

Nevertheless, by the time Goldie dropped Speed off in front of the friendly confines of Wrigley Field an hour prior to the three o’clock game between the Cubs and the hapless visiting Cincinnati Reds—a team the Cubs had already trounced sixteen of seventeen times this season—much of the initial shock and dismay at what was universally being condemned as a dastardly and unprovoked attack from outer space had begun to ebb as the first survivors were found and identified.

Among these was Seymour Schwartzman, a mid-level data analyst in the Bureau of Standards, who’d chosen to spend an illicit night at the cozy Washington studio apartment of a WAC sergeant major he’d met earlier in the evening at a notorious Georgetown watering hole rather than returning to his suburban Maryland home where his wife Ethel waited with a warmed over supper of her famous spam-and-liver surprise. “Goshdarn, dumpling,” Seymour had explained to Ethel over the phone, holding the receiver tight to his mouth to mute the noise of barroom revelry, “looks like I’m going to have to stay over at the consarn office again tonight. Working on some vital war related data analysis I can’t talk about over the phone or else the FBI’d ship me off to Alcatraz faster than a speeding bullet. But I’ll be home tomorrow, sweetie-pie, with bells on my ears and ringing, you can count on me.”

It was shortly after ten the following morning when a grieving Ethel Schwartzman, clad in a too snug black mourning dress left over from her Granny Alice’s funeral, spotted a man she instantly recognized as her late husband Seymour among the shoppers at a local Bethesda A&P arm-in-arm with a statuesque blonde woman wearing boots made of reindeer fur.

“Seymour goddamn Schwartzman, you lying sack of goose dung!” shouted Ethel as she charged head down through the produce section. “I’ll rip your cheating balls off and squeeze the bloody pulp out of them when I get my hands on you!”

Later as medics applied Mercurochrome soaked bandages to the torn groin area of the wounded Seymour Schwartzman, he continued to adamantly insist that it was a case of mistaken identity. His name, he stoutly maintained, was Calvin W. Terwilliger. He was a teacher of conversational French at an exclusive girls academy in nearby Chevy Chase, and the statuesque blonde woman in the reindeer boots was his friend and former student Brigid Nordstrom, a secretary at the now vanished Swedish embassy, and he had never before set eyes on this deranged shrew of a mad woman claiming to be his wife.

“Liar!” shouted Ethel Schwartzman, as she was restrained by two burly butchers from the A&P meat department. “Cheat! Whoremonger!”

Soon after the arrival of three squad cars of uniformed local police at the Bethesda A&P, sets of fresh fingerprints were taken from the man variously identified as Seymour Schwartzman and/or Calvin W. Terwilliger and forwarded to the Maryland State Department of Licensing as well as local neighborhood Selective Service draft boards.

The result of these comparisons confirmed that the man claiming to be Calvin W. Terwilliger was indeed Calvin W. Terwilliger. The fingerprints taken at the Bethesda A&P matched perfectly with the driver’s licensing records on file under that name.

Unfortunately for any wan hope of speedy resolution, these same fingerprints proved identical with those of the missing Seymour Schwartzman.

“J. Edgar Hoover says it’s a one-in-zillion longshot,” mused a befuddled Bethesda Chief of Police Alphonse St. Cyr, shaking his bullet head glumly. “But here we have one set of fingerprints belonging to two different men, one of them missing and presumed dead and the other saying it can’t be him because the dizzy dame claiming she’s his wife is as looney as a zootsuit hepcat on a Mexicali reefer jag. It’s a conundrum is what it is, and I’m as boggled as a bird dog with a bad head cold.”

During the following days Chief St. Cyr’s befuddled bogglement spread like a contagion as more and more of those thought to have vanished in the disappearance of the five great world cities kept turning up in other places, other towns, living different lives under different names and identities.

“Next thing you know,” said Speed Garrity as he watched the Cubs lose a fifteen-inning heartbreaker in Philadelphia to the basement dwelling Blue Jays on a dropped third strike by fumble-fingered third string catcher Dewey Williams, “it’ll turn out Phil Cavarretta—” the Cubs star first baseman and eventual National League Most Valuable Player of 1945 “—is really that four-eyed nincompoop Senator Taft.”

“Don’t be absurd, Garrity,” said Milo Detweiler, hovering nearby in hopes of lifting a colorful turn of phrase or two from Speed’s game story. “The Buckeye State’s beloved Mr. Conservative, Bob Taft, turns fifty-six next month.”

“So does Cavarretta the way he’s been hitting lately,” said Speed as he tore the finished copy from his typewriter and hastened off to phone in his story to the Graphic copydesk in Chicago. Speed’s uncanny ability to wrap up his daily game accounts within moments of the final pitch was the envy of the baseball reporting profession and one of several possible inspirations for his trademark nickname.

The climax to this spiraling epidemic of confused identities came shortly afterward when a vacationing musical theater and modern dance critic from a left-wing evening newspaper spotted a man through the window of a busy bicycle repair shop in Halifax, Nova Scotia, bearing an eerie resemblance to the missing U.S. President Harry S. Truman.

“I’d swear on Lenin’s bald head it was that crypto-fascist Truman standing there with an oilcan in his hand,” said the critic over the phone to his editor in New York. “If it wasn’t that means there’s two of the sons of bitches and one was bad enough for the downtrodden proletariat.”

A team of crack reporters hastily assembled and sent north by express train soon wired back that the man in the shop window did indeed look “more like Truman than Truman.” Yet when confronted with the similarity the bespectacled shop proprietor insisted (in French, as translated by his wife Emelie) that his name was Jean-Pierre Delacroix, the father of five grown sons(no daughters), two of them currently serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force in liberated Europe and the others working beside their father in his popular bicycle repair shop.

A set of Jean-Pierre Delacroix’s fingerprints taken from a wine glass surreptitiously obtained from his favorite Halifax bistro when compared with the First World War National Guard records on file at the Armed Forces Document Repository in St. Louis, Missouri, confirmed that Jean-Pierre Delacroix and Harry S. Truman were indeed one and the same person.

When questioned as to his willingness to return to America to resume the duties of his high office, a visibly exasperated Jean-Pierre Delacroix thrust his tongue between his lips and made a loud flatulent-like noise. “Impossible, impossible, impossible!” he exclaimed. It was the peak of the schoolgirl cycling season in Nova Scotia, as Emelie went on to explain, and Jean-Pierre’s presence in the shop was absolutely mandatory. “My sons are fine, decent Canadian lads,” she added in her heavily accented English, “but like many young men today easily given to distraction when immodestly clad females are present.”

By then, many of the U.S. reporters on the scene had slipped away in pursuit of a hot new lead concerning a man spotted in an illegal mahjong parlor only a few blocks away bearing a remarkable resemblance to the missing Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Unfortunately, the new pan-Slavic provisional government in the renamed Russian capital of Petrograd under the archly ironic thumb of temporary acting Tsar Vladimar I, son of an assassinated liberal exile, insisted that all official documentation pertaining to the missing Soviet Communist Party General Secretary had been destroyed during a German bombing raid in June of 1941, and whoever the mustachioed pipe-puffing man in the Halifax gambling den might be, he wasn’t anybody they knew or wanted to know.

Subsequent rumors of Winston Churchill seen living among a tribe of cannibal headhunters in the Amazon basin and Japanese Emperor Hirohito playing shortstop on a relocation camp softball team in rural Idaho likewise remained unconfirmed.

In the meantime, reports of as many as eleven and as few as nine of the cigar-shaped silver airships seen hovering over localities as remote as arctic Spitsbergen and lower Patagonia continued to flood the world press. “Reading in the paper about spaceships in the sky is getting be about as routine as another Saturday night shooting in a Southside bar,” observed Speed to Goldie as she set a piping hot Sunday breakfast of his favorite fried spam and soft boiled pigeon eggs in front of him. “Next thing you know somebody’s mutt’s going to go and bite the mailman.”

Theories abounded to account for the continuing phenomenon of the hovering airships ranging from self-induced mass hysteria to Biblically prophesized apocalypse. Noted Dutch psychoanalyst Dr. Theobold Van Damm in an exclusive interview with the Daily Graphic speculated that the ships might represent an archetypal Jungian physical manifestation of a suppressed racial yearning for atonement in the wake of the horrors of the recent world war. “It’s humankind’s way of saying we’re sorry for what we did and we’ll do our level best not to let it happen again,” he was quoted as saying.

“So maybe they’re real and maybe they ain’t,” said Speed to Professor Ito, who had belatedly joined him in the Wrigley Field press box for the concluding innings of a season-ending tryst between the Cubs and the stubbornly pursuing Cardinals with the National League pennant at stake. The professor, who had ingested two buds from a recently arrived shipment of the sacramental peyote cactus before leaving for the ballpark, sat serenely contemplating the husk of a partially-eaten Chicago-style kosher hot dog laced with sauerkraut and hot jalapeno relish left abandoned on a nearby platter.

“Here you go, Prof,” said Speed, handing Professor Ito a pair of high-powered U.S. Army Signal Corps binoculars. “See that section of bleacher seats next to the foul pole in right field? I want you to take a good long gander through these babies and tell me who or what you see sitting there. Whenever I look I see something different every time. Once it was pink polka dot flamingos in ballet tutus eating crackerjacks and another time it was Mrs. Roosevelt in every seat wearing a Veronica Lake peek-a-boo wig and chewing Wrigley’s spearmint. I need to find out what a scientifically trained pair of eyeballs like yours makes of it.”

After managing with considerable difficulty to tear his gaze from its contemplation of the partly eaten frankfurter, Professor Ito squinted through the magnifying lenses of the field glasses. “I see…nothing out there, Speed,” he reported back. “The seats appear quite unoccupied.”

“That’s what I thought too the first time I looked,” Speed said with a grim shake of the head. “But it don’t make sense, Prof. It’s wacky—cockeyed—daffy as that little black duck in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. The game’s a sellout today. Same as yesterday and the day before and the one before that too. With the Cubs clinging to first place by their foreskins, tickets around this toddlin’ town are hotter than Betty Grable in her skin-tight white bathing suit. There shouldn’t be an empty seat in the joint, Prof.”

A hush now fell over the ball yard as Cubs slugging leftfielder Bill “Bad Penny” Nicholson strode to the plate. A glance at the hand-turned scoreboard high above centerfield indicated that it was now the bottom of the ninth inning, the Redbirds clinging to a meager 4-3 lead, with the tying run in the person of Phil Cavaretta standing at first base for the Cubs after a two-out scratch single.

This is the whole kitten’s caboodle right here and now, thought Speed, fingers poised above the keys of his Remington Noiseless ready to add a concluding paragraph to his game account. The entire 1945 Chicago Cubs season came down to this Nicholson time at bat.

Oblivious to the high drama swirling around him, Professor Ito continued peering at the seemingly vacant seats in the right field bleachers. Adjusting the focus of the glasses with a thumb, he let out a sharp gasp of surprise as several distinct shapes coalesced into view. “I fear I may have been premature in my original judgment, Speed,” he confessed. “I now detect a number of…creatures…beings…entities…occupying the seats indicated. They appear to be observing the game studiously while munching peanuts without first removing the shells.”

“That sounds like the little buggers, all right,” said Speed, through gritted teeth as Nicholson took a called first strike on a sharply breaking curveball from the wily left hand of Cardinal hurler Harry “the Cat” Breechan. “Can you describe them in more detail, Prof? What exactly do they look like? Peppermint striped kangaroos or Margaret Truman in a garter belt and black hose or maybe—”

“Angels,” said Professor Ito. “I see creatures resembling heavenly angels as depicted in the visionary verse of Milton and the mystical etchings of William Blake. I see—”

The remainder of his words were drowned under a thunderous roar as the packed Wrigley Field crowd surged to its collective feet. Nicholson, his thirty-four-ounce Louisville Slugger wielded like a medieval knight’s battle axe, connected with a high fastball the canny Breechan had tried to sneak past him. The pale horsehide sphere rose like an eagle in flight, soaring on a majestic parabolic arc toward the ivy-encrusted brick wall in right field, up up and over the top, landing smack dab in the middle of the allegedly angelic entities as observed by Professor Ito.

For a home run!

A two-run blast!

“Hey-hey!” cried the radio announcer.

Cubs win 5-4!

(Thus claiming the National League pennant for the year 1945.)

Later that evening in the book-lined study of the Hyde Park flat he shared with a pair of high-strung intact Siamese tomcats named Einstein and Bohr, Professor Ito regretfully acknowledged that his usual keen scientific judgment had been somewhat addled by the psychoactive nature of the sacramental peyote plant. “Angels,” he muttered with a sigh. Not perhaps the most apt description of the creatures he had observed in right field. Not heavenly angels, no, not as depicted by Milton and Blake, but rather—

“Rutabagas!” he exclaimed aloud, startling the slumbering tomcats curled at his feet. “Bright neon green and golden striped rutabagas with nine bulging eyes waving at the end of long tendril-like stalks and eleven spindly legs with tiny steel casters at the tips of each foot for purposes of locomotion. Consuming peanuts, yes, shells and all.”

When the bulldog edition of the Daily Graphic hit the Chicago streets early the next morning, accompanying its many stories and sidebars commemorating the Cubs dramatic come-from-behind pennant-clenching victory (“Nicholson’s Atom Bomb Blast Blows Cards to Smithereens!” crowed the headline above Speed Garrity’s game account), a comparatively modest lead below the fold announced:

NEW PREZ ISSUES CALL FOR WORLD PEACE

The newly inaugurated thirty-fifth President of the United States was one Wilbur Mordecai LeRoux. A fifty-seven-year-old native of New Orleans and lifelong sufferer from acute psychosomatic agoraphobia, President LeRoux had been identified by a Joint Select Committee composed of members of Congress who had fortuitously been absent from Washington when the city vanished as the senior surviving executive branch official still living under his original name and identity and thus under the provisions of the Presidential Succession Act of 1886 next in line to assume the mantle of the American Presidency.

Originally appointed in February 1913 by lame duck President William Howard Taft to the position of Deputy Assistant Under Postmaster General for the Evaluation and Disposition of Salacious and/or Subversive Materials Found Loose In the U.S. Mails (or, less formally, Chief Postal Censor), Wilbur Mordecai LeRoux due to his psychosomatic affliction had been unable to take physical possession of his offices at postal departmental headquarters in Washington. As a result of his absence from the capital city, succeeding administrations regardless of party affiliation had neglected to appoint any successor and Mordecai Wilbur LeRoux continued to quietly perform his official duties from his family home in New Orleans’s historic French Quarter.

“Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!” exclaimed a startled Vice Chairman Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi after the select committee had been ushered into President-Designate LeRoux’s study, where he sat at his desk diligently perusing a Swedish sunbathing publication forwarded by a concerned postmaster in perpetually cloudy Sequim, Washington. “The President of the United States is a coal black coon!”

“Gens de Couleur is the historically preferred term, you ignorant backwoods peckerwood,” corrected the bilingual Wilbur Mordecai LeRoux, in impeccable unaccented French.

Later, after a choleric Senator Bilbo had been removed from the room by a pair of brawny household manservants, Committee Chairperson Helen Gahagan Douglas of California, best known for her titular starring turn in the 1935 film of Rider Haggard’s novel She, administered the oath of office to the new president.

In a brief inaugural address delivered from his favorite easy chair with the Swedish sunbathing publication spread open in his lap, President Leroux issued an immediate call for all world leaders to join him at his home one week from today for what he termed a “combination peace conference, indoor barbecue, and unabashed celebration of life, music, and Cajun red beans and rice” featuring the syncopated rhythms of Creole musicians Sidney Bechet and Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton. “Come one, come all,” the nation’s new chief executive declaimed in words that would soon be inscribed in schoolbook history texts, “and we shall gather together at the side of the great muddy river to let down our back hairs, boogie-woogie the night away, and bring peace and good cheer to all of humankind everywhere.”

Because of strict wartime travel restrictions still in effect, the opening three games of the best-of-seven 1945 World Series were played on the home turf Briggs Stadium of the American League champion Detroit Tigers. Spurred by the momentum of their stunning final day pennant-clinching triumph—the “Shot Heard Round the Loop” in Speed Garrity’s memorable phrase—the underdog Cubs shocked the host team by taking two of the three opening tilts behind the stalwart pitching of Yankee castoff Borowy in game one and cunning veteran Passeau, who spun a neat one-hitter in game three.

Back home in Chicago for the fourth and succeeding contests, Speed Garrity surveyed the standing-room-only Wrigley Field crowd from his accustomed press box perch, noting that the bleacher seats in right field were today occupied not by an odd assortment of purple armadillos wearing khaki short pants or bare breasted Mrs. Warren G. Hardings in G-string and stiletto-heeled patent pumps, but rather by a motley crew of undershirt wearing Chicago working stiffs swilling Pabst Blue Ribbon from stubby brown bottles.

“Looks like our outer space visitors may have flown the coop on us,” Speed remarked, handing the binoculars to Professor Ito, who had been granted an official World Series press pass under credentials issued to the publication Physical Review. “What do you think, Prof?”

“I think,” Professor Ito said, peering through the glasses, “they may well have accomplished all they set out to do among us.”

“And what’s that, Prof?” said Speed. “I mean, besides catching a few choice Cub games and ending war forever?”

Here Speed referred to the recent signing of the Treaty of St. Anne Street by the world’s political leaders after many exhaustive hours of tense negotiations accompanied by the melodious strains of hot New Orleans jazz interspersed with heaping platters of spicy Cajun food. Under the provisions of the agreement all the world’s armed forces were to be immediately disbanded and all weapons of war, offensive and defensive, disposed of by sinking beneath the waters of the thirty-five thousand foot Challenger Deep southwest of Guam.

“What do we need any of this ridiculous junk for anyhow?” demanded President LeRoux during a late morning press conference while standing arm and arm between a benign looking Mahatma Gandhi and a glassy-eyed Chiang Kai-shek. “Don’t we all have enough on our platters to keep us busy cleaning up the mess we already made without more stupid bombs, guns, and fighter aeroplanes getting in the way?”

When questioned by a reporter from the national Sporting News as to whom he favored to take the World Series, the president responded enigmatically: “That’s for me to know and for you to find out.”

With the hopes of the Cubs’ faithful riding high after the team’s success in Detroit ,it was the Tigers that promptly rallied behind the stellar pitching of their ace moundsmen Trout and Newhouser to capture games four and five.

Facing elimination in game six, the Cubs fought back to hold the Tigers to a 7-7 tie through nine back-and-forth innings of regulation play. With no viable alternative, Cub Manager Charlie Grimm reluctantly called upon his scheduled seventh game starter Hank Borowy to emerge from the bullpen and hold the battling Tigers at bay through three tense extra frames until the Cubs pushed the winning run across the home dish with a daring suicide squeeze in the bottom of the twelfth.

But with the Cub pitching staff now spent and a rested Hal Newhouser poised to hurl for the Tigers, the odds facing the Cubs in game seven seemed insurmountably bleak.

As the final stirring notes of the newly proclaimed National Anthem—”This Land Is My Land”—as rendered by vocalist Sarah Vaughn accompanied by the Billy Eckstein Orchestra echoed off the ivy bedecked walls of Wrigley Field, the restless crowd remained on its feet, necks craning toward the home team dugout as a lean lanky figure in white strolled onto to the field waving his cap exuberantly.

“Lord Jesus on a rubber crutch,” exclaimed Milo Detweiler, leaning over Speed’s shoulder, “the Cubs pitcher is a coal black nig—”

The remainder of Detweiler’s startled exclamation was buried beneath the stentorian tones of public address announcer Frank “Pat” Pieper: “Today’s starting pitcher for the Chicago Cubs under emergency executive authority of the President of the United States, ladies and gentleman, I give you number eighty-eight, LeRoy ‘Satchel’ Paige.”

When two hours and seventeen minutes later the game ended with the Cubs 9-0 victors—Miracle on Addison Street! bannered the afternoon extra edition Morning Graphic—thick dark clouds suddenly appeared in what had previously been a clear blue sky and sheets of rain poured down on the field in apocalyptic proportions.

“You know what it kind of reminded me of?” remarked Goldie Malloy during a small celebratory gathering at Professor’s Ito’s Hyde Park flat including the blind bass player and Negro tenor saxophonist from Club Kokomo Jake’s. “It was like that scene in the old silent picture Ben-Hur my Granny Ida took me to see when I was a little girl in pigtails. Right after Jesus’s crucifixion when God raised up that terrible storm to let those nasty Romans know how awful they’d really screwed things up. You think maybe those outer space people saw that movie too?”

“Anything’s possible, my dear,” said a beatifically smiling Professor Ito, accepting the smoking muggle from Speed’s limpid grasp and taking a long deep toke—his first taste of the weed now that the drug had been legalized worldwide under an obscure provision of the Treaty of St. Anne Street. “We may well have witnessed more than one miracle today at the old ball yard.”

In the meantime outside in the dark nighttime sky, nine (or perhaps eleven) tiny gleaming beacons of light could be glimpsed ascending through the starry firmament and vanishing forever from view, leaving the blue-green world behind a far better place than before.

Or so the true history books say.

BEYOND THE DOORS
OF DEATH
by Robert Silverberg & Damien Broderick

The grand master returns with an update to a beloved classic.

Galaxys Edge Magazine

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Galaxy's Edge Magazine

Galaxy's Edge Magazine

Galaxy's Edge Magazine

Galaxy's Edge Magazine

You know where your child is

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

BOOK THREE

NINETEEN

TWENTY