The Radio Magician and Other Stories (12 page)

Dad said, “Somebody should clean this pool. Maybe if there was a skimmer.” He looked around.

“We’ll fix it after we get to the hospital.” She pulled on his arm to help him to his feet, but he was so much heavier than she that she wasn’t able to budge him. Dad grunted, then stood unsteadily.

“I used to read stories about alien contact,” Dad said to the air as he followed Jenny to the gate. She checked the alley before letting him out. Light was fading rapidly, and a cold breeze stirred papers on the ground. “They were always something like us. I mean, we could communicate with them. We wanted the same things in the stories, and these aliens were like that at first. ‘Dawn of a new era in interstellar contact,’ the president said.” Dad slowed to cough, each explosion wrenching his face into pain. When he finally stopped, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “I need to take a nap.”

Jenny looked at the darkening sky. “We can’t, Dad. Not now. You just took one. Tell me more about the aliens. Keep talking.” She wasn’t really listening. As long as he talked, he would keep walking. Nothing he said would be as scary as him giving up.

They were at the top of a house-covered hill. At the bottom of the street, several blocks below them, the highway overpass shadowed the road. A hunk of the bridge’s middle was gone and a semi-trailer truck hung partly on the overpass, its cab dangling above the broken section. Beyond that, the red stonework of the campus was just visible through the smoke, but the hospital was on the far side, out of sight.

Dad said, “Different planets, different worlds, and states’ rights. It’s a stupid war. Our negotiating team laughed at the demand. Dogs aren’t people. We laughed; they attacked. No counteroffers.”

The path was downhill now, although she didn’t dare let them take the sidewalk. They stayed close to the houses, crossing lawns, stepping over privet hedges or knee-high fences some people put on their yards to know where to stop mowing. There was still a lot of broken glass, although little sign of burning now. As they passed a white two-story with blue trim, she noticed a sign by the door, “God Bless This Home.” She thought a curtain flicked behind one of the windows, but she couldn’t be sure.

She watched Robbie. He ran ahead of them, poking his nose into bushes, then running back as if he had important news. Robbie always heard the aliens before she did. If he stopped with his ears up, they needed to hide.

“Lots of people don’t own dogs, you know,” Dad said. “They just don’t like to be told by extra-solar beings that they
can’t
own a dog. They didn’t understand the relationship, or they understood, but they didn’t like it. Called it, ‘repressed, emerging sapiency.’” He hummed an off-pitched tune to himself for a few steps. “Good thing horses weren’t ‘emerging’ or, God forbid, pigs. We’d really been in trouble then,” he added, then went back to humming.

Jenny could feel the fever in his hand. In the morning, when she’d decided they couldn’t hide in their basement any longer, the skin under the bandage had an angry yellow and purple look to it, and the cut, which hadn’t seemed that bad when he first got it, had deepened and widened. She’d bathed it the best she could before wrapping his chest clumsily. She was afraid of what she’d find if she looked at it now.

On the other side of the overpass, a light shone in several windows of the nearest university buildings. It was really getting dark now and cold. The going was tough. They traced a zig-zag pattern from the house, out to the sidewalk to get past taller walls or impenetrable bushes, Jenny jumping at every sound or shadow, then back to the hiding places of the homes. Dad’s fingers rested limply in her own, and each step seemed a prelude to a fall. He mumbled to himself, his eyes closed. “Even the trees spoke.”

“Dad?”

He took several steps before saying, “What?”

“What’s that about talking trees?”

“
Wizard of Oz
. How’d you like it if someone picked
your
apples? Everything’s in how you look at it. I’ll get you, my pretty. You and your little dog.” He stumbled, caught himself, then straightened his shoulders. “It’s
Old Yeller
and
Where the Red Fern Grows
. Alien horror documentaries.”

He squeezed Jenny’s fingers, then fell backwards. Jenny dropped to her knees, shook him, called to him, but he didn’t stir. Robbie looked on quizzically.

She tried to pull him toward the house, a pleasant looking two-story Victorian, but it was useless. He weighed too much.

In the house, at the bottom of a ransacked closet, she found a tablecloth—all the blankets were gone—and took it outside. He hadn’t moved.

“Dad,” she said. “Dad? I’m going to get help. The hospital’s just a few more blocks. I won’t be gone long.” She smoothed the tablecloth over him. Above, the clouds roiled in a luminescent gray, nearly touching the rooftops. There was no traffic on the street. No voices. Only Dad’s wheezing breaths.

“You stay here, Robbie. Stay with Dad.” Robbie lifted an ear, then dropped it. “Do you understand? Stay. Be a good dog.” She kissed Dad’s forehead before running down the street. Robbie followed.

“Go back! Stay with Dad! You’ll be safer.” She shooed him away. He sat instead.

They were nearly to the underpass. “Go back,” she pleaded.

Without waiting to see what he’d do, she turned toward the campus. Even when she heard his claws clicking against the cement, she didn’t look behind.

The dangling truck cab creaked when she ran under it. Broken asphalt and bent lengths of rusty rebar sticking from cement slabs made walking treacherous. A sharp cordite smell lingered. Only a block separated her from the university, but after she negotiated the last obstacle beneath the overpass, she slowed to a walk. Across the road that entered the campus grounds, the same road the hospital was on, stretched a tall fence. Footlights every ten feet along the ground illuminated the shiny chain link structure, and in the exact middle of the road was a small gate, not nearly big enough for a car, a people gate. Two dark figures sat on the other side. As she approached, they stood. One of them shined a flashlight, blinding her.

“It’s a little girl,” a voice said.

“What do you think she’s doing out there?” the other voice asked. “I thought everyone had been detained.”

“My dad’s hurt,” Jenny called. “I need to get him to the hospital, but he’s too weak to come. I need help.” She tried to see them, but the light was too bright.

“Oh, Jesus!” yipped one of the guards. “Don’t come closer, little girl. You stand right there.”

They took the light off her, and after a few seconds of blinking, she could see one of them talking on a portable phone. Robbie leaned against her leg. She reached down to scratch him behind the ears. “It’ll be all right. They’ll get a doctor,” she said.

A couple of minutes later, while Jenny stood silently and the guards stared at her, a figure on a bicycle pedaled up the road from the campus. It stopped by the guards, leaning the bike against the fence.

“Let me out,” she said. When the woman got close, Jenny saw that her blonde hair was tied into a ponytail, and that she wore a medical smock.

“Are you a doctor?” Jenny asked. “My dad needs a doctor right away. He’s only a couple of blocks on the other side of the bridge.”

The woman stopped, six feet away. Her voice sounded strained, as if she were trying not to scream. “We can help you, but you need to come inside right now. You can’t be outside the fence without permission.”

Jenny nodded and took a step forward.

“No, no!” gasped the woman. “The dog has to stay here. You can’t bring him inside.”

Confused, Jenny stopped. “This is just Robbie. He won’t bite or anything.”

The woman sidled toward Jenny, keeping away from Robbie. “You don’t understand. We can get your dad help, but the dog has to stay outside. We have to get behind the fence now, without the dog, or it might be too late.”

She put her hand on Jenny’s arm. “The dog will be fine, but we won’t be if we stay out here. Obstructionists disappear. They’ve let us keep the hospital open, but we have to do it by their rules.”

In the distance, Jenny heard a humming.

“Oh, God,” the woman whispered. “Quick, girl. We’ve got to go now.”

Jenny let herself be led to the fence without thinking. The humming grew louder. One of the aliens’ walking vehicles was coming.

Suddenly she pulled free. “I can’t leave Robbie out here!” But the men at the gate grabbed her, hustled her to the other side of the fence and closed it. One of them picked her up so that she faced backwards, looking at Robbie as they ran from the humming sound.

The last she saw of Robbie, he was still sitting on the street, his head tilted to one side and then to the other as if waiting for her to call him.

“Run away, Robbie! Run away and hide!” But the dog didn’t move. The man carried her into a building, closing the door behind them.

Inside, the woman in the medical smock gathered supplies. “We’ll get your dad when the machine’s gone,” she said. “They’re automatic. Doesn’t matter who you are if you’re on the wrong side of the fence. You’ll have to take us to him.”

“Robbie will run away. He’s a smart dog,” Jenny said. “They wouldn’t hurt a dog, would they?”

The woman paused, her hand partway into her medical bag. “No, darling. They don’t hurt dogs. They take them to a better place, far away from us.” She looked down, hiding her eyes, and continued stuffing equipment into the bag. “They took my dog. He was a big, friendly Labrador, and I guess I was a monster, because they took him away too.”

Thirty minutes later, Jenny led a line of people out of the building. They carried a stretcher, and they all had flashlights. The spot where Robbie had stood was empty. He wasn’t under the overpass.

Dad had rolled on his side under the tablecloth, and he was shivering. Jenny put her hand on his back as the woman inserted an I.V.. She felt his shaking, but he was still alive, and she’d found help. As soon as they arrived, she felt the responsibility lifting from her shoulders. Doctors would help. Doctors could cure anything. She picked up the photo album from the dew-slick grass.

As they marched back to the campus, Dad in the stretcher, Jenny shined her light into every shadow, and when they passed houses, she checked behind bushes, expecting at each new spot to see him, snout on his paws, tail wagging, waiting for her to pet his head. She called and called until one of the men asked her, not unkindly, to stop.

He wasn’t on one of the lawns, nor was he hiding beside a cement block beneath the broken overpass. He wasn’t waiting by the fence.

Jenny stopped at the gate as the line of people went on toward the hospital. She could hear their feet on the cement until they faded away. Fingers hooked in the chain-link, Jenny listened as hard as she could for a long time. Robbie would bark if he couldn’t find her. He always barked when he was lonely. Jenny listened, but he never barked. There were no noises at all. Not a single sound in the entire city.

No dog anywhere sending a joyful yelp into the night.

The cold metal of the fence burned against her hand while the smoke-filled breeze pushed against her face, irritating her eyes. Light only reached to the bridge, and the world beyond was all shadows, empty and lifeless.

I’m not a monster, Jenny thought, I don’t care what anyone says. She remembered the photo of them on the pier, the dog sitting before her. Suddenly the memory was very clear: the sun warming her shoulders, the water slapping at the wood beneath her feet, a hint of fish and wet sand in the air.

I’m not, she thought, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not a monster.

Robbie loves me.

THE SMALL ASTRAL OBJECT GENIUS

D
ustin set the Peek-a-boo on his desk next to the computer. The softball-sized metal sphere rolled an inch before clicking against the keyboard, the only sound in the silent house. The house was almost always quiet now, noiseless as an empty kitchen with its cabinets neatly shut, the plates and dishes gradually collecting dust. Where to send it? Maybe this time something incredible would happen, if he just kept trying.

His computer listed options, starting with large objects or small ones. After he’d first bought the Peek-a-boo, he spent weeks sending it to the large ones: galaxies, nebulas, the gaseous remains of supernovas, star clusters. He’d double check the batteries, make sure the lens was clean, then choose one of the preprogrammed destinations. Sometimes he’d balance the device on his palm, hoping to feel the microsecond that it vanished in its dash across the light years before returning to his hand, but he never did. Not even a tingle. It sat against his skin, cool and hard and heavy, its absence too brief to sense.

An instant later, his computer pinged and the “picture taken” icon blinked red and green. Immediately would follow a confirmation from the Peek-a-boo Project website. “Thank you for participating,” the message would say, or, if he was really lucky, “New object! You have contributed to man’s knowledge of the universe,” and his face would tingle with joy.

He’d heard rumors among his friends that there were other messages, but he’d never seen them himself.

Lots of times, of course, the monitor showed nothing, just a black screen with maybe a wink of a star here or there, but every once in a while, the Peek-a-boo appeared in the distant space oriented perfectly and captured a spectacular image. He used to like nebulas best. Several DVDs full of pictures rested on the shelf above the computer. He’d devoted an entire disk to the Rosette Nebula, taking pictures from all the angles over the course of two weeks, its vermillion gasses thrown out in parsecs wide petals, but lately he’d turned his attention to small objects: individual stars, planets, and moons.

On the monitor, the computer gave him hundreds of preprogrammed selections. He carefully entered instead the coordinates for a planet circling Bellatrix, a giant star about 240 light years away on Orion’s right shoulder, then sent the Peek-a-boo. “Picture taken,” winked the message. The image began forming on the screen. Dustin leaned back in his chair, his hands resting one on the other on his chest.

Behind him, the door to his bedroom opened. He knew by the click of the doorknob, the distance the door swung into the room, a hint of lavender in the air, that it was his mother. She stood behind him without speaking for a moment, then sighed.

“Yes?” Dustin said.

She sighed again.

He turned his chair. Her hand cupped the doorknob with fingers so delicate that he wondered how she could pick up anything heavier than a pen or a book.

“Are you coming to dinner?” Her lips were colorless and thin, like her voice, but dark circles marked her eyes. He couldn’t remember when Mom looked like she’d had a good night’s sleep.

“Now?”

She blinked, as if his question was cruel.

“Unless you want to eat later. Your father is eating later.”

“I’m not hungry.” Almost half the image had appeared on the screen. Already he could see the planet’s curve. This could be a good one, he thought. He forced his eyes away from the picture. If he phrased the question just right, he could make a difference. “I don’t think I’ll have anything. Could we wait?”

She shook her head, and then slowly backed away, pulling the door with her. “I’ll put a plate in the refrigerator for you in case,” she said as the door closed.

Dustin shivered for a second in the room’s silence. She was like a ghost in her own house, drifting from room to room. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d touched him. Maybe she wasn’t even capable of it anymore. If he tried to hug her, would his arms pass through?

The planet on the monitor finished forming, a violet sphere with darker bands, like Jupiter, the arc of the terminator hiding a third of the surface. “Thank you for participating” popped over the image. He shook his head as he cleared the message. He hadn’t “contributed to man’s knowledge of the universe.” Other people had taken this picture and added it to the database. No rings on the planet that he could see. No moons. Still, how rare, he thought. Perfect trade material. The smaller the object, the less chance his friends would have it. Space wasn’t just mostly empty; it was depressingly, hugely empty. If all space was the size of his bedroom, the total mass of every galaxy and star and planet wouldn’t fill a thimble. Getting a picture of an object as small as a planet 240 light years away boggled the mind. He tweaked the coordinates and sent the Peek-a-boo again for a closer look, but the image came back black. The unit might have appeared closer to the planet but with its lens pointed the wrong way, or a number in the coordinates so far down the decimal line that he couldn’t imagine it ticked up or down one time too many, and the Peak-a-boo wasn’t in the planet’s range.

He sent it again. Black screen.

Again. Black screen.

Again.

His door opened. Dad said, “Dustin, I’m eating dinner in forty minutes. The dining room should be free then.”

“I’m not hungry, Dad. I’m working on something.”

Dustin could almost hear his Dad grimace. “You didn’t eat already, did you?” He stepped next to Dustin’s chair. Dustin looked at Dad’s feet, which were bare. The toenails were trimmed neatly, although they’d grown longer than he was used to seeing. “You didn’t eat with her, did you?” Dad said.

“No, really, I’m working on my computer . . .” Dustin drew in a shaky breath, “. . . but I’ll go down now, if you want.” Dustin tapped in an adjustment before sending the Peek-a-boo again.

Dad leaned in toward the screen, his hand on the chair’s back behind Dustin’s shoulder. “It’s a hoax, you know. That toy doesn’t go anywhere. It generates random images. Everyone knows you can’t travel faster than light, and certainly not with a half pound of plastic and a couple AA batteries.”

The computer indicated that the coordinates were ready. Dustin pressed the send command. “It’s aluminum, not plastic, and it’s not a hoax. Didn’t you read that stuff I gave you about Peek-a-boo theory? Interstellar distance is a mathematical conception or something like that. Wrinkly space, they call it. Just a little push the right way, and the Peek-a-boo bounces across the wrinkle and back.”

“It’s Crackerjack physics, son. Nobody believes it.”

“Scientists do. Every time I take a photograph, it downloads into NASA’s database. We’re expanding the knowledge of the universe! People all over the world are part of it! Amateurs have always been a big part of astronomy.”

Dad humphed. “You know what the scam is? Sporadic reinforcement. Every once in a while you get a pat on the back, and you keep trying. It’s why fishermen fish. You wouldn’t believe how many Pokemon packs I bought when I was a kid, just hoping for a first edition holographic rare. Hundreds of dollars lost, I’ll bet.”

“The pictures are real, Dad,” he said as a new image formed on the screen. At the very bottom a hint of violet curve filled in. “See, it’s the same planet. I’ve been peppering these coordinates for a couple days.” The image looked so authentic. Dustin thought, no way this is fake. No way!

Dad shrugged his shoulders. “I’m heating a pizza later. Come down if you want any.”

“Not tonight. Sorry.” Dustin punched the send button again. Maybe he could get a full globe shot for trade tomorrow.

Through Dustin’s open shades, the stars above the western horizon flickered behind the maple’s waving branches. Slowly, the nearly full moon slid through the last of the November leaves, then past each branch, lower and lower. Before it touched the top of his neighbor’s house, Mars joined the gradual descent. The planet and the moon appeared close in the sky, but he knew it was an illusion. Even if their edges touched, they were really millions of miles apart. Still, he liked seeing them so close. If only he could send the Peek-a-boo there! What wonders he might see, but wrinkly space didn’t wrinkle at that distance. The closest he could send the Peek-a-boo was about one hundred light years.

One by one, Pisces’s last stars disappeared, and Aries, its twinkling lights wrapped around the war god, followed the creeping parade.

The clock next to the bed flicked to 4:00 a.m. Dustin listened intently. Not a living sound in the house. His parents’ bedroom was directly below his. A year ago, he could hear them talking. No words, but a comforting, conversational rise and fall. Sometimes, even, laughter. Then, six months ago, it had been arguments. Shouting, to weeping, to nothing. Mother slept there still. If her shades were open like his, the moonlight would flood her space, but Dustin hadn’t seen her windows open for months. In the middle of the day, she’d be in bed in the darkened room, or she’d vacuum by the tiny vacuum cleaner’s light, like a dim-eyed Cyclops rolling along the carpet.

Dad slept in his study by the garage.

Dustin pushed his covers aside, crept down to the kitchen, and ate a piece of cold pizza. The milk tasted sour, and the label said it had passed its expiration by six days, so he washed it down with orange juice.

“I’ll trade you a shot from the interior of the Horse Head Nebula looking toward Earth for that planetgraph you have there,” said Slade. He’d dyed his Mohawk blue the week before but hadn’t touched it up since, so it had turned a coppery green. A spread of pictures covered the desk before him, and his CD carrier, filled with thousands of other images he’d either taken himself or traded for sat in the black case next to the prints. “Come on, it’s a good deal. All the UV bands are expressed. You could hang it in a museum.” In the hallway beyond the classroom door, voices rose and fell, the busy traffic of the middle school at lunch.

Dustin handled the print, a really lovely image marked by delicate curtains of pink and vermillion. A series of numbers printed at the bottom told him how many pictures Slade had taken, and how rare the current image was. The higher the number at the bottom combined with the rarity of the image and the prestige of the photographer determined its tradability.
Peek-a-boo Monthly
printed profiles of individuals who captured the most spectacular and rare shots. Both Slade and Dustin had been listed in the “honorable mentions” in past issues, which made all their prints more valuable. He put it down. “Nice picture, but it’s common. Peek-a-boo defaults to the nebulas. My grandmother could get it.”

“Yeah, but not this quality.”

Three other boys had gathered at their table in the empty classroom, their lunches in their laps. Each had a folder with their own pictures and their own CDs filled with images. “I’ll trade for it,” said one. He wore a t-shirt that read, IF I WERE AN ALIEN, I WOULDN’T TALK TO US EITHER.

Slade hardly looked at him. Dustin knew that Slade had already taken every image of interest from the boy already. The only other person in the school with anything that might appeal to Slade was Dustin.

“I’ve never taken a close up of an object smaller than a star. You’re like a small astral object genius. How are you finding them?”

Dustin thought about the hours of punching the send command, the boxes of batteries, the long stretches of useless images that made him wonder if his monitor still worked, the quiet creak of the door behind him that told him either Mom or Dad was checking up. He would hunch closer to the screen and pretend he hadn’t heard. Dad had told him once, when he was much younger, “Accept the things you can’t change and change the things you can.” He couldn’t get them to talk, but he could take pictures of the stars, so he pressed the send button again and again.

“I keep trying,” he said.

“Where’s this one from?” Slade put his finger on the violet planet from last night.

“Bellatrix. I like the named objects. Tonight I thought I’d go for stars in Pisces. Maybe Torcularis Septentrionali.”

“Too small. Too far away.”

Dustin put the planet’s image back into his stack. “I got this one, didn’t I? Persistence pays.”

A dark-haired girl with hair hanging over her eyes opened the door into the classroom, filling it with hallway sound. Another girl stood behind her, her eyes just as hidden. “Oh,” dark-haired said, “I thought this room was empty at lunch.” Dustin turned in his chair so he could see her better, his images in hand. She said, “Ewww, it’s the star geeks. Weren’t you guys doing role-playing games last year?” The two girls laughed as the door shut.

After school Dustin reluctantly put aside the romantically named stars he’d concentrated on for the last months: Dubhe, Alphard, Shedir and others (Their names made him think of an old Sunday school tale about Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. The idea of their names and stars and fiery furnaces had mixed in his head ever since.), and instead turned to G, F and K class stars, all which possibly could support life if they had planets the proper distance away. Numbers and letters labeled them. Sunlight through the window warmed his desktop, and he thought about drawing the curtain, but the heat felt good on his hands and arms.

The Peek-a-boo database contained over two million celestial objects. He picked a G-class star randomly, set the coordinates and punched the send button. The Peek-a-boo rested on its display base by his keyboard, a bit of dust marking its smooth curve. It didn’t twitch, but within seconds a few pinpricks of light showed on the monitor. “Thank you for participating,” said the popup message. He sent the Peek-a-boo again. A completely empty image this time. He rested his chin on his forearm, pressed the send button over and over. Eventually the sun slipped below the horizon, and for a while the maple tree stood as a shadow against the sunset sky. But the tree faded away, and only the early evening stars were visible. Vega and Altair shone brightly high on the window.

He thought about the Earth’s orbit. If an Earth-like planet circled this star (which he hadn’t even seen yet—it was possible the Peek-a-boo was missing it by dozens of light years), then it was like trying to find a dime on a high school track in the dark. He pressed the send again.