Analog SFF, July-August 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Nothing in sight, but the snow and wind made the seeing bad. He swung his flashlight's beam both directions. Not much chance a car would be far off the road. All he saw, snowdrifts and shadow.

  He walked back south thirty paces; at least it put his back to the wind. There he climbed again and searched both ways. Still nothing. He noticed, though, his bucketer's flashers came only faintly from that distance so, retracing his steps, he paused at fifteen paces for another try.

  His light caught an odd glint in, well, looked like just another snowdrift. He waded closer. Yup. A car's rear wheel at an odd angle bumped his knee. He brushed snow off, found a fender and a back window. Now he knew how it lay, front end angled down in a snow-filled drainage ditch. Feeling along, he found the door handle's cavity. It resisted his heave. Locked? No, but compacted snow had to be cleared away. Still it wouldn't come until he realized it opened gull's-wing style instead of sidewise. Then it came easy and, balanced by springs, knocked his cap off on the way up.

  Dark inside, he used his flashlight. She was huddled on the downward side, shaking with cold. Not dressed for the weather: lightweight jacket and some sort of tight-fitting leggings. She uttered a cry, whether of surprise or fear he didn't know. She seemed to cringe.

  “Don't be afraid,” he said. He remembered an old joke. “I'm from the guvvmunt and I've come to help.”

  “Oh, please!” she managed through chattering teeth. “Please!”

  The car lay steeply canted. A roadskimmer, the gull's-wing door had told him. No business on this road or in this weather. Getting her out was a job; she was shaking too bad and frantic besides. Leaning far in and yelling instructions that she had trouble obeying, he got her positioned at last so he could lift. Surprising how lightly she came.

  Staggering, stumbling, he carried her bridegroom style up over the ridge, legs going into the snow sometimes up to the hip. Twice he almost dumped her into a drift with himself on top. Managed not to, though. Teeth rattling, she didn't talk much sense, not that he listened much.

  Somehow he heaved her into the bucketer's cab, turned the heat up all the way, and started the coffee maker. She could have coffee, hot chocolate, or chicken broth; the tea option wasn't loaded but would give plain hot water if she preferred. Then he went back out to see what he could do about getting her skimmer back on the road.

  The snowplowed ridge and deep snow beyond made a problem. He'd repositioned the bucketer and was setting out another string of warning flares when a northbound snowplow came along. It stopped. “Need help?” its pilot called.

  He had the plow cut a ten-meter breach in the ridge, then let it go. Burrowing and working by feel, he fixed the winch cable to the skimmer's frame and returned to the bucketer.

  By then she was better. She'd spilled hot chocolate on the seat and tried to apologize. Among all the other stains, he told her, who'd notice? Was she up to helping get her car out?

  Still trembling some, she wasn't sure. In the dim light of the bucketer's cab her face was a pattern of highlight and shadow. She'd opened her jacket, the better to absorb the cab's warmth; the blouse underneath was some sort of glossy fabric with a laced-up opening six or eight centimeters wide slanting up to her left shoulder. It didn't actually show anything, but hinted that she might have something worth being displayed.

  Least of his worries. Other people up the road still waiting for help. He poured her another cup of chocolate and asked again if she was ready to help get her car out. Real soon, she said, but didn't sound eager.

  He went back down to her car and slotted a fresh charge. Fumbled with the keypad until heat started to come. Went back to the bucketer; “Now?” he asked.

  “I guess,” she said, finished her chocolate, and put the cup in its holder. Slowly fastening her jacket's clasps, she said, “You're from the university?”

  “Going there,” he admitted. “Dig people out just sort of a hobby. How...?”

  She pointed to the parking sticker in the corner of the bucketer's windshield. “You saved my life,” she said.

  Not true, he thought. Shivering hard as she was, she'd been way short of hypothermia. He told her that, and also that somebody would've come. But he'd been the one who did, she said. He'd been asked to, he explained, and to cover the moment's awkwardness, he took her phone and gave it a new battery. Good idea to always have a spare handy, he told her. If she needed anything, just whistle. She thought he meant it personal; asked his number. Rather than explain—he'd meant the universal emergency code—he gave it, and she made the entry.

  “Now,” he said, decisive this time. One look at her feet—impractical feminine shoes—he knew she couldn't walk it, so he carried her back down the same way he'd carried her up. “Don't try to run power,” he instructed. “Just steer to keep going straight back. Can do?”

  She thought she could, but with the door open all the heat was getting out. He backed off to let her close it and tramped back up to the bucketer for the fourth or fifth time, thinking as he struggled through the drifts that it was two or three times too many.

  Thanks to the gap the snowplow had cut, winching her car back up to pavement gave no serious trouble. As it came, it yawed this way and that, but she made corrections just fine. Disconnecting the cable was more trouble—skimmers had almost no clearance—and he had to take off a glove before his fingers found the release. Blowing on his fingers to warm them, then, he walked all the way around looking for damage. The downside front fender had a bad crack, but that was all. He had her test lights, power, and steering—no problems—and told her the road to Lincoln should be all right, just guide by the snowplow's ridge. If she came up behind a plow, stay behind. Don't try to pass. She promised not. He watched her taillights vanish in the gloom, then climbed back into the bucketer to phone his dispatcher for the next person in trouble.

  Some time after a bright winter sunrise—calm, cloudless air—his dispatcher told him no more cars reported off his piece of road. He did one last southbound patrol, saw nothing, and wearily found a slot in his university dorm's parking tower. The cafeteria gave him a double order of sausage and scrambled eggs. Coffee? No thanks. He went up to his room and crawled into bed. When he finally woke, the Sun had already gone down.

  That should have been the end of it but, given a phone number, anyone with even rudimentary database skills can track down anybody. Next evening she showed up at the door to his room. Before he could utter a word beyond admitting it was him, she'd put a long, rectangular something in his hands. “Uh?” he managed.

  “And listen,” she said. “My house has a social Friday night. You're my guest. All right?”

  “Well...” he said.

  “It's seven thirty, so I'll be here seven fifteen.”

  Quickly, then, she was gone.

  The rectangular something was a box wrapped in gold gift paper with a big red and green bow. Christmas leftover, he supposed. Unwrapping, he found a bottle of wine. Dumbly, unfamiliar with wine, he put it on his desk. Later, one of his roommates came in. He noticed. “Where'd that come from?” he asked.

  “Girl I pulled out of a snowdrift,” Don said.

  His roommate looked closer. “Hey, that cork's real cork.”

  “So?” Don wondered.

  Roommate picked it up, inspected the label. Paper, glued on the glass. To Don it looked primitive, probably cheap. “Jesus,” said roommate, and carefully set the bottle down.

  Friday night, chipper and modestly dressed, she was at his door. He went with mixed feelings; a sorority social was something outside his normal range; he was sure he'd fit like an ape in evening dress. One of his roommates had loaned a dinner jacket, which all of them advised he should wear. It fitted decently. Otherwise he'd just have to wing it.

  The girls, though, were nice. They talked friendly, asked a few questions about where he was from and what he was studying, and let him be himself. They wore name badges—first names only, and many of those in shortened form. One, whose badge said Mimi, told
him that, to hear Jeni talk, they'd expected a guy at least two meters tall and something more than half that wide at the shoulders. Uncomfortably conscious of his unspectacular hundred eighty centimeters, he explained that his outdoors jacket—maybe she'd noticed when he came in—made him look bigger and, by way of banter, suggested maybe he should go home and not come back until he'd grown some more. She laughed and said it was interesting to have a guy here who actually did things. Meaning what, he wondered, but carefully didn't inquire.

  The other guys there were from fraternities, the future accountants, lawyers, and business executives of the world. Pops had his own opinion about such; that they were the people who made things so complicated that only members of their profession could wiggle their way through the maze. A contrivance for taking money from the people who did real work. Don wasn't so sure, but wasn't sure, either, that it didn't contain an element of truth.

  They had name badges, too. Theirs showed full names and, all but his, their fraternity affiliations. In place of two or three Greek letters, some of which Don hadn't learned, Don's said HERO; Jeni's idea, of course. She'd meant it nicely, but...

  As a consequence he spent significant time explaining that this girl—yeah, this one right here—was making a big thing out of nothing. A hero was somebody who did something dangerous to accomplish something that shook the world. That wasn't him. All he'd done was snag her car out of a ditch.

  A few of the guys quibbled. Didn't smaller things matter? Didn't going out in that weather when nothing forced you count for something? Shucks, said one guy who'd been coming from Chicago that night. He'd caught the advisories and went to ground in Des Moines until stuff got cleared up; whole lot of nothing from Des Moines to Omaha, the map said, and coming through two days later he'd seen freight strings, cars, and all sorts of other machinery messed every which way and still digging out.

  Don explained it had been just a piece of work that needed doing and, because of being where he was, equipped like he was, he'd been tapped. Social contract.

  Hadn't really had to, one of the guys objected. Then it was Don's turn to quibble.

  As only a pledge, she wouldn't move into the sorority house until next fall. When the guys began to leave—Don had noticed no signal, but perhaps in this rarefied realm none was necessary—he walked her back to her dorm. It was a typical winter night, moonless and the sort of cold that bit sharp. Against the cold, all she had was the same lightweight jacket he'd seen before; he settled his own work scarred jacket on her shoulders; girls didn't feel cold like guys did, she objected, and really, her jacket was warmer than it looked. Besides, her dorm wasn't all that far.

  He insisted; this dinner jacket he'd borrowed was a bit on the warm side, he said. She made a show of reluctance, but he reminded her how cold she'd been that other night. She let his jacket stay.

  Another awkward moment, in the lobby of her dorm he wasn't sure how to handle the end of their evening; he mumbled a thank you for inviting him, she shrugged out of his jacket and handed it to him, smiled, patted his arm, and without a word walked off toward the elevators without looking back. Well, it solved that problem.

  That could have been the end of it, too, but middle of the next week she was on the phone. She had tickets to a concert tomorrow night—the Anchorage Symphony on tour—and suddenly no one to go with her. Not fun to go alone. Could he? Please?

  Symphony? He didn't know much about classical music, and that string quartet he'd been inveigled into attending last year had been a monumental waste of time. What was the program?

  She sounded puzzled, as if what the music would be didn't matter. A Dvorak overture, she said, and a Beethoven concerto—Yamaguchi the soloist—and then a symphony by somebody named Creston. Twentieth century, she thought.

  Twentieth century. He'd heard bad things about the weird stuff most composers wrote then. “Well...” he said, indecisive only because he didn't really want to turn her down. She said Please again and he weakened.

  The Dvorak was nothing much and the Beethoven went on too long. The Creston, though, was boisterous, flamboyant and, above all, loud. It blasted cobwebs from the hall and nearly took the roof off. Walking back to her dorm she was euphoric; who said serious music was stodgy? Still numb from sensory overload, he had to agree.

  Same sort of evening's end awkwardness as before. She had a more substantial jacket this time, the scent of newness strong about it; he wondered if it was because of something he'd said or done, but carefully didn't ask. She thanked him for coming with her; he thanked her for inviting him. With a smile and a pat on the elbow she headed for the elevators.

  It could have ended there, also, but he felt a need to reciprocate. The Information Company, where he'd taken a part-time job for pocket money, was sponsoring an eclectic tenor's concert. Not a sellout, so he was able to deal for a pair of tickets at reduced price. Would she like? Sure. Why not?

  She wore her new jacket. The tenor sang everything from Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and The Green Eyed Dragon With the Thirteen Tails to Shenandoah, Greensleeves, and such other chestnuts as Leaving on a Jet Plane and Send in the Clowns, which, with style, he made new. Joined by an undergraduate from the music school, he did the duet from The Pearl Fishers and Perhaps Love. In the lobby of her dorm, this time, she gave him a quick, happy hug before going off toward the elevators. It left him wondering what he should do about her.

  After that there were other concerts, student productions of The Tempest, an Arthur Miller play that was neither Death of a Salesman nor The Crucible, a ballet, and Boris Gudenov. A touring troupe of dance/percussionists came to Omaha; she said, “Oh, let's,” and they went in her skimmer. She discovered he worked three afternoons a week and sometimes a Saturday at the Information Company and contrived to stop by at times when he could take a break. They'd go to one or another of the ‘spresso joints the next street over; she had a yin/yang spinning coin that they used to decide who paid. It became a game; how it worked out that she paid twice as often as he, regardless whether he did the spinning and she called or the other way around, he never found out. All he was sure, it was her coin. Her sorority had socials every two or three weeks; he was always her guest. His name badge still said HERO, but by then it was old news.

  She got him involved in some of the campus organizations dedicated to correcting wrong things about the world. She was in all of them. It meant sitting through long, dull meetings full of talk that seemed never to accomplish a whole lot. It was a matter of changing minds, she explained, both at grass roots level—whatever that was—and in the Offices of Power. If you changed enough minds at the bottom, she explained, you'd change them at the top. Privately he had doubts, but it was time spent with her. That made it worthwhile.

  Over the summer, while he tended cattle and she shopped, played, read books, and talked with people Out East, she was on his webline almost every three or four days, never saying a whole lot but projecting an excited delight in everything she did and saw. Also that she could hardly wait for fall and back to school. Pops and Mom remarked on all these messages but knew better than to ask deep questions.

  At the football games that fall, her seat in the stadium was not far from his; whether by chance or by some trick of hers he didn't ask. With a bit of persuasion and charm, she improved their proximity until she was next to him. The team was good that year, winning more than it lost; to Don it hardly mattered. Warm and happy, she was beside him, sharing the excitement of each victory, the letdown of the occasional loss.

  * * * *

  “When was that?” Scarborough asked.

  Real time and memory work at different speeds. For a moment, Don wasn't sure where he was, then realized only a second or two had passed since he'd said that once he'd thought very hard about marriage. “Lincoln,” he managed, and took a breath. “The university. Before I knew where I'd go or what I'd do.” Scarborough made busy putting entries in his unit. “Not the best time,” he said, sounding as if he agreed with what D
on had tried to imply. “But then, it never is.”

  Still remembering, Don had to nod.

  * * * *

  Some time early in things, coming out from a performance of Cyrano de Bergerac, she said, “He was an idiot. He should have said something.”

  Don's own understanding of such matters wasn't strong, though with reflection he might have known Cyrano's state of mind more clearly than she. What he said was, “Wouldn't have had a story, then.”

  “Oh, I suppose,” she said, exasperated. “That doesn't mean he wasn't stupid.” Then, non sequitur—or was it?—she announced, “I'm not going to think about marriage for a long time.”

  “Uh...?” he uttered, his usual response when she went off on a tangent.

  “I'm like one of the girls in my house,” she said. “She says it's like never before she'll sign up to wash a man's shirts for the rest of her life.”

  Don heard it with a doubtful ear. Though his understanding of the female mind was thin, he'd noticed enough among his classmates, both in high school and now, to recognize the echo of sour grapes. “She'll change,” he said. “She'll meet some guy who flips her switches and she'll turn around like ... well, an electron in an alternating current.”

  “You think it's that easy?” she asked. “Then she's got to figure how to flip his switches.”

  Something in her vehemence triggered an insight. “You've had that happen,” he said.

  “Last year. High school,” she said, still an edge in her voice. “What he wanted, I didn't. And the other way around. We call it the Cure.”

  He'd seen a lot of that happen, too. Neither did he understand what girls really wanted, but he knew her world wasn't his. “Not sure I wanted to know that,” he said with a terrible feeling of emptiness. Between the spoken words she'd told him that, though she was palling with him, he shouldn't get too serious.