Analog Science Fiction and Fact 03/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  Solly and I looked at each other and shrugged. Jeffrey wasn’t that far back. It wasn’t like he was going to get lost or anything, and we all wanted to get the job done and get back as quickly as possible. We forged on.

  “Catching a few z’s?”

  Much to my surprise, I recognized the voice immediately. Squinting up from my spot under the oak tree, I struggled to focus on the figure silhouetted against sunlight.

  “Good to see you, Solly. I can’t believe you came.”

  “We swore on it, man.”

  “Yeah, but that was a long time ago.”

  “Many moons.” He plopped down next to me.

  “I was beginning to think no one else would show.”

  Solly looked at his watch. “Right on time.”

  I should have known. Solly was always punctual, even as a teenage boy. “Guess I was early.”

  “That you were. How the hell have you been, man?”

  “Life’s been good to me. Gorgeous wife, two kids, and a dog. The all-American dream.”

  “Way to go,” Solly said with a smile.

  “How about you?” I asked.

  “Well, I was pretty messed up for a while.”

  “You?”

  “Yeah, well, you know. I took it pretty hard. My parents did too. After I got expelled from camp, they were humiliated. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen to Solomons. They sent me away to a boarding school. I ran away after two years of that crap.”

  “Jeez,” I muttered.

  “Yeah, well. I grew out of it eventually. I went to BU and took over my old man’s business. I’m all respectable now. I did the family thing too—wife, two kids; no dog, though. I’m allergic.”

  I laughed.

  “What?” Solly feigned offense.

  “Sorry,” I giggled. “It’s just... well, it’s not too surprising, you know?”

  Benny Solomon shook his head. He knew.

  Solly couldn’t stop sneezing as we tried to sneak down along the forest line.

  “Jeez, keep it down, would you?” Zeke snapped.

  “I can’t help it,” Solly said. “It’s the honeysuckle.”

  The native plant was plentiful along the forest’s edge.

  Solly’s effort to suppress nature’s curse was defeated by a trumpeting blast of moisture that made his head ricochet.

  Zeke spun around and gave him a dirty look.

  “Look,” I said, “he’s allergic. He can’t stop it. The sooner we get past the honeysuckle, the sooner he’ll be quiet.”

  Zeke grunted and turned back toward Girls Hill, quickening his pace. Solly, trying desperately not to sneeze, followed close behind with me at his side. Jeffrey was falling farther back, just within eyesight in the dimness of the night.

  The shade of the oak felt good in the heat of a Maryland summer’s day.

  “Think Zeke will show?” I asked Solly.

  “What, you didn’t hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Zeke died, man. Motorcycle wreck, back in ’94.”

  My mouth opened, but nothing came out. It’s not like we were all that close; hell, I hadn’t seen him since we were kids, but still, it felt like a part of me had been chopped off.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t hear about it. There was a ton of coverage. Flew his bike off an overpass into oncoming traffic on 495. Real gory accident, the kind of stuff the press just love.”

  “Must not have made it to the Baltimore papers.” Jeffrey, Zeke, and Solly lived in DC back then. I was from Baltimore. “They say anything about Zeke? What he was up to all those years?

  “Nah, not much. Just that he was in and out of jail all the time. It probably was a little harder on him after we got kicked out of camp; no family to lean on.” Zeke was never too shy when it came to talking about how his foster parents treated him.

  “Ah, come on. Nothing bothered Zeke. He never even liked Jeffrey that much.”

  “Guess he had us fooled.”

  We sat quietly, and I was sure Solly was thinking about the same thing as I was: the tough kid who pushed us to the edge of trouble but never let us fall in. I had always admired the fact that nothing rattled him. I guess we all have our breaking points.

  “At least it was quick,” Solly said.

  “Yeah.”

  “And at least he didn’t have to live with the guilt anymore.”

  I looked at the stress lines on my old friend’s face. “That part would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

  Solly nodded.

  “The nightmares don’t come as often, but they still come.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  “We never should have let him get so far behind....”

  Solly had given up the futile effort of trying to suppress his inevitable reaction to the omnipresent honeysuckle and let loose with a nice long, loud one. We were half way up Girls Hill by that time, well within earshot of the cabins.

  Zeke spun on his heels, right into Solly’s face.

  “Shut that snout of yours, Solomon, or I’ll shut it for you!” His fist was clenched.

  “Come on, Zeke,” I pleaded. “It’s not like he’s doing it on purpose.”

  “It don’t matter why he’s doing it,” Zeke said. “Hell, every counselor on the hill’s probably up by now.”

  We all glanced up toward the girls’ cabins, expecting to see flashlights pointed our way.

  And that’s when it happened.

  A hideous roar. Surreal. One vicious growl and then a yelp of terror from Jeffrey. We strained to see into the night. Solly was the first to get his flashlight out and just as Zeke was about to yell at him for turning it on, we saw something dart into the underbrush at the edge of the woods. The beam of light followed its path to two red eyes trained on us from between the branches, and triggered a malicious snarl that seemed to rumble back along the trail of illumination.

  “Wolf!” Solly rasped.

  We stood motionless. We’d heard rumors of wolves roaming the woods, but always figured it was the counselors’ way of keeping us out of the forest. Nobody had ever actually seen one.

  Leaves rustled from behind the wolf and a sound... like a swarm of crickets... rose from the area. I was too scared to run. We all were.

  Then, without even acknowledging our presence, a man whose considerable height was amplified to near cartoonish proportions by his wiry build strode calmly out from the bushes. His gaunt face was devoid of features in the darkness of the night, a long gray beard the only hair decorating his odd visage. A brown plaid trench coat draped loosely on his frame hid any other details we could have used to describe him later. As he walked toward Jeffrey’s supine body, I felt as if I were in a dream, watching from a precarious position that could have been inches or light-years away, but unmistakably close enough to be pulled into that nightmare in an instant. Frozen, helpless to retreat, I was resigned to the feeling that no distance would be a safe one.

  When he reached the spot where Jeffrey was sprawled out, he stopped and the wolf edged out of the forest to sit obediently at his heels. The man knelt over Jeffrey and raised his left hand, scanning it over the motionless head and torso, which glowed a faint tint of blue at the effort. The light went out for an instant, and then the pale blue haze poured back over my friend’s face. In the stillness, I couldn’t even feel myself breathe, and then Jeffrey started to stir. At the very same moment, the man stood his six-and-a-half-foot frame upright, turned back toward the woods at an angle that continued to shield his face from us, and disappeared calmly into the woods with the wolf loping along behind.

  Zeke shined his light in their direction. “Gone. Who the hell was that guy?”

  “Who cares?” Solly said, training his light on Jeffrey. He and I scurried over to check on Jeffrey while Zeke continued surveying the trail, or lack of it, where the stranger and the wolf had vanished.

  The rock under Jeffrey’s head was covered with blood, but the stickiness had stopped oozing from him. He winced as
he tried to raise himself up, and we helped him sit.

  He began to mutter something but passed out before we could make out what he was saying.

  As we settled him back down on the soft grass, we were blinded by the headlights from a camp security jeep. It stopped a dozen yards away and by the time my retinas had recovered enough to allow me to focus, we were surrounded by a mob of counselors, campers, and two gray-haired security guards with glasses like Mountain Dew bottles, who looked more frightened than most of the children.

  It was all a blur, what happened after that. One of the counselors motioned for us to get away. We couldn’t bring ourselves to move, but as we were dragged from the scene, I could see her bending over my friend’s limp body. A helicopter arrived about fifteen minutes later and whisked him off to a hospital in Wilmington.

  Nobody believed our story. Jeffrey didn’t have a mark on him besides the gash in the back of his head, and there was no trail, no sign of the wolf or the skinny giant. They figured we’d coerced Jeffrey into coming with us, and then didn’t look out for him like we should have. That we made him run to keep up, and then when he tripped and whacked his head on a rock, we concocted that crazy story about a wolf and a giant. They were right except for the last part, of course, and we had no proof.

  The next day, the three of us were picked up from camp by our angry and embarrassed parents.

  Solly and I sat under the oak in silence, thinking about the day that had changed our lives.

  “Did you ever find out?”

  “Nope,” Solly said.

  “Me neither. My folks wouldn’t let me have anything to do with camp anymore. Not the place or the people. I figured Jeffrey must have died or they would have told me, not let me suffer so much. But I think they never really knew either.”

  “Did you ask them?”

  “Nah. It was too painful—for all of us. We never mentioned it again. I check the Internet every once in a while, you know, to try and find out what happened. But I always come up dry.”

  “Maybe just as well,” Solly said. “Sometimes the past is better left in the past.”

  We sat back against the tree again in silence. No one else was left to come to this reunion today.

  “But sometimes it’s better to know.” A lilting feminine voice wafted in from the other side of the oak tree.

  Solly and I both spun around.

  “Mindy?” I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  “In the flesh.” She smiled serenely.

  Solly and I both stood. Mindy was my first girlfriend. A summertime fling for a twelve-year-old is not a serious thing... except to that particular twelve-year-old.

  “But...”

  “What am I doing here?” she finished my question.

  Solly and I both nodded.

  “Jeffrey sent me.”

  My jaw dropped.

  She smiled, but with a tear in her eye. “He wanted so much to tell you. He never blamed you for what happened.”

  “Where the hell has he been all these years? I Googled him, tried Facebook, even tried to track down his family... nothing. It was like he’d dropped off the face of the Earth.”

  “In London,” she said matter-of-factly. “With me.”

  “You?”

  She took a deep breath. “After the accident at camp, it took Jeff a while to recover. Physically he was okay, but he had panic attacks. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, they called it. He struggled in school and became alienated from his friends, so his parents moved to London for a fresh start. Eventually, he found his way, became a psychologist.

  “About ten years ago, I was vacationing in London with some friends and spotted him sitting at a pub in Soho. Even after all that time, his face had hardly changed. We started talking and one thing led to another; we were married a year later.

  “We had a quiet life there. Then one day, about a year ago, it all changed. A new patient walked into Jeffrey’s office and, well... it’ll be easier if I just show you. Jeff keeps video records of all his sessions.”

  Mindy pulled out her iPhone, started the video clip, and handed it to me. Solly sidled up to get a better angle. We could only see Jeffrey’s back, but the view of the patient was plain as day, even on that tiny screen.

  The wiry man who walked into that room was so tall the camera angle cut off the view of the top of his head. He sauntered up to the desk with a deliberateness that conveyed a complete disregard for the constraints of time, and sat. His long gray beard was the only hair visible, and a loose-fitting brown trench coat hid the details of his frame.

  “Shit,” I muttered. Turning to Solly, I got the confirmation I dreaded.

  Even on the iPhone’s tiny screen, the image immediately reactivated the feebly suppressed memory of the Ramblewood hermit who had revived Jeffrey that night. His steely gray eyes were mesmerizing, and he looked considerably younger than I had imagined, despite deeply set cheeks and pale, nearly albino skin tone. After all these years, I finally had a face to put to that gaunt profile.

  The sound of Jeffrey’s voice coming from the iPhone drew me into the conversation. “Mr. Zile?” He extended a hand. “I’m Dr. Blon-dell.”

  The man shook his hand and nodded. Jeffrey motioned for him to sit and they each settled in on opposite sides of the bean-shaped oak desk.

  “My name,” the man started in an authoritative, deeply timbred voice that was contrary to any I would have imagined coming out of him, and I had imagined a great deal about this man over the years, “is not Zile, but it’s best for both of us if you do not know my true identity.”

  Jeffrey’s head tilted. “Look, Mr.... whatever your name is, if you’re not going to be honest with me, I can’t help you. Whatever you tell me in this room is confidential.”

  “But I don’t need your help—you need mine.” Jeffrey rocked back in his high-backed leather chair. “You’re here to help me?” “I am.”

  “Okay,” said Jeffrey, “I’m listening.”

  The man studied Jeffrey’s face. “You don’t recognize me, do you?” After a brief pause, he answered his own question. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t. You were dead the last time we met.”

  “Dead,” Jeffrey repeated flatly. “I was dead?”

  The man nodded. “Only briefly.”

  “Don’t recall ever being dead,” Jeffrey said, with a tinge of amusement coloring his voice.

  “1985. Northern Maryland. Camp Ramblewood.”

  Jeffrey leaned in and rested his hands on the desk, fingers intertwined. “I don’t appreciate your dredging up my past, Mr....”

  “Zile will do.”

  “Fine. Mr. Zile. I think it’s time for you to go.”

  Jeffrey stood but the man in the chair did not budge.

  “I was there, Jeffrey. I was the one who revived you.”

  Jeffrey sat back down. Even if he had heard our version of what had happened that night, it would have been relayed to him in a tone tainted with the doubt of those who had pegged us as liars. We’d been told at the time that Jeffrey didn’t remember any part of what had happened, and probably never would. He had no reason to believe our bizarre story. Until now.

  “My name is not important, but I’ll need to tell you a little about myself for you to understand how I saved you, and why it’s important only now that you understand.

  “When I was a young man, I studied theoretical physics at Princeton. Shortly after graduation, I was invited to Los Alamos to work with Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project.”

  “Come on,” Jeffrey said. “You’re going to have to do better that that. That was like... what, around 1940?

  “Forty-three.”

  “Okay, 1943. So that would make you ninety-something. You don’t look a day over sixty.”

  Zile ignored him and continued. “It was during my time in Los Alamos that I met another young physicist named Richard Feynman.” He paused, but obviously saw no recognition from the other side of the table. “Physicists generally don’t get the
notoriety that entertainers do, but Feynman was a star in his world, went on to win a Nobel prize. Feel free to look it up.”

  “Just did,” Jeffrey said, typing into his keyboard. “Okay, so you proved you’ve researched Feynman.”

  “Maybe that page you’re looking at mentions something about a talk he gave on nano-machines.”

  Jeffrey worked his keyboard. “Yeah... yeah, here it is. 1959 meeting of the American Physical Society at Cal Tech. There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.”

  “Right. Well, we’d actually started tossing the idea around back in the ’40s, but that was the first time anyone took it seriously. You ever hear of nanotechnology?”

  “I’m a Trekkie,” Jeffrey said.

  Zile smiled for the first time. “Many are, which begins to explain why I’m here. See, back then, nobody had heard of it; nobody thought it was possible, except Richard. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was possible. In fact, it was the next natural progression in scientific evolution—controlling the world from within its smallest structures. And nowhere was that idea more intriguing than in medicine.”

  “So I’m supposed to believe that you succeeded in making nanobots that could cure a dead man over thirty years ago?”

  “Let’s just say there was a fortunate twist of fate. Shortly after the war, I was reassigned to a base in Nevada, where I was exposed to the kind of technology people only dreamed of in the civilian world.”

  “Area 51? Aliens?”

  Zile waved him off. “I never saw anything alien other than a bunch of meteorites, but it was one of those meteorites that got my attention, a small iridescent hunk of blue metal, more dense than anything I’d ever handled. I isolated a mineral from it that had never been seen before and hasn’t been seen anywhere else since. We jokingly called it Roswellonium, but the name stuck. It had a unique property that allowed us to construct the basic building block we needed to fabricate complex nanostructures.”

  He paused, staring at Jeffrey’s face, then clarified. “It allowed us to build submicroscopic machines.”

  “Very cool. But what’s that got to do with me?”