Isaac Asimov's SF-Lite

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “Congratulate me, I’m gonna get hitched,” Ralph told me while he was putting on his muffler and overcoat.

  “Who to?” I didn’t even know he was dating. As far as I knew, his only real friend was this guy Eddy he’d known in basic training, who’d looked him up after seeing his picture in the paper.

  “I’m marrying Eddy,” Ralph said, sort of blushing. “No really, it’s not like that. See, he was struck by lightning last year, and it turned him into a woman!”

  “Wow!” I remembered reading about it, but never realized who it had been. “Well, good luck and everything.” We’d have to put on a shower for them.

  Jesse had been in back, and now he came in to restock the chips. “Heard about Ralph and Eddy?” he asked. He’s got this real velvety deep voice, but I never could figure out his accent.

  “I hope they’ll be happy,” I said, started thinking about me and Tim, and choked a little. Jesse came over to hug me—we’re only friends, really—and I told him how me and Tim just didn’t seem to communicate anymore. Then I wiped away my tears, and looked at Jesse. “Hey! You’ve been losing weight.”

  “It’s that eat all you want and lose a pound a day diet. Works!” A customer came in to pay for some gas, so Jesse went back to restock the Oreos and Pecan Sandies.

  The customer—he was paying with a credit card—said “Your stockclerk looks a lot like Elvis, don’t you think?”

  “No, not really . . .” I mean, I just thought of him as my friend Jesse, and never really thought much about his face, you know?

  “Yeah,” continued the customer, pointing to some cigarettes, so I had to ring him up all over again. “Yeah, they’ve been seeing Elvis all over—the post office in Decatur, a McDonald’s in Fresno, the Baseball Hall of Fame. . . . Now I’ve seen him here in a convenience store. Think I’ll make the papers?”

  We laughed a little about that. Another customer, buying milk and bread, put her stuff down on the counter. “Don't laugh,” she said. “Yesterday, totally unexpected, my cat dragged in an old monophonic record album, looking brand new. It was Blue Hawaii.”

  We were pretty impressed by how strange that was, including Jesse, who’d come over to listen. “I tell you,” the lady continued, “something’s brewing. It feels kind of like a storm, about to break.” She noticed Jesse. “Hey, anyone ever said you look like Elvis?”

  “No ma’am. Maybe Roy Orbison,” he answered.

  She looked him over again. “Yeah, guess you’re right. Well, Merry Christmas everyone.”

  Things stayed quiet for a while, and around midnight Brian the night supervisor came by to check on us. I didn’t like Brian much, he was always acting like he thought you were stealing money from the store, but I was real pleasant, and didn’t suspect much when he sent Jesse in back to inventory all the cookies and sodas, to see what we’d need extra to last over the holidays.

  “Come here!” Brian called, from over the back aisle, where the candy and toys are.

  “Uh oh,” I thought. Some kids must’ve snuck in while I wasn’t paying attention, and taken some toys and left the plastic containers behind. They do that if you don’t watch careful.

  But everything looked okay on the novelty rack. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” said Brian. “I just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas,” and he started to kiss me.

  “Hey!” I said, trying to make like it was a joke. I mean, I needed the job, you know? “Hey, there’s no mistletoe here.” I pushed him away—and then he opened his mouth and showed me these fangs like the plastic Dracula teeth we sell at Halloween, only his looked real.

  “Brian, what the . ..”

  And suddenly he was biting me on the throat, and I couldn’t call for help....

  I seemed to be sliding down this long dark tunnel, and there was a light at the end, and my parents, and my grandparents (except for Gran of course), and everyone I knew who ever died including my ninth grade boyfriend who fell in the drainage ditch, and all the dogs and cats I ever owned, were there to welcome me. Only when I got to the end of the tunnel, there was this view like in an old movie house with just one big screen, and it was showing Earth, and this big old rocky asteroid heading right for it. At first I thought it was something out of a Star Trek movie, but then I realized it was for real. And then the space scene was gone, and Elvis was there—Elvis himself—smiling at me. Just smiling. And he raised up one hand and said to me, “Go back and warn them.”

  Next thing I knew, I was on the floor back in the Quik-Stop-Shop, and Jesse was putting cold rags on my forehead.

  “I thought you’d died,” he said.

  “I did!” I tried to sit up, making it the second time, and noticed the floor was all wet with milk, and this slimy yellow and red gunk I didn’t recognize, but smelled awful. “What happened— is that stuff Brian?”

  Jesse nodded. “I threw milk on him—it dissolves vampires. Too wholesome or something, I dunno, but it works every time. Mind, you have to use whole milk. Skim or 2 percent just won’t work.”

  “Jesse, you got to listen to this dream I just had.” I told him about the tunnel, and the asteroid, and Elvis. Jesse just rocked back and forth on his heels. Finally he said, “It ain’t no dream, Bobby June. It’s for real, and we must act quick if we’re to save the planet.”

  I was still kind of dazed, what with dying and coming back and all, so I didn’t hardly protest when he closed up the store, and we started driving. I didn’t even really care where we were going. I just sat wrapped in a blanket—his pickup didn’t have heat—and looked out the window at the big old full moon.

  “You see, this is the culmination of my stay upon the Earth,” Jesse said.

  “Huh?”

  “I’m the Twin who returned,” he said. “The one your little baby uncle was talking about.”

  “Huh?” The night was weird enough without old Jesse getting bizarre on me. I looked at him like for the first time. He did look like Elvis. ’’Who are you?”

  “Like I said. I’m the Twin. Elvis’s twin brother Jesse, who supposedly died at birth, but who was really taken off planet and raised in a UFO.”

  “You mean the UFO people who steal missing children and eat them?”

  “Nope—those guys're from Andromeda.”

  “Then, the UFO people who take your pets or lawn ornaments for company, and return them a year later?”

  “Nope—Betelgeuse.”

  “Then how about the ones who hover outside your window and won’t let you eat junk food?”

  “Those busybodies? I should hope not. No, my UFO was from the Southern Cross, and they’re real benevolent folk there.”

  I suddenly began to snuffle. “Poor Jesse. Taken away from your family and raised with weird aliens.”

  He took his hand off the wheel long enough to pat me on the shoulder. “It wasn't that bad. The scenery was nice, and we got Lucy reruns on the radio telescope. Besides, I'm half-space alien myself, so I had kinfolk.”

  His face got real sad. “Poor brother Elvis, he never even knew the truth about his heritage. That’s why he ate too much, and drank, and did drugs. Earth food didn’t have all the essential vitamins and minerals he needed.”

  “Oh!” Suddenly it made sense, Jesse’s always sucking on a Tictac. “Your breath mints are from space too!”

  “Right. They’re to compensate for dietary deficiencies, and to protect me from the pollution.”

  Lots more was making sense. Like those Elvis sightings, all over the country. They’d been Jesse, just wandering about waiting for whatever it was he’d been sent to our planet to stop to happen so he could stop it. As he drove, he told me a little about how he traveled around, always one step ahead of reporters, and the KGB, and bad aliens who didn’t want him to save the Earth.

  Then we got to where we were going, which was the observatory up near the university. I hadn’t been there since a field trip in second grade. Jesse got us inside—he could be real impres
sive—but the egghead types there were snooty, and wouldn’t believe us.

  “Asteroid coming in to destroy us? Give me a break,” said the professor in charge, but then Jesse took him aside and whispered in his ear for a while, and when they came back, the man was pale. “Turn the scope around,” he ordered, and began searching the sky.

  “What’d you say?” I asked Jesse.

  He shrugged. “I just told him things only he knew about himself—like, he really doesn’t like sushi, and he always wanted to be a fireman, and he’s got this secret crush on Vanna White.”

  It took a while, but then the professor came back, even paler, said, “You were right!” and began making lots of important phone calls.

  Pretty soon—well, really it was hours later, but I slept through the flight to Washington and was still half asleep when we met the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff—pretty soon we were at the United Nations. They’d let me call Tim from the White House, and the President’s wife, who was pretty nice, told them to send a plane to pick up Tim and Stacy so they could be with me.

  So we were all up there at the UN. First the professor talked, and a bunch of other professors from all sorts of countries agreed with him. Then everyone got in a panic, because this asteroid was going to hit the Earth in a month or so, and smash us to bits, and we didn’t have any missiles big enough to stop it.

  I was kind of mad about that, thinking about Stacy not even getting old enough for kindergarten, and I said to the President, “Here I voted for you, and you spend all this money on bombs and stuff, and you can’t even stop one lousy asteroid.” He looked sort of upset, which got me feeling bad, so I apologized.

  “It’s okay,” he told me. “We’re all a bit on edge.”

  Then Jesse got up, and talked about how he had a plan and would need lots of cooperation. Our professor did some calculations and said it'd work. But lots of them still didn’t believe Jesse.

  “I guess I’ll just have to convince you, then,” he said, and asked someone to fetch him a guitar, and right there in the UN assembly hall, he started to sing. And maybe his voice wasn’t much better than his brother’s, who you have to admit was the greatest singer ever lived, but Jesse’d been trained by aliens, and he knew how to use that extra nine-tenths of the brain that none of the rest of us uses, so it was the best singing anyone ever thought they’d ever hear. Pretty soon everyone didn’t know if they wanted to cry or applaud, and when they’d all calmed down and the medics had taken away the delegates who’d passed out or had heart attacks, everyone voted to go with Jesse’s plan.

  So there it was, Christmas Eve day, and Jesse had a radio hookup to everywhere on Earth. They asked if he wanted translators, but he said no—and sure enough, when he started talking, slow and kind of loud, everyone understood him, no matter what language they usually talked.

  “I want everyone in the Western Hemisphere and Europe and Africa to just stand real still,” he said into the radio. I was kind of awed, thinking how everyone all over the world was hearing my friend Jesse’s words. And trusting and believing him too, because he sounded like his brother, and everyone on Earth knows about Elvis. “And I want everyone in the East, in China and Japan and . . .” Well, I’ll just skip the list of countries, cause I don’t exactly know where most of them were, or how to spell them either.

  “ . . . I want every one of you to go get a kitchen chair exactly eighteen inches tall—that’s forty-six centimeters—”

  It was real impressive how smart Jesse was.

  “You can put some books or plywood on the seat if it isn’t exactly eighteen inches. Now I want you to get up on those chairs, every one of you. Come on now.” He waited a bit, so folks who were old or young or maybe had arthritis could get onto their chairs. “Now when I say go—hold on, not yet, when I say Go, I want everyone to jump. Okay, all ready?”

  He looked over at me, and I smiled and crossed my fingers.

  He leaned close to his microphone. “Okay. Ready, set— jump!”

  And all over China and Japan and all those other countries, people jumped off their kitchen chairs.

  The ground shook a little, and Stacy began to cry. I comforted her, and Tim put his arm around my shoulder.

  The professor was talking on the phone to some other scientists, who were somewhere or other doing stuff, and he put his hand over the receiver and shouted. “It worked! It worked! When the Asians all jumped, they pushed the Earth slightly out of its orbit, so now that asteroid is going to miss us. We’re saved!”

  Everyone began to cheer and hug each other. Then we got quiet, because we’d all noticed a dayglow orange UFO hovering outside the windows.

  Jesse came over and took my hands. “You’ve been a right good friend, Bobby June, and I’m gonna miss you.”

  Stacy said, “You goin* somewhere, Uncle Jesse?”

  He put a hand on her head—and her hair’s been blond and naturally curly ever since—and said, “My job, and my brother’s, is over, Stacy. I’m going home. But first. . .”

  He took Tim aside a bit. “Now Tim,” he said, “I know you love your wife, but you have to talk with her.”

  “But if I do, if she learns the truth about me,” Tim answered, “she wouldn’t love me no more.”

  “Now, you know that isn’t true. Don’t be afraid,” Jesse told him.

  Tim said to me, “Bobby June. I wouldn’t blame you if you leave me when I tell you this. The reason we never visit my relatives, and the reason I have so much trouble finding shoes that fit—sweetheart. I’m Bigfoot.

  “Well, I’m not really Bigfoot,” he continued. “I’m just his little brother. But you get the idea.”

  I said, “Honey, I wouldn’t care if you were the Loch Ness Monster, you’re still my man,” and I hugged Tim, and Stacy jumped up and down cause she could tell things were going to be okay from now on.

  Jesse went to the window, stepping onto a gangplank from the UFO. “Wouldn’t you and your family like to spend the holiday with your relatives, Tim?”

  “Sure would,” said Tim. “But we couldn’t get no flight to Oregon on Christmas Eve, and anyway, we don’t have no presents either.”

  “Forget airplanes,” grinned Jesse. “We can drop you off on our way. And I’m sure we can find something around the saucer for you to give your folks.” He waved us to the gangplank.

  “Oh boy!” cried Stacy. “This is going to be the best Christmas ever! And I also predict major conflict in the Mideast, a startling new career development for Linda Evans, and all the dogs in Denver will lose their hair but learn to speak . . .

  DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE!

  Howard Waldrop

  “Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance” was purchased by Gardner Dozois, and was published in the August 1988 issue, with an amusing illustration by Bob Walters. Waldrop has only published a few stories in the magazine, far fewer than we'd like, but they have all been worth waiting for. He is widely considered to be one of the best short-story writers in the business, and his famous story “The Ugly Chickens” won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in three collections: Howard Who? All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, and Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop. Waldrop is also the author of the novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, in collaboration with Jake Saunders, and of two solo novels, Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs. He is at work on another solo novel. Waldrop lives in Austin, Texas.

  Here he gives us a hilarious, high-energy look back at the '60s, a look as funny, poignant, and quirky as one would expect from Waldrop, who has been called “the Resident Weird Mind of his generation. ”

  * * *

  The light was so bad in the bar that everyone there looked like they had been painted by Thomas Hart Benton, or carved from dirty bars of soap with rusty spoons.

  “Frank! Frank!” the patrons yelled, like for Norm on Cheers before they canceled it.

  “No need to stand,”
I said. I went to the table where Barb, Bob, and Penny sat. Carole the waitress brought over a Ballantine Ale in a can, no glass.

  “How y’all?” I asked my three friends. I seemed not to have interrupted a conversation.

  “I feel like six pounds of monkey shit,” said Bob, who had once been tall and thin and was now tall and fat.

  “My mother’s at it again,” said Penny. Her nails looked like they had been done by Mungo of Hollywood, her eyes were like pissholes in a snowbank.

  “Jim went back to Angela,” said Barb.

  I stared down at the table with them for five or six minutes. The music over the speakers was “Wonderful World. Beautiful People” by Johnny Nash. We usually came to this bar because it had a good jukebox that livelied us up.

  “So,” said Barb, looking up at me, “I hear you’re going to be a tour guide for the reunion.”

  ***

  There are terrible disasters in history, and there are always great catastrophes just waiting to happen.

  But the greatest one of all, the thing time’s been holding its breath for, the capo de tutti capi of impending disasters, was going to happen this coming weekend.

  Like the Titanic steaming for its chunk of polar ice, like the Hindenberg looking for its Lakehurst, like the guy at Chernobyl wondering what that switch would do, it was inevitable, inexorable, a psychic juggernaut.

  The Class of ’69 was having its twentieth high school reunion.

  And what they were coming back to was no longer even a high school—it had been phased out in a magnet school program in ’74. The building had been taken over by the community college.

  The most radical graduating class in the history of American secondary education, had, like all the ideals it once held, no real place to go.