Sputnik's Children

by Terri Favro

  “You’re just a busboy, BB. Two guests, tops. You know the rules.”

  “Have a heart, Jimmy. They’re out-of-towners.”

  “Big fucking deal. We gotta mix up a different salad every night.” The bouncer eyeballed us. “I like the chicks. Killer ass on the one in gold. The older one’s a bit skanky. What the hell, she’s in. The old guy with the cane — who are you kidding, pal, check yourself into a hospital. Black guy with a lobster claw for a hand, wearing a white suit — dunno.” Jimmy waggled his hand, Nonna Peppy–style. “I got a few Oreos in there already, not sure I want more.”

  “What did you call me?” said Kendal, stepping forward, flexing his good hand.

  Behind us, a group in hard hats and bullseye T-shirts that said Hit Me Skylab were shuffling impatiently. “Stay or go, but make your minds up, assholes,” one of them griped.

  “Girls go in with BB. Everybody else, sayonara,” said the bouncer.

  Duff put his hand on Kendal’s shoulder. “Got any dough?”

  Shrugging Duff off, Kendal dug for his wallet. He handed the bouncer a wad of bills. I was pretty sure it was all the money we had left.

  “That enough for all four?”

  The bouncer stuffed Kendal’s bills in his pocket and lowered the velvet rope. Bum Bum opened the door. A pulse of strobe light and the electro beat of Arsonist of Love spilled out onto the sidewalk.

  “Okay, beautiful nobodies, get your asses in there,” grunted the bouncer.

  We stepped into an entranceway lined with the marble torsos of generic Greco-Roman gods, their oversized testicles dangling at eye level. Overhead, crystal chandeliers dripped like stalactites. A plush carpet ran up the sloping floor like a long wet tongue. I felt like Dorothy entering a decadent version of Oz with Kendal the Lion, Linda the Scarecrow and Duff the Tin Man at my side.

  We followed the red carpet into the beating heart of the club, a humid barn-sized room stuffed with feathers and leather and spandex and flesh. Lots of flesh. Strobe lights dismembered the crowd into a jumble of body parts — fists and arms, chests and legs, crotches and thighs — moving to the four-to-the-floor disco beat.

  We pushed our way through the sweaty crowd, our feet kicking up clouds of glitter. It was like wading through stardust.

  Duff took Bum Bum by the arm. “Where’s the rubber room?” he shouted.

  Bum Bum pointed to a catwalk high over the dance floor.

  “Top floor. VIPs only.”

  “We’re expected,” said Duff. “Take us up, brother.”

  No one stopped us from climbing a spiral staircase to cross the catwalk to a dungeon-like door at one end. A heavy iron ring was bolted to the centre of the black leather door. I looked down on the heads of the crowd, bobbing like waves below the grillwork floor of the catwalk.

  Duff gripped my arm. He was holding me too tightly, too possessively, but I didn’t shake him off. Something inevitable was unfolding. I wanted to see what would happen next.

  “This is where Debbie parts company with us,” said Duff. “Gabriel is waiting for her inside this room.”

  He grasped the iron ring and started to pull open the door for me. Kendal slammed it shut again.

  “Debbie doesn’t go anywhere without me.”

  “You can’t be part of this, Kendal,” said Duff.

  I wanted to tell Kendal that I would be fine on my own. That I’d come right back to him when I was finished saving the world. But before I could say anything, Kendal pushed Duff in the chest, sending him staggering toward the edge of the catwalk. Duff windmilled his arms, trying to regain his balance. Before any of us could grab him, he collided heavily with the railing, snapping it under his weight with a gunshot-like crack. Duff fell backwards toward the dance floor.

  The crowd screamed. Duff’s cane clattered at Linda’s feet. She stood frozen, hands on her face.

  Duff never reached the dance floor. I watched him plunge down, down, his surprised face looking up at us. Before I could shout a warning to the crowd below, Duff vanished, as if an invisible hand had plucked him out of mid-air, like Michael the Archangel catching the Beautiful Alda.

  I was overwhelmed by déjà vu. I had already been with Duff at this moment of time, at the culmination of his fall, in the Z-Lands, 1969. He would land on top of a junked banana bus, where I would see him melt away from timesickness.

  Bum Bum yanked open the black leather door. “Get the hell in there before they call the cops. They’ll kill you, Kendal!”

  Kendal grabbed my hand and we ran into the room, the black leather door shutting behind us with a muffled thud, followed by a hiss, as if an airlock was sealing.

  The quiet was unnatural. The music and voices from downstairs could no longer be heard. Even the Hotwire Hum had stopped dead. Whatever happened in this room was meant to take place in private and utter silence.

  The walls were upholstered in black rubber. In one corner, a wet bar was forested with liquor bottles. In another, a potted green Ficus benjamina plant fingered its way up a wall. A round red velour bed luxuriated in the centre of the room. Before it, a TV sat blank-screened but glowing.

  “Gabriel?” I asked, tentatively.

  The TV screen suddenly came to life. A test pattern. The NBC peacock.

  Please sit down, said a voice.

  Kendal and I looked at one another. We sat on the velour bed and faced the TV.

  Watch, said the voice. This is what is going to happen tomorrow.

  five

  A Nook in Time

  It started the way we’d always been told it would — with the whine of the Emergency Broadcast System signalling the beginning of the end of the world.

  A news announcer in the NBC studio sat at a woodgrain desk, a sheet of paper in his clenched hands.

  “Today, July 11, 1979, at three a.m. Atomic Mean Time, the disintegrating NASA space station, Skylab, fell to Earth in the USSR, with large sections of fuselage smashing into the Kremlin, causing significant loss of life. The Soviets consider this an unprovoked act of war conducted from space. Intercontinental ballistic missiles have been launched at NATO countries including the United States of America, the Dominion of Canada and the Industrial Region of Canusa.”

  The newsman stopped and rubbed his eyes, before reading out the addresses of the hardened shelters in all five boroughs. All subway trains had been stopped with the passengers inside, he explained, and any New Yorkers on the streets or at work in a place without a shelter were to immediately enter the tunnels. Those with anti-radiation suits should don them now while keeping in mind that their actual efficacy in a nuclear attack was untested.

  The announcer’s hands trembled and a sheen formed on his forehead. A loud boom startled him. The bulletin fluttered from the news desk to the floor. The TV picture swayed.

  Without anything to read, the announcer seemed to look out at us, probably at the lone cameraman in front of him.

  “Is that it, then? Is that all we can do?” asked the announcer, and the cameraman’s voice could be heard answering that he had no further instructions but they’d better get their anti-rad suits on.

  “Oh Jeezu —”

  The screen went white.

  Kendal’s fingers tightened around mine.

  “Is that it, then?” said Kendal, echoing the announcer’s words. “Tomorrow is the end of the world?”

  As you know it, said the voice. Watch.

  A shaky visual filled the screen. A woman was holding a mic in both hands, hunched over as if expecting something to pounce on her from above. What was left of her sunny blonde hair hung in her face like strings, patches of bloody scalp visible. A charcoal starburst stained her dress from shoulder to waist. The cloth over one breast had collapsed like a deflated soufflé. Her breast was crushed, also part of her shoulder. How was she able to stand? What I could see of her face was blistered and s
corched, like Duff’s. Someone was talking to her. A cameraman, videotaping her.

  “Talk to me Sally,” said the man’s voice. “Just keep talking, it’s what you do so well. You don’t have much time left.”

  The woman opened and closed her mouth a few times, before rasping out, “I saw them all die, down in the subways. The sea breached the pumps. I got out with the crew. I saw my producer floating over the subway tracks, his anti-rad suit half torn off.”

  “The anti-rad suits aren’t worth shit,” said the cameraman.

  Sally’s face fell in on itself. She lifted her hand to wipe her eyes. Sinews hung from the back of her arm, her skin peeling away. She was disintegrating.

  “I can’t.”

  The man’s voice now, pleading, “You’re a pro, Sally. Keep talking. The batteries are dying.”

  Sally giggled suddenly. She was losing it.

  “We’re all dying! Who gives a fuck about batteries?”

  “We have to document this,” he answered. “Get a grip. Remember who you are.”

  The woman took a slow, shaky breath and pulled herself straighter, her wounds now grotesquely visible.

  “We’re in New York. July 11, 1979. Central Park. For the record. In case anyone finds this. Look at it. Please.”

  She stepped out of camera range. Where the park had been was now a smoking gully. Body parts were scattered over the ground. Amputated arms and legs. Headless torsos. Twisted and broken anti-rad suits, melted into the bodies they were supposed to protect. So much for efficacy. A black-orange glow bruised the sky. In the distance, searchlights raked the horizon. Like the waking nightmare of my childhood after having my tonsils out.

  “Why the lights? What are they searching for?” I asked.

  Signs of life. Signs of further attacks. Who knows? They aren’t sure themselves. A waste of a generator, if you ask me. It was a very confused time. Correction, it will be a confused time.

  “What happens to Sally?” I asked.

  I really don’t know. Sally isn’t special, just a dying reporter. She’s one of millions of walking wounded. Maybe her friend will do her a kindness and finish her off. Radiation sickness is an extremely nasty death. No gently-into-that-good-night, I can assure you.

  “Do we have to watch more of this?” I asked.

  I just want you to understand why you have to change history, said the voice.

  “But changing history would cause all sorts of unexpected disruptions to the time-space continuum,” Kendal pointed out.

  How do you know that? The voice sounded amused.

  “Everyone knows that,” I broke in. “In time-travel stories, that’s the rule: don’t change anything or you’ll unleash something even worse.”

  There are exceptions, said the voice. No matter what might come in to fill the void in time, it will not be as bad as nuclear war.

  I looked back to the TV, to Sally’s image frozen on the screen just before it pinholed to nothing. The blank screen mirrored Kendal and me in our stupid disco outfits, on the edge of the bed. We both looked dazed.

  One of you is unexpected, said the voice. This is her mission. And mine. Ours alone.

  I looked at Kendal and wondered whether Duff was right. Maybe he had fucked things up by barging in with me.

  “I’m staying with the woman I love,” said Kendal.

  You’re dealing with something much more powerful than love, pointed out the voice.

  “‘There is only one who is all-powerful and his greatest weapon is love,’” said Kendal. I recognized the quote from an issue of The Silver Surfer we’d found at Cressie’s when we were kids.

  There was a sound of rustling in the room, as if a breeze had started blowing. The leaves of the Ficus benjamina shivered furiously as its tendrils thickened and poured out of the pot and toward the floor. The plant was growing at high speed, like a Disney stop-action nature film. Its central stalk yanked itself out of its dirt bed and moved toward us; it was turning into something that looked almost human: a man, his body covered in moss. Crawling with it. No, not moss: mould.

  Kendal and I watched the floor plant transform into a body seething with green spores, shifting and rearranging themselves, and finally into something almost normal.

  A man holding a briefcase.

  He looked familiar. Curly black hair, broad shoulders, dark eyes, dressed elegantly in a suit, shirt collar open to reveal a gold chain — understated, by the standards of 1979. He did not look like the freaks downstairs in their feathers and leather and latex, but the type of young man you might expect to meet in a backgammon bar, sipping Manhattans and reading The Wall Street Journal.

  It was Bob the Varsity Wrestler. My one-night stand.

  “Are you Gabriel?” asked Kendal.

  He smiled and shrugged. “Call me whatever you like. Gabriel is a code name. Those MIT fellows love aliases. Makes them feel all mysterious and secret agenty. I’m the one who does all the heavy lifting.” He shot his cuffs and straightened his collar.

  “Are you a Twistie?” I asked, remembering what Duff had said about mutants.

  Gabriel grimaced. “I prefer ‘Exceptional.’ ‘Twistie’ is quite offensive.”

  “Oh,” I said. “No offence meant.”

  Gabriel waved his hand. “I make allowances, given that you’re from a less enlightened time, Debbie. Best we let bygones be bygones and get started.”

  Kendal wasn’t buying it. “Anyone can throw a B-grade horror movie on a TV monitor. We’re being hosed. Let’s go back to the hotel, Debbie,” he said, grabbing my hand and pulling me off the bed.

  “I can think for myself, Kendal,” I said, sitting back down.

  I was starting to feel as if we had actually turned into Kyle Crusher and the Contessina — and, as always, Crusher was making all the decisions.

  Before Kendal could start to argue with me, Gabriel settled matters. Standing at the bar, pouring himself a Scotch and adding a liberal amount of water, he said, “It’s too late to leave now.”

  “Don’t try to stop us,” Kendal warned.

  Gabriel shook his head. “I don’t have to. The room won’t let Debbie leave.”

  Glancing around, I saw that the padded leather door had been replaced by an unbroken stretch of black rubber. We were in a sealed cube.

  “Are you kidnapping us?” I asked.

  Gabriel frowned and shook his head again. “I can’t leave here any more than you can. The hands of the atomic clock ticked down to midnight and stopped. We’re sitting in a nook in time. Every clock on Earth stopped the moment you stepped into this room. Time can’t see us. We’re going to change history so dramatically that we’ll rip a hole in the time-space continuum. The timeline we’re living in will collapse and the Tagger — that’s you, Debbie — will deliver us into Earth Standard Time where all of us will merge with our alternate selves to live in that more peaceful continuum. When you leave this room, you’ll feel as if you were gone for a nanosecond. Meanwhile, you might have been in here for hours or days. Maybe even a lifetime.”

  “Why would a lifetime be necessary?” I asked.

  “Because you need training. Everything you do must become muscle memory. Atomic Mean Time sits on the knife-edge of the end of Normal life and the beginning of a level of suffering beyond the scope of anything you can imagine. Ergo, we leave nothing to chance. Once we’re on Skylab, we’re going to have to work fast.”

  “What’s Skylab got to do with anything?” I asked.

  * * *

  Gabriel picked up the remote controller. “Ah, I see my friend Duff played his cards rather close to his chest. Let’s watch some television, shall we?”

  The TV came to life to an upbeat “march of progress” theme, like NASA’s world of tomorrow films of my childhood. The title screen read, Skylab: Technical Specifications for America’s First Manned Space
Station. A deep voice said, “Hello, kids! Today, let’s learn about the flight and navigation systems of the McDonnell Douglas Orbital Lab, otherwise known as SL-1, or Skylab.”

  Cartoon astronauts waved at us from outside the space station, the familiar solar sail painted with a Sparkling Sparrow “Have a Nice Day” smiley face.

  I’m not sure how long we sat in the room. I felt as if we had fallen back to childhood, watching ourselves on TV in an animated show called L’il Debbie and the Kendal Kid. Gabriel admitted that this all-encompassing childhood nostalgia was part of the plan by the MIT boys. A brilliant way to get us up to speed on Skylab’s engineering and navigation systems in record time. A child’s brain is so much more malleable than an adult’s, better able to quickly absorb information, especially when presented in the form of a cartoon. Just like the ones Kendal and I used to watch every Saturday morning in Shipman’s Corners.

  The cartoon broke down the mission into a series of steps. Basic mechanical repairs. Reprogramming of navigational systems. And trickiest of all, repositioning the solar sail Skylab needed to gain power, a task that necessitated a spacewalk, much to my excitement. Finally, after hours or days or, for all I know, a lifetime, the cartoon’s end credits began to roll. Gabriel stood and stretched.

  “You two have learned as much as you can, short of a cerebral implant, and I don’t have the skills for that. Time to hop.”

  From inside the leather padded bar, Gabriel took out two flight suits and helmets. Then he took two syringes out of his briefcase.

  “What is this, the Fantastic Voyage?” I asked as Kendal and I donned the flight suits. “Are you shooting a tiny inner space craft into us?”

  “Not far off,” said Gabriel, swabbing the inside of my arm. “I’m injecting you with Quantum Nanothrusters — nanobots that temporarily transform your body into an organic rocket. Hopping through time and space is as much an inner journey as an outer one. The MIT boys call this ‘swinging Schrödinger’s cat.’ You’re about to be in two places at once — here and on Skylab. I’ll do both of you, then shoot myself up. If you find yourself alone in the Skylab workshop, don’t worry, I’m on my way.”