by Anthology
The soft, controlled tones only added more points to the spurs driving Emory’s rage. Giva was sprawling in her chair, legs stretched in front of her, obviously doing her best to create the picture of the relaxed daredevil who had courageously held off until the last minute. And now the medic was treating him like he was some kind of disoriented patient . . .
He swung toward the medic and the man froze when he saw the hostility on Emory’s face. He was a solid, broad shouldered type with a face that probably looked pleasant and experienced when he was helping chrononauts disembark. Now he slipped into a stance that looked like a slightly disguised on guard.
“You’re back, Mr. FitzGordon. Everything’s okay. We’ll have you checked out and ready for debriefing before you know it.”
Peter LeGrundy crouched through the hatch. He flashed his standardissue smile at the two figures on the rig and Emory realized he had to get himself under control.
“So how did it go?” Peter said. “Did you have a nice trip?”
Emory forced his muscles to relax. He lowered his head and settled into the chair as if he was recovering from a momentary lapse—the kind of thing any normal human could feel when he had just violated the laws of physics and traveled through three centuries of time. He gave the medic a quick thumbs up and the medic nodded.
He had his own record of the event. He had Giva’s comments. Above all, he had Peter LeGrundy. And Peter LeGrundy’s ambitions. He could cover every grant Peter could need for the rest of Peter’s scholarly career if he had to. The battle wasn’t over. Not yet.
You need the creatives. The creatives need your money.
I ordered the liberated captives brought to the deck as circumstances allowed. They did not fully comprehend their change in status, and I could not explain it. Our small craft does not contain a translator among its complement. But the sight of so many souls rescued from such a terrible destiny stimulated the deepest feelings of satisfaction in every heart capable of such sentiments.
Two well-placed candles illuminated the paper on John Harrington’s writing desk without casting distracting shadows. The creak of Sparrow‘s structure created a background that offered him a steady flow of information about the state of his command.
He lowered his pen. He had been struggling with his report for almost two hours. The emotions he had ignored during the battle had flooded over him as soon as he had closed the door of his cabin. The pistol that had roared in his face had exploded half a dozen times.
He shook his head and forced out a sentence advising the Admiralty he had placed Mr. Terry in command of the prize. He had already commended Terry’s gunnery and his role in the assault. He had given Bonfors due mention. Dawkins and several other hands had been noted by name. The dead and the wounded had been properly honored.
It had been a small battle by the standards of the war against Napoleon. A skirmish really. Against an inept adversary. But the bullets had been real. Men had died. He could have died. He had boarded an enemy ship under fire. He had led a headlong assault at an enemy line. He had exchanged shots with the captain of the enemy.
The emotions he was feeling now would fade. One hard, unshakeable truth would remain. He had faced enemy fire and done his duty.
He had met the test. He had become the kind of man he had read about when he was a boy.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD
Steve Bein
Ernie Sisco knows what the most important thing in the world is. It took him a long time to figure it out, but he knows what it is now. He knows because somebody forgot it in the back of his cab.
Ernie’s been driving cabs thirty-two years now, and in that time he’s seen people leave all kinds of things behind. Crazy things, things he’d never have believed somebody could forget in a taxi. Wallets and purses are commonplace. So are asthma inhalers, epi-pens, medications the fare’s literally going to die without. Once a fare actually left her baby in the back seat, a ten-month-old in one of those tan Graco baby carriers.
The kid was sleeping right behind Ernie’s seat, right where he couldn’t see her, and he’d gone on a good half a mile before he had to pull over to take a leak. Good thing for the fare, too.
When he drove back she was crying her eyes out on the street corner, too scared to tell anyone what she’d done.
Sometimes people will say their kids are the most important thing in the world, but Ernie doesn’t think that’s right. In any case the ten-month-old wasn’t what helped him figure it out.
What sent him in the right direction was folded up in a silver Samsonite carry-on.
Ernie picks up the fare at Logan, a skinny white kid, the type that doesn’t surprise a guy when they tell him to drive to Harvard. The kid’s got two bags, matching hard cases the color that car companies call Lunar Mist or Ingot Silver Metallic.
Ernie puts the big one in the trunk. The kid insists on keeping the carry-on with him in the back seat. “Plenty of room,” Ernie says, but the kid says whatever’s in the case is too important to risk getting rear-ended. It’s obvious the kid doesn’t think much of Ernie’s driving but Ernie shrugs it off and starts the meter running.
They get to the Yard and figure out where the kid’s conference is going to meet. It’s on theoretical physics or temporal physics or something like that. Ernie took physics in high school, but that was a million years ago and he was never any good at it anyway. He was never the math-science type; Ernie’s more of a reader. Look under the driver’s seat and you’ll find yellowed copies of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Ernie doesn’t know anything about motorcycles, Zen, or the Spanish Civil War; he’s just got a thing for fiction that leans toward autobiography and lately he’s been boning up on American authors.
A lot of Harvard types don’t tend to think much of Ernie. They see a chunky bald guy behind the wheel of a cab and they make certain assumptions. But Ernie’s no dope. He’s got a cushy job where he can sit and read all day if he wants to.
Park it on the corner of Brattle and James and he can spend all afternoon reading without getting a call. Some might call it lazy—in fact, there’s one in particular who calls it lazy every chance she gets—but Ernie can read the same great books as all the other Harvard types and he can do it without dropping any thirty or forty grand a year.
Ernie drops the kid off on Kirkland and sure enough the kid forgets the little Samsonite in the back. The campus has that effect on first-timers. It’s beautiful, especially on a bright summer day: all green leaves and red brick and bright whitewashed windows. And there’s the whole reputation thing too. Thinking about how they’re going to impress all the muckety-mucks has a way of leaving people a little scatterbrained. Sometimes they ignore guys like Ernie completely, and then they go walking off toward the nearest red-brick building without leaving a tip and without remembering to check the back seat.
Ernie forgets all about it too, and doesn’t hear the case clunking around back there until he’s in the line at Fenway in the top of the ninth. There’s big business at Fenway, a lot of fares, and they usually tip pretty well when the Sox win.
They’re up six-nothing when Ernie pulls up, so he stows the kid’s carry-on in the trunk and figures he’ll drop it off the next time a fare takes him out that way.
One of the buckles comes undone when he drops the case in the trunk and curiosity gets the better of Ernie. He takes a peek.
Inside there’s this funny-looking suit, a bit like a wetsuit but with copper wires running all over the outside. The neoprene smells strongly of neoprene. It’s the same shade of blue the Royals wear, and with the hood and goggles it looks like something you’d wear if you wanted to get in a fistfight with Spiderman. On the chest there’s a steel box with a little readout screen and what looks like a phone keypad.
That’s as good a look as Ernie gets before the roar goes up in Fenway. It sounds like a third out pop fly. Ernie’s back on. By the time he’s done running Fenway fares he’s hu
ngry, and by the time he finishes a brat and a soft pretzel he’s sick of working and so he heads home. It’s not until he’s a beer down and watching Sox highlights on ESPN that he remembers the funny-looking suit.
His first thought when he gets it laid out on his sofa is that he’s going to have a hell of a hard time fitting into it. Thirty-some years sitting behind the wheel of a cab hasn’t done much for his physique. But he’s just got to try it on. Whatever it is, the kid said it was too important to risk damaging. He’s careful with it, but he’s got to know what it is.
The boots are too big and the arms are too long, and it’s all Ernie can do to suck in his gut enough to get the front zipped. The stink of neoprene overpowers even the legions of cigarettes Ernie and Janine have smoked in this room. The stainless steel box hangs around his neck the way tourists hang their big black cameras, fixed to a sling of webbing, and on top of the box is that little readout screen. It’s about impossible to read the numbers on it unless he’s wearing the goggles, and as soon as he puts the goggles on he learns the big plastic rings around them house a bunch of ultra-bright LEDs. The goggles shift everything he sees toward the yellow-orange part of the spectrum, kind of like ski goggles, and the LEDs spotlight everything he looks at.
The readout screen on the chest unit is actually two screens. On the left you can set the date and time and the right side seems to work like a kitchen timer. The date and time are way off: six o’clock in the morning on March 13th, the year after next. Ernie sets it right, which for him means five minutes fast. Janine used to yell at him all the time for being late, and though he’ll be the first to admit she didn’t fix everything she says is wrong with him, at least he’s never late anymore.
Next he looks at the kitchen timer. By now he’s sweating his balls off even in the air conditioning, but he’s damned if he’s taking off this ridiculous suit before he figures out what it does. He sets the timer for two minutes and hits Start.
The world stops. The ESPN guy, in the midst of saying something about the Cubs, freezes on the “ah” of “Chicago” and just keeps saying “aaaaaah.” There’s a steady drone coming from the air conditioner, not the usual back and forth rattle but a constant monotone. The thin ribbon of smoke snaking up from Ernie’s ashtray stops dead and just hangs there.
“Weird,” Ernie’s about to say, but saying this is weird is like saying Ted Williams could hit a little bit, so Ernie doesn’t bother. Apart from him, the only things moving in the whole house are the numbers counting down on the kitchen timer.
Even the air feels like it’s stuck in place. Ernie’s got to suck it in like a milkshake through a straw. Standing up is hard and walking is like pushing through chest-deep water.
There’s a compression left in the couch cushion where he was sitting a second ago, still squished down though there’s no big cabbie ass to squish it. He wades over to the ashtray and touches the cigarette smoke with a gloved finger. It doesn’t move under a light touch, but a little nudge frees it up somehow and the part he touched starts its slow crawl toward the ceiling. The rest just hangs there like a question mark made of white cotton candy.
He fiddles with other stuff for a minute or two.
Everything he tries to pick up feels like it’s glued down, but he can budge it if he muscles it. The TV remote doesn’t do anything, though; it’s still just whatshisname saying “aaaaah” with a not-so-bright look on his face.
The kitchen holds the best surprises. That brat he picked up for dinner wasn’t doing the trick, so before he turned on the TV and cracked open that beer he put a pot on for spaghetti.
When he gets to the kitchen, the flames under the pot look like they’ve been airbrushed there. They don’t move a bit. The water looks like it’s boiling and frozen at the same time, the bubbles stock-still, a big one half-popped on the surface and looking like a crater.
Then bam, the world starts moving again. Bubbles bubble. Flames flicker. The couch cushion springs up from the ass print he left on it. The ESPN guy finally finishes whatever he was going to say about the Cubs. Ernie looks down at the box on his chest and he sees the timer’s at zero.
Ernie dumps some angel hair in the pot, then sits in front of the air conditioner and sweats, trying to figure out what the hell just happened. In the four and a half minutes it takes the angel hair to cook, he comes up with nothing. He goes back to the kitchen, grabs a black pasta spoon, and hooks a noodle to taste it. They’re perfect. Then the world gets funny again.
One second he’s holding the cheap plastic spoon over the pot. The next he’s holding a hot drooping handle and there’s spatters of black plastic all over the stovetop. The business end of the spoon is bumping around in the pot, half an inch of melted handle curling down from one side like a tail.
To beat that, his angel hair’s gone from al dente to mush.
He finds that out after he drains it and fishes out what’s left of his spoon. Right about then is when he sees the red light blinking on the answering machine. Ernie’s old school. He has an answering machine, a big brown-and-black one, and despite the fact that there were no messages on it when he got home, now there is one and he never heard the phone ring.
He plays the message. It’s Janine. She says she’s coming over in a few minutes. According to the time stamp she left the message while he was standing five feet from the phone, watching his angel hair and his pasta spoon turn to garbage in something like a millionth of a second.
Then it hits him. She’s coming over in a few minutes. He’s dressed to go scuba diving with Buck Rogers.
He struggles out of the suit, which is no easier getting out of than in. He’s in his boxers, shirtless and sweating like a dockworker, when he hears her key slide into the lock. He stuffs the blue suit behind the couch and gets turned back around just in time not to look suspicious. And desperate. He hopes.
She takes one look at him and says, “Jesus, Ernie.”
Janine’s the type of woman you can tell was beautiful once.
The tanning she did when they were in their twenties isn’t so easy to wear anymore, but hot damn was she a looker back then.
Gravity hasn’t been so kind to what used to draw long looks from every guy on the street, but back then every last one of them was wishing he was Ernie. She’s not what she used to be, but to Ernie she’s still Rita Hayworth.
He’s not even sure he realized that himself, not even just the night before, when the yelling got bad and she slammed the door on her way out. Now, after the day he’s been having, it feels damn good to have her in the house again.
“You’re letting yourself go,” she says.
“Just getting changed,” he says. “Long day at work.”
“If it was a long day at work,” she says, “you’d still be out working. You knock off after the game again today?”
“Again with the game,” he says, wishing he could take it back the second it leaves his mouth. “Look, they tip good over there,” he says. “I don’t have to work a full eight hours on game days.”
“I’ll worry about eight after you put in six,” she says. “I just came for some clothes.”
Ernie follows her to the bedroom and sweeps yesterday’s jeans off the end of the unmade bed. “You want to stay for dinner?” he says.
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to.
She rolls an armful of bras and underwear in a T-shirt and drapes another shirt and a pair of jeans on top. Ernie asks her if she’s staying at her sister’s again tonight. She says yes.
On her way back to the door, she says, “Christ, Ernie, did you steal something from a fare?”
“No,” he says—maybe a second too soon. It’s been a point of pride for him. You wouldn’t believe how many cabbies figure a fare leaves something in the cab, that means they must not want it that bad. It’s been a point of pride for Janine, too.
She always said he was better than those other guys.
She gives him a cold look and says, “Where’s that suitca
se from, then?”
The silver Samsonite’s sitting right there on the couch.
He only has to look at it for a second before he answers. “It’s for you,” he says. “I figured maybe you’d need it to get your stuff.”
Her eyes get colder. “Bull,” she says. “You’re telling me you’re making it easier for me to get out of here?”
“No,” he says. “I’m making it easier for you to come back.”
It softens her for a second. She puts her stuff in the suitcase. He invites her again to stay for dinner. “You put in a full day’s work and maybe I’ll stay,” she says. Then she walks out.
He stays up late thinking about things—about Janine, about the suit and the timer on it—and before he knows it it’s nine in the morning and the snooze on his alarm clock’s been yelling at him for over an hour. Some cabbies have to drive when the company tells them to, but Ernie owns his own car so he drives when he wants. That’s part of the problem with Janine.
By the time he fell asleep, he’d managed to convince himself things weren’t so bad. He didn’t steal the suit from that kid. Right from the beginning he meant to give it back.
He just forgot. And things with Janine weren’t as bad as they could’ve been. She was pissed, sure, but she still had her ring on. She never did get pissed off the way Ernie does. She stores everything up, lets it build, and it takes just as long for her to bleed the pressure off. Ernie, he’s more the firecracker type. Short fuse, short burst, then back to peace and quiet.
But he figures she meant it when she said she’d stay for dinner. Too bad that’s not going to happen anymore. It’s too late to get a full day’s worth of fares and be home by dinnertime. He missed the morning rush and the Sox are on the road. But before he nodded off he got himself an idea about the suit. He told himself he wasn’t going to go through with it, but that was before he slept through the morning rush. Now the more he thinks about it, the more he figures there isn’t another way. Before he tries it, though, he’s got to try an experiment.
