Asimov's SF, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Buds swelled and the fur on the pussy willows

  near the fence line was warm to the touch.

  In April the rangy smell of life

  assailed my nostrils. Yellow-eyed

  crocuses appeared and old burrs

  clawed at my socks as I walked

  the fields south of the house.

  The deer are avoiding my yard this year;

  Perhaps the new fence can wait.

  Mid-April when I tilled the beds,

  the smell of the earth made my heart race,

  and potato sets regarded me with clear-eyed,

  knowing looks as I planted them in hills.

  “Mind your own business,” I said,

  and when the lilac leaves were tiny ears,

  I caressed their tips secretly, listening, listening.

  Yesterday, when I finished the planting, I saw

  how the lilac buds hung heavy, near bursting

  on the twigs. In the night I heard scratching

  at my window as I tossed and turned,

  my mind alive, my joints aching from effort.

  It is Mary, the air is heavy with pollen.

  The hot animal breath of spring engulfs me.

  I am old. The moon is full. Tonight I'll sleep

  on the screen porch and wait for what will come.

  —Sandra Lindow

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: DREADNOUGHT NEPTUNE

  by Anna Tambour

  Anna Tambour tells us she lives in a valley in Australia that is “sometimes too popular with yee-hawing helicopterists.” Recent publications to include her stories are Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and the anthologies Lovecraft Unbound, Paper Cities, Sky Whales and Other Wonders, Interfictions, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her first tale for us is a deceptively gentle Bradburyesque story that takes a bittersweet look at a man's desperate attempt to share the wonders of his imagination with his young son.

  Molecules of Old Spice, bundt cake, hot wool, sauerkraut, machine oil, beaver dusted with snow, and of unadorned excitement melded and rose to the ceiling of the round-shouldered compartment, only to swirl silently back upon the masses. Translucent windows turned into mirrors as night fell, brightened the surgical light within.

  “Dreadnought Neptune,” Eugene Thomas said, just loud enough.

  His father Jules stifled a shiver of guilt. I should have stopped, bought him a candy bar or those Red Hots he likes.

  Oh yeah, you big sap? And why didn't you run home for his toothbrush? Like everyone here, they came as they were, carrying what they had. It's hard on a young boy.

  He bent his neck down, examined the naked, tender place on his son's head where the whirl exposed soft white. Myself at his age? Eat? His heart bumped. He heard it. They're so much younger than we were.

  “Dreadnought Neptune,” Eugene repeated. Jules regarded him soberly. The boy was speaking to himself. He doesn't feel it. Undeveloped?

  “Hm,” said Eugene. “Hm hm hm.”

  “Hm,” Jules chuckled. Quit your Agnessing.

  He would have liked to take out his handkerchief and mop his head, take off his hat—but his elbows were pinned by the crowd. “Crowd” doesn't quite describe the people packed into the little metal craft. “Crush” was more like it.

  * * * *

  The Thomases had been lucky. When Jules lowered his son from his shoulders and stepped into the portway, he glanced back at the writhing snake of a crowd, the end blurred by scuffles loud as a barroom brawl.

  An hour it had been since then, Jules estimated. He didn't have a watch at the moment, his habit of overwinding being a “trial on the family.” The past. He shoved that niggle out of his mind. Six hours is nothing of a wait, for this.

  Inside here now, the heat—tremendous—only to be expected. A faint whirr stirred the air, but with perhaps seventy people standing in a space little larger than a broom closet, and everyone dressed like polar bears, it being February, sweat slicked every face.

  There were a few families here, but no babies. Two boys’ high voices rose at times, like two wasps, but they were an exception. Mostly, there was so much silence that the few remarks people made to each other cut into only the cottony muffle of overdressed people breathing.

  A little growl, and then a muffled pop sounded next to Jules, and then the pop's smell wafted up.

  Eugene looked up at his father, mortified.

  Jules cringed inwardly, but only for a moment. “The price we pay, son,” he whispered. “Too little time to rig up suits.” Could a suit have been rigged? he thought.

  “You mean?”

  “We'll be there in a jiff,” Jules said. “And we'll fill up that gas tank,” he joked, as he always had when Eugene's stomach let it be known that the boy needed food. But Jules curled his shoulders inward, awaiting the outraged yell, or a punch in the kidneys.

  At Jules’ reassurance, Eugene's digestion lost all modesty, erupting loudly and more aromatically than that first gentle waft. But oddly enough, a few other digestions replied, and then people began, in little jerks and blusters, to talk to each other. Jules looked around and just in time, grabbed his lower lip in his teeth. This was no bridge night or church social. This is not the time to break the social ice, let alone let loose with a lotta fool talk. He dropped his eyes. Live these momentous moments. Listen to the future as it becomes the now, so unknown, and yet so familiar.

  Eugene smiled up at him, and his heart jumped with pain. My smile at the same age. My son. My stars, and the cow jumping over the moon. Eugene and me, riding the cow together. And rockets soaring and comets flying across the skies, their tresses snapping in the eyes of the galaxy watchers, daring all who dare to fly across the face of the heavens.

  Jules gazed at his son and his own years dropped away. He felt that electric, incurably impatient joy of being seven again. His eyes stung with awkward tears that he couldn't wipe away, but just then maturity stepped in, smearing the smile on his face, crooked as a blind man's peanut butter sandwich. Eugene is me at seven all right, with—nothing to blame the boy for—a dash of Agnes.

  He squeezed his son's hand. Nobody else needed, he thought powerfully just then, in a way that he hadn't before. No one complaining, warning, hesitating, nagging, questioning. No Agnessing.

  The flurry of socializing died down, everyone nursing their own thoughts.

  Jules was reminded of all the vegetables—spinach, rutabaga, broccoli—Agnes made his son eat. It's worth the trip just to get away from broccoli. The smell in the compartment was now thick enough to slice, but amazingly, there was no complaining, no whining at the crush; not like there'd be, say, waiting for a picture show, which just goes to show, Jules nodded, what even a boy's capable of when he hops into his dream and is only waiting for Opportunity to stomp on the gas.

  A cough cut the air, a couple of sighs and a grunt, and then there was silence again. Eugene lifted his face to Jules and earned a reassuring wink, and boy and father played a game of silent squeeze-rhythm, their clasped hands riffing jazz tunes, syncopating time, while time slipped along in front of Jules’ dreamy eyes; but to Eugene, didn't pass.

  * * * *

  “How long more d'you think it'll be?” Eugene asked.

  “Can't tell, son.” Jules considered that it might be hours yet, perhaps timed by an aural emanation, a Neptunian countdown now being received somewhere in the shiny works, the bug-shaped silver-shimmering craft warming up its tubes to leave. Listening, he could hear a faint wheezing.

  “In its own good time, that I know,” he reassured his son.

  “Here, liddle boy,” a big man beside Jules said. He pushed a small package into Jules’ free hand. “For your son,” the man smiled. “Broughd id in case dere's any brats, bud dere ain't. He's a nice boy, so's he mighd as well ab a chew.”

  “We're much obliged,” Jules said, passing the packet to Eugene's sweaty grasp.

  �
�Gee, thanks!” said the boy. “I wonder if it'll still have taste when we land.”

  “The name's Thomas,” said Jules.

  “Jodes. Jay oh ed ee ess.”

  Jules was momentarily sickened by the harsh pink smell of bubble gum layered over everything else.

  “Dond mean do be nosy,” Jones said. “Bud dond you hab a wife or sum'n back home?”

  Jules’ face contorted momentarily, then smoothed. “Visiting her mother.”

  “Sorry,” Jones said.

  Eugene twisted around so he could look up at Jones. “I'm not, Mister Jones. What mom would let me go on this?”

  Sure enough, the few women here didn't look like they possessed a glove between them, nor a wish to have a nice day at home away from unhealthy excitement, nor—from the moment she spotted this ship—did any of these women look like she would remember if she had a little boy.

  “Why're you here?” Jules Thomas asked.

  “All year climad control. No crowds.”

  “You mean that's not one doozy of a cold?” Jules asked, “And crowds?”

  “Wish id were. Adenoids. And cornds.”

  “Sorry to hear.” Jules shuffled his feet so that there was no chance of stepping on the man's toes.

  “Graed nambe, ain'd id?” Jones commented.

  Jules had been thinking almost that very thought, and found himself faintly annoyed to have it brought up by this unhealthy character with the big red nose.

  Perhaps his son felt the same, for just then, Jules felt his hand squeezed. He just wanted to be left alone to live to the full this once-in-a-lifetime experience: the Waiting Period Before Embarkation.

  Plenty of people might think they had the guts to do it, and the number of people trying to get in was in the hundreds. But in a city as big as Chicago, it was still a lot less than the turnout for a ball game, or the crowd that rubbernecked the Hula Hoop Derby that made Page One of the Tribune. Sure, you had to have sticktoitiveness to wiggle your way to Hula Stardom, but after it's over, what's it add up to? A fancy banana split and a night of bad-dream indigestion.

  But this! This ain't no ball game, Jules said to himself, feeling so free, he talked to himself like that coarse man would, the one with the adenoids. Everyone had just dropped their life fast as a handful of hot tar. Pile in! Take off ! So long, Earth! Jules laughed to himself, thinking of front pages to come.

  The day had boded well. Taking Eugene to the toyshop on Saturday afternoon had been Jules’ plan all week. The rocket kit in the window was something they would have to take out of town to fire off, but then that would be yet another day of excitement.

  It was when they turned the corner of Elm Street the block before the toyshop that they saw the shiny bug-shaped vehicle. It didn't have recognizable wheels—just a shimmer down below.

  “What the—” Jules mumbled.

  “It's the Dreadnought Neptune, Mister Thomas!” a splotchy boy said, running away from the thing toward the Thomases. “I've got to tell the folks.”

  Jules grabbed, but the gangling boy slipped through easy as a drop of mercury. “No time!”

  Jules took Eugene's dry hand in his clammy paw and ran two steps—like dragging a fire hydrant.

  “Dad. Dreadnought Neptune?”

  “The ship to take us, Eugene. There's no time. You heard George.”

  He jerked Eugene loose and they ran, him a shamble of short legs and heavy coat, the boy skittering but no longer a drag.

  “That proves it,” Jules said. There, in the midst of the human ants swarming by the entrance to the craft, was old Mr. Schlumpfer, without his hat. With George gone and Mr. Schlumpfer there by the craft, there was no one left at the toy store on Saturday afternoon, its busiest time of the week.

  “It's the Dreadnought Neptune, all right.” He knelt and put his hand on his son's seven-year-old shoulders.

  “Want to rocket, son?”

  Eugene's face at that moment reminded Jules so much of his own, inside and out.

  “There won't be any trees there?” Eugene asked.

  “Hard to tell.”

  Eugene picked a scab off his knuckle and ate it. “I suppose it depends on what they've prepared for us.”

  Jules looked at Eugene and thought that he had not considered that far. His son was just that little bit different. Suddenly Jules could not think of a grown man he would want more as a companion.

  “Guess we'll find out what they've prepared—”

  “When we find out,” Eugene finished—the end to a favorite bedtime story—when the boy was two.

  Jules was shaken, he didn't know why. So what? “There's no time, you know,” he said, maybe a bit portentously.

  “George said,” Eugene said.

  “And Mom?” Jules kept himself still, slowed his words. “There's no time for her. We don't have to go.”

  Eugene's eyes were so steady that for a moment, it seemed as if he couldn't blink. “No,” he said.

  Jules swept Eugene up onto his shoulders and pushed their way into the front of the most crowded mass of men and boys. Mr. Schlumpfer was working his way to the door at a remarkable rate for a little old man. Jules was just wondering how, when he saw a man jerk away from Schlumpfer with a little cry. Well, well! And here I thought they were party tricks. He wished he had thought to carry such a party trick for eventualities.. Gently but ever so insistently, he pushed a smaller man to the side.

  Eugene wiggled. “Hello, Mr. Schlumpfer!” His feet beat a tattoo on Jules’ chest “Mister Schlumpfer's coming, too!” but the old man was busy.

  “Steady, first mate!” Jules ordered. “We'll meet him on the other side.”

  All around, “Dreadnought Neptune” were the only words you could hear distinctly, but those words positively hummed.

  In his pockets, Jules carried five dollars and fifty cents, a half-full pouch of tobacco, a comfortably battered briar pipe, a half-full box of matches, and a power-ten loupe. He suddenly wished he had brought his nail clipper.

  * * * *

  Now, when it must be at least six pm, just as Jules’ knees were beginning to say There's no place like home, Eugene squeezed his hand. Jules had thought Eugene had been sleeping against him, standing up, but maybe not, because the boy's voice had an edge to it.

  “Dad,” he whined. “Did you see any sign that said ‘Dreadnought Neptune'?”

  “No, Eugene,” Jules said, surprised to hear the snappishness in his voice.

  “Can you hear that pounding, Dad?”

  “Yes, Genie.” Jules was careful to modulate his voice. It was a long wait for these soft boys of today. “But don't you remember? People have been pounding the outside to get in almost since the doors closed.”

  “I saw id,” Jones said, now awake. He had spent the past interminably long time snoring against Jules’ shoulder.

  “What?” Eugene asked.

  “The name.”

  “See?” Jules craned his neck to smile down at his son, then turned to Jones. “I was too busy getting us through the crowd.”

  “Dee ded,” Jones said.

  Eugene giggled. “What?”

  Jones looked like he was having second thoughts about the boy. “Indishuls,” he snapped.

  “Initials, Eugene,” Jules chided. “Dee En. Be sharp.”

  “But Dad!”

  “Hmmm?” Jules growled.

  “I'm not smart alecking.” The boy's eyes glittered. “Dee En could stand for anything. Did you see the name?”

  “No, son, but George—”

  “And Mister Schlumpfer.” Eugene interrupted. “I know.”

  The “I know” sounded just like Agnes. Jules wished he could slam the door to his study and light his pipe. “Yes, Eugene,” he managed to squeeze out from between his teeth. “So?”

  “And us, Dad. We're here.”

  “And me,” Jones added.

  “And me,” said a man none of them could see, but it sounded like close behind.

  As if a switch was f
licked, the low decibel level of conversation, mumbles, and grumbles suddenly increased, and began to spike.

  “Deadbeat nincompoops!” yelled a teenage boy.

  “Dratted nonesuchers,” an Englishman drawled.

  Laughter broke out, amidst a flurry of deep-voiced, but stoic grumbles.

  “Taking its own sweet time taking off, isn't it?”

  “Least that proves this train ain't run by Mussolini!”

  The guffaws shook the craft so much that a high-pitched voice needed to add a two-finger-in-the-mouth whistle to be heard:

  “There's something scratched here!”

  “Give him room,” a deeper voice commanded. “He's got to bend.”

  The crowd scrunched till heads and shoulders looked awfully mixed up.

  “Deadlock Neptunium!” a reedy voice rang out.

  “Neptunium, neptunium. What the hell?”

  “Is it Russian?”

  “Don't be crackers!”

  “Did he say Communist?”

  “Shud! Up!” boomed a voice that sounded experienced, or maybe just fed up with the wait.

  A moment of silence pervaded the atmosphere. And then a laugh that made Jules’ hair creep.

  “It's elementary, Watson,” chuckled the laugher with a polyester-English accent.

  “Nep-Tun-ium—” a woman's voice rang out, as if everyone should have known.

  “The first synthetic transuranium element of the actinide series discovered,” said the man who'd done the stagy Holmes bit, in a weary tone that didn't sound convincing. “The isotope was produced by McMillan and Abelson—”

  “—in 1940 at Berkeley, California,” the woman who'd said Nep-Tun-ium cut in.

  “—as the result of bombarding uranium with cyclotron-produced neutrons,” the man finished in a flurry so fast that he sounded, this time, pure American. And then he drawled, “Hi, Maud.”

  “Hi, Frank. What you doing here?”

  “Here?”

  “Of course not here. Chicago.”

  “A different nest.”

  “A fine nest you've made for yourself,” Maud laughed, meanly.

  “Speak for yourself, Maud. Netherby stole your work, too?”

  “Excuse my French,” an older man interrupted. “But hell if we care about your Netherby. Cut us in to your know, why don't you?”