Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition

by Rich Horton

  A couple of days later she called me on the phone. The operator told her to deposit $1.15. I heard the ching and chime of coins in the pay phone.

  "Franklin,” said Ethel.

  She never called me by my right name; I was Bubba to everyone in the family.

  "Yes, Sis, what is it?"

  "I think we had a little breakthrough here. We won't know til tomorrow. I want you to know I love you."

  "What the hell you talkin’ about?"

  "I'll let you know,” she said.

  Then she hung up.

  * * * *

  The next day was my usual Wednesday, which meant I wouldn't get any sleep. I'd gotten to bed the night before at 2 A.M. I was in class by 7 A.M. and had three classes and lab scattered across the day. At 6 P.M. I drove to the regional newspaper plant that printed all the suburban dailies. I was a linotype operator at minimum wage. The real newspaper that owned all the suburban ones was a union shop and the guys there made $3.25 an hour in l968 dollars. I worked a twelve-hour shift (or a little less if we got all the type set early) three nights a week, Mon.-Wed.-Fri. That way, not only did you work for $1.25 an hour, they didn't owe you for overtime unless you pulled more than a sixteen-hour shift one night—and nobody ever did.

  Linotypes were mechanical marvels—so much so that Mergenthaler, who finally perfected it, went slap-dab crazy before he died. It's like being in a room of mechanical monsters who spit out hot pieces of lead (and sometimes hot lead itself all over you—before they do that, they make a distinctive noise and you've got a second and a half to get ten feet away; it's called a backspill).

  Once all linotype was set by hand, by the operators. By the time I came along, they had typists set copy on a tape machine. What came out there was perforated tape, brought into the linotype room in big, curling strands. The operator—me—put the front end of the tape into a reader-box built onto the keyboard, and the linotype clicked away like magic. The keys depressed, lines of type-mold keys fell into place from a big magazine above the keyboard; they were lifted up and moved over to the molder against the pot of hot lead; the line was cast, an arm came down, lifted the letter matrices up, another rod pushed them over onto an endless spiraled rod, and they fell back into the typecase when the side of the matrix equaled the space on the typecase, and the process started all over. If the tape code was wrong and a line went too long, you got either type matrices flying everywhere as the line was lifted to the molder, or it went over and you got a backspill and hot lead flew across the room.

  Then you had to turn off the reader, take off the galley where the slugs of hot type came off to cool, open up the front of the machine, clean all the lead off with a wire brush, put it back together, and start the tape reader back up. When the whole galley was set and cool, you pulled a proof on a small rotary press and sent it back to the typists, where corrections would come back on shorter and shorter pieces of paper tape. You kept setting and inserting the corrections and throwing away the bad slugs until the galley was okayed; then you pulled a copy of the galley and sent it up to the composing room where they laid out the page of corrected galley, shot a page on a plate camera, and made a steel plate from that; that was put on the web press and the paper was run off and sent out to newsboys all over three counties.

  It was a noisy, nasty twelve-hour hell with the possibility of being hit in the face with molten lead or asphyxiating when, in your copious free time, you took old dead galleys and incorrect slugs back to the lead smelter to melt down and then ladled out molten lead into pig-iron molds which, when cooled down, you took and hung by the hole in one end to the chain above the pot on each linotype—besides doing everything else it did, the machine lowered the lead pigs into the pots by a ratchet gear each time it set a line. No wonder Mergenthaler went mad.

  I did all that twelve hours a night three nights a week for five years, besides college. There were five linotypes in the place, including one that Mergenthaler himself must have made around 1880, and usually three of them were down at a time with backspills or other problems.

  Besides that, there were the practical jokers. Your first day on the job you were always sent for the type-stretcher, all over the printing plant. “Hell, I don't know who had that last!” they'd say. “Check the composing room.” Then some night the phone would ring in the linotype room; you'd go to answer it and get an earful of printers’ ink, about the consistency of axle grease. Someone had slathered a big gob on the earpiece and called you from somewhere else in the plant. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

  If you'd really pissed someone off (it never happened to me), they'd wait for a hot day and go out and fill all four of your hubcaps with fresh shrimp. It would take two or three days before they'd really stink; you'd check everywhere in the car but the hubcaps; finally something brown would start running from them and you'd figure it out. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

  That night I started to feel jumpy. Usually I was philosophical: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. Nothing was going on but the usual hot, repetitious drudgery. Something felt wrong. My head didn't exactly hurt, but I knew it was there. Things took on a distancing effect—I would recognize that from dope, later on. But there was no goofer dust in my life then. Then I noticed everybody else was moving and talking faster than normal. I looked at the clock with the big sweep second-hand outside the linotype room. It had slowed to a crawl.

  I grabbed onto the bed of the cold iron proof-press and held on to it. Later, when I turned fifty or so, I was in a couple of earthquakes on the West Coast, but they were nothing compared to what I was feeling at that moment.

  One of the tape compositor ladies, a blur, stopped in front of me and chirped out “Doyoufeelallright, Frank?"

  "Justa headacheI'llbeokay,” I twittered back.

  I looked at the clock again.

  The sweep-hand stopped. I looked back into the linotype room.

  People moved around like John Paul Stapp on the Sonic Wind rocket sled.

  I looked at the clock again. The second hand moved backward.

  And then the world blurred all out of focus and part of me left the clanging clattering linotypes behind.

  * * * *

  I looked around the part of town I could see. (What was I doing downtown? Wasn't I at work?) The place looked like it did around 1962. The carpet shop was still in business—it had failed a few months before JFK was shot. Hamburgers were still four for a dollar on the menus outside the cafes. The theater was showing Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus and The Manster, which was a 1962 double feature. Hosey the usher was leaving in his ‘58 Chevy; he quit working at the theater in 1964, I knew. I had a feeling that if I walked one block north and four blocks west I could look in the window of a house and see myself reading a book or doing homework. I sure didn't want to do that.

  Then the plant manager was in front of me. “Hey! You've got a backspill on #5, that crappy old bastard, and #3's quit reading tape."

  "Sorry,” I said. “I just got a splitting headache for a minute. Got any aspirin?” I asked, taking the galley off #5.

  "Go ask one of the women who's having her period,” he said. “I just took all the aspirin in the place. The publisher's all over my ass this week. Why, I don't know. I robbed the first-aid kit: don't go there."

  "That would have been my next stop,” I said. I brushed a cooled line of lead off the keyboard and from the seat and up the back of the caster chair in front of the linotype. I closed the machine back up and started it up and went over and pounded on the reader box of #3. It chattered away.

  For a while I was too busy to think about what had happened.

  * * * *

  "Feeling a little weird?” asked my sister, this time on a regular phone.

  "What the hell happened?"

  "Talk to this man,” she said.

  She put on some professor whose name I didn't catch.

  He asked me some questions. I told him the answers. He said he was sending a questionnaire. My sister came back on.

  "I
think they think I gave you a bad dream two thousand miles away,” she said. “That would be a big-cheese deal to them."

  "What do you think?” I asked. “I saw Hosey."

  "Either way, you would have done that,” she said.

  "What do you mean, either way? Why are you involving me? Is this fun?"

  "Because,” she said, “you're my brother and I love you."

  "Yeah, well...” I said. “Why don't you mess with someone you don't like? Who's that guy who left you in Grand Prairie to walk home at 5 A.M.?"

  "I killed him with a mental lightning bolt yesterday,” she said. Then, “Just kidding.

  "Well, I'm glad you're just kidding, because I just shit my pants. I don't want to ever feel like I did last night, again, ever. It was creepy."

  "Of course it was creepy,” she said. “We're working at the frontiers of science here."

  "Are you on the frontiers of science there,” I asked, “or..."

  She finished the sentence with me: “...are we just pulling our puds?” She laughed. “I don't have a clue. They're trying to figure out how to do this scientifically. They may have to fly you in."

  "No, thanks!” I said. “I've got a life to live. I'm actually dating a real-live girl. I'm also working myself to death. I don't have time for hot dates with Ouija boards, or whatever you're doing there. Include me out."

  She laughed again. “We'll see."

  "No you won't! Don't do this to me. I'm..."

  There was a dial tone.

  * * * *

  So the second time I knew what was happening. I was at home. I felt the distancing effect; the speeding up of everything around, except the kitchen clock. It was the kind where parts of numbers flipped down, an analog readout. It slowed to a crawl. The thin metal strips the numbers were painted on took a real long time before they flipped down.

  A bird rocketed through the yard. The neighbor's dog was a beige blur. I could barely move. My stomach churned like when I was on the Mad Octopus at the Texas State Fair. The clock hung between 10:29 and 10:30 A.M. Then it was 10:29. 10:28. 10:27. Then the readout turned into a high whining flutter.

  * * * *

  This time everything was bigger. Don't ask me why. I was at my favorite drugstore, the one next to the theater. The drugstore was at the corner of Division and Center Street. I glanced at a newspaper. June 17, 1956. If memory serves, I would have been over in Alabama at the time, so I wouldn't be running into myself. I reached in my pocket and looked at my change. Half of it hadn't been minted yet. (How was that possible?) The guy at the register ignored me—he'd seen me a million times, and I wasn't one of the kids he had to give the Hairy Eyeball to. When I came in, I came to buy.

  I looked at the funny book rack. Everything except the Dell Comics had the Comics Code Seal on them, which meant they'd go to Nice Heaven. No zombies, no monsters, no blood, no Blackhawks fighting the Commies, who used stuff that melts tanks, people—everything but wood. No vampires “saaaaking your blaaad.” Dullsville. I picked up a Mad magazine, which was no longer a comic book, so it wouldn't be under the Comics Code, but had turned into a 25—What, me cheap?—magazine. It had a Kelly Freas cover of Alfred E. Neuman.

  I fished out a 1952 quarter and put it down by the register. There wasn't any sales tax in Texas yet. Fifty years later, we would be paying more than New York City.

  I looked at the theater marquee when I stepped outside. Bottom of the Bottle and Bandido—one with Joseph Cotten and Richard Egan, the other with Glenn Ford and Gilbert Roland. I'd seen them later, bored by the first except for a storm scene, and liked the second because there were lots of explosions and Browning .50 caliber machine guns. Nothing for me there.

  I walked down toward Main Street.

  There was a swooping sensation and a flutter of light and I was back home.

  The analog readout on the clock clicked to 10:30 A.M.

  * * * *

  I went to the coin shop. I went to my doctor's office. I went to a couple of other places. I actually had to lie a couple of times, and I used one friendship badly, only they didn't know, but I did.

  Then I found the second letter my sister had sent me from North Carolina and got the phone number of the lab. I called it the next morning. It took awhile, but they finally got Ethel to the phone.

  "Feeling okay?” she asked.

  "Hell no,” I said. “I'm not having any fun. At least let me have fun. Two days from now give me an hallucination about Alabama. In the summer. I want to at least see if the fishing is as good as I remember it."

  "So it is written,” she said, imitating Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments, “so it shall be done."

  I knew it really didn't matter, but I kept my old fiberglass spinning rod, with its Johnson Century spinning reel, and my old My Buddy tackle box as near me as I could the next two days. Inside the tackle box with all the other crap were three new double-hook rigged rubber eels, cheap as piss in 1969, but they cost $1.00 each in 1950s money when they'd first come out.

  * * * *

  This time I was almost ready for it and didn't panic when the thing came on. I rode it out like the log flume ride out at Six Flags Over Texas, and when the clock outside the college classroom started jumping backward, I didn't even get woozy. I closed my eyes and made the jump myself.

  I was at the Big Pond and had made a cast. A two-pound bass had taken the rubber eel. The Big Pond was even bigger than I remembered (although I knew it was only four acres). I got the bass in and put it on a stringer with its eleven big clamps and swivels between each clamp on the chain. I put the bass out about two feet in the water and put the clamp on the end of the stringer around a willow root.

  Then I cast again, and the biggest bass I had ever had took it. There was a swirl in the water the size of a #2 washtub and I set the hook.

  I had him on for maybe thirty seconds. He jumped in the shallow water as I reeled. He must have weighed ten pounds. When he came down there was a splash like a cow had fallen into the pond.

  Then the rubber eel came sailing lazily out of the middle of the commotion, and the line went slack in a backflowing arc. It (probably she) had thrown the hook.

  There was a big V-wake heading for deeper water when the bass realized it was free.

  I was pissed off at myself. I picked up the stringer with the two-pound bass (which now didn't look as large as it had five minutes ago ) and my tackle box and started off over the hill back toward my grandparents’ house.

  I walked through the back gate, with its plowshare counterweight on the chain that kept it closed. I took the fish off the stringer and eased it into the seventy-five gallon rainbarrel, where it started to swim along with a catfish my uncle had caught at the Little Pond yesterday. In the summer, there was usually a fish fry every Friday. We got serious about fishing on Thursdays. By Friday there would be fifteen or twenty fish in the barrel, from small bluegills to a few crappie to a bunch of bass and catfish. On Fridays my uncle would get off early, start cleaning fish, heating up a cast-iron pot full of lard over a charcoal fire and making up batter for the fish and hush puppies. Then, after my grandfather came in, ten or eleven of us would eat until we fell over.

  Later the cooled fish grease would be used to make dogbread for my grandfather's hounds. You didn't waste much in Alabama in those days.

  I washed my hands off at the outside faucet and went through the long hall from the back door, being quiet, as the only sound in the house was of SuZan, the black lady who cooked for my grandmother, starting to make lunch. I looked into the front room and saw my grandmother sleeping on the main bed.

  I went out onto the verandah. I'd taken stuff out of the tackle box in the back hall, when I'd leaned my fishing rod up against a bureau, where I kept it ready to go all summer.

  I was eating from a box of Domino® sugar cubes when I came out. My sister was in one of the Adirondack-type wooden chairs, reading a Katy Keene comic book; the kind where the girl readers sent in drawings of dresses and sunsuits
they'd designed for Katy. The artist redrew them when they chose yours for a story, and they ran your name and address printed beside it so other Katy Keene fans could write you. (Few people know it, but that's how the internet started.)

  She must have been five or six—before she got sick. She was like a sparkle of light in a dark world.

  "Back already?” she asked. “Quitter."

  "I lost the biggest fish of my life,” I said. “I tried to horse it in. I should have let it horse me but kept control, as the great A.J. McClane says in Field and Stream,” I said. “I am truly disappointed in my fishing abilities for the first time in a long time."

  "Papaw'll whip your ass if he finds out you lost that big fish he's been trying to catch,” she said. “He would have gone in after it, if he ever had it on.” He would have, too.

  "Yeah, he's a cane-pole fisherman, the best there ever was, but it was too shallow there for him to get his minnow in there with a pole. It was by that old stump in the shallow end.” Then I held up the sugar-cube box.

  "Look what I found,” I said.

  "Where'd you get those?"

  "In the old chiffarobe."

  "SuZan'll beat your butt if she finds you filchin’ sugar from her kitchen."

  "Probably some of Aunt Noni's for her tea. She probably bought it during the Coolidge Administration and forgot about it.” Aunt Noni was the only person I knew in Alabama who drank only one cup of coffee in the morning, and then drank only tea, iced or hot, the rest of the day.

  "Gimme some,” said Ethel.

  "What's the magic word?"

  "Please and thank you."

  I moved the box so she took the ones I wanted her to. She made a face. “God, that stuff is old,” she said.

  "I told you they was,” I said.

  "Gimme more. Please,” she said. “Those are better.” Then: “I've read this Katy Keene about to death. Wanna play croquet til you get up your nerve to go back and try to catch that fish before Papaw gets home?"

  "Sure,” I said. “But that fish will have a sore jaw til tomorrow. He'll be real careful what he bites the rest of the day. I won't be able to tempt him again until tomorrow."