“Gently,” he said as he handed over the sheet. “It’s paper. Real paper.”
Angela took it and handled it almost reverently. Once again, she looked around the large cavern at the many inscribed marble columns, flashing her light into every dark corner.
“Paper? That dead wood stuff you told me about? Made from trees?”
Smith nodded. “It’s true. We’ve found the ancient lost library of New Earth. And maybe, just maybe, in these volumes we’ll find the final clue that will lead us to the location of the original human home world.”
—Abraham Beard,
The day after my diagnosis, Emma comes to visit me at home. When she rings the bell, I get up from my seat in the living room, where I’ve been watching
A cold wind blasts me as I creak open the door. I shiver momentarily as Emma strides past me.
As I shut the door, she opens the hall closet and lets her hands dance upon the hangers. She ignores the empty wooden ones and selects a blue plastic one.
“It’s the middle of the day and you’re still in your bathrobe?” she asks me as she slips off her overcoat.
“I’m retired and it’s the weekend,” I say. “Why should I get dressed up?”
“Because your only daughter is coming to visit? Oh, never mind.” She hangs up her coat.
“Where’s Frank and the kids?” I ask her.
She sniffs. “They decided to stay at home.”
The kids decided to stay at home. My grandchildren, Zachary and Kenneth. Or Zach and Ken, as Emma told me they prefer to be called. I haven’t seen them in months. “They didn’t feel like schlepping out to Queens?”
“It’s too cold.”
“So why the visit?”
Emma purses her lips and glances at the floor. “I thought it would be nice to see you.”
I know there must be more to it than that, but I don’t press it. Emma will tell me in her own sweet time. “Are you hungry?” I ask as we walk to the living room. “Do you want something to eat?”
She smiles. “What are you going to offer this time? A red pepper? A clementine?”
As it so happens, the refrigerator crisper holds many peppers and clementines, but I refuse to give Emma the satisfaction. “I thought you might want some ice cream.”
“Ice cream?” she asks with bemusement. “Sure, I’d love some ice cream. Where is it?”
“It’s in the freezer,” I tell her, although it should be obvious. Where else does one keep ice cream?
The first thing Larry noticed was the cold. It filled the core of his being, then slowly began to recede as tendrils of warmth entered his body.
Then he noticed a faint white light blinking in the distance. Either the light became larger or it moved closer, and it continued to pulsate in a regular rhythm.
And finally he heard a hiss, the sound of air leaking quickly across a barrier. He tried to breathe and felt as if his lungs were filled with liquid. He tried again—
—when suddenly a door swung open, and Larry realized that he was floating vertically in a round glass chamber. The gelatinous liquid surrounding him quickly drained, and Larry fell into the arms of two men in silver jumpsuits.
“Easy now,” the taller one said. “Your muscles need time to adjust.”
Larry shook off their support. “I’m fine,” he croaked. He coughed up some fluid and spoke again. “I don’t need any help.”
“If you say so,” the taller man said.
“I do, indeed,” Larry answered. He stretched out of his stoop, and although his legs felt like they would give way, he refused to give these strangers the satisfaction of seeing him fall.
“Where am I? What’s going on?” he asked.
“All in due time,” the shorter man said in a thin, reedy voice.
Larry turned to stare at him. “I am Larry Garner, the richest man on Earth, and I demand you tell me what’s going on, now!”
The two men looked at each other, and the shorter one shrugged. “Usually, we give people more time to adjust, but if you insist—”
“I do!”
“You’re in the future,” the man said. “It’s two thousand years since you died.”
Larry fainted.
—Abraham Beard,
“Earth to Dad? Hello? Are you there?”
Emma is waving a hand in front of my face.
“Sorry,” I say. “I was just thinking. My mind—”
“Was elsewhen. Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”
I realize that we are sitting in the dining room and that Emma has scooped two bowls of ice cream, one for each of us. I pick up my spoon and take a bite. It’s butter pecan.
I hate butter pecan, but I bought some for when Zach and Ken were last here.
The ice cream is very badly freezer-burned. It’s so cold against my tongue that it hurts. I put the spoon down into the bowl and watch Emma eat her ice cream.
“You can take the rest of it when you leave,” I say. “The kids might enjoy it.”
Emma gives me a half-smile. “Even with the cold outside, it’ll probably still melt before I get it home.”
“Oh,” I say.
We sit in silence for a few moments, the only sound the tick of the analog clock in the other room, the clock my wife, Sheila, bought when we got married, the clock that hangs above the flatscreen television set that Emma and Frank gave me for my last birthday.
“So, how are things?”
“Things are good.”
“The kids doing well at school?”
“Yeah.” Emma smiles. “Zach did a PowerPoint presentation on blogging for one of his teachers.”
I nod and try to keep my face neutral, but Emma sees right through me. “You disapprove?”
“It’s not that,” I say. “It’s just—”
“I know what it is. Rant number twenty-three.”
“I’m not that predictable.”
She crosses her arms. “Fine. Then what were you thinking?”
I pause for a moment, but she doesn’t sound sarcastic so I say, “When I was growing up, the future seemed so full of possibilities.”
“We have possibilities, Dad.”
I shake my head. “We’ve turned inward. All of us have. We used to dream of a world as big as the sky. Now we’re all hunched over our tiny screens.”
Emma rolls her eyes. “Like I said, rant number twenty-three. Within three sentences, you’re going from the Internet to the lack of a manned space program again.”
“You don’t think it’s a problem?”
“It’s just that I’ve heard it before.”
“The more true something is, the more it bears repeating.”
“Nothing bears repeating if you can’t do anything about it.” She sighs. “I mean, seriously, what did you ever expect me to do at the age of twelve when you first warned me about the eventual heat-death of the universe?”
The starship
