Тим Пауэрс - Free Stories 2018

“See how it still glows?” She shrugged, pointing at the Chiata tendril chunk.

“Uh huh.” The young lady acted as if she didn’t want to touch the disgusting looking thing.

“I want you to grind it up in some green and red ink. And I want you to put four vertical tick marks with a diagonal fifth—one like keeping score—just under my left eye here. Then I want another set of five just like that beside it,” Dee explained.

“I um, I see. You know this stuff might wear off some day. I can add some nano fluorescent spheres to the ink so it will glow forever if you’d like. You really don’t even need this nasty alien thing in there,” the tattoo artist told her.

“The alien thing goes in. Keep that ink set aside for me and me alone. I’ll pay you whatever you need to do that.” Dee said. “I plan to be back. Often.”

“Here.” Rhondi passed the bottle back over to her. “Don’t eat the worm. Its mine.”

“We can always get another bottle,” Dee accepted it and killed a significant portion of what was left in the liter container.

“Jesus, you Marines are fucking nuts. You know the ink doesn’t take as well when you’re drunk?” The man working on Rhondi’s sensitive areas laughed, as he went over them again.

“Ooh-fuckin’-rah,” Rhondi grunted through the pain. Dee could see tears running down her cheeks, but at the same time her friend was laughing.

“What are these tick marks keeping score of?” The girl getting ready to work on Dee asked.

“Those fucking glowing green motherfuckers killed the man I love and they killed my big sister.” Dee swigged from the bottle until it was empty, sucking the worm at the bottom into her mouth. She bit down on it, tasting the gooey slime as it squirted from it without hesitation. “Each mark is for an alien I killed. Keep that ink ready, ’cause, I’m gonna kill every goddamned one of them.”

“And there’s a lot of them,” Rhondi added. “You’ll have to beat me to some of them, Major!”

“You sure you don’t want some pain meds, ma’am? I mean, right under the eye right there is gonna hurt.”

“Not as much as a tat up the crack of your ass!” Rhondi snorted.

“No, thanks. Me and pain, well, that’s all I’ve got left.” Dee tried but couldn’t keep the tears from forming in the corner of her eyes. She choked them back as best she could but they were coming out. “The tank is empty, except for the pain. I’ll just have to run on that for now.”

“I, uh, I am sorry for your loss,” was all the girl could manage to say.

Dee just nodded and laid her head back against the headrest of the tattoo chair while she waited. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a poster of a young punk guy with blue glowing eyes. She forced herself to focus on the writing. It was an advertisement for eye lens implants.

“Hey, can you get those to look like fire?” Dee asked.

In the small windowless room, the only sound was the hiss of static coming from a nearby speaker. It was late July and although the air conditioning at the Center was working heroically to fight off the heat, Walt Sinclair’s sweat-soaked shirt was sticking against his back as he listened to the scratchy words coming out of the gray metal speaker box—complete with NASA meatball logo—near the desk’s edge. He was trying to sit still in an old government-issued metal chair next to the desk, but it was hard to do. His legs had fallen into a nervous jerking game of their own accord, rising up and down, up and down, as the mission proceeded, as procedures were followed, as items on the checklist got ticked off.

He was in a small, windowless room at the Center, and for Christ’s sake, he wished he was out in the trenches, getting the visuals and direct mission feeds second by second, but his job this Sunday afternoon was to baby-sit a VIP visitor sitting near him, in a battered wheelchair, eyes closed, dozing during one of the most exciting days of Walt’s life He was an old man, and wore a cheap black suit, white shirt and skinny black necktie. On one of the lapels of his worn suit was an American flag pin. Save for bushy white eyebrows, he was bald, and age spots and freckles dusted the top of his head. His jowls were full and saggy, like the tendons holding them up had dissolved over the years. His name was Oscar Morrow and the Center’s personnel held him awe, for in addition to his NASA work, he had also spent years with that agency’s predecessor, NACA, the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics. In his worn and wrinkled hands, he carried a black ebony cane, like being in a wheelchair was just a temporary setback, and that he was ready for that day when he could miraculously walk again.

Walt had done a quick check on the old man’s background before meeting up with him, and found out that despite the wheelchair, he still maintained his pilot’s license Walt couldn’t imagine what kind of chicanery kept that license up-to-date, so the guy still had pull, even though—as his aunt would like to say—he looked like he belonged in God’s Waiting Room. His lips were pink and moist, and with the man’s eyes closed, Walt kept close look at his chest, to make sure it was rising and falling regularly. A hell of a thing, to have this visitor die here, on this day of days!

From the speaker on the desk came a burst of static, and voices:

“ Eagle , Houston. If you read, you’re go for powered descent. Over.”

A pause, and then another man’s voice, faint and hard to make out through the static.

“ Eagle , this is Columbia . Houston just gave you a go for powered descent.”

Oscar’s eyes slowly opened up. “What’s going on?” he asked, his voice dry, raspy, weak.

Walt’s legs were still trembling. “They just gave Eagle a go for powered descent.”

The old man nodded, looked about the tiny room. Stained green carpeting, bare white walls—save for two framed photographs of the Moon—and not much else, save for the desk, Walt’s chair, Oscar and his wheelchair.

As he did in other moments of stress, Walt played with his class ring, spinning it around his right hand ring finger. It was a class ring from M.I.T., where he had gotten his degrees in aeronautical engineering, and the affectionately called “brass rat” had soothed him over the years after leaving school, every time he faced stress, like today.

As a child he had grown up on the Oregon coast, and the Moon had fascinated and entranced him, pulling him to a career in aviation and space. Service in the Air Force had never panned out—claustrophobia, he couldn’t stand being in enclosed spaces!—but he had done the next best thing: If he couldn’t fly in space, at least he could write the procedures and create the designs to support those who did.

Like the old man before him, who had flown in lots of aircraft over the years, but whose age had barred him from space travel. In that way, Walt guessed the two of them were alike, although on opposite ends of the age scale. In the hours since he was introduced to him by his department boss—who had said “Treat him nice and give him anything he wants… he doesn’t look it but under those wrinkles, he’s an honest to God steely-eyed missile man”—Walt had begun to like Oscar. Oh, he dozed in and out, he regularly passed gas—which in this small room was becoming quite pungent—but the stories he told…

If only the old man had asked to be out in the trenches!

Oscar shifted his cane about. “Keep an ear open, son, you bet things are gonna start moving fast.”

Walt managed to find his voice. “Thanks, I will.”

The old man stared straight at him, and his weak voice changed, becoming that of a teacher, an instructor, someone who had done and seen it all. “You getting excited?”