Thirty Days Later: Steaming Forward: 30 Adventures in Time Read online

  Ceilings in the Governor’s Mansion were thirteen feet tall. Doorways were ten feet high. Bill, at nine-two, didn’t need to worry about ducking or bashing his head every time he went through one. Charlie “Bigfoot” Lewis, the second Governor of Jefferson — and the one who built the mansion during Coolidge prosperity — had been a sasquatch himself, and ran it up on a scale that suited his own comfort. Too big for humans, he’d figured, was easier to deal with than too small for his own folk. Bill blessed him for that.

  “Here you go, Governor,” the steward said when he walked into the dining room. “Coffee’s hot, and breakfast’ll be up in a minute.”

  “Thanks, Ray.” Bill drank coffee by the quart mug. He was halfway down his first cup when Ray brought him eight fried eggs, a pound of bacon, and a dozen slices of wheat toast. As he plowed through the food, he hoped he wouldn’t get hungry while he was driving.

  The Stars and Stripes and the state flag of Jefferson flew in front of the mansion. Jefferson’s banner was green, with the state seal centered on the field: a gold pan with two X’s that symbolized the double crosses northern California and southern Oregon had got from Sacramento and Salem till they formed their own state in 1919. After World War I, self-determination was all the rage in Europe, and they’d run with it here, too. That neither Sacramento nor Salem was exactly sorry to see the seceders go hadn’t hurt.

  Below the flagpole sat the Governor’s car: a 1974 Cadillac Eldorado he fondly called “the Mighty Mo.” The Detroit behemoth wasn’t quite the size of a battleship, but it came close. It was five years old now, getting long in the tooth, but he kept it anyway. Since the Arab oil crisis, cars had shrunk like wool washed hot. For someone Bill’s size, they’d gone from dubious to impossible. The Mighty Mo got next to no mileage, of course, and gas was six bits a gallon. Bill didn’t care. If the state wouldn’t pay, he would.

  He slid into the left rear seat: the driver’s seat, with a long, long shaft for the steering wheel. The ignition was on the column, not on the dash. A good thing, too, he thought, starting the car.

  Like the Governor’s mansion, the Capitol had gone up before the Depression hit. Wings and colonnades and gilded dome showed off Jefferson’s wealth, or maybe delusions of grandeur. The government office building next door? A square WPA block, as ugly as it was functional. The miracle was that it had got built at all.

  Barbara Rasmussen waited in front of the office building. The Governor’s publicist was highly functional, too, but far from ugly: a shapely blonde with big blue eyes. To use Jimmy Carter’s immortal and immoral phrase, Bill had looked on her with lust in his heart a time or two. He was married, but he wasn’t blind. Sasquatches and little people had been getting it on since long before blondes came to Jefferson — not all the time, but every so often. Some stories said one of Bill’s great-grandmothers was a little person. He didn’t know if that was true, or care.

  Barbara got into the right — and only — front seat. “Morning, Governor,” she said. “Early enough for you?”

  “Oh, pretty much,” he answered, miming a yawn. She laughed. He sometimes wondered if she was interested in a roll in the hay with him. Some little women (not at all in the Louisa May Alcott sense of the words) hopefully looked for sasquatch men to be big all over. They were seldom disappointed in that. Other ways? Men were men and women were women, big or small. Sometimes they clicked, sometimes they didn’t.

  None of which mattered right now. His size thirty-two right foot swung from brake to gas. Away the Mighty Mo went. He drove south on Jefferson State Highway 3 to the 299, then west toward the coast. What Jefferson called state highways would have been narrow, twisty, no-account two-lane blacktop roads anywhere else. That was partly because the state hadn’t really bounced back after Hoover’s name became a swear word, partly because the terrain was so rugged.

  From Yreka to Eureka was just over 200 miles: three hours on an uncrowded freeway, assuming there was any such animal. Setting out just after six, Bill pulled into Eureka just before eleven. The overturned logging truck sure didn’t help. The ship he was supposed to meet was due in at eleven-thirty. That cut it closer than he liked.

  His back crunched when he unfolded himself from the Eldorado. A car that big wasn’t meant for those roads, but he didn’t fit into anything smaller. “Hey, Gov!” somebody called. Bill waved a broad-palmed hand. Sasquatch or little person, no pol could ignore constituents.

  A few reporters and a couple of camera crews waited at the base of the pier where the Heiwa Maru would dock. Its arrival would be news here and in Yreka and Redding and Ashland and Port Orford and the rest of Jefferson. Maybe one of these birds was an AP stringer, in which case the story might go farther. But the gentlemen of the Fourth Estate just stood idly, some smoking cigarettes. “What’s happening?” Bill called.

  “Not a damn thing,” a Eureka newspaperman answered. “Harbormaster says the ship’s running an hour late.” He sounded disgusted.

  Bill was delighted. “In that case, we’ve got time for lunch. C’mon, Barbara. Let’s hit Freaky Willie’s.”

  The diner was only a block from the harbor. BIGGEST SHAKES IN TOWN, a sign painted on the window bragged, next to a picture of a sasquatch doing a swan dive into a strawberry milkshake. Bill didn’t think he’d want to try that. He’d never get the goo out of his pelt afterwards. But the food was good and abundant and cheap, all of which mattered even if he was on state business and putting it on the taxpayer’s tab.

  He inhaled three Ginormous Burgers and half a farm’s worth of fries, along with two of those big shakes (chocolate). Barbara ate, well, rather less.

  Another citizen greeted him as he came out. Bill’s hand didn’t quite engulf the other man’s when they shook. Haystack Thornton was a little man, but a big little man, close to seven feet tall and wide in proportion. He might have been part sasquatch himself. His bushy russet beard rose high on his cheeks, while his hairline came down almost to his eyebrows. He wore bib overalls and a Pendleton underneath; Eureka had to be twenty-five degrees cooler than Yreka.

  “Just wanted to tell you thanks for all you’ve done and for all you haven’t done, Governor,” he said. “Me and my friends appreciate it, believe me.”

  “No worries, man,” Bill said. Haystack Thornton and his friends were the leading growers of some highly unofficial crops around Eureka. Jefferson looked the other way, and wouldn’t help the Feds when they didn’t. Do your own thing had been a way of life here long before the hippies found it. Besides, Bill thought smoking marijuana was more fun than drinking beer, though nothing was wrong with beer, either.

  Thornton ambled into Freaky Willie’s. Bill and Barbara went back to the harbor. Sure enough, the Heiwa Maru — Japanese for Peace Ship — had come into Humboldt Bay. A pavilion of saffron cloth stood on the deck before the bridge. Good thing it’s August, Bill thought. I wouldn’t want to cross the Pacific under canvas in January.

  Snorting tugs nudged the Heiwa Maru into place. Lines snaked out from the ship. Longshoremen secured them to bollards. Down came the gangplank. Bill, Barbara, and the reporters and cameramen strode down the pier to meet the ship and its important passenger.

  “Permission to come aboard?” the governor called to the Japanese skipper at the far end of the gangplank.

  “Permission granted,” the man said in good English. He added, “Have no fear, sir. It will bear your weight.”

  “I expected it would.” Onto the Heiwa Maru Bill went. The skipper bowed. Bill bowed back. As he straightened, a Japanese sailor snapped a photo of him.

  Bill walked toward the pavilion. The saffron cloth on one side folded back and the Yeti Lama came out to greet him. “Hello, Governor Williamson,” the holy man said, his English more hesitant than the skipper’s. He wore a loincloth and cape of scarlet silk to show his rank. Two other yetis, both in saffron loincloths and capes, followed him. So did two saffron-robed human monks. The big folk never could have used ordinary cabins.

  The Yeti L
ama was someone Bill could look up to — literally. He overtopped the Governor by six inches. Anyone seeing them side by side could tell they were of the same kind but different races. In little-people terms, they might have been Mongol and Swede. The yeti’s pelt was browner than the sasquatch’s; he had broader cheekbones and lower brow ridges.

  “Welcome, your Holiness,” Bill said. “Welcome to America. Welcome to Jefferson.”

  “I thank you so much.” The Yeti Lama bowed and held his hands in front of himself with palms pressed together. Bill imitated the gesture. The newcomer looked to be in his mid-forties, near the Governor’s age. Along with many pious members of his folk, he’d fled into exile when the Chinese invaded his mountainous Tibetan homeland twenty years before.

  One reason more reporters weren’t here was that Washington and Beijing had been thick as thieves since Nixon went to China. To the State Department, the Yeti Lama was just another tourist. Bill had all sorts of reasons for feeling otherwise.

  A newshound who worked for a paper in Redding called, “Your Holiness, can you tell us why you came to Jefferson in particular?”

  “Oh, yes. It is my pleasure.” The Yeti Lama’s English wasn’t perfect, but he used what he had. “Jefferson in all the world is where I most feel a sense of, ah, communing—”

  “Of community, you mean, sir?” Bill said helpfully.

  The Yeti Lama smiled. His teeth were large and broad. One bore a gold crown. “I thank you. Yes, that is the word. A sense of community. You have in Jefferson mountains, and I of course grew up in mountains. Yours are small, but that is a trifle.”

  “We think they’re pretty good-sized.” Bill waved east, toward the Klamath Mountains serrating the horizon.

  “I hear many have trees all the way up to top.” The Yeti Lama smiled again, mischievously now. “Next to the Himalayas, that makes them foothills. Is right word, foothills?”

  “Foothills is the word, yeah. You’ve got me there,” Bill allowed.

  “But this is not important,” the Yeti Lama said. “It is only land. People on land, they are what matters. You here in America, you here in Jefferson especially, you set example for the world. Here you have small folk and large, living together in happiness and harmony. Here you have one of a large race, chosen peacefully, freely, by large and small to lead all. Not like this in land I come from. Chinese call us xueren — snowmen.” His heavy features twisted in sorrow, or perhaps anger. “They treat us abominable — ah, abominably.”

  “I’m not even Jefferson’s first sasquatch Governor, either,” Bill said. State pride counted. The less said about earlier times, when this land was squabbled over by Russia and Spain, then split between California and Oregon, the better. But little people with guns hadn’t hunted sasquatches for the fun of it in more than a hundred years. That was progress, any way you looked at it. Sasquatches had guns of their own now, too.

  And, when you thought about what China was doing to yetis and Tibetans alike, Jefferson had to look like heaven on earth by comparison. No wonder the Yeti Lama wanted to call here.

  Barbara said, “Can we all get together for pictures to show this harmony?” She turned to the Heiwa Maru’s skipper. “Captain, please join us with some of your men. Everyone gets along in Jefferson.”

  “That’s right,” Bill said. “Next month I’m going up to Port Orford to visit a businessman there. He moved to Jefferson from Japan more than fifteen years ago.”

  The captain spoke in Japanese. He and three sailors joined the Yeti Lama, his retinue, the sasquatch Governor, and the blond publicist. Barbara was taller than any of the crewmen from the Heiwa Maru or the human Buddhist monks, but even she barely came up to Bill’s chest.

  Well, that was the point of this exercise, wasn’t it? Sure it was. Big people and little people could all get along together. Different kinds of big people could, too. And so could different kinds of little people, even if their countries had fought a ferocious war only half a lifetime earlier.

  The skipper’s wrinkles and bald spot said he was old enough to have fought for Japan against the USA. But, again, even if he had, so what? He was here in Jefferson in charge of the Peace Ship. He’d brought the Yeti Lama, one of the greatest peace symbols in the whole world (except perhaps China). That was what counted.

  “Smile, everybody!” a cameraman called. Everybody did.

  The Compassionate Moon

  by David L. Drake and Katherine L. Morse

  A horse blanket. And an in-barn water pump. A sack of soap flakes. A bucket. A sleepy draft horse. And I have you, my Harvest Moon.

  So tonight I will scrub my clothes and body, getting the smell of the last week off me. Your light will aid my midnight chores without risking an open flame or lantern in a dusty hay barn. And while my clothes dry, I get to sleep close to that sleepy grey mare. Oh, how ironic, you say? A grey spot on the moon is also called a mare? Yes, yes, I know. But did you know mare means “night goblins” in Old English as well? Like the ones that chase me? Of course they are not real goblins. I know that. All too well.

  What’s that? You want to hear my story again? Do you mind if I whisper it to you? I don’t want to wake the farmers, or find out if they have a dog. Where do you want me to start? How I used to have a room at the opulent Casino di Venetia that was all silks and brocade? How about the simplistic beauty of the card game ventuno-et-un, or as I have learned to say in English, twenty-and-one. Well, I have these breeches to wash, and what’s left of my shirt, so allow me to entertain you with my tale.

  It all started in my beloved Firenza, Italia, in my print shop. Things were going well for me as a young man, until my gambling debts outpaced my income, when I decided it was better to take the last of my finances and move myself and my press to Shrewsbury Street in Worcester, Massachusetts. I remember hanging the sign over the door, “Annunziato Venator — Printer — Architectural Drawings,” the gold letters gleaming against the black background. Why take my print shop there? Simple. The nearby Tempo watch works had their own designs and they did a good business. Tempo was known for their willingness to machine specialty watches: stopwatches, scientific timepieces, mechanical fuses, and many things with gears and springs. All for a price. I provided two complementary services: redrawing components in the style required by Tempo, and making copies of those drawings for each manufacturing station.

  It all went well for two years. The conservative people of Massachusetts abhorred betting on games of chance, so it was easy for me to stay away from the private gambling clubs. I had a good relationship with John, the shop master at Tempo. One day John stopped by to pick up some illustrations, and he asked me to look at some drawings for a device he wasn’t sure was a good fit for a watch factory. He plopped a notebook of drawings on my counter. The man who brought them to the factory didn’t have much money to finance a new timepiece, so John told me that I shouldn’t spend much time on it. And then he walked out.

  I flipped open the book, somewhere in the middle, I believe. The drawings were painstakingly detailed, both graphically and in description. Nine layers of gearing, two separate mainsprings, three hands, and a three-color watch face. This was no ordinary specialty watch. Ordinary specialty? Does putting those two words together only make sense to me?

  I spent the night studying the manuscript. All night. Until the rooster crowed I read through those pages at least three — no — four times.

  The fool didn’t understand what he had designed. The simpleton had completely underestimated the value of his creativity. He would have wasted it all. It was I who saw the usefulness of it. It was I who had the vision. I alone.

  To the casual observer, it appeared to be a well-made pocket watch. And it worked as such. The long black hands moving as time passed and all that. It was the four extra buttons on the left side and the one on the right that added the hidden treasure. By pressing all the buttons at once, the timepiece would reset its internal counters to the standard set of fifty-two cards of a fresh deck. By pres
sing the buttons in a pattern, like playing a chord on a piano, the owner could mark which card had been played in a game. Another chording of buttons revealed how many of each card-type remained in the deck.

  For any game where most of the cards are revealed and decks aren’t reshuffled between hands, it was an incredibly accurate memory aid. But every page of the manuscript repeated that the instrument should only be used by casino owners to verify that their dealers weren’t cheating. Slipping in an extra ace or two. Or dropping cards off the bottom of the deck. Tricks like that. What utter foolishness.

  This was the tool for a winner. In my hands, a card game would be mine to control. As the bottom of the deck neared, I could escalate the betting and have an edge over all other players and on the casino, creating a gambler’s paradise. And the detailed drawings for this mechanism were right there in my hands.

  I meticulously copied every illustration, every paragraph, one by one. It took three long days. Then I struck a devil’s bargain with John. He returned the engineering notebook to the fool, and I sold my work and the new merchandising strategy to Tempo. They planned to sell each of the instruments for hundreds of dollars, clandestinely of course, since in the right hands, such a device could pay for itself in days. They gave me a small fortune and the first Gambler’s Friend that they made. That’s what they called it. The Gambler’s Friend.

  Massachusetts is a horse- and dog-racing place, certainly not a place for high stakes card playing. I longed for Italia and her palaces of gaming. That was the end of my printing business. I headed back to the island of Castello, and the glorious Casino di Venetia.

  With my little helper, the mistress of fortune was my devoted courtesan. I tried to stick to playing against the other patrons; no need to upset the house. I developed a habit of toying with my new “watch.” Flipping the lid. Turning it over in my hand. Opening and closing it. Checking the time. All the while, I was manipulating those little buttons. And I always got lucky near the end of the deck.