Hand and Space: A Captain Brian Saber story Read online

  Hand and Space

  A Captain Brian Saber Story

  Dean Wesley Smith

  Hand and Space

  Copyright © 2012 by Dean Wesley Smith

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover Design copyright © 2012 WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Luca Oleastri/Dreamstime

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Chapter One

  Dot was feeding me my applesauce one spoonful at a time when I saw him.

  Around us, the Shady Valley Nursing Home went on with its normal lunch routine, but today was going to be anything but normal. In fact, the survival of the human race might depend on what happened next.

  Dot and I had a signal for when I wanted her to stop, so I blinked my right eye and she instantly pulled back, taking a napkin and wiping the drool from my chin.

  Being eighty-eight was bad enough, but being mostly paralyzed from a stroke really sucked more than I could ever say. Thankfully Dorothy “Dot” Leeds made it bearable.

  She was my best friend and fiancé. Down the road a few years we might even get married, settle down, have a few kids.

  The stroke when I was eighty-five had taken most of my movement, but not my mind, and I could still speak softly. I blinked twice and Dot learned in close, her wonderful, eighty-seven-year-old face still showing the signs of the beautiful younger woman I knew so well.

  “What is it, Brian?” she asked. She turned her ear slightly so she could hear me over the noise of the lunchroom.

  “Doctor Jack Dalton, sitting at the second table over.”

  Her head snapped around to find Dalton. Then she turned back to me, her eyes bright. “Heavy, brown, knitted sweater with the food stains?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  We both watched for a moment whileDalton struggled with a plate of food on a tray before he managed to get it arranged. His hands were twisted, almost closed by years of arthritis, and they shook. I had no idea how he could even hold a spoon, but somehow he managed, which was a lot better than I could do. His very thin gray hair didn’t do anything to cover a mottled scalp, and his thick, gray eyebrows seemed more like large bugs on his wrinkled face than anything else.

  That man, that ninety-one-year-old scientist, had to be on the mission with us in the next hour. Or Earth and the entire Earth Protection League might not survive. And Dot and I had been given the responsibility of recruiting him. I had no idea how we were going to do that. Not a clue, short of just kidnapping him.

  Especially since the mission would, more than likely, be a suicide mission. If Dr. Jack Dalton did come with us, there would be a high chance he would never return to Shady Valley Nursing Home.

  Of course, if he didn’t come and didn’t help, there was a high chance that none of us would return.

  Chapter Two

  After seeing Dalton, I wasn’t hungry, but Dot insisted on finishing feeding me, whispering to me that I had to have my strength up for the sex later on. Then she finished her lunch as well, and with some help got my wheelchair moved out into the hall where we could intercept Dalton when he came out of the lunchroom.

  He was using a cane as he slowly approached, his hand knotted around the top of the cane.

  Dot stepped forward. “Doctor, my name is Dorothy Leeds and this is Brian Saber. Could we have a minute to talk to you?”

  Dot had left off our Captain titles purposefully. No point in making the guy think we were crazy right off. He was going to think that anyway in a few minutes.

  “I’m not a medical doctor,” he said, slowly moving to go past us.

  “I know that, Doctor Dalton,” Dot said. “Until you wrote a paper on the subatomic connection between space and time and matter, you were considered one of the top physicists of all time. Maybe greater than Einstein.”

  That stopped him, so Dot kept going.

  “Please, just a few minutes of your time?” Dot asked. “I know you are new here, just arrived last night, but there is something urgent we need to talk to you about.”

  I wanted to nod and give Dot some support, but there was no chance he would be able to hear me in the noise of the hallway, and I sure couldn’t even move much besides blinking.

  He stared at Dot for a moment, then at me. Finally, he nodded. “I guess I don’t have much else to do.”

  Step one down.

  Now came the hard part.

  As Dot moved in around behind me, I managed to slide one finger over the edge of my chair and push a hidden button on my wheelchair signaling the League to stand ready.

  “In here,” Dalton said, moving toward his room as we figured he would do. He had a private room, as we all did. The League could be in his room within seconds when I gave the signal.

  And his room had a somewhat sheltered sliding door to the interior garden, lawn, and patio area that the home surrounded. That would be the way we would leave.

  I knew for a fact I wouldn’t be going back to my room today for my normal after-lunch nap. Both Dot and I would be doing a rare daytime extraction for this mission. That’s how important it was.

  And if we didn’t win this coming battle, I wouldn’t be seeing my room ever again either.

  Doctor Dalton went into his room and pulled a chair over, then got another one for Dot.

  Dot wheeled me to a position between the chairs, then went back and closed the door, lowering the room into almost complete silence.

  “So what’s this all about?” Dalton asked. “And what could be so important that you would need to talk urgently with someone as old and discredited as I am?”

  “Eventually your name will be honored,” Dot said. “Because your theories are completely right. But you won’t live to see it, I’m afraid.”

  He laughed. “What, are they sending old people back from the future?”

  I cleared my throat and then said as loudly as I could, “That’s not how your theory works, is it, Doctor?”

  He again laughed. “No, it isn’t.”

  “You suggested in your work,” Dot said, “that time and matter and space are connected. Completely connected – not in the way most scientists believe, but in much deeper ways, correct?”

  “Yes, so what?”

  “You happen to be the right age,” I said, “to help out humanity with that wonderful mind of yours, and maybe save us all.”

  He just stared at me and shook his head.

  “Doctor, please listen to me all the way through,” Dot said. “I am certain you will not believe me, but when I tell this story, please keep in mind your very own theory. Please? The story will only take a few minutes.”

  “I suppose my nap can wait that long,” he said, shrugging.

  Dot smiled, her face glowing as it glowed when she was young.

  She indicated me. “This is Captain Brian Saber, the most decorated ship’s captain in all of the Earth Protection League. My name is Captain Dorothy Leeds, but my friends call me Dot.”

  The Doctor started to speak, but Dot held up a hand to silence him. “The entire story first,” she said.

  “The Earth Protection League was formed back in a time long before Atlantis, when mankind first reached out into space. We were helped by other races we met in our local neighborhood, and the League was formed and maintained even as mankind kept falling back into
dark ages. Since governments don’t last, no government knows about it.”

  “As years went by,” I said, my voice as clear as I could make it to help Dot with the story, “the EPL expanded its borders farther and farther out into space. The EPL now controls, with the help of many other races, a sphere sixty-plus light years around Earth.”

  “For centuries,” Dot said, picking up the story, “everything was fine, until about ten years ago Earth-time. The League was suddenly attacked by what we call ‘The Dogs,’ a group of alien races bent on taking over and destroying Earth and all of Earth’s allies. The Dogs were eventually beaten and pushed back to their borders, but not without a great loss of life on all the Earth bases out closer to the frontiers.”

  “So the League needed help,” I said. “But because of your theory, it would be difficult to get help from Earth to the border quickly.”

  “They needed old help because of the very thing your theory described, Doctor,” Dot said. “I don’t really understand it, but it was explained to me that matter and time and space are permanently linked. So when a person climbs into a ship that can move through warped space, and thus get to a location great distances away quickly, the mass of the human body is still attached to its original space and time.”

  “In other words,” I said, “I am eighty-eight sitting here. But if I go out sixty light-years using the Trans-Galactic Drive, I will arrive twenty-eight years old. And when I make the return voyage, arriving here within a half hour of when I leave, my body is again back to this state and age.”

  That amount of talking tired me out. Dot could see that and she slipped my oxygen mask over my nose for a moment.

  “Over the centuries,” Dot said, “scientists have managed to shelter the brain waves and thought patterns from the regression that happens as a body moves through great distances, so we keep our older minds in our younger bodies.”

  “You two are writing a book, aren’t you? Some sort of science fiction book to make fun of my theories.”

  “We are not,” Dot said. “And they’re your theories, Doctor. You proposed them; you had to know this would be an upshot of your theory if you were correct.”

  That shut the great physicist up completely. He leaned back, his old hands trembling, his face suddenly tired, but he was clearly thinking.

  Finally, after a long moment of silence, he asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because the Earth Protection League needs your help,” Dot said. “Way beyond me to explain what they need you to do. Our job was to recruit you. And go with you. And have our ships run support for you.”

  “Into space?” Dalton asked.

  “Into deep space,” Dot said, keeping her intense gaze on the doctor.

  I eased my finger toward the button that would call in the League to extract us.

  “I’m not sure who is crazier,” the doctor said, “you two, or me for listening to you.”

  “Isn’t that what your critics said about you?” I asked, staring at the doctor. “Wouldn’t you like to know, prove to yourself, that you were right?”

  “You have no remaining family,” Dot said, softly. “You are in this place until your last days. Alone. Trust me, going on missions is what Brian and I and our crews wait for, hold onto life for. Being young is wonderful. Being young with old, experienced minds, is even better. It makes living in a place like this worth the pain.”

  Dalton just sat there, saying nothing. And I knew, as Dot and I had talked about, he could never allow himself to agree. Just as both of us had never really said “yes” to that first mission when we were recruited. It’s just too crazy-sounding for any sane person to believe.

  So I pushed the button.

  “We’re going to prove this to you, Doctor,” I said, as the sliding door leading out to the courtyard opened up and four young men and one woman walked in.

  All were wearing civilian clothes, as was normal for extractions. But I knew all of them were Earth-bound members of the EPL. Or at least they would be Earth-bound until they got a lot older and could travel distances into space.

  All five stopped and snapped off salutes to me and Dot.

  Kennison, the young man who always carried me to the lift point, came over beside me, while the young woman named Val moved over beside Dot, who stood.

  Dot prided herself in walking to the extraction point.

  The other three men flanked Doctor Dalton.

  “It seems I have no choice but to play along with whatever this is,” he said, standing slowly.

  “You will believe us shortly,” Dot said. “We’ll talk again about sixty light-years from here.”

  With that she turned and moved toward the doorway while Kennison picked me up like I didn’t weigh anything. I had to admit, the kid was gentle on my old, thin skin, and I appreciated that.

  Dot and Val vanished just a step outside the door, leaving Doctor Dalton standing there, staring, with his mouth open. Usually, at night, they took us all the way to the center of the courtyard; but it seemed, with a daylight extraction, the league was willing to take more chances.

  “Teleportation,” I managed to say as Kennison carried me past the doctor and out the door.

  The doctor looked like he might have a heart attack before he got out of the room.

  A moment later we were in the Trans-Galactic Drive transport ship in orbit and Kennison was placing me in my coffin.

  Then he stepped back and snapped off a salute. “Have a safe voyage, Captain.”

  I wish I could have saluted him back, but all I managed every time was a soft “Thanks,” as the coffin lid closed on me.

  Chapter Three

  I awoke as usual to the faint, orange smell of the sleep gas being flushed out of my coffin. I reached up and pushed the lid open, relishing once again how wonderful it felt to actually be able to move my arms.

  I sat up, and then levered myself out of the sleep coffin. I still had on my old clothes with the food stains from breakfast, but I shed them quickly.

  The room I awoke in wasn’t my normal Captain’s cabin on my ship, Bad Business. This looked more like a normal stateroom on a transport ship. All my clothes and gear were on a small dresser.

  They usually transferred our sleep coffins to our cabins before they awoke us. That meant Dot was here on the transport as well, instead of in her cabin in her ship, The Blooming Rose.

  We were going to talk to the doctor here, before heading out on the mission.

  I quickly slipped on the black leather pants and white, pleated, silk shirt that was the standard Captain’s uniform. I put the black leather vest with the EPL logo on the front on ,over my shirt, then buckled on the wide black-leather belt around my waist.

  I sat down and pulled on the soft leather boots, tucking my pants legs loosely into the top of the tall boots. Then I took my two photon-blasters from the top of the dresser and put them in their holsters on my belt.

  Captain Saber was back.

  I stood and just stared in the mirror for a moment, just as I did with every mission, trying to make myself believe this was real, that the young me was standing there, not the old, stroke-damaged me who lived on Earth.

  At some point Dot and I would move out here into space permanently, get married, settle down on a planet, maybe even have some kids and work on growing old once again, doing only local missions.

  But right now we had another mission to complete if we had any hope of ever having that happen.

  I opened the stateroom door and headed down the hallway toward the ship’s lounge. That’s where the crew would take the doctor when they woke him.

  As I turned the corner, I saw Captain Leeds striding toward me, dressed as I was, but with only one photon blaster on her hip.

  She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her wonderful brown hair was pulled back and her smile filled the corridor.

  “Hi, handsome,” she said, kissing me firmly.

  I kissed her back, not wanting to let her go.<
br />
  Finally she laughed. “I told you that applesauce would get you going.”

  “Trust me,” I said, “it’s not the applesauce.”

  With that, we both turned and went into the lounge.

  Doctor Dalton stood near the huge window that looked out over the fleet of ships surrounding the transport ship. From the number, it looked like the League was expecting all sorts of trouble on this mission.

  I dismissed the guard standing beside the door and Dot and I moved over toward the doctor, through the tables and chairs that filled the lounge area around a small dance floor. Dot and I had spent many a fun evening in this lounge and on that dance floor before returning to Earth.

  Dancing was something I loved to remember when trapped in that old body.

  The doctor was standing with his left hand pressed flat against the window, staring around his hand at all the stars.

  He looked just like a younger version of the man in the nursing home, only his hair was thick and his face much smoother. He still had the extremely thick eyebrows. And, of course, his hands were clearly healthy, something that seemed to be amazing him even more than the space and the fleet of ships.

  He just kept pushing his hand flat against the view port, then looking at it.

  “Doctor,” I said. “I’m Captain Saber. This is Captain Leeds.”

  He turned and looked at us, then just shook his head. “The two from the nursing home?”

  “Yes, sir,” Dot said. “As you can see, your theories are correct.”

  He stared at his hand as he opened and closed it.

  Dot and I stood there silently, letting the great mind inside that head fight to grasp the evidence in front of him.

  Then he looked up at us. “I was right? I actually was right?”

  “You were, sir,” I said. “We are sixty light years from Earth. You are in your thirty-one-year-old body, the exact same body you had sixty years ago.”

  He pulled up the clean white shirt the service had supplied him and stared at the scar on his stomach. “Even my appendix is still gone. Lost that when I was twenty-seven.”