Changes Read online

  Changes

  a short story

  by

  William Barton

  author’s preferred edition

  8,800 words

  This story is also available

  in the collection

  Shadows in the Sky

  Copyright © 1996, 2012 William Barton

  Originally published in Aboriginal Science Fiction, Summer 1996.

  Public Domain Cover photo:

  Saturn and its moons, courtesy NASA/JPL.

  Previous Books by

  by William Barton

  Hunting On Kunderer

  A Plague of All Cowards

  Dark Sky Legion

  Radio Silence

  Yellow Matter

  When Heaven Fell

  The Transmigration of Souls

  Acts of Conscience

  When We Were Real

  Moments of Inertia

  Collaborations by

  William Barton and

  Michael Capobianco

  Iris

  Fellow Traveler

  Alpha Centauri

  White Light

  For more information visit:

  williambarton.com

  Science Fiction in Search of a Lost Age

  Table of Contents

  Changes

  List of eBooks

  Changes

  When the cramp finally let go, Harriet Severn fell back on her pillows, hating the way her skin felt, sticky sweat refusing to evaporate in the summer humidity. The sheets were damp, soaked right through, making her regret the decision to give birth at home instead of going to the hospital like a sensible modern woman. They’d never get the stains out of the mattress, probably have to buy a new one.

  And so hot. But they didn’t have air conditioning in the town’s little hospital either. The only place they had air conditioning was in the movie theater. Harriet giggled. Maybe I should’ve gone there...

  Dr. Noffzinger, sitting between her legs at the foot of the bed, smiled up at her. “Won’t be long now, Harriet. This is going to be easy.” He reached up and patted her belly, then looked back down at her “business end.” Smiled again. No problem at all...

  Should have gone to the hospital, though. Cleaner. Safer. And Wilson wouldn’t be visibly lurking outside the door like some massive ghost. Poor Willy. He always felt so bad for her when it was happening. Third time now, trying for a boy because the first two were girls. Always felt so bad. But, in a couple of months, when the damage was healed, he’d be more interested in “getting things back to normal.”

  Another cramp, making her bunch up, squint and grunt. God. Like turning inside out. One place pulling in, its neighbor popping out, hurting worse than stomach flu, and going on and on... Then done, falling back, panting hard. Right, no problem at all. Should have gone to the hospital, you little idiot...

  But you didn’t want to leave Grandpa all alone and Willy wouldn’t hear of you going off to have the baby alone, as if he’d be any help. Poor Grandpa, lying in his room, listening to all this. Or maybe not listening. Seventy-eight years old and the pneumonia almost finished with him. “Old Man’s Friend.” Supposed to be an easy death, but Grandpa was making it hard, just not ready to go. Not quite yet. I’d’ve felt bad going off to the hospital, coming home in a week to find him gone...

  He’ll see this one. Maybe he’ll smile.

  Maybe...

  Uhhhh...

  The baby’s head felt like a padded boulder between her legs, suddenly right there, the doctor leaning forward, touching it with his clean hands, gently cooing, to her, to it? Pulling, “Come on now. There, there...” Harriet put her head back and squeaked, the cramp suddenly powerful and strange, her skin feeling as if it were being burnt by a thousand little cigarette coals...

  Christ, get it over with... Now!

  And the rest of the little body slithered out like the proverbial greased pig, right into old Noffzinger’s arms.

  Owwww...

  Afterechoes, pain and more pain, but already dying down.

  Noffzinger, always the traditionalist, swung the nasty, bloody thing by its heels, one light slap, and SQUAAALLL! Alive. Cradling it then, grinning, calling out, “You can relax now, Willy. It’s a boy!”

  Then he put it on her bare belly and Harriet reached down to cuddle the slick little body, smiling wider than she ever expected she could. Maybe in a little while, when the doctor was through fiddling around down there, she could get up and show the new baby to Grandpa. A boy. It would light up his fading eyes, just one last time.

  o0o

  Mark Severn, just past his ninth birthday, lay on the floor, doing his homework on the near-pileless maroon carpet. The rug could be a distraction sometimes, with all its patterns and border colors, bits of blue and burnt orange peeking out from behind the red... not behind it exactly, since the rug was essentially a two-dimensional surface, but... God. Distracted. Got to get this stuff done. “The Cisco Kid” coming on in... squint up at the big Nelsonic clock sitting on the old upright piano... ten minutes...

  Mom, sitting in her chair, reading the current issue of Life, said, “What’re you squinting for, Mark?”

  He shrugged, squinted at her, and said, “I dunno. I guess it makes the numbers easier to read.”

  She stared at him for a minute, giving him that concerned look, then went back to her magazine. Mark went back to scribbling the English essay, hoping he wouldn’t lose too many points for legibility. Arithmetic had been easy, just problems intended as drill for kids who couldn’t seem to memorize the multiplication tables, couldn’t quite “get it” when it was time for long division. Science easy too, just not quite so... regular. This electricity business was pretty interesting anyway. English, though... Five hundred words... every one of them made up from scratch, without a clue as to what Mrs. Pennyman wanted. Oh, well. As long as I keep getting A’s in arithmetic, Dad won’t be too upset about the C’s in English and history...

  Right now, Dad was sitting in his own chair, bigger than Mom’s, next to the heavy old bookcase, the one they’d gotten when Grandma died last year, head tipped toward the big Philco radio, sound turned down so the others wouldn’t be disturbed, listening to the war news. It was pretty interesting stuff, sometimes, today the subdued voice talking about some big battle in North Africa. Kasserine Pass. Dad’s face very serious. Troubled glance at me, then. Maybe he thinks the war will still be going on when I’m old enough. Ten years. Would the war still be raging in 1953?

  Anyhow, maybe that was why dad let him do his homework out here on the floor, while Jill and Sandy sat together at the kitchen table. Mark sighed and put the essay in his notebook, threading the holes over the rings then snapping them shut, hoping what he’d done would be sufficient. Just a C, that’s all you need...

  Mom was looking at him again, smiling a little bit, kind of distant. Mom’s face was always full of sunshine when she smiled, even more so when she laughed. Like when she called Dad “Willy-boy” and Dad would smile and say, “Harry-me-Lad!” as if breathless with excitement. Like a game between them, like they were kids. They’d giggle and joke with each other then, sitting together on the couch, and sometimes they’d go to bed early, giggling off down the hallway.

  Mark flipped through his homework one last time, making sure he’d really done everything. Omissions were embarrassing to explain in front of the class, even though you were never the only one, even though you could try to pretend it was funny. Close the books. Dad was reaching out toward the radio, twiddling the tuner dial, listening close, intent. I’m glad I’ve got nice parents. Not like Donnie across the street, whose parents would sometimes whip him with a leather strap. You could hear him cry all the way down the block when that happened...

  The radio was getti
ng old and hard to tune in, Dad promising in another year or two they’d replace it. No, not with one of the new little radios, but with a television set like the one Mike’s dad built from a kit last year. Three times the size of the old Philco, with a round screen the size of a saucer in the upper right-hand corner. Once, Dad’d let him stay up late, come over to watch a boxing match on TV with the men gathered in Mr. Carozza’s parlor. I fell asleep after an hour, Dad laughing when he carried me home, beer on his breath, very cheerful, bouncing me on his shoulders...

  I’ll miss the old radio when it’s gone. Tall, peaked, made of ornate wood, scrollwork over cloth-covered speakers in the middle, two tall half-pillars on either side, like the pillars to either side of the stage in the theater down town, where Mom and Dad went once or twice a year. What was the word Mom told me? Proscenium. Like the radio was a stage, the voices from the speaker actors in a play, tiny figures before him, dressed in richly-colored costumes, striding back and forth before his eyes.

  Maybe, someday, TV will be like that, instead of those watery gray mannequins. We’ll get it, though, and then I can watch old Cisco and Pancho...

  Right now, though, Dad was smiling at him, beckoning, turning up the sound, and there was the announcer’s plummy voice, telling him all about “O. Henry’s famous Robin Hood of the Old West...”

  o0o

  Mark sat in his favorite chair, the spindly Danish Modern one with the blue nylon upholstery, pushing heavy, black-framed glasses back up his nose, staring at the front page of the Post. Two photographs, side by side, of two handsome but alien-looking young men in foreign military uniforms. Andrian G. Nikolaev, said one. Pavel R. Popovich, said the other. Orbited the Earth 64 times. Orbited the Earth 48 times. Vostok. East.

  So much for good, old Project Mercury, whose long-term goal, sometime, some day, was to keep a man in space for a whole twenty-four hours. Four days. That’s enough time to reach the Moon and land. Kennedy’s going to look like a fool. I wonder how Glenn and Carpenter feel now. Ticker-tape parades, for God’s sake...

  Hell. When our people touch down in 1970 these guys will have been there for five years. You are now entering the Lunovskaya Soviet Socialist Republic. Passports, please?

  Dad was right. Remember watching the Berlin news with him in ‘49? Our grandchildren will be dead and gone before this is over, he said. We should’ve gone in and cleaned them out right after we finished with Hitler and Tojo. Right now, it sure looked like the Communists’ centrally-managed economies had something over good, old free enterprise, all right...

  And whatever it was, it had made Khrushchev awfully damned bold. Stood up to them in Berlin, whipped them back in Korea; now this business with Castro and Russians down in the Caribbean, setting up shop ninety miles from Florida.

  Suddenly, Mark felt very cold. A young father wanted to look forward, to plan for his children’s adulthood, help them get a good start. He put the paper aside and looked at the two of them on the floor, Billy getting to be a big boy now, starting first grade in a couple of weeks, Freddy old enough to sit up beside him, out of diapers and talking quite nicely, much to Bill’s aggravation...

  You can smile about that at least... Dad. Funny to think of myself that way. Mom seems to like being called Grandma even though she’s still so young-looking. Well. Fifty-three is young. They’ll be young as long as they live. Memory of them from last Easter, Harriet sitting in Willy’s lap, messing up his thinning hair, kissing him in front of the kids. I don’t know why it upset Marian like that. Never bothered me when I was a kid. Just glad my parents seemed to like each other...

  Poor Marian. Pregnant again, just so she can try for a daughter. Unhappy about two boys, have to make sure that never gets back to Fred. Me, though, born because Dad wanted a son... OK. It’s easy to understand. Marian was uncomfortable though, in her seventh month, feeling fat and horrible, wondering why she’d wanted to do such a thing to herself once again...

  The two little boys were engrossed in watching the TV, unaware of the nasty adult world unraveling all around them. Rapt, wrapped up in the opening sequences of the last show before bedtime, listening to Fifties-style advertising singers tell them all about the “Modern Stone Age Fam-uh-Lee...” Pretty funny stuff, actually. Not like “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” making me put aside this grad-school homework long enough to watch with them, but... funny. That business about using animals in place of mechanical technology was a pretty good grade of science fiction when you thought about it. Maybe something engineers will really do someday...

  Engineers. Right. Engineers build hydrogen bombs, if they’re lucky. Engineers blow up the world. And me with my little B.S. degree. What do I build? Right. I build blueprints. I help flesh out the work of better men. For now. Twenty-eight? Still a boy. The pile of books on the coffee table was tall, and they’d been expensive. Tough, going for your Masters at night after working all day. Tough on Marian and the kids, too. For them, though, make more money, give them a future. If...

  That’s the word, all right. If. He glanced over at the bookcase. Been two years since I read it. Can’t forget it though. Words red, white and blue on a black spine, J.B. Lippincott’s edition of Alas, Babylon. I wonder how I managed to lose the dust-jacket? Very inspirational, trying to make a dead world carry on with human life... But it won’t be like that. I know. Anybody whose interested can know. Right here in the public library there’s a copy of The Prompt and Delayed Effects of Thermonuclear Weapons...

  And the kids were sitting on the floor, watching Fred Flintstone sink his teeth into his new role as The Frog-Mouth, blah-blah-blah, making them giggle at comedy too sophisticated for two little boys, one just barely out of diapers. Just reacting to the laugh-track, that’s all.

  Anyway, it looks nice on a color TV, glad we spent the money, almost enough for a new car...

  o0o

  Standing in the hot June sun, Mark took off his white hard-hat and wiped his brow on one tan sleeve, leaving a big dark splotch of moisture in the cloth. All right. Time for short sleeves. Tomorrow. It was a very nice day, not enough breeze really, but clear and cloudless, sky a lucid, vaulting blue overhead, the world bright green all around, falling away in waves of distant vegetation toward the horizon, blue mountains barely visible in the west.

  Piedmont Plateau a pretty nice part of Virginia. A lot of work remaining to be done hereabouts. He looked down at the blueprint, weighted to the rough wooden table by chunks of broken concrete and pieces of cinderblock. Finishing it off. The bridge’s skeleton was done and now they were putting in the roadway, the expander joints, making sure the sewer- and water-pipe transit fittings were lined up OK. Be done in three more months, then move on.

  Not so very far. And not for very long. The Interstate system that had kept him employed for more than a decade was almost done. Almost done and then, nothing. Should be work for people maintaining that expensive infrastructure, maybe they’d planned it that way in the beginning, but something dreadful seemed to be going wrong somewhere. Somewhere way up the line from here...

  I talked to Dad about it, tried to get his spin on it. All he could do was rave about the Trilateral Commission, about Kissinger and Rockefeller and all the rest. Jesus. Well, he’s getting old now, almost retirement age. I guess we should expect something like this...

  Don’t believe it. Old? Nonsense. Mark shook his head slowly, looking down the shallow hill at rumbling machinery, spitting little clouds of greasy diesel smoke, at gangs of toiling workers, bare-backed, sun-burned men sweating in the heat. Old? Hell. In just a few more weeks, I’ll be forty years old.

  I’m getting too old for this, that’s for sure. So tired today...

  Like to be in an office somewhere, be an indoor engineer, making up work for the younger folks to do. But this pays better. Made sixty-eight thousand before taxes last year. Billy in college, Freddy about to start, Alice in the ninth grade...

  Be easier if the taxes were a little lower. Which is why you voted for Nixon in ‘72
. Shows how much you know...

  Be easier if Marian would get a job, too. If Marian could get a job. College degree, sure, but she’s been sitting home with the kids since 1956. And maybe she doesn’t like the idea anyway, what with all that nice, unpaid volunteer work. Hell...

  Starting to turn away, get back to the business at hand, but jet noise, louder than usual, echoing around the hills, made him look up. Too bright. He fished the expensive prescription sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on, looked up again. Bright white arrowhead moving across the northern sky, leaving a tiny sliver of black smoke behind, too low to make a contrail. What... British Airways Concorde making its way to Dulles, thundering across the Northern Virginia suburbs.

  And our SST, just blueprints in the trash. Good old Boeing. Good old politics. As usual. Build the interstates and then let them rot, bridges and all, this fine new thing we’re building now will be falling down in 1995...

  And Skylab orbiting overhead the end of the space program. Spend billions to get to the Moon, get there, by God, then throw it all away. Hell, five years ago they said they’d have the shuttle flying in six or seven years. Now they say they’ll have it flying in only five or six years. I guess that’s something... Progress.

  Momentary memory of watching Apollo 17 lift off on TV, watching it light up the waterway brilliant yellow and white, the sky turning blue around the edges of the square picture. Sudden realization that this was the last one, that he really should have taken the time to go down and see one take off for real...

  Too late now, buddy boy.

  The last echo faded, Mark looked back down at the blueprints on the table, at his scribbled notes in one margin. All right, this is why they pay you so much. Fixes. On the spot. He sat down on an upturned wire-spool and slid his fat Rockwell calculator out of its holster, set it on the tabletop and clicked the “on” switch. The display lit up, bright green, easier to read in daylight than standard red LEDs.