A Fantastic Holiday Season: The Gift of Stories (8 page)

“How?” Jimmy asked.

“I don’t know,” Tessa said. “But he does.”

Jimmy kept staring at the falling snow.

“I hope you get what you want,” he told Tessa honestly, letting his mind drift over the brief words he’d written in his message.

“I hope you get what you want too,” Tessa said.

They exited the bubble window and went to find their separate families.

That night, Jimmy was even more restless than usual. He tossed and turned in his little bunk, his mind trying to unravel the trick of how any astronaut could land at Olympus Mons in a rocket sleigh, sneak into the center living complex without being seen, and leave gifts for those children who’d written him to ask for something. Tessa had told Jimmy that the old Earth legend of Saint Nicholas supposedly had the man sliding down the chimneys of fireplaces—in order to lay packages and toys beneath decorated conifer trees brought specifically into the house for the occasion.

Jimmy found the idea of trying to fit down something as narrow or as filthy as a chimney—the school library said it was equivalent to a spaceship exhaust—unnerving at best. Wouldn’t the man get claustrophobia? Wouldn’t he run out of air? How could his space suit possibly fit, especially with the bulky helmet?

The more Jimmy thought about it, the more he began to suspect that the entire idea was just a lot of wishful thinking, which made him even more homesick than usual. He scrunched his head into his pillow and quietly wept, so that his parents in the next compartment would not hear him. He was too big to be like a baby. This was his hurt, and his hurt alone, to deal with. It wasn’t fair that he’d had to leave Ceres, but he wasn’t going to let his parents know. They certainly weren’t going to change their minds—they’d talked non-stop about how exciting and wonderful Mars was.

At some point, he drifted off.

And at some point, Jimmy came wide awake again.

The hatch to his bunk compartment was slightly open, as it always was. But this time there was a different sort of light streaming in. Not the usual pale yellow of the night light that illuminated the way to the tiny family latrine, but a more subtle green and red, alternating every few seconds, like the flashing of an emergency beacon. Only those tended to be orange, and this light was much more gradual. Green, slowly dimming and transforming to red, then brightening, then dimming, slowly transforming to green, then brightening, and so on and so forth.

Jimmy watched the light for a long time, his fuzzy senses not quite able to register what the light might mean.

Then he remembered that this was supposed to be Astronaut Nick’s night, and Jimmy’s heart instantly quickened its pace.

Could it be…?

Jimmy had to find out. He slid carefully out of his bunk, his feet resting on the deck. He slid his slippers on and padded deftly to the hatch, cracking it open on its hinge so that he could get a better look. Across the hatchway, from the direction of the family living and dining area, the red-to-green-to-red light emanated. Jimmy stared at the closed doorway to his parents’ compartment, and then at the small latrine, and then back to the open hatch to the living and eating area.

He padded forth, almost breathless in anticipation.

There was a single bubble window in the east wall of the eating and dining area that had an unobstructed view of the Olympus Mons landing facility—where the big shuttles from the orbital cargo and space liners would occasionally put down. Jimmy had ridden in just such a shuttle when they’d come down from orbit. The ship he now saw sitting on the nearest pad looked nothing like a shuttle.

It looked for all the world like an oversized sleigh—something from out of the history pictures of Earth. Only this sleigh had been extensively modified, to include a kind of canopy over the seat where a driver might sit at the front. There was no team of horses—not even reindeer, as Father Christmas was reputed to have used in legend. But the snow was falling more heavily than Jimmy had ever seen it since coming to Mars. Enough so that a little heap of it was crusted over the top of the window bubble, and the red and green running lights of the odd-looking ship on the pad reflected off a million little crystal mirrors as the flakes slowly fell.

Jimmy was transfixed.
It couldn’t be. Could it?

He had to get a closer look.

Jimmy snuck to the main hatch to the family compartment and hesitated, wondering if his exit would trip an alarm. Back on Ceres, all of the family housing had alarms that activated if ever the children left their family quarters without being cleared by a parent first.

The craft on the pad beckoned.

Jimmy touched his hand to the palm reader at the door, and the hatch slid quietly to the side, no alarm to wake Jimmy’s parents.

Jimmy stepped out into the corridor beyond, his eyes still transfixed on the picture of the sleigh-like craft resting on the pad. Then the hatch slid shut, and Jimmy was left to contemplate whether what he’d just seen was real, or illusion.

He walked softly—but quickly—down the corridor, his ears keenly listening for the first hint of an adult’s footsteps. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was engaging in something illicit. As if being discovered would merit the severest of punishments. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to know, about the other-worldly craft he’d seen on the pad. He wasn’t even sure he wasn’t dreaming, or sleepwalking.

But his feet kept moving. Down the corridor, through an intersection, down another corridor, through yet another intersection, and on and on, until finally Jimmy found himself at the main observation dome that overlooked the landing pad proper.

Jimmy had not been imagining things. The sleigh still sat there, its red and green running lights slowly oscillating in a hypnotic fashion.

“Beautiful ship, isn’t she?” said a man’s deep voice.

Jimmy spun and flattened against the railing that ringed the interior deck of the dome—his heart in his throat.

The man was wearing a space suit with extra room in the middle, for his prodigious belly. The suit had shiny black boots, and the cuffs and waist ring and neck ring were bright white, while the suit itself was a deep, cheerful red. He had a similarly-colored helmet under one of his arms, and his face was covered in a very short, but also very dense layer of white beard, with an accompanying moustache under his nose. A pair of antique spectacles were drawn up close to his eyes, and he was bald on top, save for a ring of dense, closely-cut white hair that ran from one ear, around the back, to the other ear. His cheeks were pink and he seemed to be amused about something.

“Who—who—?” Jimmy tried to say, but his words came out in a cracked squeak.

“Who do you think, James?” the man said, his mouth splitting in a full grin.

“James?” Jimmy said, tasting the name on his tongue. Tessa had been right, only Jimmy’s Mom ever called him that—or occasionally, his Dad, when Dad was angry. Which seldom ever happened. Jimmy didn’t like to get in trouble.

“Ordinarily,” the man said, “I don’t like having you youngsters interrupt me in the middle of my business, but it just so happens that I was coming to find you—or, it seems you found
me
. Your request was definitely on the unusual side. I wanted to talk to you about it, to be sure you knew what you were asking me for.”

“You can … take me back home?” Jimmy whispered, his heart hammering at his ribs. “You can fly me to Ceres?”

“Ceres, or the moons of Jupiter, or even all the way to Pluto, if you want,” the man said. “Nothing’s impossible for Astronaut Nick, you know.”

“Then … you’re real!” Jimmy exclaimed, taking two steps away from the railing and examining his interrogator more closely. The man was obviously old, by the looks of him, but Nick radiated a decidedly youthful vibe that was difficult for Jimmy to put his finger on. The eyes behind the spectacles were somewhat crowded by folds of skin, but they sparkled with energy and hints of wisdom.

“Of course I’m real!” Astronaut Nick said, bursting out with a huge chuckle that seemed to begin at his belt and boom up and out through his throat.
Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!

Jimmy glanced around, waiting for another adult to appear and ruin the magic. But no such adult—nor even another child—materialized.

“Now then, young man,” Nick said, “let’s get down to business, shall we? I’ve got a lot more to do before my work is through. And if you’re going to Ceres, there’s no time to lose. So, just to be clear, you
really
want to go back? That’s your wish? You wouldn’t like, say, a model space liner kit, or one of the new three-dee video game packs? Something like that?”

“No,” Jimmy said. “I miss home. I want to go home!”

“This isn’t your home?”

“No, it’s not. And it never will be. Please, Astronaut Nick, take me back to my friends on Ceres. Take me to where I belong!”

The man in the suit seemed to consider Jimmy for a moment, then he took a step towards Jimmy and slapped his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder.

“Fine, then. But first, you’ll have to climb into my sack.”

For the first time, Jimmy noticed that Astronaut Nick had a huge, red, velvet-fabric sack resting on the deck behind him. It appeared to be filled with square and rectangular items.

“Why?” Jimmy asked.

“How else are we going to get you to out of the airlock, and to my sleigh?” he said. “Do they have vacuum suits your size here?”

“They do,” Jimmy said. “But I am not sure I can just take one.”

“Exactly,” Nick said. “So, if you will simply crawl in, please, we’ll be on our way.”

Astronaut Nick opened the mouth of the sack as wide as he could, and Jimmy stepped hesitantly toward it. All he had on were his one-piece pajamas and a pair of slippers. He’d not thought seriously enough about what might happen if Astronaut Nick actually came to fulfill Jimmy’s wish. What would his parents think when they woke up in the morning and Jimmy was gone?

“Come on now,” Nick said, frowning with impatience. “If you’re getting cold feet, just say so, and I’ll let you be. Astronaut Nick is a busy guy, and there’s plenty of other children across the solar system who need my attention tonight.”

“No!” Jimmy said. “I don’t want to stay. Okay, I’ll climb into the sack. Just promise me this won’t hurt.”

“You won’t feel a thing,” Astronaut Nick said, keeping the mouth of the sack held open wide.

Jimmy stared at the sack, feeling himself teetering on the knife’s edge of his indecision, then practically threw himself at the sack, and was promptly swallowed up as he fell an unlikely distance down into a massive pile of wrapped packages.

Space wasn’t like Jimmy remembered it. There was no tedious countdown, no painful waiting as traffic control cleared the launch, then the shuttle ride, then the long period of docking. One moment Jimmy felt and saw the mouth of the sack close over his head, the next he felt himself being lifted and hefted, and then the next he was being set down, and the mouth of the sack opened back up.

Only, by the time he peeked out, he was staring at the cold blackness of the night sky, with stars all around. The sack was sitting on the floor of the upper deck of Astronaut Nick’s sleigh—the part which Jimmy had previously seen, and which was covered by a single-piece dome canopy. Nick himself was still clad in his space suit, this time with the helmet on, and he was rapidly waving his black gloves through a series of holographic control screens that floated in his lap.

“I didn’t even feel us take off,” Jimmy said.

“Nor should you,” Astronaut Nick said. “At the gees we pull, if you felt anything, you’d be turned to jelly!”

Jimmy stared open-mouthed.

Nick kept working, then noticed his companion’s horrified expression, and he burst out with another
Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!
which didn’t sound any less loud even though it was coming through Nick’s helmet speakers.

“Don’t worry, James,” Astronaut Nick said. “In three hundred years of doing this, I’ve never had so much as a single accident. Isn’t that right, Chief Engineer?”

An improbably small person—also clad in a space suit very similar to Nick’s—suddenly popped into view. From whence the person had come, Jimmy couldn’t tell, but the voice was that of a cartoon character.

“Nosiree, Cap’n!” the tiny individual said cheerfully.

Jimmy watched as the little person hopped up onto the seat next to Nick, pulled up a series of holographic controls, and began to go to work right alongside Nick himself. The view through the little person’s helmet didn’t give Jimmy the greatest profile, but he saw an old man’s face with a beard and a moustache, and oversized, inhumanly pointed ears.

“Is that—?” Jimmy said, beginning to aim a finger at the impish being.

“It’s not polite to point, James,” said the smallish, space-suited creature. Jimmy watched as the Chief Engineer waved his little hands through numerous flashing diagrams and displays, tapping out instructions pantomime-fashion. A series of holo windows all blinked bright green, and the little man stood up and gave Astronaut Nick a proper salute.

“The drive’s good to go whenever you want it, boss,” he said.

“Thank you,” Nick said cheerfully, and then the little creature vanished—presumably through a hatch in the floor that James couldn’t see, since he was still staring over the edge of the sack in which he sat.

“Hang on,” Nick said, “this part gets a little weird.”

Jimmy had no time to prepare, as suddenly Nick’s finger zinged through a series of holographic triggers, and all the stars in space flashed like camera bulbs. They froze at that point, and grew even brighter, then they ran and smeared like melting wax across a black velvet canvas.

Jimmy’s stomach wasn’t happy with the accompanying sensation, and he slapped a palm over his mouth to keep from making a mess in Astronaut Nick’s sleigh, when just as quickly, the stars all snapped back to normal and Jimmy’s stomach righted itself.

In the distance, a dark sphere blotted out part of the view, with a thin crescent showing along one side where the sun reflected. In patches across the sphere’s black side, clusters of lights shone brightly. Familiar clusters of lights.