Tom Swift and His Dyna-4 Capsule (6 page)

It’s like a hazing
, he thought.
Except—this is a frat I really don’t want to join.

He flipped open the cellphone. Nothing.

NO SERVICE

Figures
, he thought. Was there still such a thing as a public pay phone?

He was standing next to a glass window. The shop was called
Verna’s Today
. Inside the window were mannequins modeling women’s dresses. He stood regarding their waxen expressions, their pastel-shaded outfits. Something gnawed at his mind. At last it came forth: he hadn’t seen clothing like that in a long time. A
long
time. Old-fashioned skirts, old-fashioned blouses.
Jetz
! he thought,
that one’s wearing an apron!
When had he last seen a young housewife in an apron—and pearl earrings?

On old TV reruns.

"At least the town isn’t in black and white," he joked with himself.

The shop door placard said OPEN. But he decided real men didn’t enter women’s dress shops, even to ask what town—or what
state
—he was in.

Glancing along the row of buildings—most of them small and modest—he wandered up to the drug store next in line. It was a chain drugstore, though he recognized the chain name only vaguely. Hadn’t they gone out of business when he was a little boy? The windows were plastered with hand-scrawled signs for sunglasses and aspirin and candy bars. He read the prices twice, boggling. "Man,
I’ll
say it’s a sale!" Bud muttered. Was there really such a thing as
nickel candy?

He stepped on the grooved rubber pad, and the doors swung open with a whoosh. Air conditioning wafted over his face. He could hear the canned shoppers’ music now. Reassuring signs. He cranked up his charm. It would be embarrassing, asking "Where in space am I?" But he could play the scene as a half-joke. And buy some candy.

A few more steps and realization. The piped music was all there was to the sounds of life in the store. He pivoted in place, scanning like radar. Rex-All was like the street. Plenty of things. No people.

"Hello?" he called out timidly. Was there a pushbell somewhere, for service? To wake up a dozing salesclerk, a checkout girl—anyone? Because so far there was no one.

There were two checkout counters. He marveled at the cash registers. They were mechanical, manual. No power cable. More to the point, no pricecode scanner. It seemed that, incredibly, the checkout clerks
actually had to read the individual price tags and punch in the numbers!

"If I were a certain type of guy," Bud said aloud, "I’d ring open the cash drawer and—" But, of course, he wasn’t. Still, that
Rrrring
! would bring someone running from somewhere.

Wouldn’t it?

"Hello!" he called out again, now more demandingly. He wanted to sound like someone capable of trouble. "Customer, guys!" He imagined everyone in a side room knotted in front of a small portable TV. And then he imagined the sort of national event that might have hastened them there...

Nothing stirred but the background music. It was lush with strings. No beat to it.

The young flyer ran a finger along the counter, half expecting to scrape up a cake of dust. But his finger was clean. The floor tiles—tiles, not a carpet—were also clean, and buffed, a dull ivory color with black speckles. It reminded him of the floor of a service station restroom. He had known such floors.

He looked overhead. Long fluorescent tubes, flickering just a bit now and then. Now he could distinguish their characteristic hum behind the music. It made him feel impatient, even—he didn’t like to think it—nervous. Or worried. Or maybe—afraid.

He wandered down the rows of shelves, aisle after aisle, well stocked and utterly tidy and clean. It gave him a strange, unnamed feeling to see the items. Nothing was electronic. Everything was new, but nothing was
modern
. Even the muted color schemes seemed like something from the days when his father was a child, as he had seen in old snapshots. But the toys—
there
the colors were bright and gaudy. Jack-In-The-Boxes, plastic guns, dolls. Board games he had seen stacked in the Barclay garage since long-ago days. Baseball bats—wooden. Wooden!

The little-girl dolls were dressed in frilly garments.
They can’t
all
be Alice in Wonderland
, he thought wryly. There were no colors to the faces other than blushing white. Where were the action figures? The only thing promising action was the pull-string on a doll named Chatty Cathy. The only boy dolls were clowns.

He stared at a set of faux-China for a promised tea party, a tiny one. At something called Mister Mechano.

There was a wooden rocking horse. An inflated, round-sided figure called "Mr. Bobo" stood by himself at the end of the aisle, staring at Bud with pieplate eyes and a disarming, unnerving grin.
Knock him down—he bounces right up!
promised the placard. "What happens if you knock him
up
?" Bud wondered.

The next aisle offered model kits—ships, planes, cars. The jet planes were of the Korean War era. Likewise the model cars—classic woodies, a few sporty models, a convertible. There was a build-it-yourself log cabin, big enough for a kid to sit in, made of long cardboard tubes that stacked together in notches.

But this Rex-All had boldly entered the Space Age. There were model rockets straight from ancient TV serials, the sorts of things done live in studios and recorded on scratchy kinescope film. One rocket bore on its side
Jet Jaxton Space Commando: Genuine Super-Comet
. "C’mon, guys," he said aloud. "The
Star Spear
, the
Challenger
—Tom Swift junk outsells everything these days." But this shelf had never heard of Tom Swift, evidently. Perhaps not "
these days
," even.

However, a moment made Bud reconsider, briefly. On a bottom shelf was a big box labeled
Tom Swift Electric Rifle
—safe for kids! Bud chuckled.
That
Tom was his chum’s famous great-grandfather. The item was now a collectible in the civilized world. Did obsessed collectors realize that old drug stores in timeless towns still had such a thing for sale? For—he almost gasped—
$3.95?
In mint condition?

Maybe he
was
dreaming.

He picked up a plastic ray gun,
Blast-o-matic
, and thumbed the trigger. The barrel whirred and flickered and spangles glinted. "Martians, beware!" he muttered.

He called out a few more times, with little hope, then made for the door. "Everybody’s out watching the big parade," he pronounced sarcastically. "Except there’s no parade."

He halted abruptly. Just inside the door was a magazine stand and a round swivel-rack of comic books. He stepped closer. It was as he had half-expected, but still it gave him an inner twist of disorientation. Bud had read comics growing up. He still did, now and then.
These
comics—

He opened one and glanced at the issue date.
Captain Powerful
, untattered, unyellowed, perhaps never opened by human hands or sticky fingers, was dated:

SEPT 1953 NO. 6

"
Captain Powerful, Man of Jupiter
," recited Bud Barclay. "Discontinued 1965. Last issue numbered in double digits. Early issues worth several hundred bucks." If he were a certain type of guy...

But he wasn’t.

Still, maybe he could buy out the entire rack before leaving town. Town Whatever. Smaller Ville.

Timeless Town.

The magazines were the same—fresh, crisp issues from Fall of 1953. Painstakingly reprinted, it seemed. Men’s true adventures that weren’t, of course. Covers gossiping of movies now sold as cheap DVD’s in nostalgia packages. Starlets displayed with a becoming modesty no longer seen. Actors smoking pipes clutching wives and children—probably their own. World issues long forgotten, crises that expanded, then finally contracted to nothingness. President Eisenhower and his broad grin—in memory yet green. For retirees.

Latest news of the war...

Bud saw no newspapers, though. Nothing with the real name of the town, or the exact spot on the calendar the town so carefully portrayed.

He went out onto the street. He felt dizzy.
Real men
do
get freaked out by—this
, he acknowledged ruefully.

Down the street, the stoplight changed. The hanging telephone wires twitched very slightly in a breeze too timid for Bud to feel. Nothing else moved.

He stood thinking, thinking as Tom Swift might do. What were the possibilities?

Maybe he was trapped in an isolation tank and hallucinating. Hallucinating 1953? Why? Why not grunge, punk, or even disco? What did they even listen to in 1953? Big bands? The minuet?

Maybe he had been shipped to Kranjovia and planted in a mock-up of a typical American town to drive him crazy and extract Swiftian information. But he doubted professional foreign agents didn’t know that the decadent West had become even more decadent over the last half-century.

Extraterrestrials were telepathically...

"Naw," he snorted. Baxx was weird, but hardly a space alien.

An unused movie set. But weren’t movie sets just false fronts? Why stock an entire drug store in exquisite detail? Why print up not just the covers, but the
insides
, of old comic books?

"Starting to run dry," he muttered.

Could this be one of those towns the government had built to gauge the effects of nuclear explosions? "So are they testing 1953-brand bombs or something?" he asked himself rhetorically, dismissively.

What would Tom be thinking about? A brain implant? An image produced by a 3-D telejector? Bud stomped on the solid concrete of the sidewalk. "No way!"

The possibility of a drug-induced dream was beginning to look more and more plausible. More plausible than what occurred to him next.

It couldn’t happen, could it?
his mind asked.
A time warp or something?

Back to 1953?

Maybe Gar Baxx was working for this mad scientist with wild frizzy hair...

"But look, pal," he objected, "strange to say, there were
people
living back in 1953.
People
drove those cars and read those magazines. You don’t arrive in the past and find a whole town with everything except the people who lived there."

A worse possibility struck Bud Barclay.

Much worse.

Much scarier.

Much more insoluble.

As a matter of fact, something as hopelessly
final
as anything
could
be.

Maybe he was dead.

"WELL, Bud," Bud said to himself in the comforting, calm voice of Tom Swift, "look at it logically. Do you
feel
dead?"

"I don’t know what
dead
feels like, genius boy."

"Corpses don’t walk around. Corpses don’t walk around worrying about whether they’re dead or not."

"But maybe they
dream
. How do we know? See, you die, you leave your body, go through the tunnel of light—maybe it happened while my eyes were shut—, and then, see, you’re in this, this
ghost world
where—"

"Ghosts of stop signals? Ghosts of comic books? Cash registers? Dress mannequins? Get serious, flyboy."

"Does kind of give a new meaning to ‘ghost town,’ doesn’t it."

He stopped the self-conversation, as it sounded more than a little crazy. "I don’t do crazy," he said aloud.

Still... what if? Alone for eternity in a small backward town. "Jetz, maybe I should be
glad
Timeless Town doesn’t come with people!" he said wryly.

Dread was beginning to rise in his gut. His banter wasn’t enough to brush it back. Bud was, yes, becoming very afraid. Little Luna, the moon, Aurum City beneath the sea, the Black Cobra—those formidable things were merely strange.
But some things
, he thought,
are real horrors.

He snapped himself out of it, a bit, by muscular action. He trotted to the end of the block, to the vacant intersection, where the stoplight did its pointless, ceaseless work. He looked each way before crossing, then wondered why.

The intersection seemed to be at the center of Greater Timeless Town—its downtown area. The frozen business district extended just a few blocks in all directions. Storefronts, a bank, what looked like a library, some small restaurants and diners...

No chain fast food outlets. Now
that
was
horror
.

In the distance he saw a flagpole. The Stars and Stripes dangled limply at the top. The breeze wasn’t enough to worry it.

But down the next street—Newharvest Avenue—
motion
! Red and white stripes corkscrewed down endlessly on a mechanized barber pole.

Bud sauntered toward it, steady but cautious. He had had his fill of disappointment. An uninhabited drugstore was eerie enough.

He stood in front of the little shop.
Rudy’s Barbers
. There was a bright sign in the window, a cardboard sign announcing in neat bold letters:

YES WE’RE OPEN

"Yes I sure hope so," gulped Bud, heading into the wide-gaping door. There was a moment of hope: he heard the sound of activity.

A small electric fan whirred. Fans on the ceiling stirred the air lazily.

There were, of course, no people.

A small pre-transistor radio played something that would have underscored romance in 1953. Four barber chairs. Combs and brushes and razor strops and all that. Bottles with green stuff inside. A fishbowl of wrapped candies next to the cash register. Each station was labeled: Art, Steve, Harry, Rudy. But there were no people to match the labels.

"
Hey
Art Steve Harry Rudy!" Bud called out resentfully. "Shave an’ a haircut!" He knocked the "two bits" on the back of a barber chair.

Then his eye fell across something on the floor near one of the chairs. It was a little flat fuzzy cloud of brown and gray and blond and a little red—hair clippings. Humanity!

Bud knelt down a picked at a tuft with his fingers. The whole scattered pile came up off the floor along with the tuft. And so Bud realized that it wasn’t
human hair
at all, but rather human handicraft. It was something artificial, made of fibers meant to look like hair, as in a cheap wig. The pile hadn’t grown from the casual discards of a barber at work—in this case, Steve. It had been manufactured, and set down for effect. Because a real working barber shop of 1953 would have hair on the floor.