Volume VI: Starship Summer

A small group of kids assembled on the sidewalk to watch something they had never seen before. The tallest of the kids, a boy around ten or eleven, stood straddling a black, rugged-looking his old bike that looked like it might have been new in the 1950s. He was about ten or eleven, with greased-back longish hair and thick, black-rimmed glasses, corduroys that were too short, and a light blue cotton button down shirt—definitely out of style for 1985. His nose was too big for his longish face, and his mouth had too many teeth, out of which he tended to breathe as he watched through lenses that were too thick. His complexion made him look older than his age, as if it were already preparing for the pockmarks of severe acne to come.

The other children were all younger and smaller than the boy on the bike: a chubby girl from across the street; a neighbor girl from two doors down, and a small boy sucking his thumb.

The street was a late-fifties, curving avenue in a subdivision of one-story homes built over what had previously been farmland. The house in front of which the children had assembled was one of three or four modernist ranch models repeated incessantly for blocks and blocks, from the intersection of Six Mile and Inkster Roads to Deering and the grade school, Taft Elementary, recently closed as the Baby Boom had waned.

The old, red brick nineteenth-century farmhouse, to which all this land had once belonged, stood behind the modernist ranch house and its garage, separated by a chain-link fence. On a very slight hill along Inkster, towering three stories, and surrounded by old trees, it appeared incongruous—and slightly menacing—in its own native environment.

It was rather remarkable, at this late date, to see a collection of children in the modernist subdivision at all, considering it had once teamed with children. Nowadays the homes, once own by young families, were occupied by more and more senior citizens or parents approaching middle age whose children had already gone off to college and moved away, or single owners, divorced or never married and either through with or not planning to have kids.

This house was such a house. The new owner was a young woman, a licensed social worker by day whose lithe, fit body never had children and never intended to. She did something mysterious at night involving private investigation and occasionally had strange friends from the city visit her. Usually she wore her black hair short and exhibited a vaguely punkish fashion sense, but today she wore a redhaired wig, stone earrings, and a tiger-striped cat-eye mask that clung to her face without visible means of support. Even more remarkable was one of her strange visitors, highly unusual for this homogeneous neighborhood but perhaps a sign of the changing time: a young black woman.

In past decades, since the subdivision was built, the neighborhood had occasionally been visited by black people, called Negroes then, who lived in Detroit, just a few miles east of Inkster Road. They came to clean and iron for the white homeowners, housewives whose husbands went off to work on automotive assembly lines at Fisher, Ford, American Motors. That was until the 1967 race riots, when the white husbands stored rifles in their two-car garages and white mothers clutched their white children to their breasts. After that, the blacks from the city stopped coming to iron and clean in the suburbs.

But this young black woman was just visiting her young white friend, who for some reason was wearing a red wig. They both wore loose fitting tank tops, biker shorts, socks and tennis shoes, and dribbled a basketball in the driveway, playing each other one-on-one and occasionally taking shots at the net and backboard newly-installed on the empty two-car garage.

The black woman took a shot just over the reach of the white woman; the ball hit the backboard and bounced off the hoop but didn’t get any net. She managed to recover the ball before it went over the fence into the neighbor’s yard.

“Don’t look now, Donna, but we’re attracting an audience,” said the black woman, catching her breath while dribbling in place. “Your white neighbor children have never seen an actual African-American in the flesh, except on TV.”

“They’ve never seen the Phantom Jungle Girl in daylight playing basketball, Clarissa,” said Donna, who was in a crouching, defensive posture. “But I need to bring my A-game if I’m going to play Around-the World with Ms. Megaton Man.”

Strictly speaking, Around the World was a series of free throws from positions on an equidistant semicircular perimeter from the basket: the chain-link fence by the yard, the seam in the concrete, the opposite fence with the neighbor’s yard, and so on.

“You’re not supposed to aggressively defend the shooter in Around-the-World, Donna,” Clarissa pointed out.

“What’s the matter? Afraid of my jungle leap?” said Donna, smiling behind her tiger-striped cat-eye mask.

Clarissa took a deep breath, jumped, and took her shot; Donna jumped higher and blocked it, sending the ball down the driveway. It rolled toward the tall boy on the bike, who stopped it from going into the street.

“Thanks,” said Clarissa, who ran toward the ball and picked it up at the boy’s feet. She thought she saw the smaller children flinch as she approached. She was sure she had seen the boy earlier in the spring, when Donna had shown her the house, before closing on the purchase.

“Don’t mention it,” said the boy. “I’m Larry; Larry Barton. I live across the street.”

“Nice to meet you, Larry. I’m Clarissa.” She extended her sweaty hand; when Larry tentatively shook it, she wondered whether it was the first time he’d ever touched a black person’s skin. “Who are your friends?”

“This is Sherry Trim, and this is Vicki and Corey Freedman,” said Larry. “Are you living here now, Clarissa?”

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“Would that bother you?” asked Clarissa.

“No,” said Larry. “We have two black kids in our school now, and some Arabs, too.”

“Two whole black kids,” said Clarissa. For the Lily-White Suburbs, she thought, that was progress.

“You should hear my dad, though,” continued Larry. “He works at River Rouge. ‘They’re fine on the assembly line,’ he says. ‘But they should stay in their own neighborhoods; they have the whole city of Detroit.’ He wants to move out to Brighton, but mom wants to stay put.”

“Mom’s enlightened,” said Clarissa.

“No, she just likes our synagogue and stuff.”

***

A shadow passed over the driveway, an object coming directly between it and the midday sun. It was so fleeting it was nearly imperceptible. But the Phantom Jungle Girl, who had now walked to the base of the driveway, looked up.

“What the heck was that? A bird? A plane?” she said, removing her wig and mask.

Larry Barton squinted, catching a glimpse of the object as it disappeared behind the Old Farm House. “No, it’s some kind of vehicle,” he declared. “Like the land speeder from Star Wars, only bigger, black, and shiny.”

“Like my last lover,” said Clarissa.

“Where’s it heading to? The airport?” said Donna. “Looks like it’s coming in for a landing.”

“Not Detroit Metro,” said Larry. “That’s directly south. My dad’s taken me there to watch the planes.”

“And the City Airport’s too far away for it to be coming in so low,” said Clarissa. “Looks like it’s landing somewhere along West McNichol.”

“Aren’t you going to fly after it, Ms. Megaton Man?” asked Donna.

“Do I look like I’m wearing my uniform, Fanny?” replied Clarissa, extending her arms and lifting a leg to show her bare skin. “Besides, I haven’t flown in nearly a year. I’m a sedentary grad student, remember? Why don’t you swing after it on your magical jungle vine?”

Donna noticed the children looking at her and her friend funny; she hid the wig and mask behind her back. “I was just thinking of what Preston told us,” she said. “About some large, invisible object orbiting the earth.”

“You’re that Megahero, said Larry, studying Clarissa’s flat chest. “The burgundy-haired black girl in the primary-colored costume. We’ve seen you flying over Hines Park. But that’s been a couple years now.”

“You don’t miss much with those X-ray specs of yours, do you?” asked Clarissa, whose hair at the moment was short and black but growing out—and anything but burgundy.

“They’re not X-ray specs,” said Larry. “Mom won’t let me send away for them. She says X-rays are dangerous; she works at a hospital.”

But Clarissa wondered if she should go after the plane, or bird, or whatever it was. “It’s probably landed by now,” she said. “And I can’t fly that fast anyway.”

“There’s no such thing as Megaheroes,” said one of the small girls.

“Smart kid,” said Donna. “Well, I’m going to take a shower.”

***

The jets of the hotrod still hummed as fans cooled its three shut off engines. The size of small airplane, it took up most of the rooftop of the three-story apartment blockhouse; it had made a near vertical landing using technology far ahead of anything earthly in 1985.

“Well, we’ve made it,” said a man in a long, black leather coat. He wore a trim goatee and wore his hair slicked back, his dark skin the mixture of all human races. He had climbed down the ladder from a short wing and stood surveying the hotrod, smiling proudly. “Evaded the Domain and hidden in the twentieth century—the deep, dark, primordial past of humanity.”

His two passengers, who followed him out of the craft, onto the wing and tentatively down the ladder—a man and a woman—were both fair-haired. They wore visors over their eyes to protect them from the harsh daylight; they wore cloaks and gloves over light-colored uniforms with high collars. Together, the trio looked like something that had stepped out of the future, because they had.

“Where are we, Mr. Smash?” asked the man.

“Detroit,” said the first, darker man. “D’étroit, and old French town, built over an aboriginal settlement on the strait of the Great Lakes. Taken over by the British a couple centuries before this moment in time. A little history for you. And please, Drake, call me Rory—we’re going to be spending a lot of time together.”

“I suppose we’ll have to speak these Ancient Earth languages, um, Rory,” said the woman, clearly the sister of the fair-haired man.

“Just English, Ms. Revell, or a rough-hewn dialect thereof,” replied Rory Smash. “Although you may dabble in French if you wish—since it no doubt is the language of origin of your name. We’re in a place called America—long before the Image Wars. You won’t find any complete dictionaries on your communicators; too much of the material culture from this time period didn’t survive to your time period. Luckily, I’m a native—a man of the twentieth century.”

The three stepped back from the hotrod as Rory Smash took a small, palm-sized device from inside his long, leather coat. He pointed it at the hotrod and pressed a button. All at once, the vehicle disappeared.

“Where did it go?” asked Drake, rather densely. He asked his sister, “Cody, where did it go?”

“I thought you were physicists,” said Rory Smash.

“It’s in another dimension,” explained Cody. “Isn’t it Mr. Smash?”

“No better place to stow a wanted hotrod than an alternate reality,” said Rory Smash, smiling. “Plenty of free parking.”

***

Inside the apartment, Rory Smash shed his long, leather coat and opened some windows. The living room was comfortably appointed with furniture: a sofa, bookcase, a coffee table. A counter separated a kitchenette, and a hallway to bedrooms led from the other side. Cody and Drake took off their cloaks and gloves.

“What are we to do now, Mr. Smash?” asked Drake.

“Hide from the Domain,” Rory Smash replied. “Keep your Black Hole Bomb secret away from them. Relax and enjoy a simpler time.”

“Yes, but how long must we hide? When can return to the … um … future?”

“Who knows? It may be a lifetime. What’s your hurry?”

A black cat emerged from the hallway, brushed against the leg of Rory Smash.

“Dr. Sax,” he said fondly, picking up the feline. “You’ve been well-fed since I’ve been gone. Which reminds me ….”

Rory Smash looked around the apartment. He spotted a black device on a side table, connected to the wall with a long, black cord. He set the cat down on the sofa and picked up the handset from its cradle; a coiled wire stretched from the base.

“What in the Doman is that?” asked Cody. “I’ve never seen such a strange device.”

“It’s called a phone,” explained Rory Smash. “It’s a land line; they don’t even have cellular communication in this time period.”

“Good Lord,” said Drake. “We’ve returned to the Stone Age.”

Rory Smash dialed the rotary mechanism several times, waited for a ringing tone. He got a recorded message, after which he said, “Hello. I’m back in town, just thought I’d let you know. Let’s meet at your earliest convenience. By the way, your cat is visiting.” He hung up the device.

“Who was that?” asked Cody.

“Someone who can help us,” said Rory Smash. “An old friend, Walter Samms. Except he doesn’t answer to any name; he especially doesn’t like the name people call him.”

“What’s that?” asked Drake.

“The Meddler,” said Rory Smash, stroking Dr. Sax’s sleek, black fur. “You’ll meet him soon enough.”

Rory Smash walked to the window, looked out at the Detroit neighborhood, stretched his arms luxuriously.

“God, it’s great to be home.”