originally published January 17, 2008

this writing
is in the chapbook

Long Gone Blues
by Sam Martin

(a Down in the Dirt chapbook)

this chapbook is also available for sale for $3.50 (+ $1.00 shipping and handling per chapbook)

this writing is in the collection book Decrepit Remains (PDF file) download: only $9.95 (b&w pgs): paperback book $18.92 (b&w pgs):hardcover book $32.95 (color pgs): paperback book $75.45 (color pgs): hardcover book $88.45

Tempus Boogies

Sam Martin

    “Eternity ain’t a lonnng time!” the radio preacher shouted. “It’s the absence of time!” Danny (Daniel Luke, seer first-class) reached to lower the volume, but abruptly clicked the set off. It was a bulky old Army receiver, and, since Danny knew all the on-air preachers, and that the one just speaking was deceased, was “gone on to be with the Lord,” and that no recordings, possible then only with L. P.’s, anyway, had been left behind, he concluded he must have picked up a “harmonic bounce” off somewhere unknown to Danny, some place had had not yet “looked into,” so to speak. The sudden ending got him to thinking about his buddy Jerry’s descent into eternity—or was it infinity?
    Jerry had disappeared on the three-day break after their sixth mid-shift, but he was a shack-pappy by reputation so his trick-mates weren’t too worried about him. Besides, Jerry had tested out at Level-3 Yurti, the major language of the main Island; as it turned out, however, Jerry hadn’t been on the Island, not on the main one, anyhow.
    The best Danny could make out from what happened later is that Jerry was on one of a chain of islets around the mainland. “At least that’s where I think I saw him last. I may have seen him in the fifth dimension.” he later confessed to the P. D.’s (Psychiatrist Debriefers). “Ennyhoo, we looked for him in the 3-D world, 4-D according to you P. D.’s.” “ ‘After all, we 3-D’s must ambulate through some medium.’” He mimicked their stilted speech.
    When it was time to start day-shifts and Jerry was still missing, his friends told the Trick-Chief. He yelled at them for not reporting the absence earlier. “Don’t you punks know what we’re doin’ here!? You ought to! You all have a ‘Cosmic Clearance’!” He mumbled, as he turned away, “If we didn’t need clean people, you young squirts wouldn’t be here!” Danny rode the walker to his pod and put on his eyes. His guard’s face shifted slightly. “Damn! He’d die to protect my young ass...I mean, brain. What a joke!”
    Danny was young, as were all his fellow “lookers,” (as they liked to call themselves; the Trick Chief called them “lookie-loo’s”) about as useful, uh, youthful, as any group of boys, except for their inherited talent; they shared a gene few could boast of, but they were not genetically related in any other way (known to man, at least). Oddly, they bore great physical resemblance to one another: light-colored hair, scant, and so slow-growing they seldom needed a haircut, modest height and weight, all other features regular in all respects, apparently manufactured beings, but known to be home-grown. Their only distinction from the rest of the race: large round eyes, which were judged never to be filled.
    Within twenty-four hours, Danny found himself, along with six guys he didn’t know but had seen on-station, squatting in a small boat operated by six black-haired, dark-skinned men sporting blue berets, and dressed in blue fatigues with the cuffs secured in the tops of their tightly-laced jump boots. They didn’t respond to English or Yurti. They only stared—with large, round eyes punctuated by tiny pupils the size of maculae.
    Danny’s crew weren’t so tightly attired, just fatigues and brogans, and an M-1 and ammunition clip each they had been issued from Supply at the last minute. The Supply Sergeant said goodbye without looking at them. They were hustled into a covered six-by, told not to look outside, then driven a long way to some coast.
    And now they were moving fast and almost noiselessly toward a place Danny had never seen before and wished he’d stop seeing in his dreams (“which are in 4-D, by the way”).
    As they neared the shore, they were invited to leave the boat by the jerk of a hand, thumb extended. They got wet to the knees.
    “What the hell’re we doin’? Who’s in charge here? What the hell’s goin’ on?” Danny’s crew-members demanded. He pulled out a tiny, folded paper given him by a C-7 who saw them off at Supply. It read, in Yurti, “You’re his friend. Find him. Kill him.” Danny didn’t know what to do, so he put the paper in his mouth, chewed it, then spit it out in pieces.

Danny’s Revelation

    “I can’t tell you what happened that night, because I can’t remember what happened. I did recall some of it for the De- B.’s, who then suggested I forget it, which I did—until my dreams lately:
    I see a figure a few yards off, and when I fire at it, it begins to move away—into something, into some place I can’t go. Strangely, it moves to the rhythm of a boogie beat. It’s made me wonder whether the Theoretical Physicists’ idea of “intersecting dimensions” couldn’t be validated experimenting with different tempos, as the keys to moving between different time-space continuums. Well, it works in dreams, the most obvious 5-D through which the 4-D moves.
    Well, after I emptied my clip, the other guys went running in all directions, and it was only with the use, not the threat, of the butt-end of my M-1 that I could keep us all together.
    Just at light, the boat returned, and the Leader, some grey hair showing in the sunlight, thumbed us back on board.”
    Danny recuperated in the Hospital until the guys sent him word to meet them on a nearby beach at three o’clock the next afternoon, and to wear an old uniform. He expected a beating, but as he walked down, the smell of perfume and Bar-B-Q sauce wafted toward him, and he saw a bunch of smiling guys and gals. They presented him with a new uniform. “You bastards!” he said, affectionately.

Danny’s Further Revelation

    “I saw us referred to as The Lucky Seven in documents classified way beyond Top Secret. But we, I mean I, failed in the mission to free Jerry. The Lucky Six have succumbed to Einstein’s insistence that 3-D moving through 4-D at less than light speed generates gravity, and yields to it. I submit that gravity is a euphemism for grave. I’ll return to 3-D, but Jerry won’t.”

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