A guard, sitting near the elevators, made as if to start in my direction to find out who and what the deuce I wanted, when one of the elevators came down and a group of men hustled out. There were two men, evidently State Department escorts, neatly clad in gray double-breasted suits, with three other men walking with them. The three men struck me as a little odd; they wore long, black cloaks, big slouch hats with wide brims pulled down over their faces, and carried portfolios. They looked for all the world like cartoon representations of cloak-and-dagger spies. I supposed that they were some sort of foreign diplomats and, as they were coming directly toward me, stood my ground, determined to see who they were.
The floor was marble and highly polished. One of the men nearing me suddenly seemed to lose his balance. He slipped; his feet shot out from under him and he fell. His portfolio slid directly at my feet.
Being closest to him, I scooped up the folio and was the first to help raise him to his feet. Grasping his arm, I hoisted him from the floor—he seemed to be astonishingly weak in the legs; I felt almost that he was about to topple again. His companions stood about rather flustered, helplessly, their faces curiously impassive. And though the man I helped must have received a severe jolt, his face never altered expression.
Just then the two State Department men recovered their own poise, rushed about, and, getting between me and the man I had rescued, rudely brushed me aside and rushed their party to the door.
Now what bothers me is not the impression I got that the arm beneath that man’s sleeve was curiously woolly, as if he had a fur coat underneath the cloak (and this in a Washington summer!), and it’s not the impression that he was wearing a mask (the elastic band of which I distinctly remember seeing amidst the kinky, red, close-cropped hair of his head). No, it’s not that at all, which might be merely momentary misconstructions on my part. It’s the coin that I picked up off the floor where he’d dropped his portfolio.
I’ve searched through every stamp and coin catalogue I can find or borrow, and I’ve made inquiries of a dozen language teachers and professors, and nobody can identify that coin or the lettering around its circumference.
It’s about the size of a quarter, silvery, very light in weight but also very hard. Besides the lettering on it, which even the Bible Society, which knows a thousand languages and dialects, cannot decipher, there is a picture on one side and a symbol on the other.
The picture is the face of a man, but of a man with very curiously wolfish features: sharp canine teeth parted in what could be a smile; a flattened, broad, and somewhat protruding nose, more like a pug dog’s muzzle; sharp, widely spaced, vulpine eyes, and definitely hairy and pointed ears.
The symbol on the other side is a circle with latitude and longitude lines on it. Flanking the circle, one on each side, are two crescent-shaped moons.
I wish I knew just how far those New Mexico rocket experiments have actually gone.
LIVING UNDER THE CONDITIONS, by James K. Moran
As the early April sun made his cheeks flush, Michael didn’t know what to believe in anymore.
The birds bitched in the trees as he crossed through the middle of the park, which smelled of mud, dry grass, and strong marijuana. Two men wearing shirts and ties sat on a nearby bench on the rectangular perimeter, eating take-out lunches in Styrofoam boxes. A middle-aged blond man threw a Frisbee to his retriever in the centre of the park. Mid-morning traffic rushed by on all sides.
All this meant nothing to Michael, who glanced at his watch and sped up. The birds might vanish or change into other animals, the smells of spring might change to fall, the people might float away if the gravitational constant ended, and the speeding cars might suddenly have no traction.
He had spent enough time getting used to it but had never liked it. When Michael was growing up, he and other kids shared stories about where their parents were when the Wormhole Incident happened. Civilians didn’t know the details even now, except that scientists had discovered a wormhole in space, not far from Earth. Various interstellar agencies around the world had rushed in to study and capitalize on the discovery, but something had happened. One day, morning became night, and since then, things were always changing—time, eras, laws—the Conditions, as they called them. That was why Michael had checked the Weathering Change network before leaving the house, in case anything came up. The forecast had looked clear, but he knew they were rarely right.
But right now, he had only 15 minutes before his job interview and he was in a white-hot panic. That wasn’t enough time to walk the eight blocks to the office, and there wasn’t a bus around. Michael’s heart pounded faster. Sweat covered his knit brow, palms, and already-sweaty armpits. A smell of aftershave and cologne rose from him like steam.
Michael glanced down at his freshly ironed black dress pants to make sure he had not stepped in a puddle. They looked fine. The growling engine of an approaching bus made him look up.
Michael bore down on the far corner of the park where the bus pulled up to pick up a half-dozen passengers. Maybe he had finally had a lucky break. He quickly joined the line, boarded, paid, and shuffled with the crowd toward the rear of the bus.
The bus pulled away, passing the beer store and parking lot across the street.
A billboard at the far end of the lot advertised a tall, frosty mug full of ale that threatened to spill voluptuous foam over the lip of the glass. The ad read “In these times of change, remember that change is a good thing. Try Reef’s Crimson Ale.”
Michael wasn’t so sure that change was a good thing. But he needed rent money badly and hadn’t worked in a month. Now in his early 30s, the career crisis of finding a day job hit him each morning. This was his first interview call in months.
Michael jostled past a seated, overweight woman with a hair lip. Her dirty beige jogging pants had a stripe along each side. With her right foot, covered in a running shoe, she gently nudged a pudgy baby dressed in a red jumper and stuffed into a stroller. Michael narrowly avoided tripping over both of them. The woman coughed, her stale breath wafting up to him over the smells of sweat and soiled diapers.
Michael stumbled past a tall, black man with long dreadlocks listening to a yellow MP4 player. The man nodded and swayed his slim, muscular shoulders as Michael navigated to the back door and grabbed a metal railing with his right hand.
“Excuse me,” someone said timidly behind him.
Michael tried to stay to the right side of the door. A short Chinese man in a beige bomber vest squeezed by, brushing Michael with his pot belly.
A pressure loosened in Michael’s ears as though he had just come down from a higher altitude. He shook his head, squinted his eyes shut and opened them again.
The Chinese man rose into the air, a look of wide-eyed wonder on his face, scuffing Michael in the chest with his right shoe and flailing his hand against Michael’s cheek. The man latched onto the railing. Michael felt his own feet rise from the floor.
“That’s just the gravitational constant,” the voice of the bus driver crackled on the PA system in a thick Francophone accent. “Hold onto a bar and keep moving towards the back. Keep moving towards the back, please.”
As if to affirm the news, many passengers floated upward. The man listening to his MP4 did not notice, his thick dreadlocks rising around him like an umbrella. A skinny teenaged boy snored in the back, leaning over a side seat with his arms crossed and his jaw slack, oblivious to the fact that he would soon thud against the ceiling with the small of his back. A brunette with her hair tied back jostled to the door, chatting on her silver cell phone, which slipped from her hand and rose above her head.