At once the sword flicked out and the tip of Moshe’s nose dropped to the ground. The sword flicked again, and now Moshe lost the tip of the longest finger of the hand that he had been raising to touch his maimed nose.

  Hakira bent over and scooped up the nose and the fingertip. “I’d say that if we get back to our world within about three hours, surgeons will be able to put these back on with only the tiniest scar and very little loss of function. Or shall we delay longer, and sever more protruding body parts?”

  “This is inhuman!” said Moshe.

  “On the contrary,” said Hakira. “This is about as human as it gets.”

  “Are the people of your angle so determined to control every world you find?”

  “Not at all,” said Hakira. “We never interfered with any world that already had human life. You’re the ones who decided on war. And I must say I’m relieved that the general level of your technology turns out to be so low. And that wherever you go, you arrive naked.”

  Moshe said nothing. His eyes glazed over.

  Hakira murmured to his friend with the sword. The point of it quickly rested against the tender flesh just under Moshe’s jaw.

  Moshe’s eyes grew quite alert.

  “Don’t even think of slanting away from us,” said Hakira.

  “I am the only one who speaks your language,” said Moshe. “You have to sleep sometime. I have to sleep sometime. How will you know whether I’m really asleep, or merely meditating before I transfer?”

  “Take a thumb,” said Hakira. “And this time, let’s make him swallow it.”

  Moshe gulped. “What sort of vengeance will you take against my people?”

  “Apart from fair trials for the perpetrators of this conspiracy, we’ll establish an irresistible presence here, watch you very carefully, and conduct such trade as we think appropriate. You yourself will be judged according to your cooperation now. Come on, Moshe, save some time. Take me back to my world. A bender is already being set up at your house—the troops moved in the moment we disappeared. You know that it’s just a matter of time before they identify this angle and arrive in force no matter what you do.”

  “I could take you anywhere,” said Moshe.

  “And no doubt you’re threatening to take me to some world with unbreathable air because you’re willing to die for your cause. I understand that, I’m willing to die for mine. But if I’m not back here in ten minutes, my men will slaughter yours and begin the systematic destruction of your world. It’s our only defense, if you don’t cooperate. Believe me, the best way to save your world is by doing what I say.”

  “Maybe I hate you more than I love my people,” said Moshe.

  “What you love is our technology, Moshe, every bit of it. Come with me now and you’ll be the hero who brings all those wonderful toys home.”

  “You’ll put my finger and nose back on?”

  “In my world the year is 3001,” said Hakira. “We’ll put them on you wherever you want them, and give you spares just in case.”

  “Let’s go,” said Moshe.

  He took Hakira’s hand and closed his eyes.

  2002

  50 WPM

  “You know a lot of these guys?”

  “No. We didn’t fight the same war.”

  “I thought you went to Vietnam.”

  “Oh, sure, yeah. But I never fired a rifle at anybody, and nobody ever fired one at me. I never even left Saigon.”

  “But I always thought . . .”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  “What?”

  “Your hand. Your fingers. The missing ones. I thought that happened in Vietnam.”

  “It did . . . . There he is.”

  “Who?”

  “My guardian angel.”

  “Man, if I got a guardian angel I hope mine ain’t dead.”

  “Yeah, well, he was joking, too, I think. Got in country, he saw I was kind of green. You know. I was young, I’d never been out of Hickory, I didn’t know a thing, so he says to me, I’m your guardian angel, I’ll not only keep you alive in this hellhole, I’ll even keep you sane.”

  “Well, one out of two ain’t bad.”

  “I know you don’t mean anything by it, son, and there’s nothing wrong with joking, but I got my fingers resting on the name of a friend who died saving my life.”

  “Sorry, Dad. You know I didn’t mean . . .”

  “Funny thing is, your grandpa had it all figured out so my life wouldn’t need saving. See these hands? All seven fingers? Would you believe I used to be a typist?”

  “That before or after you were front man for the Beatles? No, sorry, I want to hear. Dad, I do. Really.”

  Your grandpa was a grunt in World War II. Volunteered the day after Pearl Harbor, and when they saw how that country boy could shoot, he was infantry all the way. He wasn’t stupid, he didn’t volunteer for anything, didn’t get himself into Airborne or the Marines, turned down sergeant’s stripes three times. He just knew how to shoot, so they had him on the front lines in North Africa, Sicily, and in slow motion all the way up the boot of Italy.

  He told me it got so he didn’t even bother learning the name of a new guy till he’d been there for a week, so many guys got blown away just cause they were new and didn’t know enough to keep their heads down. Dad and the other guys’d tell ’em, but they just didn’t have survivor instinct, that’s what Dad called it. The sense to know just how far you had to bend over to keep from giving them a target.

  Helmets don’t stop bullets, son. You got a helmet so you don’t get killed when a bullet knocks a chip out of a stone wall and the chip comes and hits you in the head. But somebody aims right at you, that helmet just adds a little more metal to get slammed into your skull.

  Anyway, Pop comes to me when I’m thirteen years old, summer before eighth grade, and he says, “No, I’m not going to teach you how to shoot. Knowin’ how to shoot got me three and a half years on the front lines killin’ guys and having guys get killed all around me. What you’re going to do this summer, boy, you’re going to learn how to type.”

  Now, I didn’t even hardly know what typing was. Something girls took in high school, something you saw secretaries doing when my mom took me with her to pay, like, the water bill or something. Pop had to drag me there, I ain’t kidding, kid, had to drag me up to the high school and sign me up for summer school typing. Bought me a typewriter, too, and he didn’t have a lot of money, that was a big deal, we had to be the only people we knew had a typewriter on their kitchen table, it sat there during meals and everything. At least an hour a day, he set the kitchen timer on me and it was worth half the skin on my butt to fiddle with it and cheat. So I sat there and typed, and a lot of the time he was watching me. Stuff like “Don’t look at the keys!” and “Spell it like it’s written, you moron!”

  No, he actually called me shit-for-brains, but your mother doesn’t like me talking to you the way my pop talked to me. And yes, this is about how Daniel I. Keizer saved my life. Look, forget it, let’s go find your mother and your sisters.

  It’s not like I tell this story a lot, son. So I don’t know which parts to take out so it’s entertaining.

  It’s about my father trying to save my life. That’s why he made me take typing class. He says to me, “Bobby, there’s gonna be a war. There’s always gonna be a war. First thing they do, they find out what you can do. Me, I could shoot the shit off a squirrel’s ass so clean he’d think he wiped himself, so they put me in the dust and the mud and had people tryin’ to kill me, and all I got in exchange was the GI Bill, but I never got me a single one of my buddies back, they stayed just as dead as they were when I left ’em behind in Italy. Well, that ain’t gonna happen to you, Bobby. You go into that recruiting office and where they say skills, you put down, ‘typing, fifty words per minute.’ That’s the magic number, boy. You type fifty words a minute—and that’s fifty words without a single mistake, every minute, page after page—and they never put you near a rifle. After Basic, you just sit at a desk and type and type and type, and when the war’s over you go home and you ain’t dead and nobody you knew in the army is dead because they were all typing, too, or giving orders from some nice safe place ten or twenty miles back or five thousand miles even. That’s where I want you in the war.”

  So I says to him, Pop, what if I want to fight, and he says, “Bobby, you volunteer for infantry, I’ll kill you myself so I don’t have to worry about you getting killed by somebody else. Better me than a stranger. Your mother and I, we’ll cry over your grave, but we sure as hell never gonna sit there waiting for some letter or some telegram from the government to find out whether you made it through another day of people shooting at you. You get me?”

  Didn’t matter whether I got it or not, I was going to learn to type. And that first summer, I kept telling him to go ahead and kill me, because hell couldn’t be worse than breaking my fingers on that damn machine.

  But by the end of that summer, I was typing thirty words a minute, and that’s after you take off ten words a minute for each typo.

  All through eighth grade he makes me type all my homework—and that was before computers, hardly anybody typed their stuff, not in Hickory anyway—and I had to practice an hour a day and then every Saturday morning first thing, he’d time me and correct my paper and if I ever did worse than the week before—lower speed or more typos—then I couldn’t go anywhere with my friends that whole weekend.

  By the end of eighth grade I was typing fifty words a minute, just like he wanted. He let me off then, no more hour-a-day practices, but those weekly tests kept right on, and any week I didn’t stay over fifty words per minute, I was back to the practicing.

  So I graduate high school and Johnson’s escalating the war in Vietnam and everybody who went to college got to sit it out and I could’ve, too, you can bet I got accepted at college—I mean, hell, kid, I could spell, I could type, that made me an intellectual in the hills of western Carolina. But, see, I figured I’d get drafted, put in my two years, and then come out with the government paying all my college bills cause I’d be a veteran. I wasn’t worried about no war, kid, cause Pop took care of that, I could type.

  No, it worked just like Pop said. I come in there looking and talking like a hillbilly and I put down on my form that I can type 50 wpm and the recruiter looks at me and says, “It’s a federal offense to lie on this form,” and I says to him, I ain’t lyin’, man, and so he sets me down at his own desk and opens a book and puts a paper in the machine and looks at his watch and says, “Go.”

  Well I made that thing sound faster than a machine gun. A minute later he says to stop and what I got on that page isn’t fifty words, it’s ninety words, all spelled right and pretty as you please. And then he says, “Do it again,” and this time he doesn’t say stop after a minute, he just has me keep typing and typing. I blew through three sheets of paper and the other recruiters are standing around laughing and he looks over my typing and I didn’t make a single damn mistake and even including changing sheets, I was over ninety words per minute.

  I don’t know what he wrote in my file, but even in Basic I kept getting called out of my company to go type stuff for the base commander and when I got to Vietnam I think I’d fired a rifle exactly once. My pop, he knew what he was talking about. I was going to live through that war.

  Course it wasn’t really as easy as all that. Cause I kept thinking about how other guys were going to go out into the jungle and lay down their lives, and the worst that was going to happen to me was getting my fingers smudgy when I changed ribbons. But when I wrote that to my mom in a letter, my pop read it, too, and he wrote back to me cussing a blue streak right there on the paper and he says, “It’s just as much part of the war to type up orders and reports. Somebody’s gonna sit in that chair in that nice clean office and usually it’s some lily-assed faggot son of a congressman but this damn war it’s gonna be a hillbilly from Hickory N.C.” In those days you could still say faggot, son, it was a different world. Wasn’t better, just different.

  So I get to Nam, my orders put me right in the typing pool in an office building in downtown Saigon, and that’s where Danny Keizer spotted me.

  Danny wasn’t in the typing pool. He was the guy in charge of all the guys who typed up orders every day. You know, sending this regiment to that place and telling where supplies had to go. And it was pretty high level, I mean, the stuff he typed got sent to other offices where other guys had to type up fifty more orders just to carry out the orders Danny’s office sent them. And Danny comes into the typing pool and there I am, showing off, typing as fast as I can, and he says, “What’re you typin’ there, ass-face, ‘Now is the time for all good men’ or ‘When in the course of human events’?” And he comes over and looks at my paper and he gives this low whistle and twenty minutes later some guy comes over and lays a paper on top my machine and it says I’m assigned to the office of sit-and-dick-around-with-Danny effective immediately.

  No, that wasn’t the real name, but that was the job description whenever we weren’t actually working. I mean, Danny kept that office humming, he did his job and made sure we did ours, but as soon as we were done for the day, all he wanted to do was have fun, and he’d take along whoever wanted to go.

  Which wasn’t me.

  I had fun, it just wasn’t the same fun. Come on, you know your gran, she’s Baptist through and through and that means I never even danced when I was growin’ up and I sure as hell never smoked or drank, and as for women, well, there wasn’t no double standard in my parents’ house, they said a boy should be just as virgin as a girl till he was married, and my pop let it be known that if I wanted to keep my dick it was going to stay inside my pants and not go gettin’ anybody pregnant. And I wasn’t one of those kids, the second he’s away from home, he goes wild. I may not be as die-hard Baptist as my folks were, but I was then, and no way was I going to go out whoring and drinking with Danny I. Keizer and his cronies.

  So Danny sees I’m not going, of course, and he asks why and I tell him, not judgmental or nothing but still, you know, how it was against my Christian upbringing. The other guys just groan and I figure I’m gonna get a hard time, but Danny, he just puts a hand on my shoulder and says, “Good for you, got more brains than all the rest of us put together.” They still go out, mind you, and I stay in, but he didn’t let ’em give me any crap about it, they just went and I just didn’t and after a while they kind of liked it that way, it meant they had somebody sober when they got back to, you know, help get the booze and the vomit off ’em and get ’em to bed. And believe me, there was nothing I saw about their condition when they came back that made me want to take up drinkin’ or whorin’ or smokin’ dope.

  But one day Danny says to me—and it wasn’t that long after I got there, either—he says, “Let’s go to a place I know and have lunch.” So we go to this canteen about three blocks away, they served pretty good food and there were reporters there too so you knew it was a place where you wouldn’t puke or get the runs from eating the food. Always crowded. And Danny sat me down and I said, I can’t afford to eat in no restaurants, and he says, “I can afford to buy this restaurant because my father is a car dealer in Minnesota and he makes so damn much money he can give thousands of dollars to politicians which is why I’m here.”

  And I says, Your pop got his politician friends to send you to Nam?

  And for a second he didn’t know I was joking but then he did and he says, “Very funny, Deacon.”

  I hated it when they called me that, and I says to him, My pop is a deacon and I’m not.

  And he says, “I’m sorry, man. I guess I just keep saying the wrong thing, is that it?” And then he tells me about how he had his college deferment, but he was such a screwup he ended up getting kicked out of college and about fourteen seconds later he was drafted, because his dad was a Democrat but the local draft board was mostly Republican and they hated him big time. His dad didn’t even try to get him out, he just pulled some strings—and Danny said it was Hubert Humphrey who pulled ’em, and maybe his dad even said it was, but I mean, come on, Hubert Humphrey was Vice-President of the United States, who the hell would listen to him? Anyway, Danny only typed, like, negative twenty words a minute because he made so many typos, but they assigned him to the typing pool anyway, and the way he tells it—the way he told it—the guys in charge of the typing pool kept trying to get him kicked out and the orders kept coming back that Danny was a permanent member of the typing pool, so finally the only way they could keep things going smooth was to put him in charge of the typing pool himself. Or anyway that’s how he told it. But I also think it had something to do with him being just, you know, a likable guy. The officers around him, they liked working with him, so they promoted him. That simple.

  I liked him, too. Couldn’t help it and I didn’t try not to. Even though I knew he was a hard drinker, and I figure half those half-American Vietnamese kids they talk about must look like Danny, he never talked about that kind of thing with me. Never even swore—hell, I swore more than he did, my pop used to say he came from a long line of Swearin’ Baptists, and he didn’t care if I swore, too, as long as I never did it in front of my mother, which I never did. Though they said a lot worse things than just swearing, which I never could bring myself to say. Anyway, he never talked rough around me at all, never even swore. Just talked about . . . everything else. Everything except the war.

  He asked about my family, how I grew up, and finally I says to him, Am I, like, a sociology project or something? And he says to me, “What I hope is that you’re a friend,” and then he made a face so I’d know that he meant it but he wasn’t queer or anything, but after that he told me every-thing about his own life and his family and everything. Every lunch, or almost every lunch. Every lunch that some officer didn’t take him along to lunch with him, Danny would take me down to lunch with him, and he always paid, even though I tried to pay my share, he just laughed and said, “Somebody stateside bought a Chevy from my dad today for five hundred bucks more than he should’ve paid, so lunch is on him.”