was going to have another twenty, thirty years, I would’ve fell down on my knees and kissed your feet with happiness. At the time I had half of Japan trying to drop airplanes on me. Seems greedy to hope for thirty more.”
The sum of my entire reaction to this earnest statement was a light tingling along the scalp, a little shiver of pleasure and interest. I didn’t believe for an instant he was having me on, but the thought struck me that maybe he was mentally infirm. He wouldn’t be the only older guy who lived in the efficiencies and had trouble sorting fantasy from reality. Even his choice of words—“hot-diggity,” “shoot”—gave him a childlike aspect, suggested a boy’s mind in a man’s body.
“It’s 2019,” I said, slowly, more to see how he would react than anything else. “It’s the future already.”
“In which book?” he said, scanning the shelves. “I do like a good time-travel novel. Although really what I want is more good rockets-and-ray-guns stuff.”
I paused, then said, “There are a couple Brad Dolan novels about men coming unmoored in time. But they’re not like Heinlein. It’s more . . . what? Literary?”
“Brad Dolan?” the man in the earflaps said. “He used to deliver my papers! Or his mother did anyhow. He slept in the passenger seat most mornings. That was a while ago.” His smile took on a fretful quality, and he rubbed the back of his neck. “He’s over there now. They grow up fast, huh? Seems like ten minutes ago he was lugging a canvas sack full of newspapers. Now he’s got an M16 over one shoulder and he’s tramping through the mud. It’s Korea all over again. I don’t know what we did there, and I can’t tell what we’re doing in Vietnam either. We got enough trouble here. Men with hair down to their butts and church half empty and girls walking around in skirts so short I feel like I ought to run and get them an overcoat. Tell the truth, I’m not entirely sure about the messages you’re sending with the Bookmobile done up like it is. I can’t tell if you’re peddling books or Mary Jane.”
I laughed but then trailed off, uncertainly, when he cocked a quizzical eyebrow at me and offered me a polite but slightly stiff smile. It was a look that said he didn’t think it was any laughing matter but in the interests of our getting along he would take the subject no further.
I studied him while he studied the shelves. My scalp was still crawling strangely, but other than that I felt fine. If he was playing a game with me, he was playing hard, completely committed to the performance. But I didn’t think it was an act. The possibility that someone from the mid-sixties had shown up to return an overdue book, and maybe get something new to read, did not have the effect on me you might think. I wasn’t frightened, not at any time. I wasn’t alarmed. I felt something closer to gratitude and also . . . bemusement. In the older, truer sense of that word, which once meant a sweet perplexity.
I had a thought then—a little tug of curiosity—and acted before the idea even had time to settle.
“You liked Tunnel in the Sky, huh? I’ve got something for you. Have you tried The Hunger Games?” As I spoke, I slipped The Hunger Games off the YA shelf and held it out to him.
He peered down at it—a slick black paperback that had a gold bird embossed on the cover—with a puzzled half smile on his face. He lifted two fingers to his left temple. “No, I missed that one. Is that Heinlein or . . . excuse me. That book does something funny to my eyes.”
I looked down at it. Just a trade paperback. I looked back. He had an expression of concentration mingled with faint anxiety, and the tip of his tongue flicked out to touch his lips. Then he reached out and gently took the paperback from me . . . and his face relaxed. He smiled.
“I’ve been shoveling out my sister’s walkway all morning. I guess I’m a little punchy,” he told me. “And more snow coming this weekend.” He shook his head but smiled down at the book. “Well, this looks like the thing.” He read out the shout line on the cover: “‘In the future, the only thing more lethal than the games . . .