Free The Radio Magician and Other Stories by James van Pelt

dreams so horrible that he blocked them from his memory every night? With Jennifer’s warm hands covering his own, he was suddenly sure that he did. He’d always had the dreams. They truly were ghastly, and now that he knew, he doubted he would ever fall asleep again with peace in his heart.
    He thought Jennifer saw what he was thinking in his eyes. Maybe she’d said this very thing to other souls who quit denying what they’d known all along, who looked up and saw Damocles’s dangling sword. She said, “There’s magic in the world, Trellis. It’s not the magic you think about from fairytales, but it’s there just the same trying to protect you. There’s magic out there trying to save us all.”
    She squeezed his hands once. “There will be a place for you in line, Trellis. There will always be a place for you, when you’re ready.” She stood to leave. “I have to get back. Midnight’s coming.”

OF LATE I DREAMT OF VENUS

    L ike a shiny pie plate, Venus hung high in the observation alcove’s window, a full globe afire with sunlight. Elizabeth Audrey contemplated its placid surface. Many would say it was gorgeous. Alexander Pope called the bright light “the torch of Venus,” and some ancient astronomer, besotted with the winkless glimmer, named the planet after the goddess of love and beauty. At this distance, clouded bands swirled across the shimmering lamp, illuminating the dark room. She held her hands behind her back, feet apart, watching the flowing weather patterns. Henry Harrison, her young assistant, sat at a console to the window’s side.
    “Soon,” he said.
    “Shhh.” She sniffed. The air smelled of cold machinery and air scrubbers, a tainted chemical breath with no organic trace about it.
    Beyond Venus’s wet light, a mantle of stars shown with measured steadiness. One slipped behind the planet’s fully lit edge. Elizabeth could measure their orbit’s progress by the swallowing and spitting out of stars.
    Elizabeth said, “Did you talk to the surgeon about your scar?”
    Henry touched the side of his face, tracing a line from the corner of his eye to his ear.
    “No. It didn’t seem important.”
    “You don’t need to live with it. A little surgery. You heal in deep sleep. Two hundred years from now when we wake, you’ll be . . . improved.” She lifted her foot from the floor with a magnetic click and then snapped down hard a few inches away. “I hate free fall. How long?”
    “Final countdown. We’ll be back in the carousel soon and you can have your weight again.”
    The scene from the window cast a mellow light. Silent. Grand. A poet would write about it if one were here.
    “Ahh,” said Elizabeth. A red pustule rose in the planet’s swirling atmosphere. She leaned forward, put her palms against the window. Orange light boiled in the clouds, spreading away from the bloody center, disrupting the bands. “It’s begun.”
    Henry read data on his screens. Input numbers. Checked other monitors. Tapped keys quickly. “A clean hit, on target.” He didn’t look at the actual show beyond, but watched his sensitive devices instead. “Beta should strike . . . now.”
    A second convulsion colored the disk, this one a brilliant white at its center which settled into a deep red, overlapping the first burst’s color. A third flash, duller, erupted on the globe.
    “Was that . . .?”
    “Perfect as your money could buy.”
    In the next ten minutes, four more hits. Elizabeth stood at the window while red and orange storms pulsed in Venus’s disk. Henry joined her, mirroring her stance. He pursed his lips. “You can see the dust. If this had been Earth, the dinosaurs would have died seven times.”
    The planet’s silver sheen faded somewhat, and lightning flashes flickered in the roiling confusion.
    “No dinosaurs ever walked there, Henry.”
    He sighed. “Venus has its own charms, or it did.”
    Elizabeth looked at him. The reflected light from the window caught in his dark