Stories: All-New Tales

“When the people of the north, the Nordics and the Lapps and the rest, saw me flying, cruising at low altitudes through their midwinter skies nine hundred years ago, eleven hundred years ago, what do you suppose they thought they were seeing?”

Nancy shakes her head. She has no idea what he’s getting at.

“A flying sleigh, driven by a large bearded man who had given them gifts.”

“Oh my God.”

“And a flying sleigh pulled by what? By nothing? Literally unimaginable, so the array of antennae on the nose of the aircraft appeared to them as—what?”

“Oh my God.”

“Antlers, on a team of flying reindeer.”

“Oh my God.” She’s had three weeks to get used to the idea that she’d discovered an extraterrestrial base, and that she might actually find a creature from another planet. But this—meeting Santa Claus—is almost too shocking to process.

“When people would ask my name, I gave the one I’d always used, adapted to the local language—Nikolaos, Nikola, Nicholas. And when they asked where I lived, I saw no reason to conceal the truth—‘beyond the mountains of Korvatunturi,’ I told them, ‘near the top of the world.’ Although I don’t believe I ever said, ‘At the North Pole.’”

WHEN SHE ARRIVES THE next afternoon, he doesn’t answer the buzzer. Oh, Christ, no. She presses again. As she’s about to press a third time she hears his voice over the speaker.

“Nancy? Very sorry! Come right up.”

Has she ever been so thrilled? He’s still here, still friendly, his windows still improbably frosty. And she sees he has been scanning through his documentary videos. He invites her to sit next to him on the sofa and watch on a small, black spherical device that reminds her of Magic 8-Ball.

“I’m afraid I’ve never figured out a way to hook it up to the television,” he tells her as he touches the Play button.

“Holy Christ, they’ve got sound!” Nancy says, embarrassing herself. “Excuse me. I’m an idiot. Of course they have sound.”

She sees aerial panoramas of Lakota Indians chasing a bison over a cliff in the Sand Hills, junks and gondolas on the Tigris in Baghdad, China’s Great Wall half built. She watches and listens to slightly furtive-looking shots inside a bustling Viking tavern in northern England, men packing a piece of bronze statuary into a crate in eleventh-century Benin, a mock sea battle at the Colosseum in Rome, a smiling toddler in Edo speaking Japanese directly to the camera, a tall beardless man delivering a speech in Chicago in the summer of 1858. “Yes,” he tells her, “Abraham Lincoln.”

She is wonderstruck. She could keep watching forever. But after yesterday she’s more conscious of the time. Before long, he would get sleepy again.

“I want to discuss with you, Nicholas, exactly how you’d like us to proceed.”

“We can watch some more of this footage. We can talk. As you wish.”

“I mean longer term. I’ll do whatever you say. If you want, I could take you back up to the station, and you could see if the people on Vreez-honk, Vreez…I’m sorry. You could see if your headquarters has sent any messages to you, there, during the last seven hundred years. And couldn’t you send them a message?”

“And then wait 124 years for a reply? If there’s anyone there to reply.” He shakes his head. If he could cry, he might cry.

She says nothing for a few seconds. “Well, if I have your permission to tell your story to the world—I mean, if you prefer that I wait until after you, after you’re gone to reveal everything, posthumously, I would completely understand. If you want to maintain your privacy, I mean.”

“Thank you. Thank you. But while I am very old, it’s true, I might have another thirty or forty or fifty years left. Vrizhongilians have lived to be two thousand.”

“Good!”

“But I think you would find it a great burden and disappointment to be obliged wait that long, would you not? And when someone else stumbles across the station in the meantime?” He leans forward. “I’m tired of keeping my secret. All right, Nancy? I’m ready.” He’d thought about saying, “All right, Ms. Zuckerman, I’m ready for my close-up,” but figured she probably wouldn’t get it.

She wipes away tears. “I thought I was going to have to convince you.”

“You know, my dear, I’ve had more than enough time to consider this.”

He lays out his thinking, his concerns, his plan. The biggest problem, he believes, will be persuading the world that the Arctic station is not some kind of military base, that no invasion of Earth is imminent. Before anything becomes public, he thinks it might make sense to get Rupert Murdoch on board, possibly even offer him some kind of media exclusive, in order to keep Fox News from terrifying Americans unnecessarily. Nancy thinks he’s joking. He assures her he is not.

“Now I know this will sound corny in the extreme. Especially given the ‘Santa’ business. But I believe the best way for us to create goodwill from the outset is to describe what I have in mind as, quote, ‘Gifts to the People of Earth.’”