My thanks to ErikThread and Derek for their editing skills and helpful suggestions, as well as the eagle eye of GordonJ who found my little oversights and let me know as he went along. Thank you all three. I hope you enjoy our mutual efforts.
This story doesn't fit any neat category. It isn't really science fiction, more like a fantasy. I'll let you the reader decide where it belongs, but since it's long, I've stuck it in Novels & Novellas.
~*~
Jesse Peterson was an ordinary eighteen-year-old, just finished with high school and planning on attending university in the fall of 1961. Then he got the damn headache and his life turned into something he never imagined.
Life on Another Planet
Prologue
Friday, June 30, 1961 9:30pm
Jesse Peterson sat silently by himself on the top row of the bleachers in the high school gym, his head in his hands, elbows on his knees as he watched his classmates on the floor below him. It was the final dance of the final year of his high school education. He had graduated and would be off to university in the fall. However, unlike his pals, he wasn't in a celebratory mood.
It was bad enough that Don Pollard had stolen his girl, Juliet Crouse. That she had made a display of dumping him had been a dose of humiliation he could have done without. He asked himself for the tenth time what the hell he was doing here. Was he looking for a replacement for Juliet? It wasn't good for a guy's ego to be without a girlfriend for any length of time. Naw, it wasn't that. It must be a latent masochistic streak in him.
Pollard was the quarterback of the modestly successful Ridgeview High School football team, while Jesse was starting second baseman for the baseball team. In terms of competency, it had been Jesse's glove and bat that had been the keystone to their championship year. In terms of status, Don had it all over Jesse. What was that old song? "You've got to be a football hero to get along with the beautiful girls." That was a perverse truth.
Around ten o'clock, Jesse felt the headache which had been resident for most of the day, begin to reassert itself. His closest friends were occupied with their girlfriends on the dance floor and wouldn't miss him. He rose, looked around one last time at the end of this part of his life, and left for home.
~*~
His mother looked up in surprise as he walked in the front door.
"What are you doing home this early?"
"Headache," he said simply without further explanation. "Good night." He walked down the stairs to his bedroom on the lower level of their split-level home while his mother and father looked at each other. His mother was the first to react. She stood and followed her son down the stairs.
She found him in the bathroom, stripped to the waist, searching his medicine cabinet.
"I knew something was wrong when you didn't eat all your dinner. How long have you had a headache?"
"I don't know. Most of the day, I guess. It wasn't too bad. I took some aspirin, but it came back on me a little while ago. I decided to come home and get some sleep. Maybe it'll be gone by morning."
"That's a shame, Jesse. It was your last high school dance ... the graduation dance," she said with some sadness. "Was Juliet there?"
He paused and sighed. "Yeah ... she was there, showing off her new boyfriend."
"Well ... don't get too upset about it. It says something about her character that she'd do what she did. Besides, she's not going on to university, so you won't see her very often, if at all. You're a good looking young guy. You'll find someone who won't treat you like that. Someone you can trust. There are a lot of young ladies to choose from on campus. Thousands, I would guess."
That was his mother, always looking on the bright side, the eternal optimist. Right at that moment Jesse didn't feel very optimistic at all. Right at that moment he just wanted this headache to go away and allow him to get some sleep.
Wednesday, July 5, 1961 10:00 am
"He's burning up, Doctor Phelps," Margaret Peterson said with concern. "I can't seem to wake him for any length of time. What's wrong with him? He's been like this for four days now. He should be in the hospital."
"Now, now, Mrs. Peterson, there's no need to panic. He's contracted some kind of bug and we're running the blood tests to see if we can spot what's happening. We've checked for Meningitis, but there's no sign of that ... happily. We'll just have to keep trying to find the cause. In the meantime, I've given him another shot of penicillin."
Michael Peterson stood by silently, deeply concerned about his son's health. Everything seemed to be trial and error methodology when it came to medicine. He was an engineer. He thought in straight lines. You gather the information about what isn't performing normally, and you track the various components one by one to determine the cause. This was day five of his son's mysterious illness and as yet they had not determined the cause. In his gut, he knew this was more serious than Doctor Clive Phelps was letting on.
He could see the fear in Margaret's eyes. She knew something was very wrong, but both of them felt the same helplessness to act. Phelps was an experienced man with a wealth of knowledge. They had no alternative but to leave it in his hands, but both of them would have felt better if the good doctor had intervened sooner, sending Jesse to the hospital where specialists could examine him.
"I'll see you tomorrow, Mrs. Peterson. If he's no better, I'll ask to have him transferred to St. Andrew's hospital. We won't quit until we have this solved, I promise you," the doctor said solemnly to both of the young man's parents.
Chapter 1 The Twilight Zone
Tuesday, July 12, 2011 11am
"He's coming around, Doctor," the nurse announced as resident physician Daniel Scruton approached the third floor critical care nursing station at Coast Central Hospital. Nurse Dana Mannerly had paged the doctor after she had checked on their mystery patient and saw signs of him regaining consciousness.
Scruton nodded and immediately marched down the hallway towards room 313, bed 4. Perhaps now he could find out just what had happened to John Doe, the unnamed patient. He'd been brought in two days ago with no identification and no apparent wounds or bruises. Moreover, no one had come looking for him. Administration had contacted the police, but they had no missing person bulletin for anyone fitting the boy's description.
As the doctor gazed at him, he noted his patient again. He was clean cut, neat hair, no tattoos or piercings, and nothing in his bloodstream that indicated drugs or alcohol. Who was he? He'd been found unconscious, wearing only a pair of old fashioned, clean, flannel pyjamas: a not-so-typical John Doe. He was put in critical care because there was no other logical place for him. For now, John Doe was Dan Scruton's puzzle.
Scruton gave the youth a quick, general examination, checking eyes, respiration, blood pressure ... the usual. The boy seemed very fit from first observation, well fed with good muscle tone. No marks or bruises, no signs of needle usage. What had happened to him? He drew a chair up beside the bed and observed the young man. They'd done all the tests and could find nothing wrong with him other than some abnormal readings in the neuro-imaging. A second set of scans yesterday showed those abnormalities to be decreasing significantly. He was mystified at what had been going on with this boy, but perhaps when he regained consciousness he could enlighten the doctor as to what had happened to him.
It was an hour later that the patient woke completely and began searching around for someone to talk to. There were three other patients in the room and all of them were recovering from surgery. The young man didn't know that, of course. He simply wanted to know where he was and why.
His voice was a hoarse rattle. "Hello, is anybody there?"
He heard a groan from the bed next to him, but with a screen around all the other beds except his, he could see no one. He looked around the room and knew instinctively he was in a hospital, but where ... and why? He checked the immediate area around his bed and found a grey electrical cord with a button on the end of it attached to a handrail. He made a guess and pushed the button hoping he was right.
It was only a minute later that an older nurse hustled into his room, a smile on her face as she approached him.
"Ah ... awake at last. How are you feeling?" she asked, placing a cup of water with a bent straw on the nearby table.
Jesse attempted to reach for it, but the nurse had to pass it to him. He took a tentative sip. The young man took another sip of water, and then another while the nurse raised the head of the bed up to a more comfortable position.
"I'm okay, I guess. My headache's gone. Where am I?"
"You're in the critical care ward at Coast Central Hospital," she said, offering him another pillow. "You've been here almost ten days."
"Critical care? That sounds serious. What's wrong with me?"
"Your doctor will be along shortly and he can fill you in. In the meantime, what is your name?"
"Jesse Peterson."
"Where do you live?" she continued, clipboard in hand and pen at the ready.
"1205 Hemlock Avenue, West Vancouver. Why are you asking me these questions? Didn't my parents tell you all this?"
