Rudolph! Read Online Free PDF Page A

enough of a fix to be sure where we were heading.
    Not that I was all that sure myself. Santa and the reindeer were on a course for purgatory—or what they thought was the entrance to purgatory. Sure, I had found a computer address on the Internet. Sure, it indicated there was a machine out there running some kind of firewall software and it might have some other data structure local to it. But you couldn't make the jump from there to the positive existence of life after death.
    David Anderson had been involved in a car accident on November 27th of this year. The funeral had been held on December 7th. There was a plot of land in the local cemetery in Troutdale that contained a box and stone, one with him in it and the other with his name on it. Now, if I believed those two details—and since they were true, why shouldn't I?—then there weren't a whole lot of options.
Little Suzy had a fascination with dead things that couldn't be certified by any psychologist as "healthy," and what she wanted for Christmas was for us to dig up Daddy's head, slap a red bow on it, and roll it under the Christmas tree.
Little Suzy's fascination with biology and botany and Wade Davis meant that she was hoping that we'd dig Daddy up before the zombie powder that had been sprinkled on him before they put him in the ground wore off.
Life did persist after death, and we were going to knock on the gates of heaven and ask God to give us David Anderson back.
    Okay. Now for the rebuttals.
Too weird, even for this elf.
Nobody noticed Daddy wasn't really dead when they embalmed him? Filling Daddy full of formaldehyde would probably constitute a money-back situation with the funeral home, but it certainly wouldn't make his resurrection from a Voodoo-inspired, medicated state any easier. Flag it as highly doubtful.
Well, as a famous detective once said, when you eliminate the possible solutions, what remains—however unlikely—must be acknowledged as a very likely solution. And a couple hundred years prior to that fellow, another wise man once said: " Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate. " Keep it simple, stupid.
    The autopilot said we were heading south—all the way south. And what did we hope to find there? The entrance to purgatory, which—if I was going to keep things simple—appeared to be somewhere near the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic.
    VI
    S anta turned off the autopilot as we crossed the Ross Ice Shelf, and shortly thereafter he adjusted a couple of dials and pulled back on the sled's stick. Our heading changed, and the sun, perpetually parked overhead at this time of year, filled the cockpit with its orange glow. The material of the cockpit blister filtered just about every sort of wavelength but the visible spectrum, and even under that radiant bombardment, it polarized sharply to cut the glare. Santa flipped a few more switches, and then hit the red button that switched on the Time Clock Wave Generator. The TCWG was a localized field generator that kept the sled and team in sync with the Clock at Zero Hour. It shouldn't have done anything without the Clock on—the wave generated by the device would collapse almost instantly on its own—but Santa directed my attention to the column of white light that was now visible. "There," he said. "That's the way."
    "Yeah, I see it," I replied. I didn't know what else to say, really. The Time Clock wave had shifted us out of sync enough to reveal the entrance to purgatory—the quintessential tunnel of light. It didn't disappear into infinity; in fact, it didn't look much longer than the car wash at any local gas station. As Santa piloted the sled into line with the glittering mouth of the tunnel, there was a wrenching sense of vertigo as I looked up the shaft of light. From the mouth of the tunnel, it certainly looked like it went on to forever.
    Santa maneuvered the sled right into the center of the tunnel, and toggled the afterburners. The Mark V rumbled beneath us.