Rudolph! Read Online Free PDF

Everything went black for an instant as the intensity of the light increased and the polarization sensors in the cockpit tried to compensate. There was an awkward sensation of weightlessness coupled with the disorienting panic of all the individual cells in my body trying to move in eighteen different directions at once, and then the ride became smooth again. Ridiculously smooth, even.
    Transparency returned to the cockpit blister. We weren't over the South Pole any longer. There was no sky, no cloud cover below us, no hot sun sizzling in space over head. Everything was white. There was no horizon because there was no sense of ground beneath us. It was all just white.
    Expect for a small patch of green and brown off to our left.
    Santa had already spotted it, and he adroitly turned the sled towards the splash of color. I found the controls for the camera systems and pulled up the nose camera, dialing in the magnification. There was a small field of green grass, and sitting primly in the center of this seemingly unsupported green field was a small brown house. Large windows looked back at us and there was a wide set of double doors. Illumination spilled out from the interior of the building, revealing a pleasant arrangement of comfortable chairs. Some of the seats near the windows were filled with people in white robes.
    Santa carefully brought the sled down toward the lawn, and there was a tiny rumble beneath me as the landing gear reached out and made contact with the ground. "Well," he said, pushing the sequence of buttons that locked the sled in place. "It looks like we're here."
    "Here being a relative term," I pointed out as he cycled the hatch. The air was cool and there was a lingering smell that reminded me of the way the Residence smelled when Mrs. C was baking something in the kitchen. Santa let me go first, so I went carefully, not quite sure what I was going to step on. It looked like grass and seemed to be supporting the weight of the sled, but part of my brain still thought I was going to fall right through the illusion as soon as my foot touched the ground.
    The grass was firm but spongy, kind of like the surface of a well-groomed Chia Pet. I took a couple of hesitant steps, wondering if the sensation in my knees was what Neil Armstrong felt when he first cavorted on the surface of the moon.
    "Nice lawn," someone said. "Seems familiar, though . . ."
    Rudolph was big, even by reindeer standards, and his dark body was completely hairless. His horns were bone white and sprouted out of his head like awkward tree branches caught naked in the midst of winter. Back in '64, there had been an accident with the old Clock—the nuclear powered one—and we had lost the entire reindeer team. Santa had been down in a house at the time or he would have been baked into Santa Strips. Rudolph should have died with the rest of the team too, but for some reason—maybe he had been far enough away from the Clock that the radiation dose hadn't been enough to kill him outright—he survived. Though, if the Eyes Only NPC reports filed by the Old Quacks from that era were to be believed, he was permanently irradiated. There was no question he stopped clocks when he passed—delicate machinery broke down if it spent too much time in close proximity to him, and if you left a frozen burrito in the same room with him for ten minutes, it'd be warm and ready to eat. He could—if he wanted—make his nose glow, just like the kids expected. Of course, he usually set the drapes on fire and rendered the dog sterile when he lit up, but hey, everything's got a side effect these days, so why should being bathed in the ruby glow of a reindeer's nose be any different?
    He was, like the rest of Santa's reindeer, a complete pain in the ass. More so, because he was like that stereotypical old fart who was always yelling at the damn kids to get off his lawn. He wasn't our favorite reindeer.
    Well, Mrs. C liked him. And no one really ever said "no" to