On the bench next to me, Gran said, “She makes friends easily. That’s a gift.”

I watched them.

She kept her eyes on Emily. “You always did, too. Make friends easy. Adjust.”

I stared at the sky, but a question nagged. “What if it isn’t Gramps? Out-there, I mean.”

Gran gave a half-smile that I caught out of the corner of my eye. “I’ve considered that. Had to.”

Emily was dancing now. She’d did make friends easily.

Gran was looking right at me. “And what if it isn’t? I’ll be disappointed, to be sure. Very disappointed.” Her bright blue eyes clouded, and for a moment she looked just like she did the day Gramps died. “But there’s a place out there that’s different from here. Do we look unusual there? Don’t know. Can we taste, smell, hear, see, touch? Don’t know.”

She laughed. “All I know is that I’m willing to go see. To find something-more. It isn’t my time yet. I’m not going to just sit here and wait to die. And if your grandfather’s there, all the better. But it isn’t a deal-breaker.”

I understood. All of a sudden. It surprised me. She was doing everything in her power, taking the necessary steps to unite her with Gramps. I was here, doing nothing, staying with Don. So which one of us was crazy?

“The only thing that could keep me here,” she said as she grabbed my arm, “is you and Emily. You two are everything to me. And if you don’t want me to go, I won’t.”

She gripped harder and looked at me intently before she spoke again.

“I’d even go live in one of those virtual homes if it made you happy.”

Emily and I ran up to the holo-home with some last-minute enhancements for the program. With Gran’s debit disk in my pocket, I was prepared to prepay all the necessary fees. The disk would ensure years of uninterrupted care. Gran and Gramps had amassed a fortune in their day, and there was plenty in the bank to cover every cost, even after the debit disk ran out.

When I got back, I finally sat down with Gran. We talked, we cried, we tried to make sense of it all. And she agreed to go to the holo-home the next day. When I told Don about it later that night, he wanted to be part of it, and his cooperativeness made me suspicious.

“You’ll be there?” I asked. “You sure you want to?”

“Will I get to see it? The holographic house?”

“Of course,” I said. “But why do you care? You have your Sensavision.”

“Yeah, but I want to see the top-of-the-line version.” He winked at me. “And you’ve got full control over her money now, don’t you?”

Gran and I arrived exactly at two and sat on hard orange chairs in the brightly colored lobby to wait for Don. Gran was holding a bouquet of fresh-cut hyacinths. Her head bent; she took a deep breath.

“Are we doing the right thing?” I asked.

She didn’t answer me.

Don arrived late, but he clapped his hands, and said, “Let’s go!” when he got there.

The resident liaison, Alice, led us to the eighteenth floor, chatting about everything and nothing at the same time. My mind raced. Could I do this?

Emily liked the elevator. She pressed her face against the glass and watched the world slip away beneath us. Don watched the numbers change on the readout and avoided looking at me.

My first thought when we reached eighteen was that there had been a mistake. Before us was pure white. It was luminous and beautiful, but I didn’t understand until Alice pressed a few buttons on her handheld control. Two doors appeared. The one on the right, Alice told us, was for the maintenance crew access. Don looked at the control she held and raised an eyebrow at me. He didn’t look at all displeased.

He mouthed the words, “She won’t be able to get out?”

“She’ll never notice,” I whispered, moving closer to him. “To her, it’ll feel like she can go anywhere, do anything, see anyone. What would happen if all the poor demented souls here could come and go as they pleased?” I asked, then added, “Gran’s not one of them, of course.”

“Yeah, right,” he said with a snort.

I pointed toward the remote. “They’re giving me one of those for when I want to visit.”

“And behind this door…” Alice opened it with a flourish.

Gran’s house was there, even better than before. The sights, the sounds, the smells, all perfect.

Even Don was impressed.

“Wow,” he said, “wow.”

Alice whispered, as she backed out the door, “I’ll leave you to settle in here.”

Gran stayed near the door. She looked a little shell-shocked. Emily stayed with her.

I led the way to the kitchen. Don followed, his mouth agape.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

“Way more sophisticated than what we have at home.”

“Fully self-contained.” I pointed to near-invisible sensors on the ceiling. “Those pick up the resident’s life signs. Just to monitor health. Otherwise everything is completely private. State-of-the-art.”

He gave a slow whistle. “I’ll say. What I wouldn’t give to have this technology for my Sensavision.”

“Speaking of which, I had one installed in the spare bedroom.” I walked in that direction.

“For your grandmother?” he said, giving a short laugh. “What a waste. She’s never going to use it.”

He followed me. This room was larger than the real one at Gran’s house and I’d had it stripped bare of all decor. All four walls held Sensavisions. And since this was a holo-home, I tried not to think of how this was just a holographic image of holographic screens, because it hurt my head to make sense of it.

“I have a surprise for you.”

I flicked the “on” switch. Before us, the spaceship’s bridge shimmered to life. No cinnamon in the air; this time, I smelled the metallic freshness of a brand-new vessel. Space stretched out before us and aliens suddenly appeared, ready to fight. A blue-jumpsuited officer walked in and locked eyes with Don. “Captain,” he said, “we’re under attack.” He handed Don a weapon.

Don looked at me, then the scene, then at me again.

“I want you to have something to keep you busy,” I said, in my best conciliatory voice, “while Gran and I get ourselves together.”

He smiled then, and for a moment, heartbreaking in its brevity, I saw a flash of the man I married.

“Have fun,” I said.

But he didn’t hear me say goodbye.

Back at the front door, Gran took my hand. “Are you okay?” she asked.

I nodded, thinking about the playhouse-how many hours of enjoyment Gramps and I had had with it when I was little, and how much fun Emily would have with it now. Gran had been right all along. That little pretend shuttle really did have the power to transport us to our destiny.

And I held Emily tight as the three of us rode the elevator down.

COLD COMFORT by Dean Wesley Smith

‘Houston Space Center, do you copy?”

I sat in the big command chair, leaning back, listening to nothing as the time lag between the asteroid belt and Earth played out. The time lag wasn’t as bad as it used to be during the early days of the Martian missions, thanks to some new developments in laser communications cutting through a close-warp space, but it still took some time. About four seconds each direction from this far out. Nowhere near as slow as the speed of light, thank heavens.

Although, at this point, it didn’t much matter.

I glanced around at the five empty chairs in the big control room of Asteroid Six, code-named Klondike after the gold rush back in Alaska. After all, that was what we had been out here to get. Minerals, from gold to anything else worth mining, to make part of this exploration profitable. I always knew that someone would get rich off of mining these asteroids, and we had proved that to be true, but now it wasn’t going to be me.