Red Entaries

Nine

Outside chairman Trevor Trahern's window, the pale hue clouds were sorely missed, and baby blue skies as a remnant of how he would have spent lunch this evening at the Lunar Life Corp penthouse. Trevor wasn't in the slightest awareness of what befell his butler, Eddy. If he had known, he would have walked the five minutes or drove the forty-five seconds three blocks northwest to Mercy Hospital and wouldn't have stood up Laura for a lunch meeting. Trevor felt he owed Rains one date after he walked out on her. She was understanding and compassionate with Ed but disappointed in Trahern. Trev felt awful and guilty. But they all failed to stop Trevor from making a date with Joanna, the woman he really wanted for himself.

The vision of Trev's friend Edward was beside him. The cold rainy day of January the fourteenth and at the seventh hour. It was the eve of Trevor's three-hundredth launch to the Moon as it had been done with much care and discipline, monthly, at three p.m. for the past years.

Eddy's head convulsed violently by a nightmare in the most vivid and dark recesses of his mind where next to his bedside his beloved master Trevor tightly held the contorting forehead hoping the seizure would discontinue.

"I see it!" Ed Eliot said, the man who was barely conscious spoke.

"You see what?" Trahern responded. "Nurse, give me a notepad, I believe my butler is prophesying, or I could record it on my com."

"You don't have much time," the nurse said. "Eddy was in a shower-unit when he hit his head, he needed his sleep, he had a heart attack."

The picture of Ed's dream was painted over a canopy of dim gray clouds with streaks of white sunlight sprinkling down dew's of grass and flooding rows of blossomed milk thistles where a hover cargo-truck was scheduled to arrive at the fenced rear gate.

"No sign of the precious cargo," Edward said quiescently, as he walked up behind the chairman. The butler then planted his feet a meter apart from where he watched the master proudly as any esteemed employee would on his first day of work.

Three workers and two security officers were assigned under his master's command, where they waited in a drizzle for the last hover cargo-truck ready to unload and screen it, while their white raincoats made it comfortable to laugh at Trevor being the butt of many of Blake's jokes, apparently, the chairman is still a virgin.

Trev exhaled loudly in what looked by his butler to be a sign of annoyance.

"It must have been a difficult day for Trevor," Ed said. Not just because the humor was bitter in nature, but the choice he had to make was difficult on a personal level. The kind that will change the future of his girlfriend's life permanently. Trev left the responsibility in the hands of his butler and knew that he would be proud of him no matter what decision he made. This trust was found in his butler's judgment for the selection of which items would be shipped to the Moon colony, and which were to stay.

Eddy knew Trevor's girlfriend was to arrive in the next coming cargo truck and that he left it up to his butler to discern whether it was best for her to live on the First Reach colony or not.

"I've heard enough of this," Eliot said, as he came and tapped on his master's shoulder. "My master here is doing a great job, how he so far thoroughly inspected the cargo. He found three miner tools that were dysfunctional, and even some food that was either labeled wrong or had a past due date. I'm sure the colonists of First Reach would appreciate his job well done; so stop laughing at him." Eliot continued to speak even though Trahern dipped his head in what appeared to be embarrassment.

"He opened his heart to you all." Eddy patted his master's shoulder once more then began to point in Blake's direction. "Trevor told you how much he loves his girlfriend, Lorena Brown; and that he's going to wait until he marries her. "Pssst." Ed whispered softly, "you can have your honeymoon on the Moon master."