Someone to Watch over Me

Jimmy Barclay is trying to sleep when music down the hall gets too loud to ignore. He shouts for someone to turn it down - and then everything around him blows apart. When the noise clears, Jimmy is not in his bedroom at all. He is strapped into the cockpit of a World War II bomber, thirty thousand feet over enemy territory, and the crew is calling him Captain.

The man beside him is Lieutenant Nagle, calm and steady no matter how hard the plane shakes, and behind them an airman keeps the charts. Jimmy is certain this must be a dream, until he looks at the instrument panel and realizes he knows it - it is a Boeing B-17G, the Flying Fortress, exactly like the one in a book Mr. Whittaker once gave him. That settles it, Jimmy decides. He must be inside the Imagination Station, and if it is only an invention, there is nothing here that can really hurt him.

So he takes the controls and orders the shortest way home, straight across the sector belonging to the deadliest gunner in the enemy air force. Nagle warns him that the man has a personal grudge, that for him this war has only one enemy and his name is Barclay. Jimmy shrugs it off. Shells come up, an engine dies, a wingtip is torn away, and only Nagle's coaching brings the bomber back out of its dive. Then the enemy voice comes over the radio with a bargain: bail out, or the plane and everyone in it comes down. Jimmy makes him promise safe passage for the crew, straps on a parachute, and jumps.

He lands in a haystack - and in a completely different adventure. It is 1968 now, Jimmy is a secret agent, and Nagle is driving him in a fast car toward a ship called the Wonder, with the same enemy chasing them under a slightly different name. A crash and a cliff later, Jimmy is in the ocean clinging to driftwood, and the sailing ship that fishes him out belongs to Admiral Barclay, with Nagle serving as his yeoman. Once again a fearsome enemy is hunting him. Jimmy has had enough of falling. He calls out for Mr. Whittaker to shut the whole thing off and let him come out - and Nagle tells him gently that Mr. Whittaker cannot get him out of this one. Before Jimmy can ask what that means, the guns start, and Nagle sends him below through a door with a promise: in time, you will know everything.

The door drops him aboard a star cruiser, also named Wonder, where a ship's computer counts the damage and the enemy is simply called Grim. Nagle finally admits the truth Jimmy has been dreading - he was never in the Imagination Station at all. Together they trick Grim into a close pass and fire, and the enemy ship is destroyed.

When they dock, Jimmy's head suddenly aches, and Nagle says that is a good sign. The door home will not open until Jimmy remembers, so Nagle walks him back through it: he had been playing in the woods, in a special place, when a wall gave way and he fell and struck his head. He has been in a coma for three days, and it has been touch and go the whole time. That, Nagle explains, is why Grim has been chasing him from adventure to adventure - Grim is the Grim Reaper, death itself. But Jimmy has never truly been in danger, because he has something stronger than death: faith in Jesus Christ. Nagle, it turns out, was sent to watch over him, and Jimmy does not have to ask twice who sent him. It is not Jimmy's time, Nagle says. God still has plans for him.

The door opens then, and Jimmy hears his father's voice. George Barclay is there at the bedside, whispering thanks to Jesus and sending for the doctor while his son blinks awake with a very sore head. Jimmy is too tired to explain any of it yet, but he already knows one thing for certain: when he is better, has he got a story to tell.