by Alan Black
Larry Goes To Space
Alan Black
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Legalese
Dedication and Acknowledgement
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Other Books by Alan Black
About the Author
Outtakes
Praise for Other Books
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Larry Goes To Space
Published by arrangement with the author.
Copyright @ 2015 by Alan Black
Cover Art and Design: The Cover Collection
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scan, or distributed in any printed or digital form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
ISBN-13: 978-1517388362
ISBN-10: 1517388368
Copyright: 1-2711175461
Dedicated:
To my wife Duann, whose patience and long-suffering with my chosen career has made all of this possible.
Acknowledgement:
I want to thank my editor Melissa Manes (www.scriptionis.com). Also, I want to thank Steven, Bennett, Melanie & Melissa their quality beta reads and feedback. As usual, my chief editor did an outstanding job of cleaning up my poor grammar, punctuation, and run-on sentences.
A cow is a very good animal in the field, but we turn her out of a garden. (Samuel Johnson)
CHAPTER ONE
LARRY looked up.
The constellation of fourteen spacecraft hovered in the sky; moving as if the pilots had forgotten to set the emergency brakes. Their craft drifted slowly, silently, and slightly sideways on the lazy, late fall winds. They remained in such precise formation while moving that even an Olympics qualified synchronized swimming team would shiver in envy. Of course, Olympic qualified synchronized swimming teams cavort half-naked, making shivering as easy to spot as the fourteen spacecraft floating above the dry Kansas prairie in the cloudless blue sky.
Just like those spacecraft pilots, Larry also forgot to set his tractor’s emergency brake as he stared up at the spacecraft. The heavy farm machine wandered aimlessly about the cow pasture. Larry shivered, much like a half-naked synchronized swimmer, but for a much different reason than envy or nudity.
Larry could have been half-naked on the tractor. However, since there wasn’t much need for nudity on the farm these days, the idea of working without clothes hadn’t really occurred to him. It also hadn’t occurred to him to look skyward for UFOs until the spacecraft passed between him and the sun, throwing shadows about his cow pasture like clouds playing dodgeball on their day off.
The cows were completely unconcerned about the spacecraft. They didn’t stop doing cow things just because Larry’s tractor was wandering aimlessly about the field. And Larry didn’t notice.
Cows being what they were, they were supremely content with grass, a little water, and the ability to generate copious amounts of methane. Nevertheless, one cow was a bit thoughtful about the speed of sound relative to the tractor’s slow-chugging engine. Per normal cow mental activity, the thought was brief, wouldn’t be repeated, and wasn’t shared with anyone, cow or otherwise.
This wasn’t the first time Larry had seen spacecraft. They’d mesmerized him while watching Star Wars as a ten-year-old. As a twenty-three-year old, he’d seen them after a particularly raucous night at Benny’s Been There Bar and Done That Grill. Still and all, even with such stellar UFO sighting history, he was pretty sure this was the first time he saw a spaceship when there was a reasonably good possibility he wasn’t having a stroke or a beer-brawl induced concussion gifted to him by the Rickenhauser brothers. For that matter, he wasn’t too sure about the stroke thing.
The tractor bumped to a slow stop, as tractors often do when left to their own devices. Larry’s tractor was a particularly lazy machine and often chugged to a stop whether Larry wanted it to or not. He gripped the steering wheel as the spacecraft stopped directly over his head. Or it seemed they were directly over his head. Twisting his neck around and up was as poor an indicator of the exact, overhead direction of the UFOs as was sniffing Ol’ Bucky’s farts to get an indication of what his dog had been eating.
He flexed his fingers and clutched the steering wheel as tightly as the lid on a new jar of pickles. He decided if they were going to “beam him up” for a little alien probing they were going to have to drag his tractor along with him. This tractor had been in his family so long it was practically a family heirloom and he was not going to let it go.
Larry didn’t mind a little probing every now and then, especially if he was the prober and not the probee. His last probe had been before Nancy ran off to the big city. Sadly, she was attracted to the culture and the nightlife of a big city dweller.
He understood Nancy’s desire to follow her dream of becoming a television news anchor and follow in the footsteps of Katie Couric. He would have bet Katie had a college degree in journalism and wasn’t at all like Nancy, who had failed at high school home economics.
It would surprise Larry to learn he’d lose his bet about Katie’s college degree, that she’d earned a degree in English. Larry prided himself on his betting ability. Farmers and ranchers are consummate gamblers. They gambled on the sun. They gambled on the rain — will there be too little, just enough, too much? They gambled on the heat. They gambled on gas prices, feed prices, beef prices, and yes, even the price of horse excrement. Bad gamblers fail at farming, becoming townsfolk and weekend gardeners. Good farmers gamble to win and survive to replant next year.
Katie’s education notwithstanding, Larry didn’t begrudge Nancy her new life in the big city of Fredonia, Kansas. He didn’t understand her name change to Monroe, no matter what the television station manager said about Monroe sounding sexier, but the judge at their divorce hearing said it didn’t matter whether he understood it or not, or whether he would miss Nancy or not.
She hadn’t been near as good a companion as Ol’ Bucky. She couldn’t cook worth a damn, and cleaning wasn’t her forte. Missing having her around was hard because she still came around all of the time asking for one thing or another.
Larry did miss the probing with Nancy every now and again, whether he missed her as a wife or not. He wasn’t sure why alien abductees always seemed to complain about probing. He was sure even if it wasn’t as much fun as it was with Nancy, it was more probing than he’d had lately.
He shut off the tractor without looking at the key. Gas prices were so high it was a shame to waste any, especially if he wasn’t going anywhere. Gas was always a big concern, whether it was Ol’ Bucky’s, the tractor’s, or his own. He had the directions for converting the tractor to run on methane, but he hadn’t been able to figure out how to get his cows to fart and belch into bags anymore than he could conv
ince Ol’ Bucky to stop eating skunk-flavored roadkill. He also knew that as long as there were fourteen spacecraft in the sky over his farm he wasn’t going anywhere.
He didn’t realize that the spacecraft were getting closer until the cows started moving away. Cows being what they were, they were unconcerned about the coming alien invasion. They were actually more interested in moving out of the shade and finding a sunny spot to eat grass than they were about oppression in the Sudan, Old Sol going supernova, or — with the exception of one heifer — the speed of a sound due to an unusually explosive burp.
Larry stared at the spacecraft for so long their increasing size was a shock. With very little else to compare against the spacecraft’s relative mass against the unknown distance in a clear sky, judging a spacecraft’s actual size was as hard as judging whether the six o’clock news was funnier than the ten o’clock news.
He confirmed his hypothesis that the spacecraft were descending when he was able to pick out ever smaller and smaller details on the ships. He was sure his eyesight wasn’t improving at an exponential rate, so the spacecraft had to be descending. Still, rather than move, he sat and watched them get closer.
Not having anything else to do wasn’t the issue. He had a long list of things to do. Every farmer had more to do than he could possibly get done; not today, not in a week, and certainly not by Christmas. But, there was nothing on Larry’s to-do list he didn’t want to avoid doing. He would’ve jumped on any excuse not to muck out the barn or turn the compost pile. Spacecraft landing in your cow pasture seemed to be a better excuse for not delousing Ol’ Bucky than he normally thought up.
As they got closer, he realized the spacecraft were a good deal smaller than he initially estimated. Each of the fourteen separate craft was only slightly larger than his old, wood framed, unpainted, two-bedroom, one-bath farmhouse. The spacecraft didn’t have an unpainted look and seemed to undergo a better maintenance schedule than Larry managed with his house.
Larry was confident enough to place a few bets that the spacecraft weren’t wood framed. He was less confident on whether they were two-bedroom and one bath or not.
Watching the formation, he expected them to settle into the grass. All fourteen stopped in perfect unison at about six feet above the ground and hovered. A long pole extended from the bottom of one craft. It gently prodded a cow to move along a bit. This cow, not unusual as cows go, was more concerned about the speed of sound than about creatures from outer space about to crush it. She quickly forgot both spacecraft and the speed of sound as she ambled off into the sunlight for a greener batch of grass.
The formation lowered to about a foot above the ground and settled in mid-air with a quiet sigh. The noise was reminiscent of the sound Grandpa made when he settled into his old Lazy Boy recliner, with a cold beer in one hand, a bag of tater chips in the other, and the TV remote stuck down the front of his pants, where he would not lose it and, with firm certainty, no one would attempt to appropriate it.
A doorway melted open.
A real honest-to-pete alien stood in the doorway.
This alien was short. Maybe not short as aliens go in general. For all Larry knew, on its home planet, it may be considered a giant among its own kind. Compared to Larry — who wasn’t considered a giant by anyone over the age of two — the creature was short, barely chest high. Covered in a light brown fur from head to toe, with a stubby tail and a canine-type face with ears to match, Larry was surprised at the fox-like appearance of the alien. The little creature was standing up, not like a fox on its hind legs, but just upright like a two-year old human in a fox costume.
It waved to Larry. Its hello wave looked exactly like Granny Clampett’s good-bye wave at the end of a Beverly Hillbillies rerun, only it was different. The wave a human actress pretending to be Granny made was different, as this wave came from an extraterrestrial, a real UFO ET, a genuine space invader.
Larry wasn’t sure how much invading was being done, or planned on being done, or—since he had not turned on a radio all day — already done. Whatever was happening, he didn’t want to be the human who started an interstellar holocaust, so he started to wave back. He stopped his hand in mid-wave and realized the importance of first contact with an alien, and probably, a vastly superior race of beings.
A wave from aliens to Larry might be as appropriate as an adult patting the head of a two-year-old, redheaded toddler. However, for Larry to pat the President of the United States’s head as a greeting was somewhat inappropriate protocol. He was sure the attending Secret Service agents would protest.
Instead of waving, he held up his hand in a palm out, split fingered Vulcan salute.
“Live long and prosper,” Larry said.
He didn’t know if the creature knew English or not, but Larry didn’t know Vulcan. He didn’t know French, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, or ET-ish, if it all came down to it. Speaking in English was much like breathing oxygen to Larry, it being his only valid option. His college Spanish had long since vanished to the deep, dark parts of wherever his mind stored unused information. Larry knew he could have learned another language if there had ever been a pressing need. He wasn’t too sure about learning to breathe something other than oxygen.
The creature gestured at someone deeper inside the spacecraft. The gesture was curiously human. Larry often used the same gesture with his ex-wife Nancy, his dog, and his horse. It generally worked with Nancy until she headed for the bright lights of Fredonia. It worked occasionally with Ol’ Bucky. It never seemed to work with his horse. The gesture meant, come here. The creature’s eyes never left Larry. It continued to stare at him and gesture to the side with ever-increasing urgency.
Larry continued to stare back at the creature. He had no one to gesture to right now. Nancy was gone and he didn’t expect to see her until word spread around town that he’d sold off a few cattle and had an extra dollar or two. Ol’ Bucky was off, to wherever it was Ol’ Bucky ran off to during the day. The cows, being what they were, generally didn’t care for being gestured to, or for that matter, even over. So, Larry just stared.
The creature didn’t look much like Larry expected his first alien to look like.
He’d learned long ago that most of his firsts rarely lived up to their anticipation quotient. His first day in kindergarten wasn’t as exciting as Mom said it would be. His first kiss wasn’t much to brag about and not near as exciting as his friends told him it would be. His first drunk night out didn’t near match how much fun his friends told him it would be, and it didn’t come near to compensating for his hangover the next day. The hangover came without any advance warning.
Still, his first contact with an alien race had yet to disappoint him. The creature didn’t look like anything from the movies, but it was alien, sort of, and that was enough. Fortunately, the creature didn’t look like the ones from the movies Aliens or Predator. Unfortunately, the creature wasn’t like the aliens from the movie Avatar, either.
This whole encounter was just like his first introduction to sex in the back seat of the old Chevy. She wasn’t a cheerleader like he’d often fantasized about, but chubby Sally Killian, the preacher’s daughter. She didn’t look like he imagined his first partner to be, but she was willing and more than happy to participate. Larry hoped the aliens were willing and happy to participate even if he didn’t ask them to the prom. Sally hadn’t cared about his asking her to the prom when the time came around. For some reason, she was quite popular with the boys, for a chubby girl.
He’d be glad to meet with these aliens since they’d come to his little slice of the planet. However, he certainly wasn’t the guy to take them to his leader. He hadn’t even voted for this president, but then he hadn’t voted for the other guy either. Since neither candidate had promised to do anything about unpredictable weather for farming, he hadn’t seen any reason to even vote for the “lesser of two evils”.
Unlike the popular consensus of what aliens would look like — having a big head an
d scrawny blue body — this alien looked like an overgrown, red-tailed fox, without much of a tail. The thing was small, about four feet high and covered in a fur. It even had a long dog-like snout and pointed ears. Not pointed ears like a Romulan or one of those elves from that ring thing, but more like the fox it resembled. It stood straight without the splayed hips of a dog on its hind legs. Its hands had long padded fingers ending in sharp claws. The only thing it wore was something that resembled a construction tool belt or a Batman-like utility pack.
It grinned at Larry in an awful imitation of a smile. The smile was as disturbing as the day Grandpa dressed up like Grandma. Something about it just did not look quite right. The smile might have been unnerving, but Larry had been looking at teeth for most of his adult life.
He didn’t look at teeth like a dentist, but as a farmer, he had seen cow teeth, hog teeth, horse teeth, and dog teeth. He was sure somewhere he’d seen cat teeth and he would have seen chicken teeth, but chickens didn’t have teeth. This creature was without a doubt herbivorous. It didn’t eat meat.
That didn’t mean it wouldn’t bite.
He managed to get by on the working theory that everything with teeth bit at one time or another. Dogs and horses had bitten him more often than he could count. Whether a dog would bite or not was determined in the much the same way that some clowns were funny and some were not. Sometimes you couldn’t tell until you got close and then it was way too late.
Horses sometimes bite when they are irritated and sometimes just for the heck of it. Both irritation and simple orneriness in horses were indistinguishable emotions and totally irrelevant when you’re being bitten.
Cows, on the other hand, would only bite when they were deep in thought and didn’t want to tolerate any interruptions. Cows, being placid and more concerned with the ever-present and frequently unchanging now, were not plagued by deep thoughts very often. To have a cow bite you, it’s almost a requirement to stick your hand in her mouth and try to get her to clamp down.