by Alan Black
Not having a guide, or even one of those “you are here” maps, Larry turned left. He thought that was to port, but knew that would depend on whether he had just come in the back hatch or the front hatch. He turned left because he had once read that most people, when entering a store, a sports stadium, or amusement park almost always turned to the right. He made it a habit to obstinately turn the opposite way most people went.
Larry didn’t bother looking for light switches along the way. The lights seemed to turn on as he got close and off when he was out of the immediate area. He wasn’t such a rube that he didn’t understand motion detectors, a position that most motion detectors found highly practical. Try as he might, Larry couldn’t see any device that alerted the lights, the corridor, or any recognizable detector to his presence.
The Teumessian motion detectors would have chuckled at his inability to find their receptors, but they didn’t have much of a sense of humor. This, if someone thought about it long enough, would be a good thing in motion detectors that controlled the lights.
He reached a corner of the corridor without finding another hatch. He made a right turn and walked to the next corner. He made another right turn and walked to the next corner. He made another right turn and walked to the corner. He made another right turn and walked down the corridor to the midpoint, all without finding a hatch. Unless his sense of direction was befuddled, he had reached the point where he started.
The airlock hatches were gone. A stairway — he knew these were called ladders on ships — opened on the opposite bulkhead where the airlock hatch had been. It led up to the next level. He looked up but didn’t see anyone or anything.
He slid his hands along the bulkhead where the airlock hatch should’ve been, but he couldn’t see or feel any opening, crack, or crease. The seal was perfect. He decided at least he didn’t have to worry about all his air leaking out into space before they got to where they were going. He couldn’t see any mechanism to open or close the airlocks.
Larry looked both ways along the corridor. There hadn’t been any hatches or openings in any bulkhead when he’d made his round robin walk, assuming you could call it round when it was a perfect square. But he wouldn’t recognize a hatch if all of them were like the airlock hatches. If the length of the corridor was any indication, the size of this spaceship was a few hundred feet larger than his house. It did have a second story, where his farmhouse did not.
He thought the square corridor enclosed a central room on this level. There must also be smaller rooms around the outside of the corridor. The outside rooms couldn’t be much larger than a small bedroom or a large walk-in closet, unless they were using magic where the inside of the spaceship rooms were bigger than their outside dimensions.
Just for good measure, Larry walked around the squared circle corridor again. He ended up back at the ladder going up to the next level. He hadn’t seen any indication of any opening, any hatch, any porthole, any Teumess, or even any other intra-galactic creature. He hadn’t even seen a dust bunny in a corner, and that was very unlike his hallway at home.
He looked up through the opening to the deck above. From what he could see, upstairs was much like where he was. He walked up the ladder. He had to stretch to reach the next step. It had certainly not been designed to human specifications.
He wondered about that. The Teumess were smaller than he was. At least, the Teumessians he had seen were smaller than he was. For all he knew, he’d been captured by a group of pygmy Teumess. Still, their legs were much shorter, making the steps much more difficult for them than him. Much stronger leg muscles might explain the difference.
Larry glanced around him as his head rose above deck level. The corridor was much like the one below. It looked shorter on this floor as if the central room was much smaller than the central room below, with larger rooms around the outer perimeter.
“Hello?” he called out. “Permission to come aboard?” He realized it was a little late to call out, but they had been expecting him. Otherwise they wouldn’t have left the hatches open for him.
“Savage carnivore on level two,” he shouted. “I’m not hungry, but just letting you know.”
There wasn’t any answer. The translator yipped and yapped, but there still wasn’t any answer. He did hear the scurry of feet around the corner ahead, but he was a guest and didn’t want to go chasing after a scared Teumessian. After all, he couldn’t catch Ol’ Bucky unless the old dog wanted to get caught and he imagined the Teumessians were faster than Ol’ Bucky.
He clumped down the corridor. The clumping was deliberate. He wanted the Teumess to know he was coming. It felt like walking down the hallway of a stranger’s home, looking for the bathroom, uncomfortable, but necessary.
He made the circuit around the central room and confirmed, to himself if no one else, that the central room was much smaller on the second floor than the first. He was beyond surprised when he reached his starting point only to find that the ladder going down was gone. Even the opening in the deck had completely disappeared without any evidence it had ever been there.
Larry decided this spaceship was not at all like Nancy. She’d disappeared, but she left more evidence behind than he could count. Clothes, hair products, odd bits of human existence always seemed to float into his field of vision at odd times. He would swear that he had all her stuff out of the bathroom when in a flash of light he would spot a comb or barrette stuck in some corner. Here on this spaceship, when something disappeared, it was gone.
He hoped that, unlike Nancy, things on the ship would come back. Unless he was probed one too many times to care, he did want to see the Teumess home planet. He would like to be able to go out an airlock hatch and visit the planet when the time came.
Instead of a ladder going down to the level below, there was a hatch open into a central room. There was no doubt in his mind he was being herded, so he walked into the room.
He would’ve been much happier if Scooter had been there to greet him and show him around. Still, he was a predator. Scooter, being prey had recognized that. The little creature had to increase the dosage level he was using even to talk to him, and it knocked him out. And that was in the openness of the farm on the Kansas prairie. Drugs or not, it would’ve been a real challenge for Scooter to be close to a meat eater in the tight confines of these corridors and cabins.
This cabin was about the size of his living room, but empty, so it appeared larger. In that regard, the room was just like Nancy and her magical breasts. They appeared much bigger when they were covered than when set free. His living room at home had been huge until he moved in, then he couldn’t fit everything inside the room.
The hatch didn’t close behind him. He looked carefully along the edge of the opening. He spotted a small button in a recessed hole. It was set about six feet up. That was way too high to be comfortable for him. It would have been way out of reach for any Teumess. He didn’t press the button.
Not pushing the button wasn’t from a lack of curiosity. He was more than curious, but his relationship with this button was too new. He wanted to take it slow, to get to know the button before engaging in any interaction. It might be the best button in the world to push, quickly earning its way into his heart as a lifetime companion. Or he might be in the trash compactor and the button would shorten his lifetime beyond his planned old age.
He hadn’t seen any button, lever, or display in the airlock hatch or in either corridor. Why here? Why in this room? He made a careful examination of the room. The Teumess certainly wanted him here. There were four walls and a ten-foot high ceiling. On the bulkhead opposite the hatch was a small dimple in the wall. Next to the dimple was a second recessed button. Six feet below the button was a three-inch wide hole in the floor. There wasn’t a grate over the hole.
The only other thing in the room was a large, soft pad laid out on the deck. It didn’t look as comfortable as his queen-sized bed at home, but the pallet was obviously a sleeping pad. He dropped his bac
kpack and sleeping bag on the floor next to the pad.
He heard a small scraping noise on the deck. He spun around. The hatch was still open but there wasn’t anyone or anything there. He walked slowly to the hatch and peered in both directions, but the corridor was empty.
When he turned around again, his backpack was sliding slowly toward the hole in the deck! The pack and sleeping bag were much larger than the hole, but for all he knew the deck had the ability to open its jaws like an anaconda swallowing a crocodile.
He grabbed the backpack in plenty of time to keep it from sliding away. He dropped his gear on the sleeping pallet and stood watching it. It didn’t move.
He heard the scraping noise again and turned slowly. He didn’t want to startle the Teumess if they were trying to contact him. There was no one there. He walked to the hatch and turned right, walking around the square of the corridor.
There weren’t any hatches or Teumessians. For all he knew, he was alone on this spaceship.
He wondered when they were going to take off. He hoped they didn’t delay too long. Marcy was pregnant, so she needed a good breakfast. He was sure Gary and Marcy wouldn’t leave the pasture until he left the planet.
He wondered if they had already left the planet. Just because he couldn’t feel the engines or thrust didn’t mean that it hadn’t happened.
Maybe ever’body in the whole dam world is scared of each other. (John Steinbeck. Of Mice and Men)
CHAPTER SIX
LARRY heard the kachunk of the food processer. He shut off his e-reader without regard to where he stopped reading. He was becoming especially fond of his e-reader as it was just about the only thing on the whole spaceship that talked back to him. The little reader was especially good at holding a conversation in abeyance exactly where he left it. Still, the little e-reader tended to ramble on if Larry didn’t interrupt it every now and then. A lot of people he’d met back on Earth were like that. The e-reader tended to monopolize a conversation from time to time.
“Back on Earth,” Larry said to the e-reader. “Now there’s a phrase that I never had much use for.”
Larry didn’t expect the e-reader to comment. He hadn’t really asked it a question; he just made a general reference that didn’t require an answer. Still, he wished he had upgraded to one of those new personal assistant machines that had voice recognition and would actually speak when answering. His e-reader only responded in black and white, occasionally in color, and then just with the printed word.
That was about all the talk Larry had in his day-to-day life. The food processor wasn’t anything more than a small hatch to a recessed gap in the bulkhead. Food appeared at frequent but irregular intervals and the machine went kachunk.
The whole processor was behind the bulkhead, so he felt a little silly talking to it. Actually, for all he knew the system was like the sliding doors on the TV show Star Trek that had two guys pulling the doors open and pushing them closed—out of camera range, of course. Maybe Scooter or Betty opened a hatch on the other side of the bulkhead, put in some food, and shut the hatch. Maybe kachunk was the Teumess equivalent of a dinner bell.
Larry’s cabin may have been slightly larger than his living room back in Kansas, but the space was devoid of any furniture, other than his sleeping pallet in a corner on the floor. There were no chairs, no sofa, no divan, no chaise, not even a loveseat. He used his sleeping pallet if he wanted to sit somewhere. He always set his backpack at the foot of his sleeping pallet, unless he was using it for a footstool.
He had bathroom facilities. He relieved himself in the hole in the deck. The shower was just that recessed button and a small gap melted in the bulkhead. Water poured out when he pushed the button. Then the water ran down the hole in the deck.
The deck didn’t slant toward the hole in the floor. He was almost certain of that. He had a good eye for spatial analysis, but somehow the water knew where to go. No matter how much he splashed, all the excess water ran to the hole in the deck.
He assumed the Teumess had water that was much smarter than the average bucketful on Earth, the process was just plain magic, or the technology at work was one he’d never seen. His best guess was, the last scenario was most likely; however, he was determined not to rule anything out until he could prove otherwise.
Larry had become wary of setting anything directly on the deck. The last time he’d set his backpack on the deck, it gravitated toward the hole. The full-sized backpack was much too big to be sucked down the drain, but he did lose a good pair of socks that way. When you only had a few pair, the loss of any was disastrous. Moreover, the pair he had lost was one black sock and one white sock. Fortunately, he still had another pair just like it.
For some reason, he didn’t gravitate toward the hole and neither did his sleeping pallet. Maybe the pallet was magic in its own right, or maybe the deck recognized it as something that should be there and not to be discarded. Socks might have been too unusual for the floor to comprehend. He didn’t remember Scooter wearing anything resembling clothes — nor had Betty.
His spaceship cabin was painted, not quite like his living room at home. That was a good thing. Nancy had always hated — and disbelieved — his claim that he was too busy to paint or repaper the living room. The farmhouse was old and there were at least four generations of floral wallpaper showing at any given time.
Larry always said Nancy was too fussy about the way the room looked. At least that was what he always told Nancy. But he liked it that way. Something about a casual distressed look was comfortable after a hard day of watching cows or fishing down at the creek. Fortunately, much of his house and furniture had that distressed antique look.
He’d told Nancy she was welcome to paint or paper any time she wanted. He assured her she would have plenty of time if she quit watching daytime television and reading romance novels. He had only said that twice. Both times, he slept on the couch for a week afterward.
He was quite pleased that he figured out the connection between criticizing Nancy and sleeping on the couch after only two times. Normally, it took him much longer to find connections between such disparate activities, like being hit in the head by Doug Rickenhauser and having a headache the next day. He was still working on why it hurt worse the next day than it did on the day Doug actually punched him.
The paint job in his cabin wasn’t done in the typical Earth fashion. There was paint layered in a multitude of greens. He could only assume the Teumess liked green in all its varieties. It looked like a Kansas field on a bright, spring day when he squinted at it. The ceiling was a greenishness to a light blue hue. He wondered if the ceiling paint was the color of the sky on the Teumessian home world.
Larry would have asked that question, but Scooter hadn’t come to see him in person in the six weeks since coming aboard. Nor had he seen anyone else. The little translator disappeared one night while he slept. There was a communicator unit on the wall to talk to the crew of the ship, but the thing was just a speaker with an on and off switch that was an obvious add-on as the technology didn’t match the rest of what little of the ship he’d seen. The communicator unit wasn’t much of a conversationalist, no matter what its name implied. The ship’s crew wasn’t much better.
Scooter was the only Teumess on board insane enough to talk to Larry, even over a voice-only communicator. And for that type of conversation, Scooter still needed his drugs to do that on a regular basis. Out of concern for Scooter, Larry only called someone when he had an absolute need. He hadn’t thought of an absolute need for the last three weeks. Not that Larry had any problems with not talking to another person in three weeks. He could easily have gone that long at home, because the ever-increasing number of telemarketers kept his voice box in active condition.
His refrigerator, back in Kansas, would have laughed to hear about Larry thinking he needed telemarketers to talk to. Larry often subjected the fridge to a morning monolog, even though he awarded the coffee pot most of his attention. But, the old frid
ge would have been too polite to laugh in Larry’s face. It would have much preferred to laugh at him behind his back. That was the way refrigerators were, especially the kind without a built in icemaker.
Older refrigerators would never say it, but those ice cube trays hurt, even the newer plastic kinds. That was why refrigerators built up a layer of frost. The frost was an effort to separate themselves from those trays and minimize the contact. Larry’s fridge was ancient and extremely talented at isolating ice cube trays with frost and ice. Larry had begun to do without ice cubes and kept most of his frozen goods in the freezer on the back porch. Like all chest style, freezer-only units, it seemed to have a thing for a little pain every now and then.
It hadn’t taken Larry long to determine he wasn’t in a cell. There weren’t any bars on the windows — no windows either. The hatch wasn’t ever locked because there wasn’t a lock on the hatch. The cabin was self-sufficient, not that it had everything it needed, but it did give Larry water, fresh air, a toilet, a shower, a place to sleep and — through the small hatch in the wall — plenty to eat.
He thought back on all of his nautical terms since “room” didn’t sound quite right. The only word he could find was stateroom or cabin. Both words seemed to be a bit over the top for the accommodations provided by this room, but if he was going nautical then cabin would have to do.
All things considered, the cabin was comfortable, even though there wasn’t anything in it other than Larry, a pallet on the deck with Larry’s sleeping bag, his backpack, and e-reader. Without being locked in, he was free to push the hatch button — that one button on the bulkhead by the hatch to the corridor — leave his cabin, and wander this single ship’s corridor at will. When he first arrived, he went wandering the corridor of the ship. The surrounding corridor was short, but there weren’t any hatches or other rooms to explore. At least, he didn’t have access to any hatches or rooms. Other rooms were exactly like the women in Racine’s Bar and Girls. Her place was full of pretty girls — well … sort of pretty — on weekends — after a few beers — but, he didn’t have access to any of them, or if he did, he didn’t have a clue how to go about it.