Larry Goes To Space

by Alan Black

  Even if there wasn’t a lock on Larry’s hatch, all the other hatches remained locked and hidden. Upon reflection, Larry should have expected that. Looking at it from Scooter’s point of view, he wouldn’t want an ignorant Earth alien curiously poking buttons on the bridge or jiggling levers in engineering.

  At first, he wondered if the crew went into hibernation somewhere behind one of the locked hatches. But he heard feet scurry away from him far too often for that to be the case. He resisted the urge to chase after the sound. He wasn’t so lonely he was willing to force his presence on any creature so obviously terrified of him. Just like he was unwilling to force his presence on any pretty girl at Racine’s Bar and Girls, or even the other patrons at Benny’s Been There Bar and Done That Grill next to the motel out on Highway 74.

  The whole thing about not talking to pretty girls was frustrating. Thinking about it, he wondered if that frustration had anything to do with his rather unpleasant and oft-times painful relationship with the Rickenhauser brothers. He knew there was a correlation between his normal frustration and his growing frustration on Scooter’s spaceship. He wasn’t at the level yet to punch something or someone, but he could sense he’d have to do something soon, or he would end up punching someone.

  Larry never thought he had problems talking to strangers or even chatting up pretty girls. But with the last few weeks of reflection, he was beginning to doubt his own social skills. He clearly remembered his first meeting with Nancy. That was back when he was about four, long before he found out she was going to be a pretty girl and hence hard to talk to. Since both sets of parents were friends, they grew up knowing each other and he never had to learn how to talk to her.

  Strangely, social communication wasn’t taught in any of the schools he attended, except as an extracurricular fraternity activity at college and he’d avoided them like he avoided Ol’ Bucky’s doggy-do landmines when walking barefoot in the yard.

  Talking to aliens was only slightly less difficult than talking to pretty women. Larry tried to tell Scooter he wouldn’t harm him or any of the crew. He used every logical argument he could think of, but nothing worked, not even his promise to wear a locked Hannibal Lechter mask and give Scooter the key. Nothing worked because fear isn’t a logical, rational emotion, not among humans and certainly not among the Teumess.

  Scooter was insane. Only his insanity allowed him to talk to Larry at all. He was as loony as a jar full of Canadian one-dollar coins. To a lesser extent, so was Betty. Scooter had told him she wasn’t sane by Teumess standards. Only in her craziness had she allowed him to see her when they were back on Earth. Giving him a view of her fluffy little backside was exactly like having a human death wish. No sane prey deliberately flaunts their meaty parts to a hungry predator.

  Larry remembered from his high school psychology class that humans had a flight or fight response when confronted with danger. He thought that any creature who considered themselves as food would have developed a hide or flight response. Hence, the development of camouflage and protective coloring found on many of Earth’s creatures.

  The rest of the crew on all fourteen spaceships was, to some degree or other, nuts as a pecan orchard at harvest time in the middle of October, maybe even well into December depending on how far south the orchard might be. There was no other explanation for creatures so obviously xenophobic and so herd, pack-bound to get into a spaceship and go visit another planet full of creatures that — they were sure — planned to eat them on the first sunny day fit for a barbeque.

  Larry often wondered about why they sent fourteen spaceships when they only needed one. He understood their desire to have others of their own around, nearby, close enough to touch. But why send the number fourteen? Why not eight? The Teumess had three fingers and an opposable thumb on each hand. Two hands with four digits each would have meant eight ships. He’d counted four breasts on Betty. Maybe they had an average of four kits to a litter. That wasn’t equally divisible into fourteen.

  Maybe he didn’t have enough data on Teumess culture. Maybe crew for fourteen ships was all the crazy people they could round up for one trip. Maybe fourteen was their ultimate lucky number. Maybe it took that particular number of spacecraft to dig a decent sized wormhole through hyperspace.

  The Teumess were as curiosity driven as humans. When humans found something new, their tendency was to look at it from every angle, to touch it, to smell it, to listen to it rattle and yes, to pop it in their mouths to see what it tasted like. A baby with its first cookie exemplified human curiosity. However, the Teumess wanted to look at any new thing from a distance, much more like a mature adult in a china shop.

  Scooter told him their normal contact with other worlds was done though a long distance probe. Sending a personal representative to pick up a human volunteer was done partly out of extreme politeness. Larry thought the galaxy was a much more polite place than he would have thought it to be. It wouldn’t take long before Larry found out how wrong that was.

  Larry looked at his watch on the way across the room to check on the kachunk from the food processor. He was beyond checking the time. He watched the watch for the date. He’d been on the Teumess spaceship for about six weeks. Or that is what his watch said, although he did have to read the watch face. Everybody knew watches did not talk. At least, none Larry ever owned had talked. That new watch in the commercials did everything including talk. At the speed of technology, who knew how quickly talking watches would show up in a store Larry could afford to shop in! After all, Dick Tracy had one in the early 1930s.

  There were all kinds of other possibilities that would preclude his watch from being accurate. They could have dropped into an alternate universe where time had no relevance. They could have jumped through a series of wormholes where time stood still as they traveled through each wormhole, only to speed back to normal time when in normal space. Einstein was probably right, if they were approaching the speed of light, then his time would appear to be moving forward at a normal pace, but the time back on Earth would be speeding by. Years could have gone by at this point if that were so. Larry had no evidence to call Einstein a liar.

  Larry would have asked Scooter, but he didn’t want to bother the little Teumessian. For all he knew, Scooter was in charge of this space-going loony bin. Maybe Scooter was the head loon. Maybe Scooter needed to concentrate on flying the spacecraft.

  That led Larry to wonder if spacecraft were like cars: the faster you went the more attention the vehicle demanded. Fast cars became demanding quickly, much like some wives. If a spaceship approaching the speed of light had a proportionate demand as a fast car approaching the speed of say, seventy-three miles per hour, then the spaceship would be like having a thousand wives, each bitchier than the last. Larry chuckled, that might be a good analogy as far as his ex-wife Nancy went. Still his mother, his grandmother, and even little Marcy seemed to be a different breed.

  Larry opened the food replicator hatch. He would have called it the food bin hatch or the lid to the open space where the food came in, but it looked so much like the door to his microwave that he didn’t have much choice. The food replicator hatch was exactly like the ones on the Star Trek show, only Larry was sure there wasn’t much replicating going on. He was a good judge of a bad meal, having made so many of them. Surely, the programming in a replicator would be consistently better, or at least consistently mediocre. Machines tended to be consistent, whether good or bad.

  He was semi-pleased to see this meal was the nut log. The meal wasn’t like a nut log from the cheese store at a mall or what you got by catalog as a holiday present from an old college roommate who was either too lazy to get you a better gift or lacked a serious sense of imagination. Larry knew this wasn’t like a nut log from a cheese gift basket because he had given and received more than his fair share of such gift baskets. This nut log was exactly like a meatloaf, except there wasn’t any meat.

  He wasn’t sure what nuts were used and what vegetables were mixed
in, but it tasted quite like ground sirloin with some mashed potatoes mixed in. The alien meatless meatloaf was far removed from his grandmother’s meatloaf. Dad suggested once — out behind the barn, out of Grandma’s hearing — that her meatloaf had been the cause of Grandpa’s stroke. Larry didn’t doubt it since even Ol’ Bucky — whose favorite meal was dead skunk ala asphalt — wouldn’t eat it. This meatloaf was satisfactorily edible, its biggest drawback being that it appeared in the replicator window far too often, much like his grandmother’s meatloaf at his parents place.

  Early on, Larry tried to offer food suggestions to Scooter, but failed miserably. For some reason, the Teumessian didn’t get the concept of catsup. Larry really missed catsup. He would’ve been happy with salsa or even a spicy fruit compote, but Scooter seemed repelled by the idea of mixing fruit and vegetables in the same dish. They also didn’t get the idea of using spices much beyond salt. Their meals did have delicate and subtle flavors. Unfortunately, Larry didn’t have subtle or delicate taste buds. These meals were so bland, he was willing to try an onion and lemon peel coleslaw with a Tabasco chaser.

  Still, this nut log smelled a bit different from last time. He sniffed it and smelled a hint of smoke.

  “No,” he said aloud.

  The little e-reader didn’t respond since the sentence was completely out of any context.

  The food processor didn’t respond since it was just a small hatch and not a real machine.

  Larry shook his head. “It’s not the nut log that smells like smoke.”

  He sniffed the air, turning in a slow circle. He was sure there was a hint of smoke coming from the open food hatch. He set his nut log on his pallet and pushed the wall communication unit button.

  “Scooter? Are you there?” There was no response. “Hey? Somebody? I smell smoke in here.”

  There wasn’t any answer. There hadn’t been any answer in weeks. The Teumessians, having disappeared into the ship, weren’t talking to him, even Scooter.

  There wasn’t even any static from the communicator, not that there had ever been static. The observation was just a human one for Larry to make. The last hundred years of human technology development had driven humans toward static noise immunity. Radio static, television static, landline telephones, cell phones, and even the latest music gizmo barraged humans to the point they couldn’t operate without a certain level of noise.

  Larry was only slightly less noise inclined as farm animals didn’t generate much in the way of static. His television was exceptionally skilled at static and seemed to work at making up for his cows lack of static enthusiasm.

  He shook his head, took a deep breath, and pushed the recessed button to melt open the hatch. He was convinced somewhere aboard the ship — his open hatch would set off an alarm warning all the Teumess there was a carnivore on the loose. The smell of smoke was stronger in the corridor, but he couldn’t hear any alarms, either fire, smoke, or carnivore alarms. Larry wasn’t a long time veteran of space voyages. Still, being in deep space for six weeks put him well ahead of most humans, that included everyone he knew and then some. Even with as little time in space as he had, he was sure that fire on board a spacecraft wasn’t a good thing.

  The smoke smell was stronger coming from the left, so Larry went left. He turned a corner and faced a pair of Teumessians racing his way. The crewmembers froze. Jammed over their heads were enclosed, clear plastic-looking bags. The bags inflated and deflated with their rapid breathing. Larry didn’t want to startle them, so he slowly turned and put his face to the wall.

  He was surprised it worked.

  The Teumessians were obviously more afraid of whatever was burning than they were of Larry. They raced past him with a burst of speed, shot around the corner, and were out of sight before he could turn back.

  Larry didn’t think he could have caught them if he wanted to. He’d have to remember that argument with Scooter. Those two crewmembers moved like their tails were on fire. Still, only one of them had a really fluffy tail worth the name. She had a tail and tits. He was pleased with his observation skills, although being a guy, it wasn’t too much of a challenge to recognize breasts. The crewmembers were one male and one female.

  Also being a guy, he could not help noticing that the female was a redhead — a foxy little ginger — with breasts bigger than Betty’s. Her breasts weren’t large by Earth standards. Larry wasn’t particularly fond of large breasts. Noticing them was just a man thing. He couldn’t help but notice Ginger’s breasts anymore than he could stop breathing. Strangely enough, that was the problem with fire on spaceships. It burned the oxygen you needed to breathe.

  Larry heard yipping and yapping going on in the next cabin. He eased up to an open hatchway. There were three crewmembers in the cabin; two females and one male. All three of the crew wore clear plastic bags over their heads. The male and one female were trying desperately to move a handle set into the wall. The handle was black and looked exactly like the handle on the fuse box on Larry’s back porch, except that it was much larger, it wasn’t attached to a fuse box, and it moved right to left instead of up and down. The handle wasn’t moving although the pair was throwing their whole weight against it.

  One female, and he couldn’t say why, he thought was Betty. She was holding the end of a hose. The hose was barely dribbling out white sandy foam. The foam wasn’t quite reaching the fire engulfing one bulkhead of what looked like a small kitchen.

  Larry doubted it was a grease fire. He had set way too many pans of bacon aflame to not recognize that kind of fire. This fire was burning hot, even if it wasn’t fed by some kind of oil. The kitchen countertops were melting. Not like a hatch melting open and unmelting closed, but more like a toy green plastic army man soaked in gasoline and set on fire when bombarded by firecrackers.

  He wasn’t surprised Betty was unable to get close enough to put even a dribble of suppressant on the flame. He was standing closer than he would have wanted to be. He was worried if he went into the room he would scare the Teumessians so badly he might end up fighting this flame alone.

  He wanted to help with the lever. He hoped it didn’t release a fire suppressant he couldn’t breathe. He hoped moving the lever didn’t open a window to space suffocating the fire. He knew whatever the result, he had to help. None of them might survive if he didn’t do something.

  Larry wasn’t ready to not survive.

  …being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. (Samuel Johnson)

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LARRY stepped into the kitchen.

  Betty heard him. Her head swiveled around as if she’d been slapped. Her eyes were already wide with fear. Her breathing was causing the plastic head gear to expand and contract like a clown’s balloon gone berserk. She dropped the hose and held her hands up in a defensive position. She was close enough to the fire it had already slightly singed her fur, yet she backed away from him, moving closer to the heat. Her blondish hair began to singe, curl, and smoke. It was a perfect example of “out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

  Larry wasn’t so sure her position was as defensive as it looked. Her fingers ended in long sharp claws. They weren’t sharp like cat’s claws, but like human nails or even more like those little, folding military entrenching tools except they weren’t green and didn’t have serrated edges. He didn’t intend to get any closer to those claws than he had to. They could shred him like taco cheese and as fast as the Teumess were, his shredding would be over before you could pour on the salsa.

  He pointed at the fire, to the hose, and then back to the fire. There was no need to speak, even if they could hear through their headgear, they wouldn’t understand him anyway. He moved away from the hatch so she could bolt if she had to. He would rather fight the fire alone than have her burn to death in front of him.

  She gave a little shiver, grabbed the fire hose, and held it delicately with one hand. She pointed at the lever on the wall. She — Betty didn’t need to speak either. Th
e situation was desperate, but simple. Burn to death, let the fire rob the spacecraft of all oxygen, or put out the fire.

  There may have been escape pods. Every ship from the Enterprise to the Nostromo had some kind of emergency getaway pod, shuttle, bus, or transport. Even if this ship had them, Larry didn’t know where they were or even how to open the hatch to get to one. He supposed Scooter might show him, but that would be like a fatman going into the nearest clothing store. You never knew if you’d find something that fit. And even if he could find an escape pod that fit, could he wear it in public? What was the proper attire for hyperspace, or a wormhole, or wherever the hell they were?

  He wondered if the ship had more than one escape pod. If they didn’t, then he doubted if even Scooter would be willing to climb into a small emergency pod with an omnivore. Larry was sure he would rather be burned to death than be eaten while still alive. A spaceship wasn’t like a bus — you couldn’t get out and walk to the next town if the bus was full of crazies, zombies, or heaven-forbid a horde of rabid door-to-door magazine salesmen.

  The other Teumessians hadn’t seen him in their desperation to move the lever. It was an indication of how panicked the little creatures were. Larry was far enough into the room to see clearly which way the handle had to turn. Painted on the wall was a very earthlike arrow. The words painted there may have said anything from fire retardant; to, open for access to escape hatch; or even, times up, might as well party. Larry had seen the Teumess language, but without a frame of reference, there was no way to know for sure.