Larry Goes To Space

by Alan Black

  Having an alien creature drop a table on his head was so three-stooges-like, it was almost human. But he laughed like the rest of them, only with a more Earth-style chuckle than what sounded like the dogfight coming from the Teumessians.

  He stood up next to Betty, suddenly realizing he was quite a bit taller than she was. He had come to think of them as taller. Surely, the misconception had something to do with recognizing their intelligence rather than looking at only their physical characteristics. He had long since learned that looking good and being good were two very different things. His ex-wife Nancy taught him that, not so much in a verbal lesson, but she could teach by example better than most.

  Larry suppressed the urge to pat Betty on the head or scratch her behind the ears. Ol’ Bucky always liked a good behind the ears scratching. He was going to have to work hard to keep from thinking that just because the Teumessians were fox-like, it didn’t mean they reacted the same as anything from Earth’s canine corps.

  Besides Ol’ Bucky wasn’t a good example of canine exactitude. He was such a mix that no one was sure what breeds were involved in his DNA mix. One day he wanted to be scratched on his back just above the tail and the next day he didn’t want to be touched anywhere. Now that Larry thought about it, that was a lot like Nancy.

  He ran his fingertips lightly over the wall where Betty had pushed. He couldn’t feel anything and no matter how close he looked, he couldn’t see anything. He decided the Teumess must see a slightly different spectrum than humans. He rolled up his pallet, stuffing it and the backpack into the wall cubby.

  He handed the nut log from the replicator to Betty. “Help yourselves if you’re hungry; just leave a little for me to nibble on.” He was ravenous, but he could do without if their supplies were limited. None of the Teumessians had mentioned any loss of foodstuffs from the kitchen fire. He would have to wait and see.

  He pulled a small marker from his backpack and put a tiny dot on the wall. He opened and closed the table a few times.

  “Betty, where do you push to open a chair?” he asked.

  He placed a small mark on the wall where she pointed and pressed. A chair dropped into place. After sitting, he realized the chair was almost exactly the correct size for a human and although it only had three legs, it looked exactly like a chair a human would make.

  He knew that exact — when it comes to humans — is an inexact term. Humans ranged in size from diminutive to pro-basketball tall and from female gymnast dainty to pro-football linebacker — the American kind of football, not the weird Australian stuff.

  The chair seemed to fit his bottom-side as comfortably as his kitchen chairs and his feet rested on the floor just fine. The whole design was all much too big for a Teumess. Maybe they liked their stuff oversized and maybe they liked having to reach up for an emergency fire handle. Maybe they hadn’t built the stuff.

  “Hey! Did you guys buy this spaceship used?”

  Scooter nodded. “Of course. The builders presented us with this and nineteen other ships upon our acceptance into the Union. The price was just a few tons of gold for all of them. They had been previously used, but as you can see, they are very durable.”

  The translator mangled the weight and the name of the metal. Nevertheless, the Teumess obviously thought either the weight was insignificant or they had little regard for the metal. He imagined many on Earth would find any weight of gold as a good trade for a working spaceship. He would trade his farm, his cattle, his car, and throw in his grandmother for a working spaceship — well, maybe his grandfather. But the old man wasn’t in prime working condition, so he didn’t add much to the bargain.

  Larry put his work boots on the table. He pulled his belt off and dropped it next to the boots. Covered in soot and smoke wasn’t all that unusual for him, considering the condition was a standard result for any extended camping trip. Getting dirty was even less unusual for Larry. Although showers weren’t always a daily occurrence, getting dirty was. In a method he used whenever he had to clean up after mucking out the barn, he stepped into the shower fully clothed. At least, he stepped into what passed for a shower on the spaceship.

  There wasn’t any shower curtain to pull closed for privacy or any stall door to slide shut. The Teumessians hadn’t shown any desire for alien probing and hadn’t expressed any interest in his physical attributes. That was probably due to the fact that they had access to cable television and they had had wireless internet for years. Any alien who studied humans by viewing human entertainment wouldn’t have too many questions left to ask. Thinking about it, there wasn’t any information an alien could learn from a good probing that they didn’t already know from some of the medical shows on cable television.

  Since Larry wasn’t particularly shy, he poked a finger in the hole on the wall and the water gushed out over him. He decided showering in front of extraterrestrial aliens wasn’t that much different than showering after gym class in middle school.

  However, the situation was unusual enough that he didn’t wonder in the least why the water outlet had a small button at the bottom of a slight recess in the wall and not a hidden button like the table and chairs. Still, if he’d thought about it, he would have decided that plumbing and electrical systems were two different things and didn’t appear to be designed with any cohesive thought to control functions.

  He splashed a bit, but the Teumessians weren’t standing close enough to be sprayed. He watched the grime flush down the magic hole in the floor. He scrubbed as best as he could with his bare knuckles. He did have a couple bars of soap, but he hoped to use it for washing his body for as long as he could make them last. One bar was already about half way gone.

  All of the roughage he had been eating for the last few days had him generating some strange methane expulsions. However, not showering was exactly like wearing every smell you came in contact with, but intensified. Going for a few days without a shower, especially when doing farm labor, is an experiment in strange odors. It was exactly like the difference between listening to adult contemporary music on the radio and going to a rock concert. The radio may have been soft and soothing, almost elevator-like, but ten feet from gigantic speakers was a sure invitation to early on-set hearing impairment.

  Humans didn’t often lose their sense of smell, they just overloaded it so it didn’t temporarily register with the brain. On the other hand, the Teumess had canine-like snouts. They could be in serious trouble if their sense of smell was anything like an earthbound hound.

  Larry pulled off his a button-down, brown work-shirt. He had picked it up at the tractor store. It was a heavy material with thick metal buttons. He didn’t bother with the buttons. He never bothered with buttons. He just pulled in on and off like a T-shirt. He was sure this shirt’s buttons had never been undone since it came to live with him. The shirt’s material was designed to soak up sweat like a sponge, but it was an old-fashioned shirt that had never learned the concept of wicking moisture away from the body. It sucked up fluids and held them until they dried of natural causes.

  He wrung the shirt and re-wet it. He stepped away from the stream of water and it quit. He wondered how it knew to stop. He had to push the button to start the water flow, but it quit anytime he stepped away. Maybe there were sensors in the wall that he couldn’t see, just as he couldn’t see where to push to get the table and chairs.

  He still liked the idea that the shower and the floor were magic. Somehow, that seemed to be more Harry-Potter-humanlike than technology that was invisible to the naked eye, or at least, to the human naked eye. He wrung the shirt out again, watching the few drops magically slide down the hole in the floor.

  He spread the shirt out on the table. He was sure it would dry a lot quicker that way than the last time he washed it. The label said wash and wear, but he imagined that didn’t mean to wear it while you washed it and let it dry while wearing it. However, until Betty showed him how to get the table out of the wall he didn’t have a place to hang his clothes to
dry. He tried to spread them out of the floor, but that didn’t work. That was how he lost a pair of socks. He didn’t have many spares—there was only so much stuff he could stuff into his backpack.

  He stepped back under the hole, pressed the water button, peeling off his socks. He washed, rinsed, wrung them dry, and set them on the table. He wasn’t shy, so he went back and started the water again. Showering with the aliens watching was just like taking a shower with Ol’ Bucky in the room. Sometimes the dog would watch him shower from a safe distance. Safe for Ol’ Bucky meant close enough to see, but far enough away Larry couldn’t catch him and drag him in for a bath. Sometimes the dog kept him company, but wasn’t interested enough to watch the shower process. Sometimes the dog refused to move from in front of the television in the living room. The Teumessians were watching with curiosity from a safe distance.

  Larry started to pull off his jeans. He hopped on one foot and tugged at the cuff. Most Earth people know that perfectly fitted, wet jeans aren’t the easiest things to pull off while standing up. The maneuver was exactly like trying to balance a Buick on your nose while dancing the Macarena. That is not like one of the new Buicks either, but the good old American, heavy steel 1970 version.

  Suddenly, it wasn’t at all like showering with Ol’ Bucky watching. Betty stepped under the water stream with him. She grabbed his jeans cuff and tugged, pulling the pants away from his leg. She grabbed the other pants cuff and tugged, stripping his jeans away from his legs. Ol’ Bucky had never been the least bit helpful in that regard. She fingered the jeans material, stood and handed them back to him. She was getting soaked from the water, but she didn’t move away.

  Humans all across Earth had comfort zones in varying degrees. He shuddered to think how close humans could exist while living in places so jammed with people they had to turn around to breathe, like Tokyo, New York City, or Mexico City. Larry’s comfort zone, as a single farmer from the middle of the Kansas prairie, was well beyond healthy in any human society. Betty had stepped so far inside his comfort zone it was like watching giraffes mate at the zoo, somewhat uncomfortable, but still fascinating in a peculiar sort of way.

  Betty sniffed, “Your odor is improving without your coverings, but we both reek of smoke and fire suppressant.”

  Larry hadn’t realized the suppressant had an odor. That told him the Teumess had different olfactory senses, just as they obviously saw in a different optical range. When he thought about the optical range, it came to him that it might not be a completely different range. Maybe the Teumess just see with a more precise, a more accurate, and/or a more detailed view of the same range.

  He remembered having read somewhere that humans see around ten million different color variations. That’s a tremendous volume of colors on such a limited visual spectrum range. But suppose the Teumess could see and differentiate between ten million and one different colors, or ten million and two, or even twenty million different colors.

  The human design — by nature or by creation — was to be hunters and gatherers. Women seemed to have a greater color sense than men as they were the original gatherers. Is the red apple ripe enough to eat or is it still too green? Are the berries the right shade of blue? Is the cheese supposed to be that color of green?

  Men, on the other hand, were the original hunters. Color choices were not that important. If it moves, kill it and eat it. Well, let’s skin it first because my feet are cold and I need new shoes.

  The Teumess appeared to be the ultimate vegans. It might be a survival trait to distinguish a greater subset of colors within the visual spectral range. From what Larry remembered in high school science class, the light spectrum wasn’t all that broad. He certainly didn’t remember the nanometer range of the complete wave spectrum. He would have looked it up if he’d still been home, but the internet was not available this far out into space.

  That information may be in one of the reference texts he downloaded into his e-reader, but since he was standing mostly naked in the shower, he didn’t feel it was prudent to stop and look up a random side thought. What he did remember, without having to look, was that humans were limited to ten million colors, if that huge a number could be called limited. That was due mainly to the receptors in their eyeballs. They were the rods and cones, plus whatever other nerves were required to see. Maybe the Teumess had rods, cones and — what? — gears, cogs and diamond shaped hoops?

  The Teumessians had better smell receptors than humans did. That was obvious and not a startling revelation to Larry. He could barely distinguish between a clean shirt and one that was — well, not so clean — simply by its odor. However, Ol’ Bucky could smell skunk roadkill from 2.1376 miles away. And Ol’ Bucky wasn’t even one of those specialty bloodhounds. He was just a regular dog, a mutt, a mongrel. Larry recalled that trained dogs were able to detect diabetes in humans by smell, as well as drugs, explosives, and cadavers. He had yet to hear of any special training for dogs that included sniffing out skunk roadkill, if he ever did, Ol’ Bucky was a shoe in for the job.

  Larry thought it strange that he really couldn’t smell himself anymore. His jeans still reminded him of a weeklong camping trip. Betty did have an odor of smoke and singed fur.

  Larry shrugged. “I’m not sure about the fire stuff, but you kind of smell good, with a bit of burned hair around the edges.

  Betty imitated his shrug. “Of course I smell good. I have better than average nasal sensors, even among the Teumess. I don’t see how humans can smell at all with that little thing you call a nose.”

  Larry looked at the little alien. “Okay, so now I’m getting English grammar lessons from a non-Earth humanoid? I didn’t mean that you had a good sense of smell. I meant that your odor was pleasant, but you do have a bit of a singed hair fragrance going on.”

  He realized this conversation hiccup was due to the translations coming from the little translator unit. The whole thing was a lot like getting marriage counseling from a celibate Roman Catholic priest — Nancy was Catholic — or worse yet, getting agribusiness lessons from a city boy who’d never had a job at any step in the food production process, including fry jockey at a fast food emporium. Actually, he found out much later the priest had only become ordained after the death of his wife, so he hadn’t always been celibate and had some actual practical experience in the marriage business. The analogy still held water because the city boy was a college professor teaching agribusiness who never had a job outside of college or going to college.

  Besides, who used correct grammar anyway? The guys down at Racine’s Bar and Girls on Friday nights didn’t care whether he said “frak you and your dog” or “I sincerely disagree, sir”. The outcome was a good old-fashioned knuckle buster where the asphalt would be if Racine had ever bothered to pave the back parking lot. Larry enjoyed a good fight, and had — with increasing frequency — since Nancy left, not that he’d developed a reputation as a brawler. But recently, he had become quite adept at defending his right to a lack of proper grammar, proper attire, and even proper comportment around a pool table.

  His last English professor tried to instruct him in the correct use of the Oxford comma. The instructor was a bit of a bully, berating his students publicly for minor mistakes, it was like yelling at a bartender for using three ice cubes, not four, in your fresh, perfectly made Long Island Iced Tea.

  That day, Larry had replied to his English teacher, “I’m sorry, sir. You mean that comma between fuck and you?” That hadn’t been Larry’s last day in that class, but it had been the last time that particular instructor tried to bully him. His college professor may have been an obnoxious twit, but more recently, Larry’s most frequent partner in conversation was his tractor.

  Larry could guarantee his old tractor didn’t care about his ability to parse a sentence or use the semi-colon. Larry was sure the tractor was ambivalent about whether he said he was nauseated, nauseous, or ready to launch a ralph. Actually, he would’ve been flabbergasted to learn the tractor didn’t
listen to him all the time, not out of rudeness, but just because Larry didn’t have much to say worth listening to that the tractor could relate to. As long as Larry put his butt in the seat and the tractor got out into the fresh air, the old machine was happy, or at least as happy as a tractor could be without a Missus Tractor and a lot of little tractorettes motoring around.

  Betty sniffed her fur. Her nose crinkled. Not crinkled like Ol’ Bucky’s when sniffing another dog’s butt or even crinkled like the fries down at Cuzin’ Cal’s Cozy Corner Café over in Caledonia after you scraped off the chili, jalapenos, bacon, black olives, diced onions, and just a little extra cheese in case you aren’t already constipated enough. The crinkle was oddly attractive, not unlike June Allyson’s nose when she smiled in a 1940s romantic comedy.

  “I positively stink,” Betty said. “I could use a dirt nap.”

  “Excuse me?” Larry laughed. “In English that is a euphemism for being dead and buried.” Not that he had any firsthand experience with being dead and buried, nor was he up on all the slang of the day. He was still trying to figure out what it meant to say a woman had junk in her trunk.

  Scooter spoke up, “Ah, I like that. For the Teumess, when we are dirty we lie down and roll about in a shallow dust wallow. The mites and grubs that live in the soil clean our fur. When we are very dirty, we take a short sleep in the dust to give the mites and grubs plenty of time to clean and shine our pelts.”

  “But you don’t shower like this?” Larry asked.

  All three shook their heads.

  “There are many predators in and near flowing water. It is very dangerous to do this. We have adapted to cleaning ourselves by water on the spaceship as it was impractical to bring enough dirt for the mites and grubs,” Scooter added.