Larry Goes To Space

by Alan Black

  Larry believed the Teumess were far more technical than they were letting on. They might have been a pre-space civilization before joining the Union, but he doubted it. They had a curiosity streak that was only tempered by their xenophobia. He wasn’t even sure xenophobia was a correct diagnosis. After all, even a cow wouldn’t knowingly enter a slaughterhouse just to see what was inside. That was assuming cows did anything knowingly, which they assuredly did not.

  From what he’d gathered, they managed their space exploration by unmanned probes and listening satellites. That type of probe was sure to be a great disappointment to many human alien abductees.

  His crew might trust him, but no Teumessian trusted Earth, a planet filled with humans. That alone showed a great deal of common sense.

  Larry had known he had to lose this game. He would have deliberately lost if he thought he was getting close to winning. He needed to win, but he wasn’t ready to win yet. He had to delay for time, losing a few games would buy him the time he needed to gather information and implement the plan he had forming somewhere in his brain. Delay was easy for him, but it would be deadly on the Teumessians in the game.

  The room was loud with shouting and Teumessians running around. Larry could only imagine the Teumessians were as upset as he was. He couldn’t look any of them in the face, collectively or individually. He hung his head and waited.

  A new grid appeared on the Almas monitor and a countdown began. Larry checked his watch. It was only for ten hours.

  Larry turned and walked into the bathroom. He found the indicated spot Betty had marked on the inside, pressed the spot and the door un-melted closed. It was the first time he had been alone in three — maybe four days. He wanted to cry. Logically he had only killed a small percentage of people who would be—

  He stopped. That was it — they were people. The little Teumessians had gotten to him. They were no longer strange little fox-like aliens. They were people.

  He stripped down and stood under the shower. He was tired and he was hungry. He gave up the thought of food. He wanted to get clean. He felt dirty. He wanted to sleep so he could forget for a while what he had just done. But, he wasn’t given time.

  The door melted open. Betty came in. She walked into the shower and yipped at him. He’d left the translator in the other room, but it didn’t matter. She was tugging at him; trying to get him to come back to the main room.

  Larry sighed. He didn’t dry himself off, but he did pull his clothes on. He trudged back to the main room. A wall of sound slapped him in the face.

  “Betty, what’s going on in here?”

  Betty laughed. They were close enough to the translator he could hear her high-pitched yipping and the machine version of her laughter. “They are celebrating. You have saved eleven Teumessians. Sunlight through a Dust Cloud has gone to bring back the ones you saved.”

  “Who?”

  Betty made a few hand gestures over her fur. It translated very well; she was talking about the scruffy, little Teumessian.

  “Let’s just go with Dusty, okay? He may be crazy, but he’s a brave little cuss. But Betty, I don’t want to hear about how many I’ve saved. I lost more than I saved. This isn’t something to celebrate.”

  Scooter slid next to them, “You are wrong, friend Larry. We celebrate life. You have given life to us. Yes?” He pointed at the monitors. “The Tetra wishes to speak to you.”

  Larry shook his head. “I’m tired and I want to sleep before the next contest. There isn’t much time before then. Can they get together and decide that only one of them will speak for the whole?”

  Scooter and Betty both laughed.

  Scooter said, “Not in the time left.”

  Betty added, “Not in our lifetime.”

  Larry walked up to the four monitors. He pointed at the one on the left. “You speak. The rest of you shut your berry-eating holes and keep them closed.”

  The designated Tetra said, “We have calculated you can win given enough time. You have given us hope. You say they will not leave even if you can win a contest. Yet, they’ve promised to leave.”

  Larry said coldly, “They’re liars, but that’s okay, cuz so are humans. It was an empty promise. They won’t go no matter how many times I beat them.”

  “Then why did you extract the promise, human?”

  Larry sighed. “It was twofold. First, I was stalling for time. I’m still stalling for all the time I can get. Second, I want them to think that we have given in and are playing on their terms. I want them to relax.”

  “But if this isn’t your plan, what are you going to do?”

  “You don’t really want to know. I’ll tell you after I’ve made them leave.” Larry knew the Teumessians might not stop him, but they certainly wouldn’t help him if they knew of his plans.

  “What if you aren’t successful?” the Tetra looked skeptical. The other three Tetra were holding their tongues, but it looked as if they were about to explode.

  Larry shrugged. “I’ll be dead if I don’t succeed. But then you won’t be any worse off than you were before.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing.” Larry interrupted. “I’m tired. Go away.”

  The Tetra continued to speak. The other three quickly joined him. Their babbling intensified.

  Larry looked around. He didn’t see Jughead, nor could he recognize his two assistants even if they were standing in front of him.

  He shouted over the din, “Can someone shut the sound off from the Tetra? Let them continue to listen, but we don’t need to hear them any longer. If they want to continue to be useful, they can go be volunteers in the next contest.”

  The Teumessians near him looked aghast at such a suggestion. The Tetra still had their families. Of course, the Tetra were not insane. It would be insanity to volunteer to be supper, lunch, breakfast, or even a bowl of chips.

  Larry looked for Scooter. Dragging the translator with him, he went and sat by his first Teumessian friend. Scooter handed him a fruit. It looked bruised and mottled, but Larry bit into it anyway. It tasted like the cross between broccoli and a Chicago style hot dog. It was definitely a strange taste, but not as strange as his grandmother’s tuna casserole.

  “Scooter, teach me to pilot a spacecraft.”

  Scooter said, “I’m your friend. You will tell me where to take the ship and I will pilot.”

  Larry said, “Yes and no. Yes, you may be a pilot on my spaceship. I’ll be jubilant to have you with me. And no, you may not always pilot. I want to know how to pilot it myself. I will not ask you to pilot me where you wouldn’t go.”

  Scooter said, “You wouldn’t put me in danger if you had another option. This is true, yes?”

  Larry said, “I would not, but suppose I asked you to pilot the ship in such a way that it would endanger another. Could you do that?”

  Scooter said, “I wouldn’t. You know I wouldn’t. So you will do this bad thing, you would damage your own heart, if you must, by endangering others? You would pilot yourself to spare me, yes? The Teumess believe a person hurts himself more than the other when he hurts another. You know this and would spare me, yes? This is why you must learn to pilot and why I must teach you.”

  They spent a few hours going over the controls of the spacecraft. Scooter retrieved his written manual from their first spaceship and he grabbed a Teumessian pencil. It wasn’t like an Earth pencil. It was about the size and shape of an apple, but instead of a stem, a short stick stuck out of the center. It took a bit to get used to it, but Larry scribbled notes in English in the manual’s margins. Fortunately, the manual was more pictures and diagrams than text.

  He finally took a quick nap before the next contest. He glanced at his watch. He’d been hoping the miners would get here before he started, but it was still too early for them to have run the distance.

  “Time,” Tedorus shouted. A blare of discordant music blasted from the Almas speaker.

  Larry imagined that the Almas television executi
ve had implemented a new musical number to go along with the new game style. He could almost picture a row of Almas dancing girls in the background.

  Larry watched Dusty streak out of the room, returning a short time later. He was helping an old female. She collapsed in the corner and refused to stir, even for Veronica’s stirring speech on the Teumessian Friends Society.

  Larry wanted to start by selecting a corner square. On a computer with a machine’s random grid-fill process, it didn’t matter. However, the Almas had seen that move from the first contest. He may have been wrong, but he imagined they filled the corners with Teumess. He clicked dead center and began clearing a wide spot. He worked as slowly as he’d done the first time. He double-checked each move.

  He had marked sixteen Teumessians. He was sure of where they were. He knew he could select another half dozen with surety, but he hadn’t marked them on the grid. He felt confident he could clear this grid and save all of the captured Teumessians.

  The runners from the mine weren’t here, yet.

  Larry closed his eyes and shook his head. He said, “Forgive me,” in a voice too soft to carry to the translator. He deliberately clicked on a corner square; killing thirteen Teumess and ending the contest.

  He could hear the Almas cheering that they still had more than the previous games. He could hear the cheering of the Teumess as they celebrated saving seventeen of their people.

  Larry cried. It had been a deliberate stall. He wasn’t ready to push the Almas into their lie about leaving. He needed them confident and relaxed. He needed them happy, gaining more than they had harvested when they played their own game.

  He rushed to the bathroom and emptied his stomach down the floor drain. It had been a while since he’d eaten anything other than some fruit. All he managed to bring up was a thin bile that tasted worse than anything he ever remembered putting in his mouth. But, his stomach felt better.

  Larry brushed his teeth, using what toothpaste remained as sparingly as he could. He sat down on his pallet. Even though Betty, dragging the translator behind her, followed him into the bathroom, he turned his face to the wall and tried to sleep. He could not.

  He felt Betty snuggle up to his back. She wrapped an arm around his chest and squeezed. He wanted to be alone, but he knew the Teumess comforted others and themselves by closeness. Betty was trying to help in the only manner she knew. He wanted her to leave him alone and let him sleep, but he couldn’t hurt her that way. He patted her arm and squeezed her hand.

  Betty slid over the top of Larry and squeezed between him and the wall. There wasn’t much room, but she managed to snuggle in. He wrapped his arms around her. Without thinking, he massaged behind her ears in the exact spot that Ol’ Bucky liked a good scratching.

  Larry more felt than heard Betty purring as she snuggled in deeper.

  After a while, Larry slept soundly.

  —*—

  Bob came into the room and woke Larry. It was obvious that Bob hadn’t wanted to bother Larry, to let him sleep. The little Teumessian poked him from a distance to wake him. Bob was still working to overcome his worry about Larry’s appetite. Still, poking him from a distance was exactly the best way to wake up Ol’ Bucky when he was sleeping, since the old dog had a tendency to bite when startled.

  Larry untangled himself from Betty and levered himself to his feet. He looked at Bob questioningly.

  Bob said, “Your pry bar is here.”

  “Good. Show me.”

  In the main room, there was a long row of crowbars, pry bars, and levers lying on the floor. They were displayed from the smallest and lightest bar to the largest and heaviest. In the last few minutes before the next grid game, he hefted each bar, feeling its weight and strength. He picked one. It was just like one from his tool shed. It was about four feet long and one end was sharpened to a point. The other end was curved and flattened.

  He thanked the family of runners from a distance. They wouldn’t get close to him, but they didn’t run from the room. He went to face his last contest with the Almas.

  He began the contest quickly and completed it quickly. Space after space, mark after mark, he identified the location of each Teumessian. He hadn’t marked half of the spaces before he was done. The Almas had clustered the Teumessians together, hoping to fool him into selecting a space in the middle of their group. It hadn’t worked.

  Larry said, “Oh great Tedorus. You have promised to leave. Please honor your promise.”

  Tedorus shouted. “That wasn’t fair. The food was poorly placed. You must win six contests in a row for us to go.”

  Larry smiled. “Of course, we must be fair. But let’s not wait. How soon can you get another contest ready?”

  Dusty sprinted back into the room. “They have set the twenty-nine free. The Teumessians are leaving the district as fast as they can run.”

  “Good,” Larry said. “Tedorus? How soon until we can play again?”

  “Four hours. We must refill the grid with new meals and reset the game. Four hours and we will begin.”

  Larry stood up and hefted the metal pry bar. He rested it on his shoulder. He grabbed the interpreter’s leash with his other hand. The little machine was heavy, but it slid easily on whatever made it hover.

  His stomach growled, but he wasn’t in the mood to eat. He was in a carnivore frame of mind. He wanted a steak, a Yankee pot roast, or a little prime rib. Rabbit food wouldn’t do to fuel the fire he needed, wanted, and expected to use.

  “Everyone, please stay here,” Larry commanded. “Lock yourselves in.” He looked around and spotted the scruffy little Teumessian. “Dusty, will you guide me to the Almas spaceship?”

  Dusty took off at a ground-eating run.

  Larry tried to keep up, but he’d never been much of a sprinter or a marathon runner. Carrying a twenty-pound metal bar and dragging an interpreter-style translator didn’t help his speed. He didn’t want to be out of breath when they got to where they were going. He slowed when he could see the spaceship. They were approaching from the rear.

  He found Dusty crouched in a small depression watching the ship.

  The ship was almost an exact duplicate of the other ships. He wouldn’t have been able to tell this one from the one he rode in on the way to Plenty, except this ship’s exterior hull was plain as far as he could see without any external decoration. Or, maybe it was decorated in a manner he couldn’t see.

  He could see the actual grid built on the far side of the ship. The slapped together corrals were made from wood and metal and so oddly designed that Rube Goldberg would have been proud of the contraption. The corral pen doors hinged on the top. All the doors were open. He shook his head at the shoddy construction. Even a small-sized middle school student would’ve been able to kick her way free. He was sure the Teumessians should’ve been able to get away even when the top doors where lowered and latched.

  The Teumessians didn’t have a fight or flight response. They were hardwired for flight only. There was no either/or option. Kicking their way out of what looked to be a broken down series of cattle chutes to get free must fall too far into the fight mode for a standard Teumessian.

  Mounted on poles at each corner of the grid were cameras. The cameras provided a clear view of everything in every grid. They looked almost exactly like the shoulder-mounted cameras used by human news crews. He hoped they were stationary. He didn’t want a human seen at this stage of humanities extra-solar activities.

  Earth was a vast and deadly place for humans and not just human on human violence. Most of the planet’s surface would kill an unprotected human faster than most people realized. A human would drown if dropped unprotected in the middle of any ocean, freeze to death anywhere near either pole, and die of thirst or heat if left without water or shade in any of Earth’s deserts.

  Earth’s solar system was even deadlier. There wasn’t anywhere off their home planet that humans could go in their own system and survive unprotected. A human would die standing unprotected on
the surface of Venus. A human wouldn’t survive Jupiter’s atmosphere to even reach the planet’s surface, if it had a surface.

  However, only the human or humans directly involved would die.

  The galaxy was beginning to look more dangerous than everything else combined. A mistake out here in the galaxy might bring a horde of invading aliens that not only killed the person making the mistake, but every other living creature on the planet. Cows, horses, Ol’ Bucky, and Aunt Nola included.

  As Larry and Dusty watched, three Almas moved to a nearby metal cage. Grabbing a docile Teumessian and dragging it to the grid was easy for the Almas. They argued over the placement of each Tuemessian. With a final agreement, they tossed the Teumessian in the box on the grid, then slammed and locked the top door.

  Larry almost laughed. If winning game after game was his ultimate goal it would be a simple matter to cheat. All he had to do was set up a hidden camera and watch where they put their captives. He wouldn’t even need a camera. He was sure Dusty would be able to scribble a simple mark on a paper grid and bring it back to him.

  Unfortunately, winning didn’t really matter. The Almas weren’t going to give up and go away no matter how many games he beat them at. Six, twelve, or twelve thousand wouldn’t be enough games. The Almas were feeding their children and nothing would stop them once they started. They were using the game as entertainment to mollify their teeming population until they could manage to find a way to collect enough Teumessians to feed everyone.

  The Almas turned and went back for another Teumessian. One by one, they pulled twenty-nine Teumess from a cage and dropped them into the grid. One by one, the Teumessians disappeared into the cattle chute, yipping softly in sorrow. Without flight available to them, there was no fight in them.

  It took them an hour to completely fill the grid. The three Almas disappeared from sight. Larry couldn’t see where they had gone. He watched for a while. It was quiet except for a few yips coming from deep inside the grid boxes.