Larry Goes To Space

by Alan Black

  Glancing along the bulkheads, Dusty pointed at a row of buttons that Larry couldn’t see. Using his marker, Larry put a dot wherever the Teumessian said to put one. Neither knew which button did what. For all Larry knew, every second button activated the self-destruct. He was sure there was a self-destruct somewhere — at least he’d never seen a spaceship before that didn’t have one.

  Dusty gave a credible imitation of a human shrug and pushed one of the buttons. A hatch slid open on the bulkhead, not leading down, but opening into a room about the size of Larry’s spare bedroom. Four blank walls and a ceiling with nothing in it. Not much of a storage bay, yet Larry wrote storage bay over the dot where the button was and closed the door.

  He gestured for Dusty to push the second button. Larry was ready with his pry bar, but there was no evidence of the Almas when a hatch opened right next to the one they had just opened. A second storage bay appeared, but the room was only half the size of the first one. Larry wrote walk-in closet on the wall next to the corresponding button.

  The next button opened a hole in the deck and the last button brought back the ladder to the first deck. Fortunately, they hadn’t found any more Almas. Larry wanted to go down the lower deck and check out using the airlock buttons. However, Dusty was getting into the spirit of finding and pushing buttons on this deck. Larry couldn’t be sure, but he thought the Teumessian hoped to open the door the proverbial tiger was hiding behind.

  He moved down the corridor a little ways and stood poised over another button. Larry marked it and stood back. He raised the bar to his shoulder, giving it a little swing, pointing it at the blank bulkhead like Babe Ruth standing in the batter’s box pointing out his next homer.

  Dusty hit the button and jumped into the room, hoping to be eaten by the tiger. Larry would have been happy to find the proverbial lady behind the door, but instead they stepped into a second story airlock. Larry yanked Dusty out of the airlock before he could hit any other buttons. He hit the same button that melted the hatch open and it unmelted closed.

  Dusty pointed at a second button. Pushing it, Larry didn’t think anything happened, but the first button wouldn’t depress, so he assumed it opened the outside hatch to bare space and — without the bridge override — only one hatch in the airlock could be opened at a time.

  Larry spend a few hours dragging freezer burned Almas bodies from his bathroom to the second story airlock and throwing them out of — in what he had come to think of as — the second story window. He was taking his time because the little buggers were still half-frozen and cold on his bare hands. About halfway through, he hurried faster when the bugs buried in the back, covered in piles of their comrade’s bodies began to wiggle a few legs and squirm as he hauled them to the airlock.

  Dusty growled, hissed, and threw shadow punches at the upside down bugs, but he never got close enough to touch them. He would alternately watch Larry drag a load to the airlock and race to the bridge to see if he could see the bodies float past the windshield.

  Larry wasn’t sure windshield was what it was called. They were in space and there wasn’t any wind, but what else did you call the view screen over the dashboard. Some names just die hard.

  Larry thought about locking a few bodies in the walk-in closet. If he ever got back to Earth, someone might pay for them. If not, he could always take it on tour to the comicons around the country and charge the sci-fi geeks a couple of bucks to peak at a real dead alien. He was sure someone — government, university, or some rich nutball — would pay him enough to pick up a few more acres from the neighbors to expand his cow growing business.

  He didn’t save the bodies for two reasons. One, he wasn’t really sure they were dead and by the time he thought of the idea, the few remaining Almas were wiggling hard enough it was tough to drag them from the bathroom and throw them out the window. Two, he wasn’t sure when he would get back to Earth and didn’t know how bad a decaying Almas might smell after a few months.

  After clearing the bathroom — committing all the Almas to space — he and Dusty teamed up to push a few more buttons. The next bay was right next to the bathroom. It was little more than a small sized garage, barely able to fit a tiny workbench and a smart car. Strange as it seemed, there was a tiny workbench and what looked like a two-seater flitter parked in the middle. Larry could only imagine that the hangar roof opened up, but he wasn’t willing to let Dusty push any buttons until they were safely inside an atmosphere, whether it was Earth’s or Plenty’s.

  Dusty, of course, was willing to press any button Larry wanted pressed. Even if they found a big red button with a warning sign that said self destruct, he was sure the little Teumessian would press the button. On the other hand, Dusty wanted to die, but he didn’t appear suicidal.

  Taking the ladder downstairs, the first room they came to was engineering. Larry assumed it was engineering, although there weren’t any placards on the door like there would be on a human ship, building or bathroom door.

  There were large metal boxes scattered around the room and melted to the floor. Nothing moved. The boxes had an engineering feel to them. They would have enjoyed that thought about how they felt, but being engineering systems, they were a bit snooty about their function on the ship and weren’t listening to what Larry was thinking.

  There weren’t any hissing steam valves, jagged lightning bolts of excess electricity, no moving pistons or twisting cam shafts. There wasn’t even any humming noise or strange vibration that tickled the back of his eyelids. All in all, the whole array of machines was well beyond Larry’s backyard mechanical skills. Even Homer, down at the Gas N’ Go on Route 74 would be baffled. Maybe the guys at NASA or that civilian outfit Space Z could figure it out.

  Engineering seemed to take up about half of the space on the first floor. The rest was a storage bay. It wasn’t huge, the whole spaceship wasn’t big, but this bay took up all of the space on the first floor that engineering didn’t. The problem was, the bay was filled with what looked like fifty-five gallon mayonnaise jars. Larry rapped a knuckle on an empty jar. It looked like glass, but it was definitely heavier with a dense, smoky look. The top had a steel screw top lid. Larry knew about leaded glass, but he wondered if there was such a thing as steeled glass.

  Only about half of the jars were empty and the other half were filled with sludge. Larry figured the Almas must need glass storage containers since their natural offensive weapon was acid. From the looks of the acid the first Almas had sprayed at Dusty, the stuff was corrosive.

  Thinking of Dusty, Larry turned around to look for the little crazy ball of frazzled fur. He spotted him sitting on the floor in front of a full barrel. He was resting his forehead on the glass, his arms dangling at his sides, his shoulders slumped. Larry started to say something and stopped, realizing what was in the barrels.

  Liquid protein.

  Liquefied Teumessians.

  The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes 'sight-seeing'. (Daniel J. Boorstin)

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  LARRY scratched himself in places men are likely to have an itch so soon after waking up in the morning, not that anything or anywhere itched, scratching just felt good. He smelled his fingers as a prudent man would do, not finding anything too objectionable, he also scratched the real itch on the back of his neck. Wandering from the bedroom, or rather the front spare storage bay, he passed by the bathroom. The door was open. Scooter and Veronica were showering.

  The two seemed to be inseparable since Veronica had accepted Scooter’s fertilized egg. It did seem strange to see them in the water together. Not that showering together was strange, his crew — with the exception of Jughead and Dusty — often showered together. What seemed strange was that all of the Teumessians had spent much of yesterday taking a nice long dirt nap in a dust wallow near a tourist trap known as Where the Water Comes Down. In a fit of un-imagin
ation, Larry dubbed it Angel Falls, because it looked like pictures he’d seen on Earth of a waterfall so high it turned to mist before hitting the ground.

  Larry had liked the tourist trap part of the falls once his crew convinced the locals he wasn’t going to eat them. Word had spread that Larry had saved their species from extinction at the hands of the evil Almas, even bringing many barrels of liquefied Teumess back to Plenty that their bodies may nourish the ground.

  He was a celebrity of sorts and families gathered from all over to see him — from a distance. The local Teumessians still wouldn’t get close enough to touch him, but then, they were still sane and wouldn’t even let any of his crew get close enough to make contact. The local hucksters didn’t run away, they just backed far enough away from their stands to let him peruse through their displays of miniature clay waterfall statues and tiny replicas of their world famous special healing dust wallow.

  Out of the kindness of his heart, Larry bought a few trinkets: handmade ceramic cups, polished crystal necklaces, woodcarvings, and thick hand woven blankets. He even splurged and bought a twelve place setting of dinnerware he thought his mother would like.

  The money exchange thing wasn’t like passing coins back and forth or even swiping a debit card. It was more like, “I have a handful of pretty rocks. I will leave them on the table. I will take this thing I want. I assume you’ll like the trade or you wouldn’t have set anything out to trade.”

  A grateful Tetra Council had given him bags of shiny, colored rocks the Teumess used as their exchange medium. The rocks didn’t feel any more like real money than a Mexican peso did to his gringo fingers.

  The whole thing reminded him of his college days when he’d taken a road trip down to El Paso and crossed the border into Mexico for the day. Most of the products at the Plenty tourist trap were junk, but it was junk from another planet. Hell, he could buy sandwich bags of common dirt and it would be more valuable on Earth than diamonds.

  Not that he turned down diamonds — or the Teumessian equivalent since coal hadn’t formed on Plenty. A handful of polished crystals would go a long way on Earth. So would the thick gold rims around the ceramic cups and the deep silver inlay on the dinner plates. The blankets were just pretty.

  Rather than head toward the bridge, Larry wandered down the ladder to the first floor, heading toward the airlocks. Bob was at the spaceship controls last night when Larry and Betty went to bed, so he expected they had moved from Angel Falls to some beach Ginger had been going on about. She kept claiming he couldn’t go home until he saw the world famous Rainbow Beach.

  Larry had seen more world famous this and that’s in the last couple of months than he could remember. The Teumessian Grand Canyon was indeed grand, spanning so far from one side to the other it took a telescope to see the other rim. Their tallest mountain put Mar’s Olympus Mons to shame, scraping against the dark of space, far enough to throw the planet into a weird wobble. Plenty was without a moon and their scientists said the mountain had been a moon that crashed back to the planet eons ago. Its incredible height caused tides and weather patterns that made the planet habitable. Plenty’s biggest trees were pitiful compared to California’s redwoods, but Larry politely kept that to himself, making all the appropriate oooh and aaaah noises.

  Ginger, Jughead, and Betty were probably out hunting lone Teumessians to convert to their Friends Society. At least, that is what Larry assumed since both airlock hatches were open. Larry stepped through.

  “Well, frak me!” he sputtered. He could have used the other F word, but frak sounded stranger and definitely more alien. Strangely, alien was exactly how he felt.

  The world famous Rainbow Beach did indeed have a right to be called world famous. It sparkled and glittered in all the colors of the rainbow, many Larry couldn’t see. The beach, a result of native colored coral, was a hundred yards wide and miles long. All up and down the coast, small family clusters stood gazing as the sun twinkled off the sand in a blinding display of colors. True to Teumessian courage, none of the families ventured onto the sand, because as everyone knew, there were creatures in the water who could eat them.

  Larry said screw it. He didn’t say it aloud. He didn’t even quietly think the words. It was just the way guys think when they plan on doing something stupid. Dressed only in a pair of fairly clean boxer shorts — fairly clean was a relative term, relative to a bachelor who wasn’t trying to impress a new girlfriend — he wandered down the small slope to the beach. He could hear the crowds behind him yipping and yapping at his appearance. The crowds were amazed at seeing two world famous sites at once: the Rainbow Beach and Larry, the Almas Killer. The crowds didn’t run at the sight of him as he was also world famous for being the slowest runner on the planet.

  Up close, the sand didn’t twinkle. It didn’t sparkle. It roared color and light.

  He waded through the color reaching the edge of the water. It smelled of salt and fish. The brilliance of the sun reflecting on the sand drew masterpieces of abstract art on his back as he waded knee deep into the ocean, feeling the waves and the water pull at his feet. Tiny fishlike creatures darted away from him, their colorful bodies blending into the color splashes as the sand’s brilliance reflected across the ocean’s surface.

  Larry probably stood longer than he should have, in the ocean and on the beach. Either spot might be dangerous according to the natives. He was unsure whether he was daring some sea creature to attack or if he was trying to prove to the Teumessians that he was braver than he really was. With finality, he turned his back on the ocean when it appeared that no dangerous sea creature was going to appear. Maybe they were out there. Maybe they weren’t.

  Rather than head back to the ship, he wandered back away from the ocean. A wide grassy area blanketed much of the region near the beach. The grass was thick and lush, not growing as tall as Earth grasses might, but seemingly heavier with water and a deeper green than any type he was used to. Grass this thick could support a couple of cows per acre.

  Larry shook his head. He found he was increasingly more likely to think about home and cows than previously. That was strange as his cows at home hadn’t given a thought about him since he’d left, actually not even recognizing that his cousin Gary wasn’t him.

  Looking around Larry could see the beach lights still lighting up the sky even though Plenty’s sun was well overhead. The grassy knolls around him were peaceful and quiet.

  It started Larry thinking, “A small house on that little hillock over there would be perfect. A nice barn back there. And—” He stopped. He stopped talking, walking, and even thinking. He looked down at his feet, realizing he’d just walked past a window. These were not nice rolling hills, but a city built so eco-friendly that it blended and merged into the countryside.

  A small family grouping stepped out of a doorway that quickly became a grassy hillside when closed again. They waved at him. He waved back and they raced away.

  The Teumessians were nice enough, but seeing the happy family wrenched at Larry’s heart.

  Larry had seen enough. It was time to go home.

  The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land. (Gilbert K. Chesterton)

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  LARRY peered out the windshield of his spaceship. He was trying to see everything at once. He felt a mixture of confused emotions. Everything looked so odd. It should feel more like home than it did.

  Larry pointed ahead and said, “Scooter, try to miss those wires?” Larry knew where they were going. Well, he knew where he wanted to end up. He wasn’t sure how to get there, so they were flying low enough to read the street signs and building numbers.

  Scooter nodded human style. It allowed him to keep his hands on the controls. He dodged the wires by going over them, but he dropped back down to their designated height. The ship stirred up a small whirlwind of dry January snow. Since the ship’s cloak was on and they were, for all prac
tical purposes, invisible, the locals assumed the blast of cold air blowing their hats off was just typical Kansas weather.

  Betty stared out the window and laughed as a man chased a hat down the street.

  Veronica looked at the man, but she seemed to have a more sophisticated sense of humor than Betty. She went back to nursing her two kits. She and Scooter were trying a very un-Teumessian thing, being friends and family at the same time. Larry thought that was probably a very un-human thing to do as well. Still, who was he to judge? His marriage hadn’t been great hot rocks at either friends or family. Bob and Ginger decided to wait to see how it worked with Scooter and Veronica before starting their own family.

  Bob and Ginger were busy scanning broadcasts. They weren’t looking for anything in particular. Nevertheless, since they were with a real live human, they were determined to get his input on all things real and fictional. They were keeping Jughead busy working the communications and translation gear on the bridge.

  Larry checked over his crew. They all seemed to spend as much time on the bridge as anywhere. Looking out the windshield was odd. This was a big human city, well it wasn’t really big, but for a Kansas country boy anything bigger than two gas stations and a motel was a city. Anything big enough that you couldn’t see across was big. The huge cities like Chicago or Beijing were more foreign to Larry than the whole planet of Plenty. Yet somehow, Larry didn’t feel like he belonged here anymore.

  Unlike Teumessian cities, he could see broken concrete and cracked asphalt. In the yards and parks, the grass looked dry and uninviting to bare feet. There was graffiti where there should be none and bare walls where there should be paint. The cars were dirty and covered with rust. It all seemed so foreign to him.