Space Junk
Page 25
“Hey, don’t do that!”
“I guess that’s not it,” Steve says, setting the cube down on his wrapper. “It makes a good paperweight.”
“Now you’re getting sauce on it!”
Frowning, Steve asks, “How can you tell?”
Dave almost knocks over his giant soda as he snatches the cube back and cleans off the black goop.
“Maybe it’ll let us see into the future, or read minds,” Steve says.
Holding the cube in both hands, Dave stares at his partner and concentrates. “Are you thinking you’re thirsty?”
“Yes!” Steve says. “Wow! What am I thinking now?”
“You’re thinking you never should have taken this chitty job in the first place.”
“Good guess. But I’m more worried about how this burger is hitting my stomach.”
“I guess I can’t read minds,” Dave says.
“No, but maybe it can. Maybe it knows everything we’re thinking.” Steve shifts his attention onto the cube. “Quick, start thinking good things about the unbelievably powerful, intelligent, and…” he leans in and whispers, “sexy black gold.”
“He’s just kissing up,” Dave tells the cube. “But you are quite striking.” As he finishes his burger, he feels himself resenting the black gold’s good looks.
“Can I take that from you?” a voice asks.
Dave clutches the black gold to his chest, and he and Steve shout, “No!”
“Gahhh,” Super Dave wails.
A scaly boy in an apron carrying a bin full of dirty dishes and half-eaten burgers impatiently stares down at them.
“Oh, the trash, sure,” Dave says, pushing his tray across the table.
The boy anxiously gathers their wrappers and flashes them a nervous glance as he skitters away across the patio.
“I have an idea,” Steve says, ripping the cube from Dave’s hands. “I wish for… more black gold.”
“It doesn’t grant wishes, remember?” Dave says.
“Oh, right. Maybe it’s just on some sort of delay. Do you feel at all like exploding?”
“A little,” Dave says, holding his bloated belly. “But it might just be the burger.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter what it does,” Steve decides. “It’s worth a lot, and that’s what’s important. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
They wrestle their swollen stomachs up from the table and lurch down the sidewalk, groaning their highest praises as they wobble past the restaurant.
When they reach the van, Steve rips the keys from his pocket and unlocks it. “I remembered where we parked this time.”
“That’s fine work,” Dave says.
The ship’s frame creaks and groans under their weight as they climb up to the cockpit and collapse into their seats. After a brief period of recovery, Steve’s labored panting transforms into laughter.
“What is so funny?” Dave asks.
“I just can’t believe it. All this fishing around actually paid off for once.”
“It is incredible, isn’t it? We managed to outwit the whole universe. I can’t wait to see the look on Trant’s—” Dave suddenly bolts upright in his chair and starts patting at his uniform.
“What’s wrong?” Steve asks.
Before Dave has time to answer, he jumps from his chair and stumbles down the stairs. He can hear Steve calling after him, but he doesn’t stop explain. He races across the parking lot and back to the patio. His eyes dart over the spot where they were sitting, but the table has already been cleared. Fear rises in his chest as he crawls underneath the seat.
“Can I help you find something, mister?” a familiar voice asks.
Dave looks up and sees the busboy holding the black gold over the mouth of a Moon Burger trash can. Slipping forward and tripping over his feet, Dave nearly tackles the kid.
“Take it easy, mister,” the kid says.
Grabbing the black gold, Dave says, “I’m sorry. I was looking for this.”
“Really?” The kid shrugs and rubs his leathery forehead. “I thought it was trash.”
When Dave gets back to the ship, tired and sweaty, Steve is resting in his chair, grinning.
“What?” Dave asks, setting the cube on the dash.
“Oh, nothing,” Steve says. “While you were out there fishing around in the parking lot, a thought occurred.”
“That’s a first.”
“Why should we take the black gold back to headquarters?” Steve asks.
“What do you mean?” Dave says. “What else would we do with it?”
“Forget about our jobs. That thing’s probably worth more than our lives. How hard could it be to unload it?”
“I don’t know, what about the ICA? We were working when we found it. That means it belongs to the company, technically.”
With the persuasive charm Steve usually reserves for the job, he asks, “Why should the ICA get to keep what we found? We get a pat on the back, and they get untold riches? Neither of us will see a dime of it, and we’re the ones out here doing all the hard work. Besides, the worst they can do is fire us. Our jobs are hanging on by some sort of invisible thread anyway. This could be the answer to all our problems.”
Dave frowns, twisting his arm behind his back as he considers Steve’s proposal. “You’ve got a good pitch. But who would we sell it to?”
“Anybody,” Steve says, leaning over to scratch Dave’s itch. “We know the UE wants to get their hands on it. We could even offer it to The Foreman. We saw how important it is to her, and we’re old friends now. Fish, I’d trade the thing for permanent cabins at Scrapper’s Delight.”
Dave shuts his eyes and imagines himself in a deluxe cabin, sprawled out in his space-king-size bed, The Foreman climbing in beside him and entwining her body with his. “It’s a nice picture, but I’m still not convinced.”
“All the shrimp you can eat…” Steve coos.
“You know my weakness,” Dave says.
“Then we’re doing this?”
“Let’s do it!”
“Gahhh!” Super Dave cries.
“Fish yeah!” Steve cheers. “This calls for a celebration. How about a couple beers?”
“I thought we were out.”
Reaching into the fridge, Steve says, “I picked up a case on our way to Moon Burger, while you were on the space toilet.”
“Good thinking, for once. Hey, do we have any of those shrimp left?” Dave asks, already looking toward his next meal.
“Nah, they were starting to get a lit-tle ripe, so I tossed ‘em.”
“Aww chit, so what’s our next move?”
“I guess we should set up a meeting with The Foreman,” Steve says, slugging his beer. “But we have to be sure we can trust her first.”
“How do we do that?”
“I don’t know…”
Slumping down in his seat, Dave demurs, “This is starting to sound hard. Maybe we should just take the thing back to the ICA after all.”
“Come on, we can’t give up yet,” Steve says. “We just started tossing around ideas. Let’s think about this for a space minute. There’s gotta be somewhere else we can take it.”
Dave glares at the cube, silently mocking him from atop the dash, and Steve suddenly waggles his finger in the air.
“You thought of something?” Dave asks.
“Uh-huh.”
“And are you going to tell me?”
“We need to do two things: re-fuel and sell scrap,” Steve says. “I can only think of one place in this chitty system where we can do both.”
“Oh chit, of course.” Dave quickly guzzles the rest of his beer and straps himself in. “I just hope Ferd is stocked up on rations. I got a hankering for shrimp-flavor fancy-style.”
“You did what?!” Adam and The Foreman simultaneously moan.
“Huh?” Adam’s grandpa wakes from his nap, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “What’s going on?”
Daizy bites her bottom lip, glancing between
Adam’s slack-jawed gawk and The Foreman’s fiery, artificial eye glaring out from her phone. Breaking the news to both of them at the same time had, only moments earlier, seemed like such a good idea.
“I can’t believe this,” Adam whines. “Why?”
“I too would like to know why you would do anything to help those two bumbling chidiots,” The Foreman says. “On second thought, I don’t care. I still have the detector. I’ll follow the black gold to the ends of the universe if I have to. But I won’t purge this from my memory. You betrayed me, Daizy. I will come for you.” The call cuts off.
Daizy looks up at Adam, staring at her from across the cluttered cabin, his eyes watering, and tells him, “I only gave it to those chitheads because it wasn’t good for anything else. It wasn’t good for you. You were going to get yourself killed, and for what?”
“For everything!” Adam throws his hands in the air. “The black gold is the key to all the things I’ve ever wanted in this universe, and you just gave it away.”
“What do you want that you can’t already have?” she shouts. “You’re letting yourself be blinded. You’re alive, your grandpa is alive. Plus, I used the fishing thing to pay off your debt! So, you could thank me for that. I was helping you.”
“The black gold could have paid that debt a million times over, with enough left for a lifetime supply of Ol’ Guard!”
“Oh well, just as long as you get your beer,” she says. “You know I’m right, but you can’t let it go. You’re obsessed.”
“Can I say something?” Adam’s grandpa interjects.
“All you care about is being right,” Adam says.
“I don’t give a chit about being right, you ackle,” she says. “You’re just always wrong!”
“I need a drink.” Adam stomps to the fridge and yanks the door open. “Hey, I just filled this! What happened to all the cold ones that were in here?”
“Uh, you probably drank them, blacked out, and forgot,” Daizy says.
“That does sound like me.” He drags another case up to the cockpit and chugs a warm one, dribbling thick streams of froth onto the floor.
“Do you feel better now?” Daizy asks, slumping into the passenger seat next to him.
“No,” he says, belching. “But I know what I have to do. I’m going to go after it.”
“What? No…” Daizy moans.
“Yes!” Adam declares. “If I hurry, I can still get to those chidiots before The Foreman does.”
“Then what are you going to do? Assuming you somehow manage to find their ship, how are you going to get the black gold?”
“I don’t know,” Adam says. “I don’t know. I’ll figure something out.”
“Do you hear yourself?” she asks. “That isn’t a plan. I’m begging you to quit while you’re ahead.”
“I can’t,” he whines, laying his head on the dash. “It’s the best and coolest thing in the whole universe, and it was mine. I’ll never find anything like it again.”
“Yeah, that’s a good point,” Daizy says. “There’s just one problem.”
“What’s that?”
She grabs him by his ragged t-shirt and pulls him close. “You’re talking about a piece of junk – some hunk of phlegm hacked up from the belch that started the universe. You only want it because it’s valuable, and it’s only valuable because you want it. Don’t you see that?”
Adam’s eyes glaze over and he groans, “Ughh.”
Daizy shoves him away and, finding no one to commiserate with, tells herself, “There’s just no getting through to this guy.”
She shakes her head and turns her attention to the movie playing on the window, in which a bumbling book dealer is trying to authenticate a rare ‘satanic’ book; in other words, boring nonsense. She rolls her eyes and glances back at Adam, who’s pouting and nursing his cabin-temperature beer.
“Listen,” she finally says, “I know that thing was important to you, and I’ve given you more than enough reason not to trust me. But I’m only trying to help because I care about you.”
“You don’t get it,” he tells her. “I used to be just another broke scrapper, with no prospects and little hope. When I found the black gold, that all changed. I went from being a nobody to being the guy who found the black gold. It was like opening a pack of trading cards and finding a special insert that wasn’t even supposed to exist.”
“I don’t know what trading cards or inserts are, but they sound dumb,” she says.
“What am I supposed to do, just forget about it?” He crosses his arms and slumps down into his seat.
“Yes,” she says. “That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do.”
He suddenly bolts up and says, “Wait a space minute. You know where they went. You have to tell me!”
“I have no… idea,” Daizy says.
“Come on, I know you know.”
“Maybe I do. But why should I tell you? You’re just going to go chasing after them.”
Adam slams his beer on the dash, and it foams out over his hand. “You had no right to take the black gold. I appreciate you paying off my debt, but it wasn’t your choice to make.”
“Huhhh,” she sighs, staring into his sad eyes. “Fine, I’ll tell you. But if you chase after them, I’m not going with you.”
He shrugs. “That’s up to you.”
“Can’t we just forget about all of this?” she pleads. “There are a ton of cool places to find scrap. We could go anywhere in the universe.”
But Adam just stares at her from across the aisle, unmoved.
“They mentioned needing fuel,” she finally blurts. “The closest place for that is Ferd’s. But that was a while ago. They’re probably long gone by now.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Adam says.
“Okay, I guess that’s it, then,” she says, standing and holding onto her tail. “I’ll… seeya later.”
“Yeah, seeya,” Adam says, without so much as glancing up from the map on the window.
“You fishing chidiot,” Daizy says, smacking the back of his head as she storms out of the cockpit.
“What’s going on?” Adam’s grandpa asks as she tromps through the living room.
“Your grandson would rather fly around the universe chasing some piece of trash than have me on board,” Daizy grumbles. “He’s about to get himself killed. I’d catch another flight if I were you. Where’s my spacesuit?”
The thought of climbing back inside the musty sack, two sizes too big and reeking of mothballs, makes her skin crawl, but she’s just mad enough to tolerate it. Though, to preserve what’s left of her sanity, and at the risk of a painful death should her ship’s life support system fail, she decides to forgo the suffocating helmet.
“Well, seeya later gramps,” she announces loud enough to reach the cockpit.
“Wait a second,” Adam calls, chasing after her as she stomps into the cargo bay. “I forgot to ask you what you did with all my stuff.”
“What stuff?” Daizy asks. “You mean the empty beer cans and ration trays and all the other trash? It was starting to stink, so I threw it out.”
“No one told you to do that. I had everything just the way I like it.”
“Yeah well, you won’t have to worry about that anymore. From now on you can clean up your own mess.”
“Wait…” Glancing down at his hands, he mutters, “I’m sorry. You don’t have to go. I want you to stay.”
“I don’t want to get killed just for some fishing rock,” she says.
“We’re not going to get killed,” Adam says, his voice faltering. “Everything will work out.”
Daizy looks into his eyes and asks, “So you’re going to forget about the black gold?”
“Let’s go after it together.” He picks up her hand and squeezes it. “We make such a good team.”
“Goodbye, Adam,” she says, wrapping her arms around him.
He scrunches his nose and pulls away. “Chit, that suit really stinks.”
The cargo bay doors grind open, and Adam and his Grandpa wave to her as she cautiously guides her ship through the narrow opening and out into space. For a moment, as the big junker idles outside her window, she thinks Adam will change his mind. His grandpa will be able to talk some sense into him, and soon he’ll be calling her to come back. But before she can finish the thought, the Asteroid Jones II’s exhaust begins to glow, and with a sudden flash, the ugly junker is sailing across the dark sky, leaving only a trail of blue-white light in its wake.
Daizy flicks off the lights inside her little patchwork shell, allowing her senses to drown in dark silence, and for a while, she drifts. Without her job working for The Foreman, she has nothing tying her to this place or any other. She could go anywhere, but right now nowhere seems just as good.
As she floats through the void, tuned out to the universe, she experiences what she can only describe as a moment of divine clarity. She jerks up in her seat, flips the lights back on, and types a new destination into the little glowing control board in front of her. If she moves fast enough, she figures she might just be able to catch him.
“What is going on?” Ferd grumbles as he steps out onto the sales floor. “Where is everybody?”
He glances around the room for an answer and receives a collective shrug from his employees, busy looking at their phones. For the first time in as long as he can remember, the store is empty.
“Is there some new holiday I don’t know about – Scrapper’s Day?” he wonders aloud. “I’m going for a smoke.”
On his way out, he takes a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and sticks one of the crushed cylinders between his teeth. The parking lot is abandoned, with the exception of a single beat-up junker passing through the airlock. Ferd takes a long drag off his cigarette as the rusty ship careens down through the artificial atmosphere and crash-lands across three parking spaces. After a short struggle, the little craft’s dented door swings open, and its portly pilot jumps out.