by J. Blanes
“So slow? I’d have thought it was much faster,” he said, playing along for now.
“It’s not slow at all; it’s about seven percent the speed of light, and that’s a lot,” Albert replied instead of Blip.
Dylan was stunned for a moment. Why had Albert made such a comment? “Come on, I was joking,” he complained. “I know it’s impossible to travel at such speeds. I just wanted him to tell us the truth.”
Albert raised his head, and Dylan could see a smirk on his face. “He wasn’t lying, if that’s what’s bothering you,” he said plainly.
“Wait, what?”
“Just accept it and learn to deal with it.” Keira had to intervene, or this would go on forever. “Albert told you once already that Earth’s scales do not apply in space. If we’re moving at fifty million or at a trillion miles per hour, then so be it. We’re moving away, and that’s what matters to us.”
Albert and Keira were against him again, so Dylan gave up for now, but he would continue believing that such a speed was impossible until someone proved him wrong.
“If no one has any more questions, I’d like to ask one or two of my own,” Albert said. The others shook their heads, so he started with what interested him the most. “You classified the portal as interstellar,” he said, looking directly at Blip. “Were you implying that there are other kinds of portals?”
Blip didn’t expect this kind of question. He knew Albert had a scientific mind—he had just demonstrated it by his remark about the speed of light—but Blip had assumed his curiosity would concentrate on less primal inquires.
“The Tolok have known for a long time that intergalactic portal also exists, but that kind of technology is still out of their reach,” he explained.
“Wow!” Albert couldn’t contain his excitement. Portals for traveling between galaxies and a technology too advanced even for the Tolok, two fascinating pieces of information in a single statement. He wondered if someone had already mastered this technology. “Is there any civilization that has already reached that level of sophistication?”
“A select group of four that we know of. There could be more, but it’s not likely.”
“Amazing, a group of real masters of the universe.” Albert almost drooled in admiration.
“Look,” Blip said impatiently, “I’m happy to answer all your questions, but I have something important to do before we arrive at the portal, so nice to meet you and see you later.” He got up in a hurry and was about to jump off the table when Dylan snapped.
“Wait a minute!” He didn’t trust Blip and felt uneasy at the sudden change of plans. “How do we know everything you’ve said is true and that you’ll be back?”
“Simple. You don’t.” Blip was annoyed by his obstruction. He looked up at Dylan. “I may be lying or I may be telling the truth; you won’t know until it’s too late for you.” He gave a half smile, clearly full of himself. “Now, get out of my way.”
“What?” Dylan said. How did this little alien dare to speak like this to him? Did he really want to die?
“I’m kidding.” Blip finally couldn’t contain a laugh. “You’re so gullible! I’m going to have a lot of fun with you.”
This seemed to exhaust Dylan’s patience. Who did he think he was? He needed to teach him a lesson. “You’re dead!” he suddenly shouted as he got up and raised his arm, as if he were to hit Blip with his fist. “I’ll show you who’s the boss here!”
“Ahhh!” Blip screamed in panic. “Help me!” He looked at Keira with praying eyes before covering his face to lessen the impact.
“What are you doing? Are you crazy?” Keira hurriedly took Blip in her arms, protecting him.
Dylan stopped abruptly and smiled at her, as if nothing had happened. Then, he drew his face near Blip’s, their noses almost touching, and whispered to him. “Who’s the gullible one now?” Then he sat back, still smiling, until Blip sneakily stuck his tongue out at him.
“Hey! Did you see that?” Dylan pointed a finger at Blip. “The little bastard just stuck his tongue out at me!” He leaned forward and gave Blip a menacing look, and Blip hid deeper in Keira’s bosom.
“Incredible,” Keira muttered in disbelief. “Stop! Both of you!” she screamed at them, out of patience. “How immature! If you want to play like this, go elsewhere and don’t bother the adults.” She threw Blip back on the table.
“Hey!” Blip protested, rubbing his head in pain while Dylan, staring at him, grinned with satisfaction.
Up until now, Albert had silently enjoyed the show, but it was time to put an end to this. He believed what Blip had told them, more with his heart than with his head. He had to. Otherwise, if Blip were in fact lying, Albert’s dreams of learning extraordinary technologies would be shattered to pieces. He knew that by trusting Blip, they would be taking a huge risk, but he was more than willing to take the risk and face the consequences later. If Blip said he needed to take care of business before entering the portal, then so be it.
“You may go,” he told Blip.
The others looked at him in astonishment, but he didn’t care. “But before you go, I have a last question that’s been bothering me for a while.”
“OK, shoot.”
“I predicted that your masters, the Tolok, would be taller than us, but you’re very small. Are the Toloks as small as you, or I was right? If so, why are you so small?” After the decorations fiasco, he needed a boost of his confidence as a skilled observer. He hoped that he had been right this time.
“You were right,” Blip conceded. “The Tolok are twice as tall as you on average.” Albert sighed in relief at hearing his words. At least this time he had been right. “And answering your other question,” Blip went on, “we’re small because the Tolok use us mainly for maintenance and cleaning tasks, and that requires reaching places that only small bodies like ours can reach. May I go now?”
“One more question.” Albert suddenly remembered another detail. “Why the scorpion tail?”
“The scorpion tail?” Blip had no idea what he was talking about.
“Your tail, the thing on your back and on top of the small ship. Is it a Tolok thing?”
“Oh, this?” Blip asked, pointing with his thumb at his own back. “This is part of our communication organs. The Tolok are born with them, and they hold them in high regard. That’s why they represent them frequently on many things that they build. Now, if your curiosity is satisfied, time is critical and I must go.”
“OK, go now.”
When Blip left the kitchen, Keira snapped. “Why did you do that?”
“Yes, what the hell were you thinking?” Dylan backed her.
“I acted on impulse, I’m sorry,” Albert apologized feebly, without really feeling sorry.
“You? Acting on impulse? That’d be a first,” Keira scoffed in disbelief.
Albert knew that Keira was right. He had not acted on impulse, but on desire, and although he was not proud of it, he would do the same again if given the chance. “What’s done is done. It won’t do any good to argue about it. And if you think about it, there was no other viable option. Which one do you prefer: dying because we didn’t trust him or being no worse than before because I let him go? If he’s telling the truth, we’d die keeping him here. The risk is too high.”
“That’s not the point.” Keira didn’t understand how he could be so blind. “I don’t care what the options were. I’m talking about us being a team. We need to make these decisions together. It’s the only way to have any chance of defeating the aliens.”
“Then why didn’t you stop me?” Albert argued.
“Because we trusted you. That’s what we do; we trust each other, and that doesn’t give any of us the right to act alone.” She was so upset and frustrated that she decided to leave. “I’m tired. I haven’t sleep at all tonight,” she said. Then, she got up and left in a
hurry without saying good-bye.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into her,” Albert commented, perplexed. “I know I made the right decision.”
“Nothing has gotten into her; she’s not the one with a problem,” Dylan replied calmly. “I’m going, too,” he added and followed Keira.
Blip navigated the corridors to the chamber with haste, not because he needed time to prepare for the portal crossing, an excuse to get out of there, but to confirm his worse suspicions. How could this have happened? he thought as he touched the panel to open one of the corridors. When his masters heard about it, they would decommission him for sure; worse, they would destroy him. He was so worried that he could barely control his legs. If they had not insisted on programming those useless Human feelings, it would never have happened. Yes, that was it; it was their fault after all. If something went wrong, they could not put the blame on him.
He stopped, another corridor, another panel; why so many darn corridors? He opened it and rushed through it as fast as his small legs let him. He hoped that the Tolok had taken into consideration contingencies like this and provided some preventive measures. If not, the whole mission was in danger. Because of his stupid fear of Humans, he had not accompanied them on the small ship. If he had been there with them, he would have prevented this, but no, he had to believe the rumors. Who said all Humans were cruel and vicious? Certainly not the three that came on the small ship. Albert was big and scary but peaceful and intelligent. Dylan, the dumber one, pretended to be violent, but his eyes betrayed his warm heart, and Blip knew he could not hurt a fly. Keira was somewhat different; the cozy voice, the long hair, the slanted eyes, the softness of the skin, the small hands; it was like another kind of Human when compared to the other two, but as peaceful as a Tolok, and protective and compassionate, too. All three of them were, or at least seemed to be, peaceful and intelligent beings, maybe even Dylan. He had been so stupid; there was nothing to fear about them.
All three Humans—that was the problem; there were three of them when only two were expected. His masters had told him that two Humans had been found and selected for transportation, and they had prepared the ship accordingly. That meant that only two of the protective capsules would have been installed, enough to hold two Humans. The capsules were one of the critical elements to protect the Humans during the portal crossing. With two capsules and three Humans, the outcome was clear: one of them would emerge dead from the portal. Unless…This thought gave him a push, and he ran faster. He needed to confirm his hunch. The Tolok were masters of planning, always exhaustive and thorough, but they had already failed by not providing him with the descriptions of the two selected Humans. If he knew who the extra one was, he could wipe his recent memory and send him home on the small ship. He bet Dylan was the one, but he could not risk sending him home without confirmation.
Finally, he arrived at the last door, the one that opened to the travel chamber. He pushed the panel, rushed inside, and quickly directed his sight to the left, where the protective capsules were installed. He counted them immediately. Five! There were five! Another Human feeling took over his body: joy! What a strange, good feeling. He wanted to scream, jump, and hug all the Tolok in the galaxy. “Hurrah for the Tolok!” he screamed. They had been prepared after all. He relaxed and sighed in relief.
He could finally put his own safety concerns aside for now, but not his concern about the Humans, not yet. There was another risk for them, an unpredictable one. The Tolok had never tested the technology for transporting a Human through a portal. In fact, they only knew of a single experiment that had used a Human to cross a portal, and it had been made long ago by a more advanced civilization. The experiment had been successful, and the Tolok used the instructions provided by that civilization for building the capsules on this ship. However, only one test and a single Human as a subject was not enough to guarantee success this time. There were too many variables to consider, and the process was so complex that a simple oversight could destroy the capsules and the ones inside them. His current task was to revise and check all those many little details that could lead to a disaster if left unchecked. He asked the ship to calculate for him how much time he had before the crossing. The answer came in an instant: ten hours. It was less than he expected. He had wasted too much time with the embarrassing faint and all these useless questions, and now he only had a few hours left. Without delay, he carefully started his delicate job; their lives depended on it.
Two hours before the crossing, Blip was in front of the bedroom door. The Humans were sleeping with the lights off. It was remarkable how innocent they looked. Someone in the galaxy had probably made a huge mistake about the Humans, or at least about some of them.
“Lights on, time to wake up!” he suddenly shouted loudly, grinning broadly, scaring the hell out of everybody. Dylan even fell out of the bed and tried frantically to get rid of the sheets on top of him. “The portal is coming fast; you need to prepare!” Blip shouted again.
“What the…?” Dylan was speechless and confused, still asking himself what was all that about. Albert and Keira were in no better position than him.
Blip insisted on his shouting, enjoying every second. “Time to go! The portal is coming fast!”
Keira saw him standing in the doorway. “Blip? What’s this about?”
“Have you slept well?” Blip asked no one in particular, ignoring her question. “If not, don’t worry; in about two hours you’re going to sleep again. You have half an hour to clean yourselves and eat something. Then, you have to come with me or face certain death.”
“Is it true?” Albert asked excitedly. “Are we going to cross a portal?”
“Of course we are! Did you think I was lying? Before tomorrow, we’ll be in another star system,” Blip confirmed pretentiously.
Another forty-five minutes later, they were traveling through the dark corridors they had seen the first day they entered the ship. The corridors automatically lit up as they passed through them, without having to command the ship about it.
“We never had the chance to explore these corridors,” Albert commented a little disappointed.
“It would have been fruitless,” Blip replied. “There are many dangerous zones for Humans on this ship. The Tolok made sure you’d never reach them by accident. Without me, these corridors are completely sealed to you. You’d only have found empty walls, and some decorations.” He smiled mockingly at Albert.
They finally arrived at the chamber that contained the capsules. It was different from the other rooms they had seen until now, and it made them feel uneasy. It was poorly illuminated and somewhat chaotic. The walls were not straight and metallic as before, but irregular, with many curves and crevices. Hundreds of tubes of different sizes, some of them transparent, some making disgusting gurgling and sucking sounds, covered the walls and the floor. Dylan stepped on one of them accidentally, and he could swear the tube had swiftly moved aside, as if it had felt it. The high humidity was also uncomfortable. The floor was moist, and the walls oozed with some kind of viscous, sluggish, transparent substance. Apart from all that, root-shaped forms seemed to crawl all over the place, and they had to be careful not to trip over them. However, the worst of it was the nauseating smell, so strong as to make breathing an agonizing experience. The stench hit them so hard that they all had to cover their mouths and noses with their hands. In a brave attempt to identify the smells, Dylan removed his hand from his nose and inhaled freely for a second. He regretted it immediately. The loaded stench penetrated his lungs like a sharp dagger. His eyes filled with tears, and his sight reduced to blurred shapes. He coughed so hard that he was afraid he would expel his heart from his body. In the end, the pathetic result of his little experiment was that he could classify the smell between rotten eggs and cow shit, perhaps a mix of them.
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Keira said with a sickened face. “Why is this place so disgusting?�
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Blip knew they were having a hard time and tried to explain the reason. “The Tolok love to design and build biological structures when possible. They are easier to make, very resilient, and sometimes essential for some operations. Most structures you see in here are built by bioengineered microorganisms, mostly bacteria.”
“You could have warned us so we could have put our helmets on before coming here,” Keira complained. “We had plenty of time to do it.”
She was right, of course, Blip thought, but it was so much funnier this way. Those structures were disgusting even for the Tolok, which was why they never used them near places where they lived. They were perfect for this room, as they provided the best protection available for the capsules, and they were not life threatening, so Blip took advantage of it to have a very good time seeing them struggle; their contorted, funny faces were especially priceless. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” he lied blatantly. “You know, I have no sense of smell, and all this is normal for me.”
“Whatever,” Keira said with a feeling that he was not being completely honest.
With his big body, Albert was having special trouble advancing through the room. Dodging, ducking, and avoiding the myriad of tubes proved an incredibly difficult mission for him, albeit one he carried off with admirable skill. He reached his destination without ever touching a single thing, a feat he himself acknowledged by the victorious “yes!” at the end. Keira also did well, with a single unfortunate encounter with a transparent tube that got entangled with her right arm. She got rid of it easily, without further consequence. Dylan’s advance, on the other hand, was clumsy and awkward. He was always distracted by minor, insignificant details and often tripped over the tubes. He never fell on the floor because he leaned on the walls, a mistake he soon regretted. When he arrived at the end of the room, he was trying vigorously to shake off some persistent, viscous substance stuck between his fingers; the harder it resisted, the harder he shook. Instead of getting rid of it, he ended up covered with it and smelling like the old goat on Albert’s farm in summer.