That was the high point of my trip. As for the low point . . .
The conference was a nightmare. My panel was attended by about three bedraggled-looking spinster librarians. Turned out that everybody else was at a cocktail party in honor of the hundredth birthday a professor of medieval ballades from some local community college extension branch. The moderator of the panel must have been that professor's mother. She thought my magazine was a journal devoted to the study of petroglyphs. And my fellow panelists—there were two of them—were none other than my old buddies Frankie and Jimmy Kerr. Who of course proceeded to beat up on me verbally for forty minutes while our moderator sat there, open-mouthed and horror-stricken.
I spent the evening sitting on my bed at the Motel Five-and-a-Half eating a stale chicken salad sandwich, drinking warm, flat beer, and watching The Brady Bunch in fuzzy black-and-white. I would have headed back to Uncle Hoggly-Woggly's if I thought I could find it again, but the first time had been strictly a lucky strike and I wasn't going to risk those freeways again.
In the morning I packed my minimal luggage, checked out of the Motel Five-and-a-Half, and started across the parking lot, looking for my avocado green Gremlin.
Other people were checking out. I saw a woman pushing a double-width stroller from the office. As she reached the middle of the parking lot some kind of muscle car came screaming around the corner, headed straight for them. I don't think the driver expected anyone to be there and he mashed on his brakes and the car started to skid but there was no way it was going to stop in time and no way that poor mother was going to get her little ones out of its trajectory.
I want to emphasize, I'm no hero. I didn't decide that I was going to do what I did. I didn't even think about that, When you see somebody who needs help, business. I just—well, something clicked in my brain, and without thinking I launched myself into a flying tackle, slammed into the woman with my shoulder, grabbed the handle of the stroller with my other hand and yanked it after me. I hit the pavement hard with the woman in one hand and the stroller, complete with a pair of shrieking toddlers, in the other. I was scraped all to hell and gone and bleeding in a bunch of places but the mom and her tykes were untouched.
The driver of the muscle car had stopped and he and his passenger came trotting back to see what had happened. It was, all right, you got it, Frankie and Jimmy, and give them credit, lousy creeps that they are, they were concerned for the woman and her toddlers and remorseful for their carelessness and the tragedy that had almost caused, and one of them even looked at me and said, "Oh, Del Marston, sorry 'bout that, see you back up north."
And they climbed back into their muscle car and went tearing out of the parking lot.
The woman was hugging her toddlers and crying. After a little while she stood up and held me, her hands on my arms. She actually cried into my jacket. Then she brushed off the cloth and said, "Oh, I got you all wet."
In a minute we both started laughing at the incongruity.
She let go of me and leaned back and looked up at me. Her eyes were a color I'd only seen once before in my life. She said, so softly I could hardly hear, "You will be rewarded."
***
I got back to San Francisco without further incident. I was too pumped from the excitement to go home so I opened the crummy little West Coast office of Rock! Rock! Rock! and started through the usual accumulation of mail, LP's for review, press releases, invitations to music venues, and promo gifts.
There was a jiffy bag with no return address on it but there was a Los Angeles postmark. I opened it and extracted a tee shirt. It was gorgeous. It featured a picture of a pig wearing a chef's hat, holding up a plate of barbecue, grinning and saying, "Bet You Can't Top This!" Big, clear lettering around the artwork spelled out the name of the establishment, Doctor Hoggly-Woggly's Tyler Texas Home Style Barbecue.
***
Tha-tha-tha that's all, f-folks!
Dingbats
You couldn't pronounce the name of the ship. Heck, neither could I, nor even spell it, for that matter. So let's call it the Niña. That's as good a name as any.
And as for the crew—well, they'll still be recognizably human. Their story takes place in the future, but not so far into the future that our descendents have green extrudable pseudopodia or are disembodied brains riding around in nutrient-filled containers or any of that crazy Wilma Deering-Dale Arden stuff.
So since you couldn't pronounce their names and I couldn't spell them either, I'll call them by ordinary present-day names instead.
Diamond Lil.
Amber Annie.
Asparagus.
Well, the others called her Pair o' Guts, but she preferred Asparagus.
The Niña was a small ship. She only took a crew of three, and they weren't expected to be off Earth for long. They'd rented the ship, three total strangers but the computer (if you want to call it that) at the rental agency decided they'd be compatible and they'd save a lot of money (see above) by sharing. One worked with numbers, one with organs, one with physics. Nothing there to make for instant enmity.
A little pleasure jaunt for three new pals, maybe zip up to Luna and sightsee a little. They didn't think they'd go even as far as Nergal, or Mars as it had once been known. There were tourist facilities there and the three pals could certainly afford to vacation on the Red Planet, but they all had jobs and this was only supposed to be a weekend getaway, not a full-fledged vacation.
You understand, I hope, that everything I tell you is only approximately what I say it is. Like, try to explain a nuclear reactor or an HDTV or the way an antibiotic works in your body to somebody who lived a couple of hundred years ago, no less a few thousand or even more.
The Niña ran into a tiny singularity, the kind of thing that goes zipping around the galaxies, popping in and out of wormholes and wreaking havoc when you least expect it, and whonked out of ordinary time-space and got deposited someplace far away.
Diamond Lil was the captain, at least to the extent that the Niña had a captain, and she said, "Wow, what the hell was that?" Neither Amber Annie nor Pair o' Guts had any more idea than Lil did. Gradually it dawned on them, what had happened, or at least a vague inkling of it, and they realized they were totally fucked.
"Zapped by a singularity? I thought that only happened in braineries," Amber Annie said.
"Any way to get out of here?" Pair o' Guts wondered aloud.
Diamond Lil shook her head. (Remember, she only approximately shook her head. For that matter, she was only approximately Diamond Lil. But never mind all that.) "I think we're gonna die, girlfriends, but at least we can try and work our way out of this."
"Oh, yeah?" Amber Annie stood with her hands on her hips. "And how do you propose doing that?"
"First thing, let's see what kind of damage that thingamabob did to the Niña." She studied the instrument panel. "Everything looks okay according to the readouts. Who wants to climb into a spacesuit and check the outside?"
Nobody was really eager but eventually Pair o' Guts was pressured into the job. She climbed into a suit, checked her air and power supplies, temp and pressure controls, and crawled into the Niña's airlock.
Couple of minutes later she was creeping around on the outside of the ship, looking for damage. She didn't find any so she made her way back to the airlock, opened the hatch, and shortly stood inside the ship once again. The ship was appointed with richly stained wood and polished brass appurtenances. She peeled off her spacesuit and stood in shorts and tee shirt (approximately), the way Diamond Lil and Amber Annie were already dressed.
"Looks okay," she said.
"But take a goose at the meters now." Amber Annie pointed at the Niña's bank of readouts. They were acting pretty crazed.
"Hey, I can feel this mother moving." Pair o' Guts grabbed onto the back of a polished mahogany and red plush chair. "Something is either pulling or pushing us—hard."
They all strapped in and watched the sights outside the Niña go through some ch
anges. There was a star close enough to show as a disk rather than a point of light. It was a beautiful shade of blue. Nobody knew what kind of radiation it might be giving off. They could only tell that it was tugging them toward it.
Diamond Lil tried using the Niña's boosters to get away but they were too close already, or the star's gravitational field was too strong, or maybe those are just two ways of saying the same thing.
"Looks like we're headed for stardom, girlfriends." Lil managed a fairly sincere sounding, if somewhat ironic, laugh.
Everybody was surprised, however, when the Niña swung away from its apparent death-plunge into the beautiful blue star. Something else was grabbing the ship.
"Holy shit!" Annie muttered, "I think we're going to be rescued."
And in fact they saw something looming up in front of them, something that might actually have been a sizable black hole except it wasn't. It was a black, globular object. It just might be a planet, or maybe a miniature partner of the blue star that had never quite reached ignition mass. In the former case it would probably have a solid surface. Maybe rock or frozen water. If the latter, it might be just a fuzzy gas ball.
By now the Niña was moving fast. The drive on the little ship worked okay, at least the readouts indicated as much, but there was no place to go, really, except to the black, globular thing. Otherwise they might be pulled into the blue sun. A nasty death, that, and none of the three were interested in dying even a nice death just now if she could help it. Or they could head off into the depths of space, if they could somehow escape the gravitational pull of the blue star, but that would probably mean a slow death by starvation or suffocation or by strangulation in their own waste products, none of which was an attractive prospect.
So, what the heck, they let themselves be drawn down to the black, globular whatever-it-was. Captain Diamond Lil brought the Niña in for a nice smooth landing. If anything, the surface of the black globe seemed to be just made for the landing of a little three-person spacecraft, and Niña settled in just fine and Amber Annie, who had by tacit agreement become the ship's engineer (or something like that), turned on the exterior sensors and analyzers.
Shortly these gadgets reported that there was breathable air outside, which was pretty surprising, that gravity was well below Earth-normal but sufficient to keep them from floating off into the depths of space, and that not a damned thing was moving. Not anywhere on this, well, more-or-less, world.
It was daytime outside, or what could pass for daytime.
Amber Annie and Pair o' Guts donned spacesuits just to be on the safe side and exited the Niña.
They were confronted by a bleak and featureless landscape. The unnamed blue sun shone like a lovely amethyst and gave their white spacesuits a kind of ghostly tint. They turned around and looked at Niña and saw that the ship had been undamaged by its landing.
For the time being they were better off than they would have been if they had continued on toward the blue sun (for sure) or headed out into black space (for pretty sure), but when they considered their situation and likely future here on this small black world, the prospects weren't really very bright after all.
Asparagus cracked her helmet seal, then removed the helmet entirely and breathed deeply of the little world's air. It smelled nasty, something like the bathroom in an apartment where the owner has gone away for a week and left three cats and as many overflowing dishes of cat food and bowls of water and a litter box for the kitties to use.
Pretty ripe.
But, as the ship's instruments had said, breathable.
Annie waited to make sure that Pair o' Guts was all right, then removed her own helmet. She curled her lip and wrinkled her nose but she agreed that the air would do if it had to. Which it did.
No water, though. No food. No sign of life. There was air and water and food in their spaceship, and by careful recycling they could make it last a long time, but not forever. And who wants to live that way anyhow?
They headed back to the Niña.
Amber and Asparagus told Lil what they thought of this, well, call it a planet. They didn't like it but they couldn't think of any alternative. If only it weren't so damned dark and dismal they might have found their situation less depressing.
They didn't seem to be in any imminent danger, but the ship's stores were limited and they didn't want to sit there in the middle of a flat, black plain on a round, black, well, sort of planet, and wait for thirst or starvation or suffocation to claim them. The Niña had an emergency beacon which they set to pulsing out a distress call, but they had no idea where in the entire time-space continuum they were and the likelihood of rescue looked pretty darned remote.
What if they were in another galaxy?
What if they were a million years in the past or the future?
The planet they were on seemed to have a fairly short day/night cycle, with no real dusk or twilight to speak of. Once night fell the sky blazed with a billion unfamiliar points of light. It was a beautiful sight but it was also depressing as all get out.
What the heck were they going to do?
They decided to sleep on it.
In the morning they woke up and looked outside. The blue sun glittered gorgeously above the horizon and the flat black plain had turned into a flat white plain. It looked something like an Arctic snowfield. It was as featureless as ever but the grim, dim aspect of the day before was transformed into a bright featurelessness tinted azure by the planet's sun.
Lil and Annie and Pair o' Guts held a council of war.
They knew that the Niña wasn't going to run out of fuel. It was propelled by hooking into nature's own universal magneto-gravitic grid and unless something bollixed its propulsion and control circuitry they had nothing to worry about on that score.
But was there anyplace to go?
They settled in and lifted off. Diamond Lil set the Niña's auto¬controls for a low survey of the planet and they went skimming across the featureless terrain. Once they reached the terminator and passed into the planet's shadow stars appeared overhead and the, well, let's call it landscape, darkened. Still, it was a gleaming, porcelain white and it had the ghostly appearance, by starlight, of an old-time Christmas-card snowscape.
The Niña was intended as a vacation excursion ship and at this point its circuitry determined that a little musical accompaniment was desirable. It started playing a vocal piece by the eighteenth century composer Elisabetta de Gambarini. Softly, unobtrusively, soothingly. It was really quite lovely.
"What the hell?"
Lil and Asparagus turned. Annie was pointing at something on the ground. It was the first feature any of them had spotted on the surface of the planet.
It looked like a big more or less human head with an arching brow, oversized ears, a sloping nose, a small, pursed mouth, a puzzled look around the eyes and a generally goofy expression on its face. In fact it reminded them of one of the giant stone heads found on Rapa Nui.
"What the hell?" Lil and Asparagus echoed Amber Annie.
Diamond Lil cut the autos and brought Niña around in a graceful maneuver so they could get a closer look at the thing.
Damned if it didn't look exactly like one of those wacky stone statues, except it wasn't the color of ordinary stone.
Lil couldn't gauge the size of the head from Niña's current altitude so she dropped back, closer to the planet's surface. She realized that the head was big. Really big. Much taller than the ship.
She circled it, around the level of its ear lobes.
The statue was dark red. The ridge of its forehead shadowed its ruby-tinted eyes, but as Niña swooped past the face Lil could see two points of light right where the pupils ought to be, for all the world staring out at them, following Niña in its path like the eyes of a three-dee religious icon.
It was spooky.
Responding to Lil's touch, the Niña hovered briefly in front of the statue, then settled slowly to the ground.
They were still on the planet's
night side, but the starlight was bright. Enough of it reflected off the planet's snow white surface to create a kind of ghostly twilight. Lil and Annie and Asparagus could see the statue clearly.
They left the Niña. They weren't wearing spacesuits this time. When they breathed the air outside the nasty odor was gone. Either it had been a local phenomenon at their first landing site or it had cleared up. Or maybe they were just getting used to this strange place.
Amber Annie said, "This planet needs a name. Come to think of it, I guess the sun does, too."
Diamond Lil and Pair o' Guts agreed. "What do you want to call them?" Pair o' Guts asked.
Annie shrugged her shoulders. "What the heck. How about Amaterasu for the sun and Sakti for the planet?"
Lil snorted. "You really like rice, don't you? Well, sure, why the hell not."
Pair o' Guts said, "Okay with me."
They walked around the base of the statue. They didn't measure it but if it had been their favorite girlfriend and they'd set out to buy her a shirt for her birthday they would have estimated her collar size at ninety meters. Diamond Lil stood directly in front of the thing and looked up at its face.
She could have seen the insides of its nostrils if she'd brought a hand-laser with her, but all she could see in the ghostly reflection of starlight off Sakti's white surface was darkness.
The eyes, though. The eyes were a different story. The eyes glittered and gleamed so, made Diamond Lil dream so, she fantasized all sorts of things about the statue. She turned to her companions and said, "I wish we had a ladder. I'd like to climb up there and look inside this thing's eyes. There's something going on there, I'm sure of it."
Amber Annie tilted her head to one side. "Does seem to be looking at us, doesn't it? But what the heck is it doing here? I mean, we're stranded on this weird planet a gazillion whatchamacallits from Earth. Nobody's ever found so much as an empty beer can on any planet they've explored. And now—this?"
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