Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 3, July 2013 (19 page)

This morning he was alone on the far court, just shooting.

“You interested in a few creds for a couple weeks of work?” I said when I got closer.

“What’s the work?”

“Aliens want to take us up in a ship for a few days. Do a study in zero G. No pain. All gain.”

Johnny dribbled between his legs and kissed a jumper off the backboard. The dude coulda played somewhere, if they still had a somewhere to play.

“What’s it pay?” he said while retrieving the ball.

“Twenty a week. Two weeks.”

He looked up to the sky, shading his eyes. Then he shrugged. “What do I got to lose?”

“Nothing,” I replied.

And just like that, I had my first passenger.

He spent the next hour talking up the job all around the park. By the time I left for work he had fifteen guys lined up. I jotted down their names, and gave each the proper time and location. HydroCen 93, Gate D, 0900.

I already felt a helluva lot better.

This might be easier than I had thought.

***

“Gonna stare out the window all day, or can I have a cuppa joe?”

I said I was sorry and poured coffee. The woman wasn’t a regular, but I had seen her before. She had a job somewhere in town and came in every other week. Not quite enough for a nickname, but enough that I had a sense of ownership about her. She was fine enough: average height, average build, dark hair, dressed well. Probably a city worker. Probably thirty, maybe thirty-five. Cash enough to be comfortable. She was sitting alone, reading a scanner.

I put the coffee on the table, and slid across from her.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you might be interested in taking a vacation?”

“Excuse me?”

“The aliens are looking for people to take two weeks in a space ship. They wanna—”

“Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”

“What’s that, ma’am?”

“Are you asking me out?”

“Oh, no, ma’am.”

“Because if you’re suggesting I take two weeks off so you can get your pop on in zero-G, you better get your skinny behind out of that seat. I’ve got people around who can take
you
out.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said as I stood up.

She gave me a hard stare.

I apologized again, retreating back to the counter.

“Trying to get a little senior tail?” Kenta said from the kitchen.

“She’s not that old,” I said, realizing how lame that sounded even as I said it —as if her age was the thing to come between us.

Kenta just laughed, and banged a spatula on the grill.

***

All the regulars got nicknames.

Freddy Cat was a dude who’d been in the service and come back missing something between his ears—he was a cool customer mostly, talking in quotes from Sun Tzu and other shit like that, but jumpy as hell. Marimba was a dancer at Hulu’s who came in for coffee before her shift, then again afterward to meet Two Finger Benji, who dealt in hard-cut chime passed to his customers in little white packages held between his index and middle fingers like poker chips.

They were not Delano’s finest, but it was getting late so I hit them all, and pretty much every one of them just laughed and asked what I was smoking.

By the time my shift was over, I had only nineteen people signed up—the fifteen ballplayers, Bibi McCray, Junebug (a girl I knew from my year in school), and two older guys who spent a couple hours swilling caffeine and shooting shit about the joys of farming in the desert.

I walked downtown that night to see what might be shaking, though Delano is no sprawling metropolis. Most everything was already closed up. I found three more takers down on the dock—a woman and two guys cleaning barnacles off the hull of a fishing boat. That brought my count to twenty-two—a list both pitifully small and way too male.

“I gotta find a place with a lotta people,” I told Johnny R the next morning as we shot jumpers. “Preferably a lot of women.”

He gave me a strange glance.

“The aliens want it even,” I said. The answer worked.

“Grubb’s Point, baby,” he replied, dropping a jumper while referring to the clamor club out east.

“Not really my style,” I said.

“Is if you want to meet girls.”

Johnny was right. There would be a crapload of kids at GP. Five years ago hanging out with those kids would have been all fine-fine, but that was before I found myself living on tips, and bunking in tin sheds.

“I’ll take you out there,” Johnny said, probably sensing uneasiness. “You’ll be fine as wine, baby. I’ll see to it.”

I had to smile at the dude. Johnny R was a special kinda guy. I needed to make something happen, and he was—as usual—there with the assist.

“Grubb’s Point it is,” I said.

That left only my second problem.

I am, I admit, a crap-assed salesman. But convincing folk to become alien test monkeys was also a hard-assed sell. I mean, folks will hock their blood, or their hair, or samples of their skin—they’ll sell a damned kidney for that matter—but no one was getting off on the idea of being prodded by aliens for two weeks.

If I was gonna save the human race, I had to break my word to the alien, and tell people exactly what was happening. Damn the torpedoes. As the day went on I felt lighter about the whole thing, really. The fact that I was gonna tell the truth just made it all feel a helluva lot better. Then telling Jamaal that I quit, and leaving him to deal with lunchtime rush all on his own just capped it off all beautiful-like.

I felt great all day, all the way up until the moment Johnny and I actually left for the club.

***

Grubb’s Point was a cement-block building that had been home to an auto service center before the Installation ripped California apart. It was on the east coast, about ten minutes out on foot. I felt the music as we walked toward the door.

“Johnny! Carl!”

It was Benjamin, a guy who’s been bouncing at the Point for as long as there’s been a Point. That he knew my name spoke buckets about his memory.

“You come on a good night, my friends! Lotsa excitement in here.”

I threw cred scrip at him.

The money disappeared, and he let me in.

It was still early, but the dance floor was packed with kids. Now all I had to do was convince a bunch of them to believe me.

I went to the bar and got a drink.

“Whatcha doin’, honey?”

The girl was long and lanky, wearing a hemp dress gathered at the waist, bangles around her wrists. Her legs were smooth, and her muscles toned. She was part Mexican and part white, with a mouth a little too big for her face. Her eyes flashed with that edge that said she wasn’t afraid of nothing. I leaned into her, and yelled so she could hear over the music.

“What do you do?” I asked.

She leaned back and grimaced as if this was the last thing she wanted to talk about. “Work at 93. Packaging.”

“You wanna save the world?” I said. Not the most sophisticated line, I suppose, but she gave a laugh.

“Sure,” she said.

“I’m serious as dirt.”

She touched my shoulder. “Aren’t we all, baby?”

I put my arm around her waist. “Let’s go outside a minute. I got something to talk about. But you got to promise you won’t tell no one. Can you keep a secret?”

“Oh, honey, I can keep a secret.”

She signed on five minutes later. I couldn’t believe it.

***

It went like that all night.

It was actually fun. Everyone seemed to keep the secret, but word got out that
something
was up because people started finding me on their own, which made it even easier. It was the first time I’ve ever been the center of attention. I danced some, drank a little, and pressed a lot of palms. Some of them got loopy when I told them what I was doing, others deadly serious. No one ran, though, and the few who turned me down just smirked like I was some crazy dude on funny juice. But people kept coming aboard. I felt eyes on me, eyes that gleamed of respect, eyes that said I was something bigger than a simple hash slinger at the Universal Grill.

I can do this,
I realized about halfway through the night.
I can make it happen.

Through it all, Johnny R was hanging on the perimeter, talking and winking and taking down notes. It felt strange to be the leader with Johnny R around. I was so used to him on the court, so used to following his flow. But this wasn’t hoops. This was life, and somehow
I
had the power. He would make a good second, though. He paid attention to folks, and as the evening wore along I saw him staring at me through slitted eyes as if he was trying to get inside my head. He grew more aggressive about restraining folks too, more choosy about letting them past.

We’d make a good team, Johnny R and I. We always had before. I thought of telling him the truth about the aliens bugging out right then, but we were busy and there would be time later.

By the time we left I had a hundred sixty-five more names. These were good people, healthy and young, most from families with money, which meant they’d been to school. My total count was just under two hundred—which really should be fine. I was dead tired, but I felt strong and content.

I had done it.

I had saved the human species.

***

The knock came way too early—2:45 in the morning.

I stumbled to the door in a rum-headed haze to find two enforcement deputies standing in the darkness.

“Carlton Weeks?” one of them said.

“Yes?”

“Can we speak with you?”

I was not drunk enough to forget there was only one answer to that question.

“Of course.”

“Can we come in?”

“It’s probably best we talk out here.”

They took a look at my shed and nodded. I sat on the warped bench of the table between the Universal Grill and my room. One deputy sat across from me, the other remained standing.

“I understand you were out late tonight, Mr. Weeks?”

“Yeah.”

“And you were selling bogus tickets to an alien space flight?”

“What?”

“We have kids lined up to testify,” the standing deputy said. “They have receipts. I have one right here.” He tapped his chest pocket.

“I didn’t sell anything. I was acting as an agent. The aliens are paying folks to test them.”

“So you don’t admit to conning your friends by telling them the aliens are going to blow up the world?”

“No. That’s not—”

The standing deputy grabbed me by the back of my shirt, and pulled me from the bench. Next thing I knew, my hands were cuffed behind my back.

“We know you’re on probation,” the deputy said. “It’s a shame. Another year and you would have been a free man.”

I twisted, and I turned, and I screamed, and I pleaded and kicked and bit until the second deputy reached out with his zapper and I went out like a light.

***

I sat in a cell on a hard bench, my throbbing head in my hands. It was all a sham.

The kids at Grubb’s Point had played me, goaded me on, then created this story about me selling seats. It was pure entertainment for them, a relief from the pain of passing time in a town like Delano. The deputies searched my room, and of course they found my list. They would use it to confirm any receipt they had, and they would put me away. No probation this time. And of course no lifeboat.

What hurt most was that I actually thought they liked me.

***

I looked out my cell and into the security lobby where three deputies sat behind tables, chatting about soccer scores and what they had for breakfast. The profile of HydroCen 93 rose in the distance outside the bay windows.

The clock passed 0900.

None of my recruits from last night would show up. That left no more than thirty. Not enough, of course, but I hoped the aliens would take them anyway. At least it would be
something
. I wished I’d told Johnny R the truth, and wondered why I always waited until it was too late to do what’s right.

I watched the clock on the far wall as each second of my existence trickled away.

Then came a large, glassy
crash!

It was the bay window shattering with the force of twenty bricks. Then came voices, and alarms, and the sounds of blasting guns. Some deputies dove for cover, others escaped out the back hallway. A canister of gas twirled its smoky path into the lobby. I began choking and hit the floor where the air was better, but where I couldn’t see a damned thing.