I Married An Alien (2 page)

Jordan took a deep breath. “Very well, just say it does work. I could never turn my back on you.”

“
Then I’ll be happy for you. You know even after a hundred years of the Treaty our numbers are still too low to sustain us without assistance from Earth.”

“
Perhaps it’s because those petite little Earth women aren’t really meant for us… I can’t even remember all the stuff I learnt at the Academy. I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt one of them.”

“
I know you, Jordan. You don’t even like getting into fights with men. You could never hurt a woman.”

Jordan shook his head in frustration. “Not intentionally, but with those rampant hormones running through my system I just might… I remember what it was like when we were teenagers… Just as well we still had some of our own women. Back then it was only for pleasure, never to create the next generation.”

“
From what I’ve heard these new Earth women are quite experienced in the matters of–"

“
With men of their
own
race,” Jordan cut in, “not of ours.” He heaved a weary sigh. “We may be similar genetically, but
we are still different.
I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Logan, but it probably won’t work anyhow. It never has before… Perhaps, like you I’m destined to–“

“
Don’t even
think
that!” Logan took Jordan’s hands this time. “We’re going, and that’s that. I’ve even packed your wedding suit, as well as the notes we received at the Academy, so you can read up on them along the way.”

Jordan pulled a disgusted face. “That embarrassing outfit?” he snorted. “How did you even know where to look for it?”

Logan grinned, the lines in his face deepening even further. Six months ago he hadn’t possessed a single mark on his ruggedly handsome visage. “The deepest, darkest recesses of your closet, of course,” he sniggered.

Logan scrambled unsteadily to his feet, the action ramming home just how feeble the once robust man had become. Logan had once been packed hard with muscle, but now his clothes hang on his thin frame. Like Jordan, he preferred the traditional Terron garb; cool flowing white shirts and billowy trousers that helped protect them against the hot sun. Outside in the heat, they also wore broad-brimmed hats.

“
Now I think it’s time you had a shave.” Logan motioned towards Jordan’s bushy blonde beard. “I’ve forgotten what you look like beneath that forest. A nice trim wouldn’t go astray either. Your hair looks as brittle and ragged as on old mop.”

Jordan groaned. “Why bother?” And then something occurred to him. “Look, if it’s a holiday you want, why not just say so? We could go to the coast, enjoy the soft sand and soothing ocean instead of battling the city crowds.”

Logan wagged a bony finger in his face. “Ah, ah, ah. The Aged One has spoken. I’m in charge of this mission.”

“
More like tour de farce, to coin an Earth term,” Jordan muttered, knowing they had adopted far too many Human phrases and customs over the years. Even their first names were Earthean, simply because most Human woman couldn’t pronounce their native ones. Their planet’s name,
Terron,
had actually come from the original
Taha’rana,
which the lazy Humans had shorted to something more familiar to them.

Logan slapped Jordan on the back. “Go inside and have a shower. You reek of
Hytana
. Then I’ll attack that forest.”

“
I can shave my own beard, thank you very much,” Jordan grumbled, but preceded his friend into the house. He really did stink of plant oil. He didn’t mind the smell, but Humans reckoned it reeked appallingly.

Chapter
Two

“
Ready?” asked Professor Jackson.

“
As I’ll ever be,” I replied as I took my place in the spindly office chair inside the glass cubicle. It rocked precariously under my weight, and I gripped the sides with both hands. I could think of nothing more embarrassing than destroying the furniture and forfeiting my only chance at glimpsing the future.

The professor stepped in after me and the space shrank alarmingly, particularly when the stale reek of his sweat followed him inside. He was obviously too busy inventing to take a shower, I thought, as I tried to breathe through my mouth.

“
You’ll need to wear this protective eyewear,” the unwashed scientist told me as he handed me a pair of rubber-rimmed spectacles. I put them on and as he tightened them they hugged my face like a pair of swimming goggles. A curly electrical cable ran from one side of these highly unfashionable glasses down across the floor and out through a reinforced hole in the glass, to the computer console outside. They were already uncomfortable, but at least I could rip them off if I had to. I blinked and tried to focus through them, realizing they had been tinted pink.

“
Well, this gives a whole new meaning to the phrase looking at the world through rose colored glasses,” I couldn’t help imparting.

“
They all say that when they first put them on,” Jackson declared. “I just thought that color would be calming, since some of the things people have seen have been pretty horrific.”

“
Don’t worry,” I replied. “There isn’t much that can faze me. I’ve seen just about every doomsday movie that’s ever been made.” Why those End of the World movies so fascinated me I’ll never know, but I’d watched my favorites many times over during those long, lonely months I’d sat at home waiting for my mother to die. I know that sounds awful, but in the end that was exactly how it had felt, as she lay there day in and day out with no change in her condition. Until one night she must have decided enough was enough, and she simply stopped breathing. Finding her dead the next morning had still made me feel sick to my stomach, even though I'd been expecting it. I guess no one knows how they will react until it actually happens to them.

“
One of the reasons we chose you, Ruth Clarke,” the professor replied with a snort, nearly gassing me with the aromatic aroma of last night’s garlic feast. I gagged, almost adding another stain to his grubby lab coat. “But watching it and living through it are two entirely different things,” he reminded me.

“
Have you actually used this contraption yourself?” I felt compelled to ask.

“
Of course, but for some reason I always see exactly the same thing.” He sounded disappointed.

“
Which is?” I prompted.

He waggled a long bony digit in front of my face. “Now that would be telling, wouldn’t it? Now I just need to attach a couple of small probes to your temples so that we can read your brainwaves and record what you see.”

That might make ripping the whole thing off a tad more difficult, but not impossible.

Once he had glued two pads to my head, he finally backed himself and his aromatic body odors out of the cubicle. I took a deep breath, glad I could at last breathe through my nose again. All that shallow breathing had been making me feel rather light-headed.

“
I’m going to take you further than anyone else has ever gone before,” the prof called through the speakers above my head. I watched him position himself in front of the keyboard. It looked a bit like a TARDIS console, with all those levers, switches and cables hanging above it. I hoped that dangerous-looking lash-up would hold together. Jackson gave me a yellow-toothed grin of anticipation and I shuddered. With a bit of luck, I’d soon be looking at my own interpretation of the future.

With ample time to ponder over the two days it had taken for his team to get back to me after the briefing, I decided this aging geek had to be a charlatan, or at the very best, someone so obsessed with his project he’d make up everything to get the results he longed for. After all, if he truly was a crackpot, he wouldn’t be working for the University of New South Wales. He’d be skulking in a basement somewhere with his giant super-computer and Tesla coils. I wondered how he’d managed to get the university to fund this experiment in the first place.

I didn’t know much about how these things worked, but perhaps he was a good lecturer, and had simply been given free rein of this dingy basement to tinker in his spare time.

“
How about three-hundred years?” He winked, looking smugly pleased with himself. “I’ve been doing some tinkering and upped the power, so there shouldn’t be a problem pushing you that far.”

“
Sure, go right ahead.” I started to drum my fingers against the underside of the chair’s armrest. I encountered hardened chewing gum. Ugh, weren’t uni students supposed to be more mature than school kids?

The goggles started to buzz as the mad scientist upped the power or whatever he was doing to align his machine with the future. His image began to blur and the pink glass darkened. Something was definitely happening to my vision, because colors began to swirl rather sickeningly in front of my eyes.

“
See anything yet?” he asked through the loudspeakers.

“
Nothing that makes any sense,” I replied truthfully.

“
That’s just you traveling though time to reach your destination.”

Yeah, right. More like you fiddling with the VR channel. But I didn’t say anything else, as the colors continued to flash. I was starting to feel rather queasy.

“
Almost there… Ah… twenty-three twelve,” he announced proudly.

Almost on cue the swirling miasma cleared and I caught sight of bright sunlight filtering through a huge domed ceiling. I blinked rapidly, feeling like my head was about to explode. The pressure against my face was so intense, I was about to rip the goggles off when I felt my whole body flung backward.

Then I was falling, as though the floor had suddenly opened up beneath me.

The back of my head struck the ground hard, jerking my eyes open, once again revealing that domed, sun dappled roof. Suddenly a number of unfamiliar faces filled my vision, blocking out the sunlight. They all started talking at once, almost deafening me.

“
Move aside. Move aside,” boomed an authoritative voice, and the faces slipped back out of my line of sight. A fleshy, middle aged man appeared above me. “Are you all right Miss?” he asked, his brow creasing in concern.

No one had called me ‘miss’ in a long time. It had been ‘ma’am’ or ‘madam’ for as long as I could remember, and once even ‘grandma’.

“
Ah,” I croaked. “I – I think so.” That voice didn’t sound like mine. I cleared my throat several times.

“
You fainted by the looks of it,” the genial man said. “Do you think you can get up yet?” He leaned forward and extended a hand. I saw he was wearing some sort of uniform, navy blue in color, with strange zigzag runes on the shoulders and an official-looking stylized symbol stamped onto the pockets, that looked like a mechanical bird, or spaceship in flight.

I nodded, for some reason not trusting myself to speak. I placed my hand in his, and he easily pulled my up from the floor. He was obviously stronger than he looked, because I was no lightweight, having put on more kilos than I cared to count in the years spent nursing my mother.

For a moment I swayed, my head once again spinning like it had a few moments earlier, as I tried to get used to being vertical again. The man steadied me with both his hands against my shoulders.

I blinked, trying to get my bearings, now that the world had righted itself. I found myself surrounded by a group of very attractive young women, all wearing beautiful flowing satiny gowns of various colors and styles that accentuated their slim but curvy bodies.

They all had lovely shiny hair, styled into various dos, and exquisite faces, not a single blemish marring their smooth skin. They represented a mixture of races. There was an Asiatic girl with shiny black hair all the way to her backside, a gorgeous African chick built like a sprinter, a sultry Latino or South American, and several fair skinned lasses from Celtic or Aryan backgrounds. I counted seven in total.

What on earth must they be thinking about me, a fat middle-aged frump in their midst? I wondered, as my gaze drifted further afield.

Across a wide expanse of tiles, I saw what looked like a loading dock leading to… what could only be described as a space ship.

Hey prof, I hope you’re recording this, because you would absolutely
adore
this machine, I thought. It was as tall as a skyscraper, with giant thrusters that would put any twenty-first century rocket to shame. It gleamed golden under the midday sun, as it awaited a variety of goods that were being loaded into the enormous maw of its cargo bay. I blinked, realizing that the crew doing to loading weren’t people, but
robots.
They had Humanoid torsos and large tank-treads to help them move around. They looked they could carry at least a ton each, and several between two.

I turned in the other direction, and saw the outline of a massive city, not dissimilar to a twenty-first century, but breaktakingly
clean
, no grey pallor of pollution clinging to the skyline. The sky-scrapers gleamed in the sun, more glass than concrete, or whatever doubled as building material in this century.

It was obvious I was at an air-port, or should I say space-port, and judging by the luggage crowded around the group I was with, we were either boarding or departing from that incredible space craft.