Ice Cream and Venom (9 page)
Read Ice Cream and Venom Online
Authors: Kevin Long
Aaron woke in a hospital room, with Roy Orbison, John Lennon, and Burt Reynolds sitting around staring at him. It was a bit disconcerting. Worse still, Orbison and Reynolds weren't even paying attention to him, they were in the corner engrossed in a discussion about something called "Laminar Flow." Lennon was reading a book.
He tried to say something funny, like "That was undeniably the worst concert I've ever been to," but all he was able to do was cough a bit. Lennon called the nurses, who fussed over him for some time. Then a doctor came in and fussed over him for a bit longer, but they already knew he'd be fine or they wouldn't have let guests in, even ones as prestigious as these. After all the preamble was out of the way, they inclined his bed somewhat so he could see the others eye to eye, and then left him to talk to his new friends.
"So what the hell happened?" Aaron asked.
"You took a bullet for the president, you foiled an assassination attempt, you're a national hero," Burt said.
"Women may even come to find you attractive," Lennon said. Aaron laughed at that, but instantly regretted it. His sides hurt badly from the surgery.
"Yeah, but what was it all about... who was that guy?"
Evans came in, as if on cue, "His name was 'Dick Smothers,' Boss. He had his CP-USA card on him when West took him down."
"Wait, he took his Communist Party ID with him to an assassination attempt? That seems uncommonly stupid," Orbison said.
"We don't think he was planning on escaping, Roy," Evans replied, "But we don't know much more than that. He died about an hour ago without ever recovering consciousness."
"Wait—Smothers? His name was Smothers?" Aaron asked.
"Way ahead of you, Boss," Evans said, "His brother Tom Smothers was the head of Boeing security. They must have planned this all out years in advance."
"Which explains why he refused to lock down the base," Said Aaron. Perhaps it was just the painkillers or the shock, but he felt strangely calm. A little too calm, he thought absently.
'I'll have to keep an eye on that. I seem to like drugs a little bit too much.'
"I never did like that little prick," said Burt.
"Did we get him?" Aaron asked.
"No, but I doubt he can hide long. We'll get him. Or the Secret Service will. Boeing is horribly red-faced over all this, as you can imagine. The rumor is, after Nixon pins a medal on you, they're going to offer you the head-of-security gig for the Aerospaceport."
"Really?" Drugs or no drugs, he felt... accomplished. Like he'd done something that mattered. He looked at the luminaries in the room. They all liked him; they accepted him even though he clearly wasn't on their level of success.
Or was he? He did just save the president, after all.
And suddenly it didn't seem to matter so much anymore. The dreams of his youth suddenly seemed pale and stupid compared to the deep and ominous colors of actual history, now that he'd actually done something worth doing.
"I dunno, but it's up in the air," Ron said, "They're definitely talking about it. I'd say you'd found your calling, Boss. "
"Not bad for a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi," he said to no one in particular.
'
No,
' he thought happily, '
this is not a bad way to spend one's life after all.'
And he lived—honest to God—happily ever after. Much happier than he could have any other way.
I must have been walking across campus when it happened.
It was a small Bible college on the edge of Appalachia—pretty scenery, naïve girls, stolid minds. I hated the place, and it hated me. It and I were a poor marriage from the moment we'd met, but I'd made my bed and had no choice but to lie, cheat, and steal in it. I'd gone to a bigger, better state school before a nervous breakdown landed me here, the victim of loving parents who felt a Christian environment would be better for me than a secular one; I'd meet a better class of people, I'd get in less trouble, my mental wounds would heal more quickly here.
Wrong on all counts, of course, and I suspected as much before I'd agreed to come, but among my ailments at the time was a profound crisis of faith. The prospect of a few answers to life's more profound spiritual questions had no small appeal for me in that state of mind. I quickly learned the truth, however: that you can no more have a Christian School than you can have a Christian Toaster or a Christian jar of Mayonnaise. Schools are organizations, things, and Christianity is a belief. Organizations tend to perpetuate themselves, regardless of what they teach, and beliefs—well, they're altogether too easily trampled by organizations whether they want to or not. And in this case, their main purpose was preaching to the choir. If you had a crisis of faith, they'd just as soon you left.
I had nowhere else to go, so I stayed and kept my mouth shut, and prayed, "Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief." I suppose I was lying to God: I didn't actually believe at all. I wanted to, I tried to, I begged to, but I was always a Knower, not a Believer. Whatever trick there is to faith, I never quite mastered it. Not that it matters now.
As I said, I was walking across campus, downhill from the classroom building, and on to the gravel shoulder of the road when I heard screaming, frantic, unhinged screaming coming from the College President's house. 'House,' they called it, really more like a neo-Georgian mansion. The finest building on the campus. Meanwhile, I lived in an eighty-year-old condemned and heavily water-damaged building, and most of the rest of the students lived in tiny little concrete boxes that wouldn't have looked out of place in a Chinese prison camp. Am I bitter? Yes. No point in denying it now. No point in denying anything. I walked on, curious about the bedlam, but not curious enough to check it out. I kept seeing things out of the corners of my eyes, but when I turned to look they were gone, or simply not there to begin with. '
Great,
' I thought, '
I'm hallucinating again, just like at the other school
' but as it turns out, I wasn't.
As I climbed the small hill to my dorm/hovel, the unhinged laugher stopped and I heard a gunshot out of the president's house. It was muffled a bit by the library between his place and where I lived, so I didn't really recognize it at the time, but thinking about it since, I realize that's what it was. I went in to the dark, dusty lobby. There, sitting on the smelly old couches, and standing in every free space was damn near everyone from my dorm, all watching the one TV. A basketball game, I assumed. Lots of Hoosiers in my dorm, and they seem constitutionally incapable of thinking of anything else. I ignored them and the electric feeling of fear emanating from them and went upstairs. I took a nap in my room.
I didn't dream. Isn't that odd? No, I don't guess it is now that I think about it: The time for dreams is done. Anyway, I was rudely awakened by a polite man shining a flashlight in my face, despite it being broad daylight. I was startled, but unafraid. I'd never seen him before, but somehow he didn't seem like a threat. Maybe it was the toga he was wearing? He told me to come downstairs.
"Why?"
"Everyone has to go. It's mandatory."
"Fire drill?" I asked
"Something like that," the man said.
I relented, pulled on my pants, slipped on my shoes, and followed him down the three flights of sagging stairs. He pointed out the front door, so I went, and he headed back up for whoever else was still up there. On my way out, I caught sight of what looked like New York City burning, with people with jet packs flying around between the buildings. A science fiction movie, I figured, until I realized it was CNN.
What the hell?
I looked closer. The jet packs looked more like wings, now that I paid attention.
Another man in a toga yelled for me to come outside, so I did, distracted and curious, but still not terribly frightened. Nearly everyone from the school had been arranged in a single-file line. I dutifully stood in the back of it. Looking way far ahead, I could see the seminary students from the school on the hill across the road at the head of the line. Behind me, people from the apartment complex behind the campus were lining up. The wind was coming up the valley from the road, and carrying the smell of the stagnant, algae-filled creek.
There were several men in togas marching up and down our line, occasionally talking to people. The man who'd gotten me out of bed came out of the rickety old dorm and motioned to one of the other toga clad men, who came up to him. I noticed absently that what I'd taken to be a flashlight before was a halo hovering above his head.
How the hell had I missed that?
While I watched, two dove-white wings unfurled from his back somehow—he was facing me so I didn't see the mechanics of it—and he rose up and flew away. I tracked him as far as I could, and was rather startled to see several holes in the sky, empty spots, tunnels that went somewhere, and broke off at some crazy angle other than the three directions people were supposed to see. It gave me a headache to look at it.
I blinked and looked away. Our line moved slowly forward. There was a lot of talk and speculation and fear in the queue, of course, but I was strangely calm. "I'm dreaming," I said.
"Actually, you're not dreaming" one of the angels said to me. He was walking by with a large tray hanging around his neck, handing out sandwiches and juice boxes to the people in line. "It's really the end of the world."
"So what's going on?" I asked as he handed me some Oreos.
"Judgment. You're all being lined up for that."
"Oh," I said. What do you follow up a revelation like that with? "Can I have a napkin?" I stupidly asked, "I promise I won't litter."
"Doesn't matter now," the angel said, handing me one and moving on to the guy in front of me.
The sun set. The line was moving slowly. There were a lot of people to be judged, presumably. The other angels came by and handed out dinner—Kentucky Fried Chicken, actually. The sun went down. The angels themselves were looking rather bored by this point. It was an uncommonly pleasant night, weather-wise.
"Can I ask you a question?" I said to one of the angels as he walked by.
"Sure, you name it, sport."
"Weren't there supposed to be all kinds of signs and things before the end of the world? An Antichrist? A Tribulation?" I asked.
"You betcha," the angel said.
"Well, where were they?" I asked, "I never saw any of that stuff."
"Oh. Well, you've got to remember that stuff was written down by a guy in the first century, right? So what was shocking to him is pretty commonplace to you, right? Space Shuttles, internet porn, endless brush wars in Asia, frozen foods?"
"You're saying that I've been living through the tribulation, and somehow didn't realize it?" I asked incredulously.
"Oh, sure," the angel replied, "I mean, given his background and culture and all, John—oh, you might get to meet him later, by the way—John was the kind of guy who'd find a kid on a Big Wheel kind of shocking. But you, coming from a more cosmopolitan background, you found his horrors passé." He stared pleasantly at me while I connected the dots. Presently he lit a cigarette and took a drag on it.
I had a sudden moment of panic, and the idiot hope that somehow if I could logically argue him in to submission, this dream would end and I'd wake up and be back to normal, but at the same time I was increasingly realizing that I was more awake now than I had ever been before. The line moved forward slightly. The angel turned to leave.
"Wait, wait wait," I said in a rush blurring the words together, "What about the Rapture?"
"What about it, Chum?" He said.
"All the true Christians were supposed to be caught up to heaven in the twinkling of an eye, right? Snatched away from whatever they were doing? Planes crashing for want of a pilot, cars careening driverless out of control on the highway? What about that? How can you have the tribulation without the Rapture? How can we be in this situation without the signs we were promised?" I was frightened now, yammering.
"Oh, that," the angel said. "Yeah that happened, but there were only like five or six real Christians in the world. Nobody even missed 'em."
I found I couldn't speak. He walked off to do angel things. The line moved slowly forward.
Although there had been a couple unofficial contacts between Humans and Aliens previously, they were not well documented at the time, and didn't become common knowledge until long after the contact with the Tractus Canis, (or, if you're pedantic, Intercapedo Canis). Thus the Canis incident remained fixed in everyone's mind as the 'first contact', much as Lindberg's crossing of the Atlantic was remembered as a first, or Columbus' discovery of America was regarded as a first: none of them actually were, but 99% of the world's population would swear otherwise. Humans have bad memories and even worse educational services. It's simply the way of things: Most of what most people believe at any given moment will be wrong, and what's even more unusual, they're willing to fight over these beliefs without even attempting to fact-check them first.
In any event, the first
official
contact with aliens—but the third overall—happened during the third and final American expedition to Mars in or around the year 1990 by the calendar of the day. In short, the humans landed in the Tharsis Uplift region, roughly half way between Olympus Mons and Pavonis Mons, and set about their three months of on-site exploration.
It was a somewhat glum mission. Officially, it was to be the final 'exploratory' voyage to the red planet prior to the start of American Colonization, but in fact everyone knew it was going to be the last trip, period—unless something amazing happened. Congressional support for the Space Program had never been any better than grudging; and despite all that talk about science, the truth was that Space was a propaganda industry. It was useful in making Americans look bigger, better, and smarter than their Soviet counterparts, but not much more than that, and as Propaganda went, space was expensive.
With the economic collapse in the Soviet Union, that nation had been forced to cancel virtually all manned space flights. This meant a lack of competition for NASA and in the minds of the legislature of the United States, a lack of competition always meant they didn't have to keep blowing money that particular kind of thing. Hence the RD groups working on colony ships were quietly shut down, budgets were frozen and everyone actually connected to the mission knew that this would be the Final One, the high-water mark of Man in Space—unless, of course, something remarkable happened.
Though you couldn't really bank on that sort of thing, it
had
happened before. In 1972, as the Apollo Program was preparing for its final mission, the Soviets had landed Ivan Balenko on the moon. This had re-ignited the smoldering space race and caused the government to get obsessed with landing a man on Mars in the first place. The Soviets beat us to Mars in 1976 (though they hadn't intended to). In one of those unpredictable whims of the American public, this strengthened their resolve that there should be a U.S. presence on The Red Planet.
Alas, Mars had turned out to be every bit as boring as the moon, as well as kind of dingy, depressing and a hell of a lot more dangerous. The public had quickly lost interest and with the apparent end of the Communist threat, so had the government.
Hence the Astronauts were desperate to find something that would justify the continued existence of the Ares Program—Martian life perhaps (none had ever been found, not even in fossil form), the ruins of some long-dead Tripod civilization, some new cheap thrill the Adult Entertainment industries back home could capitalize on—whatever.
Alas, nothing was forthcoming. Everyone who'd gone to Mars so far had been male, and there were some things they simply were not willing to do for their country, which eliminated the Adult Entertainment option. The Astronauts had even considered planting or otherwise manufacturing fake evidence to keep the program going. Much like NASA itself, however, their attempts to lie their way into a brighter future were paralyzed by a lack of vision.
The mission groused on.
Sixty days after landing, one of the three Astronauts was flying in a small, powered paraglider about fifty miles west of the landing site, and saw a glint of something—
'
could be ice,
'
he thought. NASA was coo coo for Cocoa Puffs when it came to water on Mars. There had never been any doubt about water on the planet. Both previous American expeditions and all the Soviet ones (excepting the semi-accidental first one) had found the stuff. It was completely unremarkable, but NASA kept screaming about it for no reason that anyone inside or outside of the Agency could ever figure. 'We found water!' the press office would state every single time as though it was the first. 'Really?' the American public would respond, 'Fascinating. Have you ever heard of this thing called a
beach
?' Just the same, ice was a mission priority: if they saw any, they had to check it out—whether they wanted to or not.
As it happened, Joe Beauchamp didn't actually want to. He'd mainly stolen the paraglider to get the hell away from the landing site, and the other two Astronauts' continual bickering about what they could fake that would renew nonexistent interest in their mission. Joe simply wandered out when they weren't looking, grabbed the Para' and headed off in a random direction with a full fuel tank. As he flew, he alternately daydreamed about green-skinned Barsoomian princesses that looked like over-inflated Raquel Welch dolls and/or his soon-to-be-ex-wife back on Earth who had shacked up with a TV repair man. He was deep in reverie about the princesses when he saw the glint, and wasn't willing to come out of it. Following mission rules, he reluctantly logged his position—to his surprise, 20 miles further from the camp than anyone had ever gone before—and then turned to swoop low over the site, which was located in a low crater a few miles to his north.
It was a dome!
An honest-to-gosh, full-on Geodesic dome like the ones in bad 50s pulp Science fiction novels! As flew closer, he set his video recorder to document the approach, and then stared at it, drop-jawed and drooling. (The drooling was an unfortunate side effect of the low gravity. If you left your mouth open for too long, unusually large globules of saliva would form in your lower jaw which grew larger and larger until surface tension could no longer support them. Then they would slowly down your face, thick and disturbingly warm and undeniably nasty. It was damn annoying.) '
The thing is huge! It looks to be several miles across—about twelve! No, that couldn't be, could it? Let's see—radar has me X miles away from it, if I turn my head Y degrees to the right I can see the east edge, if I turn my head Z degrees to the left, I can see the other edge, which—hey, Z happens to be Y-3, and I'm traveling at R... Holy crap! It really is twelve miles across!
'
He ruminated as he got closer. '
What is it? A secret Soviet base? A city? Jeez!
' As he grew closer and closer, he could see details through the glass and metal frame—trees, pathways, what looked like small buildings and people moving around inside. '
People? Yep, people. Wow! Dozens of them! How many did the Soviets have squirreled away up here?
' He continued to stare, mesmerized by the site as he rapidly grew closer and closer.
Suddenly, his blood ran cold. '
Those aren't people, the proportions of their bodies are all wrong! Those aren't people at all, they're... things!
' He tried to zoom in with his recorder as much as he could on a few of the shapes inside the dome. He was so caught up in this that he blanked out on all the other stuff he was supposed to be doing at that moment. Never a good thing while flying. '
I need to sneak away from here without being noticed, I need to get back to the landing site and warn the others and get this information back to Houston,
' he thought intently, so distracted by what he was seeing that he never quite noticed where the Para' was or how fast it was moving. Focusing all his attention through the eyepiece, squinting on one tiny, oddly formed shape on the ground, he thought, '
Whatever else I do, I can't let them see me.
' Then, his Para' crashed solidly into the dome. It rang with a loud 'bonging' noise from the impact, like a bell struck with a clapper.
Inside the dome, every single alien turned in unison and looked at the space-suited human, stuck upside down and spread-eagled to the outside of the dome like a dragonfly smacked onto a car's windshield.
Beauchamp woke up on Earth, hallucinating that a dog was looking at him with the somewhat confused expression some dogs get when they're contemplating deep matters. He was disoriented and confused, flat on his back, but he had to be on Earth because the gravity was much heavier than on Mars, and he could smell plants in the air. '
How the hell did I get back here?
' he wondered. '
How long have I been out? What... oh, yeah, the aliens in the dome... what the hell?
'
"Arrre you all rrright?" the dog asked. Its voice was entirely inhuman, but it sounded so perfectly what you'd expect a dog to sound like if it could talk, that the oddness of it washed right over him for a moment.
"I'm fine," he said and raised one arm after the other. "Wait, that can't be right. After all those months in low to no gravity, I should be weak as a kitten. Wait a minute, did you just... uhm... speak?"
"Yes," the dog replied.
"Well, now I know I'm hallucinating," he said, "Except for the gravity, that's weird." He looked at the dog's head hovering over him, looking pretty much like you'd expect a large dog—in this case, a black lab—to look if you were holding it upright. He had a big head, a simple, non-expressive face, unusually soulful eyes, a thick neck, narrow shoulders and thin arms—or more appropriately, thin forelegs. He uncontrollably started to laugh, then said: "Speak, boy, speak."
"Cerrrtainly. What would you like me to speak about?"
"Must be a suit malfunction. I must be going giddy on bad air in the suit—that would explain everything, except for the gravity."
"What is it about ourrr grrravity that concerrrns you?"
"Well—do you mind if I sit up?"
"Please, if you feel able."
"Yeah, I am—obviously I'm hallucinating because first I saw aliens under a big dumb 1950s science fiction movie dome on Mars. Then I crashed, I think, and now I'm talking to a dog, but I seem oddly unconcerned that I'm probably suffocating or getting anoxia or whatever..." Here he grunted, and swung around on what seemed to be a doctor's examination table. He was suddenly overcome with dizziness. "...whoa. That was weird."
"Interrresting. You arrre dizzy, yes?"
"Yes," his face flushed red. "If I had any food in me, I think I'd have hurled right there." Sitting up, Beauchamp leaned forward to brace himself on his arms, his hands gripping the end of table.
"The otherrrs experrrienced similarrr disorrrientation upon arrrival," the dog said. Then he turned to the side and barked some orders—literally barked—at another dog Beauchamp hadn't noticed thus far in the corner of the room. Then he turned his attention back to the human: "The doctorrr has not had the opporrrtunity to inspect any of you in detail, but we believe yourrr species to be highly susceptible to corrrolis forrrce. The otherrrs seem to be adjusting rrrapidly, howeverrr. It may be easierrr forrr you if you trrry to avoid turrrning yourrr head."
Beauchamp didn't listen any of this, however. He was gazing down, fixing his eyes on his dangling feet, trying not to throw up. Then he noticed the dog's leg next to his. '
well, that makes sense, he's a dog standing up in my hallucination, so obviously this is what I'd see, but... where's the other leg?
' His eyes darted around frantically, realizing there was no other hind leg to be seen. Instead there was simply one large furry foot or paw, oddly symmetrical, with a big toe on both sides and three smaller ones in the middle. The lone ankle was easily as big as a man's—much larger than a dog would normally have. It attached to a leg that tapered up to its hips. Upwards from there, it looked more or less like a normal, largish dog. From the hips down, however it resembled a seal which had been modified to live on land.
He turned his head to look at the other dog in the corner and the nausea rushed over him again. Both were identical except for their coloring. Both of them were naked, except for a white vest with lots of overstuffed pockets worn by the one in the corner. He felt his attention focusing and his pulse racing. The urge to flight or fight rose within him and he moved to get up.
"I cannot rrread yourrr exprrression, I apologize. Do you trrruly believe yourrrself to be hallucinating?"
"I did," Beauchamp said in a breathless voice that even he couldn't quite hear. He said it again louder, "I did." He sidled forward over the edge of the table, feeling his feet on the floor. The upright dog-alien moved towards him with a graceful not-quite-skip, its foot scooting forward without ever quite leaving the floor. Then it raised a paw and placed it gently on his forearm. Its touch was surprisingly gentle—startlingly so.
"It might be best forrr you to rrremain herrre until yourrr shipmates can be summoned."
Beauchamp reached over with his left hand and touched the alien's paw, pulled it away from his arm and looked at it. It was a four-fingered hand, black with short fur on the back of the paw and fingers, and seemingly normal dog leather underneath. A short, stubby, but obviously manicured nail poked out of the blunt end of the fingers. He tried to turn the paw over at the wrist to see the bottom, but the dog whimpered and yanked it away. Beauchamp contained his urge to either run or lash out at the sudden movement.
"It doesn't bend that way, sorrry," the dog said. "Herrre, try this." He held his forearm straight up-and-down so Beauchamp could see its bottom. A dewclaw-like thumb stuck out of the wrist, well below the palm, long and unnaturally thin. When Beauchamp reached out to touch it, the dog picked exactly the wrong moment to demonstrate how his fingers could make a very strong vise grip. The flick of the long, bony worm startled the human, who immediately dropped into a crouch, then lunged forward with his shoulder to tackle the alien. The dog was heavier than it looked, but lighter than a man. Beauchamp—acting entirely on reflex—misjudged the force he'd need, and both of them toppled over.
The dog made a sound halfway between a canine whimper and a human groan. The other dog made something that was comically close to a surprised 'yipe', then a growl. Beauchamp cut and ran, but something was wrong, his balance was off. As he moved down the perfectly-square hallway which seemed to be the only way out of the room, he kept leaning to the right, listing against the wall. He was nauseous. He'd run three steps, fall against the wall without meaning to, then he'd right himself, run three more steps, and fall against it again. He ran for what seemed like ten minutes, never quite finding the end of the oddly-twisting hallway, always moving to his left whenever a fork in the path appeared, for no reason other than his body kept falling to the right as if he had a clubfoot on that side.
He turned a corner and saw another dog-alien. He had the same shape as the others, but was larger, very nearly man-sized, and wearing what was obviously armor. It didn't advance on him, it just blocked his way. He backtracked away from the thing and ran down another fork for a minute or two, eventually finding his way blocked by another... well, call it what it obviously is: a guard dog. There were three different corridors and three different large guard dogs blocking his way. None of them behaved threateningly. The chase, such as it was, went on for a half an hour or so.
His pulse began to slacken, his breathing calmed. The blind xenophobic panic in his mind left by degrees. He ducked down a corridor he'd already been down once and noticed the guard dog had moved further towards the entrance. He tried another corridor just in time to see one of the dogs move forward. It happened with an interesting loping movement: It went down on all threes, coiled its hind leg underneath it, casually lunged forward to land on all threes again. Then it coiled its hind leg beneath it and continued to move. It was surprisingly graceful, now that he was calm enough to appreciate it, and much more involved than the motions of the dogs he'd seen in the infirmary.
A voice came over some kind of alien PA system. It was the black lab-looking one he'd been talking to before. "My grrrandmother wishes to know why you werrre so concerrrned about the grrravity when you thought this was a hallucination? You may speak in a converrrsational voice, I will be able to hearrr your rrreply."
"Have you ever had any kind of hallucination?" Beauchamp said to the air, still walking and trying to find a way out of there.
"No."
"I have. Your brain misinterprets stuff or just openly makes it up. But I've never felt gravity to be different than it really was."
"Interrresting. Is this univerrrsal among humans, or unique to you?" The "K" sound in 'Unique' was oddly pronounced.
Beauchamp paused, "To tell you the truth, I don't know. I assume it's universal, but guess it could be just me."
"And because the grrravity is differrrent than the worrrld we found you on and differrrent than yourrr homeworld, you feel disorrriented?"
"Well, yeah," he said, moving forward more casually now, "I'd assumed I was on Earth when I woke up because I was heavier than I was on Mars, but the gravity here is all wrong for both places..." He turned a corner and saw what was obviously natural light coming through a doorway, with the silhouette of a backlit dog in it. It spoke and Beauchamp wasn't at all surprised that it was the one he'd tackled earlier.
"You arrre not on earrrth, norrr arrre you on the otherrr planet, obviously," it said.
Beauchamp stepped forward, "Then where the hell am I?"
"Come forrrwarrrd and see," it said.
He stepped through the door... and very nearly blacked out. He was on the side of a hill in what looked to be a very large meadow stretching for miles in all directions, literally as far as the eye could see, filled with plants that were obviously alien but just as obviously plants, a stream, a lake in the distance and a large suspension bridge. On either side above the meadow were two vast swaths of nighttime sky, replete with stars. Above the sky he could see very long, skinny rectangles of plants, streams, lakes, and buildings looking down on him. Between these was a final swath of nighttime sky.
"You arrre on ourrr ship, obviously," the dog said.
"Maybe I should lay down for a moment," Beauchamp said a full minute after he'd abruptly plopped down on his back. He couldn't figure out how the massive strips of land up above weren't falling on him. He also couldn't escape the obviously massive scope of this ship or world or whatever the hell it was.
"You arrre calmerrr now, yes?" the dog said after a pause.
"Yes," Beauchamp replied, "I'm sorry, you just kind of freaked me out back there. Did I hurt you?"
The dog made an indescribable noise Beauchamp later learned to be the aliens' equivalent of laughter. "You should be embarrrassed by how little you hurrrt me, actually." Another long pause.
"You certainly contained that situation well," he said, "I'm surprised you were able to... you know... bring me down without fighting or shooting me or whatever it is you... uhm... people... do."
"Yes, we have grrreat experrrience with herrrding things."
