Larry Goes To Space (10 page)

He hoped that, unlike Nancy, things on the ship would come back. Unless he was probed one too many times to care, he did want to see the Teumess home planet. He would like to be able to go out an airlock hatch and visit the planet when the time came.

Instead of a ladder going down to the level below, there was a hatch open into a central room. There was no doubt in his mind he was being herded, so he walked into the room.

He would’ve been much happier if Scooter had been there to greet him and show him around. Still, he was a predator. Scooter, being prey had recognized that. The little creature had to increase the dosage level he was using even to talk to him, and it knocked him out. And that was in the openness of the farm on the Kansas prairie. Drugs or not, it would’ve been a real challenge for Scooter to be close to a meat eater in the tight confines of these corridors and cabins.

This cabin was about the size of his living room, but empty, so it appeared larger. In that regard, the room was just like Nancy and her magical breasts. They appeared much bigger when they were covered than when set free. His living room at home had been huge until he moved in, then he couldn’t fit everything inside the room.

The hatch didn’t close behind him. He looked carefully along the edge of the opening. He spotted a small button in a recessed hole. It was set about six feet up. That was way too high to be comfortable for him. It would have been way out of reach for any Teumess. He didn’t press the button.

Not pushing the button wasn’t from a lack of curiosity. He was more than curious, but his relationship with this button was too new. He wanted to take it slow, to get to know the button before engaging in any interaction. It might be the best button in the world to push, quickly earning its way into his heart as a lifetime companion. Or he might be in the trash compactor and the button would shorten his lifetime beyond his planned old age.

He hadn’t seen any button, lever, or display in the airlock hatch or in either corridor. Why here? Why in this room? He made a careful examination of the room. The Teumess certainly wanted him here. There were four walls and a ten-foot high ceiling. On the bulkhead opposite the hatch was a small dimple in the wall. Next to the dimple was a second recessed button. Six feet below the button was a three-inch wide hole in the floor. There wasn’t a grate over the hole.

The only other thing in the room was a large, soft pad laid out on the deck. It didn’t look as comfortable as his queen-sized bed at home, but the pallet was obviously a sleeping pad. He dropped his backpack and sleeping bag on the floor next to the pad.

He heard a small scraping noise on the deck. He spun around. The hatch was still open but there wasn’t anyone or anything there. He walked slowly to the hatch and peered in both directions, but the corridor was empty.

When he turned around again, his backpack was sliding slowly toward the hole in the deck! The pack and sleeping bag were much larger than the hole, but for all he knew the deck had the ability to open its jaws like an anaconda swallowing a crocodile.

He grabbed the backpack in plenty of time to keep it from sliding away. He dropped his gear on the sleeping pallet and stood watching it. It didn’t move.

He heard the scraping noise again and turned slowly. He didn’t want to startle the Teumess if they were trying to contact him. There was no one there. He walked to the hatch and turned right, walking around the square of the corridor.

There weren’t any hatches or Teumessians. For all he knew, he was alone on this spaceship.

He wondered when they were going to take off. He hoped they didn’t delay too long. Marcy was pregnant, so she needed a good breakfast. He was sure Gary and Marcy wouldn’t leave the pasture until he left the planet.

He wondered if they had already left the planet. Just because he couldn’t feel the engines or thrust didn’t mean that it hadn’t happened.

Maybe ever’body in the whole dam world is scared of each other.
(John Steinbeck.
Of Mice and Men
)

CHAPTER SIX

LARRY heard the kachunk of the food processer. He shut off his e-reader without regard to where he stopped reading. He was becoming especially fond of his e-reader as it was just about the only thing on the whole spaceship that talked back to him. The little reader was especially good at holding a conversation in abeyance exactly where he left it. Still, the little e-reader tended to ramble on if Larry didn’t interrupt it every now and then. A lot of people he’d met back on Earth were like that. The e-reader tended to monopolize a conversation from time to time.

“Back on Earth,” Larry said to the e-reader. “Now there’s a phrase that I never had much use for.”

Larry didn’t expect the e-reader to comment. He hadn’t really asked it a question; he just made a general reference that didn’t require an answer. Still, he wished he had upgraded to one of those new personal assistant machines that had voice recognition and would actually speak when answering. His e-reader only responded in black and white, occasionally in color, and then just with the printed word.

That was about all the talk Larry had in his day-to-day life. The food processor wasn’t anything more than a small hatch to a recessed gap in the bulkhead. Food appeared at frequent but irregular intervals and the machine went kachunk.

The whole processor was behind the bulkhead, so he felt a little silly talking to it. Actually, for all he knew the system was like the sliding doors on the TV show
Star Trek
that had two guys pulling the doors open and pushing them closed—out of camera range, of course. Maybe Scooter or Betty opened a hatch on the other side of the bulkhead, put in some food, and shut the hatch. Maybe kachunk was the Teumess equivalent of a dinner bell.

Larry’s cabin may have been slightly larger than his living room back in Kansas, but the space was devoid of any furniture, other than his sleeping pallet in a corner on the floor. There were no chairs, no sofa, no divan, no chaise, not even a loveseat. He used his sleeping pallet if he wanted to sit somewhere. He always set his backpack at the foot of his sleeping pallet, unless he was using it for a footstool.

He had bathroom facilities. He relieved himself in the hole in the deck. The shower was just that recessed button and a small gap melted in the bulkhead. Water poured out when he pushed the button. Then the water ran down the hole in the deck.

The deck didn’t slant toward the hole in the floor. He was almost certain of that. He had a good eye for spatial analysis, but somehow the water knew where to go. No matter how much he splashed, all the excess water ran to the hole in the deck.

He assumed the Teumess had water that was much smarter than the average bucketful on Earth, the process was just plain magic, or the technology at work was one he’d never seen. His best guess was, the last scenario was most likely; however, he was determined not to rule anything out until he could prove otherwise.

Larry had become wary of setting anything directly on the deck. The last time he’d set his backpack on the deck, it gravitated toward the hole. The full-sized backpack was much too big to be sucked down the drain, but he did lose a good pair of socks that way. When you only had a few pair, the loss of any was disastrous. Moreover, the pair he had lost was one black sock and one white sock. Fortunately, he still had another pair just like it.

For some reason, he didn’t gravitate toward the hole and neither did his sleeping pallet. Maybe the pallet was magic in its own right, or maybe the deck recognized it as something that should be there and not to be discarded. Socks might have been too unusual for the floor to comprehend. He didn’t remember Scooter wearing anything resembling clothes — nor had Betty.

His spaceship cabin was painted, not quite like his living room at home. That was a good thing. Nancy had always hated — and disbelieved — his claim that he was too busy to paint or repaper the living room. The farmhouse was old and there were at least four generations of floral wallpaper showing at any given time.

Larry always said Nancy was too fussy about the way the room looked. At least that was what he always told Nancy. But he liked it that way. Something about a casual distressed look was comfortable after a hard day of watching cows or fishing down at the creek. Fortunately, much of his house and furniture had that distressed antique look.

He’d told Nancy she was welcome to paint or paper any time she wanted. He assured her she would have plenty of time if she quit watching daytime television and reading romance novels. He had only said that twice. Both times, he slept on the couch for a week afterward.

He was quite pleased that he figured out the connection between criticizing Nancy and sleeping on the couch after only two times. Normally, it took him much longer to find connections between such disparate activities, like being hit in the head by Doug Rickenhauser and having a headache the next day. He was still working on why it hurt worse the next day than it did on the day Doug actually punched him.

The paint job in his cabin wasn’t done in the typical Earth fashion. There was paint layered in a multitude of greens. He could only assume the Teumess liked green in all its varieties. It looked like a Kansas field on a bright, spring day when he squinted at it. The ceiling was a greenishness to a light blue hue. He wondered if the ceiling paint was the color of the sky on the Teumessian home world.

Larry would have asked that question, but Scooter hadn’t come to see him in person in the six weeks since coming aboard. Nor had he seen anyone else. The little translator disappeared one night while he slept. There was a communicator unit on the wall to talk to the crew of the ship, but the thing was just a speaker with an on and off switch that was an obvious add-on as the technology didn’t match the rest of what little of the ship he’d seen. The communicator unit wasn’t much of a conversationalist, no matter what its name implied. The ship’s crew wasn’t much better.

Scooter was the only Teumess on board insane enough to talk to Larry, even over a voice-only communicator. And for that type of conversation, Scooter still needed his drugs to do that on a regular basis. Out of concern for Scooter, Larry only called someone when he had an absolute need. He hadn’t thought of an absolute need for the last three weeks. Not that Larry had any problems with not talking to another person in three weeks. He could easily have gone that long at home, because the ever-increasing number of telemarketers kept his voice box in active condition.

His refrigerator, back in Kansas, would have laughed to hear about Larry thinking he needed telemarketers to talk to. Larry often subjected the fridge to a morning monolog, even though he awarded the coffee pot most of his attention. But, the old fridge would have been too polite to laugh in Larry’s face. It would have much preferred to laugh at him behind his back. That was the way refrigerators were, especially the kind without a built in icemaker.

Older refrigerators would never say it, but those ice cube trays hurt, even the newer plastic kinds. That was why refrigerators built up a layer of frost. The frost was an effort to separate themselves from those trays and minimize the contact. Larry’s fridge was ancient and extremely talented at isolating ice cube trays with frost and ice. Larry had begun to do without ice cubes and kept most of his frozen goods in the freezer on the back porch. Like all chest style, freezer-only units, it seemed to have a thing for a little pain every now and then.

It hadn’t taken Larry long to determine he wasn’t in a cell. There weren’t any bars on the windows — no windows either. The hatch wasn’t ever locked because there wasn’t a lock on the hatch. The cabin was self-sufficient, not that it had everything it needed, but it did give Larry water, fresh air, a toilet, a shower, a place to sleep and — through the small hatch in the wall — plenty to eat.

He thought back on all of his nautical terms since “room” didn’t sound quite right. The only word he could find was stateroom or cabin. Both words seemed to be a bit over the top for the accommodations provided by this room, but if he was going nautical then cabin would have to do.

All things considered, the cabin was comfortable, even though there wasn’t anything in it other than Larry, a pallet on the deck with Larry’s sleeping bag, his backpack, and e-reader. Without being locked in, he was free to push the hatch button — that one button on the bulkhead by the hatch to the corridor — leave his cabin, and wander this single ship’s corridor at will. When he first arrived, he went wandering the corridor of the ship. The surrounding corridor was short, but there weren’t any hatches or other rooms to explore. At least, he didn’t have access to any hatches or rooms. Other rooms were exactly like the women in Racine’s Bar and Girls. Her place was full of pretty girls — well … sort of pretty — on weekends — after a few beers — but, he didn’t have access to any of them, or if he did, he didn’t have a clue how to go about it.

Even if there wasn’t a lock on Larry’s hatch, all the other hatches remained locked and hidden. Upon reflection, Larry should have expected that. Looking at it from Scooter’s point of view, he wouldn’t want an ignorant Earth alien curiously poking buttons on the bridge or jiggling levers in engineering.

At first, he wondered if the crew went into hibernation somewhere behind one of the locked hatches. But he heard feet scurry away from him far too often for that to be the case. He resisted the urge to chase after the sound. He wasn’t so lonely he was willing to force his presence on any creature so obviously terrified of him. Just like he was unwilling to force his presence on any pretty girl at Racine’s Bar and Girls, or even the other patrons at Benny’s Been There Bar and Done That Grill next to the motel out on Highway 74.

The whole thing about not talking to pretty girls was frustrating. Thinking about it, he wondered if that frustration had anything to do with his rather unpleasant and oft-times painful relationship with the Rickenhauser brothers. He knew there was a correlation between his normal frustration and his growing frustration on Scooter’s spaceship. He wasn’t at the level yet to punch something or someone, but he could sense he’d have to do something soon, or he would end up punching someone.

Larry never thought he had problems talking to strangers or even chatting up pretty girls. But with the last few weeks of reflection, he was beginning to doubt his own social skills. He clearly remembered his first meeting with Nancy. That was back when he was about four, long before he found out she was going to be a pretty girl and hence hard to talk to. Since both sets of parents were friends, they grew up knowing each other and he never had to learn how to talk to her.

Strangely, social communication wasn’t taught in any of the schools he attended, except as an extracurricular fraternity activity at college and he’d avoided them like he avoided Ol’ Bucky’s doggy-do landmines when walking barefoot in the yard.

Talking to aliens was only slightly less difficult than talking to pretty women. Larry tried to tell Scooter he wouldn’t harm him or any of the crew. He used every logical argument he could think of, but nothing worked, not even his promise to wear a locked Hannibal Lechter mask and give Scooter the key. Nothing worked because fear isn’t a logical, rational emotion, not among humans and certainly not among the Teumess.

Scooter was insane. Only his insanity allowed him to talk to Larry at all. He was as loony as a jar full of Canadian one-dollar coins. To a lesser extent, so was Betty. Scooter had told him she wasn’t sane by Teumess standards. Only in her craziness had she allowed him to see her when they were back on Earth. Giving him a view of her fluffy little backside was exactly like having a human death wish. No sane prey deliberately flaunts their meaty parts to a hungry predator.

Larry remembered from his high school psychology class that humans had a flight or fight response when confronted with danger. He thought that any creature who considered themselves as food would have developed a hide or flight response. Hence, the development of camouflage and protective coloring found on many of Earth’s creatures.

The rest of the crew on all fourteen spaceships was, to some degree or other, nuts as a pecan orchard at harvest time in the middle of October, maybe even well into December depending on how far south the orchard might be. There was no other explanation for creatures so obviously xenophobic and so herd, pack-bound to get into a spaceship and go visit another planet full of creatures that — they were sure — planned to eat them on the first sunny day fit for a barbeque.

Larry often wondered about why they sent fourteen spaceships when they only needed one. He understood their desire to have others of their own around, nearby, close enough to touch. But why send the number fourteen? Why not eight? The Teumess had three fingers and an opposable thumb on each hand. Two hands with four digits each would have meant eight ships. He’d counted four breasts on Betty. Maybe they had an average of four kits to a litter. That wasn’t equally divisible into fourteen.

Maybe he didn’t have enough data on Teumess culture. Maybe crew for fourteen ships was all the crazy people they could round up for one trip. Maybe fourteen was their ultimate lucky number. Maybe it took that particular number of spacecraft to dig a decent sized wormhole through hyperspace.

The Teumess were as curiosity driven as humans. When humans found something new, their tendency was to look at it from every angle, to touch it, to smell it, to listen to it rattle and yes, to pop it in their mouths to see what it tasted like. A baby with its first cookie exemplified human curiosity. However, the Teumess wanted to look at any new thing from a distance, much more like a mature adult in a china shop.