Larry Goes To Space (11 page)

Scooter told him their normal contact with other worlds was done though a long distance probe. Sending a personal representative to pick up a human volunteer was done partly out of extreme politeness. Larry thought the galaxy was a much more polite place than he would have thought it to be. It wouldn’t take long before Larry found out how wrong that was.

Larry looked at his watch on the way across the room to check on the kachunk from the food processor. He was beyond checking the time. He watched the watch for the date. He’d been on the Teumess spaceship for about six weeks. Or that is what his watch said, although he did have to read the watch face. Everybody knew watches did not talk. At least, none Larry ever owned had talked. That new watch in the commercials did everything including talk. At the speed of technology, who knew how quickly talking watches would show up in a store Larry could afford to shop in! After all, Dick Tracy had one in the early 1930s.

There were all kinds of other possibilities that would preclude his watch from being accurate. They could have dropped into an alternate universe where time had no relevance. They could have jumped through a series of wormholes where time stood still as they traveled through each wormhole, only to speed back to normal time when in normal space. Einstein was probably right, if they were approaching the speed of light, then his time would appear to be moving forward at a normal pace, but the time back on Earth would be speeding by. Years could have gone by at this point if that were so. Larry had no evidence to call Einstein a liar.

Larry would have asked Scooter, but he didn’t want to bother the little Teumessian. For all he knew, Scooter was in charge of this space-going loony bin. Maybe Scooter was the head loon. Maybe Scooter needed to concentrate on flying the spacecraft.

That led Larry to wonder if spacecraft were like cars: the faster you went the more attention the vehicle demanded. Fast cars became demanding quickly, much like some wives. If a spaceship approaching the speed of light had a proportionate demand as a fast car approaching the speed of say, seventy-three miles per hour, then the spaceship would be like having a thousand wives, each bitchier than the last. Larry chuckled, that might be a good analogy as far as his ex-wife Nancy went. Still his mother, his grandmother, and even little Marcy seemed to be a different breed.

Larry opened the food replicator hatch. He would have called it the food bin hatch or the lid to the open space where the food came in, but it looked so much like the door to his microwave that he didn’t have much choice. The food replicator hatch was exactly like the ones on the
Star Trek
show, only Larry was sure there wasn’t much replicating going on. He was a good judge of a bad meal, having made so many of them. Surely, the programming in a replicator would be consistently better, or at least consistently mediocre. Machines tended to be consistent, whether good or bad.

He was semi-pleased to see this meal was the nut log. The meal wasn’t like a nut log from the cheese store at a mall or what you got by catalog as a holiday present from an old college roommate who was either too lazy to get you a better gift or lacked a serious sense of imagination. Larry knew this wasn’t like a nut log from a cheese gift basket because he had given and received more than his fair share of such gift baskets. This nut log was exactly like a meatloaf, except there wasn’t any meat.

He wasn’t sure what nuts were used and what vegetables were mixed in, but it tasted quite like ground sirloin with some mashed potatoes mixed in. The alien meatless meatloaf was far removed from his grandmother’s meatloaf. Dad suggested once — out behind the barn, out of Grandma’s hearing — that her meatloaf had been the cause of Grandpa’s stroke. Larry didn’t doubt it since even Ol’ Bucky — whose favorite meal was dead skunk ala asphalt — wouldn’t eat it. This meatloaf was satisfactorily edible, its biggest drawback being that it appeared in the replicator window far too often, much like his grandmother’s meatloaf at his parents place.

Early on, Larry tried to offer food suggestions to Scooter, but failed miserably. For some reason, the Teumessian didn’t get the concept of catsup. Larry really missed catsup. He would’ve been happy with salsa or even a spicy fruit compote, but Scooter seemed repelled by the idea of mixing fruit and vegetables in the same dish. They also didn’t get the idea of using spices much beyond salt. Their meals did have delicate and subtle flavors. Unfortunately, Larry didn’t have subtle or delicate taste buds. These meals were so bland, he was willing to try an onion and lemon peel coleslaw with a Tabasco chaser.

Still, this nut log smelled a bit different from last time. He sniffed it and smelled a hint of smoke.

“No,” he said aloud.

The little e-reader didn’t respond since the sentence was completely out of any context.

The food processor didn’t respond since it was just a small hatch and not a real machine.

Larry shook his head. “It’s not the nut log that smells like smoke.”

He sniffed the air, turning in a slow circle. He was sure there was a hint of smoke coming from the open food hatch. He set his nut log on his pallet and pushed the wall communication unit button.

“Scooter? Are you there?” There was no response. “Hey? Somebody? I smell smoke in here.”

There wasn’t any answer. There hadn’t been any answer in weeks. The Teumessians, having disappeared into the ship, weren’t talking to him, even Scooter.

There wasn’t even any static from the communicator, not that there had ever been static. The observation was just a human one for Larry to make. The last hundred years of human technology development had driven humans toward static noise immunity. Radio static, television static, landline telephones, cell phones, and even the latest music gizmo barraged humans to the point they couldn’t operate without a certain level of noise.

Larry was only slightly less noise inclined as farm animals didn’t generate much in the way of static. His television was exceptionally skilled at static and seemed to work at making up for his cows lack of static enthusiasm.

He shook his head, took a deep breath, and pushed the recessed button to melt open the hatch. He was convinced somewhere aboard the ship — his open hatch would set off an alarm warning all the Teumess there was a carnivore on the loose. The smell of smoke was stronger in the corridor, but he couldn’t hear any alarms, either fire, smoke, or carnivore alarms. Larry wasn’t a long time veteran of space voyages. Still, being in deep space for six weeks put him well ahead of most humans, that included everyone he knew and then some. Even with as little time in space as he had, he was sure that fire on board a spacecraft wasn’t a good thing.

The smoke smell was stronger coming from the left, so Larry went left. He turned a corner and faced a pair of Teumessians racing his way. The crewmembers froze. Jammed over their heads were enclosed, clear plastic-looking bags. The bags inflated and deflated with their rapid breathing. Larry didn’t want to startle them, so he slowly turned and put his face to the wall.

He was surprised it worked.

The Teumessians were obviously more afraid of whatever was burning than they were of Larry. They raced past him with a burst of speed, shot around the corner, and were out of sight before he could turn back.

Larry didn’t think he could have caught them if he wanted to. He’d have to remember that argument with Scooter. Those two crewmembers moved like their tails were on fire. Still, only one of them had a really fluffy tail worth the name. She had a tail and tits. He was pleased with his observation skills, although being a guy, it wasn’t too much of a challenge to recognize breasts. The crewmembers were one male and one female.

Also being a guy, he could not help noticing that the female was a redhead — a foxy little ginger — with breasts bigger than Betty’s. Her breasts weren’t large by Earth standards. Larry wasn’t particularly fond of large breasts. Noticing them was just a man thing. He couldn’t help but notice Ginger’s breasts anymore than he could stop breathing. Strangely enough, that was the problem with fire on spaceships. It burned the oxygen you needed to breathe.

Larry heard yipping and yapping going on in the next cabin. He eased up to an open hatchway. There were three crewmembers in the cabin; two females and one male. All three of the crew wore clear plastic bags over their heads. The male and one female were trying desperately to move a handle set into the wall. The handle was black and looked exactly like the handle on the fuse box on Larry’s back porch, except that it was much larger, it wasn’t attached to a fuse box, and it moved right to left instead of up and down. The handle wasn’t moving although the pair was throwing their whole weight against it.

One female, and he couldn’t say why, he thought was Betty. She was holding the end of a hose. The hose was barely dribbling out white sandy foam. The foam wasn’t quite reaching the fire engulfing one bulkhead of what looked like a small kitchen.

Larry doubted it was a grease fire. He had set way too many pans of bacon aflame to not recognize that kind of fire. This fire was burning hot, even if it wasn’t fed by some kind of oil. The kitchen countertops were melting. Not like a hatch melting open and unmelting closed, but more like a toy green plastic army man soaked in gasoline and set on fire when bombarded by firecrackers.

He wasn’t surprised Betty was unable to get close enough to put even a dribble of suppressant on the flame. He was standing closer than he would have wanted to be. He was worried if he went into the room he would scare the Teumessians so badly he might end up fighting this flame alone.

He wanted to help with the lever. He hoped it didn’t release a fire suppressant he couldn’t breathe. He hoped moving the lever didn’t open a window to space suffocating the fire. He knew whatever the result, he had to help. None of them might survive if he didn’t do something.

Larry wasn’t ready to not survive.

…
being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.
(Samuel Johnson)

CHAPTER SEVEN

LARRY stepped into the kitchen.

Betty heard him. Her head swiveled around as if she’d been slapped. Her eyes were already wide with fear. Her breathing was causing the plastic head gear to expand and contract like a clown’s balloon gone berserk. She dropped the hose and held her hands up in a defensive position. She was close enough to the fire it had already slightly singed her fur, yet she backed away from him, moving closer to the heat. Her blondish hair began to singe, curl, and smoke. It was a perfect example of “out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

Larry wasn’t so sure her position was as defensive as it looked. Her fingers ended in long sharp claws. They weren’t sharp like cat’s claws, but like human nails or even more like those little, folding military entrenching tools except they weren’t green and didn’t have serrated edges. He didn’t intend to get any closer to those claws than he had to. They could shred him like taco cheese and as fast as the Teumess were, his shredding would be over before you could pour on the salsa.

He pointed at the fire, to the hose, and then back to the fire. There was no need to speak, even if they could hear through their headgear, they wouldn’t understand him anyway. He moved away from the hatch so she could bolt if she had to. He would rather fight the fire alone than have her burn to death in front of him.

She gave a little shiver, grabbed the fire hose, and held it delicately with one hand. She pointed at the lever on the wall. She — Betty didn’t need to speak either. The situation was desperate, but simple. Burn to death, let the fire rob the spacecraft of all oxygen, or put out the fire.

There may have been escape pods. Every ship from the Enterprise to the Nostromo had some kind of emergency getaway pod, shuttle, bus, or transport. Even if this ship had them, Larry didn’t know where they were or even how to open the hatch to get to one. He supposed Scooter might show him, but that would be like a fatman going into the nearest clothing store. You never knew if you’d find something that fit. And even if he could find an escape pod that fit, could he wear it in public? What was the proper attire for hyperspace, or a wormhole, or wherever the hell they were?

He wondered if the ship had more than one escape pod. If they didn’t, then he doubted if even Scooter would be willing to climb into a small emergency pod with an omnivore. Larry was sure he would rather be burned to death than be eaten while still alive. A spaceship wasn’t like a bus — you couldn’t get out and walk to the next town if the bus was full of crazies, zombies, or heaven-forbid a horde of rabid door-to-door magazine salesmen.

The other Teumessians hadn’t seen him in their desperation to move the lever. It was an indication of how panicked the little creatures were. Larry was far enough into the room to see clearly which way the handle had to turn. Painted on the wall was a very earthlike arrow. The words painted there may have said anything from fire retardant; to, open for access to escape hatch; or even, times up, might as well party. Larry had seen the Teumess language, but without a frame of reference, there was no way to know for sure.

He braced his left arm against the door jam. Since the opening was really a hatch and not a door, it should be called a hatch jam, but Larry decided that sounded too much like a hot chili made into jelly. Not that he was very familiar with hatch chilies. There was that one time he tried one when he was in college. The name stuck in his head like the heat stuck to the roof of his mouth. However, he was sure whoever named the little chili a hatch chili had done so because it burned his personal waste disposal hatch the next day.

Even if this was a hatch, thinking of it as a door was easier than thinking of a door as anything other than a door, even if it did melt to open and unmelt close.

He wondered if this fire could get hot enough to melt the spaceship’s hull. The flames were doing as good a job burning the kitchen equipment as the hatch chili had done upon exiting his body the next day.

He stretched an arm over the heads of the two Teumess and grabbed the lever with his right hand. At the sight of his hand, the male Teumess squealed like a little girl, or at least the equivalent of a Teumessian little girl. He darted to a corner and cowered there. The female ignored him. She tried bracing a foot against the slick bulkhead and yanked harder on the lever. Her foot couldn’t find purchase on the bulkhead and she was unable to bring her powerful lower body muscles into play.

Larry was sure she saw him. She had darker fur than Betty, and her eyes seemed to be just a bit bigger, but that may have been due to the light refraction through her plastic headgear, her fear of fighting a fire and a carnivore at the same time, or just his imagination. Whatever the reason, Larry decided this little Veronica had a lot more guts than Jughead hiding in the corner.

Larry didn’t want to criticize his host’s design of an emergency system, but the lever was set too high on the wall for the Teumess to reach with any kind of comfort or efficiency. Even an extra length of pipe would have been enough to give the little folks the leverage needed to move the lever. Why would anyone design an emergency system with a lever? What was the matter with using good old-fashioned buttons, or a voice activated command, or better yet, an automated fire suppression system?

This spaceship was so much like farming it was scary. In farming, little had changed since the invention of the tractor and the cotton gin. With the exception of a progressive thinker here and there, most farmers did their work the same way their daddies taught them. Many farmers failed because they’d been born into families with stupid daddies.

Larry pulled the lever with his right arm, bracing harder against the door jam with his left. There was a slight pop and the lever slid smoothly to the left. A blast of white sandy foam hit him in the back of his head.

Veronica dropped to the deck in exhaustion.

Betty was yipping in distress.

The hose was blasting out the white sandy fire retardant with enough force she was unable to control the nozzle. She was small enough that the hose was tossing her about like a berserk tilt-a-whirl at a traveling carnival.

Not that Larry had ever spent any time on a berserk tilt-a-whirl. By the time he pulled himself away from the booth selling cold beer and deep fried Twinkies, he had drunk so many beers that the carnival ride would make him puke. At the same time, he had never drunk enough that he was willing to tempt a puking for such a ride. Still, he recognized Betty’s whipping and whirling motion.

Larry jumped next to her, wrapped his arms around her, and grabbed the nozzle with both hands. He didn’t feel Betty pull away from him, so he leaned in and began to direct the flow of the fire retardant toward the bottom of the flame. He felt the hose give a little tug. He glanced behind him. Veronica had lifted the hose up on her shoulders. The nozzle was easier to direct toward the flame without having to lift and direct at the same time.

It didn’t take long for the flame to sizzle and die. But, the room was filled with smoke and soot. It was hard for Larry to breathe but there wasn’t much else he could do except keep breathing. He wondered if the fire retardant was toxic. It wouldn’t make sense to use a toxic chemical when you had to keep living and breathing in the confined space of a small spaceship.

However, what might be toxic to him might not be to the Teumessians. They may look like earth-style mammals, but looks were all he had to go on. They might not even be mammals. Just because the females had accessories that looked like mammary glands did not mean their accessories were mammary glands.

The females might not even be female, since he only had the word of a translator that might have been wrong. He had to admit to himself that this was the first time he’d been close enough for a detailed look. He wasn’t sure he wanted to get that close, but that might depend on how long he was stuck in space.

Veronica ran to the lever and shut off the fire retardant flow to the hose. Once unstuck, it moved quite easily.

Larry dropped the hose and backed away from the two females. That put them between him and the open hatch. They could run away if they felt the need. Jughead jumped up from the corner and shot out of the room as if the Piggly Wiggly in Fredonia was running a two-for-one sale on cheap beer.

He didn’t blame the little guy all that much. Larry knew he would’ve been out of a swamp as fast as he could if someone dropped an alligator in with him. But he wouldn’t have left the swamp if there were a couple of women there to protect. He was a country boy, after all. You just do not leave your women behind to be eaten by alligators, even if it meant you got close enough to floss the old guy.

Veronica stood near the door, staying near the lever. Betty didn’t move. She slumped down a bit, resting her hands on her knees, assuming the place where her legs bent could properly be called knees. The two females looked at each other and nodded.

Larry didn’t know if the communication meant, good job on the fire; this carnivore is too slow to eat both of us, so no need to rush out; or, that a-hole Jughead isn’t getting laid tonight. Whatever it meant the two females didn’t leave the room. Somehow, knowing they wouldn’t run away was comforting. Maybe he was not as much of a loner as he thought or maybe Ol’ Bucky and his horse Dollar had been more acceptable companions than he gave them credit for.

He moved over to check out the fire’s hot spots. And it was hot. The first piece he yanked away from the melted, mushy, burnt mess was hot. He blew on his fingers, but reached for another piece.

He’d never had any fire training, but he’d built enough campfires to know that if you don’t spread the logs out, it’s likely to reignite, just like the time Nancy came over to get some of her stuff. She decided to stay over when it got too late to drive back on snow covered, unpaved roads. She and Larry had gotten too close on the couch and things definitely reignited.

Not willing to let things go up in flames again, Larry grabbed another piece of what looked like melted cabinet. The melted metal was hot and best cast aside; just as Nancy leaving the next morning as early as she could was best for all concerned. He pulled another few pieces away, trying to estimate the damage as he went.

A flash of flames caught his eye. Without thinking, he swatted at it with his hands, trying to pat it out. Clearing away the top layer had let oxygen reach down and feed the heat of the lower layers. He quit patting at the fire when part of the cabinet came away on his hands in flaming, molten-plastic style.

He had a brief flash of memory from childhood. Camping trips are a time for roasting marshmallows over the fire and going barefoot. However, a flaming marshmallow dropped on a bare foot shouldn’t be brushed off with a bare hand. That’s asking to get both your feet and hands burned. It had also put Larry off roasted marshmallows for the rest of his life, or rather the rest of his life so far. Maybe someday he’d try them again. Maybe he’d get the chance to try one of those s’mores things everyone raved about. So far, he’d been unable to get past the flaming marshmallow part.

He cursed himself. His hand was on fire and he didn’t have anyone to blame but himself. He’d have cursed the fire, but there was no sense in making the fire any more angry than it already was. The fire was only doing what fire did. He was angry with himself because he would have sworn he’d learned the lesson about not grabbing burning, sticky things. It was obvious he hadn’t learned it near as well as he thought.

A gentle stream of fire retardant splashed across his hand, dousing the flame. It quickly cooled his fingers. The stream flicked over to the reignited fire. The fire died, or went to wherever fires go to when they aren’t burning. Betty sprayed the whole area again, but the hose wasn’t blasting out the fire retardant like before. He looked. Veronica had managed to move the lever only partway. Larry held up his hands in front of his face in an imitation of Scooter’s agreement, cupping his fingers as if drinking water from them.

Veronica gave a delightful little yip, causing Betty to look around.

The two females yipped and barked back and forth, even pointing at Larry. He wondered if he’d made the wrong hand signal. Maybe it didn’t mean the same thing from male to female as it did from male to male. Her response could mean: not on your life, thank you, but I am not into hairless giant apes, or even bacon is bad for your cholesterol levels.

He really hoped he could talk to Scooter about miniaturizing the translator unit. After all, he’d seen commercials for cell phones with translation capabilities and this supposedly technologically superior race was dragging something around the size of an old vacuum cleaner.

He flexed his fingers. They felt hot, but showed no serious burns. They’d hurt for a few days, but it wasn’t any worse than sucking melted cheese from a pizza just out of the microwave up on the roof of your mouth.

Larry wasn’t willing to shove a bare hand back into the burned area. He spotted a pipe. It looked like cast iron plumbing. Even though one end had melted, the other end was cool to the touch. He yanked it free from the burned mess and began using it like a breaker bar, spreading the pieces every which way.

Whenever he uncovered a hot spot, Betty flooded the area, and him, with a gush of fire retardant. When he reached the corner where the bulkhead met the deck, he stopped and leaned against his impromptu fire pick. He would’ve wiped the sweat from his eyes, but his hands, arms, and shirt were drenched in sooty firefighting leftovers.