Larry Goes To Space (26 page)

A friend loves you for your intelligence, a mistress for your charm, but your family's love is unreasoning; you were born into it and are of its flesh and blood. Nevertheless it can irritate you more than any group of people in the world
. (
André Maurois
)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Larry sat on the edge of the old piano bench in his living room. Not that there was an old piano to go with the bench. He kept the bench around, tucked away in a corner, just in case he ever needed additional seating. The bench hadn’t been used since Thanksgiving Day three years ago. He’d almost burnt the whole house down, bench included, after that disastrous gathering. Today was almost as weird, but the bench had a comfortable feel.

He doubted he’d had such a strange collection of people gathered in his house since that day three years ago when Nancy tried to blend her family with his. Not that Larry had any problems with Nancy’s four sisters. They were each nice enough in their own right, but almost cookie cutter stereotypes: the farmer’s wife, the cowgirl, the biker babe, and the hippy still fighting against the Vietnam War, although nowadays, the war wore a different label.

Mixing Nancy’s sisters — and their husbands and children — with Larry’s family, was like mixing nitro with glycerin. Doing so at his tiny house was like trying to cram five pounds of explosives into a four-pound box using a hammer. Thanksgiving Day in Kansas might find the weather anything from picnic nice to freezing rain and ice. That day was too cold to be outside. Just like today.

He looked at Grandpa. The old man was crazy. He didn’t normally function well outside of his room at Larry’s parent’s home. Today, his grandfather was sitting on the floor in the middle of the living room playing with Veronica’s kits. The kits seemed as fascinated by the old man as he was by them. The little Teumessians were oddly attracted to the divergent feeling of the rough stubble on Grandpa’s chin versus the slick smooth feeling of his balding pate.

The tiny female kit had accepted the role of wiping the drool from the side of Grandpa’s mouth. She hadn’t figured out why he was leaking and continued to poke her fingers in his mouth to see what was causing the problem.

Larry hoped Grandpa remembered not to bite down, but even if he did bite, it would be a lesson for the kits, teaching them not to put their hands in the mouths of creatures with teeth. Larry learned that lesson the hard way with cows. He assumed the kits would learn from the same examples he had.

Ginger sat on the couch. She was wedged in between Larry’s cousin Gary and Gary’s wife Marcy. Ginger’s eyes were wide in amazement as Marcy sat her new baby in Ginger’s lap. Norma, the baby, giggled, cooed, and tried to stick her fingers in Ginger’s mouth.

Dad was sitting in Larry’s favorite recliner. The old beat up naugahyde chair was Larry’s favorite because it was parked directly in front of the television. Not that the chair cared if it was Larry’s favorite or not, it was after all, just a chair.

The television did enjoy the attention, though. If pressed into making a choice, the television would have preferred Larry watch more reality shows than he normally did. Not that the television didn’t like showing anything to Larry that Larry wanted to watch, but something about some of the police shows Larry liked disturbed the little set.

Dad was trying to explain to Bob and Ginger about the movie they were watching. Dad was getting all twisted around trying to explain that Audie Murphy was a real person just pretending to be Audie Murphy and that this war movie was a real event, but Hollywood was recreating the war for the entertainment of its audience.

Bob winked at Larry, having grasped the concept of entertainment long before having met Larry’s Dad, but was obviously enjoying the man’s attempt to explain the human desire to be amused. The Teumessian understood Dad and entertainment, but was horrified that humans considered watching war, death, and destruction as entertainment.

Betty and Veronica were in the kitchen with Larry’s mother and grandmother. Fixing lunch was a flurry of culinary mixology. The females were getting on well despite Grandma’s insistence that a grilled cheese sandwich was vegan and Veronica’s insistence that it wasn’t. The odors wafting out of the kitchen were odd, yet mouthwatering at the same time.

Larry certainly hoped Betty showed Grandma her non-meat meatloaf recipe. Even if Grandma substituted hamburger for the ground nuts and grains, it would have to be an improvement over Grandma’s normal attempts to make normal food. He hoped Mom could teach Veronica how to make a good peach cobbler, although they had already come to an impasse about using lard.

He could tell they were having a good time because pots and pans banged around in a loud clatter, mixed with chatter and chuckles. Even though Larry was still stuffed from breakfast, the women were working hard to prepare lunch: moving this, grabbing that, and pouring stuff from here to there.

Although it didn’t say so, the refrigerator was having the most fun it had had in years, partly because the Teumessians were small enough that when they grabbed the door handle to open it, their fingers tickled a sensitive spot. The old machine was struggling to keep things cold with the door opening and closing so often, but it decided a little workout every now and again wouldn’t be a bad thing. The stove was of a different opinion, but the fridge and the stove didn’t discuss anything — ever. Their functions were too much at odds for them to ever agree on anything, no matter how often the blender tried to mediate.

Larry wondered where Jughead was. The little Teumessian had taken a liking to Ol’ Bucky, although the dog was more than a little leery of the additional attention and was far too old to play the chase-the-stick game. Jughead’s fascination seemed to stem from the fact that Ol’ Bucky was a pack-hunting meat-eater, but didn’t seem to consider the Teumessian as food. Ol’ Bucky tolerated Jughead’s attention because the little Teumessian seemed to have a fascination for roadkill, although the two had very different ideas about what to do with it.

Larry didn’t wonder where Dusty was. Being on a planet full of omnivores made Dusty even crazier. He was still trying to find someone to kill him, Doug Rickenhauser having passed on the offer a few days before.

The road out front was lined three cars deep. The first row of cars was every law enforcement officer in a hundred miles sitting bumper to bumper. The LEOs stood at the ready. Various expressions of everything from near panic to homicidal mania graced their faces as they held their shotguns and rifles at the ready. Their orders were to protect Larry and his property until the government could send in the national guard, the army, or a congressional committee to figure out what to do with aliens in Kansas.

The second row of cars was the media, with more arriving all of the time. Cameras and microphones were pointed at Larry’s yard and house like a bristling hedgerow. Reporters wandered up and down the road attempting to interview anyone who might foolishly make eye contact with them. The few media vans with high telescoping poles could manage to get a camera high enough in the air to capture a picture of the spaceship hovering about a foot above Larry’s backyard.

The third row of cars, trucks, recreational vehicles, and motorcycles had jammed the road closed and were parked every which way, even deep into the field across the street. The foremost vehicle was the Rickenhauser’s plumbing truck. The temperature was at the freezing mark, but Doug and Jeff were tailgating: drinking beer, grilling bratworst, and lounging in lawn chairs. They’d been at it since the first day. Fortunately for the boys, Racine from Racine’s Bar and Girls brought a pickup truck filled with beer and bags of beer nuts. And licenses be damned, she was doing good business.

Dusty was prancing back and forth in front of the crowd, cameras and all, daring anyone and everyone to kill him. Jeff Rickenhauser might have done it, but Larry wouldn’t let Dusty take a translator unit out there with him. Someday, someone somewhere would take the recordings of Dusty’s yips and yaps and interpret them to find out what he was really saying, but today, all heard his Teumessian voice and understood nothing.

The steers in the front pasture heard Dusty all too clearly, however, his similar appearance to a large Earth style fox was more than they could tolerate. They were clustered in a far corner as far away from the excitement as they could get. They were too far away to care about what Dusty was saying.

The steers were somehow more stupid than the average cow. Their minute level of intelligence dropped dramatically the same day they were downgraded from bulls to steers.

More than one steer would forget why they were clustered so far away from the house and the piles of hay Gary had left for them. In a fit of desire for some tasty bit of grass, he would wander closer to the house, trudging over the hill until he caught sight of Dusty and the humans with guns. He would then race back to his herd at top bovine speed.

All this should have seemed strange to Larry, but it didn’t. This was now his normal. What was strange — very odd indeed — was that Nancy was perched on the piano stool next to him. She had a firm grip on his hand as if she was afraid he would get away again. A look of contentment spread over her face as she leaned her head on his shoulder and kissed his neck.

He was content as well.

Larry wasn’t normally a conspiracy minded person. However, he was beginning to feel a bit paranoid and was thinking that someone had put a kink in his communication hose. He, and every American over the age of three, knew the NSA could listen in to every communication he received. He expected that.

For any agency, listening to phone calls was only a short step away from blocking the calls and stopping messages from getting though at all. The easiest way to get control of Larry’s spaceship would be to choke off competitor’s offers. Larry was a cattle rancher, but the phrase National Security wasn’t unknown to him.

He might not wonder about who killed Marilyn Monroe and made it look like an accident, why Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, or where Jimmy Hoffa was buried, but he did wonder if the government had black helicopters and stealth drones. No matter what he’d said to the president of the United States, he also wondered if Seal Team Six would kill them all when they came to steal his spaceship or if they would just hold them captive for a while.

He was sure the only thing that had kept the United States government or an agent of theirs from coming after them, was the media camped in front of his house and the internet cameras watching everyone’s every move.

Hearing the whomp-whomp-whomp of helicopters overhead told him someone had grown tired of waiting.

Larry shouted. “Okay, people. It’s Go time. On the double!”

This scenario had been planned from day one.

Bob and Ginger grabbed the kits over Grandpa’s objections and bolted out the back door. Nancy grabbed her camera and was out the back door before Larry. Larry was faster, but he’d stopped to give Dad a macho chin wag, Gary a thumbs up, Mom and Grandma quick hugs.

Despite his desire to be the focus of an alien autopsy, Dusty raced around the corner of the house. A trio of actual black helicopters overhead followed him closely. Dusty’s compliance with the go order stemmed more from his belief that the government would not pay him as much for his autopsy as some civilian business might. Larry had convinced him the US government probably wouldn’t pay him anything.

Dusty quickly grasped the capitalist concept.

Larry grabbed Dusty by the scruff of the neck and tossed him through the hatch. Scrambling up behind him, Scooter gave him a quick nod of the head. Someone had always been on watch in the spaceship since setting down in Larry’s backyard. Scooter’s nod meant they had a full count. Everyone was aboard, even Jughead, racing in from points unknown.

Scooter said, “Sorry, Larry. I was watching, but I didn’t see those flying things coming.”

Larry slapped the hatch closed behind him. They were effectively sealed in and nothing the US Government could do — short of dropping a nuke on them — would damage them or the ship.

“Don’t worry about it, Scooter. Those things are meant to stay hidden until the last moment.”

Scooter waved at Nancy and waved to her camera. “Race you to the bridge.”

That was Scooter’s standing joke between him and Larry. Scooter was on the bridge before Larry could even start moving. Scooter thought it was hilarious Larry ran so slowly.

Nancy followed Larry to the bridge, her little camera whirring along happily.

Larry looked out the windshield at the helicopters hovering overhead. Two landed and vomited out armed men. They were dressed in riot gear, but they weren’t military. They wore black uniforms and were as unmarked as the helicopters themselves. Each man’s face was covered by a plexiglass shield over a black stocking mask that had very little to do with keeping out the winter chill.

Dad stood on the back porch. All he did was point at the spaceship and shrug. Larry waved back through the bridge windshield and gave his father a thumbs up.

Gary had completed his part of the go order. He’d gone out the front door and invited the hordes of newscasters to come on in. They swarmed around both sides of his house like flood waters around a boulder. Cameras and questions were stuck in the faces of the men in black. A multitude of cameras caught the spaceship from every angle, one young reporter even climbed a tree to get a higher view of the spaceship and the action unfolding.