 
Ghost Planet

Louis Shalako

This Smashwords edition copyright 2014 Louis Shalako and Long Cool One Books

Design: J. Thornton

ISBN 978-1-927944-00-4

Lenny Lays an Egg originally appeared in Wonderwaan. Anna first appeared in Ennea, Signs of Aging first appeared in defenestration magazine.

The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or deceased, or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters and incidents are the products of the author's imagination. The author's moral right has been asserted.

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Anna

Louis Shalako

Anna came into my life about fifteen years ago. What a lonely old bachelor I was, for one so young at the time. My future was bleak, empty and useless. When she walked into my life, what was a pretty barren existence suddenly blossomed with new meaning. At my age, it wasn't about having babies and starting a family. In most ways it wasn't even about sex. It certainly wasn't about lust. It was about friendship, and going places, and doing things together.

It was about not having to be alone anymore. It was about embarking together on a journey of discovery. At least that's how it worked out. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.

I must have been ready. I must have needed her.

I have such wonderful memories, like cruising down a side-road in autumn, with the top down, the roar of the motor in our ears, with warm sunlight and golden leaves falling from above, listening to classical symphonies and just laughing at the world in general.

***

It was a whole new life. My one true love, or so I thought, left when we were about twenty-five. Somehow I never got over it, and then I did the little stretch in the penitentiary, nothing special, just a little fraud charge. You don't get a chance for much female companionship in a jail. After twelve years inside, a certain little nest egg that I had put aside years earlier in a Swiss account, had burgeoned into a nice retirement fund. It's easy enough to memorize an account number.

After all those years inside, I was ruined for human relationships of any kind, or so I thought. I was an emotional cripple, for many years. There was a kind of acceptance. It's like I didn't even feel sorry for myself. I didn't even day-dream about love and romance, or relationships with women anymore. My bank manager, and the people who worked at the liquor store, or the girl who sold milk and bread, the tattooed young man behind the counter where I bought my cigars—these were the only human contacts that I needed. After I got out, my lawyer was my best friend. A lawyer will keep your secrets, and take them to the grave when he goes, too.

Time stands still in a jail.

Inside of a jail you have to shut down inside, and go into a state of numbness. It's the only thing that can get you through a long stretch with any hope of sanity when you get out. Thank God I had a little money. It gave me hope when I was inside, and I never could have coped on the outside without money.

I remember this one time, an old friend, long since departed, gave me some very good advice.

"Papillon had a plan, and you should too."

Papillon had a roll of money inside a piece of metal pipe with a screw-on cap, inserted up the nethermost regions of the alimentary canal, when they sent him to Devil's Island. I had mine inserted in a Swiss account. It was basically the same idea. Back in the eighties, when I set up that little pension-investment scheme, the one based on all the junk bonds going around back then, the one that caused me so much trouble in the end, I always knew that if I got caught before I got out of the country, I was going to do hard time.

"Pay yourself first."

That's what the financial planners and the motivational speakers all say.

So that's what I did. The feds never found any of the money I put away. I took a little time and set up a half a dozen new identities. That's really all you need for most purposes. For Christ's sakes, how dumb do you think I am? Looking back, I was a pretty sharp young guy, and I'm glad I made those sacrifices, now that I'm in my old age.

Too much success early on, then I got careless. The guys I was hanging out with were pretty dumb, and they all started off nice and respectable. They had no guts. When we got raided, all they had to do was to keep their mouths shut. Sit back, and let the lawyers fight their delaying action, and the likelihood is none of us would have done a day in jail. Once you're out on bail, and the lawyers get going, anything can happen.

When you're sitting there, 'Just trying to explain things,' to the cops, then real bad stuff starts to happen real fast. When you're out on bail, you have the option of just disappearing one day.

They watch you, but it can be done. Some guys just don't listen.

Amateurs tend to try and avoid detection. Amateurs like to have a plausible explanation of their involvement and thus their real innocence. A professional; and I thought I was one, just tries to avoid being convicted of anything. The totally professional thief really doesn't care what the neighbours think. By the time they find out, he should be long gone. My mistake was to have partners. You're only as good as the help.

Mentioning no names here, when the first one cracked, and began signing statements about the rest of us, and then a couple more guys tried to save themselves or get reduced sentences, we were all sunk. We were all sunk, and only one person, mentioning no names, got off easy in any sense, and he still did four years. He kept telling the cops, and the jury, how we made him do it.

Even those dummies didn't buy it. It's safe to say that none of my partners ever knew anything about my own personal finances; or any other sort of arrangements.

I'll tell you this much. Even if I had worked for twelve years, and miraculously saved every penny, I never would have had a tenth of what I ended up with. I guess you could say I earned it, and that I deserve to enjoy what is left of my life. I'm a reformed character now. I have no wants, no warrants, no paper on me anywhere. No unpaid fines, or taxes in arrears. I'm an honest man, now. I'm a respected member of the community.

***

After my previous life, Anna was a revelation. She was a real lady, and I quickly resolved to learn how to be a gentleman. It seemed to please her, and I wanted to please her. I remember our first anniversary, when she made us a beautiful dinner, at home in our apartment overlooking the bay. Never mind what town we were in. Her long black tresses, combed out to a glossy shine, hung over her alabaster shoulders, drawing the eye to her slim and elegant neck, like that carved wooden bust of Queen Nefertiti. I can still remember the first time I looked into those black, almond-shaped eyes, glistening in the candlelight, as we talked about sweet nonsense. We had our share of romance, over the years.

Anna was a good wife. When she walked into my life I was actually a little bit shy, and nervous, but of course at first it's not really serious. It's just that I didn't know what to expect. The cab pulled up in the driveway, and she paid off the driver. I could see her, barely, through the glare and reflections on the windshield. And then she got out, clutching her white leather purse, and wearing her smart blue skirt and jacket, with the tiny round pill-box cap perched on a jaunty angle on her head. To see her squinting up at the numbers on the front of the building caused my heart to beat a little faster. As her heels tapped their way up the walkway, my heart seemed to keep in time with her feet. I stared through the slit in the curtains with my heart pounding. I can admit that now.

But it was all right, and we got on like a house on fire right from the start. For an uncultured gentleman such as me, choosing a companion from another culture opened my eyes to a whole new world of taste, in art and literature, music, and theatre. It was always a treat to take her to the Kabuki theatre, where she would sit enthralled by the action, the costumes, the mime-type stuff, the gestures of the characters. I spent much of the time watching her reactions, more than anything.

She was so gentle when I came home from hang-gliding. I crashed a lot at first. I couldn't seem to get the thing to stay in the air. She would draw me a bath, and then after dropping her electric-blue silk kimono on the wet bathroom floor, and then climbing into the sudsy waters herself, she would soap and scrub all my abrasions and contusions squeaky clean.

Tenderly, in a motherly way, helping my tired, sore and aching body up out of the tub, she would carefully dry me off, and then make me lay down again just as promptly and then give me a thorough massage. She had surprisingly strong hands, and wasn't afraid to take her time and do a good job of it.

Anna would wrap me in a ratty green terry-cloth bathrobe I kept kicking around, and then she would curl up in my lap, as I sat leaning back in the big overstuffed lazy chair, and ask about my day. Anna was a good listener, more fearful for my safety than I was myself, more shocked at my misadventures, more proud of my successes. She claimed to be too scared to watch my attempts to fly the hang glider, and her shrieks and screams the first couple of times out, convinced me to leave her home. It was too much of a distraction, when trying to gauge the wind gusts, and altitude, and not break my damn fool neck.

She taught me to dance. To dance with Anna, her scent close in my nostrils, hand in the small of her back, was to know what intimacy really meant. What patience she had. She never lost her temper when I stepped on her feet, or backed her into another couple, lost in my own world of focus and attention, timing everything so carefully and trying to keep track of where the music was...step-step-step—oops! I smile still to think upon it. She was such a good sport, always cheerful, even when I got into one of my moods.

She was a good little housekeeper. She always knew where the band-aids were, or the sewing kit. We never ran out of milk or sugar, that's for sure. She kind of represented us as a family around the neighbourhood. I used to send her out to bingo, way back when we lived in Canada for a while.

She won a good ten or twelve percent of the time. I showed her how to invest her money, and pretty soon, Anna had her own income, which she used to buy the odd little accessories, jewelry, scarves, and things like that. She liked to surprise me once in a while with a new hairdo, stuff like that. I didn't mind, whatever made her happy was good enough for me.

We had a few spats, misunderstandings, really, but surprisingly few over the years.

Anna was such a good girl. She had her own friends, and people she used to see. Anna loved shopping. She would endlessly scour the town, wherever we were living at the time, if I needed a pair of pants or a shirt or something. She was tireless, and had a mind like a steel trap for prices. All across town, the girl always knew the prices. Some of the older women on our street would get her to go shopping with them. She was a good driver, and she could read the tags, and she would let them know diplomatically if an outfit was all wrong, or something. I didn't care. She was entitled to a day out once in a while. I used to go off by myself, out in the woods and just do some shooting—you know, just plinking at bottles and cans, sitting up on a fence post.

Sometimes I miss that old forty-five, but I had to ditch it one day just as a precaution. I don't know why, it was just some crazy instinct, but nothing came of it. I suppose it had served its purpose. It was a little paranoid, maybe. Loving Anna forced me to confront a few things about myself.

Ditching it represented a kind of closure, I guess. It was a funny feeling though. Somehow I felt naked, and all alone now, except for Anna. That was a tough time for me. I think that was the first time that I really allowed myself to grieve, for my lost life, my lost childhood. In a lot of ways, Anna helped me to learn how to feel again.

We must have made an odd-looking couple, anonymous enough in the working-class and middle-class resort towns where we generally preferred to live. She, barely five-foot three, with her creamy Asian skin, long, straight black hair, not looking a day over twenty-two. I made sure she was always dressed up as cute as a button; and myself, a tall, aging, balding figure, with a bit of a paunch, and my walking stick, easily old enough to be her daddy, yet clearly in love to any interested spectator. I favoured slightly stodgy and eminently boring wool suits in every shade of grey. The slightly-long sideburns, and the mustache, almost standard-issue amongst retired cops, army officers and bankers, was a stroke of brilliance. No one from my previous existence ever would have known me.

***

Anna and I were going to go on a tour of a half a dozen countries in Africa, on behalf of the Aids Awareness Foundation in Nimes, which was where we were living at the time. Nimes is a nice town, and we stayed there in winters, going back six or eight years. We had friends and neighbours, something that took me a while to actually get used to. All the conversations seemed so trivial, except for when someone was getting born, getting married, getting divorced, or dying.

That was about the only time anyone seemed to take anything seriously, or have a serious thought in their heads. They were completely self-absorbed. Well educated, they took no interest in the greater world around them. It simply didn't matter to them, as long as their own interests were served. They had no enlightenment. The outside world barely existed or registered on their minds. They thought they were cultured, when they went into their 'been there and done that' spiel. I never had to worry about any trouble from that sort of people. They accepted us at face value. All of them sent cards and letters when Anna became ill and flowers to her funeral. Don't get me wrong, they were nice enough people, and perfect cover.

Anna had a long and serious illness. She's buried in the plot where my mother and father would have been buried. It's a long story, but they were interred somewhere else. I was in jail at the time, so I didn't get to go to the funeral. It was a car accident.

Anna's illness lasted about four months, and in the end nothing could save her except possibly a total rebuild of all major components, and even with my independent means, money doesn't buy miracles. First of all, the servomechanisms in her left hip burned out, and the cryogenics cooling her superconducting brain-box were leaking like a sieve. Her heuristic algorithms were a bit old-fashioned, which affected her personality. While her emotional responses and reactions to a given situation were randomized by something analogous to fractal geometry, she was incapable of the sort of real growth that a human being might be capable of. She was old, tired, worn out and needed replacing.

I am grateful that we had chance to say goodbye to each other. She told me that she had enjoyed her time with me. I told her that she would last forever in my memory. She knew there was nothing we could do. We had plenty of time to laugh and to cry, and to work it all out. It was all so inevitable, really.

We thanked each other for our love.

And that was it. I stood there beside the bench holding her hand.

***

My Anna had picked up a real bad virus. It ate into her brain and caused her to have a series of micro-strokes, which had the effect of severely affecting her personality. She would never be the same again.

The technician switched her off, and then began disassembling her, as there are certain components that must be properly disposed of for environmental reasons, and others meant to be rebuilt or recycled. After all these years, the manufacturer no longer lists or stocks parts for this model, 'Anna;' #1987760-As-F-B-B.'

He boxed up her chassis, now stripped, and helped me to load her in the back of my Audi estate wagon.

Rather than pay the disposal fee, and since the plot in Shore View Cemetery belongs to me now, that's where she's buried. In a couple of weeks, Katerina arrives. I'm picking her up at the airport. She's modeled after a Swedish nurse or something. If I don't like her, I can always send her back. They've got a ninety-day guarantee. At my age, this is probably my last companion, and I guess that's a good thing. Actually, I hope she outlasts me by quite a few years, and goes on to another good home when I'm dead and buried.

Switching off a loved one is hard.

Long ago, some acquaintance, in some town somewhere or another once asked me, "Where can I find myself a girl like that?"

At the time I just laughed.

But if you have to ask, you can't afford one.

The Second Coming

Elmer Ray sat in the doctor's office, impatient to learn the truth.

Was it cancer, or some other life-threatening disease? He mentally reviewed the facts, and disturbing indeed they were.

It was just five weeks ago, when he felt a little ill in the morning. The night before, he had consumed a few beers with the boys at Houlihan's Bar and Grill, the culmination of a topping-off party thrown by Weiserman and Sons, Steel Structures, Inc. It was no big deal at first. Elmer resolved to show a little more restraint in future. He went to work as usual, and his wooziness had cleared up by noon. If it hadn't gotten better, he would have been unable to eat a trio of greasy chili-dogs from the gut-wagon out in front of the building project.

Elmer needed food of any kind or he became hypoglycemic. He could have gone home for the day, no matter what anyone said. According to his union's agreement with the Bayside City Structural Steel Contractor's Association, he was entitled to six paid sick-leave days a year; and since he had never availed himself of them in anything other than an emergency, he was entitled to a day off if he felt bad. Luckily, it had cleared up.

Elmer was not known for 'booking off,' and took some pride in his physical and mental toughness, which many young men today seemed to lack. And lately he needed every penny he could scrape up just to get by. He must endure. To coddle himself was unthinkable.

It was only after a few days of the same nausea, queasiness, dizziness, sweats, and bouts of early-morning vomiting into the toilet, when he began to wonder if he had the flu. The flu was going around, as it usually did in late spring, when everyone's psyche was at low ebb, and resistance to it was weakened by lack of sunlight and vitamins.

Yet Elmer didn't have any fever, there were no body aches, no sneezing, no snuffling, no throat or chest congestion. He decided to ignore it, and maybe it would go away.

The usually well-balanced Elmer wondered if it was 'psycho-somatic,' which meant that it was all in your head. Was he depressed? Was it the result of three years of making mortgage-payments, paying alimony and child support, and never getting to see little Brucie, whom he loved half to death, although he had no way of saying it? His son haunted his mind pretty much all of the time, a source of sadness and frustration. But he had to behave, if he hoped to see him again. His own rent payments were always last on the list.

But maybe he was really sick. He would find out today. The first appointment, last week, Elmer was so grateful for someone to talk to; to unload all that angst. This time he would at least find out for sure. This time, he resolved not to let it all out in a rush, each sentence and every detail of the ordeal tripping over his lips on the way out the door. One way or another, whatever it was, he could deal with it. He would be a man about it, no matter how bad the news was.

Vomiting into the Porta-Latrine hole was a nightmare, and one day last week the boss suggested he go see a doctor. Ned Gaines was in the next latrine, and he overheard the cursing, and gasping, and the other noises. Elmer wiped sweat from around his eyes and listened to Ned, grateful for any mercy at this point.

"It's probably just some bug in your gut, all you need is a good dose of antibiotics, and you'll be right as rain in a week or two."

Ned was the structural steel foreman.

Ned was okay, for a boss-type. Elmer had never had any problems with him; and if he wasn't the boss, and if he didn't work for the company, they might have actually been friends. Even so, there was a kind of liking, and mutual respect, for what that was worth, between them. Ned had gone through three divorces; perhaps that had something to do with it. Seated at the same table at the topping-off party, they had traded jests, barbs, and observations on some of the other disparate, or as some said, desperate characters on the jobsite. It was a pretty good time, and Elmer had few friends these days. Yes, his ex-wife had gotten the house, the dog, the boy, their one good car, and all of their so-called friends, apparently.

Ned had patted him on the shoulder, and led him into the supervisor's trailer, and stood there unhelpfully beside him, while he thumbed through the Yellow Pages and searched out doctors, most of whom were apparently not taking on any new patients.

They were especially not taking new patients in a hurry, he discovered—you might get an appointment in about nine weeks. Sitting in an emergency room for the next thirty-six hours simply wasn't on the agenda. Finally Ned called his own family doctor, and fibbed, cajoled, and charmed them into giving Elmer an appointment first thing the next morning.

Elmer was having a hell of a time with the magazines in the doctor's office, all these women's magazines with pictures of food on the cover, and full of diet pills and weight-loss programs in the advertisements. Why would anybody read this stuff? A tall wheezing elderly lady came out of the back and headed for the glass-fronted kiosk where the receptionist waited to make another appointment. Elmer was glad Ned volunteered to call his own doctor, upon seeing the frustration on Elmer's face, and perhaps guessing that Elmer was about ready to give up on the doctoring business altogether.

Doctor Ellwood's attractive assistant came out and called his name, and he found himself staring at her backside as she led him down the hall. It had been too long. But what was a man supposed to do? What he had left after all the deductions from his cheque was enough to keep him in a flea-bag rooming house, and three squares a day, and maybe within a year, he could put a down payment on a good used car. But that was only if the work held up, and they were talking about a downturn in the economy. If he focused on all the negative things in his life, he probably would get depressed, and what good would that do?

"The doctor will be with you shortly," she announced. "Please disrobe and hang your clothes up here."

"Er," he said, and she smiled demurely at him, and exited the room, closing the door with a firm thunk.

"All righty then," he muttered, and did as he was asked.

He sat on the freezing leather-encased high bench with the metal stirrups on the end.

The scales in the far corner reminded him that he was putting on quite a bit of weight.

He had gained six kilograms in just the last few weeks. Why are doctor's offices so cold?

One of the great mysteries of life, he figured. Was it really necessary to go through all the poking and prodding again?

He remembered once, years ago, when he had been forced to take off all his clothes; and all he had was an ear infection. They do it to keep you humble, he decided glumly.

That way you have no illusions about your importance in the world. Sooner or later we all get sick. Pay up nicely or go to jail. That was the unspoken message in the inane cheerfulness exhibited by most medical people.

"There's no escaping it," he told the four walls, and just then the door popped open.

The white-clad figure of Doctor Ellwood entered the room. Elmer wasn't one for long and effusive greetings, and was happy to find the doctor a like-minded individual. They shook hands briefly and then it was down to business.

"Why haven't you gone back to your old family doctor?" asked Ellwood.

"Too much chance of running into the ex," Elmer explained. "My ex-wife has a restraining order on me."

He went around to the house once too often, trying to talk some sense into Janie. Her lawyer was a real witch, a real man-hater. They had conspired to take him to the cleaners for the crime of being male, and being a good provider, and loving his family. Elmer had done everything in his power to make Janie happy, and if she wasn't having none of it, whose fault was that?

"So you were married before, then?" asked Doctor Ellwood, eyebrows rising up into the unlined, smooth, yet barren forehead, or over-extended face, as some would call it.

"Thirteen years," noted Elmer with some bitterness.

"Well. I'd like to put you in the hospital for a few days; just a few days, and run some tests on you, just as a precaution," said the doctor.

Elmer felt a trip-hammer beating in his guts, as his heart-rate escalated. So he was really sick then. A hospital!

His rent was due at the end of the week.

"Lucky for you, to be employed with someone who has proper medical insurance," stated the doctor with a certain relish.

Elmer felt a sickening sense of dread. He had cancelled the health-care insurance just weeks ago, in some ugly urge to get back, to hit back in any way he could at the witch, Janie. And expensive as it was, the money he freed up by not paying it, was supposed to buy a car. Yet he had never had any respect for men who go around disparaging their ex-wives, calling them sluts and bitches and stuff like that. He often wondered why such people married in the first place. Surely it hadn't started off that way. There must have been some love, some attraction in the beginning. Perhaps they had been drunk from the moment they met until the moment of revelation.

It suddenly occurred to him that the doctor was going to send him a bill, and it was likely to be a really big one, considering the upscale address, and the luxuriously appointed office they sat in. Forcibly, with an effort of sheer willpower, he dragged his attention and focus back to the present circumstances; while Ellwood sat watching the thoughts go through his mind and across his face.

"So, um; what exactly is wrong with me?" he asked in resignation.

God! Of all the rotten luck.

"Gall bladder? Pancreas? The spleen, perhaps?"

What Elmer didn't know about the human body would have filled several books. Still, he was aware that he was getting older, and no one was immune to illness. To his recollection, no one had ever died of nothing before. The bland-faced doctor chuckled, peering over at him above the rims of his half-glasses.

"Well, I wouldn't call it wrong, exactly," he murmured, looking down at the paperwork again.

"It's just different," he added in some strange emphasis that only he could understand. "We call it morning sickness," said the doctor; as if that explained just everything.

Suddenly Elmer lost patience, and he wasn't in the mood for jokes, as the significance of this statement slowly sank in. He sat up straight on the bench, leaning forward so as not to miss a word of information.

"Would you mind telling me just what it says on those little pieces of paper, Doc?" He grunted, biting back further commentary, including speculations as to the doctor's antecedents, and the breeding habits of his parents and other ancestors.

"Congratulations, and I'd like to meet your doctor, sometime. You're pregnant."

Thus announced the good Doctor Ellwood; with a smile of pure, unsolicited joy.

Elmer found himself standing at the side of Doctor Ellwood's desk, hovering over the man as he cowered there in sudden, uncomprehending shock. Fists balled up, shoulders hunched, chin thrust forward, Elmer's red face and neck bespoke an unmistakable message. His naked savagery made it even more surreal, more bizarre.

"And just exactly how did that happen?" he bellowed at the man in a kind of frustrated, berserk rage. "You think this is funny? You think this is some kind of sick joke? I'll pound your stupid head in, you son of a bitch!"

There was a long moment of shocked silence.

Elmer turned and stalked towards his clothing, aware that he had just blown his cool in some irrevocable way, and that voices and footsteps were coming down the tiled hallway in one hell of a hurry. Elmer jammed his feet in his trousers and threw on his shirt. Grabbing his boots, he ripped open the door, to find three or four of them standing there. Nurse, receptionist, security guards from somewhere in the building...they all stood there gaping at him, as he shoved his bare feet into his unlaced work-boots, and put his jacket on over his still-open shirt. He jammed his socks into the jacket pocket. They could wait until he was clear of this mad place.

"Get out of my way," he barked, and they all shrank back, allowing him through.

He turned for one last look, at the ashen face of Doctor Ellwood, half out of his chair in some late and forlorn desire to protect his turf and his employees.

Doctor Ellwood sank back into his chair, all thoughts of remonstration and further physical examinations gone.

"I'll get you, you freaking nut-case, if it's the last thing I ever do," he told them all.

Then he strode out of there, his mind reeling from the shock. It was only when he got outside the building onto the pavement that he began to wonder if it really was some kind of a joke, and if he was on 'Candid Camera,' or if he was being punked for some stupid TV reality show. He stood on the sidewalk and buttoned up his shirt, ignoring the passers-by.

Pregnant. Holy bejeebers. His rage, once unleashed, remained stoked. Stress had been building up for far too long, he realized. He walked to Johnson's Park, sat on a bench and tried to think things through. It took him quite a while of internal wrestling to calm down, and try to be rational, and to see the humor in the situation. The doctor had maybe picked up the wrong documents, or the lab sent the wrong stuff over, or whatever.

He had no other explanation. Maybe it wasn't the doctor's fault after all, but strangely,

Elmer felt no shame at his outburst. It had been too long coming already now. In a way, his little outburst felt pretty good—in retrospect, and with a shiver of adrenalin in the guts when he thought about it.

One thing for sure, he couldn't mention this to anyone at work—they'd never let him live it down. As he sat there thinking, he realized that men could become pregnant now.

It was on CNN. The world's first pregnant man was interviewed on 'Larry King Live,' complete with his wife, and his kid; and the gentleman was apparently knocked up again.

The jokes on the job were predictably coarse. Elmer himself hadn't speculated too much about it, in fact he was wishing he had listened a little more closely.

Elmer hadn't paid much attention to the news coverage, but one of the plumbers onsite had some crackpot theory.

"They stick a needle in behind your navel, and implant an embryo on the back of your belly-button," which seemed about as good an explanation as any. "And then nine months later, they cut it out using a Caesarian section," and Elmer was familiar with the scar, at least, as that was how Brucie was brought into the world.

It made a weird kind of sense.

"Men have breasts, or at least nipples, and if you think about it, the navel is the only vestigial placental body in the male..." or so the fellow's half-baked theory went. "Then they pump you full of hormones and off you go."

Dick Scoderman was something of a pundit, and had a pseudo-intellectual way of looking at things. Anyhow, the thing was clearly impossible, and he was sure he would remember something like that, and basically; he needed to find another doctor; if that was possible anytime soon. Suddenly Elmer felt the rage coming back.

This sort of thing was nothing to joke about. A second opinion, he decided, that's what he needed: a second opinion. Elmer decided not to show up at work today, as he needed to make a slew of phone calls and get himself another appointment.

***

A few days later, another doctor, one whose office wasn't nearly so nice as Ellwood's, told him the same thing. Although Elmer was a little better prepared for it, it still came as a shock when the unthinkable happened yet again. Doctor Ram Pangnirtung assured him it was true.

"Yes, you're pregnant all right. The blood doesn't lie." he marveled. "I'll send you to the lab for more tests, but at this stage in the first trimester, there's really no need for you to be in hospital. Are you strong? In general, are you in a pretty good state of health?"

Cheerful, yet intent, and definitely interested, Doctor Pangnirtung studied the man before him.

"And you're telling me that you have no idea how this happened?" he asked again.

"No!" barked Elmer to the unflappable Doctor Pangnirtung, who just grunted and took it in stride.

"Well, I'm not a lawyer or anything, but if you can prove that someone did this to you, there might be legal redress. Parthenogenesis is not unheard of in the plant and animal kingdoms, and in the history of evolution, there must have been a time when all reproduction was asexual..."

"P-p-partheno-what?" gasped Elmer. "For Christ's sakes, Doc, speak English!"

"Asexual, spontaneous generation of offspring," explained the doctor. "But in humans, and especially in a male, it seems clearly impossible."

"What do you mean, seems?" asked Elmer in some inner psychological pain. "And you're telling me that I have to prove someone did this...yet that seems self-evident."

"Hmn. Not to a jury, or in any Canadian courtroom, perhaps," noted Pangnirtung. "Quite frankly, nothing is ever self-evident in a Canadian courtroom. Anyway, if you think someone did this to you against your will, and without your knowledge, maybe you should try contacting the police. The good news is, this explains your sudden weight gain over the last few weeks."

"Oh, God," groaned Elmer. "This just keeps getting better and better."

"I can assure you that you will receive the finest medical treatment that money can buy," he heard through the insistent roaring in his ears.

Elmer got up and walked out, knowing that he couldn't keep on threatening doctors and the like, as they were very high-status individuals, and he couldn't get away with it forever. As he exited the building onto the gritty streets of the lower South End, he saw that the sun was out and springtime was in the air. The police! That was a quick road to the depths of hell, he thought dismally.

Yes, and he could well imagine Doctor Pangnirtung picking up the phone and having a long talk with Doctor Ellwood. But the cops were the worst. Some jerk down there would pick up the phone, and for fifty bucks he would be on the horn to the tabloids in a heartbeat; and to hell with people's right to privacy. Cops got away with everything, he thought, with his heart sinking and his mind going full blast in some kind of uncontrollable vortex of pain, and misery, and despair.

Who in the world would do this to him? Who could have done this to him? None of this made any sense. When did they get the opportunity? How was it done? How had they managed to put a fetus inside of him—perhaps embryo was a better word—and when had it happened? As for why...why? That one was also unanswerable.

The thought, unbidden, came into his head; and for the first time in his entire life, Elmer contemplated suicide. He recognized that this had never happened before, and that what he had thought of as a pretty bad life, bad life circumstances, had been as nothing compared to this. Elmer wandered the familiar streets of his youth in a kind of daze. Now he knew what it meant to feel like he had been raped...is this what women fear? Yet he had no memory of it. The bitterness, the feelings of worthlessness...suicide seemed an attractive prospect, he had to admit it.

His life in the boarding house, the greasy-spoon diner where he habitually ate, the payments, the fact that he never got to see his son, all that had seemed so harsh just a few days ago. But right now he'd give up one of his kidneys if he could just go back to that previous life and forget all this. Lord, he would give up a lung, a kidney and an arm and a leg, if he could just be allowed to go back to the way things were...Elmer didn't own a gun, but he could always jump off a bridge. For the moment he toyed with the notion of jumping off the financial towers that the company and their sub-contractors were building. But why? They hadn't done anything to him...right? It was just irrational anger.

And then he thought of Brucie, and all this thinking stopped being anger, and all about himself. What would Bruce think? Ten years old, what would they tell him? Them.

What would they say about him? All Elmer could feel right now was fear...hate...dread...despair...and a kind of anger that just wouldn't quit. Perhaps that anger wouldn't let him quit. Perhaps that anger was all that could save him.

My anger shall sustain me...

Before he took the easy, short road out, he wanted to find the people who had done this to him. First he would kill them in the slowest and most painful way he could think of. Then he would cut them up in little bits and scatter them to the four winds. He could always kill himself later, even in a jailhouse if necessary. He resolved not to let those creeps get away with this one. Whoever they were. This emotional roller-coaster ride was getting the better of him. It was hard to think with all this going on inside of him.

But there were only a limited number of possibilities. Was it really possible, that he had somehow done this to himself? And then fallen victim to a kind of amnesia, one that allowed him to remember his name, and where he lived, and the fact he had a job to go to? That possibility was quickly dispensed-with. When had he taken time off work to get the job done? The simple answer was that he hadn't.

This begged the question of when had anyone else gotten to him, in order to carry out such a procedure? That one just didn't seem very credible, for reasons he couldn't quite put into words. And Elmer didn't believe in aliens, and flying saucers and the like.

It must have been the party! Now, the weeks-long hangover suddenly made sense.

What other possibilities were there? Thank the good Lord he had some kind of a brain to think this through. But the notion of some kind of virgin birth didn't hold water.

The idea that it might be the Second Coming of Christ was just plain ludicrous, and the unlikely event of the coming of the Anti-Christ really didn't hold much water to a logical mind, and a secular sort of mind, such as he possessed. This whole darned thing was just plain crazy. He suddenly wondered about the government. Or maybe it was some big multinational corporation somewhere. One way or another, somebody somewhere was mucking around with his head, and his body. When he put it into those terms, he knew that sooner or later, they had to reveal themselves. It was a logical deduction. One way or another, it had to happen. When that day came, he had better be ready. He might only get the one chance. Perhaps a really big gun wasn't such a bad idea after all. He didn't have to use it on himself, after all.

In fact, it seemed like a very, very good idea. He had heard once that suicide was just redirected aggression, for normal, ordinary people couldn't cope with murderous thoughts, and they were frustrated by their inability to deal with aggression from their superiors.

"We'll see about that," he decided, speaking aloud on his park bench; and startling a lady jogger as she puffed past in the cool spring sunlight, with a few of last year's dead leaves skittering around her feet in the gusting wind.

***

Not far away, across town, in a three-story brownstone house, roof bristling with exotic antennas and satellite dishes, a fat man sat inside a splendid oak-paneled office, behind a mahogany desk. The smell of fresh-cut flowers was in the air, and the oppressive silence so thick one could cut it with a knife.

The phone buzzed and a pudgy, languid hand picked it up. A homely grunt was all the greeting the fat man gave. The officer-of-the-day of 'the Brethren,' a shadowy organization dedicated to the peaceful religious liberation of humanity, wasn't known for amiability. Recognizing the voice, Doctor Pangnirtung disregarded the daily code word exchange protocols, and went ahead with his report.

"He's taking it pretty hard," he informed his control and command contact. "For the time being, he's staying at the boarding house. He just doesn't have the money to go into a clinic."

"We'll keep an eye on him," said the fat man.

"I tried to get him to go to a publisher," said the Doctor. "I sort of hoped the idea of a four or five-million dollar advance might pique his interest, but..."

The good doctor was concerned for the welfare of the unborn child, naturally so. "I'm sure you did your best, doctor," purred the fat one. "We won't let anything bad happen to Elmer, I promise you that. In any case, our business is concluded, and we'll deposit a rather large sum of money into a Swiss account for you—"

"I haven't been able to contact Doctor Ellwood for the last week," Doctor Pangnirtung informed the fat man. "His answering service says he has moved his practice to Argentina!"

"Yes, yes, well. We have to say something you, know," the other man stated blandly.

"Think of it as a cover story. The Council has a very high regard for Doctor Ellwood, and is very grateful for his service. Think of it as a promotion. They also have their eye on you."

"I don't want to be a member!" gasped the Doctor in dismay.

All he wanted was to be let alone by these people—they had promised, after all. For him, the money meant nothing. He just wanted these mysterious people, these voices on phones to go away.

"Really, it's just an honorary thing, although there are a few important benefits, a kind of group life insurance, for example," purred the fat one. "Still, we can think on it for a while, and talk about it later."

"Wait!" exclaimed Doctor Pangnirtung, "Mister Ray is coming back next week," the doctor blurted out. "He's got another appointment."

"Yes, yes, very good, doctor," murmured the fat one.

He spoke clearly and succinctly now. "Can you hold the line, please? I have another important call coming in...perhaps you might care to listen to some recorded instructions on how to access your account?"

The fat one heard a deep, expressive sigh from the other end of the airways.

"Yes, go ahead," muttered the doctor in a tone of abject resignation.

On the doctor's affirmative, he carefully pushed a small button on his elaborate desk-phone set-up, and then tapped in a brief eleven-digit code. Far, far away across the city, a small but powerful charge of a top-secret military explosive drove a cluster of high-carbon steel ball bearings out of the inner recesses of the doctor's desk phone hand-piece and into his skull, killing him instantly but harming no one else in the immediate vicinity. 'The Brethren,' were careful about leaving tracks, and one day, all the world would bask in the reflected glow of their divine and peaceful revelation. Until then, one couldn't take too many precautions.

Lenny Lays an Egg

"Is he prepped?" asked Doctor Rolf Ludwig, duty intern on the night shift in this busy metropolitan hospital.

"Yes, doctor," replied Nurse Betty-Ann Genomi, a tall, brown-haired woman in her mid-forties with large, cone-shaped breasts.

Saint Athelstan's was only a stones-throw from the police station, so they got all kinds of winners in here.

"He's complaining about abdominal pain and the x-rays...well," she said.

"Yeah. It's real, all right," he agreed, hands up in the air as he stared at the shots clipped into the light box.

"Wow," he said.

***

The patient was face down, sedated but conscious. His frizzy red hair, rheumy, bloodshot blue eyes and swollen red nose bespoke a life-long love affair with the sauce. The bedclothes, steamy warm after coming out of the cubby, were pulled back to reveal the patient's pale and globular gluteus maxima.

A nurse reached up and adjusted the light, and the rays of brilliant white reflected back up from the patient's heinie.

"What's your name, buddy?" asked Doctor Rolf.

"Lenny," said the Caucasian male, who was about five-foot seven and approximately a hundred and forty-five pounds.

"How are you doing?" asked Betty-Ann, right there at his side.

She held onto Lenny's hand with an open and sympathetic look.

"Am I going to die, doctor?" asked Lenny in a slurred manner.

"Nah," assured the doctor. "We'll have that nasty old thing out of there in a jiffy."

"All righty then," he noted. "Put a little petroleum jelly on there for me? We're going in, ladies and gentlemen."

A small titter went through the assembled class. This was a teaching hospital, and no opportunity was too small to pass up.

"Okay. We're going to be doing a manual dis-impaction of what looks like a hard and compacted stool. Whether it is from compression during anal intercourse or some other cause is no concern right now."

The doctor heard a few more gasps and giggles and he looked up for a moment.

"Pay attention," he said. "The odds are you will have to do this sooner or later. I'm just grateful, but it doesn't look like a light bulb, which I have also done."

He patted the patient on the shoulder, but Lenny was pretty much out of it.

"Give me the retractor," he muttered, and then the doctor got on with the job at hand.

"That's strange," he said. "Lenny?"

"Uh...yeah...?" said the patient and everyone laughed, even the doctor. "Whaddya want?"

"Well, I would kind of like to know what this is, if you have any idea," said Doctor Rolf pleasantly.

Lenny stared wild-eyed and desperate at the floor.

"You mean you don't know?" he gasped, and tears sprung into his eyes.

"Do you feel any pain, Lenny?" asked the Senior Nurse, Betty-Ann.

"No...?" said Lenny.

The room was silent.

"It's not a stool," said the doctor.

He watched on the screen as the forceps slid gently alongside the foreign object.

"It's hard," said Rolf. "But not too hard. It's not metal or glass."

Relief was apparent in his voice and what little they could see of his demeanor behind the cap and mask.

"Well, what have we got here?" he mused, pulling what looked like an ostrich egg from the long-suffering patient, one Lenny Bonsalvo.

***

"Was he drunk when he was brought in?" asked the doctor.

"No," Betty-Ann shook her head. "But he admits to problems with alcohol."

"It's hard to believe he could swallow that, drunk or sober. I find it hard to believe he could do that, shove it so far up there," he muttered.

"He must have had help, Doctor," she murmured neutrally and in a non-committed tone.

"I tend to agree," said Rolf. "Well, I guess you can't blame the man for not wanting to talk about it too much."

"Do me a favour, nurse?" he asked.

"Of course, what is it?" she replied.

"Clean that thing up for me. I want to show it to George. You know what! I think I'm going to show it to poor old Lenny, too."

***

Lenny stared up from the bed in dismay.

"That thing—that thing was inside me?" he gaped.

"Yeah," agreed Doctor Rolf. "I have to be completely honest with you, Lenny. I was sort of wondering if someone put it there. Did you have help? I am a doctor, and I'm not judging you, Lenny, but..."

"What! But what?" bellowed Lenny.

"Hey, hey, hey, calm down," said the doctor. "I was just asking! It's my job, you know? But I was kind of wondering if somebody did this to you? You know, like maybe as a joke, or even some kind of abusive situation—"

Lenny clambered up and out of the bed, staying on the far side from Doctor Rolf.

"Lenny, Lenny!" the doctor tried reassurance. "No one is judging you, Lenny. Honestly, I'm more curious than anything. I sort of wondered if you were in some kind of trouble."

Lenny's arm shot out and he pointed an accusing finger, seemingly at a loss for words.

"What's the matter, Lenny, why are you so upset? I'm just trying to help you," soothed Doctor Rolf.

"Ah! Ah! Ah," screeched Lenny.

"Whoa! Simmer down," said the doctor.

"It's hatching! It's hatching, that thing is hatching, doctor!" shouted Lenny, then he fell over backwards, hitting the adjacent bed and the patient in that one began screaming too.

Rolf took a quick look at the thing in the jar and his eyes almost bugged out of his head.

***

Doctors Rolf and George Malassori stared at the apparition in the jar.

They had it in a workroom off to one side of the internal medicine lab.

"What the hell?" muttered the normally soft-spoken George.

He straightened up, shaking his head in disbelief.

"It's like a gecko, all covered in ketchup," he marveled. "Let me get a sample of the fluid."

"Yeah," breathed Rolf. "It's like a baby alligator or something. This is amazing...just nuts."

"I won't contradict an expert," noted Doctor Malassori. "You've just made medical history, incidentally."

"Huh," said Rolf. "Lenny did. Not me."

Malassori laughed in agreement.

"Can't say as I blame you," he said.

***

Rolf had other emergencies, and the usual rounds, and he was asleep behind his computer when screams and thumps awoke him with a distinct nervous shock. You could read about adrenalin, and you could dissect the human body, and you could listen to witnesses. But this was real adrenalin and he had no objectivity.

The doctor ran sliding out into the hallway, to be confronted by a small wave of green-clad nurses and screaming people.

They almost bowled him over as he hurriedly stepped back into the room. He reached out and tried to grab an arm as they sped past.

"Nurse!" he yelled but she gave him a frightened glance and just kept going, looking back nervously and sobbing.

"What's going on?" he asked, but she was clearly hysterical.

She spurted off again, shaking her head and moaning incoherently. Rolf thought about declaring a lockdown. His heart pounded in a moment of indecision. He needed more information.

***

As Doctor Rolf rounded the corner at a dead run, he ran smack into a hellish scene, the likes of which he would never forget for the rest of his life. Their floor security, Mister Nicholby, lay dead on the floor with his chest torn open and a black cavity exposed, and a thick trail of blood smeared in a path along the floor.

Nurse Betty-Ann had the gun up and was drawing a careful bead.

The sound of a shot, quickly followed by another, was shockingly loud in the now-quiet corridor.

The doctor flinched and covered his head, as a little fall of dust came down from the ceiling tiles.

Rolf stood there, open-mouthed, taking in the bizarre scene.

"Got the little bastard," she said, looking calmly into Rolf's eyes and blowing smoke from the end of the barrel.

"Nurse...?"

Doctor Rolf swallowed. His unbelieving eyes found a huddled, dirty dishrag-like form up the hallway.

"What the hell is going on around here?" he asked in shock. "What—"

The strident call of the overhead speakers broke into his state of mental inertia.

"Doctor Ludwig to emergency, Doctor Ludwig to emergency," he heard, in a kind of relief.

Finally, something he could understand. Something that made sense. He was tempted to give his head a shake, or pinch himself or something.

He stepped over to the nursing station, reached over and grabbed a phone. Awkwardly, he put in the number, making sure to get it right first time. His hands were shaking.

"Yes? Doctor Ludwig here," he reported. "What have you got?"

"Please get down here right away, Doctor Ludwig," came the breathless voice of Nurse Helga Slovodnik. "We have another Lenny. Doctor George thinks we may have another one

of those things."

Ashes

Troopers Lorne and Willy supervised the disembarkation from opposite sides of the ramp, itching and sweating in the armour.

The refugees streamed past in a forlorn river of unwashed humanity, the curving sides of the ship's hull looming low overhead.

It was better than the Front. Willy nodded with a grim look, raising his weapon a little higher and jerking the tip in an effort speed them up, but they kept their heads down, families, children, old couples, young men and women. Most clutched bundles, what few possessions they had been allowed to remove from their homes.

There was a crunch of gravel behind him. His guts were already tense when Kossovitch paused beside him.

"How's it going?"

"Fine, sir."

The grey faces held no joy but Kossovitch's tone was amicable, unusual for her.

"Look at them."

Lorne wondered what she meant, involuntarily turning and meeting her eyes. Red-rimmed, bags of exhaustion under them, they were still expressionless, taut with unspoken emotions.

"Sir?"

She looked away without responding as a small boy tugged at the hem of his battledress.

"Mister Soldier Sir?"

"Yes, boy?"

Kossovitch stiffened beside him.

The kid proffered something, a book. A kid's book. Lorne shook his head. Kossovitch had a funny look on her face as he looked at her again.

"Keep moving, kid." The boy looked to be about nine years old.

"Where's your mother?" Lieutenant Kossovitch must have gotten fucked last night.

He'd never seen her like this.

The kid shrugged.

"It's okay, boy. You can keep it."

They were allowed to bring what they could carry. That was the rule and for the most part it was respected. Every single thing, any little thing of value had already been stripped away from them, and now they were to be resettled.

"I'll take that." Kossovitch's tone was soft and motherly.

His guts went all queasy as the boy handed it over.

Lorne jerked his head to keep the kid moving along as an endless file of unwanted strangers passed down the ramp.

Kossovitch looked at it. She put it in her pocket. In one smooth action, she drew her pistol and shot the boy through the head. His fine mop of tousled blonde hair flew out in all directions as he spun away, arms and legs flailing.

"Aw, shit, Lieutenant." Lorne backed up a couple of steps, cocking his weapon, sweeping the tip back and forth in case any refugees should come this way.

People ran in mad panic, mostly away from the ship but some tried to go back up the ramp.

Willy was bowled over in a thin wave of panicked humanity, but he came up cursing and cocked his weapon. Whistles and shouts sounded behind them as reinforcements came running.

Kossivitch's weapon spoke once, twice, three times and ragged figures went tumbling as she giggled and clutched her stomach with her left hand.

"Aw, shit, Lieutenant. Now we'll never get them off."

The kid stared up at the sky, mouth moving, limbs thrashing. It took him a long time to die as Captain Pyke came running up with gun drawn.

"What happened here, Lieutenant?"

She looked at Lorne.

"I'm sorry, sir, I didn't see what started it."

"Shut up. I'm asking her, trooper." Flecks of foam came from the captain's mouth.

He knew the difficulty of removing refugees from a ship when they didn't want to go, and the news would flash through those still inside the transport.

"He came towards us and put his hand in his pocket, sir." Kossovitch wasn't laughing now.

Lorne looked straight ahead as small gangs of men pursued the civilians, and rounded up the stragglers cowering under the ship from the bright light of day and the fear of the unknown.

"Get these people moving." The batch they had were herded towards the entry gate.

Peering up into the darkness of the ship, Lorne made out the pale faces of those staring out in fear, a seething mass of folks in the dark disembarkation chamber, pushed relentlessly by the pressure of the masses behind them.

"It's okay." Lorne yelled up at them.

He jerked the muzzle of the gun, willing them to come down. Hoarse voices came from inside the ship as the troopers in there tried to get them moving again, and a swelling of sound came from the refugees even as truncheons rose and fell.

"Get that body out of here!" Willy ran forward and dragged it away by the feet towards the darkness by the right rear landing gear of the vessel.

"You two are on report."

"Yes, sir." The captain strode up the ramp.

He grabbed an old lady by the arm, and dragged her, kicking and screaming out into the light. A man, probably her husband, clung to the two of them, crying and begging, but the captain ignored him.

He gave them both a shove in the direction of the gate.

"Go!" He pointed as the man tried to lift the woman from the dust and pull her towards the back of the huddled queue there as the troopers outside the dome tried to keep order on what was essentially a herd.

She turned to him with a smirk.

"Thanks. You want this?"

He shook his head.

"No. Give it to your own kid."

She stuck it into her side pocket again before the captain had time to look around. Lorne stared at the blood on the sand as the people were herded down the ramp at bayonet point.

While they had all been looking forward to landing and getting some fresh air and sunshine at last, what started off as a regular day had just turned to pure shit as Lorne poked people with the muzzle of his gun and tried to hustle them along.

There were fifty thousand of the fuckers in there and he hoped this wouldn't take all damned day.

***

"Come on man, let's go."

The evening light grew dimmer. Willy, who was a hard man to shake, and so Lorne didn't even try any more, and he attended the evening presentation. It wasn't obligatory, but why take chances? That was what everyone said.

The first half hour was cartoons of the most secular nature. The feature film was called Why We Fight and while everyone there had seen it a hundred times before, it was something, which was better than nothing and at least killed a couple of hours.

Outside the open-air amphitheatre, set into a hillside, they paused for a moment when Willy grabbed his elbow.

"Look, I'm sorry, but some guys asked me to play cards. They got a bottle."

Lorne's eyes widened slightly. He'd sort of assumed Willy's company, not that it wouldn't be bothersome and boring at best, but he was now at a bit of a loss.

"Hey, no problem." Willy nodded, his prominent eyes bulging even more than usual.

"Thanks for understanding, man. See you tomorrow."

"Yeah."

Willy turned and headed off towards the far end of camp, sticking to the perimeter patrol track. Lorne, eyebrows cocked in disbelief, could think of nothing other than a quiet night in his berth. Nerves still jangled by the stress of the morning, it wasn't his favourite idea but he had nothing else.

Outside of the complex the planet was barren of life or entertainment for five hundred kilometres in any direction.

When he arrived back on the ship, he opened up the door to his nine-by twelve with micro-head as befitted full trooper status, one of the perks of this particular duty, and was confounded by light under the bathroom door—which he never closed, and some odd smell in the room.

A light snapped on and the hatch locks clunked closed behind him.

"Whoa. Lieutenant Rossovitch?"

"Call me Pattie." She reached down beside the table and then held up a Mickey-bottle.

She'd already had a couple by the looks of the level. The amber fluid inside wobbled slightly from momentum.

"Is that my liquor?"

She got up, came over and stood directly in front of him.

"Drink. That's an order."

Taking the bottle, his eyes never leaving hers for a second, he tipped it back from the awkward angle. Lorne gasped, wiping a drop off his chin with the back of his hand.

"All you had to do was ask. I was just thinking of a drink anyway."

Taking the bottle back from Lorne, Rossovitch secured the screw-cap and tossed it, onto the couch.

Her eyes bored into his.

"Rape me."

His mouth opened but nothing came out.

"...and that's an order too."

"Holy..." Lorne was in trouble now.

The question was whether to die happy or disappointed.

"Yes...sir." He could at least try.

"Please call me Pattie." Water welled up in her eyes as he stepped forward and took her in his arms, sure as shooting that it was all some mad sort of test, and one that he had already failed somehow, and that he would be shot in the morning.

Pushing her back a couple of feet, he kissed her, tongue exploring her mouth and eventually fighting and struggling with hers. They hugged fiercely, neither one saying a word.

He let go and pushed her away.

"Wait."

She stood with shining eyes and water coming down her face as he pulled the low coffee table out of the middle of the floor and then took pillows and covers off his bed. Throwing them down on the floor, he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to him. Without being too rough, he let her know who was boss, as her breath rattled in her throat from need and excitement.

Then they were naked, clothes, shoes and socks thrown or dropped everywhere.

"Down. Hand and knees."

She went down on all fours in front of him. Her eyes went from his crotch to his face and back again. She thought she knew what he wanted, and she knew what she wanted. He made her wait as he found the bottle again. He took a long swig, standing with his cock flying at full mast inches in front of her eyes and her wet red lips as she licked them and her breasts wobbled from emotion and her breathing.

"Turn around."

"Uh..."

Carefully, lightly, he slapped her, sending her scurrying around to present him with her buttocks.

One dark eye peered back at him over her shoulder, long red marks from his fingers visible on her left cheek.

Lorne dropped to his knees behind her. He held her left thigh and pushed his other index finger into her vagina as Pattie gasped and pushed back at him, moaning and with her one eye never leaving him.

"Mike." She moaned and gasped.

He lowered his face and tried to shove his tongue right up her ass as she gave a little half-scream, choked off almost instantly from being overheard as several voices were right outside on the other side of those curtains. The sound died away again and they relaxed a little.

"I—I never knew you felt that way about me, Trooper Lorne—"

"Call me Mike."

She sighed and snorted as he went in again.

"Just keeping a little promise I made to myself a long time ago."

She cranked her head around, with an incredulous look on her face.

"I've wanted to do that from the minute I laid eyes on you...Lieutenant Rossovitch." Mike crawled around beside her on his hands and knees, conscious of the hot friction of the rough Army blanket under his knees.

At right angles to her, he nuzzled up beside her ear, sticking his tongue inside and slopping it around.

"Pattie."

"Oh...fuck me, Mike. Please don't let me wait. Please don't torment me."

"When I'm ready. But first, a little torment." She twisted her head and their mouths met.

He gave her a short, sharp spank on the ass even with her mouth locked on his and fresh tears started from her eyes. She flinched but their mouths remained locked and their gaze unwavering. He stared deep into her eyes from two inches away. Mike let her have a little air as the breath was rough and loud in her nostrils.

"Thank you, Mike"

"You're welcome, Pattie."

Mike Lorne proceeded to fulfill one or two other promises he'd made to himself, carrying Pattie Rossovitch, glorious in her lithe form, firm conical breasts and thick flaxen hair on the floor of his plain old nine by twelve.

The second time, and it was her own idea, she sucked on his cock and he came right in her face, watching in sublime erotic bliss as she licked and gobbled the semen from his penis and thanking her master profusely for the privilege.

With the hands of the clock on the side wall reminding them of duty tomorrow, finally the frenzy of mutual lust and need ended and they cuddled together on the blanket, clinging tightly against the coming day. Neither one said a word. They were unable to pull their eyes apart.

After a long while, she slumped in pure emotional and spiritual exhaustion, leaving Mike Lorne to hold the girl in his arms, marvel at his good fortune, wonder how the hell it would all turn out, and praying like hell that nothing would go wrong and that no one would ever find out.

***

When he woke up she was gone. A bare glimmer of grey light at the edge of the front curtain made him look at the clock, but he still had ten or twenty minutes yet. He stayed under the blanket, heart palpitating.

He knew why she did it, of course. The thought of the kid, packed inside the dome by the door party, for the last five or ten thousand passengers were always a struggle to get in, and by that time the folks inside knew something was up.

The trooper on duty pushing the button and walking away...the sounds, even the heaving of the sides of the structure sometimes, as the place began to heat up and the moaning, screaming, seething mass of humanity inside began to suffocate from the heat and burn from the floors and walls whenever they touched anything...

It was more merciful really. In that sense, the kid was lucky. He never knew what hit him.

Why in the hell she decided to do Mike Lorne was another question, one with more slightly more subtle motivations.

As he flung the blankets aside and began to put the room together again on wobbly legs and trembling knees, longing for a quick shower, the electric kettle steamed and it was all he could do just to marvel.

***

Ann surveyed the mountain of gear and supplies with a jaundiced eye. She turned and followed Jackson into the tent, with his burly shoulders forcing a passage through the mob.

They had over eleven hundred people to feed, house and clothe during the first winter on the planet, which was three months away.

The work was daunting, with limited numbers of tool and inexperienced people. But the decision had been made and the senior officer on the ground had better get them moving. Behind the communal dining tent, gaily striped and more normally meant for shore functions during flag-showing operations in peacetime, loomed the sharp prows of their small flotilla.

She stood at the front of the tent, looking out over a mass of faces, with the light mostly coming from above through the thin fabric as there wasn't room enough for everybody and the crowd circled all around outside.

"All right, people." The buzz and hum of talk began to lessen.

"Thank you for your help in unloading." She wondered when they would begin to revert to civilians. "We have hot food coming thanks to the volunteers and we all need to get a good night's sleep tonight."

Tomorrow they would begin to build a new life on the ground.

***

The three ships remaining hovered at zero velocity in relation to a line drawn between the Mother Worlds, a relatively small volume of the galaxy and a particularly active radio source. They were undetectable at this range.

Senior officers regarded each other on their view screens. A decision had been made. The ships were operating with skeleton staff.

"So we are agreed then." The Vice Commodore of the Fleet, now commanding what was believed to be the last striking force of the Polity looked out at all crew members, laugh lines by his mouth and humorous crinkles at the corners of his eyes betrayed by the ashen skin and grim resolution on his face.

"Aye." They answered as one, without a quaver in their voices or a hint of hesitation.

***

Thirteen days later, coming in on a vector designed to elude analysis and pursuit, the three ships and the men and women dying of radiation sickness inside them plunged out of the sky at near-infinite mass and velocity into the glittering capital of the Mother Worlds.

They had no way of knowing, but their timing was fortunate and their supreme sacrifice was not in vain.

Fearless Leader and the bulk of her cabinet were instantly vaporized and their ashes subsumed in the boiling cauldron of molten rock and burning gases, fifty-kilometres in radius, where there had once been a city of a hundred and fifty million people.

News feeds carried the story in pictures, sound and commentary, to all worlds and outposts. While the grief and shock were considerable, there were other enclaves of Government and the leadership selection process was already underway.

The news feeds left no doubts in the minds of their stunned citizenry that the War and the Sacred Cleansing of mongrel peoples would go on, and that one day the Galaxy would be safe for decent people everywhere.

Ghost Planet

What the hell happened, I will never know. It was just some rare electronic glitch that brought me down.

I was on my way to my sister's wedding.

In transit from Galactic East, clear across to the other side, it made sense in terms of energy curves to cut straight across the southern arm and make a shorter trip to my destination of Westside. In purely conventional terms the Galaxy spun in that direction anyway. Technically the universe is isotropic, in that half of all galaxies spin clockwise, and the other half counter-clockwise. Without some agreed-upon convention, we wouldn't know which way is up.

Crossing the Great Dark Sea, an anomalous term but not without merit, it never occurred to me that I might have a breakdown. The Petrel had never let me down, or at least nothing that I couldn't fix on my own and with the few tools and spares available.

When she sputtered and the display warnings lit up, my first reaction was a little mild cussing.

Before long I realized it was serious, as both engines were down, and the re-start procedure failed three times running.

The realization that I was a hundred and thirty or forty light years from the nearest human or other habitation was sobering.

Looking at my map display, I opened it up on a large scale, tracking magnetic anomalies in the projected glide path—I've never used that term before or since, but that's what it was, and I quickly determined that the electronic suite was showing green on all points. According to the computer, there was nothing wrong with the quantum engines. Without knowing what was wrong, I had no idea of how to proceed.

All I could do was to run all diagnostic programs on the software, looking for bugs, glitches, and missing bits of code, which happens often enough. This would take a little time, so I went back to the maps.

One major bulge in the fabric of the space-time continuum bore further investigation. On zooming in, I saw a string of numbers and a pinprick of yellow light. The un-named white dwarf had one planet, and the planet had been mapped a couple of centuries ago. It had that much going for it. There was an asterisk, indicating a robotic surface probe. It was so close to the end-point on this trajectory that it seemed like I was going there anyway, whether I liked it or not. There were some ruins of archaeological interest but no present habitation. The ruins were classified as belonging to a well-known, highly-dispersed group of predecessor species. They were thought to have died out or moved on fifty or a hundred thousand years ago, according to my search of onboard files. While not the most up to date encyclopedically, these were usually good enough for the time being.

Managing a ship without engines is a simple problem of thermodynamics, and it didn't take long to calculate emergency maneuvering thrust from the auxiliary bottles, which I would have to mount within the next two or three days if I couldn't get her running otherwise. The ship was stored with the minimum legal number of six, which would require some space-walking. Not my forte, really, but it might have to be done.

Unfortunately, that is exactly the way things turned out.

***

With a bigger ship, I never would have made it down. With its lifting body shape, more of a styling thing these days with transmission booths everywhere and the modern propensity for saving time, money and docking fees by leaving ships in high orbit, but the atmosphere had sufficient density. My jury-rigged thrust bottles gave enough braking power for insertion. I could at least steer to the initial point.

The low gravity of the planet itself, which was only about one-half of one standard planetary mass, made the glide into the selected destination fairly calm, although there was quite a bit of turbulence in the troposphere.

Picking my spot, dropping the skids, deploying flaps and speed brakes, kept me busy enough, but the signs of past civilization were there all right. The electronics suite was just blank, a new experience for me. It was all dead down there, the people departed long in the past.

There was nobody home.

My landing was slated for an oval saline lake bed, fifteen kilometres wide and about forty long.

I only had one shot at it, and so I held her a bit high, bleeding off speed in a series of pull-ups, gentle stalls, and finally one big, diving S-turn right over the downwind end of the lake.

At three thousand metres, we had plenty of space in front of us. We were falling at a thousand metres per minute. With no place else to go but down, I was committed to the landing.

The ship flared when I pulled back on the stick, battery power still holding out, which was good as hitting a little too hard would have been fatal. Ground effect, which I had never experienced, surprised me and it was like she just wanted to glide forever. There wasn't even a bounce. Once she set down, she stuck nicely.

It took a long time to stop on the pebbly salt surface, with an improbably blue mirage coming up fast under the nose. My heart raced at the sight of all that water, and the possibility of having to make an underwater exit.

The ship came to rest in a foot of water, nose pointed out into the middle of the lake, and I had gotten very lucky indeed.

The temperature outside was about twenty-eight degrees Celsius and the winds were from the southwest. It was nine-thirteen-thirty-six a.m. by the ship's chronometer.

I sat in my seat for a long time, but sooner or later I had to go out there. Scanning with the manual emergency periscope, it looked like the nearest mountains, and the most likely place to find fresh water and hopefully local game animals, were about fifteen or twenty kilometres to the northeast.

Hopefully the rescue beacon I'd left in one of the LaGrange points for this system would be spotted by somebody, but that could take a long time if it happened at all. Of necessity, the things were low-powered and traffic out here was pretty much non-existent. Any passers-by would be looking for salvage as much as anything. The ship had its own transponder, one with a little more juice to it, but my hopes were very slim.

Skimming through the start-up checklist, I tried yet again to get the motors running.

No luck, no clue as to what the problem was. She just wouldn't go. I sat quietly thinking about that. One last restart was all I dared. I was going to need those batteries, at least in the short term, just trying to stay alive for as long as possible in hopes of rescue.

That didn't seem very likely.

The truth was that I could very well die here—probably would, and no one would be the wiser.

This was my new home.

***

Without any idea of whether the ship would settle into the silt, which seemed hard enough at first examination, I faced some tough choices. The natural inclination was to stay right where I was. That's what all the survival manuals said.

Coming down in pretty much any other part of the Galaxy, staying aboard might have been an option. While rescue was not exactly assured—it still took days, weeks or months for missing ships to be found, the thought of leaving her behind and striking off all alone into the barren wastes of an alien planet far from home was not attractive. I figured it had to be done, and the sooner the better. The more supplies I kept in reserve, the more options I had in an emergency.

The thinking seemed clear.

Just sitting there until food and water ran out was not an option.

One way or another, I had to find food, water, and with a little luck, a more permanent shelter.

As for inhabitants of this rather unattractive little pebble in space, they had left long ago, and there wasn't much we could do about that.

I left a note on my seat and the hatch unlocked. It seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

I took enough solid food for a three-day journey. I figured one day there, and one day back, which left a day to sit around and wait for something to walk by. If I could find something to eat, that would be helpful. Hopefully, if I could see it, I could hit it with the old .45 I kept for pirates and landings on inhabited but otherwise inhospitable planets, of which I'd seen a few in my time.

Clambering down the ladder, I stood in the warm brine and looked off to the north and east. Walking around underneath, the Petrel seemed in good shape. That was some consolation.

I had no famous last words, just the terrible thought of dismantling parts of the ship and pioneering, hopelessly alone, for the rest of my life out there in the middle of nowhere.

It took twenty minutes just to find dry land. Turning, the Petrel looked forlorn, lost and out of her natural environment. From this angle, she seemed down by the nose already, and again I wondered just how much she might settle.

I did have one last word, and having said it, I turned with grim resolution towards the low dark smudge on the horizon, the only thing I could see that held any promise at all, and then I started walking.

***

Like many a true spacer, my physical condition was not the best. All that time spent in artificial environments, and tightly-constrained ones at that, meant that I was soon sweating. My lower back and hips had some twinges, but I kept going. Hopefully that would ease over time.

I reached the base of the hills in less than two and a half hours, an oddly impressive feat. It wasn't as far as I had thought. Partly I think that was due to something called atmospheric perspective, something else spacers weren't too familiar with. The air dimmed the colour of the distant scene. What I thought were mountains a couple of thousand metres tall were just hills less than a third of that. Rising out of the sun-baked white plain I trod, the first big ridge loomed up in front of me. At first it was welcoming, with glades of grass, and an open park-like forest of tall green vegetation on its lower slopes, with some of the stems two or three metres thick. It was inviting enough until I comprehended the meaning of the bare tops and reddish tint of the summit, sticking up above the tree-tops.

I was sticking to the bottom of a cleft, for surely this was my best chance of finding water, and in fact I was heartened to see rounded rocks, patches of sand and gravel, and the occasional sign of the bank coming down recently. There were roots and dark topsoil exposed in vertical walls of dirt.

So far, no water, but I felt I was on the trail of something. I drained the first of my one-litre bottles and stuck it back in the side pocket of my pack.

Then I set out to find the top of the mountain.

After a few minutes the forest closed in, and the ground got steeper. The thicker brush implied some occasional rainfall if nothing else, for the small gulley I was following was still dry. Up ahead was a tangle of broken rock, roots and fallen vegetation. I got out of the gulley but tried to stay beside it as best I could. The problem in my mind was evolution. If the trees had evolved over millennia for a dry environment, then signs of rain or water might be months old and of course what looked like trees and grass in my limited knowledge might be anything but comparable to trees and grass elsewhere in the Galaxy. They might be able to go a very long time without rain, but unfortunately I was going to need water in the next two days or it would be a long walk back for more.

That was my initial plan, and my backup plan still. The view from the top would help me to decide what to do next, or where to go next, is more to the point.

When the trees gave out, there was nothing but the stringy green growths, which had an unfortunate tendency to rip out and let go just when I tugged on them to get up a steep spot. Finally, I was on all fours, slipping and sliding until I got to one final ledge. Above me the rocks were bare and wet-looking. A light mist clung to the summit, one which hadn't been there when I first started up. Walking along the base of the ominous rock slope, wondering if I really ought to even attempt it, I found a crack, gushing with a small rivulet that petered out within yards. The rocks were green with slime, there were small round pads of something spongy and pale green, and the darker grass circling beyond that was thick and lush.

The water was cool, clear, and there was really only one way to find out. I sucked some up thought a filtered hand pump, examining it in the clear tube of the body. It looked okay. I pumped some through into my mouth.

Unbelievable. I never knew water could taste that good. I filled my empty bottle, drank half of it off now that there was no shortage, and filled it up again.

For the first time in my life, I really appreciated water, which sounds odd for a spacer but it's true.

That's all I can say.

So far I hadn't felt hungry, and I really didn't feel hungry now, but contemplating the climb that lay ahead, it seemed like a good time. With the mist hanging between me and the lake, I couldn't make out the ship. That was a lonely moment, and without further hesitation I opened up the pack and took out the first of my meals. Opening a tin of something indecipherable, I saw row after row of small fish packed in a reddish sauce with bits of green leaf in it. That one, I think, had been in the back of the galley cupboards for a very long while. With a lightweight plastic fork, I dug in and began eating dutifully. Whether I liked it or not, I had no choice but to eat every bit of it. Looking down, it looked like a thousand metres or more. I had no experience judging distance by naked eye in such an environment, a sobering realization.

The humblest, most scuttling little four-legged varmint had at least that much of an advantage on me.

It was one hell of a view from up there.

***

An hour later, drenched in sweat from the unaccustomed effort, I pulled myself onto a flat slab of red rock, banded with wide strips of white, and looked back the way I had come. There was a tiny black dot in the sparkling aquamarine of the dead lake. For all I knew, it was the Petrel.

The thought of climbing back down that wet seventy-degree slab, cracked and studded with ledges and crevices as it was, was not a good one.

The sun was high in the sky. The planet's rotation indicated about a sixteen and a half-hour day at the equator. This time of year, there were about seven hours of darkness at this latitude.

With a shrug and a strong pull of will, I turned and looked the other way. My knees seemed weak and wobbly.

This actually took some guts. As things turned out, I was deathly frightened whenever I looked down. It was a kind of razorback ridge of up-ended slabs. This made standing tall out of the question—I crouched there, and yet the other side didn't look quite so bad.

That was a bad moment, to look back, and to fear the descent. To look forward, and it was only marginally better...

Going over the lip was bad, yet I had enough objectivity, once safely clinging to the edge and standing on the first outcropping, to take a moment and try to figure out where I was headed.

Below lay a snaking blue watercourse. Obviously, down was my first priority. The next thirty metres were the worst, for on this side the plant life if I can call it that began almost immediately.

Having a branch or root to cling to was better, especially going down. The fact that I had made it up at all, was something of a miracle.

On one side, it was barren desert, on the other side, a river and a temperate forest. Every spacer must know a little bit of planetology, if only for trading purposes, and it didn't seem too outlandish. The hills blocked the rain and kept it from getting to the desert. It was all elementary school stuff. There was a much better chance of food here as well.

Once I felt safe again, I took a little more time to study the prospect laid out below.

The river's curves tightened up and got closer together on the right, and it seemed wider there. The hills on the far side diminished in the distance, and maybe the valley opened up a bit. Off to my left was nothing but mist, so it wasn't a fair comparison. I decided to follow the current when I found the river.

Based on what I saw, my instinct was that the river ran to the right, and grateful for the low brush screening my view of precipitous depths and plumb vertical drops, I carefully worked my way down, becoming conscious at some point that the light was fading and it wasn't all due to the hillsides or the forest blocking out the daylight.

Night was coming and it was time to find somewhere safe to hole up.

With that thought, came another kind of dread.

I had a sleeping bag, I had my toothbrush. All that sort of thing, but the real problem was that I had never really been away from home before—I'd always had one ship or another to call home.

So far I hadn't seen any animals, nothing that even resembled an insect, or anything, really.

The thought wasn't much comfort.

***

I didn't even think of having a fire that first night. I just curled up in my sleeping bag and tried to put all thoughts out of my mind. Sleep was essential, and to get too exhausted in physical or psychological terms was stupid. I would need every edge to survive, even in the short term. Just sitting in the ship for day after day would bring inevitable thoughts of despair. I was no worse off out here, and there was every chance I would learn something of value. I needed that knowledge.

By now, people would know that I was missing. They would be so worried. I thought of my mom, and it was wretched. Tears almost overwhelmed me but I kept them back, sniffling a bit and wiping my nose on the sleeve of my jacket. They at least, would be fine. I didn't have to worry about that. It wasn't helping me to dwell on it.

My most important asset was what was inside my head.

I had everything I needed to survive out here, at least that's what I told myself. As the sky darkened and the temperature dropped shockingly fast, I watched the stars come out and marveled at my fate, thinking about some of the survival stories that I'd read or heard about over the years.

The only sound was the wind. On a ship there are noises, always something running in the background. But here there was only the wind.

It occurred to me that if I ever got out of there...I would be one uniquely privileged individual.

The most amazing thing about the experience is that I finally did sleep.

***

Nothing ate me in the night.

I woke with a bang, with the rustle of the wind in some low bushes right beside me, and of course I had to pee. The sleeping bag was warm, and the air on my face felt cold, but nature's call must be obeyed.

My shoes were right there.

After climbing back in the sleeping bag, I waited for a little more daylight, but I could only stand it for another ten or so minutes. There was nothing for it but to go on. At least I had a water source within easy walking distance of the ship, although there was no guarantee the small spring I had found would be there in all seasons.

In an hour and a half of walking, the forest had grown to trees thirty or forty metres tall, maybe higher.

That's when I came upon a road. At first, it was just a wide slash across my line of travel, which tended downhill and what was indicated planetary west on my old-fashioned compass.

Looking to the left, it seemed to narrow, but the shadows might have been deceptive. It also seemed to climb, while on the right, perhaps due to the angle of the sun, the way seemed more open, and it also appeared to drop in the distance. Through the tops of trees I could see a bright gleam off the water.

I followed the slash to the right, for while my initial impression was of a street or road, there was nothing underfoot to indicate pavement or asphalt or anything like that. It was relatively flat in small, interlinked patches.

It went on for a while and then the forest on the left opened up and I could definitely see that I was paralleling the river. I still wanted to see which way the current was going, so I stepped into the forest proper again and cautiously made my way down to the bank.

Just because the planet was uninhabited, that didn't rule out big, predatory animals, although I had seen none so far. Neither did it rule out other hazards, inimical plant life, parasites, and unknown diseases, many of which would be water-borne.

***

The second night found me in what once must have been quite the metropolis. The ruins were a strange mixture of massive stone blocks clearly belonging to a barbaric age, and then crumpled heaps of something much more recent, and fairly high-tech if the bits and pieces of building materials literally sticking out of the grass in places were anything to go by.

Metal would have long since corroded, or simply sunk out of sight. I grabbed the end of one that looked like a twenty-five millimetre T-section. I gave it a good tug, but it wouldn't come up out of the ground. The impression was of stiff plastic, rather than light metal. There were even small buildings entirely covered in brush and undergrowth, and yet the shape of it revealed that the house inside might still be intact. I considered hacking away with my little hand-axe, and what the interior would probably look like, and gave that idea up. All I really needed was shelter.

Some of the huge masonry ruins had arches and recesses relatively out of the rain, and it was to these that I turned my attention.

Off in the distance, the rumble of thunder, a darkening sky and flashes of light spurred my search.

I found a likely spot, what might have been a temple or shrine, all pale and smooth marble or limestone, or who knows what. It was like a semi-spherical band-shell, and the right end was angled against the prevailing wind.

With some thought to the prowlers of the night—I'd seen a few tracks at waterholes along the way, I gathered up dead branches and sticks, heaping them in big armfuls along the trail. This was on the bank of a small, clear stream that went through in there.

More thunder, and the wind whipped up a little now, and then I started bringing in the heaps, making a big pile three or four metres from where I planned to sleep. I went back for more, thinking that I had really only had two meals so far. Other than a clean white skull and three other small bones from some omnivore judging by the teeth, I hadn't seen any wildlife so far.

The tracks by the river said otherwise, and although there was nothing there much bigger than a dog would make, the key thing was to be the predator, rather than ending up as prey.

With that thought, I unrolled my sleeping bag and stuck the .45 under the rolled-up jacket I was using as a pillow. If I left the camp, that baby was going with me. First thing in the morning, I would have to figure out a better way of carrying it.

***

The storm had passed, although flashes still came over the horizon from the south-east. My watch said four a.m., a little after. I must have fallen asleep pretty early, zonked as I was from all the walking. The flickering of adjacent walls made an eerie impression.

I could have sworn I heard voices, a lot of them.

I froze in terror inside the bag. My hair prickled and a chill of something shot right through me.

My guts slowly relaxed as I listened. It was a kind of awe, for surely it must the creek, gushing and gurgling along, dropping over small ledges and bustling past snags and small boulders. I'd never heard anything like that before in my entire life. That stream made the weirdest noise effects.

It was the most horrible thing. I had the impression of laughing, and people talking, like at a cocktail party, one going on just over on the next block but you can't catch even a word of it.

I mean, like when your ears burn and you think everyone's talking about you, and there's another wild burst of laughter just to ram the point home.

My heart ticked over at a steady beat, maybe a little faster than it should. With dawn still some hours away, I lay as still as possible and tried to convince myself that I didn't have a care in the world, let alone worrying about what a planet full of stupid ghosts thought of me.

***

"So, you made three of these expeditions, spending a total of thirty-four days on the planet's surface?"

"Yes."

"And you managed to finally get some food?"

"Um, yes. There were starchy fruits growing on low bushes. I did see a couple of animals, small furry ones, but I didn't try to shoot them as they were too far away."

Constable Owen Barnaby of the Patrol looked sympathetic on the view-screen.

"And then for whatever reason, on impulse, you tried to start the ship and it worked. Okay, that seems clear enough. We can't find any service bulletins for the GB-19 series, and this one is definitely serious."

"Yes, also, my folks will be asking about me."

"Confirmed. Would you like to patch through, or maybe we could notify someone?"

"No. I'll call in a few minutes."

"Well, thank you for filing a report. As for a planet there, we don't have anything on that. Our records just show the magnetic anomaly you spoke of."

There were some implied doubts regarding my story in that statement, but I was prepared to let it drop if he was. They were more concerned with my safety than anything else. Certainly there were no criminal charges they could lay, as I had filed a flight plan and my ship's log showed the engine failure and a landing on something.

Going on and on about my irrational thoughts or feelings about the experience was not an option. These guys could yank a permit on a whim if they got grumpy, and a pilot's mental state is definitely grounds for inquiry.

"Well, if there's nothing else, Mrs. Snelgrove, all we can do is to let you get on with your busy day."

"I'll have the ship checked over as soon as I get home."

He nodded and stuck his thumb to the screen.

I stuck my thumb on the screen and sealed the file as far as I was concerned. There was more, a whole lot more, but duty was done and unless he asked a specific question, I wasn't going into it.

"Thank you."

We broke the connection at the same time.

I especially didn't want to bring up the feeling that I got after my first big fright, that demoralizing feeling that someone was watching me, every stinking minute of every stinking day. I don't know how long I would have lasted out there on my own if I hadn't gotten lucky with the ship.

I will always think of that place as the Ghost Planet. I would also very much like to get all these voices out of my head.

Top Secret

Your Eyes Only

From: Chief of Naval Operations

August 29/2015

COM-USPACFLT

Admiral Owen Jenkins

To: David Weslingham

Vice President Product Development

Krafft Foods, Dairy Products Division

Dear David;

Regarding the test results from experiments with your product conducted from May 12/15 to June 17/15 inclusive. The majority of fleet personnel have responded to the questionnaire issued to U.S.S. Bainbridge ad U.S.S. Cormorant, the vessels participating in the aforesaid experiment. Breakdown is as follows. Preference for pineapple additive, fourteen percent, French onion additive, twenty-six percent, jalapeno, thirty-one percent, cinnamon-apple, nine percent and the other three flavors, dill pickle, peanut and olive, were evenly divided at about or just under seven percent each.

Yes, in general, ratings and senior personnel liked the cheese. Aroma, flavour, and mouth-feel were all rated as A-Plus or equivalent. The appearance of the product was appealing in ninety-six point-seven percent of cases. The product did not produce excessive amounts of intestinal gases, and neither did it cause undue indigestion.

Under FDA testing, the product met or exceeded all guidelines for food safety including low counts of toxic constituents. Independent laboratory examination has corroborated these results.

Moreover, the ability to store the product for extended cruise duration is a prime indicator that it would be available in sufficient quantities to satisfy crew desires for unique flavour combinations over the duration of a deployment. The resulting boost in morale is significant. There would be minimal need for replenishment in foreign or suspect markets, thereby eliminating security concerns regarding offshore vendors and contractors, which as you are aware is an ongoing process of the Department of the Navy. The ultimate goal of this three-year study is to select a core group of suppliers and reduce the dependence on offshore vendors. In short, David, congratulations. Your firm has the contract for the next two years of shipboard trials. I think we can all look forward to a successful conclusion to this phase or aspect of the experiment.

Documents confirming the order are forthcoming.

Addendum.

The unfortunate incident aboard U.S.S. Cormorant of June 2/15 remains highly classified. Early indications from the ongoing investigation are that the personnel found embedded in the decks and bulkheads of Cormorant resulted from experimental work being conducted at an undisclosed location, unrelated to this project. Krafft Foods and their Products Development Division have no cause for alarm in the opinion of this office and should not unduly concern themselves with issues of liability, culpability, or other issues, other than nominal security issues upon which you will be briefed.

It would be best if speculations about this event among Krafft Foods staff were kept to a minimum. Such speculations should most especially not be shared with outsiders or those not connected to the project, or those without sufficient security clearances.

Officers of the Department of the Navy will attend your offices and facilities by appointment only, in order to further inform you of your duties and responsibilities in this regard. They will instruct you and your staff in civilian contractor security protocols. There were a limited number of Krafft Foods staff aboard on the day in question and we will take all measures to limit further disruption. Krafft Foods representatives will also be briefed by members of the Judge Advocate General's office regarding the Department of the Navy's provisional compensation package.

We deeply regret exposing you and your staff to unanticipated dangers, and this office assures Krafft Foods that such an event will not occur a second time.

You have this office's deepest apologies.

In a more personal note, the Department of the Navy knows, David, just how upsetting it must have been for you and your staff members to have witnessed such an event, and you are applauded in your commitment to limiting disclosure to all but the most crucial staff members involved in this matter.

Thank you and have a good day.

Sincerely yours,

Admiral Owen Jenkins

United States Navy, Pacific Fleet.

The Implosion Bomb

"The implosion bomb works on a very simple principle, ladies and gentlemen." Doctor Stephen Morley was addressing a top-secret symposium of the planet's most imposing sub-nuclear scientists.

The grizzled African-American father of two peered over half-glasses, his notes neatly arrayed on the podium. He hardly needed them, but they provided reassurance.

He had full confidence in the findings, and well he should. The thing was a reality now, in a twenty-five year project that made the Manhattan Project look like a fart in a windstorm.

He put the first slide up on screen. It was an asteroid, hanging dim and mottled in the inky blackness of space. On the far side of the sun from Earth, its detection, or rather the lack of its presence, would not be remarked by unfriendly powers for many years. He'd done the math himself, and the secret location was highly-classified. Space was free territory. Other powers could easily investigate, if only they knew where to look. Stephen had given countless briefings over the years, including the present and three past presidents.

"As you know, the atom is mostly empty space. So, it turns out, are the sub-nuclear particles with which we have all become familiar. Or at least thought we had."

The room was dead silent as he went on.

"Modern scanning techniques go far beyond molecules, atoms, and particles. Now, ladies and gentleman, we have glimpsed the very matrix, the space-time continuum itself. It promises great revelations for the future, and yet this technology must still be proven. Research must still be paid for. The work must go on."

He waited. Eyes gleamed back at him in the darkness, lit only by the slide on the screen.

"What if we took all that empty space and made it go somewhere else?"

He put up the next slide. At first, it looked like a washout, all white glare, with smudges of pale grey and finally charcoal in the corners. The next slide came up when he clicked. This one showed a spectrum of radiation, a very strong impulse, with major frequencies shown with graphic scales of the signal strength beside each one. The figures didn't make sense at first. The numeric values were astronomical, although the scales had been designed with such a possibility in mind.

The swell of talk began to envelop the room as the brains behind those glazing eyes and open mouths took in what he was saying and it all began to sink in...

"Now you see it—and now you don't."

The talk turned to an uproar as a field of stars appeared, the exact same stars as in the previous image. The picture was clearly taken from the same vantage point, probably a satellite or small spaceship. The significance of the photo's time and date imprint became collectively known and then everyone was out of their seats and shouting questions and even some abuse in his direction.

Quickly the lights came up, a safety precaution as they were all out of their seats by this point.

"That's right, ladies and gentleman." He stood at the rostrum grinning down at his colleagues, all six hundred of them here tonight. "That's right."

Hiding in plain sight, the symposium's main venue was the ballroom of the Anaheim Hilton hotel. Security arrangements were unobtrusive but intense.

The uproar dropped down a bit, almost reluctantly, or so it seemed at first, but then it spontaneously built to a crescendo. The applause of his peers and the shouts of his supporters and admirers quickly drowned out the inevitable moaners and groaners, asking questions about ethics and what all this was costing and just exactly how it all came about. All the really fun science was happening right here in the good old U.S. of A.

It was a triumph of science and engineering, and they all knew it.

"Matter and space, time and energy, ladies and gentlemen. It's all rolled into one now: and this time, we really mean it."

He clicked on the icon for the slide show to roll automatically. Dramatic music swelled as the lights dimmed, interspersed with coughing and shuffling noises as people looked around and found their seats again.

"What's really interesting is that we theorize that all of the laws of conservation of momentum ceased to apply at the moment of implosion. There is no debris to follow along a trajectory, ladies and gentlemen. It has ceased to exist."

The room got very quiet.

"So there are still many gaps in our theory. Science brings us constant surprises."

Pictures of the asteroid, close-ups of the space-ship, one which they had never seen before, drew gasp after gasp from the assembled watchers. The room was dead silent again, as the implosion event played across the screen, from multiple angles, varying distances, and at different time-markers, beginning at Point Zero.

Finally there came a picture of the device itself, which was not much bigger than a deluxe backyard barbecue. It even bore a passing resemblance on its tall trolley wheels and with a keypad slung on each side of the device for arming and programming. The next pictures showed a power panel, mounted on the left side. The right panel held a keyboard and a small screen, and a pair of old fashioned key switches.

A collective rumble went up. It was a psychological moment in this type of briefing.

The doctor concluded his briefing, holding up a hand to still applause. He wasn't quite done yet.

His peroration was short and to the point, a quote from J. Robert Oppenheimer, spoken after the Trinity test at Alamagordo in 1945.

"And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have become Death, the destroyer or worlds."

The uproar broke out again, but he shouted them down.

"And it's true, isn't it ladies and gentlemen? We have become destroyers of worlds."

Which was more shocking, the pictures onscreen or the image of a serious scientist yelling his damned fool head off at what had become a mob of frightened humanity, no one could say, but the people eventually quieted. Reluctantly, they listened and watched with spellbound attention as Stephen concluded with some minor points.

"Ladies and gentlemen! Ladies, and gentlemen."

There was no way to keep such a thing a secret, of course. The question was how and when to announce it to a tired world, one which had seen enough power politics and gunboat diplomacy, long before the implosion bomb came along.

That would be the next item on the symposium's agenda. Inwardly he could see the relationships already sorting themselves out, into cliquish little study groups, each and every person wondering what the hell to say. How could they ever cover their own asses in the pitiless lens of history...the unpalatable answer of course, what that they hadn't known about it.

They would have plenty to say about it. He knew most of them, some of them very well.

The real work was just beginning.

"All I do is invent them, ladies and gentlemen. Your job is to figure out what to do with it. And may God have mercy on our souls."

It wasn't exactly the Bhagavad-Gita, but it would have to do.

The Frenchman

Mr. Staples wobbled alarming as he stood on the wrong side of the window.

"We just want to help you, sir." Constable Dan Knebworth had seen it all before.

"I don't want any help." Bob Staples shouted back.

Bob's eyes, white and terrified, rolled over and he took a quick look. Twenty-five stories, straight down.

"Can you tell us what the problem is?" Constable Janine Knox wanted to help. "Maybe we can help you with it."

Bob looked down again.

"No one can help me."

He seemed quite lucid, and he wasn't ranting and raving, or threatening anyone. They might be able to talk him down.

"Well, at least tell us what's going on." Constable Knebworth was known for patience.

"You'll just laugh, and say it's nothing, but it's not nothing." Mister Staples, white knuckles visible as he clung there, shouted hysterically.

"See, now you're not making any sense." Knebworth kept trying.

"We promise we won't laugh." Janine was very empathetic. "Can you tell us what's going on? Why are you doing this? Surely nothing can be that bad, why, there's nothing so bad that you can't deal with it..."

"Fuck you." The subject was extremely upset about something.

"There's still time to think about it. My name is Dan. Can you call me Dan? If nothing else?"

Mister Staples uttered a deep sigh, closed his eyes, and he was gong to do it. At some risk to his own safety, Dan reached over and grabbed the man's jacket, thankful that it was thick and strong and properly fastened.

"In you go, sir."

Janine clung to his belt as he gave a good heave.

***

Once they had him in the hospital ward, locked in solitary for three days of observation, they had a brief chat with the senior nurse.

"He says he's turning into a Frenchman." Janine snorted. "He doesn't look doped up."

"Suicide attempt, eh?" Nurse Henrietta Endercott filled in a form. "Must be some deep underlying issues..."

"He's all yours." The pair of cops had done their duty.

Henrietta glanced at the clock and the reports lined up in a row on the countertop. Doctor Chickadee would be in momentarily.

In the monitor, Robert Staples was lying on the bed, on his left side. He was weeping. He had made no effort to resist, did not lash out with hands and feet, and in general was polite but upset.

***

"So, tell me your troubles." Dr. Chickadee was a West African with the most cultured Oxford accent.

A pet phrase, one he stumbled upon just out of school. He had hung onto it ever since.

"Somehow, I am morphing into a Frenchman." Bob was miserable.

"What makes you say that?"

"Listen to me! Look at me!"

"Well, a little bit of an accent maybe..." Dr. Chickadee's admission came readily. "We've never met, so..."

"Look at all these gestures. I've never been to Quebec in my life!"

"I find that hard to believe."

"You see! Now you're doing it." Bob was getting angry, with the red creeping up his face and neck.

"Okay, okay. So you are not French, then?"

"No!" Bob bellowed at him. "I'm not French, I have never been French, and I don't want to be French! It's not going to happen."

"So you want my help."

"No, I want you to kill me, you stupid bastard."

"I see. That's very strange, but you seem remarkably French to me..."

In a trice, Bob dove across the table and had his hands around Chickadee's throat.

***

"He claims that he is an 'Anglo,' which is a word I have never actually heard used before." Dr. Chickadee explained as best he could. "He was born in Toronto, but there are French speakers in Toronto."

Dr. Pelman was reading about his parents, Robert senior, and his mother, Mrs. Betty Staples.

"These personality-displacement disorders are nothing new." Doctor Davis Pelman was a mentor. "For some reason he can't stand being himself."

"On the face of it, he was having a pretty nice life before. Good job, wife and three kids. Nice home. He insists there was nothing wrong in his life and he wants it back, which is a good sign."

"They are usually sophisticated enough to lie." Davis had seen much in twenty-five years, as he went poring over every little bit of information in the file. "So your patient is six-foot one? Interesting."

"What?"

"In the original report he is listed as six-foot-one, yet my examination shows him to be five- eleven...it's not unheard of to take a wrong measurement, but usually it's the other way around—people turn out to be a half inch or an inch taller than the record."

"So?"

"Well...it occurs to me that the average height of a person living in France probably is somewhat shorter...but it probably is just a mistake. I mean you could never prove it, either way, to anyone's satisfaction."

Davis had an odd, disbelieving grin on his face, noted Chickadee.

Dr. Chickadee knew this was due to people slouching, for in some ways to be measured and documented was very demeaning to the average person. They were just trying to help them, and no one really liked it, but accurate records must be kept in order for the staff to cover their backsides in the event of a successful suicide attempt. Unkempt records were alarming to the liability insurance people and their lawyers.

"I'll speak to the senior nurse about that." Chickadee added to his case notes. "He says he thinks like a Frenchman now, and he says that he even thinks in French. But, in a nation where every product is labeled in two languages, he probably has some kind of subconscious database of knowledge. His pronunciation seems fine to me, but then, I don't speak French."

The other just nodded, studying the file.

"All right, I'll take him on for a while." Davis smiled in reassurance. "I don't know how helpful I can be, but I will try."

"Thank you. Honestly, I think he's still a threat to himself and others."

Davis nodded in appreciation of the facts.

***

Bob sat across the desk from Dr. Davis Pelman.

"Have you ever been to France?"

"Non!" Then his face flushed. "I mean, no."

"Are any of your relatives French?" Doctor Pelman realized it sounded like a stupid question. "I mean like a grandmother or some other relative by marriage?"

"No." Bob enunciated very carefully.

"Are you sure?"

Bob let out a breath.
"I don't recall anyting like dat." He started turning beet red again.

"What are you going to do if we can't help you?"

"You better be able to help me." Bob scowled. "You fucking bastards keep me in here long enough..."

"Yes?" Doctor Pelman inquired politely, suspecting the answer before it came.

"I fuckin' kill you."

***

"Can you tell me what you had for breakfast this morning?"

"Shit."

"No, Robert, you know that's not right."

"I didn't eat nothing."

"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day." Doctor Pelman was finding it hard going.

"That's why I won't eat it. I don't want your stinking, fucking shit breakfast. I want to be me."

"I admit the food really isn't too palatable, and it's never very hot, but you really must eat something once in a while." Doctor Pelman had concerns. "We'll force-feed you if necessary."

"I rather die than a be a somebody else. I bite you're a-fuckin' hand off. Tabernac."

***

Dr. Chickadee and Dr. Pelman pored over the case notes.

"Wow." Doctor Pelman was definitely intrigued. "We've got ourselves a real humdinger here."

"His weight has stabilized. Holy shit! His height is now five-nine?" Chickadee's jaw dropped.

Davis Pelman nodded shortly.

"Fascinating, simply fascinating." Pelman muttered. "Now, if you asked me to prove the loss of height, in an otherwise physically healthy, otherwise normal male of thirty-seven...holy, crap."

"We've been at it long enough. How about some dinner?" Davis had a good idea there.

Chickadee was single and Davis was divorced, and it was no big thing to phone up a chic local restaurant and make reservations.

***

While the Staples case was interesting enough to dominate dinner-table conversation, the pair talked about other subjects as well.

Doctor Chickadee realized just how hard he had been working and that he needed a night off once in while.

It was an enjoyable meal, in nice surroundings, such a change after the cafeteria! Or frozen dinners and stuff eaten off the coffee table.

The next morning dawned bright and clear. It was a fine day in the neighbourhood.

Stepping out to get the morning paper from the mailbox, he saw Mary-Ann, his neighbour.

"Hello, Doctor Chickadee." She called over brightly, waving as she put the kids in the car.

"Bonjour." Chickadee spoke the word, much to his own surprise, but she just gave him a happy look and went on with her business.

Yes, this patient was definitely getting to him!

"Oh, golly, I have been working much too hard." Doctor Chickadee gave a Gallic shrug.

***

"Maybe it is infectious." Doctor Chickadee was at a complete loss to explain it.

"Nonsense." Doctor Pelman was firm.

He had to admit, it felt a little queer to examine a fellow physician. Although they all had other doctors on their patient lists, the people never seemed to come in for an appointment. It was like they feared periodic checkups by a fellow professional, but considering the stress of the job, maybe that was understandable.

"Nom de Dieu! What in the fuckin' hell are we going to do?"

"I would like to know what causes this. In the meantime, we should take full prophylactic measures."

"What does that mean?" Of course, Chickadee already knew the answer.

***

For lack of a better plan, Doctor Chickadee took a room after some persuasion, in the mental wing of their very own hospital.

Oddly enough, the Doctor had never spent any time in an isolation cell, and he was surprised by how hard on a person it was. Why, if he were to be kept in here long enough, he was certain that he would go mad, and perhaps even become violent. Thank Christ, but it was just for the overnight hours, and that they let him out during the day.

It shocked the doctor, the fact the place had no books, or magazines, or anything but one TV set for eighty people, a TV set inevitably tuned and then locked to the most mindless programming, stuff like Regis and Kelly, Heartland, and CTV News Channel.

At some theoretical level, now he knew how abusive it was to place a person in there...it felt like punishment. He had to admit. People saying otherwise just sort of riled him up. When he got out, he planned to write a paper on the subject. If nothing else, as part of their training, doctors, nurses, and police officers really should spend a few days in there...it might smarten them up.

The worst thing was, that Doctor Chickadee continued turning into a Frenchman, albeit a black and very well educated one. But he was becoming a Frenchman nevertheless.

***

"I have good news." Doctor Pelman regarded Chickadee.

"Oh, nom de Dieu." The doctor turned patient was pretty desperate by this point.

Davis was silent.

"What's the bad news?" Davis just lowered his eyes and looked at the papers.

"We think that you and Mister Staples consumed pate from a radioactive goose. You and a few others, actually."

"Others?" Chickadee gasped in dismay. "How many others?"

"Everyone who had that fuckin' pate, you know?" Doctor Pelman made a Gallic shrug and a gave a flounce of the head.

Doctor Pelman looked very sad.

"You were pretty fuckin' hungry," He answered Chickadee's unspoken question. "I only had one little fuckin' cracker!"

"Eh? So...?"

"Tabernac! With me, maybe it take a little longer, eh?" Davis Pelman's eyes smouldered. "Moudzie! By gar, and I don' like this one liddle beet."

Mouth open, Doctor Chickadee stared across the table, rendered speechless by this revelation.

"What'r you gonna do?" Davis shrugged. "Maybe it's only, like, temporary, eh?"

Upon this revelation, Doctor Chickadee slumped onto his arms, folded on the tabletop in front of him; and put his head down and cried.

The Cabbie

Flashlights stabbed the night and alarm bells rang, but it was already too late. The convenience store was only three blocks from the jail. His bent coat hanger was a spare, from the rack in the medical room. The nurse bent over to look in a drawer, and it was gone!

Too easy, really.

Ritchie Algernon put the cab in gear and drove off. Hot-wiring the old thing was no problem due to years of experience. It was New Year's Eve, and the driver was safe inside the gas bar, holding a forlorn cup of coffee in one hand. He was waiting at the back of a very long line up. The windows were all steamed up from wet floors and mucky boots, and the victim probably couldn't see a thing. It was black anywhere not directly under a streetlight.

The maximum security county bucket was simply too easy...too easy. Ritchie was resourceful.

Making a right and turning out onto the street, two young men on the sidewalk suddenly leapt out almost right in front of the car, waving their arms frantically. On some mad impulse, thinking that three heads in a taxi would be a bit of a cover, Ritchie impulsively pulled over. With a touch of the button, the passenger side window began rolling down, but the young guys weren't waiting.

"Hey, Mister! Can you take us down to the south end?" the kid, about nineteen years old, practically bellowed in his ear.

The second one was already climbing into the back seat on the right side. They smelled like beer.

"Sure, hop in!" said Ritchie. "Where did you say? I have another call. I really shouldn't do this!"

"It's a big party," vowed the kid. "You should come on in, man; it's going to be great."

"Car eighteen," said the radio.

A voice answered as Ritchie gave it some gas. The streets were covered with about two to three inches of a thick, sloppy combination of snow and slush.

"Car thirteen, car thirteen..." came the voice of the dispatcher, but there was no immediate response. "Car Thirteen...car thirteen..."

Ritchie reached over and switched off the radio.

"Right!" yelled the kid beside him.

Cursing, Ritchie tucked the nose in, gave it some throttle, and the back end came out. She went around the corner like a dirt-racer, and Ritchie feathered the throttle down. No one seemed to care that he was wearing orange pants and elastic-sided slippers...thank goodness for the cabbie's jacket and a spare ball cap in the back window.

"We'll give you twenty bucks if you can get us there in like five minutes," said the kid in the back, whipping out a cell phone and punching in numbers.

The guy started talking on the phone in a low tone, surreptitiously looking all around out the windows. The front end of the car bobbed up and down, and in the glare of the tail-lights he could see rooster tails of slush coming up.

The snow flurries were coming down on an angle, the wipers were going back and forth, the FM radio was babbling away, and Ritchie didn't mind hurrying, although he would have liked a moment to think.

The gas tank showed about a half...driving from city to city would take cash. He wondered if he could pry the sign off the roof without too much hassle. With his heart in his mouth, he saw a cop car coming along on a side street to the right. Ritchie eased up on the throttle. It stopped and it had the left blinker on...Ritchie was doing about sixty kilometres an hour. The kid in the back twisted and watched out the back window, as it turned and went the other way.

"We're cool man, don't get pulled over!" said the one beside him, by which Ritchie understood that maybe they had something on them.

"Hah!" he said with a sharp grin. "I ain't got time for them guys. I'm going to make me some money! Give me the twenty."

The kid gave him a look and Ritchie glanced over.

"I'm Roscoe," said the fellow, a lanky male with long, dark hair falling all over the place and a thin wispy beard. "This is Dud."

"Hey, Dud," said Ritchie, accepting a twenty from Roscoe.

"Here's your twenty," said Dud.

With raised eyebrows, Ritchie accepted that one too, but Roscoe just grinned. The smell of alcohol was pretty strong, but they didn't seem to have booze on them.

"All righty, then," said Ritchie, stepping on the throttle.

The back end came out but he held the thing balanced, and then pulled out with a snap.

"Yee-hah," he called in animal joy.

"Here, man," said Roscoe. "You're cool!"

Ritchie looked over when he had a second; and saw something in the kid's hand.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Mushrooms!" said Roscoe.

"Oh, I don't know, man," said Ritchie, silently cursing.

And of course the kid wouldn't take no for an answer. Now there was a joint burning in the back of the car.

"Ah, fuck it," said Ritchie, grabbing them.

"Left," called Dud. "Left up here."

The kid had left it a bit late, so Ritchie did a couple of s-type fishtails under braking, on the greasy road, and both of them took gasping deep breaths.

With the joint smoking in his mouth, Ritchie looked over. Roscoe had his hands braced on the dashboard as Ritchie nailed the intersection perfectly, and then let the tail hang out as he accelerated up to eighty-five kilometres an hour. He chewed on what seemed like a pretty big handful of mushrooms, sort of wondering if he could spit it out when they weren't looking.

Lowering the window, he got it down about three inches before Dud spoke up.

"Oh, man, I'm freezing," and Ritchie put it back up again.

The car went sideways in a strong gust of wind. They were on sheet ice for a moment. Ritchie caught it with a flick of the wrist. He had the wad of mushrooms jammed up in his cheek. There was already an edge to him, he could feel it.

"Don't kill us, man!" laughed Dud in the back. "Holy, fuck!"

"No, don't worry You're riding with the best," said Ritchie. "This thing handles pretty good."

It was a Ford or something. It had rear wheel drive, and an automatic transmission and a big, rather loose V-8 engine up front, with overhead valves by the sound of it, and the thing handled okay. The roads were atrocious, but the car was in its element, especially with Ritchie's strong hands and sure confidence behind the wheel. Ritchie wasn't afraid to break it, perhaps that was the thing.

"Ahhhh!" said the guys as he held a long, four-wheel drift through a curving section of the road.

"Oh, Jesus!" yelled Dud as he saw the curve switch back the other way.

Ritchie was laughing at them the whole time.

"You asked for it, suckers," he advised them. "Do up your belts!"

"Whoa," said Roscoe as Ritchie flicked her to the right again and they drifted through the next curve at something over seventy kilometres an hour.

"Where are we?" asked Dud.

"Where's this party?" asked Ritchie, passing the roach.

"Three or four more blocks," said a wild-looking Roscoe.

Finally; they were pulling over. Up ahead, seventy yards or so, Ritchie saw flashers and it looked like the ubiquitous cops had someone stopped. Roscoe stuck his head back in and without fanfare shoved something into Ritchie's upper right jacket pocket.

"What...?" asked Ritchie.

"Don't worry, it's just a doob," said the kid.

"Hey!" called Ritchie.

"What?" asked Roscoe.

"There's someone in there that wants a cab," Ritchie told him. "Tell them I can't wait."

Roscoe yelled at Dud, just heading in the door, and Dud looked back with a nod and a wave.

"Thanks, man," said Roscoe.

Ritchie grinned, pretending to listen to the cabbie radio down at a low volume.

Somebody stuck their head out the front door of the house as Roscoe went up the steps. She waved at Ritchie.

"Don't go! Don't go!" she called.

"Well, for fuck's sakes, hurry up then," muttered Ritchie as he watched the police car up the road.

He saw the officer get in his cruiser, and sit inside with the light on. There was no other action up there. Situation not resolved yet, he figured, but it would be soon enough. On New Year's Eve, they had to have pretty much every available car and officer on duty...happy, youthful voices caught his attention again.

The car rocked as a bunch of them got in. A pretty little blonde girl, all of five-foot three and about fifteen years old by the look of her sat in the passenger side.

"Money up front," called Ritchie over the seat back. "Somebody already tried to rob me once tonight."

"Aw, you poor man," said the girl, staring at him with big, shiny dark eyes. "You must have been so scared..."

"What? No, I beat him up and threw him out," said Ritchie, and they all laughed and giggled and there was a whole lot of young faces staring at him in the mirror.

Ritchie resolved to shut up for a while and just drive.

***

"Please, ladies, please don't give me no trouble," groaned Ritchie as the third one in a row giggled and tried to show him her tits. "Aw, come on!"

"You're a nasty old man," said the one in the passenger side, her name was Sandy.

They were all yelling their names and phone numbers at him and he was pretty sure one was stripping in the back seat.

"Cops!" he yelled and someone screeched.

The car heaved as they all shifted around back there.

"Yeah, I'm a nasty old man, all right," he said. "But I just don't have time. Besides, I got a wife and three kids!"

"There's no cops! Have a drink, mister," came a breathy voice right up close in his ear.

Two or three cans of beer fell out of her massive purse, he could hear them clanking around in the back. There were more laughs and giggles, and the smell in the car had to be experienced to be believed...all of that perfume, and makeup, and hair spray, and underarm stuff...five of them, for crying out loud. Cans of beer landed on the seat beside him.

"Oh, Lord, where is this party?' asked Ritchie. "Maybe I will go in."

Every so often he giggled, aware that he sounded kind of stoned.

It seemed to take ages, as all of them were already drunk; but finally they navigated their way into a massive subdivision, all curving streets, cul-de-sacs, and crescents without end. By the time they all got out, it seemed like a lifetime. The actual trip wasn't that far. Ritchie had a handful of fives, tens, coins, little slips of paper...a piece of tinfoil with something in it, hopefully not gum. He looked up, stunned, to see a bare ass right in front of his face. It was right inside the car window.

"Thank you," said Ritchie, and with a quick lunge, kissed her left buttock and then took a sharp little nip.

"Oh!" she said, spinning away. "You bastard!"

"Yeah!" he grinned. "Thanks for the beer. Have a good night, and don't forget to call again."

"Bye, sugar," she smirked impishly in farewell, and she blew him a kiss.

"Bye, Sandy," he said fondly, but sirens drowned it out.

Three fire engines roared by and pulled up to a house just up the street, and a cop car was right behind them.

The smell of hot and probably illegal teenage pussy still lingered, at least in his imagination.

Ritchie put it in gear and got the hell out of there. So far; no one had even noticed that he forgot to trip the meter! Maybe no one cared.

***

Ritchie couldn't believe his luck. It was getting surreal, or perhaps he was just hyper-alert...

The next couple, waved at him from a front porch as he was going by. He remembered to trip the lever. They sat in the back and hissed at each other, or endured a deadly silence, for the whole trip. That one paid exactly five dollars, and they gave him a ten-cent tip!

"Happy New Year's," said the lady with a brilliantly insincere smile.

"Thank you," said Ritchie, wondering what in the hell was their problem?

***

Ritchie saw the scene through the brightly lit windows of the Area 51 bar.

Some guy was falling against the glass doors, which sort of burst open as he went down and through, and then there were two big beefy guys still throwing kicks and punches at him...

"What the?" asked Ritchie in disbelief. "Jesus!"

All of a sudden, the guy leapt to his feet and bolted straight for Ritchie.

Before he even had time to think, the guy, stinking of booze and big enough himself, was in the front seat beside him.

"Drive!" he barked, all insane-looking and angry as all hell. "Take me home! I'm going to get my gun!"

"Aw, for fuck's sakes," noted Ritchie.

"Take me home! Take me home!" the man was right in Ritchie's face, glaring at him, blowing little flecks of spittle all over the place. "I got to get my gun!"

"I need to know where it is!" said Ritchie reasonably enough, but the man was having none of it. "How can I go there if you won't tell me?"

"Just fucking drive!" bellowed the customer, pointing dramatically forwards out the windscreen. "I'm going to get my gun!"

Sighing deeply, Ritchie figured this one was not only a freebie, but also a big waste of time.

***

Ritchie managed to drop the guy off in front of some apartment building by pulling to a stop, reaching over and yanking on the door handle, and then giving the asshole a hefty heave-ho. The stupid drunken bastard fell out onto the curb and just lay there cursing as Ritchie drove away.

"Screw you, you fuckin' idiot," said Ritchie as he drove away.

Ritchie was just pulling up to an intersection when he saw a forlorn figure, again he saw the desperate look. A young woman in a mink coat got in when he pulled up.

"Hello," she said brightly. "My boyfriend's a pig."

"Where's the party?" he asked, slightly jaded, what with all of this cab experience under his belt.

She gave him an address and he asked her how to get there.

The snowflakes were coming down even harder and he belatedly snapped on the meter.

"I'm just new here," he explained.

And here was another one! The crazy woman, a nice-looking blonde in her late twenties, had her legs open, she was fingering herself, and she was gasping in pleasure...

"Aw, lady," said Ritchie. "Seriously."

"Maybe you should forget about driving and come to the party," she said, turning to gaze deeply into his eyes. "You might get lucky."

"No, really, please, I can't do that, I'd lose my job for sure," said Ritchie, blushing furiously, and wondering what this one was on.

By the time he managed to talk her out of it, and dropped her off in front of some upscale apartment building, Ritchie had a little over three-eighths of a tank of gas left and about seventy-five bucks, three cans of beer, a doobie, and a small chunk of what looked like crack. A few phone numbers, mostly illegible...

He had a coat, which he discovered in the trunk. It was a little dirty, but it was a coat. There was a piece of luggage in the trunk, but he dumped the woman's clothing out of it in a small strip mall parking lot. Lost and found, and lost yet again.

Ritchie still didn't have a plan, but it was only ten-thirty, the snow was falling like crazy, the roads were icing up, the town was going crazy, and the mushrooms and the joint were taking effect. One thing for sure, he couldn't just sit there, in an empty cab, on New Year's Eve for very long. He jumped out and had a piss against the rear tire, watching in hopeless disbelief as yet another cop car zoomed past with siren blaring and lights going. The one thing he could not do was to panic...

All of a sudden, he heard shouting from not too far behind him.

"Aw, no," said Ritchie as someone shoved some kind of a crazy-coloured plastic badge in his face, yelling incoherently.

"You're fucking busted," the man shrieked, grabbing him by the collar and suddenly slipping on the ice. "I am going to beat you senseless!"

Ritchie went down right on top of the man, cursing and wriggling, desperately trying to catch his fall and maybe even to get away from the son of a bitch without ripping his pecker to shreds on his open zipper...

***

"Take us to the cab company! You're all busted," the big, loudmouth male in the passenger seat shouted for the seventeenth time.

Three well-dressed, adult people sat in the back, another male and two women, all of them drunk and all of them threatening him with legal action, arrest, or just assault. Ritchie shook his head in disbelief as another cab came up beside, honked the horn, and then the driver shot him the finger.

The guy rolled down the passenger side window and spat in his direction.

"You fucking cocksucker!" the guy yelled, raging at the awful fate that had befallen him.

Ritchie just shrugged and slumped down further in the seat.

Stolen fare!

"Not my fault, man," he muttered. "Just my luck!"

"Shut up or I'll kill you!" bellowed the male in the back seat as the ladies giggled.

By this point, he was driving aimlessly around in circles with the meter going while they berated him endlessly.

"Why were you hiding in the bushes?" he asked loudly. "Is there some place you would like to go, ladies and gentlemen?"

They gave no answer to that one, all he got was just more abuse. If the guy hit him, Ritchie was going to take him outside and beat him within an inch of his life...this night was getting out of hand. He would have gladly taken them anywhere, but no one would listen to him, not even for a second. Apparently, from all the cursing and shouting, they had been waiting for a cab for over three hours.

Ritchie found that all this somehow put his own little problems in better perspective.

In an amazing stroke of luck, Ritchie saw a sign up ahead.

"Acme Cab! I'll bust every one of the bastards!" bellowed Bully Bob, who was apparently some sort of guard at the jail! Ritchie didn't recognize him, and thank God for that.

The man's ID was right there on the seat beside Ritchie...the vehicle rocked as they all went boiling up the stairs and into the building, a small white frame house on a side street in the poorer end of town.

On an impulse, Ritchie half got out of the vehicle. The sign on the roof of the car said, 'Joe's Cab.'

"Hey," he grinned. "Serve 'em right."

Ritchie got out of there, noting a strange smell, and a quick glance over his shoulder showed him some kind of pale coloured Tupperware bowl sitting on the rear seat.

"I hope that's macaroni salad," he muttered. "Now all I need is a little salt."

Ritchie heard a sound nearby, a loud thumping that seemed to come right up through the seat.

It had to be a train.

***

Eleven minutes later, Ritchie sat in a seat on the far side of the train as it pulled out of the station. He wore his big overcoat and a red ball cap pulled down low. He had three beers, a joint, and some other knickknacks, including a jail guard's ID. He had a suitcase with a cab company jacket in it. He had twenty-seven dollars left. He had a bowl of macaroni salad all to himself. A pretty good buzz was really starting to kick in.

His whole life lay ahead of him. He saw that very clearly now. Didn't he deserve a second chance? Ritchie was no worse than the rest of them, and who knows? Maybe even better than most. You could say it put getting caught with a half a bag of dope into perspective.

A man approached up the aisle, apparently floating an inch above the carpet, which seemed to go in waves as he walked. It was the conductor. Everything had a weird air of unreality about it.

"Welcome to VIA Rail! How are things? Is there anything I can do?" he boomed pleasantly, with his voice reverberating softly inside Ritchie's head. He stood there expectantly, with his eyebrows raised in inquiry, his posture slightly bent, and his hands held behind his back.

"I could really use some salt," sighed Ritchie Algernon. "And a plastic spoon, maybe. That would be just about priceless right now."

The Big Bust

"Shhh! Someone's coming," whispered Staff Sergeant Jinny Rosko.

Her partner crouched there in suspense, peering intently through the strap-on night-vision goggles.

"There's three of them," advised Constable Bill De Floret. "I've got three hot spots in the brush. They're walking east, just this side of the cornfield."

DeFloret was a good man and a hot trigger, and she was glad to have him here for backup under these tactical circumstances.

She lowered her daylight-type pocket scope half an inch and took a regular look for herself. Three distinctly bulky, black silhouettes were visible in the moonlight to her naked eye.

They were just on this side of the fence-line. Small conifers provided a windbreak, and the men flitted through the shadows for cover.

She could see why they chose the place for an entry point into their patch. The occasional passing car headlights would be easy enough to dodge, and dopers were a paranoid bunch. Their bobbing, round little heads were occasionally backlit by the light of the full moon as they traipsed along.

People walking across farmer's fields in the middle of the night were an unusual sight, and bound to arouse comment. Some of these people knew their ground very well indeed. It was best not to underestimate the opposition in this never-ending war on drugs.

She keyed her microphone and whispered instructions to her troops, perfectly disposed to interdict and capture what she figured were dope-cultivators. A local farmer, yet still within the city limits, was reporting suspicious activity on his property. He said there were all kinds of nocturnal comings and goings. They had found a trail running across his land, and a dead giveaway, plastic bags, peat pots, arm-loads of stalks and sticks, root-balls, and other garbage dumped in the ditch.

An urgent phone tip half an hour ago brought them here on the double. Their farmer-friend was driving to town when he observed three men on mountain bicycles and wearing backpacks.

They were riding out along Vimy Ridge Side Road. She scrambled half her shift, not sure they could get here in time to deploy in classic ambush positioning.

"Observe and report," she instructed. "Be aware of booby-traps. These men are presumed armed and dangerous."

In her earpiece, she heard a series of double-clicks in acknowledgement. Bringing the microphone to her lips, she breathed softly in tension and suspense. There was only the eight of them, four teams of two.

"Hold up, hold up," she murmured into it.

De Floret was still watching intently.

"They're going into the trees," he reported. "They're following their little trail."

"Wait," ordered Rosko. "Everyone just hold up until I say. We need evidence, remember."

Bill looked over for a moment.

"Safety first," she added into the microphone.

He nodded with a little grin.

"They're at a hundred-fifty metres," he advised, pointing across the gloomy fields, to where the dope-trail led into the dark and threatening forest.

"Based on past performance, they should have a couple of lights," he allowed.

While still speaking at a murmur, silence was not so crucial, now that the quarry was committed. It was vital to catch as many of these turkeys as they could. In a world where social inequality, rampant consumerism, and crass materialism ran amok, people smoking pot represented a challenge to the established social order, without which further economic progress could not be made. And it cost a lot of money—a good bag of pot might run as high as $300 these days. The scum should be spending that money to feed their families; but it just went to more dope and more crime.

The mosquitoes were bad, despite the fact she was liberally slathered with repellent.

It was a known fact the stuff would fade the dye in their uniforms. She cursed the anti-social misfits who put the state to so much time and expense.

Time hung heavy on their hands.

She checked her Rolex.

"They've been in there five minutes," she said quietly.

Jinny made a careful note, and then re-stashed her notebook.

"How long?" asked De Floret, with a bead of sweat trickling down his forehead from under the camouflaged forage cap. "I've had enough of this crap."

"We want to nail 'em good," she said. "Let's catch them with the stuff, all right?"

Checking her watch again, she saw that a fairly large, fluffy cloud was going to go past in front of the full moon.

"All right. All units converge, very slowly now. Soupie's ETA three minutes, confirm," she breathed into the radio.

A series of decisive double-clicks avowed their determination to succeed, a form of non-verbal communication.

"Bill?" she murmured.

But De Floret was already moving out, his .40 Colt automatic 'all tuned-up and ready to go,' as the saying went. She shoved the little scope into a pocket and fastened the Velcro properly.

She picked up her weapon.

Cocking the SPAS-12 assault shotgun, she checked it for safety. Her finger would never leave the lever until these guys were in the back of a cruiser, or the scene was secured...Jinny wasn't taking any chances with these jerks.

Some saw it as a game, a big chess game. But she never traded pawn-for-pawn with these turkeys. There was no ratio. It didn't matter if you killed a hundred of them for even one of your own, the price was still too high.

Simply put, they didn't get paid to take risks with their lives. She focused on following Bill silently through the gloom, relying on his unerring instinct and the fact that he had their only pair of night-vision goggles. The department could only afford a small number of the devices, and so she had to share them out, one set to a team. She tripped on a root or something invisible and went down.

Back up in a heartbeat, she gratefully acknowledged that it was a pretty quiet sort of a fall.

And thank goodness for that, because they were right at the black edge of the tree line. She and Bill both halted for a moment and breathed a sigh of relief when they got out of the direct moonlight.

***

Units Two and Three were deployed to cut off the quarry's escape route, and Bill and she were following the trail. Unit four was right at the road, anticipating that if the men slipped through the cordon, they would make for the place they normally stashed the bikes before the long hike in. Twenty men would have been insufficient, if truth be told, and she knew it, but...but.

While they hadn't had time to locate any patches of dope, that was why Two and Three were in close, where they could observe and locate the exact spot the men went.

Suddenly the night exploded with shots, shouts, and flashes of light in the woods from ahead and off to their right.

"Go, go, go!" she gasped at Bill, but then she stumbled right into the back of him.

"I'm friggin' blinded," he gasped in dismay. "Hold up, hold up!"

"Follow along," she advised, grabbing his sleeve and literally willing the man to move along.

More shots, more incoherent shouts, although she could recognize some of the voices among them...

More flashes.

***

Stumbling forwards with De Floret in tow; Sergeant Rosko made for the ruckus, still trying to follow the trail in the blackness of the forest.

"Damn! I've got to turn on a light, Bill," she cursed.

"I still can't see a damned thing," he agreed. "Down."

They squatted there in the underbrush as they heard more loud voices, and another shot. It was dead ahead, about forty metres into the thicket.

"That's Murgatroyd," gasped Jinny.

"Hold fire! Hold fire!" she bellowed, conscious that they had no idea where that round went, or where it was directed, or who had just fired it. She could see beams of light stabbing around over there.

Everything was very silent for a moment, and then someone off the trail but inches away, just on the other side of a veritable wall of tall grass, leapt up and dashed away off to the northwest, or so she thought. Their breath was ragged, and loud in the darkness, clearly someone panic-stricken with fear...

"Hold fire!" she shouted, springing to her feet and pelting off through the long grass and small shrubs that made for a small clearing in the gloom. Just for one moment, her flashlight picked out a fleeing figure.

"Halt! Halt!" she shouted, slowing down, sliding into position, and freezing into her firing stance.

It was already too late, but she pulled the trigger a eight or nine times in sheer desperation before thinking better of it and putting the weapon up.

She didn't have a compass...but she was pretty sure it was northwest. Jinny pulled out the microphone.

"Four, one suspect has gone to ground, may be heading to you, over," and she heard excited voices in response, drowning out all the voices, good, excited cop voices, behind her.

She held the button down, making everyone's ear pieces squeal for a good thirty seconds, an old supervisor's trick. When she let it up there was silence.

"All right, I'm coming in, hold your fire," she ordered. "Bill?"

Off in the distance, from the direction of the city, she could hear sirens—a lot of them.

"I'm right here where you left me," he responded. "I can see better now."

"Shine your light, I'm coming in," she told them. "What have you got, Two and Three?"

***

What they had was one dead suspect, He was face down in the grass, and there were two backpacks. One was still on the suspect, and one had simply been abandoned in flight.

"There are two suspects still out there, people," she advised all the teams, including those inbound.

"Let's see what we've got."

De Floret gently lifted the dead person's chin, and rotated the neck to get a look at the face.

"I saw this guy at the drop-in centre a couple of months ago," he grunted.

She was busy re-deploying available manpower, and waiting for reinforcements. With cruisers parked on all contiguous side-roads, the suspects were probably walking across-country, most likely back to town.

"What was the beef?" she asked.

"Huh?" asked Bill. "No, he was just there, having a free cup of coffee and some cake, and listening to some lecture on something or other. Mental hygiene, for all I know."

Bill was there looking for another individual.

"What's in the bag," he mused, whistling a nameless tune through slightly pursed lips.

He knelt in the grass beside the dead man and carefully opened up the top while Jinny held a light for him.

The dead weight of the load suddenly let go, and she stepped back as the stuff rolled and tumbled out on the forest floor.

"What the hell?" she gasped in sudden confusion.

The pair of them stood looking at a load of tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, and acorn squash.

What the hell was going on here?

Jinny stood there gasping for breath and sanity.

"Three here. We have a blood trail. I repeat, we have a blood trail..."

Bill got up abruptly and went to the other pack. It was the same thing; more vegetables, more tomatoes.

"Aw, for God's sakes," he groaned.

Bill grabbed the microphone.

"Approach suspects with caution, and hold fire," he advised all the teams. "We may have a code ten-one-hundred here. Ten-one-oh-two. They're probably, I repeat probably unarmed, and not dangerous. Approach with caution."

Jinny stood there, gazing down at the dead man's load of stolen vegetables.

"How could we have known?" she asked the brooding night, as silent tears streamed down her face. "How could we have possibly known?"

The voices of a billion crickets, with all of their chirping and rustlings in the grass, was no answer at all.

Star Trash

In life we have to take someone else's word for a lot of things.

I'm just taking my dear departed mother's word for it, when I say that I am twenty-eight years old, or that my father was a man named Brendan Hartle, and that he was abducted by aliens a long time ago.

But if that is true, then he must have beaten them at their own game, just as my mom Layla said. Otherwise, I suppose I wouldn't be here, and I wouldn't have the ship, and yet I can't verify anything. I can't prove anything either way.

For whatever reason, I was just sitting there thinking my melancholy and philosophical thoughts, when I saw this object, cruising along all unbeknownst to itself. This was a totally unfamiliar configuration. The ship and I had been evading the Imperium's ships forever, or so it seemed. We were familiar with most configurations, but this one was all-new.

"What the hell is that?" I asked the ship.

"It's a probe," was the response.

"Yes, I see that. Where did it come from, and where is it going?" I asked peevishly. "Can you tell me who made it?"

"Well...it's heading towards the Centralian Empire," the machine suggested. "Back-tracking...it came from there, that is to say it might have originated at any point on this line..."

If it hadn't made any turns, yeah, yeah...

The cabin lights dimmed and the appropriate vectors appeared, hovering in the air before my eyes, with relevant star bodies and other objects and polities displayed for my inspection.

"What do you think is out there?" I asked obscurely, but the machine was fairly intuitive."Perhaps whoever built the probe?" it replied without a trace of mockery, but I have often wondered.

"All right, smart-ass, let's go have a look at that thing," and without further ado, I began to strap myself in securely, and prepared for up-close and personal maneuvers with another starship.

After a half a minute of study, the ship's computer had an incomplete verdict on the data. "It's surprisingly big," it told me. "I have no idea what they're using for fuel. We'll have to get closer."

"Relax, I'm on it," I told my sole surviving shipmate, the computer, and began edging us into  
an intercept vector.

***

"There's letters or a word on it," I told the flight computer. "It says 'ESA,' unless I'm much mistaken, and 'Artemis,' on the side of the thing."

"That doesn't correspond to anything in the registry," it noted. "But as you know the registry hasn't been updated in too many years for any reasonable degree of accuracy."

That was true enough, but we would have had to interact with an Imperial data terminal somewhere to update it, and I preferred to leave absolutely no traces of our whereabouts, at any time, for any reason. Theoretically it was possible to do it wirelessly and anonymously, but then our knowledge of anti-hacking technologies and capabilities was out of date as well. Always; caution and stealth were best.

"When will it arrive in Centralian space?" I queried.

"At this speed, in about four and a half months," I was told.

"Okay. That's a relief. But I really don't know what to do about it..." I trailed off.

This thing had English lettering on the side of it. I sat there in shock. It had taken too long to sink in...

"Flight computer!"

"Yes?" it responded.

"Figure out just exactly where this thing came from," I ordered it in no uncertain terms.

My father had a bunch of old books, old music, and they were all lettered in the same script that was on that probe. As we pulled up alongside, at a distance of a half a kilometer, the sheer size of it became more apparent.

It was a good three kilometers long, and maybe a third of a kilometer in diameter, and there was no way the Centralians would let that thing go sailing through their jurisdiction without challenge.

And from what little I knew about Earth, and based upon what my mother had told me, the people of Earth probably didn't know too much or even anything about the Centralian Empire, or their clients and allies and associates.

"Well, it's definitely unmanned," I muttered, and the computer's silence indicated its agreement.

What the hell the Earthmen were trying to accomplish with that vessel was incomprehensible to me. But one way or another, either they, or we, or both were about to get in a whole lot of trouble.

***

I was trying to figure out what to do next.

"If we can shut it off, or stop it, or even redirect it temporarily, maybe we can salvage it," was my first notion.

Cash rules the anonymous economy.

"We'll have to determine how and where it is controlled," said the flight computer with just a hint of doubt in its usually emotionless voice.

This spoke volumes for its actual state of mind.

"I'll be careful," I assured it. "But actually I was thinking of re-routing it, and that would give me more time to think it all through..."

But it was not to be, for just at that moment we were hailed by a squadron of roving Imperial destroyers, which was quite a shock as they really had no right or reason to be here at this exact moment in time.

I suppose I should have known better, really, than to get too focused on something that wasn't really my concern...but they almost had us with our pants down.

"Nine minutes to intercept..." noted the computer.

"Dummies!" I laughed.

They should have just kept creeping up on us, carefully stalking us from the other side of this probe's fucking thrust-cone. The little wheep-wheep-wheep of the hailing alarm nattered at me from the console speaker.

"Would you like to respond?" asked the flight-comp.

"Nope," I said, giving the straps a quick cinch.

"Destroy the probe," I instructed the machine, and then I took manual control through the stalks and blasted us out of there at full design speed plus a little something extra just for luck. Even so, I was pissed at them damned Imperial destroyers, but maybe we would get a crack at them guys another day.

"Target destroyed," reported the computer. "Tracking multiple targets...out of range. Out of range."

"Are they following?"

"No, they're investigating."

"Damn! That's bad news for the Earth."

The Imperium had at least as much simple curiousity as we did, and a lot more to lose.

One thing harsh experience has taught me above all, is not to get too involved in other people's problems.

Stuart Goes Postal

"Good morning, Stuart. How are you today?" the storekeeper's voice, Mr. Shin's, greeted Stuart as he entered the cool yet brightly-lit interior of the local supermarket.

The automatic greeting emanated from an overhead speaker in the lobby, with its air-sealed doors and glass panels from floor to ceiling. It was twelve-oh-seven a.m. on a Tuesday night; or rather a Monday morning, according to the machine.

"Uh," muttered Stuart as he stalked past the glassed-in booth where the manager's actual head was visible, as he bent over a blue-glowing computer screen.

All he wanted was a lousy quart of milk, and he wasn't in the mood for small talk right now.

It had been a long day. He didn't want to be up half the night without any milk or food in the house, and he was concerned that maybe tonight would be an insomnia night. Although he hoped not, it kind of looked that way.

"Would you like a cart, Stuart?" the stock clerk's irritating voice came.

But Stuart only wanted a quart of milk. The only place that was open this late at night in the whole town was right here, a mile and a half out on the Golden Mile Parkway, and he didn't need a cart for a quart of milk. Theoretically, he could go to the Nine-Twelve Gas Bar and pay two bucks more for it. Two bucks is two bucks.

"Argh!" he grunted at the thing as he sauntered past.

"Hi, Stuart, it's been a long time," the butter on the end of the dairy case said in a bright cheery voice. "When was the last time you picked up a pound of dairy-fresh butter?"

Stuart just shook his head at this question, as he'd just had a big blow-up with the car over the parking position. The vehicle was arguing that he could park a ways away, as he could use a bit of a walk, while Stuart would have preferred to park it right in front of the store, as it looked like a spot of rain was on the way. And it was late at night after all. The parking lot was empty, there were plenty of spaces for all, and when was the last time you saw a disabled guy who could afford a car anyway? Not that he was planning to take one of the disabled parking-spots, but there you have it.

But the talking butter display reminded Stuart of an important point, which was that one often thought of a few other items while in the store. Spinning around on a whim, he went back and got a cart.

"I told you so," the stock-clerk assured him, and he growled at it in response.

Stuart walked down the aisle, and wished he could turn all this stuff off, as one-hundred-and-fourteen cheeses bid for his attention. As he moved along, each product had a range of about six feet, in which it would activate by motion sensor or body heat or something; and then it would go into its spiel, trying to outbid all the other products on the shelf for his attention.

"Mister Jones! Mister Jones!" yelled the cottage cheese, and, "Stuart! Stuart!" called the Monterrey Jack Cheese; by Kraft.

"They're fun for your tummy, Stuart," called the process cheese slices as he proceeded past.

"Argh," groaned Stuart as he went by.

He wished he'd never accepted their 'points' card, the one with a little radio ID chip in it, but he had thirteen thousand points saved up, almost enough for a trip to New Guinea that he was promising himself. He only had another two thousand points to go; and only a month and a half before the deadline. At that point, he would lose the first five thousand. But he couldn't let that resentment stand in his way...one quart of milk would be five more points.

All he really wanted was a quart of milk.

Not that it wasn't a good cheese or anything like that, but at some point one tired of all the racket. Just then his phone buzzed, and he pulled it out of his pocket, pushing the cart along one-handedly while his attention was momentarily diverted by the pictures on the push-handle mounted video display screen: the Sports Illustrated Annual Swimsuit Edition was out, and Stuart reminded himself to grab one at the checkout. The display on the phone indicated that an automatically-generated e-mail from the auto-dealership where he had bought the turkey, the lemon, had arrived. The last time he had taken the car in for a free recall repair, he walked out with a bill for over ten thousand dollars.

A few other little things," were found wrong with the car, upon, 'a casual inspection.'

None of them were covered by the original warranty on the two-and-a-half-year-old car.

He shoved the phone absent-mindedly into his pocket again.

"Ten cents off a half-dozen eggs, twenty cents off on a dozen," yackitty-yacked the eggs. "If you forgot your coupon, just ask at the checkout."

But Stuart just wanted time to think. He knew he needed a quart of milk, and surely there was at least one other thing. He'd driven all the way out here with a mental list of three, or maybe four little things. At least two of them had been crucial, one of which was the milk, but for the life of him he couldn't remember the others. And yes, a bag of chips would be nice, and something else as well—if only he could remember that one other thing. He was pretty sure it was just the four items.

"We can beat that," the next product display was informing Stuart matter-of-factly. "While the sizes may vary as pictured in this week's flyer-insert, our eggs in the five and ten-packs are only a dollar ninety-nine and three-forty-nine. And you don't need a coupon."

"Why in the hell would anyone make a five-pack of eggs?" asked Stuart, mystified as to where the world was headed sometimes.

Was the whole world going insane? Or was it just him?

"Originally, increasing demand led to a slightly smaller pack than a dozen, i.e. ten eggs," the display's voice informed Stuart. "Then one thing led to another, and we ended up with a half-sized pack, of five eggs. But people of a certain demographic group love the trendy and upscale asymmetrical packaging."

"Who in the hell would buy five eggs?" Would the madness never end?

"New Age, the twenty-five to forty-year year-old segment, college or university-educated, mostly lesbians, many of whom only eat one egg at a time," the computer-generated response came. "Or they eat two and serve three to a friend. Or maybe they each eat two and save one for mixing up a batter of some sort or another."

"I'm sorry I asked."

"Most of our clients have a tattoo. We get that from all kinds of surveys. Do you have any tattoos, Mister Jones?"

"No!" said Stuart, as he pondered whether to take the car in for the recall, or just ignore their e-mails.

Milk, chips, pop...was it pop?

"Well, you probably don't want any of our eggs, then," noted the machine.

"I already knew that," griped Stuart.

Was it pop that he wanted? It was milk, chips, pop, and one more thing. Was that it?

Lunchmeat? Bread? Pickles? None of these items jogged his memory with any conviction.

"Would you like to participate in a survey?" asked the display brightly.

"Argh," said Stuart, and moved on, finding no peace as he sped up abruptly and zipped along towards the other end of the aisle where the milk was kept.

"Orange Juice!" came the calls, and, "Margarine!" and, "Poppin' Fresh Breakfast Buns!" blared and blasted and sang and murmured and muttered and buzzed all along beside him as he went.

Dozens of voices called out to him as he traversed the hundred feet or so till he got to the refrigerator he sought.

"Argh," said Stuart. "Argh."

He slowed there, gripping the push-handle of the cart and grinding his jaws.

"And how can we help you today, sir?" asked the fridge in vacuous cheer as he approached.

"I just want a quart of milk, a fucking quart of milk," grimaced Stuart. "And I don't want no fucking back-talk from you!"

"What size of milk are you looking for? Our two-quart jug of two percent is thirty cents off," the thing told him.

"I want one God-damned quart of milk," Stuart told it. "One God-damned quart, just one fucking quart of milk. One quart. Where is it, you son-of-a-bitch?"

"Our line-up includes one-quart plastic jugs, and one-quart waxed cardboard containers," began the machine.

"Argh," said Stuart. "Just tell me where they are."

For some reason he was blinking at a high rate, completely uncontrollably. For weeks now, he had been under stress at work, and at home, but just knowing it did no good. He wondered if it was all coming to a head, and if he was having a nervous breakdown. All that commuting at a high rate of speed to save time...racing from traffic back-up to traffic back-up, stoplight to stoplight, waiting endless minutes at a standstill in the coffee shop drive through...

"Milk," snarled Stuart resentfully, as he ground his jaws back and forth. "Just give me some fucking milk, before I smash your ugly display into a million pieces."

"Two meters further down to the right, sir," the machine muttered quietly to the still hulking and tension-ridden figure of Stuart.

Stuart, who just stood there; holding on to his cart with both hands for his dear life.

"Is there a problem here?" the store's security-drone floated directly ahead of him, it was right in his way.

"I just want some fucking milk! Get the hell out of my way," barked an ashen-faced Stuart Jones.

He had just about had enough of this place.

The place was always better when it was crowded, with the hum of real human voices, women, kids, infants, store employees, all two of them in this eighty-thousand square-foot retail space, drowning out the bedlam of the artificial ones.

"There's no need to create a disturbance," reproved the machine in its metallic, officially-oriented voice, like a Canadian news-caster speaking through a tin horn.

"Argh. I just want some fucking milk. Why can't you turn all this shit off?" grated out Stuart. "I'm tired of all these voices, voices. I just want you to shut them off!"

"But they are pleasant and helpful to our other customers," gently reminded the machine. "We have to think of their safety and convenience as well."

"You don't have any other customers. I'm the only one in here!" The outburst brought only more reproof.

"Sir, if you cannot behave in a civil and socially-acceptable manner, then store security will have to ask you to leave," the thing told him firmly yet in a neutral, non-judgmental tone.

"Argh!" said Stuart.

"I don't know how to interpret your response, sir," the machine floating there in front of him said sadly. "Perhaps it would be better if you were to just leave now, sir."

"Argh. All I want is a fucking quart of milk," stated Stuart firmly and with regret. "And why should I be polite to a fucking machine? Fuck you. I want a quart of milk."

"I'm sorry, sir. Police are being notified, and I will have to ask you to leave peaceably," the floating cop-thing told him in its imperturbable fashion.

"All I want is a quart of fucking milk!" howled Stuart, manfully shoving the hovering machine aside, which took a surprising amount of force.

Brushing past the hellish thing, he headed for his destiny.

He remembered a report on TV; that said these things were gyro-stabilized. He gave it another shove, and then forced his way forward with the cart. He could see the milk, his prize, awaiting him just two yards away...suddenly his body stiffened and convulsed, and before his numbed brain could comprehend what was happening, he was laying on the floor, as another bolt of lightning flashed through his body.

"Please leave quietly," said the cop-thing. "This establishment is private property...we have rights."

"Argh! Argh! Argh!" moaned Stuart, as the machine hit him with blast after blast of Taser energy.

"If you continue to resist arrest, you will be subdued using sufficient force," the cop-thing told the squirming blob of protoplasm that had once been a fairly rational human being, Stuart Jones.

"Argh!" Stuart moaned and cried, his tears leaving a wet path, and lubricating the floor under his limp torso and abdomen as he tried to crawl away from the freezer case.

Unfortunately, blinded by tears and rage, anger and resentment, Stuart crawled in the wrong direction. He was headed for the back rooms, by all factual indicators, and the cop-thing Tasered him again; while Stuart cried, shouted, gasped, choked, gagged, and puked on the floor, his limbs, no longer under rational control, still moving reflexively, still struggling to get away.

It was mercifully over. Strong hands gripped him under the armpits.

"Fuck," began Stuart, and then a short, sharp blow to the head stunned him into a silence that he stubbornly decided to maintain against all assault.

He watched with a corner of his mind as the cops, real, flesh and blood ones this time, dragged him out to the parking lot. As he slid along, he noted the blood dripping from his head, or facial area, leaving bright, flower-shaped spatters on the highly-polished flooring of the store.

"Up you go," said a voice, and then Stuart heard a big 'thunk,' noise, a light flashed in his head, and his world went black again.

Stuart Jones woke up in the back of a police cruiser, and slowly became aware that they were still sitting at a standstill in the parking lot of the shopping center. The security drone hovered outside the car window as an officer in the driver's side engaged the thing in conversation, and another officer took notes from the other side of the front seat.

"Whoa," grunted Stuart in disbelief.

"I'll have to ask you to restrain yourself, sir," the female cop in the passenger seat informed Stuart.

Unable to help himself, Stuart bent over at the waist and began to vomit into the floor well, shoving his feet over against the door, and trying to hit the far side with the sudden upwelling of stomach contents.

Suddenly the fire of fifty-thousand volts shot through his body from a hundred short, sharp metallic electrodes in the seat and back bolster of the car seat.

"That will teach him," muttered the pretty blonde female cop as Stuart screamed and screamed and screamed.

Finally she pulled her hand off the little yellow button on the dash, complete with its little logo, 'Taser International.'

"Are you going to behave?" she asked Stuart.

"Oh, God, oh Jesus Christ," moaned Stuart, as his bad back had just been sent into a spasm, and suddenly he began vomiting again.

"Ah!" Stuart's screaming rose again as the female cop zapped him with another ten or fifteen seconds of high-voltage.

The tasering only stopped when Stuart was little more than a blubbering, sobbing, broken thing, no longer recognizable as a man or as a human being. Finally he was able to speak.

"What are you doing? Why are you doing this?" he gasped and sobbed uncontrollably. "All I wanted was a fucking quart of milk!"

The cop-bitch's hand was hovering all over the yellow button as he said all this, so he stopped. With a mean glance at her victim, she waited for a moment of silence, and then slapped the button again, sending Stuart into a paroxysm of fits, starts, seizures, and forlorn attempts to get up and stay off of the seat. Finally, he was unable to sustain it, and fell back onto the seat with a little groan, and then apparently went unconscious.

"So what did this turkey do?" the male cop asked the security-drone.

"He was causing a disturbance," said the drone.

"Did you receive any complaints? Like from other customers?" the male cop asked.

"No, not really, but he was bothering our employees," noted the machine.

"And how many employees were on duty at the time?" suddenly Stuart's cracked and almost psychotic voice came unexpectedly from the back seat. "Can you tell me that, you stupid and immoral machine?"

"You'll get your day in court, Buddy," noted the male cop affably.

Stuart was rewarded by the sight of the female cop's hand on the button again, and another jolt of electricity was sent sleeting throughout his body.

"He assaulted a store employee," noted the drone.

"You don't have any employees," shouted a berserk Stuart from the back seat.

"Another fifty thousand volts for the rude person in the back seat," noted the female cop, a certain Rodericka von Smiltz; known far and wide, and even in this stinking little shit hole of a town, as, 'The Bitch in Blue.'

"I'm sorry, I have decided to withdraw all charges, and am irrevocably wiping all details of this incident," squawked the drone, and suddenly for no apparent reason it began backing away from the car.

"What up with him?" mused the male cop, a certain Steven Culvert.

Turning around, he was slightly bemused to see what had once been a living, breathing, human being, albeit one with a few issues, maybe...or what was left of him, smoking in the back seat.

Jake looked at Rodricka for a moment; then shook his head in resignation.

"We can only kill so many people before someone somewhere begins asking questions," he gently reproved her. "They can't all be mentally ill—we have to shoot a criminal once in a while or it doesn't look too good."

Still, one had to admire her stand-up attitude regarding issues of access to justice for the poor, the mentally ill, the disabled, the working poor members of this here community.

With Rodericka, zero-tolerance meant just that.

Still, if the information was properly presented to the media, the situation might work out to their advantage.

Steve could visualize the CTV News Channel coverage now: "Mentally-ill terrorist subdued by brave, courageous, self-sacrificing, noble, unbelievably honourable, terribly underpaid, quick-thinking city cops..."

Yes, that would do very nicely, and here in Canada, the media was carefully trained not to ask too many questions.

Steven Culvert looked at his watch.

"Well, this is all very upsetting. How about grabbing a bite to eat?"

"What about him?" She indicated the figure in the back seat with a jab of her thumb.

"I don't think he's very hungry right about now, and if we're going to dump him in the usual place, then I prefer to do it on a full stomach."

All in all, it was looking to be a pretty uneventful shift. The best days were the ones where absolutely nothing of any real importance happened. Any cop will tell you the same thing.

Spider Baby

Dade McCorkindale burst into the maternity ward, still flicking at his phone. Momentarily distracted by his shit-ticket-tracker app, he made a mental note that they were down to the last two rolls of toilet paper. He never would have known that otherwise, just one of the many benefits of modern telephone-science.

"Honey!"

His wife Dee's pale, oval visage swung to him and his heart leapt strangely. She was a real trooper.

In her arms was the newborn. He stood at the edge of the bed as a nurse bustled around on the other side.

"Oh."

Dee lifted the bundle in his direction.

Warm in his arms, and surprisingly heavy, they already had a name picked out.

"It's a girl." The nurse looked at him proudly, as if she'd done the deed herself. "Eight pounds, nine ounces."

Dade had the phone tucked awkwardly in between this ear, neck and shoulder area, waiting for Solly Melman, the famous Hollywood agent, to come on the line.

"Miss Muffett!" Little Miss Muffett.

His heart pounded. He could hear the blood streaming through his ears, but this was just so real.

Dee smiled tiredly, too wrung out by the ordeal of childbirth, plus all those drugs, to argue with Dade.

"Look at that little nose." He eyed Dee and the nurse. "Has she opened her eyes up yet?"

They shook their heads, eyes shining with womanly emotions.

It was too bad.

The phone dropped and he cursed, but stopped abruptly.

He put the baby on his wife's arm and shoulder area, and stooped to pick up the device. All it had was a lit main screen with nothing on it. Thoughtfully, he snapped it shut and put it in a side pocket. Dade stood looking at his daughter. Then, as a hint of sadness crossed Dee's face, he took the edges of the blanket and pulled them back.

"Oh, magnificent. Magnificent." He looked up at the nurse, beaming down and making goo-goo-ga-ga noises at the child, who appeared impervious to her wiles.

Miss Muffett's eight hairy legs, three joints on each one, with a small thorax, the big abdomen, and the vestigial mouthparts, were just adorable.

The phone buzzed in his pocket as he gazed open-mouthed at the fruition of all his life-long dreams and ambitions. The technology was there, and with the right people behind them, a deal had been made.

Now he and Deirdre had a spider-baby.

His wife put the wrappings back on and brought the child's oddly-formed mouth to her breast, which she exposed.

Licking his lips, he answered the call.

It was Melman.

"Solly! Have I got some sweet news for you!"

"So it's all right then? How's the kid? How's the mother?"

"Fine, fine. Better than expected. So...what's up?"

"Oh, ah...the kid's okay? It's going to live and everything?"

"Yeah! It's going to live." Dade gave the nurse a big thumbs-up as she left the room.

"Okay...okay then. I will let them know, ah, okay?"

A ten-million dollar advance. In the bag. Yes!

"Yeah."

"We need the first three chapters straight away so our ghost-hack can get to work."

"Sure! No problem." His neighbour was onboard already, he was functionally literate, as Dade didn't bother with such things himself.

He had bigger fish to fry.

"Uh...bye, Dade. Say hi to the wife for me."

Dade bit his lip in sheer excitement.

"Yeah—I'll do that."

He snapped the phone off again.

"Congratulations, honey. It's in the bag." She was right out of it.

His eyes softened.

Spider-baby made little sucking noises, as she took in the essence of life from her mother's milk.

Wild Life

Eric Martinez felt the hot desert breezes swirling in through his Chinese red Jaguar's open windows. As he negotiated the bends of California's Highway 117, the sticky sweat, drying in his armpits almost as soon as it had oozed out, was an old and familiar friend. To the tall, pleasant looking, fifty-four year old executive, this trip was a part of his weekly routine. He would take the six-cylinder, inline, double-overhead cam, three-point-eight litre car up to eighty or a hundred miles per hour when the busy southern California traffic permitted.

It was completely irresponsible, but he just needed to feel some kind of gut-level rush of pure, animal adrenalin once in a while. He had to deal with all the stresses and tensions that had been building up in his life. On some theoretical level, the classic machine, dating to 1965, should have been worthy of better treatment. He loved the old coupe, but it was his car and he could afford to fix it if he broke it, and to hell with the rest of the world.

And a man with all of his responsibilities, with all those employees, contractors, customers and clients depending on him, he needed some kind of physical outlet. Some way to blow off all the little repressed peeves. All those times when diplomacy and deference had been the only way to go, in spite of his more natural inclinations. But you couldn't kick the clients or even the lowest employees around. Even when they were at their most perverse and you were chasing your tail around in ever-diminishing circles, just knowing the contract would be cancelled at the last possible moment. Yes, he had earned a couple of little burn-outs, a little wind in the hair, a little four-wheel-drift once in a while.

It's not that there was no one else. But, who could be entrusted with a delicate mission such as this? It was just that the knowledge, the power that this knowledge would give them; would be too much temptation for a mere employee. It was only human nature after all, and as a younger man, Eric had seen the usefulness of studying human nature and learning to take advantage of it. The temptation to speak, to ask, to suggest; to consider, to second-guess; it would be too much. He had no room for discussion. There had been no time to consult.

His son Marc handled the actual wildlife. This was only a euphemism, but a pretty good one. For those predators which were created by Marc, were capable of life on their own once released. And they were meant to kill, figuratively speaking. Yes, they were very much meant to kill. At one time, Eric had taught Marc everything he knew about computers and software, but the student had quickly surpassed the master. For years Eric had thought it all a waste of talent, but Marc had surprised him in the end.

The skunk-works was located fifteen miles out into the desert from company headquarters in Vaughn, California. Eric was a graduate of the California Institute of Technology. His son Marc had refused to go to university! But he had taught the boy computer science on his own time.

With a major in mathematics and a strong talent for anything miniature and electronic, with a mind self-taught in systems analysis, Eric had written his first anti-virus program while seated at the kitchen table, providing moral support to his first wife Jo as she learned to handle a bottle.

His own attempts to change diapers, and to learn how to spoon feed Marc, lingered in his mind for a moment. He had become a father at age thirty-four, fairly mature, ready for anything, or so one would have thought. Neither one of them had been prepared to be a parent. There are some things in life no preparation can get you ready for. Every parent that ever lived, was probably scared stiff when they held their first-born kid in their arms for the very first time. It had been tough, for sure, especially watching Jo, eaten up by cancer at thirty-five. He still felt a hard kick in the guts every time he remembered the look on her face as she died...she had missed so much.

Jo had given up so much for him and Marc.

Sometimes the memories were all jumbled up together, in painfully random order.

The Jag's tires howled through another turn, and he momentarily considered whether he should give it just a touch more throttle, and make the back end come out, but he decided instead to cool it just a little. No sense going too crazy. Just when he and his son had achieved, or were about to achieve, the dream, the vision of a lifetime.

While the company he had built over thirty years, Eritech, had a pretty good line of products, they had been having trouble competing with the big multi-national business-systems firms, and Marc, who had always been a bit of a black sheep, had been struck by an inspiration. Eric settled back in the seat and went through it in his mind again, just as he had a thousand times. And he was still pretty sure that he was proud of Marc; even though the boy had practically stiff-armed him into doing it at first. He focused on driving for a moment, pulling to a complete stop, and making sure to signal properly. The last time through here, there had been a highway cop. As he turned east on Highway 210; he checked the bushes beside the sign-board, but there was no police cruiser this time.

Just as well, really, the way he felt right about now. Lately Eric had been suffering just a touch of paranoia, which he put down to a guilty conscience, a conscience just crying out loud to get caught. What was it about him that made him feel this way? Was he an honest man at heart?

Had he been sucked in by his own greed?

Marc had floored him with the idea. There was no other way to put it.

It was inspired. He had to give Marc credit for that. Eric felt the road drop away as he rounded the last rise, and saw ahead of him a series of S-turns, with the highway going down into the valley. It was not a true desert full of wind-blown sand, but merely arid, just a lot of low, rounded hillsides covered in a chaparral that was dry, tough, and burnt at the drop of a hat, or so it seemed. He'd chosen this place well. It would burn at the drop of a hat...or a match.

The building was located on what had once been an emergency-landing airstrip back when this part of the world had hummed with the training of thousands of Army pilots, more than sixty years ago? Seventy? The valley opened up into a small, dry lake bed, crusted with white salt in places. That salt was put here God knows how long ago, he thought as he pulled up to the gate. It was a barren, ancient land. He hit the remote control device clipped to the sun-shade on the upper frame of the windshield, and listened to the creaking of the old steel gate as it laboriously dragged itself open.

He could see Marc outside the Airstream trailer he affected to live in, although he owned a beautiful condo in Los Angeles. He was apparently firing up the old cast-off barbecue. A few hours spent with his only son, a steak and a couple of beers. Then he could be at the public library at Benton, or Ormondsville in forty minutes, and then be home by nine or nine-thirty tonight. Melanie, his twenty-four year old wife, his former secretary, would be all tanned up after a day by the poolside, and after a drink or two to relax, they might make an early night of it.

He pulled to a stop on the shadowed side of the trailer, beside Marc's 1500-cc road hog, a big red bastard of a bike in flaring fenders, swooping handlebars, naked demon-bitch airbrushed lovingly onto the gas tank, and gratefully climbed up and out of his own low machine, now quietly ticking in the cool-down mode. Eric's eardrums felt funny in the strange silence, perhaps something to do with still air, or perhaps higher pressure? Or just less buffeting; after the drive.

"Hey, pops," called Marc from the side of the barbecue. "It's going to take a while for this to burn down to the proper coals."

His son's tone indicated pure relaxation and a kind of satisfied disdain for life and present circumstance. Eric wished he could be that mellow once in a while, perhaps for four or five hours on a Sunday evening, he thought with a grin. You probably couldn't schedule this kind of bliss, he realized mutedly. Eric slung his jacket up from behind the seat, knowing that the desert would cool off rapidly after sunset, and Marc didn't have a lot of outside lighting around here.

Off to his right, over the low black hills, the brazen sun was subsiding into the horizon.

Sooner or later he would come looking for it anyway. There was just a tiny little bulb over the door of the trailer, and another, far-stronger, but still lonely flood light on the front of the skunk-works proper. This was a creamy-white, metal-sided shed with a pair of small windows side-by-side on the right, and a truck door on the left, and a man-sized door beside it, all on the front of the building.

The only other door was on the back of the building, strictly for emergencies. The outside of the back door was completely blank, without even a keyhole. It simply wasn't meant for entry.

Simple as it was, the whole building and the complex of equipment had all been designed and built by Marc, Eric, and one or two trusted Eritech employees, who were really more like old-time family friends. The actual framework and siding, the bare-bones structure; had been ordered by telephone, pre-fabricated; from a well-known metal building supplier. It arrived on the back of a flatbed trailer, and it had taken about three weekends to assemble it, with a few good friends and a few barbecued steaks, a few cases of beer involved in the process. Eric had some pretty good memories of that time. Eric stood there watching his son, still with that funny little grin on his face.

"What's so funny?" asked Marc, with a quizzical look.

Familiar with all of his father's moods, there was something different in the air tonight.

"Oh, I don't know, really. I just had a good run out, though," the father explained. "I think I just needed to let it all hang out...to remind myself of why we do all this, why we work so hard."

Not having anything to say to that, Marc turned with a nod and went into the trailer to get his old man a nice, cold, can of Budweiser. Without a wasted motion, noted his father, as Marc was back with a cold one for him in less than twenty seconds. His son was a man of few words, but when he spoke, he usually had something worthwhile to say.

"I've got a really good one for you today," Marc told his dad. "But then we have to put out a few half-baked, amateur ones."

Eric nodded. They'd already planned all this months ago. For some reason he preferred not to talk about it right now. Maybe another thing he needed was just to enjoy being with his son for a while.

***

When Marc first broached the subject of creating their own viruses and freeing them into the internet, it had all sounded so nightmarish. But it was dead simple, and somehow even rather appropriate, when viewed in a certain nihilistic and morally uninhibited light.

"We have to attack our own systems, in order to make them stronger," in Marc's humble eloquence.

It was so much more impressive than mere rhetoric, or abstract, philosophical erudition.

"By trying one virus, and finding our own antidote for it, we prevent someone else's successful surprise attack," his son had explained. "It's pre-emptive, and we control the circumstances."

At the time, Eric had wondered why they couldn't use a closed system, right in their own labs. But the lab wasn't the real world. They couldn't duplicate other people's proprietary systems in their lab, they simply didn't know enough about them. Although they thoroughly analyzed the more successful systems, there was no way to know how they had arrived at a given solution, or to know where they might take it in future.

Oh, yes, it all sounded so simple—and so necessary. You could even see it as being for the good of society, all societies, when you reasoned that the company was non-denominational, and not out to take sides or determine outcomes. All people had to do is subscribe to the service, a measly thirty-five bucks a year, and they would always be safe.

"Make no mistake, hacking is all about ego," Marc had assured Eric. "If an attacker fails, if a person has a grudge, they will try one thing, and then another, until they find something that works. Their reasoning, or their reason, if you will, is of no concern to us. The justice, or the injustice of their supposed cause means nothing to us. All we have to do is learn to defend our systems, and other people's systems, and the world will beat a path to our door."

Marc had explained that they had to attack everyone's systems, in order to find out what made them go, and how to fix the problems created. The truly impressive thing was that for Marc, it wasn't about money at all. Neither did it seem to be about risk-taking, or thrill-seeking. There was little of the soup-kitchen volunteer, no public-philanthropy thing about his son either. He did it because he had the talent, and the resolve, and the gumption to do so. His son was the most egotistical hacker of all, or so his dad had reasoned. But what do you do with such a child?

Imagine hearing your twenty-year-old son say something like that.

It was pretty cold-blooded. Borderline psychopathic; was Eric's first impression. But he had gotten caught up in it. The sheer audacity of Marc's plan, and yes the admittedly commercial aspects of it. You create a virus, and then you find out how to kill that virus. Then you release that new-born electronic wildlife into the internet, shortly after you had uploaded an upgrade to your own product, of course. And after a while, no one on the planet wanted to be without anti-virus protection. They had scooped the opposition just enough times to be plausible; without being too lucky, or too good. Word of mouth gets around, and non-subscribers quickly learned their lesson. They had even joined an association, and sent junior executives to meetings, coordinating with other firms in the cooperative fight against internet chaos.

Now all dear old dad had to do was to go into town, after enjoying a nice steak and a salad and a baked potato, if he knew his son's routine. All he had to do is go into town, go on a computer at the public library, and stick in his little disc, or use the SD card or HD card, whatever feature was available on that particular machine, and fool around on the internet for a while.

It was simple, really, once you thought about it. Perhaps a little too simple.

***

A hard hand clamped down on his left shoulder as he sat there in the dingy computer room at Ormondsville Public Library and Art Gallery. He was trying, or attempting to look like he was trying, to find an old game from the late nineties, scouring website after website. With all his attention focused on his acting, his cover, he hadn't the foggiest notion of who had come up behind him. It was a simple, amateur mistake. It could have happened to anyone.

Eric nearly jumped out of his seat, and no amount of friendly smiles and proffered handshake seemed to be enough to get over it. He found himself literally shaking like a leaf, and struggled to get control of it.

"You're Eric Martinez," said the tall, rangy, blue-eyed stranger, a man with an air of quiet authority about him.

The man stood there tall and straight, in spite of his sixty-odd years, written in all the lines of experience upon his face, and the thinning and silvery hair visible above his cleanly shaven face. That suit must have cost five thousand dollars, noted Eric in recognition of quality. And a kind of unspoken recognition signal, if he wasn't mistaken.

What was a player of this caliber doing in a public library? The alligator-skin boots, the pipe-stem black broadcloth pants, the black coat, the silky white shirt and the western tie, all of this belied something deeper—Eric knew a costume when he saw one. The fact that the man was theatrically crushing the brim of a pristine white Stetson somehow put the fine point on it.

"Yes," said Eric. "What can I do for you?"

"Hello, sir. I'm George Margolis, United States Homeland Security. I'm Director of the southwest region," said the gentleman, squeezing his hand just hard enough, but not too hard. Eric had been just about to hit the button to upload this week's wildlife, a modified version of a heuristic virus, one that used Boolean logic and self-animated crypto-analytical algorithms to send selected circuits into a feedback loop. This had the effect of opening every file potentially an infinite number of times, but the average private-homeowner's desktop would crash within about eight seconds, according to Marc.

Eric stood there, unable to recall getting out of his chair.

"Oh, um. What can I do for you?" he asked again, heart racing, and with the man's friendly but steely eyes glinting at his own.

"Can you come into the back room, for a moment of your time? It's quite a lucky chance, running into you here," explained George. "I remembered you from a convention. You were the keynote speaker."

"Oh!" said Eric in some surprise, a small sense of relief flooding through him, only to be caught up short. This man would lie with no compunction, right? And they would baby you along at first, right? In the hopes of tripping you up? Ask a few innocent questions, questions designed to form some kind of impression?

"Well," murmured Eric, as politely and neutrally as he could. "What's it about?"

"Please come with me and we'll discuss a few private matters of mutual interest," suggested the Director with a hand under his elbow.

It suddenly occurred to Eric that if this was an arrest, the Director would hardly do it himself.

"Um. Okay, okay, it's just a lousy game, after all," said Eric, red-faced, and gratefully so. This wasn't acting. He could act real, well enough. He was definitely confused.

He stepped away from the machine, but the Director halted him again. Eric's mind was racing. He noted that his heart pounded, and that he had absolutely no idea of what to do. Yet he could remember his lawyer, Jack Ignatius, had told him once or twice what not to do...who to call? Call Jack?

'Don't say anything, anything at all.' Yet that hardly seemed practical, under the present circumstances.

Reaching forward deftly, Margolis pushed the little button and ejected Eric's HD card which was barely visible in the slot. With bated breath Eric watched in morbid fascination as the man's hand came up and proffered it to him. Eric put it in his jacket pocket, feeling damp sweat on his palms, and a fresh river of moisture running down from his armpits inside of his shirt.

"Oh, right," he mumbled.

The gentleman was flashing him some very-official looking identification.

He bent over the seat and quickly clicked on a couple of icons, shutting the machine down and logging off, and then he preceded the gentleman in the indicated direction. Eric could see a door over there in a darker corner of the library, perhaps a couple of overheads had burned out; and so he headed for it, listening intently to get some clue if the man was right behind him. He was, too, and all Eric could do is go in through the opening, and follow the corridor to the right.

***

"What convention?" asked Eric as they entered a room about thirty feet square, with a number of long portable deal tables, and a mess of computers, and tracing equipment, which he instantly recognized, and a feeling of complete and utter dread swept over him. For a moment, Eric felt a total and disorienting nausea.

"You spoke to about sixteen hundred defense officials, at the d'Amalie Hotel in Anaheim," Mister Margolis said. "There's no reason for you to remember me, of course. I was just sitting at a table with a dozen other guests. Oh, I guess it would have been December of last year."

The Director led him over to the one good desk, a maple school desk that looked oddly out of place, even in what was obviously a temporary arrangement.

"Oh," said Eric humbly, sinking into brown leather, the only padded and upholstered arm-type chair in the room. Even the Director was sitting on a simple, stacking black and chrome institutional chair.

"I run your anti-virus software on my home computer, and your anti-spyware as well," noted the Director as if for the record. "I've always found them to be very good products."

Eric took a deep, slow breath, and tried to listen, to really listen, in spite of the rising sense of panic and total emotional desolation.

"So, um, er; you have no complaints, then?" mumbled Eric, totally mystified, that is to say if he wasn't under arrest. "Are...are you renting here?"

George Margolis' smile lit up, and he was instantly transformed, as he sat up straight and slapped himself on the knee.

"I knew you had a sense of humour," began the Director. "Anyhow, as I recall, you have pretty high security clearance, right? Right. I've just verified it in any case."

"Why?" asked Eric, somewhat stunned at his own boldness.

"Well, we're not renting here," the Director began anew. "Have you heard of the Pipeline Bomber?"

Eric just shook his head in the negative.

"Oh; really? It's been on all the news channels. Still, I guess a busy and important person like you, sir, you probably don't get a lot of time to sit around watching TV in any case?" the smiling Director said.

"Not really," admitted Eric.

What the hell was this all about?

"We were kind of expecting the Pipeline Bomber to show up here tonight, but he may be along tomorrow night, or the next night. Believe it or not, it has something to do with the new moon, that is to say the period of no moon...follow my drift?" asked the Director.

"No! Not really," gasped Eric. "What are you saying?"

"We had hoped to nab the Pipeline Bomber here tonight," explained the Director. "Oh! Sorry. But you're not a suspect," smiling that devastating smile again, "He likes to send an e-mail, and he always sends it between seven-thirty and eight-thirty at night. He likes to send the emergency crews scrambling; and sometimes he even plants a bomb, but not always. He has some kind of crackpot political manifesto, but so far we have asked the media not to publish it."

"Oh, right, right, right. I remember something about it now," said Eric as if that explained just everything.

"But of course, this is not the only case on my docket right now," added Director Margolis.

"I understand," said Eric, although it was the furthest thing from the truth you could get.

"Anyway, it's a lucky break for me to run into you here tonight," said the Director. "I admire a man who does his own legwork once in a while. Well, you see me here doing it tonight, although I admit a little good press helps with the budget allocations once in a while. But essentially, I was going to call you in a few days anyway."

His own legwork? What the blazes did that mean?

The Director spun his desktop screen around to that both he and Eric could watch at the same time. With a few deft key strokes, he cleared the screen and brought up another file.

"Take a look at this," he told Eric. "It's some kind of wacky new virus..."

Eric thought he was going to die right there and then. It was almost more than he could do to look at the screen as the Director showed him a series of screens, with files that had been devastated, files skewed, almost as if by an intelligent hand, the mischievous hand of a fourteen-year old prankster...Eric found it extremely difficult to breathe, as he saw diagram after diagram, and mathematical formula after formula, equation after equation.

He sat up suddenly. Someone's personal photos had been turned into cartoon caricatures, not destroyed, exactly, but just...weird. Just weird.

"That's not..." he gasped, almost bellowing his relief out loud!

"It's not the Chinese," muttered the Director in total agreement, apparently misunderstanding Eric's response. "There are certain calling-cards, we call them. Perhaps cultural, even."

After a quick down-surge, a palpable sense of relief, Eric's paranoia had come back in a renewed wave-crest, his unshakeable feeling that he was in a lot of trouble, as in hard-time in a federal penitentiary kind of trouble. Then his fears climaxed. He subsided back into the chair, drained of all response. All he could do was listen, and wait for the hammer to fall. He actually felt like he was falling, and his heart was still racing in his chest. What a horrible sense of dread.

"It's not...it's not like anything I've ever seen before," with his normally strong, and smooth, confident voice coming out in something very much like a quack, Eric noted.

His heart seemed to be in some distress.

***

"Every mind leaves its imprint upon its works," the Director explained patiently, as Eric sipped at a glass of water, grateful that a little nitro spray under the tongue had calmed his angina pains.

The Director had been slightly reassured when Eric told him, "It's no big thing..." and that the problem was long-standing but not immediately life-threatening.

In a way it was a stroke of luck. The moment of pause had forced him to take physical stock of the situation. And maybe it wasn't so bad after all. The man was still beating about the bushes, seemingly with no place to go.

"So what are you saying?" asked Eric in a better tone.

"Well. If we don't recognize any of the usual minds, and if it's no one you've ever run across before, then it really is a mystery, isn't it?" Those intelligent blue eyes gleamed at him in some humour.

The Director was right, of course, Eric had run across a few 'minds,' as the other so eloquently put it, before. And they did have fingerprints, certain characteristic mental quirks or processes, and you very often knew who was doing it, either via hacking, bugging, and hitting you with viruses, spying, or whatever. The trouble was of course locating such individuals, who could cruise around using stolen hardware and wireless services purchased under fake or stolen identities. This included account payment by wireless, and using accounts that were fake, stolen, or otherwise bogus and untraceable. Except using cellular tracing technology...and the place was full of such equipment, as he looked around the room again. Jesus! What is really going on around here?

"And so you see our little problem. With no idea of the identity or personality of the malefactor, with no idea of where to look, no idea of the purpose... other than to cause harm, I suppose," the Director went on. "We can use all the help we can get on this one."

"And it's not the Chinese, the Russians, Al Qaeda, none of our allies or former allies, is what you're saying," muttered Eric, trying to desperately cover up the relief he felt at all this logical explanation. "No known personality has done anything like this before?"

"As far as we can tell," agreed the Director. "We got it off some science-fiction website. We received a complaint. The person said it was just a little too creepy, and that they had gotten a real bad virus off of it. We check out all serious complaints. Some of those complaints are passed up and on from other agencies, it just takes some time to follow up. We are after all, very busy."

"I see," said Eric gratefully. "Now I understand. And you think our firm might be of some assistance to you...to the government?"

"Yes," nodded the Director. "Anything you can tell us, anything you think of, any strange and crazy ideas, or any hunches...anyone with a strange mind that you might stumble across..."

"A strange mind?" Eric chuckled, feeling comfortable for the first time in what seemed like hours.

Visibly relaxing in his chair, he thought for a half a moment.

"Let's have another look at that thing," he offered.

"Of course," said Director Margolis, and he let Eric move around and take over his chair.

Eric sat there and scrolled through all the data again, staring, reading quickly and then going back and forth over it, again and again.

"Huh!" he said once or twice, as the Margolis wandered around the room, with his hands behind his back, and talking to a couple of obvious-agents, who came in and stood by the door, unobtrusively trying to get his attention.

Eric ignored the distractions as he studied the thing.

When he was younger Eric had wanted to be a doctor, and had actually learned quite a bit about medicine. This thing looked oddly like it was more organic than electronic...he was reminded of how antibodies adapted to match the invading antigens, coating them, and attracting the body's own defense mechanisms. It was like a disease, where the body's own antigens attacked the victim's own cells...a disease like multiple sclerosis, or systemic lupus erythematosus.

Finally he groaned and sat up, stretching.

"I don't think I can really get a handle on it in a few minutes," he told the Director, who was looking over the shoulder of one of the other agents, hunched over another terminal in the corner.

The Director nodded.

"The shit-house poet has struck again," muttered the beefy blonde security man. "He sent it from Bakersfield! And he's a half-hour late," the fellow added acidly.

The Director cussed mildly for a second or two, under his breath for the most part. Then he came back over to Eric after patting the agent on the shoulder in some sympathy.

"So what do you think? No ideas? I must say, it's a handy weapon, if we can figure out how to make it ourselves, or even how to control it..." he said with a trace of real enthusiasm, albeit wistfully.

"God! This may have been created by aliens, for all I know," stated Eric with no trace of facetiousness.

"Aliens?" The Director grinned. "You're putting me on."

"I don't know. There's something about his base fourteen counting system, and the codes are all wrong, they shouldn't work at all. The whole thing is by one mind, that's for sure. There's some kind of message encoded in it, but I can't tell what, maybe audio, maybe video. It's definitely a guy. Whoever did this, is either one crazy whacko, or from some other planet, I'll tell you that."

"Why...why do you say that?" Margolis' eyes were serious, he wasn't patronizing Eric. He was genuinely interested. "Believe me, Eric, I value your opinion...may I call you Eric?"

"Because, sir, half of this stuff doesn't even work. It's either just window-dressing, or camouflage, or it's for stuff no one has, or it's for stuff that no one has invented yet..." Eric could see the Director's eyebrows rising up into his forehead.

Eric stood.

"Well," he grinned, "You asked for an opinion, and you got it."

Eric stuck his hand out for a farewell handshake.

As the two shook hands, and the other two agents gathered up wires and began boxing equipment, Eric had almost forgotten his original purpose here tonight.

"It's been a long day," he told Margolis. "I guess the games can wait for another day."

His guts thumped a little bit as he said it, but it came out okay.

"Thank you for your time. And I'll have to pass that up the ladder," noted Director Margolis. "Who knows what they might think! But I value your opinion, don't get me wrong."

As Eric stumbled in sheer emotional exhaustion out to the parking lot, he had to marvel at his good fortune. While unable to memorize more than a little of what he had seen, the basic concepts were so stunningly original that he felt he would be able to drag them back up with a little help from Marc. As for the possibility of alien manufacture, he didn't take it too seriously himself, but let the Homeland Security boys and girls chew on that one for a while...and in any event, he could always try the insanity defense, if any other little matters should come up.

He had a gut-level instinct that he hadn't heard the last of Mister George-Southwest-Region-Director-Margolis. It was a good thing he had a bolt-hole in Belize for just such an eventuality.

Signs of Aging

You know you're getting old when you wake up one day and you have no hair on your feet. One of the very first signs of aging is when you come home and find fifty pink flamingoes on your lawn, and you're not even Italian. When you go to write a singles ad, and all you can come up with is, "Man with no future seeks woman with no past."

You are old.

When you need a pill to get it up, and your biggest worry is, 'uncontrolled priapism that lasts more than four hours.'

What are you so worried about? Word gets around, and sooner or later they'll be beating a path to your door.

Oh, God, you know you're getting old when attractive women start to call you, 'sir.'

When your buddy asks: "Are you up for it?"

And you just say, "No!"

When you engage telemarketers in idle conversation, you're getting old. You know you're getting old when beer just makes you sleepy and you can't stand your own music.

You're getting old when you try to get out at least once a week—as long as it's free.

(If there's free coffee and donuts, you invite a friend.)

You're getting old when you have a few beers and all you can do is complain about peeing. When pudgy forty-five year olds start to look good, you're old. You know you're getting old when the doctor has to tell you to whack off once a day, and you keep coming up with excuses: "If my wife catches me, she'll say, 'if you have so much energy why won't you help me paint the dining room?'"

Yes, when the doctor tells you, "The left hand is a stranger," your doctor is also getting old; and just a little creepy, too.

Buddy, you're getting old when you need your reading glasses to roll a joint; and when you make a special day to go out to shop for socks and underwear. You're getting old when you go to the supermarket once a day whether you need anything or not. When you suddenly realize that young people today just piss you off, you're old.

When you start reading the obituaries, and all your friends are in there, you're right to be concerned. That's because you're old too. You're just not dead yet. Don't worry, you'll know when it happens. It will be in the paper.

It's not up to me to say whether you're getting old or not.

You know yourself best.

My New Girl

There's this Weather Network promo. It's a shot of people walking down a street. One girl caught my eye. She's a tall girl, with long straight hair, kept neat with a band at the back.

She's wearing a long dark coat. She has glasses.

Whenever I see that commercial, I think, "Wouldn't it be great to have a girlfriend?"

Really, it's been a long time; and they are nice, and everything. Girlfriends are fun, right? So now I want a girlfriend. And strange as it may seem, I even want one with glasses. That way there's a better chance for me. I am kind of an old gomer these days. Secondly, when she doesn't have her glasses on, I'll be better looking.

The only weight restrictions I would suggest would be to say, "At that weight, you'd better be pretty tall."

When I take my glasses off, she'll be better looking too. Right?

I wouldn't mind having a joint bank account, if it means I can keep my own place.

My old man says, "There is no such thing as boyfriend-girlfriend these days, you have to shack up. Yeah, and them shacks cost five hundred grand."

"I've got that all figured out," I told him. "As soon as I tell her my crazy old man will be living in the back bedroom, I'm sure she'll see it our way. Yeah, when I tell her you sat on Santa's lap and asked for a life-size Cabbage-Patch Doll with Greek features, I guess that will be it for us."

I'm looking for a woman who will love me and then leave me the heck alone. I just have to find a really hot-looking chick, one who has her own money, one who is stuck looking after her elderly mom or dad; because she's not going to want two more mouths to feed, right? You don't have to be forty or fifty years old to apply, younger prospects may apply as well. You just have to be a little bit desperate.

I hate cooking myself, but I had to learn. I plead self-defense. I learned to cook for my own safety, all right? I growl like a tiger when I cook. I just decided to start a little earlier. That makes things a lot easier. I have time to wake up and smell the coffee burning. The other day I came in the back door, and I smelled toast, burnt toast. For a minute there, I thought my old man was having a stroke, but then I saw he was just making a tomato sandwich. It was a pretty close call, though.

I think I'm going to write, 'girlfriend' into my retirement plan.

If I start saving now, I might be able to get myself a top-of-the-line Sony. We can cruise around in my hydrogen fuel-cell powered convertible. I might even get a hair transplant.

I'm not kidding. They got them now, these little robot girls, okay, they do still kind of walk funny and stuff like that. I imagine they'll be kind of expensive at first, like the first video-tape decks. As time goes on the makers will upgrade them, and then they will quickly become obsolete. Then you're stuck with one of the older models. It leaks fluids, takes a while to warm up in the morning and at some point the repairs get out of hand. There's still a year and half left to go on the lease, and you're already over on your mileage. All new technologies are like that.

They quickly make themselves indispensible. And you can't beat that new-car smell the first time you take her out for a spin.

If you're looking for companionship, get a dog, right? But you have to feed a dog, a dog can get sick. A dog needs to be walked. You can't switch a dog off and stuff it into the back of a closet. Women will want robots too, take my word for it. A lot of married men would love to buy the wife a robot:

"Now let the God-damned machine help you paint the freakin' dining room, Honey."

I'll bet there are a lot of other people whose primitive emotional needs could be quite adequately met by a robot. It's no more infantile than an imaginary friend, a virtual avatar, or any kind of role-playing in online game-spaces. You could probably even program it to do a little housework once in a while. I mean seriously, it's a robot. There's no reason for feminists to be outraged, right?

Speaking from a purely technical point of view, a robot has no actual gender.

It's true equality, state of the art, top of the line, cutting edge, right out of the box. What would be better than that? The thing might even be able to cook. What the machine really needs to have is a good onboard coffee-making system. (I like double cream in mine.)

Hey, I just thought of something, and this is truly brilliant, so you know it's my idea: you could make the robots run on hydrogen fuel-cells. They're, 'green,' and everything. And if it falls off the back when you're cruising on your Electro-Harley, no one gets hurt. It's just a freakin' robot, right? If that happens, better for it to happen under warranty.

Just tell them she walked into a door.

Just put your arm around her, and tell them, "My new girl, she's real clumsy, right, Honey?"

Then squeeze her real hard, and give her a soft, slow, gentle, symbolic little punch in the cheek with your closed fist. You have to admire the Japanese, though. I think it has something to do with the teachings of Kung-Fu-Tzu, or Confucius.

"If you see a need, fulfill it, and the world will beat a path to your door."

Now that guy knew what the hell he was talking about.

End

About Louis Shalako

Louis Shalako began writing for community newspapers and industrial magazines His stories appear in publications including Perihelion Science Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. He lives in southern Ontario and writes full time.

http://shalakopublishing.weebly.com

