Larry Goes To Space (21 page)

Larry cried. It had been a deliberate stall. He wasn’t ready to push the Almas into their lie about leaving. He needed them confident and relaxed. He needed them happy, gaining more than they had harvested when they played their own game.

He rushed to the bathroom and emptied his stomach down the floor drain. It had been a while since he’d eaten anything other than some fruit. All he managed to bring up was a thin bile that tasted worse than anything he ever remembered putting in his mouth. But, his stomach felt better.

Larry brushed his teeth, using what toothpaste remained as sparingly as he could. He sat down on his pallet. Even though Betty, dragging the translator behind her, followed him into the bathroom, he turned his face to the wall and tried to sleep. He could not.

He felt Betty snuggle up to his back. She wrapped an arm around his chest and squeezed. He wanted to be alone, but he knew the Teumess comforted others and themselves by closeness. Betty was trying to help in the only manner she knew. He wanted her to leave him alone and let him sleep, but he couldn’t hurt her that way. He patted her arm and squeezed her hand.

Betty slid over the top of Larry and squeezed between him and the wall. There wasn’t much room, but she managed to snuggle in. He wrapped his arms around her. Without thinking, he massaged behind her ears in the exact spot that Ol’ Bucky liked a good scratching.

Larry more felt than heard Betty purring as she snuggled in deeper.

After a while, Larry slept soundly.

—*—

Bob came into the room and woke Larry. It was obvious that Bob hadn’t wanted to bother Larry, to let him sleep. The little Teumessian poked him from a distance to wake him. Bob was still working to overcome his worry about Larry’s appetite. Still, poking him from a distance was exactly the best way to wake up Ol’ Bucky when he was sleeping, since the old dog had a tendency to bite when startled.

Larry untangled himself from Betty and levered himself to his feet. He looked at Bob questioningly.

Bob said, “Your pry bar is here.”

“Good. Show me.”

In the main room, there was a long row of crowbars, pry bars, and levers lying on the floor. They were displayed from the smallest and lightest bar to the largest and heaviest. In the last few minutes before the next grid game, he hefted each bar, feeling its weight and strength. He picked one. It was just like one from his tool shed. It was about four feet long and one end was sharpened to a point. The other end was curved and flattened.

He thanked the family of runners from a distance. They wouldn’t get close to him, but they didn’t run from the room. He went to face his last contest with the Almas.

He began the contest quickly and completed it quickly. Space after space, mark after mark, he identified the location of each Teumessian. He hadn’t marked half of the spaces before he was done. The Almas had clustered the Teumessians together, hoping to fool him into selecting a space in the middle of their group. It hadn’t worked.

Larry said, “Oh great Tedorus. You have promised to leave. Please honor your promise.”

Tedorus shouted. “That wasn’t fair. The food was poorly placed. You must win six contests in a row for us to go.”

Larry smiled. “Of course, we must be fair. But let’s not wait. How soon can you get another contest ready?”

Dusty sprinted back into the room. “They have set the twenty-nine free. The Teumessians are leaving the district as fast as they can run.”

“Good,” Larry said. “Tedorus? How soon until we can play again?”

“Four hours. We must refill the grid with new meals and reset the game. Four hours and we will begin.”

Larry stood up and hefted the metal pry bar. He rested it on his shoulder. He grabbed the interpreter’s leash with his other hand. The little machine was heavy, but it slid easily on whatever made it hover.

His stomach growled, but he wasn’t in the mood to eat. He was in a carnivore frame of mind. He wanted a steak, a Yankee pot roast, or a little prime rib. Rabbit food wouldn’t do to fuel the fire he needed, wanted, and expected to use.

“Everyone, please stay here,” Larry commanded. “Lock yourselves in.” He looked around and spotted the scruffy little Teumessian. “Dusty, will you guide me to the Almas spaceship?”

Dusty took off at a ground-eating run.

Larry tried to keep up, but he’d never been much of a sprinter or a marathon runner. Carrying a twenty-pound metal bar and dragging an interpreter-style translator didn’t help his speed. He didn’t want to be out of breath when they got to where they were going. He slowed when he could see the spaceship. They were approaching from the rear.

He found Dusty crouched in a small depression watching the ship.

The ship was almost an exact duplicate of the other ships. He wouldn’t have been able to tell this one from the one he rode in on the way to Plenty, except this ship’s exterior hull was plain as far as he could see without any external decoration. Or, maybe it was decorated in a manner he couldn’t see.

He could see the actual grid built on the far side of the ship. The slapped together corrals were made from wood and metal and so oddly designed that Rube Goldberg would have been proud of the contraption. The corral pen doors hinged on the top. All the doors were open. He shook his head at the shoddy construction. Even a small-sized middle school student would’ve been able to kick her way free. He was sure the Teumessians should’ve been able to get away even when the top doors where lowered and latched.

The Teumessians didn’t have a fight or flight response. They were hardwired for flight only. There was no either/or option. Kicking their way out of what looked to be a broken down series of cattle chutes to get free must fall too far into the fight mode for a standard Teumessian.

Mounted on poles at each corner of the grid were cameras. The cameras provided a clear view of everything in every grid. They looked almost exactly like the shoulder-mounted cameras used by human news crews. He hoped they were stationary. He didn’t want a human seen at this stage of humanities extra-solar activities.

Earth was a vast and deadly place for humans and not just human on human violence. Most of the planet’s surface would kill an unprotected human faster than most people realized. A human would drown if dropped unprotected in the middle of any ocean, freeze to death anywhere near either pole, and die of thirst or heat if left without water or shade in any of Earth’s deserts.

Earth’s solar system was even deadlier. There wasn’t anywhere off their home planet that humans could go in their own system and survive unprotected. A human would die standing unprotected on the surface of Venus. A human wouldn’t survive Jupiter’s atmosphere to even reach the planet’s surface, if it had a surface.

However, only the human or humans directly involved would die.

The galaxy was beginning to look more dangerous than everything else combined. A mistake out here in the galaxy might bring a horde of invading aliens that not only killed the person making the mistake, but every other living creature on the planet. Cows, horses, Ol’ Bucky, and Aunt Nola included.

As Larry and Dusty watched, three Almas moved to a nearby metal cage. Grabbing a docile Teumessian and dragging it to the grid was easy for the Almas. They argued over the placement of each Tuemessian. With a final agreement, they tossed the Teumessian in the box on the grid, then slammed and locked the top door.

Larry almost laughed. If winning game after game was his ultimate goal it would be a simple matter to cheat. All he had to do was set up a hidden camera and watch where they put their captives. He wouldn’t even need a camera. He was sure Dusty would be able to scribble a simple mark on a paper grid and bring it back to him.

Unfortunately, winning didn’t really matter. The Almas weren’t going to give up and go away no matter how many games he beat them at. Six, twelve, or twelve thousand wouldn’t be enough games. The Almas were feeding their children and nothing would stop them once they started. They were using the game as entertainment to mollify their teeming population until they could manage to find a way to collect enough Teumessians to feed everyone.

The Almas turned and went back for another Teumessian. One by one, they pulled twenty-nine Teumess from a cage and dropped them into the grid. One by one, the Teumessians disappeared into the cattle chute, yipping softly in sorrow. Without flight available to them, there was no fight in them.

It took them an hour to completely fill the grid. The three Almas disappeared from sight. Larry couldn’t see where they had gone. He watched for a while. It was quiet except for a few yips coming from deep inside the grid boxes.

Dusty crawled in a circle around the spaceship and slid again into the little depression next to Larry.

Dusty said quietly. “They don’t watch out of the view screen. I can only see two on the bridge from here. There remains yet one Almas on the ground near the main hatch. I have done all that you have asked and more. May I die now?”

“Maybe. Can you outrun an Almas?”

Dusty shook his hands no. “I can only outrace an Almas for a short distance. In the long run they would catch me.”

“Then let’s be quick. I’m going to leave my translator here, so we won’t be able to talk. I want you to go around the spaceship that way. I’ll go the other. I want the Almas to see you and turn toward you. Do not die yet, run away if you must.”

Larry took off running. He held the heavy pry bar in both hands, as if it was a rifle held in the port arms position. He hadn’t been in the military, but he’d seen enough war movies having men running with rifles, not to mention he’d had a whole bag of little green plastic army men to play with as a youngster. At least, he’d played with them until the Independence Day holiday rolled around and he blew them up with fireworks and tiny Molotov cocktails.

He rounded the ship without slowing or looking. He hoped Dusty was successful in distracting the Almas at the airlock. If not, Larry wouldn’t survive to help the crazy little Teumessian. Larry suddenly remembered Dusty said the Almas sprayed acid. That didn’t sound like a good thing to run into head first.

The Almas was exactly like Scooter had described to him way back in the shower the day of the kitchen fire. It was exactly like an Earth beetle only different, since he’d never seen a beetle about three feet tall. Larry had no way to know if this Almas was representative of the species or if it was a freak among its own kind — time would tell … if he lived.

The Almas was so black in color it seemed to shimmer blue as the sun glinted off its hard shell. From the backside, the shell was about all Larry could see of it. There weren’t any wings like some beetles, and as Scooter had said, it had short little legs, short enough to even be remarkable to a creature like the Teumess whose legs were really short. It had skinny little bug-like arms, just long enough to reach to its middle.

Since the Almas didn’t have a head, Larry wasn’t sure how to tell which way it was looking. He hoped Dusty would help him sneak up on the alien creature.

The scruffy Teumessian was more than successful as a distraction.

The Almas stood with its back to Larry, spraying acid at Dusty. The little Teumessian was taunting the Almas, dodging the stream of liquid, rolling, moving, and running back and forth. Larry could see how the little Teumessian lost patches of fur. Small splatters of acid splashed on Dusty as he raced and bounced with the dexterity of a fourteen-year-old Chinese Olympic gymnast.

Larry raised the bar and brought it down on the Almas like he was splitting a hardwood log. He heard a crack. The Almas fell to the ground on its belly. Larry slammed the bar again and again, until a pus-like jelly oozed from the crack. He jammed the bar into the bug; swishing it around until he felt a hard nodule.

Larry wasn’t an expert exobiologist in alien physiology. He wasn’t an expert in exo-anything. But he’d stomped on his share of bugs over the years. Every creature he knew of with any sense of intelligence whatsoever had a central command center, a brain, or at least some sort of nerve center. He hoped the Almas fit the stereotype.

He jammed the sharp end of the bar into the nerve center and twisted. The bug quit squirming.

Larry jumped into the spaceship. He assumed it would be the same layout as the other one. It was.

A mass production assembly line must crank the ships out like a Kentucky auto factory. He left both hatches to the airlock open and raced to the bridge. The jelly from the dead Almas coated the metal rod, but rather than make it slippery, the jelly was making the bar sticky and easier to hold.

He hoped the Almas had left the stairway to the second deck in place. The bridge was on the second deck and without it, he was stuck. The stairway — ladderway was down. The deck above was open and clear. He ran to the bridge and through the open hatch.

There were two Almas on the bridge. Both were facing the monitors on the pilot’s console with their backs to him. The Almas were only about three feet high, but they had those tough, little, bug shells. He’d be reduced to a protein paste if they turned and shot acid at him. He wasn’t near as fast as Dusty and wouldn’t be able to avoid a splashing.

He realized he should have held his attack until he was prepared to deflect acid. More importantly, he wasn’t prepared to sacrifice one more Teumessian to Almas entertainment and hunger.