Alien being and other attractions

  I step off the shuttle with all intention of doing my duty. For 18 years, I have lived my life giving and receiving orders, ignoring the minor deatil of whether I live or hate the men I command or those who command me. My father raised me this way, teaching me to see the fine line between order and chaos. The blur it is to invite disaster. Over those years, I have found my own reasons for keeping the faith, needing to stay in control of the essential details of my life. All this rocks a little when the hatch opens and I stand at the top of the metal stairs and look out at the surface of Faer III. A wave of heat and stench flows over me like a physical blow and I stagger back against the on coming business men who have journeyed here with me from orbit. Fright is the wrong word for how I feel. I act a little giddy – maybe even drunk – so that the other passengers eye me as if thinking I have consumed a full gourd of Aljar Nectar. One man in a well-tailored suit raises his nose so ...

  I should have turned in Green the minute he moved into the neighborhood. He was such an odd fish, he had to be some kind of alien species. Their kind has spread throughout the planet ever since our kind made contact with races on other planets, Town by town seemed to lose identity and turn into some kind of alien colony. Even the landscape changed, new crop rise up and crowding out what we always had growing around us. Strange flowers, weird trees, and food stuff bad enough to make any true human sick. Conditions got so bad that I started wondering if I had landed on another world rather than the other way around; I felt like an alien on my own planet. Fortunately, our town has a strong anti-alien committee, one that doesn’t always wait for the law to make a determination, and for this reason, we have managed to keep the intrusion to lower levels than most other towns. While we can’t just ban them from our neighborhood, we can make it difficult for them to stay. So finally when I...

  We find out the Mack 7 space flyer is really a Mack 1 spruced up to look like a Mack 7 only when we jet out of the Alpha 12 planet system, fleeing for our lives. After ten centuries, you still can’t trust a used car dealer, especially when you need a vehicle to escape a bank heist. I would go back to demand a refund, but the Imperial police are behind us and threatening to catch up. Since we don’t want to spend the next fifty years in prison, I ask Virgil to find a planet we can land on. Virgil is more scared than I am, and with good reason. He once held up a convenience store on his home planet, which means he faces a second offence and the death penalty if we get caught now. Imperial law tends to be a bit strange in that way. Kill any person you want and you’ll likely get probation. But steal from the rich and they prosecute you to the fullest intent of the law. This time we stole a lot from the bank most of the rich use to hide money from Imperial taxes. While Imperial law fro...

    Scene: mountain cabin in upstate New York   CARL: Tim? What do you want to eat? (picks up skillet examines it, mumble to himself) This will need oil if we won’t want to come back next spring and find it full of rust. Boy, do I miss civilization.   TIM: (standing just outside the kitchen on a deck overlooking a valley) You act as if you didn’t enjoy yourself.   CARL: Of course, I enjoyed myself. But you can get tired of anything after long enough.   TIM: Such as what?   CARL: Well, I miss warm showers, for one thing. And regular meals for another.   TIM: You didn’t go hungry will all we had to hunt   CARL: That’s not what I meant by regular. If I never see another trout or piece of venison I won’t miss them.   TIM: I’ll remind you of that in January when you’re aching to come back.   CARL: I’m sure I’ll missing living rugged. But right now I miss clean sheets, flannel napkins and the sauna at the club. I even miss hearing the tax...

  I stop for a railroad crossing when something with bright lights smacks the back of my van and then takes off. I think it’s one of those spoiled rich kids who likes playing soldier in the Humvees their oil-rich daddies by for them. I don’t realize my mistake until I’m off chasing them to get a license plate number for the police and the damned hit and run driver takes off from the ground. Of course, I have to explain this to the cops when they pull me over for speeding. I get an extra ticket for trying to play the cop for a fool I know I should forget about the matter. Shit happens. There’s nothing you can do about it. But I’m soc sick with it I can’t get it out of my mind. I run the scene over and over in my head, trying to pick up on some clue as to what I might do. For some reason, I dream of a mountain and I wonder if it’s the local address of the alien that hit my van. I tell my wife I’m going on a fishing trip, knowing that if I tell her the truth she’ll have me committed. ...

You don’t walk around with a five billion credit reward on your head like I have and not worry that someone might try and turn you in. Although the reward the corporation offered slips out of my mind for a moment when I walk along the shore. The blue water of the lagoon is anybody’s idea of paradise. By daylight, I can almost believe I am living a normal life on earth, strolling along any of that world’s wonderful beaches with no care in the universe. The reality hits me at sundown when we have to hear for the bunkers to keep from being crushed in this planet’s monstrous storms. For me each cycle is creation and doom, the world rising out of chaos at dawn and sinking back to it by dusk. Who in the universe would think to look for me here on a world so ravaged as to make civilization impossible? No one understands how I might choose my own prison over the titanium jail the corporation has built for me. Better paradise half the day than that kind of hell for all of it. Yes, I am lonely, ...