Wednesday, January 16, 1985
Daily Nebraskan
Pago 19
Officer anxiously awaits Ong mission
Editor's note: This is the
first episode of a weekly
fiction series.
The end of the second shift was 10
minutes away and Jack Frost, main
tenance officer, was hungry and tired.
A space voyage is a collection of
countless problems and vexations: This
day had yielded more than its share of
those.
Jack's ship, the Argus, had picked
up 150 new personnel from the planet
Veloah, most of them technicians. The
existing facilities onboard the Argus'
would have had no difficulty in
accommodating the new personnel but
for one detail. The Veloans were of a
species wherein five wholly different
sexes were required to procreate one
new individual. They had five sexes,
whereas earthlings had two. The problem
was that the Veloans demanded a
separate restroom for each sex, which
the Argus' existing facilities could not
provide for. After months, the Veloans
would endure their predicament no
longer.
So Jack had spent the shift drilling
holes and setting up partitions and
hanging up signs. It had been one of
those days. Jack had lost a flashlight
and had to waste an hour filling out
forms on where, how and when he had
lost it. He had accidentally dropped
the flashlight down one of the snip's
toilets. Retrieving the flashlight would
be easy enough in a primitive culture,
but onboard the Argus, the toilets were
anti-matter vacuums. Anything falling
into their depths met with a flash of
blue light and was gone forever a set
of keys or a coin dropped in was lost
period.
One thing Jack hated about space
travel was thinking too much. You had
nowhere to go, so you started to go
inward, always thinking. You were on a
200-yard leash. You saw the same people
every day until you knew each other too
well. You could watch an endless amqunt
of videotapes until the very act of
watching them became repugnant.
Everyone onboard had mastered pool,
pingpong, shuffleboard and chess to
the point where a game was only a
matter of who made a mistake first.
Everyone had aced all the video and
pinball games onboard it was nothing
for someone to keep racking up game
after game for up to seven hours.
But tomorrow would be different.
The Argus had orders to send a pod
down onto an unexplored planet. Jsck
had volunteered to lsad with the patrol.
There was a certain amount of danger
involved.
A dissonant buzzer went o startling
Jack. His shift ended. He hurried to the
mess elevator waiting in line for 20
minutes was the last thing he needed
now.
After eating, and a short visit to the
game room, Jack decided to turn in
early. In the breakroom, everybody was
making bets and shouting. Two clones,
Boyd and Lloyd, had argued over who
was strongest and began arm wrestling.
Fifteen minutes had gone by and neither
had won. They were probably still at it.
Jack entered hi3 tiny room and
flopped down on his bunk" scattering a
nock of tiny parrots like sparks from a
forge. The birds were like macaws,
each about the size of his thumb. Seven
ln &N there were three nson blues, two
scarlets, one yellow and one albino.
Jack had bought them at a pet store on
Veloah, where the science of genetic
engineering was honed to a fine tit
Jack had gotten them in trade. The
panots, which were worth $100 apiece,
for a box of Milk Duds. Processed sugar
was rare in those parts and immediately
addictive to the Veloans.
Onboard personnel weren't supposed
to keep pets, but everybody did. The
captain himself had a little mastadon,
which was about the size of a chihuahua.
He boasted that it had been made from
a hunk of frozen mastodon flesh found
in glacial ice.
Matt
Fiersol
Jack had brought , some food back
from the salad bar for the parrots. He
took it from his pocket: a handful of
seeds that looked like lima beans and
tasted vaguely like brazil nuts. He
singled a few out onto his dresser a
few would be enough and tapped
them with the heel of his boot. Once
pulverized, he scraped them onto a
magazine, which he placed out on the
floor. The birds watched this enterprise
with interest, then, waiting until Jack
had returned to his bunk, fluttered
down to their supper.
Jack was trying to get the birds to
speak. He switched on a pocket tape
recorder, adjusted it so that it repeated
this phrase over and over, so that the
parrots might pick it up: "Help! He
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Somebody at the pet store had taught
one of them to repeat the phrase "fur
shurrr..." over and over and Jack was
getting damned tired of hearing it. He
contemplated tossing that bird down
the toilet before the others started
mimicking him.
Watching the parrots eat, Jack
thought that maybe he was back on
Earth in some nice city on a nice map,
in some nice institution feeding the
nice ducks. And all this was just some
overblown dream from which he couldn't
wake up.
No, it was real; the parrots were
making crunching sounds and Ids travel
bag was heavy as he lifted it and placed
it by the door. Even if he could get back
to Earth, everyone he knew would be 80
years older.
In eight hours he would be riding
down to the surface of the planet Ong.
The prospect set his stomach in motion,
like before a big game when he was a
hot dog on his high school basketball
team. The tension was
exhilarating after the unrelieved
predictability of an 18-month voyage.
Face down in the pillow, Jack noted
that his heartbeat sounded like foot
steps, like someone walking through
cornflakes. The droning hum of the
ships systems lulled him to sleep.
He dreamt briefly that he was on the
inside of an enourmous conch, and that
he was running up the slippery sides
and sliding back down with a whoosh.
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