Bubba And the Aliens
Battle Lines

Bubba and the Aliens

Or

Rednecks in Space I

By:

Jerry L. Harvey Jr.

2021

Look, none of this is real. If you think it is real, then I don’t know what to tell you. I mean, there really are states called Kansas, and Colorado, and such, but none of the people or the events are real. Okay? Quit emailing me and asking about my proof.

Other Questions?

[email protected]

Battle Lines

I rolled over in the bed on Saturday morning and slapped the top of the alarm clock. It was seven thirty. I was going to meet my friends for breakfast, and then play a round of golf at the local club. It was a five-minute drive to breakfast. I stretched and considered snoozing for a few more minutes. My bladder was telling me it might not be such a good idea. Like finishing off a fifth of tequila the night before had not been a good idea from the way my head was pounding.

I sat up and rubbed my face for a minute, stretched, stood up to head for the bathroom.

“Where are you going?” Janet asked sleepily from her side of the bed.

We have been together a little over six months now. I could go into the history of how we met, but no one cares about those sorts of things. Besides, if you want to hear about a grand romance, you would not be looking in these pages, but I digress. Okay, there is the thing with Bubba and the princess, but we are not there yet. I digress again, sorry.

“Bathroom,” I answered quickly. I stepped over discarded clothes and shoes as I sought to answer nature’s call. I found the pain killers in the cabinet a few moments later. I came back out and started getting dressed. She opened one eye to peer at me sideways.

“Golf course,” I explained as I looked for a pair of argyle socks to go with the plaid polyester rainbow knickers I had pulled on. I had a striped mustard yellow and green shirt and a brown corduroy sweater vest to go with the ensemble. I thought the obnoxious clothes were a distraction to the rest of the foursome. I also wore a neon orange newsboy cap with a tufted ball sticking out of the top.

“Don’t you have something else to do?” She admonished.

I knew she was referring to cleaning out the garage, so she could get her car in there. Right now, it was littered with the various disassembled parts of an oh-three Harley Sportster, a four-wheeler, and a bunch of tools I needed to put up.

“Golf course, or intercourse,” I suggested. I thought I was being cute. She did not. She closed her eye and rolled back over towards her side of the bed. I went out to the garage. I grabbed my golf bag and shoes from beside the door and carried them out to the truck.

If I had known it was the last time I would see her for eight weeks I would have kissed her goodbye.

“Look, I know I was supposed to be here two hours ago,” I exclaimed, “but the Pilifino putting the time coordinates in was spit balling some of the figures. We were lucky to get Bubba back from the aliens and make the jump back to earth before we got blown into smithereens by the Elvi.” I tried to hit Janet with an excuse as we walked in before she could demand the reason for my tardiness.

“What in the heck are Elvi?” She demanded, anyway.

Janet is a five foot two red-headed ball of fire with the temper to match. She is part Irish and part Italian. I am not always sure which parts are which. She had a right to be mad. We were supposed to be at her sister’s house for a cookout over an hour ago. It was to be the first time I would meet her sister and her parents. However, the thing with the Pilifino was true. So was the thing about Bubba. By all rights he should have been killed by the Elvi. We all should have been. Of course, we never should have been there in the first place. But, as the past couple of months had taught me, the universe often has plans for us we don’t know about.

“They’re aliens,” Bubba tried to explain.

“Illegal immigrants,” Janet retorted.

Bubba did not hear her. “Damn mean little suckers too. I think they are still angry about the King having to spend all those years on earth and the influence it had on him. But man do they love peanut butter!”

“Is he stoned or just stupid?” Janet turned to me for an answer.

“Look, the time jump can make people a little loopy for a while,” I stated.

“You left this morning to go play golf with your buddies and drink beer,” Janet began as the volume of her voice grew. “Now you show up late and want to give me some crazy story as an excuse! I’m not having it, Jack!”

That is me. I am Jack. “Look, honey, let me change clothes really quick. We can talk about it on the way to your sister’s.” I was dressed in basic five-pocket jeans, a grey shirt, and a black leather vest. My boots were square-toed and rose over my calves outside my jeans.

“I am not showing up at my sister’s house two hours late for her birthday party!” Janet exclaimed. “Maybe you and the three stooges ought to explain things to me now.”

“Well, we were just kind of glad to be back on earth and all,” Dingo said. “I think I’ll head on home. I got them chinchillas to take care of.”

“Yeah,” Bubba sighed. “I’m gonna need turpentine to get the Sesterisian mud out of my unmentionable areas. I ain’t quite recovered from the last donut the elves gave me.”

“You stopped for donuts!” Janet exclaimed.

“No, no,” Dingo jumped in. “We got them at the hospital. After Arlo got attacked by the vacuum cleaners on Sesterisia they put a box in his room. We didn’t know they were special,” he explained, making quotation marks with his fingers.

“What,” Janet leaped to a conclusion. “You went to Colorado. That explains a lot.”

“Wait, just calm down,” Bubba jumped back in on defense. “We didn’t go to Colorado. There was a place that seemed a lot like Vegas, but it was two weeks ago. What was that place?”

Janet spun towards me with wild eyes. “You went to Vegas with these bozos.”

“No, we did not, I emphasize not, go to Vegas. It just reminded Bubba of Vegas because of Elvis.”

Bubba shuddered were he stood. “I told them I was sorry, but they didn’t want to hear it.”

“And it wasn’t true.” Dingo pointed out.

“Out of all those aliens we met, the Elvi had to be the evilest.” Bubba stated.

“Illegal immigrants,” Janet yelled. It was one of her pet peeves. We had argued about it on several occasions. The whole opposites attract thing was the basis of our relationship. She was a firebrand liberal. I was an independent, with a lot of conservative leanings.

Arlo looked at her like he was expecting her head to spin around like one of the girls he saw in the bar on Darfo Seven. When it didn’t, he turned around and looked to me for a moment.

“I don’t think she gets it,” he stated. “Of course, there is no way she could.”

“Oh, I get it!” she countered. “You got drunk, ate special brownies, saw an Elvis impersonator, harassed some Filipino guy at the golf course and its mostly Bubba’s fault. That’s what I’m making out of the gibberish you’re spewing so far. Is that about, right?” Janet was pretty close to screaming now.

“No,” Arlo replied calmly. He is six foot two, thin, and a little on the nerdy side. He has dark, curly, hair and brown eyes, no glasses. He splayed his fingers out and began to count things off on them. “First the alien was Pilifino.”

“Immigrant,” Janet said through clenched teeth.

Arlo looked at me for a moment. I shook my head no and he let it go. “Second, we ate donuts, not brownies. And we wouldn’t have done it if the elves had told us about the effects.”

“Did you see elves before, or after, you ate the special donuts?” Janet asked, also making the quotation marks when she said special.

“Well, both,” Bubba said looking a little bewildered. Just so you know, Bubba is five eight with a powerlifter build and a high and tight haircut. He was an armorer in the military and has an intricate knowledge of weapons. “I mean after the vacuums attacked Arlo,” he quit speaking mid-sentence at a withering look from Janet.

“You were attacked by a vacuum?” Janet turned to Arlo in disbelief.

He raised his shirt up to show her the twenty to thirty suction marks. They looked like hickeys across his chest and down his right side. “Several, they belong to the Elvi,” he explained, “and I don’t want to lay blame, but it was kind of Bubba’s fault.”

“Why is it your fault?” Janet asked as she spun towards Bubba.

“He’s the one who hit the Pilifino with the golf ball and started this whole mess,” Dingo said, somehow managing not to sound accusatory.

We did not really blame Bubba for what had happened. Well, the thing with the princess somewhat, but we will get to it later.

“Was it before, or after, they gave you the special donuts?” Janet inquired.

“Damnit Janet,” Dingo called out and flopped down in the lazy boy.

Dingo is six foot or so, same as me, and rangy. He spent two years in Australia with an aborigine woman living in a hut after we got out of the Navy. He came back to the States and found me through social media. We had been sharing an apartment before I met Janet. He often spoke like an Aussie, even though he was from Idaho.

“The Elvi were the ones with the vacuums.” Arlo continued. “They were trying to kill Bubba because of what happened with the Lakanican princess. The elves ran the hospital on Keebler Six. They are nothing alike.”

Janet glanced at him momentarily before turning back towards me. “An Indian princess and Keebler elves,” she asked unbelievingly, raising one eyebrow.

“The universe is a funny place,” I began to explain.

“I’m not laughing,” she replied.

“The eight-legged cats on Octavia,” Arlo said with a light laugh and a grin. “Now those were funny!”

“It was ironic,” I corrected Arlo. “Not funny, not humorous, ironic.”

Janet was swiveling her head back and forth between the two of us. Arlo was giggling and trying not to laugh. I could see Dingo was doing the same. We were all feeling the effects of the time jump. Arlo was trying not to laugh and failing badly. I heard him let out a sound similar to a pig snort.

Bubba looked dumbfounded, which was not unusual. He turned to look at me. “Are they talking about the octopussies,” he asked calmly. I am usually considered the sanest of the group and the de facto leader in times of crisis, such as facing off with Janet.

“The Octopussies,” Arlo squeaked out and began laughing wholeheartedly. He fell to the floor and began rolling around, repeating the word every few seconds between fits of laughter.

Janet sat down on the couch and watched Arlo roll around in the floor.

“Honey,” I said, sitting down beside her after a couple of seconds, “do you have the picture you took of us last night at dinner on your phone?”

“Yeah, it’s still on there,” she answered absently as she tried to fathom the pandemonium of the moment.

“Take a look at it for a second. I want to show you something.”

She pulled the photo up and glanced down at it. “What about it Jack?” she asked.

I gently turned her head towards me and looked into her eyes. I pulled her hand up to the two months of beard and mustache on my face. “Did I have a beard in the picture, or this small scar over my right eye? Was I missing the last quarter of my left pinky,” I asked, holding my hand up in front of her?

I saw her eyes go saucer sized for just a moment in wide-eyed wonder. I had been cleanly shaven when I left the house to go play golf, with all my digits fully intact. I had also been wearing distinctly different clothing. It had been eleven hours for her, but eight weeks had passed for the four of us, give or take a day.

“And you didn’t have a tan,” she whispered.

“The beaches of Sesterisia,” Dingo offered. “Or the desert of Obujutte Thirteen,” He added. “One or the other, maybe both.”

“I think you better explain,” she said quietly, glancing from her phone to my face.

“That’s what he’s been trying to do,” Bubba defended as he went to the kitchen and pulled a beer from the fridge. He brought the six pack back and handed bottles out. Arlo was on the floor, breathless, but recovering,

I looked around the room for a moment, meeting each man’s eyes. “No one would ever believe the tale we are about to tell. It doesn’t matter. We were there. We survived the journey. We made it back, in spite of Elvi, octopussies, Khelids, the vacuum cleaner attacks, and even the Herpes.”

“Maybe you should say the incident on the planet of Herpe,” Dingo suggested.

I nodded my head in agreement. “We even survived the incident on the planet of Herpe,” I repeated, looking at Janet.

“I don’t know the best place to start.” I looked around the room.

“Not the Octopussies,” Arlo wheezed out and fell to the floor again.

“Maybe the Guatemalan hooker,” Dingo suggested, shaking his head. “I’d like to stay and listen, but I got to get to them chinchillas.”

“The chinchillas will wait,” I reminded him.

“Is this going to be one of those ‘we just had an amazing adventure and saved the world too’ kind of things?” Janet asked.

“We” I started looking around for confirmation, “we didn’t save the planet. I don’t think we did anyway.”

“No,” Dingo agreed kind of sadly.

“Well, nobody asked us to,” Bubba said, quietly offended now. He realized we had not been asked to do anything so grand. He took a drink of his beer.

“We saved the princess from the Elvi,” Dingo stated. “Although, I’m not sure we did her any favors. Sorry Bubba,” he finished.

“And we found out why the Mayans left earth,” Arlo said as he sat up from the floor and reached for a beer.

“Why did the Mayans leave?” Janet was instantly alert.

“We aren’t supposed to tell anybody, remember,” Bubba cautioned under his breath.

“Oh yeah,” Arlo answered. He took a drink of beer and looked around the room aimlessly, avoiding Janet’s gaze.

“Jack solved a problem for those spider things. I suppose it was kind of helpful.” Bubba said and raised his beer in a toast to me.

“You did what?” Janet asked.

“It was nothing,” I answered dismissively. “I just told them about cryogenics.”

“What do you know about cryogenics?” She asked.

“Just the theory behind it, their scientist seemed pretty interested though.”

“Maybe you should just start at the beginning,” Janet suggested.

I looked around the room again. “The beginning was a dozen years ago in South America when Osned met the hooker. Maybe she is the place to start.”

“Is he Mayan,” Janet asked.

“We are not going to talk about the Mayans,” Bubba said loudly. He stood up from the couch and stomped off down the hall towards the bathroom.

“Why don’t you tell me what happened after you left the house to play golf.”

I turned back to Janet and nodded my head slowly. I took a drink of beer and took her hand in mine. “It started as a normal Saturday morning,” I began.

Earth

(Eight weeks, or eleven hours, earlier)

“The fifth hole is a par five,” I began to explain to Janet. “I do not know if there is supposed to be irony in it or not. It is a blind dogleg to the right and Bubba has to fight a bit of a fade. Anyway, his tee shot turned into a wicked slice and left the vicinity of the fifth fairway. It traveled back into the fairway on number three. Through some quirk of the universe, it happened to hit Osned directly in the head as he was lining up a short chip shot to the green.”

“You didn’t tell her about breakfast,” Dingo broke in.

“Nothing important happened at breakfast,” I retorted.

“Looking back, I think one waitress could have been an Ozkerian spy,” Arlo contributed.

Bubba looked around for a moment at the living room. “I feel like Dorothy,” he stated. “We’re back in Kansas.”

“Just let me tell the story,” I said a little perturbed.

“Here Toto,” Arlo said and fell on the floor laughing again. “Those octopussies would have scared the crap out of that dog.”

“Shut up!” Janet yelled. She turned back towards me. “Who is Osned?”

I combed my memory for a moment. “Osned is a Pilifino. He was sent into exile, in the twelve thousand, four hundred and fifty-fourth year of the reign of the House of Ransahoff, for a particular indiscretion with the daughter of Warfarin. Warfarin was three hundred and eighty-sixth in line for the crown on the planet of Pilifin. He ran his house as if he lived in the castle himself, according to the official record we read later on.

“The truth is, Osned was a towel boy who did nothing for eight hours a day but stand at the edge of the bath. He held towels for those who were in the bath. If no one was in the bath, he was allowed to set the towels on a sideboard. Initially, he thought it would be a good idea to just leave them there and hand one to whoever got out of the bath. That kind of initiative and radical thinking were soon beaten out of him. Therefore, he held the towels at the ready when anyone was in the bath.

“One of the regular bathers was the youngest of fifteen daughters of Warfarin. She liked the wild spirit of Osned. She soon offered herself to him in rebellion against her father’s rules. When her father found out, Osned was taken out, beaten again, and then left for dead.

“Well, they may have broken his spirit, and a couple of ribs, but they had not broken his mind. Osned woke up to find he was not dead. He was able to escape his horrible situation. He fled his planet by stowing away on a space freighter. They left him here on earth when he was caught and dropped him into the jungles of Guatemala.”

“You are claiming there is an alien on earth?” Janet said sadly. “Really, it’s where you are going to go with this?”

“Yes,” I answered as I nodded. “Pilifinos are a humanoid race and as such most people would not notice the slight difference between them and earthlings. This is especially true in larger cities or at rock concerts. They average six and a half feet in height and their heads are slightly pointy on top. Most people do not notice because they cannot see the top of their heads. Besides, there are very few of them on our planet, and they all use the same hair salon in Miami.

“They do not play professional basketball because they do not want to draw any unwanted attention to themselves,” I answered the question before Janet could ask. She was a Pacers fan.

“Anyway, what I am saying is, they can fit in on earth fairly easily in most places and would not be conspicuous.

“This was a problem in Guatemala though. The closer you get to the equator in South America, the shorter the people get. I personally believe it is because they are trying to get farther away from the sun. A six foot six Pilifino stuck out like a sore thumb in Guatemala

“Now, Pilifinos are also immune to the effects of grain alcohol. Osned took advantage of this. He opened a tavern in the jungle where he would bet the locals he could drink any of them under the table.

“The natives in the area were not immune. Osned used his winnings to buy a bar. He became an expert brewer of a specialized Chicca that rivaled the Quetzalteca and Venado in the area. He soon renamed the bar to what would be roughly translated to ‘The Poison Giant’. He was not a marketing genius, or maybe he was.

“See, snake venom is the equivalent of alcohol for Pilifinos. Osned would occasionally trade drinks for the Barba Amarilla and rattlesnakes in the area and then freak people out when he let them bite him. After their venom was released into his veins, he would cut their heads off and give the bodies to the cook. He became a local legend in short order.

“Then he met Dahlia. She was a twenty-six-year-old one-legged pigmy hooker. I know pygmy is a description mostly given to African people of less than one hundred fifty centimeters in height.”

“Although Dahlia was not of African descent, she was rather short of stature, even for a Guatemalan.”

I do not often let facts get in the way of my point of view either. This is my story, and I will tell it my way. I also know there are a variety of ways I could describe her that would not cause people to accuse me of racism, height bias, or any other number of politically correct offenses. The fact is the most correct description of her would be a four-foot six inch tall, one-legged, Guatemalan, dwarf, prostitute. I just like pygmy hooker better. She is not now, but she was twelve years ago.

Janet was staring at me in either disbelief or complete incomprehension. I could not decide which. She was not arguing or asking questions, therefore I continued.

“Dahlia wandered into Osned’s bar one day looking for customers. He was instantly smitten with her and offered her a job as a bartender. He built a walkway behind the bar for her and fashioned her an artificial leg. He was interested in her romantically, but thought he had no chance, due to the vast difference in their height. Also, Pilifinos are generally unattractive to earthlings because of their pointy heads and somewhat narrow faces. Most people think they are just tall geeks kind of like Arlo” Arlo shot me a dirty look, but it was all.

“What does this hooker have to do with anything?” Janet wondered.

“Well, just a bit of back story we learned later on. You may as well know everything. Dahlia had lost the lower three-quarters of her left leg in a freak accident when she fell off a tractor as a child of eight. Her leg went under a disc harrow. It was a traumatic injury for an eight-year-old girl. Her family thought she would never be anything but a burden. They never returned to the hospital to claim her after her injury. After she recovered, she was sent to live with the nuns in the local village. She never saw her parents again. I know it is a cruel fate, but people can be terrible jerks sometimes, even parents. The care, concern, and the unmerited and unaccustomed kindness Osned showed her blossomed into a passionate love for each other.”

“Is any of that important?” Janet wondered.

I nodded. “We did not know any of this when we found her screaming on the fairway, bent over Osned. She was shaking him vigorously to revive him after he had been hit in the head by Bubba’s golf ball.”

“This is where the universe gets a little weird.” Dingo stated.

“Now it starts to get weird?” Janet questioned, cocking her head to one side.

“See, we also did not know seven months ago,” I picked back up, “the house of Ransahoff fell in a coup. Everyone in line for the throne, including Warfarin and his daughters, were quickly killed by the Anawatchung family. They are a large corporate laundry conglomerate on Pilifino, who thought they were paying too much in taxes. The politics of the Pilifinos is not an area we need to discuss at great length.

“Needless to say, things had changed on Osned’s planet. He was part of the Anawatchung family. A ship had been sent to seek him out and return him to his planet. There he was regarded as somewhat of a hero for the stand he had taken about the towels.”

“You’re kidding about this,” Janet interjected.

“No, he isn’t,” Arlo answered as he shook his head.

“The ship happened to be hovering,” I continued, “undetected to the primitive electronic scans of our military, and our own eyes, about two hundred feet above the golf course when Osned was struck down. A recording of the incident would be presented at our trial on Pilifin.”

“You weren’t on trial,” Bubba corrected, “just me and Dingo.”

“So, you can see how one might say this was all Bubba’s fault,” Arlo interjected at this point.

“You are telling me they took you aboard a spaceship,” Janet inquired unbelieving.

“Yeah, but it wasn’t like anything you have seen on television or the movies,” Dingo replied. “One minute we were on the golf course, the next we were on the ship, surrounded by a dozen Pilifinos with weapons. It felt weird.”

I nodded my head in agreement with the memory. “Luckily, we were too stunned to make any aggressive movements. It felt like coming down off a really good buzz, to be unexpectedly and suddenly sober. Even the slight shift in location had an effect.” I did not know how to describe it to Janet exactly.

“Okay, yeah,” I said after a moment’s thought, “we were grabbed by the Pilifinos and put into a holding cell with Dahlia. We could not understand her, because she is Guatemalan. None of us know much Spanish, because, well, we live in Kansas,” I explained.

“What do you have to say about this Bubba?” Janet asked as she turned towards him. Bubba was the weak link any time we attempted to come up with a conspiratorial lie to cover our tracks with Janet or anyone else’s girlfriend. He just could not lie effectively.

“I don’t think it was really my fault,” he answered, his mind still on the earlier accusation. “It was an accident. How was I supposed to know my drive would knock out a member of the ruling family on a planet I never heard of? What are the odds they would be waiting to pick him up at just that moment?”

“Where are your clothes,” Janet asked, swiveling her head back to me.

I met her eyes for a moment, before looking down at the jeans and tee-shirt I was wearing. It was, again, far different than what I had left the house in. “The fashion police destroyed them,” I admitted.

“The fashion police,” she repeated.

“We don’t want to go there,” Bubba said as a shudder ran through him. “They were not as bad as the Elvi, but they were close. Can you imagine the war that would break out if they ever tried to impose their law on Elva? Now those were some fashion criminals.”

“The Elvi,” Janet pronounced the word slowly, “don’t have any fashion sense?”

“Well, you have to realize Elvis is their king. Have you ever been to Graceland?” Arlo asked.

Janet shook her head negatively.

“The Elvi are all seventies and Vegas and disco,” Arlo explained. “It is platform shoes, bell bottoms, and plaid polyester as far as the eye can see. Oh, and Hawaiian shirts. It’s horrible. The pants and shirt Jack was wearing when we went golfing were still in his bags when we ended up on Darfo Seven.” Arlo shook his head sadly.

“The Philipinos have real fashion police?” Janet was looking around the room.

“I’m telling you she doesn’t get it,” Dingo stated again. “Pilifinos,” he corrected, “and no it was not them who arrested Jack. We are getting ahead of the story. Go back to the part where we were in the brig on the Pilifino ship. We will get to the trials on Darfo and Octavia later on.”

“You had two trials for two different crimes,” Janet asked.

I looked around the room at the other members of the group. “We were kind of labeled as Galactic criminals.”

“Ignorance of the law is no defense,” Bubba said, quoting judges and magistrates one or the other of us had faced on several planets.

“Show her the scar again,” Dingo said motioning towards me.

“It’s not important right now,” I dismissed.

“You have scars from being punished? She asked with a hint of concern in her eyes.

“No, from where the Kelvekian hit him,” Bubba said in his matter-of-fact way.

“Guys, we are getting way out of sequence here,” I admonished. “We will get to the Elvi, the princess, the fashion police on Darfo Seven, and even the Kelvekian, but first I have to tell her what happened with Osned and the Pilifinos.”

I heard a chorus of agreement and turned back to Janet.

“Why was a couple from Guatemala on a golf course in Kansas,” Janet asked.

We all looked at each other for a few seconds before I turned back to Janet. “It’s a darn good question, and there is probably a darn good answer for it somewhere.”

“But” she supplied.

“Well, I don’t think we ever asked them. We did not get the Galactic translator microbe things until after our lawyer met with us. Once he realized we didn’t understand each other he had us injected.”

“And Dahlia had been removed from the cell before we made the space jump,” Dingo provided.

“So, we were surrounded by Pilifinos with weapons.” I tried to reestablish control of the conversation. “We could not understand them, but it was obvious they wanted to know who was in charge of our group. I stepped forward.”

“Everybody else stepped back you mean,” Bubba corrected.

“Whatever,” I answered as I glared at him. “Osned had been carried out of the room. Dahlia was talking gibberish at ninety to nothing. She would not shut up. She was screaming, crying, and basically just kind of losing it. We were surrounded by aliens and the only man she had ever loved might be dead or dying. The only man who ever loved her was taken by aliens. That is why the back story was important,” I pointed out.

“Of course, we didn’t really know they were Pilifino warriors at the time,” Arlo added. “It became clear when they took her out.”

“They killed her,” Janet asked with surprise.

I shook my head. “No, one of the guards knocked her out. They wanted her to shut up, kind of like I want you three to do,” I said looking at my buddies. They nodded sullenly and fondled their beer bottles.

“After a bunch of shouting back and forth and the brandishing of weapons in somewhat menacing ways, they left and closed the door. We had no idea we were on a Pilifino spaceship at the time. It looked like we were in a big metal box. There was a small window in the door, but it looked out into a room that looked like a smaller metal box. About three hours later a buzzer started going off. It, and some multi-colored flashing lights, were supposed to warn us the ship was about to make a space jump.”

“What’s a space jump?” Janet inquired.

“It’s a way to cover vast distances in space between planets,” I answered. “I have no idea how it works. I know you can’t be orbiting a planet or on a planet.”

“It has something to do with gravity wells and the magnetic resonance of subatomic particles. It was how they got us onto the ship, but they had to be relatively close to us on the golf course to do it.” Dingo offered.

“Yeah,” Arlo said quietly. “They can’t pull people off the surface of a planet into outer space because of atmospheric variations and the possibility of creating a black hole on the surface of a planet. Space is a vacuum, so gravity wells are not much of a problem unless you try to move something really big, like our moon. Something like it would create a black hole.”

All of us turned to look at him. “I asked when we were approaching Octavia. You were fighting the Kelvekian,” Arlo explained. “I wanted to know why we couldn’t just beam you up to the ship from the surface like they always do in Star Trek.”

“The best way I can describe it,” I said, “is like you are standing perfectly still in the middle of a room, then the whole house jumps sideways. It slams you through a wall into another room, but you remain perfectly still, and the wall is intact.”

“Yep, that’s it,” Bubba agreed slowly and thoughtfully, then finished off his beer.

“The buzzing sound and the flashing lights are supposed to warn you to strap in and prepare for it. We didn’t understand any of it. Therefore, when the ship did jump sideways, we were all slammed against the wall and knocked unconscious.

“After the jump, we were approaching Pilifin, and our legal representative came in to talk to us. He realized we could not communicate. We were injected with something. Five minutes later we could understand him and anyone else who talked to us no matter what language they were speaking.”

“Injected with what,” Janet inquired.

We did another round of looking at each other while I searched for words I did not have. “We don’t really know. It is some type of bacteria or virus or something. Microbes of some kind rewire mental synapses somehow. I have no idea how it works either, but it does work. I guess it could be a technology of some sort. It’s what the mind cleansing thing the Darfons used was.”

“What was the mind cleansing supposed to do?”

I did not answer right away. The experience had been traumatic in a way difficult to explain. Bubba had never spoken about it either. I met his eyes, and he shook his head slowly side to side. He would not speak of it now.

“It didn’t hurt the way you think about pain,” I answered as I collected my thoughts about the ordeal. “It just made you feel different. It had something to do with aligning visual stimuli to bring balance and harmony to your soul. Not externally, because the universe is just plain ugly in some places. It just made you more aware of how ugly it was.”

Now Bubba was nodding his head. “Ignorance truly was bliss,” he stated.

I tried to start again. “When we woke up, we were being dragged to our feet and laughed at by the Pilifino warriors. I might not have understood their language, but we knew they were laughing at us. After we spoke to our legal counsel and got the translator things, they marched us through the ship and out into the spaceport.”

“Which was impressive as Hell,” Dingo interjected.

“Which was very impressive,” I edited. “We still had no idea where we were but, as Dorothy once alluded, we knew we were not in Kansas anymore.”

“Where were you?” Janet asked seriously.

“Damnit Janet!” Dingo spit out. “Are you even listening? We were on Pilifin!”

“Calm down Dingo, you have to remember, Janet wasn’t there with us.” He finished his beer and took the bottle to the trash can in the kitchen. I saw him head for the garage. I knew he was checking to see how many cases were out there.

“What solar system,” Janet asked. We had been out at night to look at the stars in the clear Kansas skies a few times together. She barely knew the constellations. I could have told her anything, but I went with the truth.

“We later learned there are over six thousand known inhabited planets. The Galactic standard is to use the name of the dominant planet in the system. We are in the earth solar system because it is what the Americans called it when aliens visited the astronauts on the moon. We are called earthlings because it is what we called ourselves.”

“What are you talking about?” Janet inquired.

“It’s probably highly classified, and we aren’t supposed to talk about certain government secrets,” Arlo warned.

“No one is going to believe us guys,” I reminded them. Besides, they never told us not to talk about the moon landing.”

Dingo came in from the garage and put two more six packs in the fridge. He handed out cold beers to everyone.

“When the astronauts first went into space, they were observed by the Quinanots. They are still in our galaxy, about fifty light years away. The Galactic counsel began sending emissaries to our planet to help prepare us for the eventual contact with outside races, which is probably still hundreds of years away if we don’t destroy ourselves or the planet in the meantime.”

“What kind of emissaries?” Janet queried.

“People like Gene Roddenberry,” I admitted.

“I find it hard to believe,” Janet countered.

“As would anybody,” Arlo explained, “which is why no one suspects them. People don’t want to believe we are being influenced and observed by aliens. They make movies and shows about the interaction between races with some degree of conflict but hope for peace. It appears we are one of the most violent and adaptive races they are aware of.

“They are kind of scared of us. Not us now, even though we have figured out a way to blow up our own planet already, but more of who we might be once we figure out how to get beyond our own solar system.”

“Just who all did you talk to,” she wondered aloud.

“Lots of folks, whoever would talk to me,” Arlo answered. “I wasn’t arrested on Darfo Seven like Jack and Bubba. I met this cute little girl who said she was Tzatzikian. She was really into Galactic politics and conspiracy theories. She’s the one who told me about the astronauts, which I shared with Jack at some point before he fought the Kelvekian on Octavia,” he explained.

“Anyway, they started sending agents to earth in the nineteen forties and fifties all around the world to begin preparing us for our encounter with the larger universe.”

“But we didn’t land on the moon until nineteen-sixty-nine and Gene Roddenberry was not six foot six. Your story doesn’t hold water, Arlo.” Janet smiled. If he was lying, then all of were lying.

“Gene was not Pilifino. He was Palladian. Time travel is outlawed for common folks,” Arlo said. “Which does not mean it doesn’t happen, as we recently discovered. Some of the military members of the council thought sending agents back before we had the capability for space travel to help shape our attitudes about alien encounters would be a good idea. Jules Vern overshot his time jump as a matter of fact.”

“Why don’t they just come to help us and introduce us to the wonders of the galaxy, or universe, or whatever,” Janet inquired.

“Well, Galactic politics, and a noninterference policy until space travel is efficient and effective,” Bubba observed. We all looked at him. This was an astute observation we were not used to.

“They don’t trust us, not future us, but now us either,” Dingo commented.

“We are kind of considered the backwater rednecks of humanoids at the moment,” Arlo explained. “In eight weeks traveling to other planets we were banned from most of the ones we visited.”

“They just don’t think the planet, as a whole, is ready,” I concluded. “The whole fear of the violence and adaptability thing is part of it. We are too unpredictable. Earthling was a term of derision on every planet we were on.”

“Tzatziki sauce,” Bubba announced seemingly out of the blue. This was more in character for him.

“Yes,” Arlo agreed. “Zeus and his brother Poseidon with all their kids influenced Greece. They came from a heavy gravity and wetter world than ours, so they seemed superhuman.”

I had no idea how Arlo had connected Zeus with Bubba’s utterance.

“Do they believe in God,” Janet wondered.

“Several hundred of them from what the archives on the ship revealed,” I stated. “Most believe in a creator. They just differ about the name, the way to salvation, and the same stuff people on earth do. Some people and planets are very religious, others are not. But, when you have guys like Zeus and Poseidon come to a planet where they are extraordinary, they get written into local legend, or can become gods in the eyes of those around them.”

“But” Arlo jumped in, “stuff like it is taboo. They used to use exile to some out of the way corner of the galaxy as punishment when more liberal guidelines ruled the council, or somebody just wanted someone off the planet. It’s how DaVinci ended up here,” he said casually. “It led to the creation of local legends, or people taking over whole countries or planets. Now, they send them to a prison planet, or kill them.”

“How did you get to look at archives on the ship if you were prisoners?” Janet wondered.

“Not on the way to Pilifin,” I corrected. “It was after we left Darfo to go to Herpe, and on the way to Octavia. We were on a different ship.” I saw the raised eyebrow and then continued.

“There are laws to space travel and how fast a ship can move in the vacuum of space and a whole bunch of science I could never come close to understanding if I wanted to. Basically, it boils down to a speed limit in occupied solar systems similar to a wake zone in a harbor. There are designated safe zones for jumps through space in faster than light travel. They have all the math worked out and even some kind of warning system so two ships should not arrive at the same coordinates at the same time.”

“Should not,” Bubba said with a shudder.

“Which does seem to have happened in the past on rare occasions,” I explained, “but not very often anymore. We never saw it happen and did not talk to anyone who had seen it happen. We did hear stories.”

“Well, if you were involved in it, you probably wouldn’t survive,” Dingo pointed out.

I nodded my agreement and turned back to Janet.

“What does it have to do with you reading the archives,” Janet asked to correct our course.

“Nothing,” I answered and moved on. “Okay, so we were put in a room with our lawyer in the spaceport. He began explaining our rights and what we were accused of. Bubba was accused of something akin to assault by accident. Arlo and I were material witnesses because we had already taken our shots and put our clubs away. Dingo was an accessory because he still had his driver out and a ball in his hand, so intent of action was questionable.”

“But I thought it was an accident,” Janet interjected.

“It was,” Bubba defended.

“It was,” I agreed. “However, Bubba had accidentally assaulted a Pilifin citizen. A citizen the government media was trying to bring home and present as a hero for standing up to the recently deposed regime. There was going to be a made for television special about his life and the torture he endured. They would profile the courage he had to stand up for himself, and a follow up on what he had done in his years of exile.”

“I thought you said he put towels on the sideboard instead of holding them and then ran away.” Janet looked befuddled.

“Well, Pilifin is a rather boring planet all in all. The people don’t have many vices. It is not a democracy,” Dingo explained. “They are one of the semi-religious worlds. People tend to be very sedate and accept things as they are. Bucking the trend and doing something unexpected, and then having to flee the planet for it, had all the makings of a heroic tale.”

“Of course,” Arlo began, “they did not realize how spontaneous and barbaric earth was. They thought Osned would love all the attention.”

“Fifteen minutes of fame,” Janet observed.

“Something like it,” I stated. “Anyway, we went over strategy with our lawyer. Once we were done at the spaceport, Bubba and Dingo were restrained. Arlo and I were under house arrest. Apparently, there are a great many factions on Pilifin who would attempt to use our presence and lack of knowledge for their own nefarious gains supposedly.

“We saw news stories about our being barbarians who would kill anyone we encountered. Others described how we were misunderstood. Some claimed we were being kept from doing interviews due to a great government conspiracy. Some claimed we were a sign of their god or Satan, and fulfillment of ancient prophecy.

“They fed us well and provided clothing in the style of their planet, even Bubba and Dingo because they didn’t want to appear to be biased against them.”

“They wanted to keep an eye on us. The whole planet is caught up in conspiracy theories about the government, religion, aliens, or the intertwining of them. No one trusted us.” Dingo explained.

“So, what happened at the trial?” Janet asked looking towards Bubba. “I mean he didn’t get the death sentence or whatever?”

“I almost died of boredom,” Bubba offered, and took a drink of beer.

“Well, as we said, they are a sedate people.” Arlo looked around and we nodded before he continued. “The trial took several days. I could cover the details, but I can’t think of any way to make them exciting in the least bit. They brought in the captain of the ship who had taken us. He and the executive staff explained what they had witnessed from the bridge. Every guard who had had any kind of interaction with us at all was questioned. The final day of the prosecution Dahlia and Osned were on the witness stand. The video of the golf ball hitting Osned was played ad nausea throughout the whole thing as each person described what happened from their perspective and the impact it had on them personally to see Osned attacked. Then there was cross-questioning from doctors and psychologist about the veracity of each person’s view and how their past colored their interpretation, and on, and on, and on.”

“Our defense,” Dingo picked up, “only lasted a couple of hours. They called Bubba and me to refute any of the testimony, which I had managed to sleep through quite a bit of. They convicted us within ten minutes of discussion. They sentenced Bubba to death and me to life in prison.”

“And you and Arlo broke them out and fled the planet,” Janet assumed with amazement, looking at me almost heroically.

I shook my head negatively. “The outcome of the trial was a foregone conclusion. They had to convict Bubba and Dingo. It made it possible for Osned to go to the judge and beg for their sentences to be commuted and sway public opinion. They could feel good about justice being served and how much more sophisticated than us they were. The sentences were reduced to time served. We were banned from Pilifin for life. This made Osned look like more of a hero, wise and compassionate It set him up to rise in the ranks of the government his family now ruled.

“They were going to do a movie about his life story, as I said. They wanted to cover his suffering through his time of exile on earth and how horrible it must have been to live in a world of savages like us.”

“Never fail to take advantage of a crisis,” Bubba lamented. “We were set up, knocked down, and being kicked off the first alien planet we had ever been to. The only thing we had seen was the jail and the courtroom.”

“So, they sent you to another planet?” Janet wondered.

“Not exactly,” Dingo said, “they put us on a spaceship to send us back to earth, or so they said. Jack figured you would have packed up and left him or would have the police searching for all of us. All our vehicles were still at the golf course, or would have been towed, we figured.”

“And I figured I would have lost my investment in them chinchillas,” Dingo offered.

“We knew no one would believe us, because even with all the movies and UFO sightings, we are still being conditioned to not really believe,” I explained.

“So how did you convince them to do this supposed time jump?” Janet made quotation marks again when she said time jump.

“We didn’t,” I answered, and turned to look at Bubba.

“Bubba convinced them?” Janet asked amazed.

“Bubba,” Arlo articulated expressively, “was the one who picked up the Lakanican avatar when no one was looking. It changed everything.”

“I traded an arrowhead and four dollars for it,” Bubba exclaimed. “Hey, I wonder who has our golf clubs? We could have traded our golf clubs! I bet some sorry, no good, thieving, delinquents stole our clubs thinking we abandoned them on the fairway.”

“Forget about the golf clubs Bubba,” I advised.

“I sure could have used my new driver on Sesterisia,” he argued.

“An arrowhead and four dollars,” Janet prompted.

“Which was a fool’s bargain,” Dingo chided. His tone suggested Bubba was the fool.

“The trial ended on the equivalent of a Thursday in their work week.” I continued, “The suspension of the sentence was delivered on Friday. They wanted us off-planet as soon as possible. Someone thought it would be good public relations to let us wander around the shops near the spaceport with a heavy guard presence to protect the locals.” I supplied.

“Since we didn’t have local currency or anything we thought anyone would trade for, we just kind of looked around, except someone lost track of Bubba and he got the avatar.”

“I didn’t know it was an avatar,” Bubba defended. “It just looked like a little carving of a wood elf or something.”

“Like a Keebler elf,” Janet asked.

Bubba missed the sarcasm. “No, more like them north pole elves you see in the old Christmas movies, or some of the stuff from Europe you see on the home shopping network.” He looked around the room and saw we were all staring at him. “I like some of them what-nots and figurines,” he said with a look that expressed he knew we were going to rib him about it for the rest of our lives.

Dingo took a drink of his beer and began speaking. “Unbeknownst to us, or the individuals on the cargo ship they hired to drop us back off here on earth, the avatar contacted the Lakanican, Bipodecus, who did something to the navigation while we were in port on the second planet.”

“What was the second planet like?” Janet asked, though I suspected she did not believe a thing we had told her so far.

“We don’t know, we were confined to quarters until they dropped us back on earth,” Arlo answered.

“How convenient.” Janet offered.

“So, you can imagine our surprise when we heard the alarms going off and fighting in the hallways after we left the planet. We were released from our quarters and hurried through the passageways to another ship. We were told we were being rescued. Once we boarded the other ship we sped away for a couple of minutes and did a space jump. The four of us unbuckled ourselves to find out what was going on and get some answers. One of the new aliens looked at us with surprise and horror. They were jumping again. We felt the shift as it happened, got slammed through a wall again, and woke up in a field of purple wheat.” I summarized.

“Where were you?”

“Lakanica,” Bubba supplied. “The group that hijacked us was long gone except for the guy the avatar contacted.”

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