Making the Galaxy Great

Jason awoke to a series of increasingly aggressive raps on the closet door. While he struggled to sit up, McCauley was already facing the door, pulser in hand.

“Goddamit, Fleming! We need to go!” shouted Tina. The grouchy alien opened the door and flipped on the light. “And I can’t find your— oh, I see. A little quickie before your big adventure, huh?”

“Morning,” Jason muttered. “We were going over strategy.”

“I hope your strategy was satisfying,” said Tina. “Now we’ve got to get in the Scooby Van and go.”

It was not quite morning outside. The stars had faded and the black sky had given way to an indifferent flecked granite. Somewhere up there, thought Jason, an Yrrean ship was orbiting the Earth.

They followed Tina and Grace out the back of the building, to an old panel van of the type used for day trips at the senior living community where his grandmother had lived. This particular van looked nearly as old as some of those seniors. Two of the wheels were missing hub caps, and it looked as if someone had started to repaint it but only got as far as the primer coat.

“Shocks are shot,” said Tina, who fumbled with a key attached to a rabbit’s foot. “But it drives. And it’s got what you would call a stealth coating, so those ass wipes from A-69 can’t see inside.”

There were no seats in the back of the van; just cushions and blankets. Probably to fit more people — more alien refugees — inside. Jason’s stomach churned. It was his first experience of a people smuggling operation, and Grace and Tina were the coyotes.

Grace turned the key and the van’s engine grunted and coughed and when it finally started, the entire vehicle shook and rumbled. What an impression it must make on the Yrreans who crowded in off the shuttles, he thought to himself. How badly did they want to leave their home world?

Eventually Grace eased the doddering van out onto the streets and carefully navigated toward the Blue Dot Shoes building. At every stoplight, the van idled so roughly that Jason was afraid it might stall, but it shuddered forward each time Grace hit the gas and in a few minutes they were parking around back of the erstwhile shoe factory, near the loading dock and out of sight from the street.

Jason and McCauley clambered out the rear doors and followed Grace and Tina through the loading dock, to a metal staircase that crisscrossed up to the roof. An Yrrean shuttle was already waiting there, pulsating with a pale blue glow.

Back in the Beckman Forest, Jason had been too busy worrying about dying to notice much about the first shuttle he’d encountered. This time he paid more attention. The jelly-bean shaped craft had not actually landed on the roof; it hovered somewhat less than two feet above. There was an oval outline on the crackled surface beneath it that looked like something more than a shadow, as if the craft were generating heat or some other kind of energy that was speeding the decay of the old rooftop. The smugglers were going to have to find a new place to land pretty soon.

There were no windows or any external devices or structures on the shuttle; its surface was smooth and continuous. Or at least it was until a small door opened upward at one end of the craft, though Jason could see no signs of hinges. Seconds later, a line of Yrreans, the refugees, began to walk out, jumping tentatively to the ground. Jason watched them wobble and hop — one even fell — as they adjusted to the lower gravity of Earth.

Jason counted sixteen refugees, a huge number to have been packed into a craft that couldn’t be more than twenty feet long. Then he remembered that all sixteen of them would soon be crammed into the even smaller Scooby Van. Grace rounded them up and pointed the way toward the steps. In the meantime, Tina motioned to Jason and McCauley to follow her into the craft.

As Jason reached out a hand to the hull to steady himself, Tina cried out: “Don’t do that!”

Tina pulled his hand back and explained that, because of the shuttle’s field drive, the exterior of the ship was highly charged. “You could fry like a slice of bacon. Put your foot up here and step in.”

The interior of the shuttle was even smaller than Jason had expected, a circular area no more than twelve feet in diameter. At just under six feet in height, Jason had to stoop slightly. The walls were almost featureless, save for a few knobs that could have been switches, or latches, or something else entirely. And the lighting, which seemed to come from inside the walls, was surprisingly dim — so dim that Jason nearly tripped over one of the four small seats arranged in a semicircle in the middle of the cabin. They looked like giant slivers of cantaloupe rind.

“Where’s the pilot?” Jason wondered aloud.

Tina frowned at him. “Fleming, there is no pilot on the refugee run, so we can pack as many people as possible inside. Besides, these things fly themselves. This baby’s probably set to head back to mama in about two or three minutes, so you’d better grab a chair. Which should be easy, since you’re the only passengers on the return flight.”

Jason stared at the chair he’d nearly fallen over. “What about our weight? Won’t it throw off the,you know, the auto-pilot or whatever?”

Tina’s brow knitted for a moment. “That’s actually not a stupid question. But the answer is no. Everything should be self-adjusting. In fact, we’ve had some refugees who wuss out at the last minute and don’t get off the shuttle. They just fly back home to starve. So grab a chair and enjoy the ride, which should be approximately 90 seconds.”

“Wait. What about strapping in?” Jason asked. “I don’t want to be floating around the cabin.”

Tina glanced at McCauley. “This one’s high-maintenance. Always with the questions.”

“Tell me about it,” replied McCauley.

“This is not one of your lousy commercial airliners,” said Tina, managing to convey, with monumental ease, both impatience and annoyance. “The inertial adjustment system will automatically hold you in your seats. You just need to sit back and shut the hell up.”

Jason got into one of the chairs and as soon as he did, he felt a gentle pressure, evenly distributed all over his body, enveloping him.

“By the way,” said Tina, “just thought you should know this is the same shuttle that brought the two Yrreans you shot in the forest. So it’s probably not going to be lovey-dovey if they find you on the home ship. If you want to reconsider . . .”

“We’re going,” said McCauley decisively. She didn’t even glance at Jason, on whose face she would have detected a significant degree of hesitation.

Tina shrugged, waved a hand and disappeared out the opening in the hull. Jason turned to McCauley, who was ensconced in her own melon rind chair. “What happens now?” he asked.

“How do I know? I’ve never been in one of these before.” He saw that McCauley was nervous, too. Her cheeks were pulled like smooth plastic over her strong jaw and angular nose, which flared as she breathed quick and hard.

The door in the hull shut silently. The lights dimmed further and a slight hum, like the murmur of bees around a hive, was discernible from what Jason supposed was the rear of the craft.

“I think we’re about to take off,” he said after a few more seconds of humming.

“Please be quiet.”

Jason felt the inertial adjustment system ease off. McCauley cursed under her breath and hopped out of her seat.

“We’d better go find your Yrrean friend and find out what’s wrong.” She felt impatiently along the wall where the door opening had been. “How the hell do we open the hatch?”

Jason got out of his seat and instantly felt dizzy and out of breath, so much so that he nearly toppled over.

“The gravity,” said McCauley when she noticed what had happened. “Dalite gravity. It’ll slow you down a bit.”

It didn’t just slow Jason down. He waited through three successive waves of nausea which fortunately subsided before he actually lost control of his stomach. Wiping his sweaty brow, he tried to concentrate.

“Why would the gravity have changed?”

“Goddam door,” muttered McCauley.

“Umm . . . the last thing Tina did was wave,” Jason recalled. “I thought it was a goodbye wave, but maybe —”

McCauley didn’t wait for him to finish the thought. She waved her hand in the approximate spot where Tina had waved at them two minutes earlier and the wall opened outward. But now, instead of the decaying roof of an abandoned shoe factory, they were staring at the shiny, almost iridescent blue-orange floor of an Yrrean transport vessel.

Jason whistled softly. “We are not in Kansas anymore.”