House of the Galactic Elevator

by Gerhard Gehrke

  Toggs awkwardly stepped onto the base of the light pole. Everyone was staring. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Toggs said. “I also don’t know anything about what’s going on, not for certain at least. What I do know is that the Bunnie went to the Galactic Commons and left us here. In the meantime, we need to get off this airfield and find some cover. We don’t know what the humans will do when they find us. If you have the cyclopedia app, you might be able to identify animals and plants in the world around us. Assume anything might be poisonous. There are some structures over there.”

  He pointed down the airstrips to a set of large white hangars. They were too small for the whole crowd, but at least the entire group wouldn’t be sitting out in the open.

  “Let’s gather together down that way. We’ll keep an eye out if the elevators return for us.”

  Toggs looked up at Kwed. He was compressed into a knot atop the pole.

  “I agree with that course of action,” Kwed said in a muffled voice.

  ***

  “I’m hungry,” Kwed said for the eighth time.

  “We’re setting up a food printer,” Toggs said. “You’ll just have to be patient.”

  Kwed began to walk in a tight spiral pattern on the floor, winding himself up like a long vacuum cleaner hose. He rose up into a column, unwound, began the process again. Toggs looked around for someplace else to sit and wait, but the hangar was full. About a third of the refugees fit within the old human structure. The other two hangars, while smaller, almost held the rest. A few sat about just outside after repeated warnings that it would be best if none of them were seen. Several more refused to leave the runway, certain that the elevators would resume service any minute. It had been twenty hours since being dumped on the human world, almost an entire day cycle for this world.

  “We should go scouting,” Kwed said.

  Toggs sighed. “Fine. Be my guest. Don’t get lost.”

  Kwed’s antennae sagged. “But you should come with me. Help keep an eye out for natives. You and I as this group’s leaders need to know what’s out and around here, to get to know the lay of the land. Ergo, we would be the ones to undertake this mission.”

  Toggs stretched, heard his spine crack with a rat-tat-tat as it readjusted, and sat down on the ground with his head on an arm.

  “Are you with me?” Kwed asked.

  “No. And I’m not anyone’s leader. Neither are you. We need to stay put and out of sight and wait. Quietly, if possible.”

  Toggs closed his eyes. He could hear Kwed continue his vertical pacing, as well as the murmurs and rustling of the hundreds of others within the hangar. He breathed deep, tried to block it all out. Then his own stomach gave a gurgle. He hadn’t eaten anything just before the evacuation, as he had been wrapped up in his project. He had only periodically thought of food since his arrival, as excitement ruled the day. But now, here, with nothing to do and the adrenaline gone, he was famished. He sat up.

  “Okay,” Toggs said. “Let’s go look around. But not far.”

  ***

  Not far meant different things to different people, Toggs realized.

  Once Kwed and Toggs got to the end of the runway and had climbed up a low, earthen levee, the millipede sniffed the air, raised his antennae, and sped off towards a thick group of trees.

  “Hold on!” Toggs cried.

  He started to hobble forward at an awkward jog. The millipede moved too fast and was quickly out of sight. Toggs descended the other side of the levee and trotted across a field of dried mud and grasses. Small insects sprung out of his way. The dirt was soft and warm on his bare, knobby feet. The smell of the soil was rich. He would have to take a minute for a closer sniff later if he could stop Kwed from getting them all murdered by the human populace. The signs of Kwed’s passage were apparent. A collapsed column of short lines on the ground showed where his little feet had made contact. The bug could run!

  “Kwed!” Toggs called as he made it to the trees.

  The trunks of the big plants grew high and often split, giving way to two or sometimes three lesser trunks that sprouted the trees’ many branches. The leaves looked rounded and sparse. Other varieties of trees filled the area, all differing in shape and height and leaf structure. Toggs wanted to smell them all. Toggs then noted at least a few pieces of plastic and windblown trash. Humans lived near enough to this area to produce the telltale evidence of a sloppy industrial society. Their reported violence fit in with a lack of thought in waste disposal. It also meant the refugees were on dangerous ground.

  “Hey, dummy!” Toggs called.

  Toggs heard a dry, cracking sound of something wooden being rent. He went that way. He saw Kwed at a fallen tree corpse, tearing at the bark and the soft, rotted layers beneath. His mandibles tore up huge chunks of wood until he uttered a squeal as if he had just gotten a splinter in his tongue.

  “Are you okay?” Toggs asked.

  Kwed ignored him. He plunged his face into the log, thrashing wildly at the pulp. He then pulled back, his mouth full of small white larvae. He began to munch. Once he swallowed, he went back in for another bite. A score of winged insects were lifting off from the log, beating a surprisingly meandering retreat from their colossal attacker. Soon Kwed was neck deep in the honeycombed center of the log. Kwed finally came up to chew again, this time languidly, savoring the mouthful of bugs in his mouth.

  “So good,” Kwed said through a full mouth.

  “You idiot. You can’t just run off like that. We need to get back.”

  “Soon. I need to eat.”

  “How can you be sure that those things aren’t poisonous? The flora/fauna app isn’t complete.”

  “Don’t care.” He chewed, swallowed, spat out a mouthful of indigestibles. “Didn’t you say you were hungry?”

  Toggs was indeed. He checked around. Among the varied grasses grew several things that smelled wonderful: thistles, clovers, ranunculus with yellow flowers, and more. His app displayed their range of growth on this world, their metrics and coloration. Yet the app held little information as to whether he could actually eat any of the abundance before him.

  Instead of eating, he did a lap of the area around the fallen tree. The air was temperate and warm for this section of the world, a late summer. He recorded everything. If there was time, he could take samples and, upon returning to the Galactic Commons, turn in said samples to those who compiled the data and wrote the apps. Instead he was caught up in looking at the variety of things to see. He found a dried-out husk of something that looked like scat. He prodded it with a toe, and saw it held hair and bones. He moved on to a large growth of some kind of lichen on ankle-high rocks. The lichen didn’t do much of anything to indicate their level of intelligence. He watched ants worry a grasshopper until the larger insect jumped away with only two clinging passengers attached.

  Then he heard someone crying in pain.

  “Huuuuhhh,” came a low moan.

  Toggs found one of the refugees lying in a bramble of thorny vines. It was a short insectoid with a rear segmented shell. The guy was on his back, his eight legs twitching.

  Toggs took a knee and gently held one of the creature’s legs.

  “Hey, buddy,” Toggs said. “You okay?”

  The creature managed to shake its head in the negative. Its mouth moved as if it were about to speak, but it could only groan.

  Toggs looked about. Kwed wasn’t in sight. He could still hear the splintering sounds of the ongoing feast. Toggs didn’t want to shout.

  “I don’t want to pick you up just yet. Let me get help.”

  The creature shook its head again. Its mandibles twitched as if the creature was about to speak. Maybe it was delirious. Maybe it just didn’t want to be left alone.

  “Hang on.”

  Toggs trotted back to Kwed.

  “So good, so good,” came the mantra from within the log. It appeared as if twice the volume of the log had been excavated as a pile of chewed waste on the gro
und around the dead tree. The log itself held its shape, and Kwed was now fully inside.

  Toggs punched the log. Kwed popped his head up. Spat, swallowed.

  “Did you find something to eat?” Kwed asked.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Toggs said. “Come on.”

  Back at the bramble, the creature was gone. A spattering of brown goo congealed on the dirt and vines where the sick refugee had lain. Toggs started his recorder, not to document whatever sickness the poor creature was suffering through but in the hopes that the program and lens might catch a clue as to where the missing fellow might have gone. He zoomed in. There. Traces of the goo led away from the brambles to a low tuft of grass. His eye app magnified further. Toggs pointed.

  Kwed drew up behind Toggs, looked down at the traces of goo. He smelled the air, recoiled.

  “That’s blood, my friend,” Kwed said.

  “He was here a minute ago,” Toggs said. “He wasn’t leaking then.”

  Toggs moved forward, scanning the ground past the tainted grass. He saw several more spots on bare dirt leading further away from the airfield. Toggs started to trot in that direction.

  “Hello?” Toggs said.

  The trail led to a thick growth of vines with white flowers. The ground here slopped down towards the direction of what sounded like running water. The missing refugee had gone under the lush wall of foliage. Toggs was about to push through when Kwed collided with him in his haste to keep up, knocking Toggs forward. Toggs flailed, but failed to catch anything thick enough to support his weight. He stumbled through the vines and landed on hard, dry mud.

  Toggs looked up to see a human with a rifle standing over the leaking body of the sick refugee. The human didn’t see Toggs yet, intent on the creature on the ground. The human wore an expression of horror and disgust.

  “Look out!” shouted a second human.

  This one was standing back near a red plastic cooler. He wore a blue bandanna. He, too, held a long firearm. This weapon pointed straight at Toggs.

  CHAPTER 11

  “What did you do?” Irving the Grey screamed.

  It threw itself forward towards the console, the weapon in its hand all but forgotten. Jeff snatched the blaster away, held it up so the Grey couldn’t reach for it, but Irving was intent on the elevator’s controls.

  “Send us back! Do it! Do it, Oliop! I’m warning you. I’m begging you.”

  Jeff body-blocked the little creature. Even though it was waist high to him and as light as a toddler, it moved quickly, and Oliop had to assist in keeping the Grey from hitting any of the controls.

  “We’re here,” Oliop said matter-of-factly. “We can’t go back until we can program for root destination.”

  “Yes we can!” the Grey said. “It will take us back. It has to.”

  It twisted past Jeff and Oliop both, got a hand on the dark button. It slapped it hard. Nothing happened. The button was no longer red. The console itself began to dim, with only half of its lights now illuminated. The Grey spammed the button, the click-click-click the only sound in the tiny space. Its hands ran along every nook and crevice in a desperate search for some other switch to try that just wasn’t there.

  “Why isn’t this working?” the Grey asked.

  Jeff pocketed the weapon and gave Irving the Grey a gentle shove away from the console in case the little bugger broke something.

  “I thought you’re the super-genius that had this stuff all figured out,” Jeff said. “You were going to put us in the elevator and ship us off. A one-way trip to nowhere. Remember what a petard is? You’ve been hoisted by your own.”

  The Grey’s expression drooped. It looked as if it might cry. Then a hard stench of rotted milk filled the compartment. The Grey’s face darkened and it bristled.

  “I hate you so much,” the Grey said.

  Of course the Grey knew what a petard was. The creature spoke perfect English and perhaps every other language known to humanity as well as the Galactic Commons, as the Grey was once the operator of the entire translation network, a reverse-engineer of a galactic Tower of Babel fueled by a seething soul of hubris.

  “Why don’t we see where we landed,” Jeff said. “I guess we might be here for a while.”

  Jeff stepped toward the door.

  Both Oliop and the Grey yelled, “Don’t!”

  Jeff froze.

  “We don’t know what’s there yet, Jeff Abel,” Oliop said. “It could be bad atmosphere or water or nothing at all.”

  “Stupid human,” the Grey muttered.

  “So you’re saying we could be hanging in space right now with a vacuum outside this door?”

  Oliop nodded solemnly and said, “And without computer guidance we now have no fail-safes to prevent you from opening the door.”

  Jeff retracted his hand. “Well, let’s find out what’s on the other side because this room is getting pretty ripe. Can you do that?”

  Oliop swiped a finger across his wrist device, which popped up a screen that hung ghostly blue in the air. His ears lifted. He nodded and smiled, pleased by what he read.

  “It’s Earth,” Oliop said. He checked the console, hit a few keys, and his expression brightened even more. “And we didn’t land on anyone!”

  Jeff opened the door. He felt a perverse rush of pleasure as the Grey flinched in anticipation of a mistake on Oliop’s sensor reading. But there came no water, no broiling atmosphere, no vacuum that would cause the fluids of their eyeballs to flash-freeze and the oxygen in their blood to bubble out of their bodies, causing a huge mess. Jeff took a whiff of Earth air.

  Jeff had been too busy over the past three months to think about the small differences between the Galactic Commons and his own world. Pre-abduction, he hadn’t given the smell of the air around him a second thought except when encountering something foul like skunk, dead opossum, the exhaust of a gas-powered weed whacker, or a leaking septic system. While he had gotten used to moving about California and Nevada in search of a perfect hermit’s nook with a paycheck, he never thought about how the smell of basic Earth air in all the places he passed through with its trace pollutants was something he might one day miss.

  Sunlight hit his face: warm, yellow, unlike the weird silver glow of the Galactic Commons sky. He stepped out onto dry soil and brown grasses just outside the door. As when he had first encountered Oliop, the world around the newly arrived elevator was silent. Soon enough, the buzz and snappy clicks of grasshoppers kicked in. An oak tree grew nearby where a loud woodpecker and a louder Steller’s jay were complaining to each other with their telltale scoldings. Both birds remained unseen. Jeff had never had the urge to kiss the ground until now and was surprised at the sudden swell of emotion. He was home.

  “Your world stinks, human,” the Grey said.

  Jeff ignored the comment. He crunched through the grass and moved around the elevator to take a look at where they had landed. The elevator rested on the edge of a ruined airport. A single runway stretched off into the weeds, having deteriorated into broken segments of asphalt and grass. Three large hangars stood nearby, once painted white but now faded and tagged with colorful hieroglyphs large and illegible. Shrubs and trees surrounded the property, with white grungy air hanging around their edges as if the airfield were an island in the smog.

  “We’ve been here before,” Jeff said.

  The Grey and Oliop emerged from the elevator, the Grey’s face showing disgust at walking through the weeds. Oliop poked at a white moth and watched it flutter away.

  “Oliop, is it safe to leave the elevator?” Jeff asked. “Or will it be recalled by Lord What’s-His-Name?”

  “Should be safe, Jeff Abel. But then again, the elevator shouldn’t have gotten us here. If Lord Akimbo can turn the whole system back on, then the elevator might return to the Galactic Commons.”

  “But you still have a retrieval app to request a pickup.”

  “Assuming that even works.”

  The Grey plodded past them, heading fo
r the hangars.

  “And where are you going?” Jeff asked.

  “Out of your cursed sun’s light,” the Grey said as he left them behind.

  Jeff and Oliop followed. Oliop crumpled something in his hands–the torn red envelopes he had opened before turning on the elevator with the worm.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Jeff asked.

  “It’s nothing,” Oliop said. He flushed, the few exposed areas of skin around his face fur turning a deep brown. He put the trash into his pouch and wiped his hands on his jumpsuit’s legs.

  “Didn’t look like nothing. That’s the package for the Jinong AI. I thought you gave that back.”

  “I was going to. Honest.”

  “We’ll talk later.”

  They came to the first hangar, the largest of the three. It looked as if its roof had been kicked in. One corner of the structure was gone, with cracks running down the walls. Twisted metal stood bent out of the opening like the bones of a chest cavity from where something had escaped.

  “This was the Bunnie hangar while they were preparing for their invasion,” Jeff said. The Bunnie had held Jeff, Jordan, and Oliop captive inside this very hangar until Oliop managed to hijack one of their ships, crashing it into the building in the course of their escape.

  Oliop paused to sniff the air. Jeff waited, then saw the Grey nearing the second hangar, and pushed the technician along so the Grey didn’t get out of their sight.

  “Bunnie all gone,” Oliop said.

  “At least that’s one thing to not worry about,” Jeff said. “At least here.”

  The Grey stopped at the closed door and put a hand to its face to shield it from the sun. “Of course they’re gone,” the Grey said. “Once you set them in motion, they have the singular intention of following through with a goal without bothering with things like a backup plan. They wouldn’t leave anyone behind. Their level of commitment is truly remarkable. Open the door, human.”