Space Junk

by Andrew Bixler

  “Any idea where we’re going?” Beer asks.

  Horton pulls up a map of their current location and zooms out to see where the Ears are headed. “They’re on course for Misery Acres.”

  “Misery Acres? There’s nothing out there,” The One says. “This guy probably got tricked. Why else would anyone help the Ears?”

  “I doubt that,” Horton says. “Those are high-ranking ships – much fancier and more expensive than the patrol boats back home. They wouldn’t be this far from home without a good reason.”

  “I’ve never been to Misery Acres,” Pants cries. “This is exciting!”

  “Don’t get too excited, Pants,” The One tells her. “It’s just a bunch of rocks and crummy old space homes. All the bumper stickers start ‘I’d rather be…’”

  “I hate to admit it, but he’s right,” Beer says. “It’s kind of a dump. But so far it’s the biggest clue that we’re on the right track. Misery Acres is exactly the type of far out place I’d expect this mission to take us.”

  “I have to agree,” Horton says. “The evidence is mounting.”

  “Yay!” Pants holds her fingers up in a ‘V’ and winks into the camera.

  “Get comfortable.” Settling in, Horton stretches his arms, tilts his head back, and drips illicit prescription strength regenerative eye drops in his eyes. “It’s going to be a while.”

  “A while?” The One says, a concerned frown forming on his face. “What’ll we do ‘til then?”

  “Touch yourself,” Beer cracks.

  The One laughs and shakes his head. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  While Horton doesn’t entirely mind the sounds of his friends arguing, right now he needs to concentrate, so he mutes and shrinks their feeds. He presses a button on the dash and loud electronic music throbs from his ship’s speakers. His mini fridge casts a dark blue light over the cockpit as he reaches inside for a can of Big L@lz, which claims in bold neon letters to provide ‘48 MANIC HOURS WITH NO CRASH!’ He chugs half the can and trains his strained eyes back on the window, where pages of information instantaneously open and close as he navigates the digital waters. So far the only evidence he’s been able to find that the element even exists originates almost entirely from unverifiable anecdotes of dubious origin. The few reputable names who do reference the object treat it as if it were nothing more than a backspace legend.

  Unable to hear his own voice over the thumping music, he mutters, “Unreal.”

  Stars dot the dark like pixels on a television sky, lulling Adam into a state of starry-eyed catatonia as a grainy video plays in front of the empty passenger seat – a porch swing rhythmically beats itself against the side of an old ramshackle cabin in the woods – adding another dimension to his hypnosis.

  When he feels his ship slowing, he breaks from his trance and manually navigates the field of floating rock. A flicker of light glints in the distance, and soon the old dust-caked dome comes into view. He presses a button on the dashboard, and the garage door shielding the dome’s airlock grinds open.

  Adam lands the Asteroid Jones II in a patch of dirt on the edge of the sprawling lawn and drunkenly stumbles out. As he plods over the brown grass, he finishes off an Ol’ Guard and tosses the empty can amongst a heap of scrap poking out of the weeds. It clinks against the decaying remains of an old cockpit, and he momentarily recalls playing inside of it as a kid, pretending to do all the things he actually does now.

  “It was more fun then,” he mumbles to himself.

  The big house, its dingy white paint layered thick over rare planks of ancient alien lumber, looks just like it did back then, only more so.

  Adam knocks hard on the towering front door and cracks it open. “Hello?”

  The house is silent as he steps inside. Rooms on either side of the doorway and the staircase to the second floor are dark.

  “Hello!”

  He stomps on the hardwood floor to announce his presence as he walks toward a soft yellow light at the end of the long hallway leading to the den. Inside the bright cavern, books line the walls and are spread out across the floor and tables. Grandpa’s tattered red chair faces the ever-squawking antique television mounted above the crackling fireplace, and Adam can see little tufts of silver hair poking up over the tall back.

  “Hi,” Adam calls out as he approaches. “Grandpa?”

  The old man’s fragile frame is motionless, and Adam cautiously pokes at it.

  “Wah!” Grandpa shouts, learching up.

  Adam stumbles back, tripping over a small table and nearly into the fire. “What the fish is wrong with you?”

  “I got you.” Grandpa chuckles, wiping the tears from his sunken cheeks. “I suppose one of these days I really will have bit the space dust. But not yet.”

  “Yeah, that’s hilarious,” Adam says. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

  Grandpa grabs Adam and hugs him. “What are you doing here? I thought you were out roaming the galaxy.”

  “It got boring out there all alone with no one around to criticize my every move.” Adam grins.

  “Come on, sit down,” Grandpa points Adam to the chair next to his, picks up a book from the table, and flips it open. “I’ve been reading about ghosts and spirits. People have been researching the phenomenon for thousands of years. Did you know that? And they’re still coming to the same conclusion. Do they exist? Does life continue beyond death? I can sum it up in one word – maybe. This guy rambles on about it for 473 pages.”

  “That’s… something,” Adam says. “But check this out—”

  “And there’s something called a ghost-planet.” Grandpa laughs, pointing to his book. “No one can prove they exist, and there’s supposedly a whole planet of the things.”

  “Yeah, that’s weird all right,” Adam says. “But I found something even more interesting—”

  “How’s it been out there lately?” Grandpa asks. “It was hard enough when I was scrappin’, but with all the competition these days… of course, there’s always more scrap. And you got fancier ships now. We used to fly around the universe in metal tubs that were held together by little more than a weld and a prayer—”

  “Yeah, I know, but listen for a second,” Adam pleads. “I want to show you something.”

  “Well I know something about everything.” Grandpa leans back, and his old chair creaks under him. “I probably haven’t seen it all. But if I haven’t seen it, I’ve heard of it. Still, you have to be careful. There’s a lot of dangerous stuff out there. I remember, it must have been fifty years ago now, Doug Akinmeier was poking around some abandoned outpost and brought back a big industrial generator. I told him it looked busted, but he gets it running, and the thing right away sends a long crack down the middle of his dome. If it’d gone any deeper, he would’ve been sucked right out into space. Dougie lucked out that day. He kept kickin’ for some thirty odd years after that, until that old dome finally did crack open—”

  Adam wrenches the cube out of his pocket, and Grandpa immediately abandons his story to examine it.

  “Well that’s a weird thing,” Grandpa says, snatching the object from Adam’s hand. “It kind of sucks the light up. It’s like some sort of ore. Only I’ve never seen any ore that looked quite like this.” He holds the thing close to his face and then smacks it against the arm of his chair.

  “Hey!” Adam shouts, reaching for the cube, but Grandpa moves it out of reach.

  “Let’s take a closer look,” Grandpa says, jumping up.

  “Hold on a second,” Adam yells. “Don’t break it.”

  Grandpa hurries from the room, and Adam follows him through the hall and down a flight of handcrafted stairs that wobble and creak under their feet. The basement is crammed with old tools and boxes of scrap collected over the course of a lifetime.

  Grandpa places the object under a giant microscope on his workbench. “Found this beauty in an abandoned Ear research facility. I wasn’t sure I’d ever use it, but it’s come in h
andy more times than I can remember.” He stands over the machine, squints into the eyepiece, and adjusts one of the knobs. “Hmm, that’s odd.”

  “What?” Adam asks. “Do you know what it is?”

  “Well, no,” Grandpa says.

  “Oh…”

  “Its surface doesn’t show any tool marks, but it’s a near-perfect cube. I should be able to see some evidence of polishing, ‘specially with this baby. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it formed this way naturally.”

  “What does that mean?” Adam asks.

  “Beats me,” Grandpa says.

  “Hmph, all right.” Adam throws up his hands and starts stomping back up the stairs. “It was worth a shot.”

  “Hold on a second,” Grandpa yells, still staring at the cube. “Don’t you want it back?”

  “Nah, you keep it,” Adam says. “There’s nothing I can do with it.”

  “There’s something familiar about it.” Grandpa chases Adam upstairs into the hall, turning the thing over in his hands. “I’ve never seen anything like it, but maybe I read about it somewhere, or – hey, where are you going?”

  Adam opens the front door and sticks his foot out on the porch. “I’m going back to the bar. This is the first time I’ve had extra money since,” he pauses to think, “ever. I want to enjoy it a little.”

  “You don’t have to leave yet,” Grandpa says, pulling Adam away from the door. “Set a spell. Take your shoes off. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

  “All right…” Adam sighs and reluctantly follows the old man back down the hall and into the den. “I’ll stay for a few space minutes.”

  He sits in the chair next to Grandpa’s, which has, like all rarely sat-in chairs of the vintage, grown increasingly stiff and uncomfortable with age.

  “That’s one thing I’ll always remember,” Adam says, pointing to the fire wriggling in front of his feet. “This was the only place I ever saw a real one. I hope your air filter’s working.”

  “Impractical though it may be, it reminds me of my childhood,” Grandpa says. “But each generation sheds another layer of the past. Finally it’s the fireplace’s turn to go, I s’pose. So tell me where you found this thing.”

  “It was the biggest pile of high-grade scrap I ever saw,” Adam says, becoming animated. “Like some beautiful ocean of trash, the remnants of two of the oldest space empires stretched as far as the eye could see.”

  Grandpa juggles the cube between his hands. “That must’ve been something. I had my share of war bounty. My buddies and I worked it so we could intercept encrypted classified communications from the different armies. We’d find out when two of ‘em were getting ready to implode, and we’d hangout nearby and collect what was left before the space dust settled. That’s one thing war is good for – all the scrap.”

  “You wouldn’t believe it.” Adam waves his arms in the air, trying to recapture the majesty of the moment. “It’s the closest I’ve ever come to finding actual treasure.”

  “Oh, I’d believe it,” Grandpa says. “The empires spend an unspace-godly amount of crits fighting each other. Even Ponce Raleigh famously spent his life, and a considerable amount of his empire’s wealth, searching for some treasure that was all in his head. He lost everything trying to get a little more.” Grandpa shakes his head. “Always remember…”

  Adam gives Grandpa a moment and finally asks, “Always remember what?”

  But Grandpa just stares off into space.

  “Okay, well I’m out of here,” Adam says. “It’s always good seeing you.” He stands to leave, but Grandpa grabs his wrist.

  “Hold on a minute.” With a sudden urgency, Grandpa jumps from his chair and begins furiously searching through books.

  “Really,” Adam says. “I’ve finally got some time off, and all I want to do is drink it away. I’ll come back and see you soon.”

  “Here it is.” Reaching up to a high shelf along the back wall of the cluttered room, Grandpa pulls out an old tome with an unmarked black binding and begins thumbing through it. “This is a copy of Raleigh’s notebook. I bought it years ago as the curiosity it’s widely thought to be – a glimpse into the mind of a madman.”

  “That’s great but I’m really not up to another history lesson right now,” Adam says.

  “The object of his fatal quest was something mythical,” Grandpa says, ignoring Adam’s attempts to extricate himself. “Raleigh theorized that a small amount of a unique element, what he speculated would be an object of exceptional durability, formed at the same instant the universe burst forth.” He turns the book for Adam to see. “He called it black gold.”

  Adam scratches his head as he attempts to decipher the page. “You mean texas tea?”

  “Don’t be a chidiot,” Grandpa says. “That’s fool’s black gold. I’m talking about the real thing. It would be the rarest, most valuable substance in the universe. But Raleigh didn’t even know what it would look like, only joking that it would be ‘fitting if it were black, to camouflage it against the darkness of space and provide me with yet another insurmountable hurdle in my quest.’ More than once he questions his sanity in Chasing a Shadow. As everyone knows, he never found what he was searching for.”

  “So what’s the point of all this?” Adam asks, and Grandpa grins, holding up the cube. “You mean, you think that thing could be the black gold? Ha, I doubt it.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Grandpa says. “It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “Sure, it’s possible. And it’s possible you’re hiding a room full of beautiful alien women back here. But I wouldn’t bet a crit on it. Anyway, if nobody knows what it looks like, how are we supposed to figure out if it’s the real deal?”

  “I might have a way.” Grandpa wags his finger and scurries out of the room with a smile plastered over his face.

  Doors slam, something clanks, and angry curses echo through the hall. A few minutes later, Grandpa returns carrying a big, metal box with a long antenna sticking out of the top.

  “What the fish is that?” Adam asks.

  “It’s s’posed to be a working replica of the machine Raleigh used to search for the black gold,” Grandpa says.

  “But he never found it.”

  “That’s true,” Grandpa concedes. “But in his book, he posits that he’d have to get pret-ty close to the thing before the machine could detect it. I took it scrappin’ with me for a while, but I never did get it to work.”

  “So how is it going to help us?” Adam asks.

  Grandpa shrugs. “Maybe it won’t.” He twists a knob on the front of the box, and a loud beeping erupts.

  “What does that mean?” Adam yells over the shrill sound.

  Grandpa just stares, his mouth hanging open. “I don’t know. It’s never done this before. As a matter of fact, it’s never done anything.”

  Adam snatches the cube out of Grandpa’s hand and inspects it. “You don’t think?”

  “You’ve struck black gold!” Grandpa shouts.

  “Wait a minute. We don’t know that for sure.”

  “What else could it be? I was never sure this thing was even on. Now it’s goin’ haywire. I think you found what Raleigh never could.”

  The men stare at the cube for a moment, in solemn, slack-jawed awe of its incredible rareness.

  “Wh-oa,” Adam moans. “What do you think it’s worth?”

  “It’s worth more than anything in the whole universe,” Grandpa says.

  “Yeah, but how much is that? And who could possibly afford to buy it?”

  “Well, I don’t know. One person comes to mind. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t even consider sending you to him. But these aren’t normal circumstances.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “He’s called The Foreman,” Grandpa says. “If a piece of scrap changes hands anywhere in the galaxy, he knows about it.”

  “Will you turn that thing off?” Adam shouts.

  Grandpa turns the knob, and the ma
chine quiets.

  “Do you hear that?” Adam asks, and Grandpa shrugs. “It’s like a high pitched ringing.”

  “I can barely hear anything,” Grandpa says.

  “All right, I’ll take the black gold to this Foreman guy,” Adam decides.

  “The Foreman is a dangerous person.” Grandpa’s tone suddenly turns serious. “And others will be after that thing, some willing to risk their lives for it. The sooner you get rid of it, the better.”

  “I know, I know…”

  “I’m not kidding. This isn’t some regular ol’ piece of scrap. Part of me wants to tell you not to go.”

  “But I know you still feel that ol’ scrapper’s curiosity,” Adam says. “What’s it saying?”

  Grandpa shakes his head and smiles. “I just want you to be careful.”

  “Don’t worry, it’ll be a piece of ration cake,” Adam says. “So where do I find The Foreman?”

  A bell chimes from behind the velvet drape, just loud enough for Ms. Chibois to hear from the lobby. Briefly abandoning her post at the counter, she steps through the curtain, down the hall, and into a brightly lit room, where she empties the clean blankets and pillowcases from the industrial dryer into a basket on the floor. She lugs the heavy basket back to the front of the building and begins her meticulous folding ritual, which, after decades of practice, has become rote.

  But before she can finish the first sheet, the front door opens, and she shuffles out from behind the desk to assist a disheveled alien with green, pocked skin as he wobbles into the lobby.

  “Let me help you find some space,” she tells him, cheerily.

  With a sad grin, the man nods and allows Ms. Chibois to guide his emaciated body, first over to the counter to pay, and then across the lobby into the adjoining room. Leading him through a tangle of sleeping customers, she sits him down against the wall, between a dwarf covered in alien tribal tattoos and a bleary-eyed gray. The man licks his lips when she produces a small pipe and lighter from the pocket of her coat, and he snatches them, lighting the contents of the pipe. After a moment, his body turns limp, and Ms. Chibois unobtrusively slips the pipe from his hand and tiptoes back out of the room, careful not to disturb any of the other customers scattered around the floor.