Skid

by Keith Fenwick

  His heart beating even faster now, Bruce stood in the center of the room, anticipating who knew what. “Get in,” he ordered.

  “You will be comfortable in here while I consult with my associates.”

  Bruce tried to decide whether there was a hint of malice in Myfair’s voice. Deciding there wasn’t, he relaxed a little.

  Myfair motioned to a small keyboard on the wall beside the doorway. “These buttons will call up any amenity you may require.” He pressed one to demonstrate, and a toilet appeared. A good, old-fashioned dunny complete with a wooden seat quite out of place in the stark, sterile chamber.

  Bruce had been anticipating this kind of slip-up. One that would prove he was caught up in some kind of elaborate hoax. Surely a real spaceship would have something more high tech to sit on. The toilet was so terrestrial in appearance that Bruce almost found its presence reassuring.

  Myfair pressed another button, and the toilet bowl disappeared.

  “Each button has a symbol for the amenity required,” Myfair explained as he stepped outside, and the wall slid shut behind him with the finality of a cell door closing on a condemned man.

  Bruce took a nervous drag on his cigarette, waiting for something to happen. Just exactly what that might turn out to be he wasn’t sure. He still half expected to wake at any moment up to find himself lying on a hospital bed with needles and tubes sticking out of him and a team of doctors poking him about. He wasn’t sure whether he imagined himself to be in intensive care or in some alien laboratory.

  Unable to find a suitable receptacle for his cigarette butt Bruce dropped it, grinding it into the floor with the toe of his boot. Seconds later he almost jumped out of his skin as the silence of the room was shattered by a shrill whirring sound.

  “What the hell?”

  A trap door flipped open in the seamless wall below the keyboard and a small drone, shaped like a toaster on its side with a bowl on top, rolled out.

  The dogs cringed against the wall as the drone shot across the floor and stopped over the cigarette butt. Emitting a sound like a vacuum cleaner it sucked up the butt and ash, then spun on its axis with an excruciating squeal and bolted back into its hole.

  Bruce shrugged his shoulders as if to say nothing else could surprise him. He lit up another smoke and had a close look at the buttons on the wall. The various symbols etched onto them made as much sense to him as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. He pushed a few at random. A circle with a dot in the middle evidently meant ‘toilet’. A sideways ‘L’ represented a bed. An open-ended rectangle caused a shower, complete with running water, to appear in a corner of the room.

  Now that looks like a good idea, Bruce thought. For the moment, though, he continued to push the buttons randomly, vainly hoping the door would open. Finally he decided that Myfair must have locked it from the outside. Not that Bruce had the faintest idea what he would do if he escaped from the room. He simply would have felt better if he could have gotten out. He pressed the bed button. A bed shot out of the wall as he pressed the ‘L’ button, joined moments later by the shower cubicle.

  Temporarily cowed by the sudden appearance of the bed and with Punch’s heavy tail thumping a slow, steady rhythm on the floor, the three dogs watched Bruce peel off his clothing. Boots first, then the plastic leggings, Swanndri, jersey, socks, shirt, singlet, trousers and understrides. All dropped in an untidy heap on the floor.

  Bruce reached into his shirt and pulled out his smokes, chucking them onto the bed for safety, then stepped into the shower.

  After several moments of standing under the comfortably warm jets of water, Bruce instinctively reached out for the soap, only to realize at the same time that the water itself contained some sort of detergent.

  “Shit hot!” he said, rubbing the soap over his body.

  Then the dogs started barking furiously.

  “Shut up!” Bruce leaned out of the cubicle to see what they were barking at just in time to see a larger version of the drone that had sucked up his discarded cigarette butt doing the same to his pile of clothing. He leapt out of the shower, slipped as his foot touched the floor and missed the drone by inches as it bolted back into the wall. “Bugger.”

  He stood dripping in the middle of the room. There was nothing like nakedness in an alien environment to make a man feel completely inadequate.

  “Shut up, ya bastards!” he yelled at the dogs, who were still barking maniacally at the empty wall the drone had disappeared through. He could do without that racket as well.

  Three

  Myfair followed his companions into the conference chamber where their prior discussions had been rudely interrupted by his impulsive beaming up of the offworlder.

  “Explain yourself, Myfair!” Toytoo demanded.

  “I, er …” Myfair fumbled for the right words with which to express himself as the other three crewmen waited expectantly for an answer.

  “The expert candidate is now resting in one of the accommodation units along with the three other unidentified specimens that were accompanying him at the time of his transportation.”

  “What were you thinking of, Myfair?” Cyprus hissed, offended by Myfair’s break from procedure. “Why did you preempt the consultative process?”

  “Haven’t we all, my friend?” Myfair reminded him dryly, “by deciding to come here in the first place?”

  “Be that as it may, we were deciding on how we should identify likely candidates. How do you know you have made a suitable choice?” Cyprus blustered, suddenly unsure of himself in the company of his peers.

  “I am certain he will be ideal for our purposes,” replied Myfair hesitantly. Well, he had to be, did he not?

  “What gives you the right to take this sort of action yourself?” Mulgoon demanded, affronted that his own counsel had been ignored so precipitously.

  Myfair made no further effort to justify himself. He knew from his cultural programming that silence was his best defense. Besides, none of his fellow crewmen was sufficiently his social peer to remonstrate with him at any length. Certainly not Mulgoon or Cyprus.

  Toytoo recognized the parallels between Myfair’s actions and their collective one by being in this part of the universe at all. Rather rapidly for a Skidian, he made up his mind.

  “Although I believe Myfair’s action to be precipitous, he has forced us to act in a manner that will prove to be productive.” The others nodded solemnly. This was Skidian decision-making in action. A problem was generally debated at length and then the most effective course of action was taken. In other words, decisions were based on expediency and the self-interest of those in the decision-making process. Myfair could not be censured too heavily for they relied on him to pilot the patrol vessel home to Skid. “I suggest we observe the candidate in order to assess whether he will meet our needs,” Toytoo continued. His pronouncement was greeted by three solemn nods. “Meanwhile I suggest Myfair transports several more candidates to the ship so we will have a balanced sample from which to make our final selections.”

  Mulgoon, Toytoo and Cyprus watched the primary candidate  who now lay naked on the bed, having completed his ablutions  on one of the internal monitors.

  The offworlder was obviously too stupid to find himself some clothing after the drone had automatically disposed of the garments he had carelessly discarded on the floor. Didn’t the offworlder realize that the drone management system would immediately sense and remove any waste products from its designated zone of responsibility? If he did not know now, he would soon learn.

  Myfair rapidly developed a theory about the offworlders as he returned to the control room. Being concerned with organic food production, it followed in Myfair’s mind that the best candidates would come from areas of the planet below covered by the larger examples of vegetative organic material displayed on his screen. He accepted that he might have erred in the selection of the first offworlder, and he now sought to redeem himself in the eyes of his colleagues by refining his selection proc
ess.

  Not that Myfair had the faintest idea of what organic material was; organic was simply a technical term used to describe some of the material the vessel’s sensors identified. That some of this organic material might be inedible did not occur to Myfair either. Surely anything organic could be consumed as a nutritive source?

  Myfair made his selection. He chose a cross section of candidates so they could weed some of them out if necessary and dispose of the one he had already transported up to the ship. Myfair punched several sets of coordinates into the computer and made the necessary alterations to the vessel’s flight path.

  In this manner the Skidians became host to an aged drunken prospector from Australia’s Northern Territory who had been on an illicit prospecting trip through a tropical forest on an Aboriginal reserve. A Swedish forester, who had been checking for signs of regeneration in a forest devastated by acid rain, joined him seconds later.

  The Australian thought he was suffering a severe attack of the DTs, while the Swede was sure forest elves of ancient legends had kidnapped him. But before either man could begin to come to grips with this sudden change of scenery, they were joined by a woman who had given up all hope after becoming lost on a tramping trip in a forest in the northwestern United States.

  Myfair studied the candidates standing before him, registering their expressions of surprise, fear and, in the case of the female, surprisingly of relief. For a fleeting moment Myfair wondered how he would feel if suddenly transported onto an offworld spaceship. He didn’t dwell on that unlikely event as his attention was drawn to a warning light that had begun to flash accompanied by a siren.

  A primitive detection system had stumbled across their presence as they cruised through the planet’s airspace. This wasn’t a major issue as the ship could easily outstrip any pursuit offered from the planet below. But it wouldn’t do to allow any of the locals a close inspection of their ship.

  Myfair quickly adjusted the controls. With a barely perceptible jolt the ship accelerated, leaving the earth’s atmosphere and the as-yet disorganized attempts at identifying and pursuing a possible unidentified intruder wallowing in its wake.

  A slight turbulence jostled the ship as it approached terminal velocity, all pretense of stealth forgotten in Myfair’s haste to escape, and the ship became a bright speck in the sky visible to billions on the planet below, a sight that would consume the media (new and old) and conspiracy theorists for weeks. Seconds later the ship ripped open the entrance to a wormhole that would deposit it within a light day of its homeport on Skid in a matter of hours.

  The other crew members, alerted by the alarm, joined Myfair in the control room to look over the new arrivals.

  Both groups watched each other. The Skidians looked with a curious detachment and indifference (after all, these primitive offworlders were no threat to them, being lesser beings than they were  whatever they might think or feel was of no importance when the future of Skid, the most advanced society in the known universe, was at stake). The offworlders, on the other hand, unsurprisingly, viewed their situation with mounting anxiety.

  The initial euphoria felt by the crew members dissipated a little as they examined the unlikely group on which their futures depended. For better or worse they were committed to the scenario they had hastily conceived, unless they dispatched the offworlders into space and returned home empty-handed.

  Four

  “What was that?”

  Bruce was a light sleeper. The barely perceptible jolts as the ship left the earth’s atmosphere and accelerated into space, and the slight stutter as the ship ripped open the wormhole ahead of it, woke him. He sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and looked around. Can looked up, glanced around the room and dozed off again. Cop made little doggy snuffling sounds in his sleep, while Punch watched Bruce with something approaching adoration, his tail thumping lazily against the deck and thick streams of drool dripping from his mouth.

  Bruce scratched his groin, deciding this was a funny sort of dream. Wasn’t he supposed to wake up and find it had all been a dream? Then he remembered the room, the room the alien had shut him in, the one in which he was sitting.

  Although the room was comfortably warm, Bruce wished he had some clothes to put on. His nakedness accentuated his sense of vulnerability. To his great relief, despite the deprivations of the drone and his own damp body, Bruce discovered that his smokes had survived intact, jammed between the bed and the wall. He reached down and flipped open the cardboard lid. There were seven cigarettes left in the packet. He wondered whether he should ration himself. Who knew when he would get anymore?

  He put a cigarette between his lips, took out the lighter, which had been nestled inside the packet, and lit it.

  “A cup of coffee would be nice,” Bruce suggested wistfully to the dogs, “and a feed wouldn’t go amiss, either.”

  However, perhaps he was not as hungry as he imagined. His stomach rumbles could well be caused by tension and worry. Butterflies! He chuckled at that thought. If he was really on a space ship, anything was possible.

  “What was that?” Bruce heard a faint noise that sounded like a woman screaming as he thought about his empty stomach. He shook his head. Not likely here, then he noticed the dogs had pricked their ears up.

  Suddenly it occurred to him that the spacemen were probably watching him. This was more important than some imaginary noises in his head. He belatedly dropped his hands to cover his genitals. Then he realized they had probably seen all they wanted to by now, so he dropped all pretense at modesty, stood then wandered over to the keyboard by the door.

  Before he had a chance to do anything a tray shot out of the wall laden with a pile of light cotton sheets.

  “A bit late for that, eh, boys?” Bruce picked up one of the sheets and shook it out. “A bloody dress!” He grunted in disgust, tossing his cigarette butt away. This time he didn’t bat an eyelid as the little drone shot out of its lair to clean the butt up, almost before it hit the ground.

  “Too small.” He tossed the first dress at Cop who got to his feet, shook it off and lay down on it. There were three smaller garments and one large one that Bruce guessed was meant for him. He regarded the garment dubiously and then held it up to his body to check it for size. Not the sort of clothing he would have chosen for himself, but he didn’t seem to have a choice right at that moment.

  He pulled the robe over his head, fought his arms into the sleeves and began to shake the rest of it down over his body, missing the sound of the door sliding open in the process.

  “Aghhh, aghhh, let me go you creep!”

  Bruce’s first thought was that the screaming hadn’t been imaginary as he tugged the robe down in order to cover his extremities. Then he realized he was giving whomever a full frontal and tried to turn away.

  “Bugger!” he exclaimed as he lost his balance and fell to the floor still struggling to poke his head through the hole in the top of the robe thingy.

  The screaming stopped abruptly, replaced by the sound of someone sobbing.

  Bruce finally regained his feet, arranged the unfamiliar garment about him with a series of firm tugs and just about tripped over the floor-length hem in the process. Then he turned to see what the racket was about.

  A woman stood, back against the wall, peering at him through her hands that covered the lower part of her face. Her eyes were red and puffy as if she had been crying for hours, and dark and tangled wisps of hair stuck to damp patches on her face and hands.

  Bruce’s eyes were drawn to the twin firm globes of her dark breasts revealed in the open front of the garment she wore. The woman caught his eye and clutched the material of the open neck together, hunched her shoulders and slid down the wall until she was sitting against it with her legs outstretched.

  “Who are you?”

  Bruce wondered if she might be some sort of slave sent to minister to his needs against her will. “Probably not,” he muttered to himself. She was a fellow victim.


  Cop got to his feet, stretched then wandered over to investigate. While Bruce wondered what to say, Cop broke the ice by licking at the hands covering the woman’s face. He was quickly joined by Punch, who took a quicker route to her affections by trying to stick his head up her robe which had bunched up around her thighs as she slumped against the wall.

  “Oh you horrible animal. Get away. Shoo!” She struggled feebly to push both dogs away.

  Bruce couldn’t blame her. There was no way he would want Cop, whose favorite pastime was dining on decomposing turkey, licking his face either.

  “Go on, get out of it!” He aimed a kick in the general direction of Punch who slunk off to lie down in the corner as if nothing had happened. Cop sat by the woman’s side like a bodyguard, hesitantly watching Bruce and occasionally taking a quick sniff at the woman.

  “Gidday,” Bruce tried again. However, not for the first time recently he cursed himself for not having anything more intelligent to say. “Well, here we are then,” he tried again after a few moments.

  The woman didn’t respond. She just stared at him with wild red-rimmed, confused eyes.

  “Get away from me!” she screamed, leaping to her feet as Bruce moved a little closer.

  “Ok, lady, ah … um.” He was still stumped for something to say as he raised his hands in a placatory gesture. She didn’t think he was one of them, did she? Well, why not? How would she know otherwise?

  Bruce backed away, sat on the edge of the bed and groped around for his smokes. Cop came over and rested his head on his thigh while his eyes flicked like a metronome from Bruce, to the woman, and back again.

  With great deliberation Bruce selected and lit a cigarette. Trying to sound as convincing as possible he said, “I’m not one of them, you know.” He shook a cigarette out of the packet and offered it to the woman. “Cigarette?”