Velocity

by V. B. Larson

  He was real, Beth and Pandi were not. It was time that we put our energies into escaping this damned tubetrain physically, rather than mentally.

  Rahashi ignored me, his sobs changing to Hindi mutterings after a time. I hung my head beside him, thinking hard.

  “What does that light mean?” he asked finally. My head whipped up and a glad smile split my face. “It’s the transmitter. Someone has heard our broadcast!” I rushed to my makeshift equipment and gingerly adjusted the resistance on the lines going to the speakers.

  “Repeat: do you read me, Weaver? Come to Ohio Crater for pick-up-”

  Excitedly, I keyed in a response and sent it. They acknowledged and I whooped for joy, then made my way to the control cubicle by swinging from the loops of plastic that hung from the roof of the tubetrain. I jerked up the power rods and the tubetrain lurched into to motion, accelerating rapidly. We were saved. Rahashi looked at me as if I had lost my mind, and perhaps I had.

  Twenty minutes later we donned our vacc-suits and headed out onto the floor of Ohio Crater. The majestic walls of the crater towered above us, ringing the blazing stars overhead. Still our largest star, Earth’s sun shone bright, just over a light-year behind us.

  I smiled to myself in the darkness of my helmet as Rahashi and I signaled a group of men on the upper decks of the automated mining plant. I was fully ready to sing the rebel anthem, or dance a hornpipe jig for the captain and his officers, whatever would make our rescuers happy. Whichever side had won, the Kamadeva would have officers. And we would serve them, happy just to be among humanity again.

  Idly, I patted my right breast pocket, which had tightly self-sealed its own flap. Inside the pocket was my backup copy of Beth, safely stowed away on a coin-sized molecular disk.

  Starplay

  1

  “Twiddle it to the left,” suggested Jason.

  I did as he suggested. The wavering image shimmered, brightened, then flew apart into a liquid rainbow splash of a million colors. The picture went dead, fading to black as if the commercials were finally over with and the show was coming back. But it didn’t.

  “No, no, dumb-ass!” moaned Jason. “I said left, LEFT. You know what I’m talking about, moron?”

  “I did turn it left,” I protested remotely, too interested in the Space-television to get annoyed by Jason. I pressed the reset button-at least, that’s what it seemed to do-and started twiddling again. The dusty workshop around us was quiet except for the humming of the machine’s transformers.

  Jason made a move to shove me out of the way and get his butt into the folding chair we had set up in front of the console. But I weigh more and have two inches on him, so I managed to elbow him back.

  “Knock it off, Jason.”

  “Well, I found it!”

  “No, you didn’t. We both did. And besides, it was my crazy dead uncle Chet that invented the thing.” My uncle had been totally bananas according to my dad. Mom said he was disturbed, but a gifted inventor, which should tip you off to which side of the family he was on. All I remember was that he lived in a plaid bath-robe, never brushed his teeth and screamed a lot at night. Eight years ago they had put him in a nuthouse and he died shortly after. It was when they committed him that they closed up his workshop. My folks were always kind of funny about the subject and never wanted to discuss it.

  Curiosity has always been one of my weak points, so when they left the ranch this year for a vacation in Wisconsin, the time seemed ripe for an investigation. It had been no mean feat to cut that padlock, let me tell you.

  “So?” Jason retorted, refuting my entire argument with one syllable. He flopped back into his folding chair, which was to my left. His chair squeaked because one of the legs didn’t sit right on the floor anymore. I turned back to the Space-television. We had decided to call it that when we first found it because it worked kind of like a television, and it showed mostly pictures of space, nebulas and stars and stuff. When it showed anything at all, that is.

  “Lookit, I want to try for a while,” Jason said with a touch of wheedling in his voice that I detected and enjoyed. He put one elbow on the console beside me and leaned into my view. One finger went to his forehead, which was covered up by overly-long brown-blonde hair. He started poking at the zits he kept under there.

  “Tough.”

  “Come on, Steve.”

  I ignored him and concentrated on the dials in front of me. The damn thing was so hard to focus, it seemed to be made for someone with finer hand control than I was able to manage. I had a certain goal in mind, I wasn’t just jacking around. I wanted to get the settings back to just the place where they had started, when we had first touched the console and brought it into life.

  “Come on, Steve. Why don’t you give it a rest, huh?”

  “Shut up. I’m trying to get the trees back.”

  “Oh… Uh, I don’t know, Steve,” Jason’s tune changed from that of a dog watching dinner through a sliding glass door to one of concern. “I don’t think we should mess around with those things.”

  The screen blurred a reddish haze, then an image of orange-red fuzzy stars like hairy tangerines solidified. My tongue slipped out to wet the corner of my mouth. I moved my fingers in the tiniest increments of pressure that I could manage. The picture focused. I sat back and smiled.

  “It’s the wrong picture,” Jason pointed out unnecessarily.

  “Yeah, but it’s clear, my man. It’s clear!” I slapped his back with slightly intimidating force. He winced and scowled at the picture. Then the bastard reached out and, just as random as you please, twisted the third dial from the right.

  “Jesus! What the hell do you…”

  I drew back my arm. I was going to slug him, and he knew it too, but he wasn’t ducking. He was pointing at the screen. A calm part of my mind wondered what made Jason do crap like that all the time and why I let him hang around with me. He was kind of like Beetle Bailey, always farting around with the Sarge, knowing full well he was going to get his teeth pushed in.

  “Look!” that was all he said.

  I paused, but didn’t look in case he was planning to duck and spoil my aim. He didn’t do anything of the kind.

  “Damn, that’s weird! Look, Steve!”

  I finally looked. And my mouth fell open twice as far as his did. Jason doesn’t have all that much in the way of imagination, but he knew weird when he saw it. The screen was a wash of blue. A blue painted sky above and a shimmering blue sea below. It wasn’t space, it was a planet.

  My stomach just fell away, like when you first start down in an express elevator from the seventieth floor. My insides turned to jelly. It was the first time since we had started fooling with my uncle’s invention that we had seen a planet.

  It wasn’t just an empty sea, either, there were somethings moving in the water, dark sinister shapes. My mind immediately conjured images of mermen, killer whales and platysaurus herds. Unknown things from an unknown world. And I was watching them in my own home.

  Hungrily, I leaned forward, forgetting completely to slug Jason. I could have kissed him. Almost. I rubbed my hand on the ball that moved the view in place, doing a complete 360 degree rotation. I spotted land and my heart leapt again. My hand moved to the knob farthest to the right, the one that never seemed to do anything but make the image shimmer a bit. I had long suspected that it was for fine tuning movements.

  “Go for it, Steve!” whispered Jason, sensing my intent. “Go for it!”

  The last knob was spring loaded, or something, because when you twisted it, it resisted you and always moved back into place when you let go. I felt the cold metal knob under my fingertips. I centered the land with the aiming ball and gave the unknown knob the slightest hint of a twist. The image of the land leapt away and dimmed to a smudge on the horizon.

  “Zoom lens!” shouted Jason. He kept pointing at the screen, as if to keep it there.

  “But in reverse,” I said as I nudged the dial the opposite direction.
<
br />   The land loomed, filling the screen. And there they were. The trees that we had first seen when we had powered up our space-television.

  2

  The landscape was definitely alien. Our viewpoint was perhaps fifty feet above the ground, just over the treetops. In the distance, hidden somewhat by the haze in the air, mountains loomed. Closer were green carpeted hills with great flapping pink and white birds flying lazily over them. The hills and the jungle that covered them marched right down to the pebble and shell strewn beach in front of us. The trees weren’t like trees at all, they were more like giant ferns. Huge green fronds swayed and tossed about in the wind like green-haired dancers at a neo-punk concert.

  “I did it!” shouted Jason. “I twisted the right dial and there are the trees!”

  He whooped and stood suddenly, still aiming an index finger at the screen like a bird dog in pheasant farm. His fingernail had a black crescent of grime around it. I gave him a dark look, remembering the well-deserved slugging. But then I softened.

  “Yes, you did it, all right,” I admitted.

  “So…” He said distantly. He turned to me and looked troubled.

  “What should we do now, Steve?”

  The elation of what had just happened overwhelmed me again. I had trouble focusing my thoughts for a few moments.

  “Hell if I know.”

  “Well, should we tell someone?”

  “No. Absolutely not. Haven’t you seen enough movies man? We want to keep this to ourselves. I’ve always wanted something like this to happen to me.”

  “Me too,” said Jason, his voice falling away to a near whisper. “But now I don’t know what to do with it.” Then he spotted something. He went into a point again.

  “Holy crap, Batman! Would you look at those little dudes! ”

  For the next full minute we gaped at the screen like a couple of specials. Everything was fairly normal, Earth-like that is, except for the green people in the fern-trees. I could see seed pods, up under the fronds, like coconuts on a palm. I could also see a lot of skinny little green guys in the fronds with the coconuts. Jason broke our stunned silence. Nothing could stun him into silence for long.

  “Jeez. They seem to be looking at us.”

  “You’re right,” I said. For the first time, I felt a cold hand grip my bowels and give a gentle squeeze of fearful excitement. I shifted in my chair and rubbed my fingers against one another nervously.

  “Those little green bastards…” Jason muttered wonderingly. “They’re goblins!” he stated with sudden decision. “That’s what they are.”

  “Goblins, huh?” I chuckled. Then I spotted a glint of metal and straightened up. “They have weapons too,” I said. “See there? That one has a knife of some kind, and the three in the tree next to him have bows!”

  “Maybe they’ll shoot at us!”

  “Maybe you should shut up.” But I was worried. Just what, I wondered, did we look like to them? It was clear that they could see us. Just thinking about what we were seeing was enough to scare the spit out of my mouth and to start the sweat running out of my relatively cool armpits.

  Then one of the skinny little farts fired an arrow at us.

  “Duck!” Jason all but screamed. And though I didn’t see any real danger, and the arrow looked like it would probably fall short anyway, I ducked. When we looked back, we saw that the arrow had indeed fallen short and that we were apparently out of their range. They shot several more arrows which dropped into the sea below us before they finally gave up.

  “Come on Jason, they can’t hit anything. It’s just a picture.” I was a bit pissed that Jason had gotten me to duck.

  “I don’t know…”

  “Here, let’s just give them something to shoot at.” I reached forward to the fine tuning knob and brushed it.

  The image zoomed in and we found ourselves in the middle of one of the big fern-trees. We stared into the startled faces of three goblins. Up close they looked kind of nasty. They were about three feet tall. They might have been a little taller but they seemed to move about in a crouch all of the time, as if their knees were permanently bent. Their hands were long with thin fingers and large bony joints. Their facial features were sharp and pinched into a perpetual snarl. Surprised by our sudden move, they produced thin screeching sounds and displayed mouthfuls of protruding yellow teeth that glistened wetly. We were right there in the middle of their fern-tree and it was like shoving a torch into a snake pit. They squirmed away and hissed excitedly.

  “There now…” I began.

  “Are you CRAZY?” Jason screamed at me.

  I turned to him, startled. Jason was reaching for the fine tuning knob, doubtless about to pull another move that would throw us into the ionosphere. I reacted by reaching for his wrist, but before either of us achieved our objectives, the goblins got into the act.

  A thin knife-blade, perhaps eighteen inches long, stabbed out of the picture on the console and opened up a deep gash on Jason’s forearm. Jason screamed like a girl, his voice cracking and going high. Blood surged out of the wound, wetting the goblin’s blade, which was instantly withdrawn. Red drops spattered the control knobs.

  For a moment I was paralyzed by this. Jason, squealing like a stuck pig, tripped backward over his folding chair and went sprawling. His fingers gripped his forearm to staunch the flow of blood. The chair clanged against the floor and neatly collapsed into its folded position.

  The clang seemed to bring me back to life. My eyes went to the goblin, who crouched directly in front of the screen. His lips were drawn tight and his slitted eyes slid back and forth between Jason and myself. About four inches of his knife protruded onto our side of the screen. I slid out of my chair and to one side, out of his reach. He made a lunge, his arm coming through right up to the bicep and his knife jabbing at my midsection.

  I managed to dodge and get out of his reach. I circled the room to Jason and helped him up and over to my uncle’s bed. I eyeballed the tuning knobs. If I could get to the console, I could send the goblins a thousand miles away. I wondered briefly if the goblin’s arm and blade would come with us.

  The one knife-wielding bastard was so far the only one brave enough to come up to the screen, but he was jabbering over his shoulder to his more cautious companions. His speech reminded me of the ringing and clacking of castanet’s. I realized that if the ones with the bows got their peckers up, we would be peppered with their arrows. I had to fight not to panic. I needed a weapon.

  “Jason!” I yelled. He was sagging on the bed, he was losing it, maybe due to shock, maybe fear. “JASON!”

  He didn’t answer, he just bled on the sheets. The goblins were getting increasingly brave. I could see a few moving up cautiously through the fronds. There was no more time. I had to act and I couldn’t get to the console without getting cut. I ran for the stairs and ran up them, three at a time, something I am quite good at and practice whenever I get a chance. At the bottom I turned at break-neck speed, grabbing the doorjamb to swing myself around the corner. I guided my wild progress by slamming hands against the walls of the hallway. I hung a left at the bathroom, bounded across my brother’s snarled bed in one step and thrust a desperate hand into his closet.

  My fingers wrapped around a slim cold metal tube. A rifle barrel. I yanked out my brother’s. 22 caliber semi-automatic Ruger, my heart thrilling to the feel of it. I put my hand on the wood-grain stock and instantly I felt some of my usual self-confidence flow back into my limbs. We had always had guns around the house and I have done quite a bit of hunting on our ranch. I’m a good shot, and having a gun in my hands always gave me a boost of courage. I dug ammo out of the dresser. In the top drawer I managed to find a box of. 22 caliber hollow-points, just what I needed.

  I trotted back down the hall and up the stairs, madly cramming bullets into the clip. I snapped the bolt as I came to the top of the stairs and had the gun to my shoulder as I entered the workshop. The goblins had not been idle during my brief absence
. Three of them were now completely in the room. The ballsy one that had cut Jason was standing on my chair, watching for my return. Another was at his side, with his bow drawn.

  Fortunately, the bowman faced toward the console. The third was actually standing on the console, his feet carefully planted so as to avoid touching the control knobs. As I entered, he was in the act of handing something through. Of Jason there was no sign, other than the bloodstains on the sheets and the carpet. The goblin with the bow turned my way and I put the rifle’s bead on his breastbone. That was when I realized what the goblin standing on the console was handing through to the other side. It had been Jason’s legs. Even now his Reebok sneakers were disappearing into the screen. His left one was untied, and the laces trailed lightly across the console.

  The goblin with the bow swung to shoot me, but I beat him and put two slugs into his chest. His arrow went wild and thudded into the plaster a yard to my left. He fell back, knocked on his can, squealing and grabbing at the wound.

  This appeared to enrage the green knife-wielding guy on my chair. He gave a ragged shout that shot spittle from his yellow teeth and threw himself at me. He charged in low (naturally) and I wasn’t able to bring him into my sights at such close range. So I hit him with the butt of the rifle and threw him back. His head opened across his bald scalp. Red blood welled up, contrasting sharply with his bell pepper-green skin.

  “If you little suckers killed Jason, I’ll gut-shoot your whole tribe!” I shouted. A momentary look of fear passed over the goblin’s features as the volume and power of a human’s voice assaulted his ears. Then he slashed at me once and took a bullet in the teeth. He fell back and rolled in gargling convulsions. The third in the raiding party had disappeared back into his fern-tree. I moved to the console and looked through, breathing hard and feeling elated. My hands and stomach shivered a bit with the adrenalin of the moment. Pinpricks of salty sweat popped out on my forehead.