In contrast, these ships look as if they were just parked in here yesterday. No dust, no rust. I bang a fist on the side of a Puzzler space chariot, and the metal gives back a solid boom.
“What was that?” Sam shouts, from somewhere far away on my right.
“Just me,” I shout back.
I keep walking. And all the time, country music keeps playing from somewhere up ahead of me. Now Willie Nelson is On the Road Again. Quite apt. The volume is meager, the sound quality’s shite, and I would very much like to know why and how the aliens who built the Ghost Train got to know about 20th century American country music. Time travel? Oh Jesus, no. Please.
There has to be a rational explanation for this.
CHAPTER 2
The country music is coming from somewhere ahead of me.
Following the sound, I enter a jam-packed area of the parking bay. Fitted in around the spaceships, in such numbers that only narrow aisles are left open to walk through, are bicycles, motorcycles, sleighs, gondolas, monowheels, cars, and other vehicles so weird I can only guess what kind of terrain they once travelled over. My interior trainspotter gets overwhelmed by the sheer variety. In some places there are solid walls of A-tech rising up on either side of my head. It’s as if someone amused themselves by fitting all the things together like 3D jigsaws.
There were bones in that star shuttle Sam investigated … I shudder, and walk faster.
I hope it was not a very bad idea to split up.
I’m carrying my lightsaber in my right hand. It’s a brilliant weapon, and the powerpack is still at least half charged, but I don’t think it would be very much use against whoever it was that could kidnap Denebites.
The walls get lower. Now there’s only one layer of vehicles on the deck.
Further down the long, straight aisle I’m in, I spot the rear end of a pickup truck sticking out of its parking space.
It’s a Dodge Ram.
They still make those. But this isn’t the new, anti-grav-equipped, flying model. It’s the old kind of pickup truck, that only ran on roads.
The music is definitely coming from the Dodge.
I amble closer and marvel at the truck’s bumper stickers.
Keep Texas Armed.
Buchanan For President.
Dallas Cowboys 1992 Super Bowl Champions.
The pickup is parked on a corner. Another aisle crosses this one beyond it. I walk around the pickup, and bellow in shock.
There’s a man in the cab!
He’s sat with his boots up on the dashboard, an acoustic guitar on his lap. Sixtyish, gray-haired, as lean as a strip of beef jerky, he’s playing—and singing, tunelessly—along with Willie Nelson.
He sees me at the same time I see him.
The boots go down, the guitar goes on the passenger seat, and a 1911-style handgun pops out of a holster I didn’t see before.
I instinctively duck.
BLAM! He fires a round into the Sagittarian amphibious tricycle on the other side of the aisle I’m in.
I sprint back the way I came. As I skid around the corner, another round smashes into the electric purple articulated halftrack beyond me, so close I practically get a friction burn on my scalp.
If I stay in this long straight aisle, it’ll be like a shooting gallery for him. I leap on top of a Pygmy Ent tractor, and plunge down the other side on top of a heap of scooters. They clank, settling under my weight.
The door of the Dodge Ram slams. The man’s footsteps thud down the aisle. “Where ya at, asshole?”
Should I stay put, or keep moving? I’m in a narrow crevice. I can see where I might be able to wriggle under a Silicon People gravsled. I shift my weight. The scooters rattle again. I freeze.
“I heard that! Where ya hiding? Come out and show yourself!” His voice approaches my hiding place. “You ain’t got no reason to be scared. This is the safest place in the galaxy. HA!”
BLAM! He fires another round into the Pygmy Ent tractor.
I nearly piss myself in terror. But he hasn’t seen me, after all. That was just Texan punctuation.
His footsteps move past. Maybe I should pop up and stab him in the back with my lightsaber. If he doesn’t hear me moving, and shoot first.
“Oh, here’s a good one! I like this one.”
Willie Nelson has turned over the mic to Johnny Cash, and now this Texan lunatic begins to sing along. “An old cowboy went ridin’ out one dark and windy day, upon a ridge he rested—” BLAM! “I see you! There you are! I got you covered!”
Trying not to make any more noise, I twist from the waist. Oh Jesus, there’s Sam, up on top of a spaceship with a melted-looking hole in its side. He’s lying flat between two bulges on the nose of the ship.
BLAM! One of the bulges shatters. Sam jerks back from the shrapnel.
“Screw y’all,” grits the Texan. From the pause, I gather he’s reloading.
Johnny Cash sings on, and without thinking about it, I start to sing with him:
As the riders loped on by him, he heard one call his name
'If you wanna save your soul from hell, ridin’ on our range
Then cowboy, change your ways today, or with us you will ride
Tryin’ to catch the devil's herd across these endless skies …’
Johnny Cash was an Irishman, you know.
“Huh?” screeches the Texan. “Who’s that singin’?”
I lean back against the Pygmy Ent tractor and give him the chorus. I could never be a singer by profession, I like money too much, but I’ve got a decent voice. I used to do the vocals when my friend Donal would play his fiddle for ceili nights on the Skint Idjit. We’d have the girls weeping at Spancil Hill and Missing You, never mind they’d never been within a thousand miles of Ireland. Everyone on the Railroad can relate to a song about being far from home.
And apparently the Texan feels the same way about Johnny Cash’s musical parable. His face pokes over the top of the Pygmy Ent tractor. There’s a twisted smile on his lips. “Hey man.” He sits up on the tractor and beats out the rhythm on its roof. We finish out the song. I bow, as best I can, and he claps. “You got a good set of pipes.”
“I heard you playing the guitar. You’re not bad yourself.”
“Oh hell, I got nothing else to do ‘sides practice. We should have a session sometime.”
“Can you give me a hand up at all?”
“You stuck?” the Texan chuckles. “Sure.” He helps me out with a dry, guitar-callused grip that turns into a handshake when we’re both stood on top of the Pgymy Ent tractor. “Caleb Dunhill. Pleased to meetcha. I’m from Roswell, Texas.”
“Fletcher Connolly, from Lisdoonvarna, County Clare.” I glance down at his 1911, now back in its holster. “Any particular reason you were trying to blow my head off?”
“Aw, man, I ‘pologize for that. I thought you were an alien.”
I glance up at the spaceship. Sam is swarming down its side. “That’s my friend Sam, from the Omega Centauri Cluster. He’s not an alien,” I add, just in case Caleb gets the wrong idea.
Caleb looks me up and down. He’s not looking at the lightsaber in my right hand. When it’s switched off, it just looks like a short stick with alien writing on it. He’s looking at my clothes. Or rather, the lack of them. “That what they usually wear in County Clare?”
I am wearing a pair of Speedos, black work shoes, and nothing else. My shirt got left behind at a holiday resort on Treetop’s moon, and my trousers got covered with blood during the same episode. They were too disgusting to put on again. Mercifully, it’s not cold in here.
“It’s a long story,” I say. “But no, this is not how I normally dress, and I’d be very grateful if there might be some clothes around here I could borrow.” That don’t come off dead aliens. I decide against adding that. I don’t want to get him started thinking about aliens again.
“There might be,” he says. “You been on board long?”
“We have not. We just got here. You?�
��
Caleb cackles. “Longer than you been alive, I bet. What year is it now?”
“2067.”
“Lord, how the time flies. I was abducted in 1994. Whatcha think of that?”
I don’t believe him. He appears to be about sixty, spry and leathery, with cowlicks in his silver-gray hair. On the other hand … those bumper stickers.
“I’d say you’ve not missed much,” I tell him. “The twenty-first century was an awful shambles until the Railroad came along. Since then, it’s been teeth and nails and devil take the hindmost. Everyone’s racing to find the best A-tech and make money off it. On the bright side, there are no wars anymore, because everyone’s busy getting rich.”
“That’s what I heard from the last guy came through here. He told me about the Railroad, how every man with an ounce of smarts and a pound of motivation can make his fortune. Better ‘n the Texas oil rush!”
If it was that easy, I would be king of my own planet by now. “Your man may have painted it a bit too rosy.”
Sam reaches us in time to hear the last part. “What’s the Texas oil rush?” he says.
Caleb eyes him. Sam is also wearing Speedos and nothing else, for the same reasons as me. He hasn’t even got shoes on. “Your friend said you was from the Omega Centauri cluster?”
“Uh uh,” Sam says. “I lived there when I was in my teens. But I was born on Cygnus 2c. My mom was into truffalo farming back then. Second worst mistake of her life. Number one was my dad.”
“Okayyy,” says Caleb.
I cough. “This fella who told you about the Railroad. Is he still around?”
Caleb doesn’t seem to hear me. “Say.” His eyes brighten. “Did they impeach Clinton?”
“Oh, Jesus.” I know which Clinton he’s talking about, a 20th-century US president. But history was never my best class in school, when I was in school, which was not often. I prefer to think of myself as an autodidact. Strangely enough, US presidents have never been very high on my list of things to Google. “Sorry. I don’t know. Maybe not? It was before I was born.”
Caleb sighs. “I been waiting seventy years to find out if they nailed that son-of-a-bitch.”
“They’re all sons of bitches,” Sam says.
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“That’s why the Railroad is so great. You can get away from the politicians,” says this son of a pirate who styled herself the empress of the Omega Centauri galactic cluster. “But guess what? They’ve set up a police force in space now. It’s called the Near Earth Police Department, woop woop. It’s the beginning of the end.”
“Shee-it. Is there anything the government can’t ruin?”
“Fletch! Sam! FLETCHER!”
Finian must be a fair distance away, but he’s got brass lungs on him. Johnny Cash can’t compete.
“We’ve—FOUND—the—WAY—OUT!”
CHAPTER 3
“No, he ain’t found the way out,” Caleb says. “There is no way out.”
This gives me pause. After all, Caleb should know.
But hope resists reason. I jog towards Finian’s voice. Sam’s already taken off running. Caleb ambles after us, in no hurry.
“OVER—HERE!” Finian shouts.
Breathless, I catch up with Sam. We round a corner and there’s Finian. Imogen is with him.
She’s holding a fistful of Finian’s sleeve, cowering behind him.
I can see why.
“This is Dizzy and this is Pew Pew,” says Finian, beaming.
Dizzy and Pew Pew are gandy dancers.
They are sitting in lawn chairs at a folding table beside the steps of an honest-to-God supermarket tabloid UFO. Their stubby three-fingered hands hold playing cards. It looks as if they were in the middle of a game of Beggar My Neighbor. The cards are dogeared and fluffy around the edges. Dizzy wears a homburg and Pew Pew a fedora, and both are clad in overalls, which look like pantomime costumes on them, since they are gandy dancers..
Gandy dancers are the maintenance entities that came with the Interstellar Railroad. They have bulgy foreheads, big black eyes that are totally devoid of expression, and little mouths like goldfish. It is thought they are not actually alive, because they don’t do the things that intelligent beings do, such as conquering planets, fighting over them, reducing them to rubble, picking through the rubble for saleable items, etc. Also, they try to be helpful in their way. It is not unheard-of, when a ship comes off the Railroad in deep space, for the gandy dancers to put it back on the tracks, although that’s certainly never happened to me, and you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.
But Finian’s grinning like he has just won the lottery. He clearly thinks the gandy dancers will help us get off the Ghost Train.
“This is Sam, and here’s my nephew Fletch,” he introduces us.
“I CAN SEE THE RESEMBLANCE,” says Pew Pew (fedora).
They can talk!
“Jesus, I hope not,” Finian chuckles. “Now what was it you were saying about the way out?”
“YES. EXIT IS THIS WAY.”
Imagine if your fridge could talk. That is what Pew Pew’s voice sounds like.
“OH HELLO CALEB,” says Dizzy. He (she? it?) has a more toaster-ish sound to its voice, and I randomly decide it is a she.
Caleb, ambling up, gives the gandy dancers a slovenly salute. “I’ll tag along with you,” he says to us. “You’ll see.”
We follow the gandy dancers through the parking lot for the best part of a mile. Along the way, Caleb introduces himself with exaggerated Texan courtesy to Imogen, and hits it off with Finian. This is in the nature of things. Both of them are aged nutters who enjoy shooting at people. I look forward with anticipation to the moment when Caleb finds out Finian is an agent of the hated government, but Finian does not mention it, and I decide not to give the game away, as it might lead to shooting. I suppose his NEPD uniform just looks to Caleb like some weird futuristic fancy dress.
The parking lot ends in a wall. There is an emergency exit door and a sign that shimmers through different combinations of runes before displaying THIS WAY OUT in English.
I could have found this standing on my head.
Finian is chuckling, stroking his moustache nervously. His face falls when we pass through the door into an ordinary stairwell. Of course, this is not the way out of the Ghost Train at all. Only out of the parking lot.
“Were you expecting to step out onto the surface of Earth?” I say, unable to resist needling Finian. “In the middle of a crop circle, maybe?”
“More likely a stone circle,” he snarls. “These lads have clearly been around since the galaxy was young. It’s far from unreasonable to assume they’ve got teleportation portals and shite. You’ve not got the vision to see the possibilities, that’s your trouble, Fletch. That always has been your trouble.”
“NO TELEPORTATION PORTALS, FINIAN,” says Pew Pew. “THAT WOULD VIOLATE LAWS OF PHYSICS.”
I can’t help laughing.
“What’s this, then?” Finian says, waving his arms, as we come out of the stairwell into a blindingly white lounge area with backless couches scattered around. “Are we not violating the laws of physics just standing here? The Interstellar Railroad folds time and space. You can travel twenty lightyears and come back in time for dinner, not a whiff of relativistic time dilation anywhere. If that’s not violating the laws of physics—”
“NO VIOLATING.”
“How not?”
“IS HARD TO EXPLAIN TO BEINGS OF MEDIOCRE INTELLIGENCE.”
I’m weeping tears of laughter by this point, and Sam’s in stitches. It’s the shook expression on Finian’s face, as if he’s swallowed a frog. I bet no one has ever called him a ‘being of mediocre intelligence’ before. Pew Pew just stands there with his head on one side. Butter wouldn’t melt.
“Well said,” I gurgle, slapping Pew Pew on the shoulder—and immediately draw back. It feels like slapping the bonnet of a car. No, these lads are not flesh and blood.
“Don’t worry about explaining the science. Just let us know if there are any more nasty surprises coming.” I recall the old alien abduction stories, which gained much more credibility after we found out the bulgy-headed ‘aliens’ were gandy dancers all along. I devoutly hope we’re not about to end up on lab tables with alien probes up our arses. “You aren’t planning to, erm, examine us, right?”
“NO, FLETCH,” says Dizzy, with a straight face, which is the only expression she’s got. “WE DO NOT DO THAT ANYMORE. HUMANITY HAS ALREADY BEEN CLASSIFIED AS SAPIENT.”
“That’s good to know,” I smile.
“IT TOOK SOME TIME.”
“Any of y’all hungry?” Caleb calls. He’s on the far side of the lounge, pushing white buttons on the white wall. “I’m a get me a chicken sandwich.”
The scent of fried food wafts through the lounge, and I realize I’m so hungry I could eat the horse and chase the jockey. My last meal was a bagel from the police cruiser’s emergency food stash.
It turns out that the wall can produce any type of consumer item, not only food. I don’t believe Caleb when he says this. Then he types in a request for a Johnny Cash album. The wall’s hatch opens and there lies a reflective disk with a hole in the middle.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a CD, of course.” Caleb sticks it into his pocket. “I already got this album, but they get scratched up easy.”
He chuckles at our blank faces.
“You was saying something about you want clothes?”
The wall has no respect whatsoever for copyrights and trademarks. I get a pair of Carhartts, with multiple cargo pockets for my lightsaber and other stuff, and a Galway United t-shirt. Sam gets Levis and Adidas sneakers. Once she sees our loot, Imogen gets in on the act and requests a baggy flower-print dress and stripy leggings. That is the way she prefers to dress, unfortunately.
“I’m not a taxi driver anymore,” she says. “So why should I wear this dumb uniform?”
She hides behind one of the sofas to change, while we order sandwiches, burgers, and drinks.
The COMPLETE Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: A Comedic Sci-Fi Adventure Page 31
