OK, so this was probably a cleaner’s ship, Cal reckoned. Although clearly not a very good one.
“You know, I actually am smelling something,” Miz said.
“Oh?” said Loren.
“I’m smelling how much this place sucks.”
“It is pretty fonking grim,” Mech agreed.
“Hey, guys,” Cal hissed, gesturing to the still-bouncing Splurt with his eyes. “Let’s not be total killjoys, huh? Some of us are pretty excited. Besides, it’s like they say, never judge a theme park planet by its docking area.”
“No-one ever says that,” said Loren. She caught Cal’s look, then glanced down into the eager eyes of Splurt. “But you’re right. I mean, we’ve just landed. For all we know, the fun starts right around this corner.”
They turned a corner. The fun was conspicuous by its absence.
No hilarity or entertainment awaited. What did await them was a roped-off queuing area that zig-zagged like a snake, folding in on itself as it weaved its way towards a row of ticket booths at the far end of the room.
Only one of the booths seemed to be in operation, but as the line currently consisted of just one person, this was unlikely to be problematic.
“Oh, now this is much better,” said Miz. “I totally spoke too soon. I don’t know about you guys, but now I’m, like, totally excited.”
Her veneer of enthusiasm fell away. She slouched her weight onto one hip. “Oh, and in case you didn’t notice…?”
“Sarcasm,” said Cal. “Don’t worry, we picked up on it.”
Splurt yanked free of Cal’s grip and raced towards the ticket booth. He was shorter than the ropes that marked out the line, and darted beneath them easily. Cal gave chase, weaving and winding his way through the maze of ropes, gradually making his way towards the front.
“Hey, Splurt, get back here!” he shouted, but Splurt was already at the front. He was standing behind the only other visitor, bounding eagerly from footless leg stump to footless leg stump, and looking for all the world like a lime-flavored jelly baby that had come to life.
The man at the front had just finished being served. He collected his ticket and slid it into his shirt pocket, then turned and almost tripped over Splurt.
“Whoa! Sorry, uh, kid,” he said. “Didn’t see you there.”
“Hey, can you keep him with you?” Cal called over to the man. He hung a left, ran several feet back in the direction of the Untitled, then the queue turned one-eighty so he was headed back in the direction of the ticket booth again. “I’ll be right there in, like, forty minutes.”
In fact, it took Cal only another twenty seconds to reach the front. This was largely because he realized he could unhook the ropes and proceed in a straight line towards the ticket booth far more quickly and efficiently than he could stick to the path.
“Thanks,” he said, giving the stranger a nod. He squatted down until he was at Splurt’s eye-level, and wagged a finger. “Don’t you run off on me like that again, mister,” he said. “I know you’re excited, but I don’t want you getting lost.”
Splurt hung his head. If he’d had lips, his bottom one would almost certainly have stuck out. Cal smiled and shook his head. How could he stay mad with this guy? “We’re going to have fun, right?”
Splurt’s head raised again. His eyes, already impossibly wide, seemed to become even more so. “There’s my little champ,” said Cal, squeezing his squidgy shoulder and standing again. He turned to the stranger, only to find him staring back, open-mouthed.
“Thanks for your help,” said Cal. “He’s usually much more responsible.”
“Uh…” said the man.
And he was a man. For perhaps the first time, Cal felt fully comfortable in thinking of the guy as such. He had no extra limbs, no additional facial features, and exactly the right number of heads. Everything he did have was where it should be, too, which was rare.
He wasn’t too big, and wasn’t too small. If there was a Goldilocks zone of ideal human heights, this guy was slap-bang in the middle.
He would be average build for a human, too. Better than average, even. He had the build of someone who spent a lot of time swimming or climbing, but perhaps didn’t take it too seriously.
He was dressed for a vacation – colorfully-patterned shirt, knee-length shorts, and a battered old pair of sneakers with frayed laces.
Cal met the man’s eye again, before the sneakers dragged his attention back down.
There was something about them. Something he couldn’t quite place.
“Um. OK. Sorry,” said the man. “This is going to sound insane, but… are you Cal Carver?”
“What? I mean, yes. I mean… how do you know my name?” asked Cal, tearing his eyes from the shoes. “Oh! Wait, yes. I guess we’re probably famous now. Cal Carver and Space Team, saviors of the multi-verse.”
“Uh, haha, right,” said the man. “But I meant… No, not that. It’s just… and, again, I appreciate this is a stupid question, but… Were you a friend of Lori Thomas?”
The name hit Cal like a rabbit-punch to the chest. Lori Thomas. He’d dated her for… what? Four months? Five? They’d traveled together in Cal’s younger days. Got as far as Europe before a hot Spanish belly-dancer had caught his eye and led him astray.
Lori Thomas. God, he hadn’t thought about her in years.
“You both stayed with her cousin, Dave, when you were in Belgium. You went to that nightclub together. It was raining. The roof leaked. You said it was simultaneously the best and worst night of your life.”
“But mostly the worst,” they both said at the same time.
Cal’s gaze flitted across the man’s face, trying to figure out what the fonk was going on. “How the fonk do you know about that stuff?” he asked. “Are you… Are you psychic?”
Suddenly, even though he was no longer looking at them, Cal knew what was unusual about the sneakers. Or not unusual. Usual. Very usual.
The swoosh. The sneakers had a swoosh.
The guy was wearing a beaten-up pair of Nikes.
“No,” said the man, holding out a hand and smiling in a way that suggested he was just as perplexed as Cal was. “I’m Lori’s cousin, Dave.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cal found himself gaping at the outstretched hand, just as pretty much everyone he’d met had done to his from the moment he’d arrived in space.
A handshake. This guy knew what a handshake was.
Cal clutched the hand in his, and let out an involuntary chirp of laughter as they shook. Dave was clearly an accomplished hand shaker. His grip was firm, but not overly so. He pumped up and down just enough, and Cal felt a twinge of something like grief when he pulled his hand away again.
For the next few seconds, Cal just stared at his own hand in a sort of stupor of disbelief, then lowered it to his side and stared at Dave instead.
Dave, for his part, stared back.
Quite a lot of staring transpired, in fact.
They were locked in a particularly intense bit of gawping when a buzzer rasped angrily from the ticket booth, making them both jump.
Behind the counter, a vaguely female-looking robot with a painted smile whirred its head in Cal’s direction. “Next customer,” barked a voice from somewhere behind the unmoving mouth. “Keep the line moving, we’ve got a lot of guests to get through.”
Cal glanced back at the line, which was empty aside from Mech, Loren and Miz, who were currently weaving their way through it. Dave stepped aside as Splurt raced to the ticket booth and stood on tippy-stumps so he could see over the top of the counter.
“Uh, yeah. Sorry,” said Cal, plastering on a smile. He was too stunned to know which of his many smiles it was, but as the server’s eyes were as painted-on as her mouth, he didn’t think it really mattered. “Five for Funworld, please.”
The ticket-seller raised a mechanical hand and pointed to Splurt, whose eyes were just visible above the counter-top. “Age?”
Cal glanced down at Splu
rt, then shrugged. “Uh, not sure.”
The robotic clerk let out an audible sigh. “Adult or child?”
“I’d say… child,” Cal said.
He found his eyes pulling in Dave’s direction as the clerk began ringing up the order on a cash register that wouldn’t have been out of place on Earth in the 70s. Dave quickly looked away, trying to hide the fact he’d been staring in wonder at Cal throughout the whole ticket ordering process.
“That’ll be eighteen thousand credits.”
“Fonk. What?” Cal spluttered. “How much?”
“Eighteen thousand credits.”
“I know, I heard you. I just… How much?”
“Eighteen thousand cr—”
“No, I know. It’s just… Jesus.”
Dave laughed. “Jesus! Wow. There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.”
“Do you maybe do, like, a family discount?”
The ticket-bot groaned impatiently. “Do you have two or more children in your party?”
“No,” said Cal, then, “Wait! Yes. Mizette is six! I mean, you wouldn’t think it to look at her. Or listen to her. Or, you know, be around her at all, but—”
“Sixteen thousand credits.”
“Aha! That’s more like it,” Cal said. He rested an elbow on the counter and leaned closer to the ticket-bot. “But, well, the thing is, we don’t have sixteen thousand credits right now. We did have, but it was stolen. So, what could we get for, let’s see… zero credits?”
Despite them being painted on, irritation seemed to flicker behind the robot’s eyes. “Next customer, please.”
“Hey, come on, I’m sure we can work something out,” Cal said, filling the sentence with as much charm as he could muster. This wasn’t a whole lot, but then the majority of his brain was still stuck on the Dave situation, so he reckoned he could be forgiven.
“Please return to your vessel and vacate the docking platform,” the voice crackled. “Next customer, please.”
“Look, we need to get down there,” said Cal. “It’s important that we…”
A small hatch flipped open in the robot’s chest. Cal was about to remark on it when a small prong shot out of it and attached itself to his face with a hooked barb.
“Ow! What the—?” he managed to say, before an electrical charge poured from the barb and filled the inside of his head.
His teeth clamped together and his eyes went wide. His whole body, from the head down to his toes, locked rigid, and he could only watch helplessly as the ticket booth rolled away from him and he toppled backwards like a falling oak.
“Whoa, whoa!” Dave cried, catching Cal before he could hit the floor. “It’s fine, I’ll pay them in. Here, charge it to my account.”
He heaved Cal upright again and reached for his wallet. Still rigid, Cal immediately fell sideways, managing to eject a whimper before he crashed to the floor.
“Oh shizz, I’m sorry,” Dave said, covering his mouth with a hand. He bent and plucked the metal prong from Cal’s cheek, then tossed it into the ticket booth. It clanked against the ticket-bot’s head, then fell onto her desk.
Dave addressed the robot sternly. “I want the last two minutes logged and sent as an official complaint to a supervisor. I expect a response in my inbox within the hour. Understood?”
“Understood,” the ticket-bot said. “Complaint noted.”
The tightness that had locked all Cal’s muscles slackened. With Dave’s help, he propped himself up onto his elbows and shot Splurt a dirty look. “Seriously? You were right there, and you couldn’t have caught me?”
Splurt waved his flag, as if to indicate he had his hands (or lack of them) full, then gestured impatiently towards the ticket booth with his head.
“You OK?” asked Loren, as she, Mech and Miz finally arrived at the front of the line.
“You mean aside from being shot in the face and electrocuted? Yeah, totally fine,” said Cal. He dragged himself back to a standing position, although the wobble in his legs suggested he might not stay there for long.
“What’s happening?” Mech asked. “Did you get the tickets?”
“No. Turns out you have to pay for them,” said Cal. He shrugged, throwing up his arms. “I know, right? I mean, who saw that coming?”
“Shizz,” said Loren. “So, what are we going to do?”
Cal placed the back of his hand next to his mouth and whispered. “Well, I thought Mech could sleep with the ticket seller, and while she was distracted—”
“Fonk you, man. I ain’t screwing no robot.”
“Screwing,” said Cal. “Good one. You know, because you’re both held together with—”
“We get it,” Mech said.
“Anyway, he can’t,” said Miz. “I mean, he doesn’t even have a—”
“Can we please not discuss this right now?” Mech snapped. “It ain’t happening, and that’s all there is to it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Dave. He held up five tickets. “Ta-daa!”
“What? No way. We can’t accept these,” said Cal, immediately plucking the tickets from Dave’s hand and clutching them to his chest.
“Seriously, it’s fine,” said Dave. “Because if you think I’m going in there without you…? You and I have a lot to catch up on.”
“Uh, you haven’t introduced us, Cal,” said Loren.
“Yeah, who’s your friend?” asked Miz, spitting out the last word as if it offended her taste buds.
“Right, yes! Of course!” said Cal. “Loren, Miz, Mech, this is Dave. Dave, Loren, Miz, Mech.”
Dave didn’t bother reaching in for a handshake this time. He just smiled, and waved with an easy sort of confidence that suggested blue-skinned women, cyborgs and wolf-creatures were an everyday occurrence.
“Dave here,” said Cal, rocking back on his heels. “Is from Earth.”
The next few seconds were swallowed by a stunned silence.
“Earth?” said Loren.
“As in… your Earth?” asked Mech. “As in that backwater shizzhole in the—”
“That’s the one,” said Cal, cutting him off. “Earth. My home planet. Our home planet.”
“I’m Lori’s cousin,” Dave added. “Lori Thomas.”
“Who?” said Miz.
Dave’s confident smile took a quizzical turn. “You didn’t tell them about Lori?” he asked, a hint of accusation to his tone.
“Who?” said Cal. “I mean, what? Did I tell them about Lori?” He snorted. “Well, yeah! Only all the fonking time.”
“Uh, like, no. You didn’t,” Miz insisted.
Cal laughed and put an arm around Miz’s shoulders. Or around as much of them as he could reach, anyway. “Ha! Oh, Miz. You do make me laugh.”
Dave’s smile returned. “I’m kidding. Relax. It was, what? Fifteen years ago? Eighteen? I’m just messing with you.”
He thumbed in the direction of a set of double-doors a short distance behind the ticket booth. A variety of symbols had been painted on the wall above. As Cal looked at them, they untangled to form the words, ‘A World of Imagination Awaits!’
“The next shuttle down to the surface will be leaving soon, and we’ve still got the induction to go through.” Dave faked a yawn. “It’s a bit of a borefest, but got to be done,” he said, then he stepped aside so Splurt could lead the way. “So… shall we?”
* * *
The induction was even more tedious than Dave had prepared them for, and the robot delivering it made the ticket-bot seem like a bottomless well of charisma.
This one had a male voice, a scuffed exterior, and a slight sideways tilt that made Cal subconsciously lean a bit to his left in sympathy. It spoke at length about rules, about what was and wasn’t permitted while on Funworld’s surface, and prattled extensively about safety procedures, and what to do in the event of a fire, flood, earthquake, or worldwide catastrophe.
Cal switched off at about the fourth word, and diverted everything except the ‘nodding and smiling�
� part of his brain to the Dave situation.
He kind of remembered him. Sort of. Maybe.
He recalled Lori had a cousin they had stayed with, but he didn’t remember much about him. He was friendly enough, but pretty quiet. Did he come to the nightclub? Maybe. There had been several people in the group – strangers, mostly, but a few of Lori’s college friends who were also making their way around Europe at the time.
Cal tried to subtly study Dave’s face. It wasn’t unfamiliar, but there was nothing that immediately triggered any memories, either.
If he tried to picture Lori’s cousin, he couldn’t see any details, just that vague impression of someone affable, but a little reclusive and unsure of himself.
This Dave was certainly friendly, but he had a confidence about him that Cal wouldn’t have associated with the guy whose apartment they’d crashed in. Cal had a niggling recollection of borrowing money from the guy, knowing he wasn’t the type to ever ask for it back. This Dave, though, with his confident swagger and his stern complaints to supervisors – this Dave would ask for it back, and probably with interest.
“You are welcome, of course, to bring your weapons,” droned the inducto-bot. It gestured to the blaster on Loren’s hip, but as its mechanisms seemed to be in desperate need of a full service, this took several awkward seconds. “However, the technology dampening field will ensure they cease to function.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Mech. “What do you mean, ‘technology dampening field’?”
“Please save all questions for a designated clarification break,” the inducto-bot said.
It paused long enough for Cal to suspect its batteries had run out, then its voice crackled out of it again.
“Designated clarification break.”
Mech muttered something below his breath, then raised his voice to normal levels. “What do you mean, ‘technology dampening field’?” he asked. “Is that gonna apply to me?”
“Good question,” said Cal. “Is he going to go all Tin Man on us, and just, like, freeze in place?”
Space Team: Planet of the Japes Page 7
