by Jerry Oltion
"No, no," she said. "Ti." She tried to wrestle the paper free, but the baby cinched its tentacle tight, crumpling the paper into a fan and holding it high out of her reach.
Trent got up to help her pry it out of the baby's grasp, but the baby whipped its tentacle around and squealed in protest.
"Jeez, I hope that's not somebody's insurance form or something," Donna said.
"I wonder if insurance would pay out here?" Trent got a grip on the baby's shoulder, then worked his way up to the paper. Slime dripped off his fingers, but he didn't let go until he'd rescued the paper. He wiped it dry as best he could against his shirt, then looked to see what it was, but the writing was in Chinese.
"I somehow expected things to be done in English out here," he said. "The place was founded by an American, after all."
Donna nodded. "You'd think. But the way the U.S. is clamping down on people leaving, I guess we're just outnumbered."
"So because they want everybody everywhere to think and act like Americans, they wind up with a colony that doesn't even speak English as a first language. That's really bright." Dixit kept squealing and reaching for the paper. Trent looked for a blank piece, finally pulling one out of the inkjet printer on the corner of the desk, but Dixit wasn't interested in that paper. Only the original one would do.
"How about this one?" Trent asked, holding up a preprinted form that was at least empty of handwriting.
Dixit started to howl. Trent tried crumpling up the blank paper and tossing it from hand to hand in front of the baby's face, and that distracted it for a moment, but not long. Donna tried singing to it, but Trent could barely hear her over the baby's squeals.
"Okay," she said, standing up again. "Time to go back to Momma." Dixit quieted down as soon as she started moving, so they took their time walking back down the hallway. When they got to the exam room, Dr. Chen looked up and said, "Okay you come back now. Just take a minute to develop." His assistant wheeled the x-ray machine back into its spot, then took the film plate into a back room.
Donna handed Dixit back to Katata. It was hard to tell who was the most relieved. Everyone waited impatiently for the x-rays to be developed, Dr. Chen fussing with a tray full of equipment and with the light table while the rest of them just shifted from side to side and fidgeted. Trent's eyes kept straying back to Donna, whose wet shirt was clinging to every curve. She might be a mess, but she looked so alive and so . . . so real, that he could have swept her off her feet and made love to her right there on one of the exam tables if he wasn't afraid it would scare the aliens. She caught him looking at her and blushed, which only made him ache for her all the more.
At last the doctor's assistant came back with a two-foot by foot-and-a-half negative and stuck it on the light table. There were four shots of Talana's tentacle, presumably at different orientations, but they all looked pretty much the same to Trent. He had seen pictures of dinosaur skeletons with their long tails made up of short little segments of vertebrae or whatever; these x-rays looked a lot like that.
"So they do have bones," he said softly.
"Oh yes," Dr. Chen said. "And this one has fracture right here." He pointed to one of the segments, maybe two inches long and half an inch wide, that had the faintest of shadows running diagonally across it. "See from side? Very clear." Chen said, pointing to another image where Trent couldn't spot anything unusual at all. "Not broken completely, but definitely fractured. We will need cast." It took some explaining to make Katata and Talana understand what he intended to do, but they must have had casts or something similar on their homeworld, because they didn't protest when he got out the gauze and the plaster and started building one on Talana's tentacle. He positioned it so the tentacle rested against Talana's body more or less like an arm, and the injured bone plus two or three more on either side were immobilized. He worked fast, because the plaster set quickly. By the time he fashioned a sling and wrapped it around Talana's neck, the cast was hard enough to give off a solid thunk when he rapped it.
"Very good," Chen said. "Now we wait overnight and see how tentacle feels in morning. Make sure no complications before we send home. You have place to stay?"
"Yeah," Trent said. "I mean, yeah, Donna and I do, but the camper would be pretty tight for all five of us."
"No problem. Family can stay here tonight."
They managed to get that across to Katata, pantomiming her and her children going into a patient room, then the sun going across the sky once, then Trent and Donna coming back in through the front doors.
"Bakbak," Katata said when she figured out what they were talking about. Then she snaked out the tentacle that she wasn't using to hold Dixit and grasped Trent's hand with it, curling around his fingers and palm a couple of times and giving him a light squeeze. "Batakit," she said. She did the same to Donna, and Donna replied, "You're welcome."
"We'll be back in the morning," Trent said, and he and Donna let themselves out into the night while Dr. Chen showed his patients to their room.
Trent waited until he was outside to wipe his hands on his pants. Donna laughed and did the same, then they stood beside their pickup, smelling the wood smoke in the air and listening to the night sounds. Most of them were of human origin: music and laughter from the bars, and off in the distance a vehicle crunching along a street, but behind it all was the constant rush of the river and the whisper of air moving through the trees.
"Well, here we are," Trent said.
"Not quite how we expected our first night to be, is it?" said Donna.
"Nope. But you know, it feels good. I haven't felt this useful in ages."
"Me neither." Donna slid her arm around his waist and leaned her head against his chest. "Kind of puts things in perspective when you find someone in worse shape than you are, doesn't it?"
"I guess." Trent had never really understood why another person's problems made your own seem less important, but they did.
"Now what?" Donna asked.
"Good question. You tired yet?"
"Not really. I'm still kind of wound up."
"Me too. And it sounds like we're not the only ones stayin' up late. Want to check out the night life in Bigtown?"
"Sure. Let me get out of these messy clothes, and let's go."
Trent put his arms around her and gave her a long, slow kiss. "You want a hand with that?" There was barely room for both of them in the camper, but Trent pulled the door closed behind them and made sure it latched. It was pitch dark for a second before he found the light switch and flipped it on. When he turned around, Donna was already wriggling out of her shirt. She had her arms in the air and her shirt over her head, so he reached out and cupped her breasts in his hands and said, "Guess who."
She giggled. "Oh, Bob, how did you get in here?"
"Try again," he said, giving her a squeeze.
"Jeff? Dennis? Gosh, there's so many people it could be."
"Is that so?" he said, surprised at how much some other man's name could jolt him even when he knew she was just playing with him. He reached up and grabbed a handful of her shirt, intending to whisk it off her in a single tug, but he misjudged the angle when he pulled, and he heard it rip as it came over her head. "Oh, jeez, I'm sorry!" he said, but then he saw the look of wanton lust on her face and he whispered, "Whoa, maybe I'm not."
She flung the shirt aside, grabbed the front of his shirt in both hands, and pulled it open. It had a snap-down front, and the first couple of snaps popped loose the way they were supposed to, but the rest of them didn't have a chance. The sides of the shirt tore instead, leaving Donna with two handfuls of cloth and a look of total astonishment.
Her nostrils flared out, and a slow grin spread across her face. "Hang onto your hat, cowboy," she said in a voice that was breathy and deep. "We could wind up miles from here."
"Hang onto it, hell," Trent said, sweeping his Stetson off his head and tossing it onto the counter beside the sink. "I'm gettin' it out of your way. You look like you mean business."
"Damn right I mean business." She took another couple fistfuls of his shirt and yanked them apart, ripping it all the way up his back.
Clothes went flying. Trent had never seen Donna like this, had never felt quite so out of control himself, but he wasn't about to stop and question it. They stripped each other bare, shredding every piece of clothing they could in the process, and had their way with each other right there on the floor of the camper. If anybody was watching the pickup, they would know for sure what was going on inside, but Trent didn't care. Let the envious bastards watch all they wanted.
"Yee-haw," he said in the moment of calm afterward. "That was worth coming all the way to Alpha Centauri for."
She was snuggled up against him with her head on his chest. "You think so, do you?" she asked softly.
"I don't know. Maybe we ought to do it again just to make sure."
"You think we'd survive it?"
"If we didn't, I'd die happy."
She laughed and snuggled in closer. "I just want to hold you for a while."
"Good enough by me." He ran his hands lightly over her back, amazed as always how warm and soft she was. Who would have believed that somebody as gentle and feminine as her could literally rip the shirt right off his body? For that matter, he'd never been quite so fired up before, either. He wondered what had triggered it. Was it just the release of so much tension built up over the last few months, or was it something about the planet? Or maybe something about Katata and her kids? If it was some kind of alien hormone, then her kind weren't going to have any trouble fitting in around humans at all.
8
They were still wide awake half an hour later. Wide awake and hungry. It was about dinnertime by their clock, and the only thing they'd had for lunch had been a sandwich. So they put on fresh clothes, intending to pile into the front of the pickup and drive back downtown to find a likely place to get a burger and a beer, but when Trent opened the passenger door for Donna, he saw all the alien slime still waiting for them.
"Oh, yuck," Donna said, which pretty much summed up how he felt about it, too. He got a shop towel from under the seat and wiped off what he could until it was soaked, then got two more out of the back and he and Donna both wiped off the rest of the goop as best they could. Trent laid out a tarp anyway, so Donna wouldn't get any on her clothes from the stitching in the seat.
"Okay, let's try this again," he said, helping her up into the cab again. Then he went around to his side and climbed in himself, flipped on the lights, and headed back down the dirt street toward downtown.
There was less activity now than when they had driven through on the way to the hospital, but a couple of bars were still open. They were right across the street from one another, so Trent parked in front of the one on the right since it had an open spot handy. There were maybe half a dozen vehicles on each side of the street, and he noted with satisfaction that all of them were electric. That made a certain amount of sense when he thought about it: you couldn't very well take a gas rig into space. Every liquid from the fuel to the crankcase oil to the transmission fluid would boil off into vacuum within a few minutes of exposure, and even if you did manage to seal everything up somehow, there wouldn't be any gas stations where you were going. There weren't necessarily electric generating stations on every planet, either, but any place with a settlement would have at least a wind turbine or a bank of solar cells. Onnescu obviously had more than that; there were street lights at every corner, and the bars had neon signs in the windows.
Most of the buildings were built of peeled logs, the cracks between them sealed with quarter-rounds of smaller logs nailed into place. They hadn't been painted, but they looked almost white in the streetlight; evidently the local trees had pretty pale wood. There was a boardwalk alongside the buildings so pedestrians didn't have to step in the mud. Trent had parked in front of a land office, and there was a hardware store next to that, and then the bar. By the laughter and music coming from inside, someone inside was having quite a party. Trent took Donna's hand in his and said, "It looks safe enough, but if there's trouble, we're gettin' out fast, okay?"
"Okay."
Trent pushed open the swinging doors—just like an Old West saloon—and they stepped in. He had half expected the whole place to go quiet, but only a couple of people even noticed them, and they just smiled and waved.
All of the activity seemed to be centered around three or four tables that had been pushed together in the middle of the room, where everyone watched a gray-haired guy with a thin face and a big nose stretch a wide rubber band back toward his chest as if he were about to shoot it at someone. He let fly, but the rubber band didn't go anywhere. Something about the size of a BB did, though: it bounced off a beer mug across the table from the shooter and ricocheted straight at Trent's head. Trent ducked just in time, and heard it whack the top of his hat before it rattled off toward the bar. Now everybody went quiet.
Trent didn't really like being the center of attention of a bunch of strangers, but he figured since he was already there, he might as well make the most of it. He reeled back a step and said, "I been shot!"
"Lord, call the medic," said the gray-haired guy.
"He's busy with a family of aliens," Trent said. He took off his hat and inspected it for damage, but he couldn't even find a dent. "Guess I'll live."
"Good. I'd hate to have my last night on the planet marred by a murder. Pull up a stump, and have a beer on me."
Trent glanced at Donna, who shrugged and said, "Sure, why not?" so they snagged a couple of chairs from a vacant table and the gray-haired guy's friends scooted around so there was room at his table for them. There were seven or eight other men, mostly Trent's age or younger, five or six women about the same age, and two aliens. They were about a foot taller than the humans, with dark red skin mottled with black, and thin as rails. They had two arms each, though, build pretty much like a person's, and their heads were close enough to normal that they could probably pass for human on a dark night. They had beer mugs in front of them like everyone else, and nobody seemed to be paying them any special attention, so Trent just nodded to them along with everyone else and sat down. After an evening with Katata and her brood, these guys seemed perfectly normal.
The gray-haired guy hollered something in what sounded like Spanish to the bartender, then held out his hand to Trent and said, "Name's Nick."
"Trent Stinson," Trent said. "This here's Donna."
"Pleased to meet you both. This is Glory." He gave the woman to his left a squeeze. She was maybe half his age, blonde, buxom, and smiling like a lottery winner. Trent guessed she'd had three or four pints of beer besides the half-empty one in front of her.
One of the guys across the table from Trent said, "You're the Trent and Donna that brought the aliens in to the hospital?"
"That's right." His voice sounded familiar. "You're Greg, aren't you?"
"Yeah. Hey, that was a stand-up thing you did."
Trent shrugged. "Actually, it was mostly sittin' down and drivin'. Thanks for talkin' us in." Greg laughed. "Hah! If sittin' and talkin' can help people out, I guess we're in good shape around here! So how's the kid?"
"Broken bone about halfway down one tentacle," Trent said. "Doctor Chen put a cast on it, but he wants to keep her overnight to make sure it'll be okay."
"Good man," Nick said. "I'll miss him."
"That's an understatement," Greg said. "First time you get a broken bone, you're gonna do more than miss him."
Donna said, "You're moving?"
"Yep. Glory and I are going to find a planet of our very own. One that's not likely to be found by anyone else for a long, long, time. Then we're going to settle down and do the Adam and Eve thing."
"The Adam and Eve thing?" Trent asked.
"Live by ourselves," Nick said. "Raise a family. Start our own civilization from scratch, with our own legends and our own beliefs."
Donna frowned. "You mean just the two of you?"
"
Yep."
"But . . . your kids would have to . . . have kids with each other."
"Yep," Nick said. "That ought to give evolution a good kick-start. I bet they'll adapt to the planet inside a couple dozen generations."
Trent figured that was just about the stupidest thing he
had heard all day, and was trying to figure out a diplomatic way to say so when the bartender came over and set a couple pints of beer in front of him and Donna, plus a big bowl of popcorn.
"Any chance of gettin' something serious to eat this time of night?" Trent asked.
"Sorry, no hablo inglés," the bartender said.
"Kitchen's closed anyway," said Nick. "But there's plenty of popcorn."
"Oh. Well, thanks." Trent shrugged. They could get some real food when they got back to the camper.
When the bartender left, the woman next to Greg said, "We've been trying to talk Nick and Glory out of it all night, but they're committed."
"Ought to be committed," Greg said.
Nick laughed. "You aren't the first person to say that! My neighbors back on Earth thought so, too, when I told 'em I was coming out here, but now look at this place. I might as well have moved to Los Angeles."
Trent tried his beer. It was considerably thicker than Bud, but it actually tasted pretty good. He took a handful of popcorn and settled back in his chair, trying not to look too much like he was starving.
"How do you plan to keep from being discovered?" he asked. "From what I hear, about a third of the planets a person can live on are already inhabited. And humans aren't the only ones lookin' for new real estate." He nodded toward the two aliens at their table.
"There are four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way alone," Nick said. "Even if every third one is already spoken for, that's still a lot of places to go. And the Milky Way isn't the only galaxy, either."
"You're going to a completely different galaxy?"
