Stupendous Tales

By Simon Pole

Plumb the universe in 40 stories, from the very short to the very long. Discover humankind's terrifying past, and our frightful future. Meet our enemies, and our friends, whatever corner of the cosmos they might inhabit. Discover the absurdity of our situation, but also our salvation. No facet of our experience will be left unexplored in Stupendous Tales.

Bio

His mind corrupted by childhood exposure to horror movie matinees, but equally enthralled by the atmosphere of old churches, Simon Pole writes cosmic poetry from the location of Vancouver, British Columbia. A graduate of Harvard University, Simon has continued his studies of what is hidden in the dark. Writing is also in his blood, being the great-great-grandson of early Canadian poet Susie Drury.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Pole
• Release date: Jul 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311060211

Simon Pole

His mind corrupted by childhood exposure to horror movie matinees, but equally enthralled by the atmosphere of old churches, Simon Pole writes cosmic poetry from the location of Kingsville, Ontario. A graduate of Harvard University, Simon has continued his studies of what is hidden in the dark. Writing is also in his blood, being the great-great-grandson of early Canadian poet Susie Drury.

Book preview

The Stairs Outside My Office

I sat in my office, which wasn’t much of an office, studying my dingy curtains and the dust on the surface of my desk which hadn’t been disturbed by a customer sitting down to negotiate with me in what seemed like an awfully long time.

I was a private detective, that’s what my licence said, framed on the wall behind me, looming over my head like a golden halo with its fancy scrolls and official seals: Licensed as a private operator in the four quadrants of earth by the Terran Space Authority. Which was just a lot of bureaucratese that meant the stormtroopers looked the other way when I jimmied open a window or punched a hoodlum out in the street.

It wasn’t much of life, but then again, I wasn’t much of a person. I’d been on the moon for fifteen years, before coming back to earth. The moon takes a lot out of a man, no doubt about it. You sign a contract, and for seven years, and seven years again, you belong to them body and soul. I was a guard, riding up and down the elevators that took the miners into the core. The miners weren’t human. No human being could survive the temperature and the pressure that blasted the ore-face a hundred miles below the crust. We’d found the miners on Jupiter, swimming through the murky gas compacted to the consistency of mud far inside that giant. They were like monkeys, these sailing sacks of gas, and easily trained to work the machinery deep inside the lunar tunnels. Occasionally though, they went off the rails, slightly mad, snapping the machinery and corroding it with their emanations. Then you had to blast them. That’s where I came in.

Fourteen years of frying gaseous membranes kind of colours your view of the universe. For one thing you can never forget that smell, or get it off your skin. There’s no one much to talk to when you’re at work, just those gibbering sacks. I had to quit after fourteen years, or I’d have gone crazy—really crazy, not the kind of waking derangement everyone suffers on the moon. I stuck around one year at the lunar base, cashed in my pension and started up an outfit trading in the ore the mines produced. That failed within six months. I had to wait another six, sleeping in the air ducts and scrounging food before I could hitch a ride off the rock and back to earth.

The P.D.’s certificate was easy to get. A few of the old guards from the rock were in with the stormtroopers, doing the easy work like guarding the compounds where the pursuit vehicles were kept, or riding with the payroll from the bank on Friday afternoon. The stormtroopers always demanded their pay in cash. Funny, maybe they knew something the rest of us didn’t. But what do I know? I hadn’t had a customer in what seemed like months. I’d take payment cash, credit or in kind. Hell, I’d take a customer on for a kind word, just to keep from going rusty.

I was studying patterns in the dust on my desk, like they taught us to do on the moon—looking for the flow of energy and direction in what was seemingly random—when I heard the door open on the street that led to my office. I waited for the step on the stairs. My office was on the second floor. My dingy curtain hid a window that looked out on the sidewalk. If I had enough energy, I would get up and part the curtains and look down at the doorway to my office. Someone had opened it and not yet climbed the stairs. It could be a customer, indecisive, maybe even a little embarrassed about coming to see a private dick. Then again, it could be trouble.

But I didn’t get up, and go over and part my curtains. That was another legacy of fifteen years on the moon. After living so long in low gravity, your movements become sluggish when you return to the real thing—mother earth. Returning guards get a bad name. Lazy bones, yawners, oafs and sluggards. Not many employers will hire you. Only the stormtroopers, really, in any great numbers, who appreciate your experience, and of course your loyalty, because they’re the only ones who will hire you. The only other option is going into business for yourself. Which, as my own case shows, is no expressway to riches.

I opened up the drawer in my desk. This was much easier than going to the window. I lifted up an oily cloth and revealed my blaster, the only possession I brought on my stowaway from the moon. I could break it down in my sleep, as it seemed I frequently did when I worked as a guard. The waking day was no different than the night. Man, am I glad that is over.

I activated the blaster. It blipped and the function light appeared on the grip. I let the oily cloth settle back on top of it, disguising it from view. I left the drawer open. The blaster was there if I needed it.

There were steps on the stairs now, though I hesitate to call them steps. What they exactly were, I’m not sure. Kind of a wet slap. It had rained earlier in the day, I heard that much through my curtain and closed window. I assumed the pavement outside was still damp, though I wasn’t going to get up and check that either. I settled back in my chair, the surplus chair I’d purchased in a bankruptcy sale—it was giving me a bad back, I was sure of it—and waited for this prospective new customer to walk through my door.

You know, I kind of like the earth, even though I was dealt a bad hand when I got back. The air is still free, and though the quality is dubious, it’s better than having a meter on your oxygen tank and paying through the nose with each paycheck for what you use. That’s why you never get ahead on the moon. Not that it’s much better on the earth. Just a different set of bills, and they ding you on the first of each month. The only people who seemed to get ahead were the stormtroopers. They knew where all the honeypots were. I had my blaster, but you’d be a fool to cross them. How could you win against an institution like that?

I looked critically at my office. Did it reek too much of desperation? If you’re a private eye, don’t let a customer think you’ll do anything. That’s an invitation to trouble. I’ve got morals, but they’re a little battered, just like everyone else. Don’t come to a private eye thinking you’ll get a hired gun. There are other people like that, and I can point them out to you. Don’t think because my office has a worn, disintegrating orange carpet on the floor you can turn my head with a flurry of bills. That’ll get me talking, but I have my limits. I always have, even when I was down in the mines on the moon. They were tested, that’s for sure, down in the humidity and pressure underground. But I was kind of surprised when they held up. Limits, you have to know what they are when you become a private eye.

The wet step was now outside my door at the top of the stairs. There was something faintly repulsive in the way the footprints flapped and slid on the stairs. I hoped the customer wasn’t tracking water and mud up from the street outside. I’d have to pay someone to clean it, and my credit was already overextended with the janitors who took care of the building. Never get a janitor angry at you, with all that garbage at their disposal, something was bound to start stinking somewhere. Janitors are also a private detective’s best friend, no one notices them, but they notice everything. They make more money than me, but they can always use a few extra bills. Believe me, it pays to treat the janitor well.

I was surprised by a good, solid knock on the other side of my door. Not wet, or flappy, but professional and confident. Someone was here to do business. I shouted for them to come in.

It was a shock at first to go to the moon. Everything is different there. You have to be conscious of your every move. You can’t just open the door and go for a walk, thinking of something else. There are half-a-dozen things you have to do every hour, on the hour, if you want to stay alive. Some people can’t live well under those conditions, other people thrive. Me, I just sort of got by, after it dawned on me what I signed myself over to, and I counted the years until I could get off the rock. But the original shock was always there. You can’t go back to your bunk and close the door on the moon. Your oxygen tank is always there reminding you what the score is.

The old shock came back when I saw what kind of customer I had standing in my doorway. I don’t mind aliens. I supervised them on the moon. The stupid ones who worked the machines. The smarter ones who roamed the lunar surface as our eyes and ears in the wasteland. But aliens to me belong on the moon and elsewhere. Those fifteen years I was on the moon, I always had this dream of earth as a sanctuary. Someplace I wouldn’t have to continually check myself to see if I was still alive. Where I could open the door and go for a walk, if I wanted to, without having to worry about my air supply—did I have enough credit to pay for it?—or solar radiation. There were aliens on the earth, in their quarters, and I kept out of them. They ruined my dream of what earth should be.

But in business, you take your customers where you get them. I told the alien to come in. He shuffled his four wet feet over the threshold, and closed the door.

The alien was about waist-high to a man. He had four tentacle-like legs that hung down from the central filmy sack where the brains and intelligence was. This part was red and an inner illumination glowed softly through the translucent outer membranes. The glowing red sack pulsed regularly as it processed the Terran air.

I felt kind of sorry for the sack. As it made its way across my worn, orange carpet, depositing a trail of the slick oil that coated its four writhing legs, I could see it was as sluggish in the Terran atmosphere as I was when I returned from the moon. The sack looked like a jellyfish out of water. Which, to a certain extent, he was. This species of alien originated on Titan, where it swam in methane seas. They were brought to earth, on contract, to work underwater at the lip of marine trenches where a wealth of desirable material welled up from inside the earth. Their contracts said they were confined to their quarters in the port cities of the earth. And inside those quarters, the law said they had to stay out of shopping malls and off buses. The Space Authority, who was responsible for their conduct on earth, was tired of the continual lawsuits over ruined carpets, saturated cushions, and treacherously slick linoleum their presence inevitably caused. As far as we could tell, the aliens didn’t mind these restrictions. They preferred life underwater in any event.

It was strange then to see such an alien in my office as I was far from their quarter in this city. This alien had made quite an effort to come and see me. The least I could do was be polite. I waved the alien to my visitor’s chair, fully aware that the moisture secreted by its body would ruin it for future use.

The alien, having clambered aboard my visitor’s chair, and perched himself on the edge of it like a kid in short pants, fumbled with the talkbox that hung on a chain from the top of its red, pulsing sack. One of its slick, tentacled feet turned a switch, and the box squawked on. There was some static, and the noise resolved to a steady hum. Then a mechanical voice issued from the speaker in the middle of the talkbox.

I want you to shoot me, the voice said.

It was shaping up to be that kind of day. I didn’t say anything, hoping the talkbox had made a mistake and garbled the impulses the alien was sending it. But the voice spoke again, and there was no denying it.

I want you to shoot me, the voice said, now more insistent and demanding, I have money to pay you.

Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do it. Killing an alien was illegal, even if they weren’t human. Stormtroopers might not get you right away, but they’d find you eventually when the alien didn’t show up for work underwater. The Space Authority had to account for every jellyfish they brought to earth from Titan, and make sure they all left when their contracts were up. They were picky about that.

I pay in cash, the alien said through its talkbox.

I thought about the time I would have after committing this deed to get off the earth and to the free colonies at the edge of the galaxy, before the stormtroopers caught the scent. But the conditions there were worse than the moon, and I’d be indentured for the rest of my life. If the stormtroopers caught up with me, I’d be put in the penal class, and I’d die, exhausted, within a matter of months. I just couldn’t take the extraterrestrial life anymore. I was on the earth for good.

Sorry, jell, I said to the alien, No amount of money is worth drawing the law down on my head.

I own a great deal of Titan, the mechanical voice said through the talkbox, A large part of the methane sea. I have a licence for the extraction of a thousand cubic tonnes a year. That would support a luxurious life anywhere in the galaxy, indefinitely.

This little guy was persistent. I’d have to understand more of what he was on about before I made my decision. I have to admit, his offer was tempting. It’d been a long time since I had a paying customer, and I was in debt on everything from the hydro bill to the protection taxes paid to the stormtroopers. If I didn’t pay up soon, I’d be going to the penal colonies whether it was my choice or not.

You are in debt? the mechanical voice said, inquisitively.

These little beggars were perceptive. Sometimes I think we underestimated these aliens because they looked like wet sacks of garbage. I wonder what they were really up to in those quarters of theirs, far away from human eyes in the aquarium-like buildings where they lived their communal lives like schools of herring. In terms of technology, these beings were primitive, which is why they came to earth—to learn, and to work, according to the contracts the Space Authority negotiated. But I don’t wonder if their communal lives made them more attuned to what other people were thinking, human or not.

Listen, jell, I said, trying to draw as much human authority into my voice as I could. I’m a licensed professional. See that? I jerked a thumb at the embossed paper on the wall behind me. I know you— (I almost said sacks of garbage, but I caught myself). I know you Titanians can’t read Terran, and have only recently gained an alphabet yourselves. But it means I’ve passed a rigorous examination and periodic polygraph tests. If you want a hired gun, I can point you down the street.

There. I’d managed to stand up for my reputation and my self-respect. Which wasn’t easy, under the circumstances.

I see you are a man of principle, the alien’s talkbox squawked.

I groaned. You couldn’t win. What tack was he starting on now?

I come to you as a— the alien paused, searching for the word. The talkbox squawked again, —as a sentient being of principle.

This was getting loopy. There was nothing to do but sit back and ride it out. I let the alien continue.

I see I was wrong to offer you money first, the alien said, Forgive me. I thought this was the way of human beings. It has been, from my limited experience. But perhaps I have met the wrong human beings. I will tell you why I came here. Then you can make your own decision, quite apart from monetary considerations.

All my decisions were monetary ones these days, it seemed, but I let the alien go on.

I have been too long away from Titan, the alien said, Do you know what it’s like to miss the seas where you grew up from an egg? To miss the pod that you swam with, and ate with in the time of migration as the ocean delicacies rose up from the depths? These are the memories we rhapsodize on with my temporary pod-mates in the substandard housing you humans gave us to live in.

Don’t blame me, I said, I don’t live in a palace either. Blame the stormtroopers, they control all the good housing.

I know, the alien said, I should remember that. All humans aren’t the same. But yet, some are so greedy. Why is this?

It was a good question. One I couldn’t answer. If I could answer that, I wouldn’t have spent fifteen years on the moon working for pesos. I shrugged, a gesture the alien no doubt had come to understand, and loathe, when dealing with human beings.

I’m sick, the alien said.

I gave the contents of my desk drawer a good, hard look. The function light of the blaster was visible through the oily cloth that covered it. An alien virus, that was exactly what I needed today. That was another reason they kept the alien workers in their own quarter. They screened them for every imaginable pathogen, and even tested blindly for bugs they’d never even thought of, but sometimes something slipped through. Back when the Titanians first came down, some fifty years ago, there had been a massive epidemic—a hideous wasting disease that sent people into the streets where they died in bloody heaps. The bug was like the common cold to the Titanians, but to us, it was another Black Death. There were riots, lynching—common stuff—before the stormtroopers restored order. The troopers took over, people were relieved they did, but they never folded up their tents to go home. They still control much of this city, and the country for that matter.

Looking at my blaster was only the typical reaction. A kind of revulsion rippled across me at having the alien in my office. The aliens were still here, on our planet, because we needed them. The only resources left, the only sources of nickel, iron, oil, hydrogen were found in the most inhospitable places on earth and at the most unreachable points in outer space. Our civilization was barely holding its own. It cost almost as much to retrieve these resources as they delivered to us in terms of benefit. It was a zero-sum-gain. A fool’s game played by fools like me for fifteen years on the moon. We needed the aliens because they didn’t cost much. Technology to reach under the sea and into space was just too expensive now. Perhaps at one time we could have afforded it, but we had been on a trajectory downward for a century or more.

But who was I to gripe at the state of things? I had a sick alien in my office. How did that rate in the scheme of a dying planet and a race slowly and surely exhausting itself? Just my own personal punishment I guess. Guilt by association. Think globally, act locally, they said when the crisis was first recognized. I was taking the fall for a hundred years of mistakes made before me. It was that kind of day.

You’re sick, I said, trying to keep the exasperation out of my voice, see a doctor. We have those on Earth, you know.

Ha, ha, the alien’s talkbox barked, in a frightening mechanical approximation of a human laugh, Ha, ha. We Titanians appreciate jokes, even of the Terran variety. That is not generally known about us. When we follow our paths in the oceans of Titan, with our peers in the pod, we have many pranks of a playful kind. Life is easy there, and sweet, not like here on Earth.

I didn’t want to hear about Titan. I didn’t want to hear about the sweet life (call me bitter). And I definitely did not want to hear that mechanical laugh again.

You have five minutes, jell, I said with finality, Tell me why you’re here and what you want. Bear in mind, I’m not going to shoot you.

Cut to the chase? the alien said, a touch of irony in its mechanical voice, if that was possible, Cut to the chase translates a phrase that is very pertinent to us on Titan. Though perhaps this is not relevant to us here at hand. Then again, maybe it does have some bearing. You have ways of dying here on earth?

I didn’t say anything, that only encouraged him.

We all come to death, that is the end of all living beings in the universe, the alien continued without missing a beat. But what happens if you couldn’t die?

Now I was being used as a psychiatrist. I started to get angry. This was beginning to sound like a college dorm conversation, not that I could have ever afforded to go to college. That is why I went to the moon.

Certain qualities of the earth preserve us, the alien said, Our metabolism slows down. We age very slowly. Which is another reason why we like coming here, despite all the hardships—the people who hate us, the slums where we have to live, the difficult work underwater. When we go back to Titan, we are still young, and we have acquired valuable expertise and knowledge. We are big— (again the talkbox stuttered, looking for the right word) —beings there.

There are customs we have, ones that are difficult to replicate on earth, the alien said, But they are as necessary to us as oxygen is to you, a human being. We know that when you travel to another planet you’re like a fish out of water, to use your expression. And I suspect the feeling of being alien is much more than the lack of air to breath. As it is with us.

The jellyfish was reading my mind. It was like he knew everything that happened to me on the moon. The feeling that there was nowhere to rest, that the next step you took would land you somewhere all your training, and even what little intelligence you had, would be totally useless. As helpless as a fish out of water or like a jellyfish squirming on the shore. The moon was like that. You never knew which end was up. I haven’t told many people this—but my first week home on earth, I didn’t leave the cheap apartment I was renting. I just sat on my couch, ordering pizza and enjoying gravity and breathing without a respirator. I could go to the fridge and get a beer without checking a hundred things off on a list to make sure I’d make it back to the couch alive.

When you can’t practise your customs, and you can’t adapt—or they won’t let you adapt—to the new customs of a new planet, then you are alien, the jellyfish said. There is no cure for this. It is only a stasis. You are neither one thing or another. This is extremely distressing. Physically, we are doing well here. We don’t age. We learn from the treasure-trove of knowledge the human race has amassed. But where it counts, in the heart—if we had hearts, again that is an approximate translation by this blasted speaker box—if I had a heart, it would be sore almost to breaking.

I didn’t say anything. I said the alien had five minutes, and I was going to hold him to it. In spite of that, I had come to admire the alien during the short time he had sat in my office. As he perched on my visitor’s chair, dripping the oil from his tentacles all over it, there was a poignancy in his being so far from home. He spoke with such dignity and such assurance, in such difficult circumstances, that he put all the astronauts who explored the planets of our solar system to shame. You read about them in the history books. But this alien, this poor, home-sick jellyfish, no one would ever remember him. He was probably already forgotten by his kin on Titan. He had been too long on earth.

I have been too long on earth, the alien said, again as if reading my mind (was he watching me closely? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know where his eyes were), it’s not that I particularly liked the place, but an inertia sets in. Every day you get up and go to the mine under the ocean. You work and come home to the slum. You spend time with your pod-mates then rest. When the night ends, you do the same again. It’s a rut, one that you can’t escape from, especially when it costs so much, and it’s so difficult to leave the earth.

Or the moon, I added in my head. It took me fifteen years. I wondered how long the alien had been here on earth. I couldn’t tell by looking at him, I didn’t know what the signs of age were for these Titanians. I only knew what he told me.

But I am sick, like I told you, the alien said, sick unto death, as you say. On Titan, when this sickness begins, and your pod-mates see it, they know—and you know—you only have days to live. It is the natural way we end. Preparations are made. Rituals are enacted in the ocean. And when you expire, as is inevitable within days, you are consigned to the hope of what lies beyond. This is how it has always been. Except on earth, where conditions make a mockery of the old ways and the old rituals are ineffectual. It is very distressing.

You can’t die, I chimed in, And your pod-mates are waiting for you to die. Is that it?

That’s exactly it, the alien said, with a note of pain in the mechanical voice, if that was possible, They’ve tried everything and they don’t know what to do. For them, it’s like living with a dead man—a corpse that sleeps with them at night, and a wraith who works with them by day under the ocean.

I’m going to deduce something, I said, using my powers of investigation, the ones that earned me that certificate. You’re dying, but your pod-mates, they can perform the rituals that mark what is happening, but they can’t hasten the end in any way, is that right?

I knew I came to the right person, the alien said through its talkbox, suddenly grateful, you truly understand.

Why come to me then? I asked, because I didn’t yet understand, There are other ways to go. Some of them are right outside this office. Step into the street, get run over by a truck. Go to a spaceport, stand underneath a rocket as it takes off. They’ll never find all of your atoms.

That’s exactly it, the alien replied, I need to collect all of my atoms. They need to be returned to Titan.

The whole thing fell into place, and I at last understood what was going on.

Your ashes must be spread over the methane oceans of Titan, I said, And you want me to make that possible by killing you and, let me guess, returning your remains there.

You are a very perceptive private investigator, the alien said with admiration, One who richly deserves his professional certificate.

Hold on, jellyfish, I said to myself, flattery will get you nowhere. I haven’t yet decided to take your case. Though how I even came to be considering helping you would be a topic to think about on a rainy day. For the moment, I had to determine if it was financially and legally possible to help the jellyfish. Only then could I make a professional decision.

As I said I can pay you well, the jellyfish said, sensing my deliberations.

I understand that once we get to Titan, I paused, "Once I get to Titan with your remains. But how can we—I mean I—afford to get there? We’ll need a ton of cash, and not just for spacefare across the solar system. You know how many officials we’ll have to bribe along the way? About a hundred. That is, if we even get off the earth. The stormtroopers have a whole office dedicated to watching for schemes like this. Some of them can’t be bribed. Though I just wonder. Let me make a call."

The alien settled back, confident that I was on his side. Now he was getting that oily stuff all over the chair. I’d have to throw it away. Though, if I took his case—if it was doable—and we succeeded, I wouldn’t be coming back here. To heck with the chair, and this seedy office. He could oil it up all he wants. Make yourself comfortable, I said as I waited for the call to go through.

I was calling someone I used to know on the moon. Someone who spent fifteen years there, like me, but who came back to earth, and was a success—unlike me. You wouldn’t see him skulking in a dirty office, pretending to be an employable private detective. He had a good job, working for the stormtroopers, guarding their payroll as it was transported from the bank. He knew all those guys, their best friend—pat’em on the back and howya-doin-Frank—all that sort of stuff. If anyone could get me off the earth, it was him. I guess I was in the with the alien. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it.

Hello, give me Smith, I said, when someone picked up the phone. I could hear the revving of supercharged engines in the background. I’d reached Smith in the garage, where they repaired the interceptors the stormtroopers drove and put the armor-plating on the trucks that carried the payroll. He was always handy on the moon, and he made himself useful at stormtrooper central, up on the hill that commanded the city.

I pulled the phone away as Smith screamed hello. Working in the garage, and by the big machinery on the moon had made him partially deaf. The revving of engines in the background didn’t help.

Smitty, I yelled back, It’s me your old pal, Crip Hughes. Remember, fifteen years on the moon? Yeah, that Hughes. Don’t pretend you don’t know, you old rascal. Yeah, I’m doing fine. Business is not so good, though it looked up today. Listen, is this a private line?

Smitty bellowed he would have to change lines and went outside to take the call on his portable. This would be a private conversation, untapped by the stormtroopers. There was also considerably less yelling, as the noise of the garage was gone. I pictured him sitting on the green slope of Stormtrooper’s Hill, as it was called, looking down on the city. If he looked hard enough, he could see the down-at-the-heels street where I had my office.

I need a favour, Smitty, I said to him, in a quieter voice this time. We talked it over. Smitty dropped his voice close to whisper. It was a hard to hear him. I imagined he was afraid of microphones in the immaculate grass around him. This was not much of an exaggeration. The stormtroopers watched, reviewed, and listened to everything. That’s why it was so hard to get off the earth.

Smitty and I made a deal. He would get me the pass I needed, signed by the proper stormtrooper in question, someone who was a liaison with the Space Authority. All I had to do was flash this, along with a little cash here and there (and there would be a lot of here and there—at least a hundred Authority officials) and I could go as far as I wanted in the solar system. Smitty was taking a big risk in doing this. If the stormtroopers found out, they wouldn’t kill him—at least not directly. He’d be exiled off the earth, to one of the penal colonies, probably around Neptune. There he’d be worked until he died, in a bare camp without colour or happiness. It was the torture of waking death, and then death. Months of hell with the camp doctor keeping you alive until it wasn’t worth feeding you anymore.

But I’d saved Smitty’s life on the moon. I didn’t have to. No one else would have, but I did it. Waded into the scalding steam where Smitty had gone down with the aliens writhing and gibbering around him. He could have been smothered to death, scalded to death, drowned or crushed as the rubble washed out of the minehead. I dragged him out of the tunnel, and up to the surface where the medic looked him over in a bored way. Goner, the medic said before moving on to more pressing matters (arranging cargo for the smuggling operation he ran on the side). I stayed there, made sure Smitty got the medicine he needed (paying for some of it out of my own pocket—another reason I owed them fifteen years on the moon). And arranged a fill-in for the shifts Smitty would miss, as per his contract. That cost another small fortune that came out of my wages. Still, it was worth it in the end when I saw Smitty get out of his bunk and go back to work.

Smitty and I made a deal over the phone that day. He would arrange the paperwork, and even phone ahead and grease the wheels for me—vouching here and there I could be trusted, render all possible assistance, do not search any bags this man might be carrying. That was his part of the bargain. For my part, he told me I had to do right by this alien. Fulfill the promise I made to him, get his remains back to Titan. You might think this was a strange vow for Smitty to extract from me, but then you’d be thinking of the old Smitty before his accident. After he recovered, left his bunk and went back to work, Smitty was a different man. He was gentle now, where before he had been indifferent. He was still a good guard. In fact, after his accident he was a better guard. He seemed to know what the continuum of force was now, what level of pressure should be applied, and where.