Far-out Show (9781465735829) (3 page)

“Reprocessing. Perform the challenges. Here
perfect
has other ideas attached.”

“It would reassure me to know which other
contestants made it safely to the surface even though I must still
attempt the tests to amuse the home audience.” He straightened his
hat and touched Wowseyla as he added, “Also to know if you are
detecting any signals you cannot account for, ones that might hint
of problems I should check on.”

“They warned you that the transport risk is
more than they at first expected because the atmosphere here is not
as they had expected so what they told you when you signed up to be
a contestant did not hold. But the game rules say no one may tell
you about the other contestants. Not whether or where they landed
safely. Not whether or where were captured and killed by the
locals.”

“What about signals from sources you cannot
identify?”

“None are registering.”

Nerber raised both arms in a gesture of
excitement. “
Pipswitch doogely
. All is acceptable then. I
proceed for the glory of appeasing the blood lust of the home
audience,” Nerber muttered. “We all know that they say other if
asked by authority persons but many of the audience secretly hope
for game contestants to be killed as long as they get to watch all
the gore and details.

“Appeasing the audience means being widely
known as a hero - and being made rich,” Wilburps reminded him.

“What better motivational excuses could I
have? Does it be full of any sense to say phone home, Wilburps? I
am being sense filled with that as a thought to say coming from I
have no hint of where. But I have arrived intact and I am ready for
the next challenge.”

Penelope Regimentator, known by many who knew
her whether they were happy about that fact or not only as
Reggie
, was a calculating user. This morning she was also in
her own mind on the job as an
enhancer
. She parked along
this urban back street lined for several blocks on one side by
four-story apartment buildings and on the other side by row homes,
all the structures long time occupants of their spots.

She got out of the car she had borrowed for
the day and looked it over. She had stopped on her way here to
scatter some bags of loose dirt over it to make it less noticeable
and, as she intended, driving fast down the expressway coming here
had blown off the excess loose material and left the medium blue
car a dull blue-gray. She would wash it before she returned it and
there would be no obvious trail back to her. Details like that were
important to her sense of how things should be done.

Descriptors commonly used for her were “not
to be trusted” and “sneaky but not all that bright”. She was also
“on the wrong side of forty”, and “sort of scrunched down” because
although of average height she often looked shorter as she skulked
around hunched over to be less noticeable. Her medium-length
graying hair had a way of accumulating static electricity so it
stood on end even when she was calm, giving her a fright wig look
that often alarmed others who had to get near her. She was thin
because her nervous energy had her moving much of the time when she
was awake so fat didn’t have time to find a place to settle. She
had pale, unhealthy looking skin because she distrusted the sun not
to do bad things to her and being out in it also meant she wasn’t
skulking and she really liked to skulk.

She chose her clothes to be durable, easy to
maintain, and sort of automatic camouflage because of their drab,
unpatterned dull colors and unremarkable design. Today she wore
what she considered to be close to an ideal outfit - sweat pants,
hooded sweatshirt, plain T-shirt, and plain sneakers. All the items
in shades of gray; none of those grays matching one another or her
hair which might have made her even less noticeable.

Checking that she had the essential items for
this mission in her fanny pack, Regimentator hurried down the
street on the roadway side of the line of parked cars. She moved in
full skulk mode with cartoon-character furtiveness. She stopped
every few yards to crouch and look around for anyone who might be
noticing her although she couldn’t imagine why anyone would.

This was a one-way street and she had
deliberately parked a full block ahead of the old parked car that
was the focus of her interest. That was to minimize the likelihood
that the man she didn’t want to see her would do so. She intended
to enhance his parked car with an electronic tracking device so she
could follow him discreetly with no risk of losing track of him and
no risk of him noticing her because she had to follow too
closely.

She had that small device stuck to one side
of a square of extra strength double-stick tape, ready to be
attached to her target’s car in some out of sight place. Since, as
she had seen when she drove by it on her way to find a parking
spot, his old car was as incidentally dirt-covered as hers was
deliberately she would have to get close to find a place to firmly
attach the tape but that shouldn’t be a real problem. She would
only need to rub clean a spot two inches square and the job was
done.

As she eagerly approached the target car she
made her last minute moves. She took the prepared square of
double-stick tape from her fanny pack. Using a razor blade she had
cut out a section of the protective paper cover and affixed the
dime-width sized electronic device to the exposed glue, leaving the
outer part of the covering on so she wouldn’t stick to that
side.

Holding the square device-side-down in her
left palm, she silently rehearsed how she would peel off the cover
from the other side of the tape so it would be ready to stick to
the car but keep it in that hand so her right was free to rub a
spot clean of dirt so it would get a good grip before she attached
it. Satisfied that she was ready, she went through her
crouch-and-look-around-for-observers routine twice in the last few
yards. You can maybe never be too careful. She really liked to
sneak around and do secret stuff that would pay off for her.

She got to the target car and moved along it
on the driver’s side, around the back between it and a parked
rental van, and back up on the pavement side. She was looking for
the best place to tag it but was distracted when she looked in
through the car window and saw two cartons on the back seat. Her
instinct shouted in her mind’s ear that those might be important
and she should try to find out what those were.

Then she heard the whistling – and cussed to
herself. She knew who the whistler was and what it meant that the
sound was getting louder at a fast rate. He was coming out of his
apartment building and literally any second now would see and
probably recognize her near his car. That would seriously
compromise her plans.

So she yanked off the cover of the second
sticky side of the tape and slapped the tape and tracking device on
the passenger side door. In her hurried fumbling she managed to get
the tape’s second surface cover stuck to the outer side of the
device which made its true nature less obvious. She scooted away up
the street and stepped in between parked vehicles so she would be
out of sight when the whistler stepped outside since he, being a
generally paranoid type, would scan the area for anyone whom he
should wonder or worry about. She hoped her interest in him was
going to finally pay off.

Ms. Regimentator was always on the lookout
for someone to set things up that she could swoop in on at a late
stage and get the profit from. Taking credit was of secondary
importance but was a plus she was always more than willing to grab
too. She has a wide range of areas where she made a point to know
what might be worth real money and what work or discovery might be
needed to capitalize on that item. She was averse to the work
aspect, telling herself that she was a specialist. Her skill was in
recognizing who had done the work but then, as they were about to
reach payoff time, made the mistake of telling someone who would
repeat the claim so she would hear about it in any number of
roundabout ways.

Over several years she had added the name of
George Krinkle to the Rolodex she had found at a garage sale and
used as her fast and convenient way to remember who might be of use
to her, along with a note about the areas where each was likely to
present an opening for her.

She made a note on his card each time she
found a small newspaper item about his claims, theories, or
investigations that all seemed to involved extraterrestrial beings
and their interest in Earth. After seeing him in a thirty-second
report on the TV news on a slow news day she had a premonition that
this weirdo could actually make an important discovery. When that
happened she wanted to be there to witness it – and to sell the
first photos and story about it to the news media.

When she heard on today’s morning radio news
about the latest round of suspicions that alien beings had invaded
overnight she checked her Rolodex and decided that almost certainly
George Krinkle would be hot on the trail of any such creatures. Her
notes suggested that he kept up to date with a proverbial three
tons of resources on such things so he had a better than average
chance of finding something the news people would take at least a
momentary interest in, whatever it finally turned out to be. She
then made the judgment that it was worth her while to be ready,
camera in hand, if he found something newsworthy, sad as it was how
that term had deteriorated over the years. This was her plan and
mission today.

George Krinkle stopped whistling as he
stepped out the door of his rundown apartment building and looked
around warily for any movement. He was thirty-two and super
nerdy-looking in dark-rimmed glasses and a hat, jacket, shirt,
trousers, sock, and even shoes each a different pattern of several
muted colors and featuring vaguely star- or planet-shaped
designs.

Zippedy Jones, twenty, with an unkempt mop of
dark hair and a vacant air-head expression, ambled up the opposite
side of the street. He passed Regimentator who was hiding between
the parked cars on the other side of the street from him without
noticing her since she was crouched down and not moving and he was
in his own world in his head.

After a check for traffic Jones crossed the
street to join Krinkle.

“Is anybody following you, Zippedy?”

Jones looked around, almost falling over as
he tried to make a full turn in place without moving his feet.
“Don't see nobody, Mr. Krinkle. I just got off the bus at the
corner two blocks up and you're the only one I've seen. You got
your special clothes on, that must mean somethin'.”

Krinkle whispered, “I think aliens have
invaded for sure this time. My camouflage and distraction outfit is
so I don't panic 'em before I'm sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“I telescope-spotted something up by the moon
but as usual the authorities won't listen to me without solid
proof.”

“You saw the man in the moon?”

“No, there's a thing staying still beside the
moon. Space junk would move in orbit. A thing that stays in the
same place has to be using power to do that so it must be a
UFO.”

“So you’re gonna catch it?”

“I'm only going to locate the critters who
landed from it and call in the Army to take care of them. With me
getting proper credit of course. I may need your help with my
equipment,” Krinkle said, pointing to a large cardboard carton on
the back seat of his car. Small flaps cut in the right side and the
top exposed the currently unextended telescoping rods of two
rabbit-ear type antennas. Large flaps in the front and the left
side revealed a device inside with multiple dials and switches that
could be observed and reached through those flaps. “That my FODD,
my foreign origin detection device. I learned how to make it in a
dream. It should let me tell from a distance who's not an
earthling.”

“Does it work?” Jones asked, fascinated with
the idea.

“Uh, I haven't detected any aliens with it
yet to be sure but I have confidence in it. The smaller thing
beside it in the other box is my jammer.”

“You take your jammies out for car
rides?”

“My jam
mer
. It's to jam the aliens'
communications systems so they can't call for help as I close in on
‘em.”

“You throw jam on their radios so they're too
gunked up to talk into?” Jones seldom had an easy time with more
than the most basic statements but he was amiable and willing to
help with grunt work if you gave him detailed instructions and
supervised him closely.

“No, my jammer detects their wave lengths and
automatically swamps those with music off the radio. Mostly country
music since that’s popular around here. The aliens can't hear one
another because of all the broken hearts and unfaithful boy or girl
friends.”

“Won't that make the aliens not trust
cowboys?”

“A small price to pay for catching them
before they can learn our secrets. Let’s do this thing. George
Krinkle and Zippedy Jones are off.”

“That's what my mom keeps saying.”

Krinkle went around behind his car to get in
on the driver’s side.

Jones stepped over to the front passenger
door to wait for it to be unlocked so he could get into seat. He
noticed the item stuck to the door, pulled that off – and after a
cursory glance at it, tossed it over his shoulder. Krinkle was
unlocking his door and didn’t see that.

The tape and its electronic payload hit the
front of the rental van - and stuck there.

Krinkle drove himself and Jones away without
seeing that.

Regimentator had turned around so she could
watch the men by peeking down the pavement side of the parked cars.
When Jones got into Krinkle’s car she moved around, always in a
full crouch which was hard on her thigh muscles but necessary for
sneakiness, so when they drove by her location she was on the
pavement out of sight rather than still between the vehicles where
Krinkle might have seen her. She didn’t know if Jones had noticed
her when he passed on the opposite side of the street but the fact
that Krinkle drove away without looking more than routinely
paranoid suggested the young guy at least hadn’t mentioned seeing
anything unusual.