Episode 5, Stelzer’s Travels

As it turned out, there was no champagne.  Not for me nor, I suspect, for anyone else on the lander.  The night we arrived, Siegfried Mueller, the captain of the PLS Starbound let me know he was not at all pleased with the failure of his crew to discern my sub­terfuge.

“All they had to do,” he said, “was punch one button on their com­puter clipboard and they would have seen exactly what Hedge­wick really looked like.  And you practically gave your­self away with those stupid questions.  My fault, I sup­pose, in sending Fletcher and Slocum.  They’re backups.  Our regular crew would have flagged you in a minute, but the poor chaps had already taken two trips down gathering infor­mation and I didn’t have the heart to force them into a third.  Their nerves were shot as it was.  Can’t say I blame them.  What a mess you’ve made of the place!”

“What are you going to do with me?” I asked.

“I’m not going to do anything.  It will be up to the home office to sort things out.  They’re not going to be happy, I can tell you that.  The last thing Luxenben needs is an­other real estate agent.  On the other hand, my guess is that the investigators will be inclined toward leniency.  If they do threaten to send you back, you can always claim refugee status on the grounds that your life would be endangered.”

“Well, not my life exactly…I couldn’t honestly claim that. . .”

“Nonsense, Stelzer.  We’ve gathered enough information to confirm that every living creature, man and beast, on Earth is imperiled.  We gave you the chance to escape and you took it.  I say, good for you.  Who in his right mind wouldn’t want to do the same?

“I’m afraid it’s your young friend who’s going to bear the consequences of your little masquerade.”

“Neuman?  He didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Oh, I’m afraid he did.  Had he spoken up when you launched into that impersonation of yours, I’d be talking to Hedgewick now instead of you.”

“But Hedgewick didn’t show.”

“Couldn’t show.  We’ve learned now that he was tied up in one of your infernal traffic jams.  Got to East Pershing just a few minutes after you took off.  No question as to Hedgewick’s veracity.  Mr. Neuman confirmed that there was a traffic jam earlier this evening.  Heard about it on your car radio.”

“He knew about Hedgewick all along?”

“Absolutely not.  We don’t tell our invitees any more than they need to know.  The first time Mr. Neuman was even aware of a second person was when he overheard your conversation with Fletcher.  But that’s beside the point.  He should have fingered you.”

“But it was entirely my idea.  It caught him by surprise.  And the next thing you know, we were on board.  He didn’t have time to react.”

“That’s not quite true, Mr. Stelzer.  I am told he did react but in precisely the wrong way.  Welcoming you aboard with that stupid flourish of his.  Had he acted responsibly, we would have sent you packing and found out what was holding up Mr. Hedgewick.  The bottom line is that the company was counting on getting a person they selected and they’re getting one they did not.”

“Wait a minute.  You’re telling me that Neuman was selected too?  Neuman?”

“That’s rather obvious, isn’t it?”

“But why in the world would you. . .”

“I’m afraid I can’t answer that.  This trip is being conducted under the auspices of the company’s research branch and no information concerning its operations can be made public at this time.  But, believe me, selected or not, your young friend’s going to hear about it when we get back.”

“You mean he’s actually going to be punished.”

“I mean, Mr. Stelzer, that under our arrangement with Mr. Neuman there were obligations on both sides-absolute trustworthiness underlying them all.  He had every indication that we were fulfilling ours.  Regrettably he did not feel it necessary to reciprocate.”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean to be. . .”

“That will be up to the investigators to decide.  For now my instructions are to keep both of you confined to quarters except for an hour each day in our fitness center if you like.  Your workouts will be staggered, of course.  There are bound to be interrogations and we wouldn’t want to muddy your responses, would we?”

“But I would like to. . .”

“I’m afraid my time is limited, Mr. Stelzer.  Petty Officer Kellog will see you to your cabin and the exec will check up on you shortly.”

*    *    *

And as I recorded on the first pages of this journal, Executive Officer Brimley did indeed join me in my cabin minutes after I was confined to it.  So, as promised, I have brought my journal up to date.  If, in so doing, I have left the reader with unanswered questions, please understand that you have no more than I.  Hopefully, time will clear things up for us both.

*    *    *

Each of the ten days our ship spent in transit has further contributed to my peace of mind.  Past events have slipped from my consciousness as effortlessly as our ship slipped away from the planet on which they took place.  And present events have taken their place in an entirely agreeable manner.  Whereas technically I remain confined to quarters, my conducted trips to and from the fitness center-later extended to the ship’s library as well-have left me with a sense of awe for the extraordinary construction of this ship, the amenities it offers the crew, its superior maintenance, and its technological wonders.  Moreover, I could not have asked for better attendance to my personal well-being.  My hosts have been consistently civil, their staff solicitous, the food excellent, and, as I noted before, the accommodations comfortable.  True, there are uncertainties ahead as to the welcome Neuman and I will receive thanks to my stowaway status, but, by and large, I could not be more pleased with my sudden decision.

As I mentioned, another amenity available to me was the ship’s library with its fine collection of Luxenben travel books.  Now that I have perused-not read, mind you-a number of them (I’ll explain my difficulty with Luxan text later) I am all the more keen to set foot on Luxenben’s soil.  If the planet even begins to live up to its photographers’ images, then my experiences of the last several days will have been just a prelude to what lies ahead.

*    *    *

One group of memories that have been slower to recede than the rest are, understandably enough, those relating to my children.  With but one day to go to our arrival, I feel the need to consciously prepare myself by mentally cleaning house, as it were, in much the same way one discards superfluous furnishings in moving from an old house to a new.  If this seems unfeeling, forgive me, but one cannot live on two planets at once.  I had made a choice and now I had no alternative but to see it through.

Thus to gather up memories for disposal, I allow my thoughts to drift back through space-time to the den in what had been my home little more than a week before.

In my imagination I see a television screen on which a basketball game is underway and before it sit my two preteen boys in their accustomed places.  I study their impassive faces and wonder how they feel about my mysterious disappearance.  Mixed emotions, I would guess.  Certainly they feel a personal loss but, truth be told, I played but a minor role in their lives and my guess was that, now that a number of days had gone by, their grief would be contained.

I say “mixed emotions” because I limited their television viewing time to a few hours a week and they didn’t like it.  As they must have seen it, in pretending to be the head of the house, I was a usurper to the throne-the rightful occupant being the electronic jinni in the den.  Now that I was gone, they were free to elevate it to its rightful position and prostrate themselves before it.  After all, was not life to be defined as a day-by-day, hour-by-hour exchange of time for sen­sation?  Let others be dis­tracted by extraneous endeavors, they would keep their eyes fixed on the screen; time frittered away elsewhere was fulfillment lost forever.

They would be aware, of course, that their mother occupied the house as well, but they knew the television set to be a tolerant monarch.  So long as she kept her allegiances straight and did nothing to interfere with court functions, she would be entitled to come and go as she pleased, to make meals, and to attend to her other domestic duties.  And once his majesty had re­tired for the night, he would not begrudge their giving their mother a warm hug or two.  Indeed, she might even be allowed into the den for occasional thirty-second visitations whilst court was still in session.  Not every commercial, after all, was worth watching twenty times over.

But my imagination might be doing my children an injustice by painting too bleak a picture.  The television set, after all, did not deny them all conversation.  The younger, I would guess, would be the more curious.

“Mom’s selling the car, isn’t she?”

“Guess so.  She never liked to drive dad’s car anyway.  Too big, she said.  So there’s no use for it just sitting around here collecting rust.  He’s not going to need it anymore, I guess.”

 ”After he drowned?  Hardly.”

“But nobody knows that for sure.  Dredging the river didn’t turn up anything.”

“They didn’t expect to.  Not after the five days it took before that guy on the mower stumbled on the car.  You saw what its like on the six-o’clock news.  Downstream from that dock the river goes into a big, underground conduit.  The current’s something awful.”

“Couldn’t he and Neuman just have gone off somewhere?”

“How?  Keys were in the car.  Plenty of gas.  Nothing in walking distance but those factories.  And all of them were closed for the night.  No footprints leading away.”

“But why would he go into that filthy water?”

“Nobody knows.  Maybe that kid Neuman got into trouble and dad went in after him.  Awfully dangerous trying to rescue somebody like that.”

“I guess so, but why would Neuman go in the first place?”

“Beats me.  They say he was crazy enough to do anything.”

“Not according to that old rabbi.”

“But maybe he’s a little crazy too.”

“I thought he seemed like a real nice guy.  You see the way he was all shook up?  Telling that reporter he blamed himself for sending them off.”

“What probably shook him up was losing all those books of his.  You know rabbis and their books.”

“Where’d the books go, I wonder?  They jump in the water too?”

“Look, would you stop asking stupid questions?  How am I supposed to know stuff when even the police can’t figure everything out?”

“Because, smart ass, you’re supposed to know everything.”

“Shut up, will you?  The game’s starting up again.”

I stopped this unfair portrayal and wound the script back to the beginning.  Under their mother’s aegis, my children would more likely have abstained from tele­vision alto­gether for a period commensurate with their loss.  I could even imagine their inventing a touch­ing little farewell cer­emony and, in tribute, lowering the antenna to half mast.

Whatever the case, I cut the cord to my past and gazed expectantly out the porthole at the sleek side of our spaceship as it wove through the multidimen­sioned warp of space-time.  We were approaching Luxenben-according to everything I’d gathered so far, the most contented of all the known planets in the galaxy.

*    *    *

CHAPTER 6. VENTURELAND

 Luxenben certainly knew how to create a good first im­pression.  Based on what I have seen thus far of the planet during these first two months, the travel books had not exaggerated.  One had only to feast one’s eyes on Luxenben’s shining vistas, or look upon the happy, well-fed faces of her children, or witness the smooth functioning of her en­terprises, to conclude that this was what Earth was not: a functional society.

It would seem natural at this point to illustrate my thesis by launching into a description of Luxenben’s physi­cal makeup.  And it is indeed tempting to awe the reader by expounding upon this or that technological embel­lishment that adorned this handsome planet.  But what would be the point?  Contrivances so advanced can no more be copied than those found in futuristic comic books and computer games; it must be developed bottom-up from principles that Earthling scientists are not yet even aware and, it hardly need be added, I have not the wit to comprehend let alone describe.  Allow me, then, to merely observe that Lux­en­ben was as exotic as one could possibly imagine of a distant planet-the skilled hands of nature and her denizens vying with one another to be the more spectacularly in­ventive.

With so much to relate, I will skim over the preliminary steps by which my hosts eased me into my present comfortable circumstances.  As it turned out, the captain’s predictions regarding my reception here was unduly cautious.  Without any special pleading on my part, the company’s immigration examiners characterized my escape from Earth’s life-threatening environment as a victim’s justified act of desperation.  Indeed, whereas none of them said so explicitly, they seemed to admire my decisiveness and the cool manner in which it had been employed, and who was I to argue?  Accordingly, my infraction was judged no more than a misdemeanor and my sentence limited to the time already served in confinement aboard the PLS Starbound.  My official status was to be the same as that of their hundreds of other “guest specimens,” with all the privileges and obligations that pertained thereto-more of which will be discussed later.

The only point of contention arose when I was confronted with their standard entry form containing the requirement that all newly-arrived specimens spend two weeks on display in the New Acquisition Arena.  However I might resent being the object of such intense public scrutiny, customary procedures had to be followed, I was told, and, in any case, it was only for a fortnight.  Fortunately the form shown me also contained a conspicuously blank line at the bottom for the consenting specimen’s signature that, I gathered, was required prior to his departure from his native planet.  I contended that, since they could not produce such a formally executed document, I was under no such obligation.  To my surprise, they accepted this rather legalistic argument and, with a shrug or two, waived the obligation.

When I had cleared up my situation, I inquired as to Neuman’s but learned nothing.  I was told only that he was being processed separately and that was that.  It occurred to me that, since his immigration into Luxenben had gone through normal channels, he must have signed the exhibit consent form and thus would have no way of escaping its obligation.

Having done their job, the committee had me escorted without further delay to the company’s zoological garden.  There I underwent a battery of evaluation tests-a process that, I am happy to say, took only a few hours and produced a favorable result.  Thence I was taken to the Upper Level Mentalities House, commonly known as the Upsem Dorm, where I was released in the custody of Matilda, the dorm’s house mother.

Matilda took me around the building’s communal areas, then to the room she had assigned me that, while adequate, fell below my expectations.  I made no complaint about the Spartan space; however, recalling the sensitivity of my examiners to the plight of refugees, I decided to press my luck.  I had not survived Earth’s treacherous conditions unscathed, I began apologetically, and continued in the same vein when it appeared that Matilda was listening sympathetically.  My prostate problems made the distance to the hall bathroom of more importance than I cared to admit.  And I feared the partitions might not be soundproof enough to avoid disturbing my neighbors with the loud, hacking cough to which I was sometimes prone.  Moreover I was concerned lest my frequent hot baths to ameliorate my sciatica monopolize the facilities.  The good creature needed no more prodding.  Promising to make amends for the hardships I had endured, she whisked me up one more flight of stairs and installed me in one of the dorm’s suites complete with a private bath, spacious closet, a coffee maker, and a large writing desk overlooking the grounds.  Before leaving, Matilda gave the room one last check, called my attention to the residents’ information booklet on the desk, and assured me that I need but call on her if I needed help.  Now alone, I flung myself down on the bed and found the mattress to be every bit as good as I had hoped.  My first day on Luxenben had gone well.