-SALOON AT THE EDGE OF EVERYWHERE-

Chapter Twenty Eight

The best thing about Nexus travel to Rufus was that because no one was charged for using it, you didn’t need to pay for a ticket on some fancy cruise liner. When he said hitch a ride that is exactly what he meant to do. He had been hitchhiking since he was fifteen, ditching school and roaming up and down the California coast. And besides, Rufus knew a guy.

In actual fact, the guy was not so much a guy at all, but a large, silvery insect-like creature who was more of a hermaphroditic drone, but you get the idea. His name was Wasilahskiphara-something-or-other, but Rufus had shortened that considerably to just ‘Skip”. Skip was a Vaccurian, but more importantly, he was the Head Cargo Chief of the Hub, and that made him ‘the guy’.

When Rufus sauntered into the main cargo hanger, all the busy aliens in the place stopped working and cheered him. Rufus waved both hands in the air like a politician during primaries. I hope that doesn’t happen again, he thought to himself, feeling his cheeks turn pink. Once Rufus got to know you, you couldn’t shut him up, but he was really a very shy person.

Rufus looked for Skip in his office, but as usual, the Head Cargo Chief was hard at work, directing countless crates and storage units in and out and all around the Hub. “Rufus, my man, the man of the hour, eh?” was what Skip said when Rufus at last tracked him down. He went on, “We didn’t even know the whole thing was happening from way down here, do you believe it?”

Rufus wasn’t interested in telling the story, but got sucked in to it anyway. When he was done, Rufus asked about a ride to Earth, and Skip told him, “Sure, there’s a Tinnjjee freighter heading that way in an hour. I’ll clear it with the Captain. Just don’t be late, eh?” And with that, Skip was back at work.

Rufus was back in less than an hour with the Professor in tow. The Captain of the freighter was a Tinnjjee, a member of a race descended from crustaceans of some sort, and not a race that appealed all that much to humans on a visual level. Not to be unkind, but they were in fact rather ugly to human eyes. If you have ever been on a Southern California beach and caught one of those little sand crabs, you know, the little gray ones that leave the ‘V’ shape in the sand each time a wave recedes, and if you can imagine one of those that was five feet tall and standing upright, then you have the general idea.

“I saw you on the news,” said the Captain of the small freighter to Rufus in what sounded like pretty good English, as he and the Professor stepped into the small crew lounge and galley. Speaking for these hard-shelled beings involved mouthparts that looked like hacksaw and razor blades imbedded in a blood-red food processor. Or maybe a dispose all reflects the idea better. As if the mouth were not bad enough, it was surrounded by small, segmented crab-like arms with claws that flicked at each other over the mouth as though they were rubbing together in glee, or perhaps anticipation.

“You are srippery, srippery rike an ear,” said the Captain.

“Excuse me?” said Rufus.

“Rike an ear,” repeated the Captain helpfully. “You know, it’s the rong fish, the rong fish.” Here he stretched out two armored arms in front of himself as if indicating length.

Rufus was baffled.

“Ahem,” said the Professor, “If I may interject, I believe that the letter L is missing from their vocabulary, and is therefore unpronounceable to them. I think that he is saying that you are slippery like an eel, no doubt in reference to your little adventure. Can’t say I don’t agree either, eh?”

Ah, the long fish thought Rufus, getting it at last.

Now you may recall Ned knowing something that Rufus did not know, and now is the time to let you know as well. As Rufus and the Professor made themselves comfortable on a worn out bench in the crew lounge of the freighter, all the other members of the group who had joined in the heroic rescue mission were being escorted to luxurious suites aboard a brand new cruise liner. They were all guests of the multi-galactic Enzyme Corporation, a human-alien hybrid conglomeration which owned, among very many other things, the cruise liner that was hijacked by the Wasp Whips, as everyone, much to Rufus’s delight when he later learns of it, is now calling the race that spawned the piratical teenagers.

They had all looked for Rufus, but due to his penchant for slipping away unannounced like a ‘srippery ear’, and the fact that he had turned off his cell phone, they just plain missed him.

The cruise liner that his friends were taken to had a dining room that smelled like a seafood buffet because the cruise ship had a seafood buffet. The freighter’s crew lounge smelled like a seafood buffet also, but not in a good way. While the rest of the heroes were drinking free champagne and doing personal interviews for various news outlets, Rufus and the Professor ate cheese and crackers that Rufus had brought with him. But that is not to say that Rufus did not put his time to good use.

“Professor,” Rufus said after their light snack, “do you mind if I try out that memory stone of yours?”

“Oh, by all means, my boy, it hardly belongs to me, don’t you know?” said the kindly old man.

The slowest part of Nexus travel is usually waiting your turn at the Nexus Point. It has to be clear at each end for your run in and your exit. The freighter had a slightly lower priority than the cruise liner, so even though Rufus and the Professor left an hour ahead of the others, they were bumped down the waiting list by the liner itself, a diplomatic vessel, and some VIP in a private yacht. Rufus and the historian arrived at Earth an hour after the cruise liner.

Rufus and the Professor spent a lovely and relaxing few hours on the freighter as it waited its turn for the Nexus transit, and then the long deceleration run at the end. At last they were in geosynchronous orbit over San   Francisco. This was the destination of many of the cargo carrying ships heading to Earth, because the Bay Area had had the foresight to turn Treasure Island into a huge cargo landing facility. The old decommissioned naval base on the small island under the BayBridge had gained a new life as a center of trade, and seagoing boats and barges swarmed around the island, moving tons of new types of consumer goods in both directions as cargo came and went from the planet. The ports of the Bay Area were now the busiest in the history of trade.

While the majority of the heroes spent some time being wined and dined and catered to, and Rufus and the Professor spent their time trying to breath without using their noses, the rest of the universe played a game of ‘where’s Rufus?’, speculating wildly on his disappearance. While the Captain of the freighter waited his turn in orbit to be unloaded by the cargo landing craft, not so very far away the multi-galactic, human-alien hybrid conglomeration had sent a luxury landing vessel to the cruise liner and the other darlings of the universe were whisked down, landed at a small field used by the cruise liners, then put in a small fleet of limos and rushed straight to San Francisco’s City Hall for the largest press conference ever held.

But Rufus and the Professor did not waste their hours entirely, as I said, so perhaps I am getting ahead of myself.