-SALOON AT THE EDGE OF EVERWHERE-

Chapter Twenty Nine

If I may be allowed to backtrack just a little, Rufus spent some of his time on the freighter learning how to use the memory stone, which the Professor had packed into a large sports bag. The Professor did give Rufus some advice on how best to interact with the stone, like: “Try to think of what you are interested in, but don’t try to force it.”  And, “Just sort of let it come to you.”

Now this may seem like a strange thing for me to say, and I want to be firmly on record as being against all illegal and dangerous mind-altering drugs, (though why humans ever made marijuana, one of the true natural wonders of the universe illegal is frankly beyond my ability to understand) but in this one instance, I have to admit that Rufus’s use of LSD and other substances during his early years may actually have been the best training for the human mind when utilizing the strange potentials of the memory stone.

There, I did it at last; I created a sentence that was a paragraph long. Now I have mastered the English language, and I can rest easy.

Rufus held the unzipped gym bag on his lap, took a deep breath, and placed his hands on the cool, smooth surface of the stone. Now here is a thing that you may recall I mentioned about Rufus; He is an all art-side-of-the-brain kind of a guy. By which I mean, as the humans say, he leans towards the art side of the brain, except that in his case, he is leaning all the way over. Or as Rufus puts it, “I don’t just lean to the art side, I am actually incapacitated by lack of access to the logic side. My life is a struggle to use artistic solutions to solve logic problems.” This, I am fairly sure, accounts for a great many of his character traits.

But in short, Rufus, in one of those cosmic coincidences, may well have been the best human you could possibly have found to access the memory stone, even if you held planet-wide auditions along the lines of ‘Earth’s Got Talent’, if you see what I mean. Between his mind-altering experiences, and the fact that his mind naturally worked in strange ways, he was perfect for the job. For example; while the Professor found it almost impossible not to focus on history questions, Rufus was interested in everything, but not particularly interested in any one thing. Being a high school dropout, he was largely self-educated, and he wasn’t particular about what he learned. He just liked to know things.

The memory stone, when faced with such an unstructured mindscape, just more of less exploded in Rufus’s head like a supernova. Wow, was Rufus’s first thought, followed immediately by, hey, this is kinda like being on acid. The brightly colored trails and flashes were like familiar old friends, and colors, of course, are merely the playthings of the artist. He followed after a lovely comet tail of burning crimson shooting through darkness like an ember even as he had another thought; this is why mystics and shamans had always used hallucinogens to travel to other wheres and other whens.

Images began to coalesce, but he refused to get sucked into focusing on any one thing. Because of this, the memory stone itself intuitively tried to expand its search parameters. Still it could not tell what it was that this being wanted to know. The stone responded to this challenge with admirable enthusiasm, and opened itself wide, flooding Rufus’s mind with all that it had.

This fazed Rufus not at all. He just rode with it like some kind of cosmic surfer, skimming over an endless ocean of information but never becoming a part of it. Rufus saw stuff, oh, he saw some wacky stuff, and each time he simply passed over it as the surfer passes over the starfish on the sand beneath the waves. The memory stone responded to Rufus’s ‘playing hard to get’ as eagerly as a love struck suitor.

At last the memory stone gave up and settled down, almost like a wild horse that had finally been broken by the patient, masterful cowboy. The stone seemed to tremble with released emotions before it meekly lowered its head and allowed the saddle to be placed on its back, uh, metaphorically speaking, of course. Rufus, without knowing it had even happened, had mastered the memory stones for all time.

Now being self-obsessed was one of Rufus’s many weaknesses. His childhood friends still tease him about how he had combined his love of military history with his love of himself and used Photoshop to create hundreds of pictures of his head stuck on the bodies of warriors and soldiers of Earth’s history. As his friends say, ‘If it ain’t about Rufus, it ain’t about nothin’. But here was a subject the memory stone could not dredge up memories of, because as you may recall, the Flying Pickles had had no knowledge of Earth until Rufus was already old enough to ‘start getting boring’, as he put it. He could almost feel the disappointment and regret emanating from the stone at its failure to provide information.

“Don’t worry, little buddy,” he murmured to the stone as he broke contact,” we can play again later.” He then read part of a used paperback book he had packed. It was written by a British commando and survivor of the Arnhem parachute drop in W. W. II. Rufus made little ‘X’s’ on the margins by interesting passages. He was supposedly working on an historical book featuring weird and freakish things that take place in combat using the hundreds of military history books he lugged with him in boxes whenever he moved as references. This book joined the thousands of other unfinished stories, songs, poems, jokes, novels, and paintings and get-rich-quick schemes that Rufus started and yet rarely finished.

At last the cargo was loaded onto the landing ship, and Rufus and the Professor said goodbye to the Captain of the freighter and his crew. “Good ruck, and may you rive a rong rife,” said the Captain cheerfully.

“Couldn’t have said it better myself, Captain,” Rufus said with a perfectly straight face. Rufus and the Professor crammed into the lander with the last of the cargo, which happened to be crates and crates of a cheese like substance so stinky that Rufus had always been afraid to taste it. The ‘milk’ used to make this ‘cheese’ came from a plant, because as all advanced and civilized cultures know, it is inherently sick and wrong to steal the milk from even the least intelligent of the mammal and mammal-like creatures for your own insidious purposes. Earth cheeses were one of the few human endeavors that sentient life forms throughout the universe were not falling in love with. These particular plant-cheeses were a product produced by the Trex’s, or Bats, and were popular enough to have begun a recovery of the long ago-spent Royal treasuries, but not among humans. Rufus liked stinky cheese so much that he had once started putting together a website where the words ‘I love the stinky cheese’ was repeated in every language on planet Earth, but being surrounded by this stuff was downright oppressive. Even though Rufus delighted in knowing the fact that the blue part of blue cheese was almost chemically identical to the fungus that causes athlete’s foot rot on active people, this cargo hold smelled like a locker room in hell to him. This consignment was meant for consumption by the countless alien visitors flocking to see the sights of Earth, but of the humans themselves, no one, it was said, would touch the stuff, not even the French.

The lander touched down on the special runway that had been built, jutting out into San Francisco bay from Treasure Island. Rufus got his first look at home in quite a while when at last, to his relief, the hatches were popped open. He looked east across the bay and into the hills above Berkeley. He could practically see the house he had grown up in from here. Rufus and Treasure Island had something of a history. He had often brought people who had never been to the Bay Area before to this spot, to watch the sunset and admire the cityscape from the bay level without having to rent a boat. He had also done a little brig time there, back when he was seventeen and it was still an active naval base. Besides, this is where they filmed the TV show ‘MythBusters’ that Rufus had enjoyed years ago.

Now a funny thing about this new modern age of space travel and the huge influx of alien tourists visiting Earth is that it is now more difficult to travel from one country to another on this planet if you are human, than it is for aliens to travel from their home-planets to anywhere on Earth. There were two main factors contributing to this. One is the technology that allows most space going vessels to hover using antigravity devices of various sorts and manufacture. So the aliens in these ships had a tendency to just land where ever they wanted. They came down in fields, or tied themselves to the Golden GateBridge, or landed in empty sports arenas or parking lots. Actually that last one sort of makes sense, in an ironic sort of a way, but you get the idea. But all of this made it next to impossible to set up passport control offices or to keep track of all the alien visitors. Planet Earth does not have a front door or a sign in sheet.

This ability of ships of differing sizes to land just about anywhere has lead to some rather humorous situations. It isn’t uncommon for the Secret Service to have to come running out of the White House and tell some enthusiastic alien tourist, “Hey, we’re sorry, but you can’t park your spaceship on the White House lawn. This is where the President of the United States lives”  It may or may not surprise you to know that bad driving and parking habits are not confined to the human race, but seem to be fairly universal.

The second factor that contributed to the governments of Earth giving up on trying to keep track of just who was visiting them and where they were going and what they were doing, was the marvelous advances in medicine brought by our alien visitors. Since most forms of contagious diseases were now a thing of the past, there were no more worries about some plague from outer space wiping out the human race.

So these two factors, combined with the fact that there are such an overwhelming number of aliens that it is impossible to keep an eye on all of them, has led to a situation where it was easy for a human being to travel to the stars and then land anywhere back on his home planet with no identification or papers of any kind, but just try to get over the border into the U. S. from Tijuana like that and see what happens.

The only thing standing between Rufus and the Professor rejoining human civilization was a security guard with a clipboard. Rufus and his traveling companion walked across the cement runway and approached the security guard, who barely even glanced up from the small portable TV he was watching, and seemed to have no interest in them at all until suddenly a look of recognition passed over his face. He pointed at Rufus and said, “Hey. You’re that Rufus guy! How come you’re not at that press conference?”

“Press conference? What are you talking about?” asked a mystified Rufus. The guard turned his small TV around and pointed at it, and Rufus was more than a little surprised to see Candybar Venezuela’s face on the screen. Rufus’s first thought was that some Reporter, or some reporter, was interviewing Candybar back on the Hub. Well good for her, he concluded, as long as it’s not me.

“You still have time to make it over there,” said the security guard helpfully.

“Make it over where?” Rufus asked, totally confused.

“City Hall,” said the guard, equally confused, and gesturing in the direction of San   Francisco just a little ways away.

“So she is here, on Earth?” Rufus asked, still searching for clarification.

“Well, yeah, all your guys are over there, you know? They’re calling them ‘Rufus’s Avengers’. You guys are like famous.”

Oh yeah, Rufus thought sarcastically, that’s just what I want to be.

The guard continued, “Everybody is looking for you! Nobody knows what happened to you. Maybe I should call my supervisor. We still have time to get you over there.”

“No, no, that’s okay,” said Rufus even as he took the Professor by the arm and hurried on out the gate and to a taxi he saw waiting nearby. He jumped in after shoving the historian in first, and gave the address of his mother’s house in Kensington, a small town in the hills just north of Berkeley.

If anybody is looking for me, he thought, they can just keep on looking. I am going home. And that is exactly what he did.