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Stardusters… Canto Three

Installment 3 in my ongoing unfinished Sci-Fi saga is here for your perusal.  Hopefully it is not too awful.  It is a little bit racy in a junior-high sort of way… and it might turn your eyes black to read it, but it is also a little bit funny.

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Canto Three – In the Tadpole Chambers Aboard the Base Ship

Alden Morrell was astounded by the changes alien technology had made in him.  His wife, Gracie, inhabited a child’s body which had been artificially created by the Tellerons.  Her mind had been lifted out of her dying brain and placed into a container which had automatically adopted her DNA.    So the aliens had offered him a chance to be the same age and size as his now child-like wife.  They had put him in a device that resembled a tanning bed and processed him like a naked frog in a microwave oven.  When he had come to… no more body hair, penis reduced to a tiny pink mushroom, bald head re-forested with hair, and a renewed youthful energy he could barely contain.

Alden sat now in the moist sauna-bath that was known as the Tadpole Chamber wearing only his fruit-of-the-looms.  Gracie sat next to him, naked, and feeling apparently far less embarrassed than Alden himself felt.  Five naked Telleron tadpoles were with them, Davalon, Tanith, Brekka, Menolly, and George Jetson.  The tadpoles were the reason they were there.  Nutrient baths were absolutely necessary to the continued health of the amphibianoid children.

“We should dance,” suggested Brekka.  She was a lovely female Telleron tadpole with skin of forest green and having a delicate reddish blush on cheeks and neck, as well as her shapely buttocks.  Alden shuddered when he realized what he had been looking at.  He looked away and blushed deeply maroon himself.

“Why do you always want to dance?” asked Tanith, another pretty young female of emerald green.  “You suggest that forty times a day.”

“Since we learned to do that on Mars,” said Brekka, “I haven’t wanted to do anything else.  I want to dance like the Mickey Mouse Club kids we saw on the Earther broadcasts.”

“It doesn’t hurt to exercise,” said Davalon.  “I learned that by playing baseball.  It makes the muscles hurt at first, but then you come back stronger and more filled with power.”

Alden beamed at that.  He had been the one to teach Davalon about baseball during that brief time on Earth when he had tried to adopt the abandoned fin-headed alien boy.

“The computer system has Mickey Mouse Club music recorded from Earther TV,” reminded Menolly.    “We just have to ask for it.”

“Yeah!  Great idea!” said George Jetson.  Like many of Captain Xiar’s children, George was named for something on Earther TV that Xiar particularly liked.  “Computer, play all the Mickey Mouse Club songs.”

Alden didn’t know the song that started to play, but it had a good dance beat and the green children began to sway and move and dip and boogie.  It was a wild collection of dance moves from Earth filtered through alien perceptions.

“Let’s dance too,” said Alden’s beloved wife Gracie.   She stood and held out a hand to him.  “We can show them how it’s done.”

Alden was forty years old and Gracie was two years younger.  But now they inhabited children’s bodies, having been reduced in age to twelve and ten.  Their health was so much better, and many years had been added to both of their lives.  Still, it felt unnatural and somehow wrong.  She was younger now than when they’d first met in Belle City High School in Iowa when he was seventeen and she had been fifteen.

“Do you really have to be naked in front of the children?” he asked her in a whisper.

“Why, yes, you old coot.  I think I do.  You should take those soggy shorts off too.  This is like a sauna bath after all.”

“You know Mrs. Castille wouldn’t approve.”

“That old fuddy-duddy doesn’t have a say in this.  Prudes would tell us we have to wear swimsuits in the bath tub because they have issues, not because we do.”

Alden nodded.  He didn’t agree, but he nodded because that was what he thought Gracie wanted.   She was a mere child again, but his love for her made his twelve-year-old body want her mightily.  He had to dance bent forward because he didn’t want mushrooms blooming and embarrassing him while he danced with naked girls in an alien nutrient bath.

*****

My Art

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The Need for Magical Teddy Bears

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I woke this morning in excessive amounts of arthritis pain.  My left elbow has not been working well for a month.  My lower back is always painful after a restless night’s sleep.  Neither of my knees is willing to do the basic job required of knees in the early morning when you first wake up.  So I had to work joints back and forth to loosen them up despite the pain.  I had to stretch parts where muscles were knotted up in protest to stretching.  And it took me a half hour of painful work to get on my feet.

I have been psychologically in pain of late as well.  Being a school teacher who dedicated his life to getting young people to work together and grow up and mature, I have been deeply distressed by both the police shootings of innocent black men and the massacre of policemen here in Dallas.  My publishing goals have also hit a brick wall with recent rejections and cancelling of contracts.  I need to curl up in a corner and lick my wounds.

When I was a child I relied on stuffed animals to make me feel better when I was sick and in pain.  I had a toy tiger that was my constant companion.  I had a couple of teddy bears, one a panda, the other Smokey the Bear.  And there was a terrycloth pink elephant that I shared with my sisters.  Like many children, I talked to the stuffed animals.  Like a strange few other children, the stuffed animals would answer back.  I think that plays a large part in explaining why I am a writer of fiction stories.  I medicate my mind not with drugs, but by talking things out with imaginary people.

At this moment in time, when I am on the verge of being overwhelmed, it is a good thing that my hoarding disorder has caused me to collect stuffed toys.  I have more than one magical teddy bear to turn to.  Everything will be all right in the end.

 

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Return to the Stone Age

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Pebbles Winchuk, South Texas dino-girl

We are swiftly returning to the Stone Age.  We are dividing into armed camps and shooting each other.  Texas is an open carry State and they are allowed to carry rifles to Black Lives Matter rallies.  Former Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh took to Twitter to declare the conservative position (at least the lunatic half plus at least one per cent).

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Well, if he is coming for Black Lives Matter punks, then he might as well come for me, too.  I believe black people have been unfairly targeted by law enforcement (even black cops who buy into police-culture prejudices).  I think police forces need to be retrained to be more race-sensitive and determined to de-escalate potentially violent situations instead of executing the suspect on the spot.  If they can do that for white suspects, even armed and potentially violent white suspects, then they can do that for everybody.  As a school teacher, I stopped and broke up at least forty fights in my career.  Two of them involved weapons and I stopped at least four high school fights while being forced to walk everywhere on campus with a cane.  You can bring violence to an end by talking to the participants.  You don’t have to shoot Jose and Deshawn to get them to stop punching each other because they both like Maria.  But the government does nothing to move the national conversation in the direction of non-violence.  The Dallas shooting was made so much more complex because there were so many potential “good-guys with a gun” on the scene that the brave policemen who charged towards the shooting had a hard time determining who the bad guy was.  And Joe Walsh is coming for us because we don’t believe we should be shot without due process.

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A picture of the Pebbles Winchuk picture taken with my brighter light.  Still not as good as sunlight.

So, we are returning to the Stone Age.  I need to start chipping away at pieces of flint to make more spear points.  I probably need to brush up on my dinosaur-training skills, or at least, watch Jurassic World another couple of times.  The Walshian tribe is coming, shouting “Ugga-bugga Thump! Thump!” and getting ready to throw more stones.

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In a Softer Light…

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The news recently has been painful to contemplate.  Police shootings of suspects that seem on video to be indefensible, yet no charges are ever brought.  Angry people taking vengeance with guns on good Dallas policemen and women because the shooters somehow convinced themselves that violence in return for violence will balance the scales of justice.  Did they perhaps get that idea from orange-colored presidential candidates who have been campaigning about fighting fire with fire?  The weight of the injustice and spirals of anger are crushing me… and I deal with those things through humor, but humor takes time.  So what do I do while I’m trying to process all of the pain?  I spend some time shining lights on things and thinking about stuff.  I told you before that I bought a cheap lamp with a 300-watt bulb to use for photographing artwork.  Let me show you some of the photographed and re-photographed stuff I have been working on;

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Doom Looms, Dear Ones

 

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Wisdom from Pogo by the Great Walt Kelly

I get down and depressed when things continually go down hill and life becomes a depository for piles of disappointments, busted plans, and reversals of fortune.  I recently got rejected again by a publisher.  They told me they didn’t want my work, and subtly hinted that they really didn’t think it would be a good idea for me to submit any more to them.  And this, of course, was not one of the big five.  They don’t even accept submissions from a goof as lowly as me who thinks he can write stories.

I take things like that with a grain of salt anyway.  Twenty years ago I was told by a published writer that my writing was good enough to be published, and that all good writing eventually gets published.  But I chose the coward’s path back then, continuing to invest my time in teaching hormonal and homicidal brats to read and write English in a poverty-pocket of South Texas where they barely pay teachers anything.  I chose that cowardly path because it challenged my abilities and seemed a fulfilling life… and besides, I loved working with kids.  Now, my life is winding down.  I am retired on a full pension which is surprisingly good compared to what most teachers get nowadays, earned at a time before the Grinch became Emperor of Texas and declared the teaching of Science and making students think were acts of pure evil.  My health is failing now, and getting published in the age of the internet is now a much more iffy sort of thing where hacks can make fortunes and good writers are ignored.  Even small publishers aren’t interested in my work.

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Yes, I tend to say “Gork” a lot because it doesn’t matter where I go from here.  I have lived a good life.   Now, as I dissolve in illness and pain and disappointment, I have no regrets.  I fought the good fight and did good work.  If the writing thing doesn’t do anything more for me than let me entertain myself in my last days, then that is good enough.  I have one book published, and I mean to continue banging away at stories that I have always intend to tell, they will continue to exist after me, at least for a while, and will represent me well when I am gone.

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So, I am bound to die, and fairly soon, and we are going to have the racist Orange King as our next President, so the economy will collapse into the pocketbooks of a handful of billionaires.  Doom Looms… a phrase I borrowed from a Walt Kelly strip that cut to the heart of the matter long ago.  While we live, we are all together as passengers on Spaceship Earth, and we are the only enemy available to contend with.  So, instead of being bummed out about bad fortune, I choose to count my blessings and seriously contemplate what I can do to make things better… whether it is in a big way, or just a little bitty one.

Fools

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Stardusters… Canto Two

I am trying to follow through with my insane writing plan to post a chapter from this unfinished Sci-Fi novel every Tuesday.  So, here is the second installment of my comedy about the end of the world if it was a lizard world, which it isn’t… or, at least, we hope it isn’t.

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Canto Two – Xiar’s Captain’s Quarters

“What do you mean by Galtorr Prime?” shouted Captain Xiar at his first officer and his first officer’s Earther primate wife.  The Captain had inherited his rank rather than earned it, so he firmly believed that shouting was the key ingredient in good leadership.  “We can’t be at Galtorr Prime.  That’s the worst place for us to be.”

“This was not the plan, Captain,” said Biznap.  “We arrived here by accident.”

“Well, reverse the process.  Even going back to Earth is better than here!”

“Well…” Biznap scraped the floor with his foot.  “The thing is… we can’t.”

“What?  Why?”

“We corrected a fundamental flaw in the program that has been there for over a hundred years.  The astrogator has been rebooted with a new primary Sleer seed.  It can’t find the coordinates for Barnard’s Star or for Earth either one.   It will just calculate up a spot in empty space.  We have been travelling using the wrong coordinates for more than a century.”

“Why can’t we go back to those coordinates?”

“They are now gone from the system.”

“How could this happen?”

Harmony Castille, the beautiful blonde Sunday school teacher, raised her hand.  “It’s my fault.  I corrected the math and caused the system to operate on new coordinates.”

“Really, Captain,” said Biznap. “It turns out we have been operating with faulty math for too long.  Now that we’re doing it right, the machine won’t go back to the old, wrong system.  We would have to map out new coordinates all over again.  Re-explore the entire empire.”

“So you are telling me we have no choice but to live in orbit around the most dangerous planet in existence?”

“No, it is worse than that.  No longer recycling protein by eating our tadpoles means we have to find new food sources on the planet below.  We are going to have to establish a downport colony to continue to survive and grow as a community.”

Xiar sat down on his resting pad thoroughly stunned.  His new wife, Shalar, beautiful and green and wearing only the satin robe made for her by the Morrells, put both arms around Xiar’s thick green neck.

“What do we know about the Galtorrians, dearest?” she asked innocently.  Hugging behaviors were entirely new to Tellerons.  They had seen humans do it countless times on Earther television, such as the I Love Lucy show that Tellerons loved so deeply, but they had never practiced it until Alden and Gracie Morrell had adopted Xiar’s son Davalon who Xiar had nearly marooned on Earth (accidentally).  They had shown him how to do it as they showed him how to actually be a good parent.  Xiar found it totally alien… but he liked it.

“I don’t really know.  We have to get Farbick to work on it right away, but I believe they are lizard-men who eat meat and fight wars.”

“We knew the Earthers ate meat and fought wars,” reminded Shalar.  “They didn’t turn out to be so terrible.  In fact, we learned a lot about them.   They were very kind and generous to us.”

“Do you really think we can be so badly mistaken about two races we believed to be our enemies?  One was unlikely enough.”

“I really fear we are not mistaken this time,” said Biznap.

“Do we have their broadcasts to monitor?” asked Shalar, “We had a wealth of information at the tips of our sucker pads last time thanks to the broadcasts.”

“No signals at all,” sighed Harmony.  “It’s like they haven’t invented TV or radio yet.”

“Maybe our superior technology will help us this time,” suggested Biznap.

“Not when guided by stupid brains,” moaned Xiar.  “This time we are surely lost.”

“Don’t give up before trying,” said Harmony.  “The Lord helps those who help themselves.”

“I don’t know who your Lord is,” said Xiar, “But fire up the ritual laser lights and let’s get praying.  We need all the help we can get.  Do we need to consider sacrificing a few tadpoles or junior officers?  What appeases your god?”

“Ach!  Educating heathens can be such a trial!” swore Harmony.  “Let me get my Bible.  I have some serious educating to do.”

*****

So, there you have chapter two, which probably makes no sense whatsoever, unless you read chapter one… or possibly bought and read my published novel Catch a Falling Star.  Tricky about shameless self-promotion, ain’t I?

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The Need for Easy Pants

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I have never been an advocate of hard-to-wear pants.  Pants are suppose to be an aid to civilization, allowing a man to hide away the sensitive and sorta ugly bits that make him more like the animals, and in certain situations, unable to access the rational data-base in his little bean-like head.  My own need for comfortable pants is further complicated by an enlarged prostate that presses on the spine, as well as two lower vertebrae eroded by years of arthritis.  Pants have to be tight enough to hold me together, yet not so tight they cut off the blood flow and kill my lower half.  It would be danged inconvenient to have to walk around without any legs, or any butt, or any naughty bits.  If I wore Urkel pants, I might even lose my heart and my stomach, things I’m almost certain I would miss.  And I wouldn’t be able to do the Urkel dance, either.

Of course, there are times when the whole issue of easy pants can become a real concern.  I am trying to make my way through the labyrinth of problems of the retired on a budget.  So I tend to favor cheap pants.  I buy most of my pants from Goodwill Inc.   They are mostly used pants… or previously loved pants… or previously worn-out pants.  The pants I am wearing at the moment have developed holes in the region of the crotch… not a good place for unwanted air-conditioning.  And the pants I bought to replace them have buttons in place of a zipper in the fly.  I didn’t realize the potential for spontaneous bathroom dancing that the combination of buttons and arthritic fingers could cause.  My best pair of blue jeans are the kind of denim known UN-affectionately as “high-water pants”.  This, of course, leads to inconveniently aerated ankles.

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The final verdict is in about easy-pants issues.  To avoid all pants-related issues you have to give up wearing pants.  And I do still have issues with becoming a nudist as well.  So the struggle to obtain and wear easy pants is a never-ending battle that we simply cannot afford to give up on.

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Polyticks

political insanity

People are people, no matter how wrong…

And it isn’t a good thing to argue too long.

My friend is a “Can” from the Republic of Cans,

Who says all the poor people are just bad hu-mans.

And he really believes it, even though he’s not dumb,

‘Cuz he thinks climbing ladders using one of his thumbs,

Is how all people manage to be worthy and good,

And lazy bad people choose to fail like soft wood.

And though he’s not seen that old ladder of mine,

Or the ladders of people with one rung in nine,

He’s thoroughly convinced that all ladders are fair,

And it’s all their own fault if they fall through the air.

Yes, people are people, no matter how wrong…

And it isn’t a good thing to argue so long.

I have a good friend who’ll do Demos of Crats,

And screech about equity like an army of cats.

He thinks we should pay for all college and school,

And use our tax money as a leveling tool.

He thinks we can make the rich pay for our dreams

And make life all breakfast of sugars and creams.

And maybe he can and maybe he can’t…

Make sense of the subject of his long, drawn-out rant,

But they’ll never pay it and he will get Berned,

Because they never part with what they think they have earned.

But, people are people, no matter how wrong…

And it isn’t a good thing to argue so long.

In conclusion I think the thinks that I think

Are carefully measured and really don’t stink,

But don’t take good thinking to toss in dump,

Or sooner or later… it’s President Trump!

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Granny Quest 2016; Not the Conclusion, but Close

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Here is the result of my colored-pencil push for Granny Quest 2016.  This is not the final picture of Grandma Gretel Stein that I will need to do in the course of this novel project.  But it is the first real accomplishment in defining what she actually looks like.  Work continues on the novel, but today is a busy day.  My wife is returning from a month in the Philippines today.  My son is taking driver’s education as I write this.  My daughter is busy trying to clean the messy house that I have characterized as Muck Man’s Swamp in previous humorous posts with a superhero theme and an unfortunately too-accurate-to-be-weathered-without-shame sort of basis in fact.  The Princess is determined to reach a point where she can invite friends over this summer without having to claim she was kidnapped and raised by a tribe of baboons.  So, as always, the potential for utter disaster looms large, and I anticipate having something to write about where I can turn disaster into laughter.  It’s what I do.  It is my real super power.  (Although the stunning of villains with pungent odors thing is also pretty effective and pretty nearly reality.)

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Novel Uses for Novel Projects

Since I have stopped writing two other novel projects for the sake of the current novel fixation, that means I have two other unfinished novels that I have to find a use for.  I thought perhaps I could post a novel chapter every Tuesday until I either finish Recipes for Gingerbread Children or use up all the chapters I have written on the other two novels.

So, let’s start with;

Stardusters and Space Lizards

A novel by Michael Beyer

My Art of Davalon x2xx

Canto One – Aboard the Base Ship of Xiar the Slightly Irregular

Commander Biznap was the most over-worked Telleron aboard Xiar’s mother ship.  Given the fact that he was the most competent spacer on board, in fact the ONLY competent spacer on board, it was easy to understand why.  None of the other fin-headed, green, Telleron frog-people could do even half of the necessary spacer tasks that made a starship run.  (Of course, there was Farbick, the yellow-skinned Fmoog, but you couldn’t count him, at least Biznap didn’t want to count him, because the possibility existed that Farbick was actually more competent than Biznap and merely the victim of Telleron anti-yellow-skinned racism.  That couldn’t be allowed to get around to the green-skinned Tellerons.)

Corebait was gone.  The foolish Fmoogian foul-up had gone and disintegrated himself while on Earth using a skortch pistol and an Earther mirror.  That meant no one on board was competent enough to do the astrogation calculations it was necessary to complete for the Tellerons to travel from the ancient Mars Base in Earth’s solar system, back to Barnard’s Star where their orbital living complex was located.  It was very possible the entire crew would have to learn to live on the space cruiser in orbit around some other fool planet in the Earther solar system.

“If you don’t want to live on Earth, dearest,” said Harmony Castille, Biznap’s new Earther “wife”, “then maybe we should just live on Mars.  There’s a perfectly good planetary base there.”  She was an Earther primate known as a “human being”, so Biznap had to forgive her for monkey-based-life-form thinking.

“You must forgive me, honey, but I don’t want to live anywhere even remotely near your people.”  Biznap’s frown told it all.  He had learned to love this woman of another species.  Now that he had used the de-evolutionizer to make the old Sunday School teacher young again, she was ravishingly beautiful… so much so that Bizzy had decided to take up the same strange Earth custom that had so appealed to Captain Xiar and his new Telleron wife Shalar, and married her, binding her to him for the remainder of their lives together, however many centuries that would be.  But Earth people were strange primates with such weird customs.  They didn’t eat their own young, but they ate meat, even (shudder) frog legs.  They used machines on a regular basis, but they also relied on muscles and physical labor far more than any Telleron could stomach.  And since they didn’t absorb moisture through their skin like a Telleron, they preferred dry rooms and refused to run about the spaceship naked the way Tellerons preferred.  Harmony insisted that Biznap wore clothes at all times, except when they actually had time to be intimate.  She was a bit of a prude (a word Biznap had learned meant that she deeply loved to copulate, but had to pretend that, not only did she not like it, but she couldn’t stomach the thought of other people even thinking about it).

“Well, what will we do, then, if we don’t find a way to get back to your Bernie’s Star?”

Barnard’s Star,” corrected Biznap.  “You people named it, after all.”

“Okay, okay.  But it will just be living on a space station, won’t it?”

“Um… yeah…  The artificial swamp in the interior is very realistic, though.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to live with real ground under our feet?  I mean, I think I’m going to miss the birds singing in the early morning, and the lovely fall colors of maple trees.”

“I really don’t think so.  I mean, I don’t even know what those things are.”  Being a Telleron who had lived his entire life aboard some form of space vehicle, a frog-like sentient life form, and her being a planet-raised monkey-person instead of a proper amphibianoid, might just not have been ideal for getting “married”.  Bizzy loved her bare legs and the wonderful Earther invention known as “breasts”, but did that really make up for having to live your love-life with an alien monkey-person?

“Look here, Bizzy.  You forgot to carry the one in this equation.”

Biznap looked down at the tablet computer.  “I think I know a little more about Sleer Mechanics and Advanced Sylvanian Geometry, thank you.  …Oh, look at that.  I, um, forgot to carry the one.”

“Does that help our problem?” she said sweetly.  “I mean, the same mistake is right here in Corebait’s old equations?”

“Yes… yes, I think our problem is solved!  The numbers match and flow properly for a change.  Thank you, dearest one.  Now we must try it.”

Biznap went to the primary jump control board and began inputting the numbers just as Harmony had corrected them.  The machine purred and glowed with its inherent bioluminescence.  It was a happy machine for the first time since Biznap could remember.  It chugged and farted, and then they were physically lifted through space and time and light-years of travel.  Suddenly a planet appeared on the view screen.

“Oh, no!” gasped Biznap.

“What’s the matter?” asked his lady love, gaping at the blue, green, and brown ball of dirt slowly rotating in space before them.

“This is Galtorr Prime!  The one planet in the area of the Telleron Empire that’s more dangerous than Earth!”

“It’s that bad?” asked the clueless Sunday school teacher.

“They are reptile-men!  With big teeth!  And they’re more aggressive than humans.  If they ever learn space travel, we’re DOOMED!”

“Yep,” she said.  “Maybe we don’t want to live here either.”

Biznap smiled a crazy smile.  A thought had occurred to him.  Living on Galtorr Prime couldn’t be any more difficult than being married…

*****

 

Okay, so that is chapter one.  I call it a canto.  And I am aware that it is a bit on the lunatic end of the science-fiction spectrum.  But hey, I’m a devotee of Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  So. whatever you do, “DON’T PANIC!”

 

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