Beads and Trinkets

[sasha]

The flying saucer settled with a thud on the rocky little planet orbiting third from its star. It landed hard on an outcrop of bedrock, and teetered back and forth a few times before slipping off and landing on a flat ledge a meter below. It rotated a few times on its rim around its central axis before coming to rest, like a spinning coin slowly winding down on a tabletop.

Captain Yb untangled herself from the wreckage of her console seat and rose unsteadily. “Not one of your better landings, Zixx,” she admonished.

Engineer-Pilot Zixx still clutched the joysticks in his gleaming tentacles, wiggling them in their sockets. “What did you expect?” he grumbled. “I told you the Brenn deal mostly in junk. Look at these crappy control sticks!” and he wiggled the joysticks back and forth. “They’re not supposed to have all that play!”

“Well, don’t make it worse,” Yb cautioned. “Any idea where we are, Ryll?”

Biologist-navigator Ryll had been consulting his star charts in anticipation of this very question. “Looks like we’re somewhere in Octant 4 of the Varna cluster. I tried getting a more precise fix before collapsing the manifold, but we materialized into this space before I could.”

“You’re supposed to know where we are at all times!” Yb snapped.

“And you were supposed renew the ship’s certification two cycles ago!” Ryll retorted. “I can’t be expected to maintain an accurate fix on our position if we’re constantly dropping out of hyperspace to dodge Regulatory!”

“Well,” Yb replied. “Just saying.” She extended a pseudopod and wrapped it around the chrome tubing of her console seat. “Not again,” she said sadly, lifting it from the floor. “It’s broken clean off at the base.” She turned it over a little morosely. “Can you fix it, Zixx?”

Zixx swiveled his eye stalks towards the wreckage and was quiet for a moment as he assessed the damage. “That thing’s been welded back together so many times there isn’t any original metal left,” he finally said. “I could try, but…”

“That’s all I ever hear from either of you,” Yb complained. “I tried this, I’ll try that, It’s the equipment’s fault, not mine. It’s those thieving Brenn, it’s the Regulatory authorities.” She released her grip on the broken seat and let it drop back to the deck with a crash. The pseudopod sucked back into her mantle with a liquid snap. “Whatever happened to personal responsibility?”

A ridge of flesh bulged out of Ryll’s mantle in an involuntary gesture of protest, but Zixx just flushed blue with anger. “A question I often ask myself – Captain Yg!”

Never fond of puns, especially those linking her name to body functions, Yb bristled. She triggered her chromatophores, turning her mantle into a color she knew Zixx found offensive. Zixx responded by extending a pair of pseudopods and waggling them in a suggestive manner.

Ryll turned purple with disgust. “Real mature,” he snorted. “Larvae. Like a pair of larvae.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts of Troop 152 were encamped at the base of the hill on which the craft had come to its uneven landing. They were just emerging from their tents and preparing to fix breakfast when the flying saucer passed overhead and disappeared over the ridge looming over their campsite. “Hey!” Senior Patrol Leader Ricky Swain cried out. “Did you guys see that?”

A dozen or so boys gaped upwards, shading their eyes from the rising sun. Tenderfoot Stanley Zelinski of the Badger Patrol spoke first. “Yeah! Looked like something from outer space, or something!”

“Or something,” Ricky agreed. “You’d better go get Mister Putnam, he’ll know what to do.”

“Okay,” Stanley said, and ran across the campsite towards the Scoutmaster’s RV, parked at the edge of a grove of white pines. He banged on the door of the camper, crying “Mister Putnam! Mister Putnam, a flying saucer just landed up on the hill!” The curtain covering the small window in the ell extending over the cab of the truck was jerked back, to reveal the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Putnam peering down at him. They were disheveled and seemed to be out of breath. “Mister Putnam, there’s a flying saucer in the woods up there somewhere!”

“Go away,” Mr. Putnam said. His voice was muffled by the plexiglass window, but clear enough for Stanley to hear. The curtain jerked back, covering the window again.

“Okay,” Stanley said, and ran back across the campsite to where Ricky was just lighting his campfire.

“What did he say?” Ricky asked the breathless youngster.

“Go away,” Stanley replied.

“What??”

“Go away,” Stanley repeated. “He said to ‘go away’”.

“Oh.” Ricky fed a handful of twigs into the smoking fire. “I guess he wants us to handle this on our own,” though as a more worldly 15 than the naïve young Tenderfoot (he was already 3 merit badges on his way from First Class to Life Scout, and the only one in the district to have earned the badges in earthworm husbandry and Basque yodeling), he strongly suspected that Mr. Putnam’s brusque dismissal of Stanley had been motivated by something other than a desire to encourage independence in his charges.

“So what should we do?” Stanley asked.

“We should first eat a proper breakfast,” Ricky said. “And then clean up the camp. And then parade inspection. After parade, we’ll check out the flying saucer.” He rigged a stout branch across the firepit from which to hang a small pot of water. “Go tell the others,”

“Okay,” Stanley said, and ran off to inform the other scouts of their second-in-command’s action plan.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Back at the saucer, while Zixx was trying (without much success) to mend Yb’s damaged chair, Ryll was analyzing the planet’s atmosphere to assess its breathability. “A little thin,” he mused. “It is mostly nitrogen, but it’s diluted with a lot of oxygen – nearly 20%.”

“Will we need to suit up?” Yb asked.

“Probably not – we can make up any nitrogen deficit with gas cannisters attached to the respirators.” He gestured towards another monitor behind him. “I’m more concerned about some of the biomarkers I’m seeing. There appears to be a herd of local fauna nearby, and their organization and intercommunication suggests some degree of intelligence and purpose.” He turned away from the instrument panel. “If we’ve attracted their attention, they might be curious enough to come investigate us.”

Yb flushed blue with irritation. “I’d be surprised if our graceless arrival hadn’t attracted attention,” she stated accusingly. Zixx made no reply, but used a pseudopod to make an obscene noise. Then, with a frustrated flap of his mantle, he dropped the welding torch. “It’s no use,” he lamented. “There’s not enough metal left in this thing to tempt a Brenn trafficker.” He forlornly held the broken chair in a tentacle and offered it to Yb. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Maybe we’ve got another one down in the cargo hold.”

Yb glumly took the chair from him, regarded it sadly, and set it on the deck near the exit hatch. “Go check, will you?” she asked.

The cargo bay was only accessible from the outside, so Zixx slid over to an equipment locker and withdrew a respirator, to which he screwed a nitrogen canister. Yb helped him don the apparatus, and opened the hatch for him. After warily casting his eyestalks this way and that at his first view of this alien world, he descended the ramp and made his way around to the access hatch of the cargo hold.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Troop, ten-HUTT.” The boys of Troop 152, already fallen in by patrol, snapped to attention (though “snapped” might incorrectly imply crisp military precision – perhaps “wandered”, “sauntered”, or “drifted” more accurately describes their measured response.)

Ricky looked over his charges with satisfaction. “Camp’s in fine shape, Men,” he praised. “Fires have all been properly doused, mess gear cleaned and put away for lunch, and all trash rounded up and placed in the proper receptacles. Well done.”

The boys beamed and squirmed a bit with pleasure under this praise from their senior patrol leader.

“And,” Ricky continued, “I’d like to commend a few of you for particularly fine jobs this morning. At ease,” and the boys slumped out of their rigid postures into something more typical of 12-year olds. He fished a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket and consulted it. “First: award for Least Smoky Cook Fire goes to…” – here he paused for dramatic effect – “the Tree Frog Patrol!” After a burst of spontaneous applause, he said “Let’s hear three How-hows for the Tree Frog Patrol!”

And the boys lustily shouted, “How-how! How-how! How-how!”

“Now, for the Tightest Tent Guywires: three How-hows for… the Pine Siskin Patrol!”

And again the lads chanted, “How-how! How-how! How-how!”

Ricky was savvy enough to make sure everyone received accolades. The Badger Patrol got three How-Hows for the Cleanest Cookware. To the Eastern Spadefoot Toad Patrol went three How-Hows for the Best-Constructed Firepit, and the Most Delicious Breakfast Cook Smells were awarded to the Semi-Palmated Lesser Mongolian Plover Patrol.

Finally, after leading the troop in the sacramental recitation of the Scout Laws (trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, etc., etc.), the Scout Oath (“On my honor/I will do my best/to do my duty/…”, etc., etc.), and the Scout Motto (“Do a good turn daily”), he gave the command to “Fall Out”, and led the way to the trailhead of the path leading to the top of the hill and, presumably, the mysterious object they’d seen land there.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Yb slid over to the communications console and hit the intercom. “Zixx,” she called. “Any luck?”

The intercom buzzed and crackled. “Not yet,” Zizz replied. “We had a bunch of stuff come loose when we landed, it’s all over the place now. The deck is covered with skalloh berries. I’ve got the juice all over me.”

Ryll interrupted. “Captain, something’s just come up.”

“Stand by, Zixx.” She turned from the intercom. “What is it?”

“That herd of fauna I told you about?” he said. “There’s a formation of them approaching us.” He moved aside so Yb could see the viewer screen. A small red circle at its center represented the spaceship’s ground position. A cluster of yellow-green dots toward the upper right represented the unknown fauna. Where before they’d been scattered haphazardly in the corner, they were now arrayed in more or less a straight line towards the center of the screen. They were on the way. And they were getting closer.

“Maybe we should unlock the weapons locker?” Ryll asked.

Yb was silent for a moment. “I’ll unlock it,” she finally replied. “But don’t check anything out. Yet.” Together they crossed the space to a ceiling-high storage bay fitted with an electronic lock. She punched in a 10-digit code with pseudopod. A relay clunked, a green light over the lock turned red, and a klaxon began to sound. She disabled the horn, but the light remained red, indicating that the weapons bay was no longer secured.

Behind them, the intercom burped again. “Uh, Captain?” Zixx said.

She turned and pressed the “talk” button. “Go ahead, Zixx.”

“Captain, I think you and Ryll had better get down here.”

“What for?”

“Easier to show you. Make it fast.”

“OK. Give us a few minutes to get our respirators on and we’ll meet you at the cargo hatch.”

“Negative. No time for that. I’m heading back in, I’ll meet you at the bottom of the ramp. Hurry. Zixx out.” With that, the intercom went silent.

She and Ryll exchanged worried glances, then crossed over to the exit hatch. They looked around cautiously before edging out and down the gangplank to the ground. Zixx was just coming around from the other side of the ship. He raised a tentacle and pointed off into the distance. “Look,” he said.

They looked. "Uh-oh," Yb said, blanching yellow with alarm.

“Uh-oh is right,” Ryll echoed. “Look at that…”

Maybe 100 feet off, a small band of bipedal creatures stood in a clearing atop a bare rock ledge, apparently looking their way.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Look at that!” Ricky exclaimed. “A real flying saucer!”

“Yeah!” Stanley enthused. “And what’s that next to it? Look like giant slugs!”

“Must be alien monsters!” one of the boys said.

They gasped and murmured in awe at their first ever view of extraterrestrial life. “They don’t seem hostile or anything,” Ricky ventured. “Maybe we should try talking to them.”

“Okay,” Stanley said. To the aliens, he called, “Hi! Where you guys from?”

To their amazement, the alien outside the ship actually turned color, from a nondescript tan to a golden yellow. For several seconds the two groups just stared at one another without moving. Then one of the aliens made a noise. It sounded like a cross between a bagpipe being played underwater and a fart. The boys giggled. Stubby even raised his forearm to his lips and blew, producing a loud flatulent sound in coarse imitation. All but Ricky laughed.

“This is serious, Men. We mustn’t make fun of their accents. It’s not the Scout way.”

This shamed them into silence. “Sorry,” Stubby mumbled.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Listen,” Ryll said. “It sounds like their trying to communicate with us!” One of the creatures had raised an appendage to the bulbous organ at its apex and produced a rough facsimile of their speech. It had no meaning, but its timbre was strikingly similar to their own. He turned his eyestalks away from them and towards the Captain. “They don’t seem to be initiating aggression,” he said. “Could we try communication with them?”

Yb thought for a moment. “I think that’s a good idea,” she said. “We’ve got a Universal Translator, and some idea of the distribution of their languages from the broadcasts we picked up on our approach.” To Zixx she said, “Would you mind?”

“Right,” Zixx said, and slid up the ramp back into the ship. He returned a few moments later fumbling a small device with a multitude of knobs and blinking lights. “How do you work this thing?” he asked.

A bubble of annoyance rippled out of her mantle as Yb extended a pseudopod his way and snatched the gadget from him. “Give it here,” she snapped. “I thought you were supposed to be our technical expert.”

His eyestalks drooped at the rebuke. “Hey,” he said. “I’m an engineer, not a freakin’ linguist.”

She dialed in the most commonly spoken language on the planet and spoke slowly into the device. “We are from a star far from here, we mean you no harm.”

The box said, “Cèsuǒ shìfǒu gōngzuò?”

The Scouts looked to one another in confusion before turning back to the visitors in uneasy silence.

“They don’t seem to speak that one,” Ryll said. “Try another.”

She twiddled the dial to another popular indigenous language and repeated, “We are from a star far from here, we mean you no harm.”

“Rabotayet li tualet?”

The Scouts shifted uncertainly from one foot to the other, looking to one another in hopes that one of them would have some idea of what to do. Even Ricky seemed unsure.

“Maybe we should just leave,” Stubby finally said.

“Still not right,” Yb said to herself. She made another adjustment and repeated her greeting. “We are from a star far from here, we mean you no harm.”

“Ist das Bad in Ordnung?”

This time one of the boys perked up. “Hey, that sounded like German,” Boomer asserted. “My old man speaks it, and taught me a little.”

Ricky clapped him on the shoulder. “How-how!” he said. “Do you know enough to answer them?”

“I’ll try,” Boomer said. He cleared his throat. “Sprechen nicht Deutsch – aber Englisch.”

To Yb, the device buzzed, “Not in German – but English”.

“Got it!” Yb enthused, and dialed in the appropriate language. “We are from a star far from here, we mean you no harm!”

The device said, “I say, old chap, is the loo in working order?”

This only confused the Scouts further. “Are you – do you need to use a toilet?” Ricky called a little hesitantly. “There’s a latrine back at our campsite…”

Yb held the device up to her eyestalks and gave it a shake. “When was the last time this thing was calibrated?” she demanded.

Zixx let his eyestalks droop even further. “I don’t think it’s ever been calibrated,” he admitted. “We hardly ever use it, and I’ve got enough to do keeping this barge in running order.” He straightened. “Let’s see it, maybe I can make some adjustments or something.”

She handed him the device. He peered down at it, turned it over and back, then banged it a few times against the ship’s hull before handing it back.

“Your technical expertise never ceases to amaze me,” Yb muttered. To the device she asked, “Can you understand me now?”

And the device said, “Am I making myself clear, lads?”

“Yes!” Ricky enthused. “We can understand you now! Can you make that thing talk American English, instead?”

Yb nudged the language selector one last time. “How’s this?”

“Fine!” Ricky shouted back.

“Where you guys from?” Stanley shouted.

“We are from a star far from here, we mean you no harm,” Yb replied, figuring she might as well at least make an attempt to follow diplomatic protocol.

“Cool!” Stubby shouted.

Her eyestalks twitched in confusion. “Er… we measure the ambient temperature as nearly a third of the way between the first two phase transitions of hydrogen oxide… hardly ‘cool’…”

“Just an expression,” Ricky shouted. “Means… impressive, awesome, interesting; you know… cool!”

“I think it’s meant as an affirmation,” Ryll said, forgetting that the Translator would pick up his utterance.

“Yeah, that’s the word!” Ricky shouted. “Affirmation! Cool! Cool word, too!”

“Might want to lock that in,” Ryll offered. “I have a feeling their language is more colloquial than the device is programmed for.” He looked back to the group of boys patiently waiting on the rock ledge. “Shut it off for a second,” he whispered.

She looked at him quizzically, but did as he’d asked. “What is it?”

“What are your thoughts about initiating a more… more intimate contact?”

She was aghast. “You mean invite them aboard?”

“Why not? They seem harmless – they outnumber us and could have naively tried to overpower us had that been their intent. And we have the weapons locker opened and ready.”

“I don’t know… what do you think, Zixx?”

Zixx rippled his mantle thoughtfully. “I suppose I could get a weapon on standby… just in case…”

She sighed. “All right,” she finally consented. “But I still don’t like it. The bay’s unlocked. Go check one out. And make sure it’s on standby ONLY.” As he departed up the ramp, she switched the Translator back on. “We’d like to invite you aboard our vessel for an informal summit…”

The boys were ecstatic. “You mean we can look inside your ship?” Ricky asked.

“That’s right,” Yb said, and was astonished at the outbreak of pandemonium her reply engendered. They had begun shouting inarticulately and jumping about, and to her consternation had actually begun charging the ship, at least until their spokesman had intervened.

“Troop, HALT!” Ricky commanded.

The boys stopped their rush and waited expectantly.

“We shall do this in an orderly fashion, Men. We’re Scouts, after all. Fall in!”

The boys fell in.

“Now – forward… March! Left… left… left, right, left…”

And thus did the boys of Troop 152, though badly out of step with one another, approach the alien spacecraft with a modicum of decorum. When the column reached the base of the ramp, Ricky called out, “Troop, HALT!” And the boys halted. He saluted and announced, “Troop 152, requesting permission to come aboard!”

Ryll and Yb glanced at one another. Yb raised the Translator to her air sac and said, “Permission granted.”

“Yayyy!” With a collective shout, the boys, unable to contain their enthusiasm any longer, pushed past Yb and Ryll and rushed up the ramp. At the top, Zixx met them at entrance to the ship, clutching in one of his tentacles a deactivated Annihilator. If his intent had been to slow the charge, it produced instead exactly the opposite effect. They jostled past him, spilling into the ship’s interior, laying hands on all the exotic artifacts within. “Wait,” he feebly protested, forgetting that Yb and Ryll shared the Translator. “Don’t touch anything…”

“What’s that thing?” one of the boys asked, reaching for the Annihilator.

“Don’t touch it,” Yb frantically called as she followed them up the ramp. “It’s very dangerous!”

“Cool!” the boy enthused. “Looks like a ray gun! Can I shoot it?”

Ryll had managed to squeeze past the throng and slide over to his workstation, where Stanley and two or three others were pressing buttons and twirling dials. “What’s this thing do?” he asked.

“Please don’t touch those things,” he pleaded. “Those are our navigational instruments…”

“Okay,” Stanley said, and stepped back. The others, however, appeared not to have heard, and continued their manual explorations.

“Hey, look at me!” Stubby said. He’d donned one of the respirators, though it was constructed for an anatomy quite unlike his own. He was fumbling with the regulator valve. “How do you work this thing?”

“Please don’t,” Ryll begged. “It’s calibrated for our physiology…” and he looked beseechingly towards their apparent leader, the one they called Ricky.

Though he couldn’t read the aliens’ body language, Ricky nonetheless sensed that matters were beginning to get out of hand. He reached for the whistle hanging by a lanyard from around his neck, placed it between his lips and gave three sharp blasts. Three sets of eyestalks retreated into their respective mantles, which had flushed yellow with alarm at the unexpected noise; but the scouts responded with a brief lull in their excited milling about. Ricky used the momentary quiet to bellow, “Troop, ten-HUTT!” And the boys immediately stopped whatever they’d been doing and stood still, expectantly awaiting further instruction.

Yb’s eyestalks timidly emerged from the fleshy folds of her mantle. “Thank you,” she said, forgetting at first to address her remark to the Translator. “Thank you.”

Ricky nodded. ‘You’re welcome,” he replied. To the boys he said, “Men, we’re guests here. I expect you to behave like guests.”

Though technically still at attention, they shifted positions uneasily, exchanging guilty glances. “Sorry,” someone mumbled. The apology was followed by a dozen or so others. Stubby removed the respirator from his face, looked around for a place to set it, and extended it instead towards Ryll. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess we got a little carried away.”

Ricky looked his charges over, and decided he’d gotten matters under control. “At ease, Men,” he said, and the boys relaxed, though they remained quiet and subdued. Yb’s mantle turned a pale green in relief. Hoping to distract them from further mayhem, she asked “Do you have any questions for me?”

Boomer had been examining the remains of Yb’s seat when Ricky’s whistle had brought things to a halt. “What’s that thing?” he asked. “It looks like it’s busted, or something.”

The word “busted” caused a bit of temporary confusion, but the Translator eventually worked it out. “That was my flight bench,” she answered. “We had a bit of a bumpy landing, and it was damaged.” She looked accusingly towards Zixx. “My engineer tried to repair it, but was unable to. We were looking for a replacement below when you arrived.” She had a sudden idea. “I don’t suppose you have anything like it we could trade you for?”

Ricky was intrigued. “Can you show us how it was attached?”

Yb and Zixx looked briefly at one another, then slithered across the deck towards the broken chair. They lifted it up and propped it against the framework jutting from the bulkhead in an approximation of its correct placement.

Ricky looked the arrangement over carefully. “We could probably make something like a camp chair from scratch,” he said thoughtfully. “Then we could lash it to those support beams. What do you think, Men?”

The boys murmured in agreement and seemed to come together in enthusiastic focus on this new challenge set before them.

“Who’s our best knot-tier?” Ricky asked.

“Pudge!” someone else said. “Pudge, can you do it?”

All eyes turned to a chubby crew-cut lad in the back. A bit self-consciously at first, he made his way through the crowd, but quickly warmed to the task of studying the chair and its support framework. “Sure,” he finally said, giving his best professional assessment. “A coupla long poles, a coupla short ones, some cordage – lash ‘em all together with a triple-overhand-clove-and-a-half hitch – piece of cake.”

Ricky turned to Yb. “We can do it,” he assured her. “What have you got to trade?”

Yb’s mantle went still in thought. Weapons were out, and the penalty for sharing advanced technology with primitive civilizations was higher than she wished to risk. “Wellll…” she hedged. “We have some Halnosian melons in cold storage… quite a lot of Prudalese tea, recordings of Tekka folk music…”

“Nah,” the boys murmured. “Nah… No…”

“Medicines?” Ryll suggested. He caught Yb’s warning look and stopped before mentioning the kilos of Rendalanian hallucinogens they carried. “Energy-boosting drugs? Sensory enhancement? Cognitive boosters?”

“How about love potions?” Stubby suddenly asked.

“What?” Ryll asked.

“You know, some kind of elixir that would make girls fall for us?”

It took the Translator a while to decode this into a narrative comprehensible to Ryll, Yb, and Zixx. “Ahh…” Ryll faltered, but Yb interrupted him. “Sure,” she said. “I’m sure Ryll can run some diagnostics on your metabolism and extract some kind of pheromone rendering you attractive to the females of your species.”

Ryll’s mantle bulged in protest, but he said nothing, and neither did she.

After quickly consulting with the members of the troop, Ricky said, “It’s a deal!”

“When can you start?” Yb asked.

Ricky again glanced at the boys, who seemed eager to get underway. “I guess we could start now. Troop – Fall in!”

The boys fell in, and Ricky marched them out of the ship, down the ramp, and into the brush surrounding the saucer. Ryll then set to work in sick bay, trying to isolate any compounds that might serve as an attractant. Zixx ambled down the ramp to enjoy the sunshine and to avoid as much of the work as he could.

Ricky wisely delegated to Pudge the task of supervising the others, organizing teams to cut poles, others to trim, others to haul the material back to the ship. Pudge himself undertook the task of assembling the chair at the base of the gangplank, expertly wrapping and weaving paracord around the poles while consulting with Yb to make sure that the end product met customer requirements. In little more than an hour, the structure was completed. He and Ricky carried their creation up the ramp and set it against the support beams behind Yb’s console.

“Hold it steady, now,” Pudge cautioned, and (with Zixx’s help) Ricky held the structure in place while Pudge made the final lashings securing it to the bulkhead.

“There!” he announced triumphantly, and stood. The other scouts spontaneously burst into applause, and he blushed with embarrassed pleasure. Yb ran a tentacle over the rustic structure, her mantle flickering a pale mauve of bemusement. “It’s – interesting,” she finally said.

“Try it on for size!” Pudge excitedly said.

She eased her bulk onto the framework, and her mantle rippled with surprise. “Actually,” she said, “it’s surprisingly – not too uncomfortable!”

Ricky nodded with satisfaction. “I think Pudge deserves three How-hows!” he said, and led them in a rousing “How-how! How-how! How-how!”

“And I think all of you have earned this,” Yb said, and handed Ricky a sealed flask containing a clear liquid.

“Use it sparingly,” Ryll cautioned. “You won’t need much of it to get results.”

“Thanks!” Ricky said, accepting the trade. “I guess we’d better be going – Mister Putnam must be wondering where we are!”

With that, Ricky called the boys into formation, led them in a cheer of three How-hows for the alien visitors, and marched them out of the ship. Yb and her crewmates watched them depart.

“That could have gone a lot worse,” Ryll finally said.

Yb turned to him. “Did you really synthesize a sexual attractant for them?” she wondered.

Ryll blushed an embarrassed ochre. “Well,” he said. “I might have if we’d had more time – but all I could manage was – well – psychological encouragement…”

“A placebo,” she corrected.

“Water with a bit of a pleasing aromatic. It won’t hurt them, and might render them slightly more attractive to their females.”

She sighed but chose not to discuss further the ethics of the transaction. She turned her attention instead to the elaborate construct now adorning the bulkhead of her post, and settled into it. “You know,” she said. “A piece like this could fetch quite a lot of money at the Jann’lu artifact bazaar. Ahh…” she leaned to one side and with a free tentacle snapped off a twig that had just poked her in the mantle. “Enough to buy me a new bench.” Then she placed her tentacles on her console and flipped a switch. “Let’s get this ship ready to fly, Zixx.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Darkness had fallen, and the scouts of Troop 152 were seated around their council fire. They’d eaten their fill of toasted marshmallows, told all their spookiest stories about demons in mirrors and maniacs with hooks for hands, and had settled into quiet reverie, gazing into the hypnotizing flicker of flame and ember, lulled by the musical accompaniment of the fire’s hissing and crackling. Suddenly a strange breeze arose, carrying with it from the ridge a low humming noise. From overhead, a bright light panned across the ground.

The saucer had lifted off, and hovered briefly over their campsite before heeling over and disappearing into the night sky.

“There they go,” Stanley whispered.

“So long, friends,” Ricky said, and the other boys all murmured, “’Bye”. “So long.” “Bon voyage…” Then they fell into a pensive silence.

“So, Pudge,” Stubby said after a bit. “Who are you going to use the potion on?”

“I dunno,” Pudge said. “Maybe Terry Dooley…”

“Ooh, good choice!” Stubby replied. “I was thinking maybe Jill Kominsky.”

“Donna Cheever,” Boomer stated. “Definitely, Donna Cheever.”

“Brenda Howland,” Ricky said. “My sister says she’s interested in me anyway.”

And one by one the boys ticked off the names of the young ladies who’d captured their fancy, whose fancy they now wished to capture, newly confident that Ryll’s potion would serve them well in their pursuits, blissfully unaware that the potion itself was useless, and that this new confidence was all they would need to ensure their success.



10/?/2016 – 9/18/2017