To Be Alone

ichard Crenshaw was a writer. Well, in a way. He wrote for TV. Not anything people considered their favorite show… He wrote what people watched while they were waiting for “something good” to come on.

By the age of thirty-seven he had made just enough money to retire. So he did. He bought a house in the middle of the Nevada desert. His friends in California thought it was to far away to bother visiting him, which Richard didn’t mind at all. Real people weren’t nearly as entertaining as the ones on TV. They weren’t as attractive, they weren’t constantly saying witty things, and most of them had personal problems that lasted longer than half an hour. Worst of all, real people made demands. They wanted phone calls or emails or, sometimes, physical contact. Things like that could be massively inconvenient. But the folks on TV would always be your friend, and all you had to do was watch.

Richard never watched the shows that he had written. His dialog was bad enough as words on a page. It was even worse coming out of the mouths of the surgically-enhanced talking props on the screen. Instead, Richard watched other shows. All the other shows. Everything and anything that came on the tube, as long as his name wasn’t anywhere in the credits. Watching the product of his feeble talents and rather limited imagination was too much for him to bear.

One particularly hot afternoon in August, Richard was sitting in his enormous, overstuffed recliner, watching the television. He was just about to go into the kitchen for a snack when he noticed a rather odd reflection on the screen.

“What’s that? Something shiny…” He turned around and there, floating in the air in front of him, was a silver ball. It was the size of a cantaloupe and so shiny he could see his chubby, bewildered face staring back at him. The ball was floating left and right and up and down, all over, as if it was exploring the room. Whenever it changed direction, it shot out a small puff of pink smoke. Apparently it only needed that small force to propel itself in a new direction, and nothing at all to hold itself in the air.

It hovered in front of the television for a moment, and then moved over to the fish tank in the corner. It puffed out its smoke again, shooting over to one of the lamps on a coffee table. At last it settled in the air in front of Richard. And it spoke. In Spanish. Richard, having taken German in school, was at a complete loss. “I don’t know what the hell you’re saying,” he said, wondering if he should bother asking the ball “Sprechen Sie Deutsches?”

The ball then addressed Richard in French, Japanese, and what might have been Ancient Greek. Finally it said, “I have determined your language to be English. Is this correct?”

“Yes!” said Richard, glad that he could finally get to the bottom of this. “What the hell are you supposed to be, then?”

The ball swayed from side to side as it spoke. “I am a representative of the trade ship M’chlark Q7. We are interested in purchasing your valpinium.”

Richard carefully considered what he should say next. “Um…”

The ball apparently decided that the problem was that Richard was distracted, so it floated to the other side of the room and knocked the television’s plug out of the outlet. Floating back to Richard, it said, “Please allow me to try again. The trade ship M’chlark Q7 is currently orbiting this little blue planet and my masters aboard the ship have sent me to you to ask about the valpinium underneath this dwelling. We would like your permission to remove the valpinium from the ground and take it with us to our planet. Would you like to negotiate a price?”

For once in his life, Richard thought quickly. “Something called valpinium is under my house… I suppose it’s a mineral of some kind. And this ball thing says it’s from another planet. So some aliens want to drill under my house and take this mineral, and they actually want to pay me for it! I wonder if they have gold on their planet…”

Addressing the ball, he said, “Well, I suppose I could sell my valpinium. Or not. Either way. What do you aliens use for money?”

The ball circled Richard’s head as it spoke. “We have Centurion Dollars, Galactic Alliance Credits, and the giant, stone currency of the Lapp Islanders.”

“Do you have gold?”

“What is gold?”

“Guess not… Diamonds? Rubies? Something like that?”

“Not in our inventory today. Perhaps we could arrange some sort of trade? We have various goods from all over the galaxy, any of which we would be willing to exchange for mining rights.”

“Well,” thought Richard, “this sounds interesting.”

“We have a solar igniter! Brand new, still in the original package!’

“What exactly is that, then?”

The ball swayed in the air, stopping just over Richard’s head. “A solar igniter is a device which causes solar energy to explode. It’s powerful enough to destroy entire planets!”

Richard figured that the United States and the Chinese had more than enough bombs to do that already. Besides, he didn’t want to destroy the planet. That’s where he kept his stuff. “What else have yah got?”

“We have a gross of jetpacks, all fueled and ready to go. You know, for kids!”

Richard was very much afraid of heights. “No, what else?”

“How about a portable fission generator? Dump anything in the hole, garbage, dirt, whatever, and it’ll power an entire city!”

Richard thought that sounded very interesting indeed. He didn’t know enough about machines to figure out how it worked, but he was sure he could hire someone else who could. “Build a few thousand of those,” he thought, “and I’ll be the richest man alive! But… I have no idea how valuable this stuff is. I should see if I can get anything else.”

Turning to the ball he said, “Sound’s great, but… How about the generator, plus seven million Galactic Alliance Credits?”

The ball voiced its agreement. The ball shimmered like heat coming off the highway, and vanished… A moment later, a large, gray cube appeared in the middle of the room. It was making a humming noise and vibrating the floor.

“Great, how do you turn it on?” Richard asked no one in particular. Examining the cube, he saw a small hole in the top. Clearly that was where the fuel went. The cube had no buttons or switches or any other visible controls. “But if it’s making noise, surely it’s working, right?”

On pure hunch, Richard grabbed the television remote. The TV was still unplugged, but Richard pressed the “ON” button anyway. And the TV came to life! “Amazing,” thought Richard. “Not only does this thing generate power, it broadcasts power through the air, like a radio tower. I think I’ll unplug everything in the house… No point in running up electric bills, huh?”

Richard spent the next twenty minutes unplugging his fish tank, his lamps, his stereo and every other electrical device in the house. When he was done, he realized something. “So now aliens are going to come down to earth and drill a mine under my house. The ball said they were orbiting the planet… When they enter the earth’s atmosphere, the military will pick them up on radar, right? I wonder if they’ll send fighter jets in to shoot them down. I should go outside and watch. That’d be at least as entertaining at my soaps.”

Richard sat on his front lawn, looking at the sky until the sun went down. The aliens never came. “Maybe they have to go back to their planet to get drilling equipment or something. Oh, well. I’m going to bed.”

Ten or eleven hours later, Richard rolled over and climbed out of bed. He drew back the shades to let in the morning sun. But, strangely, there wasn’t any. “What the hell? Nighttime again?” He double-checked the clock on his nightstand, and checked the watch on his dresser. They both said “ten A.M.”. So why was it still dark?

Richard donned his faded blue bathrobe and walked outside. His mouth dropped open in awe. Under the light of ten million stars, he stared out at the desert. Or rather, where the desert should have been. Instead, there were the sixty or so feet of his front yard, and then nothing. Nothing but darkness.

He walked to the edge of his yard and looked down. Nothing but stars. His yard, his house, and all his worldly possessions were floating in space, a world to themselves. He reached out his hand and felt something. There was something there, cold and smooth and transparent. It was like there a wall of glass surrounding the edge of his yard.

Richard walked the circumference of his yard, feeling the invisible wall. “Whatever this is, it must be what’s keeping the air inside here. It probably has something to do with that spaceship up there.”

Yes, there was a spaceship a hundred feet or so above Richard’s house. It was a typical spaceship like you see in all the movies: silver saucer, windows around the edges, mysterious glow of energy and all that. The spaceship began to move, taking Richard’s yard along with it. This must have been some sort of intergalactic tow truck.

“OK, so I’m in a glass bubble being towed by a UFO to some planet somewhere… What the hell am I supposed to do now?” Richard did the first thing that came to mind: screaming obscenities at the sky. “Hey! Hey, you stupid fucking spaceship! This is my house! And my yard! See all this dirt, you assholes? It’s supposed to be back on earth! It’s mine, and I want you to put it back!”

A voice from behind Richard said, “Actually, it’s not yours. We bought it.”

Richard turned around. It was the silver ball. “What the hell are you talking about? You bought the valium… Val parasol… That stuff! You bought the minerals underneath my house, not my fucking yard!”

The ball danced around Richard’s head. “This is standard mining procedure. We paid you for the rights to the vein of valpinium. So we used our energy scoop to remove the section of earth containing it. If you chose not to leave the area, it’s your problem, not ours.”

Richard was furious. “You didn’t tell me that’s what you were going to do! And besides, you never paid me that money!”

The ball insisted that an account had been created at the Galactic Alliance Bank on Titan, and the credits had been deposited under his name. The ball headed back up to the ship.

“Wait!” shouted Richard. “Wait!”

“What is it?” said the ball.

“Do you need all this dirt?”

“No. We just extract the minerals from the bottom of the dirt pile, and then we throw the rest into the nearest black hole.”

“Well, instead of throwing my house and me into a black hole, here’s another idea… Hear me out, now… Why don’t you take the minerals out, and then take the leftover dirt (and me and my house) back to earth?”

The ball floated back down, and hovered inches from Richard’s face. “That would be impossible. We would use up a lot of fuel, and that is very expensive.”

“Well, why don’t I give you back those credits you gave me? Is that enough?”

The ball buzzed like a florescent light. Finally it said, “My calculations show we are forty-eight million miles from earth. Your seven million credits is just enough for us to make the trip.”

“Great! Great! Let’s go back to earth!”

But first, the spaceship sent out a mining pod. It was a small ship shaped like a dentist’s drill. It swooped down underneath the pile of dirt that used to be Richard’s yard and bored a hole. An hour or so later it came back into view and returned to the spaceship. Then the ground started to move. Richard sat down and watched the stars fly past his house. It never occurred to him to get his telescope down from his attic. Nine hours later, the earth was finally in sight. It got larger and larger, and Richard could see the lights of the cities below. Suddenly, they stopped moving. And the ship was floating away!

“Wait!”

The silver ball appeared by his elbow. “What’s wrong now?” it demanded.

“Where are you going? You’re supposed to take me to earth!” he insisted, trying not to cry.

“We’re at earth now, human. Don’t you recognize your home world?”

“Yes, but… We’re in orbit around it,” he whined. “I thought you guys were going to take me all the way back down to the surface!”

“At the time we made our deal, your seven million credits were enough to take you all the way to the earth’s surface. But since then, your planet has moved in its orbit.”

“So you’re going to leave me in orbit here?”

The ball hovered for a moment, considering its options. Finally it said, “I’ll make you a deal. You don’t make us use up any more fuel, and we’ll leave the force field up. That way you can keep all this air as a souvenir of your good times on Earth!”

“Great,” thought Richard, “I won’t suffocate, but there aren’t any stores on this asteroid… I’ll starve to death instead.” Richard tried to negotiate further with the silver ball, but it refused to spend any more time on the matter. It returned to the spaceship, and the ship flew away.

Like I said before, Richard was afraid of heights. Being a mile above the earth was much to frightening to think about, so he went in the house. Because of the fusion generator, he still had electricity. Thanks to his satellite dish, he could still watch TV.

“Amazing,” Richard thought. “You get great reception from up here…”

Filed under: science fiction, story by Writepop