A weekend at a wild science fiction convention.
Chapter 1
The glass stalactites began to shatter and fall razor-edges first toward him when the giant green guardian bats shrieked in alarm. Up ahead he could see his copilot, stripped to her leather strap underwear and chained to the sacrificial altar as the planet’s drug-crazed ruler loosed the restraints on his pair of blood red spiders.
Garbage.
“But, it’s either that or Good Morning America,” I said to myself as I slapped the eject button on my VCR. “Time to go to work.” I took Spider Virgins of Venus with me and threw it onto the front seat of my car.
The day the craziness started I parked my beat-up broken-down 1952 Dodge gas guzzling monster behind the Del Oro theater and headed for Johnny’s Donuts. I didn’t get far. When I slammed the car door, it fell off at my feet. It did that about one out of five times. Good enough odds. No sense fixing it.
I grabbed the big roll of duct tape off the dash and picked up the door. As I was taping it back on, a teenager in ripped jeans and a T-shirt the size of a small room roared up on a skateboard. As he leaped to a flying stop with an easy grace that would make a ballerina cry, the skateboard flipped into his dangling hand.
“You should try Velcro.”
“You should try brain surgery. I have a shovel in the trunk.” He shrugged, an ultimate teenage rejection of adult stupidity, and was gone. I knew the type — listens to bands I’ve never heard of and thinks anyone who has been to a drive-in movie is an old fart. Kids today get a glassy “shut up and die” look in their eyes when they hear the name “Woodstock,” just like I did when my dad started talking about “The Great Depression.”
I finished taping the door back on. Then I locked it.
Tuesday morning, the start of my workweek, and ever since I got up I’d been pestered by the image of something rushing at me. That happens to me a lot and usually I ignore it until the hallucinations start.
Johnny’s Donuts would make me feel better. The depressing decor of mint green carefully aged by a few decades of burnt coffee smoke seemed to be helpful to the trauma of work week reentry. The decoupage wood slabs featuring a clock, a truck, John Wayne, and Jesus help a lot, too. I know anywhere I go from here will look better. That morning I was large scale wrong.
“Middle Morning Burnt Coffee Blues,” I wrote on my soggy napkin as I sat at the counter. I’m a writer. Mostly I write notes to myself.
I’m a science fiction writer, but a lot of people seem to think I’m a private detective. I’m not, but it’s as good a way as any to waste time and keep myself from writing. And, some day that beautiful woman in trouble will walk in to my office.
Sometimes I tell people I used to be a science fiction writer until I rented Sam Spade’s old office.
I decided to move my work out of the second bedroom in my cabin and into town where I could find civilized time-wasting comforts, like Johnny’s Donuts and a fair supply of bars. The pine trees weren’t enough of a distraction any more. My severe case of Contagious Writer’s Block was waning and I was starting to write regularly. That had to be stopped before it became a nasty habit.
So, I found this old second floor office with a marbled glass pane in the dirty wood door. It was up a dark wooden stairway from the street in downtown Grass Valley. I wanted it at once. Nobody would bother me and I was a two-minute walk from the Owl, a passable bar for a writer in need of middle of the afternoon medication.
But was I ever wrong about privacy.
The office had been the home of the Prometheus Detective Agency, and my lease said I had to leave the gold leaf name on the door. The place looked like the owners, Walter Bouten and Harry Brogan, had spent thirty years working up toward being a small time outfit.
The Prometheus Agency handled divorce cases. The partnership, and the agency, ended the day Bouten got blown away when he caught a client’s wife diddling the local gun shop owner on top of the store counter. His partner, Brogan, closed the case file with these words: “Operative terminated by man with his pants around his ankles. Funeral costs added to client’s bill.” Harry Brogan wasn’t very sentimental, at least in the terse comments I found on the files left behind in my office.
Two cardboard cartons of files were in the corner when I moved in. By the time I finished reading through them I knew much more than my stomach could handle about who in our fine little American town was making lunch hour weenie tacos with other people’s spouses.
An old desk and a wooden filing cabinet came with the place. I dumped the Prometheus files into the filing cabinet, bought a couple of plants, and added some yard sale furniture. The day I turned the lights on, I started to get walk-in cranks. The first one was a guy who looked like he could kill over the phone. Was I still following his wife? Small towns have long memories and as far as Grass Valley was concerned, the Prometheus Detective Agency was still in business. I kind of liked it. It made me feel important to be mistaken for a detective, and, it did a hell of a lot to keep me from writing.
I threw down a dollar on the counter at Johnny’s and left my cup of light brown water untouched. Time to open up the office for a heavy morning of work creating monsters from space. It was 11:30.
On the way out I dropped a quarter in the pay phone and called my office, punching in the beep code to start my coffee maker. When I walked in, the room was filled with the smell of strong fresh-brewed Sierra Mountain coffee.
I flipped the power to my IBM clone and the screen started talking to itself. I had just added a 20 metaphor hard disk that jump-started the system for me while I filled a big old diner mug with coffee. I told the system to bring up the story I was working on.
There wasn’t a chance in hell he was still alive.
In low orbit Eleanor picked up the carrier beam from Sund’s suit on her flight console. Down. After the slamming slowdown of the atmosphere her ship speeded up to a sliding fall.
I looked up when the door opened.
It had happened. Here was the woman in trouble and she was gorgeous. Most of the women up here are married and pregnant by nineteen, slopping around town in faded blue jeans, dragging a kid and pushing a baby in a stroller. This one was wearing a dress from Magnin’s, two-hundred-dollar shoes, and nylons. I hadn’t seen nylons since the last issue of Penthouse.
“My husband is cheating on me,” she said, her voice firm. I want you to find out who she is.” Like a settling mist she sat in my visitor’s chair.
I looked at her for a minute and said, “Your husband’s a fool. Let him go.”
“I plan to. But I want to break her legs first.”
“Look, lady, I’m a science fiction writer, not a private eye. That sign on the door is older than both of us. I write. When you walked in, I was writing about a young woman who will be made to mate by an alien.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“At this rate I may never know.”
“Do you fool around with married women?”
“No.”
She sighed and rose elegantly. “Neither do I.”
The door closed and I was alone in the office, with a faint swirl of her Electricity. It’s a perfume they don’t sell up here. “That’s a department store item,” a woman at Long’s Drugs told me. I decided to overpower her scent and my lack of creativity with another big mug of black coffee.
Back at the keyboard Eleanor moved under my fingers.
Eleanor had been doing what landing pilots do most of the time on exploration voyages — drinking coffee and listening to music.
Bach’s wonderfully complex music was interrupted and eclipsed by the one-note beeping of the emergency warning. A few minutes later she was enclosed in metal, screaming toward Brakko II.
The door opened a second time, and the hallucinations began.
He came into my office like an orange spider avoiding the light. He was somewhere between slim and skinny, and he had very strange skin. It was not only hairless, it was shiny, like it had just been through a car wash, and it had the color of too much sun lamp. His face had no gargoyles of fat. The architecture of bone was unadorned and just below the surface. ”I don’t have time for this shit! I haven’t submitted a story in two years. I’m tryin’ to get something down on paper here!”
Ignoring my outburst he took one nervous look at the yard sale visitor’s chair and started talking, standing up. “I’m an alien.”
“I know Grass Valley can make you feel like that sometimes. It’s the absence of almost everything a human being needs to thrive intellectually. That’s why I moved here.”
“You don’t understand…I’m not from here.” His voice was climbing and I could hear the wails of the hysteria siren in it as he leaned over my desk, his red-orange face looking like a deflated whoopee cushion.
“I can tell that.”
“I’m from up there,” he said, pointing at the Career School of Computer Repair offices upstairs.
“I’m from Montana, myself. Now, what is it you think I can do for you. Start off with where you think you are.”
“You are a private detective, right?”
“Wrong. I’m a science fiction writer who rents what looks like a private detective’s office.”
“But, the door…”
“What am I supposed to do? I rented this dump to finish a story and maybe start a book. I don’t give a shit about the door!” I was screaming.
My visitor stood there with a look of deep sadness, as though watching a friend die of stupidity.
“Then, you write about other planets. I am from another planet and they are trying to capture me.”
“Right.”
I figured it was about time to wind this up, so I got up and poured myself some more java. I didn’t offer any to my guest, but I did open the door.
“I am an alien from another world and I want your help to get home,” he shouted. I shut the door. It was all right to write science fiction in Grass Valley, but don’t have Martians hanging around. The people in the pizza joint downstairs just won’t have it.
“I saw that movie,” I said, sitting down behind the desk, my cup wrapped around my fist like ceramic brass knuckles, steaming.
To my left Eleanor waited, kept from finding Sund by this jackass from space. I kept nodding as he talked, but my eyes were on the amber letters.
Breaking the seal she opened her hatch and, grabbing the overhead handhold, lifted her slim body up and out of the ship.
“Look, I got bug-eyed monsters to create here. What do you want me to do?”
“There’s a science fiction convention this weekend in Sacramento. Go with me and protect me until I can make contact and get a ride home.”
“No.”
“Then they will kidnap me before I get away.”
“Who?”
“Evil people. Yaw-Bees.”
The cursor blinked, flushing a bit of my writing time down the toilet with every silent tick. I had to get rid of this nut. The reason why I was so intent on actually writing this morning had to be that my Tuesday morning begin-the-week-with-pain personality was in control. I had eliminated Mondays and moved to get rid of that bastard, but after a couple of months he found me. Some weeks I just got in my car when he showed up and drove around until it was Thursday and my too-late-this-week personality took charge.
“Look, pal, forget it,” I told my visitor. “I don’t go to science fiction conventions any more. People keep asking me what I’ve had published lately.” I decided a while back to skip cons until I had sold a second story. I’m a one-hit rock and roll star. One story, so I’m a science fiction writer. Now I need to publish again. I need it as bad as a teenager imagines he needs his first lay. Worse. I need it as bad as the teenager really needs it the second time. But only on Tuesdays when pain was behind the wheel.
“If you don’t help me, I will never get back to the woman I love.” It was a low blow, but it got my attention.
“She’s going to be at the con?”
“Yes.”
“So take a bus. There’s one leaving every day.”
“I took a bus up here.”
“Why?”
“No private detective in Sacramento would listen to me. I found the Prometheus Agency in an old phone book.”
“Too old, pal. Too old. They’re gone.”
“But, what can I do?”
“Go home, order some flowers, and meet your true love at the convention. Live happily ever after.”
“They’ll get me first.”
“Haven’t we been here before? You’re too skinny to be Costello, so you must be Abbott.” He looked at me like I was talking Martian. “The Yaw-Bees will get you, right?”
“Right.”
“They’ll keep you from meeting up with your true love and going home, right?” I remembered R. Crumb’s great comic strip that I saw in an underground newspaper during the sixties about going home. It touched a universal chord in all of us who were all alone, like a rolling stone.
“Oh, Heinlein! Listen, if I go to the convention with you, my fee is $500 a day and expenses.”
“What’s an expense?”
“Everything.”
“All right.”
“All right? All right?” He had it out and was laying it down. Crisp new hundreds. It was time to reorganize my priorities. I could take the heat from the other writers if I got enough to drink and screw. And got paid handsomely.
“What, exactly, do you expect from me?”
“You will help me.” I guessed it wasn’t going to get much more specific. The hundreds were on my desk, flashing louder than the cursor.
“Okay. Do you have a name?”
“Anjou.”
“Okay, Anjou, meet me in the parking lot behind Victoria’s Truss Store and Wheelchair Rental at eight Saturday morning. We’ll drive down and be there for the nine o’clock opening.” He left smiling and those hundreds left me smiling.
I smiled at Eleanor. She scratched her crotch.
Underfoot the dust was powder. Her big boots left sharp tread cuts as she set off toward the carrier beam from Sund’s suit. She found it behind a dust-covered rock, empty.
But I couldn’t concentrate. Eleanor was supposed to be rushing into the clutches of a creepy alien who wants to play naughty doctor with her. All I could think of was Muffy.
It was time to admit to myself that Muffy was the real reason I’d stopped going to science fiction conventions. She was always there, always beautiful in public and an animal in bed. I wanted to go on playing animal house after the tent was folded and she always disappeared back to her secret real life.
I was tired of finding and losing her, so I wasn’t ever going to another convention…until my client buried me in crisp new Ben Franklins.
Now I was consumed. I could feel her body moving smoothly underneath her clothes, struggling to escape. Like the time we got buck naked together at NoBullCacaCon and floated down the artificial stream through the lobby of the Houston Hyatt using clusters of condoms as water wings. When Security threw us out, Muffy covered herself — in a very token fashion — with the yellow-white balloons as hundreds cheered.
I didn’t give a good flying fornication what this orange person really was. Most likely a bad case of chemical imbalance, very unlikely to be driving in the right lane. But, I was sure of three things. I’d soon be seeing Muffy again, I had a bunch of bucks, and I was back. Playing writer was much easier and much more fun that actually writing.
I headed home to brush off my Panama hat. My San Francisco hat maker once told me, “Don’t get a hat that has more character than you do.” I was never very good at taking excellent advice.
Of course, since it was only a little after one, I needed some lunch first. And before lunch I needed a cocktail. The Holbrooke Hotel has a bar that came around the horn back when gold dust was blowin’ in the wind. It was a cool, dark room with an elegant old look to it. Overhead was a pressed metal ceiling older than the concept of the automobile. Big mirrors behind the dark wood bar showed you a picture of yourself that was, somehow, finer than real life.
The woman who mixes drinks during the lazy afternoons between lunch and dinner is as beautiful as any I’ve seen in a bar…either side of the plank.
“Tanqueray, rocks, twist, please Suzanne.”
“The good stuff. Must have been a good morning.”
“Right. I wrote, oh hell, ten, twelve words.”
“Is that good?”
“No.”
“Then what are you celebrating?” Suzanne had black hair and a face that could break hearts across a busy street, and when she talked the bar talk I could almost believe she meant something special by it.
“I met an alien.”
“Yeah? From what planet?”
“Forgot to ask.”
“Oh. What did he look like.”
“Brad Pitt.”
“Great. I hope they’re planning to invade.”
Only Brad Baby is handsome enough to interest Suzanne. I know, I’ve tried round after round to get something more than the next drink. I just don’t get it. I’m handsome. I heard a woman whisper it one night at a party in San Francisco. That sounds damn conceited, but temper it with the fact that it has taken me most of my life to discover it. Maybe it was just the hat.
Curly hair, great smile, funny…charming.
Two stiff gins made me feel like some wine with lunch, so I went to the hotel dining room for a quick salad and a half bottle and then back to the bar for an after-lunch brandy with Suzanne, trying to make her into a substitute for Muffy through alcohol alchemy.
I’d blown a chunk out of the first hundred and I hate small change, so I decided to go somewhere else and have another drink.
Then the country western band was taking a break and the clock behind the bar at The Office said 12:30.
“Shit, that can’t be right,” I told the 45-year-old cowgirl sitting next to me wearing 20 years of beer for a belt. “I know it was at least a couple of hours past noon when I had lunch.” Then I fell off the bar stool. Two kind gentlemen helped me up and out to the gutter where they laid me down for a nap. Something had happened to the sun.
Okay, end of playtime. I was in great danger. Not only had they put me in an empty parking space in front of a busy bar, I was sure they were calling the police. The Grass Valley police always arrest everyone not in an expensive automobile. Unconscious drunks are routinely shot for attempting to escape.
I made it down a couple of back alleys, negotiated a perilous crossing of a deserted street, and arrived at my car. I’d lost my keys, so I ripped the duct tape off the driver’s door and crawled into the back seat.
Almost immediately a hot white light burned through my eyelids, convincing me I was being tortured by creatures from outer space. I could do it, I’d hold out…I would never open my eyes. They couldn’t make me!
I opened my eyes. It was morning.
“Wednesday. Hump day,” I said, climbing out of the back seat and heading for Johnny’s. When I got there the woman behind the counter looked like Suzanne after eighty years of drinking cheap wine. I discovered I was broke.
“I.O.U.” I wrote on my soggy napkin. Sometimes it pays to be a writer…in a small town where they know you.
Read more about It Came From Citrus Heights and Don Baumgart HERE.
Copyright 2008 Don Baumgart. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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