Walter Stickle and the Galactic Rangers, page 15
Walter passed a reddish ball that he took to be Mars, though it didn’t look angry like in the movies, and he passed through the asteroid belt between it and Jupiter in a wild series of flumps that made the ears he no longer had hurt. Ahead, near one of Jupiter’s moons, he saw a spacecraft that looked like Galactic Ranger Scout Ship Alpha, just as it was drawn in the comic strip. In the time it took for him to wonder if he was going to collide with it, the collection of disconnected particles called Walter Stickle entered the craft through a tiny portal on the underside of the ship. He was traveling through a dark tunnel. The light was bright at the end and getting brighter. Everything was spinning, shimmering, blinding.
When the shimmering stopped, Walter found himself staggering around a stark metallic room that smelled of Lysol and pepperoni. He was Walter again, but his computer and chair were gone, his TV, his sofa, his living room, his house, all gone. Sprinklers on the ceiling began spraying a white substance that stuck like glue to his clothes, his hair, his skin, everything. When the jets shut off, electronic music filled the room.
A light above a door turned from red to purple, the door opened, and a man who looked like First Officer Gak entered the room. He was taller than the Gak on TV, his arms and legs more elongated than Kelso drew them, but his skin had that unmistakable bluish Ranger hue. The man had a large bald head, and his ears seemed to be on backward. His red and yellow uniform didn’t bulge with muscles like it did in the comic. He could have looked almost friendly were it not for the gun he was pointing at Walter.
He was holding a Lason-T, an advanced particle-emitting weapon capable of anything from momentarily stunning an adversary to melting a hole in the hull of a ship. In the comic, the Rangers had used them in the episode Boarding Party when they were forced to repel an attack by the Cardashians, an advanced and aggressive female-dominated society possessing a unique technology that allowed them to attack Scout Ship Alpha through its view screen.
“Come with me,” the man said, waving Walter toward the doorway.
Walter looked at his ghostlike hands. “Am I dead?”
“No, Mr. Stickle. You are not dead.”
“Where am I? What happened?” He spit out the words in globs of pepperoni-smelling white goop.
“You have been beamed aboard Scout Ship Alpha. Now come with me.”
“No, seriously, where are we, and why do you look like First Officer Gak?” Walter felt like a piece of raw mackerel that had been covered in oil, breaded, and was about to be thrown in the oven. “And what is this stuff?” he said.
“You are being decontaminated, Mr. Stickle. Now, move.”
“I’m dreaming, aren’t I? But why am I asking you that? You’re in the dream with me. Wake up, Walter. Wake up. Come on, you’re probably drooling all over the keyboard right now. You’ll ruin the finish on the desk. Wake up.”
“Mr. Stickle, you are not asleep. We must complete the decontamination procedure now. Come with me.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me where we are.”
“I have already told you.”
Walter heard that odd electronic music again coming from a loudspeaker. When Gak took a step closer to him, it became words. “Decontamination protocol stage two commencing in three minutes.”
“Okay,” said Walter. “If I’m not dead and I’m not dreaming, then I must be hallucinating. That’s it. You drugged me and kidnapped me, didn’t you? But how? Why? Who are you, and what do you want from me? And why are you dressed as First Officer Gak?”
“I am First Officer Gak.”
“This can’t be the TV show. This isn’t how they bring actors to a studio. They use limousines. They pamper them with booze and cigars. They don’t drug them and cover them in crap that smells like an old pizza that the cleaning lady’s gotten to. Are you the hackers? Kidnapping me won’t do you any good. They changed all my passwords.”
“Mr. Stickle, it would be most fortuitous if we could continue the decontamination procedure before your sun goes supernova.”
“What? Why am I even talking to you? You’re my hallucination. Shut up and let me think.”
The Gak look-alike’s face shimmered and darkened. He grabbed a pair of red rings attached to his utility belt and flipped them across the room at Walter where they encircled his wrists, tightened, and began to glow.
“What’s going on?” Walter said. “These look like the nano-cuffs the Rangers used on that Space Pirate captain.”
In the comic strip, Galactic Ranger handcuffs were composed of living nanoparticles that responded to mental commands. Once attached, the nano-cuffs could deliver a restrained prisoner unassisted to wherever the Ranger wanted just by his thinking it. Kelso really did have an amazing imagination, but Walter wasn’t thinking just then about the chances of getting the evil genius’ autograph at the Comic-Con.
Gak turned and walked out of the room. The cuffs dragged Walter along after him like a staggering zombie through the hatchway into a high-domed chamber where the ceiling and walls were composed of hundreds of mirrored hexagonal panels. Gak continued through another door and both doors closed, trapping Walter inside.
“Wait. Where are you going?” Walter said.
The walls and ceiling began to glow red. The room became uncomfortably warm, then too hot to bear. Walter‘s skin was on fire. He wanted to scream, but opening his mouth was like touching his tongue to a hot stove. He pulled his shirt over his head and cowered in the middle of the room.
Seconds later, the red light changed to white, the burning stopped, he heard music, and he felt like he had been thrown into a pile of snow with nothing on. When the door opened again, steam was rising from his shivering, nude, and handcuffed body huddled there on the floor. The pepperoni goop and his clothes were gone.
Gak frowned at him.
“What kind of hallucination is this?” said Walter.
“It was necessary to remove any possible contagions.”
“What contagions? And what’s the big idea dragging me out of my house like that? That’s kidnapping, you know.”
“Mission parameters require your presence.”
“You drugged me and kidnapped me. That’s against the law.”
“You are not drugged, Mr. Stickle.”
“Really? Then, how was I was flying through outer space with no spaceship? And why do I think I’m aboard Scout Ship Alpha with a Galactic Ranger?”
“You are aboard Scout Ship Alpha.”
“And where are my clothes?”
Gak removed a small red cube from his belt and passed it under a device attached to his wrist. The object began to glow. “Here,” he said, handing it to Walter.
The cube dissolved in Walter’s cuffed hands. Red and yellow warmth flowed up his arm, engulfing it and spreading like a second skin to his chest, his other arm, and then his legs, his hands, and feet. It solidified into a Galactic Ranger uniform.
“This is so cool,” said Walter, admiring the hundreds of images of Walter Stickle, Galactic Ranger in the mirrored walls. “Except for the nano-cuffs — if this is my hallucination, why can’t I just hallucinate them away?”
“Standing orders are that all prisoners must be escorted in a restrained state unless the captain directs otherwise.”
“Prisoner? Prisoner?” Walter said, as he stumbled, unable to resist, out of the room and down the corridor behind Gak.
Gak led him into a lift no bigger than a walk-in closet. The doors closed and, almost at once, opened again onto the bridge of Galactic Ranger Scout Ship Alpha.
“Wow,” said Walter.
It was just like in the comic strip: the view screen as big as a home theater, the communications console with Sparks hovering over all the lights and buttons and gizmos, Klaxon working the dials on the propulsion unit, and the captain brooding in his chair.
Captain Kleeg swiveled around to face them. “Report.”
“Captain, Mr. Stickle was extracted without incident and has been decontaminated. I gave him a uniform because his own was not heat tolerant.”
“Heat tolerant?” Walter said. “You burned the crap out it and nearly incinerated me in the process.”
“You may lower your weapon and remove the restraints, First Officer,” said Kleeg. “I don’t think the Earthling is a threat to us.”
When the captain stood up, he towered over Walter, and unlike Gak, Kleeg filled out his Ranger’s uniform with muscles that Superman would envy.
“You are one big hallucination,” said Walter.
“Repeat?” said Kleeg, adjusting the dial on a device attached to his belt.
“’Hallucination,’ as in you’re not real?”
“Captain,” said Gak. “Mr. Stickle apparently thinks that this is all part of some dream or drug-induced fantasy. That is how his primitive mind is dealing with what he is unable to believe.”
“I see,” said the captain. “Mr. Stickle, we are quite real, and we are not of your world.”
“Look,” said Walter. “I’m not stupid. Aliens don’t speak English. They speak alien. They make funny noises. They drool a lot.”
Gak removed a small device from his belt. “This, Mr. Stickle, is a translator. It understands every known language in the galaxy, including yours.” He turned it off and continued to speak, but the sounds that came from his mouth were like music.
“You sound like what was playing in that room where you Shake ‘n Baked me,” said Walter.
Gak turned the device on again. “When in range, it directly stimulates the audio receptors so that you experience us speaking in your ill-formed language, and we hear you similarly in our own.”
“Oh, for crying out loud. That is so stupid. It figures I’d hallucinate something like that.”
The captain growled something that the translator was unable to put into proper English.
“Fine,” Walter said. “I’m just going to sit in your chair and ignore you until the drug wears off. How about that?”
Walter sat down in the captain’s chair. “This is so realistic,” he said, looking around the bridge and at the view on the screen of Jupiter beyond the mottled yellow moon they were orbiting. “It’s hard to believe it’s not real.”
Kleeg’s eyes ignited, and he picked Walter up with one hand and threw him against the wall.
Walter stood up. “I barely felt that,” he said, “and that, my imaginary friends, proves my point that you are an hallucination.”
“The uniform protected you,” Gak said. “Without it, you would have been dead.”
“Of course, why didn’t I think of that? Oh wait, I did. This is my own little world, isn’t it?”
Kleeg slapped him across the face, knocking him over. “Is that real enough for you?”
Walter lay on the deck nursing his jaw.
“He is useless to us in this state,” said Kleeg.
“Perhaps a demonstration, Captain,” Gak said.
“Perhaps you are correct.” The captain stood over Walter. “As much as I would like to at this moment, I cannot destroy your backward planet to accomplish our mission, Mr. Stickle, but I can obliterate your lifeless moon to demonstrate the reality of this situation. Klaxon!”
“Aye, Captain?” said the navigator.
“Power up the primary weapon.”
“Already at full power and targeting coordinates entered, sir,” Klaxon said. “Awaiting your order to fire.”
“Captain,” Gak interrupted, “apart from the fact that the loss of the Earth’s moon would be difficult to explain without suspicion of extraterrestrial interference, which would compromise the current time estimates for Earth’s achieving space compression, the effects on the Earth’s gravitational field, its axis of rotation, and life as they know it would be catastrophic. Perhaps something less dramatic is in order.”
“Good thinking, Mr. Gak,” said Walter. “Couldn’t have said it better myself, but I did, didn’t I, since you’re inside my head?”
“Very well,” the captain said. “Bring our other guest to the bridge.”
Gak left. The captain returned to his chair to look over the ship’s log, and the other two Rangers, who had not given Walter much more than a passing glance, continued to monitor their stations. Walter went over to Gak’s console and studied its strange and incomprehensible instrumentation. It was far more detailed than the comic, but that only made sense to him in the self-constructed fantasy in which he found himself. The language and symbols were gibberish. That made sense too. After all, they were Argonian. The image on the display, however, did not make any sense at all to Walter. It was his house, his yard, and a car driving down his street.
“This looks like a live feed,” he said, “like a helicopter is over my house.”
“We control your planet’s artificial satellites,” Sparks said. “We are monitoring your domicile. At this distance, the time delay is sizeable and the imaging primitive, but it is functional.”
“A spy satellite? Are you guys NSA, I mean you guys behind this hallucination? Why did you drug me? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Walter watched as his neighbor climbed up a ladder in the dark to adjust one of his floodlights that had slipped in its bracket, lining it up again with Walter’s bedroom window. “I knew it! Caught you red-handed, didn’t I? Just wait till I get back. You… you… lousy neighbor. Can I get a tape of this?” he asked Sparks.
Sparks ignored him.
“Never mind. I almost forgot. This isn’t real.”
Walter moved on to another console, one that controlled the ship’s nano-cable, a device the Rangers had used in the episode Into the Sun to rescue a freighter caught in the gravity field of a giant star. First Officer Gak had a Delta rating in nano-cables, and it was his expert operation of it that had pulled the disabled ship to safety.
“Don’t touch that,” Lieutenant Sparks said.
“Don’t worry, I’m just looking. Wait,” Walter said. “This is isn’t right. This lever thing is supposed to be blue. I distinctly remember that from Into the Sun. Why am I hallucinating a green lever?”
Sparks came over and looked at the console. “That shift lever was blue before I replaced it. It wasn’t functioning within acceptable parameters. How did you know that?”
“Gak used it to rescue that freighter that was falling into the sun.”
The lift doors opened, and Gak entered with a prisoner.
“You’re the captain of the Space Pirates that the Rangers defeated in the Crab Nebula,” Walter said.
Gak looked at Walter. “How do you know this?”
“He also knew that the left shift lever on the nano-cable was blue before I replaced it,” Sparks said, “and he knew of our rescue of the freighter Andromeda.”
“How is it that you know so much about us?” asked Gak.
“Why are you asking me this? You’re the Galactic Rangers. I know everything about you. I read the comic every day.”
“Explain,” said Gak.
“Okay, I’ll play along.” He pointed to Gak’s console. “Can you get Internet on this thing?”
“Since entering your solar system, we have acquired much of your accumulated electronic data from the network you call the Internet,” Gak replied.
“Oh course, you have. Look for the Pitville Times. It’s a New Jersey newspaper. It’s online, though I still get the print copy because I don’t like sitting at the computer to read it. I prefer relaxing on my sofa or the glider. You know how it is. Well, maybe you don’t.”
A glance from Gak dropped the Space Pirate captain to his knees, writhing in anger against the nano-cuffs that forced his compliance. Gak came over to his console and entered a string of strange characters on the keyboard. The newspaper’s website appeared.
“There,” Walter said, pointing to the link to the comics. When he touched the screen, it clicked through to the comic section. He scrolled down to Galactic Rangers. “That’s you. That’s how I know.”
The First Officer stared at the Galactic Rangers comic strip as Walter clicked backed through a week’s worth of them. Gak turned to the captain. “Captain, we have a serious breach of security. It appears the Earthlings are reporting daily on our movements.”
“How is this possible?” asked the captain.
“Don’t ask me,” said Walter. “Ask Kelso. He’s the one who draws it, but I thought he was with you.”
“Who is this Kelso?” the captain said, coming over to dwarf Walter beneath his blue scowl.
“Just some guy. I don’t know. He’s a cartoonist. He draws a new comic strip of your adventures every day. It’s published in over a hundred newspapers.”
Kleeg’s eyes narrowed, and he turned to Gak, “Theories?”
“It seems obvious, Captain,” Gak replied.
“Yes, it does.”
“Just as it seems obvious that we have a spy on board.”
“Hey, don’t look at me,” Walter said. “I just got here, remember? Maybe,” he said, going over to the Space Pirate captain and putting his hand on his shoulder. “Maybe it’s you. You look the type, and wow, do you smell bad. Why couldn’t I hallucinate a world where people take showers and use deodorant?”
“It’s time for your demonstration, Mr. Stickle,” said Kleeg. He addressed the pirate, “Captain Karn, the Congress of Planets has found you guilty of piracy, murder, and sedition. Do you have any last words before I carry out your sentence under Article 23-5, battlefield addendum 13?”
“I do not recognize your Congress or your authority,” the pirate replied. “You are nothing but murderers.”
“Objection noted,” said Kleeg. He drew his Lason-T and adjusted the setting.
The pirate captain looked up at Walter. “Escape while you still can.”
