The Gaming Outpost

Huge, black, spiky furred gorillas hemmed me in right and left, fore and aft, on a plain made flat by the pounding of many feet. The thousands of gorillas around me raised a fine dust about my ankles as they stepped and stomped, and the whole crowd of them moved by what might be Brownian motion, or might be a plan to take me along…

Something tentacled was on my right ankle, I realized as I woke from the verser coma that is attendant upon arriving in a new universe. Being careful, I drew my K-bar commando knife earned in the WWII Invasion of Moscow under General Patton, and looked down to my sockless ankle in between the track shoes and the loose thin, crinkly linen dyed brown to save on cleaning bills, of my running trousers.

A dry leaf lay on my anklebone. Sagging with relief, I flicked it off, put back the knife in the sheath on my thin, leather belt, and looked about. I was resting in the lee of a low brush covered hillside. An occasional sedimentary rock, broken in almost regular block shapes, and brown and dusty to match the tan of the hillside was mixed in with a waxy leafed and well spread spindly trunks of a ten foot tall bush with white seed balls, and a mass of dark, green oval, but pointed leaves that had torch red flowers in bundles spotted over it, here and there. Above me, providing the leaf that had startled me stood a tree…

If my second year botany was correct, this was creosote bush, bougainvillea, and a joshua tree. But that left something vaguely like a mangrove thirty feet to my left along the backside of the hill. It had dozens of short, stalky stems, grasslike really, but each three yard stalk (below its crowning tassel) was connected to another stalk, or more than one by means of sheathes that bent off the main stalk, and merged with another stalk.

Plus, it was ruby red with black elliptical dots of sizes varying from a quarter inch to a tenth of an inch in diameter. I did not remember anything remotely like it from botany, or any of the nature programs I had seen whether they were slides, or black and white televsion, or color television, or streaming video, or even holovid. It was alien was my thought as I approached it, full of curiousity.

And then something with twenty inch long segments, like a yellow snake, but with spiky, insectile legs, two for each joint, came out of the alien mini-mangrove area. I heard other rustlings in the thirty square foot area.

It charged me, with its back jointed knees, go snippity snap, as its straight pin feet went clippety-snip on the rock, and I halted for one second. Just enough to see a dozen other emerging, and then I took to my heels, and went straight up the hillside.

It followed close on, and fearing that I should get bit, I scrambled with my hands on warm rocks, and my legs pumping high and mad, and so grateful I had runner’s trousers on. My previous world frowned on the notion of displaying one’s legs in public. It was not dignified they felt, so men and women when running wore what were in essence capri pants of linen.

I kept bolting to the top of the hill, and once I got a slightly open spot, I spun about to my right to throw off any pursuers, and looked back. Halfway down the hill, I saw the segmented snake think looking my way.

It raised itself up, and waved its front ten legs at me.

“Don’t worry, pal, I got the message.” I said softly, and turned to walk on. It could be that the mini-mangrove was their nest, or something weirder, the alien stalks were a brain, and the segmented snakes its hands. But it was clear that for now, my curiousity would have to be put aside.

I passed great clumps of purple sage, still flowering, and enjoying the scent, and the view down into the long valley below me, I was startled by a thrumming passing over me. Looking up, I saw a bulbous, two parted spacecraft that shook the air with its gravitic emmissions, even if it was only seventy feet long, and not going that fast.

At least I think it was a spacecraft. Otherwise the not that aerodynamic design is even worse for effort than I had thought. Being curious, I decided to follow it.