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From: Clem Kadiddlehopper <manco6204@yahoo.com>
Subject: {ASSM} Planet Pauline, Part One (MF cons rom scifi)
Date: Mon,  8 Jul 2002 16:10:03 -0400
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<1st attachment, "Pauline1.txt" begin>

Planet Pauline, Part One (MF cons rom scifi)


Ed: Skip to the very end (of Part Two) if you want an image to go with
the story.


Chapter 1


   Steve knew something was wrong as soon as he woke up, but people
have a way of denying the strange, going about their business under the
hope that things will be normal when they look up again.  He could see
from the dark face of the alarm clock that the power was out - again. 
Goddamn PSE, he thought.  It seemed like every two or three weeks it
was out, usually in the morning.  That meant no hair dryer, no morning
TV and resetting every stinking clock on every appliance in the house. 

   He went into the bathroom, grabbed a robe off the peg and sauntered
out to the living room, absently reaching for the TV remote until he
remembered.  The sun was bright in the window, but there was
something unsettling about the light that caused him to pause for a
second, until he remembered the task at hand.  He decided to call PSE,
to report the outage as usual, though doubtless someone already had.  He
was already rehearsing the speech; yes, the power's out - again, emphasis
on the "again", though the person on the other end of the line could care
less about his sarcasm.

   The only phone that worked when the power was out was in the
garage, and the door was outside, across a tile court from the main house. 
He unlocked the door of the house and walked outside.  A severe sense
of displacement hit him in the face, like a seizure.  He turned around and
hugged the door frame, breathing heavily. 

   "Jesus Christ!" he said out loud, "What the fuck!"  He laughed a little
nervously, thinking about the neighbors, but those thoughts were
swamped by the image in his head.

   What he had seen, or thought he had seen, was wrong - way wrong. 
What he should have seen was his tile court, and a strip of landscaping
beyond, a new section he had just planted after removing a tree, with
roses and shrubs.  Behind the roses was a grey fence, and then there
should just be a peek of the neighbor's roof below him, and trees and
hills leading out to a pocket view of the Cascade mountains to the east,
where the sun should be rising.  He should not have seen some sort of
jungle beyond the fence with the sun shining on the odd foliage from the
west.  Not at six in the morning, and not ever for that matter.

   Get hold of yourself, he thought, keeping his eyes shut.  He walked
back in the house and sat on the floor, opening his eyes to see the sun
blasting into the kitchen and dining room windows across the house from
him.  Everything looked normal aside from the sun, but then he could
only see the fence on the other side of the yard through those windows. 
He lived on a hill, and the next house was on a level above him, hidden
by a rock wall and the fence, covered in climbing roses.  

   Of course, he laughed to himself, it must be evening.  I must have
slept the day somehow, or taken a nap and forgotten, but he instantly
knew that was nonsense.  On a table in back of the couch was a paper
plate from the mini-pizza he had eaten last night.  The box from the
DVD he had watched was still sitting on top of a shelf of equipment.  He
was the type to put everything away, though sometimes he would leave
a mess for the night.  Those things would not be there if it was late
afternoon.  He worked himself up, took a deep breath and turned around. 
The jungle was still there.

   Instead of the his neighbor's trees, there was a hill covered with a
strange sort of palm tree.  That wasn't right, they weren't trees at all, not
like any he had ever seen.  They had stems and leaves alright, but the
shapes and forms were just all wrong.  And the colors were off
somehow.  I'm dreaming he thought, it's okay, go with it, see what
happens.  He stood up, shaking, and walked outside to stand in the
middle of the court.  He turned to the north, and the familiar trees of his
yard greeted him, but there was something strange about them as well. 
They didn't look right, it was the color of the light.  And what lay
beyond definitely wasn't right, more of the bizarre jungle above the roof
line of the bedroom wing of the house.

   The next thing he noticed, still staring off to what used to be the north,
was noise.  He could hear off in the distance the sound of waves, like a
seashore.  That fit with Seattle, but he was ten miles inland, in Bellevue,
way too far to hear the sea, and it was in the wrong direction anyway. 
And where were the birds?  He kept a feeder in his backyard full of seed,
and the chirping would start before dawn.  There were always birds in his
yard, always.  He didn't hear a single peep or catch even a glimpse of
anything moving through the air.  Now that he thought of it, there was
no traffic noise.  The air should be thick with the sounds of the morning
commute from the freeways across the valley.  The sound of crashing
waves could not be mistaken for traffic.

   May as well complete the circle, he thought.  He turned towards his
house, looking back into the sun.  Over the roof line there should have
been firs and cedars marching up to the top of Clyde Hill, not a tropical
mountain in the distance that looked like something out of Bali Hai.  He
was too close to the garage wall to see the landscape that way, which was
a relief, of sorts.

   The next step, he thought, pretending to enjoy the dream, was to look
over the fence.  He put on some rubber sandals and walked through the
new landscaping to peer over the top of the fence, being careful not to
step on any of his new plants.  His yard continued about ten feet beyond
the fence line, and then just stopped, like a knife had cut the earth.  He
could see by the ground beyond that there was a drop at the edge.  What
the hell, he thought.  He walked back to the court and then down a path
beside the house, turning to push through a small gate in the fence.  He
walked out beyond the fence line and peered over the edge.  There was
a drop of about eight foot to the ground.

   That was bad enough to swallow.  Worse was the foliage on the
ground below.  It was just plain weird.  It was green, but not the right
color, and it twisted along the ground like a bunch of small vines, with
little spiky things sticking up from the stems.  The foliage appeared to be
soft and feathery.  He could see he was sitting in a depression at the crest
of a small hill, and what he saw looking down towards the sounds of the
crashing waves was the worst of all.  Through the jungle, a half mile
away, was a wide beach, and beyond it another sun, small and white,
sitting on the edge of the horizon of an endless blue-green sea.  


Chapter 2


   Some people say they dream in black and white, but most seem to
dream in color, and report sensations, such as pain and taste.  Still, even
in an unusually vivid dream, the action is rarely continuous, jumping
from place to place as they unfold.  Steve dreamed in full technicolor,
and could remember sounds and sensations as clearly as if he had lived
them.  He sat on the ground, recalling the bizarre dream of the previous
night, in which he visited an ex-girlfriend in a city somewhat like San
Francisco, when a volcano erupted down the street.  Most of the dream
concerned his frantic search for his car keys to get away, the usual
frustration scenario.

   No matter how remarkable the dream, he could never recall one in
which he sat passively, staring off into space, thinking.  He tried to recall
if he thought to himself in dreams.  "Screw it," he said out loud.  This
was obviously no dream.  Somehow, his house had been transported to
some other place.  Another planet, he thought.  It occurred to him that
somehow he had been shifted in time, but there never could have been
two suns.  He looked out through the gap in the jungle towards the
distant sea.  The small whitish sun was sitting just above the horizon,
ninety degrees to the yellow sun behind him.  Clearly this was a binary
star system, quite common as he recalled.

   He got up and stretched, over the initial shock, feeling oddly elevated. 
I could be insane, he thought, but in the meantime there were several
hundred things he needed to do at once, and he began to prioritize.  First
he had to go the bathroom.  Correction, he thought to himself with a
smile, the bathrooms are currently out of order.  He went back into the
house, feeling very odd at being inside the familiar surroundings.  After
thinking about it for awhile, he picked up some toilet paper and went into
the garage for a shovel, doing his business in a hole he dug in the yard
outside the fence line.  After he finished and covered up the hole, he
looked at the toilet paper roll in his hand.  I'm going to miss you soon,
he thought, wondering what else he could use when his current supply
ran out.

   The next order of business was to get something to eat and drink. 
Standing in the kitchen, he considered the options.  The power was gone,
and PSE was not going to fix it anytime soon.  He was a bachelor and
had little food in the fridge, but there were a number of steaks in the
freezer, all of which would be junk soon.  He had a few cans of beans,
a half sack of pasta and a few other odds and ends, but without another
food source he would starve.  The first decision, was easy; steak for
breakfast, save the canned goods.

   Then there was water.  He had bottles of water throughout the house,
just sport bottles for drinking.  There were a couple in the fridge, two in
the garage, one by the bed and another in the bathroom.  He could drink
the water in the toilets and the hot water tanks.  About a week's worth
at best.  The obvious choice for now was the leftover milk in the fridge,
still cool.  The power had gone out about six hours ago, he guessed,
though there was no way to be sure.  All the clocks were either battery
operated or were LCD readouts, now dark, so there no stopped clocks to
compare.  He laughed; the power had not gone out, he had gone out. 
Way out.  It was supposed to be eight o'clock, but by the position of the
sun, it was more like late morning.  Of course, that depended on which
sun you went by.

   He couldn't help be amused by the situation.  It was so incredible as
to be beyond belief, and it just wouldn't sink in.  But he kept focused on
the schedule of events for the next hour or two.  Next, cook steak.  He
had two choices, and one of them excited him briefly.  In the garage was
a Honda emergency generator, a big one, sitting in it's own alcove with
the exhaust pumped outside the garage wall.  It was hooked into the main
panel and could operate the power in the entire front section of the house. 
Only the back bedroom wing was cut out.  He could fire it up and use
the stove to cook.

   It was an enticing idea, and it would be comforting to see the lights go
on, to play some music, maybe a tape or a DVD.  But it was also foolish,
he realized, it would use fuel that maybe he would need later. Nope, he
thought, the charcoal grill for now.

   He fired up the grill, sparing the lighter fluid and using wadded up
newspaper instead.  Which is more precious, he thought.  He heaped the
coals on one side of the grill and placed a couple of frozen steaks on the
other side, to defrost them before cooking.  Having a few minutes to kill
he decided to dress and explore.

   As he pulled on shoes and shorts he considered whether he should get
a ladder and climb down to the foreign ground.  Not yet, he thought.  It
was possible the plants might be poison, or could even burn his feet. 
Acid for blood, he chuckled to himself, remembering the Alien movies. 
First a circle around his own turf, get the lay of the land.  He tinkered
with the grill a bit, and started to walk the bounds, beginning with
familiar territory outside the fence line, through the side gate.

   He stopped to examine the edge of the cut again.  He looked at a rose
cane that was growing at an angle over the edge.  The end of the cane
had been sliced through so neatly that there was no sign at all of the cut. 
Everything beyond the edge of the yard had just vanished.  Plants that
spanned the edge were bifurcated as neatly as if a team of surgeons had
worked with scalpels, carefully cutting every leaf and stem where it
crossed the line.  Everything had just been zapped, in a dead straight line
down the yard.  He got on his belly and wormed his way to the edge, not
wanting to collapse the earth.  He lined up his eye with the edge and it
was absolutely straight, up and down and sideways.  Some dirt had
crumbled off the edge and that was continuing as he watched, a few
rocks rolling across the alien foliage.

   There was something else he noticed.  A small pile of dirt had fallen
from his property onto the vine plants on the ground, and where the dirt
lay on the plants they had withered.  It wasn't the force of the dirt that
had crushed them to death, that was obvious by more recent activity.  He
was sure the contact with his dirt had killed the alien plants.  Take that,
he thought.  As an experiment, he picked up a rock and threw it to the
ground.  The foliage reacted as anything on earth would have, dented by
the rock, but not affected otherwise.  It didn't explode, or vaporize like
in some low budget science fiction movie.
 
   He was startled by a motion that continued long after the rock had
come to rest.  Something had moved in the foliage, something clearly
alive.  He reacted quickly, picking himself up from the ground and nearly
sprinting into the house, shutting the door and locking it behind him.  He
walked into the kitchen and pulled a gun from a drawer.  

   Steve kept guns in every area of the house.  That's what they're for,
he would say, an unloaded gun was just a hunk of metal.  There was the
357 magnum in his hand, a 44 in his bathroom, a 357 by the bed, another
in the glove box of his truck in the garage, and in a cabinet in the garage
several guns, including a hand cannon, the 475 Linebaugh, a custom built
gun that was at one time the most powerful handgun in the world, built
on a single-action revolver frame that was light and easy to carry.  He
was well armed with plenty of ammunition, but he still regretted the lack
of a shotgun or a rifle. 

   The 357 was the closest at hand, but he wanted something bigger, so
he carefully crept out of the house to the garage, ignoring the steaks on
the grill for now.  Once in the garage he selected the 475.  This type of
gun could kill any animal on earth with a well-placed shot, and he was
good, practicing regularly.  He also knew enough science to calculate
quickly that there was probably nothing on this planet he couldn't best
with the weapon, with luck.

   The gravity of the planet felt about right to him, close enough to earth
to impose the same restrictions on the physics of the beasts that might
exist.  There would be nothing without a spine over a couple of feet tall,
that wasn't remotely possible, unless somehow insects had learned to
make carapaces out of steel.  An animal with an internal skeleton could
get huge, and a creature the size of a dinosaur could obviously not be
ruled out.  But even dinosaurs were made of flesh.  Snarling aliens with
acid for blood and skins that looked like polished chrome were as likely
to exist as the boogy man, that he was sure of, or at least he hoped.  

   He felt confident with the gun in his hand, and put on the shoulder
holster loaded with cartridges, venturing out through the side gate again,
keeping his body flexed with the gun leading.  If anything showed its
face he intended to blast it and ask questions later.  He walked over to
where he had seen the movement below, and let the gun barrel drop. 
There was no need to guess what creature he had seen, it was standing
out in the open, picking at the fronds of the vine plants.  

   It was a crab, or nearly enough, a fairly big one, a little larger than a
dungeness.  Its back shell was relatively slender, and its legs were very
large in relation to the body.  There were four legs on each side and two
large claws in front.  The shell of the central body was a yellowish
orange color, while the legs were bright red.  The colors were off a bit
from what he was used to, as the sunlight was more yellow than on earth. 
The closet analogy he could find in his memory was a coconut crab, a
land crab of the South Pacific.  It appeared to have eye stalks in front,
and clearly had mouth parts below, munching the foliage.  If the creature
was on earth it would pass without notice, if such crabs were normally
present.

   He sat on his haunches and watched the ground closely.  He was
surprised to spot two smaller crabs scuttling around in the foliage.  He
looked around and saw another of the coconut crabs on the trunk of one
of the weird trees.  Crabs, but no birds.  No insects either, he realized,
at least nothing flying.  What else lived here?  If the crab flesh wasn't
poison to him it was evident he had found a food source.  He would find
out soon enough, he thought, and considered climbing down a ladder to
grab one of the crabs, grill it up right now and test it.  Later, he thought,
remembering the steaks, one thing at a time.

   He had to drag himself away from the edge, his curiosity pulling at
him to explore.  He saw another of the coconut crabs, as he called them,
and then two more on the ground below.  He was surrounded by crabs
it appeared.  The steaks were starting to cook on the edge closest to the
coals, so he moved them over and shut the kettle lid to keep the smoke
it.  May as well cook them right, he thought, going into the kitchen for
a fork and knife.  He turned the steaks, and when they were done he just
ate them off the grill, cutting chunks as they sizzled.  He was in a hurry
to get fed and back to the exploration phase of today's activities.  He still
hadn't even walked around his own yard.


Chapter 3


   He wolfed down the steak and grabbed a cold pop out of the fridge. 
Four left, and then goodbye to caffeine free diet Dr. Pepper, he thought
with regret, even though it was just colored water.  The idea of
permanence had already sink in; he didn't have any illusions about seeing
a grocery store again.  He shrugged off the thought and walked through
the front room and out the door to the street side of the house.  The view
was incredible.

   Beyond his front yard, across the street where his neighbors' houses
should be, was a slope running down in front of him, covered with the
odd vegetation.  He could see he was sitting in a saddle on top of a small
hill, the jungle climbing up on either side, but sloping down in back and
front.  This side of the house faced inland, looking up to a series of
upright rock peaks covered with vegetation.  Hawaii, he thought, it
looked very much like the north coast of Kauai.  He guessed the peaks
were volcanic by the look of them.  He could see about thirty miles, up
a series of hills and valleys to a central peak.  

   He looked off to the left quarter and caught his breath, staring at the
sky, trying to confirm what he thought he was seeing.  It was obviously
a small moon, maybe a tenth the size of earth's, hanging about a third of
the way up from the horizon, illuminated by the sun to his right.  The
sight brought home the situation he was in.  He shook his head and
whistled, "whew."  Of all the planets to land on, at least it was scenic, no
doubt about that. 

   His front yard was intact all the way past his white picket fence to the
street.  It appeared that the cut in front took about a fourth of the width
of the street with his house.  He paused to consider what must be going
on back on earth, wherever that was.  Or whenever.  The press would be
having a field day with alien abduction stories.  Too bloody right, Steve
thought.

   The driveway on the left leading to his garage was intact, as was most
of the hill running down beyond the driveway to where his neighbor's
yard would have been.  The power cable was still attached to the pole on
the garage leading to the meter, but ran down the front door of the
garage and across the drive where it had fallen when it was cut, or
whatever happened to sever it from the rest of the world.

   To his right he could see that the cut line had crossed a rock wall
separating his yard from the neighbor uphill.  The last few rocks at the
street end had fallen off the edge.  He walked over to look down,
stepping over his severed phone line on the way.  The former southwest
corner of his yard had collapsed with the rocks onto the jungle floor
below.  This was apparently one of the first parts to fall, and all the
jungle vegetation the soil had touched was brown and shrivelled.  He
watched as a small crab walked across the foliage to the dirt and turned
back, moving a few inches and running into his dirt again, backing away. 
He couldn't tell whether the crab was a different type or a small coconut
version, but it obviously did not want anything to do with earth dirt. 

   Steve relaxed and holstered the gun he was carrying.  Evidently so
long as he stayed in his yard he was safe from the animals and plants of
this world.  That wasn't possible of course, he couldn't survive there for
long.  Even if he could catch rain water, he still had to eat.  The collapse
of the rocks and soil had left a fairly gentle slope.  He shrugged his
shoulders and spoke to himself out loud.  "What the hell."  If it kills you,
he thought, it kills you.  He sat down on the edge and lifted himself over,
scrambling down to the rocks below, dragging some dirt with him.  

   He pulled the pistol and peeked around the corner, making sure
nothing was lurking there.  A crab was a few feet away, but was small
and moving in the other direction.  He walked out a few feet to look
back at his house, and almost laughed at the sight of the earth wall in
front of him.  The sewer pipe and water inlet opened in the dirt wall,
sliced through just like everything else.  He could see into the sewer pipe
a good distance, and spoke down the tube, "hello in there."  
   A movement behind him caused him to jump and draw the gun.  It
was a large coconut crab, the biggest he had seen, just a few feet away. 
It apparently wanted to walk in his direction, but every time it ran into
some of the fallen dirt it backed up, moved around a little and tried
again.  He thought of shooting it, but decided to save his ammunition. 
Instead, he picked up a good size rock and walked slowly over in front
of the crab, avoiding the native vegetation for the moment, keeping to the
dirt slope that had crumbled from the front edge of his yard.  He picked
his time and then threw the rock down right on the crab's head, crushing
it.

   The crab flipped over and waved its claws it in the air, trying to right
itself.  Steve sat back on his haunches to see what would happen, not
wanting to touch the crab yet.  After awhile its legs and claws slowed
down and stopped.  It was apparently dead.  He considered climbing back
up to his yard for gloves to handle the crab, but reconciled himself to the
situation.  Screw it, he thought.  If this place is poisonous, or if
everything contains acid sap and blood, I'm dead anyway.

    Keeping his feet on his own dirt, he reached out and poked the crab. 
The claw moved back and waved a little, about what you'd expect from
a freshly killed crab anywhere.  The nerves driving a crab's legs would
react even after they were gutted.  He looked at the end of his finger,
which appeared to be unhurt, then reached out and grasped the back of
the crab's claw between his finger and thumb, keeping away from the
pincer.  It felt smooth and hard, just like it looked, and he pulled it over
onto the dirt next to him, flipping it on its back.

   He could see that the rock had crushed the eye stalks and smashed
through the front shell, messing up the mouth parts and putting a hole
through the thick shell.  He could see very normal looking guts inside the
crab.  He poked a finger into the mess, and pulled it back quickly. 
Apparently the beast did not have acid for blood, as his finger was moist,
but unharmed.  He sniffed the end and it smelled about as he expected
crab guts to smell.  Shrugging to himself he picked up the crab by a back
leg and carried it over to the slope he had climbed down, flipping it up
into his yard.  

   Before he climbed back up he looked down the edge of the cut.  The
rocks that had fallen and those still piled into a wall had been cut as
neatly as everything else.  It apparently didn't matter what things were
made off if they had crossed the boundary.  There was no sign of heat
or scratching or any other mark on the cut surface.  The rock just ceased
to exist beyond his yard.  He shook his head in amazement and climbed
back up into his yard.

   The crab had landed on some plants, and they didn't appear to be
affected by contact with it.  As an experiment he ripped part of the back
of the crab off and pulled some of the guts onto some ground cover,
planning on coming back later to see what happened.  He pulled off the
rest of the crab's back plate and shook the guts over the edge of his yard. 
The crab had gill material underneath the shell and the guts appeared to
be pretty much normal.  It was difficult to compare them to an earth
crab, as he had never examined one closely anyway.  Crab guts didn't
bother him, but he had never made a study of them either.  He shook off
his fingers and carried the crab back into the house, tossing it in the
kitchen sink.  

   He wanted to wash the crab off, but thought better of wasting any
water.  Instead he pulled a precious paper towel off the roll and wiped
as much dirt off it as he could.  Let's cook this puppy he thought.  The
coals in the kettle grill were still hot, so he widened the air opening to
get them going and placed the crab on the rack, covering it back up.  He
sank into a patio chair and waited for the crab to cook, savoring his cold
pop sip by sip.  Soon smoke began to roll out of the kettle top and the
smell of crab filled the air.  He pulled off the lid to check and was
rewarded with a blast of smoke and smell as the crab sizzled and popped
on the grill.  The smell was wonderful, scrumptious really.

   He turned the crab over and let it finish cooking, anxious to taste the
meat.  He tried to convince himself that nothing that smelled that good
could be bad to eat, and he half believed it.  The crab smelled like a
cross between lobster and king crab, but sweeter and more aromatic than
either.  He was pacing around the grill as it finished cooking.  He
laughed at himself; damn man, settle down.  After a few minutes he
lifted the top again.  The crab's shell had changed color a bit as it
cooked, losing its sheen.  He almost ran back into the house to get a
plate, and licked his fingers after pulling the hot crab off the grill.

   Grabbing a pair of pliers and a fork from a kitchen drawer, he sat
down at the dining room table with the hot crab.  He first pulled off the
legs using an oven mit to protect his hands.  The legs and claws came off
just about the same as any crab, bits of clear connecting tissue tying the
muscles to the shell.  He picked a large leg segment and cracked it with
the pliers.  Picking away the shell pieces he pulled a nice piece of white
meat out of the leg, covered with a pink outer covering, very crab-like
in all respects.

   Here goes nothing, he thought, goodbye cruel world.  He separated a
small piece of the meat and placed it on his tongue, chewing it slowly. 
His mouth didn't burn or smart from contact with the flesh, so he picked
up a larger piece and tossed it inside as well.  The taste of the crab was
ambrosia.  He tried to relate the flavor to the crabs he had eaten before. 
There was the clean sweet taste of a dungeness at one end, the strong sea
taste of a king crab on the other, but this was sweeter and better tasting
than either.  The meat tasted like it had been marinated in tropical oil. 
He had named the crab by accident, but coconut crab was a good
description of the taste.

   Without thinking about it too much, he swallowed the crab and chased
it with a swallow of pop, sitting back nervously, attentive to his stomach. 
He didn't want to eat too much at first.  Even if his system could tolerate
this strange creature, it might require small amounts to get used to it.  He
felt fine, so he at the rest of the leg piece with relish.  One more piece,
he thought, and cracked a large claw with the pliers.  The meat in this
section tasted different, a stronger flavor and not quite as sweet.  Like a
dungeness, he thought, where each front leg piece tasted slightly different
to an experienced crab fancier.  

   He left the crab on the table and laid down on the couch, putting his
hands on his stomach.  He was nervous and sweating a little as he waited
for a reaction.  After a few minutes he felt nothing unusual, and stood
back up, still feeling okay.  He cracked one more claw segment and ate
the meat before picking up the plate and walking outside with the crab. 
He was afraid if he kept the crab he would eat more, and tossed it into
the jungle over the fence.  There was plenty more where that came from,
and he wanted to give it a few hours to digest.  But he watched the
cooked crab fly through the air with regret.


Chapter 4


   After lying down a while longer and not feeling any ill effects, he
continued with his plans to explore.  He dressed himself in jeans and
hiking boots in case any of the vegetation had spines.  It was hot outside,
the thermometer said 82, assuming it was reliable, and the sun was
bright, so he put on a light shirt and a sweat band.  His skin burned
easily, so he slathered suntan lotion on his arms and face, wondering
again what he would do when it ran out.  It was curious, he thought.  He
had been out in the sun for a few hours already that day, and his skin
hadn't even turned pink.  The sun didn't feel that hot, maybe it wasn't. 
The light was a different color, and it was certainly possible the sun was
either smaller or larger than earth's, and that this planet had a different
orbit.  The disk of the sun appeared normal to him, or at least familiar.

   He shrugged off those thoughts for later, but when he stepped outside
he couldn't help notice the position of the sun in the sky.  It should be
past one o'clock by now, according to the battery operated clocks in the
house.  But the sun was still only part way up in the sky, rising from the
east, rather than the west.  He had to laugh at himself for imposing
directions on this planet, and he realized he didn't even know if he was
in the northern or southern hemisphere.  By his reckoning he guessed he
was fairly close to the equator, just in tracking the sun's path for the
limited amount of time he had been watching.

   He walked out to the far edge of the yard and looked down towards
the sea.  The small white sun was still on the horizon, but had shifted
over a bit.  Apparently the axis of the planet was pointed at the
companion star at the moment, while the larger yellow sun tracked pretty
much the same on earth.  He realized that if he simply shifted south and
north in his mind, east would then be west and the sun would then rise
and set like he was used to.  Fair enough, he thought, assigning south to
the direction of the sea, towards the white sun.  

   After thinking for a bit he decided to explore towards the sea, the
logical destination for now.  He picked up a small backpack with a
couple of bottles of water and some precious toilet paper, along with a
small medical kit and other odds and ends.  The 475 rested in a custom
leather shoulder holster.  He hesitated before climbing down off his
property again, thinking it through.

   What if the process was to reverse, and his house disappeared again
while he was gone?  Then he'd be stuck on this planet forever.  Of
course, there was no guarantee that if the house transported itself it would
return home.  It could re-appear in the middle of a star or more likely
just out into the vacuum of space.  But there was one clear clue that he
relied on for now; the force that had moved his house through space,
time or both, was no accident.

   If some kind of accidental Star Trek-like space warp had done this to
him, it would have been random, and the chances of ending up on the
surface of a habitable planet were too ridiculous to consider.  Then there
was the precision of the cuts.  Expect for dirt and rocks that had tumbled
down afterwards, so far as he could tell the corners were exactly square
and the lines perfectly straight.  A random force could not have cut his
house out of the earth like a slice of lasagna. 

   No, whatever had done this was intelligent, and there was a reason. 
He briefly considered if he was dead.  If so, was this heaven or hell? 
Heaven for crab lovers, he chuckled to himself, remembering the taste of
the one he had sampled.  He doubted an afterlife, so he temporarily
consigned his fate to some sort of alien life.  Was he in some sort of lab
experiment, plot number twenty seven, version "B" from Star Trek,
where an alien puts Captain Kirk in some bizarre environment to see how
he copes?  Possibly, but it was pointless to speculate for now, he thought. 
Besides, he was truly excited by the day ahead.  How many chances do
you get to explore an alien planet for the first time?  He was Columbus,
Magellan, or more apt to the circumstances, Neil Armstrong.  

   Steve was by nature a loner, which explained to some extent his
emotions over the day's events.  He was nearly fifty and fresh from a
six-year relationship with a woman who had lived with him, even though
they hadn't married.  The relationship had broken when she left him,
angry at his lack of commitment and his isolation from other people.  He
had no real close friends and attended social gatherings reluctantly.  He
threw himself into his work as a financial analyst at a local insurance
company, actually enjoying beating on the keyboard all day in front of
screens full of data and graphs.  In his spare time he attended to his
hobbies, remodeling his house and a few other pursuits, including
growing a little marijuana hydroponically in his garage.  

   My plants, he thought, I've got to do something about them.  He
realized they wouldn't survive more than a couple of days without light,
and before setting off he shed his gear and attended to them.  They were
growing in plastic trays in a cabinet he built into the garage wall, and it
was a simple matter to unplug the water lines and lift the trays out. 
There was enough water in the trays to keep them for the day, so he just
set them out on the patio for now.  Hope no helicopters are flying today,
he joked to himself.  

   Having attended to that detail, he set off again, walking around the
garage into the front yard and down the slope on the corner.  He walked
down what he now assigned as the east edge of the house, marvelling
again at the way the rock wall had been sliced where it crossed over the
border of the cut.  Past the far corner of the house the jungle floor began
to drop down towards the sea, and the walking was easy.  None of the
ground cover plants, mostly the weird vine, had any sort of stickers or
anything else that looked dangerous, and the crabs he met either ignored
him or scuttled out of the way at the sound of his coming.  He looked
back at the strange sight of his house sitting on its pad of dirt in the
middle of the jungle and then proceeded down the hill.

   He walked down into a depression that continued from the house site,
and then met up with another larger valley that came in from the right. 
To his delight he could hear the sound of water as he came closer to the
junction, and soon he could see a broad stream or small river.  He
diverted his course to walk down to its banks.  He stood for a few
minutes looking at the water, trying to see if anything lived there.  The
water was too deep in the middle to see the bottom, and was flowing
swiftly.  Evidently there was plenty of rainfall to create such a stream,
as the thick vegetation of the jungle confirmed.  He looked up at the sky,
but there were no clouds at all.  The sky was a blue color, pretty much
like on earth, but like everything else, the colors were a bit off.  It was
more obvious back at the house, having a reference point.  Out here in
the middle of the jungle the colors began to look natural to him.

   Upstream the river wound off to the left and disappeared into the trees. 
He saw a different kind of tree a hundred feet upstream and walked up
the banks to look at it.  The tree had a broad umbrella shape with long
fronds like from a fern, but shaped like nothing he was familiar with, the
leaf all broken up into feathery tufts.  From the center of the crown grew
several large stems, and hanging from the stems were pods, mostly dark
green, but turning red and yellowish as they grew larger at the ends of
the stems.  Fruits, he thought, or close enough.  

   The tree wasn't tall, and he walked up to it and reached up to pull one
of the pods off.  It twisted off with a little effort and he held it in his
hands, turning it over and examining the skin.  It was about the size of
a cantaloupe, egg shaped with a scar on one end where it was attached
to the tree.  He put it on the ground and pulled out a swiss army knife
from his pack, cutting a plug from the center.  To his surprise the inside
was liquid, a clear viscous substance.  He looked at the plug, noting how
the flesh of the plant became softer towards the center and finally
dissolved into tendrils and mush.  He dipped his finger into the liquid and
it felt greasy, like cooking oil.  He shrugged and said out loud to himself
again, "what the hell," and placed a drop on his tongue.  The liquid tasted
very much like a tropical oil, palm or coconut came to mind.  He rubbed
some more between his fingers and decided that it was oil.  It was
slippery, and felt and tasted pretty much like you would expect.  

   He cut into one of the smallest and darkest green pods and found the
insides were a white pulp almost all the way to the center, where the
tissue became softer and finally disintegrated into more of the oil. 
Obviously as the fruits or gourds matured, the flesh liquified into the oil. 
He didn't see any fallen pods around the tree, but the crabs could explain
that.  They would value the oily contents of the fruits.  He could see that
the tree had a collar of stiff leaves around the central stem, just below the
crown.  Possibly to protect the fruits against the crabs, he thought, who
would have difficulty negotiating their way over the collar with their
clumsy legs and claws.  The only problem was that lack of seeds in the
pods.  Why would a tree invest the energy to make a high calorie fruit
like the oil pods if not to nurture its seed?  Perhaps the whole pod was
the seed.  He let it go for now and continued downstream.

   Another hundred feet beyond the valley junction he came to another
such tree, only somewhat different in appearance.  The pods faded to a
dark purple as they grew larger.  He cut a plug out of one and found the
insides were also liquid, but a milky color.  He dipped a finger again and
found that it was also oily, but not as much as the other tree, about half
and half, he figured.  The taste of the fluid reminded him strongly of
coconut cream.  The image of one of the land crabs cooking in a pot of
this liquid instantly came to mind.  Coconut crab in coconut cream, he
thought, that's dinner tonight maybe, if I don't sick up the crab I've
already eaten.  He actually felt fine, putting his hands on his stomach. 
Whatever was happening inside wasn't painful.  He hoped the crab meat
was being digested, but at least it wasn't poisoning his system.

   He continued downstream as the brook wound back and forth in the
valley, which was becoming broader and flatter.  About a thousand feet
down, the course straightened and the water flowed faster.  He could see
several hundred feet through the jungle down the stream, and could hear
another sound from that direction that was different from the waves on
the sea shore.  It was a waterfall, he thought, or rapids.  He quickened
his pace and followed the course around a slight bend and down another
few hundred feet to a pond.  He passed several more of the pod trees,
some of which had different appearances than the ones he had sampled,
but he was anxious to explore, and let them pass by.

   Just before he reached the pond, something he saw made him stop to
investigate.  A trunk of a tree had fallen across the creek, and the wood
had begun to decay on each side of the bank.  The center portion of the
trunk where it landed in the water had vanished.  He could see why when
he felt the decayed wood.  From the center core of the tree out almost to
where the outer bark started, the pulp was arranged in circular layers of
soft white tissue, like birch bark, but softer and finer.  He pulled a hunk
of the fiber out of the rotting tree and felt it in his hands.  It felt like a
wad of kleenex that had been moistened with lotion.  He spread it out
into layers, and rubbed it over his skin, leaving a fine sheen behind. 
Toilet paper, he thought, pre-moistened.  

   It was amazing.  Within the course of his first steps into the alien
landscape he had found what was apparently a vegetable oil, something
that might pass for cream and now the finest substance to wipe one's ass
that could be imagined, better really that the roll he carried in his pack. 
What the hell is going on here, he thought.  Don't forget the tasty crab
either, he reminded himself, this can't be accidental.  He began to think
of the planet as being alive, or controlled somehow by the intelligence
that brought him here.  Air, water and food, the necessities of life,
presented for him within a rock's throw from where he landed.

   Star Trek came to mind again, the episode where the crew gets
stranded on a planet that looked like the a village from the nineteenth
century run by a sinister computer the inhabitants worshipped.  He
searched for the name of the computer god; Landru, that was it.  He
laughed, and yelled out loud; "Hey Landru, what do you want with me? 
Why did you bring me here!"  Apparently Landru didn't speak to his
prisoners, and his voice merely echoed off the hill behind him.

   He turned his attention back to the pond, the roar of the water now
drowning out the sea, which was close at hand.  He found his way
around the edge and walked down a slope on the other side.  The stream
was blocked by a wall of basalt, with a slot cut through it by the water,
which blasted through the gap in a long, arcing stream, settling into a
basin below where the stream continued on.  He could see all the way to
the sea, over a bluff below him to his left.  He stopped for a moment to
admire the beauty of the scene.

  There was an incredible play of colors in the water spray, rainbows
from two different quarters, and of different colors.  It was the two suns
of course.  The yellow sun above him was shining over his head into the
water, and one mist rainbow was created by its rays, a softer palette of
colors than a terrestrial rainbow.  The small white sun was shining
upstream into the face of the water, and there was another incandescent
rainbow created by its rays, superimposed.  Both rainbows were created
by his eyes, he knew, a relationship between the light reflected off the
water drops and the angle of his vision.  The apparent distance of the
colors and the orientation were independent of the angle of the source
light, so the rainbows both appeared in the same place, but layered just
slightly, like the ghost image one could see above and below a rainbow
on earth, but stronger.  It was an amazing sight, and he reluctantly turned
away from it.

  He looked up at the yellow sun and out to sea at the white sun, holding
his hands to their rays.  The yellow sun was the warmer of the two, by
a factor of ten or more, he guessed.  Neither sun felt very intense, far less
than earth's sun.  He was sure the soft light accounted for the lack of any
effect on his skin so far.  However bright they were, it was hot, and he
was sweating from the walk and the jeans he was wearing.  He decided
to get rid of the jeans and stopped to unlace his boots and pull the pants
off, stuffing them into his pack.  Well Landru, he thought, I hope you're
not modest.  He pulled on his boots and walked off down towards the
bluff, wearing only his shirt and briefs.


Chapter 5


   Apparently the stream had broken through the rock wall in the recent
geological past, as there was a broad bluff to the left that had obviously
been the stream bed at one time.  Part of the stream still ran in the
former course, churning through a channel cut in the bedrock to reach a
small pool on the outer ledge.  As Steve walked over the bluff, the
panorama of the seashore captured his attention.  He hurried to the edge
as the view opened up, dropping his pack and looking around to take it
all in. 

   In front of him the bluff dropped about thirty feet to a band of
vegetation and then to the beach, which ran out about two hundred feet
to the shore.  To his left, the east he reminded himself, the beach ran
down about two thousand feet to a point of rock, where the waves
slammed into the rocks, spray creating a mist flowing over the rocks.  To
his right there was unbroken beach for about three thousand feet before
another rock point interrupted the flow of sand.  About a thousand feet
out from the west point a series of small islands broke up the horizon,
but otherwise the sea was undisturbed.  The white sun was still on the
horizon just to the west.  If the planet continued to rotate in its present
fashion, the islands would block out the white sun in a few hours.

   He glanced back up at the yellow sun, now just past noon.  But it
should have been four o'clock, maybe later.  It was obvious the day
length was much longer than on earth.  Steve considered what affect that
would have on his own body rhythms, which had evolved on a twenty-
four hour clock, but the sea was now uppermost on his mind.

   He fished his binoculars out of the pack and scanned the shore in both
directions.  Nothing was moving on the shoreline or on the edge of the
jungle, aside from coconut crabs, which appeared to be everywhere.  He
had disturbed many of the crabs on his walk downhill, and had come to
ignore their presence.  They had never made any offensive move towards
him, and appeared to be exclusively vegetarian.

   Steve considered the bluff again for a few moments, admiring the view
back over the jungle canopy, up the hill to the distant peaks beyond.  The
hill was highest where his house had landed, and fell off gently in both
directions, exposing the further hills and peaks to his view.  It appeared
he was in the middle of a large valley between two spurs of peaks
running down to the sea, maybe twenty miles broad at the seashore.  He
thought there were probably many streams leading to the sea, and
possibly even a full-size river in a valley this large.

   He looked back to the sea and sand.  There was a constant wind from
the west, like the trade winds, he thought, and the waves were running
at an angle into the beach.  After being interrupted by the west point,
they formed long parallel lines with curled peaks running the entire
length of the bay to crash on the rocks at the east point.  It was a surfer's
paradise, he thought, tube city.  You could ride any of the waves for a
good half mile across the bay.  He wondered what it looked like in a
storm.

   The beach in front of him did not reveal a tide line, which indicated
that there was probably no large moon.  The small moon was now
heading for the west horizon over the peaks.  It would have some tidal
effect, but probably it was a hundred times less massive than earth's
moon, maybe much less.  The beach did have wave lines running in at
the same angle as the sea, forming lopsided parabolas that extended to the
line of the vegetation below him.  Storm waves, he thought, that's as far
as the sea ever gets.  Certainly the bluff he was standing on was free of
any flotsam from the sea.  There was the occasional tree stem or frond
on the beach, but there was no definite line of drift debris that would
indicate a storm or tide line.

   He walked over the bluff to the stream pool on the far right.  The pool
was about four feet deep with a sandy bottom, probably created by sand
blown into the pool by the wind.  The stream flowed over the edge of the
bluff forming slots in a wall of rock, then flowed around the rock back
into the main channel of the stream, which meandered over the beach. 
The walls of the pool were the same black basalt that formed the base of
the bluff.  There was no life in the pool aside from some vine-like
growth on the edge, bits and pieces of which populated the rest of the
bluff.  It was very inviting, and he was sweaty from the hike, so he
pulled off his clothes and sat on the edge, dabbling his feet in the water
and finally settling in.  The water was warm from being heated in the
pool, but it felt cool to his skin at first.

   He realized he hadn't drunken any of the stream water yet, and he may
as well now.  It's as good as time as any, he thought, and plunged his
head under the water, taking a mouthful.  He held it for a moment as his
shook his head clear of the water, and then swallowed it down.  Water
was water, he thought, and the taste was normal.  Of course, it was
entirely possible he had just swallowed a deadly brew of foreign
microbes and viruses that would kill him in days, but it was likely that
he had already breathed in enough alien life forms to do similar damage. 
Possibly his body systems could handle the organisms, he thought, or
maybe the bugs would be killed like the plants had been, not being able
to tolerate his earthly chemistry.

   It's also possible I have just fatally infected this world, he thought. 
Maybe one of my body lice will evolve to dominate the planet.  With a
start he realized what the impact would be of the insects on his property. 
There must be billions of pill bugs, spiders, centipedes, ants and worms
of all kinds, waiting to blow out into the ecological niches this planet
offered.  It appeared that the planet was not well evolved, maybe
equivalent to the Cambrian period on earth, or even before.  For one
thing, there were no flowering plants, and he thought again of the pod
trees, several of which he could see from the pool on the edge of the
jungle  How did a tree without flowers produce such fruit and why?  

   He let the questions go for now, concentrating on his stomach.  It was
churning a bit, which could of been because he was hungry, but he didn't
feel ill.  He had packed a sandwich made from one of the slices of ham
left in the fridge, and climbed out of the water to eat.  He sat naked on
the edge of the pool eating the sandwich, wishing he had brought the
cooked crab instead.  I wonder if I'll get sick of crab, he thought,
chewing the bread and ham thoughtfully.  He figured he was eating one
of his last sandwiches ever.

   As he ate and relaxed he thought of the next step in his exploration. 
So far all he had seen of animal life was the land crabs, but the sea was
far more likely to be the home of more varied life, where clearly the crab
had come.  The crab was an excellent example of the adaptation of sea
life to land, and probably something similar happened on earth.  Clearly
the crab was based on the same principle of life on earth, almost certainly
DNA based.  The crab was carbon based life, and amino acids formed
naturally in an environment such as this.  But there was a stronger reason
for suspecting DNA aside from chemistry.

   The crab expressed bilateral symmetry.  It had two sets of legs and
claws each, two eye stalks, a set of complimentary mouth parts and
parallel sets of gills under the shell.  DNA based life naturally organized
itself in twos, because DNA used base two math.  The two sets of amino
acids forming the molecule were a code in binary language, zero and one. 
DNA based life had two sexes, not three or four, for example, because
two sets of genes coming together formed the strand that coded the new
life.  Steve made a point of looking at the coconut crabs more carefully
to confirm there were two sexes, although a hermaphrodite form was also
possible.

   Even the number of legs on the crab was no accident.  Life that filled
an ecological niche tended to look the same.  He remembered the
marsupial wolf of Australia, the Tasmanian tiger or Thylacine.  Although
descended purely from marsupial stock, in no way related to the wolf, the
Thylacine strongly resembled the dog in form, with four legs, a long
snout and a tail.  There were many such examples on earth, and he
expected that he would not be shocked by the life to be found in the sea. 
By rights they should resemble earthly sea creatures.  I hope there's a
lobster, he thought.

   He stood up and regarded the coastline again.  To his left in front of
the east point there was a shelf of rock that the waves crashed over. 
There appeared to be a broad fan in front of the point that could be full
of tide pools, refreshed by the breaking surf.  That was the next
destination he thought.  He started to dress again, but thought better of
it.  It was too warm for clothes, and he felt just fine nude, drying himself
off in the wind and sun.  What the heck, thought Steve, maybe I should
change my name to Adam.  But where's my Eve, he thought, for the first
of many times.

   In the end he decided to keep his boots on and stuffed his shirt and
shorts into the pack, wearing only the shoulder holster and the binoculars
around his neck.  He walked to the other side of the bluff and found his
way down a slope next to the jungle line to the beach, disturbing a crab
as he walked through the vegetation.  He kicked it over on its back and
checked the underside for indications of sex.  This one had a flap on its
rear like the one he had eaten, but it was much larger.  A female, he
thought, relating it the earthly crabs; does it lay eggs?

   The sand was soft and warm, a light tan color.  He stooped to examine
the sand at close range, putting a few grains in his hand.  He was
surprised and delighted to find he was looking at the tiny remains of sea
shells and corals, a common ingredient of sands in tropical regions.  Then
the sea must be teeming with life, he thought with excitement.  He
started off towards the east point almost at a run, first churning his way
through the dry loose sand then finding better footing near the water line,
keeping above the slips of water that ran up the beach from the waves
that rolled in.  Out this far from the jungle line the view inland was
better, and he stopped for a moment just to take it all in.  It was truly
paradise, he thought, like Hawaii without tourists or insects.  He could
just see some wispy white clouds to the far west, but otherwise the sky
was completely clear and the view breathtaking.

   As he drew closer to the point he stopped and checked the terrain with
the binoculars.  There definitely was a wide shelf of pools and sheltered
areas filled with water under the cliffs, and he smiled as he spotted
another type of crab on the rocks, with a dark red shell.  It was about the
same size as the coconut crabs.  He walked a little further and found a
dead shrimp lying on the sand, or at least what looked like a shrimp.  It
was very large, about six inches long, and had sacks of eggs under the
tail, which was thick and meaty.  A couple of small crabs were working
it over, different in appearance from anything he had seen.  As he walked
on he began to spot shells and other debris in the sand, but nothing fish
like at all, all invertebrates.

   The first pool he reached had a sandy end where the water flowed in
and out from the wave action.  There was some interesting growths on
the far end, but this pool was too scoured by the sand to be productive. 
Beyond there was a rock shelf than ran out about thirty feet and then
networked off into other ridges.  Water ran over the spine of the shelf as
the pools in front were filled by waves, the water splashing over into the
pools beyond and then washing back out.  He thought about walking out
on the spine, but as he got closer a better one appeared behind it, exposed
to the air, with only small channels of water interrupting the surface.

   He sprinted the remaining distance and walked out on the rock, his
eyes searching the pools on either side.  What he saw filled his heart with
joy - the pools teemed with life.  The sides and bottom were lined with
coral type plants or animals, probably the latter, and there were many
shelled creatures that looked like mussels and clams clinging to the rock. 
There were several types of crabs, how many he couldn't tell, and
shrimp-like creatures swam and walked over the bottom.  In one pool he
could see two very large crabs fighting over a scrap of food, looking like
dungeness crabs but easily double in size.  He walked along the rock
wall, looking into this pool and that, finding many more types of
shrimps, crabs and shellfish, and at least two kinds of creatures that
strongly resembled spiny crawfish.  On a earthly restaurant plate such
creatures were granted another name borrowed from the true creature;
lobster.

   As he neared the end of the spine of rock he spotted something he
couldn't classify sticking out from under a rock.  It had long feelers on
its head, like a lobster, one large and one small claw, like a hermit crab,
and a thick body with large legs underneath.  Behind it carried a broad,
flat tail like a lobster, but wider.  He couldn't figure out what to call the
thing, but settled on "lobsterite", from a Stephen King story he vaguely
recalled, though it wasn't quite the same word.  Aside from the relatively
bizarre mix of body features, what distinguished the creature was its size,
nearly three foot from the head to the flaps on the end of the tail.  Steve
recalled the reaction of the ocean scientists who pulled the first giant
Ruby Red shrimps from a deep trench in the Caribbean - they ate one of
them.  He wished he could catch this monster and build a beach fire right
now.  He waved to it.  "See you later," he said out loud.

   Aside from the hard shelled life there was little else, no jelly fish or
squids, certainly no vertebrate life.  Dinner on this planet was going to
be from the shellfish side of the menu, and that was fine with Steve. 
Clams, mussels, oysters and scallops maybe, some conch-like creatures,
crabs, shrimp and lobster.  He would miss beef, chicken and pork, much
less chocolate, chips and beer, but things could be worse.  As he searched
the pools he realized that the water he drank from the stream had no ill
effects.  He could still die tomorrow of some horrible alien disease, there
was always that possibility.  But for now he was vastly encouraged by
the prospects.

   He decided he had explored enough, and started for home.  There
would be much to do, inventorying what could be used and what needed
to be preserved.  His was particularly concerned with his cannabis plants,
and wanted to get them planted in earthly dirt before their hydroponic
water container dried out.  He pictured himself sitting in a hammock on
the bluff above the beach, smoking a fat joint, sipping a coconut cream
drink and snacking on crab.  He had two film cans full of seed in the
freezer, but the living plants were the best he had grown, culled from
many trials, and he wanted to keep them producing.  He wondered what
the effect of the longer day would be on the plants.  Cannabis flowered
when kept in darkness at least twelve hours; how long would the night
be here?


Chapter 6


   Steve walked back up the beach to the bluff, climbing up the same
way he had come down.  He stood by the edge of the pool again and
thought about the site.  If he had to choose a place to live, this would be
it.  His house was located away from water and this location was far
more scenic.  The bluff had been scooped out by the stream when it must
have formerly made a shallow lake here, and much of the ground was
rocky.  He realized there was a solution at hand.

   He thought about the walk down the hill from the house by the stream. 
There were a couple of low places and a few trees, but with a little work
he figured his small Mazda pickup could easily make it down.  He had
about eight gallons in the tank, another two in the Honda generator and
two more in a spare can.  There might by another half gallon in a garden
debris chipper.  The truck could coast down the hill, leaving only the
return trip under power.  Being conservative, at ten miles per gallon, that
meant well over two hundred trips.  He figured that the back of the truck
could hold about seventy five cubic feet of dirt.  He did a rough
calculation and figured he could pull out about one eighth of the dirt in
the pad under the house.  Figuring most of that was unproductive hard
clay, he figured he could move all the topsoil, and easily enough to fill
the bluff to level ground.

   Having his native soil covering the bluff would mean he would be free
of crabs in his yard, as he had seen how they avoided his dirt.  Probably
it wouldn't be necessary to consume all the trips left in the truck for dirt,
as many of the plants could be stacked on top of the truck full of dirt,
and whatever space was leftover could be used for boards, pipe and other
gear.  His mind was moving quickly, already planning where the new
house would be built.  He hadn't forgotten about the pool above the bluff
with the strong flow through the rock gap.  A dam of rocks, a little
plumbing and I'll have running water, he thought.

   He considered forgoing all the work, and just building a small shelter
down here, contenting himself with lying on the beach, eating crab and
smoking pot, but it went against his nature.  Even with the large
collection of paperback books in the house, he would run out of material
to read in a matter of a couple of years, and he really didn't like to read
books twice anyway, aside from a few favorites.  No, he would need
something to do, and building a house would consume his time nicely.

   Steve was a businessman, but he was also a jack of all trades, growing
up in a succession of jobs in construction before switching gears as he
grew older, going back to school for a white collar career.  He had
remodeled most of his house himself, and had completed all the finish
work.  The garage was full of tools and boxes of parts.  His had a shelf
of nails, another of screws and bolts, several containers of pipe odds and
ends from the hydroponic setups he had built and re-built over the years. 
Most of the tools were electric and of little use, since the gas was more
precious to do the hard work of moving the dirt and building supplies to
the new site.  But he had a complete set of hand tools as well, and all the
needed yard gear, shovels and rakes and so forth.

   He thought about the plumbing required.  He could use the pressure
regulator from the street connection, currently connected to thin air, the
city line being some light years away.  That left the supply line to the
house, about a hundred feet, and from there PVC or copper to the house
site.  There was all the plumbing inside the house, most of which would
be excess, and he remembered two or three long copper pipes in the
crawl space that had been left when the contractor closed off the old
crawl space access in favor of a hatch in the floor, stranding the pipe
inside.  It was suppose to be used in the kitchen remodel, but that project
was on indefinite hold.  He had pipe solder, and a box full of map gas
and propane, even a couple of oxygen containers for the welding kit. 
There was plenty of glue for the PVC and a bucket of leftover
connectors, elbows and so forth.  He figured it out in his head, and didn't
see anything to stand in the way, aside from the will to work, and he was
chock full of that at the moment, at least.

   Then there was the waste plumbing.  To the east of the bluff the jungle
floor took over, sloping down to the beach line.  Using the existing
plastic sewer connection, plus all the pipe in the footing drains and in the
gutter system he had built, there would be plenty of piping for a drain
field.  "Piece of cake," he said out loud.

   He was anxious to get home, to take an inventory and sit down with
paper and pencil work it out.  He was still naked aside from the gun, and
decided to stay that way for now.  There wasn't anything to scratch his
skin on the way home, all the foliage had been soft and plush.  He turned
around and took one more scan of the beach and sea, then turned to walk
home again, attentive this time to the lay of the land as he walked, noting
the places where it would be necessary to shore up for the truck, or trees
that would have to be removed.  The walk up from the beach took only
a few minutes, and before he knew it he was looking up at his house,
which appeared strange and out of place to him now, being used to the
scenery.  

   As he walked he considered the materials in the house, and how they
would fit.  The windows were mostly aluminum clad wood, with internal
blinds and screens.  They would be perfect for the bluff site, allowing
him to control the breezes flowing through.  His house was made from
standard wood frame construction, and most of the nails could be pulled,
straightened and re-used if he was careful.  The roof was enamel coated
steel, and there was plenty of silicone sealant in a box in the garage to
waterproof the flashing needed.  He began to think of a layout for the
new house.  

   Aside from relieving boredom, Steve had a strong motivation to
complete the project.  He had been pulled from his world and his life and
dumped on an alien planet against his will, or at least without being
asked.  By building a house on the bluff he could re-assert himself, take
control of his environment, make his mark on this world.  Take that,
Landru, he thought.  Of course, it was entirely possible that Landru had
planned this all along, dumping him conveniently close to a perfect
building site, already equipped with running water.  You could have left
me a little closer, he thought, shaking his fist at the sky.  And given me
a woman, he thought again.

   Before climbing up into the yard, he picked up a couple of rocks and
went crab hunting, nailing a particularly large one with a bright yellow
back.  He flipped it over while it waved its legs in the air and noted the
flap on the underside was slender and pointed; a male, he presumed.  He
grabbed the crab and walked around to the collapsed corner, climbing up
into the yard.  He started to walk towards the house and then
remembered his experiment, dropping his gear to go back to where he
had smeared crab guts on some ground cover.  The guts had dried on the
plants, but they were not affected.  That was a interesting sign, indicating
that while the primitive plants of the planet could not suffer alien soil
chemistry, perhaps his plants were tougher.  He wondered if they would
take over the planet after his death.

   He thought of the insects again.  He didn't see any flying around, but
that would be expected, as likely they would have flown off after being
transported with the yard.  But some should still be around, there were
several plants in bloom that were attractive to bees and butterflies.  He
lifted the cover on the pressure regulator in the water line, expecting to
see a number of varieties of insects underneath.  There was a spider web
in the damp box, but the spider was curled up in the center.  Several pill
bugs lay on the bottom, not moving.  He poked them with a plant stem,
and they were all dead.

   Forgetting the crab and his gear for the moment, he walked around the
house to the side of the garage and pulled out a small digging trowel. 
Picking a spot, he starting digging into the soil.  He turned up several
earthworms and laid them out on the ground, still moist, but lifeless.  He
went back in the garage and retrieved a small loupe he used to examine
his pot plants for bugs.  He scooped some soil in his hands and looked
at it closely.  He could see several tiny varieties of flea-like bugs, all
dead.  He dropped the soil and sat back on his haunches, thinking.

   This was Landru's work, he realized.  He couldn't bring me here with
all my vermin ready to take over the world.  Within a couple of hundred
years the planet would have been overrun with earth insects, the only
competition being the tiny crabs, which apparently filled the same niche
here.  Here was confirmation, if any was needed, that his coming here,
to this particular place, had been no accident.  Someone, or some thing,
had snatched him for a purpose, and had made careful arrangements to
accommodate both him and the planet.  I wonder if I liked beef more
than seafood, he thought, would the world be dominated by cows?  Was
this entire planet molded to suit his tastes?  "Why am I here!!" he yelled
suddenly, but only the wind answered in the strange trees of the alien
jungle.

   He sat for a few minutes, in a depressed mood.  The death of the
insects saddened him somehow.  He didn't particularly like insects,
though being a gardener he had made his peace with them.  But now he
felt even more alone, having no company from his planet with him, not
even a spider or an ant.  He shook off the feeling and went back to front
yard to pick up his pack and the dead crab.  He was hungry from the
hike, and invested some more of the remaining charcoal to fire up the
grill, cleaning the crab and tossing the guts and shell into the jungle,
placing the leg and body segments on the grill to roast.  He rinsed the
crab off his hands, no longer concerned with wasting water, and went
inside for awhile.

   The inside of the house felt very bizarre to him now.  All the familiar
furnishings seemed out of place.  Without running water and electricity
it seemed stale.  He retrieved a pad of paper and a pencil and sat down
at the dining room table while the crab cooked outside, sketching out his
plans.  He briefly considered turning on the generator, just to liven his
spirits, blast some earthly rock and roll into the alien sky.  But the gas
was too valuable to waste like that he knew.  Thinking of the generator,
a thought occurred to him, and a smile grew on his face.  He laughed and
slapped his knee, yelling out loud, "son of a bitch!"

   The generator was driven by the gas motor, but it didn't care what
turned the shaft, so long as it was at the right speed.  If he could damn
the stream at the rock slot, it should be possible to make a water wheel
that could spin a shaft.  The rotation speed would be too low, he knew,
but there was plenty of force in the water.  By cannibalizing the truck for
gears and bearings from the transmission, it should be possible to gear up
sufficiently to run the generator.  The power output could be smoothed
by using a flywheel from the truck, and the power protection unit for the
home computer would buffer the electronics in the video and audio gear. 
It was just possible he could rock this world after all.  

   He was lost in thought when he noticed the grill was smoking heavily,
and he went out to turn over the crab, which had been scorched a little
on one side.  It smelled luscious, and he forgot his plans for the moment,
finishing cooking the crab and eating it sitting at the patio table, cracking
the beast apart with a pair of pliers and sucking all the meat down.  He
sat back and belched, idly picking through the smaller leg pieces he had
passed over.  If the crab was bad, this should prove it, he thought.  He
had probably eaten well over a pound of crab meat, and was feeling
bloated.  He decided to take a walk down to the stream, to refill his
water bottles before evening.

   The yellow sun was now about at the three o'clock position in the sky,
and the white sun could not be seen down the valley.  The kitchen clock
said it was nearly nine o'clock.  He did some rough math in his head; the
days here were maybe eighteen hours long.  If he was about on the
equator, which he guessed he was, that would make a day and a night
thirty six hours long.  Ignoring the time problem for the moment, he
considered the condition of the planet.  If this was near the equator, and
the temperature was about as hot as a nice August day in Seattle, what
was the rest of the planet like? 

   He reached the stream and filled his bottles, returning home to do
some work around the house.  The first thing he did was to take the
battery operated clocks off the walls and toss them in the closet.  What's
the point, he thought.  All they did was confuse the situation.  He
decided to maintain a twenty four hour day in his head, but to stretch out
the hours to correspond.  He had a sundial in his yard, and that should
still work on that basis.  It's three o'clock, he thought.  Just think that
way and it will make sense.  But his body thought it was much later. 
Full of crab, and having spent a full day on his legs, he decided to take
a nap.  When he woke up six hours later, the world had changed
considerably.


Chapter 7


   At first he woke up in the twilight thinking that was the most bizarre
and detailed dream he had ever experienced.  He could still taste crab in
his mouth, and reached over to the side table next to the bed for the
water bottle he kept there.  He couldn't see the time, and picked up the
clock, which was dead.  As his mind cleared he lay back in bed and
remembered where he was.
  
   He got up and peaked out the back door experimentally.  No fir trees
over his fences, and he could hear the sound of the sea in the distance. 
Okay, he thought, you're still here, wherever that was.  The inside of the
house was too warm, and he had sweated while sleeping, so he walked
out on the patio from the bedroom door, stretching and smelling the
strange air.  He looked up at the sky and about fell over.  

   Above him was the spiral arm of a galaxy, huge, right across half the
sky.  It was rising into the sky from the east, where the yellow sun rose. 
There was something to the west as well, shining through the jungle, and
he walked down the patio to get a better angle.  Through the trees he
could see part of it, a huge red and blue cloud covering about ten degrees
of the sky, a giant luminous nebula.  "Holy shit!" he said out loud, and
to himself he joked, you're not in Kansas anymore.  He was frustrated by
not being able to see more, and pulled a ladder from a rack on the side
of the garage.  Before climbing up on the roof he thought better of it,
and went inside to slip on some running shoes, pulling on his gun and
grabbing the binoculars from his pack.  As an after thought he picked up
one of the bottles of water, and picked up a folding chair from the garage
before climbing up the ladder with his gear.

   He walked out onto the flat roof of his garage and looked around
himself in awe at the spectacle of the sky.  He could see more of the
galaxy now, another spiral arm in farther, and the end of the large arm
curving back around.  This planet was evidently on the edge of the
galaxy, but not within the plane of the ecliptic, sitting above the galactic
arms.  He looked behind him and gasped as more nebulae and other
attractions revealed themselves.  There was a globular cluster about ten
degrees above the jungle canopy inland, bright like a moon.  It was so
large he thought maybe this planet was on the outskirts of the cluster. 
He counted at least twenty nebulae visible with the naked eye, of several
colors and shapes.  

   He lifted up the binoculars and scanned the sky, revealing more
marvels, hundreds of nebulae and clusters, and in the near distance, a
complete spiral galaxy, just visible to the naked eye when he lowered the
binoculars.  He turned toward the ocean shore and could see a glow on
the far west horizon, which he guessed was the white sun going down for
the count.  The glow blocked out the stars in that portion of the sky, but
he could see several bright colored spots in that direction.  Looking over
his shoulder to the east he gasped again as a bright orange and yellow
cloud smeared a good portion of the sky through the trees.  

   He thought about what it would look like when the galaxy was
centered in the sky as the planet rotated.  This planet was paradise for
sky watching, and he wondered again if that could be an accident. 
Sitting down for a moment, still marveling at the sky, he began to
formulate a theory for the planet and his presence there.

   Suppose an advanced race had wanted a vacation planet, a quiet and
serene world with little animal or insect life to bother with or to present
any sort of threat to life and limb.  It would make sense that you would
find the planet, or even locate it, in a place like this, on the edge of a
galaxy near a star cluster with all kinds of action going on.  Suppose that
the advanced race had left a machine behind to run the planet, to tend it
between their visits.  Now suppose the aliens had died off somehow, or
had simply become tired with their toy, and had moved on to another
pleasure world, better maybe than this one, or just different.  Would the
machine become bored, would it seek out a tenant for its world?  Was
that it, was Landru just a lonely machine?

   It made sense, he realized, at least it was as good an explanation as
any he could think of.  But if Landru was lonely, why didn't it
communicate with him?  Maybe the machine wasn't suppose to make its
presence known, maybe that would diminish the charm of the place.  He
thought for a moment, and then spoke loudly; "you can talk to me, if you
want, I don't mind."  He waited for an answer, but there was only the
wind rustling in the trees as usual.

   After awhile he climbed down for the purpose of rolling a joint.  The
view was so spectacular he decided to get stoned and lie on the roof.  He
remembered his pot plants and checked them out before going inside.  He
could see clearly with the lights in the sky, and found there was still
plenty of water in their container.  They would be okay for the night, at
least.  He went inside and made another sandwich, realizing that the ham
was a little warm.  This is the last sandwich, he thought, and threw the
rest of the ham into the kitchen waste bin for now.  He checked the
freezer and most of the food was still frozen, but not hard.  There was
a pool of water in the ice cube bin, with only a few cubes surviving. 
Steak for breakfast, lunch and dinner tomorrow he thought, and then he
would clean everything out of the fridge.

   He rolled a joint using a flashlight, and took the joint and the light
back up on the roof with a couple of blankets and pillows.  He shined the
flashlight around in the jungle canopy, but there was only the usual
coconut crab or two.  He was no longer seriously concerned that the
planet held any animal threat, but he couldn't help imagine that some
beast might come out only at night.  Of course, this wasn't really night,
not in the earth sense.  The massive number of stars in the sky produced
enough light to make it more like dusk.  He could see colors around him
that were stronger than a full earth moon would reveal.  

   It felt very strange after smoking part of the joint, the drug freeing his
mind to consider his situation fresh.  He felt a little paranoid, resting his
hand on his pistol and shining the flashlight around, but after awhile the
pot mellowed out and he lay on the blanket, hands folded over his
stomach, staring at the sky.  Finally he drifted off to sleep.

   He woke up again a few hours later, sore from lying on the hard roof. 
He got up and stretched and looked behind him.  The galaxy now filled
half the sky, and there was a glow on the eastern horizon that marked the
center, he guessed.  He peed off the roof of the garage and realized he
was still naked.  The air was warm and soft, and he didn't feel the need
for clothes.  Naked like Adam, he thought.  Where's the apple tree?  And
where's Eve, he answered himself once again.

   Scanning the sky again, he saw that the nebulae cartoon show had only
gotten better.  There were several more colorful clouds in the east and
north skies, a wild display, like someone had tossed day-glow paint on
the celestial sphere.  The glow on the western horizon was gone, and he
assumed the white sun had now set completely.  The nebulas and clusters
in that sector of the sky had exploded into brightness.  He made a quick
count, and there were over a hundred individual features in the sky to
marvel at, excluding the giant spiral galaxy filling the night sky. 
Whoever had picked this planet had done an exceptional job of locating
real estate.  Lots on the beach would probably go for a million a foot, he
thought.  The transportation problem would be tricky of course.

   After awhile he became bored watching the sky.  As beautiful as it
was, there was only so long that you could look at it, and he decided to
make himself busy for a few hours.  For one thing, he had already slept
plenty enough for a day, and this night was likely a good ten or twelve
hours from being over.  He climbed down to the patio again and
retrieved the scratch pad and pencil, sitting at the patio table, working
from the light in the sky.  He began to think about the schedule.

   First, see to the plants in the yard.  It rained here, that was clear, and
probably often enough, but he would need water to transplant the
cannabis plants at least.  That meant finding containers and making a few
trips to the stream.  Next, build a ramp down from the yard for the truck
to climb in and out.  He figured he could remove the picket fence in
front and expand on the collapsed corner, using rocks and soil to form a
roadway.  Give that about a week, he thought.  Then build a road down
to the bluff.  He figured that to be about a month's work, at most, maybe
less.  

   After that he could start hauling dirt and plants, first landscaping the
bluff and then building a base for the house.  He figured he would build
a small shelter at the bluff to sleep at night, since the water problem
would make it difficult to stay at the house.  Next, work on the stream,
dam the rock wall and plumb the water line to the house site.  Then build
the drain field, then the foundation for the house.  He couldn't use the
existing concrete foundation, as he didn't have any way to cut it apart,
but there was plenty of concrete pavers in garden walls and the whole
backyard patio.  That combined with native rocks should be sufficient to
build a crawl space and a foundation wall.  

   Next, start taking the house apart, a board at a time, carefully
preserving as much as possible, using the garage as dry storage. 
Hopefully there would be enough gas left in the truck to move the
heaviest timbers down, or they could be stacked on top of dirt loads,
changing his time line a little to compensate.   The siding and plumbing
and so forth could be left for later.  He figured he could use the truck
wheels as the foundation for a cart he could pull up the hill with a
shoulder harness. 

   After enough materials were moved, put in the plumbing and electrical
wiring and frame up a floor and the basic building.  He figured his first
sit on his own working toilet might be about three years off, in earth time
that is.  When the truck ran out of gas, start the generator project, using
whatever was needed from the transmission and other parts to get it
spinning.  He figured that might take several months of tinkering around. 
Then with power tools back on-line, finish the house, using the same
interior materials from the existing house, carefully pulling out the dry
wall and panelling.  He had a big bucket of drywall paste, but it wouldn't
last that many years, although he might try to wrap it in plastic to keep
it moist.  The same applied to the paint, but if those products wouldn't
last, he could pull the wood ceiling from the house and use it for interior
wall paneling.  

   The tough part was the soil, but he had done extensive work in his
own yard, tearing out over two hundred yards of native hard pan clay and
bringing in topsoil to replace it.  It was tough work, and moving it down
by the truckload would make it even harder, but it was just time.  The
tricky part would be the water wheel and the generator, that was the only
project he wasn't sure of.  He would need some luck to pull that move
off, he knew. 

   Steve sat back to admire the sky again and put it all together in his
head.  Everything taken together, he figured six years start to finish.  He
remembered the home handyman's time scale; take any job figured in
days, convert it to weeks and multiply by three.  I'll be lucky to pull this
off before I'm an old man, he thought.  As it turned out he was too
pessimistic on both counts, in a way.


Chapter 8


   By the end of the first week he had completed the ramp down from the
yard, and was starting to clear trees down the draw.  None of the trees
were very woody, he soon found, which meant anything structural was
going to have to be made out of materials from his house and yard.  It
also meant that the trees were easy to cut, their stalks parting quickly to
a thin japanese pull saw he kept cleaned and oiled.  By the end of the
second week he had cleared down to the bluff, and was working at filling
in the low areas, shoveling the native dirt for the first time.  It seemed
normal, a little crumbly, and he found that tiny crabs lived in the topsoil,
performing the necessary task of keeping the soil aerated.

   That was a problem for his own plants, he knew.  As an experiment
he tried planting some of his cannabis seeds in pots filled with the jungle
topsoil, and some in sand from the beach.  Nothing germinated in the
soil, but the seeds developed naturally in the sand.  He transplanted some
weeds into the soil, and they died within days.  By mixing the native
sand with his soil, he figured he could control the problem of drainage,
as otherwise the rains would leave the roots damp too often for the plants
to tolerate.  But it apparently wasn't possible to his plants to take over
the world.  Landru's influence again, he suspected.

   And the rains did come, regular as clockwork.  The first sign were the
wispy clouds he had seen the first day, on the western horizon.  The
clouds grew thick and black, and rolled over the land nearly ninety
degrees to the sea, the same as the wind.  It rained steadily for about six
hours, the surf rising to wash the beach nearly up to the plant line.  Then
the band thinned out again and the sky cleared.  The far edge disappeared
over the eastern horizon, only to show up again in the west about three
to four days later.  Steve began to think that there was little or no land
around the equator of the planet, as otherwise the weather could not be
so predictable.  He wondered again what the planet looked like from
outer space, and what was north of him, inland.  Was he on an island or
a continent?  

   The new light regimen was having an effect on Steve and his plants. 
The cannabis plants reacted to the eighteen hour night by flowering.  If
he was going to grow weed on this planet he had to have an artificial
light or rely on seeds.  Given the time line, it looked like the current
generation could not survive, being on a course to finish blooming and
then die within a couple months.  If he was going to grow, it would have
to be from seed and not from clones.

   To Steve, the altered day length threw a grenade into his sleep cycle. 
At first he tried staying awake into the night, sleeping for eight hours and
then staying awake until the next night.  That proved impossible.  He
tried inserting a nap in the middle of the day, and managed to stay on
that schedule for less than a week before he starting slipping, alternately
feeling so tired that he would sleep anywhere, even in crab land.  The
crabs always kept a safe distance from the smell of his body, which
usually was without clothes, unless something rough needed to be done.

   Finally he relented and slept as he needed, finding a midpoint between
his circadian rhythm and that of the planet.  It meant that he slept at
different times during the day and night, but he found he could work
even in the dark periods, the light being sufficient for most tasks
involving the moving of dirt.  He made rapid progress as the weeks went
by, and soon he was ready for the first trip down the hill.

   The day of his first load arrived, and he was anxious as he turned the
key to start the truck.  It came alive quickly, the CD player coming on
where he left it, and Lush joined him in the cab briefly.  He turned off
the music and concentrated on the task at hand.  He pulled out into the
driveway and across the yard where the plants and fence had been
cleared, rolling down the new ramp and across the jungle floor, beeping
his horn and hollering like a madman, "I'm king of the world!"

   His predictions for gas use had been overly conservative, and within
six months he had moved all of the dirt and most of the plantings with
about four gallons left, including what had been drained from the
generator's spare gas can and the weed chipper.  He left two gallons in
the generator, thinking he might need power for various parts of the
project ahead.  He enjoyed the rides uphill in the truck, usually two or
three times a day.  The sound of the machinery was comforting to him,
it felt like home.  He usually played a CD on the drive, though it was
often over before the end of the song, even feathering the throttle.

   The bluff looked striking with the new landscaping treatment.  A line
of upright evergreens screened off the jungle side, forming a familiar
earthly backdrop to the house site.  The foundation site was scraped bare
for the moment, as was a patio in front and a flat section by the stream
pool destined to be places to live outside.  The rest of the bluff was
bordered by the largest plants he could move, big camellias, himalayan
birches and several junipers, forming groves flanking the house pad.  The
bigger roses guarded the entire front and side boundaries, all the way up
the branch of the stream.  Flowering bushes and smaller roses filled in,
along with ground cover like vinca and thyme.  His yard had held over
three hundred distinct plant species, and he had been able to fit in about
two hundred on the bluff, leaving the lesser desirable plants and those
trees too big to move stranded on top of the hill.

   When the last plant had been moved he celebrated by taking the day
off, catching and cooking a medium size lobsterite in the ponds, gorging
himself on the sweet meats of the beast until he could hardly move,
stretched out in the rock pool like an otter, belly up to the sky.  By now
he had learned how to catch and eat just about any of the sea creatures. 
There were several varieties of shrimp, some better than others, and three
types of spiny lobsters, all good.  Some of the smaller bivalves were tasty
eaten whole, while only the muscles of others were worth eating, like a
scallop.  He had taken to calling them by the name of the closest earth
analog, though none of them were really the same.

   By far the best was the lobsterite.  The claws were tastier than the
coconut crab, and that was saying something.  The leg meat was superb
and the tail was something special indeed.  It cooked fast, about as thin
as a double flank steak and four times the size.  The texture and taste
were perfect, very reminiscent of lobster on earth, but better than any he
could recall eating, even the South African tails of old, scarce by the time
he left the planet for happier hunting grounds, at least for shellfish.

   Often he used the coconut cream pod as a marinade, slathering the
lobsterite tails and other goodies with the thick liquid.  Drunken out of
the pod it was a nourishing drink, like some kind of weight gain formula. 
Working as hard as he did, the pods were most useful, saving him the
time of catching and preparing food, though "catching" was stretching it
a bit; a coconut crab could be had merely by lifting a rock and bashing
the brainless thing on the head.  Crab was always on the menu, cooked
on the grill, dry papery native wood forming the fuel.  Often a pot of
coconut conch chowder complimented the meal.

   He found several other pods in addition to the oil and cream, one of
which was like a durian, except without the stink.  The warm vanilla
pudding from the pod was pretty much the only desert available, though
he continued to hack open pods looking for different flavors.  Apparently
Landru lacked a sense of humor, and he didn't find any chocolate chip
peanut butter pods.  One pod had a soapy tasting interior, and worked
passably well in that role.  Another had a sharp citrus taste, like a
bergamot, not quite as distinct.  There were variations in the pods, at
least fifty types, including one that had pulp which dried to a reasonably
good flour.  It wouldn't rise, but was stiff enough to make decent pasta.

  Salt he would have to make from evaporation, but pepper was now
available from the garden.  He had found a old mexican cooking kit in
a kitchen drawer someone had gifted him years back, and it contained
several kinds of chile peppers and cumin seed.  Enough of the seeds
sprouted to round out his garden herbs from earth; onions, garlic,
rosemary, thyme and marjoram.  He wished for a tomato plant and some
fruits, but at least with the pod liquids and his herbs he could make some
pretty tasty sauces.

   Fire had not been a problem, though it was a daily chore to light the
grill using the bow and stick method from his Boy Scout days.  He had
six precious plastic butane lighters he refused to touch, and a mini
welding torch with a good supply of butane fuel to light joints.  As a
backup he had lots of batteries, which could be used with a light bulb
filament, but he resisted using any of the easy solutions to make his
resources last.

   He learned to keep time by the movements of the galaxy, marking the
position in the sky it rose every night.  By the time it returned to rise
where he first saw it, five hundred and seventy six days had passed, give
or take a few.  That meant the yellow star was much larger than earth's
sun, and the planet was farther away.  The white sun also must be very
large, as it was obviously much farther out, moving slowly up in the sky
as the years passed.  He realized that it must be the dominant partner in
the binary system, the yellow sun and the planet its satellites.  He figured
eventually it would cross the sky and disappear over the northern horizon,
many years in the future.  There were apparently other planets in the
yellow star's system, judging by the movements of the brighter dots of
light, but that was guesswork, since he lacked anything more powerful
than the sports binoculars, and wasn't educated in celestial mechanics.

   He started a calendar with twelve months of forty eight days, each with
four weeks of twelve days, noting the position of the various nebula in
relation to the passage of time.  He abandoned the project after awhile,
as there was no point in knowing the date.  But the habit of marking the
time in weeks and months stayed with him, and he become accustomed
to guessing the passage of days by the night sky.

   By then end of the first long year the foundation work was complete
and he was moving in the last loads of gravel and rock from the house. 
He had recovered all the gravel and crushed rock he used on the surface
of the old yard, and had mined out the old drainage pit from the gutter
runoff, a pile about ten foot long and six foot deep, plenty for the drain
field.  Before he began digging the field he finished the dam and ran the
water supply down to the house.

   The dam turned out to be simple project, done within a few weeks. 
Standing below the water fall wearing a welder's face shield to keep the
water out of his eyes, he had broken the slot in the rock with a
sledgehammer down about four feet, the water now pouring through a
gap nearly eight foot tall.  Three inch plastic pipe formed the inlet, laid
in the bottom of the slot, and held in place with gravel poured in from
the pool in back.  The tip of the inlet pipe was screened with plastic
mesh he made from a bleach bottle, carefully cutting small holes in the
sides.  The inlet was located well back from the rock wall, where it could
be reached with a pole for cleaning.

   After securing the pipe, he had filled in the gap with rocks and thick
plastic sheeting, forcing the stream over the lip of the pool, creating a
broader waterfall with a large mist rainbow gracing the hollow.  The inlet
pipe turned through an elbow and ran to the stream bank below, where
it was connected to the old city devices he had recovered.  He ran the
water flow through the pressure regulator and was delighted to see that
the device actually decreased the pressure in the pipe.  There was plenty
of pressure, more than enough to run the house.  With the valve closed,
he ran the house feed line down a trench to the home site, extending its
reach with plastic pipe from the house and the hydroponics garden,
saving the copper for the house plumbing, where it wouldn't be in
contact with the ground.  

   The drain field went quickly, and by the time the next year rolled
around there came a day when he sat on his throne on the bare floor of
the house, temporarily connecting the plumbing for the ceremonious
occasion.  As he flushed the toilet for the first time, he spoke out loud;
"see Landru, you old machine.  Now that's civilization."  The framing for
the house was up in a few more weeks, and the roof was in place and
sealed before the next year.  

   Although the house was a skeleton inside, all the plumbing worked,
and the basic outline of the house was complete, most of the windows in
place on the stick frame.  He had built a rambler with a bedroom on the
east side, towards the jungle.  Behind the bedroom he had built two
bathrooms, one with just a toilet and a sink and the other the same with
a bidet.  The woman's room was built on faith alone; build it and she
will come.  There was no need for showers or baths in the house, those
would be in front, in the warm air, Hawaii style.

   The living room took up the entire middle of the house, though it was
all one large room, the bathrooms excluded.  His big old couch and
chairs now looked out over the garden to the sea, and in the west sat his
dining room table.  The kitchen was in the far corner, though for now it
was just empty space with blocked-off pipe fittings sticking through the
floor.  Without power, there would be no point in installing appliances.

  All the domestic gear was still stored up in the garage on the old
property, now looking sadly forlorn. All that remained were the teeth of
the old foundation, some scattered trees and bits of fencing and the intact
garage.  First he moved the contents of the garage down to the house,
filling it to the brim and then covering the rest with plastic tarps.  Then
he took the garage apart and built a smaller version off the east corner of
the house, between it and the jungle border, facing the sea, but set back
from the house so as not to block the view out the side windows.  He
retained the old double roll-up door as the front of the building, intending
it to be his shop and storage area.  

   When the last trip had been taken he parked the truck behind the house
near the back border, and drained the last of the gas into the spare can,
retiring the faithful workhorse with much ceremony and sadness.  Steve
patted it on the hood saying, "good old boy" and thought how proud the
Mazda company would be if they knew - the hardest working truck in the
known universe.  He jacked up the truck on blocks and went to work on
the problem of the power supply.

   He had designed many types of water wheels on paper, but scrapped
all of them one day when he was considering whether to install the
washer and dryer.  They were pretty much worthless, as he never wore
clothes anymore, aside from sweat bands which could easily be rinsed in
the stream, along with the few towels he had, the sheets and pillow cases. 
Suddenly he thought of the spinning drums, and the water wheel was set. 
The washer basket formed the impeller, as it was punched through with
holes that could be elongated manually using a hacksaw.  He could have
used the generator and cut the holes with a ceramic disk on the skill saw,
but he always traded time for fuel.  

   The slots were bent up into scoops that stood out from the basket, and
the idea was for the water to be directed over the basket, spinning it on
its side.  The power would be generated by a shaft connected between the
generator and the bearing shaft of the basket.  The first problem was in
mounting the basket solidly against the flow of the water.  He built a
wooden crib in front of the rock wall and mounted the basket on uprights
supported with scavenged steel brackets.  It worked, but the basket was
only held up by the bearing, and it looked too flimsy to last.

   After considering the problem for awhile he hit on the idea of mating
the dryer drum to the washer basket, forming a cylinder supported on
both ends.  Supported by a timber cradle, the device appeared rugged
enough to perform the task.  He took apart the supports and set to work
on the drive train.  

   The original generator was designed to run with the Honda engine,
about two thousand RPM.  The water shaft turned about two hundred
RPM, a factor of ten.  He worked for many weeks on various
combinations of gears, first having to take apart the drive train of the
truck.  By using bearings and brackets from the transmission housing, cut
out slowly with the welder, he finally managed to produce a solid
package of gears with the required ratios.  He had to fire up the generator
several times to run a power drill and grinders, praying that the gasoline
would last.  

   Finally the drum was installed below the rock wall, and a plastic pipe
was opened to allow water to spin the device.  One half of the truck's
drive shaft connected the drum to the truck's flywheel, which was in turn
bolted onto the gear train.  The flywheel, gears and generator were
mounted in a covered shed out of the weather and away from any crabs,
protected by a layer of earth soil around and under the shed floor. 
Connecting up the various parts had been difficult, but he managed it
with plates bolted in the center to the shaft bringing power in, and to the
next connecting plate mounted on the end of the shaft taking the power
out.  When everything seemed to be spinning nicely, he turned off the
water flow and took apart the generator, toting the gas engine out to rest
by the truck, left to rot into the ground.

   With the generator hooked to the new power source, he spun up the
drum and clicked on the power outlets.  The lights on the generator panel
flickered red for a few seconds and then cleared, the device humming
smoothly as the dial lit up and read out four thousand watts.  The
combined effect of the mass of spinning metal in the drive train was
buffering the rotation of the drum, and the dial stayed quite steady.  He
plugged his drill into a socket and pressed the trigger, shouting in
triumph as the drill whined in his hand.  

   Within days he had a cable buried for the power line and had hooked
up the main panel in the house.  He moved the microwave out of the
shed and plugged it in on part of the kitchen counter that was finished,
along with a table lamp.  When he punched in the breakers and the light
bulb lit he sat on the floor and cried, his eyes smarting from staring at
the light.  It had been over three years on this planet's time, over eight
earthly years of normal days, since he had seen artificial light.  He started
laughing when he looked at the microwave.  The LCD readout had come
on, blinking insistently; "12:00, 12:00, 12:00."  He covered it over with
black tape, after nuking a ceremonial crab for the occasion.  

   Finally, one day before another long year had passed, he found himself
walking up the beach in the fading light, returning home with an ice
chest full of shellfish.  The lights of his house and garden greeted him as
he walked up the steps he had made up to the bluff.  He paused on the
tile court by the pool to rinse the sand from his feet with one of the
shower stands he had installed.  The other was outside on the front porch,
by the large freestanding tub that had formerly dominated the master
bathroom in the old house.

   He stopped to sniff a rose, and then walked by the cannabis plants
blowing in the breeze, getting some of the sticky resin on his fingers as
he ran his hands through the tops, delighting in the spicy smell they
released.  He walked up the path to his front court and through the door
of his home, setting the chest on the kitchen counter next to the sink. 
After putting a CD on the stereo, he worked over the day's catch, gutting
crabs and cleaning sand veins as the Simple Minds filled up the room,
the sounds of Charlie Burchill burning a clean cut on his guitar one more
time.  

   He wrapped and froze all the food except for a quarter lobsterite,
baking it in the oven in its tail shell, soaked in coconut cream.  He took
a citrus flavored drink and the lobsterite out to the front patio, eating the
food in a reclining chair, watching the galaxy rise in the evening sky, and
waving goodbye to the white sun, now cycling out on the far west
horizon out past the point.  That night he slept outside in a brass bed
spread with clean linen.  The rain cycle wasn't due for another day, and
he would cover it up with tarps while it passed.  For now he could lie
uncovered in the warm air, watching the universe flow by above, all the
lights out now except for the glow of the joint in his hand.  

   Tomorrow was the start of the next phase of his life on the planet.  All
of the domestic chores were done, and it was time to take stock of the
world.  The catamaran he had crafted waited on the beach, loaded with
gear.  Almost all of his old clothes had been sewn up into the sail, but
he had no need of clothing anymore.  There was nothing in the jungle or
the beach that tested the calluses on his feet, and the temperature was
always warm, except in the middle of the night and early morning, when
usually a single sheet was sufficient as cover.  

   He had looked at himself in the mirror that morning, humoring himself
that he looked the part of planetary explorer.  The plan was to run the
catamaran against the wind, tacking to the west down the shore.  That
would make the home leg a straight run downwind, when he was likely
to be most tired from the journey.  Depending on what he found, he
would then take the east shore, learning from his experiences to be able
to tack home upwind from the journey.  It would be long and tedious
against the steady trade winds, which never reversed direction and rarely
varied.

   But it wasn't the journey that troubled him as he looked at the show
in the sky.  His reflection should have been of an older man, worn down
by long years of labor and toil, his skin and hair coarse from the sun. 
Instead he looked fresh from a summer vacation, slightly tanned, but with
a firm smooth face and a head of sandy brown hair free from grey.  His
hair had in fact grown to fill in bald spots that had been receding on
either side of his forehead.  His hair was a bit longer than a man
returning from a few weeks in the sun, but with a little brushing and
grooming he could fit in at the local club.  

   He liked to kid himself that it was just sound living, but he knew that
was a lie.  In the first place, he ate far too much to stay in shape, now
that the heavy lifting was complete.  But he stayed about the same in the
belly and legs, in fact leaner than when he had arrived.  He hadn't used
a razor in years; his face had simply ceased to grow hair.

   There were other signs besides, the lack of any health problems for
example, or any cavities in his teeth.  He had cut himself badly once
during the construction work, digging a chunk of flesh out of his hand
with a dull utility knife.  The injury was painful and bled badly for
awhile, but after it healed the skin cleared up without a scar.  That wasn't
possible, he knew, the cut was big enough to require stitches if he was
on earth.  It would have left some sign, a white patch of wrinkled skin,
a line, something.

   But it was his penis that settled the issue.  No matter how well toned
by exercise and good living, a man's unit did not grow past his youth. 
He had always been a little under the average in length, he knew, having
measured it in his youth.  When flaccid it retracted into the loose skin,
a roman penis, he would have said, looking like the statue of David.  But
now he was looking down his flat stomach at a five inch sausage lying
soft between his legs, and when angry it grew to over seven inches.  It
had been that way often enough, and his collection of jpg's of big busted
women had been well used in the past year.

   This was the doing of Landru, he knew.  As he had grown older, he
had ceased to care about childish things like the shape of his body or the
size of his penis.  He was middle age before he left earth, and was
comfortable with his body.  He had never experienced difficulty with
women, and he hadn't really regretted his penis size in decades. 
Apparently the planet machine was capable of seeing into his mind,
tapping the memories of his youth.  He hadn't asked or wanted the extra
flesh he now possessed, but it was there regardless.  He thought about it
for awhile, and then fell asleep.  He would be sleeping many miles from
his bed tomorrow.  It was time to see where he lived.


Chapter 9


   His first experiences at sailing had been near disasters, the catamaran
being pushed near to the rocks before Steve was able to tack into the
wind against the flow of the waves.  He worked with the boat for several
weeks before starting the trip, and now handled the sail with confidence,
surfing wave crests out beyond the point and turning to tack beyond the
breakers, riding the swells of the deep ocean.  

   The hull of the cat was made from plywood salvaged from the house,
sealed with visqueen and silicone caulk, the last bits scraped off the
empty tubes of the remaining supply.  The hull forms were simple boxes
with ramped bows, there being no way to curve the wood.  Fir
crosspieces held the hull sections together and supported a light deck
made from pine boards.  The mast was carved down from a long wall
beam leftover from the house, and the sail was a patchwork affair made
from his old clothes.  It looked clumsy, but sailed well enough, the
catamaran design making up for flaws.  

   He already knew what lay beyond the point, from fishing expeditions
to the islands.  A huge crab could be found there, the size of a tanner or
king crab, and every bit as tasty.  Apparently the crab favored deeper
waters, but would walk up to the island shallows often enough to be
caught.  He rotated his fishing between the pools of his own bay, the
islands off his point and from similar pools and islands in the
neighboring bays.  He had been correct about the valley he lived in, and
two bays to the east was the mouth of a substantial river, creating a broad
delta.  The fishing was particularly good offshore, and he had found a
shellfish like an oyster on the sand spits, which apparently favored the
fresh water flow from the river.

   He sailed beyond that now for the first time, and discovered similar
bays and valleys as he progressed east.  All of the hills and mountains
appeared to radiate from the large inland peak, and he guessed that it
was, or had been, a volcanic hot spot, creating a fan of debris that
formed the shoreline.  The farther he sailed east of the peak, the flatter
the land became, until it was nearly featureless, a jungle plain as empty
as the sea.

   It rapidly became apparent that the valley he lived in was a central
point, and also the farthest south.  As the days turned to weeks, he was
sailing more north, the shore curving towards the pole.  The jungle began
to grow sparse and finally gave out into an endless tundra of low ground
cover.  The weather was turning colder, and before a thousand miles of
sea had gone by the rudder, Steve started wearing the few clothes he
brought.  A knit cap appeared on his head and a jacket became a fixture
on his back.

   The sailing was easier with the sail cutting across the wind from the
east, and it was a simple matter to find shelter when the inevitable band
of clouds appeared on the horizon.  He camped on the beach at night,
enjoying the spoils of the sea, supplemented by dried strips of citrus pod
and rose hips to prevent scurvy.  As the water turned colder he began to
find new treats, including a giant red shrimp a good foot long, and
dozens of new types of crabs and lobsters, and all sorts of creatures
between.  The boat had held up well, requiring only a few patches from
the one tube of silicone caulk he had saved for the journey.

   But in spite of the novel sea life, the journey had bogged down into
monotony, the look of the sea and land never changing for weeks.  He
began to consider returning home about two months out.  He figured he
had travelled about thirty miles a day, sailing at a steady five knots for
about ten hours at a time, tacking back and forth across the wind.  He
thought about it while he camped on a beach nearly three thousand miles
from home, shivering under a tarp as a rain band moved overhead.  In
the end he decided to go three hundred more miles, ten more days, and
then give it up.

   He never made it that far.  Three days out he ran into the first iceberg,
well out at sea, drifting to the south.  The next day he spied several, and
the following day he had to pick his way between them, even close to
shore.  The land plants had completely given up by this time, aside from
something like lichen that coated the ground.  The sea life began to die
out as well, and it was clear that further travel north would soon be
impossible.  The next day he saw a mist on the horizon that stretched
over the curve of the world.  Carefully dodging ice he sailed on until he
could see the reason for the fog.

   It was a endless wall of ice, miles high, from sunrise to sunset,
covering both the land and the sea.  He had come to the end of the
journey, and it was clear that his guess had been correct.  From observing
the suns and the night sky, it was obvious he lived just north of the
planet's equator.  If the temperature was in the eighties there, it didn't
take a genius to predict that the territory to the north would be cold. 
Still, the lack of any features to the landscape was a major
disappointment to Steve.  It turned out that the richest part of the planet
was right back where he lived, the tip of a small continent dipping down
into a warm band of seas at the equator, but buried in ice like the rest of
the planet to the north.

   He guessed by the steady winds and rain bands that the rest of the
planet was the same.  It was certainly possible there were other warm
land areas, possibly even large islands in the seas.  But likely the south
part of the planet was covered with ice as well, and the journey across
the open sea was not one he was prepared to make.  So he turned back
to the south, letting the steady trades whip the catamaran down the
shoreline to the east.  Within a few weeks the cap and jacket were
stowed, and soon he was sailing naked again, caressed by the wind as the
shoreline flew by.  A month of steady sailing brought him within the
regions shaped by the inland volcano, and within a week thereafter he
sailed into his bay, greeted by the sight of roses and evergreen trees
bending in the wind.

   Nothing had disturbed his property, and when he clicked back in the
breakers, the lights came on as usual, the fridge clicked and hummed, and
power lights appeared on the audio equipment.  He spent a couple of
weeks tending to his gardens, renewing the marijuana plants from seed
and cutting back the excess growth, and then set off again while he was
in practice, running downwind to the east.  He travelled about three
weeks out before admitting defeat, the land dwindling to flats and curving
northward, just like the west shore.  He turned around finally and spent
more than a month tacking into the teeth of the wind on the homeward
leg, and when he arrived home he decided his travelling days were over.

   Another week of work was required to get the gardens back in shape
again, and when it was done he sat in his chair, looking out at the sea
between the rock points of his bay, the finest real estate on the planet,
with his house at ground zero.  He felt beat down by the knowledge that
this was the extent of his world, this bay and a few others like it.  There
was nowhere to go, and nothing left to do but live day to day, pursuing
pleasure.  He felt lonely and tired, and wept for the second time in his
life on the planet, this time in sadness.


Chapter 10


   His mood recovered some over the next few days, and he found the
energy to go on a pod hunting expedition.  He had not been able to
figure out the reproductive mechanism of the plants, and they were far
too large to transplant, so pod gathering was a normal weekly activity,
and he knew the good plants well.  This journey was to search out
different plants, and he decided to strike inland and east, down the valley
in back of the hill where his house had landed.  

   There was another reason for the walk, which he didn't admit to
himself.  Wherever he went his eyes always cast around for the slightest
sign of something artificial, a hatch or a building, anything to indicate the
presence of the machine that ran this planet.  It had to be somewhere,
and the mostly likely place was underground, in this valley, at the center
of things.  Of course, he realized it was possible that the computer or
whatever Landru was might exist in space, maybe in the small moon,
looking down at him like the producer in "The Truman Show".  

   He hadn't walked up the crest of the hill in several months, and the
sight of the jumbled up dirt and concrete made him sad.  Several of the
larger trees were doing fine, outgrowing the surrounding jungle.  He had
pulled dirt around the base of the trees, and he could see that more work
was needed due to erosion.  The cedar tree was almost a hundred feet
tall, and would need more soil for its roots.  There was plenty left on the
front of the lot, but the tree would have to make do mostly with clay. 
He patted the tree and promised to come up soon with his tools, and
walked down the valley beyond.

   There were a number of pod trees on the floor of the valley, mostly
following a stream bed.  Pod trees usually preferred the bottom lands, so
he didn't bother searching on the hills.  The only use for the rest of the
trees was recovering the decaying tissues where one had fallen over, for
toilet paper and kitchen scrubbing.  All of kitchen towels were in the
catamaran sail, but it was easier to use the soft sheets from the forest
than to do laundry anyway.  The material decomposed quickly in water,
making it ideal for the drain field.  

   This day he had come across a couple of pod varieties he hadn't seen
before, one with ridges on the outside skin, which was rare.  The contents
of the first were disappointing, just another oil variety and not as good
as the one he was using now.  The ridged pod was similar to the citrus
pod, only cleaner tasting and not as sharp.  He squeezed some of the pulp
into his mouth and pulled a face from the sour taste; lemon juice, he
thought, or close enough.  It needed sweetener, but the dried durian pod
flesh answered that need, which could be beaten and separated from the
sugar, allowing it to be recovered by evaporation.  Camellia leaf and rose
hip tea with lemon and sugar was now on the menu.  He put a ripe pod
in his pack and mapped out the location of the tree.

   He headed downstream and passed a valley coming in from the north. 
He was walking up the draw to investigate a pod tree when he became
aware of the depressions in the ground.  He froze for a second and then
dropped to the ground, fishing his ever-present 475 from the holster,
looking around the jungle for any signs of movement.  

   The marks were clearly not natural, and lying close to the ground he
could see there were a progression of them coming down the north draw
and continuing down the main valley towards the east.  He checked the
slopes above him, thinking that whatever made the tracks might have
circled back.  Nothing was moving except crabs, so he allowed himself
some time to look at the marks.

  There were two, in pairs.  The back set were the deeper, and had a
squared-off front and a rounded back, which had dug the deepest into the
soft ground by the stream.  The front parts were not as clear, fading from
a rounded front to an indistinct rear.  They could have been the hoof
marks of some alien creature.  They also could have been boots, but he
put that hope aside, staying cautious, moving down the stream slowly,
following the tracks.  

   He measured his stride against the marks, and compared the
depressions his heels made.  Whatever had made these tracks was smaller
and lighter than him, that was clear.  At one point the prints crossed the
stream over a shallow bank, and the prints on the far shore were the best
defined he had seen, pressed into the soft mud.  The bottom of the prints
were smooth and flat, and he was sure they must have been from a
manufactured material.  No creature would evolve such regular and
defined feet pads.  Human, he thought, it had to be.  Landru had read his
despair and finally provided a companion.  I hope Landru isn't gay, he
thought, let this be a female.  The boot prints weren't encouraging, they
were more like what a man would wear, but he took heart in the apparent
size of the person, which indicated a woman.

   He holstered his gun and set off to follow the tracks with a little less
caution.  He could tell by the print in the mud that the wearer of the
boots had passed this way some hours in front of him, and was likely far
down the valley.  He knew the lay of the land better, and could cut over
the hill, down the slopes to the sea, where he could walk the beach down
to the place where the stream entered.  It was likely the person would
stay by the sea once they reached the stream mouth.

   Just as he decided to leave the path, he spotted something out of place
ahead.  Drawing the gun again he moved quickly down the stream.  He
stopped and pulled out the binoculars from his pack.  It appeared to be
something made of cloth.  Then it was human, he thought, and ran down
to the object that lay by the stream.  When he reached it he picked it up,
scrunched it in his hands and sat down on the ground, eyes streaming
with tears.

   It was a bonnet.  A women's bonnet, there was no other explanation. 
He could smell perspiration on the inside band, and figured the person
had taken it off due to the heat.  There was also something else, like
baby powder, though faint.  He examined the garment carefully, his heart
pounding with excitement.  It was clearly of human make, the cloth
patterned into tan and white stripes, but it was odd.  There was no label,
and the stitching was by hand.  He stopped to consider what type of
women would wear such an old-fashioned hat.  Had Landru sent him an
Amish girl?  That would be interesting, stepping down the shore to greet
her, naked, carrying a gun.

   His mind was now made up and he ran up the hill, crashing through
the undergrowth, scaring crabs out of his path as he raced for the sea. 
He slowed down as the slope grew steep, watching his step, and then
sprinted down a gentle valley until he reached the edge of the jungle
facing the sea.  His first plan was to move along the shoreline, in plain
sight as he reached the stream mouth.  Now he reconsidered, and decided
to be more cautious, sticking to the edge of the jungle, moving quietly
along the skirts of the beach growth.

   Soon the hill above him sloped down to meet the stream valley, and
he moved into the jungle, keeping low.  He crawled the last few feet to
the edge of the jungle, keeping behind a bush as he scoped out the
brightly lit stream bed in front of him.  He saw her at once, across the
other side of the stream, sitting in the water, naked.  He could see her
clothes on the dry ground of the far bank, a large one-piece dress outfit
that matched the bonnet, and thick black boots, as he had guessed.  He
ignored the clothes as he concentrated on the woman, stopping to heave
in several deep breaths; in his excitement he had forgotten to breathe for
a moment.

   She had blonde hair, and was young, maybe late teens or early twenties
at the oldest.  Her face wasn't clear in the binoculars, but appeared to be
well shaped.  He waist was slim and her hips large, though they were
mostly hidden in the water.  It was easy to guess at her age due to the
condition of her chest.  The girl was hugely endowed, the large breasts
cantilevered out over her rib cage, her small nipples pointed up from the
ends.

   He lowered the binoculars and breathed deeply, realizing again he had
been holding his breath.  He considered stepping out of the forest and
surprising her, but there were three reasons he could find for not doing
so.  First, she was naked, and must have been a modest person on earth
to wear such clothes.  Second, he was naked, and third, he had a
throbbing erection.  It wasn't his fault, he thought.  The first human he
had seen in maybe ten earth years turns out to be a busty blonde girl, and
naked besides.  Surprising her with a hard on was not the way to make
an introduction, particularly given the state of mind the poor girl must be
in.

   He decided to wait until his erection went down, but it refused to
cooperate.  The girl continued to sit in the stream, splashing water up on
her breasts and face.  He found his hand wandering down to his organ,
and went with the instinct, stroking himself while watching through the
binoculars.  One sure way to deflate his penis, he thought, and he soon
spurted into the bushes in a long series of blasts, fumbling and dropping
the binoculars.  He lay on the ground quietly, recovering himself.

   Finally he decided to retreat and walk back to the beach.  His cock had
softened after cumming, and was shrinking back down to its normal self,
or at least what passed for normal these days, after the influence of the
planet.  He decided to walk down the beach whistling to himself to give
the girl plenty of warning.  He considered running back to the house to
find something to wear, but so far as he could remember there was
nothing, unless he wrapped a sheet around himself.  Besides, it was too
far away and he was anxious for the meeting.  So he brushed his hair
back and stuck out his chest, walking down the sand from the jungle to
the edge of the sea, strolling towards the stream mouth, nervous,
whistling badly out of tune.


Chapter 11


   He heard the girl before he saw her, yelling through the jungle line as
he approached the creek.

   "Hey, hey you, help me!"

   "I'm coming!" he yelled and broke into a trot up the beach.  She was
wading across the stream when he rounded the corner, wearing her dress,
but not laced up.  It covered her from her ankles to her neck, and she
was having difficulty walking, holding on to her boots, lifting the hem
of the dress and trying to keep it from falling off her shoulders all at the
same time.  He waded into the stream to help, and she looked up,
dropping the boots in the water and turning around to hide her face.

   "Jesus, man, where are your pants!"

   "Sorry, look out for your boots."  He waded out and retrieved them
before they floated away.  Her back was uncovered and he admired the
smooth skin, puzzling over the strings and hooks on the back of the
dress.

   "Are you covered up yet?" she said.

   "No, I'm afraid not.  Look, I don't have any pants, no clothes at all. 
Come on out of the stream before you're soaked, I won't bite."

   "Are you a savage?  You don't sound like one."

   "A savage?" he replied, "No, just naked I'm afraid."

   "How do you expect me to face you without any clothes?"

   "If you don't get out of the stream I'm afraid you'll lose yours."  Her
dress was being dragged off her by the weight of the soaked hem, and
she was bent over trying to grab it up to her face.  She started slowly
backing out of the stream, still turned away.

   "I'll manage, I'm sure.  Can't you cover yourself up somehow?"

   "I'll hold my pack over my front, if that will help."

   "Your pack?"

   "My bag, you know, my backpack."

   She turned her head around tentatively and seeing that he had covered
up his penis, she walked up the bank of the stream, staying well away
from him, arranging her dress.

   "You can't just go around without pants, someone will shoot you for
an Indian," she said.

   "An Indian?"  He stalled for a moment, trying to think what she meant,
an image of a sikh in a turban coming to mind.  "I don't understand."

   "A savage, a redskin."

   "A redskin?  You mean an American Indian?"

   "What else would I mean?" she replied, tying up her dress, glancing
at him, trying not to stare. 

   Steve felt ridiculous holding the pack over his groin, but he was far
more interested in the girl.  She had the voice of an angel, he thought,
and the face to match.  Her eyes were cornflower blue, her cheeks and
lips ripe and full and her bright blonde hair spilled off her head in long
waves.  He couldn't see her legs, but her bottom was full and her waist
slim.  He felt himself beginning to get excited again, looking at her, and
blushed furiously, imagining what a disaster an erection would be right
now.

   "Well?" she said, finished with her dress, and turning around, shielding
her eyes with her hands.  

   "Um, sorry, I lost track there."

   "Where are your clothes?" she repeated.

   "I told you, I don't have any, only some hats and jackets, nothing I
could wear in this heat.  Look my name is Steve, I came here just like
you, I've been here for years.  What's your name and how did you get
here?"

   "My name is for my own kin, and where is here, if you don't mind me
asking?"

   "Your kin?  Where are you from?  You sound American."

   "And what else would I be?  I asked first, where am I and how did I
get here?"

   Steve shrugged, and let her have it.  "Okay, here goes.  You're not on
earth, you're on another planet out in space, I don't know where.  So far
as I know, I'm the only person living here, aside from you now.  I don't
how either of us got here or what will happen to us."

   "Tell it to the cows!" she replied.  

   "I don't . . . oh, I see, you're saying you don't believe me."  He
thought for a second about the expression; it was old, like her dress. 
Maybe the bonnet made sense now, the hand stitching; not Amish, just
old fashioned.

   "Answer just one question if you will, what year is it?"

   "Don't be daft."

   "I'm serious, tell me the year."

   "It's the year of our lord nineteen hundred and twelve, as you know
well enough, unless you're potted as well as naked."

   "1912," he replied, "Boy, I'll have some surprises for you at home."
He tried to picture what the world was like in 1912; did they have
electric lights?  He thought so, but maybe not out in hicksville, where
apparently this girl resided.

   "And where's your home, if I may ask a question?" she said.

   "You may, and it's down the beach, around the next point.  We'll walk
on the edge of the beach, it's easier going there.  You won't need your
boots, they're all wet anyway."

   "They're shoes, not boots, I don't wear boots, and there are things with
claws everywhere."

   "Sorry, and don't worry about the crabs, I've been here several years,
actually make that eleven or twelve in your time, and they haven't bit me
yet."

   "I think you are potted," she replied.

   "Maybe I am if you can explain what you've seen of this place.  I
think you should walk down to the beach and have a look out to sea,
over this way," he said, pointing to the east.

   He decided if he started walking she would follow, and when he
glanced around she was, though in obvious distress from having to watch
his bare bottom.  Despite her bravado, he could see she was scared out
of her wits, as he was the first day he found himself deposited here. 
1912, he thought again.  Who was the president, Wilson?  Or was he
elected that year?  Apparently Landru could transport through time and
space, or maybe it was just an accident.  Certainly the machine had
acknowledged his desires, and he mentally took back every bad thing he
had every said about Landru.  Not only had it found him a woman, she
was his ideal babe; short, buxom, blonde and cute.  It figured, he
supposed, but he was enormously grateful and excited beyond measure.

   As he walked over a rise he could see the white sun off on the eastern
horizon, up about five degrees from where he had first seen it.  He
pointed out to sea as she walked up the slope, and her hands fell from
her face, eyes wide.

   "Preserve us!  What is it?"

   "It's the second sun, it's a binary system.  I mean by that there are two
stars, circling each other, and this planet revolves around the yellow star
above."

   She fell to her knees, hands clutching the sand, looking up above her
to the yellow sun then back out to sea.

   "It can't be, it can't be."

   "It is, I'm afraid, everything I've said is the truth, as you'll see soon
enough.  I told you my name, Steve, won't you tell me yours?"

   "I'm Pauline Thompson," she replied, dropping her eyes to the ground.

   "Pauline, that's nice.  I don't bother with my last name anymore, I'm
just Steve.  I came here in the year two thousand and one."

   "Two thousand . . . that cant be true."

   "Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman,
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush,
Clinton and another Bush."

   "I'm sorry?" she replied.

   "Those are the presidents since 1912, It took me a minute to remember
who came before Wilson."

   "Wilson?" she asked.

   "Governor of New Jersey, he wins in the fall.  What time of year was
it where you came from?"

   "May," she replied, distracted, "May 31st.  I am to be married in two
weeks.  A June bride."

   "I'm sorry, I don't think you're going to make the wedding.  So far as
I know, there's no way off this planet.  I'm not even sure earth exists
anymore, not in our time, not here."

   She looked shattered, so he sat down next to her, trying to keep the
conversation light.

   "Where are you from?"

   "Tipton," she said, after a moment, "Tipton Iowa."

   "I don't know the town I'm afraid.  Where is it near?"

   "Davenport."

   "I've heard the name, but I don't know where that is either."  He
paused for a minute, the girl still kneeling, eyes staring at the ground,
probably hoping it would all go away if she wished hard enough.

   "I'm sorry you lost your husband, what was his name?" he asked.

   "William."

   "Was he from Tipton?"

   "No, we live out of town.  He owns the farm down the road, off Sugar
creek.  He's older . . . older than I."

   Steve let that go, figuring he would learn all about her past soon
enough.  They had plenty of time to share history.  Right now he was
curious as to what happened when she was transported, as he had been
asleep at the time.

   "Won't you tell me how you came here?  Do you remember what
happened?  Where were you, what were you doing, were you awake?"

   "I . . . I was walking," she replied.  "It was early, no one was up.  I
wanted . . . I wanted to be by myself, so I walked down the road a piece. 
I was just thinking, not looking at anything, and then I looked up and I
. . . "

   She began to cry as it seeped back in, sobbing, holding her face in her
hands.  He moved over next to her and placed a hand on her shoulder
and squeezed.  

   "I know, it's not easy, believe me.  I was asleep when it happened, and
when I woke up, here I was."

   "Am I dead?" she asked through her tears.

   "A fair question.  I don't think so, at least I don't feel dead, do you?"

   "I don't know," she said. "No, at least I don't think it would be like
this.  Where are we, what is this place?"

   "I'll tell you as much as I know, but let's walk down to the beach to
my house.  You must be hungry, come on."


End of Part One
<1st attachment end>


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