Mrs. Edgley saw what the revelers were doing at ground level and she
didn't want to miss it. She grabbed
Edgley's hand and started dragging him down the stairs to the cheap seats.
"What are you doing?" yelled Edgley over the music. "We'll get wet!"
Mrs. Edgley couldn't hear a thing over the music, especially with her
back turned to her husband as she negotiated the stairs. Her grip on her husband's arm was so
ferocious that he had no choice but follow or lose his footing and fall down
the steep bleacher steps. Soon they came
out from under the protection of the VistaCard awning and the rain thoroughly
soaked them within half a minute. Once
they got out into the world of the tents, the first thing Mrs. Edgley did was
push Mr. Edgley onto his ass.
"What the hell are you doing?!" he demanded, now covered in
mud and wet to the bone.
"Having fun!" she said and proceeded to drop her own behind
into a big puddle. "Come on!"
Mrs. Edgley tore off her hat, vest and blouse and threw them into the
air as Edgley made a grab for each of them, since they were all designer labels
and worth a fortune. Suddenly she was
grabbing at his shirt and pulling it out of his pants. His belt fell below minimum tolerable
distance on his rotundity and his pants fell down. As he tripped backwards, Mrs. Edgley held
onto the shirt and it came off his body in a long riiiiip.
"Would you stop!" he yelled. But then she was off running down the rows,
holding his pants in the air. His
SPECTACL came flying off and landed in a puddle and he crawled after it
frantically.
John Summers looked around for his wife, but now almost everyone was
covered in muck and he couldn't tell her from the rest of the million or so
crazy folks stretched out before him, dancing and slipping in every direction.
He got hit in the face with a big wad of wet dirt. He looked around -- there she was, giggling.
"Got yah," said Mrs. Summers. John Summers laughed, threw off his shirt and
tackled Hailey Summers. They rolled
around getting soaked, stabbing themselves with tent pegs and kissing and
laughing.
"Hey," said Hailey.
"Remember?" John
Summers couldn't hear her, but he could read her lips.
"Yeah," he yelled over the music. "Sometimes!"
They kissed and it tasted like sand and bleach. They spit and laughed and rolled back and
looked up at the sky. The drops of rain
fell down like railroad tracks, coming out of a single point and spreading
around their heads and into their faces.
To Hailey, who was smashed out of her mind, it looked like a waving
multi-blue curtain. To John Summers, it
was just pretty. But then the rain
slowed and the clouds began to part.
That's when people started to yell and point to the sky. The clouds were beginning to dissipate, the
rain went from torrential to zero in less than 30 seconds. In the gap between the clouds, where the
first patch of blue revealed the bright Texas sun, a little sphere dangling
from three parachutes got bigger and bigger.
"That's our kids!" yelled Mr. Summers.
Mrs. Summers couldn't see the Waste-REL, but she
could see a wreath floating out of the sky.
The flowers were pretty and the sash said "Rest In
Peace". She smiled. "Pretty."
"Okay," said Jules.
"Get ready to land."
"Should we re-belt?" asked Lyle.
"Sure, why not," said Jules.
"Better safe than sorry."
A few of the crew decided to sit down.
Lyle even belted, but the descent was as gradual as a feather and the
landing site was impossible to miss for a computer with Jules's sophistication.
"I'm compensating for the wind by pulling on the parachute
controls," said Jules. "It's fun."
"Crunchy!" said Verna, still enraptured by the afterglow of
her transference through the fuzzynavel.
She gave Jules a little smile to show that she liked to fly too. She and Ayame were monitoring the
descent. It was textbook. The two pilots held hands like schoolgirls.
"Can we see what's beneath us?" asked Portia.
"I've got cameras everywhere," said Jules and he showed her.
"What is that?" asked Mickey. "Is that a field of crops?"
"Those are tents and people," said Jules.
It was tents and people to the horizon in every direction.
"Where are we?" asked Lyle, worried.
"The GAG Festival," said Jules. "We'll be landing directly on the stage
in approximately one minute. Do you have
your speech ready?"
"My speech?!" said
Lyle. The idea of speaking in front of a
crowd was inconceivable to Lyle. If he'd
known it was a crowd comprised almost entirely of Boomers, he'd have fainted
right in the chair.
"What will I say?"
"The Aliens," said Mickey.
"They'll talk through the robe.
Remember?"
"Oh, yeah," smiled Lyle.
"Aren't they in for a big surprise?"
"What surprise?" asked Donny.
"Oh, noth…," said Lyle, but he was
interrupted by a loud cracking sound as the Waste-REL tore through the awning
that had been protecting the GAG Festival's stage from the rain.
The band "What?!" had to make a hasty exit to the back of
the stage. When the Waste-REL landed, it
tore through the awning and crushed all their musical instruments -- which is
what the band had been planning to do themselves -- just a little later in the
show. The drums made a particularly
crunchy noise as the ship came to rest and the occupants of the Waste-REL had
to adjust their stance to accommodate the angle upon which the ship was perched
on the crushed equipment.
"Okay, Jules," said Portia.
"Open the door."
"There's a problem," said Jules.
"What is it," asked Portia.
"Step back," said Jules.
Everybody took a step back.
The Waste-REL's exit opened.
The crew looked out on a sea of people, 138 feet below. The crowd cheered wildly at the site of the
door opening. The parachutes fluttered
down behind the ship.
Mickey approached the doorway carefully. "Watch out for that first step ---"
"Yes, that's the problem," said Jules. "Sorry -- going through that awning
placed us too close to the edge of the stage.
I thought I'd adjusted for it, but it was an uncontrollable
element."
Just then a gust of wind pulled the parachutes Northward and the ship
followed, dragging the Waste-REL to the center of the stage and leaving a big
gouge down the rubberized floor.
"Ah," said Mickey.
"We can get out now."
The fact that Mickey was the first to get out of the Waste-REL has
never been in question, because his ten story high image was recorded for
posterity by 3,400 digital Trideo™ cameras. Only Mickey and Donny had removed their space
suits and were wearing their tight-fitting STC jumpsuits. When the crowd saw the newly famous pop-star
get out off the Waste-REL, despite their age, despite the fact that he was a
Feedbaq star whose only claim to fame was his reproduction as a cyber-actor,
they went supernova.
The mud stained citizens of the city of New Woodstock were whistling
and howling and clapping and screaming.
Even Daffi had to come out and look and when she saw gorgeous,
brown-skinned, muscles and ringlets, ten-story high Mickey Humboldt with three
days of beard, she went all moist and nearly fainted.
Portia was the last out of the ship because she had to wait as Jules
poured himself back into her quantum SPECTACL.
He would be a little slower, but it was still the same Jules.
As the rest of the crew crowded around Mickey, they thought that the adulation
was for the ship, or the mission or whatever.
They did not know how famous they'd all become and especially how famous
Mickey would remain.
Mickey held his hands in the air to quiet the crowd. Donny ran over to the wings of the stage and
asked a roadie for a working microphone.
The roadie picked one up off the ground and handed it to him. Donny put it to his lips and blew into
it. The blowing noise could be heard in
Louisiana.
Donny returned to his crewmates. They all just stood in place, flabbergasted,
staring at the crowd. Donny passed the
mike to Mickey. Mickey took the mike and
glowered at it. He turned to Lyle. Lyle swallowed hard, removing his helmet.
Next: Announcing the Verdict
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