The Time of The Cat 24
TWENTY-FOUR
HIPPIES?
We ended up in the uni-sex restroom at the back of an incense-filled head shoppe in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. We exited the restroom, coming out of one of the toilet stalls and then going through the door. In so doing, we totally freaked out the owner, a beaded, hippie-type leftover from the sixties. He was so leftover that his expiration date had long run out, but there he was, still in his glorious garb with a headband tying back his long, gray hair and wearing a peace symbol on a leather thong underneath his leather vest.
We weren’t too sure where we were at first. You can still find people like him in about any major city, and this might have been Astoria if we’d been wrong about the bearded Vernon Wardell’s origin. The hippie wasn’t able to speak much; he was so frazzled over all of us coming out of his toilet, carrying guns!
“Guns!” He was apparently aghast over the very concept.
We poked our heads out of the front door to verify where we were. Sure enough, we were right at the intersection of Haight and Asbury. These two streets commemorate two early San Francisco notables, banker Henry Haight and politician Munroe Ashbury. The hippies of the sixties would have probably decided to have their Summer of Love in another location entirely if they’d been aware that the streets were named after such establishment types.
Mr. Hippie was not happy as we turned and trooped through his shop again. We passed some nice macrame hangings, headbands, and leather watchbands and turned left by the psychedelic posters into the restroom.
He was able to say, “Hey, you all can’t...,” but then he paused, possibly thinking about what we were all going to do in his bathroom; five guys, a beautiful woman, and a Tomcat.
San Francisco is a strange place full of strange people doing strange things, but it must have given him a mental paroxysm because he started stuttering at that point, “can, can, ca, ca, ca.”
It really didn’t matter what he said; the fact was that we were all going to pile into his restroom anyway. As we entered, Joe turned and gave him the peace gesture. He stopped stuttering and returned it.
We got back to the St. Louis location and moved to the next transporter. We now had identified two of the five, so the odds were greater that the next would be one of our destinations. Only it wasn’t. We ended up on the Moon.
Oh, sure. Everyone thinks they want to go to the Moon. I mean, it was pretty cool, and we felt lucky to be able to see the Earth from there, but I was kind of put out over it. It seemed like we couldn’t catch a break, and we were spending more time on a kind of lunatic tour than on approaching our enemies’ strategic point.
We came out of the transporter door into a crater. This could have been deadly for us, but this crater had a transparent cover about halfway up the walls. The crater was deep, too. The covering glass, or whatever it was, looked as if it was about four hundred feet over our heads, and the crater walls went on up from there for at least another five hundred feet or so.
The glass itself had some dust on the top of it that obscured our view of the Earth a little. I don’t know how dust travels around on the surface of the moon, but this had obviously fallen down from above. There was no wind on the Moon that I knew of since there was no atmosphere, but later Liz mentioned to me that the solar wind consisting of photons and other particles ejected from the sun was possibly to blame. The Pugs probably didn’t bother to clean it off because the dust would go a long way to obscure activities on the base of the crater from viewers on the Earth.
There are telescopes at various locations on Earth that are easily powerful enough to see the bottom of lunar craters. There was activity in the bottom of this one to see, but with the dust covering part of the glass, it may have broken up the view to the point that nothing was obvious to any observer. There wasn’t much to see at the moment; the floor of the crater held a stack of large, solid-looking crates but no Pugs.
We looked at the view of the Earth like Kansas farmers look at the New York skyscrapers when they first wander into Times Square. Yes, we gawked. It was amazing and brought a lump to my throat. I got over it soon enough, though, because suddenly, some Pugs entered the crater bringing more boxes toward the stack. They didn’t have any equipment aside from their own muscles, but they were moving the big boxes easily in the light gravity.
They saw us after a few seconds and let out a perfect hissing storm of their language, ending with one of them speaking into some kind of communicator. The response was a series of hisses. That tore it! They all started running our way in their snake-like fashion, and we started shooting at them. Liz screamed, “Use splinter guns, you idiots.”
Joe and Colin were blasting away with their 45s, and the bullets were bouncing around. She was afraid that they’d break the glass with a ricochet, but she needn’t have worried. Any substance that is strong enough to withstand even a minor meteor strike should be able to take a pistol shot with no problem. Even so, they pulled out their splinter guns and went “Poof” rather than “Bang” at the Pugs. Two of the aliens went down immediately, and the other three started bouncing back toward the boxes, looking for cover.
The communicator must have summoned help because another Pug poked his head out of a door on the far side of the crater. He became an immediate problem since he had one of the long, energy-bolt shooting tubes. He lowered it onto its mount, pointed it at us, and let fly. We could see the bolt coming, and we jumped to get out of the way.
We were surprised to find that our adrenaline-powered jumps moved us high above the surface. The light gravity was a great help in dodging the shot.
We jointly sailed through the air and came back down about the time he let off a second shot. It went wide of our location because Rudy had managed to somehow shoot him with a splinter. How he managed it while flying through the air, I don’t know. He kept firing as he jumped and landed on his shoulder pretty hard because he was concentrating on shooting. When he landed, he let out a groan and stopped shooting, but it didn’t matter by then.
There was one Pug remaining. He’d been hiding behind some of the crates, but now he was bounding for the door where the bolt shooter was positioned. We all unloaded in his general direction, and he obligingly staggered and died before he reached it.
Rudy recovered rapidly because he jumped up and leaped over to the dead Pugs in an attempt to recover some additional weapons. He found one splinter gun on the Pug that had shot the bolt at us. We yelled at him, and he came running back, giving the gun to Chandra, who didn’t have one.
We retreated back to the transporter door in a hurry. Jefferson was already there, as usual. I realized that he had remained by the door rather than risk his neck in what seemed to him to be an uninteresting exercise. Somehow he always seemed to know when we’d be backtracking. That foreknowledge saved him a lot of walking at times.
We were all breathing heavily when the transporter dumped us back in the room in St. Louis. The combination of looking at the Earth from the moon and being shot at was a little too exciting, and I wouldn’t recommend it.
The good thing was we now knew that the last two transporters would take us to our intended destinations and, although we didn’t know which one went where, we really didn’t care that much. Rudy, Colin, Chandra, and Joe turned to us and saluted in a military manner and then went into the next transporter. Just before the door shut, Rudy re-adjusted the strap holding the eraser-gun I’d given him, grinned, and said, “Tonight we dine in Lubbock!”
“See you in Loveland,” I rejoined. Their door shut, and we turned to the last transporter. Its door opened when Liz pressed the call button, and we entered.