The Earth Tripper

  THE EARTH TRIPPER

  Tock Von calmly watched them stretch the huge net beneath his tree. He saw the man in the uniform go and return with an odd gun cradled in his arms. He looked down at the command post the fuzz had established at a sufficiently safe distance from his tree and then up at the rising muzzle of the gun. He had a chilling moment of misgiving as he imagined crosshairs, himself frozen in their hairline juncture. But there were always risks involved in dealing with an alien species, he reminded himself. He was perfectly willing to take them. He rose up on his toes, gave Devlin a smart salute and waited for the drug dart to strike, planning on initiating peace talks later and presenting a persuasive argument for the reordering of certain earthly priorities.

  Copyright© 1973 by Leo P. Kelley

  First published 1973 by

  Fawcett Publications Inc, New York

  Coronet edition 1974

  FOR BINKY

  The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which this is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain for

  Coronet Books, Hodder Fawcett Ltd,;

  St. Paul’s House, Warwick Lane,

  London, EC4P 4AH,

  By C. Nicholls & Company Ltd,

  The Philips Park Press. Manchester M11 4AU

  ISBN 0 340 18285 7

  ONE

  “Well, Tock Von, like I said,

  I don’t ball mutants.”

  Not normally a sidler, Tock Von nevertheless slyly sidled across the polished cocktail party floor where prowled the wild and the would-be wild. He slid past the miniskirts and the Daks, ducking “What do you do’s?” and dodging indiscriminate and nonchalant gropings.

  This was his sixth field trip to Earth. He had made up his mind that it would be different from his previous five. This one would not be limited to a specified amount of time as the others had been, nor would it be “spatially circumscribed within acceptable levels of contactive risk.” At least, not for him. Not this time.

  They had called him a rebel on his home planet, Eleison, almost from the minute he had enrolled in the program of Extra-Eleisonite Expeditions into Alien Galactic Territories by Means of Warp Continuum Exploitation. They said he was too daring, not conformist enough. Something of a malcontent, as as a matter of fact.

  They were right on all counts. Why, he had mentally asked himself, must he and the others taking the trips remain within circumscribed physical limits? How could they truly learn about the natives of Earth if they were not allowed to mix freely and without restrictions?

  The older and more experienced members of the Extra-Eleisonite Expeditionary Force had answered that too much contact might prove problematical. Thus space/time limits were imposed on each member during the field trips. This time, this sixth time for Tock Von, they were researching the mores of a typical terrestrial cocktail party. No member of the EEF was allowed to leave the premises. They would remain on Earth for only four hours.

  In uncharacteristic fashion when the plan had been outlined, Tock Von had kept his mouth shut. But he had made his plans.

  Wandering on through the cocktail party room, he reeled past brittle girls breaking their laughter into careful quotas, an other-ended wind, because they didn’t want to seem too eager for whatever. He slid past men with precision haircuts and polished eyes that told of barbs and bank accounts. He found himself thinking of the long evolutionary road a-winding up through salt seas—unicellular somethings swishing and sloshing about in Earth’s primeval waves and then slipping out on beaches. “Air? Ugh!” An antiphonal unicellular response, “Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it.” And then, of course, in time, all in good time, the brontosaurus and the pterodactyl. Missing links and minor miracles. The opposable thumb and the wheel. A capsule history of Man.

  The simulated human body he inhabited, Tock Von thought, glancing idly at himself—not really himself—in a gilded mirror, was an effective disguise and fairly efficient, although it couldn’t compare with the evolutionary excellence of his normal Eleisonite body. Long hair, black—a concession to contemporary terrestrial times. Lean face. Muscles here and there. A soulful expression befitting the twenty-year-old male Caucasian he was supposed to be. He glanced at his wrist watch.

  Ten minutes left.

  The other members of the Force were sprinkled about the room. Talking. Talking.

  Someone was talking of the wonderful way Cuba used to be—sleek-eyed men in dim doorways whispering of erotica. But now—ah, well, revolution certainly had its virtues but, hell, increased sugar cane production was a rather shabby compensation for neon sex, don’t you think? What do you do? Don’t you think?

  It was all very in, with it, together, now. In two words: New York. Under the elegant recessed lighting’s fluorescing promise, Tock Von sidled on, making mental notes on Man.

  Ah! Over there! He saw her sitting on the floor, on a purple pillow, with her legs crossed—en garde!—and fondling an ill-tempered Siamese cat. The cat pawed her finger cymbals, became momentarily entranced by her silver bracelets, then stalked away haughtily. She laughed. Did glasses shatter? Mirrors? Go over? Why not? Who knew what evil might lurk in the mind of a maiden?

  He knelt down before her, a mendicant monk sandaled at a roadside shrine. He reached out, through the sheer cloud of sick-sweet smoke from the burning grass in her hand to touch with gentle brazenness her left nipple, which peeked eerily out at him from beneath the green silk of her see-through blouse.

  He spun the prayer wheel of his head, hoping. “Would you like to know what I do?” he asked her. She had funky nostrils.

  “I can tell.”

  “I mean besides that.” She might, he thought, yep, she just might.

  “My name is Gloria and I was a nun once. Well, a novice, to be exact.”

  “My name is Tock Von and I am from the Planet Eleison in the Sixteenth Star System of the Gamma Galaxy.” Breaking his cover and not caring, breaking the first rule of the EEF. How did former nuns—novices, to be exact—do it? She might insist on incense and a lace surplice. Fetish fun!

  “You must be a science-fiction freak,” she remarked without enthusiasm.

  “No, honest,” he said, speaking sincerely through the smoke and her heavy scent. “It’s true.”

  “Really? You look human to me. Except for those spooky gray eyes of yours.”

  Yeah, spooky gray eyes. Still—there had been a girl in Hoboken on his fourth field trip who had liked them a lot, kept the light on all the time just so she could see them during. Ancient history. “Sorry. Look at me only when I blink.”

  “If you’re from another planet, how come you look human?”

  “I’m passing.”

  “You’re putting me on.”

  He shook his head and smiled sincerely. “It’s the truth.” Could she take it?

  “Are you a head?” she asked suspiciously.

  “No, an Eleisonite.”

  “I guess I see what you mean.”

  “You’re very understanding, you know that?”

  “Listen, man, you got an extra stick? I’m fresh out. I’ll trade you. These bracelets and my finger cymbals for one lously little stick. Okay?”

  “Well—”

  “Just give it to me.”

  He quickly switched to the right nipple. “You really mean it?” ‘

  She got it. “No, I
don’t really mean it. I don’t ball mutants.”

  “I’m not a mutant. I’m Tock Von from the Planet Eleison.” He slipped on her bracelets, pocketed her finger cymbals, and passed her a stick.

  “Well, Tock Von, like I said, I don’t ball mutants.”

  He was hurt. He tried to explain, feeling his massive and by now familiar erection falter, that mutants had nothing to do with it. He was simply an alien.

  “Okay, so you’re an alien,” she yipped, using the cold word as if she had just discovered it in a dictionary devoted to contemporary pornography. Well, aliens, she explained, puffing on the stick, were not her bag. She didn’t go that route. It soon became apparent which route she went. She had been watching the dreamy girl across the room who was using an eyedropper to do esoteric things to her gin. He explained himself again, but she got up from her purple pillow and went over and spoke to the girl with the eyedropper whose name, he had learned earlier, was Angie Jean something. She was a waitress from New Rochelle who only came into the city on weekends “for a little speeding, a little sunshine.”

  The girls left together.

  He made up his mind to forget Sister Sappho. Strange indeed, he thought, were the alien ways of humans. He looked at his Watch. Two minutes and forty seconds left of this trip.

  “Ready?” a sleekly coiffed woman whispered to him.

  He nodded assent to the commander of the Extra-Eleisonite Expeditionary Force who was masquerading in her version of what an earthly movie star should look like. She wore a see-through blouse over her mammoth breasts and struggled earnestly with her top-heaviness.

  A moment later, one by one, the Eleisonites slipped through the warp and were gone. Tock Von, with calm elan, waved goodbye to them and headed for the door leading from the apartment.

  The lusty commander of the EEF suddenly reappeared and seized his arm. They struggled.

  “See you later,” Tock Von told her, trying to break her wrestler’s grip.

  “The warp will decoalesce!” she warned him. “Delay can be fatal!”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Tock Von declared, breaking free.

  “Renegade!” the commander roared above the din of the party. “You’re on report!”

  Tock Von saluted her disappearance with a raised middle finger.

  “Hey, where the hell did everybody go all of a sudden?” cried a drunken advertising executive.

  “Here today, gone tomorrow,” answered the blonde beside him who had one cool hand on his wallet.

  Tock Von went out the door—on the run.

  Passing.

  Passing through.

  He was passing—in sandals, woven poncho, jeans, silver bracelets, and finger cymbals—through the artificial wilderness that someone at the party had told him was called Central Park because it lay in the mindless middle of the whore called New York City. Her pimps—General Motors, Chase Manhattan. “How goes the war, General?” He and the general talked earnestly and imaginatively of chrome and horsepower while Chase Manhattan woke and winked in a Draculean, vault and spat out shining untouched coins through a cracked front tooth.

  He used the finger cymbals Gloria had given him, click-clang, and roused sleeping birds and the sun. The birds complained; the sun shuddered mournfully up the side of the Plaza Hotel.

  Crinkled little paper cups that once had held smooth Italian ices in all the colors of every rainbow lay limp and empty on the grass around him. Ragged bits of potato chips eyed him anxiously as he crunched on. Dogs had been here before him. Their recent culinary history was everywhere, disguised. The ruins of Saturday’s children skittered in the half-hearted wind—newspapers, soda straws, popcorn, scrawny peacock feathers, torn political posters. Saturday’s children had fled hours before his advent, abandoning the park to the twisted and the reckless. Today was Sunday.

  Click-clang. Softly, in deference to the early birds. A brass whimper, not a bang.

  The terrestrial trees, he noticed, were glassy with leaves above his head as they flayed the empty sky with their strong branches in a brutal green silence he had never heard before.

  There was a yellow balloon caught in one of the trees beneath which a shabbily clothed man lay snoring. Tock Von looked long at the yellow balloon, seeing a circus. He looked down at the man—an unemployed clown? He jumped up, caught the string tied around the puckered lip of the balloon, and ripped it free. He tied his finger cymbals to the string and then released the balloon. Some mysterious gas carried the globular rubber prison up to touch the sun, yellow on yellow. The tender eloquence of the ascending click-clanging woke the clown who muffled up against the tree. “Who’re you?” he wheezed, obviously awaiting the inevitable roust or rolling.

  “Prometheus,” Tock Von replied, remembering his terrestrial mythology. He held out his wrists, flapped his hands limply. “My chains.” The silver bracelets that had once belonged to a former novice jingled noncommittally.

  “You plainclothes?”

  “Looking like this?”

  “They got ’em dressed up like girls over on the West Side. To catch the muggers. Like motorcycle nuts too. To catch the fags.”

  “You messed your clothes, man.”

  “That ain’t none of your goddam business!”

  “Take mine and welcome to them.” Quickly, gaily—out of the poncho and off with the bracelets, kicking off sandals, dropping jeans and jockey shorts in an ecstasy of liberating and typical Eleisonite benignity.

  The grizzled bear beneath the tree, totally unclowned now, grew canny. “You mean it, bo?”

  Naked, nude, unclothed, bare-assed, vulnerable to the whimsy of the wind and the wet games of a not-yet rain. “Take them.” And he was off on his erratic way beneath the trees which whispered secretly among themselves of orgasmic sap, above fingers of grass which groaned only to his ears as his bare toes pressed them down and down, within the rocking ocean of Earth’s filthy air to which he was gradually becoming, a bit, accustomed.

  Turning, turning, arms outstretched, giggling, genitals Jiggling merrily, Tock Von watched the bearish clown in the woven poncho flap his scarecrow way toward a different destiny.

  On.

  Past benches and rocks, statues perched ponderously on at pedestals—stone poets, a gilded dog, a mother in a pointed hat with a skinny goose at her cloaked side, an immense and grotesque Alice seated on a bronze toadstool—oh, the wonder of this new world.

  The cops were cooping.

  The signs were raging:

  DON’T LITTER.

  NO LOITERING.

  BICYCLISTS MUST FOLLOW MARKED PATHS.

  DON’T … NO… STOP.

  Needing no notebook, requiring no sheepskin or other encumbering academic paraphernalia, he glided on, planning on getting it all together—on cataloging and recording the facts, the figures, the shenanigans of the relatively hairless, relatively homicidal sapiens species that loped and lumbered along, together with fireflies and copperheads and eagles, giving the world a whirl for their three score and ten. Although for some, he would in time discover, a summer was all (twelve weeks of seeking sex and dodging fly swatters).

  He found the zoo. And more signs. Felis Leo. Et cetera. He climbed over the guard rail and gripped the bars of a cage with both hands and spoke in all seriousness to the civet cat inside. They talked at length about the psychology of voyeurism and the merits of biped and quadruped nudity but they came in the end to no firm conclusion.

  The keeper who first spotted Tock Von dropped his pail of corn cobs and held onto the guard rail for support. “Arughh!” Tock Von moved menacingly toward him. “Give me your keys!” He rolled his spooky gray eyes and shook his mane of black and thickly curled hair that ambushed his ears.

  “Arughh!”

  He roared an arpeggio.

  The keeper turned, ran.

  After him!

  The two together, each uniformed in his peculiar way, ran wild under the amazed eyes of sleepy tigers and ever-aroused spider monkeys. At the end
of the hundred yard dash, the keeper surrendered and led the way to the monkey house. He nervously handed Tock Von the keys, all the while babbling and evidently wishing he could bar the door of his world against apparitions. ‘

  Tock Von padded away, pitter-pattered in his bare feet past all the iron bars and the desultory eyes of the inmates. He fitted keys, fumbled about. Out leaped a lioness blinking golden in the sun. Raccoons minced free, their noses and tails twitching.

  The humans, Tock Von noticed, were coming to the park now, unaware as yet that this would not be just another Sun Day of hangovers beside the seal pond while their children screeched and their heads rumbled, of wistful stares at unapproachable potential partners—oh, where did I go wrong?

  He watched the monkeys masturbating in cool unconcern. He saw the women wearing girdles that pinched their increasing circumferences, watched them buying balloons. He sensed their indiscriminate hatred that made masks of their faces.

  Under the Delacorte clock, which was always out of order, he watched them all parade without direction for the sake of the children. Alcoholic cotton, he knew, was stuck in the slick mouths of the angular New York girls who swung their hips in sad and ersatz freedom. In a small crowd in the distance, he noted the button-down male lips split at the seams as the Dutch organ played; and stocky women in wooden shoes and white caps who lived in Brooklyn sold souvenirs, and nobody thought to ask of what or why. Little boys in woolen shorts sat bored in the cart that the Shetland pony pulled as it shit its way around the track.

  “Jay-sus!” roared a barrel-bellied subway conductor as he came knee to nose with a dislocated coyote. “Jay-sus, Mary, and Joseph! What the fuck?”

  All the others were twisting out of the paths of pumas. Careening crazily, they ran, collided, recovered, ran again. Someone gave a scream that would intimidate the most vociferous parrot’s talent. Chaos had come to the artificial jungle because bars had become unreliable and nothing was any longer predictable or dependable. It might as well have been Monday morning, six A.M., when clocks alarmed and frightened away every dream.