The Christmas Planet and Other Stories (Beta Version) Read online

  I guess some of my cynicism must have rubbed off on her.

  The room resembled that of a quality hotel back on Earth. Christmas-tree scent came from the wreaths on the wall, keeping us in the holiday spirit. Our luggage sat on the floor by the closet. I put my bag on the bed and started unpacking. “If you get in your pajamas and brush your teeth, sweetheart, we’ll all open our presents.”

  While she was doing that, I told Charli about Guccio joining another group. She opened her mouth, probably about to object, then closed it.

  After a few seconds, she said. “So, there are different groups? I didn’t hear anything about that.”

  “Right. And I’m thinking Guccio isn’t the dog-sledding type.”

  She hung her jacket in the closet. “Maybe it wasn’t the dogs he was interested in. Maybe there was some hot chick he wanted to make time with.”

  “Make time?”

  She punched me in the shoulder. “You know what I mean.”

  “I talked with the woman he was with on the space plane. She wasn’t exactly hot, but she was nice. She’d gotten the impression Guccio was interested in her. She said his seat was empty when she woke up.”

  “Why don’t you text him?” Charli put her clothing into a bureau drawer.

  “Our phones work here?”

  “You didn’t read the packet they gave us, did you? The phones work but only for texting. No voice calls.”

  I pulled mine out and sure enough, it had four bars. I texted, Hey buddy. Where U at?

  Sophia bounced out of the bathroom and brought the three presents over to the bed. We snuggled together against the headboard, and she opened her present first. It was a silver charm bracelet with a tiny Christmas tree, a Santa, a reindeer, and some other holiday-related charms. I helped her fasten it on her wrist. She was all smiles. Charli got a Hummel figurine of an elf surfing. What says Christmas like surfing elves, right? I got a snow globe featuring Santa’s Ranch, complete with a cowboy snowman.

  The bedside table held a picture book of The Night Before Christmas, with an intricately painted cover showing St. Nicholas and his eight, two-tailed reindeer. I pulled it onto my lap, and we took turns reading the poem.

  Partway through, my phone vibrated, but I ignored it and kept reading. “Away to the window I flew like a flash, tore open the shutters and threw up on the sash. The moon on the—”

  “Daddy!”

  “What?”

  Sophia giggled. “He didn’t throw up. You made that up.”

  “Do you know what a sash is?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s part of the window.” She pointed to the illustration of a man opening the window. “We learned that in class.”

  “Very good. I’m impressed.”

  We continued reading. When I changed “laying his finger aside of his nose” to “sticking his finger inside of his nose,” Sophia didn’t react—sound asleep. We tucked her into bed and I checked my phone.

  The text was from Guccio. All OK. Went dog sledding on whim. With chick.

  I showed it Charli.

  She frowned. “With chick?”

  “Right.” I thought for a while, then I typed in: Don’t blow us off like last Christmas! I showed it to Charli.

  She nodded.

  I sent it.

  * * *

  The Kikmots who’d engineered Santa’s Ranch must have been the B team. While the quaint village was perfect, some of the seams showed back on the ranch. The biggest problem was that the emphasis was on the Wild West rather than the North Pole. Think OK Corral but with snow.

  The entrance to the ranch wasn’t far from the hotel and consisted of a stockade fence with a towering gate. Just inside the gate was a puppy-petting enclosure.

  Sophia rushed over. She called back. “Oh, Mommy, can I pet them?”

  “Just a second, sweetheart,” Charli said.

  We caught up with her and watched the other kids petting the creatures. Everything looked okay to me.

  I nodded.

  Charli put her hand on Sophia’s shoulder. “Yes, you may pet them.”

  We all went in and petted them. Most resembled golden retriever puppies but somehow cuter. I’d read that the young of many species elicit that “Awww!” feeling as a defense mechanism. Who would hurt a puppy?

  I picked one up. Its fur was softer than that of a chinchilla, and it expressed its unbounded love for me with squirming, tail wagging, and licking. Yes, the tongue was blue, and the animal had two tails, but that didn’t detract from the cuteness. Charli held one against her cheek.

  Sophia would have been happy to spend the whole day in the enclosure, but the show was about to begin. We took our seats in an amphitheater in front of a snowy wild west town. Santa rode in on his sleigh pulled by animatronic reindeer that reminded me of the Boston Dynamics robots but much more advanced. Santa looked back at the band of outlaws chasing him, which included a human-sized Easter bunny, a witch, an Uncle Sam, and Elvis.

  Sophia sat on Charli’s lap, transfixed by the action. My phone vibrated, and I pulled it out.

  The text from Guccio read: LOL. Right. Sorry about that!

  The weird-but-entertaining show continued, ending with Santa vanquishing the bad guys and riding off into the sunset on Rudolph. The crowd gave them a standing ovation.

  Sophia pulled us to the petting pen after the show, and Charli and I sat on a bench at one end with sleeping puppies in our laps.

  I put my mouth close to her ear and whispered, “You agree something’s wrong?”

  She nodded her head.

  Guccio hadn’t “blown us off” last Christmas. Not at all. He and his girlfriend at the time spent the holiday with us. I’d never heard him use the word “Chick” to describe a woman. That suggested the Kikmots had bugged our hotel room since the night before, Charli had referred to a “hot chick.”

  We were on an alien planet, light years from home. I couldn’t call the FBI or the local police. There was no American Consulate. We were at the mercy of these short, dog-faced creatures.

  Guccio hadn’t written those texts. That fact ruled out an innocent explanation for his absence. Our friend had been kidnapped.

  Walking home we discussed strategy.

  “Should we confront Hakupha? Make him produce Guccio?” Charli whispered.

  “I don’t think so. We don’t want to tip our hand. I think I should do some snooping around.”

  “Even though it’s Christmas Eve.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  She thought for a while. “You’re right. But where will you look?”

  We entered the lobby and walked to the elevator.

  I pushed the button for the third floor and put my mouth near Charli’s ear. “I have some ideas.”

  We stepped off the elevator and stopped dead.

  Gordon Guccio stood by our door, his trademark unlit cigar in his mouth.

  * * *

  The three of us ran down the hall to Guccio. I caught sight of a Kikmot—Hakupha?—passing through a door at the far end of the corridor.

  “Where’ve you been, buddy?” I asked.

  “Long story.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Apparently.”

  Charli pulled him down and gave him a peck on the cheek. I heard the words she whispered to him, “The place is bugged.”

  He frowned but nodded.

  I unlocked our door, and we paraded in. I would have searched for bugs, but given the Kikmot’s alien and advanced technologies, what chance of finding something did I have? They might have implanted microphones in the walls. Video was possible, too.

  I pushed Guccio into an easy chair and pulled over a wooden one from the dinette table. “So, what happened?”

  “Well, I’m a little fuzzy on it. I kind of came to in a hospital. Hakupha was there with some Kikmot doctors. They told me that … uh … I’d gone to a bar and started drinking whiskey then passed out in an isolated alley. Someone found me ju
st a few hours ago.”

  “Do you remember that? Going to the bar?”

  “No.” He had a thousand-yard stare. “And I felt lousy—still do—as if I’d undergone a long operation. As if I’d been drugged. Really unpleasant. I never want to feel that way again.”

  “What’s the last thing you remember?” Charli asked.

  “On the spaceliner, I was talking with Ruth, the woman sitting next to me. We had eggnog. That’s all.”

  “That must have been some strong whiskey.” I gave him a tiny shake of the head as I said that. I typed “Act normal” on my phone and showed it to him.

  He nodded.

  I displayed our text conversation on the cell phone and handed it to him.

  His bushy eyebrows popped up. He gave me a head shake. No.

  Our nonverbal conversation was reaching its limits. I stood. “I think you and I should go for a walk. Maybe that will help clear your memory.”

  Charli held out a hand: Stop! She went to the side of his chair, leaned over, and started futzing with his hair like a baboon grooming a fellow member of the troop. When she found what she had apparently noticed, she turned to me and pointed.

  A tiny area of hair had been shaved away. The skin was pink as if something had been irritating it.

  I grabbed my coat and handed Guccio’s to him. “Let’s go.”

  We walked down the block and out into a field. A group of singles was in the middle of a rowdy snowball fight.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “What?”

  I pointed to the group. “Here comes your seat mate … Ruth. She was mad at you. Can we confide in her? Trust her?”

  “She’s a self-esteem coach. That’s her job.”

  “Gotcha.” I shouldn’t have judged her, but that didn’t seem to be the kind of profession a pragmatic person with good secret-keeping skills would have.

  She stomped directly over to Guccio, shaking her finger. “You! Why did you disappear? I wasn’t pretty enough for you? I thought we were hitting it off well. Why did—?”

  Guccio grabbed her shoulders and kissed her on the mouth. Released her.

  She stood blinking in the twilight. “I—you—”

  “Ruth, I woke up in the hospital a few hours ago. I don’t remember a thing since our time on the spaceliner. I’m not sure what happened, but I did enjoy our conversation. I think you’re a fun person and pretty, too.”

  She looked at me.

  “It’s true,” I said. “About the hospital.”

  Guccio took her hand. “Let’s get together later, okay? I have some private things I must discuss with my friend right now.”

  We left Ruth standing there and continued across the meadow. The snow had been stamped down along a path lined with lampposts from a Dickens novel.

  “So, you definitely didn’t send those texts?” I asked.

  “Of course not. You knew that. ‘Chick’? Who uses that word? What’s your theory?”

  I shook my head. “Too early to say, but I’m thinking the whole reason for using the spaceliner, instead of paratransiting us directly here, was to put everyone to sleep for several hours. Something in the eggnog, maybe. While we were sleeping, they attached electrodes to our heads. I found a touch of gel in my hair when I woke up. I think that was conductive electrode gel.”

  “Do you think they did anything to our brains, or were they just recording?”

  “No idea. You don’t feel different?”

  “No, just confused about the lost time,” he said. “and kind of sick, as I said.”

  The path curved around the far side of the field. “Okay. So then, I figure, the Kikmots singled you out for some reason. Maybe some people as well, though I haven’t heard that anyone else went missing. Then they did some more in-depth brain monitoring with you. You have patches on your skull where they shaved off the hair.”

  “Ah, so that’s what Charli was doing. It was weird.”

  “Right,” I said. “So maybe you had heavy-duty electrodes attached.”

  “Not possible that they could probe for state secrets or anything?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so, but on the other hand, these guys are a lot more advanced than they seem. Can they read minds electronically?” I gestured back across the meadow at the quaint village glowing on the hill. “They put together this whole theme park in short order. We saw a show with animatronic robots that could pass for the real thing.”

  “We’re not in a position of strength here, but I don’t take kindly to being kidnapped. Ideas?”

  “I don’t want to disrupt the holiday for Sophia, if that’s possible. So, let’s play dumb until after Christmas morning, then you and I can snoop around. I saw a Kikmot go through a door that looked like it led into a subterranean area.”

  “Like in Disneyland.” Guccio waved to Ruth as we approached the snowball fight. It seemed to be breaking up.

  “Yeah, probably. We’ll only have Christmas afternoon before we go back, but maybe we can find something to pass on to the Galactic Association.”

  Guccio joined Ruth, and I went back to the hotel.

  * * *

  Our hotel room had two queen beds. At 5:00 a.m., Sophia bounced over to our bed and climbed in between us. She put her lips against my ear. “Daddy are you awake do you want to open presents now?”

  The Christmas Planet rotated with a period of twenty-seven hours. The Kikmots had set up the clocks so they split the difference between passage of Earth time and local time. That is, hours were thirteen percent longer. Time signals to our cell phones made sure everyone was on the same schedule. By a happy coincidence, Earth dawn on the day we’d left had been only a few hours later than the local dawn. Their three suns rose at 5:15 on Christmas morning.

  It had taken me a long time to fall asleep, puzzling over why Guccio had been kidnapped and what we could do about it. I’d failed to appreciate the danger of being on an alien planet, being at the mercy of extraterrestrials. I’d gotten a few hours of shuteye, and I resolved to put aside all but Christmasy thoughts until afternoon, when Guccio and I would investigate.

  I ran my hand over my face. “Let’s wait until Mommy wakes up.”

  Charli cleared her throat. “I’m awake, but I don’t know if Santa Claus comes to this planet.”

  “Oh, Mommy. That’s silly.”

  Charli tickled Sophia then popped out of bed. Soon, room service brought us coffee and a tray of turkey sandwiches on white bread. Not standard Christmas morning fare, but fine with me.

  We all sat on the floor and exchanged presents. Charli and I gave Sophia an art set with colored pens and markers along with a book on how to draw dogs and puppies. She hugged us both.

  “Now, I have your presents,” she said. “I made them myself.”

  Mine was a thick, white candle painted with stars and comets and spaceships. I turned it slowly, admiring the artwork. “How did you make this?”

  “We did them at school. We drawed on tissue paper, then put wax paper over it, and the teacher melted it with a hairdryer.”

  “That’s wonderful, sweetheart.”

  Charli’s candle had drawings of Boonie.

  My wife presented me with a leather wallet she’d put together from a kit. I gave her a small box.

  She opened it and laughed. “A mood ring!”

  “Right,” I said. “But not like the mood rings from the seventies. This really works. It’s based on a technology we got from the GWW.”

  She gave me a kiss and laughed some more. “I think maybe this is for you, so you can tell what mood I’m in.”

  “It sends a signal to my phone when you’re in a romantic mood.”

  “Ha!”

  We met Guccio and Ruth in the hotel’s restaurant for an early Christmas dinner. Guccio and I skipped the alcohol—we were going to need our wits about us.

  * * *

  The door I’d found was in an alley between two shops. Too small for humans, it didn’t need an “Employees Only” s
ign because it was locked. Guccio and I stood beside it talking on the sidewalk, waiting for our chance.

  “The game will be up as soon as someone inside sees us.” His unlit cigar bobbed as he talked, but somehow never fell from his mouth.

  “Yeah, we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it. My hope is that since today is the big day, most of the creatures will be out here doing their jobs. They’re administrating the reindeer races and the bonfire. But if we’re challenged, we’ll just say ‘Oops.’”

  “And we don’t have backup. If—”

  “You want to find out what happened or not?”

  He put his hands up. “I’m just making conversation. We’ve got to talk about something.”

  After a while, he said, “Ruth’s going to have a real self-esteem crisis if I stand her up again—here comes one. No.”

  The Kikmot went past without stopping, but two minutes later another came along, glanced at us, unlocked the door, and went in. This was it. The door was hissing closed. I waited until the last second, took two running steps then stuck my fingers between the door and the jamb. Ow!

  “Nice,” Guccio said.

  I held the heavy door from latching, but pulled out my fingers and shook them. “Nice?”

  “You didn’t do that on purpose?”

  “Yeah, I figured breaking my fingers would help.”

  “It gave a nice clunk against your hand. If you’d just caught it, the Kikmot might have noticed that the door didn’t clunk shut.”

  “Whatever. Jeez, I think I really broke something.” I held the door and made sure there were no Kikmots around. “Okay, here we go.” I opened it and stuck my head in. Steep stairs, with small steps leading down into the gloom. The creature who’d entered was gone. Guccio and I slipped in and started down.

  “Hold on, Jake, I’m going to penny the door closed.” He pulled coins from his pocket then reached up high, and with the door latched, slid as many coins as he could between the jamb and the door. Then, while pushing outward, he slid them down toward the latch. “They force the door outward and the friction will keep the knob from turning.”

  “Yeah. I remember doing that in the college dorm.”

  We’d gone down ten steps when the sound of a key slipping into the lock reached us. We froze and looked back up. The door’s knob rattled but didn’t turn.