Alexis Latner - Threat of Stars at 912 Main

With a rattle of keys Annika opened the glass door of her gallery. Whereupon, her cat streaked out.

“Oh, no! Trippy, come back!” Annika called after the fleeing cat.

Triptych is the complacent type of cat. It’s a bad sign when a cat like that spooks. I stepped past Annika into the gallery and, holding the glass door open, turned on the lights.

Incandescent brightness burned the scene into my retinas. Tam’s painting, “Tech 7,” was out of place. Mixed Media was out of place too. To be exact, the painting seemed to be stuck onto the side of Mixed Media as if glued onto the mess—the whole of which scooted across the hardwood floor. It made a beeline toward me. I stood holding the door ajar with my mouth wide open.

The anodized aluminum frame of “Tech 7” hit my shin as it was propelled past my legs. I nearly tripped, but caught myself on the door handle. With a clink as the frame glanced off the door jamb, Mixed Media and “Tech 7” were out the door. Tam let out a startled yelp.

The art sped away on the sidewalk. The configuration had changed. With Tam’s painting balanced on top like a graduation cap and mortar, Mixed Media disappeared around the corner.

The idea of a robot art thief dawned on my otherwise blank mind. This had to be an unholy practical joke, centered in the Mobile Robotics Lab at Rice University. Annika emitted a choked sound. Of the three of us, Tam was the first to shake off total bewilderment. “That’s my work!” she yelled, and gave chase like a sprinter out of the starting blocks.

“What the hell!” Annika sputtered.

“You look for your cat and we’ll get the piece back.” I took off after Tam.

With flat shoes and long legs, Tam moved fast. Two blocks down the side street and around another corner, I caught up with her. She had trapped the fugitive in the recess of a store front. The scene was bizarre: a lovely woman confronting a ball of clutter crowned by a painting.

Her Southern accent and attitude were out in force. “Give me my work back, you sorry lil’ whatever you are!” She grabbed her painting by the frame. Mixed Media hung on somehow—as if the painting were glued onto it. With a hard shake Tam freed “Tech 7.” And then Mixed Media made a noise, a thin rattle like aluminum drink cans hitting the recycling bin.

“Don’t you dare cuss at me!” Tam snapped.

Taking Tam by the elbow, I said urgently, “Let’s go back to the gallery.” I expected a van to screech up beside us and wild-eyed graduate students to jump out bent on retrieving their robot, plus or minus snatching the painting while they were at it.

To my consternation, Mixed Media followed us.

Out of the gallery context it didn’t look like art at all, just random debris coating a mass which disconcertingly changed shape all over at the same time, bloblike with various undulations. “That is one hell of a robot art thief,” I muttered.

“It has pseudopods. That’s how it walks.” Tam’s voice sounded constricted. “I don’t know of any machines like that.”

“It’s not a little robot?”

“Michael, no way!”

In the humidity of the summer night, I sweated. Part of my sweat was sudden, sour nerves. I was acutely aware of how deserted this street was—buildings closed, blank, untenanted—as I watched that thing over my shoulder, following us like a coagulated shadow. Then it hit me. “Out of the mouths of babes!” I whispered.

“What baby?” She sounded tense.

“Ben’s friend. Remember what she said about the bad habits of tourists? Just not from Romania. From a lot further away,” I blurted. The city of Houston seemed to spin dizzily around me as that thought hit the fan of my mental processes.

Quick on the uptake, Tam gasped. “You think it’s alien?”

We hastily backed around the corner. Mixed Media scuttled after us on a ripple of pseudopods. A streetlight’s glare reflected in three orbs of green shimmer. “With three eyes, you think it’s not?” I demanded, gruff with alarm.

Tam snatched up a garbage can lid from a receptacle stationed beside a bolted-shut door. “Scram, you dev’lish critter!” She hurled the lid.

Mixed Media dodged the lid by rolling to one side with a sudden short wobble like a cube of Jell-O falling off a dessert plate. Then it resumed following us, undeterred.

Near the garbage can lay a discarded push broom. The business end was ratty, but the stick was long and intact. “Aha!” I darted over to grab the broom.

Mixed Media Jell-Oed toward Tam, who let out a little shriek and jumped back. I rushed at MM brandishing the stick end of the broom. “For your next party trick, how’d you like to resemble meatball on a toothpick!?”

It backed off with a disagreeable crunching noise like when you step on a tin can before recycling.

“Ha!” I crowed.

But it kept trailing after us, just out of skewer range.

I thought about the cafe, with people in it, and Annika standing on the sidewalk with her cat in her arms, anxiously looking for our return, a short, familiar figure. Such safety was still at least a block up the street and around one more corner. I muttered savagely, “Things like this are supposed to show up in Socorro, New Mexico. Not Houston.”

“Maybe it needs heat and humidity both,” said Tam. “Like slugs and slime mold do.”

“Figures!” I was warily half-turned toward Mixed Media. We started to pass an alley. Out of the corner of my eye I caught blurred motion inside the alley. I snagged Tam’s elbow and hauled her to a halt.

Things poured out of the alley. With a startled cry, Tam crowded against me. The things arrayed themselves across the sidewalk in our way.

Confronting us were three blobs just like Mixed Media. But bigger. Badder-looking. “Oh, shit,” I whispered. “It’s got friends!” Tam and I clutched each other.

The one right in front of us was not only three times bigger than Mixed Media, it was three times uglier, encrusted with debris that looked and smelled like the dregs of a garbage dumpster. The broken end of a fluorescent light tube stuck to it. So did a battered hubcap.

And it had a tentacle that waved toward us in the air. The tentacle snatched the push broom out of my hands, then tossed the broom into the alley with a clatter. Then, the hovering tip of the tentacle pointed at “Tech 7,” with the precise indicative motion of an index finger.

Tam embraced her painting tighter. I understood. But feeling empty-handed and defenseless, I hissed, “Let them have it before they fry us to get it!”

She extended “Tech 7. The tentacle curled around the painting in a flash of motion, jerked it from her hands. To my horrified fascination, a pocket about three feet wide opened up in the blob’s crust of debris. Like the pouch of a giant kangaroo without legs or paws or head. “Tech 7” was deposited into the pocket.

Tam swore in a low tone of utter malice. Behind our heels, Mixed Media rattled gleefully.

I expected the big garbage ball to be satisfied with its extortion. I wanted the aliens to crawl off and let us go back to the cafe and Annika.

Instead, they started to advance on Tam and me.

The adrenaline in my system ignited. Whirling, I grabbed Tam ’s hand and pulled her with me, jumping over Mixed Media and bolting down the street.

When I shot a glance over my shoulder, my heart nearly stopped in mid-systole. “They’re coming!”

“But I gave it to them!” she panted, gripping my hand harder. “What more do they want?”

And that was when it dawned on me that unscrupulous alien art collectors might just decide to collect an artist or two. I didn’t waste time and breath explaining. “Run!”

We pounded down the deserted street’s sidewalk. The side streets and alleyways were dim, hemmed by office buildings. Dumpsters sitting in the dimness looked ominous to my frantic imagination—the dumpsters seemed more like angular machines with great big hatches, the use-battered landing craft of an alien invasion.