Lawrence Watt-Evans - Out of This World

“The others are already aboard,” someone said.

It suddenly struck Pel that they were being herded aboard a spaceship-they were going to leave Psi Cassiopeia Two.

“Hey,” he said, “we’re leaving?”

Captain Cahn heard him, and turned to reply, “Yes, Mr. Brown-they’re giving us a ride back to Base One, just as we wanted. Nine days, I’m told, and we should be back there, ready to send you and your family home to, uh… to Earth.”

“But I thought… didn’t your telepath Thorpe say there weren’t any ships available, when we were out on the desert?”

Cahn nodded. “They weren’t available-that freighter just got in this morning, they couldn’t find the owner of that little one back there, and the liner here was just down, hadn’t cleared quarantine yet. And none of these are Imperial property, you know; we’ve had to invoke martial law to get the use of the liner. Don’t worry, Mr. Brown, we’re doing the best we can to get you home just as fast as possible.”

“But we haven’t seen anything here yet!”

Someone snorted; someone else chuckled.

“Believe me, Mr. Brown,” Cahn answered, amused, “you’ve seen everything worth seeing on this planet!”

Pel didn’t argue; for one thing, Nancy was glaring at him. It was quite obvious that she wanted him to shut up and not do anything that might delay their return home, and he belatedly realized that he didn’t want himself to do anything that might delay their return home, either.

Still, it seemed wrong, somehow, to visit another planet, an outpost of the vast Galactic Empire, and see nothing but a few hundred miles of desert and the spaceport waiting rooms.

This was another planet , after all, thousands of miles across, big enough for whole oceans and continents, entire new civilizations-and all he’d seen was a little of one town.

Maybe rushing home as quickly as possible wasn’t all that necessary…

He cut his chain of thought right there.

Getting home as fast as possible was necessary. He had responsibilities there, Silly Cat not the least of them. He had a home and a business and friends and family, all of whom would be wondering what had become of him.

And while he might be in the Galactic Empire, he didn’t have so much as a toothbrush with him.

The possibility of coming back here later, properly prepared, occurred to him. It was an idea, certainly.

If Earth had anything the Galactic Empire wanted, then they could probably open a healthy tourist trade; who wouldn’t want to visit an entire new universe, with strange new worlds, different air and light and gravity-and where everybody spoke English?

The business prospects in that began to percolate through his mind. That was certainly full of marketing possibilities, and marketing was what he did, after all.

But on the other hand, the Empire didn’t seem to be a particularly friendly place, and seemed to be unhappy about the very existence of other universes. It might well be that they wouldn’t want tourists.

And Earth might not, in fact, have anything they wanted-would a culture with interstellar travel and the resources of a galaxy be interested in a single planet’s output?

Looking around, Pel thought that they just might, at that. Psi Cassiopeia Two was a backwater, admittedly, but it seemed to him that what he’d seen of the Empire and its works wasn’t all that impressive, in many ways. They did have anti-gravity, which was amazing and wonderful and useful and all that, and they had blasters, which were effective enough, but they seemed to be rather backward in their use of metals, and he hadn’t seen anything using any sort of electronics anywhere-no digital clocks, no LED read-outs anywhere, certainly no computers. No one had even mentioned television.

There were innumerable possibilities, not just in tourism, but in trade of all sorts.

Where Shadow’s universe fit into this he wasn’t sure. And of course, he had no idea what the difficulties of inter-universal travel might be; so far, it had seemed simple enough, stepping through portals, but those had been magical portals, opened from Shadow’s realm-the technologically-created space-warps the Empire used might not be so easy.

Scientifically -created space-warps, he corrected himself-the Empire didn’t seem to like the word “technology” much, and preferred to call it “science.”

Had the Empire considered the possibility of trade?

Oh, they must have, he told himself. How could they not? Just because nobody had mentioned it to him, because everything anyone had said so far was about diplomatic or military interactions, that didn’t mean that no one had thought about trade.

Somebody must have thought of it. Surely, once the preliminaries of opening relations and dealing with Shadow were done, the Empire didn’t intend to just shut itself off from Earth again!

He stumbled slightly, the toe of his shoe catching in an uneven patch of gravel, and brought himself back to the present reality. Right now, nobody was talking about doing business between universes, because right now they all needed to get back to Base One and pick up where they had left off, in coping with Shadow and its creatures.

Raven probably wasn’t concerned with trade possibilities at all-he just wanted Stormcrack Keep back. Captain Cahn was just doing what he was told to do by his superiors, and not worrying about long-term consequences.

And there wasn’t really much point in his worrying about them, either, he decided. He squeezed Rachel’s hand, and on a sudden whim, leaned over and kissed Nancy on the cheek.

They stepped up from the gravel to the concrete pad, and marched on toward the ship. Pel could see her name now, painted on the side near the nose, in gleaming gold letters- Emerald Princess .

Captain Cahn stepped to one side at the foot of the steps, and started counting noses; Raven’s boots clanged loudly on the metal steps as he led the way up, into the waiting vessel.

The narrow steps created a slight bottleneck, and the Browns had to wait their turns for a few seconds while Stoddard and Valadrakul and the rest sorted themselves out.

“Nine days,” Nancy whispered, leaning over close so Rachel wouldn’t hear. “The cat will be frantic!”

“ Everyone will be frantic,” Pel whispered back. “And unless these guys prove they’re real, somehow, no one’s going to believe our explanations.”

“Well, we’ll just say we were kidnapped by a UFO,” Nancy said. “It’s almost the truth, isn’t it?”

Pel started to protest; this was real life, not the absurd fantasies of little men with big heads who went around mutilating cattle. Then he stopped, before a word had escaped him.

After all, if one other universe was trying to contact Earth and botching it, why couldn’t there have been dozens, over the years? What if all those flying saucer stories were true?

Now that was a terrifying thought. Pel had grown up with science fiction and fantasy, in books and in movies and on TV, and while he enjoyed the stuff immensely, he’d always been very clear on where the line was between fantasy and reality.

Flying saucers and UFO abductions and psychics and all the rest of the material found in tabloid headlines he had always put on the “fantasy” side-and he’d considered them bad fantasy, at that.

But here he was, boarding a spaceship, and that woman, Prossie Thorpe, was a telepath-a psychic, in other words. He’d been abducted from Earth, after a fashion, and had found himself in a world of little men-though Grummetty’s appearance in his basement had hardly been the stereotypical close encounter of the third kind. Grummetty had seemed thoroughly down to earth, despite his impossible size.