Cosmic Hotel by Russ Franklin

Author:Russ Franklin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619028081
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2016-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

He left it downstairs, the dog free to go on about its business in the world. Maybe a worker in the other room would take it. He hated them all, them turning his house into something he didn’t want.

Upstairs, without the dog, he found Ruth standing topless by the open window, wearing only those ugly briefs pulled below her slightly swollen belly. She’d told him that she was eighteen weeks “along,” and to him the belly looked like she’d drunk a milkshake—maybe two milkshakes and a few beers—and the skin was stretched tight enough to be mottled red, and her breasts hung full. She leaned against the wall and smoked as she studied the world outside the open patio doors, the canopy of trees.

“You shouldn’t be smoking,” he said still standing in the doorway.

“What was that all about?” she asked.

Ruth Christmas was the only other person in the world who knew that Chava Norma was the planet in question. The dog had to be Ruth’s doing, he thought, but she wasn’t a person to play a joke.

He explained to Ruth what had taken place downstairs. His theory, he said, was that someone was harassing him, and he waited for her to show some sign of guilt.

“Who else have you told about this?” she asked.

“No one,” he said. “I did tell my son.”

“Which one?”

“Sandeep.”

“The one with money. Not the priest?”

“He wouldn’t have told anyone,” he said.

“How do you know?” Ruth held the cigarette beside her head to think. “Someone else obviously knows what you’ve found,” she said. “The dish has logs. Someone can go through them.”

“That won’t tell anyone anything. It was a scan. It scanned large sections of the sky. This makes me anxious. Time is running out.”

“For what?” Ruth asked him.

“I don’t know.” Van Raye got on the bed, flat on his stomach, took his glasses off.

“Tell me how this would make you feel,” she asked, “if the dog thing, this problem, just disappeared?”

“Problem? Don’t change this to your problem.” He sighed, not in the mood to be analyzed by the space station’s chief of biomedical problems. She was, ironically he thought, her own biomedical problem.

She went to her duffle bag and pulled something out. “I guess I should give this to you.” It was a box about the shape of a coffee grinder, orange. She tested the weight and then underhanded it to him. The orange box flashed through a streak of sunshine and came toward the bed. He rolled, and it bounced heavy, and he put a hand to stop it from falling off the bed.

“Jesus!” he said. “What are you trying to do? What is this?”

There were two white stripes around the box, a handle on one end, Cyrillic letters and multipronged, female outlets on the side.

“Is this what I think it is?” he said. He had to retrieve his eyeglasses from the floor. “You’ve had this all along?”

“Courtesy of Roscosmos. It was a backup unit.”

“Jesus, there was a backup?” He held it in both hands. “Do you know how much this little orange box is worth?” he said.

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