Orrie and Ollie

T'Kept approached the pocket of air around the blue planet. When she approached, she saw the glow of artifical lights around the seaboard and rivers of some of the great land masses. She could not be sure, but she assumed that this meant that there was some form of intelligence, and that the brightly lit areas were population centers.

She needed time to think, and to observe, and if necessary, to defend herself. She found an area that was dark, and far from the big rivers. It was in a dry area on the landmass that looked from above somewhat like a firbin, a fruit on her home world that had two large, oval- shaped, fleshy parts connected by a thin, stringy fiber. She was to land near the base of the north firbin.

T'Kept had decided that she would enter just as the rays of the planet's star reached out over the horizon, in order to give herself as much daylight as possible to explore. She was a good navigator. Others might go for the easy landing on the flat part of the desert floor, but she wanted to hide herself, until she knew what was going on.

She watched an image of the outside of the ship turning a warm shade of orange, and checked the diagnostics for hull integrity. It was good. She would be down soon.

Suddenly she heard a noise. She froze. She was alone, in deep space. The few items that she needed were in the hold, fastened down. Calm down, T'Kept. It is probably nothing. But you need to find out what it was.

T'Kept had a disturbing thought. Surely her two miffins had not stowed away. There was not time for them to find out. And surely they were not clever enough to figure out how to get on the ship without being detected?

She rotated a few dials, and a voice artificially generated by the ship broke the silence of the cabin, as T'Kept could not speak the miffin language. No one on Earth would have been able to understand it, but it translated to "Orrie! Ollie! Are you there?"

A shaky and nervous baritone voice answered back, "Yes, Tiki! We both are. We did not want you to get lonely."

She shouted back, through the artificial voice, "You could have gotten me killed! How did you get on the ship without being detected? Your extra weight - your consumption of air - your food. I ought to jettison you out into space, but at this point I run more risks doing that than just landing."

A sweet but equally nervous alto answered, "Orrie and I are sorry, Tiki. We really are. But we have been planning to surprise you for months. We have our own supply of enriched air that we brought. And we did the calculations three times, and the ship is still within safe weight limits. As for food, we are hungry. We have not eaten since we left. But we like you, Tiki. We thought that you might die alone, and that would be sad. So we wanted to come with you, and help you."

T'Kept thought, "Miffins! I suppose that I should blame myself for letting them stay around. But they did have a point. She could use some company. And miffins were the most intelligent mammals on her planet. T'Kept determined that she would make the best of it, and hope that three brains were better than one. She gave in.

"Orrie and Ollie, you have made a mistake. I feel sorry for you. You will be separated from your own kind. I am afraid that you will be lonely. The life that I am about to lead, as a scientist and explorer, requires much sacrifice. It requires much training, and at times, decisions that must be put into action right away. There may come a time when I have to leave you behind. If and when that happens, it is not personal."

The baritone voice responded, "I understand, Tiki. Ollie and I will try not to hurt you."

So the ship started to descend toward the New Mexico desert. On board was the alien T'Kept, and two miffins, Ollie and Orrie. On T'Kept's home planet, most of the large, land-based land life were mammals. There were two branches of the mammal family. There was the more primative branch, the placentals. These gave birth to almost fully developed young, and had relatively long gestation periods. Certain curious varieties of rodents were in this category. The disadvantages of this mode of reproduction were well-known to T'Kept. The mother had to put a lot of energy into keeping the child alive, and was vulnerable during the long gestation periods. The placentials were curiosities, but could not survive dramatic changes in the climate, as happened on her planet tens of millions of years ago. Only animials with high reproductive rates, such as field mice, could overcome this natural disadvantage, or so she had been taught.

The more advanced form of mammal was the "pouched" variety, or marisupial. They had short gestation periods, and bore young that were poorly developed, but had a protective pouch where they could nurse the young for years, in the case of a miffin like Ollie. If times became hard, the marisupial young might die, but the mother would most likely live to reproduce another day. On T'Kept's home planet, this was the branch that proved to be best adapted.

Orrie and Ollie were curious creatures. Orrie was a few inches shy of six feet, with Ollie being about five-and-a-half feet high, although of course, T'Kept would not have thought of their length in terms of feet. Orrie and Ollie both stood upon long hind legs, and had two arms with very flexible hands. Both of their hands had four fingers and an opposable thumb at its end, which allowed the miffins to manipulate tools, and get themselves into all sorts of trouble. Unlike most other mammals, the miffins did not have tails. Indeed, over most of Orrie's body, the hair was so fine his bare skin would have shown, except that he wore and artificial skin to cover this. Ollie had somewhat more hair. Although Ollie was also covered with the artificial skin, T'Kept knew that she had a long strip of hair on her belly between her waist and her pouch, which was about a third of the way down her chest. T'Kept learned that long ago the wild miffin newborn would use this strip of hair to climb into the pouch, although modern miffins would simply take the newborn and gently place him or her into the pouch.

In short, if Ollie and Orrie kept their artifical skins on, they looked very much like those who built the great artifical lights.

The thing that T'Kept liked best about Orrie and Ollie, besides their loyalty to her, was their expressive faces, especially their eyes. It took her a while, but she learned that one could almost read a miffin's mind by looking at their face. She could tell when Orrie was lying to her by his characteristic looking away from her, or when Ollie was happy by a twinkle in her eyes and a slight lift of the corners of her mouth. She had learned to know if they were sad, angry, or tired, also by looking at the expressions on their face.

T'Kept advised her miffins to fasten themselves in tightly. She would land as gently as she could, but these landings were unpredictable. She wondered if the life that existed near the artificial lights on the coasts had noticed their arrival.

1. Yes. Many men saw her ship come in through RADAR or some other advanced form of detection.
2. No. T'Kept's ship was designed to avoid RADAR detection. Everett and Sparky were the only one to see the ship, and they saw it the old-fashioned way.

Go Back

View Forward Story Tree
View Back Story Tree