A sympathy for the whales

This is an incomplete story. If there is enough interest, I will finish it.
The punchline of the completed piece will be: "Damn you, Greenpeace!"
Please vote Yes or No via email (grdn19@gmail.com) or via Twitter (#damnyougreenpeace)



A BATTERED green pick-up bumps along a deserted Ohio back road. Plumes of orange dust rise like monstrous rooster plumes each time it strays off the blacktop and fish-tails back on again. It has a gate-scratch down one side, smashed tail-lights and a buckled fender where it hit a 300lb hog on a rainy night in a cow paddock. Took some fancy driving that did, to hit that pig.

At the wheel of the pick-up is Dwayne. Dwayne is one of 14 children, and even though he's three months off his 19th birthday he has seven kids of his own. Some of them to the same mother.

He hunches over the steering wheel, chubby hands clutching it hard as he thinks of Emmy-Lou-May back home. Emmy-Lou-May is the mother of his two youngest and the woman he truly loves. At the moment. Dwayne is thinking about the grits and greens Emmy-Lou-May has waiting for him. His ample stomach, barely contained by his denim britches, rumbles under the V8 grunt of the pick-up.

It's sunset, and as Dwayne drives west the blazing ball is low in his eyes and he squints hard to see the road. That's why -- on account of the low sun in his eyes -- Dwayne doesn't see the spaceship hovering at tree-height 200 yards ahead. And that's why -- on account of his rumbling ample stomach and the grunting V8 -- he doesn't hear it as it hums menacingly upon his approach.



* * *

In the cockpit of the Psi Kam-glooptych hovering above the road, kLYKRIM9x and fdRENJIL-8k watch the pick-up.

kLYKRIM9x painstakingly enters data into a black stone tablet.

Although nothing of the process can be seen by the human eye, streams of information in subnucleus-sized packets pour into the tablet in a process involving invisible white matter and wormstrings, a kind of encrypted manifestation of pure mind. Dates, times, tetra-dimensional coordinates and details about the approaching human and its primitive vehicle are being stored for further study.

kLYKRIM9x makes a guttural hiccupping sound a human might mistake for indigestion. In fact, kLYKRIM9x is chuckling. "Scientific research," he/she/it thinks. "Ngknarrrbl ngknarrrbl ngknarrrbl!''

Beside kLYKRIM9x, fdRENJIL-8k's tentacles twitch excitedly. This is the part he/she/it loves - the anticipation of another capture. He/she/it extends a tentacle in readiness to activate the tractor beam that will immobilise Dwayne's pick-up and draw him and his machine into the belly of the spacecraft.

fdRENJIL-8k's nutrition intake orifice salivates at the thought of Dwayne laid out on the craft's dissection table, revealing to them his fleshy, delicious, scientifically fascinating (but mostly delicious) secrets.

In the pick-up, Dwayne reaches across to crank up the CD to maximum volume. If anyone has recorded a better version of Over the Rainbow than Billy Ray Cyrus, he hasn't heard it.

As the pick-up speeds into range, fdRENJIL-8k hits the tractor beam. A column of blinding white light -- whiter than the whitest white recorded on Earth -- stabs earthward and nails the truck to the bitumen like a butterfly beneath a lepidopterist's pin, stopping it instantly.

Dwayne slams his head against the dashboard. When he opens his eyes he is swimming in a sea of dazzling white. His other senses are wiped clean, although he thinks he can hear something in the distance, a heavenly chorus sung by an angel. Soooooome-where, o-ver the rain-bow ...

The pick-up starts to rise in the air, turning slowly like a waterlogged boot hauled from a lake on a piece of fishing line.

To be continued (depending on interest)

Last line:
"Damn you, Greenpeace!"