Chapter 4: Whoa!

“Mermen? They don’t exist except as myth.”

“They used to exist in huge numbers until a little over a century ago. We can restart the culture. Mermen were dolphin human hybrids. I’ll pick out docile young dolphin females for your breeding stock. About two dozen is the most harem I expect you could handle.”

“Companion? Is this your idea? Pip Squeak couldn’t possibly know all this at her age. I must assume you coached her. Who are you?”

“I am the last of the original merfolk. It was no accident I introduced you two. From the first, I intended you and Pip Squeak to recreate my people.”

“That clears up a lot but WHERE are you?”

“In a different realm than where you are living. I’m alive, neither a ghost nor a spirit. I slipped through the cracks, you might say.”

“Are you mermaid or merman?”

“It’s been a long time since I was a maiden and I was never male. Mer-granny correctly describes me.”

“You must be very ancient, Granny.”

“I prefer Your Majesty. If you insist on calling me Granny, I’ll begin and persist in calling you, Dunderhead. It’s not an endearment.”

“Stop! Whoa! Hang on! Everybody put on the brakes. Reality check. Rule number one. Nobody comes aboard my ship without my expressed permission, it’s the Captain’s prerogative. That means, don’t invite your cute friends to visit unless I invite you to invite them, understand, Pip Squeak? Rule two. When I ask for specific information, I demand a concise, forthright, and accurate answer. A run-around pisses me off and being around me becomes unpleasant. Explain realms and falling through the cracks. I insist Alice. I won’t call you granny since you object. Careful how you tread, Alice. Bye sweetheart. Thanks for the pussy, and I promise to see you later Pip Squeak. Watch for the grocery boat when the sun is high in the sky. The chandler is hired to serve you your lunch every day at noon.”

The anchor was retrieved, and as it clamored aboard the bow rotors revved up. As the deck tilted, Pip Squeak has washed out the hatch with the cascading water she formerly reclined in. The aft rotors came online, adding their lift. Lucid leveled out was soon airborne and rapidly ascending. Small scoops opened collecting the high-velocity air and directing it through the rockets to flush and dry out any remaining water. When the atmosphere became too thin for the rotors to effectively bite, they folded up and the feet rockets fired quickly increasing our speed to escape velocity.

“Welcome to space Alice.”

“Your thoughts are too jumbled to make sense of. Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and Jackie Gleason and The Honeymooner’s Alice Kramden. Nothing makes sense.”

“I intentionally jumbled my thoughts so your reading my mind wouldn’t give you an advantage. The crucial moments have passed, and now I’ll allow you to know my intentions. To the moon, Alice!”

“Is that a joke? I read in your mind it was supposed to be a funny punchline in an early TV comedy routine.”

“Pow, right in the kisser. Quite a punchline, don’t you agree?”

“Was spousal abuse funny back then?”

“That’s not the point, that’s beside the point, misses the point.”

“What’s the point, then?”

“Threat! Answer my questions truthfully, or I’ll drop your conch on the moon’s Darkside. What did you mean by a different universe? Later you said you are in a different realm and fell through the cracks. Explain yourself. Be thorough.”

“You like old movies and you’ve seen a lot. Are you aware every movie you ever watched is recorded full length in your memories? All of them are available if you know how to access them. I have.”

“Interesting. Later I’ll ask you to teach me how to access my latent memories. Not now. Now is the time to answer my questions.”

“Do you recall a movie, The Incredible Shrinking Man?”

“Vaguely. Didn’t he eventually shrink down to a subatomic level?”

“The film implied he did. Are you familiar with the Old Norse Viking word, Midgard? Oversimplifying the definition, it means the world of men or Earth. The human perspective is uniquely centered between the microscopic and macroscopic. The middle of big and small.”

“Let me interpret, the realm you spoke of is microscopic?”

“Very good, Dunderhead. Now, does my falling through the cracks make sense to you? I am not inside the confines of the conch shell’s spiral involute, I’m tinier, a part of the shell’s crystalline structure.”

“You escaped by shrinking. How did you do it?”

“You don’t want to know. This is a dangerous and frightening realm. Bacteria and viruses are monsters larger in scale than Tyrannosaurus Rex to human scale. Never come here! I refuse to teach you how.”

“It’s amazing you can sound so powerful when you are so small.”