Chapter 2: Babies, Women and Aliens; Oh My

"Will you allow me to make us more comfortable, Angelo?" ask the Alien.

"*!" I thought. Don't worry; I didn't understand my response either.

Then I was on a beach somewhere with a warm, humid climate, on a world with two suns. I was sitting in a deck chair beside a table that was shaded by a large metallic umbrella. In my hand was my favorite beach drink, spiced rum over ice with a thick slice of lime. I was dressed in beachwear, a somewhat loud flowered print shirt, outrageous shorts and a woven beach straw hat. The Alien was dressed in a similar fashion except he was drinking a Coors Lite from the bottle.

"First, Angelo; allow me to introduce myself, I am Grelix just as you are Human; and my name is..." what followed was very similar to a what I imagine a cat's mating scream would sound like if played back sideways from the bottom of a well.

"But you can call me Max. I also apology on behalf of all Grelix for our laxness in preventing the plague that nearly destroyed all human life", he said in a very solemn tone. "This laxness resulted because most of our station personal had returned here to our home planet to partake in our centennial mating celebrations. The skeleton crew that remained on earth did not recognize the early signs of the plague for what they were. By the time they raised the alarm, and we were able to halt the plague, all but a mere fifteen million humans were left a live. As the plague was most virulent among human males, there are only about five hundred thousand males left with the rest being female. As that is a ratio of 30:1 we felt it was necessary to make certain adjustments to the human thought processes, allowing the males to become more dominant and the females much more submissive. In most cases the survivors seem to be happy with their adjusted situation. A few males were somewhat overly aggressive and had to be toned down. A few were somewhat reluctant to take advantage of their women sexually, but you are the first case that has come to our attention where a male actually totally rejected the adjustment. Could you explain your rejection, so that we can make the necessary adjustments?"

I don't know how long I sat there, staring out at the orange water, just watching the lazy waves rolling onto the shore. My first thought was of those women and children back on earth. I was about to ask about them when...

"I assure you Angelo, they are safe, and completely unaware that you are not there. We currently exist outside of that serial time frame, and when we return only a single moment will have pasted," he explained.

And before I could even frame my second thought about him reading my...

He answered, "of course Angelo, we are both incapable of speaking each others languages, so I have resorted to telepathy to facilitate communication."

"~ (water)!" I responded

"Yes it is beautiful here, and your point is well taken, that in spite of our differences we are still very much alike; we may not be able to speak each other languages, but we do think the same. You are also right, in that we were wrong to make such adjustments to your people, without consulting with those we were trying to help," he answered. How he was able to get all that from a response I did not understand myself amazed me. That he hit the nail on the head, about how I felt about the situation, amazed me even more.

"How do you suggest we precede Angelo?" he asked after taking a sip of his Coors.

"This 'adjustment' you have engineered in the women to make them submissive, must be reversed; to force them into such a role is criminal. Well I can understand your actions in this regard; in trying to assure that they will become pregnant as often as possible; this is not the way to do it. The horrid costs this will result in, far exceed any possible gain we humans would derive by a population increase," it was only by sheer force of will, I was able to hold back the anger and calmly reply.

"I don't understand, most of the men are very happy, as are a majority of the women," he said defending the Grelix position.

"Let me ask you, do you think the men would be as happy if you had made them the submissive stud animal, to a superior population of women?" I responded with a lot more calmness than I truly felt.

"No, I suppose that they would not be happy." He said with some reluctance.

"Your mistake is that you allowed your Grelix biology to taint your solution to a human problem. The fact that your female nymphs are only semi intelligent, and only come into estrus for a short season every century... How did I know that, where did I get the information?" I asked in a panic, very confused by the situation.

"Calm yourself Angelo, and I will explain. As with most forms of broadband communication, like telepathy; there are many channels. There is the main conversation channel; I am currently using to tell you this. There are also side bands, such as this one, that convey background data, to supplement the information of the conversation channel, " explained Grelix.

Suddenly I became aware of the telepathy multi-channel universe, and unlike our own 'hundreds of channels TV world'; there was something good on every channel. On some of the other channels, there was emotion, contextual information, opposing view information, information of a less detailed more simplified nature, and there were even several channels that 'spinned' the information for different personality types and differing points of view. I was bombarded with information, after a few moments I was in severe pain, the pressure was so immense that I was in danger of suffering a complete mental collapse.