Lont's Ship

The inside of the spacecraft was almost completely white. There was very little light inside. Nothing was inside the small room that Jade, Peter, and Bob now were in. Everything was smooth in here, as well. Every corner of the walls was rounded. One wall suddenly formed an opening. This hole was perfectly round, and the edges where it joined the wall was just as smooth and rounded as everything else on the ship. It did not open like the panels on the outside had, but rather just formed as though the wall was made of wax and the hole had been quickly melted through. Jade and Peter, still unconscious, were attracted to this hole, and floated through it, as did the goldfish bowl. Once they had gone through it, the hole closed in reverse of the manner it had opened.

Inside the next room in the spacecraft, the walls were just as smooth and white, and the light was still quite dim. Only a single creature stood there, something the size of a large dog. It had a single, bare, long tentacle extending out one side, but was covered on the rest of its body by a thick coat of fur. This animal moved, by unknown means, toward the bodies with a shuffling sound and a sweeping movement of the ends of its long fur. It grabbed them one at a time with its tentacle. They were not laid on examining tables, but instead on large, flat slabs of metal. These were held above the floor by cylinders of the same material of which the floor was made. The corners were round where they met the ground. They spread out and covered the entire bottom of the slab, then curved around the corners and covered the sides as well. The parts that covered the sides extended slightly above them, and were round on top. Although the corners along the horizontal plane were round, where the two materials met each other were the only sharp corners in the two rooms.

The spaceship hovered in the air until Jade, Peter, and Bob had been successfully transported into the second room. It then took off into the sky.

As Jade, Peter, and Bob were placed individually on the metal slabs by the first alien, another entered the room by way of an opening in the wall, which immediately resealed itself after it was through. This alien, a very furry humanoid, carried a small machine with an assortment of extensions. It stood next to Peter's lifeless body and set the machine on the side of the structure. It pulled on one extension, which looked like a thick pen attached to a very small tube. The tube extended until the tip of the 'pen' touched the skin on Peter's left shoulder, right at the base of the neck. After a few seconds, it retracted back to its original position. The alien pulled on another extension, which resembled the first, only with a thicker tube. This extended to exactly the same position the other one did. After a few seconds, the tube began to fill with Peter's blood. After quite some time, once Peter was 'drained', the tube and its attachment retracted. Yet another time, the alien pulled on an extension of the machine. This was almost identical to the second one, but had two tubes rather than one. It placed itself on Peter's skin and sat there for a few seconds. One of the tubes filled with Peter's blood, which was stored in the machine, and the other one filled with a liquid that looked like dusty, lightly green-colored water. After Peter filled back up, the alien moved on to Jade. Bob lay on the metal slab between them, but the alien passed over him. After he was done with both humans, the unusual creature exited the room, along with the other alien, through another hole that opened on the other side of the room, which quickly closed behind them when they had gone through. A few minutes later, the metal slabs under Jade, Peter and Bob bent slightly under their weights, as though they were heated close to melting.

Jade, Peter, and Bob slowly sank into the metal slabs on which they had been laid. The metal soon covered them completely. They were now in suspended animation as the spaceship sailed off, away from planet Earth and the entire solar system. Within five hours, it was outside the solar system.

 

Jade and Peter awoke, in the middle of a huge, dark room. Unbeknownst to them, they had been originally placed in this same room. They were lying on slabs of metal, but it was not cold. The entire room was comfortably warm, and the air was at a perfect humidity. Although the environment was completely luxurious, Jade and Peter were very confused and disturbed. Peter immediately searched for and found Bob. He expected to find his joints stiff, as the last thing he remembered was being tired and falling asleep in the middle of the forest. However, they were in perfect working order, and he felt fully awake and refreshed. Jade hopped off his stand and searched the room for any other objects there might be. He did not find any, so went back to his comfortable slab and rested. Peter continued to look around, and was startled when the wall formed a hole right in front of him. "Hey, Jade! Come over here!"

"Yeah?" Jade slid down from his resting place and joined Peter. "How'd that get there?"

"It just opened up in front of me. I don't know how! Anyway, let's go through. There's another room in here." He and Jade went through the hole and came out into a long room. The walls were exactly the same as they were in the previous one. Jade and Peter walked the length of it. The room was only about four feet wide. Then Peter remembered that the wall had opened when he got near it in the other room, so he pressed up against the wall and walked slowly along it. A hole suddenly opened, and Peter fell through it, into a large room.

Many creatures were in there, emitting an assortment of noises, including clicks, whistles, and murmurs. There were at least three different types of aliens in the room. Some looked like the small one that had greeted Jade and Peter when they first arrived on the ship, while others were slightly larger and smooth-skinned. There were only two humanoid creatures there. They had tentacles extending off their shoulders, concluded with large claws. Their two eyes were at the ends of long, moveable stalks. Their bodies were completely covered with hair, but stood erect and had legs with feet on them. The other aliens were small, spotted bluish animals about one foot long. They crawled on four legs and had two small arms in front. They did not have ears, eyes, or a nose, but did have a recessed patch on what seemed to be their foreheads, below which a trunk extended.

Jade and Peter nervously retreated through the hole and went into the hall. The wall became solid again, and they searched the hall for other doors. The next time the wall opened in front of them, they saw a gigantic room with assorted objects floating above the floor. They looked like bent cylinders with rounded edges, and were of assorted sizes. Although none were connected, they all floated near each other, with ends lining up. There was a very pale blue glow coming from the spaces between ends.

On the wall directly to the right of the opening was a panel that stuck slightly out of the wall. On it was a design, consisting of many different rounded shapes connected to each other by lines. On each shape were a small dark disk and a few black symbols. One of the disks was slightly tinted red. On the floor beneath this design was a raised ring of dark metal with darker circles embedded in at all around. Inside this ring was a metallic disk. Although it reflected images brightly, it blurred and distorted them. As Jade was gazing into it, he noticed that there were no lights in the room.

He looked all around the ceiling and the walls, but he could not find any source of the light that made the entire room bright. He wandered in astounded silence, searching for the source of illumination in this room. Though it was very bright where he stood, it was extremely dark in the area where the massive cylinders were. As he observed this, his eyes trailed and wandered through the maze of intertwined cylinders. They were completely white and dull, not having the slightest hint of reflection. He looked farther and farther up the stack and noticed that it continued above the level of the ceiling, which had halted and turned upwards into a wall just in front of the cylinders.

He returned his focus to the search of a light source. It was as if the light was emitted from every part of the walls and the ceiling, even the floor. In another attempt to find the source of the light, Jade looked at, or rather for, his shadow. It was only then that he noticed that he did not have one. The floor was not even darkened around his feet. Jade's eyes darted around the room in confusion.

Jade changed his concentration back to the design on the wall, and Peter went to explore the floating cylinders. There were about thirty feet between the wall in which the door opened and the seemingly endless array of cylinders. He walked slowly, always paying attention to the glow coming from the spaces between the ends of the cylinders. He was soon close enough to touch one small cylinder, one that was about four feet wide and six feet tall. He took one step closer, and his foot hit a wall. Although he could not see anything in his way, no part of his body could extend beyond a plane that ran just in front of all the cylinders. He looked at the floor to see if there was a difference in the way it looked, but it was just as if it continued without changing under the cylinders, with nothing on top of it. He ran his finger along the corner where the ground and this invisible wall met. He kicked the wall, expecting to hit it. His foot stopped and dropped to the floor, but it did not bounce off. Peter took off his shoe and tossed it towards the cylinders. It also stopped in flight, but did not bounce back. It instead fell directly down to the floor.

"This is really weird, Jade. Maybe we should just go and try to find some other rooms."

"I'm still not done looking at this thing, Pete. Just hold on. You know what? This thing looks like one of those transporters on that science show I told you about last week." Jade stepped on the strange circle of metal, half expecting to be zapped onto another planet. He wasn't. Instead, the metal stayed perfectly solid, and Jade stayed where he was. He stepped off it and ran his fingers along the panel above it.

Peter began to get bored, so he decided that sneaking up behind Jade would be a good thing to do to pass the time. Jade was still concentrating on the design in front of him. He set down Bob's bowl, and then yelled, "Look out Jade! You're going in!" Jade fell against the panel. Although the lit shape was still reddish, one other shape that Jade touched turned green. Jade continued his descent to the floor and fell onto the circular slab of metal. The darker circles embedded in the large ring lit up and spread an intensely bright white light all around Jade. He landed on the metal and, to his surprise, continued through it! All around him, Jade could see nothing but a blinding white light with slightly darker streaks running through it. Jade began to get lightheaded and felt as if he were about to regurgitate when the light, which penetrated his shut eyelids, suddenly stopped. As did the sick and dizzy feeling. Jade felt as if someone hit him on the shoulder.

He opened his eyes and was in a completely different room. He was lying on his side, and it then dawned on him what had just happened. The panel was a transporting device, but only worked within the ship. The design on the panel was a map of the entire spacecraft! He jumped up from his lateral position and looked at the map above this transporter. It was exactly the same, except the shape that was lit green in the last map was now red, and there were no green sections. Trying to remember where the red shape was on the last map, he stepped onto the transporter and pressed the shape that he thought corresponded to the room he was last in. The lights in the ring around the base he was on predictably lit up, and Jade fell through the metal panel. He closed his eyes and tried to bear the sickening feeling he experienced, and it all ended within a few seconds. He didn't feel like someone hit him this time, and, when he opened his eyes, found that he was standing upright in the other room, looking at Peter.

"Jade! What happened?"

"It is a transporter! But it transports you inside the ship, rather than onto another planet. We can explore the whole ship from here!"

"Okay, then let's get going. I've seen all I need to in this room."

"When we get on this thing, you need to close your eyes."

Jade and Peter, who was carrying Bob, stepped onto the platform. Jade pressed the shape farthest to the top and left of the design, and the field of view of the entire group was filled with a blinding light. Each individual, along with their bowl, descended into the ring, and was spat out of another in another room a few seconds later.

"Isn't this cool?" said Jade.

"Well, I guess so. But Bob didn't enjoy it too much."

"I think he'll get used to it. But we need to be careful where we go. Remember how there wasn't one of these in the room we woke up in? I wonder what would happen if we tried to go there."

By using the room from which they had just come, Jade traced back to the large hall. He couldn't remember which room off it was the one in which they started, but he did remember that the hall did not have a transport disk. "I think I'll test what happens with my shirt. It could be dangerous for us to be zapped into nothingness."

"There isn't exactly a whole ton in here to look at, but I think we could explore some other rooms." What Peter said was true; this room was almost identical to the one in which the group had awoken. The only difference was the number of platforms. The room was full of at least twenty platforms.

Jade stepped back near the platform and pressed the shape that corresponded to the long hall. He closed his eyes and prepared to have his shirt transported to nowhere, but the shape did not light up, and the metallic disk below his shirt stayed solid.

"Well, that's good," commented Jade. "This way, we won't have to worry about being sent into the void." Peter was already looking at some of the platforms closest to the transporter. He jumped up, sat on the side one of the platforms, and then laid down on it. It was warm, just like the other ones, and so he stayed there. When Jade came over to him, he said, "Pete! You're sinking into it!"

It was true. Peter's arms, legs, back, and head had all sunken about one inch into the metal. Peter tried to get up, but the extra force on his feet only pushed them slightly more down into the metal. Peter was slowly sinking into it. Seeing this, Jade jumped onto the edge of the platform and swung his other foot onto the other edge. He reached down to Peter's arms and pulled. Peter slowly emerged from the metal and, after a few minutes of constant pulling, was completely out. The metal did not leave any residue on him.

"That was enough for me. Let's go to another room."

Rather than search the walls for another door, the group went back to the transporter. Jade pressed the shape directly to the right of the one that was lit red, which immediately turned green. Everyone closed their eyes and dropped through the ring. They emerged from a ring in the next room and opened their eyes. They explored this room, which was full of assorted objects that seemed to be computers and scientific equipment. In this way, they explored the next few rooms.

After entering one particular room, Jade and Peter found an assortment of large, clear, hollow cylinders. Metal parts capped the cylinders on both ends, but the bottom piece had two large tubes extending from it. One went into the floor, but the other bent 90 degrees and opened into the room. It was covered on its end by a dull metal plate with a small panel of shiny metal. Suddenly, a hole opened in the wall, and at least twenty of the smooth-skinned aliens they had seen with the other aliens came into the room and wrapped their tentacles around them. The room was filled with assorted clicks as this happened, apparently their form of speech. They carried each person and fish out of the room, back through the hole in the wall.

The entire procession went through many rooms and hallways, eventually coming to an exceptionally large room with many aliens sitting in it. They were all facing a gigantic screen at one end of the room, in front of which Jade, Peter, and Bob were held. The room slowly became illuminated by the image on the screen. It was another type of alien. Jade recognized this one as a so-called 'classic grey.' The only unusual differences between this one and the stereotypical grey alien were that this one had a small nose, as opposed to the normal type that lacked a nose, and that it was wearing dark, triangular glasses. These glasses had no nosepiece, and did not hang off the alien's ears, as there were none. Instead, it seemed to be attached to the sides of its head.

Once the image on the screen was in complete focus and the right shade, the entire room filled with noise. Emitted from all the aliens capable of complex speech was a chant: "Lont! Lont! Lont!" All the other aliens made clicks in unison in a pattern of three quick, high clicks followed by a pause and one low click. Then, on the screen, next to the image of the alien, appeared a grey arm and hand with three fingers on it. The fingers curled into the palm of the hand. The room fell silent.

The arm lowered below the view of the screen, and sounds began to come from some unidentified source in the room. It seemed to be a language that the boys had not yet heard, so they assumed it was the alien on the screen speaking. However, his mouth did not move; instead, it was his nose that moved rapidly up and down as the alien spoke. The speech paused, and one of the hairy aliens that walked erect came out of the crowd of aliens and joined Jade and Peter at the front of the room. He was carrying a goldfish in his hands. He looked up at the screen and yelled a series of sounds at it. It seemed that the hairy alien was speaking to the alien on the screen in its language. The alien on the screen responded and then fell silent. The hairy alien then stared directly at Bob's fishbowl. After a few seconds, Peter whispered to Jade, "Jade, Bob said that the aliens can communicate with us through him. That alien on the screen's their leader. His name's Lont. He wants to talk to us on his planet. I guess we're getting dropped off."

Jade responded, "Okay, I'll believe you this time. We need to be nice to them, though. Can you ask them nicely where we are in relationship to the Earth?"

"Fine. Hold on." Peter stared at Bob, and, after about a minute, the hairy alien yelled something into the crowd. Another alien, in the back of the room, left through a hole in the wall, and soon returned with a small machine. He came to the front of the room and handed the device to the first hairy alien, who looked at it and then concentrated on Bob.

"Bob says that we're just a little way away from a planet in a solar system about ten thousand light-years away in the Milky Way galaxy. We were in suspended animation the whole way here. That's what those platforms were for. We're leaving in about ten minutes to go down to that Lont guy's palace so we can talk to him."

 

The crowd in the large room quickly exited the room through the back, leaving Jade, Peter, Bob, who was now a necessary member of the group, and the hairy alien. The hairy alien led them to a section of the wall next to the large screen, which was now blank. There was a small area where the wall was very slightly lighter than the wall around it. The alien extended its arm and pressed its hand against this part of the wall. The wall opened after a moment, and on the other side was a room with only a transporter inside. The panel above this transporter was different from all the other ones. There were only two shapes. One was red, and the other was blank. The alien ushered the group onto the transporter and pressed the unlit shape. It immediately turned green, and the group fell through the metal panel and came out on the other side in another room.

The room had a raised area in one corner, and almost nothing else. This room was very different from all the others, as almost nothing was rounded. Every corner was square, and the room seemed to be a perfect cube. The raised area in the corner of the room was in the shape of a quarter circle, with a radius of about five feet. It was raised about six inches above the floor, and the corners where it met the floor and walls were square, just as the corners on walls were. It looked like a large version of the transporter through which they had just come, with the strange metal in the middle of a ring that had lights in it. The alien again led them to this platform but before they stepped onto it, Peter stuck out his arm and stopped Jade.

"Jade, the alien says we need to be careful. He's not coming through this one with us. We need to not step onto this panel, because it's not solid. He says just to close our eyes and jump into it. You ready?"

"Okay. Tell him thanks."

Peter paused for a moment, then said, "Let's jump." They did, and what the alien said was true. This metal platform was not solid, so they went directly through it. The same sensation that had followed a passage through the other transporters followed this one, as well. Combined with that was a feeling as though they were free falling. After a brief moment that was slightly longer then the time it took to use a normal transporter, the unusual sensation stopped.