Carl Lusk was not completely reckless. There were some encounters he did avoid. Dogs, children, and men were at the top of that list. But that didn't mean that he couldn't fantasize about these things. To that end, he put together one of the world's largest collections of taped and print pornography to facilitate his fantasizing.
Carl was a baggage handler at Denver's Stapleton Airport. It was not the most glamorous job in the world, but it enabled him to copy off women's names and addresses from the luggage he loaded. It was better than a computer dating service. Cheaper, too. Carl Lusk was ferrying a load of luggage to a waiting 747 when the garbage truck that would change his entire attitude toward sex rolled past him.
Carl knew right away there was something strange going on.
First, garbage was not picked up on the runways, where the jets sat.
Second, there was no one driving the garbage truck. The driver's seat was empty.
Carl spun the baggage truck around and lost the rear cart of the baggage train, but he didn't care. He was sure the garbage truck was out of control and he wanted to see where it ended up. Carl also liked to stop at major traffic accidents.
The garbage truck went around a corner to the area where private planes were hangared, and Carl had visions of Piper Comanches flying in all directions.
When Carl negotiated the same corner, he was surprised to see that the garbage truck had come to a full stop.
Carl came to a full stop too.
The garbage truck had stopped behind a Lear jet, its front bumper touching the tail assembly.
Then the garbage truck reared up on its back wheels. The wheels spun and the garbage truck lurched like a rogue elephant. It came down on the Lear jet, squashing the tail and pushing its nose into the air. The garbage truck began to shake furiously. The Lear quivered like a fish caught in a net.
Carl Lusk watched in rapt awe. Under his breath, he said the first thing that came to mind. "Oh, my God, they're screwing!"
Carl Lusk got down on the runway and tried to look under the garbage truck's chassis. He had never seen a garbage truck screw a corporate jet before. He wondered what the garbage truck-which was obviously the male-had for equipment. Details like that fascinated him.
As he watched, gravel digging into his cheek, Carl heard the truck's hydraulic equipment start to grind. "I wonder if that means it's coming?" he asked himself. Then he saw it. A silver ball, like a perfectly round egg, dropped from the garbage truck's undercarriage and was absorbed by the jet. The jet's aluminum skin just opened up and swallowed the silver ball.
The garbage truck, suddenly quiescent, fell over on its side, rear wheels smoking and spinning impotently. The Lear jet suddenly whined into life and rolled onto the runway.
As it passed, Carl Lusk saw that there was no one piloting the aircraft. Not only that, but the crumpled tail was returning to its normal shape like a plant recovering after being stepped on.
After the Lear jet had vaulted into the sky, Carl Lusk summoned up enough nerve to approach the garbage truck.
The driver's seat was vacant. But he knew that. The truck smelled of week-old trash and tiny bugs crawled out from the smeary edges of the hydraulic door, which hung open and empty.
"It's dead," Carl Lusk whispered. And then he thought about what he had just said. Funny that he would think of the garbage truck as dead. Garbage trucks did not live. Garbage trucks also did not copulate with other machines, but this one had.
Carl Lusk retreated to his baggage cart and decided not to mention what he had seen to anyone. On the way back to his terminal, he decided to burn his pornography collection. It would be tough to live without it, but maybe there was such a thing as too much sex after all. That left only the future course of his sex life to be decided-monogamy or celibacy? It was a grim choice. Perhaps he would flip a coin.
When the unauthorized Lear jet landed at Burbank Airport in California, it taxied to one end of the main runway and whined to a stop.
Because it had refused radio contact, did not ask for landing clearance, and came down the wrong way, the tower naturally assumed it had been hijacked.
Airport security was immediately mobilized. The first man on the scene was Officer Andy Ogden, who drove his car to the jet and got out cautiously. He did not draw his gun. He assumed that a drawn gun would be a signal for violence and he was trained to defuse violent situations, not make them worse.
As he approached the jet, Andy Ogden heard a loud metallic sound, like a titanic punchpress. There was no explosion, so he knew it was not a terrorist grenade going off.
A man came out from under the far wing. He jumped down as casually as if he had stepped from a barber's chair. The man walked up to Officer Andy Odgen.
He was not armed, so Andy Ogden did not pull his weapon. Pulling his weapon would have been an overreaction. And Andy Odgen was trained not to overreact.
And so when the man with the strange silver suit and the fixed face approached him with an outstretched hand and said, "Hello is all right," Andy Ogden accepted the hand in relief as much as in friendship. When he saw that the man's face was a cluster of wires and circuits with glassy blue eyes and an armrest ashtray for a mouth, it was too late to draw his weapon because the man had squeezed his hand to a blood-soaked pulp and had started to work on his other hand.
His last thought was a strange one. Why did the man have a round porthole in the middle of his chest?
When the main security team reached the Lear jet, they did not think twice about having passed Andy Odgen on the way. Officer Ogden was driving his car, which for some reason had a great silver ball mounted on the roof. He was probably going for help. When they found the body on the runway, skinned raw, they forgot about Andy Odgen and drew their guns.
They recognized that there were times to overreact. They moved under the Lear jet's wings, looking for an open hatch.
They did not find an open hatch, exactly.
What they found was an opening in the far side of the hull. The opening was six feet tall, in the rough shape of a man, like the chalk outline usually made at murder scenes to indicate where the victim fell. It led directly into the ship.
They climbed in through the man-shaped opening and found that the plush passenger section was deserted. Going forward, they found that the cockpit had been vandalized. Most of the flight controls-the navigational instruments and on-board computers-were missing. They did not find the missing hull section, which should have been impossible to miss. Not only was it shaped like a gingerbread man, but there should have been a porthole in the middle of the thing.
The only other oddity was a television set built into one wall. It was on, showing a popular children's cartoon program. The chief of the security team turned it off and led his men back out to the body on the ground.
"Wonder who that thing was?" one of the others said. The security chief looked at the inhuman carcass for a moment. He saw the gleam of white gold on the man's left ring finger and suddenly sat down on the runway.
"What?" he was asked when they saw his stricken expression.
"The ring. Look at the ring. That's Andy's ring!"
"You sure?"
"Look," the chief of security said in a sick voice. One of the men looked. He saw the silver monogram A. 0. mounted on an onyx setting. Bits of skin clung to the edges of the band, indicating that the epidermis had been torn off around the ring.