Spludge
by Richard A. Lovett
Illustrated by Mark Evans
Billy Whilmer wasn’t sure when he realized there really were thoughts better left unthunk. Not that he believed in thought police waiting to get him. There were just some ideas that, once planted, rattled around your head until your only option was to test them. Either that, or go mad, wondering. Which, he supposed, is why there really would be thought police if anyone ever came up with a way to do it.
Not that Billy was all that philosophical. He just liked to play with ideas.
Whenever his epiphany came, it was after the gelatin incident. He’d been noodling around, doing nothing in particular, when the idea was handed to him in a news story. Some girl had sneaked in at night and dumped a gazillion pounds of gelatin into a high school swimming pool. The next day, she’d gotten to the locker room early so she could be there when the first victim ran out, jumped in… and emitted a yell, accompanied by a sucking, slurping noise the commentator rendered as “spludge.”
Billy didn’t hear the rest of the story. Some ideas, once planted, really can’t be unplanted. “Spludge” was the seed. He wanted to hear it for himself.
It took months. First he had to locate massive quantities of gelatin at an affordable price. Nor could it be colored, lest a lemon or cherry tint give the whole thing away. A pale, swimming-pool blue, that’s what he needed, whipped up with clear gelatin and a few bottles of food coloring.
Then, after he finally found a restaurant-supply business that didn’t balk when he placed the order on his father’s credit card, he had to gain the janitor’s trust so he could get into the building late at night. He also had to learn how the pool’s water pumps worked. Ruining expensive equipment wasn’t his goal.
Practical jokes aren’t for the lazy. Billy had to join the swim team and do enough six a.m. laps that by the time he was ready to lug gelatin bags around, he was already developing a physique. Billy-the-jock… not something he’d ever envisioned.
He only forgot one thing: The boys and girls teams shared workout time. Technically speaking, he didn’t forget. He just didn’t think it relevant. Unfortunately, the first (and only) one into the pool that morning was a girl. And, while the gelatin made a most satisfying sound as she hit it in a shallow racing dive, she was wearing a two-piece suit… part of which kind of got left behind.
Billy was charged with sexual harassment. The school principal wanted it upped to assault, but Billy’s attorney convinced him that since she’d hit the, er—even the attorney had trouble coming up with a word, but eventually settled on “surface”—under her own power, Billy hadn’t quite assaulted her.
That rather technical distinction saved him a lifetime as a registered sex offender. But it was pretty much the only thing that went his way. If it had been a guy who’d been first into the pool, Billy might have had detention for the rest of his high school career, but it would have been academic detention. As it was, he was eighteen by the time they let him out of juvie.
You might think he’d have learned. But Billy, now going by Bill, breezed through his first year of college short-sheeting beds and placing prank phone calls.
Meanwhile, he found himself increasingly interested in science. It seemed odd; he’d always seen himself as the class clown, not an egghead. But before the gelatin incident he’d not been a jock, either, and he now worked out five days a week.
He wasn’t much of a theoretician. More like the ultimate experimentalist. But his trip to reform school and Nobel prizes stemmed from the same basic question: I wonder what would happen if…? Nobel laureates were just better at constructing controlled experiments. Bill’s more often went something like this:
* HYPOTHESIS: What would happen if I stuck both ends of a heavy-gauge wire into a wall outlet?
* PROCEDURE: Wear gloves. Use insulated pliers. Stand on rubber mat.
* OBSERVATIONS: Brief but spectacular pyrotechnics. Sparks shooting to ceiling, star-shaped scorch on outlet and wall. Globs of molten copper buried in desktop.
* CONCLUSION: Entire dorm floor wired to single circuit breaker. Bad design, but at least nobody knows who did it.
Another lesson came his senior year, when he realized that government agencies have zero sense of humor. He was doing a stint on the college newsblog, the Daily Truth, and one afternoon he went to the state capitol to sit in on a committee hearing. When he got back to his car, he found a ticket.
Irritated, he plucked the bright yellow “courtesy” envelope from beneath his wiper. A box was checked: Parking in Reserved Space, $110.
“What the…?” he said, raising his arms to the heavens. “Where the hell does it say reserved?”
And there it was, painted on the parking garage ceiling like a direct answer from God. Who puts a reserved sign on the ceiling?
Of course he wrote about it. When life gives you a lemon, and all that. It was almost as entertaining as spludge and a lot cheaper than the gelatin. Not to mention legal.
A month later he was back at the capitol. Gone were the painted “reserved” signs on the ceiling. Someone had made hundreds of shiny metal plaques and posted them in front of each and every reserved spot.
That wasn’t funny. A lot of tax dollars had been spent to ensure that no one would ever again poke fun at the parking czars.
For the next several years, Bill, now going by William, stifled all public traces of humor. He took a job with the Western Times and wrote serious tweets and pod-scripts about politics, science, climate change, and why the Chinese were beating everyone at just about everything. He married a woman who made the mistake of confusing his public persona with his private one… and divorced him six months later.
Then the aliens landed.
It wasn’t quite clear how they got here. One moment, scientists were reporting a new comet. Then the Chinese, Brazilians, Europeans, Japanese, Americans, and Qataris were all accusing each other of launching something big, unannounced. The next morning, LGM were walking up the lawn of the Taj Mahal.
Why they picked the Taj Mahal was one of those things nobody ever figured out. There was also a bit of debate, later on, about whether they really were little green men. They were definitely small, lime-colored, and most emphatically male looking, in a Mayan-statuary type of manner. The question was whether this was their normal appearance or whether they had chosen it.
Like most of the world, William watched on tri-vid, though unlike many, he flattened the 3D so the LGM’s lime-green Mayan-statuariness wasn’t quite so, uh, intrusive. By this time, LGW, equally Mayan in their Earth-mother attributes, had decanted from an honest-to-goodness flying saucer on the White House lawn. Maybe they were drawn by the color of the grass. There certainly wasn’t any reason William could see for them to be attracted by the current president.
Still, it was the president’s job to greet them, and if he wanted to be re-elected, hiding in the Situation Room wasn’t going to do it. So, to the obvious dismay of his Secret Service contingent, he was on the lawn, trying not to stare.
One of the little green women raised a four-fingered hand in an odd V-pattern. “Take me to your leader,” she said. “Nano-nano. Live long and perspire.”
“Uh, you too,” the president said, plummeting a couple of points in the polls with each word. “I think. Whatever you say.”
The alien was carrying a large box. She reached in and withdrew a little green baby. Or maybe it was a pet. It was hard to tell. “For peace between our races,” she said solemnly, holding the tiny whatever-it-was out to the president.