The ship set gently down in a clearly marked space in the largest space dock in existence just outside of Los Angeles, Californian, Earth. Before our engines had completely shut down a shuttle attached itself to our exit port and established a lock. All two hundred and forty three passengers moved from their gravity seats to the bus type seats on the shuttle. The shuttle made the short hop to the terminal’s clear plastic dome buildings and we all filed out into the filtered air of LAX.
Just inside the door stands a very pretty girl with short black hair, old style plastic rimmed glasses wearing a short dark blue pleated skirt and a plaid vest over a red knit top. She holds a hand painted sign with Jasper’s World Welcome! written on it. Sally was fine with my reading the sign but when my eyes drop lower in order to form an opinion of the lady’s dark knit leggings Sally punches me in the ribs. Sally has become much more possessive lately.
“We welcome you to Earth. I hope your fight from Jasper’s World was comfortable.” We smiled and say things like, “very nice thank you,” stuff like that.
“Please follow me. Your shuttle awaits you,” I must have been following her a little to much ‘cause Sally hit me in the ribs again. It’s not much of a deterrent because I enjoy it when Sally hits me in the ribs and this Earth girl was just a little bit beyond cute. The place was crowded but the little girl had a way of carving a path and after just a short walk we were entering another shuttle not much different than the one we had just walked out of. Our guide says good bye and I watched her walking away long enough to get another jab in the ribs. The shuttle was just like the one I used to take from the mall in Bakersfield, California, Earth; just a little smaller, so I showed all the guys how to use the safety straps and we settled in for the twenty minute ride to our hotel near the test site for the full sized GR Earth’s factories had produced.
“Feels weird going back to Bakersfield, I said to Jasper who sat beside me in the aisle seat Sally and I saved for him.
“There ended up being four sites that met our needs for the test. Bakersfield was centered among the factories that produced most of the components and they had an assembly plant large enough so being your home town factored in but did not need to carry much weight.”
“A strip of land ten miles wide and twenty miles long, an island of green on a brown world,” Matthew, a fellow student, said from behind our seat on the shuttle.
“It’s going to be glorious,” Jasper said, turning in his seat and giving Matthew a grin.
david blankenship 