Read Angry Young Spaceman for Free Online

intergalactic spaceport, but weren’t by any means small. Mr. Zik tried to keep his platform at a regular speed, but kept shooting ahead.

    “How was your trip?” he asked.

    “Kind of rough. I drank too much coffee and so I couldn’t sleep.”

    “Ah,” he said. “Coffee.” He made a hissing sound. “Drinking coffee makes me... jumpy?” He looked at me.

    I didn’t know what he was asking me.

    “Is that right?” he asked. “Jumpy?”

    “Yeah, that’s right, jumpy.” I said authoritatively. The teaching had begun! “They had hoses on the ship where you could get any beverage you want, so I drank too much. I love coffee.”

    Mr. Zik nodded. We stopped in front of a large gold saucer. “There is no coffee on Octavia,” he said, perhaps sadly.

    “Oh,” I said, certainly sadly.

    Mr. Zik pushed a button somewhere on his person and there was a bleep. The ramp started to lower.

    “This is a nice saucer. I haven’t seen rocket thrusters on a saucer before.” I pointed to them, two large chrome pipes right below the back window.

    Mr. Zik paused on his way up the ramp. “No,” he said. “They aren’t rocket thrusters. They’re... thrusters.”

    “Another... kind of thrusters?” I fished.

    “Yes!” He continued up the ramp and I followed him. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember the word for the kind of thrusters.” He made the hissing sound again, which I decided was probably a laugh.

    “That’s OK,” I said. “Your English is very good.”

    “No,” he said. “It’s very blad.”

    The cockpit had been rearranged to facilitate the platform. He moved in close to the control board and his tentacles swept out across it in a languorous way. We were airborne in half the time a human would need to take off.

    “Wow,” I said, as we manoeuvred through the asteroid belt that surrounded the station. “Having eight appendages is really useful!”

    He laughed softly, his head still on its side, watching the viewscreen. “It is useful for driving... not so useful for walking.”

    “Well, knowing how to walk isn’t very important for people on Octavia. Most humans can’t swim very well.”

    He watched the viewscreen and said nothing. I waited for a while, to see if the conversation was paused or finished. I knew there were questions I should be asking, but I was so tired my brain felt like there were cables cut in it, the frayed ends sparking. I looked out the window and thought about how good it would be to get some sleep.

    Traffic was really light, just the occasional saucer passing us every couple of minutes. Saucers were very popular here; they never really sold well on Earth because the first models were all manual control and got the rep as being death-traps before the fully automatic ones came out. But I always liked them — one of my best friends in high school had built one from scratch, pretty much, for shop class. He had to keep it at school, though, ‘cause his dad was a bigot who thought that driving anything without a motor meant you were an alien sympathizer.

    “I went on a road trip in a saucer once. My friend Pete was a really good pilot.”

    “Why did your friend fly a saucer?” Mr. Zik asked.

    “Why? ...Uh, well, they’re really cheap. A lot of students get them because they don’t need fuel and you can fit a lot of people in them.”

    He nodded. “I see.”

    I thought about telling him about how the young people also like how it pisses the xenophobes off, but decided against it. “A lot of my friends swear by them. Do you know that phrase?”

    “Yes. ‘Swear by them.’”

    “Yeah, they think they’re more reliable than floaters.”

    Pause. “Yes. More reliable. More efficient, too.”

    It had become quite busy, saucers on every side. Gold was most common, and the rest were silver. It was an odd feeling, because I was used to floater traffic with only the occasional saucer thrown in. As well, the guy behind us was really close. I was about to