I told them that Las Vegas was where we should go to find the kind of woman we were looking for, but the captain overruled me and ordered us to Kansas instead. That's how he put it to the navigator -- "Kansas" -- like it was a set of coordinates or something, instead of a whole big-ass state. These Areoleans, they're always having trouble with details like that: city or state, human or animal, man or woman. It's all a broad brush to them, as if their entire understanding of the planet came from lazily skimming the briefest of summaries. Earth: The Cliff's Notes. The captain didn't want to admit it, but I figured out pretty quickly (even through the buzzing mechanical jumble of the Auto-Translator) that his Kansas obsession stemmed from the fact that he'd intercepted and studied a transmission of the film The Wizard of Oz during an earlier expedition.
He fancied himself an expert on Earth in general, and Kansas in particular, and he was just sure as anything that we'd very quickly find the woman we needed amid all that colorful frolicking and music. I tried to explain to him that he was confusing Oz, an imaginary place, with Kansas, a real place, and I tried to tell him what the real Kansas was like, and why it probably wouldn't suit the purposes of our mission, but he wouldn't listen. Hey, what the hell do I know, I just grew up on this planet, why listen to me when we have a bona fide Wizard of Oz expert on board who has been to Earth a whole two times? Fat little three-legged know-it-all bastard. It took us a week of hovering around Topeka before we finally found a woman who would go for it.
She was a redhead, thirty-ish, pretty, a little on the busty side. Part of the deal was that I got to pick her, and that's what I was looking for: nice curves, nice boobs, nice hair, pretty. I'm not picky, but I figured after all these light-years of flavorless food and sun-less skies and being surrounded by ship-mates who are half my height and not even remotely of the same species, I deserved to be a little picky. The Areoleans didn't care one way or the other who I picked, as long as she was female. (Not that they'd know the difference if I decided to pull one over on them; for a supposedly more advanced culture, they are remarkably unobservant little things.)
Her name was Jackie. "As in `Kennedy-Onassis,' " she told me, with a smirk, over our drinks in a quiet bar on the outskirts of the city. "My parents were into celebrity gossip, and I guess she was still a big deal when I was born, in '73." I nodded. I remembered well what a big deal Jackie Kennedy Onassis had been in the early 1970s (right around the time I left) because that was, to me, just a year or two ago. But of course I couldn't tell that to this Jackie. I didn't know whether she was even familiar with Einstein's theory (well, more than a theory, as it turns out) about what happens to a person's relationship with time when he spends a few dozen years traveling at near-light speeds. How does one explain to one's date -- to whom one appears to be roughly of her own generation, age-wise -- that one is actually old enough to be her grandfather? And more to the point, how would that revelation, interesting though it may be, advance one's mission-goal of having sex with her?
It had been awhile since I'd done this, picked up a woman in a bar. In one sense, it had been maybe three years since I'd done this, but in another sense, it had been something like four decades. I could assume that the mechanics of the ritual were pretty much the same -- libation, conversation, flirtation, consummation -- but I was worried about whether I could navigate the nuances now, the subtle cultural shadows that you don't recognize from studying radio transmissions and satellite intercepts. Sitting there in the bar, trying to lock eyes with her at the other side of the room, I'd only gradually become aware of how much those cultural shadows had shifted at the edges. The bar was still a bar -- in some ways so similar to the bars I remembered that I was momentarily embarrassed for my species' lack of evolution since I'd been gone -- but then I began to notice things. The air felt strangely light, with none of the trademark haze that defines the air of a bar, and I eventually discerned that it was because not a single cigarette was burning in the whole place. (There weren't even any ashtrays. In a bar!) The bars I'd remembered usually had a boxy television set tuned to a football game or something, but this one had, like, five television sets -- huge, remarkably flat ones, hanging from the walls like murals -- and they were tuned to several different sports, two of the which I didn't recognize. A little machine stood in one corner of the room under a glowing sign that announced, "ATM -- CASH," and I spent a good deal of time wondering what that was all about. The bartender, instead of jabbing at a cash register, poked at a computer screen. The whole setting was just a little off, like a blurry photograph of something familiar.
The clothing and hair styles were different, of course, and I'd expected that much. I'd warned the Areoleans about how quickly hair and clothing styles change on Earth, and I had suggested that we take a little extra time to do some reconnaissance and manufacture an updated image for me before embarking on the mission, but as usual they wouldn't listen. Upon walking into the bar, I was immediately aware that my hair, a little too short by the standards of the time when I'd left, was now, clearly, a little too long. I think my clothing, though, was the bigger issue. I concluded, from the long, open stares I received from every corner of the bar, that my snug white slacks with the flared cuffs at the bottom weren't "in" anymore. Or maybe it was my wide-collared silk button shirt with the thick blue-and-gold vertical stripes and the lime-green sleeves. A few minutes after arriving, I buttoned up the top few buttons of the shirt, and that seemed to help diminish the stares somewhat, but it was still clear that I wasn't going to win any fashion awards.
"You should have listened to me about the clothes," I muttered behind my beer, knowing that they were listening. "I'll be lucky to get the time of day down here, let alone get laid."
But as it turned out, the clothes worked to my advantage. "That's a helluva shirt," Jackie said, grinning -- pretty close to laughing, actually -- as she happened upon me at the bar while ordering her drink. I thanked her for the compliment, and she grinned and sort-of laughed again in response, and then asked me if I was going to a costume party or something.
"Actually," I said, making an impromptu strategic decision, "I'm dressed like this because this was how people dressed when the aliens picked me up, in 1971. They didn't give me time to pack anything else."
She laughed fully this time, as I pondered whether the strategy had been a good idea. The Areoleans were pondering it too, and angrily; I could hear them howling their falsetto little howls through my inner-ear implants, demanding to know why the hell I was telling her that.
"Aliens," she said, chuckling. "Hippie aliens, right?"
"Actually, I was the hippie. Sort of," I said, pressing ahead with the strategy while trying to ignore the sounds of pissed off aliens echoing in my ears. "They were here on a scientific expedition, and they took some specimens, including me. Now they've come back to run some field tests. I'm part of the mission."
"And what, exactly, mister hippie space-traveler," she asked, still grinning, "is your mission?"
In my ears, I distinctly heard the captain growl through the Auto-Translator: "Don't dare you!" (The Auto-Translator jumbles words sometimes.)
"My mission," I said, ignoring Captain Whiney-Butt, "is to find a willing woman, and pick her up, and have sex with her."
"Ah," she said, with mock scientific detachment. "And this little experiment will take place on their spaceship?"
"No, no. Here. I mean, not here in this bar -- here on Earth. In my hotel room."
"The aliens rented you a hotel room?"
I nodded. "They have a budget."
"And they'll be observing this . . . experiment?"
"Mmm-hmm. Through my eyes and ears. They've installed implants."
"Of course," she said, still trying to sound scientifically detached, but allowing a few little chuckles to slip through. "And are there any particular . . . positions . . . the aliens would like to see you use with this `willing woman'?"
