Jimmy’s World
It would be a normal day for anyone who grew up on a planet with an equatorial climatic region but that wasn’t Jimmy’s world. Jimmy’s world was cold. Jimmy put on his parka and went to check on the snow collector…. Dad had to have water for his coffee, or he’d be pissed, which is hard to be on a planet where water is scarce.
Jimmy collected the precious drops and reset the snow collector so that Mom would have something to make soup with later on after she went hunting in the hydroponics garden. (more water I’ll have to drag in). Jimmy’s world has no summer and it has no winter… it’s just a snowball orbiting to far from its sun. Ordinarily, we would feel sorry for Jimmy, except for this particular quirky day. On this day he made something like history.
As He walked back to the house, jug of water in hand, he heard something unusual from the sky. Of, course, anything making noise from the sky on a planet with no weather would attract attention. And so Jimmy’s attention was duly attracted. And of course he looked up.
Jimmy saw a ship, and the sound he heard was a sonic boom. Although he was familiar with the ships that had brought his parents to this place, he had never seen the likes of this one and the loudest sound he had ever heard was the music that his father listened to.(Rock and droll or something like that). Fear and curiosity simultaneously tugged at his mind. He thought to himself… It was time for a decision, was he grown up enough to make it? ( Jimmy was a bright boy).
He was also an adventurous boy, so when he saw where the craft had landed, away he went, straight toward it. As he approached the ship, he noticed that the snow beneath it had melted. `Heat’, he thought, `Like the thermopile under the house’. Upon closer scrutiny of the ship he found what appeared to be a port, an entryway. Having absolutely no idea on how to open it, he did the first thing any kid would do, he kicked it.
It opened. (Did you ever have one of those days where everything goes right?) As he walked inside he noticed two beings seated in front of what appeared to be a control panel. Both seemed dead. (Or just immobile, since in Jimmy’s world he never had known anyone who died). On the Console in front of the beings was a series of buttons, but one grabbed Jimmy’s eye. It was big and it was red. So of course he pushed it.
What happened next would become a topic of discussion for centuries…because no one knows exactly what that button did… but I just saw that Adolph Hitler and his band’s latest groove is doing great on the charts.
J. Jon Shumaker
jjshuuuz@aol.com