Snot is My Copilot

[incol...@zodiac.rutgers.edu]

Snot is My Co-pilot by Jim Incollingo

"At first, we thought your eyeballs were purely decorative," the
heaving jellied mass bellowed in an aquamarine baritone, using a
combination of violent shudders and a thick, sucking sound for
emphasis, "the most compelling theory for years was that your
light sensors were housed in raised red bumps on your face.
Thus, we thought that vision peaked during the teenage years,
then declined steadily throughout a human's lifetime. It wasn't
until we intercepted that 'Brady Bunch' episode where Jan gets
glasses, but won't wear them and drives her bike into the family
portrait that we realized something was wrong. I mean, she
should have had perfect vision by our standards. The whole
eyeball development embarrassed the hell out of the scientific
community, and of course the military was livid; it seems that
the going invasion plans called for a planet-wide atmospheric
release of benzoyl peroxide gas to temporarily blind the human
population, rendering them incapable of mounting an effective
defense. Once word got out that the only thing the gas would do
is eliminate adolescent facial blemishes, heads started rolling
like loaded dice."

I sunk further into the alien barc-a-lounger and let the
blubbering pile of protoplasm babble on about his species' recent
episodes of galactic adventurism. Aside from the very foolish or
highly dangerous, there was nothing else I could think of doing.

"Eventually, we kind of gave up on Earth as a viable takeover
option. A lot of people still wanted to go for it, you know,
even after you trashed the environment (which by the way, was
considered by our chief military planners to be a brilliant
stroke of defensive strategy), but once people realized how bad
the weather is in conjunction with the general smell of the
place, the idea kind of faded. It was just about that time that
we got interested in Scrofulosa. Oh, you'd know it as M1417 in
the Scab Nebula ."

"Sure," I thought, "Scab..."

"Now, you probably think I'm pretty gross, right, which by human
standards I'll admit, but believe me, you would rather lick me
into a lather than take so much as a whiff of a Scrofulan. I
mean, those beings are nasty. Lemme see...Earth analogies...
OK, picture this: you take a rotten eggplant the size of a
delivery van, saturate it in warm bull urine, you know, till it's
dripping, then make it sprout yard-long poisonous spines and a
head that looks like ten feet of roast hemorrhoid..."

I began to drift off at that point. I had no idea how long I'd
be rocketing through the void with that overbearing glob of
verdant wheat paste, but I was beginning to fantasize about stray
asteroids looming in the viewscreen...