Rest Area 51

                 “Clean up your fraxis, Dariant.  Damn it.  And stop hitting your sister.  I swear it.  I’ll turn this spaceship around and nobody will have fun skating the frozen milk ponds of Godon Four.”

                “Wait.  Don’t go in the bathroom yet.  I just saw a Kleekie go in there.  They never wash their tentacles.”

                “Only five thousand light years to Pickron Seven.  Can’t you hold it until we at least reach Neptune?”

                 These are just some of the things you hear in and around the galaxy’s most visited Rest Stop---Joswell, on Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons, the one with the biggest variety of random feces to be found anywhere in the known universe, except maybe Texas. 

                 Vanuti Federino was the grockefelter of this particular rest stop.  Like our own grockefelters here on Earth, Vanuti occupied the lowest rung of alien society.  Anyone who works in and around fecal matter is pretty much associated with it anywhere in the universe.  And this leads to judgment.  Just ask the huckify miners of Flaxon, the snake-like drain cleaners in the sewers of Vicko Towers, or, you know, any janitor on Earth.

                Being a grockfelter does have its advantages though.  You can spy on anybody since hardly anyone even acknowledges your presence.  You know the ins and outs of your work space intimately, very intimately.  So therefore you notice the details, the little stuff that most travelers, in their haste, miss.  This is how Vanuti Fererino became the most famous grockfelter in the known universe.

                At first Vanuti only noticed that some things were a little off that fateful Indhuniday, on the ninth of Nuvoko, in the year 40, 546. 

                When the seven member family of Reshuffaloos strolled into the snack area, Vanuti noticed that something was off with their ears.  Don’t Reshufaloos all have seven ears?  Isn’t that how they can hear the low frequency cosmic zither music of the natural springs on Jidar Six?  These Reshuffaloos only had six ears a piece.  And why are they standing and staring in horror at the snack machines?  Don’t they think that sixty-five grackles is a decent price for a twelve pack of jackapi moon rats? 

                Shrugging it off, Vanuti went back to mopping the congealed kiku slime off of the baby changing table.  But when he noticed Frelic, the lone Jupierian pervert who always hung around the rest stop, approaching the family of Reshufaloos, he paused and watched.  The family seemed disgusted when Frelic offered them a chance to buy a pack of naked Martian women playing cards.  That’s normal.  Frelic is a freak-show.  But as the family was quickly hurrying away, the mother’s face seemed to be slipping off.  Straining his ten good eyes to see them as they were entering their idling spaceship, Vanuti could have sworn that he saw the whole family take off masks.  And what was underneath changed Vanuti forever.  He saw heads with two eyes, one nose, two ears and only one mouth.  After repeatedly vomiting in disgust, Vanuti could come to only one conclusion:

                There were humans at Joswell!

                Not knowing what to do next, Vanuti ran inside and quickly astrally projected to his boss, who just laughed at him.  Vanuti’s boss, Donald Trump (he’s actually not human—explains a lot, doesn’t it?), was a universally renown asshole, literally.  He ran all of the rest stops in the Milky Way and owned quite a few luxury resorts—you know the kind that cater to snobby, upper class Hunarians and the Jikiliatoos who look down their four noses at the rest of us.  Donald liked to gossip to his fellow masters of the universe and, so, within days, Vanuti’s human sighting caused quite a stir.  The intergalactic press made fun of him mercilessly.  His girlfriend left him for a professional golfer from Venus.  And his lifelong depression only spiraled. 

                Life went on much as it always had at Joswell.  Although he tried his best to simply keep his heads down and do his work, Vanuti kept noticing strange things happening at his place of work.  Once, while busting up a Plutonic homosexual orgy, he saw a Freedoptu literally fall over and crash into two pieces.  He quickly righted himself but Vanuti could swear that it was two tiny humans stacked on top of each other in a giant Freedoptu suit.  Another time he saw a Hunarian sneeze and some foreign yellow gooey stuff came out instead of the usual wood screws.  After a few Earth months of this, Vanuti came to the conclusion that there were indeed humans at Joswell. 

                 Of course the authorities hushed it all up pretty quickly.  Vanuti was now known as the prophet of the coming humans, but was still treated like crap since he was a janitor.  The authorities used their power to float bunches of different and far-out rumors to discredit and confuse.  Nobody wants a rumor as spooky as humans on Jupiter circulating the galaxy.  That kind of thing just freaks everybody out. 

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This story is from Bowen Craig's book entitled A Look to the Future Through the Eyes of an Eighty Year Old Pirate available online at http://www.amazon.com/Look-Future-Through-Eighty-Pirate/dp/1450286194 .