Tuesday, July 11, 1995
11:30 PM
Los Angeles, California

The man living in the small house at the end of a dark, quiet street wasn't asleep. Far from it; he was sitting at his kitchen table scribbling in a notebook, his craggy face fixed in a scowl of concentration. His pen scratched against the paper with a fitful, almost angry sound. His whole body, tattooed and solidly muscled, was taut with energy, as if there were a spring inside him that was winding tighter and tighter as his ability to write down his thoughts lagged behind his ability to think them.

So engrossed was he that he didn't take much notice of the sound outside at first. It started faint and grew stronger, the sound of a jet aircraft approaching. That wasn't unusual, anyway. Los Angeles was one of the air hubs of the world. Jets flew over all the time. You learned to tune them out after a while, even if you weren't a man in the grip of some hellish introspection, furiously struggling to scratch down your thoughts before they slipped out of your head.

This aircraft sound was different, though. It grew steadily louder and louder, coming closer, never peaking and fading back off in the other direction - and then suddenly it was right outside, and there was a sudden bright light slashing through the Levolors and drawing brilliant stripes of blue-white on the far wall. That got the writer's attention, finally. He dropped his pen and turned in his chair to look out the window, but the street had gone dark. He could see that there was some shape out there, hear the sound of turbines spooling down, but he couldn't make out anything but a vague shape in the dim glow of the malfunctioning streetlight.

He got up from the table, turned to go, then paused and, almost as an afterthought, turned back to grab his notebook. Then he yanked open the door and strode outside, ready to confront whatever the hell was going on there - and then pulled up short on his doorstep, jaw dropping, stunned by what he saw.

There was an airplane in his driveway.

Well, not in his driveway, exactly. More like half in the driveway and half in the street out front. And not an airplane, exactly, either. Part of it looked kind of like an F-14 jet fighter - had a fuselage, a cockpit bubble, wings, recognizable jet intakes (never heard of an F-14 with giant booster rockets on its back, but what the hell) - but it also had limbs. It was standing in his driveway on a pair of legs that, on closer examination, seemed to be the lower halves of the engine nacelles with chicken-leg joints in them. And it had arms, human-like robot arms with fully articulated hands. Its right hand was empty. The left held what looked like a giant rifle.

"What the fuck," said the writer.

As if in answer, the cockpit canopy hissed and then swung upward with an electric-motor whine. The cockpit had two seats, one behind the other, and there was a figure wearing what looked like armor in the front seat. The pilot pulled off his helmet, then reached down to his instrument panel and flipped a switch. A small light on the panel clicked on, illuminating his face as he turned and leaned over the edge of the cockpit.

He was an ordinary-looking guy - white, brown hair, glasses, maybe college-age. He smiled in a friendly manner and raised a gloved hand.

"Hi," he said.

The writer blinked. "Uh... hi," he said, offering a small wave, feeling a little stupid and a lot surreal.

"You're Henry Rollins, right?" the pilot asked.

The writer blinked again. "Uh... yeah," he said.

The pilot grinned. "My name's Ben Hutchins. You can call me Gryphon." He pointed to the side of his plane/robot/thing, where, sure enough, the lettering just below the cockpit said,

Rollins supposed he couldn't argue with that. It was, after all, right there in black and white. Now that he looked more closely, he noticed other lettering on the machine. On the lower leg, painted so that it would read normally if the engine was where it belonged on a normal jet, were the words WEDGE DEFENSE FORCE.

"Wedge Defense Force," Rollins said; then his eyes went wide. "You're those guys," he said. "The ones they say blew up Worcester. Twice."

Gryphon's grin became a trifle embarrassed. "Uh, yeah, well, we had help both times," he said. "Listen, I don't have a lot of time here. For various screwed-up reasons, I couldn't get a Shadow Legios for this trip, and I'm sure NORAD has my deorbit trajectory all dialed in. There's gonna be shit coming in from Vandenberg, El Toro, Edwards - " He glanced down at his instrument panel. "They're launching an F-117 over in Burbank right now, and - " He looked impressed. "Something just took off from Groom and it is smoking. Jesus." He returned his attention to Rollins. "Point is, I gotta get going real quick or there's gonna be some seriously heavy shit going down here, so I don't have time for the long version."

Rollins raised one heavy black eyebrow. "So gimme the short version," he said, sounding intrigued.

"Despite whatever official line the U.S. government might've taken after our little, uh, misunderstanding a few years ago, we're the good guys. We roam around making the galaxy a safer place, seeing the sights, and generally having a blast - and we want you to come with us."

Rollins raised the other eyebrow. "Me?"

"Yeah."

"Why me?"

"Why not? You're one of the few people on Earth we think can handle what we see out there, that's why. Handle it, hell, you'll love it."

Rollins ran a hand over his short brush of stiff black hair. "I dunno, man," he said at last. "This is pretty heavy stuff."

"Oh, come on, Hank," Gryphon said with a hint of friendly scorn. "You know you want to get off this rock. Besides, if you don't, you'll always wonder what you would've seen. Roll the dice, man. Buy the ticket, take the ride. It'll be good times." He moved a control. A panel in the side of the fighter, under the rear cockpit, opened and a chain ladder unrolled to the street.

Grinning again, Gryphon said, "Get in the van."

Rollins stood for a moment longer, his face blank, the gears of his mind turning behind it.

Then he smiled and said, "Lemme get my toothbrush."

Gryphon glanced at his radar scope and shook his head. "No time. Besides, we've got vending machines."

Rollins started clambering up the ladder. At the top he paused, one leg over the side of the cockpit, and asked, "You've got vending machines in space?"

Gryphon pulled on his helmet and sealed it with a hiss, reached to the panel, and punched a couple of buttons. As the turbines in the fighter's legs chunked and started spooling up, his voice crackled through a speaker in the helmet:

"Wait'll you see the shit we've got in space, man."

That said, as impressive a guy as he seems to be, what exactly does the WDF want him for?

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We pray for mercy because we would be fools to pray for justice.

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Jon Helscher

I'm here to slow you down, cost you money, and generally retard the process.

-Mike Rowe: Dirty Jobs

--G.
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