By John Sallis
I am a science-fiction buff, meaning that I like to watch, read, eat, and sleep sci-fi. Currently, on ABC TV, there is a new program, called “Battlestar Galactica,” but I’m not about to critique that, no. Another show I’m about to throw the book at is “Project UFO,” a pet peeve of Jack Webb.
Jack Webb may be a hero, but this latest program of his is about to get my dander up. Possibly. What they are doing is a bit all wrong. After all, I do have a little sci-fi with my specimen.
Dum de dum dum.
This is the city. The big city. There are more than a million gnomes living in this city. All kinds of gnomes. Good, hard-working gnomes that have to leap from bit street debris to climbing down into a face of buildings and using passages between very green hand.
Big professional gnomes who sit behind real small desks of Gnomes who fought for this and won the Gullivarian war. A good gnomes. Some of them even sherlocks.
That’s where I come in. I’m part of 8:05 a.m. 268 degrees on the street. A cool day in the city. My partner Franktoid and I are checking out a heist. We go to a flop-house on the east side where a taller larger woman, about 3-foot-6 with her purple face in curlers, comes to the door in a gasoline driven housecoat.
“What happened?” Franktoid asked her.
“Burglary!” (freetled by those green gnomes on they evening).
“This is for American television.”
“Okay, she said,” Franktoid and me. “Came right in the back window, he did, without even a knock.”
Mugger by-looking. Hotel. Medium build. About 14 degrees. Probably 3 foot-4. Chartreuse beard. Orange eyes.”
“Nothing unusual, huh?” I asked.
“No; so you’d notice,” she tells us.
10:57 p.m. Nothing much to go on, so we get back in our earmot and head for the sleazy part of 8.
A bartender runs screaming out into the street.
“It was fierce, fierce,” he tells us.
“Just the factoids,” I tell him.
“It was,“ the bartender says, “enormous. Probably 6 feet tall. 210 pounds. Two blue guys.”
“Sure, fella, two eyes,” yes, realizing we got another unit on our hands. “And I suppose it had hands and feet too?”
“How’d you know, Mac?” someone asks.
“I read the poll,” I tell him. “We’ve had reports of stones called ‘pretty before and we’re getting good right now.”
“The streetsides are filled with teen-age gnomes hooked on grehodius, gangs of young thugs whose parents have no idea where they are at 11 o’clock at night, breaking into hovels of low-headed silent majority gnomes.”
“And we’re supposed to spend our time messing with a crazy numbtoid like you? Now, you can either drop the whole story or we’re taking you downtown.”
The gnome comes to his senses and drops it. The gnome doesn’t help Franktoid and me. We leave for the station where we have to fill out our 23rd “people” report in less than a month.
“They’re probably all out of junktoid,” Franktoid reiterated.