Bob’s starship lifted off from the parking lot of the Sunnyvale Molecular
Bonding Company where the principles of interstellar travel had been stumbled
upon during unrelated research into automobile polish. Some cheering secretaries
from the Sales Department held up a banner printed on a length of accordion-fold
computer paper upon which was printed ONE SMALL STEP FOR BOB, ONE
HONKER OF A MARKETING CONCEPT. The banner was decorated with
birthday cakes, due to some problems with the graphics program. A stringer from
“The UFO Conspiracy/Bigfoot Sightings Report” newsletter had been invited to
witness the historic event but had become distracted by a keg of Heineken that one
of the VPs had brought in the trunk of his BMW and so missed the actual lift-off.

Once Bob reached the Alpha Centauri star system he looked around with a pair
of binoculars until he found a planet that seemed about right. He went into orbit
around it and turned on the atmospheric spectrometer that some of the guys in
Hardware Development had rigged up the night before. It beeped and buzzed; then
a green LED lit up, under which was a strip of masking tape with GO FOR IT
BOB! written on it with a Magic Marker. He landed, stepped out, cautiously
opened the faceplate of his war surplus 1978 U.S. Air Force pressure suit, sniffed,
found the air smelled no worse than the Silicon Valley’s during rush hour, and
removed his helmet. He looked around.

He seemed to have set down next to a busy highway. The vehicles were models
he didn’t recognize; his first thought was that he had landed in Taiwan. As he
watched, a half-dozen semi-rigs slowed down, lumbered off the road and rolled
cross-country towards a stand of trees with glossy black leaves. The semi-rigs
reared up on their hind trailer sections and began to browse in the treetops. Bob
quickly got out his Sanyo VHS camcorder and started taping.

A number of silvery little bipeds stood by the side of the road. Whenever a
truck approached they would wave and hop up and down in some sort of ritual
display. One of the trucks pulled off to the side of the road and slowed to a stop
beside them, huffing clouds of vapor out of its blowhole. It flared open gills on its
sides and the bipeds wriggled inside. The truck rolled off, belching vapor.

But the bicycles were his favorites. The road bikes, slender as gazelles, would
whiz by on the edges of the paved roads, warily keeping out of the way of the larger
vehicles. The more robust trail bikes, with heavier frames and thicker tires with
knobby treads, tore around in the dirt, favoring steep hillsides. They tried to butt
each other off the paths, possibly to establish mating dominance.

Each night the trail bikes would gather at his campsite and watch curiously as
he set up a butane stove and prepared a freeze-dried pack of Authentic Three
Cheese Lasagna Trail Cuisine, of which he had 72 packs. He often reflected that the
temp worker who had been assigned the task of buying his provisions should have
been given more detailed instructions. The meal over, Bob would sing “Like a
Virgin” while the trail bikes chinged their drive chains in rhythm.

One day the trail bikes were menaced by a pack of massive, rumbling,
predatory choppers. Bob yelled and waved his shirt. The choppers vroomed and
circled around him ominously for a while, then pulled defiant wheelies and roared
away.

After a week Bob ran out of video cassettes and lasagna and so returned to
Earth. He landed in the parking lot of The Sunnyvale Molecular Bonding Company
in the middle of the night. He rapped on the employees’ entrance until the security
guard woke up. After some exercises in mime Bob returned to the starship and got
his employee’s I.D. badge and pressed it against the glass of the door. The security
guard let him in to use the phone.

As dawn was breaking excited company executives began to pull into the
parking lot. The Training Manager set up a TV in the cafeteria and played the
videotapes Bob had taken on Alpha Centauri. He was warmly congratulated and the
Director of Human Resources presented Bob with the Employee of the Month
Award to the applause of his co-workers.

A few days later Bob was brought in handcuffs and leg shackles into an
interrogation room in the basement of the Sunnyvale Municipal Courthouse where
an official of the FBI was waiting.

“See,” Bob said enthusiastically, “the wheel is really a very efficient way to get
around, lots better than legs. That’s why we design vehicles with wheels and not
legs, see?”

“I see, Bob,” the FBI official said cautiously, ready to spring back in case the
prisoner suddenly went berserk.

Bob said, “And once the wheel evolved, the wheelers naturally developed
pretty much like we design wheeled vehicles. Form follows function, see?” The
official made a note with a sharp yellow 2H pencil on a pad of yellow legal-size
notepaper.

“And the highways, Bob. Where did the highways come from?”

“Oh, the wheelers laid them down themselves. Their wheels shed this rubbery
stuff and it gradually gets packed down.”

“Ah,” the FBI official said. “And the little silver people?”

“I call them footers. A different order from the wheelers, and not very
successful. See, the footers remove parasites from the wheelers, so the wheelers let
the footers ride them. It’s a symbiotic thing. There are parallels on Earth, like tick
birds and water buffalo.”

“What kind of parasites, Bob?”

“Well, there are these leafy, rectangular leech-like things that accumulate on
them whenever the wheelers stop anyplace for long—” The FBI official snorted,
gathered up his pencil and notepad and left.

Bob was charged with a variety of felonies including trying to illegally inflate
his company’s stock prices and fraud stemming from his attempt to sell videotapes
of Alpha Centuri to Geraldo Rivera. A team of lawyers from the Sunnyvale
Molecular Bonding Company’s parent conglomerate, Nakamura Diversified
Industries, trooped in, and in a dazzling display of legal expertise, proved that Bob
had never been a Sunnyvale Molecular employee at all but was legally an
independent contractor and therefore was not entitled to legal services at the
expense of the corporation. Then they trooped out.

Bob’s court-appointed attorney, in an impassioned if disjointed speech, accused
the judge and prosecutor of flagrant racism. Then he offered to plea bargain Bob
down to a manslaughter rap for which he had pre-printed forms. Then he laid his
head on his table and went to sleep.

Bob offered to take the foreman of the jury on a brief trip to Mars. The
prosecutor informed him that the so-called starship had been scrapped and The
Sunnyvale Molecular Bonding Company shut down when executives at Nakamura
Diversified Industries had pointed out that in the previous fiscal quarter the market
for interstellar travel-related products and services had been zero and therefore
there was no market for it.

Bob was permitted to show the jury a videotape he had made on Alpha
Centauri. The jury watched attentively. After it was over the foreman asked Bob
how he got the bicycles to stay up with nobody on them; was it a computer
animation thing or did he just use wires? The jury became impatient with his
answers.

Jenny, Bob’s nine-year old sister, got to move into Bob’s old room, which
would now be available through her college years and then some. Presently the pod
he had given her hatched into a wobbly little tricycle three inches high. She suckled
it on a can of 3-in-One Oil with an occasional squirt of WD-40 as a treat. It
followed her around the house, dinging its little bell. She resolved to take it to her
school for show-and-tell next Monday where she was sure it would be a bigger hit
that Susanna Morgenstern's stupid pet hamster that everybody thought was so cool.

The End


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