Page 35 - Unlikely Stories 2

Earl King and his Puppet Thing

removed their now-dysfunctional sunglasses and unbuckled their
padded armor. Paste-white and freckled with nascent melanomas, their
faces were not more attractive than the puppeteer’s gouged and scarred
nose, cheeks and ears. Nevertheless, the troglodytes recoiled and
grimaced on first confronting the Surf; quite a bit of time had passed
between face-to-face meetings.
Little was said as the men progressed toward the grotto. Earl King
knew the etiquette, and that his presence was barely tolerated. They
stopped at a small way-station to decontaminate the outsider. This
process, a cursory beating of his garments with wire brooms, had a
function for the Techies more psychotherapeutic than hygienic. The
elevated level of ultraviolet radiation on the surface bathing everything
organic in an envelope of hydrogen peroxide permitted few of the
ordinary human epidermal parasites to survive. The danger to a visiting
Surf was much greater: rapidly mutating colonies of exotic bacteria and
viruses thrived in the moist temperate underground micro-climate. Earl
King’s hardiness had thus been doubly tempered and twice tested; his
remaining span of months or years would likely be terminated by
malnutrition rather than disease.
After traveling through another short tunnel, the trio debouched into
a large cavern, evidently a commons for the Techies. The puppeteer
knew he would not be invited to venture further, into the living areas
and highly-guarded nuclear power plant, so he put down his sack and
quietly began preparing his act. Word had preceded his arrival, and a
small group of children and parents was already assembling around the
edges of the great hall. The Techies had extra strings of lighting draped
around the stalagmitic perimeter; these, usually disconnected, were
suddenly illumined, causing a gasp of excitement to escape from a
dozen tiny goitered throats.
The performer made no attempt to conceal his face from the
audience as he assembled his props and drapes, nor did he return the
horrified hypnotized gaze of those youngsters getting their first
exposure to a man from the surface of the earth. He did notice the
impatient gesture of one of his hosts, indicating the act must begin
immediately. The Surf shouldered his one-man theatre, disappearing
within its dark and voluminous folds. A hush fell all around him.
From inside the curtain a shrill blast of a kazoo announced the show
had started. Then a small rectangle of cloth parted in the middle,

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