Different Directions
by
George Pollock, Jr.
The nurse left work at five o'clock. She swung her purse's long strap across her green scrubs and headed out the hospital entrance.
No big plans that night. Just the usual subway ride home to Brooklyn, a shower, dinner and curling up on the couch with Haagen-Dazs and a DVD of "Sex and the City." Maybe two.
And it was all just across the street and down the subway entrance. But the light at the corner was red, so she had to wait. As she did, she noticed a small man with dark hair and big, dark eyes walk up. His skin was pale, and his awkward gray business suit looked as if a giant girl had dressed him badly in doll's clothes. He held open a small red book and looked lost.
Tourist, she suspected, but something beyond that seemed out of place. She tried to look casual as she unsnapped her purse's cover, slipped a hand in and fingered the small can of pepper spray inside.
" 'Cuse, please," he said with a thick, indeterminate accent as he glanced at the book. "Can help, please?"
"If I can," she said noncommittally. A foreigner, she thought, but that wasn't news here. God knows where he's from.
"Am new here," he said to the little red book, not her. "Who most important person here, please?"
"Here? In … New York?"
"Yes, please."
She smirked. "Well … if I wanted to get corny, I'd say Lady Liberty."
His big eyes lit up. "Lady Liberty? Who she, please?"
OK, definitely a foreigner. "She's the lady with the torch. Out in the harbor."
"Har-bor …," he repeated, as if he were sizing up the word.
"She's the big green woman on an island out in the harbor."
He quickly flipped the pages of the book, stopped and studied an entry. The nurse saw that the writing was the strangest she'd seen. "How to … go … in … is-land, please?" he asked.
"Well, a ferry goes there from Lower Manhattan."
"Ferry? Lower …?"
She was about to huff in frustration when she noticed the light turn green. She pointed down the street past the man. "That way," she said and headed into the crosswalk.
The man watched her cross the thoroughfare, enter some kind of large kiosk and descend into the ground. Finally, he joined the stream of pedestrians and headed in the direction she had indicated. But at the first opportunity, he stepped into an alleyway and went down far enough to be in, if not the dark, at least a deep shade.
So, he thought, a female leader. A matriarchal society. Preliminary intel suggested otherwise, but that's why they called it "preliminary." But it apparently hadn't messed up on the natives' garments. Given the reaction of the female he conversed with, his disguise hadn't caused a negative reaction.
He reached into an outer garment and took out a small device. He adjusted it, and the refractor he was wearing made him vanish. The hover/flying pack on his back would take him high enough to see any local bodies of water. A large green female holding a torch on an island shouldn't be hard to spot.
And the linguists seemed to have gotten the native speech down. The female he spoke to had discerned his meaning clearly. He must have sounded fluent.
He smiled as the hover/flying pack started lifting him. This initial contact was already paying dividends: He liked his females large and green.
The homeworld, he thought, was going to be so proud of him when he got back …