Chapter 2

"Dick!"

"Exigius 12 and a half!"

"Who-gius?" Tim O'Hara suddenly asked at the exact same time as Tommy, Sally, and Harry.

"I go by the name Martin now, Dick," Uncle Martin curtly corrected in a tone that carried quite the distinct disdain for an equally catty Dick Solomon. "Just like you go by Dick instead of..."

The sudden series of dolphin-like clicks and screeches caused all four Rutherfordites...Rutherfordians?...to answer in a similarly silly-sounding fashion.

Which caused Tim to slap his hands over his ears and shout out, "What're you guys all speaking? Sounds like a flock of fishy porpoises...sees...si!"

"Dolphins, Tim," calmly corrected Martin, as he swiftly explained, whilst Dick, Tommy, Sally, and Harry looked at one another with comically confused countenances in regards to their usage of an alien language not spoken since first landing on Earth in Human forms in a red Rambler. "And I was speaking to Dick and these others in their native tongue. Or, to be more accurate...tongues."

"A-are you s-saying that these...people?...are from Mars, too?" stammered Tim.

"Mars?" Dick said with an unflappable pride not shown since his shared-with-Mary secretary, Nina, had jokingly asked if such was whence he had hailed. "I wouldn't be caught dead on that planet! And, believe me, if I went there in this body, I would be dead!"

"No, Tim," Uncle Martin steadily explicated. "Dick and his little 'family' come from a barred spiral galaxy some..."

"And they have Human names like 'Dick' way out there?" Tim interrupted whilst pointing off to his right in a forty-five degree angle.

Causing Dick to quite quickly realign Tim's arm a half-foot further forward and at a slightly steeper degree, "It's more in that direction, er, uh, Tim."

Tim's handsome face screwed itself into a totally perplexed, and comical, mask as he jerked the arm down as if he'd just been touched by a tentacled creature as slimy as the scum of a primordial pond.

"Anyway, Tim," proceeded the explanation via Uncle Martin, as Dick denoted discernible personal insult over Tim's not-nice reaction to being touched by an alien in Human form. "Though their real names are far too hard for any Human to try and pronounce, suffice it to say that for the past three years they have been so known by their current noms de l'homme that such is exactly how they perceive themselves."

"B-but their n-not Human at all?" pressed the slightly shaking Tim O'Hara, whilst stepping a little closer to Uncle Martin. Making Martin turn, knitted-browed, to give Tim his patented expression saying far more than mere words in regards to his pseudo-nephew's nervousness in the face of the fantastic.

"Uh, no, Tim. They're actually purple tubes about the size of..."

"Hey!" said Sally as she half-clumsily pushed her way to the front of their foursome. Causing Tim to suddenly smile whilst looking her luscious Self up, down, and up again. "We may be purple tubes beneath these borrowed bodies, but, dammit, we're Human now, buddy! So watch it!"

Even as Sally stabbed the air with one well-manicured finger, Tim quite comically made his move...

"Well? What's a nicely-wrapped purple tube like you doing on a planet like this?"

As Sally favorably reacted to the handsome Tim O'Hara's clear-cut sexually-fueled "hit" upon her, turning from terrorizing Amazonian to a too-greatly grinning, nibbling nervously on one fingernail, leg swinging pussycat...

Which caused Dick to step forth now, exaggeratedly shoving Sally back, as she clumsily caught herself whilst screwing her beauteous face into a half-feral mask of Comedic enmity toward Dick.

"And have you, Exigius 12 and a half..."

"Martin."

"...told Tim what you really are beneath that Human-like shell he's been seeing and speaking with?"

Even as Martin made silent signals for Dick to shut the hell up, his all-too-Human looking countenance a comically uncomfortable mask, Tim turned to quite curiously ask...

"Wh-what's he talking about, Uncle Martin? Y-you mean you don't really look like...th-this?"

"You've heard of 'little green men'?" rhetorically asked Dick, a smugger-than-normal expression dominating his bigger-than-necessary face-and-head. Then, after Tim exaggeratedly head-nodded, "Well, underneath that phony facade is one! Very little and very green!"

As Tim swiveled his head in a ridiculous half-spiral from Dick to Martin to Dick and back to Martin, he sheepishly said, "Uh, U-Uncle M-Martin...Wh-what's he t-talking about?"

Even as a nervous giggle left Tim's tremulous lips, like it always would when he was very nervous!, Martin made an attempt to more fully explicate...

"You see, Tim, I'm not really a Human-like individual. I...and my entire race of Martians...are only about three inches in height and..."

"Oh, c'mon, 'Martin'," a less-than-patient purple tube-in-Dick's bumpy body loudly lauded, whilst too hurriedly pushing past Tim to tug hard, thrice!, on Uncle Martin's left earlobe. "Just show the kid already!"

Almost instantly, and almost exactly like what had appeared in a recently released, two years earlier, "Men In Black" movie, Uncle Martin's face hissed with a sudden release of internalized pressure...

"Voila!"

...only to open to reveal a literally little green "man", although his humanoid appearance was most definitely not at all Human and, again, more like that found in the 1997 film called "Men In Black".

Sitting inside an exceptionally super high-tech interior, wherein not only a number of micro-controls could be quite clearly viewed, but stereoscopic screens with which Exigius could "see" the outside world around him and, finally fully understandable to Tim!, those TV-type antennae that Martin would invariably raise just prior to popping out of visibility.

"Hello, Tim," a tiny, tiny voice said from the large-headed, hairless!, green-skinned, slightly scaly!, almond-eyed, but blue, not black!, situated inside the red-haired, Human head, which was what Tim had called "Uncle" for three years. "It might interest you to know that you're the first Human in history to see what I really look like. Even Thomas Jefferson couldn't claim that! Isn't that worth anything?"

"Y-y-y-you're n-n-n-not really Hu-Hu-Hu-Hu..."

"Human!" Dick, Sally, Harry, and Tommy loudly said so as to finish the still shaky Tim's barely-able-to believe reaction to such a stranger-than-fiction factoid.

"Y-yeah...o-one of th-those!"

"Tim," began the tiny-voiced, green-skinned little alien within the red-haired Human head, before working some of the controls surrounding him to, first, lift his left hand and, then, tug thrice upon that left earlobe so as to close-and-pressurize his faux face.

Then he continued in what Tim had come to know as Uncle Martin's oft-highfalutin tone...

"Tim, I'm sorry you had to see the real me like this, but I'm still the lovable Martian you once rescued and took into your home and heart. Just as you have irrevocably become part of my heart."

The clearing of four throats at the exact same time, from Dick, Sally, Harry, and Tommy, forced this Martian-in-a-Man shell to restate, "My hearts."

"Hearts?" Tim started, only to be almost playfully interrupted by Martin once more.

"It doesn't matter, Tim. You and I have become family since I crash-landed. The two of us have had lots of exciting times. Lots of adventures no other Human could claim. Not in all the hundreds of years I've been visiting this planet in my 'Martin-bot'. Such a shocking revelation, in regards to my true nature as a fellow Being sharing this same yellow star's system, shouldn't erase years of togetherness that has made you as much my real nephew as any I may have left behind on Mars."

Even as Martin's heartfelt words melted Tim's timidity as it pertained to the Martian within the Man, a teary-eyed, what one could actually see through those self-imposed slits of his!, Harry blatantly blubbered, "That's the most saddest thing I've ever heard that wasn't followed by a commercial for tarter-controlling toothpaste."

As Sally started to blubber as well, Dick loudly ordered, "Stop this immediately! No more melodrama in front of the High Commander! Or else...I might leak, too..."

As the foursome swiftly, as well as overly commodiously, returned to their previously overtly-stiff Selves, save for Harry who just seemed as stupid as usual...

"All right, you two...now explain exactly why you left wherever you're both from to come here! And what the hell is that thing on the back of my favorite chair?"

Before further words of detailed explication could slip past lips that Tim now knew were not truly Human, Uncle Martin said, whilst gesturing toward said overstuffed seats in the quaintly crowded little living room...

"Maybe we should all sit down first, Dick. Then I'll tell you everything."

END OF CHAPTER 2