Sam's problems began as he was heading toward Bingnagia, a planet where, his agent Ahbbbb had said, with surprising faith in him, there was a simple problem that he could solve in a matter of moments--a trivial matter that required only the simple laying on of Sam Boone's very human hands, to put it simply. So convinced was she of his ability to bring the matter to a close that she had booked passage for him on a Blattskitt liner that was to depart just a week after his arrival on Bingnagia. "Shouldn't take you more than a few days to clean everything up," she'd said with confidence.
She'd gotten a cabin on a Glimmora freighter for him. "These are first-class accommodations," she'd hummed reassuringly, as her tendrils beat a rhythmic tattoo on the inflated bladder at her throat. "You will not be disappointed. They are so excited about transporting a human that they've added a wide selection of Earth delicacies."
These assurances of a gourmet feast and luxurious accommodations were uppermost in Sam's mind when he threw open the door to his cabin and saw what appeared to be an alien approximation of a musk ox staring at him.
It was a good imitation, lacking only the ox's delicate beauty of line and grace. Where a musk ox's horns would be, six rope-like tendrils erupted. Every one of these was in constant motion, a swirling mass of six snake-like appendages. The pseudo-ox was using the sharp tip of one of these to scratch its neck, just below its mane of thick hair.
Sam found the creature's stare to be very intense. The intensity was understandable, since the blue-haired alien had four complex eyes on each side and each one was independently focused on Sam's personage. It made him extremely uncomfortable to be the center of so much attention.
"Greetings," Sam said with as much bonhomie as possible and waited for his faithful portable translator, a marvel of Rix engineering, to convey his opening expression of friendliness to his unexpected traveling companion.
Snorf! the alien belched loudly as it swivelled three of its eight eyes to glance around the room while keeping Sam fixed with the other five. One of the snaking tendrils started to extend in Sam's direction and then diverted to scratch the corner of the ox's puce lips, just above its long, green beard. Snorf, the near-ox belched, repeating its earlier entreaty.
Sam reacted quickly as the expanding wave-front of the alien's breath reached his nostrils. A single whiff of the stomach-churning combination of halitosis and swamp gas was all it took to make Sam beat a rapid retreat. Snorf! the alien repeated as its lower jaw moved slowly from side to side and all eight eyes lazily returned to fix on Sam.
For some inexplicable reason the translator remained silent, giving Sam no indication of whatever it was that the alien had snorfed at him. Sam worried that perhaps the snorf-eze language wasn't within the translator's data banks, which, he thought, would be a fine kettle of fish: How could he share a cabin for the weeks it would take to reach Bingnagia if he couldn't even converse with his traveling companion?
"There seems to be some sort of problem," Sam said, pressing his lips close to the microphone grille of his silver box so there would be no mistaking his desire to communicate. The translator's speaker remained mute, unwilling or unable to produce a single, decent snorf. Sam was infuriated with the stubbornness of the little machine. "Damn it!" He slapped the translator's case with his hand--hard. He got nothing but a stinging palm for the effort.
The machine still refused to produce a decent snorf.
While this was taking place, the ox-thing appeared to have lost interest in things Samuel and stuck its head into the opening of a large sack hanging from a hook on the wall of the cabin. Two of the alien's tendrils stretched the bag's opening wide enough to allow entry of the exobiotic-ox's huge snout. Loud chewing and smacking sounds came from within as the ox's head moved back and forth.
Sam considered the situation. The Rix translator had never, not once, failed him before. In every situation the machine seemed to adapt itself well to the speech mode of every intelligent alien he'd encountered.
"What if," he said aloud, "this alien isn't intelligent? What if it has no language?" But that would be ridiculous. Why would anyone pay cabin-class simply to transport some galactic livestock? The fee for cabin-class interstellar transport was far too expensive to make that a possibility.
Then another thought, a more frightening one, dawned. What if this ox-thing was his as-yet-unmet cabin-mate's pet? The idea that he would be sharing his room with something that would make this creature a pet was daunting. Still, it was a possibility: he'd not had that much experience with the galactics to understand some of the subtleties of their various cultures.
)
[Book 4 of the Sam Boone Series] The voyage on the first class Glimmora freighter was bad enough, but even that near disaster did not prepare Sam for the challenges facing him on Bingnagia. All he had to do was simultaneously figure out how to keep himself from being stomped by the overly-friendly giant aliens, prevent an interplanetary war, avert legal disaster from the Galactic Courts, and solve a murder mystery, for which he was the prime suspect.
