5. Kerr finds a quest I
Ringo was barking. He was barking his little doggie head off. Ringo was barking because he was angry. And what had made Ringo angry? It was the little Martian - the one who bought Ringo from Normal. The Martian, whose name was Kerr, had taken Ringo to his spaceship as soon as he could.
Sure, the Martians had been around for decades and people were supposed to be used to them by now. Still, most folks just didn't regard them with much favour. People being people[1], they found something which looked like a little woolly pillow with stick-like arms and legs poking out of it rather unsettling. In fact, some folks tended to be so darn unsettled, that they'd outright attack the Martians. Of course, that was perhaps the last thing they did[2] on this side of existence since the Martians had such powerful weapons that they reduced these misguided humans to ashes in an instant. That sure was one way to keep the gene pool chlorinated, as one wag had commented.
While their weapons would have enabled the Martians to beat humanity with two out of their three skinny little arms tied behind their backs, for some inexplicable[3] reason, the Martians preferred peace to all out bloodshed. They would resort to weapons only when there was no other alternative. This made them appear all the more alien to most humans, who couldn't understand why the Martians didn't just take over the world.
Maybe it was the influence of all the old stories they'd heard for centuries - tales of bug eyed monsters from outer space taking over the world. While the Martians weren't, in truth, bug eyed[4], it just didn't feel right that any self-respecting alien would go against this age-old code of alien-kind. This was not to say that anybody wanted any stinking aliens taking over the world, mind you, but this kind of passive behaviour just didn't seem natural. Of course, nobody thought of asking the Martians about this aberrant behaviour. Perhaps they didn't want to tempt fate.
The Martians, on their side, understood humanity well enough to know that it was best to stick to their ships unless they had business outside. This was why the Martian had come back to his ship with Ringo as soon as possible. Now that he was home, safe and sound, he moved on to the next phase in any Martian meal - first you caught or bought the food, and then you tested the food.
The tests were standard. All Martians learnt from a very young age to be careful about what they put in that little slit in their bodies that passed for a mouth. It must have been a survival trait, and an effective one at that. You just couldn't go around stuffing your face with anything you found lying around on a planet like their home world[5], and hope to have your race survive for long.
Thus, the Martians had evolved a system of food testing that rivalled anything found in that sector, or any other sector for that matter, of the Fifty Galaxies. Even if the food proved to be edible (not to mention quite delicious, as the Martians had found dogs to be), they put each individual item of food through a rather thorough battery of test before it was put in the Martian equivalent of a Mr. Chef[6]. The Martians considered this to be simple common sense[7].
To be continued ....
[1] If they hadn't been people, they would have been vegetable or minerals and that just wouldn't do.
[2] Except to scream, "Aaaargh!"[8]
[3] Inexplicable to humans that is. Martians understood the reason - if you went around beating up everybody you found, soon you had a lot of people needing bandages and only you left to bandage them up.
[4] In fact, they weren't even from Mars. Life on Mars had died off a long time ago. But some wit [9] had dubbed them Martians when the aliens had first landed and the name had stuck like egg yolk to a new suit.
[5] Acid rocks, poisonous plants, exploding pods, sausages and that nameless brown gruel served in prisons and schools everywhere - they had them all on Kerr's home planet.
[6] Kerr's people just didn't believe in 'if it looks ripe, give it a bite, if it don't make you shite, you can eat it alright'
[7] It's a good thing that the Martians weren't human, common sense being very uncommon amongst humans, the Martians would have died out a long time ago.
[8] Some have been known to scream other things, but "Aaaargh!" for some reason, was the most popular cry amongst these ephemeral individuals.
[9] Most people usually prefixed it with "dim" or "half", when referring to this anonymous individual.
