13. Wylie looks for Normal
"Blast it all! Where could that insane, imbecilic, irrational idiot have disappeared to?" John Wylie was flying into a rage. Wylie and rages were a lot like ships and spaceports; he was always either flying into one or flying out of one. He had thought that it would be a simple matter to discover where Normal had gone. After all, how difficult would it be to find a man with a dog? Just inquire at the apartment Normal and Katy shared and find out if anybody had seen Normal leave the place. Nothing in life ever turns out to be as simple as it looks at first.
Of course, they knew who Normal was at the apartment complex and Wylie'd even found several people who saw him leave the apartment the previous day with the dog. But then the blasted blathering, blinking, blinded bonehead had taken it into his head to walk somewhere instead of using a hovercab. How was one supposed to track a man on foot? People on the street never noticed anything!
Wylie had walked the streets in vain, stopping this person and that, asking them if they'd seen a man with a dog the day before. All he'd got for his pains was the kind of look which said that they were trying to decide whether it was safe to run[1]. That was, of course, after they had figured out where the voice they heard was coming from.
He really hated this world! Why couldn't these humans be a normal height instead of being so inconveniently tall? Was it so hard to realize that there were short people in the world? Was that such a hard concept to grasp? Imbeciles! Ignoramuses! Interbred iguana's with inverted intelligence indicators! Why'd he have to end up here of all places? Oh, of course, that'd been his own fault, hadn't it?
He had picked this world as a safe haven. He'd thought that the best place to lose oneself was in a crowd[2]. This world had looked ideal in many respects for getting lost. It was a recent enough discovery that it didn't have all the technological trappings that an older world would have. He didn't want people being able to locate him with no effort at all just because the world was an established one and everything ran like clockwork, where all arrivals were registered as a matter of course. A newly discovered world like this where many races moved in and out at will was the ideal choice if one wanted to lose oneself from the rest of the Fifty Galaxies.
The accidental similarity in physiology had been an added bonus. He looked so much like the humans, except for his height, or rather, lack of it, that most humans never realized that he was as alien as the "Martians", as they insisted on calling the Gaddians. So he had thought that this world would be the ideal place to lie low and run his business till the time was right for him to make his move. Unfortunately, he had not factored in the humans and their irrational behaviour!
What reason would possess that hare-brained, addle-witted fool to walk off with the dog? Or perhaps he had not walked off? Maybe he'd taken the dog out for a walk and something had happened? But he knew that Normal didn't like the dog much. It was the very situation that he'd discovered at Katy's house which had prompted him to take this particular course of action. How could he have miscalculated so badly? There was nothing for it but to keep on looking and hope that he found a lead.
"Excuse me, sir?" said Wylie and waited impatiently for the man to look around and finally decide to look down. Why was it so hard for humans to look down anyway? Was it something in their physiological make up?
As Wylie had expected, the man looked around him as if there were invisible beings addressing him. They'd believe anything, even a voice out of thin air, but they wouldn't believe somebody short could be talking to them? Interminably inbred, imbecilic idiots! Finally, the man looked down.
"Oh, I didn't see you down there! Yes?"
"Have you seen this man by any chance?" Wylie flashed a solidograph of Normal, for what seemed like the thousandth time, at the stranger. "He might have had a dog with him ..."
"You mean Normal? I know him ... We've had a few drinks at the Drum a couple of times. Why are you looking for him anyway?"
"I'm a friend of his wife's ... Actually, I'm her boss and Normal's been missing since yesterday. Just trying to find out what happened to him," Wylie hurried to explain.
"Really? I saw him at the Drum just yesterday! Didn't get to talk to him though. He seemed to be in a hurry."
"Are you sure it was him? Did he have a dog with him?"
"Why in Shima would he drag a dog into the bar? He doesn't like animals much. Not enough to buy one a drink anyways!" smirked the stranger.
"Thank you. I'll head on over there and see if I can find anything ..." said Wylie over his shoulder as he hurried in the direction of the Electric Drum ... and promptly slammed into somebody who'd been walking in the other direction. Unfortunately, the other person was tall and that, combined with Wylie being diminutive enough to win the shortest man alive contest, resulted in bowling the person over.
It would have stopped there had the person that Wylie slammed into not grabbed the nearest person for support. He only succeeded in pulling the second person down and the second person naturally grabbed onto a third. This resulted in a domino effect which would have been wonderful to watch, as long as one wasn't within grabbing distance of the human domino or had not caused the whole fiasco in the first place. However, one advantage of being compactly built was that he could squeeze through the tiniest of spaces, and a tangle of arms and legs was no great obstacle to Wylie. He nimbly crawled through the cursing, shouting, screaming, wriggling human mass and made his way towards the Electric Drum in search of further clues as to the whereabouts of Normal Kint.
[1] People had this insane notion that Wylie would jump on their back and ride them all over the city if they turned from him and ran - it was something to do with ancient fears of midgets.
[2] Philosophers through the ages have pondered the question of who came up with such platitudes. All the races in the Fifty Galaxies had at least a few such sayings. When you stopped to think about it, they either were overly simplistic or not at all logical. For instance, the humans had a saying which went "a centavo saved is a centavo earned". What did that mean anyway? How could one earn something by saving it? Didn't one have to earn it first if one were to save it?
