Zork stared at the screen with his forward eyes and clicked his beak. “Witha, come look at this.”

            “Hang on, Professor, I’m pushing gas from our last meal. Remind me not to use that delivery service again. The seafood had way too much methane residue to be anywhere near edible.”

            With his rearward eyes Zork watched his assistant slide from her perch before a bank of screens and slip across the observatory floor, pulling herself forward with long beautiful tentacles. Will ya look at those suckers, rimmed in green and purple? She’s driving me crazy.

            Witha plopped down beside him. “So what’s so important that you have to interrupt my third-stomach digestion?”

            Zork pointed to an object in the center of his observation screen, his tentacles dancing over an array of buttons and switches. “Haven’t you seen GOP2020 before? I’ve been watching it for over a pugburp.”

            “Of course I’ve been tracking it. I’m not some worm like your last assistant.”

            “What do you notice that’s different about its trajectory?”

            Witha stared at the screen, her beak chattering as she adjusted the controls. Finally, she looked at Zork, her forward eyes showing bewilderment. “I…I just checked on that rock a couple of diptwangs ago. It was headed toward the gap between our suns.”

            Zork farted his impatience. “I know all that. But where is it heading now?”

            “I…I can’t believe it. Astro-bombs don’t change course like that.”

            “Check its speed.”

            Witha worked more dials. “It’s moving at 70,000 marfarks per diptwang, range is 240,800 marfarks. At its current speed it’ll…it’ll collide with Frigyou in 3.44 diptwangs.

            They stared at the screen without speaking. The brilliant purple of Witha’s suckers faded to a dull gray. Zork felt his own hide stiffen with fear.

            “How big is this thing?” he asked.

            Witha studied the screens. “It’s shaped like a shipspat tube sponge, about 10 marfarks in diameter and about 60 long.”

            “Ah fugert,” Zork muttered, “that’s a planet killer.”

            “Shouldn’t we notify the Science Council?”

            Zork sighed and wrapped his tentacles around his head, groaning. “What good would that do? There’s no time. We can send up a drone to observe, but that’s about all.”

            “How long will that take?” Witha asked.

            “About a diptwang, maybe a little longer. Just do it.”

            Zork sucked in a deep breath, his tentacles quivering, and watched the screen as Witha worked the controls. A silver launch tub pushed up at the edge of the observatory grounds. Witha programmed the drone’s intercept course. With a loud explosion, the rocket shot into Frigyou’s yellow sky and streaked toward the planet’s binary suns before disappearing from view. The astrophysicists tracked the rocket’s progress. In a depressingly short time, the drone circled GOP2020 and began sending back visuals.

            “What the clamfug is that?” Zork groaned and pointed to some kind of white machine resting neatly on the astro-bomb.

            Witha enlarged the screen image. “It appears to be some type of crude spacecraft. Its markings aren’t anything I’ve ever seen. Let me scan our records.”

            She slid to another bank of controls and worked at break-tentacle speed. “We have never encountered anything like that.”

            “Can you reverse engineer its trajectory before its recent diversion and tell where it came from?”

            “Yes, give me a moment.”

            “We don’t have many moments left.”

            “For craplet sake, Professor, give me a break here.”

            “Sorry.”

            Witha keyed her voice microphone and muttered a series of commands. Complicated mathematical symbols and equations flashed across her screen until replaced with a map of the galaxy with a circle drawn around a particular star and its planets.

            Witha sighed. “As near as I can figure, the astro-bomb was directed toward us from the third of eight planets that orbit this star.” She pointed to a bright dot on the map. “It’s on the outer segment of a spiral arm of our galaxy.”

            “What do we know about that planet?”

            “Not much. But from its distance to us, it must be inhabited by a civilization that developed some form of hyper drive. Otherwise, at its current speed, the astro-bomb would have taken over 20,000 pugburps to get here.”

            “What else can you tell me?”

            “What does it matter, Professor? We’ll soon be incinerated, all of us on Frigyou, and maybe even those on our satellite colonies.”

            “Science, Witha, science. Inquiring minds need to know.”

            The astro-bomb had grown in size on the monitoring screen as it neared the outer edge of Frigyou’s atmosphere. Witha continued to work the controls.

            “Ah fugert, I knew something was amiss. Our records show that 200 pugburps ago, our Science Council ordered the launching of a series of rockets into that galaxy sector.”

            “What was the mission?”

            “You sure you want to know, Professor?”

            “Just tell me and hurry.”

            “In the bad old days, we were disposing our most toxic industrial wastes into space.”

            “What kind of wastes?”

            “Mostly spent fissionable material, but also…”

            “Come on, come on, tell me.”

            “We sent them our amassed bodily waste, our sqatext!”

            Zork groaned. “Whose bright idea was that?”

            “Some long-dead politician, I’m sure. It was cheaper than disposing of it here on Frigyou.”

            “So, the…the astro-bomb is payback for our past mistakes?”

            “That would be my guess. But I can’t be sure, and in a short time it won’t matter. But I’m still curious about one thing.”

            “What’s that?” Zork asked.

            “That red, white, and blue symbol on the alien spacecraft is unique. But I couldn’t find a match in our records. Whoever they are must have one hell of a mean streak.”

            The two Frigyouians moved from their perches to the large window looking out onto the observatory grounds and the scarlet plains beyond. A new sun came to life, burning almost as bright as their own. It shot across the glowing yellow sky, trailing streamers of vermillion and greenish gold. Zork and Witha wrapped each other in their tentacles and watched their planet dissolve before them, adding even more waste to the galaxy.

Terry Sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his artist-poet wife (his in-house editor) and two plump cats (his in-house critics). He writes full time, producing short stories, essays, poems, and novels. Since 2005, his short stories have been accepted more than 360 times by commercial and academic journals, magazines, and anthologies including The Potomac Review, The Bryant Literary Review, and Shenandoah. He was nominated twice for Pushcart Prizes and once for inclusion in Best of the Net anthology. His stories have been listed among “The Most Popular Contemporary Fiction of 2017” by the Saturday Evening Post. Terry is a retired urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist who once played with a symphony orchestra backing up jazz legend George Shearing.

Art by Jack Roberts