Jim Baen's Universe

Science Fiction Stories

Ted

Written by Tom Van Natta

Illustrated by Daniel Monroe

I know my son will ask me someday, so I had to write this down. No one will believe it —and that's okay. But he deserves to know the truth, as strange as it is. It had started out as a fairly normal Friday. . . .

****

"Sam, I don't think we can be together anymore. I just can't date a man who carries around a stuffed animal." Marie hit me with it after work, while we stood together beside my old van in the employee parking lot.

I stared at her with my mouth hanging open. We had plans together that evening.

"I'm going home alone tonight," she continued. "Here's your ring back."

Marie was dark haired, blue eyed, long and lean, and the best-looking girl at the company. We'd been dating since her first week there, almost a year ago. We got along pretty well; I helped loosen her up and she toned me down a little, a good fit. We weren't engaged exactly, but I'd given her a "steady ring" like we were high-schoolers. It made her happy, and me too.

I didn't know what to say. I knew calling her would do no good; she didn't answer me half the time when we were on good terms, and never when we'd had a little spat. I'd need to wait for her to cool down—she could be persuaded sometimes, but never pushed.

****

Marie's annoyance with me began about six months before, when I flipped a coin into a bottle at the company picnic and won a big white stuffed teddy bear. I mean BIG: we were the same height when seated, though it had short arms and legs. I couldn't carry it around with me, so I took it back to my van and put it in the passenger seat. Lots of people saw me carrying it, and many more saw it in my van, so I got razzed about it a bit. "Hey Sam, who was that big fat one I saw you with?" and stuff like that. It's a big company, and being in Marketing, I knew a lot of people there. Most of them had a comment, all in fun.

So I gave it back to them: "Oh, you mean Ted. No, don't call him Teddy. He's my pal. Ginny has cats, Dave has dogs. I've got Ted." Somehow over the next few weeks he never quite left the van; he was usually buckled into one seat or another as I drove around. One of the guys in the copy room made up a yellow, diamond-shaped "Bear On Board" sign, copying the then-popular "Baby On Board" signs, and stuck it in a back window.

It went on from there. I had the big van and didn't drink much, so I was the driver a lot. We'd go to a football game, get there early to cook hot dogs and drink beer in the parking lot, and Ted was always with us. Many fun pictures were taken with Ted drinking beer, feeling up the girls, suntanning in a lawn chair. His eyes could be rotated and his tongue had some side-to-side adjustment, so he could look happy, leering, or cross-eyed drunk. All the girls wanted their pictures taken with Ted.

My boss was a good-natured sort, and encouraged lighthearted personal notes at the bottom of the status reports we submitted each week. So after the work-related items, Ginny told about her cats, Frank told what new words his kid had learned, and I wrote about Ted:

• "Ted thought he was losing weight despite his beer intake. He's broadened his diet to include nylon dog bones and styrofoam peanuts."

• "Someone at the ball game gave Ted a hot dog on a plastic plate. He ate it, said it was delicious, but gave back the hot dog."

• (Scheduled for delivery when I was on vacation:) "sam wernt heree to do hte ststtus reprts so me ted is doin them. nothhing much happned this week except for tha chicago bears and cubs both winnin a lot but ucla bruins losst. go bear teams go. sorry for baad typin. is hard wif paws."

• "Ted saw a special on TV about polar bears hunting seals beneath the ice. He wants to go to the mall and hunt for stuffed seals at the toy store. I didn't have the heart to tell him . . ."

And so forth. Ted emerged through these snippets as a blue collar sports fan (especially a fan of teams with bear mascots), not too bright, well-meaning but prone to drink and mild debauchery, with a diet of plastics and beer. Everything was all fun and games, and everyone liked Ted—except for Marie.

Marie thought that a guy having a stuffed animal—even a macho one like Ted ("Don't call me Teddy")—was childish. Dumb even. So we quarreled about it a bit, nothing too serious. She insisted we take her car whenever possible, because she didn't want to be seen in Sam's Bear Van. And she had this way of rolling her eyes when my friends started talking about setting up Ted for some new pictures. But I didn't guess how strongly she felt until she gave the ring back.

That night, I had agreed to drive six folks from work to a club to see a touring band—I'd gone to college with the drummer and we had kept in touch. Since I was the one who had set it up weeks before, I had to go, even without Marie. So it ended up three couples in the back, and me and Ted up front. The band played sort of hippie jam music, not bad, but meandering. "Twenty minutes of great music squeezed into two hours," was how I described it, "but the twenty minutes are worth it."

I still didn't know what to think about Marie. Maybe she just wanted Ted to be gone, maybe we weren't as good a fit as I thought, maybe it was just a bad day at work. I listened to the music, nursed my beer, met the band and talked to the drummer between sets, and tried to enjoy myself. It almost worked.

The band and I all sat around a big table between sets, and I must have drunk someone else's beer, because I got dosed with some sort of psychedelic drug. I didn't really recognize it at first, but after a while I figured out what was starting to happen to my head. (I don't want to go into the details, but I will say that I went to a California beach college, so it wasn't a completely novel experience.) Oh, shit! I needed to get out of there. It was late and my riders looked tired, so they all agreed when I suggested we go; I was hoping to get everyone home before the dose fully kicked in. Our company had a strict drug-testing policy, so I didn't want to say anything to my co-workers, and the effect really wasn't so strong—at least not yet. I could cope.

The drive home was intense. I had to drive like a robot, because all my instincts were gone and I really didn't remember how to drive. Stay in lane. Check speed. Keep it straight. Check lane. Speed. Red light, stop carefully, don't jerk. Wait. Green light, go. Worse, I thought I saw a flying saucer hovering around the van as I drove down one long straight road. I almost pointed it out to my passengers but decided that was a bad idea, and tried to pay attention to my driving and not the weird things I was seeing.

Luckily I made it back to the company parking lot without hitting anything. Everyone piled out and I drove on home, out to the edge of town where my place was. I made it there okay too, but the world had turned pretty weird inside my head by that point. I went inside and lay down on the bed. The room started to spin, so I opened my eyes to steady things. I decided to get up again when the ceiling began to twist into strange shapes. Whatever psychedelic was in the beer I drank was pretty powerful; I tried to recall coping strategies. If I just kept busy I would be okay. I needed somebody to talk to, but it was late, my friends had all gone home, and my girlfriend had left me.

Luckily, I still had Ted. I gathered up my notebook filled with status report items about Ted and Ted pictures, and went back out to the van. I plopped down in the driver's seat next to my big friend, who was still sitting in the front passenger's spot. I looked at the Ted pictures, read about his exploits, and talked to him about Marie—I'm not sure he answered back, but I'm not sure he didn't, either. I suppose I eventually drifted off into some sort of fugue state approaching slumber.

It was exactly 3:42 a.m. when the crash came—I learned this later because I found the van's broken clock. Something sliced through the right front corner of the van, missing me by inches. The area where Ted sat was completely disintegrated. Missing. Gone.

Whatever had hit us bounced up into the air a bit, then settled back down near the van. From the driver's seat I could see it was, no lie, a saucer. A flying saucer. Not a UFO, because I could identify it, and it was definitely a flying saucer. Like from the movies. I was hallucinating, of course. But when I blinked my eyes again it was still there, and still unchanged. Wisps of smoke came off the saucer, and they twisted into strange shapes I knew only I could see, so the drug hadn't entirely worn off. But the saucer was there, big as life. And a ramp was slowly folding down from it.

I looked at my van, or what was left of it. A big crescent-shaped piece was missing from the middle of the front grill to the back of the side door. There was some twisted metal at the edge of the missing area, but the bulk of it was gone. The whole front passenger area, with Ted in it, was sheared away and just gone. I was scared. I was angry too, and the angry part won.

I got out of the van and waited for the ramp to finish coming down. There were two, uh, creatures at the top of the ramp. They were bipedal, had big eyes and weak chins, and looked sort of like the little green men from sci-fi movies, but their skin was pink and they wore overalls. They were about Ted's height, but not so fat.

Now I know that the first words spoken to an alien race should be something like "Welcome to Earth" or "We hope you come in peace" or even "Klaatu barada nikto" but . . . well, sorry. The first words I said were "You bastards! You killed Ted!" Maybe I should have thought about future intergalactic relations first, but I was mad.

One of the two said "What?" and the other said "We apologize," so I knew they understood me. The first one said, "Our instruments show we destroyed no life form with a weight over one gram." The other said, "We can repair your vehicle." The two spoke with exactly the same voice, and their mouths didn't move, so something else was generating the voice—but it was pretty clear.

I laid into them good. I yelled and screamed, told them they'd just killed my best friend. I swore at them, told them that Ted weighed much more than a gram and their instruments were bad. I called them demon murderers from another planet. At one point I forced them to look at the notebook full of Ted pictures. They tried to talk but I did almost all the talking—yelling, really. If those aliens hadn't learned swear words from our airwaves, they learned them from me that night.

Finally I forced the Ted notebook into their unwilling hands (they had three fingers and a thumb, I noted) and went back inside my house and slammed the door.

I lived in a converted outbuilding on part of an old farm, with trees close and the neighbors far, so probably no one heard the crash and my ranting in the middle of the night—or at least if they did, they didn't call the cops. I went down to the basement to look for my good camera, and sat on the edge of the guest bed I keep down there . . . and that's all I remember.

****

When I woke up, light was streaming through the tiny basement window and my tongue felt like a long-dead fish. I remembered the last night in flashes, like a montage of still frames. Marie, giving her ring back. The band, the dosing. Talking to Ted in the van. And, oh yes, the flying-fricking-saucer. My god, how messed up was I to hallucinate that? Did I crash the van?

I staggered upstairs to the kitchen. My head hurt, and my brain barely worked. I managed to find the door, opened it and looked outside. The van was missing, and there was a big circular dent in the lawn Oh my god. . . .

Numbly, I went outside and looked around. No van, but I did find its clock in the shrubs next to the house. So I went back inside, trying to get my fuzzy brain into gear. Should I report the van stolen or wait a bit? Should I call Marie? I grabbed a jar of orange juice from the fridge and stumbled into the living room to plop on the couch and have a think.

But the couch was taken. Ted was there. He was munching on styrofoam peanuts from the bag in the closet, and drinking a beer. He said, "Hi, Sam. How are you feeling? Tough night last night." He looked just the same as I remembered, though his fur was a little cleaner and the red ribbon around his neck (the only thing he wore) was less wilted.

I collapsed into the easy chair. Ted ate another peanut—he had fingerlike protrusions from his paws, kind of like a hand inside a sock—and turned to look at me. "How you doing? You all right?" His voice was an oddly resonant baritone.

"I'm okay, Ted.