Illustration: “ET Kid Gets Rocket” by Steve Cartwright (c) 2005
When the Solinarians asked me to save their planet, I told them it would cost at least $10,000,000,000,000 credits. “Plus expenses,” I added. We’d met for lunch at Hammerhead Hank’s Intergalactic Multi-Ethnic Bar and Grill, and I was eating the Telexu squid burger with pickled yenkils on the side. “Plus, it’d be nice to maybe have a city named after me, or a public holiday. But not one of those holidays nobody celebrates. I want to be the holiday everybody gets a day off work for.”
Genezel Ho, the Solinarian rep I was meeting with, was eating rice noodles with a thamboso-bat cream sauce that gives me diarrhea. He paused from the disgusting, appetite-killing slurping noises he was making and lifted his snout from the plate. “The Solinarian people do not labor as other races do,” he said, boastfully. “We are what you would call a utopian society.”
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