Holiday Travel

When I got up this morning, there was a note by my computer. It read: Go to Ned's today. These notes always freak me out a little.; the ones about Ned, I mean. I never know where or when they are coming from. Did Nina leave me the note, this morning, as a reminder or did I leave it for myself last night or am I going to leave it for me to find after my trip to Ned's?

You see, Ned is one of those "stranded aliens" that you never read about. Back in the 1950's we had what you could call some "close encounters." Most aliens races have a very strong entrepreneurial spirit, have very long life spans and, apparently, are rather gullible. So when a few of them dropped by to see where we were in our race-to-space, they looked at our magazines (like Popular Science and Astounding Stories) and dropped into our movie theaters and saw movies like The Angry Red Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still. And they believed that we were just around the corner from interplanetary space travel, teleportation rays and flying cars. So a few of them told their friends to "go on ahead", they would catch up when we did.

They are still waiting.

In the mean time, they had to make a living. So, using the intergalactic version of the Swiss army knife, a few of them set up shop performing various necessary functions. My friend Ned has a travel agency.

My wife and I are going to visit our son and daughter-in-law in Ohio for Thanksgiving. Our older son and his family will be driving in from Colorado. We were going to drive but decided to go through Ned's instead.

Ned doesn't have a real impressive . . . ahh . . . I guess you would call it -- presentation. In fact, he has no presentation. Basically, he's a piss-bum at the bus station. He doesn't charge much for his services and his alien metabolism absolutely thrives on cheap wine. He wears loose clothing to cover his extra stuff and a certain . . . miasma floats around him, creating a wall of stink few people are willing to penetrate. Nobody looks too closely at Ned.

As I sat next to him, a handkerchief pressed to my face, I explained our travel plans. We negotiated a fee (three bottles) and he continued with his spiel. "You do realize the cost of your travel plans?" he asked. His rheumy brown eyes moistening the loose skin under them.

"Yes," I thought I was repeating myself. "Three bottles."

"No, not that!" he said impatiently. "I mean the COST. The trade off. The balance of nature."

"Uh, could you run it by me again. You dealt with my wife the last time. She wasn't clear on all the details." I explained

Ned hitched himself up a little higher in the orange plastic scoop chair and, with the air of a professor fallen on hard times, said, "Nothing in the universe is free. Motion, mass, energy, time all have counterbalancing components. Time travel, for instance, requires an equal mass sent in the opposite direction for an equal period of time. It is so complicated to calculate that few people bother." He paused to take a swig from a bottle wrapped in a paper bag, wiped his rubbery lips with his coat sleeve, and continued.

"Your trip to Cleveland will have similar consequences. What you are asking for is instantaneous transportation, in your vehicle, from your driveway to your son's neighborhood. Correct?"

"Yes" I answered. It sounded weird when he said it.

"Ah huh." he replied. "This will take a tremendous amount of energy and a balancing will have to occur."

"What kind of balancing?" I asked.

"Well, there is only so much energy available at any given time. If you consume a lot of it, there is that much less available for everyone else. In simpler terms, if you get there faster, other people will have to travel slower. But there is the dampening/averaging effect that disperses the counterbalance."

"That's good, right?"

"Normally. But you want to get there instantaneously. That is very, very fast. This is going to take a helluva lot of dampening and averaging." He sat there, looking at me with those sad eyes and his Richard Nixon jowls. I think he looked sad but it was hard to tell with Ned.

"O.K.? . . ." I tried to get the conversation kick-started again.

"You really don't know what I'm talking about, do you?" he asked me.

"Maybe you better spell it out." I encouraged.

"In order to dampen and average the counterbalance of the tremendous amount of energy necessary to transport you, your wife and your car instantaneously over that distance, all other transportation in this hemisphere will virtually grind to a halt. There will be long lines and delays at every airport, highways will be packed, cities will experience gridlock and the low price of your fare (three bottles from around the corner) will be counterbalanced by higher gas prices, increased airfare and fuel costs. Many people will be late or miss their holiday altogether, relationships will end, marriages will crumble and people will lose their jobs."

"All because my wife gets a sore tushy from a long car ride?" I asked incredulously.

"Yes." he said. Staring at me.

"O.K. then," I said briskly. "Let's do it and how much for the return trip?"

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