yuvi zalkow

This science fiction story takes place on Uranus. Stories never take place on Uranus. But this one does. And it does so without a lick of mockery for the planet’s name, which typically finds itself in more joke books than scientific journals.

The hero of our story arrives on Uranus for one simple reason: to save our solar system. Our hero is so famous that even an alien stationed on Uranus wants to meet him. In real life, our hero is a nobody who sits around in his torn underwear, trying to write a novel about a man trying to write a novel. But instead, he ends up writing silly stories about Uranus. In real life, this man is timid and scared, he weeps at night, he has problems communicating. In real life, our hero is impotent when it relates to the bedroom and his wife. But in this science fiction story, our hero is blond and bold and beautiful. He is virile, he is a brilliant tactician, and he is our last hope for mankind. Our hero is the most famous political advisor on Earth and now he has one hour to negotiate with a JoLan alien creature who is tasked with blowing up our solar system. This creature is the last of his species to remain behind when the rest have cleared town, so to speak.

It is worth mentioning that JoLans look to us like monkeys. This is by design. It was the 1959 flight when we launched Able and Baker, a rhesus monkey and a squirrel monkey respectively, into space that the JoLans first noticed our solar system and our cute little space program. So the JoLans sent their first fleet of negotiators in the form of rhesus monkeys. As far as we could tell, they were identical to monkeys, arriving even with fleas in their hair. We would never have been able to distinguish them from our own monkeys -- except that they could talk. And that sight looked as laughable as the special effects in Planet of the Apes. But these JoLans were not jokers.

At first, the JoLans inhabited Uranus. Thousands of them. And they waited. They waited for our knowledge to progress to a point that merited communication. But after 200 years, they grew impatient with our slow progress. “They should have kept the monkeys in charge of the space program,” the JoLan negotiators agreed...

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