The first thing Leon asked his abductors was whether this counted as travel time.
The taller one folded in half. The shorter one struck the ceiling and clung to a light fitting, wheezing through a row of blue slits.
“Put that in the act,” the tall one said.
“It isn’t in the act. I was carrying soup.”
Above them, the shorter alien made a sound like someone emptying cutlery into a bath.
Leon examined the clean circle where his shopping bag had been. Thirty seconds ago he had been outside his apartment. Now he stood in a spacecraft beside a poster of himself, enlarged to a size that exposed the repair in his shirt collar.
LEON BELL. FUNNIEST BEING IN THE UNIVERSE. ONE NIGHT ONLY.
They had used his passport photograph.
“Who voted?” he asked.
“I did,” said the tall alien. “I own the club.”
Her name was Plet. She had four arms, a red velvet waistcoat and the dazed happiness of someone whose unreasonable plan had worked. Her species, she explained, emitted little bursts of force when amused: an involuntary reflex, useless to imitate. The slits ran down your back, which made the direction fairly predictable. A good laugh pushed you forward. A great one required padding.
“We call it the comic impulse.”
“Of course you do.”
Plet slid six inches across the carpet.
She had found his recordings while searching for cabinet-assembly instructions. She had watched all forty-seven. Her cabinet was still in pieces. Leon was halfway through saying that some of those were very early when she produced a narrow envelope containing the exact fee listed on his booking page, in crisp banknotes.
“I understand that you prefer money.”
“I also prefer agreeing to things.”
“Yes,” said a voice from the ceiling.
The shorter alien let go. Leon caught him badly. They struck the carpet together, elbow, knee, something ring-shaped.
“This is Miv,” said Plet. “Our opening act.”
“Former opening act,” said Miv. “You’ve given my forty minutes to a mammal in walking clothes.”
Miv wore a stiff silver jacket. One side was covered in medals; the other was bare except for a little portrait pinned face inward. He righted the portrait before standing.
Leon handed back the envelope.
“Take me home.”
Plet’s waistcoat darkened. Beyond a curtain, several hundred feet stamped. Someone chanted Leon’s name with too many syllables.
“One set,” she said. “We go straight back. You will lose twenty minutes of your evening.”
“No more taking people without asking.”
Plet agreed so quickly that Leon made her repeat it without smiling. Then he took the envelope. Twenty minutes, proper money, a full room. He had worked worse clubs voluntarily.
Miv led him through the curtain, stopping to straighten a twisted hose on the end chair.
“Keep your intake clear,” he told its occupant. “I say this every night.”
“Do not lean on the red lever,” he said.
Leon glanced at it beside the stage. EMERGENCY UNDOCK.
“Is that a local joke?”
“No.”
The house was strapped into swivel chairs. Behind each chair a flexible hose led from the occupant’s back into the floor. Plet checked a pressure gauge beside the curtain, then gave Leon an extravagant thumbs-up with all four hands. Broad windows overlooked a docking bay shaped like an enormous open mouth. The club was the small spacecraft parked on its tongue.
Leon had performed at weddings. He could work with this.
He adjusted the microphone. A hundred and eighty aliens leaned forward, their hoses tightening.
“Lovely to be here by force.”
Every hose jerked. The ceiling lights dimmed.
“Usually a booker just says there’s parking.”
A roar. His passport face shook on the wall. At the back, Plet opened all four hands in delight.
Leon relaxed. There was the room. He could feel it.
He did his bit about assembling a bedside cabinet alone: the spare screw, the suspiciously smooth drawer, his conviction that furniture companies put in one unnecessary piece to keep a man humble.
“It’s been three years,” he said. “I still sleep on the floor. The cabinet looks confident, but I’m waiting it out.”
The audience exploded.
The floor dropped a foot.
A panel burst beneath the stage, flinging a silver cap into his water glass. Hot air hissed up his trouser leg. Leon stepped back and landed against the red lever.
Outside the window, the docking bay began to recede.
Miv crossed the stage in three long strides, pulled Leon upright and slapped a button beside the lever. Nothing happened. He slapped it again, less professionally.
Plet’s voice came over the house speakers.
“Remain seated. The collection tank has ruptured. Normal propulsion is unavailable.”
Leon looked down into the hole. All those hoses had fed a tank. Their evening’s laughter had been stored under his feet.
“You fly this thing on applause?”
“Laughter,” Miv said. “Applause is wind.”
Leon grabbed the microphone. “Everyone stop laughing.”
The request produced a small, nervous titter.
The spacecraft shuddered. Through the windows he saw one of the docking bay’s teeth pass quite close.
Miv held up both hands. “The tank is split. Your impulses are venting directly through the lower ports. You are moving the vessel.”
People went still. A patron in the third row clamped a napkin over his back.
Plet came running from the automatic flight cabin with a little steering wheel in one hand.
“Is that meant to come off?” Leon asked.
“Yes. I thought you might find it reassuring.”
She put it behind her back before he could answer.
They were drifting sideways across the bay’s mouth, too slowly to clear it. The upper row of teeth had begun to descend. It was a freight dock. Its enormous shutters were closing for the night.
“Ask them to wait.”
“I have. The emergency brakes are on. It’s still coming down.”
Beyond the glass, a yellow line crawled down a tooth.
Miv knelt at the ruptured panel. He pushed aside the jagged metal with a medal and traced four thick pipes.
“Manual routing still works,” he said. “They stopped fitting this on the newer models.” He checked each socket with one fingertip. “Front, rear, left, right. Give me small bursts. I can get us back onto the berth.”
Plet brought a torch. He set it beside his knee.
“You’re a pilot?” Leon asked.
“Twenty-six years.” Miv turned the little portrait outward: himself, much younger, beside a female in an identical silver jacket. “My flight instructor said I had beautiful timing. So I retired to do this.”
“She’d seen your act?”
“She’d seen my landings.”
Leon started to laugh.
“Not you,” said Miv. “You’re useless.”
He hauled a pipe into a different socket. A light above the microphone turned green.
“One small laugh.”
Leon faced the audience.
“Right. Who’s visiting from out of town?”
No one answered. Behind him, Miv spread two fingers a quarter of an inch apart.
“Anyone?”
A patron raised one arm. “I grew here.”
“In the club?”
“In that chair.”
Leon looked at the hose.
“Nice of your mother to leave you the plumbing.”
A scattering of chuckles. The stars outside shifted. Miv made a minute adjustment.
“Good. Again.”
Leon asked the patron’s occupation.
“I install private moons.”
Leon had been offered some difficult occupations, but usually in rooms that weren’t about to be bitten in half.
“For the very wealthy,” the patron explained.
“How rich do you have to be before the regular night isn’t good enough?”
A laugh, sharp and big. Miv yanked a handle. The ship rolled; everyone leaned sideways. Glasses skated across tables until their magnetic bases caught.
“Smaller,” Miv said through his teeth.
“How small?”
“A wedding where the groom has died.”
Leon turned back to the room. “Any accountants?”
Four hands rose.
“Fine. Talk among yourselves.”
The ship lurched.
“Still too large,” Miv said.
Leon wiped sweat off his face with his sleeve. He had always resented comics who claimed to have nearly died onstage.
He needed something mild. He went back to the cabinet, describing the tiny bag of dowels, the instruction drawing of a cheerful man who owned no possessions.
“Don’t let the drawer hear you!” someone shouted.
Half the house laughed. The other half shouted the same line. Miv threw himself onto the pipe, missed the valve and caught it with his second pair of hands. A tooth filled the left window.
“That was my punchline,” Leon said.
“We love that one!” called the patron.
For the first time in sixteen years, having fans was a serious professional disadvantage.
“New material,” Miv said. He had one foot wedged against the panel. “Very weak new material.”
Leon looked at Plet, who was gripping the useless steering wheel against her waistcoat. Then at the ceiling. Then at Miv, whose silver jacket was beginning to smoke against the hot pipe.
He took the torch from beside Miv’s knee and shone it on Plet.
“Our promoter, everybody. She abducted me from my own street. Didn’t even put a little card through the door. Imagine my neighbors. They’ll think I had plans.”
The green light flashed red. Leon stopped.
“Half that,” Miv gasped.
Plet slid under the panel beside him and used two arms to take his weight. With the other two she held the pipe steady.
“She paid me in advance,” Leon said. “I knew we were a long way from home.”
The lights flickered. Miv shifted a valve. The tooth began to withdraw from the window.
“Good. Hold.”
Leon held. No explanation, no nervous filler. Outside, the berth came slowly into view, a narrow bed of yellow lights. The ship continued to drift.
Miv inspected the row of sockets. His jacket’s scorched shoulder had split open.
“We need a hard braking burst. I’ll time the valve. You give me the laugh.”
Leon planted his feet. A roomful of people urgently wanted him to be funny. Every one of them watched his mouth.
His mind offered him the drawer joke.
Beyond it was the drawer joke again, louder.
“Ready?” said Miv.
“No.”
Miv’s hand hovered over the last socket. The berth lights slid beneath them.
“Leon.”
Leon looked at the steering wheel. Plet had set it on the stage. He picked it up.
“When you said we were going straight home—”
He lost the sentence. There had been a joke attached to it. Somewhere.
The front row watched with terrible tenderness.
“Oh, let me,” said Miv.
He sat upright in the wreckage, one hand still locked around the valve, and held out another for the microphone.
Leon gave it to him.
Miv waited. The yellow lights reached the middle of the window.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we will shortly be landing. Please return your human to his original upright disappointment.”
The room fired.
Miv twisted the valve. Plet braced him. Leon fell backward into the red lever, which was already down and had nothing further to contribute.
There was a bang, a long metallic scrape, and silence.
Outside the window, a yellow berth light blinked at Leon. The spacecraft had stopped. He stayed on the floor until he was sure.
Then he reached up and turned off the microphone.
No one complained.
It took Plet forty minutes to hire another ship. She offered Leon three times his fee for a return engagement. He wrote ASK FIRST on the envelope and gave her his agent’s number.
Miv had changed into an old flight suit. His comedy jacket lay across a chair, the medals blackened on one side. Leon stopped beside it.
“Beautiful timing.”
“I know,” Miv said. “It’s the forty minutes before it I have trouble with.”
Leon suggested ten minutes for the next opening set. Miv demanded twenty. They settled on twelve and a safety demonstration.
Plet would replace the tank.
Back on Earth, Leon found his shopping bag upright on the pavement. His soup had gone cold. His neighbor stood beside it in slippers, looking up.
“Spaceship,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Comedy thing?”
“Yes.”
She considered that.
“Did it pay?”
Leon showed her the envelope.
“Well,” she said. “Keep at it.”
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