Space station Zeta Orionis was, it must be admitted, a strange place. Not only was it located on the far fringes of known space, many light years from Earth, it also had been designed by an exceedingly eccentric architect known only by his initials, NTBFW. This man, or woman—no one was sure which—must have had a grudge against the conglomerate that commissioned the station, because it was designed and built in such a way that it resembled an obese chihuahua. It was well known at the time that the CEO of the conglomerate, Ms. Francine von Chew, had accidentally killed just such a pet when she forgot to outfit the dog in its custom tailored space suit, and the dog—Pepe—subsequently exploded when Ms. von Chew left her gigantic mansion on Mars to take Pepe for a walk. Pepe, poor soul, didn’t get more than about ten feet from the door. The incident, which left Ms. von Chew covered in blood and blobs of chihuahua fat, was a painful memory for her, one she ardently wished to forget, and consequently NTBFW’s design could only have been intended as a deliberate insult to her.

Ms. von Chew, however, never saw the completed station—perhaps fortunately for the architect—because she herself died only a few months after Pepe. In a case of bizarre parallelism, she too exploded after inexplicably forgetting to put on her own space suit one day when leaving her mansion to, as she always put it—rather oddly—”get some air.” Her death, as well as the death of the beloved Pepe before her, prompted the authorities on Mars to—in a somewhat controversial move—post literally thousands of warnings all over Mars asking residents “Are YOU wearing your SPACE SUIT today?” These signs were controversial because not only was their efficacy highly doubtful, but they also tended to remind the wealthy residents that they really shouldn’t have been living in such a hostile environment in the first place, and were only doing so because, wealthy as they were, they nevertheless could not afford to live on Earth itself.

But to return to space station Zeta Orionis—or, well, Pepe, as most people called it—not only was its appearance eccentric, so also was its internal arrangements. In fact, the place resembled nothing so much as a giant rat maze—corridors twisted and turned, doubled back on themselves, or ended in blank walls. Conference rooms, advertised with signs and arrows, couldn’t be found, their existence apparently purely theoretical. Elevators went up and down but opened on different levels at different times, according to what the station’s mathematician calculated was a differential equation of fearsome complexity. Maps of the corridors were, of course, produced, along with the mathematician’s calculations regarding the elevators, but these were all so complicated—consisting of many pages—as to be virtually useless. Most people just got around by trial and error, and didn’t use the maps at all, except perhaps as emergency toilet paper.

The Director of the station, Tiberius Bonefish, known as “Boney” because of his large, bald, cranium, had attempted over the years to correct these problems, mainly by simply blasting new, straight corridors right through the existing ones, as if he were Baron von Haussmann in nineteenth century Paris, but he had to stop this practice when his engineers warned him that the new corridors weakened the overall structure of the station, potentially leading to its imminent collapse. Needless to say, Boney, who had no desire to suffer the ignominious fate of being crushed inside Pepe’s bloated stomach, heeded their advice. The result being that only two through corridors were actually completed. A third, which would have led directly from Boney’s quarters to the station’s famous tequila bar, had to be abandoned, much to Boney’s chagrin.

These structural difficulties, annoying as they were, were by no means Boney’s only problem. He also had to endure an obsolete computer system which, due to an error in programming that no one seemed able to correct, at random intervals maliciously switched his appointments with that of a hairdresser living on the far side of the station. This meant that, on several occasions, Boney found himself, after an arduous journey through the station’s labyrinthine corridors, meeting someone he thought was going to be his chief engineer or his personnel officer but who instead turned out to be either an elderly woman wanting a permanent or a teenager wanting their hair dyed purple. Meanwhile, his chief engineer or his personnel officer would be back in Boney’s office wondering why Boney had scheduled them to meet with a hairdresser. (Usually, whoever it was just ended up getting a trim because, well, why not?)

It was, in fact, after just one such occurrence that Boney learned of what would turn out to be his most urgent problem. He had just made it back to his office when he found himself confronted by the station’s lead astrophysicist, Ms. Lydia Blog. Ms. Blog, a petite woman of about forty with stringy yellow hair and an annoying habit of repeating everything that was said to her, told him that a huge ion storm of unknown origin had been identified on long range scanners headed directly toward the station. Boney, frustrated by the long trip across the station and back, and by his inability to fix the various problems he seemed always to encounter, received the news by pounding his forehead repeatedly against the surface of his desk. Ms. Blog, witnessing this behavior, gasped in amazement and concern, but she needn’t have worried. True to his nickname, Boney’s broad forehead was unusually thick and sturdy. In fact, had Ms. Blog been able to closely study Boney’s office and living quarters, she would have discovered a number of dents in the bulkheads at approximately the height of Boney’s head, the residue of previous encounters between Boney’s remarkably resilient cranium and the somewhat less sturdy material of which Pepe had been made. Indeed, many objects and surfaces throughout the station bore evidence of such encounters—the vending machines in the lounge, in particular, were battered almost beyond recognition.

Ms. Blog, once the pounding had ceased and she had recovered her composure, asked Boney what they should do to prepare for the storm. In reply, Boney instructed her to take one of the station’s flyers and survey the approaching storm from close quarters in order to ascertain more precisely its strength, nature, and extent. Ms. Blog, after repeating this instruction back to Boney (thereby irritating him to the point of nearly precipitating another episode of head pounding), obediently did as he instructed. She retrieved one of the station’s aging flyers and headed out towards the storm. Unfortunately for her, however, the storm proved to be far more powerful than her initial calculations had indicated. As a result, as she neared the storm in the small flyer, she became caught in a swirling vortex of plasma that completely disabled the ship’s systems, spun it about, and blasted her millions of miles away into a hitherto unknown region of space, where she crash-landed on a large, rocky planet that happened to be the home world of an ancient, alien civilization.

Given this unfortunate circumstance, Ms. Blog might be assumed to have suffered some terrible horror-film fate, such as, perhaps, being forced into a bizarre form of alien sexual slavery, or simply being eaten, but in fact no such hackneyed result occurred. The aliens, it turned out, were no more ferocious, and no larger, than crickets. When Ms. Blog exited her ruined space ship, she accidentally stepped on and partially crushed an entire alien city, as a result of which the aliens wanted nothing to do with her. Being an industrious and highly intelligent race, they rapidly repaired her ship and, by frantically waving their antennae, managed to herd her back into it and thereby facilitated her escape. (There was, it should be noted, a dissident faction among the aliens that argued she was an invader who should be, in fact, eaten, but this minority was considered fanatical and not taken seriously.) Thus, Ms. Blog eventually made it back to the comforting confines of space station Pepe, but without any useful data. Her report to Boney ultimately consisted of a single sentence: “its a real whopper, sir.”

At the time he received this communication (via an implant he had in his ear), Boney was, somewhat irresponsibly, holed up in a private booth in the back of the tequila bar having sex with one of the waitresses, a woman of unusually muscular physique known as Hercules. Irritated and alarmed by the news, he instinctively sought a nearby object on which to bang his head, but all that was readily available was Hercules’s own head, which Boney, with an effort, refrained from striking on the grounds that doing so would likely have caused Hercules to crush him with her titanic thighs. By way of compensation, Hercules offered to let him smack her bottom instead, saying “its as good as steel, baby,” but Boney declined because, he explained, striking her there with his head would not only be logistically challenging but also not very satisfactory. Hercules, vaguely disappointed, nevertheless conceded the point and Boney reluctantly took his leave. Zipping up his pants, he made his way back through the bar, where he paused briefly to down several shots, and then headed woozily toward his office, wishing along the way that he had built the direct line he had planned between the two, despite his engineer’s warnings. As it was, it took him more than an hour to get back, partly because he made the mistake of taking one of the elevators on a day when, according to the mathematician’s calculations, it didn’t go anywhere at all, but simply remained in place for fifteen minutes with the doors closed.

Once finally back in his office, Boney summoned his executive team for an emergency meeting. His intent was to develop a plan for surviving the coming storm, but unfortunately his team radically disagreed regarding the proper course of action. His chief engineer, a reclusive man with a heavy German accent and a passion for children’s literature, insisted that they had to evacuate the station, which he claimed could be accomplished by constructing a giant orange ball in which the inhabitants of the station could be placed and then carried away to safety by the station’s flyers, a la James and the Giant Peach. This weird idea gained virtually no support, however, because there was no time to construct such a ball and no way to supply it with the food, water, and air it would need to support the station’s personnel. (As it turned out, the chief engineer himself did evacuate the station in just this way, with himself in a flyer and his beloved pet beagle “Johan” in a peach-like pod dangling below. Together, they left the station just before the storm hit and disappeared into the surrounding nebula. Although they were never seen again, rumors circulated for years afterwards that Johan, at least, had miraculously survived the storm and was living on a far distant planet inhabited by a race of intelligent crickets. However, this was never verified.)

The other members of the team, including Lydia Blog, thought that the station could withstand the storm, but they differed sharply in how best to fortify it and otherwise get prepared. Steel being far too heavy and bulky to be transported to the far reaches of the galaxy, Pepe had been constructed of an expanding foam which, when extruded, basically resembled paper mache, albeit reinforced with a graphite matrix. Spare barrels of this foam remained in the station’s storage bay where it was occasionally used for repairs (as well as, incidentally, for school projects, Halloween costumes, teen age pranks, and even, by some brave souls, as a suppository.) Lydia advocated simply adding more of this foam to the station’s exterior. She contended that this would not only strengthen the station but have the added benefit of making the station look slightly less like that unfortunate chihuahua, Pepe. The idea thus appealed strongly to Boney and, when Lydia articulated it, he actually lifted his head momentarily from where he was banging it on his desk and almost smiled. Unfortunately, however, the idea had to be nixed when the supply officer reported that the barrels of foam in the storage bay had been entirely used up just the week before by a troupe of itinerant actors who used it to construct an elaborate set in which they staged the popular comedy “Kiss My Ass, Kate.”

Suffice it to say that, ultimately, the exec team failed to agree on any particular course of action, and each thereafter pursued his own preparations. This might have been considered unfortunate, if not actually dangerous under the circumstances, but it was by no means unusual—Boney’s exec team seldom agreed on anything, not even what they would have for lunch. In Boney’s case, his preparations amounted to little more than stockpiling his office with as many bottles of tequila as he could carry and attempting to persuade Hercules to join him there. Unfortunately for Boney, Hercules had to decline his offer because she was, when he contacted her, trapped under a 400 pound barbell she had unwisely attempted to bench press. Apparently, Hercules was of the belief that, if only she were strong enough, she could hold the station together herself by brute force, as if she were Atlas. She was not freed from her predicament until the storm hit when, in a bizarre sequence of events, the floor underneath her bench collapsed, dumping her into the apartment below where she ended up, amidst a cloud of dust, in the arms of an elderly biologist who, for some reason, began examining her teeth, apparently in the mistaken belief that she was an extraterrestrial. (Reportedly, the man said “you’re very well endowed, for an alien.” To which Hercules replied, “no shit, jack.”)

Boney, meanwhile, having worked partway through his first bottle of El Jefe Gold, instructed the station computer to issue a general alert, as the storm was then only an hour or so away. The computer, however, maliciously reinterpreted his request so that, instead of a warning, it issued a general call for all personnel to meet in the station’s largest conference room where, it said, Boney would arm wrestle any and all comers. This announcement was met with considerable skepticism by most of the station personnel, since not only was it absurd, it also was well known that Boney, despite the fearsome character of his forehead, was otherwise physically a wimp. Consequently, everyone ignored it, with the exception of a handful of rather thick-headed mechanics who bore a grudge against Boney because he had, after suffering some staggering losses, outlawed their weekly poker games. These men saw it as an opportunity to revenge themselves, if not on Boney as a whole, at least on his arm. They therefore headed in the direction of the conference room, pulling up their shirt sleeves as they went. (The conference room, incidentally, was known facetiously as “the Brain,” because it was located in an area of the station corresponding not, as one might expect, to Pepe’s head, but to his genitals. Pepe, perhaps frustrated by the lack of other dogs on Mars, was known to hump just about anything that came his way. In fact, on his last, fatal, walk, he was in the act of humping a paving stone when he exploded.)

Because of these miscommunications and farcical errors, the station was not well prepared when the storm hit. In fact, most of the station’s residents were caught completely off guard. One young resident, who happened to be looking out a viewing port at the time, saw the storm coming but mistakenly thought it was an approaching cloud of alien space locusts which, coincidentally, he had been reading about just moments before in a pulpy science fiction magazine. Thus, he jumped up and ran out into the corridor screaming “we’re being invaded, we’re being invaded! Close the hatches!” He tried to make his way to a nearby storage locker where there were some cans of insecticide, but the storm arrived before he got there, causing the bulkhead next to him to collapse and knocking him unconscious. He awoke some days later in the medical ward where, apparently still addled, he kept asking his doctors, to their consternation, where “the hoppers” were.

His experience was by no means unusual either. The storm shorted out the station’s electrical systems, leaving everyone in the dark and stranding some unfortunate souls for hours in the station’s elevators. As the station shook violently, people ran frantically from one place to another, bumping into the walls as well as each other and, in some cases, ending up on the floor, tangled in each other’s arms, their clothes partially torn off. (What with the darkness and the vibration, and the sense that the world was ending, more than a few of these encounters became quite heated, with the result that there was a noticeable uptick in births on the station approximately nine months later.) Pepe’s left rear leg got completely blown off, nearly taking with it the mechanics waiting in the Brain for the arm wrestling to begin. Wall units and monitors throughout the station exploded, showering some people with glass and even setting one woman’s hair on fire.

Ms. Lydia Blog, who had, weirdly, decided to ride out the storm naked in her bathtub, listening to a tape of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyrie, narrowly escaped electrocution when the antique “boom box” (as she had read the device was called) on which the tape was playing fell off its shelf into the water. Fortunately for her, the device was so old and decrepit the electrical charge it carried was minimal. All she experienced was a mild, not entirely unpleasant, shock. The shock did cause her stringy yellow hair to stand permanently on end, giving her a frightful appearance, as if she were wearing a broom on her head, but she actually came, in time, to appreciate the look. She found that people took her much more seriously with it than they had before—often, in fact, scurrying out of the room as soon as she entered, muttering “yes, ma’am, whatever you want, no problem.”

Boney, for his part, was, at the height of the storm, standing precariously on top of his desk, seriously drunk and alternately pounding his forehead with his hands and swilling liberally from his second bottle of El Jefe Gold. Motivated by an obscure sense of responsibility for the station mingled with anger at the injustice of his fate, he at one point reached upward with outstretched arms and began yelling incoherent curses into the darkness, for some reason adopting a faux Irish accent in the process. “Bastard!,” he screamed, “son of a whore’s tomcat! Do ya dare to winkle me heinie? I’ll show you, ya foul sucking teat of a dead sheep!” Ironically, just as he was yelling this, Hercules—who had by then managed to escape from the biologist with the tooth fetish, and had fought her way through the station’s corridors, sometimes bodily throwing people aside along the way—arrived not, as she had expected, at the door of Boney’s office, but at a small anteroom adjacent thereto. Whereupon, driven by desperation and taking a cue from Boney himself, she repeatedly smashed her head with all her considerable strength directly into the wall, eventually causing the wall to buckle and her head, a bit bloodied, to emerge on the far side where, grinning triumphantly, she began screaming along with Boney.

Boney, in his drunken stupor, saw by the dim light of an emergency flare what appeared to be a foreign object burst through the wall of his office and mistook it for a catastrophic breach of the station’s hull. Reacting as quickly as his inebriated state would permit, he half-fell, half-jumped down off his desk and smashed his three quarters empty bottle of El Jefe Gold on top of Hercules’s skull, in what was apparently an effort to seal the rupture. This caused Hercules to collapse backwards unconscious into the anteroom, while Boney himself stared in disbelief at the hole in the hall she had created. He did not, however, stare for long, because an instant later a massive shock wave struck the station and he fell backwards, striking the back of his head on the edge of his desk and rendering himself unconscious. (The back of Boney’s head, unlike the front, was not heavily armored with bone.)

In the end, the station survived the storm—damaged but intact (except for Pepe’s left rear leg, which ended up in orbit around a distant planet where it was eyed hungrily by the local carnivores.) The extruded foam of which the station was made turned out to be an ideal material. It was flexible enough to move with the storm while at the same time rigid enough not to be torn apart. Moreover, the many corridors winding backwards and forwards through the station had the effect of strengthening it, proving that the designer, NTBFW—contrary to what most people thought—knew what he (or she) was doing. When Boney woke up, the storm was over. His office was in chaos and he had a terrific headache, but he was whole and, with the exception of a painful bump on the back of his head, uninjured. As he looked about, taking stock of his situation, he noticed the ragged hole Hercules had made in the wall of his office. Gazing through it, he observed her lying still unconscious on the floor of the anteroom next door. The sight was a bit of a shock, as he had no memory of their encounter during the storm. Concerned, he staggered out of his office and, after some initial confusion about which way to go, made his way around into the anteroom, where he knelt at her side. When she awoke a few minutes later, she gazed blearily up at his broad, somewhat bumpy, forehead, and said the first thing that popped into her mind, which was “what the hell does ‘winkle me heinie’ mean?”

Boney—unaware of what she was referring to—just shrugged. Then he helped her up and together they limped out into the hall and began making plans to put the station back together. One positive from the storm, which didn’t emerge until some days later, was that the station had been so shaken and twisted by the storm’s powerful magnetic fields that it no longer resembled poor Pepe. Instead, it now vaguely resembled a tequila bottle and consequently was rechristened “El Jefe,” a fact which Boney had mixed feelings about. All Hercules had to say about it, though, was “salud!”

————

T. J. Young is a writer living in Seattle, Washington. After years as an environmental attorney, he now pursues the far more lucrative profession of creative writing. He occasionally travels to the Andromeda galaxy in search of material, but otherwise spends most of his time reading. He is married with three superhero children.