Sherry steps up to the machine, goes through the process, gets her envelope, followed by Joe, then Kenny.
Outside, new arrivals stand around sucking blood from the ends of their fingers, opening envelopes and reading work orders.
Kenny looks at the work order. “What’s a honey wagon?”
Sherry looks at hers. “What’s an E-train, Joey?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
Moe works in a grasshopper mill, a windowless hangar-like building on the outskirts of town. A cavernous, warm room, actually a huge incubator. Thousands of football-sized grasshopper/alien eggs lay row upon row under lights.
Moe, in white smock and rubber gloves, operates a set of pedals near a vat of eggs soaking in a soapy liquid. The pedaling activates an agitator in the vat, washing the eggs.
Tiring, he stops to rest, looks down into the vat while absent-mindedly picking at a large pimple. When he finds a loose part, he lifts it, the pimple bursts, spilling all sorts of pus-like spew into the egg vat.
A loud buzzer goes off, then an ear-piercing alarm.
Moe holds his ear and cringes, his pimple deflated but still dripping.
The bad part of Witchy Toe. The unpaved, muddy alley is lined with the backs of eight-story tenement houses. Though not a soul is to be seen outdoors, the din and commotion of crowded living spills loudly from rear tenement windows.
A pedal wagon with eight metal drums in its bed and a rear-mounted hand pump turns into the alley, Kenny at the pedals. He has on a brown uniform, a rubber apron and rubber boots. The wagon stops at the first tenement house. Kenny unstraps himself from the pedals and climbs out of the vehicle. He lifts a heavy metal manhole cover with difficulty and looks in. He sees feces, tampons, pet frogs, a snake, bugs, tissue paper, and a random selection of things that find their way down a toilet. He drops one end of the hose into the tank and begins working the hand pump, sucking sewage into the drums. The odor is so ghastly his eyes water. As he pumps, he spots the money plane in the sky.
In the cockpit, the alien pilot is saying, Roger there, tower. How many bundles for Witchy today? Uh-huh. I hear ya. Only four. That’s a hell of a cutback. Tough times, folks, sorry. Here comes some yellow rain.
In the alley, Kenny watches the plane descend. Its bomb bay doors open and four bales of money drop out. Three of the bales break apart as they should, but one continues to fall intact. Alarmed that it might land on him, Kenny abandons the pump and steps away from the wagon just as the bale of money splashes into the septic tank, dousing him in a shower of sewage. “Dumb fucker!”
He shakes his fist at the plane, which falters in its climb, the engines stopping and starting. When they stop altogether, the plane drops like a stone. Kenny sees a parachute in the sky and a distant fireball.
An E-train station. New arrivals pedal the four-car train slowly along a dark, underground passage.
In one of the cars, Sherry, in a blue uniform, moves down the aisle collecting yellow money from passengers. Quite a few of them exhibit subtle alien features, or the scars of radical surgery. She places handfuls of the money in a leather pouch carried over her shoulder. “Okay, folks. The harder you pedal, the less you pay. Come on, put some muscle in it, now. Let’s get where we’re going in my lifetime…. Next stop, Arden Boulevard. Arden Boulevard next stop. We change drivers here. You got five minutes to rest.”
The E-train stops. Passengers de-board. They stretch, they smoke, they mill around in the dim subway station.
Sherry leans against a wall, killing time. She hears an oozy, sloshing sound and walks down the tunnel to have a look. In a cul-de-sac she finds a pile of steaming grasshopper/alien eggs. They undulate actively, about to hatch. She recoils in disgust, backpedals to the train.
Once back on board, she says, “Let’s go. Hurry up. Pedal! We’re running late.”
As the train slowly pulls out of the station, the eggs hatch crossbred human/alien organisms.
An operating room in an alien hospital lit by kerosene lamps. Moe lies etherized on a metal drain table. Breast transplant surgery is being performed on him by gloved alien hands.
Another set of alien hands performs some sort of indeterminate surgery in Moe’s groin area.
The sound of bleating sheep distantly, then closer.
Moe comes out of the anesthetic. When he looks at the heaving female breasts on his chest and his heavily bandaged groin, he’s mystified.
He hears laughter from an inner courtyard below his window. He props himself up with great effort and looks out.
The courtyard, Eden-like, lush with alien vegetation, features an old swimming pool teeming with alien fish.
Whole sheep, wool and all, roast over a pit of coals.
Alien doctors in surgical garb stand around with buckets.
A new arrival hacks open the stomach of a sheep. When the steaming hot entrails spill out, the aliens catch what they can in the buckets and eat it hungrily.
In Moe’s hospital room, he looks again at his breasts, then at the place where his pudenda should be. He looks into a wall mirror and pales with horror.
Behind the mirror, in a small, dark room, an alien watches a screen displaying a three-dimensional X-ray image of Moe’s now-female pelvic region.
In an empty lot behind a derelict Holiday Inn building, sheep graze.
A pedal bus arrives. Passengers get off. Some walk or hobble, or are carried, toward the hospital entrance, Kenny and Joe among them.
The sound of sheep bleating is audible in the background.
In another alien hospital room, Joe looks out the window. He sees sheep roasting over open coals and aliens in surgical garb eating entrails.
The Terranova seating area at the end of the day. Joe, Kenny and Sherry, in their work clothes, sleep sitting up. Kenny has a City Moon partially covering his face, the headline reading: MONEY THOUGHT WORTHLESS!
A tall, gaunt figure in a rumpled black suit sits in front of them and removes his wide-brim black hat. There are small patches of green mold on the hat and suit, even on the back of his hairless, liver spotted head. Suddenly, he turns around. “Good mooooorning. The name’s Baker. I don’t mean any harm.” Joe is the first to awaken from a weary slumber, followed by Sherry and Kenny. “Morning, folks. The name’s Baker. Hope you slept well. Looks like you’ve all had your surgeries and your job assignments. That’s good. Listen, I’m working for the Department of Antiquities and I need volunteers for a dig. Just outside of town. They’ve found something very interesting there and I need help getting it out of the ground.”
Kenny says, “We already got jobs.”
Joe says, “If we don’t show up for work, we’re fucked.”
“They’ll be spanking us at the Ice Palace,” Sherry adds. “Or maybe we’ll end up in the sewer.”
Baker leans over his chair-back. “No, no. Volunteers are exempt from all that. You get a work waiver. Come with me. Come on. It’s easy work. Let’s go. The sooner the better.”
A desolate stretch of land, the wreckage of the Hey Abbott distantly visible.
Joe, Sherry and Kenny stand over a partially dug, grave-like excavation. Baker lets down the handles of a wheelbarrow full of shovels and picks. “Start digging. Be done by dark.”
Later, about sundown, the hole is about six feet deep when Joe’s shovel strikes the metal lid of a coffin.