Big Chunk Soup

   There was nothing Lester liked better than a bowl of big chunk soup at the end of a long day in the yard. Lester and the crew would walk into the yard at six most mornings, and we would be there till at least six at night.

    “Busy day today”, he would always say when he came back inside. “Me and the crew are starved! We need some of that big chunk soup!” He would slap me on the back as I filled up his bowl. The smell and ultimately the taste of the food made the day seem better and made us like each other, even with what we saw on the news and on the streets outside.

    Big chunk soup was a necessity of life in those days. It’s what we wanted to eat after being in the yard for twelve hours or more. But big chunk soup was hard to make right. You had to have good ingredients. The wondermeat had to be cut chunky and thick, a spoonful and a half, if you know what I mean. 

    And I made the best big chunk soup out of anyone in the crew. Everyone said so, especially Lester. And so, on most days I would get cut loose from my usual job and go down to the kitchen a couple hours before the workday ended and start cooking. Lester would come in all cranky from the stress of the day, and I’d fill him up with big chunk soup. Lester had always looked like a man with too much on his mind, and I always thought that if a bowl of big chunk soup would make his life easier, then it was a good thing.

    Things would usually start to get stressful as soon as the first ship full of Centauries landed in the yard. The ships were always packed full. Sometimes it was an upper crust sort of highfalutin load of them, and the ship was full of suspended animation chambers that looked like thin beds covered with glass and row upon row of Centauries waking up or unthawing or whatever it was they did in one of those things. They could take hours upon hours to unload, what with having to wait till everyone woke up and got warm.

    When that happened, it would sometimes take all day to get just one ship unloaded. It was much faster if it was a ship full of what I would guess are your average everyday Centauries. They just got stuffed into every nook and cranny of the ship and were given some drug that knocked them out and kept them alive for the year it took to get here.

    Obviously, they were from Alpha Centauri. You probably already know that.

    Lester was supervisor of the unloading yard. If that sounds like a big job, it is, and I must tell you I couldn’t do it. I was in one of the unloading crews and there’s not much reason to say more than that.  It was a challenge all its own, but nothing like what Lester had to do every day. He had an office, and sometimes early in the morning or late at night he would be in conferences with supervisors of other unloading yards, and whoever it was they all reported to.

    And the spaceships just kept coming. Every day, at least one ship, more normally two or three. I guess that’s what happens when a meteor is on a collision course with your home planet and you have just a couple months to get everyone off, and all you can think of is to go to the nearest inhabited planet and hope they’ll take you in.

    When the first ship got here the United Nations took the lead in deciding what to do with them. You’d think it would be a tough call, what with Earth overpopulated and under-resourced and all. Pretty easy in my mind to tell them ‘No thanks’, and just have the ships move on. Go find another planet. I hear that Mars is habitable. Have them stop there.

    But it turns out that all the leaders of all the countries got together, and said ‘sure, we’ll take you all in, all hundred or two million of you, and help you find somewhere to live, and eat, and work’. Or at least that’s what we were telling them. And so, the first ships started orbiting down, and we got into a routine, and every day a few thousand Centauries landed on earth for processing. We had been doing it for about two years when something happened. 

    I’d been making big chunk soup nearly as long as we’d been at the yard. You might be wondering what was in it other than wondermeat. The mosaic virus pandemic had gone on for a couple years before the Centauries came. It had ruined half the world’s crops then killed most of the livestock.   I was like everyone else –everything I had eaten in the last two years was mostly water, or manufactured in some lab, or bugs.  But even so there was not enough to go around. People were starving.  It was right after the Centauries came that someone at the UN came up with wondermeat.   I didn’t know what was in it, but they told us it exceeded the dietary requirements of your average human and that it was processed and made available everywhere. It might have saved civilization. Me and the crew started eating it every day. And it was the key ingredient in the big chunk soup Lester liked so much.

    There were other ingredients in big chunk soup. There would be water, and if I could find some cricket or maybe even some chicken broth I would put that in too. There might be part of an onion, a potato, or a couple carrots; one time I found a bell pepper and some garlic.  That might have been the best big chunk soup ever. But the key ingredient was the wondermeat. They say it’s not meat, not really; but it’s nourishing just like meat, and has lots of vitamins and minerals just like vegetables do.  It has everything you need. I used to think it was pretty tasty too, after you add some salt and pepper.

    Anyway, one day me and Lester and the boys were down in the yard. A big ship full of Centauries had just landed. We were getting them off the ship with their stuff, and onto the trains. That’s the process - we get them unloaded from the spaceship, then put them on a train and ship them off to the processing station. Usually there’s a sign on the train that tells which processing center they are going to. This one said, ‘Trenton’. It was a train with nice passenger cars. The Centauri are shaped about like us, maybe a little taller so the train seats would be comfortable, if maybe just a bit cramped.

    And one of them came up to me and started talking. Now this was a problem, because at the time I didn’t speak Centauri. Nobody in the yard did. I’ll guess that at the time there was someone in the UN headquarters building or some university somewhere that had learned to talk the language, but that was all. And I had never heard them speak English. So, I didn’t know what it was saying. This one had a small Centauri in its arms, which I am assuming was a child but at the time I didn’t know if they had and raised children the same as we do. I just didn’t know anything about them.

    I did what I would usually do, which is just point in the direction they are supposed to go and wave my arms. But this Centauri didn’t go, just stood there in front of me, still making a noise like it was talking. They are built just like us, same two arms, two legs and a head, eyes and something that looks like it could be a nose, and a mouth, and noise comes out of the mouth, just like us. The only difference is that their skin is green, and they don’t have any hair. And the little one was there, its little blue and yellow eyes seeming to stare right at me. They were holding up the line and Lester came running over and asked me what was going on.

    “I don’t know”, I said, “but I think it’s talking to me.”

    “They don’t talk”, Lester grunted. “that’s just noise”.

    “Sounds like talk to me”, I said. “And I think that’s a kid it’s holding.”

    “Just keep the line moving”, he said, running off. “We are getting behind.”

    But something made me stop and look for a second. I had never noticed before, but a lot of them were carrying little ones, and some seemed grouped together, like a family, and I started to think about how earth families clump together when we are standing on line, and how you can tell who belongs together just by looking at them. And I looked at the line again, and it looked like the Centauries were clumped into groups too, and that made me think.

    I looked at the Centauri and pointed at myself, and said, “Earl”.  That’s my name. And darned if the Centauri didn’t point at himself and say something. I couldn’t understand what he said and since no sound came out part of the time his lips were moving, I guess maybe I couldn’t even hear everything he said. Then he pointed at the little one and his mouth moved again.

    At this point I knew he was talking. But what to do next? The line was backing up, and the attendants getting ready to load the Centauries on the train were looking at me like I was crazy, and my buddies on the crew were starting to razz me a little, and then Lester came running over again.

    “Dang it Earl, what are you doing?” he exclaimed. “We have to load at least a thousand on the train in the next three hours.”

    “It’s talking to me, Lester”, I answered. I looked at the Centauri and pointed at Lester and said his name. The Centauri did what it did before: pointed at itself and then the little one and made noise.

    “See?” I said. “It was telling you its name.”

    “I didn’t hear nothing but gibberish”, Lester snapped. “Now get it on the train!” He stepped in front of me and pushed the Centauri forward, then urged the rest of the line on. Then he turned to look at me.

    “Earl, do you know why we get all the wondermeat we can eat?” He asked loudly.

    “Um, I don’t know”, I replied, turning a little red. The other guys were staring at us.

    “It’s because we keep the line moving. We make the quota; we get the reward. And the reward is that we eat. Outside of here-” He waved both arms. “People get wondermeat once a week if they are lucky!” I bowed my head and kept the line moving. 

    It was getting close to the end of the day and Lester came by and told me to go downstairs and start the big chunk soup. I went down to the kitchen and found half a head of cabbage only a little wilted, and a couple tomatoes that weren’t moldy that I could cut up really small and put in the soup. Then I started looking for wondermeat. One of the other cooks told me there were some cases in the cooler. I went over to the cooler and grabbed a case and took it back to the kitchen.

    I saw a label on the case. It said, ‘Processed in Trenton’.

    I didn’t eat the big chunk soup that night. In fact, I barely finished making it. Even so, Lester and the rest of the folks ate it as fast as they could. I thought I was going to be sick. After dinner I went outside to the yard and looked at it, the collection points and the signs and the railroad extension and wondered just what it was we were doing there. Lester walked by on his way to his office for his nightly call.

    “Lester, what are we really doing here?” I asked.

    “I don’t know everything pal, but best not to ask”, Lester said heavily as he walked by. “Just remember that you’re eating. And that’s not true of everyone on earth right now.”

    I leaned against a wall and looked at the yard and wondered how I could live with myself if what I thought was true. Was it just a coincidence that someone discovered wondermeat a month or so after the first Centauri ship hailed us from orbit? I stood and watched the yard till almost sunrise, just thinking. I had some ideas what I could do, then I went down to the yard for a couple minutes. It’s easy to accept a wrong when it saves you, but are you really saved if there’s a wrong behind it? And I thought maybe it’s better to risk dying then to let someone else think you were saving them when you weren’t.

    The next morning there was another spaceship full of Centauries, and when they got into line to board the train, instead of waving them on to board I pointed them to a hole I had cut through the fence and waved my arms at them. Before anyone could react, a dozen Centauries were out the fence, and when the others saw the reaction of Lester and the rest of the crew, more sprinted for the fence. All told, maybe a hundred got out.

    I wound up sitting on the floor in a small dark room. Two times a group of people opened the door and stared hard at me, then closed it again. One time I heard the word ‘Trenton’ just as the door was closing, and I thought I knew what that meant, and it made me feel sick.

    When the door finally opened, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Leg chains and manacles? But they just stood and held it open for me. As I walked out, a man in a suit stepped in front of me.  He looked at me quizzically.

    “You’re Earl.” He stated.

    “Um, yes I am”, I said, getting a little confused.

    “Earl, we are establishing a Centauri colony.” He said.

    “Better than eating them”, I burst out, then seeing the look in his eyes, immediately regretted it.

    “You don’t understand everything, so quit talking”, he replied. “A lot of people are still alive who wouldn’t otherwise be. But there are people, important people, that agree with you. So, we are exploring options. One hundred fifty Centauries, approximately 40 family units, are going to an island in the Pacific.  We need someone to act as an intermediary between them and the UN. Given that you have some sympathy for their plight, and you can’t work here anymore, I am giving you the chance to go with them.”

    “What if I say no?” I asked.

    He smiled at me. I could see a gallows in his eyes.

    “Yes.” I responded. “I’ll go.”

    It’s hot on the island, hot and far away from everyone and everything I’ve ever known. But we are all alive, and hopefully we can stay that way. Big chunk soup has fish in it now instead of wondermeat, and I still make it better than anyone. There’s a Centauri I call Lester who stops by every day for a bowl. It’s a good thing.