Larry Goes To Space Read Online Free

its flesh and blood. Nevertheless, it can irritate you more than any group of people in the world. (Andre Maurois)
     
     
     
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    LARRY continued showing Scooter around his farm, even though the little creature turned positively green at the smells inside the barn. Larry sometimes felt the same way himself, but mucking out the barn was really near the bottom of his to-do list.
    Mucking out the barn was somewhat like visiting his Aunt Nola, not much fun, but something he had to do on a fairly regular basis. Visiting Dad’s youngest sister had gotten much more odious as of late, since it came out that Uncle Gary had a second wife and another passel of kids. But as emotionally draining as it was to visit his aunt, those visits were not exactly like mucking out the barn on a regular basis, but similarities did exist. Aunt Nola’s complaints piled up like — well, like what had to be mucked out of the barn.
    Larry’s horse, Dollar, lived in the barn most of the time. His horse was a lot like his relatives, neither was really housebroken. Larry’s horse was different in that it really didn’t want to live in and continually revisit its own filth, but being a horse, it was incapable of mucking out its own stall. Fortunately, for both man and horse, Larry had adopted a Mad Hatter tea party kind of plan. When one stall became messy enough to require a good mucking, he moved Dollar to the next clean stall. The mucking happened when Larry and Dollar ran out of stalls to move to.
    Everywhere they went on the farm, Scooter pulled the translator unit along behind him. The small alien had various pieces of equipment taped, glued, and stuck on translator’s sides. It hovered silently about a foot off the ground following along behind Scooter, like Larry’s little cousin Rupert toddling after Aunt Nola.
    Cousin Rupert seemed to be angry most of the time. Larry wasn’t sure what the young boy was angry about. Maybe the two-year-old was still angry with Aunt Nola cutting him off from the teat. Maybe he was angry because he found out his name came about because of a character in an English novel about teenage witches. He wasn’t named after the character from the book, but in Aunt Nola’s usual downstream sense of logic, he was named after the actor who played the character in the movie version of the book. Rupert would really be angry when he got old enough to learn his middle name was Grint. One sister already called him RG, while another steadfastly called him Weasley.
    The little translator unit didn’t seem to be angry about anything, not even when Scooter spun the knobs and tried to speak to every living creature on the farm. None of the animals seemed to care one-way or the other, but Scooter got a bit snarky when he didn’t get a response from the cows.
    Still, Larry figured it was a good thing not having Ol’ Bucky around to be interrogated by Scooter and his translator. Larry’s dog was a lot like his cousin Melvin. Mel never seemed to be around — whether you needed him or not. He showed up when, or if, he needed something, not the other way around. Just like Ol’ Bucky, he was quite prickly when asked questions, singularly or in a series.
    Larry remembered having read somewhere that some philosopher said some time ago. “A family without a black sheep is not a typical family.” That made Larry laugh so much he wanted to stitch it on a pillow for the sofa, as his family comprised a whole field full of black sheep, brown sheep, slightly off white sheep, and even a few multicolored, rainbow hued sheep. Cousin Mel seemed to be the type of sheep who would change color when you weren’t looking. Most of the family would have turned Cousin Mel into the Feds as the Unabomber if ol’ Ted Kaczynski hadn’t already been caught and locked away.
    Scooter said in frustration, jabbing some instrument in Dollar’s direction, “This horse shows evidence of some intelligence.” He waved the small handheld box