Nick puffed out his cheeks and leaned back. This is...a heavy load. He rubbed his forehead for a few moments. “I give food. Wait.”
“Petra, I need a device.” Nick pulled up Petra's menu and started searching through her blueprints. He left the transmitter running so that the aliens could see he was working on it.
“What device do you need?” They had spoken this exchange several times once Nick had taught it to her.
“I need a device to print food. Just food.”
Petra showed him a printer menu. He'd seen it before, when he had realized that having Petra print everything herself directly was taking too long. The simplest one he had made was the air purifier. It “printed” clean air, using contaminated air as a source.
Now he was looking specifically for a food printer. Once he found some options, he sorted them by expense of materials. All of them needed carbon and hydrogen and so on to build the food out of, naturally, but it also took significant resources to print a printer, even a limited one. Nick was running out of element 25, for example.
He tried again, looking for printers with fewer and fewer capabilities.
“Ik!eh?”
“Kathy, I... make ...food.” He gestured vaguely with his hands and hoped that she got it. “I make printer, I give you printer, you make food.” Kathy didn't appear to get all of it, but she understood enough to get excited. Nick went back to looking at menus, trying to think. Then he got an idea.
“Oh! Kathy! Um...Hold on a sec...” He rummaged around until he came up with a silver coin. “Element forty-seven. Silver. Um...ten and ten and ten and ten and five and two,” he said slowly, hoping that he hadn't lost count.
If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
Nick taught them the rest of the numbers up to a hundred, because this was going to take forever otherwise. Once they had that down, he picked up samples and showed them. “Element forty-seven. Element seventy-nine. Element twenty-six. You get it?”
“Eh eh men.”
“Good.” Now here's the tricky bit. I'm glad I already went through this with Petra. “Element eight.” He made a big show of inhaling. “Element eight and element six.” He blew the air out dramatically. “You? Yes or no?”
“Yezz! Eh eh men ayy, eh eh men ayy and eh eh men zzih.”
“Good. That means I can give you an air purifier and you'll get carbon for food.” Nick heaved a sigh and rubbed his forehead again. This is exhausting.
“Element eight and element one.” Nick poured a cup of water in front of the camera. “Water.”
“Aw uh.”
“You need food. You need water? Yes or no?”
“No.” Kathy said something to one of the other aliens, and a minute later, she was showing off a pitcher of fairly dirty water. I'll have to see about giving them a water purifier too. The important thing, though, is that they already have a water supply.
Nick went back to searching for food printers, trying to make it cheaper. A cruder model needed water and ingots to be fed in by hand, but the aliens probably wouldn't mind that.
“Petra?”
“Yes, Nick?”
“Language tutorial. Talk to them. Learn their language, and teach them English.”
“I don't understand, Nick.”
Eight tries later, Nick was pretty sure he got the point across, because Petra started talking to the aliens.
Meanwhile, Nick figured out what he needed and set up a production queue. He could bring them some of his devices so that they wouldn't have to wait. An air purifier. A dehumidifier. At least three solar panels to run things. That decided, he set Petra to printing the cheapest food printer he could make, and then more of his own food supply.
I've got a million questions, but they'll have to wait until Petra figures out their language. I'll go nuts if I try to do it myself. At least there's more than one of them so they can switch off as needed. Petra will never get tired. So, with any luck, she will pick up BigBall-ese a lot faster than English.
I wonder, how long will it take Kathy and the rest to realize that Petra is the interesting and important one, not me?
