7 — Terry Cunningham

Mar­vin felt the Plen­ty­wood shud­der as the board­ing lad­der slowly unhinged like a Slinky descend­ing a stair­case. In spite of the odd, con­vo­luted set of cir­cum­stances, he couldn’t help but note that “Plen­ty­wood” was both the name of the air­ship and a fair descrip­tion of what was hap­pen­ing in his pants.

He had no idea who – or what – would be ascend­ing the lad­der into the diri­gi­ble, but he knew with great cer­tainty what caused a town with a uni­ver­sity slo­gan of “Moun­tains & Minds” to be trans­formed into the hell-hole now referred to as “Molten Muck & Mas­tur­bat­ing Mon­keys.” Mar­vin recalled that the oppor­tunis­tic huck­sters in Butte, Mon­tana had launched an adver­tis­ing cam­paign to attract tourists: “All of the Molten Muck, None of the Mas­tur­bat­ing Mon­keys.” Butant bastards.

Yes, the Venu­sians had been observ­ing the Earth from the moment the planet con­gealed from rock and gas. They knew that the term “the dawn of mankind” was an oxy­moron. Earth men weren’t kind, and noth­ing “dawned” on them but dom­i­na­tion — and the faint notion that they should scratch them­selves when­ever pos­si­ble. Men fash­ioned clubs. Men sharp­ened arrow-points. Men forged spikes and spears and guns. When men evolved, they merely used their new­found wits to turn the small­est par­ti­cles in the uni­verse into weapons.

For eons, the Venu­sian High Priest­esses scanned the blue orb for even a faint glim­mer of hope and – in 2011 – their atten­tion was drawn to a most unlikely place. The run­ning joke among Venu­sians was, “We didn’t think a place called Boze-MAN would be the epi­cen­ter of The Female Awak­en­ing, but, after all, it is in the GAL-latin Val­ley.” Then they would laugh so hard, they’d spon­ta­neously molt.

At first, it appeared to be a set of ran­dom coin­ci­dences. Mon­tana State Uni­ver­sity named its first female Pres­i­dent. The Lady Hawks Cross Coun­try team placed 11th nation­ally. Tiffany Lach of Sola Café was named Entre­pre­neur of the Year. Nikki Kim­ball won the 2011 Ridge Run. Corinne Gar­cia earned the Pulitzer Prize for her mem­oir, You Go, Girl! A switch had been flipped; the women of Boze­man, Mon­tana began to dom­i­nate every con­ceiv­able field of endeavor. The Venu­sian High Priest­esses sat up on their hind legs, took notice and sent forth a mes­sage through the ether, “Help is on the way. All we need is a thin patch of finely man­i­cured lawn for a land­ing strip.”

There was only one flaw in their plan to nur­ture the evo­lu­tion rev­o­lu­tion. They hadn’t counted on Percy………