Chapter XXIII: Ruby Slippers
The hovercraft, this time an almost-new Blackmon Santa Fe forty-seater, slowed to a side-slipping stop where the world-covering moss thinned at last to bare soil at the border of the human settled polar territory. It sighed as its impellers wound down and its flexible skirt deflated, lowering itself to the ground.
An attendant steered a set of stairs—itself a modified hovercraft—toward the machine’s broad, transparent, curving boarding hatch. Mac and Pemot, having offered their good-byes to the passengers and crew, started down the steep flight of metal stairs.
Mac had flown three quarters of the way to the pole to find this excursion machine, had astonished its passengers and crew by alighting on its deck, and, once he’d secured their promise to come rescue Pemot—“superlysanders” had seemed to be the magic word—had flown back again to keep his friend company and to bid farewell to Middle C and the other taflak villagers.
When the hovercraft had arrived, he and Pemot had hidden, snickering behind their hands, as the natives threw the machine’s captain and owner into the village cooking pot.
Many of the galley slaves the taflak had picked up, to everyone’s surprise (including the slaves’, themselves), after being subjected to the cannibal joke, had discovered they liked being free—and uneaten. Others, like Leftenant Commander Goldberry MacRame, with her hair hanging down in limp strings and her sopping uniform already beginning to shrink, hadn’t been amused at all.
“I say,” the lamviin told his friend, “it would appear we’ve a substantial greeting party.”
Pemot was right. Waiting at the bottom of the long ladder was a small crowd of well-wishers, all of them waving and yelling at the tops of their voices. The first individual Mac recognized, from his tall, battered plug hat and the eternal dark aroma of his pipe, already wafting up the staircase, was A. Hamilton Spoonbender.
Impatient, the man bounded up the stairs to seize Mac’s hand. “You did it, Berdan, my boy! Blast me, I never really believed you would, but you did it!”
Mac was forced to clamp his teeth together to keep from chipping them and biting his tongue until the museum owner was through jerking his arm back and forth. Feeling shy, he grinned, discovering he didn’t know what to say. “I, uh…”
“Let’s get down on terra firma—and believe me, the more firma, the less terra—the whole gang’s here to see you, boy, custom delivered by a chauffeured private starship. Everybody, including—”
“Who’s your handsome sidekick, Berdan?”
This from the female lamviin, Miss Nredmoto Ommot Uaitiip who, as the three reached ground level at long last, seemed to be looking Pemot over with more than casual interest.
“I, madame,” replied the scientist, “am Epots Dinnomm Pemot, at your service and pleased to meet you. Our mutual friend now travels under the name MacDougall Bear.”
“Likewise, I’m sure. Whatever he’s calling himself, a lot of high-powered talent’s waiting to see him.”
Mac blinked, but it wasn’t the equivalent of a nod. “What do you mean, Ommot?”
“Well, aside from Hum Kenn, here, Rob-Allen Mustache, Vulnavia, and the kids, there’s—”
A hand shot from above the freenie’s eyestalk and between the chimpanzee and Mrs. Spoonbender. “Freeman K. Bertram, young man, the chauffeur Mr. Spoonbender mentioned, also President of Laporte Paratronics, Earth. At your service and happy as a clam to see you—not to mention the Brightsuit, wherever you’ve got it stowed.”
Bertram was a neat, bearded individual in an expensive business-model smartsuit. Behind him was a tall, well-shaped blonde who somehow seemed familiar to the boy.
“Well,” Mac answered, surprised to be able to get a word in edgewise, “you’ll have to talk to Mr. Spoonbender about the suit. It’s his. I got it back for him.”
The Brightsuit wasn’t far away. Much to Pemot’s dismay, Mac was looking more like his old self. He’d programmed the Brightsuit to disguise itself as an ordinary, well-worn smartsuit adjusted to look like a sports shirt and Levis. Even at three hundred miles per hour, it had taken the hovercraft over twenty hours to race from the equator to the pole, and the boy hadn’t wanted to take chances.
He’d reclaimed his pistol belt and the Borchert & Graham, no longer too much gun for him, although, given the powers of the Brightsuit, it had hardly seemed necessary to carry it on the way back as anything other than additional camouflage.
“Correction, young soldier of fortune,” Spoonbender told him. “The suit’s Mr. Bertram’s—and by right of invention, as well as community property, Professor Thorens’. It belonged to them to begin with. Your parents were testing it for their company. But they’ve recompensed us handsomely for our claim in it.”
If A. Hamilton Spoonbender called it “handsomely,” it must have been handsome, indeed.
“You mean,” Mac asked, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, “the Professor Deejay Thorens?”
Spoonbender turned to Bertram and grinned a toothy grin. He turned back to the boy. “Don’t let me down. Be sure you hold them up piratically, Ber—Mac, for they’re well and truly desperate, I assure you, and can certainly afford it.”
Bertram looked exasperated. “Thanks a lot, Spoonbender.” The businessman shrugged and grinned. “But what the dirty dishes. You brought it back to us, didn’t you, Mac—or should I say Mr. Bear? I knew your dad and mom. Let me tell you, they’d be proud of you today. Why, that’s his Borchert & Graham you’re wearing, isn’t it?”
Mac didn’t hear the question, he was busy feeling what he was supposed to, when he was supposed to, and wiping tears out of his eyes as a consequence.
“I don’t understand this,” he answered at last. “You and your—Professor Thorens—you don’t owe me anything. It’s still your suit. My grandfa—Dalmeon Geanar stole it to sell to the Hooded Seven, whoever they are, and I got it back for you because of my folks. And because I was ashamed.”
With enormous effort, he stifled a sob. Instead, he turned his back to regain control of himself, and, without warning, felt a soft, warm hand on the back of his neck.
“What are you doing to this boy, Freeman?” The voice was soft and warm, as well.
“Dora Jayne, my dear, this is no mere boy you’re fondling, but a man in every sense of the word, just returned triumphant from the savage jungle! And by the way, since you’re a married woman, I’ll thank you to stop fondling him.”
“Oh, Freeman, you’re so cute when you’re jealous!”
Mac turned and gazed into the bottomless azure eyes of the galaxy’s most famous—and most beautiful—physicist.
The business arrangements with Laporte Paratronics were simple and straightforward. Mac had recovered the suit, for which Bertram and Thorens felt he was owed a fee. In addition, because the suit had been sold for scrap and later—a legal technicality determined by the timing of his grandfather’s death—“abandoned” on the surface of Majesty, it was his by right of salvage.
What surprised the boy most of all was that, even after he’d been recompensed—both handsomely and piratically—he was encouraged to keep the Brightsuit.
“This is the age of spray-painting, boy!” A. Hamilton Spoonbender lectured him. The man seemed to have assumed a kind of spiritual—or financial—guardianship over him which he wasn’t certain he liked or needed.
“The computer programs have all been lined up since the first suit was built. All they have to do is push the ENTER button, and zoot—a brand-new Brightsuit!”
Deejay Thorens nodded. “We do retain all of the original plans and programming, Mac. We’d also like to borrow your suit for a while, just to be sure what figures Dalmeon Geanar altered and which he didn’t. But the fact is, now that it’s been thoroughly tested—of course we’ll want the readouts—we don’t really need the prototype anymore, and you might as well keep it, since it’s yours, anyway.”
Behind her, Freeman K. Bertram nodded his agreement, beamed, and grumbled as a matter of form.
&nbs
p; Mac was stunned. He’d worn nothing but secondhand and hand-me-downs all of his life. Now he owned the newest kind of smartsuit in existence. And he was, at least by his own standards, rich.
The reception party began to drift back toward the hovercraft terminal with eating and drinking in mind. Even here at the pole, the sun beat down hot on the rubberized parking apron. Mac and Pemot, left to themselves for a moment, took up the conversation they’d been having aboard the Blackmon before the settlement had been sighted.
“What I’ll never understand is why Geanar didn’t use the suit during our battle with him, or afterward, to treat his injuries or save himself from the rats.”
Pemot’s fur indicated a shrug, followed by a shiver. It had been too cold for his peace of mind, even on the equator.
“I hesitate to point out that the man was your grandfather, MacBear, and that, if you can’t answer a question like that, I certainly can’t be expected to.”
Mac laughed. “You’re a big help. Okay, let me see: he knew the suit worked. It wasn’t the dangerous failure he made everybody think it was. But what was it to him? A valuable commodity, something to be stolen and sold, like a bag of money, or a—”
“Or a fur coat,” Pemot suggested. “I doubt whether many mink thieves try on every coat they steal.”
“Vehicle thieves surely do,” argued Mac. “People who steal hovercraft or spaceships have to drive away what they’ve stolen. But to grandfa—Geanar, I mean, the Brightsuit wasn’t the vehicle it is in fact, but a suit of clothes.”
Pemot blinked. “And so, he adopted the fur thief s attitude, rather than the hovercraft thief’s?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s the closest we’ll ever get to understanding what happened—unless we just say he was a self-made loser and leave it at that.”
The lamviin blinked again. “Well I’m glad you were the one to say it, MacBear. I should have been reluctant to do so.”
Mac grinned, reached down a hand, and patted the distinguished xenopraxeologist on his furry carapace. It was a stroke of fortune that Pemot had been fully suited up when Mac had grabbed him off the Trekmaster. They’d later learned that close proximity to the Brightsuit in full-powered flight could cause severe tachyon burns.
“I can understand that.”
“And,” Pemot observed, “I suppose we’ll leave the mystery of the Hooded Seven for another time. It was quite clever of them, hiding beneath the leaves in a spaceship.”
Mac chuckled. “If that’s what it was. I’ll bet they were pretty disappointed at what they found in the Trekmaster. I don’t know whether I did them any harm, and I don’t care. I’ve had quite enough adventure for a while, my lamviin friend. Not forever, but for now I’m going home. I imagine Mr. Meep’ll be glad to see me—as a regular paying customer, rather than a clumsy busboy and apprentice cook.”
He lifted an arm, indicating a crowd boarding another of the big sightseeing hovercraft, newcomers to the planet Majesty of all sizes, shapes, and species. Gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees kept company with smartsuited porpoises in implant-directed wheeled frames, and even a little human girl and her dog.
“Maybe it’s up to somebody else to solve the mystery.”
Pemot blinked. “Perhaps it is at that.”
Brightsuit MacBear Page 20
