He plucked Wowseyla from the air, made it bring up its virtual keyboard and display screen, then tapped in more code. He touched a spot on the zerpy and a foot-long beam of green light shot up from it. He touched another spot, released the device, and Wowseyla hovered but shifted that light beam a bit to point into the sky but not directly overhead. “Sensor beam locates Whizybeam and we begin a sweep.”
He watched as a series of graphs appeared and were replaced by others in sequence. The screen blanked, then came back with an image of what appeared to be an aerial view of a strange looking but colorful city surrounded by dull barren wasteland.
“Suspicion confirmed. Whizybeam is having no problems with its communication problems. The interference with signals to me is one-way and deliberate. There are worrisome problems with her other systems though. The producers wish to rattle me but we all should be rattled by the strong possibility of major engine failure. If they recognize that they have given me no word about it - but then I suppose they would not.
“Wowseyla gives top-most diagnostic programs for Whizybeam, maybe even better than they were given. But if I alert them to the danger they learn I have a latest version mini-zerpy and that starts the fight to take control of it and all that is recorded by it before we are home. I cannot ignore the possibility that they know about the danger or are even somehow faking it exactly to get me to let them know all that I know. More reason for me to be angry and upset and for them not to be truthful. Where there is money and influence to be had there is always the playing of games.” He tapped some code into the device. The screen filled with one of the graphs from moments before.
“I judge my return to Whizybeam to be uncertain but with it not happening more likely than sure to happen. I must act accordingly. It saddens me, audience who may someday get to witness these words, that what was officially an educational adventure that needed the hard sell of the entertainment competition format to get funding and the necessary clearances is I find full of information so much in error. It is probably best not to air anything unless I can get the truth past the producers who have reason to want to avoid annoying the governors by making the truth known. That focuses me on the need to survive – which I intend to do no matter what. I also need to keep the existence of my mini-zerpy and its output undetected during the return trip and through the inevitable searches on arrival. Then I can concentrate on getting true information around the blockades of the naysayers, which means avoiding all official channels until copies of the material are too far spread to be suppressed and destroyed with no chance of them coming to light to embarrass those who wanted them suppressed. That is a lot of challenges and they all depend on me and Wowseyla not being destroyed by the inhabitants, Whizybeam’s mechanical failures, the producers, or the guys who wield the power on Ormelex.”
He waved at Wowseyla and said, “Tuck it in.” The keyboard and screen disappeared. He held a hand under the device and it fell into his palm. He reached up, gave it a light toss, and it moved to and stuck to the exact same spot on his hat so no one would wonder how it had moved from spot to spot if they compared recorded images of Nerber.
“I set out on an adventure but I did not imagine how big a one.”
Chapter 11
A short time later Nerber stood on the porch of the Parker’s house talking through the open window to Edith and Adam, who were in their chairs. Wilburps hovered at waist-height beside him. Adam was using his laptop computer where he sat.
“Yeah, best you stay out there. Uh, the hamster's loose in here and he bites. Can’t trust him an inch,” Edith warned.
“Popped into my head this question did and wonder about it made me think. You are goodly being to seek my answer.”
Adam said, “It’s an interesting question. Who if anyone could give sanctuary to a space-type alien and deliver it to the scientists to keep it from being senselessly slaughtered by yahoos? You can find out almost anything on the Internet. Yes! No, I need to narrow the search. I'm not sorting through twenty-seven thousand matches. I'll search alien species, not just aliens.”
Nerber leaned close for a better look at the window screen.
“Hey, keep your distance, you! Ain't ya never seen a window screen before?” Edith shouted.
“I have truly not. What is it?”
“One of man's great inventions,” she answered. “Lets the air in but keeps the bugs out.”
Nerber nodded and gazed down at it as his zerpy translated that directly into his head. Nerber showed his confusion and distress when he got that translation so he requested, “Please to excuse it, bugs are what?”
“Insects. Pests. Don't tell me you don't have pests where you come from,” she said.
“Aha, pests are undesirable things to be squish-ed by your foot? Squish-ed sounds like a messiness.”
Adam interrupted. “This is more like it. But it's no real help. Only a few entries match all the criteria. They all seem to mean there's no official preset way to do what you asked about doing.”
Nerber laughs awkwardly, “Oh, I did not ask for me, only as a general interesting point to talk about.”
“Whatever,” Adam said. “There's apparently no law about it so you couldn't be arrested for hiding an alien from a mob but you might get torn limb from limb if the mob found you doing that.”
“Quiet, there's new news. Turn it up,” Edith snapped.
On the TV reporter Beth Regards said, “Vigilante mobs are forming in several areas to search the city for alien invaders. Check the list at the bottom of your screen for the mob scene closest to you. Happy hunting. Now back to our reruns in progress.”
“My, look at the timing, I must go,” Nerber said as he turned to head for the steps.
“Yeah, there's no safety with us,” Edith called after him.
Nerber hurried off the porch and up the street, Wilburps close behind him and trying to seem like his backpack but a close look showed that the two were not in contact and that the carrying straps hung empty against the boxy zerpy.
“What’re you thinking, Momma?” Adam asked.
“Whatever the heck that fellow is, it seems there should be some way to make this pay. He’s peculiar enough to seem like he could be a far-out invader critter so it wouldn’t be crying wolf,” Edith replied as she stood at the living room window watching Nerber move out of sight.
“You could get famous by calling to have the police, heck, maybe even the president’s people, check him out,” Adam said.
“Nah, then they get the credit and give themselves bonus money. Unless of course there’s a reward being offered now,” she replied.
Adam’s fingers danced across the keyboard of his laptop and he scanned several different sites before he answered. “Nothing yet. Bunch of people looking for leads on anything suspicious but they’re all private people, not government.”
“You tell ‘em what you saw and they report it and take the credit. Suckers are all around us. Maybe later as people get more scared and the politicians get the most scared that someone’s gonna say they didn’t do enough there’ll be some offers to consider.”
“There are several news companies offering money but they want pictures, especially video, not just a say-so that you think your neighbor’s a weirdo.”
Edith turned to look at her son with real interest saying, “Yeah, pictures. That makes sense. You don’t have to risk anything trying to cage it or tie it up, just click the camera and make a pile. That means fame and something you can take to the bank.”
“You’d still have to prove what’s in the pictures.”
“Adam, some days I think you were born just yesterday. Not that I’d go through all that grunting and pushing again.”
“We’ve agreed not to keep going back through that, Momma. I wasn’t in control of my own birth. What did you mean?”
“Two things pop right out of my head. First thing, this is news company shark attack stuff. They want to be the first to get anything on the air or on their pag
es, they’ll worry about saying exactly what it is later. And second, they won’t care what it is as long as it looks odd. They get the attention they want and move on to the next distraction without worrying about being correct in what they said might be. Note that, might be. Only government or groups you don’t want to succeed have to prove their claims to many people.”
“You’re probably right.”
“The smart game of course is to put some blood in the water and see how big the bites’ll be.”
“I’m not clear on what that means,” Adam admitted.
“You got pictures, you don’t sell ‘em to the first one that offers you ten dollars for all the rights to them. You take bids and you let ‘em all know that’s how it’s being done and that it’ll all be old news quick so if they want the first and exclusive they need to pay for what you’re offering. You’ve got the goods and they’ll pony up top dollar when they see you’re not gonna be a fool and give ‘em away.”
“So you want to send emails to these different companies saying we have pictures and the bidding war has started?”
“Hell no. We need to keep what we have secret for now.”
“But you just said we need to be the first to have pictures to sell.”
“Exactly.”
Adam waited for her to clarify that but she was back to looking out the window, pressing close to the glass in an effort to see if Nerber was still in sight, which he was not.
“Exactly what?” he finally prompted.
“We need the pictures first. They’ll want them lickety-split and if we say we’re gonna go try to get them now that we have the bids it won’t go good,” she replied. “Even more though, as soon as we say we have ‘em there’ll be a hundred others blanketing this whole area with their cameras. As soon as a bunch of people have pictures the value of all of ‘em falls fast. We can’t tell anybody what we have until we have it and can deliver on the instant when the best price is agreed to.”
“Okay, I follow that. I see two really big problems with the plan though.”
“I know, I know. You and me won’t know when to say yes ‘cause the offer’s the best we can get. We’ll pay your cousin Barry the lawyer to do that part. His mom’s always bragging about what a hard-nosed negotiator he is. I usually think snot-nosed snob but if he can go it better than we can for his standard fee we should go with him,” Edith said.
“Yeah, that’s a third thing. My first thing though is that we don’t have a decent camera. My second thing is that as soon as it gets known that the alien suspect was in this house the government may insist on taking everything we have away to burn it up or something in case it’s got foreign contamination. Maybe they’ll even make us go and live in a special isolation booth in case we caught alien germs.”
“You watch those silly old movies too much.”
“So do lots of people,” he answered a bit defensively. “That’s why they’ll demand that be done with us and the house. You certainly know that ‘be reasonable’ doesn’t cut it when you decide to worry about something. No matter who or how many experts assure us everyone there’s no danger, people still feel it’s the right and expected thing to do to beat up on somebody else.”
“You can never trust experts. Common sense is what protects us all,” Edith insisted.
“And what’ll put us in plastic bubbles in a secret laboratory for the rest of our days to be certain there’s not even a tiny chance we can make lots of people sick with contamination.”
“I think you’re over-worrying it but if it’ll make you feel safer we won’t tell anybody it was even on our porch. We can say all the details’ll be in our book and then not write a book. That’d deal with it.”
“The neighbors’ll want in on some of the attention so they’ll tell.”
“Did you tell anybody? I didn’t. There, nobody knows.”
“You could tell about almost everybody who has visited every other house within sight out that window,” Adam said.
“I’m only protecting the area from strangers.”
“So are the others watching out their windows without making themselves obvious. If you want to worry about all that, go ahead but do it on your own time. Right now we need to deal with your first thing. You need a camera to take the pictures.”
“All we have is that ‘use it once and turn it in to be developed’ thing that we got last year in case the family up the street had a noisy lawn party and I wanted to complain with proof. That won’t do,” she insisted.
“Why won’t that do?” he asked.
“You have to get close to get a decent picture and with Nerber now on the run that’s not likely to happen,” Edith noted.
“Right. Plus I’m not taking the chance that if I get close to do that I might get sprayed with his poison or something.”
“He sprays poison? That’s terrific as a selling point.”
“Don’t go saying things we don’t know are accurate, Momma. The point is that we don’t know what he can do but in the old films the alien monsters sometimes can do things like that so there must be some reason to think it can happen.”
Edith responded with a derisive snort.
“Or you can be the one to get close and take the snaps, Momma. Then you can be famous as the first one to be specially destroyed by the government to contain the contamination.”
“We need a better camera. Solve that problem,” she said.
“Cameras are expensive.”
“We only need it for this one time so find a cheap one.”
“That’d be a one-use-and-turn-it-in-to-be-developed type.”
Adam went into the next room and Edith went to the front door and stepped out onto the porch to see if she could see Nerber up the street from out there but he was not in sight.
Adam returned with the Yellow Pages phone directory. He started to sit on the sofa but stopped in mid-motion, glanced at that item of furniture, then moved over to his regular chair. He glanced back at the sofa warily. When Whiskers the hamster poked his head out from under the sofa to look around Adam gave a sad shake of his head. How much risk was he willing to take? How much of their stuff would have to go to be sure they weren’t contaminated? Animals should probably be at the top of that list. Oh well, they were tired of the hamster anyway.
“Well? What’s in the book?” Edith asked as she returned to her chair. “We can probably borrow one since we don’t want it except for today.”
Adam’s fingers did the walking to the appropriate page and then guided his eyes down the listings. He said, “There are a bunch of camera stores...”
“Any that sell used cameras? That should be the cheapest way to do this since we don’t care about it beyond taking some snaps of the stranger.”
“Better yet, there are two places that rent cameras.”
“For an arm and a leg I’ll bet,” Edith said.
“Instructions on using them is part of the package.”
“You point it at what you want to take a picture of and push a button. How much instruction do you need?”
“Tell me all about it when they show you what to do,” he said.
“Me? No way. You’re the one doing the leg work. That’s not something we’re gonna talk about, it’s how it is. Meanwhile time and opportunity are scooting on by. See where you can get to to rent a camera and then get back here and use it. Maybe we should send your cousin Barry to rent it, he might argue them down to a better price.”
“Or waste time quibbling over a few dollars that won’t make it cheaper since there’ll be his fee on top and first paid.”
“Why doesn’t he do things for us for nothing? We’re family after all,” Edith grumbled.
“We won’t take time to analyze that. Let me call this store and see if they have something I can rent, then I’ll worry about getting there and back.” Adam walked out of the room with the Directory.
“At least if you rent it we won’t have some neighbor griping that we borrowed her camera so she
should get part of the money we got for the pictures,” Edith said, knowing he was probably out of hearing but not caring about that. “Go ahead, call from the kitchen phone so I won’t kibitz while you’re doing it. I know what going out there’s about too.”
She went and stood close to the window to see as far as possible up the street. She muttered, “Maybe we took too long thinking to do this. Having a good camera won’t matter if we can’t find it to take its picture. Where could it have gone? Hell, once it got to the corner it could have gone lots of places and I don’t have a clue. Have do I make the boy know that’s his fault.”
Adam came back in with a street map in hand and without the phone directory. “They have a camera that should do what we need to do for a reasonable price as long as I get it back to them within one day.”
“How much did you tell them about what you want it for?”
“I didn’t say to take ET’s prom pictures, only that I wanted to record some people at a short distance or even a long distance. He’ll show me how to use the lens that lets me get close from far away.”
“How much?”
“A reasonable price considering what we want it for and don’t want to invest in it for the long haul.”
“How much?”
Adam ignored that and focused on his laptop that sat in its usual spot on the end table by his chair.
Far-out Show (9781465735829) Page 9
