by Mel Gilden
'Your interest in finding the proper spine necklace seems to be neither academic nor even financial. I don't trust you. I don't want to see Pele and Lono hurt.'
'How would I hurt them?'
'You'd keep the necklace for yourself.'
'And what would I do with it?'
'Lono seemed to think you'd know.' Medium Rare turned to Rupee Begonia—a neat trick, hanging there at the tattered end of a green scarf—and said, 'Take us back to my consultation room.'
Rupee Begonia closed her eyes. If she was trying to concentrate, her nervous mouth and hands hadn't heard about it. Then she grabbed each of us and dragged us back through the funhouse, back across the ocean with the glowing penguins, back across the field of campfires and torches, and suddenly we were hanging near the ceiling of Medium Rare's octagonal room. The glass ball was empty. Medium Rare and the geek were still sitting there. The geek still had his nose mashed into the octagonal table.
Then the floating Medium Rare was gone, and the one at the table began to move. She yawned up at me. She said, 'Thank you, Rupee Begonia.' Suddenly, Rupee Begonia was gone and the glass ball was full of smoke again. Medium Rare stood up, and the door to the long hall slid open.
Edgar Allan was standing there, waiting. Feeling a little queasy, I said, 'What about me?'
'You?' Medium Rare said. She smiled and said, 'You ain't got no body. And nobody cares for you.'
Chapter 22
Not A Bad Way
To Spend Eternity
MEDIUM Rare made big conjuring gestures with both hands as she said, 'You will toss forever on the spirit winds, never again knowing flesh.' She nodded to Edgar Allan, who came into the room and lifted my body over one shoulder. I felt violated, used, as if I'd been cracked open against my will and filled with sewage.
Medium Rare mused, nearly to herself, 'It is not a bad way to spend eternity. You will know neither hunger nor thirst nor fatigue. More importantly, without a spirit guide such as Rupee Begonia, you will not visit the same place twice. Anyone who sees you or hears you will think only that you are a hallucination, a bad dream, something to fear and forget.' She nodded again to Edgar Allan, and he took steps toward the door.
I dived for my body with all the control of a paper airplane. Edgar Allan had not taken two steps before I was on it, and trying to get my foot in the door. Behind me, Medium Rare was laughing. I don't know what she was doing, but there was no more way into my body than there was into a walnut.
Focusing as hard as I could, I cried, 'Will!' Would he and Bill hear me downstairs? If they could hear me, could they get up here in time?
Then, against all logic, Will and Bill were standing in the doorway. 'Grab me and run,' I cried.
'What?' Will said, looking from my body to me—or slightly too high and to the right of me.
'Do it.'
'Look out,' Medium Rare cried.
Will made a grab at my body but missed because Edgar Allan took a step back as he half-turned to look at her. He tripped over Medium Rare, who was trying to prevent Bill from pushing the backs of Edgar Allan's knees. Will grabbed my body as Edgar Allan and Medium Rare hit the floor. Bill squeaked clear and hustled after Whipper Will down the hall.
'Get them,' Medium Rare ordered.
I floated after Will, Bill, and my body. I said, 'Quick. Changehorses.'
'You got it,' Bill said, and began to whinny like a horse.
'Ribbit!' Will said loudly, a big frog in a little pond. 'Ribbit!'
I could hear the hubbub of a gathering crowd at the bottom of the corkscrew stairs. Making all that noise themselves, they'd never hear the animal sounds Bill and Will were making. Medium Rare and Edgar Allan were certainly close behind us. We were trapped. I floated past Bill and Will, and hovered at the foot of the stairs.
A crowd was congealing in the giant's coffin, but no leader had yet emerged to lead a charge up the stairs. It was a mixed crowd of men and women, the likes of which you could see on any street corner. The one thing they had in common was lost and empty eyes that searched for things this world did not contain.
I focused so they could see me. Hoping the name would have the same effect on this crew as it had on Merle back in Changehorses, I spread my arms and intoned, 'I am Elvis.'
That got their attention, which was all I wanted. They stared at me dumbfounded and quiet—quiet enough to hear a horse's whinny and the night call of a frog. That frightened them, and they backed away from the entrance to the stairwell, the crowd knotting like the smoke in Medium Rare's glass ball.
Will hit the bottom of the stairs at a run, and kept running. They'd been expecting a horse with moonglow on his muscles, but they got one old surfer and a small ducky robot; they stepped back just the same. Not being too polite about it, Will was able to push through the surprised crowd. The front rank fell back on the true believers behind them, leaving enough confusion to slow Medium Rare and Edgar Allan when they got to the bottom of the stairs.
A moment later, Will was behind the wheel of the Belvedere. He shot down the mountain, hauling Bill and the short body of a big-nosed alien in the back seat. The part of me that wasn't in the back seat led the car along the twisting road.
A big, invisible hand pushed me off course, and a universe of ugly green bubbles spurted at me from a point deep in the western sky. I cried out, and tried to hug the spire of a pine tree, but my hands went right through. No hunger, no thirst, no fatigue, but fear. Plenty of fear in the spirit plane.
Using the last of my concentration. I focused on getting my consciousness down into my body. Maybe without Medium Rare blocking me, I could manage it. I fought against the spirit winds like a hummingbird in a hurricane. Green bubbles were all around me. Inside each one was a clutch of eyes and tentacles. I fought harder, and slipped through the roof of the car. Bill had my head in his lap. The green eyes watched as I turned to match the position of my body. I don't know if they were angry or sad or just bored with the spirit winds, but those eyes were the last thing I saw just before I slid into my body the way a hand slides into a glove, and I retreated to an infinity point of my own.
I awoke to a vibration and a hum that had been part of the dream I'd been having, I opened my eyes. At first I thought I hadn't made it back to the physical plane, that the green eyes were still looking at me, but then I blinked and the eyes became friendly. They were Bill's. I sat up next to him on the back seat of the Belvedere, and saw that we were on a freeway, speeding through the pregnant yellow hills, I rubbed my nose. It was still sore from where it had hit the table. Strangely enough, it was the only part of me that hurt.
To the back of Whipper Will's head I said, 'Where are we?'
'Are you cool, dude?'
'All in one place, anyway. Where are we?'
'Not far from Castaic.'
'Anybody after us?'
'No way, ho-zay. I cruised north instead of south.'
'I hope that's tricky enough.'
The hills slid by us. I wanted to think, needed to think, but my mind was a solid brick of clay. Bill was watching me. I told him I was fine. He said, 'You bet,' but he kept watching me.
I said, 'I thought you guys went outside.'
'Colder outside than a brass bathing suit,' Whipper Will said, 'Bill and I decided to wait in the hallway.'
'In the hallway it was warmer than a brass bathing suit,' Bill said.
'Great patter. Bill,' I said.
'You got it, Boss.'
A few miles later, Whipper Will said, 'What happened in there?'
'I don't know myself. Maybe it was all a dream.' I rubbed my nose. I told him most of the story, leaving out only the deal I had made with Pele and Lono. No point getting Will's hopes up about Captain Hook.
'Astral projection,' said Will as if he were impressed.
'The screwball's answer to the old reliable one-way trip to the bottom of Santa Monica Bay.'
Whipper Will took us farther north. Occasionally I turned to look out the back window, but if
anybody was following us, he kept changing cars to do it. At the Castaic off ramp, Will turned the car around and we headed south, back toward Los Angeles.
The country was pretty, if monotonous, just the thing for a guy who was trying to dig his brain out of a landslide. Whipper Will drove smoothly while he hummed what may have been a tune. Bill looked out the window, saying nothing. We soon passed the Changehorses off ramp. I felt better when I saw that no brass band was waiting for us. We continued to drift south.
Medium Rare was wrong about Pele and Lono. They were not spirits. They were also no more Polynesian than I am, despite their current appearance. Even before I knew their names or had seen them for the first time, I'd known they were not of this Earth. The top hat, of course, had given them away.
Pele and Lono were from Yewpitz, a planet we Toomlers had had dealings with long before we ever intercepted the first broadcast from Earth. The Yewpitzkitziten were a strange and not very reliable race, but not without their charm—kind of like the surfers in Whipper Will's house. The ones I'd seen looked more like eggbeaters than Polynesians. Why they chose to design one of their ships to look like a top hat was anybody's guess, but I knew for a fact it had been done before.
As a race, the Yewpitzkitziten were intrigued with tricks and trickery; Clarke may have been thinking about them in particular when he wrote about the science of a sufficiently advanced race.
None of which explained why they were interested enough in blowfish spine necklaces to steal Harry's truck. Except that blowfish spines coincidentally looked a lot like slaberingeo spines, and slaberingeo spines are what make the Standard Hyperspace Interstellar Propulsion unit work. If they'd somehow lost their spine, the SHIP unit wouldn't work, and it would take centuries for them to get home, or to anywhere else in the galaxy. They'd look hard for their spine, or for a replacement. Yes, they would.
No matter what their motive, they'd illegally parked their hat on the beach and stolen a truck and who knows what else? I should turn them in to the police at my earliest opportunity. Three things prevented me.
The first was that I didn't know where they were, though I assumed the place where I'd spoken to them was not located any deeper in the spirit plane than was the San Fernando Valley. The second was that an unhappy Yewpitzkitziten could start a lot more trouble than the police or anybody else on Earth were ready for. Portable volcanos and instant thorn bushes were only the beginning. The third was that I knew what it was like to be a very strange stranger. I'd give them any slack I could.
None of which meant that I wouldn't look for the spine they wanted. As far as I could tell, nobody would be hurt if I found it. Not Captain Hook. Not Pele and Lono. Maybe not even the person who had it at the moment.
I had an idea about that. The airplane Whipper Will and Bingo took back from Hawaii had been wrapped up in a strange fog that hadn't bothered any other plane. Maybe it was just bad luck. More likely, somebody aboard that plane was carrying an unbalanced slaberingeo spine. If they still had it, they might not mind my finding them.
A car roared up beside us, and kept level. It was small and feisty, with lines so streamlined, the bodywork looked as it if had melted into that shape. There was nothing so odd about the car or its actions. But the driver was a circus all by himself. He glanced at me through round glasses whose frames hung from his face a little crookedly and with no more confidence than a man on rubber stilts. His white beard fell in finger waves from his nose, and looked as natural as suspenders on a goose. Then he lifted one long hand and pointed a pistol at me.
I cried, 'Drop back, quick!'
While Whipper Will said, 'What?' the person in the green car squeezed off a shot. His car swerved at that moment, and the bullet went somewhere other than into my head. The shot sounded frail and far away against the road noise. The green car pulled ahead of us and kept going. I'd have gotten the licence number, but it had conveniently been splashed with enough mud to plant petunias in.
'Follow that car,' I cried.
'What?' Will said again.
'That green car. Catch it.'
Will said nothing more, but hunched over the wheel. The Belvedere chugged as Will tried to accelerate too fast, caught itself like a drunk regaining his balance, and then steadily picked up speed.
'What's going on?' Will said.
'The driver of that car took a shot at me.'
'I thought some gravel hit us.
I didn't know what to say to that, so I concentrated on making the car go faster. Sitting in the back seat as I was, my efforts did all the good you might expect. We closed the space between us and the green car, but couldn't go fast enough to actually catch it. I was about to ask Bill to get out and push when I heard a siren and saw lights flash behind us.
Whipper Will saw them, too, and grumbled, 'Pigs.' Over his shoulder he yelled, 'I thought you were driving. I didn't bring my licence.' I passed him my temporary licence. He was a little taller than the description said I was, but there was no comment about noses, so maybe he'd be able to fake it.
Will slowed the Belvedere, and pulled onto the shoulder. In the distance, the green car was a bug scurrying along the highway. It went over a rise and dipped out of sight. A few seconds later, it reappeared much farther away.
The Highway Patrolman strolled over to us, getting out his book. His partner watched us through the windshield while he spoke into a handset. After that, there was a lot of very polite dialogue concerning safe driving habits, with particular reference to the speed limit. The patrolman took my temporary licence from Will and studied it gravely. He copied some information off it, then walked back to the patrol car. A few minutes later he came back, handed the licence to Will and said, 'Remember, traffic laws are there for your safety.'
'Yes, sir,' Whipper Will said, as if admitting it had been he who'd put the overalls in Mrs Murphy's chowder.
The patrolman gave Will his ticket, and walked back to the patrol car. Will stuffed the ticket into his pocket, started the Belvedere's engine and accelerated till he was driving enough under the speed limit to be comfortable. A few seconds later, the Highway Patrol car roared past us, crossed three lanes without signaling, and got off at the next off-ramp.
By this time, the green car was long gone.
Chapter 23
The Big Broadcast
BY the time we got back to Malibu, the afternoon was almost gone, and a lot of the western sky had been plated with gold. It had been a good day. I'd astrally projected for the first time, and had not quite been trapped in fairyland. On the way home, somebody had taken a shot at me, but that was OK because they'd missed. Whipper Will had chased them, netting me nothing but a ticket for speeding. He had been right. You didn't need a licence to drive, only to get caught. Oh, and yes, the guy who'd taken a shot at me had gotten away without revealing his licence number.
Though it was early enough for the surfers to still be bickering about dinner, I felt no livelier than twenty pounds of French fries. Captain Hook was in Will's and Bingo's bedroom, making dirty clothes circle through the air like floppy, misshapen vultures. I complimented him on the trick and asked him to get out. I was not very polite. It had been a good day. Good and long, and I was ready for some rest.
The rest ended with somebody shaking me. Sleep receded, allowing me to open my eyes It was light in the room, meaning I'd slept through the night. I no longer felt like French fries, but I was still twenty pounds of potatoes.
'Wha...' I said, waving Whipper Will away from my arm.
'Somebody on the Ameche.' His voice seemingly came through layers of cloth.
'Huh?'
'The blower. The phone.'
I struggled to my feet, and made it to the kitchen without bumping into more than a couple of walls. Bill had the phone to the side of his head, listening intently.
'Interesting conversation?' I said as I took the receiver away from him.
'I don't know. They didn't say anything.'
'Hello?' I said into the ph
one.
'Zoot? This is Busy.'
'Right both times. What's up?'
'Somebody's been here. They went through my blowfish spine collection.'
A chilly wind blew through the kitchen. I may have imagined it. I said, 'Have you called the police?'
'Of course, silly.'
'Why call me?'
'You're a detective. I thought you might be able to help. You seemed awfully interested in blowfish spines the other day.'
'Well, everybody's after blowfish spines. It's the latest thing. Haven't you heard?'
'You sound drunk.'
'The result of hard work and clean living.' I turned away from the phone and cleared my throat, surprising Bill so that he jumped and looked at me. Into the mouthpiece, I said, 'Anything missing?'
'Not that I can tell.'
'Who knew about your collection?'
It became quiet at Busy Backson's end. Her breath was soft and even, and so peaceful she might have been sleeping. She said, 'It wasn't exactly a secret.'
'I see. Then all we have for suspects is the immediate world. Anybody hear about your collection just recently?'
'Not from me.'
'What about Gone-out?'
'Wait a minute,' she said. There was the clatter of the receiver dropping on the floor. While I waited for her to come back, I used one hand to pour myself a cup of the coffee left in a Pyrex pot. It was tepid, bitter stuff, but I felt a little sharper for drinking it. In the phone I heard shouting, a man's voice and a woman's voice. It could have been Gone-out and Busy. It could have been the Man in the Moon and one of his moonbeams.
I had choked down three sips when Busy came back on the line. 'He says he told a guy named Avoirdupois.' She was angry now. She sounded as if every square inch of skin on her body itched, and it was all she could do not to scratch. I knew that any minute now, I'd start to itch too.
I said, 'Uh huh. What, exactly, did you want done?'
'Breaking and entering is still a crime, isn't it?'
