The Water Peddlers

by Greg M. Hall



  The Water Peddlers

  By: Greg M. Hall

  Originally Featured in Golden Visions Magazine

  Copyright 2010 by Greg M. Hall

  This book may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided this book remains in its complete original form and proper attribution is given the author.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events portrayed in this novel are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Traffic Control (Action)

  Closure (Fantasy)

  City of Light (Fantasy)

  Easy Money (Fantasy)

  Rick’s Hostage (Horror)

  The Gig (Horror)

  My Pal The Bug #1: For They Know Not… (Sci-Fi)

  My Pal The Bug #2: The Haunted Drug Lab (Sci-Fi)

  That Stupid Kid (Literary)

  Azad jolted awake, briefly disoriented before remembering he’d slept on the battered old sofa in his back-room workshop. The amber glow of a streetlight filtered through the workshop’s lone window, but his body told him dawn wasn’t that far away.

  The sound of another man’s breathing made him start; his heart slowed when he recognized it as the grumbly snore of his older brother. Mikar had gone to sleep on the floor with his sport coat wadded under his head.

  The clumsy oaf should not have been able to enter without waking him, but the feverish work of the past six days had worn Azad down. Taking his brother’s words to heart, he’d only slept when he found his fingers and mind too dull and fumbling to continue productively. That meant around four hours’ sleep a night, with a ten-minute ‘Edison nap’ at midday.

  As the circuits of his mind began to engage, he allowed himself a smile. He’d gone to bed with a shred of optimism. Around two in the morning, he made his shoebox-sized test vehicle jump two meters from one table to another. Not really jump as much as blink; it started in one spot, and when he closed the switch, it was in the other.

  The air still held a faint whiff of ozone, and his stomach immediately lurched in reaction. He hated being stressed out like this. The lack of sleep, the deadline—

  Azad burst from the couch and in three quick steps hunched over a sink where he vomited, his stomach unable to produce anything but soupy, bile-yellowed slime. The acidity bit at the lining of his mouth, and he spat several times before cupping some water in his hand and rinsing it out. He’d wakened in this manner for the past three mornings.

  “What happened?” Asked Mikar from behind, in the closest thing to a show of concern Azad could remember.

  “It’s nothing.”

  His brother sat up with a hmmpf and rubbed his face in his palms.

  “Concerned about my progress? There’s no need. I finally had a breakthrough last night; now I need to put a rat or something live on board, and duplicate it, then—”

  Mikar held a hand up. “Truly, I want you to understand how… how impressed I’ve been at your ability to operate under a deadline. If there were any way I could give you more time…”

  Azad, who rarely saw sympathy from his brother, asked: “Why did you sleep here last night? Is something wrong?”

  From the front of the house, a doorbell chimed.

  Mikar let loose a phrase in the mother tongue, a filthy one that their uncle Rabat had taught them. “Listen to me: we must go now!”

  A month before, the brothers had been relaxing on the living room sofa. At Azad’s insistence, they watched the news.

  “We’ve been talking to them for ten years”, said Mikar. “It’s no big deal anymore.”

  “Yes, but it is the first time we’ve met them face to face. Please don’t change the channel.”

  On the screen, the Earth ambassador offered his Gliesan counterpart a spare metal vessel. Mikar, his body shaking with condescending laughter, said: “And that’s all we give them: a jug of water.”

  “You’re always so quick to belittle things. Water is perfectly appropriate. Gliese is more desolate than the Rub-Al-Khali.” His research-physicist colleagues had taken to calling it Arrakis.

  Onscreen, the Gliesan ambassador accepted the bottle and lifted a reflective ingot the size of a Hershey bar from an intricately carved box. Mikar rose from the couch, walked to the TV set, and brushed his hand on the screen. He always touched things; always put his hand on people when he talked.

  “Is that platinum?”

  “I believe iridium. Which, as far as I’m aware, fetches a price somewhere between gold and platinum.”

  Suddenly his brother turned his bulky frame, a wide grin splitting his neatly-trimmed beard. “Imagine if there were a way for us to bring them our own jug of water!”

  Usually, Mikar would present one of his hare-brained schemes and the brothers would share a good laugh. Azad didn’t even smile as he watched the liquid-smooth brick change from alien to human hands. A queasy wave passed through his gut, like it did every time he had a brilliant idea that promised massive effort and potential for failure.

  His brother’s grin drooped. “What?”

  Azad stared at his brother, afraid to breathe. The older man’s eyes, wide as a toad’s, darted around the room. In the front of the house, the doorbell rang a second time, followed by the unmistakable tattoo of a fist on wood.

  “Who is that?”

  “It doesn’t matter who,” Mikar grunted. “What matters is what they’ll do when they find us.”

  That got Azad moving. He strode to the full-scale apparatus and sat in the control seat. Everything that he did to the mock-up, he’d also done to the full-scale before running a test. It had seemed the best way to ensure something didn’t get missed in fabrication.

  He flipped a pair of switches, and a warbling ache from the vast amounts of power stored behind him flared in his back teeth. The superconductors had been charging while he experimented; they were the easy part of all this. He’d already programmed the coordinates into the apparatus’ processor, a nice diversion while he waited for polymers to set and adhesives to dry. The rest of it, the wiring and adjustments that he’d sweated over for the past week…

  They were about to find out.

  Mikar climbed into the adjacent seat while a percussive thwack came from the front of the house. There could have been a number of things that caused that noise, but to Azad it sounded like a sledgehammer blowing through a doorknob.

  He swung his palm toward the red plunger to release the two-terawatt burst that would transport them fifteen light years instantaneously—

  And he stopped it, inches from deployment.

  “What’s wrong?” hissed Mikar.

  Another bark of noise from the front of the house, this one more drawn out and splintery, announced to the brothers that they no longer had a functional front door. Mikar reached for the plunger, but Azad, in the only act of physical restraint he’d ever performed on his brother, grabbed his wrist.

  “No!”

  “It must be this week!”

  Mikar had that look again, the one that augured an imminent explosion.

  Taking a deep breath, fighting down the stress-induced nausea that welled in the pit of his stomach and wrapped its fingers around the gut-spike of his ulcer, Azad tried once again to inject a measure of sanity into their conversation.

  “I’m telling you, Mikar: if this doesn’t work, we don’t just go broke or lose a little dignity. We die!”

  “Overcautious as usual,” his brother replied. “Perhaps if I described where some of our funding came from, you’d share my sense of urgency.”

  “No, Mikar. Even with the testing I want, we’re taki
ng a significant risk. Without testing, we’d be playing Russian Roulette!”

  They locked dark, angry eyes for a moment. Suddenly, Mikar smiled. It was a weary, fatalistic expression, and Azad would have rather seen him shouting. “Ah, brother,” he said, ruffling a hand through his hair, “at last I see a measure of assertiveness from you. Perhaps Mother didn’t just find you in a basket in the rail yard next to the house.”

  “And my testing?”

  Mikar’s smile disappeared, replaced by a jutting lower lip. “Fine. You have ten days—”

  “—But I need three weeks at least—”

  “—Ten days. Run all the tests you want in that span. If you don’t think that’s enough time, I suggest you move the couch into the workshop.”

  He’d left the room, ending the argument.

  “We forgot the water!” hissed Azad.

  Voices filtered under the workshop door. The crash of something heavy and tinkly let them know they’d need a new television.

  Mikar looked impotently at the empty drum against the wall. “There’s no time!”

  Azad bolted from his seat, sprinted to the sink, and over his brother’s nearly noiseless but wildly gesturing protestations filled a teapot from the tap. Then he rushed back, water brimming over from the teapot, and handed it to his brother. Some of it splashed onto his leg in an embarrassing spot, but he didn’t notice: the doorknob to the workshop was turning.

  In one motion Azad planted himself in his seat and hammered down on the red plunger. The contacts clicked, but nothing