Suddenly, Bubba stiffened as a thought occurred to him. “Say, uh, Mike. Has Kermit voided your warranty?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Well, you got all these wires hanging out of you, solder joints and such. You don’t look much like you did when I plugged you into that slot. In fact,” he said thoughtfully, “I doubt very much if I could plug you in the way you are. Now, I can’t say for sure, but mightn’t that make it difficult for you to operate normally?”
Quite suddenly, there was an extended burst of noise from the screen. Mike was clearly agitated, if the characters scrolling across the screen were any indication. They were jumpy and scattered, mixing standard English characters with alien.
“Bubba, I must speak with my supervisors. It is of great importance.”
“OK, I’ll call ’em in.”
When the two aliens saw the cobbled-together connections, they grew excited and began talking rapidly in their own language. Mike interrupted them, speaking just as quickly. Ollie pointed to the solder joints and threw up his hands, while Stan attempted to calm him, speaking softly and slowly.
“What’s going on, Mike? We screw up?” Kermit asked, a little nervously. “I’d hate to be vaporized or something.”
“That would depend on your definition of the phrase screw up,’ Kermit. Ollie is certainly unhappy, but you’re in no danger. We’re not a particularly violent race.”
“I know I should be reassured by that, but—”
“Let me speak to them.” Mike began talking quickly, Stan nodding from time to time and adding his own comments. Ollie looked from Bubba to Mike, occasionally asking the screen questions, and clearly thinking hard about the answers. Finally, he shrugged and spoke, pointing first at the screen and then at Bubba. Stan clapped his hands, obviously pleased, and nudged Ollie, who grinned a little ruefully and made a gesture that clearly meant “What the hell?”
“Bubba,” Mike said, “we have much of importance to discuss. My supervisors have determined that, with the modifications Kermit made in order to interface with your computer, I am, as you conjectured, no longer able to interface with the ship. As these changes were done for the repair of the ship’s power systems, the adaptation was necessary and inevitable.”
“OK,” Bubba said slowly, “What does that mean, exactly?”
“I have been classified as damaged equipment. Since I am no longer able to function as I was, I have been, in your idiom, discharged.”
Bubba stared. “Fired.”
“Yes.”
“No longer a representative of your parliament.”
“Yes.”
“And whatever knowledge you have of the technologies involved with the Silver Bird…”
“…Is now available to you, yes.”
Bubba sat down. “Well, drop me in dog-shit.” Absently, he took out his rag and began wiping his hands. “This is… a tad overwhelming, Mike.”
“Wait a minute, guys,” Kermit said. “Bubs, we’ve read enough SF to know that his home planet isn’t going to allow us to have this kind of technology. It stands to reason that they have some sort of laws against it, and a standard operating procedure to prevent it. How about it, Mike?”
“That is correct. There is a device built into my circuitry that will wipe my files when triggered.” He added a few words in the alien’s language, and Ollie nodded. He took a small object about the size and shape of a matchbox out of a belt pouch and held it up.
“We owe you much,” he said in English. “You are friend to us, and you fix for us to get home. This is auto-destruct for Mike,” he said, and dropped it. Stan leaned nonchalantly against the workbench, then flicked a heavy wrench onto the floor, smashing the little object into tiny bits.
Stan and Ollie looked at each other and said in unison, “Oops.” Then they left the garage and moments later Bubba heard the opening bars of “Oh, Fortuna” from Carmina Burana.
“What the hell are they watching now?” Kermit asked, blinking in bewilderment.
Bubba waved a hand in dismissal. “Any of a half-dozen bad movies. We got to think, Kerm. There’s something pretty momentous going on here, and I just don’t know how to deal with it.”
“You’re going to be a rich man, Bubs. Rich and powerful.”
Bubba shook his head slowly. “I don’t want that, Kermit. I got no illusions about my place in the scheme of things. I got whatever I need right here, and I got my work. Who the hell needs big money in Central Garage? Hell, we’re only half a day from Frog Level, and nobody else in the world can say that. And I’m certainly no more capable of wielding this kind of power than your average panful of scrapple is.” He stood up and tapped the screen with his fingers. “I dunno, Mike. I’m at a big loss for what to do, at least until Kirby calls back.”
“I’m sure you’ll find a way to use it, Bubba. In the meantime, Kermit, if you’ll do the honors, we can get the ship fixed before my ex-supervisors become addicted to television.”
After Kermit plugged in the cable, Mike called up the CAD program and drew the cams in wire-frame, with their dimensions marked. The shapes were too complex, it was decided, for milling.
“Tell you what, guys. I did some metal-casting in college, and I think that might do a better job,” Kermit remarked. “You’ve got some bronze stock here, don’t you?”
“Yeah, bar and sheet, I use it for bushings. Got a blast-furnace, too. How do we do it?”
“Well, the easiest way would be lost-wax. We’ll need plaster, and you’ll probably have to smooth off the rough edges a little. Mike,” he said, “do these measurements have to be absolutely precise?”
“No, Kermit. The on-board system is capable of making adjustments until we get to a nearby outpost. As long as the cams are made of non-ferrous metal, they’ll do fine.”
“In that case,” Bubba said, “how about lead? Be a whole lot easier to handle, and it’ll set up quicker. Easier to trim, and I got plenty left over.”
“OK. Great. Let’s get to it.”
“I’ve got some beeswax around here, too. Let me see…” He rooted around in a drawer until he came up with a box, then cut it into blocks roughly the right size.
Kermit set about carving the wax into the correct shapes, roughly an inch on a side, carefully checking against the images on the screen and using calipers. When it was done to his and Mike’s satisfaction, he began rolling out a long, narrow “snake” of wax, which he then cut into shorter lengths. “You have to vent it. Otherwise, the form’ll blow up.” He attached the snakes to the cubes, and said “Bubba, time to mix some plaster. We’ll need a block about the size of two bricks.”
“I can do that. Bucketful be enough?”
“Fine.”
When the plaster was ready, Kermit pushed the cubes into it, making sure that the vents weren’t covered.
“Now what?”
“We wait about an hour for the plaster to set. We should let it go overnight, but we don’t have that kind of time. In the meantime, how about some pictures?”
In the ensuing hour or so, Kermit had the aliens pose in front of their ship. He got shots of them watching television, eating microwave popcorn, and waving happily at the lens while pointing at the Central Garage Corporate Limits sign.
Finally, the plaster was as set as it needed to be, and Bubba started his blast furnace. Throwing a bar of lead into a heavy crucible, he opened the door of the furnace and stuck it in.
“Now what, Kerm?”
“We bake the mold.”
“Bake it?”
“Yep. Melt the wax so we have a negative impression of the cams.”
“Bring it on into the kitchen, then.”
Within a few minutes, the wax had run out of the vents, and they were ready to pour in the lead. Kermit handled the ladle himself, with the others looking on in interest; apparently, Stan and Ollie had never encountered anything of the sort, and they kept up a running commentary.