Lois and I hide out in this fortress a little beyond where the Rangers' cottages all are. When we first came back to the Institute we were guarded twenty-four hours a day by some of Major Handley's guys — from our new fans, sure, but also from the Searles and their goons, who were not good losers — and then the fortress got built. I didn't know anything could go up that fast — it was like watching time-lapse photography. It was amazing. It also must have cost a fortune. Dad is still pretty protective about me in some, sometimes weird, ways, and he seems to think it would blight me or something if I knew what it cost. With everything else that's happened I think this is pretty funny. Maybe it's just something he can protect me from.
And where's the fortune coming from, you're asking, or maybe you're not. After all, the galaxies of tourists not only buy tickets but they now all buy ye olde genuine Smokehill souvenirs by the barrowload — most of 'em stagger out of here now carrying shopping bags like they've just bought the week's groceries for a family of eight. It's mostly just the usual souvenir junk too, only with dragons on it, plus a few Smokehill specials, like real dragon scales, and the only place you can buy our dragons' scales is at our tourist center gift shop, and while it dragon scale is only sold as a dragon scale, I'm sure a lot of tourists go home telling themselves that really theirs is one of Gulp's or Bud's (Lois doesn't shed proper scales yet). This isn't necessarily tourists being blind and stupid either — dragon scales are all the same color after they've been off the dragon for a little while, whatever color they were on the dragon, so why not imagine yours is from your favorite dragon?
Everybody wants scales though, so it's a good thing we now have lots of dragons to provide them. I mean, we've always had lots of dragons, but after I collected a few bagfuls at Dragon Central and went through a really amazingly silly nonconversation with Bud about whether it was all right if I took them away, the dragons started collecting them for me. I don't think anyone has a clue what I want them for; it's just another of those inexplicable peculiarities of humans.
It's funny about the scales. Dad always said it was a bad idea, our Rangers have better things to do with their time than haul trash for tourists, tourists are just fine with coffee mugs and mouse mats that say GREETINGS FROM Smokehill. And I remember the flap when Mom and Katie and the latest noise of consultants (okay, what's the collective noun for consultants — a fire sale of consultants? ha ha ha) brought him around, saying that it was something tangible about our australiensis that visitors could not only see but touch and take home with them. Not to mention scales being about the only things attached to dragons that don't disintegrate within a few months: Maybe it's something to do with the fact that scales don't actually stay on the dragon long. Dad did have to admit they made us money — and even a big bag of them doesn't weigh much, so they're not a burden to carry back to the Institute. Since Lois the sanctuaries in Kenya and Australia have started selling scales too, but all their scales are just from any old dragons, and they don't do anything like the business we do.
Then the postcard from that first TV documentary-filmed at the Westcamp meadow, so there is a lot of hushed, dopey voiceover narration of the and this is where IT FIRST HAPPENED variety — of Gulp prostrate at my feet sold like nearly enough for a down payment on Smokehill II. You can't see most of her, of course, just a bit of her neck and her head, with her face tipped down enough for her nearer eye to be looking straight at me, very much like the first afternoon, when she was apologizing. The panorama version — where you can see all of her — sold even better. And then there's our patent on Dragon Dolls. And Dragon Squadron was last Christmas' biggest seller — in both its computer and its board game formats — the sort of scene where parents were pulling each other's hair out in front of FAO Schwarz. They had to call in some kind of riot police in Denver, I think it was, when a shipment got hijacked to somewhere else.
And, okay, yes you can buy an autographed copy of the panorama postcard of Gulp and me, and Gulp doesn't sign autographs.
It's true that they built our fortress before the money really started rolling in, but maybe the bank manager Dad got the loan from could smell that it was going to. Or maybe he just had a sense of humor. Or maybe Dad made up the idea for Dragon Squadron on the spot (actually, it was Dad's idea — I didn't know he even knew what a game was, let alone a computer game) and promised him first editions for his kids.
And speaking of people who were born to go on TV (the spinyridged ones that peep and the two-legged ones that bellow), Eleanor also made a huge difference in how the whole story went over at the beginning, when a lot of the country was still mostly on the Searles' side and the Searles were trying to make out, oh, I don't know exactly, it all made me so angry I couldn't think about it, just like at the beginning when there was a dead dragon and a dead stupid evil jerk and Lois was a secret — the Searles tried to make it out there was some kind of child abuse going on with my dad sort of giving me to the dragons as a sacrifice or something, or like that famous psychologist who raised his kids in a box to keep out bad influences (and I think my dad is a control freak). Seems like poor Dad was always getting whacked for the way he raised me — last time it was for handing me over to the Rangers. (Nobody ever tried to argue that the dragons had handed Lois over. Dull.)
So some enterprising reporter started looking for other kids and there are only Martha and Eleanor and Eleanor took over immediately and said that they'd known about Lois from the beginning and like sue her, she's eleven years old. This took the wind out of a lot of political sails, especially when Eleanor told the story of how it was Martha who found out that Lois liked her tummy rubbed, you just had to wear gloves to do it. Hardened senior Republican senators watching on the video link were going "awwwww" and then trying to pretend they were coughing.
Then the Searles tried to make it out that someone had taught Eleanor what to say, but the same enterprising reporter managed to convince Katie to let Eleanor have what amounted to a press conference, with questions from the floor and stuff. By the time Eleanor, perfectly self-possessed and articulate, had explained that it maybe wasn't true that I was the only human who'd ever tried to mom a dragonlet — there were one or two old Australian folk tales about it (they're in one of Mom's books) but they were so bizarre that the white guys that translated them thought they were about taking too many drugs, the Searles had lost. And without the Searles goading them nobody wanted to look bad by trying to put me or Dad in jail. So it was Gulp and Lois and Smokehill to a landslide victory. Just like Eleanor's is going to be when she runs for president in forty years or so.
I've gotten ahead of myself again. But this is sort of the happy ending part — or at least the cautious if a trifle shaky happy beginning – and also I didn't think the story was going to go on this long and I'd like to get it over with. But there's some other stuff I want to tell you the real version of. Like the animal rights activists breaking into Smokehill and letting all the things in the zoo out and how one of them (the zoo critter, not the activist) tried to eat Eleanor. There's a lot that happened in those last few weeks, after Lois and I fled west and the Searle army closed in, but I can't be bothered sorting out most of it, and there are already millions of people writing magazine articles and thumping great books on everything to do with Lois and dragons and Smokehill now so you can read them. I'm mostly only writing this at all to make Dad and Martha happy, and a little bit to try to get in some of the stuff all the other great thumping books leave out, or get wrong. Like the animal activists — there weren't any, okay? — and anything even trying to eat Eleanor.