Karl’s Marine and Spacecraft Repair
by G. David Nordley
Illustration by William R. Warren, Jr.
“Mr. Karlsson, we need your help.”
It was a crisp, cultured, vaguely British accent and I looked around, hoping to find some source of the voice other than the frog Ellie was holding up to me.
“Sir?” It was the frog. Something about how the Sun had come up red this morning told me it was going to be a different kind of day. The frog seemed a quite ordinary, if large, green-spotted leopard frog. It wasn’t quite large enough to catch the attention of Marie at the Allouette Grill and French Kitchen, who was known to skulk the shore reeds of this chain of ponds and channels leading from Gull Lake up to Nisswa searching for fresher fare than she could get from her Duluth suppliers, but it was a largish frog. Maybe the size of a man’s hand. Pretty natural looking—seamless, no sign of any buttons or anything electrical, but they’re pretty good at disguising that kind of thing today.
“Grandpa,” Ellie stomped her ten-year-old foot on the oil darkened floor of the shop, “the frog wants to talk to you and my arms are getting tired.”
“Uh, pardon me, Frog.” I humored her and addressed the frog; Ellie got her way with me pretty easily, but had some sort of common sense not to take advantage of it too much, the way some kids who have to grow up too fast do—like they have a kid part and small adult part.
Ellie had to grow up fast about her ninth birthday; she moved in with me after Tad and Ellen got killed in a car wreck. It was a bad time. Six months earlier, my Terri Ann had got what was going around, except she got it a lot worse than anyone else did. All they could do at Brainerd was to keep her comfortable enough to die in her sleep. So, in less than a year, Ellie had lost her parents and her grandmother.
Snowed early June that year, too, which cut a couple weeks off the tourist season. A real stinker. Trying to keep Ellie on an even keel was all that kept me from going to Minneapolis or something. So now, Ellie had a talking frog—well, she could have had a lot worse. I didn’t see how playing along would hurt.
“You know,” I drawled at Ellie’s talking toy, “it’s been a while since I’ve run into an English frog. Some people wouldn’t use that accent on the Fourth of July, however.”
“Grandpa.”
Had some condescension crept into my voice? Have to work on that. “OK, OK Ellie, maybe the, er, frog would be more comfortable on the workbench.” I indicated an open spot between the cowling of an old Evinrude and a cracked prop off a Chris Craft which I had better get fixed or replaced by tomorrow noon.
Ellie nodded seriously and held her hands up to the edge of the bench and the frog waddled off her fingers with the grace and dignity of a miniature sumo wrestler. An expensively realistic toy, I thought. More than my Ellie ought to be spending, but I pretty much let her spend her allowance as she saw fit. The frog turned, faced me, and opened its mouth very slightly.
“Please don’t be alarmed by the form of this motile. It is a rather convenient shape to be going about in this area with little notice, don’t you think?”
I had to concede that point. “Whatever. You look like you belong around here, OK.”
“Of course he does, Grandpa; he’s a frog!”
“Uh, sure, Ellie; have you taken the trash out yet? The truck comes by at noon, you know.”
“Oh…” Ellie’s eyes got large and she scampered out without a further word. Score one for Grandpa.
She forgot to take the frog.
“We really do need your help,” it said.
Who the hell was controlling it? I wondered.
I looked quickly around to make sure no one else was looking at this and turned to Frog again. “OK, you’ve had your fun; now I got work to do.”
“Perhaps, motile was the wrong word. I am linked to our cybersystem, but am quite capable of independent action. More of a robot, really. And I do have work for you.”
I groaned. Some days start out better than others. The shop door looked out on the marina where most of my regular customers kept their boats. One of them was probably sitting out there on a boat with binoculars, a microphone, and a radio control getup. I decided to call whoever’s bluff and grabbed a piece of oil-smeared newspaper and held it up to the frog. “What’s this say?”
“The headline reads ‘Good Wild Rice Harvest This Year, Tribe Says’ and it goes on to talk about how much Sun—”
“OK” I interrupted. So those eyes weren’t glass. I grabbed the Evinrude housing and slapped it down over the frog. It was an old style metal housing which should have made any radio link with the frog pretty difficult. “Now turn the scrap of paper over and read the other side.”
There was a rustle, then the frog read: “Alice Jensen, 93, Crow Wing County librarian for sixty years. Drowned in a boating accident when her jet ski…”
Damn, it was an autonomous, multi-sensored, talking frog robot like something out of a Popular Science dream—or nightmare. I wasn’t ready to guess just where Frog might be from, but it clearly wasn’t out of the Target toy department. “OK, uh, Frog. Whatever you are, I’ll have to admit you seem to be on your own.”
“Very much so here, unfortunately. I had to come a long way to find someone open today.”
“Now let me get this right. You are something that someone, er, made, and you need my help?”
“Quite so,” Frog replied. “I represent a pair of astronauts and the cybernetic mind of their excursion craft, which unfortunately suffered a most inconvenient encounter with a jet ski down in Steamboat Bay last night. I’m afraid I’ve come to regard those vehicles as a significant nuisance.”
“You bet,” I agreed sympathetically and removed the Evinrude housing. If you ignored his shape and his accent, old Frog began to make a certain amount of sense. “Astronauts, you say. I suppose you don’t mean human astronauts?” Not too likely, but one could always hope.
“Our biological progenitors originated in the Small Magellanic Cloud about seven million years ago, but we are from a relatively local colony in Proxima Centauri’s asteroid belt.”
“Uh, have you folks checked in with NASA or the UN or the Chamber of Commerce or anyone?” Whatever else he was, Frog was probably some kind of what we used to call, um, a wetback.
“That might not be very wise for us or you. We’ve been observing the emergence of your race since the advent of wireless telegraphy. It’s a rare event of great scientific interest, as you can imagine. I can assure you that your extreme discretion will be well rewarded.”
“Some folks around here might call that a bribe, trying to keep me from my civic duty.”
“Quite a noble sentiment! Very well, then, we shall simply ask for the favor and ask that you contemplate what complexities might result from your report of a conversation with a frog.”
The thing you don’t need in Nisswa, Minnesota, is complexities. We’ve got weather and tourists and that pretty much takes care of complicating life by itself. I backed off a mite. A talking frog had a repair job for me? Whatever. I could use the work.
“Then again, some folks might consider it common sense to keep quiet about something like you. You have a repair job in mind? I do good work but I gotta charge for my time.”
The frog turned and stuck its tongue out and into the crack in the Chris Craft prop. A kind of fuzzy gray foam appeared over the crack and the prop moved ever so lightly. Then the foam vanished and the tongue flipped back into Frog’s mouth. The prop looked good as new.
“I trust we have a few hours in the bank, so to speak?”