Kim looked impatient. “Mr. Karlsson, a good night tonight might mean a whole class next semester, if you understand.”
“What do you do?” Ellie asked and I winced.
Kim rolled her eyes up but Kate knelt down to look Ellie in the eye and smiled. “I dance.”
“You’re very pretty. If I want to look like you when I grow up, do I have to take dancing lessons?”
Kate laughed lightly, “It wouldn’t hurt.”
Meanwhile, I had the starter and carb off, exposing the block. It had a crack. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”
“Hit me,” Kim groaned.
I nodded. “The bad news is that it looks like you’ll need a new block and that’ll be three hundred seventy-five plus labor and two days before I can get it because it’s the Fourth of July. The good news is that Dick’s Rentals is open ’till noon. He should have something to get you around for the next couple of days.”
“We gotta get to Minneapolis tomorrow. Business.”
Ellie tugged on my trousers and pointed to Frog, maybe thinking Frog could fix the cracked block. For all I knew, he probably could, but I wasn’t about to count on it just yet.
“Oh! That’s a big frog,” Kate gasped. Kim rolled her eyes again. Kate sidled up to me, pressing herself into my bare arm and demonstrating that there was even less to those net tops than met the eye. “I could drive back up Friday morning, pay and pick it up if you can’t fix it today. Will you take it, please, Grandpa? The rig belongs to my uncle and aunt.”
“Please, Grandpa, I like Kate,” Ellie added.
I disengaged myself, perhaps a little abruptly in my embarrassment, and nodded curtly. “Can’t promise anything, but I’ve got to go into Brainerd tomorrow morning anyway. If North-star Marine Supply has something on hand, I can have it ready for you by noon.” It’s a two and a half hour drive back to the Twin Cities and I didn’t figure their kind of business started much before five in the afternoon. “Meantime, you’d better get over to Dick’s.”
Kim shrugged and nodded. Kate touched my arm again, her eyes saying: “You don’t fool me.”
“I’ll show them where it is!” Ellie offered.
Kim cracked the first hint of a smile I’d seen on her. “OK, then let’s move our rears. We’ll have her right back, Mr. Karlsson.”
I thought a minute, then nodded. I used to know Kate, but if Kim hadn’t smiled, I don’t think I would have nodded. Dancers my eye, I thought, but they seemed nice enough and Kate wouldn’t let anything happen to Ellie.
“There’s a slight problem with tomorrow, I fear,” Frog said as soon as they left.
“Oh?”
“We really have to be on our way tonight.”
“It’s the Fourth of July; Olsen’s closed today. Why do you have to go tonight?”
“Otherwise the beings I represent will experience significant difficulty.”
“Difficulty? Damn it, was this a matter of life or death, or being late for dinner?”
“You must be very discreet.”
“I won’t tell another human being.”
“More discreet than that.”
I should have guessed. It was that kind of day.
“Won’t tell any other frogs either,” I promised. “Now, what’s up?”
“They need to return to the base spacecraft before their—the closest English words would seem to be guardian, or perhaps godparents, but the emotional relationship is closer to that of a human parent. The literal translation would be ‘Egg Tender.’ At any rate, they need to return before they are missed.”
“Uh-huh,” I said with a smile, having been at both ends of that circumstance in my life. “Is there more to it than that? I wouldn’t want to get too far on the wrong side of the, er, egg-tender’s by helping the little Huck Finns.”
“Romeo and Juliet might, perhaps, be a more apt analogy, though I might concede a bit of Tom and Becky in the characters of these two. The salient feature is that their respective Egg Tenders are not good friends and the two lack the necessary approvals for spawning. The spawning pools of the observation ship were thus unavailable to them. Also, the eggs would not survive in your waters, and this saves the inconvenience of unregistered larva. So this was a convenient place. Their respective Egg Tenders are doing research at Lake Baikal, and will return to the observation ship very early tomorrow morning, by your local time.”
“And they left Romeo and Juliet home alone. Uh-huh.” I tried to explain to myself why I should care, and gave up. I did—maybe the Romeo and Juliet analogy was some very sophisticated psychological manipulation on Frog’s part. He certainly was very well informed. They probably watched a lot of Masterpiece Theater and what not up there.
“Frog, you seem to be taking Romeo and Juliet’s side of this, rather than the authorities.”
“A complex situation, I agree, particularly when unauthorized use of a vehicle is involved. However, the authority involved in Egg Tending is personal, not societal, and the vehicle and its motiles have primary loyalty to the vehicle passengers and must try to avoid their harm. Should they return undetected, no harm will have been done.”
So our societies had that much in common—one could do whatever one wanted as long as one did it undetected. “Whatever,” I answered.
OK, Olsen had the stuff, he wasn’t open, but this was an emergency—for someone anyway—and a challenge for me. That had to be it: the challenge of fixing an authentic spaceship. I could leave that problem alone as well as an itch.
“Well, we could try to reach Olsen at home. Wouldn’t get your hopes up, though. Mac,” I called out to my computer. “Call Thor Olsen at home.”
My ancient Quadra III Compact lived on an oil-blackened wood shelf next to my coffee maker, with a good mic and speaker hanging beneath the shelf on hooks. Between the voice interface software and my interactive parts catalog, there wasn’t room for a lot else. But I didn’t need a lot else. Pretty soon, I heard a dial tone, then Mrs. Olsen’s voice came on line to tell me they were taking the kids to Paul Bunyan Land and to please leave a message.
“Paul Bunyan Land?” Frog asked.
“Big amusement park in Brainerd. Gotta big huge talking robot of Paul Bunyan and all sorts of north woods stuff around him, some legendary, some historical. We’ll probably have to go there and try to find him. Shouldn’t be too hard; Thor Olsen is almost seven feet tall.”
“Is this, perhaps, the same Thor Olsen who played center for the University of Minnesota fifteen years ago?”
I nodded. “You bet. NBA wouldn’t take him though; too slow.”
“I remember an image from one of your television programs,” Frog replied, “and can update the apparent age of the image to his current age. Observe the monitor on your Quadra III.”
There was Thor, all right. I nodded. “Add a full beard to that; he had one almost down to his chest, last I saw.” The beard seemed to grow in a second, and I was looking at Thor Olsen the way he looked last week at the Sons of Norway barbecue at East Gull Lake. I nodded.
“So, we are off to Paul Bunyan Land,” Frog announced.
“I wanna go, too!” Ellie squealed, followed by the sound of the front office screen door slamming. I made another mental note to turn the air screw out a bit—the darn thing closed so slowly now that a customer could pretty much come in, get a candy bar out of my machine, read a magazine, pick up a repair job, and be on the way out again before it finally slammed shut. Well, maybe I exaggerate, but an early warning system, it was not.
“You were talking to that frog,” Kate observed, trying, not quite successfully to stifle a giggle.
“That’s because it’s a talking frog,” Ellie explained, impatiently. “Can I go to Paul Bunyan Land with you, please?”
“Uh, later Ellie. Hi, Kate. I’ve got another job that’s going to take me into town today—won’t wait, so I might get a head start on your engine if I can find the right block.”