"Great. You do that. Now tell me one thing. How come you just lie here studying all the time?"
"My leg hurts."
"No, the studying part. I mean, Louise. You're on vacation here."
"We still have to graduate."
"Oh wow. You are spoo-ky. Graduate? Why?" Nico tries to wipe the sweatband of his ball cap without removing it. "Okay, never mind that one. Suppose, just for grins, that I humor you. So what do we have to know for the exam? Go ahead. I'm asking. Graduate me. Learn me something."
She gives him a strange, probing look. Her eyes tell him: You can drop the disguise. No need to pretend with me. I've read your biography. Twice through. And this is where I'm supposed to teach you the end of the story you were eavesdropping on, outside the window, late one interrupted night.
The look, the accusation — I know who you are — rattles him. "Hey, Cluckie. C'mon. Let's blow this peanut stand. We got work to do."
Chuck hesitates a moment, his bandaged face trying to twist into an explanation wide enough to appease everyone. He turns to trot after the boss, when Joy calls them back.
"Wait a minute. 'Lino?" She swallows the first syllables in ignorance or first, awkward attempt at familiarity. The summoned boy returns to bedside, nice and casual like. "I wanted to ask you." She reaches, without letting him from her steady scrutiny, for a thin volume that she has kept at her side since receiving it days back. She fixes on the ancient, taut face, hoping to surprise it into dropping its disguise. "Do you know this story?"
If she flushes out the revealing muscle-flinch she expects, it does not show. Nico takes the hundred and fifty pages, thumbs through it back to front, reads the dedication and the tide page. "I'll swap you two superheroes, a sci-fi, and a kissy thing of your choice."
He looks up. His eyes challenge those of this overlathed dowel, this vanishing girl. "And I'll throw in a mint-condition chocolate cream egg. Just because I'm a nice guy."
For obvious reasons, the premature pensioner becomes Linda's darling. Any kid who not only puts up willingly with her amateur therapy reading but actually ad-libs asides is a patient after her own heart. On her rounds, she quickly learns how to get the maximum rile-up by calling out to him, "How's it hanging, old man?"
He glows under the sobriquet, puts on a palsy act, laces his already disconcerting voice with parody tremolo, and warbles back, "Can't complain. Well, I could complain. In fact…" Or: "Hanging? Wait. Lemme check."
Well, she asked for it. This afternoon, Linda finds Nico and a fraction of his gang camped around a TV. "What's up? What's on?" Perfect chance to get them to tell her one for a change.
"Stupid so-called show about some cartoon future that the friggin' cat dragged in." Nico's betrayal of the spell that has held half a dozen of his cohorts enthralled causes several wounded faces to jerk in hurt incomprehension. His better self, protesting pitifully from its perch on the traditional right clavicle, causes Nico to repent his rudeness by the time-honored method of redoubling it. "Yeah. You heard me right. Dumbshit program here, gentlemen."
"Nico," Linda growls. Quite the little performance he's mustering for her sake. A shame that kind of strutting is restricted to the young, or the old, or whatever her potty-mouthed courtier actually is.
"Oh. Sorry, ma'am. I mean dumb-fu…"
"Cut! That's enough out of you. Somebody fill me in."
But the other kids are too cowed now to give a synopsis, and His Nibs is pulling this royal sulk to punish the woman. So just kick back and watch a while. Linda settles in, tries to catch the drift of this installment's saga. It's set in that obligatory, endless High Chaparral of Space. She can tell it's the outermost Outer, because the guns, bombs, and assorted vehicles of outrageous intricacy are all proton-powered.
Wider and wilder skeins, eternally higher levels of energy manipulation: that's, like the immortal hokey-pokey, what it's all about.
On the one hand, they've got the matter transporter — the be-all and end-all of the whole civilized shooting match. On the other hand, galactic destiny still comes down to a slew of hand-to-hand combats with what amount to electrified meter sticks. The story takes place in two different worlds. One world just doesn't cut it with discriminating audiences anymore. Seems on one of these two, there's this combination architect, civil engineer, and voice crying in the wilderness…
"Hold it. Who is this guy? I can never understand it when they talk through those echo machines."
Suzi Banks peers up suspiciously, steals a glance at Nicolino and then back at Ms. Espera. "Beezaholi," she murmurs, in a coy, little-girl drawl as impenetrable as the cartoon sound effects.
"Say who? Beet-aholic? Would you mind spelling that?"
A violent shush from Nico cannot quell the ranks' revival. Suddenly, paraphrase flies at Linda from all directions, almost as if recounting gives as much pleasure as watching the wrinkle of event unfold in the first place.
"Beezaholi."
"He's eviir
"He's not evil. He's the one's gonna save M-31."
"What's M-31?"
"That's where the Dromedaries live."
"Andromedans, pissbag."
"Oh, them," Linda says. "I remember them. We go way back. What's bugging them this time?"
Childhood's hair-trigger tone detectors threaten to set off a chain reaction of suspicion, jamming all the communicator channels. Linda is rescued by the beautiful Chuck, who says, "They're facing Galactic Heat Death something fierce."
"Sun blowing up on them?"
An exasperated quartet shouts, "No! Dying out slowly." Dummy. Get your stellar thermodynamics straight.
Their spark is going cold, motionless, still. A race against the last ticks of the thermal buzzer before life fades into the freezing vacuum. The fable's appeal is as familiar as the planet-encroaching ice caps visible even from here, in the smogged semitropics of Angel City. Every day, a little trickle of available use escapes irreversibly through the cracks of the system. Cars slow, appliances rust out, neighbors capitulate in a hush. If Linda herself feels it, these kids must be frantic.
These, the fresh heat litmuses, the thermostatic coils still factory mint, must long ago have registered the approach of absolute zero and are left to go about astonished that the planet makes no preparation.
Beezaholi chooses this lull to mumble to himself: "The Cyclogeneron must be assembled on a scale no one has jet imagined. It must span the entire diameter of the star system! Only then mil it be capable of accelerating particles to the velocity needed to give us final power over the very laws of…"
"What's a Cyclogeneron?" Linda asks.
More irritation at her unending trouble with the obvious. But facts are as boundless as their unassuageable underpinning. The more they give to her, the more they have.
"It's this humongous metal ring…"
"More of a torus, really. A doughnut."
"I'm sure. A galaxy-sized metal doughnut. Give me a break."
"Arm or a leg?"
"And it's lined with these awesome hyperelectric solenoids that accelerate these subatomic…"
"And truly brutal cosmic forces come shooting out the other end."
"End? How can a doughnut…?"
"Beezaholi tried to tell the 'Dromedans about it. But that Rathgor, who's got control of the Planetary Radix…"
"Not just Rathgor. All the Phagolytics. It's like they simply don't want to…"
"The whoozy-whats?"
"Rathgor," Beezaholi says, "you must listen. If we don't begin at once to redirect the energy we squander on Amorphicoms into the construction of…"
"Did he say 'Amorphicom'?"
"They're like these immense private jets…"
"I thought they could transport themselves."