“Nobody’s ordering us,” Sheldon said. “The Navy’s asking for us. They need our help with something.”
He shrugged. “I’m going. There aren’t any flights to the States anyway. Might as well go do some work and earn some hazard pay. It beats sitting around a hotel room the size of a shoebox, watching Japanese game shows.”
“I’m not going,” Ann said. “The Navy can kiss off.”
“Okay,” Sheldon said. “I’ll tell Rick, and they’ll send somebody else.”
“They can’t do that,” Ann snapped. “Mouse is my baby. I did half the fabrication, and I wrote most of the code. Nobody knows that robot like I do.”
“I understand that,” Sheldon said. “But Mouse doesn’t belong to you, Ann. It’s a very expensive prototype that happens to be the property of Norton Deep Water Systems. And Norton has an extremely lucrative contract to build a few hundred Mouse units for the United States Navy. Ann, you know that corporate isn’t going to piss off their numero-uno customer. If the Navy wants a Mouse technician, Norton’s going to send them one. If it’s not you, it’ll be somebody else. But it’s going to happen. You know that.”
He turned back toward the door. “I’ll call Rick, and tell him to get another tech out here.”
Ann sighed. “Alright! I’ll go, damn it! Just get out of here so I can pack and get dressed.”
Sheldon checked his watch again. “The van will be here in about forty minutes. Why don’t we meet in the downstairs coffee shop in half an hour?”
“Okay,” Ann said. “Have some caffeine ready when I get down there. Otherwise, I may have to kill you.”
“Will do.” He reached for the doorknob.
“Sheldon?”
He paused. “Yeah?”
“Did you look at my butt when my back was turned?”
“Ah … no. I thought about it, but it didn’t seem polite.”
Ann threw a pillow at him. “You’re too freaking nice for your own good. Now, get the hell out of my room and let me get dressed.”
Sheldon laughed. “Meet you downstairs.”
Thirty minutes later, Ann walked through the front door of the coffee shop. The lighted plastic sign by the entrance identified the shop as Hero Coffee Star. The accompanying logo included a bright red Art Deco coffee pot, rendered in the style of a 1950s Flash Gordon rocket ship.
The interior décor of the coffee shop followed the retro-science fiction theme. The walls were airbrushed with cartoon murals of alien lunarscapes, dotted with improbable-looking domed cities in which the buildings all resembled old-school jukeboxes.
Sheldon was seated at a small round table that had been silk-screened to look like the planet Saturn. As promised, he had a cup of coffee waiting on the table in front of Ann’s chair.
He was looking the other way as she approached, and humming a strange little tune — bouncy, but with an odd rhythm.
Ann sat down and started doctoring the coffee with sugar and powdered creamer. “Do you really have to make that much noise this early in the morning?”
“It’s stuck in my head,” Sheldon said. “From a Japanese commercial.”
He hummed the tune again, and used his spoon to gently tap out the notes against the rim of his coffee cup. The musical clink of the metal on porcelain seemed to goad him into song. “Kitty paws,” he sang. “Like Santa Claus, but kitty paws…”
Ann snorted, and had to grab a napkin to keep from spewing coffee. “Kitty paws? What were they advertising?”
Sheldon took his own swallow of coffee. “Have you ever watched Japanese commercials?”
“No.”
“You can never tell what they’re advertising,” Sheldon said. “At least I can’t. They don’t make any sense to me, but a lot of them are pretty funny.”
“I don’t care what language it’s in,” Ann said. “How can you watch a commercial and not know what they’re advertising?”
“The language isn’t the problem,” Sheldon said. “It’s the cultural subtext. The Japanese contextual cues are totally alien to me. They go right over my head.”
Ann snorted again. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” She set down her coffee cup. “I don’t claim to understand people, but I always know when somebody’s trying to sell me something. Describe this commercial to me, and I’ll tell you what they’re selling.”
Sheldon leaned back in his seat. “Okay … Let’s see … It starts out with a view of the earth, seen from outer space. The camera zooms in closer, until you see the Japanese islands, from great altitude and through cloud cover. Then the camera drops through the clouds, and you’re looking down on a major city — Tokyo, maybe. It zooms in even closer, past the tops of the buildings, and then down to a beautiful little Japanese tea garden, sandwiched between two enormous glass skyscrapers. In the middle of the tea garden is a black European sports sedan. Something really sharp looking. Maybe a Saab. I don’t remember. And draped across the hood of the sports sedan is a tall dark haired woman, European or American, with legs that go on forever. She’s wearing a strapless black evening gown, slit way up the thigh to show plenty of leg, a pair of black stiletto heals, and a little headband with black Cat Woman ears attached. The narrator is talking a mile-a-minute in Japanese, while an off-camera choir of little Japanese girls sing the jingle in English. “Kitty paws … Like Santa Claus, but kitty paws …”
Sheldon sat up, and took another sip of coffee. “Then the camera pulls in tight on the tall woman’s face. She does sort of a sexy-pouty thing with her lips, raises an eyebrow, and says, “the excitement has arrived …”
Sheldon looked at Ann. “So, what do you think they’re selling? Japanese tea gardens? European sports cars? Evening wear and sexy shoes? For all I know, they were selling those little Cat Woman ears.”
Ann glared at him. “You just made that whole thing up. Nobody would shoot a commercial like that.”
“I didn’t make it up,” Sheldon said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Japanese commercials are all like that. They don’t make sense to anybody who wasn’t born into the culture.”
He set down his coffee cup. “When we get back to the States, I’ll find that commercial on the Internet, and download it for you. I’m really not joking.” He laughed, and started singing again. “Kitty paws … Like Santa Claus …”
He chopped off in mid-note. His cell phone was ringing. He flipped it open and held it to his ear. “Sheldon Miggs.”
He listened for a second. “Thanks. We’ll be right out.”
Sheldon closed his phone, and took a final gulp of coffee. “Grab your bags. The excitement has arrived. In this particular case, the excitement takes the form of a U.S. Air Force van, with a government-issue driver.”
He pushed back his chair and stood up. “How about it, Cat Woman? Ready to go rescue mankind from certain destruction?”
CHAPTER 34
The titanium cylinder hung suspended in the water 100 meters below the ice, at the end of a Kevlar-jacketed cable. The cylinder was anodized in a flat gray color, the precise shade of which had been calculated by marine biologists to resemble neither food, nor predator. The protective Kevlar cable jacket had been molded in the exact same color, for the same reason.