“Ah.” Hubert looked Ronnie up and down again. “That Cecelia?”
“You know her?”
“Never met her. Never heard of her. Now I know.” He shook his head. “You have a problem, boy. Your young lady may be in serious trouble.”
Now Ronnie felt cold. “What? Why do you think that?”
“Because Patchcock in general, and Twoville in particular, are not that friendly to strangers. Especially strangers with a mission.” He gave them that toothy grin again. “And no one is going to believe you sneaked off to Patchcock to enjoy the beautiful scenery together.”
“I’ve got to get back.” Ronnie turned, and took a long stride without looking. This time it was his boot that smashed into a stingtail mound.
“Look out!” Hubert and George yelled together; Ronnie jumped back from the angry writhing swarm of stingtails that poured out of the hole.
“Not so fast,” Hubert said, grabbing his arm. “Here—this way—walk through these—” He led Ronnie a few meters farther from the shore, onto matted rust-brown vegetation that crunched underfoot and released a sharp, garlicky scent. “Now settle down—getting yourself eaten up by stingtails isn’t going to help your young lady.”
“Eaten up?” George asked. He looked back at the mound, now covered with stingtails.
“Of course. Didn’t Marshall tell you? They swarm on you, and start stinging—somewhere between fifty and a hundred stings paralyzes the average human. Unfortunately, it doesn’t numb the rest of the stings . . . we lost quite a few settlers at first, people who thought stingtails were no worse than ordinary ants. Luckily, they can’t follow a scent across stinkfoil.”
“And you didn’t tell me!” George glared. “You had me hopping down the shore like an idiot—”
“It worked,” Hubert said. “Got your attention, too. Now. Enough flabbery-dabbery. Your young lady.”
“She was taking a tour today,” Ronnie said. “Her Aunt Marta, you see, sent her here—”
The old man’s expression so clearly said Pull the other one; it’s got bells on that he didn’t have to open his mouth.
“I know she was taking a tour. The operative question is, did she come back?” Ronnie felt a sinking inside; he could easily imagine his heart having turned to iron, slowly plunging through his guts to the center of the planet.
“We’re supposed to meet tonight,” he said. “At someplace called Black Andy’s, for dinner.”
The blue eyes rolled up. “Oh, dear. Black Andy’s is it? Not wise, not wise at all. Let me tell you what to do. You go back to your digs, get cleaned up. Go by her hotel and see if she’s back. If she is, stay with her—eat there—and you’ll hear from me tomorrow. If she’s not, give me a call—” He fished out an immaculate business card, and handed it over with a flourish. “And do be careful on the way back. No more stingtails.”
“Can’t we just walk on the . . . er . . . stinkfoil?” asked George.
“Not advisable; it’s a bit corrosive—if you’ll look at your bootsoles—” George lifted a foot and winced at the lines etched in the sole. “It would probably eat through before you reached town. If you’re careful along the shore, you shouldn’t have too much trouble. I can’t go with you—wouldn’t be advisable at all, you see.” Ronnie didn’t see, exactly, but he was ready to run the whole distance back to their lodgings, if only it would help Raffa.
“Thank you, sir,” he said. “We’ll—we’ll be in touch.”
By the time they got back to their lodgings, they were both hot, sweaty, and reeking of stinkfoil. The one-armed man at the desk glared at them. “Tourists!” he said. “Didn’t have no more sense than to go dancing on stinkfoil—you’ll smell up the whole place.” He got up and shuffled around the desk. “Might as well throw the boots away; you’ll never get the smell out.”
“But—”
“We don’t like that stink in here—” Two large, beefy individuals had come out of the door to the right, and another from the door to the left. “We don’t really like your stink in here.”
A half hour later, Ronnie and George limped barefoot back to their room, where someone had been kind enough to ransack their luggage and sprinkle it with cloying perfume.
“I don’t think they’re friendly,” George said. Their assailants had done no real damage, beyond bundling them into a smelly blanket, wrapping it with sticky repair tape, and then manhandling them downstairs into a storage closet. It had been locked, once they worked their way out of the blanket and tape, but it was a flimsy lock.
“I wish I knew if Raffa’s back,” Ronnie said. The room’s comunit would be no help; he could see the severed cable from here.
“We’ll have to go find out,” George said. He pawed through the piles of clothes on the floor. “I hope they left us some shoes.”
They had left shoes, filled with something that looked and smelled like rancid cottage cheese. “Not friendly at all,” George went on, in a tone of voice that made Ronnie forget all about Raffa for a moment. He remembered that tone, and the smile that went with it.
“George—” he started.
“No,” George said. “These were my best pair of Millington-Cranz split-lizard, custom-dyed . . . how petty of them. Truly, truly petty.”
“George, you aren’t—”
“I have some sense,” George said. Ronnie doubted it, in that tone of voice. “Priorities, Ronnie. Great minds always keep their priorities straight. First things first, and all that.”
“Yes?” Ronnie hoped to encourage that trend, providing they could agree on the priorities.
“Raffa first; as a gentleman, I fully agree that her safety must come first.”
“Good. Then suppose we clean up, and—”
“Just how do you suggest we clean up?” George’s expression suggested that Ronnie had just lost his senses. “Are you planning to go down that hall, and into those showers, assuming that ordinary decency prevails and you will come back clean and all at peace with the world? While nothing happens to your belongings here?”
“Well . . .” Ronnie had thought, in the brief intervals available while struggling with three very strong men, with the blanket and tape, with the locked door, that a nice hot shower would be next on his list. Followed by clean clothes. Followed by Raffa. He realized now that George had a point—someone, if not the same men, might be lurking in the halls, or in the showers. The clothes on the floor weren’t clean anymore. “I guess I thought we could be ready—”
“No.” George shook out a cream silk shirt, sniffed it, and shuddered. “No, we’ll simply have to wear these things, producing an olfactory melange that should certainly confuse any stingtails we meet, and hope that Raffa doesn’t pretend she never saw us before.”
Glumly, Ronnie agreed. He found a green knit shirt slightly less fragrant than the rest, poured the odoriferous slimy goo out of his own brown shoes, and watched as George put the gritty stained towels to use wiping out his.
“I think,” George said, holding one up for inspection, “that it may be salvageable. Good shoes are tougher than they thought. Here—” He tossed the remaining dry towel to Ronnie.
On their way out, the desk clerk said, “Have fun, boys,” without looking up. George waited until he was outside to mutter.
“Schoolboys. That’s what it is, really. They didn’t steal anything; they didn’t take our money or papers. Taking revenge on good clothes just because we have them . . . like those ticks in the fourth-floor end dormitory—”
Ronnie was seized with an unnatural desire to be fair. “We did put cake batter in their things first, George.”
“Not in their good things. In their sports clothes. I have never in my life desecrated a pair of Millington-Cranz shoes, and I cannot imagine sinking so low.” He stalked on, in silence, through the hot dusk that ended a Patchcock day. Ronnie, aware of an unpleasant dampness between his toes, followed him gingerly.