<< Chapter 1 >>

In Which We Meet Our Protagonists.

My friend Kitman is cheerful by nature, and gloom, when it does visit him, settles upon his countenance like clouds upon the Matterhorn: clearly present and quite striking, but not quite making contact.

It was not quite making contact this July morning, as it happened, and I immediately suspected why.

This is why: Kitman is a genius, but dumb.

The genius: rescuing one hundred discarded Apple IIgs computers from the Contamiski County School District and wiring them into a parallel-processing network that was even now nearing the end of analyzing its second SETI@Home unit. The dumb: forgetting that one hundred Apple IIgs computers draw as much power as six microwave ovens. Kitman had racked up a utility bill of epic proportion and had no practical way to acquiring the cash to pay it. When his parents got home, there would be Trouble.

"Here it is," he said, and tossed me a coin before crossing the deck of the tree lab to plunk himself down on his travel chest.

"Here what is?" I said, having failed to make the catch.

"The South Rhode Island state quarter," he said, unfolding the copy of the Contamiski Times-Herald that he had gone out to buy. "Also my remaining net worth."

I gave him the eyebrow raised and fixed before hunting around on the floor for the slippery two bits. Some people would have said he was exaggerating, on the mere grounds that the travel chest he was sitting on was packed full of gold coins, but I knew better: a hundred and fifty pounds of gold is, in fact, worthless if you don't have a plausible excuse for having it, and apparently he had lost his own.

I found it -- the coin, not the excuse -- under the photochromatograph, and gave it the once-over. It featured a hummingbird framed in the outline of the state, with the motto SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL underneath. (South Rhode Island had lacked an official motto when the state quarters came along, and there had been a referendum on what to put on the coin. SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL had actually finished third against THE HALF-PINT STATE and FREE WITH ANY PURCHASE. I would have voted for ACTUAL SIZE myself.)

"Very nice," I said. "What's the problem?"

"This," he said, holding up the newspaper.

And right there on the front page -- on the bottom half, true, but accompanied by a color picture -- was the fatal headline:

PIRATE GOLD!
Abelton Park Kids Find "Mythical" Lost Treasure

"So much for passing it off as the Red Pagan Leola fortune," said Kitman.

"Oh dear," I said, and smiled faintly.

Kitman stared at me.

"Why," he said, "are you smiling faintly? I know it cannot be at my impending doom."

"I am smiling faintly," I said, "because while you were out buying a newspaper, I took a telephone call from -- guess who?"

He blinked. Relays clicked in his brain almost audibly. "My parents...?"

Dr. and Dr. Mrs. Kitman were representing the Liberal Arts department of Contamiski College at a seminar on Abnormative Semiotic Vacuities in Joycean Scholarship, and were due back tomorrow.

I should stress the word "were".

"Your parents," I said, "are enjoying themselves far too much, and are...indefinitely delayed. Apparently a controversy broke out during one of the programs, something to do with that word in Finnegan's Wake that represents God sneezing in Welsh or whatever it is."

"And...?"

"Half a dozen arrests, including a Pulitzer Prize winner and the organizing chairman. Apparently your parents are material witnesses and won't be coming back any time soon."

Kitman was transfixed. "Freude, schöner Götterfunken, tochter aus Elysium, wir betreten feuer-trunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum! -- Williams?"

It was not my name, but relatively few words are. "Yes, Kitman?" I said.

"We must celebrate. For the moment I have no greater problem than an empty glass on a warm afternoon. Care to join me?"

And so I did.

 

•

 

"Alienate the audience up front, that's my recommendation," said Kitman, raising a foaming, sparking glass of intermittently transparent fluid. "I can't tell you the number of times I've gotten halfway through a novel only to find it was intended for an entirely different demographic. Generally one with far higher tolerances for scenes involving explosive disassembly of the human body. It's highly irritating."

"You don't think I should break things to them gently?" said I, holding pen above paper.

"Certainly not. If you're going to be inflicting talking ducks on the readership, tell them so up front and neither waffle nor mince. It will save endless wear on their wall plaster." And he raised his glass again, this time going so far as to drink from it.

The Kitman Cocktail will be available at your local supermarket in the Energy Drinks section — any day now. It is an excellent tissue restorative and neurocellular decontaminant composed of wind, fire, B vitamins and chemical compounds ending in -ine. Taken as directed it results in what the Germans call neuronengesang. If you don't feel like looking that up at the moment, as, frankly, I don't, imagine an orchestra tuning up with your consciousness as the conductor; if you don't like that image, imagine a bubblebath for the mind. It was devised by Kitman when he was in his freshman year of high school, in association with a convenient uncle in the chemical industry; they licensed it to an up-and-coming nutriceutical company and now the royalties flow like water -- or would flow, or will flow. The problem was, or is, or will continue to be, that the up-and-coming company had turned out to be a front for a tax dodge scheme and designed to go straight from up-and-coming to down-and-out. To date Kitman has received nothing from his invention but bits of paper from lawyers informing him which creditors now own what percentage of his intellectual property. As yet, therefore, it is not available at the neighborhood Food-N-Stuf, and Kitman is forced to mix his own at home, possibly illegally.

"Your wit is razor as always, Kitman," I said, and cancelled half a line.

And just for the sake of mentioning it, since this seems an appropriate time: I don't know if you've ever had a world-shattering adventure, but in the event that you ever do find yourself caught up in one, I strongly advise that you take time out from it to acquire yourself a voice recorder, one of those googolbyte-capacity jobbies for preference. Just button it into your shirt pocket and leave it running. It will save you untold trouble later, when you're trying to remember the name of the dark god worshipped by the evil little thingies-with-the-tubules who worship the dark god that you can't remember the name of.

Kitman peered over the rail of the tree lab, and set down his drink in order to pick up his spyglass, which he trained on a squirrel behaving suspiciously on the lawn below us. "Then again," he said, "it never pays to alienate them too much. Your use of the term 'ontological infarct' disturbs me no end. Call it a wormhole and have done with it." He handed me the telescope. "Favor me with an independent observation," he said, and pointed down into the yard. "Does that look like the red squirrel from yesterday?"

"What red squirrel from yesterday?" I said, applying scope to eye. "And you said it was an ontological infarct."

"The red squirrel you called my attention to. And it doesn't matter what I called it. A little inaccuracy saves reams of explanation."

"Oh, " I said, and tried to focus on the adorable fuzzy vermin bouncing around on the grass. I don't pay much attention to squirrels; as a rule I'm content to leave them to it. Yesterday, though, I'd seen a red one on the receiving end of a full-body tackle.

"Could be the same one," I said. "He's the right color, at least. Why?"

"If it's a different one there might be a breeding pair. Red squirrels making a comeback in the Northeast? In some circles that would be headline news."

"Kitman?"

"Yes, Williams?"

"In some circles, " I said, handing back the telescope, "I'm a Philistine."

"Oh. Yes. I forgot," said Kitman. "Well, no matter, get on with your writing." He stepped away to make a thoughtful adjustment to one of the plush toy squirrels that are deployed throughout the tree lab as part of his continuing experiment on Abelton Park fauna, and I got on with my writing —

— and so, however inconspicuously, began another world-shattering adventure.

You never see them coming.