Dollar For Your Thoughts, Part 12/14

           “‘Dear Imno’,” Connie complained aloud. “‘I would like to point out some flaws in the Lil’ Im Floaty-Floaty device’.”

            We tugged the contraption off . It was fairly light. A bulky 20 kilos. I frowned at the huge dent it had left on the roof as I felt my rear, assessing the damage that had been done by the steak pan back in the restaurant. My pants hadn’t been burned through, as far as I could tell.

            “We still don’t know who made the thing,” I said.

            “Ok. ‘Dear Tenger’.”

            I took the aviator’s cap, goggles and scarf out of the wagon and handed them to her.

            “Here. You’ve earned them.”

            She hugged the gear to her chest and smiled. Then she swung the car door open and chucked them into the back. We pondered the wagon.

            “But I have to admit,” I told her. “It looks like an Imno machine.”

            “Hoo!” Connie was pleased with my admission. “But this,” she bent over and slapped the zinc-looking box beneath it all, “may be an alien job.”

            I crouched down and looked at where the box was mounted beneath the wagon.

            “‘Dear Extraterrestrials: Couldn’t you have made a body for the thing?’”

            “‘Dear Whatever: How do we get it apart?’”

            I tore the cushion out of the bottom of the wagon. There were four bolts from the top of the box fastened there.

            “Economic enforcement officers, here.”

            Connie was lifting her laminated badge to a small group of children coming toward us. We’d seen this gang before, near headquarters, harvesting sweet treats the chosen didn’t want.

            “Everything under control. Nothing to see here.”

            I found that the bolts to the box were secured to the wagon with wingnuts. The entire job was countersunk with, as far as I could determine, a ball peen hammer. Connie continued to address the juvenile crowd.

            “Party’s over. Go home.”

            They didn’t. But Connie didn’t expect them to leave right away; this herd of five or six Lumber City gamin, and more were filtering out of the woods at the edge of the parking lot. Connie turned back to me and I showed her how the wagon had been attached to the anti-grav box.

            “Wingnuts!” She shouted. She accepted one from me and put it in her jacket pocket. We were now surrounded by the children, who, of course, wanted wingnuts.

“Industrial gauge,” I told her. “And one was working loose while we were up there.” I gave the other three wingnuts to the first of the children to arrive. They seemed, not so much ‘dis’, but only moderately appointed with their share.

            “Where’d you get all that?” A skinny ten-year-old boy asked us. He was in a striped shirt with muted tones, and had a case of the sniffles, but he sniffled like an adult, matter-of-factly. He was the one who led this group which was looking for something semi-constructive to do.

            “We requisitioned it,” Connie told him. The kids ‘ooh’ed at the word as I put the anti-grav in the trunk.

            “Can we have that,” the boy nodded to the wagon, “then?” Connie looked up at me from beside the wagon.

            “It wouldn’t fit…” she said. Then to the boy: “This is for all of you.”

            “We requisitioned it!” a girl said from amidst the swarm.

            “You requisitioned it,” Connie told them. “But you have to do one thing.”

            “Depends on what thing,” the boy leader said.

            “If anyone asks…” Connie addressed the gaminhood, “we went thataway.”

            She pointed southeast.

            There were chirps of accord and some thanks from the tiny mob, and, already, two of the smaller were being tugged about the lot in the magic wagon. But some stuck around as I closed the trunk and we carred, with Connie on the driver’s side.

            “What’s in that box, then?” the Im youth spokesperson asked.

            Connie answered through the window as she fired up my poor Imno 400. The Bathos Machine.

            “It’s packed with twenty beneficial vitamins and minerals.”

            “Ok. We don’t need that, then. Bye!”

            We were waved off by those older procurer/administrators of that gamin set with some cheers as my Imno 400 exuded an air of persecution with every gravel pop of her tires.

            I said to Connie, “Everything fell into place.”

            Note my feeble attempt to place it all firmly in the past tense.

            “We figured out the trances,” I said. “We stopped them. We grounded Wingnut…”         

            Connie nodded. I continued with the past tense, hoping it was all over.     

            “We got Johnny on the run!”

            She chuckled as we went back down the east/west drag, back to the highway.

            “Whoever this ‘Johnny’ is…” I continued feebly.

            As if to answer, Connie took us tearing up the 57 north ramp, toward Fort Covington, and into the present/future tense again.

            Tooth repair. Bonded filling. Left lateral incisor: 1000

            Imno 400 roof section replacement: (due to perfectly rectangular dent) 3000

            Hubcap: (missing) 40

            Pants: 20

            We sped north on the former interstate, with crossing ramp detours pastwhere overpasses had crumbled, putting Lumber City behind us. Connie found an overpass that was clear, so, instead of continuing down the ramp and back onto clear interstate going north, she took us west over blacktop. I thought it was a good evasive tactic, but she did it for more than that reason.

            I was, I’m sure we both were, wondering exactly what we had in the trunk. To use a poker metaphor, we now had a hand. But that’s all we knew. We had to watch the other player to determine what we held, and we didn’t even know what that player was. Connie found another county road north, then broke the weary silence.

            “I came down here because of the trances. I thought Imno had something that they didn’t know how to use.”

            She was couching her terms; using passive language for something that I was very much a part of.

            “I think that I was on the right track, though. Heading west through Imno Central.” She jiggled in her seat with the thrill of the hunt and quarry cornered. “We solved some things by dealing with the trances, and that led to the anti-grav.”

            She turned with me with those eyes again convincing. She was borrowing my car now. I was disposable.

            “From the size of that ship in Oak City, aliens have to be involved. For one thing, neither Tenger or Imno have enough manufacturing scale to produce so much sheer material. Neither of them would put all that into just one project.”

            “Sounds right.”

            “Imno just plain couldn’t.”

            “Hey.”

            “So, this is my theory. Extraterrestrials are leasing anti-grav to earthlings in exchange for our minds. Using them to process information.”

            “HAWW!”

            “Hey.”

            “Sorry.” I was beginning to notice my decimated tooth more with every syllable, and my lower lip was beginning to swell. Thus, I said to her,

            “What doth Fort Cothington hap to do wit it, though.”

            I was trying to point out the fact that Connie had taken over the mission. Which was alright, as long as we had the best chance of success. She answered without inflection.

            “The ships have always been pointing southeast when we encountered them, and we’re due southeast of Fort Covington. And that’s a give-a-way in two respects. It has to be alien technology, but whoever’s piloting them is human. Or influenced by humans. If it were aliens, it wouldn’t matter how the ship was positioned, as long as it was going where they wanted. We still think in two dimensions, though.” She pointed down the road on which we sped. “If this car could go sideways just as well, I’d still want to point it forward. Seasoned star travelers wouldn’t need that.”

            “So, we’re dealing with technofofy we can barely fathom, driven by human pilotf with their heartf on their sleevef. There’s no plafe like home.”

            “That’s it,” Connie said. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say they’re Ims too.”

            “Hey.”

            “You started it.”

            We laughed. Connie spotted lights ahead and ‘ah’d’ in anticipation of a properly fried Turkey T.

            “Don’t get me wrong,” Connie said. “Lumber City’s a fine town. Hospitable to visiting officials, if they have the proper escort.”

            I chuckled.

            “…fine accommodations, if you don’t mind being bathed in incandescence.”

            “It hidef the wallf.”

            “It hides the walls.”

            “Squalor vogue.”

            “Hee. Good crumble, and what-a-floor-show!”

            “I liked the finale.” I whistled past my tooth-stub on the ‘f’. Connie was distracted. I prompted her, asking what we would do when we got to Fort Covington. She stiffened a bit.

            “I don’t rightly know,” she said. “Give them the anti-grav back and see how they react. Maybe then they’ll just continue to leave us alone.”

            “If they really wanted that little bof, they’d haf it by now.”

            “Perhaps,” Connie answered. “But I have to know. And I have a confession to make.”

            Her hopelessly creased laminated badge plopped onto my lap.

            “I’m not an economic enforcement officer.”

            “Then, what are you. Are you an agent?”

            “No. I wasn’t lying when I told you that I’m not. I was a major, but then I was fired for drinking on duty.”

            “Then how do you haf the badge?” With the injury, my mouth was beginning to fail me, at the worst time. I plucked the badge from my lap and looked at the features that I hadn’t seen at first- the Tenger crest- stifling the impulse to just hang it back around her neck.

            “I just didn’t turn it back in.”

            I stifled a gasp, which would’ve hurt anyway. This was a confession. Willful mis-appropriation of a laminated badge. Now it was ‘on my lap’, as they say. Connie filled me in as my Imno 400 Nonpareil took us into the parking lot of the Sawdust City Imno Mart.

            “I was having trances, and got into a wreck during one,” she told me. “They wanted a blood test. I knew that what I was having was trances, and I told them that they would be testing for the wrong thing. The sergeant clicked a box, and they took it as a refusal.”

            She parked us in a slot, and we walked into the bright, toward crunchy patties of joy, nestled in bun, sauce, and shredded lettuce. Deep-fried in we didn’t want to know what. I let Connie get out first and I put the badge on my seat as I left, thinking that if she sat down there, it would be hers to deal with.

            “I told them about the trances, but it wasn’t enough for them to unclick that box.”

            “It’s tough to unclick bofez…” I followed her in.

            In the Mart, I suggested the Turkey T Family Meal Pak. Connie raised an eyebrow, but I explained.

            “Last stof before Tenger.”

            She nodded as the meal was prepared so quickly.

            “Last meal.”

            “Maybe we can store what we don’t eat,” I told her as we left. “Efer seen an alien refrigerator?”

            Connie shook her head.

            “I had to check, Con. You’re enigmatic, you know.”