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A handful of stillpix had been published with the story: a holo of the front of Spoonbender’s Museum (to Berdan it looked more like the pawnshop it also claimed to be); a candid three-dimensional portrait of Captain Burris Griswold, a tough-looking character whose expression sent a shiver down the boy’s spine; one of A. Hamilton Spoonbender himself, whose flamboyant moustache and eyebrows curled up on the ends; and a picture of the smartsuit itself, still in its tall, transparent display case—about the same size as his grandfather’s crate—looking as if it had been fabricated out of mirror-polished titanium or chromium rather than the plain, rubbery gray synthetic to be expected.
Berdan didn’t have fifty silver grains to summon up the sidebars which might have told him more. Some services aboard Tom Edison Maru came free, as part of a crewbeing’s or resident shareholder’s benefits. Others had to be paid for. News service, whether it was worth it or not, all but the sketchiest front page headline sort of stuff he’d just accessed, was one of the latter.
Come to think of it, now that his grandfather had departed, he wasn’t certain how much money he had. An instant, inward glance at the family “checkbook”—Berdan was in charge of paying bills, also buying groceries and household supplies—told him the worst: Dalmeon Geanar had departed after withdrawing every last silver ounce in their account. The rent on their apartment hadn’t been paid yet this month, nor any of the utilities. Berdan was on his own, with what he earned at Mr. Meep’s—not payable until next week and not a tenth of what he needed—to tide him over until his grandfather came back.
If he came back.
As he crouched, half in and half out of the old man’s closet, both knees beginning to hurt, both legs beginning to fall asleep with the loss of circulation, it was neither physical pain nor anticipated financial distress bothering him. He still wanted, very much, to read more about the experimental smartsuit stolen from Spoonbender’s Museum. No doubt lingered in his mind about who the two researchers were who’d been killed testing the device.
But what could be dangerous about a smartsuit?
And why would anyone—without jumping to any undue conclusions, he also felt confident he knew who the thief had been—why would his grandfather want to steal one?
And, Berdan thought about himself, what could he do about it if he were right? Who’d listen to him? He was just a fifteen-year-old kid, after all, without any money, in all probability without any job, and without a leg to stand on where his guesses were concerned. A surmise, he appreciated (and in this he was ahead of many adults), even based on the strongest of feelings, wasn’t the same as a fact.
Knees stiff, Berdan began to get to his feet. Maybe the best thing was to tell Mr. Meep about the whole thing. Maybe the old chimpanzee could tell him what to—
“Ow!”
Berdan had hit his head again, this time on the underside of an overhanging closet shelf. All sorts of odds and ends which had been stored on it began tumbling down onto his surprised and unprotected shoulders. The worst, amidst a hailstorm of rolled-up socks, sweaters, underwear, and spare shoes, was a sizable box, upholstered in thick, coarse-grained reddish leather, which struck him on the upper arm, leaving what he was sure would be a bruise. If it had fallen on his head, he thought, he’d have been knocked out cold.
Being as neat as he could, Berdan began putting everything back. The box—more of a briefcase than anything else—was fastened shut by means of some sort of powerful, hidden catch. The thing possessed no visible outer locks nor any hinges. He shrugged and was just about to slide it back in place, as well, when he noticed, above the handle, a name embossed in the leather and inlaid in gold:
MacDougall Bear
This had belonged to his father!
Beneath the swiveling luggage handle a metal plate, two inches on a side with a shallow, bowl-shaped depression in its center, had been set into the leather. Having absorbed most of what he knew, like all kids everywhere, from adventure stories his implant summoned up for him, he recognized an old-fashioned thumbprint-activated lock. Which meant, of course, since his father was long dead, no one had ever been able to open this case again without destroying it. And themselves in the process if spy movies contained any truth at all.
Still, Berdan wondered what was in the case. It was heavy enough. Some great weight inside shifted back and forth, but without much noise, when he tilted it. He laid an idle right thumb in the depression, and was astonished when he heard a dull clank and the top of the case popped partway open.
Berdan sat down on the floor again, this time well outside the closet, where the light was better and there were fewer long, hanging leaves to tickle the back of his neck. He laid the leather case in his lap, pivoting the lid back all the way. Inside, on top, was a large yellow plastic envelope with the inscription:
For Berdan Bear on His Twelfth Birthday
Berdan Bear: although he’d been told this was the name he’d been born with, the boy couldn’t remember anybody ever calling him by it. It wasn’t such a bad name, at that. When his parents had died, his grandfather had adopted him and…but his twelfth birthday had been three years ago! With shaking hands—and without noticing what else might be inside the case under the thin cover of tissue plastic which had rested beneath the envelope—Berdan turned back the flap.
* * *
Dear Son,
You can’t know, of course, why I pressed your baby thumb into a briefcase lock this morning before leaving for the lab and will never remember I did it. It’s probably a silly, unnecessary precaution, but there’s some amount of risk in everything worthwhile, and the suit design still has a couple of hoops to jump through.
Anyway, just to make sure, I’ll strap on my second-best until the final testing’s over with, and leave this with your grandfather. If anything unexpected happens—not likely at this point—he can hold onto it until you’re old enough to learn to use it wisely. Your mother and I have made other provisions, financial ones so you’ll never have to worry, but this is personal.
We both love you.
Your father,
Mac
The tissue-plastic crinkled, loud in the empty room, covering up other noises Berdan wouldn’t have wanted anyone to hear. After a while he wiped his eyes on a sleeve and began unwrapping whatever his father’s briefcase contained.
Inside the thin plastic lay, rolled up upon itself, a wide, heavy belt of the same color and texture as the case. Along its length were flap-lidded pockets, at least a dozen of them, containing one unfamiliar artifact after another. Berdan recognized an inertial compass and a big, unpowered folding knife.
The belt hadn’t been cut straight, however, and it supported more than just a series of utility pockets. From the right-hand side, where the leather had been formed into a gentle, low-hanging curve, an open-topped holster had been suspended.
And in the holster, dark-finished and deadly-looking, rested the bulk, inert at present, of an enormous fusion-powered Borchert & Graham five megawatt plasma pistol.
Chapter V: Spoonbender’s Museum
The place did look more like a pawnshop than a museum as Berdan paced the sidewalk just outside the door, trying to make up his mind. In one hand he held a small zippered Kevlar bag containing everything he owned and cared about. From the other hung the leather-covered briefcase containing his father’s Borchert & Graham.
No closer to a decision, he pushed through the membrane, hearing the annunciator—music, he supposed someone might insist on calling it—burst forth with Wagner’s Valkyrie played on a row of bicycle horns, in all probability by a trained seal, accompanied by an entire orchestra of bagpipes.
A few feet in front of him stood a partition with two doors, one at either end of the small roo
m the partition formed, and a single, barred, arch-topped ticket window. The wall itself was a riot of color and motion, ablaze with giant holograms.
Spoonbender’s Museum of Scientific Curiosities
—And Friendly Finance Company—
Checks Cashed—Loans Arranged
Music Systems Installed—Computers Repaired
Fine Art While-U-Wait
We Also Walk Dogs
* * *
The advertisement was repeated many times in several dozen different languages, not all of which were human in origin or which Berdan recognized. From behind the small counter at the window, a wrinkled, ropy, carrot-colored periscope with a black faceted lens the size of Berdan’s fist, peered out at the boy. “Sorry, we’re closed today—deliveries at the rear!”
Berdan dropped his overnight bag and the briefcase and slapped both palms over his ears. It felt as though someone had stabbed his eardrums with a pair of icepicks.
“Oh, I’m extremely sorry!”
What had been an excruciating high-pitched squeal now became a normal-sounding human baritone, almost a bass. The orange periscope rose with a series of jiggling motions until Berdan could see it was rooted in what looked like an old-fashioned army helmet, painted fluorescent pink. From beneath its bottom edge a fringe of rubbery gray-green protuberances undulated as the freenie they belonged to, and whom they served as feet and hands, climbed up the ramp built for it behind the counter, crossed the surface to the window bars, and stuck its periscope neck and glittering eye out from between them.
“Please forgive me sir or madam, I was just speaking to my mother on the ’com and forgot to downshift frequencies. I hope I haven’t caused you too much discomfort.”
Sir or madam indeed. Berdan was indignant. Any member of a species boasting seventeen sexes—he wondered which of its parents the creature counted as its mother—ought to be able to tell the difference between a mere two.
“That’s all right,” Berdan answered the freenie. “I, uh…I’d like to speak to Mr. Spoonbender.”
“Wait there a minute,” the freenie suggested. “We really are closed today—burglarized last night and taking inventory for insurance—but I’ll see if the boss is busy.”
The alien trundled toward the ramp, stopped, and looked back at Berdan, its voice now a whisper. “Actually, he’s hardly ever busy. The rest of us do all the work around here.”
“Tell him it may be about your burglary.”
The freenie nodded its periscope at Berdan and disappeared down the ramp. The boy was left alone with his thoughts and the colorful holographic signs. Something more than a minute later, the door on the right dilated and a tall man in distinctive clothing whom Berdan recognized from the Infopeek stillpix emerged.
“A. Hamilton Spoonbender?” Berdan asked.
Tall, with wavy brown hair, short beard, and a fantastic, curled moustache, the man wore a work shirt, frock coat, real Levis—not just an illusory suit pattern—a battered top hat, and, on the end of his nose, rimless spectacles which Berdan suspected were, unlike Geeky Kehlson’s, more than an affectation. Above the lenses, his eyes gleamed in a manner the boy would have described as benignly crazed. In his hand he held a smoking meerschaum carved in his own likeness. The lobby was soon filled with a heavy tobacco aroma.
“The Hamilton Spoonbender,” he replied, “than whom there is no other. At your service, sir. Walk this way and we’ll talk business while I try to sort out a sorry mess.”
If the outside of the museum looked like a pawnshop, the inside was like a junkyard, and had doubtless looked this way long before the burglary. Paratronic components spilling out of their cabinets in bewildering tangles stood side by side with painted carousel horses and wonderful, carved musical instruments. A pottery kiln and some kind of metal-melting pot competed for space with a band saw, drill press, table saw, horizontal and vertical mill, and a lathe.
To Berdan, it was like examining the working area of a flint knapper, as if molecular fabrication—spray-painting—had never been invented. A flock of stuffed bats hung from the rafters. In a corner, the remains of a taxidermized Vespuccian sandgator were locked in permanent death-struggle with those of a Sodde Lydfan rotorbird. Scattered about the huge room Berdan could make out at least a hundred semifinished projects, tools and parts lying on bench tops amidst plastic sawdust, metal shavings, and scraps of other materials.
Even above the odor of Spoonbender’s meerschaum, Berdan could smell the streaked and grimy coffee machine which stood in the corner with the sandgator and the rotorbird. Here and there, at one bench or another across the vast, disorganized, and cluttered shop, looking less like workers and more like tornado victims searching the rubble for their belongings, Berdan saw half a dozen beings of assorted species. Everywhere he looked, coffee cups stood in various conditions, some full, some empty, some in between. Several were full of peculiar, fuzzy orange mold.
“This delightful creature…” When they’d made their way to the middle of the workshop, Berdan’s host removed the pipe from his mouth and took the gauntleted arm of a short, plump, cheerful-looking woman with a welding mask pushed back onto the top of her head. “…is my lady wife, Vulnavia Spoonbender.”
“The Vulnavia Spoonbender?” Berdan inquired, taking the small hand she offered and shaking it.
“Touché—one point for the kid. And, speaking of kids, these young ruffians…” Raising his voice to a shout, Spoonbender pointed to a pair of boys a year or two younger than Berdan, busy carving a fifteen-foot totem pole with chain saws. “…are my sons, Shemp and Curley.”
The chain saws stopped.
As one, the boys protested, “Aw, c’mon, Dad!”
“Very well, as you like it: N.O. Spoonbender and N.T. Spoonbender, esquires. May I also present my esteemed associates, Miss Nredmoto Ommot Uaitiip, Mr. Rob-Allen Mustache, and Mr. Hum Kenn, whose acquaintance you’ve already made.”
Berdan was somehow certain “N.O.” and “N.T.” stood for “Number One” and “Number Two” sons, respectively. Ommot was a lamviin, female judging by the stress Spoonbender had placed on her middle name, the first individual of the species Berdan had ever seen in person. She was just putting the finishing touches on a wax sculpture of Sherlock Holmes. Mustache was a chimpanzee; where had he ever gotten a name like that? Hum Kenn was the freenie who’d almost deafened him.
His coffee cup was spotless, filled to the brim, and steaming.
“And you, sir, are—”
Spoonbender’s eye fell on the leather case Berdan had put on a counter in order to shake hands all around.
“But I can see, you’re the MacDougall Bear.” A puzzled expression passed over the man’s features. He shook his head, accepted the cup of coffee his wife had brought him, and sipped at it in an absent manner, dismissing whatever thought had caused his confusion. He set the cup on a bench.
“Delighted to meet you, sir. How may we be of service?”
Berdan, however, failed to hear the question because, not far away, where it hadn’t caught his eye in all the confusion, standing in its tall glass case, just as he’d seen it on the Infopeek program, he spied the chromium glass of the experimental smartsuit he’d thought his grandfather had stolen.
“Put your jaw back in place, Earthling,” Ommot told Berdan. “It’s only a replica.”
“She’s right,” Rob-Allen Mustache agreed, “one I cast from pewter a few weeks ago.”
His synthesizer emitted a sigh. “Wish we had the real thing back.”
“Indeed,” Spoonbender added, “and I wish it could do everything it was supposed to have—”
“And if we had some ham,” Hum Kenn interrupted in a sarcastic, nasal tone, “we could have some ham and eggs—if we had some eggs.”
“My dear Kenn,” Spoonbender suggested, “why don’t you—Great Albert’s Ghost! That’s where I heard the name! The MacDougall Bear—and you’d be his son?”
Berdan hadn’t had a chance yet to straighten th
em all out about his name. On the other hand, what did it matter? He was MacDougall Bear’s son, after all.
He nodded. “That’s right, Mr. Spoonbender. I heard about the burglary and thought I’d come and see…” He wasn’t sure what he’d come here to do. He didn’t want to accuse his grandfather outright, not to a third party.
One small idea in the back of his mind had pushed him through the door: selling his father’s pistol, so he could pursue the old man and discover the truth. But he’d never done anything like this before. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to or not. The pistol was the one thing his father had managed to leave him.
He spoke. “I was raised by my grandfather, Mr. Spoonbender, and never knew much about my father and mother. I came to find out more, especially about how they died.”
Mrs. Spoonbender frowned, as if she were thinking about her own sons growing up without mother or father. With an abrupt movement, she flipped the dark-visored helmet into place and went back to her welding. Berdan heard her sniff back a tear behind the mask.
In the embarrassed silence that followed, Ommot offered Berdan a cup of coffee—it seemed to be the tribal custom in this place—which, being as polite as he could about it, he refused.
“The Brightsuits…” Spoonbender mused, appearing to be speaking more to himself than to anybody in the room. “It’s said three of them were created to begin with, prototypes, years in the making. Two of them were destroyed, and the last, which I bought as surplus, had been built as an emergency backup. They all possessed certain features which, at least in theory, would have allowed instantaneous transport through space—”
“—without,” Ommot interrupted, “benefit of a spaceship—”
Spoonbender ignored the lamviin.
“—using its own inertialess tachyon drive system.”