Of course, Portia's miraculous recovery and Lyle's return and second
exit made all the news reports within minutes and most of them were heavily
editorialized, making Lyle and the team from the Waste-REL look like the most
dangerous hucksters to ever try to con the public.
And that's how the next month went.
The crewmembers of the Waste-REL were vilified for being the worst kind
of grifters; held responsible for multiple injuries and even Edgley's death.
The million or so folks who attended the GAG Festival were all
starting to get sick, and rumor had it that the Waste-REL had been emitting
radiation. Of course, the real reason
everyone was getting sick was that they wallowed in mud filled trichloroethylene,
but nobody knew that -- not even Jules.
However, Jules did follow the news reports and, after reviewing the
reported symptoms of the festival patrons that were clogging the hospitals,
deduced that it couldn’t be the Waste-REL's fault.
Mickey traveled all over, using his fame/infamy to get shots on the
talk show circuit, trying to convince folks that it hadn't been a big
hoax. But everyone believed the
mainstream media and assumed the whole thing was an elaborate publicity stunt
gone bad, brought off with the full cooperation of the organizers of the GAG
Festival who had gone missing long before due to a financing mix-up with a
family of private investors in Chicago or a tax problem, depending on the
applicable indictment.
Furthermore, there were attempts on the crew’s lives. In one case a big Japanese guy came rushing
out of an alleyway just as an assassin dressed in black pajamas was about to
knife Mickey in the back. The big
Japanese guy shot the assassin and then smiled at Mickey and walked away.
"Well, I guess that's a big thanks to Aya," Mickey said to
himself while making a hasty exit.
STC was sued, but with Edgley dead they just blamed him for everything
and used their floor of lawyers to delay all court dates until the next
millennium.
Portia was fired, as was Verna and the rest of the team. Jules had to hack into the STC mainframe and
convince it that Portia never borrowed her quantum SPECTACL or she'd have had
to return it and Jules would have had nowhere to live.
Donny went to Japan with Ayame.
Ayame was able to go home looking like a hero, but that was only because
everyone figured she was a victim of the hoax herself. No one wanted to listen.
It didn't look like they'd ever get back into space.
"Hire them back," said the "Petroleum Jelly
President", Derrick J. Firth.
"Put the entire crew of the Waste-REL back to work for STC!"
President Firth was one of the few Presidents of the General Assembly
of the International League who ever had any real power. This was because the Secretary-General was
his former employee and, more importantly, might be again. This was also because he personally owned 7%
of the world's oil production capability, including oil fields and refineries
as well as a national chain of dry cleaners and a petroleum jelly factory.
He was originally from Idaho, but moved to Texas at the turn of the
Century, attended Yale; worked his way up the corporate ladder at ErGenta
Corporation; ran for office; became Governor of Texas and then spent 2026
through 2030 as President of the United States of America.
Due to decades of excessive abuse of an erectile dysfunction drug,
President Firth was a pretty cranky guy, known for fits of rage and general
mean-spiritedness and he spat when he talked so that people never wanted to be
any closer than 10 feet from him when he was angry.
He was now ranting and raving and the board room table in his office
only afforded a distance of 6 feet in any direction. His cronies, most of whom were not only
tremendously powerful but also permanently engorged, all wished they had an
umbrella.
"What do you mean you tried to have him killed?! Have you no sense? We need these people! If we don't send them back into space, how
are we going to follow them back to where they went and then stop the aliens
before they kill us all?"
"You mean, it wasn't a hoax?" This was spoken by a new member of the
Security Council, a nice old painter who was appointed by the Czech Republic.
"OF COURSE NOT, YOU STOOGE," yelled the petroleum jelly
president, punching the table with his index finger. "And we're going to surprise the
butt-mellos out of those freaking aliens by showing up on their doorstep and
hitting them with the biggest damn nuclear bomb they ever saw!"
"Uh," said the painter.
"Aren't you assuming that they live on only one planet?"
For a moment, President Firth looked at the little Czech painter with
an expression betraying the kind of contempt normally reserved for rats and
cockroaches. Then he thought about it. "Right.
We send an armada of Nuclear bombs."
"Uh, that's not what I meant…" started the painter, but he
was interrupted.
"Good thinking there," said the petroleum jelly
president. "You can stay."
"I thought I was…" but the painter was interrupted again.
"So, we're in agreement, aren't we?" said Firth. "We're going to war."
Everyone nodded vigorously except the painter who tried to speak
again, but the chair didn't recognize him and they went on to other business
related to a popcorn storm in East Asia.
Inkelis was sent to prison, not for stabbing Daffi, who recovered, or
for attempting to kill Lyle -- since Inkelis was the hero of some popular
sentiment for the attempt. No, Inkelis
went to prison for the attempted murder of Portia Summers, even though there
was no evidence to suggest that she was ever wounded. This was mostly to remove him from the public
eye.
His prison term was mostly for show and he enjoyed the respite, using
the time to begin his first book of history:
"The Age of Incontinence".
Within a couple of months, Inkelis was paroled into the care of the
National Security Council of the International League. As an astronaut, petroleum salesman and
assassin he was perfect to lead the team that would secretly follow the crew of
the Waste-REL back into space. He was
given the title "Director of Earth Security".
The twin missions were planned, with the refurbished Waste-REL Mark II
and the space shuttle Armada being
built simultaneously.
Inkelis set up the pheely stations in the Waste-REL II training pods
so that the machine could simultaneously scan their brains for data. This data would give him an unfiltered
debriefing on everything the crew of the Waste-REL had experienced on their
trip to meet the alien.
Once he had everything in place, he called for the crew of the
Waste-REL to be rehired.
Verna was a woman obsessed. She
had tried to get her hands on seventeen different space going crafts, but
despite her stellar record as an astro-pilot and her completely restored
eyesight, she couldn't get a job as a flight attendant on a commuter shuttle.
Mickey's fame lasted more than 15 minutes, but not much more and
people became tired of his stories of how it was all true and Lyle really did
go to the other galaxy and they really are going to kill all the Boomers if we
don't stop destroying the planet and the glaciers are falling and the coastal
cities will be destroyed in a few months … yada yada yada.
So now he was a formerly famous/infamous (depending on who you talked
to) guy who couldn't get a job at Gyroworld.
He lost his appetite for living in pheely-space and found himself
reading books, something he'd never really tried before. As he traveled he searched through old
bookstores, looking for information about spacecraft construction, electronics,
astronomy, anything on paper that he could find, old or new and it was mostly
old.
Donny was out of place in Japan.
He was a bit of a novelty because they didn't get to see many romantic
American gangsters in Japan and so he couldn't go many places without being
swarmed for autographs.
Ayame was similarly well known, mostly for being the astronaut who got
dragged onto the Waste-REL and fell in love with her captor. She couldn't get anybody to understand that
Donny wasn't her kidnapper. This was
doubly true after a Japanese pulp author released an unauthorized and utterly
apocryphal romance docu-novelization entitled "He Captured My Heart in
Space" (it sounds better in Japanese).
Donny didn't want to cop a pheel any more than Mickey. Now that he'd experienced a substantial
amount of reality, he'd come to prefer it and spent much of his time just
walking around Osaka, being occasionally swarmed by schoolgirls but otherwise
just enjoying the scenery. He didn't get
much time with Ayame because she was back at work with NASDA and preparing to
go back into space on a routine mission to the International Space Station
IV. She was paid inordinately large sums
of money so Donny wasn't obligated to work and instead spent his time writing a
memoir of their trip.
Ayame had tried to get the NASDA people to hire her former crewmates
but they just laughed as if it was a really good joke because they were so
embarrassed by the request. Ayame looked
for a commercial space Captaincy but every company backed off once she
mentioned her former crewmates.
Portia spent the first month of the alien countdown looking for a new
condo and trying not to get too depressed.
Portia and Mickey were mostly apart as Mickey traveled from city to city
doing press interviews and speaking at any local meeting that would let him
talk. Of course, Portia had Jules for
company, but he was morose, missing the incredible computing power he'd had in
the metaquantum computer. Jules hated
performing the role of a personal agenda and glorified clock. His one consolation was that the war-bots
could never threaten him again. The
Sagittarian satellite had provided him with an impenetrable algorithm with
which to protect himself.
Then Portia got the call from STC and everything changed.
"We want you ALL back," said the new president of STC, Mr.
Lackner. "We want you to crew the
Waste-REL II."
Portia was thrilled. The fact
that she was thrilled -- considering how much she hadn't wanted to go up in the
original Waste-REL -- made her laugh.
Her new boss had no sense of humor but he didn't care why she was
laughing -- he was under orders.
"Is that a yes or a no?" he asked.
"It's a yes," chortled Portia.
When she hung up, Jules burst into a song of celebration and she
danced about the room with a virtual Jules in the SPECTACL field. "Wait 'til Mickey hears!" she laughed.
"I'm going to be big again!" cried Jules.
Next: Friends
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