Dark lightning thunder a.., p.17
Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning), page 17
I didn’t like the feeling.
—
As we approached the Broussard Estate, we could make out some people standing around in the road that came closest to our private property. There were maybe twenty or twenty-five of them, in several groups, talking to one another.
“Media?” Cassie asked.
“Would be my guess,” I told her.
“Remember that movie about Michael Jackson?”
“Don’t have to,” I said. “Remember the one about Mama.”
We had seen both biography pictures, centering around one of the biggest stars from the twentieth century and one of the biggest of the twenty-first, our dear old mom. Judging from the one they made about Mama, the one about Jackson must have been full of baloney, with only a scattering of facts. That’s how Pod People was, and we had Mama to point out the many errors.
But the scenes I recall most vividly were what Mama referred to as a “feeding frenzy.” That was when a mob of reporters were gathered someplace where Mama had to go. They apparently lost all contact with their humanity, and behaved like a bunch of rabid dogs. They shoved cameras and microphones in the faces of celebrities, blinded them with lights, shouted stupid questions, shoved and even punched others to get in position for a photo.
I remember watching those scenes of the actress playing Mama with my jaw dropping. How could civilized people behave like that?
“Because they’re not civilized,” Mama told us. “The reporters of the celebrity press are pigs, to a man and woman.”
“Was it really that bad, in real life?” I wanted to know.
“Worse. It got to where I couldn’t do normal things like go shopping, unless I made an appointment and came in the back way. I had to live in a gated community. I missed normal things.”
That was about the longest rant I ever heard from her concerning her celebrity back at Old Sun. Mostly she didn’t talk about it, except to say how glad she was to leave Earth and Mars a few light-years behind her.
“Let’s not get famous,” I said.
“That won’t be a problem for you since there’s nothing for you to be famous for unless you count bull’s-eye landings in pigsties. Me, I have to be careful to hide my electric charisma all the time.”
“Otherwise, you’d have to constantly beat the boys off with a stick, right?”
“Oh, I have to do that already. I’m talking about not letting the larger world get a glimpse of my true greatness.”
“Please continue to do that,” I said. “You’ve done such a good job so far, no one suspects a thing. That, or you’re truly boring.”
“Bitch.”
“Boring bitch.”
When we were younger, that could have gone on for a long time, but we’re mature now, and above it.
“Dumb bitch,” she whispered.
“Silly bitch,” I whispered back.
—
We decided we didn’t want to run the gauntlet of reporters milling about at our driveway. Luckily, we were old hands at sneaking in and out of the Broussard Estate. We knew a dozen ways. The best for this situation was the pond.
We got off the road and abandoned our bikes in the stand of pine trees that grows densely on the spinward side of the shore. It was a short walk to the water, but not so easy getting in. There’s only a small amount of sandy beach on our lake, and it’s on the other side. The rest is “wetlands,” which is sort of a swamp. There are cattails and water lilies and lotus, and some of our friends who aren’t used to dirt and mud would never follow us into something like that.
But we’ve been doing it all our lives, so we slipped off our shoes and waded in among the reeds. I’ve always liked the feel of mud between my toes, and the smell of the stagnant pond water. Some find it unpleasant, but to me it’s the smell of living things, of a complex ecosystem, of “nature,” such as we have it in our totally controlled environment.
A bullfrog about the size of my foot protested our presence, and leaped into the water in front of me. In twenty or so yards, the water was deep enough to swim in. We eased into a quiet breaststroke, barely rippling the surface.
We reached the dock easily and pulled ourselves out, streaming water and a certain amount of green algae. Cassie’s hair was a wreck, and I assumed mine was, too.
“Mama, Papa, we’re home,” Cassie shouted as she slammed through the screen door, leaving me to dive for it so it wouldn’t slam. It was wasted effort. There was nobody home. We stuck our heads into every room, and even looked out the window and up at our tree house. No one there, either.
“Call ’em, I guess,” she said.
“Showers first.”
“Best idea you’ve had in a long time.”
So we did that, and considered our closets.
“What do you think?” she said. “What do you wear to a family meeting?”
“Let’s skip the formal gowns,” I suggested. “Besides, you probably split a seam on that slinky number the other day.”
“You mean rubbing up against Patrick?” She winked at me, the bitch.
“No, I mean you did everything but spread your legs. And I saw how enthusiastic he was, and so did everyone else.”
Every once in a while you throw a barb that really hits home. She tried to keep a brave face, but I could see the hurt behind it. It didn’t make me feel good. Ribbing each other mercilessly is just how we get through the day, but it is seldom intended to hurt. We have a way of dealing with it that works most of the time.
“My regrets, twin,” I said, and held up my hand.
She slapped it, maybe a little harder than necessary.
“Forgotten, twin” she said.
Usually, it really is. I wasn’t so sure this time. Patrick could become a real problem between us.
I picked out a mustard sleeveless knit top with a turtle neck that stretched to fit tightly, with a charcoal pair of jeans that ended midcalf, and black penny loafers. I found a black beret that went pretty well with the ensemble, and accessorized with a silver chain necklace and bracelet. Cassie went with the same sort of idea but in different colors.
We found no sign of the parents until we reached the kitchen, which is where we should have looked first. Papa doesn’t own or operate a personal phone. Our low-tech solution was a blackboard in the kitchen. It saves paper, and it’s fun, and Papa hardly ever leaves the property when he’s out of the bubble anyway, so it’s not like he’s hard to find. Chalked there in Papa’s childish block letters was the message:
I AM IN THE LABERTERRY
We ambled out to the backyard and down a short path that followed the lake to the other structure that made up the Broussard Estate. Like the rest of the place, it was not what it appeared to be.
There was a rusty tin roof, weathered siding, and a wide screened-in porch. The porch opened onto a landing and a short dock, where a wooden pirogue was tied up. The place does look like pictures I’ve seen of bait shops on a bayou. But it’s just a façade, one that appeals to Papa. Inside is Papa’s laberterry.
There’s a screen door, but once you’ve opened it, you can’t just walk in. The security there is just as strict as at our house, probably more so. I pressed my palm to the plate and leaned forward to look into the twin lenses. A dim red light flashed, and Papa’s recorded voice called out.
“Come on in, Cassandra Ann!”
“What the . . .” Cassie looked shocked, too. We had never been misidentified by a machine before. People, sure, but this shouldn’t have happened. I looked at Cassie, and she shrugged, so I did, too, and opened the door.
A grizzly bear, ten feet tall standing on his hind legs, raised his front paws and gave out with a heart-stopping roar. Well, it would have been heart-stopping to anyone who wasn’t expecting it. But not for long.
“Hello, Winnie,” Cassie said, and patted him on the side. A little dust and some hair puffed out from his pelt, which had seen better days. Some of the seams were coming apart where he had been sewn together, and one of his hind legs was split open so you could see the metal strut inside. He also clicked when he moved.
“You need an oil can, silly old bear,” I told him.
We had named him Winnie a long time ago. He was part of Papa’s oddball collection of stuff that he had brought with him from Earth, then from Mars. He had been part of an amusement park that Papa had built animated figures for, many years ago.
You had to go around Winnie to get to the stairs, which went down for three flights to end in another door with another palm plate and another set of lenses. I let Cassie operate that one, and sure enough, it greeted her as Pollyanna Sue. Then it opened and admitted us to the inner sanctum.
Don’t call my papa a mad scientist, at least not in my presence. I’ll rearrange your face . . . or at least hurt your feelings real bad. But “eccentric scientist”? I’d have to let you get away with that.
What we entered was not the lab of a mad scientist from old movies, with dry ice bubbling in beakers full of colored water, and electrical arcs from Jacob’s ladders humming and sizzling up toward the ceiling. It was part machine shop and part museum. It was quite a large room, much bigger than the bait shop above it.
Haphazardly spotted around the room were some of Papa’s toys, like an X-ray machine, an MRI, an electron microscope, a huge hydraulic press, several drill presses, and racks and racks and racks of hand tools and power tools. If someone somewhere ever invented a tool that Papa doesn’t have, it probably wasn’t good for anything. He has stamping machines and furnaces, and analytical machines from chemical labs and hospitals. There are bins and bins of hardware.
No one gets in the lab but Travis, Papa, and Mama, and their two little puppies. No one. That means no maid service except for guess who. We had been down there two weeks ago, in anticipation of Papa’s arrival, and cleaned it from top to bottom. That is no small job, believe me. Mama does a white-glove inspection, and it all has to shine.
We are saved a little effort because of one cardinal rule: Don’t move anything! The one thing Papa can be strict with us about is his lab. We clean only surfaces, leaving everything just where we found it. He wants all his projects to be exactly as he left them when he gets out.
—
We found him after a short search among things best left undescribed. Or maybe I should say things I’d be hard put to describe if someone asked me to, so don’t ask, okay? The things Papa builds seem to defy logic, and often look like nothing more than a random selection of junk tossed into a garbage can with some epoxy glue squirted in, shaken up for a few minutes, then dumped out on the floor. Sometimes they emit sounds or lights or even steam, and I steer clear of them. They look like they might bite.
He was sitting at a workbench wearing some sort of magnifying glasses, peering into a box about a foot on each side.
“Stay back a minute, my girls,” he said. “I’ll fix this up in no time.”
He went back to his work, and it really didn’t take him long. He finished up and sat back with a satisfied sigh.
“That’s done,” he said, and turned to us grinning. “Come give your papa a hug, my darlings!”
We did that, and when we moved away he looked at us with an odd expression.
“Didn’t have no trouble gettin’ in, did you?”
“Papa,” Cassie said, “for some reason the door . . . Did you do that?”
He laughed. “Pretty funny, huh? Even the door cain’t tell y’all apart.”
“Pretty funny,” I agreed. Behind his back, Cassie rolled her eyes, but she assured him she thought it was pretty funny, too. It could be worse, I always figured. He might like itch powder and exploding cigars.
“What’s in the box, Papa?” Cassie asked.
He got serious real quick.
“It’s for something I gotta find out, me.”
Cassie was looking into it, frowning. I did, too.
It was like all the things I’d ever seen Papa build. No, actually, I mean invent. He was quite skilled as a carpenter, a machinist, any manual skills at all, really. If you wanted him to build a house, he’d make a great one, and it would be just according to a normal house plan. Building our tree house, he had let his imagination loose a little, and the result was a lovely fantasy, a toy. Ask him to build a mechanical device from plans, something that already existed, he would faithfully copy it.
But when he was inventing, he went into some sort of creative trance and grabbed the first object that came to hand that would serve his purpose. That’s one reason he has so much unsorted junk scattered around the lab. He always knew where each item was, could go directly to it. And then he would build something weird. And always it looked like a mess, but it always did its job.
This box was no different. There was some greenish light down near the bottom, and a couple of reddish lights elsewhere, but I couldn’t see the source of either light. It was making a very faint hum, so quiet I didn’t notice it at first. There was a faint smell I couldn’t identify, but suspected was some sort of lubricating oil. Maybe the slightest whiff of ozone.
No telling what it was for. I just had to hope Papa could do a better job of explaining it.
“Does it have to do with the problem with the ship?” I asked.
“It do, cher,” he said, with a frown. “This thing ought to tell me something ’bout that, if I done her right.”
“So . . . when are you going to do your experiment?”
“That gonna be a little hard to do,” he admitted. “I was hoping you girls might be able to he’p me with that.”
“Anything you say, Papa,” Cassie told him.
“You got it,” I agreed.
Well, I’ll abbreviate a little here, because I’m still a little pissed off.
Mama arrived while Papa was struggling to explain what he needed. Essentially, he needed someone to take the box somewhere and do something with it. The box was some sort of detector for dark lightning, or something like that. I didn’t understand it completely. What Papa wanted to do was train someone to go to this place and take readings.
Sounded simple enough. Wasn’t simple at all.
The procedure wasn’t all that complicated. A reasonably smart chimpanzee should have been able to handle it, and Cassie and I understood it after a few run-throughs. A few lights, a few buttons, a few notes to take, since Papa hadn’t had time to invent and program an automatic register for the thing.
In fact, he’d been in such a hurry, it was a wonder the thing worked at all. Several times while he was demonstrating how it worked, it just stopped. He had to open the top and fool around in there with a screwdriver. Once it gave off a shower of sparks, making me jump and causing Papa to suck on a singed finger.
It soon became clear that whoever operated the box was going to have to know how to keep it running right, and how to fix it when it didn’t work. And no one needed to point out that there was only one person in the room who could do that.
Papa was really upset.
“I’m going to have to go with whoever takes this thing where it need to go,” he said, in some agitation.
“Why can’t you . . .” Cassie said, and stopped. I knew she had been going to ask why he couldn’t go there and do it himself, and didn’t bite her tongue in time. I glared at her, and she gave me an apologetic shrug.
“Because I get flusterpated, my darling,” Papa said, sadly. He knew his limitations, and though he had long ago come to terms with them, it wasn’t a source of pleasure to have to acknowledge them, even to himself.
Papa needed someone from his family, preferably me or Cassie or Mama or Travis, to keep his anxieties in check. He was going to have to take the device himself to do whatever it was he intended to do with it, but he was going to need a minder, a human security blanket, to keep calm enough to do what had to be done.
Mama and Papa discussed it, with helpful asides from Cassie and me that never seemed to be appreciated, at least not by Mama. Well, Mama never seems to appreciate us. (Insert put-upon sigh here.)
There were really only four possible minders, and Mama said she and Travis were not on the list because the family meeting they were holding was too important for either of them to miss.
“Well, Papa,” Cassie said, “how long do you think it would take you to . . . well, to beef up that box so it isn’t breaking down all the time?”
“Too long, probly. A couple a days, at least.”
“That’s too long?”
“I’m really worried, cher.”
So was I, and even more when I heard that Papa seemed to think it was really an emergency that required action that fast.
“Anyways, my darlings, I’m afraid your old papa would need somebody to babysit hisself even if I do clean the box up some.” He didn’t look at us as he said this. I reached over and squeezed his shoulder. Cassie put her arm around his waist.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll be happy to go with you.”
“Me, too,” the twin piped up.
“We’ll both go,” I said.
“No, you won’t,” said the Mama unit. “I’m going to need one of you. There’s a lot of things we have to cover in this family meeting. A lot of things to be decided, and if they go one way, I will need someone to run some errands.”
“Then I’ll stick with Papa,” Cassie said quickly.
I glared at her. “I offered first.” I was determined to be the one to stick with Papa because we would be going someplace I’d never been before, and in the finite—although quite large—universe of Rolling Thunder, you didn’t get to do that every day.
Mama interrupted, a deep frown on her face. I thought she was going to read us the riot act and render a decision that had a 50 percent chance of being unfair, but that wasn’t it.
