Lois, I swear, was made to go on TV though. She is interested in everything, and as long as I'm still somewhere relatively nearby, she is a shameless flirt with everything else human, or that's how it comes over. She figures that humans are her family, and she's just thrilled any time another of her strangely shaped relatives wants to meet her. For some reason people carrying blinding lights and trailing leads and yelling are included — even the ones whose first reaction, on seeing a great scaly lump on little bent legs lolloping briskly toward them while making extraordinary noises that allow a too-clear view of teeth several inches long, is to run away. Lois has a very generous heart as well as a lot of energy.
Anyway Gulp didn't fry me that first day and she hasn't fried anyone since and she's not going to, but even I, who spends, and who has already spent, more intensive time with dragons than any other human ever has, I've still never got over how big they are, so I can hardly blame the TV crews — as well as what are now our rivers of visiting scientists — for being a little jumpy. Gulp, fortunately, doesn't run at people the way Lois does. I suspect even some of the TV people pick up her fatalistic stoicism, even if they don't know that's what they're picking up. They're probably just telling themselves that anything that large is kind of oppressive by definition.
Maybe that's why they usually end up liking Lois so much. She's still small, comparatively, and she seems to have the gene or the pheromone or something for being fetching. It can't be her big deep soft brown shining long-lashed eyes because she has small poppy greeny-reddy eyes increasingly surrounded by knobbly spikes and eyelashes like stilettos. There is just no way to make out a baby dragon as cute. Lois is cute anyway, and her energy level, if you don't have to live with her, is pretty appealing. You know how charming it is when some dog you've never met before comes rushing up to you like you're his long-lost best friend. The enthusiasm is contagious. For a few minutes you think maybe you are best friends. Then you begin to wonder what the dog must be like at home. I don't think most of the TV people ever get this far thinking about Lois because she is, you know, a dragon. I suppose I can't have it both ways, expecting people who've never met a dragon to get it about dragons and then feeling crabby (or superior) when they don't.
We don't have mere rivers of ordinary tourists, of course, we have oceans of them — galaxies — Avogadro's numbers of tourists. They still rarely see any dragons but it doesn't stop them coming, and we now have loops of some of Gulp's and Lois' finest video moments on big screens in the tourist center, as well as the one of me being spastic on Bud's head. I can't risk just going into the tourist center any more myself, it's like being a pop star or something, and don't laugh, because it's ghastly.
Lois and I hide out in this fortress a little beyond where the Rangers' cottages all are. When we first came back to the Institute we were guarded twenty-four hours a day by some of Major Handley's guys — from our new fans, sure, but also from the Searles and their goons, who were not good losers — and then the fortress got built. I didn't know anything could go up that fast — it was like watching time-lapse photography. It was amazing. It also must have cost a fortune. Dad is still pretty protective about me in some, sometimes weird, ways, and he seems to think it would blight me or something if I knew what it cost. With everything else that's happened I think this is pretty funny. Maybe it's just something he can protect me from.
And where's the fortune coming from, you're asking, or maybe you're not. After all, the galaxies of tourists not only buy tickets but they now all buy ye olde genuine Smokehill souvenirs by the barrowload — most of 'em stagger out of here now carrying shopping bags like they've just bought the week's groceries for a family of eight. It's mostly just the usual souvenir junk too, only with dragons on it, plus a few Smokehill specials, like real dragon scales, and the only place you can buy our dragons' scales is at our tourist center gift shop, and while it dragon scale is only sold as a dragon scale, I'm sure a lot of tourists go home telling themselves that really theirs is one of Gulp's or Bud's (Lois doesn't shed proper scales yet). This isn't necessarily tourists being blind and stupid either — dragon scales are all the same color after they've been off the dragon for a little while, whatever color they were on the dragon, so why not imagine yours is from your favorite dragon?
Everybody wants scales though, so it's a good thing we now have lots of dragons to provide them. I mean, we've always had lots of dragons, but after I collected a few bagfuls at Dragon Central and went through a really amazingly silly nonconversation with Bud about whether it was all right if I took them away, the dragons started collecting them for me. I don't think anyone has a clue what I want them for; it's just another of those inexplicable peculiarities of humans.
It's funny about the scales. Dad always said it was a bad idea, our Rangers have better things to do with their time than haul trash for tourists, tourists are just fine with coffee mugs and mouse mats that say GREETINGS FROM Smokehill. And I remember the flap when Mom and Katie and the latest noise of consultants (okay, what's the collective noun for consultants — a fire sale of consultants? ha ha ha) brought him around, saying that it was something tangible about our australiensis that visitors could not only see but touch and take home with them. Not to mention scales being about the only things attached to dragons that don't disintegrate within a few months: Maybe it's something to do with the fact that scales don't actually stay on the dragon long. Dad did have to admit they made us money — and even a big bag of them doesn't weigh much, so they're not a burden to carry back to the Institute. Since Lois the sanctuaries in Kenya and Australia have started selling scales too, but all their scales are just from any old dragons, and they don't do anything like the business we do.
Then the postcard from that first TV documentary-filmed at the Westcamp meadow, so there is a lot of hushed, dopey voiceover narration of the and this is where IT FIRST HAPPENED variety — of Gulp prostrate at my feet sold like nearly enough for a down payment on Smokehill II. You can't see most of her, of course, just a bit of her neck and her head, with her face tipped down enough for her nearer eye to be looking straight at me, very much like the first afternoon, when she was apologizing. The panorama version — where you can see all of her — sold even better. And then there's our patent on Dragon Dolls. And Dragon Squadron was last Christmas' biggest seller — in both its computer and its board game formats — the sort of scene where parents were pulling each other's hair out in front of FAO Schwarz. They had to call in some kind of riot police in Denver, I think it was, when a shipment got hijacked to somewhere else.
And, okay, yes you can buy an autographed copy of the panorama postcard of Gulp and me, and Gulp doesn't sign autographs.