It's true that they built our fortress before the money really started rolling in, but maybe the bank manager Dad got the loan from could smell that it was going to. Or maybe he just had a sense of humor. Or maybe Dad made up the idea for Dragon Squadron on the spot (actually, it was Dad's idea — I didn't know he even knew what a game was, let alone a computer game) and promised him first editions for his kids.
And speaking of people who were born to go on TV (the spinyridged ones that peep and the two-legged ones that bellow), Eleanor also made a huge difference in how the whole story went over at the beginning, when a lot of the country was still mostly on the Searles' side and the Searles were trying to make out, oh, I don't know exactly, it all made me so angry I couldn't think about it, just like at the beginning when there was a dead dragon and a dead stupid evil jerk and Lois was a secret — the Searles tried to make it out there was some kind of child abuse going on with my dad sort of giving me to the dragons as a sacrifice or something, or like that famous psychologist who raised his kids in a box to keep out bad influences (and I think my dad is a control freak). Seems like poor Dad was always getting whacked for the way he raised me — last time it was for handing me over to the Rangers. (Nobody ever tried to argue that the dragons had handed Lois over. Dull.)
So some enterprising reporter started looking for other kids and there are only Martha and Eleanor and Eleanor took over immediately and said that they'd known about Lois from the beginning and like sue her, she's eleven years old. This took the wind out of a lot of political sails, especially when Eleanor told the story of how it was Martha who found out that Lois liked her tummy rubbed, you just had to wear gloves to do it. Hardened senior Republican senators watching on the video link were going "awwwww" and then trying to pretend they were coughing.
Then the Searles tried to make it out that someone had taught Eleanor what to say, but the same enterprising reporter managed to convince Katie to let Eleanor have what amounted to a press conference, with questions from the floor and stuff. By the time Eleanor, perfectly self-possessed and articulate, had explained that it maybe wasn't true that I was the only human who'd ever tried to mom a dragonlet — there were one or two old Australian folk tales about it (they're in one of Mom's books) but they were so bizarre that the white guys that translated them thought they were about taking too many drugs, the Searles had lost. And without the Searles goading them nobody wanted to look bad by trying to put me or Dad in jail. So it was Gulp and Lois and Smokehill to a landslide victory. Just like Eleanor's is going to be when she runs for president in forty years or so.
I've gotten ahead of myself again. But this is sort of the happy ending part — or at least the cautious if a trifle shaky happy beginning – and also I didn't think the story was going to go on this long and I'd like to get it over with. But there's some other stuff I want to tell you the real version of. Like the animal rights activists breaking into Smokehill and letting all the things in the zoo out and how one of them (the zoo critter, not the activist) tried to eat Eleanor. There's a lot that happened in those last few weeks, after Lois and I fled west and the Searle army closed in, but I can't be bothered sorting out most of it, and there are already millions of people writing magazine articles and thumping great books on everything to do with Lois and dragons and Smokehill now so you can read them. I'm mostly only writing this at all to make Dad and Martha happy, and a little bit to try to get in some of the stuff all the other great thumping books leave out, or get wrong. Like the animal activists — there weren't any, okay? — and anything even trying to eat Eleanor.
They'd started having regiments or units or whatever you call them of the National Guard (let me see, a noise of consultants, maybe a Saruman of National Guard?) moving in on Smokehill. The president hadn't quite declared a state of national emergency but I guess he'd allowed as how there was at least a clear and present danger of something or other. (All of those thousands of ten-mile-long dragons are hungry.) You remember a busload of tourists had actually seen a dragon flying about half a mile away — so just how much obviously threatening behavior are we going to put up with from this final handful of a nearly extinct creature, anyway? The Searles' spin doctors made it sound like it was like an armada of kamikaze bomber dragons and the tourists on that bus were all in the hospital being treated for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. So the guys in camouflage with funny hats rolled a couple of helicopters in.
You remember that helicopters are the only things that can fly in here, and even they have instrument difficulty, and first you have to get 'em through the gate, but after one of our dramatic rescues about twenty years ago we got a little tiny extra driblet of congressional money to build a garage outside the gates where all the garages and the parking lot are, to hold a flatbed truck that would carry a helicopter with folded up blades through the gate. We couldn't afford a helicopter but we had our very own flatbed helicopter-carrying truck, which I suppose at least saved transporting it, since it went about five mph and made our solar buses look sporty.
There wasn't any place to put everybody so at first the Guard and their helicopters were camped outside the gate, and there was a lot of shouting about that, because the gate was so (comparatively) small and if they had to "mobilize" quickly, there'd be a bottleneck. Also the tourists objected to their parking spaces being taken up by heavies in uniform, since Smokehill was still open for business. Eventually Dad got semi-overruled and most of the people still stayed outside the gate but the first two helicopters and three guys to look after them got brought through. Our new tourist attraction. Not. (But it freed up some of the parking lot.) Well, that made everybody in our party really nervous, because the last thing they wanted was any of this gang being able to move anywhere fast, so people began to think of creative ways to make sure this didn't happen.
Martha started chatting up one of the guard Guards — have I mentioned that she'd started getting really cute when she hit her teens? — and he showed her a lot more about his helicopter than he should have, but then she's just a dumb girl, isn't she? So when the order finally came that they were going to start Operation Dragon Vanquish (I am not kidding) by finding out what had happened to me, there was a flurry of people putting plans of action into action. I don't know exactly what Martha did to her helicopter (when I asked her she said demurely that she "disrupted the synchronization between the front rotor and the rear one." With a little help from a wrench. "Oh," I said) but that still left one. Now pay attention, because this is where it gets exciting.
Eric opened one of the cage doors at the zoo. Just think about that for a minute. Eric. Opened. One. Of. The. Cages. Eric. But we were looking at the possibility — no, the likelihood of losing Smokehill, so last ditch efforts were in order. I'm still really impressed. But this is the best part if you're going to do something like let something out of its cage to make an uproar, you want to let the one that's going to cause the most uproar out, right? Like, you might say, the biggest stink. So guess who he let out. You get three guesses and the first two don't count.
So then he came screaming up to the Institute, which was by then buzzing with Guards doing moving-out things, and all these great horrible (Martha said) army super jeeps and things were rolling through the gate like Grond at the siege of Gondor, and Eric had a tantrum of, I guess, epic proportions even for Eric (even Eleanor was almost impressed), and nearly brought the entire National Guard to its knees single-handed, between the tantrum itself and — well, you guessed it, right? — odorata, who was cavorting around having a high old time doing what odorata does.