“Right. That ugly puppy would’ve had you for lunch if I hadn’t popped you to convince it you were dead. We were lucky it was a picky eater.”
“I was dead! All electrical and chemical activity stopped cold.” He shuddered at the memory. That unhappy event had occurred on their first Expedition together, back before they were married. On one side a creature that made a Lovecraftian horror look like a Disney bunny, on the other this aggravating crazy woman squinting through her gun sight as she drew a bead on him. Then nothing, not knowing until he’d come to which had gotten him. That image of himself as a sitting duck had recurred frequently the day they got married, and he still occasionally wondered if he might just have been better off with the bogmaster.
She quickened her pace to give him a fond pat on the fanny. “Coming back to life made you homy as hell, if I recall. That’s when we started fooling around. Remember? We had hot zombie nookie for two solid days.”
“And I needed a week to recover afterward. Careful, watch your step!” They detoured around a loveseat-sized heap of fresh dung that was a faded hue of the vivid lavender that was the predominant color of Pitstop’s vegetation, a scattering of what looked like glitter embedded in it.
“That’s one titanic turd,” Claire snickered.
“Indeed. It must have come from one of the big animals Maud called leviathans.” He pointed to several others in the clearing. “It would appear that they come here fairly often.”
“So Maud parked on the rim of a toilet bowl. Do you think she was studying them?”
“Maybe.” His handpad wheeped. He looked down at the screen, paled. “Uh oh, that’s one coming into sensor range now. We better hustle. They’re supposed to be vegetarians, but there’s no sense taking chances.”
Claire surveyed the surrounding growth with bright-eyed anticipation. “Don’t worry, old Betsy and me will take care of it.”
“It’s almost suppertime, not high noon.” He spoke into the pad. “Blind-ship Echo Seven, drop portal cloaking and open.”
Twenty meters in front of them and two off the ground a section of Pitstop’s lean-limbed, jelly-leafed jungle vanished, replaced by the welcoming arch of a blindship portal—which in this case was a fanlighted faux-wood front door complete with brass knocker and mail slot. The long metal tongue of its boarding ramp extruded down toward them.
Arthur started walking faster, one eye glued to the red dot which marked the leviathan. “Come on, lady! Let’s get inside and buttoned up in case it comes here.”
She increased her pace only slightly, her lower lip quivering in a theatrical pout. “You never let me have any fun!”
“I’m your husband,” he shot back, as if that explained everything.
Claire was, of course, more than just another gun nut.
Her official title was Expedition Fixer, a term the Whuggs found so splendidly evocative that they had insisted on its use. The supersentient aliens were not micromanagers. The human contingent of Why Not U chose who went on Expedition, and the Science Master decided what they did there.
The one exception to this tentacles-off policy was the office of Fixer. That person was always chosen by a Whugg or Whuggs. There was some confusion on this point; sometimes several spoke as one, other times one spoke as several, and the rest of the time were just in their everyday state of multiplex discrete consensual singularity.
Equal in rank to the captain of the huge mothership the Expedition had come in and was based from, as Fixer Claire was partly morale watchdog—acting as counselor, confessor, therapist and spat resolver; and partly head of security—functioning as cop, criminal investigator, judge and jailer. She could perform weddings, divorces, and autopsies with equal gusto. Part constable, part shrink, and part sacred clown, it was her job to act as the grease which kept all the odd human cogs from grinding each other toothless. She had more degrees than her husband, and acted as if they had all been gotten through mail order by sending in box tops.
Although there was nothing hurried, or even particularly coplike about the way she moved, it took her only a couple of minutes to ascertain that Maud Whalsitz was not on board and there were no immediate signs of foul play.
“Can you believe this pigsty?” Arthur called when she returned to the living room that served as main compartment. He stood in the middle of the floor, unhappily surveying the scattered food containers and wrappers, empty beer and liquor bottles, mounds of funky laundry and other uncategorizable detritus that covered every available surface. All in all it looked like a very large wild animal with an unrestrained fondness for junk food had been holed up in there.
“Yeah, I’ve seen her digs back at home base.” Claire picked up a box at her feet, sniffed it and frowned. “Hmmmmm.”
“What have you got there?” Arthur asked, hoping it was a clue. The sooner they wrapped this up the sooner they could go back to their own blindship, which was, thanks to him and no thanks to her, neat as a pin.
“Dried salted herrings.” She extracted one by the tail, held it out toward him. “Want one?”
“You’re joking,” he answered, revolted.
“Had to after I smelt it.” She dropped the small fish back into the box and put it aside. “Are the ship’s systems still monitoring and recording the area outside?”
“I’ll check.” He picked a path to the science station and, wishing he’d brought rubber gloves, fussily cleared the dreck off the console and chair. Wiping his hands on his pants he sat down and began a status check.
“It’s on. Is there something I should be looking for?”
Claire was holding a food-stained puce nightgown out in front of her, sizing it against herself. Although not a small woman, there was room enough for four of her to ballroom dance and even practice synchronized dipping inside it. “Hippo tracks?”
“What?”
She grinned at her husband, wadding up the garment and tossing it away. “All right, class, here’s today’s lesson in deduction. The missing Professor Whalsitz is not anywhere on her ship. Therefore she must be, stay with me now, elsewhere. I believe we can logically assume that she went outside as her first step in disappearing. So what we do is backtrack through the recordings until she was last sighted. Knowing what she was doing when last in the area may tell us where she went.”
Arthur nodded. “Good thinking.”
A modest shrug. “Us law enforcement types know more than just our donuts. Though some cruller sorts refuse to admit it.”
He sighed. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.” He turned back toward the console. “System. Locate and replay last sighting of Professor Whalsitz in the area outside.”
“Entire recording?” the device replied. “It runs thirteen minutes and twelve seconds.”
Arthur turned back toward his wife to see what she wanted him to do.
“Why not?” she asked, sauntering toward him with a big plastic bag tucked under one arm. “I’ve got the cheese popcorn.”
Dr. Arthur Linstrom hated it when things went wrong. Had he been the sort given to tattoos—which he wasn’t—his might have read Born to Count Beans or Death Before Ducks out of Row.
Expeditions existed to collect information to be shared with the Whuggs. To his orderly mind that process had to be carried out as smoothly and efficiently as humanly possible. Humanly was the key word. Since the normal state of human affairs is the sort of milling muddled confusion you might expect from a flock of neurotic, tone-deaf sheep attempting to square dance, achieving such a lofty goal took no small amount of doing. There were nearly four hundred people on the Expedition working this star system, two-thirds of them scientists from several dozen disparate disciplines. The only surer recipe for conflict would have been to involve either religion or soccer.