“Hi,” she said. She put the cards in a neat stack and laid them next to the old man. “I’m Omiko. I just moved in with Charmaine, and I was wondering if I could use your bathroom.”
Chris glanced warily up at the door. “We blew a fuse,” she said. “Mr. Hutchins is fixing it, but it’ll probably be an hour. Why don’t you ask Mr. Nagisha if you can use his bathroom?”
“Would you pleathe be quiet!” Molly said from the landing. “We’re being interviewed.”
Chris went on up the stairs past Molly and Bets. “I danthed in the road thyow of Annie Two,” Molly said to the redheaded man and then dropped to a stage whisper as Chris went past. “That’th her!”
“The woman who rents the apartment?” he said.
“Yes,” Bets said, and whispered something Chris couldn’t hear.
In the hall Charmaine’s lawyer was standing by his printer, watching it chug out copies of something. “Tell Okee I’ll have these ready for him by tonight.”
“All right,” Chris said, not really listening to him. She inserted her key in the door, thinking, please let him be taking a nap. But he wasn’t in the hammock or the hall, and the door to the bathroom was open. So was the door to Mr. Okeefenokee’s room. A key was still in the lock. She pulled it out, put it in her pocket, and went in.
Mr. Okeefenokee had bought a bed. Though he must not have bought it today, Chris thought, because there wouldn’t have been time to deliver it, let alone get it in here and pile all those things on it.
The bento-bako boxes were stacked on the foot of the bed next to a tangle of paper umbrellas and a set of encyclopedias. The rest of the bed was piled to the ceiling with boxes that appeared to be microwave ovens.
She came around the end of the bed into a narrow aisle formed by stacks of boxes that went clear to the ceiling. One of the boxes read, “One gross dental floss.” Hutchins’s bicycle was propped against the boxes. Next to it was a baby buggy with a Christmas tree in it. She couldn’t see the piano anywhere, but there were four accordions sitting in the middle of the aisle.
Against the back wall was a trampoline propped on its side with six pairs of roller skates and a wind sock hanging from it. Hutchins was kneeling in front of the trampoline, digging in a box full of Styrofoam packing. He lifted out a lava lamp and looked at it.
“How did you get in here?” Chris said.
He laid the lava lamp back in the box and stood up. “Okee gave me his key,” he said. “I thought you were going shopping.”
“I thought you had a job interview at Luigi’s,” Chris said steadily.
“I did, but I called Luigi and told him I’d be a little late. Okee wanted me to check on whether he’d bought a Japanese-English dictionary or not. He couldn’t remember. It’s no wonder with all the junk he’s got in here. At least we know what he wanted the high ceilings for. You don’t see a dictionary anywhere, do you?”
“There aren’t any job openings at Luigi’s,” Chris said. “Charmaine told me he’s not even taking applications.” He stopped pretending to look for the dictionary. “She also told me she saw you on the axis this morning.”
“Chris,” he said.
She backed away from him into the Christmas tree. The balls rattled. “You’re a spy, aren’t you?”
He looked genuinely astonished. “A spy? Of course I’m not a spy.”
“Then what are you doing in here? And why did you lie to me about the job interview?”
“All right,” he said. “I didn’t have a job interview. I went up to NASA to get my subvocalizer checked. I wanted to know what made it tick.”
“Because you’re a spy,” Chris said, still backing. “I’m calling Stewart.”
“No!” he said, and then in a calmer and even more unsettling tone, “No. You aren’t calling anybody. As soon as NASA works out a deal with the Japanese, they’re taking Okee down to Houston. I’ve got maybe two days to figure out what he means by ‘space program’ before the NASA people start demanding that he deliver a space program he doesn’t know anything about. I don’t have time to mess with your idiot fiancé.”
“He’s not an idiot,” Chris said, feeling behind her back for something she could hit him with. Her hand closed on a golf club.
“Oh, isn’t he? He’s engaged to you, for God’s sake, and he doesn’t even exercise his option. He puts you on hold and goes off and leaves you barefoot in the ginza and lets strange men sleep in your room. If I were engaged to you, I’d… I’m not a spy. I’m a linguist.”
Chris’s grip tightened on the golf club. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “Stewart said the American linguistics team was at NASA, talking to the Eahrohhs’ leaders.”
“Okee’s the leader.”
She let go of the golf club, and the whole bag of clubs went over and spilled out. “But Stewart said he was just a passenger.”
“The Eahrohhs told the Japanese linguistics team that Okee was noru hito. That means passenger. It also means proclaiming one. That means he’s the one who’s supposed to deliver the space program, only I don’t think he’s got one. Do you remember what you said to Okee when I moved in? You said, ‘There isn’t any space.’ ”
“Oh, no,” Chris said. “And he only understands one meaning of a word.”
“The first one he hears. But those idiots over at NASA think that if an alien who has known our language less than two weeks says space program, he has to mean astronauts, rockets, and zero-gravity bathrooms. It never even crosses their minds that ‘space’ also means a vacuum, that ‘program’ also means a series of musical numbers. Okee could be giving us radio, for God’s sake.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to do what I’ve been doing for the last two days—try to figure out what the hell he means by ‘space program.’ He can’t pronounce ‘honeymoon’ right. What if he can’t pronounce ‘space program’ either? What if he’s offering us a spice program and NASA’s going to find itself with eighty tons of cinnamon? What if it’s a spaze program, whatever the hell that is? Or a space pogrom? We’ve got to find out before he goes down to Houston. That’s why I was in here. I thought maybe he was keeping some machine in here or secret plans or something, but all he’s got is a swing set and a gross of Girl Scout flashlights. I don’t know. Maybe he’s a smug-gler.”
“What about the subvocalizers?” Chris said. “You said you tried to find out what made them work.”
“Nothing,” Hutchins said. He pulled his out of his pocket and looked at it. “It’s two pieces of metal with five millimeters of air between them, not even vacuum, just air.” He put the subvocalizer back on. “All they could tell me over at NASA was that it does what it’s supposed to.” “It does what it’s supposed to,” Chris said. She thought about him taking it off so he could come over here without being followed, about talking to her at lunch with it. “Your giving me the subvocalizer, that was all a setup, wasn’t it, so you could make sure I didn’t tell Stewart about you?”
“I couldn’t risk your moving me out. I needed to be where I could talk to Okee.”
“Did you really come up on the shuttle yesterday, or was that part of the act, too?”
“It wasn’t an act. I was supposed to come up with the rest of the team, but I’d heard how much trouble the Japanese team was having communicating with the Eahrohhs. I figured it was because everybody was trying so hard to get the names pronounced right and learn the language that it made the Eahrohhs nervous. So I thought if I could come up here incognito—”
“Like Spielberg,” Chris said bitterly.
“ ’Scuse me,” Charmaine’s cheery voice floated up from downstairs.