The garage was a pop-up dome with an adjacent trailer serving as both home and office. No one was home (the place was a mess). The dome was deserted, or so I thought. A lone roadster was up on jacks near the far end. As I drew closer, a pair of boots came out from under it, then legs, then the rest of Stinky Gonzales.
"Jake?" He squinted at me. "Jake! What the punk are you doin' here? How the punk are you, anyway?"
Stinky spoke Intersystem better than anyone I knew; in fact, he was the only person I knew who could speak it idiomatically. His use of the billingsgate was nothing less than masterly. He had been born and raised on a world where Intersystem was the lingua franca as well as the official tongue. There are a few of those. The last time I'd seen him, though, had been on Oberon, an Inglo-speaking world.
"What the punk are you doing here?" I answered in English, though keeping to his favorite vocabulary. "You finally get run off Oberon?"
He laughed. "You son of a punkin' bitch. What the punk do you think I'm doin' here? Tryin' to earn a punkin' living! Hey, how you been, anyway? You gettin' any?"
"My share, and no more. Busy?"
He gestured around expansively at the empty garage. "Oh, yeah, I'm so punkin' busy I ain't got time to wank it. They're piled up like stack-cats around here." The reference was to a multi-gendered animal native to his home planet; the species is noted for its acrobatic mating rituals. "What the hell you talking about? I just got set up here not two weeks ago. Gotta give it some time to―" He suddenly looked at me, his eyes narrowed. "Hey… what's all this crazy merte I been hearin' about you?"
"What crazy merte is that, Stinky?"
"I don't know. All this punkin' roadbuzz about you havin' a Roadmap or somethin'. Goofy stuff."
"That's exactly what it is." I slapped him on the shoulder. "Got some business for you. Sam's ailing."
"Well, let's throw him against the wall and see if he sticks. Bring him in."
I went outside and told John to take everybody to breakfast. There was a little diner not two blocks away. Then I eased Sam into the garage. It was a tight fit.
Twenty minutes later Sam was in pieces all over the dome. The engine was stripped of shielding and laid bare to the torus. During the process, I discovered to my nasal discomfort that Stinky was still worthy of the nickname only his friends could call him with impunity.
Stinky tapped the engine with his flex-torque wrench, a clinical scowl clouding his features. "I don't know, Jake. This punkin' thing might have to go."
"The torus?" I yelped. "Christ, you're talking big money, Stinky."
"Hey, do you want me to tell you punkin' fairy tales or do you want the truth? The punkin' confinement tubing is hotter than a [reference here to the sexual habits of the human inhabitants of a planet called Free] during Ecstasy Week." He crossed his arms and looked the rig over distastefully. "Hey, Jake. How come you don't get an alien rig? This thing's a piece of merte." He shook his head. "What do you want with this punkin' Terran merte anyway? Look at this thing." He reached and tapped a cylindrical component. "An ohmic preheater." He snorted. "I mean, that's a punkin' joke. Nobody uses them anymore, even on Terran models." He crossed his arms and clucked disapprovingly. "I don't know how you get around in this pile of scrap." He looked at me, then hastened to add, "Hey, I don't mean no offense to Sam."
I was impatient. "Right. What do you think's wrong with it?"
He threw up his arms. "How the punk should I know? I gotta hook up the sensors and look at the thing. Okay, so you
got a kink-instability. That's only a symptom. What if it's this preheater? They don't make parts like that any more. I'll have to rig up something. Or it could be the vacuum pump. Or the current pickup, or the RF breakdown transformer. Punkin' hell, it could be anything." He shrugged, giving in. "Oh, hell, Jake, I'll do my best. Should be able to do something with it. After I get her fixed, I'll degauss it for you."
I thumped his back. "Knew I could count on you. Stinky."
"I know, I'm such a punkin' genius." He glanced at the exposure tab on his filthy shirt front. "Hey! I better get my rad-suit on and you better get outta here before we both get our sferos cooked off."
"Okay. Sam'll keep in touch with me. Let him know, okay?"
"Okay, Jake."
I tumedtb go.
"Jake!" Stinky called after me.
"What?"
"You're walkin' kind of fanny. You all right?"
"We met up with some bugs out on the plains. Things about this long, with―"
"Oh, hoplite crabs. I don't know why they call 'em that, but that's what they call 'em."
"Right, hoplite crabs. They told us at the hospital."
"You gotta watch out for those things."
"Uh, we… Yeah. See you."
The gang was waiting for me outside in the Gadabout. I climbed in, and in doing so, I got the itchy, antsy feeling that something was crawling on me. I gave myself the once-over, but found nothing. Too many small, nasty things lately. Nerves.
After running some errands in town, mainly to pick up groceries and sundries, we drove out of town. The mail question was settled when we drove by the Maxwellville post office and saw the mail rig unloading at a side dock. Doubtless it contained a communique about us.
Also before leaving, we dropped off two of the group, the Abo man and a Hindu woman, at a motel. They'd been having a low-key argument with Sukuma-Tayler. The two did not care for the way things had been going. They wanted time to think things over―"get in touch with the Plan," is the way they put it. The implied meaning of the phrase struck me as rather diffuse. Sukuma-Tayler didn't say good-bye to them, but he didn't appear to be overly distressed at their leaving.
A short stretch of Colonial highway ended in a dirt road that conveyed us bouncingly along for what seemed like hours, winding around high buttes and towering sheer cliffs, until it split into a Y.
Sukuma-Tayler stopped the Gaddy and threw up his hands. "As usual," he said sardonically, "directions given barely approximate directions taken. Anybody care to guess which way we should go?" He turned to the Oriental man in the front seat. "Roland?"
Roland poked his head out the window, trying to find the sun. "Hard to get your bearings on a new planet… especially when you don't know the axial inclination. Do you have the Guidebook, John?"
"The what inclination?"
"Let's see," Roland said, shielding his eyes, "the sun's there. So, that means… uh―" He scratched his head.
"Well," I put in, "Maxwellville's in the opposite direction of where we want to go, and so is the Skyway." Without knowing why, I turned to Winnie, "Where's the Skyway, honey?"
"That way!" she piped, pointing to our right.
Eyes turned rearward. After a moment's hesitation, John started the Gaddy forward again, and took the left fork.
By now we had a depopulated crew: me, Darla, Winnie, the Oriental, and a Caucasian woman, to whom we were introduced for the first time ― Roland Yee and Susan D'Archangelo ― plus our Afro leader. The man in the hospital, we learned, was named Sten Hansen.
Susan was light-haired, thin, had hazel eyes and a pixie nose that crinkled when she smiled ― a young face, but I put her on the downhill side of thirty, probably having forgone her first series of antigeronic treatments for financial, religious, or ethical reasons. I still had only a shell of an idea as to what Teleological Pantheism might mean or contain. Yee was younger, had short, straight black hair that stuck out in spikes toward the top of his head. He was very easygoing and pleasant, as they all were.