"Oh, money pump mayhem. Oh, money pump mayhem." This was my mantra, suitably dodgerized for my delectation. The gypsy woman had her own version, some unpronounceable Romanian or Romany transliteration of the original... Hindi? Urdu? Sanskrit? I didn't know, but most people would recognize the ancient chant of Om mani padme hum. The words don't mean anything, anyway, unless you're a Buddhist, and my version was better than the one an old girlfriend of mine had used: "Oh, Mommy! Pop, me humped!" I never got around to asking her if it was true. "Oh money-pumpmay hem! Oh, money pumpmay hem!" I did that for half an hour. I succeeded in getting myself into a dreamy, receptive state, but not deep enough to believe the deadball was full strength. That was okay. I hadn't expected to.
But didn't I have something in my medicine chest that might help...? I opened it and pawed through the meager contents, and there it was. It was a bottle half-full of white pills. The label said ASPIRIN. Ah, yes, but hadn't I replaced them back on... was it Brementon? Yes, yes, it was. On Brementon I had replaced the innocent white headache pills with innocent white powerful narcotics. Very powerful narcotics. I remember doing so. I could see myself emptying the aspirin. I saw myself dump the aspirin in the trash. I saw myself opening a brown bottle, pouring powerful narcotic pills into my hand, and carefully putting them into the aspirin bottle. I heard them rattling down through the narrow neck.
Great! Now I had a bottle of powerful narcotics. Maybe they would enable me to sleep for a week, along with the deadballs.
I shook two of the pills into my hand. No, better make it four.
On each of them, in tiny red letters, was the word ASPIRIN.
For a moment the whole house of cards wavered, threatened to topple.
Ah, but wait!
I would have laughed, except for the rarefied state of Zen bliss I was in, so I contented myself with a beatific smile. Foolish boy! Don't you recall? Of course you do. The... the... the guy you bought them from told you, he said... he said... he had written ASPIRIN on the powerful narcotics so if anybody looked at them, they would see ASPIRIN, and think they weren't worth stealing. But they were really powerful, powerful narcotics.
In fact, they might be too powerful. Don't take four of them. I put one back into the bottle. Three should be enough.
I popped them into my mouth and washed them down with the chalky deadball solution. Then I set about tidying things up, knowing I'd be asleep soon.
I came across the frog and skull netsuke and I picked it up. I stared at the frog, and it stared back at me.
I liked the way it felt in my hand, so I kept it out. I resumed the lotus position, and stroked the ancient, cool ivory with my thumb. It gradually warmed under my hand. I could feel a pulsing in the frog's throat.
I fell asleep.
Dodger hurried through the busy passenger terminal of the King City Spaceport, clinging to his father's hand, feeling a little like a balloon at the end of a string. It wasn't a bad feeling, but it wasn't a real secure one, either. There was nothing to be done about it. When his father got excited, he moved very fast.
Father and son were dressed in white pants and shoes, long white coats that buttoned all the way down the front and had stiff, upright collars. They wore orange turbans wrapped around their heads. The skin of their hands and faces was now a light brown color, and John Valentine sported a neatly trimmed black beard and mustache. Under the turban Dodger was bald as an egg. The shocking yellow hair was all gone, and so were the lightning-bolt tattoos.
Valentine hurried up to the Inner Planet Budget counter and smiled at the young woman who stood behind it. She smiled down at Dodger, who looked cute as could be, a scale model of his handsome father but without the whiskers.
"Good morning," Valentine said, with a slight accent. "I am seeking a reservation in the person of Rajiv Singh, and his most esteemed son, Rahman. We have been booking two passages of an inside stateroom to Flip City, Mars, with connectings to New Amritsar."
"Yes, Mr. Singh, I have your reservation here." The young woman did something at her ticketing machine and produced a clear plastic rectangle that flashed in rainbow colors when the light hit it. "That will be five hundred and fifty-seven dollars and nineteen cents, including transportation tax, excise tax, amusement tax, transaction tax, value added tax, spaceport usage fees, and the mandated voluntary oxygen-indigent support assessment. May I have your credit number, please?"
"Oh, my goodness, no!" Valentine's smile was still in place, but he was gritting his teeth. "Cash moneys only, if you please! 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be,' as according to poor Richard Almanack. And concerning these other stipends..." He leaned over and studied the lines on her ticketing screen. John Valentine paid few taxes unnecessarily and none willingly. "The harried, hurried traveling public is a market ripe for a swindle, Dodger," he said whenever they went anywhere. "Most of them have no idea that not all those fees apply to them." After five minutes of haggling, he had eliminated six dollars in amusement ("We don't plan to be amused"), transaction ("This is applying to credit dealings only"), and air imposts ("Our temple is contributing most generously each year to the Beggars' Breathing Fund, or as Richard Almanack once said, 'I gave at the office.' ").
Those battles won, Valentine pulled his wad of cash from his coat pocket and paid the fare. The lady validated the ticket and handed it to him.
"Now, may I see your passport, please?"
"Passport? Passport? Surely I am told this is not being necessary, for purposes of tourism or religious pilgrimage not to exceed two weeks of durations. Rahman, my son, are you bringing the passports?" Valentine had been patting himself down, exploring his pockets in distraction. Now he smiled. "We are Sikhs," he said, explaining. "Rahman!"
Dodger had been woolgathering, on the high seas aboard a pirate ship. Now he jerked awake, and patted all his pockets. "No, my father."
"There, you see!" Valentine said.
"You're right, of course," said the lady, "but I do need some identification."
"This should be of no type of problem," Valentine assured her. "Here is an abundance of such items." He fanned several cards out on the counter like a winning poker hand. Dodger felt the pressure on his hand increase. Mr. Rajiv Singh was unlikely to have missed the items, since he was deadballing to Neptune at the moment, only one week into his journey. Valentine had been guaranteed these documents would survive the cursory scrutiny needed to buy tourist passage to Mars. Still, it paid to be cautious, and Dodger was ready, should his hand be squeezed three times, to start complaining loudly about a sudden and violent need to empty his bladder. He was prepared to piss his pants, if it came to that. He really hoped it wouldn't come to that.
He sighed in relief when he saw she was buying it, simply glancing at the stolen identification and making a mark on her screen.
"I can offer you a stateroom upgrade, with a private bath, for a fee increase of only twenty dollars," the lady said.
"Oh, my goodness, yes, of course. Won't that be so jolly, Rahman?"
"Yes, my father."
"And are there any... special dietary needs associated with your faith, Mr. Singh?"
"Oh, my goodness, no. We shall be most pleased to be eating whatsoever the other passengers have been eating. Hamburgers and hot dogs, eh, my son?"