Maybe the smart thing to do was make the best of it. Until his visitor returned, he could at least do what Boyes had suggested. He could think about it.
The glow was very subtle. It would have awakened a dog immediately. Ex-soldiers required only a little more exposure before their field-sensitized senses kicked in and responded. Despite the passage of years, Harry had not lost that.
So it was that he found himself carefully picking up the shotgun from its resting place next to the bed, hauling himself into the wheelchair, and heading cautiously outside the trailer. If the sight of his shaggy, unkempt self clad only in slippers, underwear, and oil-stained sweat-shirt wasn’t enough to scare off any intruders, maybe the shotgun would suffice.
As he neared the crumbling stuccoed back of the old garage, wheeling his way silently between lovingly tended cacti and poorly labeled rusty mining implements, he saw that there were actually three lights. By far the brightest came from the dry riverbed that wormed its way through rock and dry soil half a mile north of the station.
The others were nearer, and flickered within the garage. That was where he kept those few items of his collection that could be considered valuable. That was where he kept the gadget.
Whoever was inside had not only broken the lock but also disarmed his admittedly simplistic alarm system. His lips tightened. If that slick son of a bitch Boyes had come back early and with help, they weren’t going to leave without participating in a twelve-gauge discussion on the merits of breaking and entering.
But there was no car, unless its headlamps were the source of the light illuminating the edges of the distant wash. Why park way out there? he wondered. Even if they had a four-wheel, it seemed unnecessary.
Slowly, he made his way around to the rear of the station and worked his way up the ramp that led to the back door. It, at least, was still closed. Good time to have a power chair, he told himself. Another luxury he couldn’t afford. He couldn’t have cared less, except that in order to get his chair up the ramp to where he could open the door he had to use both hands, which meant putting the shotgun down on his lap however momentarily.
The door opened silently: not surprising, since the alarm system had been disarmed. Easing himself inside, he closed the door behind him. No doubt Boyes wasn’t expecting trouble from a reclusive double amputee. He was in for a serious surprise. You didn’t have to pull triggers with your toes.
On silent rubber rims he rolled into the museum and headed for the nearest light switch. He never reached it. Mentally prepared for falling fists or clutching hands, he did not anticipate being halted by a glow—but that was exactly what happened.
There were two of them. The largest stood nearly seven feet high, tall enough to have to maneuver between old hanging lamps and a rotting crystal chandelier. Its companion was considerably smaller, topping out at maybe four feet. Lean and lanky, clad in what looked like fleecy gold, they revealed pale white skin that would not have lasted five minutes in the northern Nevada sun without burning.
Skinny, they were, with long thin legs and arms that terminated in two sucker-tipped fingers apiece. Their faces were comparably elongated, with loose flaps of brownish skin on either side that could as easily have been gills as ears. Jet-black hair trailed from midway down the back of the neck and was gathered together in an incongruous ponytail by more of the woven gold material. Their eyes were vertically oval, black, and fitted with slightly convex dark-blue pupils. The mouths were small, round, lipless, and toothless. The distinctive glow they were emitting came not from them but their attire.
They might be advanced, but they were not omnipotent. They had not detected his entrance, and were clearly surprised when he rolled into view. At least, he chose to interpret their slight retreat as surprise. Captivated by their alienness, he gingerly laid the shotgun down on the floor and rolled slowly toward them.
“Hello.” He raised one hand, palm upward, because that seemed to be as appropriate a thing to do as anything else.
In response, the smaller one looked up at the larger and mouthed something that sounded like wind whispering through holes in rock. The larger replied, and then both turned to gaze at him. Emboldened, he resumed his advance.
“You two look like you could use a good feed. But I have the feeling this isn’t a social call. Let me guess: You’re here for the gadget.”
There was no reply. They simply stared, following him with their unnaturally prominent pupils as he wheeled himself over to the display case. Parting the doors, he lovingly removed the gadget from its pedestal. As always, the intensely bright yellow cylinder continued to circle its silvery cone. He spun the chair.
“Guy came by today wanted to buy this. Two hundred thousand he offered me. I have a feeling I can’t do anything to stop you if you insist on taking it back, but I just want you to know that I could sure use that two hundred thousand. Like I told him, if I shopped it around I could probably get more. Especially now that I know it’s, well, genuine.”
Again the shorter visitant looked up at the taller and spoke. Receiving a reply, it stepped forward. Harry held his ground, a simpler decision to make in the face of conflict when you don’t happen to have any legs. But he had the feeling he would have held it anyway.
Two long arms extended in his direction, the sucker-tipped fingers outstretched toward him. The meaning of the gesture was plain enough. So was Harry’s response. Tense but with little to lose, he held on to the gadget, and waited, and watched.
After a minute or so the more diminutive of the two aliens stepped back. It had not tried to take the gadget, had made no threatening gestures. What it did next surprised Harry almost as much as the aliens’ actual initial appearance. It also explained some things.
The smaller alien put one two-fingered sucker-tipped hand on the larger one’s arm and turned its head away from Harry. It did this by rotating its skull almost a full 180 degrees on its neck. The larger creature wind-whispered something to the seated human, then started to turn. It struck Harry then that they did not intend to take the gadget from him by force. Maybe an interstellar version of the old finders-keepers law applied here. Or maybe there was something going on that he did not understand.
Either way, he thought he had it figured out. Their shape might be alien, and their posture, but the relationship between them could only be interpreted in one way. At least, given his limited store of knowledge and imagination, he could only interpret it in one way. For all he knew he could be completely wrong, galactically off-base. But, what the hell . . .
“Hey, wait a minute! If it’s that important to you . . .”
They turned back at the sound of his voice, not because they understood the words. Smiling even as he wondered how it would be interpreted, Harry held out the gadget. He was going to miss it; miss the looks on the faces of the astonished travelers who visited his museum, miss playing with the bright little lights, miss the extra dollars it brought him in tips—but what the hell . . .
“Here you go, kid. I lost a toy or two when I was your age, too. Or your size, anyway. Next time, don’t be letting it hang out the window when you take off. Or wherever it was hanging when you left without it.”
As the smaller alien accepted the gadget, one of its fingers made contact with Harry’s. It was amazingly cool to the touch, like tinfoil that had spent an hour sleeping in the refrigerator. Then the hands withdrew, clutching the gadget.
The two aliens never changed expression. They might be incapable of doing so, he realized. But neither did they leave. Instead, both approached and began to examine him more closely, running those strangely flexible fingers over his face, his body, the chair. Up close, he found that their golden suits generated not only soft light but soft heat. Sitting in the chair in his underwear, he could sympathize. The high desert got plenty cold at night.
A sucker-pad touched him in a sensitive place, and he laughed, causing both his gentle examiners to draw back sharply. “Hey, watch it! That tickles.”
When he reached out to touch the smaller alien, he was infinitely delighted to see that it did not pull away from him.
“What do you mean, it’s gone?”
Boyes hovered menacingly over the man in the wheelchair. The two unimaginative types flanking him scowled down. They were hot, and tired. It was evening, the sun had set, and already they were regretting having left their regular gigs in Reno to haul all the way out here to the middle of nowhere. But the guy who had hired them had promised that there would be little or no trouble, and thus far he had certainly delivered on that. As much as anything, they had been brought along to intimidate. It annoyed them that they did not appear to be having the desired effect on the clown in the chair.
Harry spread his hands. “I told you, I gave it away. Back to the original owners. They showed up two days ago, and I gave it back to them.”
“I can’t believe this,” Boyes muttered. Ever since he had arrived to find the gadget gone, he had been muttering it a lot. “Wait a minute. You just gave it back?”
“That’s right. I gave them back the gadget, and before they left they gave me an old bike. Looks like a classic, but I thought the idea was pretty funny. Giving me a bike, I mean.”
“Watch him.” Fury bubbling in his eyes, Boyes strode off toward the sad-looking garage-museum, leaving Harry waiting under the baleful gaze of the two hirelings.
“You guys get out this way much?” he inquired conversationally.
“Shut up, jack,” the nearest meat ordered him. “We’re not liking this any better than you.” He wiped at his forehead. “Christ, it’s hot out here! How do you stand it?”
“I’ve been in hotter places. Arabia. Bosnia.”
The other dog showed a flicker of interest. “You were in Bosnia? That how
it
happened?”
Harry snorted. “Didn’t happen crossing Silver Creek Road in Tahoe.”
His transitory nemesis nodded. “My dad was in Bosnia. Worthless bastard, except for that. They say he did good there.”
“Sorry.”
“Hey, don’t you be sorry for us. You’d better hope that—”
“He’s telling the truth.” They all turned in the direction of the gas station as Boyes came stomping out. “It’s not there.” Approaching the chair, he leaned over its occupant and glowered.
“You don’t think I believe a word of this, do you?”
Harry shrugged. “What are you gonna do? Tear the place apart? If I did still have it and wanted to hide it from you, you know you’d never find it. I know this country, and you can’t dig it all up.” His eyes rose to meet those of his visitor. They did not swerve, or fall.
“As for beating it out of me, I’ve taken worse than anything your hired donkeys can hand out.”
“You think so?” Unexpectedly finding himself pinned by that unwavering stare, Boyes suddenly blinked and straightened. “One thing at a time, I suppose.” He eyed his companions. “Search the trailer first. Then we’ll start in on the museum and the rest of this junk out here. And if we don’t find it pretty quick,” he paused meaningfully, “maybe we’ll find out whether you’re as tough as you think you are.”
They did not bother to keep an eye on him. After all, it wasn’t as if he was going anywhere. As for the possibility that he might have a gun stashed somewhere, Boyes secretly hoped that he did. It would give them an excuse to shoot him, useful in the event the law became involved. Not kill him, of course. Just shoot him. In that event, it would be a simple matter of their swapping a call for medical assistance in return for the gadget. He was not concerned about Harry’s possible prowess as a sharpshooter. The two men he had brought with him were professionals, and he had been assured they were competent.
They were working their way through the tired, slovenly bedroom, ripping out drawers and tearing apart storage boxes, when they heard the boom and the subsequent ascending whine. Rushing out back, they saw the small silvery disc rising into the remnant blue of late evening. It trailed a pale pink streak and a somehow triumphant howl behind it. Very quickly, it was gone.
Gone where, Boyes could not imagine. But he would have given a great deal to know.
“What the fuck?” one of the hired pair mumbled. His partner swallowed hard, his gaze focused on that impossible patch of prevaricating sky.
Boyes found himself nodding knowingly. “He said they gave him an old bike. I should have paid more attention to what he was saying. No—I should have
thought
more about what he was saying. He called the generator a gadget. I wonder what it was he called an ‘old bike’?”
Next to him, the meat whose father had been in Bosnia shrugged. “You got me. But whatever it was, it seems to work fine without pedals.”
PEIN BEK LONGPELA TELIMPON
Papua New Guinea is one of the most beautiful, most
fascinating places left on the planet. The best diving, incredible natural wonders (thirty-eight of the forty-three
known species of birds of paradise . . . quick, what’s the
highest point of land between the Himalayas and the
Andes?), and some of the most primitive yet wondrous
human cultures left around.
The highland peoples of PNG were the last large group
of humans to have contact with the outside world (1932,
when some Australian gold prospectors wandered into
the hitherto unpenetrated mountains). There are still
undiscovered tribes living in the razor-backed, jungle-wracked mountain valleys. Upon contact, some eventually
find their way down into the cities, only to find themselves confronted with and bewildered by the trappings
of what we like to call modern civilization. Sometimes the
resultant confrontations are amusing. Sometimes not.
Pein bek longpela telimpon
is a phrase in Melanesian
Pidgin, a trade language still in frequent use in New
Guinea and throughout portions of the South Pacific. It
translates loosely as “Long-distance payback” . . .
Wahgi first heard the muffled screams and angry curses as he was rummaging through the Dumpster. Not that this was unusual. Late at night in Boroko there were frequent fights between men who had blown their weekly paycheck on cheap beer. Wahgi saw them staggering drunkenly out of illegal pubs, stumbling between tired whores and their pseudo-macho customers, arguing with predatory taxi drivers over disgraceful fares—even the chickens that clucked and pecked their way across the central square around which the run-down shops were situated were usually in a rotten mood.
But this encounter was different.
Instead of trade pidgin, the combatants were spewing an inarticulate mush of proper English, Strine, and several foreign tongues Wahgi did not recognize. That was notable. After four P.M., the few tourists who braved the square in search of artifacts, Sepik River wood carvings, and illegal bird-of-paradise plumes were usually gone. After five, when the last European-owned stores pad-locked their security screens for the night, only local people were left. To hear European tongues this late at night suggested goings-on that were far from normal.
Like everyone he knew, Wahgi was intensely curious about the wonderful things white people carried around with them. He was among the first of his tribe to come down from the Highlands into the capital in search of work to help support his family. Highland people learned quickly, and it did not take a village Big Man to realize that these wonderful objects could only be obtained in exchange for a pocketful of money. Yams were not accepted currency in the city stores, and only rarely would a sympathetic checkout clerk, perhaps not long down from the Highlands himself, accept a pig. If anyone had told Wahgi a year ago that it was better to possess a fistful of brightly colored paper than a corral full of pigs, he would have scratched at his arse-grass and looked upon them as if they had taken leave of their senses.
But the fact that the Highland people had only made contact with Western civilization in the early 1930s did not mean that they were irredeemably ignorant. Only isolated.
What bad thing could possibly happen to him if he just went to see what was going on? Certainly he wasn’t having much luck riffling through the contents of the smelly Dumpster. Stretching himself to his full five foot five, he boosted himself up and out and followed the sounds of dissension. Scattered among the shouts and curses like corn seeds between rows of sweet potatoes was much labored grunting and snorting. It reminded him of rutting pigs crammed into a pen too small for them.
There were four men fighting in the dark covered accessway that ran between the Ha Chin dry goods store and the
niuspepa
shop. Even though he couldn’t read, Wahgi liked to go into the
niuspepa
shop to look at the pictures in the glossy magazines, especially the ones that showed women of all colors in skimpy clothing. That is, he did until the bush knife–wielding shop manager chased him out, realizing that the hick Highlander had no money.
Concealing himself in a corner near the back alley that intersected the accessway, he watched the fight in silence. Even though he could see no
longpela naips
, or machetes as they were called in the Steamships stores, he could tell that the fight was serious. Though he couldn’t see which of the four men was wounded, fresh blood, black and wet, was running on the cracked concrete, mixing with the betel nut juice stains. He wondered what they were fighting about, here too late at night in an unlit passage in a poor shopping area like Boroko.
Then he saw the suitcase. It was much smaller than the ones the ground crews unloaded from the planes at the airport. Too small to hold much of anything in the way of clothing, which is what he knew white people usually carried in their baggage. The small suitcase lay off to one side, propped against the grille of iron bars that protected the
niuspepa
store. Was it worth four men fighting over? If so, it might be full of something valuable. Maybe, he thought excitedly, money paper.
He gauged his chances. The men were wholly occupied with one another. In the village he had been a good hunter, bringing back tree kangaroos, monitor lizards, rats, hornbills, and crowned pigeons. Like many Highlanders he was small and stocky. If they saw him, would they forget about their own fight and come after him? Though new to Port Moresby, he was confident he knew the hidden places of Boroko better than any European.
Besides, he hadn’t eaten since yesterday.
Waiting until he thought the moment just right, he slipped out of the shadows and slid along the wall, keeping low. Providentially, the suitcase had a handle fastened to the top. He was a little surprised to find that the case was made of metal instead of the soft fabrics and leathers he was used to seeing at the airport, but it was astonishingly light. Modest in stature the Huli peoples might be, but every man was muscled as hard as the stump of a mahogany tree.
Gripping the suitcase in a fist of iron, he slipped back the way he had come, keeping the black iron security bars pressed against his spine. Busy with one another, none of the combatants noticed him. As soon as he reached the alley, he turned and ran. That was something else Highlanders were good at.
He did not stop until he was halfway to the suburb of Koki, where he shared a ramshackle hovel of salvaged wood, cardboard, and corrugated iron with two other young men from the village. Like all the buildings in Koki, it was built on stilts out over the water. It was not a bad place for poor people to live. No one could sneak up on you unless they had a good, quiet boat, and the tide provided the services the nonexistent sewage system could not.
Pausing on the Ela Beach road beneath the harsh yellow lights of a British Petroleum station, he settled down beneath a hibiscus bush to inspect his prize. Even to his country eyes the case looked expensive. Though small, the lock proved resistant to his probing. But only momentarily.
One of the night attendants at the station was another Huli who hailed from a village not far from Wahgi’s village. He had struck up a casual acquaintance with the man, and their clans were not currently at war. Though suspicious, the attendant lent him the hammer and heavy screwdriver his fellow Highlander requested. He knew Wahgi wouldn’t run off with them. That would have put the attendant in deep trouble with the station’s owners, which would have turned into a payback situation against Wahgi’s village. Every Highlander treated the ancient tradition of payback with extreme respect, and Wahgi was no exception.
Modern as it was, the lock eventually yielded to Wahgi’s strength, persistence, and single-minded determination. After returning the tools, he went back under the bush to examine the case’s contents. In these he was both disappointed and puzzled.
The case contained a number of small electronic devices that were as alien to Wahgi as if they had fallen from the moon. He knew what a radio was, and a television, and an airplane, because he had seen them up close, but otherwise his knowledge of contemporary twentyfirst century technology was lamentably limited. Another section of the case was full of paper, but to his disgust and disappointment none of it was money. Though colorful, the papers were much too big to be currency: PNG, Aussie, or otherwise. He did not know what they were. Perhaps his roommates Gembogl and Kuikui might know, though they had spent little more time in Mosby than had he.
He was philosophical about his theft. The contents might be valueless, but the case itself was certainly worth something, even with a broken lock. Leaving it under the fragrantly flowering bush, he went once more into the station, this time to beg a length of used twine from his fellow Huli. With the lock broken, he needed something to secure the case.
When he returned, something inside was beeping insistently.
Slowly and with commendable caution, he reopened the case. The noise was coming from one of the small electronic devices. Gingerly lifting it out of the case, he turned it over in his hands. It was about the size of two packs of cigarettes. On its front were a large number of illuminated buttons above which a small yellow light was blinking. This he eyed in astonishment, wondering how anyone could manufacture so small a bulb.
Could the device hurt him? He knew he should find a way to stop the beeping, or he might draw unwanted attention to himself. The Mosby police were not gentle with thieves, especially those who stole from visiting Europeans. He had seen how buttons could turn a radio on and off. Perhaps one of the buttons on the device could do the same to the insistent beeping sound.
Experimentally, he began pushing them one after another. Each time he depressed a button, it responded with an electronic chirp, but the continuous beeping never stopped—until he pushed one of the buttons near the bottom. Not only did the nerve-wracking beeping cease, but the yellow light turned to green.
“Stavros, Stavros . . .
was ist mit ihnen los? Sprechen
sie
, dammit!”
Wahgi almost dropped the device. Then he realized what it was: some kind of telephone, but unlike any he had ever seen before. For one thing, it was infinitely smaller than the ones that were fixed in the public boxes. For another, it was attached to nothing. From it issued a voice that was as clear as it was unintelligible.
“Stavros!”
The tone was angry and insistent.
Maybe, he thought, there might be a reward for such a unique and therefore probably expensive telephone. Could he make the irate individual on the other end understand him?
Leaning toward the device without knowing where to direct his voice, he said in his best rudimentary English, “Hello. Good morning. How are you?
Yupela
wantok me?
”
This resulted in a long silence from the tiny telephone, and Wahgi wondered if he had somehow broken it by speaking into it. Then the voice returned, no longer irate but obviously confused. Confused, and curious.
“
Ya?
Stavros? So you are now speaking English?
Warum?
Why?”
Stavros, Wahgi decided, must be the name of one of the four men whom he had seen fighting. The owner of the case, or at least its keeper. And like the man on the other end of the line, he had spoken English—as well as other things.
“I no—I am not Stavros,” he informed the telephone. “I am Wahgi.”
There followed another extended pause that was broken by a stream of furious foreign syllables that the Huli decided he would not have been able to follow even if he could understand the alien tongue. Then another interlude, after which a new voice spoke. It was much more controlled, much calmer than its predecessor, and its English was far better. To Wahgi it sounded like American English, not Aussie or British, but he could not be certain. Sometimes it seemed to him that there were as many varieties of English as there were languages in Papua New Guinea.
“To whom am I speaking, please? You said that your name was Wahgi?”
“Yes.” Wahgi was relieved to be talking to someone whom he could understand, and who might be able to understand him in return. But he suspected the person on the other end would have little or no knowledge of Tok Pisin.
“Wahgi,” the voice inquired in a sweetly reasonable tone, “where are you?”
“In Mosby–Port Moresby. The capital.”
The voice faded, as if its owner was momentarily speaking to someone close to him. In the same room, perhaps. “At least that fits.” Louder, and obviously to Wahgi, it added, “Look at the bottom of the phone you are holding. There should be a word, or words, there. What does it say?”
Wahgi found the single word easily. “I see what you are talking about, but I do not know the word.” He added apologetically, “I cannot read.”
“How many words? Can you count?”
Of course he could count! Did the other man think he was empty-headed? “Just one.”
“How many letters in the word?”
Wahgi counted, laboriously but effectively. “Six.”
A murmur of voices could be heard over the phone. “Good,” the other man said. “Now Wahgi, this is very important. Where did you find this telephone?”
The Huli considered, then decided to plunge ahead. How else was he to find out what the case and phone might be worth, or how big a reward he ought to ask for? “In a small suitcase.”
The man’s tone changed ever so slightly, but not so slightly that Wahgi failed to pick up on it. “Two men should have been watching this case and its contents. Do you know where they are?”
Wahgi looked up as a pair of fruit bats with four-foot wingspans settled into the tree alongside his resting place. On the busy road, cars and taxis whizzed past without stopping. “Yes. When I left them they were fighting with two other men. In Boroko.” He thought rapidly. “I took the suitcase for safekeeping.”