8.
 “Yes. Lights at night, rising and falling. We think it is somehow near the Western Sunset Arroyo Motel, but the owners won’t talk to me and have chased me off their land. Well, that’s nothing new. I and my people go through it all the time.”
“Your people? Are you with an organization of some sort?” She felt the urge to lay him backwards over the rocks, slit him open from top to bottom with a gutting knife, and yank out all the secrets inside of him—though she suspected all that would come out was old wash and a few other items of junk, so it was just as well it was just a metaphor.
“North American Society of Saucerologists, or NASOS,” he said proudly. He flipped his lapel over, showing her a button with a weird face in it with slitty eyes.
She stepped aside and used her light meter to check the settings, which were maximal. Then she started snapping photos in preparation for finishing the painting she was going to start this morning. Perhaps if she and Sparto got back to New York alive, she’d finish the paintings and display them in a sympathetic gallery affiliated with NBI. Perhaps she’d just remember how it had looked, and throw the canvases in the trash if they got out alive. So when was the showdown? Ever? Soon? No way of telling. Was Rodney Soltan one of the syndicate warriors? No way to tell for sure. Best to let him keep chattering while she watched the sky with one eye and Soltan with the other. No way to warn Sparto without giving the show away, that was the only rub with this vulnerability thing. But vulnerability was what Dorio wanted—‘expose yourself so they come to you, if come they will. Then we can step in and squash them before this gets any further out of hand.’
“Sure is hot out here,” said Rodney Soltan, squinting as sweat ran down his round little face. He looked boyish, and she felt sorry for him. She said: “You aren’t from this area?”
“No, I’m from Berkeley, California. I’m a professor of engineering in real life. This is what I do during my vacations.”
“How interesting,” she said. “What do you engineer?”
He looked at her with new interest. “I don’t engineer, actually, I teach.”
She nodded. “Oh.”
“Yes, in a large lecture room. Five, six hundred students at a clip. Makes one feel godlike for about forty minutes.” He laughed.
Not knowing what he found funny, she laughed too.
“So,” he said, “what do you do for jollies?”
“Jelly beans?”
“J—“ He stared at her, and she could see the pink under his tongue, the vapidness in his eyes, the utter incomprehension in his brain.
She brushed a fingertip over her toolpad to play back his last words. The toolpad complied, highlighting “jollies” and explaining its subtle social meanings, including “fun” or “a vaguely disparaging term for offbeat activities bringing the doer socially unacceptable satisfactions; see ‘getting rocks off.’” She raised her head slightly in understanding and said, “Oh, getting rocks off, is that what you mean?” She wondered what the framework of the metaphor was, and touched the keypad again. She blushed slightly at the result.
“R—?” he said, still looking vaguely like the chambermaids and the policemen around here, though he had 36 white teeth that looked as though he brushed and flossed often with savage dedication.
“Let’s talk about something else,” she said.
“Sure. Are you married?”
“Yes.”
He digested this, nodding as he tried to think of the next thing to say. “Children?”
“No. You?”
He shrugged with some embarrassment and singsonged selfconsciously: “Still single, looking for that Mrs. Perfect to be the mother of my children.”
She took that in, considering. “Really. Well, I should think there are many eligible mothers running around who will be happy to join you in childbearing. Sounds like you have primo genes.”
He looked at her as if she had stolen his toy or stepped on his mud pie. “You say strange things.”
“Do I?”
“And you have a faint accent. What is it, Eastern European?”
“Not exactly. Northern, more likely.”
“Ah. Swedish. Like the famous swimsuit team.”
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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