“Ummm, pretty good,” I said. “I mean, we fight sometimes—”
“No,” said Mitch. “No. Who is she to you. What is your connection.”
“She’s my mom. I’m her daughter.”
Mitch scribbled on his clipboard. I suddenly remembered a promise I’d made.
“Oh! And can you also find, uh…Marta! Marta Gonzales. And when you do tell her Christian and Alberto are safe and living under Happy Mouse Kingdom.”
You could actually see a little part of Mitch die inside. He hugged his clipboard against his stomach.
“There is no form for that,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “could you—”
“If there’s no form, I don’t see how we could possibly…Michaels? See if there’s a form for that?”
“Yessir,” said one of the men in suits behind him before hustling away. Up to now I’d assumed they were just back there to catch Mitch if he fell over.
The policewoman walked up and said, “Your brother is eating pencils.”
“He’ll do that,” I answered.
“You know,” she said, “you should put your mom’s name on the Lost List.”
“Oh, dear,” said Mitch. “You may as well tell her to throw darts at a map.”
“What’s the Lost List?” I asked.
It seemed that Americans were not waiting for the Bureau of Missing Persons to find everyone for them. Some people had taken to carrying lists of names around. Everyone had ten names, and when they got a new one it was added to the top and a name was crossed off the bottom. As they went about their day they might call out, “John Hancock looking for Susan B. Anthony,” or “Buddy Holly looking for Ritchie Valens.” If you heard them and you knew a Susan B. Anthony or a Ritchie Valens, you’d stop and tell them what you could.
“A lot of people have been reunited that way,” said the woman.
“Do what you like?” sniffed Mitch. “Okay? But the Bureau is the simplest, fastest way of finding missing persons I know about. Now here’s your ticket,” he said, handing me a blue slip of paper.
It read, CASE FILE #9003041-CHARLIE BRAVO in black ballpoint, and under that, LUCY TUCCI, MOTHER OF CLAIMANT. On the reverse was a coupon for a car wash.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
“Hold on to that,” he said. “You won’t be able to claim your mother if you lose it. Check back with us in ten to fourteen business days.”
They learned to really hate me at the Bureau of Missing Persons. I did not check back in ten to fourteen business days. I checked back the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. All the while J.Lo and I lived in Slushious, just outside of town. They wanted to find us something better, but I resisted. We moved around a lot so we wouldn’t be too easy to sneak up on (J.Lo had to get out of his costume once in a while), and we used the showers and bathrooms on the university campus. I registered Mom with the Lost List people. They had a sort of office in the back room of an empty pet store. There weren’t many working phone lines yet, but they had a shortwave radio. This was different from a regular radio in two ways I could tell. First, you could talk into a shortwave. If someone else was listening to your frequency, they could hear you, and the other Lost List offices in other cities always listened to the right frequency. Second, people who use shortwave radios really like shortwave radios. I had to listen to this pale guy named Phil talk about his for forty minutes.
J.Lo and Pig and I got on okay. We were out of food, but there was plenty of milk shake. J.Lo was right about that. Most communities near cities had teleclone machines for water and food, but people were trying to farm anyway, because the milk shakes tasted like whipped cardboard.
In the evenings, J.Lo worked on the teleclone booth. I kept coming back to the charred and broken corner of the cage.
“Is it missing something important here?” I asked finally. “Is the damage bad?”
“I do not believes so. Probably only lost a couple of nozzles. Still workable. Hold the flashlight still, please.”
“Are you sure? I mean, if we ever try this thing, I don’t want to teleport out the other side missing a foot or something.”
“You will have on both feet. The damage, it is lucky, actually. It disenabled the receiver.”
“That’s good?”
“That is good. With no receiver, no mores Gorg could be made, or teleported. With no receiver, the Gorgship could no send the self-destruct command. Hm.”
“So if the Boov hadn’t damaged the booth just right, the Chief never would have been able to steal it in the first place. And you can fix it?”
“Sh,” whispered J.Lo. “Concentrating.”
He looked over every inch of the cage, the machinery, the bits he’d disassembled and set aside. He put the whole thing together in a matter of minutes, then took it apart again.
“I cannot understands,” he said finally. “It is just as a Boov telecloner. It is alls the same.”
“There must be something different.”
J.Lo didn’t respond. He crouched by a nozzle and frowned at it.
“I bet they all got out of Roswell,” I said. “The guys had that car. And they’d have the Chief’s truck, too.”
J.Lo whacked the nozzle with a stick.
“Plus the Party Patrol car,” I added. “Did you leave the key in it?”
“Hm?”
“That key you made for the Party car. Did you leave it in the ignition?”
“Ah. Yes.”
“So they could have used that too,” I said. “If they wanted.”
Nearby, two crickets were talking back and forth, again and again, same question every time:
Are you there?
Yes. Are you there?
Yes. Are you there?
Yes. Are—
J.Lo smacked himself in the eyes. “It is alls the same!”
“Shhh!”
He pored over the booth, brushing his fingertips across the nozzles, mumbling to himself. The crickets picked up where they’d left off.
“Well, you said it still has to be connected to a computer, right?”
“Yes,” said J.Lo. “By signal. But this makes no difference.”
“But…” I said, “couldn’t a computer keep track—”
“No,” said J.Lo. “No no no. Is too complicated. No Boov has ever built a computer so powerful as to keep on track all of the participles of a person.”