“DO NOT FLY THIS VEHICLE HIGHER THAN THREE GORG, OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON AGAIN,” Gorg said.
I guess he meant about twenty-five feet. “Oh, don’t…don’t worry,” I said. “It can’t even go that high. It only…it only goes maybe one and a half Gorg high. At most.”
“VERY GOOD.” Gorg nodded. He wasn’t really shouting. I think his voice just had a natural loudness because of his big head. Then he turned to leave, and I heard a familiar sound: the lawn-mower-over-whoopie-cushions sound of a Gorg sneezing. His head snapped back and his eyes, growing ever redder, stared at me hard.
“WHERE…” he said, then, “DO YOU…”
I tried my hardest to meet his gaze. These Gorg always seemed to get really angry after sneezing, and it had a way of making me feel guilty even when I’d done nothing wrong.
His face was crimson like a cherry, and stuff ran from his eyes and nose. But I thought as I looked at him that he couldn’t be the same Gorg I’d met before. His face was different. Wrinklier, anyway.
“YOU. YOU ARE HUMAN YOUNG. A…CHILD.”
“…Yeah,” I said, wondering if this would make him more or less likely to kill me.
“THE NIMROGS HAD CHILDS ONCE.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. Gorg stifled another sneeze with his fist.
“GO ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS,” he said, and walked off wiping his nose.
As he left, all the nearby humans looked in different directions and marched quickly away, trying not to draw attention. This Gorg encounter had gone much better than the last, I thought. Maybe you just had to get used to them.
I entered the hotel and had to give my name to a security-type guy in the lobby and explain why I was there, and then he said I couldn’t see Landry, and we had a really interesting and loud conversation about that, and then he asked if I was related to a Lucy Tucci, and when I said I was he let me go on up. And I decided that at the first opportunity I was going to make up some “Lucy’s Kid” T-shirts and wear them everywhere. I climbed nine flights of stairs and felt like a sap when I realized the elevators were working, and then I found the door I was looking for. It was dark wood with a brass knob and Daniel P. Landry, District Governor in gold letters. It also had one of those do not disturb things hanging on the handle, but I knocked anyway.
No answer.
I knocked again, this time to the beat of an old Gene Krupa drum solo. The door flew open.
Landry’s face was as angry as a dried cranberry. But as he looked down and saw who I was, it softened quickly into more of a peach, all pink and fuzzy. If that’s not forcing the fruit metaphor.
“Gratuity Tucci! As I live and breathe! How are you? Come in, come in. How’s your mom?”
Inside was the largest hotel room I’d ever been in. Granted, that’s not saying much—Mom and I always stayed in the sorts of places that posted the price right on a sign facing the interstate. But this room was easily big enough to play racquetball in.
“Hi, Mr. Landry—”
“Dan.”
“Hi, Dan,” I said, trying to make it sound natural. “If I’m bothering you, it won’t take long.”
“No! No bother,” he said. “Anything for Lucy’s daughter.” And I thought about my T-shirt idea again as I looked around the room.
If there had been a bed, it was gone now. On the deep green carpet stood plush chairs and a dark wood desk upon which Landry could have reanimated Frankenstein and still had room for his pens and golf calendar. But what really got me were the bookshelves. Landry had a library of big, hardback books. Heavy, serious books you could knock somebody out with if you swung hard enough.
“Ah, a book lover, are you?” he said, and paced in front of the shelves. “Before you are some of the greatest works of literature. Tolstoy. Pynchon. Ellison. Hemingway. Many are first editions. I’ve read every one. Each and every one. I read them, and I put them up there. You know my secret? I’m a speed-reader. Officially. They have a test you can take, my certificate is over there.”
I looked at the certificate.
“You see this one?” he asked, pulling a book down from the shelf. “The Grapes of Wrath. Pretty thick, right? I read it in one sitting.”
I began thinking that this was a guy who displayed his books the way another guy might display his animal trophies. Each wall of bookshelves was more like a wall of mounted heads, and the important part was not really the animal so much as how it was killed. “Here is the head of a Siberian tiger,” he might be saying. “One of the world’s most deadly beasts! The animal weighed six hundred pounds, but I downed it with one shot after two days of tracking.”
“Here, now, is Ulysses by James Joyce. Considered by some to be the most challenging book in the English language. It weighs in at 816 pages, and I read it in a day and a half!”
“Very nice,” I said. I could hear his nose whistle when he breathed.
“Well,” Landry said, and then there was silence, apart from the shaky monotone of the air conditioner. I suddenly thought I should have showed more interest in his hobby, so I put on a smile. But it felt weird, so I put it away again.
“How can I help you, Gratuity? You didn’t come to hear me drone on about my books.”
“No, no. They’re great.” I cleared my throat. “Anyway, Dan—”
“Mr. Landry. You were right the first time.”
“Oh. Mr. Landry, have you heard of any kind of resistance group against the Gorg?”
Landry folded his arms.
“You know, your mom told me you were getting all worked up about this.”
“She said that?”
“Gratuity, you need to trust in your leaders. I know you kids might not think that’s ‘cool,’ but the Gorg have a lot to offer us.”
“Nothing that wasn’t ours already,” I muttered.
“On the contrary. They are driving away the Boov, first of all—the Boov, who thought one state was enough for an entire country. The Gorg are giving back the whole Southwest, and we’re very close to getting California as well. Did you know that?”
“But—”
“And there’s more than that. They have a big surprise waiting for us on Excellent Day, during the Nothing to Worry About Festival. I can’t talk too much about it yet.”
Darn right they’ll have a surprise for us, I thought.
“It doesn’t bother you that they’re asking us all to meet in one spot like that?” I said. “It doesn’t seem dangerous?”