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"All I was go
"They'll find him soon enough."
"Maybe, maybe not." He kept looking at me.
"All right. I'll call."
"That's good." He looked down at the water again. "I'm glad I won't be diving into that. Looks cold to me."
"Are you kidding? This is Hawaii. It's warm as soup."
"Yeah? Seems to me there's a nip in the air."
With that the droning noise got a lot louder, and the first wave of torpedo bombers of the Japanese Imperial Navy appeared over the pineapple fields to the north. I gave Elwood a sour look, and shoved the Pantech over the side. When I hesitated for a moment, he planted a foot encouragingly, and I tumbled into the water.
The next half hour kept me busy as a one-man show of Cast of Thousands. It wasn't nearly as dangerous as it looked... or so I kept telling myself.
Pacifica's Pearl Harbor spectacular, known in the trade as a Vegas, employed every trick in the book to make it seem life-sized and historically accurate, including one of the more subtle tricks I know: having parts of it actually be life-sized. The aircraft were all exact replicas, powered by real gasoline engines. The torpedoes they dropped were to scale, but had no warheads, explosions being provided by charges already in place. The battleships themselves were also big as life... on the side the audience saw, anyway.
The show employed a cast of several thousand. Most of them simply had to run around shouting and pointing. Others did actual stunts, from simply swimming through water dotted with burning oil slicks, to being blown from the deck of an exploding battleship. There were fire gags, with sailors ru
Only about a hundred of these were full studio-certified expert stunt performers, and they were clustered near the center of the action. The rest were journeymen, getting extra wages because of the marginal dangers involved, but not qualified for the more exacting gags. My plan was to stay in the areas where these guys were assigned, and try not to get my hair singed off.
The Pantechnicon is equipped to deliver motive power in a variety of mediums. Today I'd rigged a small propeller to a shaft that would normally power a set of wheels, and I trailed behind at the end of a three-meter cord. The Pantech is about as streamlined as a brick. Its progress might best be described as wallowing, but it managed a steady three knots, which would eventually get me there.
I'd seen the show twice before, so I had some idea where the biggest effects were produced. Still, it could get dicey. The best thing I had going was the clarity of the water, at least before the worst of the explosions roiled the bottom and filled the water with foamy bubbles. I could duck my head under and see where the charges were placed.
My worst moment came when I felt a vibration in the water, turned my head, and saw a torpedo headed straight for me. I saw it pass about ten feet below, a lethal silver shark, then the water all around me turned to foam and my clothes filled up with air for a while.
But a few minutes later I ran aground on a concrete shore to the south side of Ford's Island. I dragged myself and my luggage out of the water and sat down to await the end of the show.
If you think the sinking of the Arizona is spectacular, you should see the raising.
Brita
Everybody went about his business without a single cheer being raised, nor a solitary high-five exchanged. They call it theater, but it's not, to my mind. I know it's hard to maintain enthusiasm after a long run. The solution to that is to get out when you no longer feel excitement as the curtain falls. This particular Vegas had been ru
Ah, well. It created a lot of jobs in the system's number-one industry: tourism. I'll confess I've played in them when at liberty from more rewarding projects.
No one gave me a glance as I found my way to the freight elevator that took me down into the bowels of Pacifica and deposited me at the employees' train station, which in turn dumped me at the spaceport fifteen minutes later. Even on the train car I drew no curious stares as I dripped Hawaiian water onto the red seats and black carpet. Plutonians are a mind-your-own-business crowd, one of the best things about them.
One more train ride and I was at the freight terminal at the most remote point of the spaceport. If I'd come there two weeks before, I could have avoided a great deal of trouble, and Isambard Comfort could have missed a monumental headache.
I hadn't come here for one big reason. It scared me to death. Now the alternative was worse, so I marched resolutely up to the express counter of Pillock and Burke Interplanet Carriers and inquired as to the cost of mailing myself to Uranus.
I didn't put it in just those words, of course.
"What's in it?" the clerk asked, with a big yawn, looking without interest at the Pantech, sitting there seeming as new as the day it was built, having shaken off all signs of its recent adventure like a duck's back sheds water.
"Personal effects," I said. "Tools of my trade." I knew that would get me a discount, under the Interplanetary Artists' Convention.
"Anythin' t'd'clare?"
"No contraband. There's a Bichon Frise inside."
"A what?"
"A dog. Here's his license. I'll need Oh-two and H-two-Oh feeds, and a two-twenty power co
Such as the one he now asked.
"What about food? The dog go
"He has his own." He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. "He doesn't eat much," I explained. "It's a small dog." I could feel myself getting too elaborate. My father always said to keep your lies simple, and never answer a question you're not asked. But he kept looking, so I shoved the license closer to him and let the P$20 bill peek out from under it. His eyes shifted, and he picked up the license and shoved it into a machine. The bill was gone. He handed the license back to me with a new stamp on it. I really hated to do this, since anyone who knew about Toby might be able to trace me through him, but I had no choice.
He took a yellow form from a stack and started filling it in with a pencil. It was almost Dickensian, and a blatant waste of time since he had a voice-capable computer at his elbow, but Pluto, like most planets, had some archaic and fiercely protected labor laws. Reading upside down, I saw him fill in the spot for breed of dog as Bitching Freeze.