Nice Wood

Today, as we have more than once, my wife and I were driving in the hills east of Corvallis, and passed Nicewood Drive, only this time we looked at each other, snickered and exchanged those fateful words:
"Nice wood...."
"Wanna fuck?"
Because you're only young once, but you can be immature your whole life. 8-) :-})

Fridtjof Nansen

Over at Sadly, No!, they are discussing the question of whether the far-right goofballs have ever liked any of the other Nobel Peace Prize laureates (at least while they were still alive).

http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/25803.html/comment-page-1#comment-984884

One commenter brings up the 1922 laureate, the now mostly forgotten Fridtjof Nansen, and much of the subsequent comments are to the effect that Nansen was way cool and probably proto-metal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fridtjof_Nansen

Not so sure about his being metal, but he was definitely cool.

Earth-349: Aquawoman

Disclaimer #1 This story is set in a hypothetical parallel world within the pre-Crisis DC Universe, based on a story in Superman #349, but not limited by that story or any other.
Disclaimer #2 Some characters appearing in this story are based on copyrighted characters owned by DC Comics, Inc., Marvel Comics and others. Their use here is not intended to infringe or disparage those copyrights.
Disclaimer #3 This story is not recommended for persons under 18 or the easily offended, especially those who are uncomfortable with such topics as transgender, transformation, polyfidelity and participatory democracy.

Gloriana Curry, known to the land-dwelling public as Aquawoman, considered her reflection in her bedroom mirror. She liked the mirror very much: oval, a meter and a half tall, an ormolu frame, salvaged from the wreck of the Antilie (sank in a storm, July 23rd, 1911, near Bermuda). She thought the reflection was...adequate: 421 moons old (32.2 years, land-reckoning), blonde hair, fair skin (evenly colored but not very smooth), tall and muscular (chest very broad, making her breasts look smaller than they really were), belly firm enough that she could still wear her unforgiving shirt of orichalcum scale mail. No scars, thanks to the excellent Atlantean healing capacity. Her right hand was still a little pale, and the wrist would probably always be slightly crooked where it had grown from the stump of the one she'd lost, but it was no longer so noticable that she felt the need for gloves. Absolutely stunning legs, by the standards of either land people or Atlanteans (did they look better bare, or in the green tights? Tights today). She would do for a routine appearance as the Queen of Atlantis. Queen of Atlantis was a very fanciful translation of her actual title. A better one would be First Speaker of the Executive Council of the Poseidonis Reach. Her executive position was an elective one (though it did involve wearing a crown and carrying a ceremonial trident), and her territory did not by any means cover all of Atlantis. The city of Poseidonis and its environs, plus its assorted vassal city-states and allied settlements and nomadic tribes, accounted for only about half of the population, and maybe a third of the inhabited area of the Atlantic Ocean basin (the Reach was defined by tides and currents, not lines drawn on the seafloor). Still, calling her a Queen did no harm, and calling the Poseidonis Reach "Atlantis" harmed only those insufferable merfolk in Tritonis, so what the hell?

Aquawoman thought of a Quaker fishing boat captain she knew, who had recently been named Clerk of the Committee for Ministry and Oversight of the Gulf Coast Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends of Christ. She made a mental note that when next they met, she would address him as "Archbishop of New Orleans".

It was not a ceremonial occasion, just a semi-formal birthday party for the oldest member of the Council, so she would forgo the crown, the trident, the walrus-hide mantle and the tedious riding of an Atlantic Giant Seahorse. There would probably be a good crowd even so, because people would be wanting to see the royal consorts. With a final check of her tights for wrinkles, she swam out the nearest window and down to the plaza, where her husbands and most of the other guests were waiting. It was rare enough for all five of her husbands to be gathered together in one place. They all had their jobs and their private interests, and if it didn’t happen that one or more of them was away from the city, he was likely to be occupied with some project elsewhere in town. For once, though, she found them together: Turth, scion of a Poseidonis family even older than her own. Malco, a legless merman from Tritonis. Glibdup, a clawed and scaly gill-man from the chilly coastal waters of Rhode Island. Blue-skinned Niaremus, an adventurer from Earth-348. And perhaps the oddest of all – “Hey, where’s Todd?” Nobody seemed to know. Turth said, “He was definitely going to be here, but I haven’t seen him all day.” A boy in an Army uniform, barely into puberty, swam into the midst of the royal party, glancing uncomfortably around at the consorts but remembering to salute the queen, and said, “Excuse me, Ma’am, but the Black Manta is approaching from north by northeast, showing truce lights.” Todd Arliss’ family had been shipchandlers for over a century, and had inherited a very substantial business at the age of 19. He had insisted on selling the business and spending almost his entire fortune on illegal experimental treatments intended to give him an Atlantean metabolism, allowing him to live in the sea, go to Atlantis, and plight his troth to Aquawoman. He had been phenomenally lucky. He might have died, or become a mindless Aquabeast, or worse yet from his point of view, been turned into a too-exact duplicate of Aquawoman. Instead, he had wound up as the curly-haired, round-cheeked amphibian the Atlanteans fondly called Aquababy. Even then, there was no guarantee that the adventurer and stateswoman would want anything to do with a somewhat-obsessive admirer. But he’d proven to have many attractive qualities, and in the end had been allowed to become her fifth companion. He’d also proven very popular with the people of Atlantis, who had made him something of a mascot. It had been very clever of the Ocean Master to choose him as a hostage. By the time Aquawoman had reached the dome that covered the city, the Ocean Master’s immense black submarine was holding a position less than fifty fathoms from the glass. It loomed there, resembling nothing so much as an immense sperm whale’s penis, with the Ocean Master himself perched suggestively at its prow. Atlantean soldiers were arrayed in a half-sphere before the vessel, spearguns ready. Aquawoman swam up to the officer in charge. "Has he said yet what he wants?” “Yes, Ma’am. The crown of Queen Clea.” “He can’t have it,” she said automatically. The officer nodded curtly. Moments later the four husbands and most of the Council arrived. Aquawoman told them what the Ocean Master wanted, and assured them that she considered paying the ransom out of the question. Malco was dubious, and tried gently to suggest that they at least consider it. The others all disagreed strongly. Turth spoke smoothly to calm Malco, with a trace of condescension. “We must not, of course, allow...that object...to fall into such hands as those. The Ocean Master is bothersome enough as a science pirate; giving him the power to truly master the world’s oceans would be disastrous. Nevertheless, for our beloved brother’s sake...?” Aquawoman nodded. “For Todd’s sake, we should consider all our options. And what better place to discuss the matter than in the Nameless Vault?” A generation before, Atlantean archaeologists had found an ancient crown once worn by the Wizard-Kings, a hideous thing formed of seven serpents. Everyone who saw it was troubled by the evil power emanating from it, but the silver-haired Queen Clea had dared to place it on her head. After that, she had displayed increasingly spectacular magical powers – and increasing megalomania and depravity. The escalating crimes of Queen Clea, and the civil war that eventually resulted, had nearly destroyed Poseidonis. Once she had been neutralized and the crown secured, it had been stowed in the Nameless Vault, along with other items deemed too dangerous to be used. The Executive Council, Aquawoman and her husbands made a crowd that did not easily fit down the narrow passageways that led below the city to the Nameless Vault. The Vault itself lay in the deepest and oldest of the Palace’s sub-basements, in the natural caverns and chambers hewn from living stone that had underlain the city when Atlantis was still above the surface. Its door was of a kind of steel otherwise unknown on Earth, possibly older than Earth itself. The lock was two years old, from Stark Industries, and required three members of the Council to authorize entry. The Vault-Keeper, a broad-chinned oldster in a red robe, stood by watchfully as they unlocked the massive door. As the door swung open, a perverse corner of Aquawoman’s mind reflected that the term “Nameless Vault” could also be translated as simply “a secure unnamed location”. The contents of the vault seemed deceptively ordinary. On one table stood an insulated steel vial labelled simply “Virus”. On a set of shelves were several boxes of waterproof punchcards, marked “Master PC”. Presumably PC stood for “punchcard”, but what made a computer program so dangerous? A television set, looking to be about ten years old, seemed laughably out of place until it moved, turning toward the visitors as though it were alive. A sealed package offered no clue of its contents, except for being marked “SRU”. It seemed to Aquawoman that the Vault badly needed a catalog. At the very back of the Vault, on a pedestal as though in a museum display – or on a blasphemous altar – a dreadful object waited. Three snakes glared off to the left, three to the right, and the largest looked forward, its eyes projecting a challenge. Come wear me. Come, and have power over the sea and the land. Come and be like Clea, only better, more perfect. Wear me, and be a real queen, feared and loved by the whole world. Not taking her eyes off the crown, Aquawoman said to her companions, “This is what we’re here for. Let’s go.” The Ocean Master had his feet planted on the prow of the Black Manta when Aquawoman returned. It was a strange, nonsensical position to hold underwater, but landsman that he was, he doubtless thought it looked dramatic and authoritative. He remained in position as Aquawoman swam out to meet him. He saw that she did indeed have the Serpent Crown with her. She was wearing it. The Ocean Master spoke through a hydrophone in his ornate helmet, “The Queen of Atlantis will surrender the Serpent Crown to the Ocean Master, and thereby acknowledge him her overlord and the true ruler of all the Earth’s oceans.” “Francis Marion Ormsby, if you think I’m going to let you leave here with Clea’s crown, you’re a dumber sprat than you were when you tried to pants me the first day we swam together!” “I need the crown,” the Ocean Master said coldly, not showing any sign that her backhanded appeal to familial ties had touched him. “I have to have it, Atlantean, in order to fulfill my destiny. Hand it over, now, or I’ll kill your precious Aquababy before your eyes.” She swam toward him, her eyes burning in a manner that suggested red lightning might shoot from them at any moment, or perhaps from the eyes of the serpents in her crown. The ancient and obscene power of the object carried a weight of silent menace. “Yes, you could do that, and it would wound my heart in ways I doubt you can even understand. But with my surviving husbands to console me, I’d manage to go on. I’d retain enough of my self-control to begin the hunt for you right away, and you’d find that 71% of the planet’s surface area is not room enough to hide you from my vengeance.” He remained still for a long moment, his face unreadable in that mask, and then he turned to his nearest henchman, a silver-blonde youth in the ragged remnants of a U.S. Navy enlisted work uniform. “Let him go.” Less than a minute later, Aquababy swam out through an airlock, waved to the crowd as they cheered him, then swam toward his wife. The so-called Ocean Master slipped into his vessel through a different airlock, and the Black Manta began to turn slowly in place, preparing to depart from the city. There was more loud cheering as the invaders fled. Aquababy swam to his wife’s side, but held back at the sight of her wearing the crown. He was not an Atlantean, and had not even been born yet when Queen Clea made it infamous, but he knew its reputation as a corrupting influence. He was clearly wondering whether Aquawoman’s sacrifice had been worth his life. Aquawoman pulled the crown from her head and crushed it between her hands. The baked-clay replica crumbled to powder and dispersed in a muddy cloud. To the people of Atlantis she called out, “The crown of Clea is safely stored away, and that’s where it will stay!” and then kissed her husband very warmly and firmly. They broke from the kiss and began swimming back toward the palace side by side, surrounded by her other husbands and, more distantly, by government officials and the adoring populace. Aquawoman gave a long telepathic sigh. “I swear, I don’t know what it’s going to take to make him put a stop to all this Ocean Master nonsense. I may have to marry him."

Niaremus turned to Malco and raised one long eyebrow.

"Marry him? Isn't he her half-brother?"

"Step-brother. Former step-brother, since her father is divorced from his mother."

"So I suppose a relationship between them would only be..."

"Palimpsest?"

Todd swam close to Aquawoman, bumping against her frequently in an intimate gesture that would only be tolerated between lovers.

"Have I mentioned lately what a really magnificent woman you are?"

"I'm not sure how recently the last time was," she replied lightly, "but feel free anytime it comes up."

"It's relevant right at the moment, hon. When I heard you telling Ormsby, 'Go ahead, there's four more where he came from'--"

"That's not what--"

He shushed her.

"You said what you had to say. I have no complaint. Quite the contrary. I love and admire you more for having had the strength to say it. When you stood him down like that, I think it was the first time I'd ever really seen you look like a queen."

Aquawoman made a dismissive gesture.

"Me, a queen? I'm just a nice girl with five husbands."

More Earth-349 stories can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/earth349

Contact the author at dr_psycho1960@hotmail.com

On the Streets of Portland

KPOJ, "Portland's Only Progressive Talk Station", is sponsoring a team in Portland's Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, called "Get Outta My 'raq", thus demonstrating that multi-layered cultural references don't need to be subtle or clever.

But it does bring to mind this image, which I have not yet been able to expel, of Lady Babylonia entered in the race, going down the streets of Portand with classical draperies over a sports bra that contains her Junoesque though alas occupied bosom.

Her cousin Portlandia hands her a cup of Bull Run water as she passes, while the Dragon of the Ishtar Gate yelps happily at her heels.

I blame Detective Neptune, myself.

I Give You My heart

Once there was a boy who loved a girl, as so many do. And like so many boys, he had been told by his mother that one day he would meet a girl and want to give her his heart. So he did.
He came to her door with the front of his shirt still bloody, so that she cried out with alarm when she saw him, but he brushed aside her concerns and pressed a bundle wrapped in white paper into her arms.
“Go on, unwrap it,” he said eagerly. “See what I have done for you!”
Backing into her house, still casting anxious glances at his bloody shirt, she carefully unwrapped his gift. When she saw the rounded bloody mass, excitedly throbbing in her hands, she nearly fainted.
She looked up at him, horrified.
“What…?”
“It’s my heart. I have given it to you!”
She looked at the heart in her hands, and then at the bloody front of his shirt.
“But why would you do such a thing?”
He looked stunned.
“Last night, you said you loved me, and I said I loved you. Isn’t that what you ought to do after you have pledged your love – to give them your heart?”
She cradled the heart in her arms and stroked it gently with her fingertips. He moaned softly with pleasure.
“But…that’s just a saying. You shouldn’t do it literally!”
He shook his head, confused
“Are you saying you don’t want my heart? I thought you cared!”
“I do care. I care too much to see you put yourself in so much danger over a silly gesture like this.”
His eyes darkened.
“You think it’s silly? I did this for you!”
“Well, you shouldn’t have! Don’t you see how dangerous it is to take your heart out like this?”
As she spoke, she carelessly clutched the heart just a tiny bit too hard. The boy gasped in pain and doubled over, clutching at his heartless chest.
“Oh, dear, did I do that?”
“I’m sorry, I know you didn’t mean to do that. Just…be careful with it.”
She gave the heart some careful strokes, then stopped and sighed heavily.
“God, I wish you hadn’t done this. There are other ways of showing that you care. You didn’t have to do this to yourself – or to me.”
“What? What do you mean, do this to you?”
“Well, look, what am I supposed to do with your heart? Am I supposed to just carry it around with me all the time?”
“Well, why not?”
“For one thing, I have work to do. For another, it’s just too much responsibility. Carrying your heart around with me is like having a baby to look after. If I make a mistake, I could kill you, or cause you so much pain.”
“Well, what do you want me to do then? Take my heart back? Put it back in my chest?”
“Yes. Your heart needs to be in your chest, protected by your ribs. That’s where it belongs. That’s the best place for it. It won’t mean I love you any less.”
The boy sighed.
“All right, then.”
He unbuttoned his shirt, and reached for his heart.
“No. Let me do it.”
She nestled the heart lovingly in its spot, and gently reconnected the aorta and vena cava. She withdrew her hands, and his ribs quickly closed around his heart. The skin followed moments later.
The boy looked down sadly at the unbroken skin between his nipples.
“I’m sorry you didn’t like your gift.”
“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t accept it. I do love you, you know.”
She placed her hand on his chest.
“I can still feel it beating, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Come feel mine.”

See You Later...?

Little Boy, I hope I get to see you again before too much time goes by.

But I would settle for being able to write you latters, send you birthday presents, and maybe talk with you on the phone once in awhile.

So, I hope your mother relents enough to let me have a mailing address and e-mail where I can reach you.

I hope so.

And I'm not the only one.

Earth-349: General Jumbo

Disclaimer #1 This story was inspired by a story in Superman #349, but is not
limited by that story or any other.
Disclaimer #2 This story features characters based on characters owned by DC
Comics, Inc., Marvel Comics and others. This story was written for
entertainment only and is not intended to infringe or disparage those
copyrights, even though they should have expired decades ago and freed those
characters from the dead hand of perpetual corporate ownership.
Disclaimer #3 This story was inspired in part by the short story “Boobs” by
Suzy McKee Charnas, but not so much that anybody’s likely to call it an
infringement.
Disclaimer #4 This story is not recommended for persons under 18 or the easily
offended, especially those who are uncomfortable with a feminist analysis of
precocious breast development in jailbait.
Note 1: General Jumbo will be a pretty obscure character to USAn readers, but
Britons should recognize him. More information can be found at
http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/j/jumbo.htm
Note 2: This story is dedicated to “Melons” and all the other girls who have
had to endure the sort of cruelty Amanda suffers from in this story.

Mummy always says I’ll be glad one day to be “well-endowed”, and maybe
I will, but if so, couldn’t the silly great things have waited until “one day”
to come along, instead of popping in unannounced during the summer I turned
twelve?
“One day”, according to all of Mummy’s friends, the boys will be
worshipping me on account of them, but so far it’s been nothing but teasing and
rude jokes and hands grabbing at them.
I swear, if one of the boys would just look me in the eye and tell me
that my knockers were driving him crazy and could I please take off my jumper
and let him have a feel, I might just say yes. I could see doing that for
Nigel Barr or Bert Gregory. They’re halfway human most of the time and they
used to act like they were my friends (although I haven’t got the least wish
for a “boyfriend”). But not for that beastly Colin Gillie. He’s the one who
really made my life miserable over the things. He was the one who started
calling me “Jubblies” instead of Johnson, and when he got four of the best for
it, he changed it to “Jumbo”, and pretended it was just because I was so tall.
I don’t think the adults were fooled, but it gave them an excuse to pretend
they were fooled, and most of the time that seems to be all they want.
And it was Colin Gillie who got that pack of boys chasing me down
Mulberry Lane that day in April, when I really thought something bad was going
to happen.
I was walking home from school. It’d been a long day and I was good
and ready to be home and watch a little tele. I was adjusting my bra, trying
one more time to find a way to make it actually comfortable, when I heard
Colin’s nasty voice behind me.
“Look at that, even she can’t keep her hands off them!”
And it was his nasty voice, not the one he used for talking to boys or adults
or other human beings, but the one that was for talking about my tits and the
creature unlucky enough to be standing behind them.
I looked behind and there were Colin and Nigel and Bert and a couple of
other boys I recognized from the comprehensive, though I couldn’t put names to
them.
I shouldn’t have run. I should have walked up real close and showed my
teeth and called Colin a nice ripe bad name. If I’d done that, they might have
left me alone. Instead, I started to run, and when I did Nigel yelled “Get
her!” and they were off after me.
If it had only been Colin by himself, or Nigel, I expect he wouldn’t
have gone past copping a feel, but with the lot of them together, each one
afraid to back down before the others did, it might have gotten a lot worse.
In the books I’d been reading lately, boys did terrible things to girls at
times like this. They didn’t go into detail, those books, but that made the
terrible things all the more terrifying.
In the books, it was bad girls who had things happen to them, but I
wasn’t so stupid as to think that there were really rules about who bad things
happened to in real life.
Besides, any girl in those books who had big tits was always a bad one.
I ran, and the boys all came baying after me, and the more I ran and
they yelled, the more frightened I became. And it would have to be the part of
Mulberry Lane where the creek ran along one side and there was a stand of trees
along the other, and no houses for a couple of hundred metres, and there was
nobody else around.
I rounded a turn and the boys were still after me. I was taller than
all of them except Bert, and I probably could have just outrun them, but I was
scared and I wanted help, wanted adults or better yet a policeman nearby. I
wanted to be amongst people, not here in this frightening place where there was
nothing between the boys and me but the law of the jungle. Yes, I was getting
all out of proportion here, but that’s the way I was thinking right then.
Up ahead was a garden wall, and I ran right up to it and grabbed its top and
hauled myself up. I balanced on top of the wall, trying to get a purchase with
my feet, and felt myself starting to slide over the other side. I remember
thinking that with my buttercakes on the far side of the wall, I had gravity on
my side. A hand grabbed my foot and I kicked back, connecting with somebody’s
face, and served him right.
Somebody’s hand went up under my skirt. I don’t think he did it on
purpose, I think he was just grabbing for me any which way, but whoever he was
got hold of the waistband of my panties and I screamed and made a crazy
scramble that put me over the wall in a tumble, scratched and bruised and
panting. I sat up and there was a tank pointing its cannon right in my face.
It was small enough that you could cover it with a hat, but somehow it
didn’t look like a toy. Looking down that pen-sized barrel, I felt as though
it could shoot a small but very real hole in me.
There were more tanks, I now saw, and behind them squads of tiny soldiers scrambling over miniature terrain, forming up to face me. I was in a garden, back of a house, and it was all little ridges and hills and tiny trees and houses, all made to the scale of the soldiers, who were maybe five centimetres tall. With all those little guns pointed up at me, I felt like one of the monsters in the films they showed at the Palace on Saturdays, except for
the “bombs and shells have no effect” part.
I stood up slowly, and the guns all tracked on me. The soldiers aimed their
rifles (I learned later that only their bayonets were functional, but I didn’t
know that then), and the tanks swung their turrets, all aimed at my chest. I
held very still.
“Here, girl, leave off the toys and come play with us!”
I looked over my shoulder, and there was Colin grinning over the wall at me.
I stood there, frozen between a danger I didn’t really understand and a danger
that just seemed crazy, and then I heard a buzzing noise like a giant wasp, and
a tiny little fighter jet flew between Colin and me and shot something at him
that exploded like a squib in his face. Colin fell backward, squawking, out of
sight.
I stared at the wall for a moment and then remembered the army behind me. I
was turning to face them again when I heard a sharp voice.
“Who are you and what are you doing in my garden?”
On the far side of the tanks and soldiers, a tall thin man with white hair was
holding a small metal box with a long antenna coming out of it. He was pushing
buttons on the box, and turning a little dial, and the army was moving away
from me. The man looked rather familiar, though I couldn’t place him.
“Those aren’t toys, you know. Their weapons are real. You could have been
badly hurt.”
The man wasn’t very cross, he was obviously more concerned for me than anything
else, but he also seemed like a very authoritative person, like a teacher or
even a clergyman. I’d never dropped a curtsey to anyone before without having
been reminded ahead of time to do it, but I did for him.
"Amanda Johnson, Sir. I’m sorry for intruding, but there were these boys….”
He nodded, and then he bowed.
“Yes. I saw that one nasty fellow, and you were obviously afraid of him, so I
saw him off. Christopher Pike, Miss Johnson.”
“You’re Professor Pike? You’re the one who invented Robot Annie!”
I expected him to smile and look proud at that, since Robot Annie is so
famous, but instead he just looked sad, and then he said, “I worked on that
project, yes, but I’m not a member of that group anymore.”
He sort of shook himself, and then he smiled at me.
“Well, let’s get you inside, where you can telephone home and have a
cup of tea to settle your nerves.”
That sounded lovely to me, so I went to walk with him into the house,
and that’s when I found out that the boy who’d been yanking at my panties had
ruined the waistband, because they fell down around my ankles right in front of
Professor Pike himself. Worse yet, there was no way I could just pull them up
and they’d stay up, so I was forced to step out of them and stuff them in the
pocket of my blazer. The Professor was ever so kind, though, and didn’t say a
word.
It was the most remarkable cup of tea I’d ever had. In the Professor’s
parlour, more little creatures like the little army bustled about. A teddy
bear, three feet high, brought sugar and milk to the table, and a little
footman walked across the tabletop to scoop up sugar for me. The teapot rolled
over to my cup on little wheels and poured itself without spilling a drop.
The Professor told me that he was living in Dinchester to have a quiet
place to work on robots for the military. They were going to be used for
things like sneaking cameras behind enemy lines, or bombs that could fly
themselves to their targets. For fun, he’d built his first prototypes in the
form of toys, but he’d given them the kind of motors and sensors that the real
military robots would have, and had even armed some of them. The planes fired
missiles that exploded like squibs. That was what he’d used on Colin. The
tanks had the barrels and firing mechanisms of small pistols (“twenty-twos”, he
called them), and while they normally just fired blanks, he’d loaded them with
real bullets to do some target practice today.
He explained that the government was eager to have weapons that could
keep Britain a world power, even though we had no atomic weapons, and also
wanted to encourage science, even though we had no space program. He made a
joke, saying, “And if we’ve got any superheroes stashed in a bunker somewhere,
I’m not aware of it!”
We went out into his garden after that, and he showed me what his
little army could do. He let me handle the control box, and told me I was
a “natural”, which made me feel terribly proud. I told him about how the boys
harassed me on account of my tits (only I said “bosom”), and he was very
sympathetic.
“When I was your age, I developed the foulest breath on Earth. No
tooth powder or mouthwash could control it. I learned much later that it was
an infection, and it took sulfa to get rid of it, but at the time it was just
misery for me. The kids all called me ’Stinky’ and that name came close to
breaking my heart.
“And then one day a boy called me ‘Stinky’ one time too many and I just
snapped. I grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him up against the wall,
good and hard, and I put my face up close to his so he could get a real faceful
of my breath, and I yelled, ‘That’s Mister Stinky to you!’ And somehow, that
was the right thing to say, because after that they did call me Mr. Stinky, and
it didn’t seem so bad. I had my Mum knit me a sweater with a big picture of a
skunk on the front, and I had more friends and less trouble.”
I could only shake my head at this story, finding it hard to believe
that I could ever make a decent name out of “Jumbo”.
The Professor had a caller then, and I was ready to say goodbye and
head for home, but he invited me to spend some more time with his little army,
and left me alone in the garden. I set the soldiers to drilling in formation
and the tanks to patrolling along the garden wall, and started getting familiar
with the planes. It really was amazing how much you could get the little
things to do, with just one little control box with only a few buttons and a
couple of dials.
It felt good, having those little machines under my command. It felt
like nothing I’d ever done. The sense of power, of control, of having a kind
of talent for running things, was simply marvelous.
For so long, I’d felt as though I were helpless, pinned down by adults
and their rules, by boys and their mad hands, by girls and their envy, but at
least here, in command of the Professor’s little army, I was in charge.
I was making the planes fly in formation and then break off one by one,
while part of my mind was working out how you could set up little tabletop
battlefields and have people hire them like pinball machines, when I heard a
cry of pain from the house.
I ran back to the French doors and saw two men raising the Professor
roughly from the floor, while a third stood over him with a pistol in his
hand. There was blood coming from the Professor’s mouth.
“I’ll say again,” the man with the gun said, “is there anything you’d
like to take with you? We really do want you to comfortable in your new home.”
I should have been too frightened to do anything, except maybe run the
way I had from those boys. But right at that moment, I didn’t feel like a
schoolgirl – I felt like a general. So I twisted dials and punched buttons as
fast as I could, and the Professor’s little army went marching through the
French doors with guns blazing.
I saw later that I really shouldn’t have fired so many of the guns.
The three men were all wounded, and one of them nearly died, and it was only
luck that the Professor wasn’t also shot. Still, I did manage to stop them
from abducting him.
My little army stood guard over the men while I telephoned the police,
a little plane circling above them as they cringed together and held
handkerchiefs to their wounds.
I got a nice letter from the police and my picture in the paper.
Everyone at school made a fuss over me, and so did my family, but I assumed
that would be the end of it. At tea a few days later, though, the Professor
surprised me. He told me that he wanted me to come by every day and drill his
army, and even take some of them out with me to march and roll and fly around
town. He said it would serve as a test of his robots’ powers, and also let me
get practice at using them. He said that I had a real future as an operator of
little machines like his, and that there would be lots of jobs calling for that
kind of work in the future, both in business and in the military.
The idea of being part of a new industry, and maybe a new kind of war,
was kind of interesting, but I’ll admit that what really sounded good was
getting to have my own personal army to follow me around.
I have a permit from the police to take the little army out in public. The tanks and planes only fire squibs now (even an adult wouldn’t be allowed to
load the tanks with bullets), but those can be quite useful in distracting and
confusing a person. I’ve already helped the police capture a man who was
robbing a shop, and disarmed a bomb someone left in the Mayor’s office.
Things are different at school, as you might imagine. Nobody tries to
bully a girl who commands an army. They call me General Jumbo now, and you
know, I do like the name better, just as Professor Pike said. I even have a
cap with gold braid on the bill, and a military tunic.
Double-breasted, of course.
Contact the author at dr_psycho1960@hotmail.com