Michelle hauled herself slowly to her feet. Somehow a shaking from her own body managed to communicate itself to her mechanical one. “Guys?” She found that she could only croak. Her mouth had dried up.
“Acme Pest and Dragon Control, at your service,” Kevin’s voice said in her phones. The tiger-striped mec saluted with its saw. “Hi. It’s Kevin. Or in this outfit, better known as Tigger. What do you think?”
Its red companion withdrew the lance, revealing a rotary cutting end that bored like a drill. “No job too small. Saving pretty damsels a specialty,” Taki said. “Meet the Red Lobster.”
Just at that moment Michelle had never wanted to hug two people more in her life.
Eric’s voice cut in. “I think that might be enough excitement for now. Michelle’s showing a cold sweat here. Can you two guys get Carroty Chop back up to the box if we decouple her?”
“Sure,” Kevin said. Michelle wasn’t going to argue with that. . . .
And seconds later she was back in the chair at the house. Her breathing was coming in quick, panting gasps, and she could feel her pulse hammering. But she was her own size once again. She wouldn’t have believed that something so basic could feel so wonderful. A few seconds more, and the helmet and phones were lifted away. Eric was grinning at her.
“Are you okay?” he asked, unfastening the collar. She nodded mutely but didn’t feel it. He shook his head wonderingly. “Well, you sure believe in going for the spectacular, I’ll give you that.”
“So what do you think?” Ohira asked her. “What would people pay to visit a safari park like that? A big difference from looking at stupid giraffes and zebras, yes? You think these two kids might be onto something good here?”
Michelle’s recent experiences didn’t appear to have aroused much in the way of concern; but she’d worked for Ohira long enough not to be too surprised. She sighed inwardly and told herself not to worry about it. It was all part of the job. She was being paid for it.
Eric passed her a can of soda. She sipped it gratefully and nodded. “Yes, I think they could all be onto something big,” she said, at last finding her voice. “Really big.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Kevin sat in his room with a deck of cards, practicing fan flourishes, false shuffles, and top- and bottom-palming. Two days had gone by since Michelle’s introduction to Bug Park. Michelle was downstairs, having come back to the house on her own to talk about patents and licensing arrangements with Vanessa, who had the most involvement with the legal and financial side of the business—Eric was at Neurodyne, anyway. She had been there for about an hour. Kevin had a video cartridge that he’d promised to copy for her, a collection of highlights from other Bug Park exploits, and had asked Harriet to make sure that Michelle didn’t leave without picking it up. It would be an excuse for him to say hi again, too.
He and Taki had agreed that Michelle had given a pretty impressive first-time performance—an unusually generous assessment to grant to an adult still in the yet-to-be-categorized category. Taki’s older sister, Nakisha, had frozen in terror at the sight of a clawed scarab beetle, and refused to have anything further to do with the enterprise since. Ohira never displayed much in the way of feelings or emotion, but Kevin had noticed that he did more observing from the home base than active exploring these days. And Vanessa thought only in terms of the scientific and industrial possibilities that had spurred the technology into existence in the first place. The thought of any involvement in public entertainment evoked the kind of attitude that she might have held toward a game arcade or a VR parlor. Kevin had overheard her describe it to one of her friends as “vulgar.” Kevin wasn’t really that surprised. It was typical of the coolness that she seemed to display toward all of his and his father’s projects.
He felt sometimes that Vanessa avoided emotional closeness deliberately, which struck him as peculiar for somebody who had taken on the challenges of becoming a replacement mother. But adulthood was full of peculiar attitudes and rituals that he didn’t understand, but which he presumed—more through a primitive faith that the world he was becoming a part of was a product of people who knew what they were doing, than from any solid conviction that he could attest to—would make better sense one day.