Bug Park by James P. Hogan

When the tests were through, Vanessa, Payne, and Finnion could go for lunch. That would give Garsten time to get back to Seattle and turn the “special” mec over to Vanessa. And they would be set. Today was Tuesday. By Saturday it would be all over.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Kevin stood to one side with Sam and Josh, both also from his grade, watching the daily boarding mêlée around the school bus. When God had finished creating people, He found Himself with lots of legs and pimples left over, Kevin decided. So He threw them together in clumps and called the results teenagers.

Vanessa thought that Kevin ought to attend private school. It had the right social image. Eric said that learning how to mix and get along with anybody was more important.

“Would you get a load of that assignment,” Sam grumbled. “Five pages! What do I care about the dumb English and their dumb king? They should have chopped all their heads off, like the French did.”

“When do we get to see this boat of yours, Kev?” Josh asked. “Are there any islands along the inlet? Maybe we could fix up a swimming party at one of them.”

“Let me think about it,” Kevin said. “I’ve got a lot going on right now.”

Taki appeared, picking his way through the throng, a blue school-bag slung over one shoulder. “Ah, Kev. I was beginning to wonder if you were in today. I was looking for you at lunch time but couldn’t find you.”

“Oh, there was something I needed to get finished.” Actually, Kevin had spent the break in the library. He had wanted to be on his own and think.

“Did you bring the mecs?”

“I’ve got them here.” The two that Kevin had put in Vanessa’s car were not the flying versions that he and Taki were trying to develop.

“And the relay too?”

“Er, no. There’s something else—”

“Gee, darn it, Kev. You said last night that you would. I wanted to try adding something tonight.”

“Something else has come up that I needed it for. I’ll tell you about it later.”

He had to talk to somebody, he had decided—about the whole situation. Somebody who could share his viewpoint as an equal without going into lecture mode. While he knew that Michelle and Doug were on his side, adults had this propensity for letting themselves be hemmed in by rules. Their reflex seemed always to see only the restrictions by saying, “You can’t do anything because . . .” Negative. He wanted to talk to somebody who could listen and say, “Hey, we could do something if . . .” Positive. That was what being American was supposed to be all about, wasn’t it?

“See you, guys,” Kevin said to Sam and Josh. He and Taki boarded the bus behind two girls talking about the clothes that you could buy in thrift stores. One of them had a happy face on the seat of her jeans, that someone had stuck there. Kevin followed Taki to the back, where he found a seat wedged next to a younger boy with freckles, nursing a cage containing a bat that he had brought in to show the class. Kevin wondered if it might be possible to equip a mec with sonar and process the echo signals so that they could be perceived as vision. Now that would be really neat, he told himself. He said to the kid that it was a weird looking bat. The kid blew a bubble of gum at him and didn’t answer.

The bus pulled away and began threading its way through the suburbs: white oblongs, regularly spaced; each surrounded by its patch of green with flowers; no people. Eric always said they looked like graveyards.

Hiroyuki’s house had what had once been a basement family room, which Taki had taken over bit by bit like an encroaching plague and transformed into his private workshop. It included a mec control setup, with a coupler in the form of a barber’s chair that one of the innumerable relatives had acquired as part of a job lot at an auction and had no use for. Taki sat hunched in it, legs crossed and arms wrapped around his knees, the mec-control headset and collar set aside on the cubicle adjacent. One of the winged mecs lay on the bench beside him. Above the bench was a shelf with parts, drawer units containing components, and an assortment of mecs, including several of the larger, earlier models. Kevin sprawled on the bar stool in front of a console. Both of them had managed to keep the winged mec aloft semicontrollably—more or less—for periods of up to several seconds, which was an encouraging step forward, but that had been earlier. For the best part of an hour now it had been inactive and eventually forgotten as Kevin divulged the full meaning of the events that Taki had witnessed the previous Friday and recounted the further developments that had taken place since.

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