BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
by BUD WEBSTER
* * * *
Illustrated by William Warren
Any job needs the right people to do it, and conventional qualifications are not necessarily the best way to pick them.
So what’s the verdict, Bubba?” The voice, although not unquestionably electronic, had a distinctly nonhuman timbre. It emanated from a small, flat box, rather like an Etch A Sketch, propped up against a particularly ugly lamp made from a small stuffed alligator. “Are we going to be on television?”
“Don’t look like it, Mike.” Sixtyish but still burly rather than fat, Bubba Pritchert brushed his hand through his short, salt-and-pepper hair and sighed as he looked at the letter in front of him. “Jamie and Adam went to bat for us, but that wasn’t enough to make the cable suits change their minds.” He shrugged. “Oh, well, we’d have had to relocate to California, and I been there once. Didn’t care for it. I don’t suppose it’s changed all that much in the past forty-five years or so.”
“I’d have thought that an experienced jackleg mechanic, an artificial intelligence, and an abnormally strong alien would have been a powerful asset to the Mythbusters, Bubba.”
“Me too,” he shrugged, “but I think it was that ‘alien’ thing that got to them.” Bubba shook his head. “Damn. Hoss is gonna be real disappointed. He loves that show.” Hoss, the alien in question, was a Thunt, a humanoid alien with more in common with a Shar-Pei than a terrestrial from the neck up; Bubba had befriended him several years before and had been adopted into his clan.[1] He laced his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. “I was looking forward to building a faster-than-light drive at M-5, too.”
[FOOTNOTE 1: See “The Three Labors of Bubba” in the June 1996 Analog.]
“Dream on, future-boy. It would be easier to build a time machine from stone knives and bearskins.”
“There you go with that pop-culture stuff again. Don’t you have anything better to do than watch reruns on TV?”
“Until we come up with a way to make me a lot more mobile than I am now, it’s about all I can do,” the Nishian artificial intelligence said.
“Well, as the technology stands right now, your choices are to be a hovercraft or a helicopter. Or with skinny little legs and arms like that lightbulb guy from the Gyro Gearloose comics,” Bubba said thoughtfully. “Any way you look at it, you’d be kickin’ up dust.” He shook his head. “I was hopin’, what with Jamie’s experience buildin’ robots, that I could talk him into helpin’ out. Ain’t gonna happen now, looks like.”
“I told you that you should have mentioned the work you did for NASA in 1973....”
“Now, Mike,” Bubba interrupted, “I didn’t do all that much, just made a couple of suggestions about how to put a square peg in a round hole with a few judicious whacks of a big hammer, is all.”
“Perhaps, but they called you, didn’t they?”
“They didn’t, Mahlon did. Saucer Nut Number Six-Sixty-Six, he was, our first rocket scientist—though he hated bein’ called that. He was working at JPL when all that happened, and he figured I might have some ideas about how to fudge the CO2 filters.” He scratched the back of his head. “Might’ve helped a little, I s’pose, but they did all the hard work. They were the heroes.” He frowned. “I really miss Mahlon, he was cool as a moose and almost as fuzzy.”
The phone rang. Bubba’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Hmph! Maybe the Discovery Channel changed their minds.” He picked up the handset and answered. “Yellow? The Prit-CHARD residence, mechanic of the house speaking.”
“Bubba, you’ve got to stop watching those Britcoms. They’re having an unfortunate effect on you.” The voice on the other end of the phone was brisk, but not brusque.
“Hey, Kirby! What’s shakin’, homey?”
“I believe the correct answer to that is ‘nothing but the leaves on the trees,’“ the lawyer replied, “so let’s take it as said.”
“Stipulated, counselor,” Bubba said. “Whassup?”
“I’ve been contacted by one of the media people at the Smithsonian. Apparently,” Kirby said wryly, “word of your, er, exotic personal conveyance has spread.”
“And...?”
“National Air and Space wants to hire you for a very special job.”
“Oh, do they?” Bubba drawled. “Tell me more.”
“I’m sending you e-mail about it even as we speak.”
“And I’m downloading it now,” Mike said.
“The wonders of a DSL connection. It’s a little complicated, Bubba, but I don’t think it’s anything you can’t handle. And in point of fact, I doubt there’s anyone else who can handle it.”
“I’ll look it over,” Bubba said. “Meanwhile, when you gonna come back down for the Urbanna Oyster Fest? You’ve missed it the past few years.”
“If I can get out from under these congressional hearings, I’ll be there this year. I’m certainly not going to let you get them all. I’ll let you know when I know.” They said their good-byes and rang off.
Bubba sat back in his overstuffed chair and picked thoughtfully at the frayed piping around the arm. It was late afternoon in Central Garage, and the early fall sun came through the living room window, tickling the array of toys on the shelves that lined the walls. Magazines and newspapers covered every flat surface in the room, and the hallways leading into the other rooms were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. In a rack by the television were dozens of DVDs ranging from classic screwball comedies to last year’s monster fantasy epic.
“Got it, Bubba,” Mike said, “along with three hundred other messages. How many mailing lists are you on, anyway?”
“Oh, one or two, I guess. It’s all research.”
“‘SpaceGhostFan’ is research?”
Bubba looked hurt. “Hey, it’s a great show, Mike. Don’t it remind you of home?”
The little box snorted static. “As if. Anyway, here it is.”
Bubba read the words scrolling across the screen. “Well, don’t that beat all,” he said in wonder. “What do you think, Mike?”
“Well, it’s certainly within your range of skills, and it won’t take us nearly as long to make the round trip as they would.”
“Any foreseeable snags?”
“Oh, only a hundred or so. Clearances, licenses, permits, fees ... not to mention the fact that you’ve never flown to the Moon—at least, not that I know of.”
“Nope, not yet, anyway. Think I’ll have to get shots?”
“Frankly, Bubba, I don’t know what kind of restrictions the government is going to put in your way. Shots are probably the least of your worries.”
“Easy for you to say,” he muttered. “It ain’t your butt.” He stared at the ceiling and a slow smile spread over his face. “Bringing the first Lunar Rover back from the Moon. The ultimate tow job.” He laughed aloud. “Well, dip me in dog shit.”
“You have to do it, Bubba,” Mike said. “You know you have to.”
Bubba nodded. “Oh, I’m gonna take the gig, all right. Just remains to be seen how the contract gets writ. Don’t wanna soak ‘em, but we’re talkin’ about some pretty serious mileage here.” He rubbed his hands together. “Might even be able to get some ‘considerations.’ It’d be so cool to have a Moon rock, or one of the flags, or something like that. But,” he sat up straight and picked up a pencil, “Mom taught me it don’t pay to get too greedy.”
“I’m sure they’ll be as generous as they can be. And take it from me, a rock is a rock.”
Bubba shook his head slowly. “No. Not to me, Mike. See, this stuff is no big deal to you. You been there, done that, and got the T-shirt—assuming you could wear it. To me, it’s solid gold, a gem of purest ray serene.”
“Now who’s making obscure references?”
Bubba peered at the little screen over his reading glasses. “You’d prefer I quote from Astroboy?”
“Astroboy, Aristotle, Alfred E. Neuman; it’s all the same to me. It’s not my culture.”
“That mean you gonna give up watching TV?”
“Right after sweeps.”
Bubba laughed. “As Eleanor of Aquitaine said, ‘There’ll be pork in the treetops come morning.’”
The contract arrived by courier the next day. It was thick, almost one hundred pages. “Son of a bitch,” Bubba said in wonder. “Hell, even Kirby’d choke on this thing. Wonder what’s so god-awful involved in this that we can’t just say, ‘We the undersigned do hereby agree’?”
“You know better than that. This is a government contract. Everything has to be tied down in triplicate.”
“I guess so, Mike, but all this,” he waved the sheaf of papers, “just seems so unnecessary. I ain’t gonna steal it from ‘em and sell it to a chop shop. All I want is to be able to say I did it and get a little promotional use from it, and they already agreed to that.” He tossed it on the table. “I dunno, Mike. Maybe things were different when you were with the Nishian Parliament ... “[2]
[FOOTNOTE 2: See “Bubba Pritchert and the Space Aliens” in the July/August 1994 Analog.]
“They weren’t.”
“...but all this hoop-de-doo about a simple tow job is, well, it’s draconian, is what it is.”
“Er, Bubba, that statement doesn’t make sense.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, I know, but I always wanted to use ‘draconian’ in a sentence.” He rustled the pages in frustration. “Shit on a stick. I ain’t gonna ‘grand theft’ nothing, I just want the gig. Anyway, who could want anything more than to go to the Moon, for the love of Pete?”
“I’ll look it over,” Mike said. “I’m not admitted to the bar here, but I’ve got access to every online legal database. If there’s something wonky, I’ll run it past Kirby. Between the two of us, I think we can catch any problems.”
“I trust you. Check and see if there’s anything in there that says I can’t grab a moon rock or two for myself...
widez2