R.S.V.P.
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Slimeworld & Galaxy Magazine -- All rights reserved -- |
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Chapter XXXIII
by General (Uncle Claude) Xxaxx
& General (E.J. Gold) Nunan PFC 1st Class Ret.
Woo was a bit concerned that perhaps Little Roy couldn’t find the restaurant after all. It was an official function to watch Woo on her many rounds, so she couldn’t imagine Little Roy’s mother interfering despite the goober’s concerns to the contrary. “How tough it must be to live the life of a goober. At least as an egghead I was exiled to live with my own kind. The poor little goobers are live with parents that only put up with them because of the law.”
A curious fact is the insistence by the bosspersons upon gaining complete and absolute power that goobers be raised by their citizin parents rather than consigned to camps as previously handled. (See reference on rise of bosspersons to power for further text.)
Professor Woo was escorted to the table in the traditional egghead corner — i.e. away from the other patrons, away from the maître, away from the kitchen and away from the front. If they could have found a way to set them away from the back as well and still satisfied the law, they would have done it.
Integration laws of 2175: No public facility may operate in the total exclusion of eggheads or otherwise impose discrimination based on bubble form or color. (See sub-reference: Bubble Treaty of 2170.)
Professor Woo needn’t have been worried about Little Roy. He was already sitting with Ja Mere in the corner. That explains the especially dirty look from the hat check girl and the maître. In a culture without any clothes, the hat check girl is one of the most important employees in a restaurant’s staff.
Woo looked around the room. Yes, the restaurant was already filling toward its nightly capacity. Unlike the more ancient restaurants that she has studied, in modern restaurants there was no “turn-over” only one party to a table each night.
Turn-over: phrase used in late to early twenty-first century to describe the cycling of patron’s utilization of the same rectilinear serving platform. Profits were directly proportional to number of patrons served. (See reference to Repeat-Customer for counterbalancing effect of high turn-over.)
“Yep,” Woo thought to herself, “No eat and run for this crowd. Why bother? Bubblers had no need to seek privacy for breeding rituals. — the bubbles took care of any need in that department as any glance around the room at the myriad of rainbow-hued crotches could attest.”
Extract from restaurant marketing manual: The proper maintenance of vidi color, contrast and clarity is the key to customer satisfaction. Remember, if your customers could tune in their own home televids they would not come to the restaurant. So long as the food is not outright poisonous, or becomes generally known as such, and you have good to excellent reception of the three major game show stations you can be assured of constant clientele. (See also, Protocol for hiring egghead vidi tuners.)
Escorting Professor Woo to her table the maître’s job was to take the path of least irritation to the other patrons and by all means never to let the egghead interfere with proper viewing of the game show offerings. The egghead’s blasé attitude toward game shows was a complete mystery to the bubblers in charge of restaurant management. You never, never had to warn a citizin to not walk in front of a live vidi. But these eggheads required constant reminding.
As the maître gave Woo one final shove in the general direction of her table Woo called out in a voice calculated to be loud enough to encourage the management to close the sound baffle. “Ja Mere, how good to see you. And, Little Roy so good of you to join us. I’m sure bossperson will be very pleased at your diligence.” As long as the maître thinks there is even a partial chance that a bossperson is behind Little Roy’s sudden sojourn into the eatery he’ll think twice before he trying to eject Little Roy from the restaurant. But that won’t stop him from getting the sound curtain closed as quickly as possible.
The table was small, round with three legs slightly shorter than the fourth, table cloth slightly dirty, salt and pepper shakers proudly displayed with pepper in the big holed salt-shaker and salt — caked solid — in the shaker with the small holes. Engineered so that a match book is not sufficient to level, the tables were guaranteed to rock all night long.
Eggheads tried smuggling table wedges into restaurants but research has shown that the wobbly table was preferred 3.4 to one over the other indignities that replaced it.
As in each visit to a restaurant, Woo wondered how the bubblers managed to aim the air conditioning vent just at neck height. Looking over at a pillar that almost completely blocked the vidi screen from view of anyone sitting at the egghead table, Woo chuckled to herself, “This was supposed to be the final straw meant to break the camels back. Those poor bubblers just can’t imagine anyone going to a restaurant without being afforded a grand view of the game shows.”
Little Roy looked somehow dressed-up. How a naked boy in a big gelatinous bubble could look dressed-up, escaped Professor Woo at the moment. But that didn’t negate the impression — he did somehow look dressed-up. Maybe it was his overwhelming happiness at this — his happiest day. Professor Woo actually began to have major pangs of guilt about the dirty trick she was about to play on him — or rather, trick him into playing on her and Ja Mere.
“Ja Mere, you’ve met Little Roy?”
“Yes, we’ve been having a very inspiring conversation about frogs, haven’t we Roy”
“My name is Little Roy. I like frogs. They live in the water and not in the water. Fish can’t do that. My Mom says that is because frogs are greener than fish.”
“Have you two ordered yet?”
Ja Mere gave Little Roy a conspiratorial look, “Little Roy helped me order for the three of us. It should be here momentarily.” Ja Mere leaned over toward Professor Woo winking, “Little Roy gave the order. If it’s possible, the bubbler hated taking orders from the little goober more than an egghead.”
Little Roy was thoroughly involved in the comings and goings of the staff.
“I hope he pays enough attention to our meeting to give an accurate report to his bossperson when he turns us in for flagrant xpearimintalism.”
Returning a more conspiratorial wink at Ja Mere, Woo started speaking in what Woo hoped would look like a a whisper without actually making it hard for Little Roy to hear. Woo needed Little Roy to think he was overhearing a conversation not meant for his ears. “Ja Mere, we must talk. The earth is slowing down. We must do something about it.”
Following Woo’s lead as per the earlier phone agreement Ja Mere jumped in, “Okay, Professor what did you have in mind?”
“We need to do an xpearimint.” She continued, “But we need to keep it ultra-ultra-sekrit. Not only because it is illegal to xpearimint, but more importantly because this xpearimint is so big and so important that if we fail, every Citizin on the planet will laugh at us if they find out. It will be totally humiliating. We’ll look like complete stupid dumb dumbs.”
Ja Mere leaned close to the Professor and whispered, “Ease up, Professor — if you are oo-tay obvious-ay ey-thay ill-way ue-clay inay oo-tay ee-thay on-cay.
“Ja Mere, it’s okay — I’ve thought this through. This is the best step. The only question is, can we carry it out in sufficient secrecy? We’ve got to do it and it will take hundreds of eggheads working together to do it.”
“What’s the basis of the xpearimint? How will it work?” Ja Mere added his two lines into the dialogue.
“Here’s how it can work. Remember what happens when you let a balloon go — it squirts all over the room.”
Little Roy so wanted to tell Professor Woo about the time that he taped a balloon to his toy car and sent the car scooting around his bedroom. His Mom made him stop. She said that if it wasn’t bought from the toy store changing it was like xpeariminting. This made Little Roy sad because he so much wanted to try aiming the scooting car at his toy soldiers. Professor Woo was talking quiet like Mom and Dad did when they didn’t want Little Roy to hear them. So he had to do just like he did with them, and pretend he couldn’t hear. It was harder, now, because he wanted to say something.
“We’ll collect fire extinguishers and aerosol cannisters. We’ll make large industrial strength squirters. We can fill millions of balloons with carbon dioxide. We can find every source of CO2 propellant that we can and fill all the balloons there are. We will then distribute them to egg-heads all over the world. Throughout the world, at exactly the same time, every egghead will start squirting toward the west. This should speed up the planet, like millions of tiny retro-rockets.”
The waiter came, bearing trays of food — cold and overcooked, just the way they always serve eggheads. Something that looks to have been a form of meat before its recent incineration and a vegetable or two — limp and lifeless, any color that may have been present before cooking was boiled away. After the waiter plunked the food down on the table, very obviously neglecting to refill the water glasses or ask if Woo and party needed anything else, he walked away from the table.
Returning to a conspiratorial whisper Professor Woo continued, “As I was saying, Ja Mere, it is imperative that the Citizins not find out about this performance. If they know about it and it fails, we will be laughing stocks of the planet. They will finally get the laugh on us that they have been waiting for.”
This pretty well concluding the performance geared for the benefit of the citizins. If Little Roy played his role of guard, they ought to have known about the plans by the next night. The rest of the dinner continued uneventfully. Coffee never arrived, and the bill had to be added with the maître four times before they could get the total somewhere near its proper amount — or at least sub-astronomical.
Later that night lying in his bed,Little Roy for the first time in his young life had to wrestle with a large issue. Even the stars shinning one by one through the hole in his ceiling were of little conciliation. He had to decide and he had to decide alone. “What do I do? I’m supposed to be guarding Professor Woo. It is my job to stop eggheads from doing xpearimints. But Professor Woo is my friend. He let me go to dinner with him and his friend — and I only had to ask once. If I turn him in,the bossperson will do something to him, and everyone will laugh at him. If I don’t turn him in,then he will do a big xpearimint and that’s bad. But this xpearimint is only putting balloons all over. Dad and I did that at my sister’s birthday party. Mom said we did a good job. It is almost always someone’s birthday. So if we sing Happy Birthday song then it can’t be bad. If all the goobers sing the Happy Birthday song, then Professor Woo won’t be making an xpearimint, he’ll be making a party. And everyone knows that a party isn’t bad.
Harboring his new found determination close to himself, Little Roy dropped off to sleep. He now had a plan, a good plan that would make everybody happy.
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R.S.V.P.
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Slimeworld & Galaxy Magazine -- All rights reserved -- |
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