Karl’s Marine and Spacecraft Repair

Illustration by William R. Warren, Jr.

“Mr. Karlsson, we need your help.”

It was a crisp, cultured, vaguely British accent and I looked around, hoping to find some source of the voice other than the frog Ellie was holding up to me.

“Sir?” It was the frog. Something about how the Sun had come up red this morning told me it was going to be a different kind of day. The frog seemed a quite ordinary, if large, green-spotted leopard frog. It wasn’t quite large enough to catch the attention of Marie at the Allouette Grill and French Kitchen, who was known to skulk the shore reeds of this chain of ponds and channels leading from Gull Lake up to Nisswa searching for fresher fare than she could get from her Duluth suppliers, but it was a largish frog. Maybe the size of a man’s hand. Pretty natural looking—seamless, no sign of any buttons or anything electrical, but they’re pretty good at disguising that kind of thing today.

“Grandpa,” Ellie stomped her ten-year-old foot on the oil darkened floor of the shop, “the frog wants to talk to you and my arms are getting tired.”

“Uh, pardon me, Frog.” I humored her and addressed the frog; Ellie got her way with me pretty easily, but had some sort of common sense not to take advantage of it too much, the way some kids who have to grow up too fast do—like they have a kid part and small adult part.

Ellie had to grow up fast about her ninth birthday; she moved in with me after Tad and Ellen got killed in a car wreck. It was a bad time. Six months earlier, my Terri Ann had got what was going around, except she got it a lot worse than anyone else did. All they could do at Brainerd was to keep her comfortable enough to die in her sleep. So, in less than a year, Ellie had lost her parents and her grandmother.

Snowed early June that year, too, which cut a couple weeks off the tourist season. A real stinker. Trying to keep Ellie on an even keel was all that kept me from going to Minneapolis or something. So now, Ellie had a talking frog—well, she could have had a lot worse. I didn’t see how playing along would hurt.

“You know,” I drawled at Ellie’s talking toy, “it’s been a while since I’ve run into an English frog. Some people wouldn’t use that accent on the Fourth of July, however.”

“Grandpa.”

Had some condescension crept into my voice? Have to work on that. “OK, OK Ellie, maybe the, er, frog would be more comfortable on the workbench.” I indicated an open spot between the cowling of an old Evinrude and a cracked prop off a Chris Craft which I had better get fixed or replaced by tomorrow noon.

Ellie nodded seriously and held her hands up to the edge of the bench and the frog waddled off her fingers with the grace and dignity of a miniature sumo wrestler. An expensively realistic toy, I thought. More than my Ellie ought to be spending, but I pretty much let her spend her allowance as she saw fit. The frog turned, faced me, and opened its mouth very slightly.

“Please don’t be alarmed by the form of this motile. It is a rather convenient shape to be going about in this area with little notice, don’t you think?”

I had to concede that point. “Whatever. You look like you belong around here, OK.”

“Of course he does, Grandpa; he’s a frog!”

“Uh, sure, Ellie; have you taken the trash out yet? The truck comes by at noon, you know.”

“Oh…” Ellie’s eyes got large and she scampered out without a further word. Score one for Grandpa.

She forgot to take the frog.

“We really do need your help,” it said.

Who the hell was controlling it? I wondered.

I looked quickly around to make sure no one else was looking at this and turned to Frog again. “OK, you’ve had your fun; now I got work to do.”

“Perhaps, motile was the wrong word. I am linked to our cybersystem, but am quite capable of independent action. More of a robot, really. And I do have work for you.”

I groaned. Some days start out better than others. The shop door looked out on the marina where most of my regular customers kept their boats. One of them was probably sitting out there on a boat with binoculars, a microphone, and a radio control getup. I decided to call whoever’s bluff and grabbed a piece of oil-smeared newspaper and held it up to the frog. “What’s this say?”

“The headline reads ‘Good Wild Rice Harvest This Year, Tribe Says’ and it goes on to talk about how much Sun—”

“OK” I interrupted. So those eyes weren’t glass. I grabbed the Evinrude housing and slapped it down over the frog. It was an old style metal housing which should have made any radio link with the frog pretty difficult. “Now turn the scrap of paper over and read the other side.”

There was a rustle, then the frog read: “Alice Jensen, 93, Crow Wing County librarian for sixty years. Drowned in a boating accident when her jet ski…”

Damn, it was an autonomous, multi-sensored, talking frog robot like something out of a Popular Science dream—or nightmare. I wasn’t ready to guess just where Frog might be from, but it clearly wasn’t out of the Target toy department. “OK, uh, Frog. Whatever you are, I’ll have to admit you seem to be on your own.”

“Very much so here, unfortunately. I had to come a long way to find someone open today.”

“Now let me get this right. You are something that someone, er, made, and you need my help?”

“Quite so,” Frog replied. “I represent a pair of astronauts and the cybernetic mind of their excursion craft, which unfortunately suffered a most inconvenient encounter with a jet ski down in Steamboat Bay last night. I’m afraid I’ve come to regard those vehicles as a significant nuisance.”

“You bet,” I agreed sympathetically and removed the Evinrude housing. If you ignored his shape and his accent, old Frog began to make a certain amount of sense. “Astronauts, you say. I suppose you don’t mean human astronauts?” Not too likely, but one could always hope.

“Our biological progenitors originated in the Small Magellanic Cloud about seven million years ago, but we are from a relatively local colony in Proxima Centauri’s asteroid belt.”

“Uh, have you folks checked in with NASA or the UN or the Chamber of Commerce or anyone?” Whatever else he was, Frog was probably some kind of what we used to call, um, a wetback.

“That might not be very wise for us or you. We’ve been observing the emergence of your race since the advent of wireless telegraphy. It’s a rare event of great scientific interest, as you can imagine. I can assure you that your extreme discretion will be well rewarded.”

“Some folks around here might call that a bribe, trying to keep me from my civic duty.”

“Quite a noble sentiment! Very well, then, we shall simply ask for the favor and ask that you contemplate what complexities might result from your report of a conversation with a frog.”

The thing you don’t need in Nisswa, Minnesota, is complexities. We’ve got weather and tourists and that pretty much takes care of complicating life by itself. I backed off a mite. A talking frog had a repair job for me? Whatever. I could use the work.

“Then again, some folks might consider it common sense to keep quiet about something like you. You have a repair job in mind? I do good work but I gotta charge for my time.”

The frog turned and stuck its tongue out and into the crack in the Chris Craft prop. A kind of fuzzy gray foam appeared over the crack and the prop moved ever so lightly. Then the foam vanished and the tongue flipped back into Frog’s mouth. The prop looked good as new.

“I trust we have a few hours in the bank, so to speak?”

“Maybe four or five,” I replied with the poker face I reserved for negotiations, but it was clear that Frog wouldn’t be a total loss in my kind of business. “Fine, we can barter. But if you can do that, what is it you think I can do for you?”

“We could fix any simple damage with our nanomotiles, but we cannot quickly regenerate material which is utterly gone. I regret to say that the aeroshroud, which protects the propellant tank of our landing craft and stabilizes the mechanical interface with the life support module under max Q conditions, was impulsively detached in the jet ski collision and lies somewhere in the aqueous sediment of Steamboat Bay. The boat activity in that area made any recovery effort most impractical. I fear we shall have to ask you to fabricate a new one.”

I nodded slowly as if I’d understood all this. A shroud was likely a thin shell of something, and I’d guess it was lost in the bottom muck. “I’ve got some sheet steel.”

“Too massive for its strength, we fear. What is required is a ten-mil hydrogenated diamond aluminum laminar sheet.”

I should have guessed something like that. I shrugged my shoulders. “Maybe you need to go somewhere they can pronounce whateveritwas you said.”

“We’ve taken the liberty of accessing your supply net.”

I looked sharply at Frog. How the hell had he done that? Then again, how the hell did he do anything he did? Seven million years, he’d said.

“The nearest vendor,” Frog continued, “is Olsen’s Roofing in Brainerd. The Japanese are exporting it as a substitute for corrugated iron. It is three times as dear, but lasts indefinitely.”

I knew Thor Olsen; he liked to open early, seven thirty as I remembered, and he’d give me wholesale if I picked up enough to cover the boat shed as well. Pricey, but it would likely be the last time I’d have to do it. At fifty-five, I was beginning to feel that my roof-climbing days might not last through another set of tin. Brainerd was anywhere from a thirty to fifty minute round trip down 371, depending on how many tourists were in town. I guessed I could go after breakfast tomorrow and be back in time to open. I nodded to Frog.

“A four-foot, three point five six two-inch diameter circle would do nicely. I’ll cut a twenty-seven point eight three-inch circle in the center and a point seven two eight nine three radian wedge, then we bend it into a cone. I or one of the other motiles can nano-meld the seam after installation.”

I nodded again. “That might be a good idea: your doing it. My, uh, nano-melding is a little rusty.”

“We can count on your assistance, then?”

I shook my head. “Whatever. I’ll pick it up tomorrow morning.” I wasn’t contemplating leaving the shop on the Fourth. All sorts of emergency repairs turn up, and at doubletime holiday labor rates, it was one of my bigger days.

“Grandpa!” Ellie shouted, “someone’s outside and they broke their outboard and they need it fixed right away.”

See? All I had to do was think the thought. “Be right back,” I told Frog and walked out to the front office.

It turned out to be a couple of young ladies, both about medium height and build, one a short-haired full-figured blonde and the other more lithe and boyish, with long black hair falling free to her tight rear end. She looked familiar, sort of. They were barefoot, wearing utilitarian walking shorts and barely legal net swim halters that showed lots of tan. We don’t see a whole lot of that in Nisswa and Ellie was staring, about as wide eyed as I probably was. They didn’t seem to mind, or even notice. A Winnebago trailing a twenty-foot outboard runabout with a cabin was parked in front.

“I’m Kim, she’s Kate,” the blonde said, so businesslike it almost pulled my mind off her chest. “We got a Johnson fifty-five that won’t start and we’ve got to get down to Bar Harbor. Business.”

I wasn’t about to ask what business, but suspected I’d make some people happy if I could get them on their way. They seemed sane enough, and my libertarian instincts weren’t displeased.

“We’ll pay cash,” Kim added.

Kate looked me up and down with the kind of smile a kid has when she’s got a surprise she just can’t quite hold in. My hair’s still all there, though it’s been white since my early thirties. My skin’s not too loose and I don’t have much fat on me, courtesy of the annual Nisswa County senior ten-K and my winter season cross country business. The wart next to my nose was removed last winter, so, for fifty-five, I probably passed muster, if that’s what she was thinking.

“Or barter,” Kate said in a very quiet sincere voice, staring into my eyes in a way that promised more than simple fun.

It was a strange thought that something like that might actually happen to me now, even as part of a transaction. I’d met Terri Ann my first day at Bemidji State, and while we’d both had special friends and experimented with life styles a bit in those loose and heady days, we’d settled down by the mid-seventies, and there’d been no one else for me for thirty years. God, I missed her and there was something about this girl that brought it all back, instantly.

“Whatever. I’m Karl.” My real name was Anthony, courtesy of my mother. It didn’t stick past first grade, but I remember every time I introduce myself. “Battery OK?”

“Full charge, cranks fine,” Kim replied. “Engine pops, smokes, won’t catch. Bad symptoms.”

“The smoke was black,” Kate added, “and the plug fouled. It’s my uncle’s boat, and we have to get it back by the weekend. Don’t you remember me, Grandpa?”

Kathy Alquist! The name came suddenly and with it the face of the tomboy that used to babysit Ellie maybe five years ago. No relation, but Grandpa was what everyone had called me in that family, and she’d been pretty much part of it for three or four summers. Damned if she hadn’t been a bit of a flirt back then, if I remembered. My mouth must have gaped like a walleye in a stagnant pond, the way she giggled. “So it’s Kate now? You’ve grown up a bit; your face looks like your mother’s.”

Kim groaned. A hint of a frown passed over the subject’s face, to be replaced by a determined grin.

“So they say. Just a summer job, Grandpa. Kim, he’s a good guy. We can trust him.”

Oh? Exactly what was I supposed to say to Kate’s family if and when it got out what she was doing, and it got out that I knew what she was doing and didn’t tell anyone that she was doing it?

Well, she was too pretty not to smile at. “Kathy, er Kate, it lays a bit of a burden on a person when you say flat out that you can trust him like that without asking permission. But your business is your business. We’ll get your motor fixed, don’t you worry about that.”

Kim looked relieved and tossed her head toward the stern of the boat.

I nodded. “Let’s take a look now. Ellie, could you roll the hoist out?” Pushing that big thing around made her feel important. She scampered off.

We had the engine disconnected and off the runabout in ten minutes, and soon on my test stand on the side of a big oval cow-watering trough. I hooked up my DC and hit the starter button. It popped, smoked, and didn’t catch. I took the cowling off, pulled a plug, stuck in the gauge, and cranked. Hardly moved the needle.

“What’s the diagnosis?” Kim asked, frowning.

“She’s premed,” Kate interjected with a smile.

Probably thought she was invulnerable to disease. But I nodded sympathetically. Our state rep had voted to increase tuition again, and I was beginning to feel guilty about voting for her. “It could be better,” I drawled. “Rings, or maybe a crack in the block. Happen all of a sudden?”

“Kinda,” Kate sighed. “Wouldn’t plane coming back in last night, though with six people on board I thought maybe it was just out of adjustment.”

Kim looked impatient. “Mr. Karlsson, a good night tonight might mean a whole class next semester, if you understand.”

“What do you do?” Ellie asked and I winced.

Kim rolled her eyes up but Kate knelt down to look Ellie in the eye and smiled. “I dance.”

“You’re very pretty. If I want to look like you when I grow up, do I have to take dancing lessons?”

Kate laughed lightly, “It wouldn’t hurt.”

Meanwhile, I had the starter and carb off, exposing the block. It had a crack. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

“Hit me,” Kim groaned.

I nodded. “The bad news is that it looks like you’ll need a new block and that’ll be three hundred seventy-five plus labor and two days before I can get it because it’s the Fourth of July. The good news is that Dick’s Rentals is open ’till noon. He should have something to get you around for the next couple of days.”

“We gotta get to Minneapolis tomorrow. Business.”

Ellie tugged on my trousers and pointed to Frog, maybe thinking Frog could fix the cracked block. For all I knew, he probably could, but I wasn’t about to count on it just yet.

“Oh! That’s a big frog,” Kate gasped. Kim rolled her eyes again. Kate sidled up to me, pressing herself into my bare arm and demonstrating that there was even less to those net tops than met the eye. “I could drive back up Friday morning, pay and pick it up if you can’t fix it today. Will you take it, please, Grandpa? The rig belongs to my uncle and aunt.”

“Please, Grandpa, I like Kate,” Ellie added.

I disengaged myself, perhaps a little abruptly in my embarrassment, and nodded curtly. “Can’t promise anything, but I’ve got to go into Brainerd tomorrow morning anyway. If North-star Marine Supply has something on hand, I can have it ready for you by noon.” It’s a two and a half hour drive back to the Twin Cities and I didn’t figure their kind of business started much before five in the afternoon. “Meantime, you’d better get over to Dick’s.”

Kim shrugged and nodded. Kate touched my arm again, her eyes saying: “You don’t fool me.”

“I’ll show them where it is!” Ellie offered.

Kim cracked the first hint of a smile I’d seen on her. “OK, then let’s move our rears. We’ll have her right back, Mr. Karlsson.”

I thought a minute, then nodded. I used to know Kate, but if Kim hadn’t smiled, I don’t think I would have nodded. Dancers my eye, I thought, but they seemed nice enough and Kate wouldn’t let anything happen to Ellie.

“There’s a slight problem with tomorrow, I fear,” Frog said as soon as they left.

“Oh?”

“We really have to be on our way tonight.”

“It’s the Fourth of July; Olsen’s closed today. Why do you have to go tonight?”

“Otherwise the beings I represent will experience significant difficulty.”

“Difficulty? Damn it, was this a matter of life or death, or being late for dinner?”

“You must be very discreet.”

“I won’t tell another human being.”

“More discreet than that.”

I should have guessed. It was that kind of day.

“Won’t tell any other frogs either,” I promised. “Now, what’s up?”

“They need to return to the base spacecraft before their—the closest English words would seem to be guardian, or perhaps godparents, but the emotional relationship is closer to that of a human parent. The literal translation would be ‘Egg Tender.’ At any rate, they need to return before they are missed.”

“Uh-huh,” I said with a smile, having been at both ends of that circumstance in my life. “Is there more to it than that? I wouldn’t want to get too far on the wrong side of the, er, egg-tender’s by helping the little Huck Finns.”

“Romeo and Juliet might, perhaps, be a more apt analogy, though I might concede a bit of Tom and Becky in the characters of these two. The salient feature is that their respective Egg Tenders are not good friends and the two lack the necessary approvals for spawning. The spawning pools of the observation ship were thus unavailable to them. Also, the eggs would not survive in your waters, and this saves the inconvenience of unregistered larva. So this was a convenient place. Their respective Egg Tenders are doing research at Lake Baikal, and will return to the observation ship very early tomorrow morning, by your local time.”

“And they left Romeo and Juliet home alone. Uh-huh.” I tried to explain to myself why I should care, and gave up. I did—maybe the Romeo and Juliet analogy was some very sophisticated psychological manipulation on Frog’s part. He certainly was very well informed. They probably watched a lot of Masterpiece Theater and what not up there.

“Frog, you seem to be taking Romeo and Juliet’s side of this, rather than the authorities.”

“A complex situation, I agree, particularly when unauthorized use of a vehicle is involved. However, the authority involved in Egg Tending is personal, not societal, and the vehicle and its motiles have primary loyalty to the vehicle passengers and must try to avoid their harm. Should they return undetected, no harm will have been done.”

So our societies had that much in common—one could do whatever one wanted as long as one did it undetected. “Whatever,” I answered.

OK, Olsen had the stuff, he wasn’t open, but this was an emergency—for someone anyway—and a challenge for me. That had to be it: the challenge of fixing an authentic spaceship. I could leave that problem alone as well as an itch.

“Well, we could try to reach Olsen at home. Wouldn’t get your hopes up, though. Mac,” I called out to my computer. “Call Thor Olsen at home.”

My ancient Quadra III Compact lived on an oil-blackened wood shelf next to my coffee maker, with a good mic and speaker hanging beneath the shelf on hooks. Between the voice interface software and my interactive parts catalog, there wasn’t room for a lot else. But I didn’t need a lot else. Pretty soon, I heard a dial tone, then Mrs. Olsen’s voice came on line to tell me they were taking the kids to Paul Bunyan Land and to please leave a message.

“Paul Bunyan Land?” Frog asked.

“Big amusement park in Brainerd. Gotta big huge talking robot of Paul Bunyan and all sorts of north woods stuff around him, some legendary, some historical. We’ll probably have to go there and try to find him. Shouldn’t be too hard; Thor Olsen is almost seven feet tall.”

“Is this, perhaps, the same Thor Olsen who played center for the University of Minnesota fifteen years ago?”

I nodded. “You bet. NBA wouldn’t take him though; too slow.”

“I remember an image from one of your television programs,” Frog replied, “and can update the apparent age of the image to his current age. Observe the monitor on your Quadra III.”

There was Thor, all right. I nodded. “Add a full beard to that; he had one almost down to his chest, last I saw.” The beard seemed to grow in a second, and I was looking at Thor Olsen the way he looked last week at the Sons of Norway barbecue at East Gull Lake. I nodded.

“So, we are off to Paul Bunyan Land,” Frog announced.

“I wanna go, too!” Ellie squealed, followed by the sound of the front office screen door slamming. I made another mental note to turn the air screw out a bit—the darn thing closed so slowly now that a customer could pretty much come in, get a candy bar out of my machine, read a magazine, pick up a repair job, and be on the way out again before it finally slammed shut. Well, maybe I exaggerate, but an early warning system, it was not.

“You were talking to that frog,” Kate observed, trying, not quite successfully to stifle a giggle.

“That’s because it’s a talking frog,” Ellie explained, impatiently. “Can I go to Paul Bunyan Land with you, please?”

“Uh, later Ellie. Hi, Kate. I’ve got another job that’s going to take me into town today—won’t wait, so I might get a head start on your engine if I can find the right block.”

Kate wasn’t paying attention. She walked over to the frog, and stuck out her hand. “I’m Kate, and you are?”

“Frog seems to do nicely.” Frog rocked back a bit and reached Kate’s index finger with its own little fivefingered hand. Except for a little webbing, leopard frog hands look quite human, I found myself thinking. Finger and hand moved up and down in a dignified simulation of a handshake.

“Glad to make your acquaintance.” Then she bent over and kissed Frog’s head, and laughed. “I’ve always wanted to do that. I wish I could stay to talk, but I have business. Kim’s waiting.”

“Another time, perhaps,” Frog replied.

“My pleasure.” Kate gave me that sincere, open look again. “Ellie told me about your family; she’s got a lot of grit. We’ll be in and out of Bar Harbor tonight. You know the boat.”

I gave her my best noncommital response. She gave me a quick smile and bounced out through the front office door. It closed so slowly that a momma mosquito could fly in, brood in my test tank, and her children fly out before it locked them in. I stared until the sound of it crashing shut brought me back to my senses.

“Could I come and watch Kate dance?” Ellie asked.

“That,” I chuckled, “I think, would be alter your bedtime.”

We didn’t head out for Brainerd and Paul Bunyan until two. An Evinrude came in with a carburetor problem; I replaced the fuel filter, and ran Gumout through it until the problem went away. A family limped in to dock with a methane-air fuel cell Merc Electric which had cracked the cork on its liquid methane dewar. I was able to match the threads with an LPG plug I had lying around, drill holes to fit the rest of the hardware and got them on their way. Next, against my better judgment, I patched the hull on a teenager’s jet ski with some superfiber and heat-dried it solid—the customer was in too much of a hurry for a fifteen minute sand-and-glaze, so he took it as was on a discount.

Then the front office was empty, so I consulted my internal Worst Case Scenarios service and set my “back-at” clock to five p.m. So, Frog, Ellie, and I were off in my old jeep down the highway, windows open, our hands diverting as much of the eighty-eight degree slipstream to our sweating bodies as possible. Off the lake, it was a scorcher with that kind of heavy before-the-storm feel. The forecast for the Fourth had been hot, muggy, and partly cloudy last I looked, but I began to get a feeling…

Ellie carried one of Terri Ann’s old bags that was big enough for Frog to hide in. It made her look older and that made me notice the way she was starting to fill out her T-shirt, which started me thinking that I should ask Marie to talk to her about wearing something underneath the next time we stopped in for crepes. Ellie was still a month short of her eleventh birthday and I thought I’d had another couple of years before I had to really start worrying about that kind of thing. But she was about five two already, and clearly running a little ahead of her age in all respects. It could be worse; the Ender kid had managed to get pregnant at twelve.

“Grandpa, did you hear what I was saying?”

“No, Ellie, sorry. I was lost in thought.”

“I just told Frog about all the Paul Bunyan legends, digging the Grand Canyon and everything, and he said if Paul’s a real robot, he might be able to do things like that. That would explain a lot, wouldn’t it, if Paul Bunyan were a big robot?”

I laughed. “Yes, if he were a robot, it just might explain a lot.”

It was a zoo when we got there. We checked with the Olsen’s answering machine from a pay phone, and it said they were still out, so we started wandering around the central square looking for a seven-foot guy with a beard. Turned out, there were a lot of big people around. The biggest, of course, was Paul, a twenty-foot animated giant sitting in a huge logframed stage next to a monstrous blue ox.

I lifted Ellie up on a fence post so Frog could peek out of the hand bag and get a good view without attracting too much attention.

“Possible target entering the lumber museum,” Frog announced.

He had better eyes than any human-made robot I’d ever heard of. I spun my head around and caught a glimpse of a big guy in a lumberjack shirt disappearing into the entrance of the huge log shed that housed the old-time lumberjack exhibits. So I lifted Ellie and Frog down and headed through the crowd towards the entrance. It took us a couple of minutes, and I thought I saw someone who looked like Olsen outside the museum two or three times, but I wasn’t sure.

The museum was crowded. In addition to all the nineteenth-century logging equipment, there were all sorts of cheerfully unecological murals concerning Paul Bunyan and his Blue Ox laying waste to the forests of North America, and various cheap ceramic sculptures of this or that having to do with Paul’s mythical entourage.

“Ahem,” Frog said softly, peeking out of Ellie’s bag. “Could you set me up on the shelf next to that china blue ox where I can get a view? I can pretend to be ceramic and fit right in.”

One of the people next to me looked around, puzzled. I smiled at him, he nodded and went about his business. I sidled back to the wall near the shelf, and when I thought no one was looking, I put Frog up on the shelf.

After a minute or two, Frog told us, as softly as he could, “It looks like he’s not here.”

“Momma! A talking frog!” shouted a sun-bleached blond boy who looked to be about six. “Who are you, Frog?”A curly-haired woman in a bright orange muumuu, who might have missed a session or two with Jenny Craig, turned and stared at Frog.

“I heard,” Momma answered. “Isn’t that cute?” She waddled up to Frog’s perch and poked at it with the red lacquered nail of her index finger. “Ugh, it feels real. What is it?”

“Ahem,” said Frog. “I am one of the frogs that got caught in the lumberjacks’ throats in the winter of seventy-eight.”

The woman stepped back, and a couple of other people turned around. There was no chance to grab Frog and run.

“It got so cold and miserable,” Frog continued, “that everyone had a frog in their throat because it was much too cold for us frogs to be outside of people’s throats. Paul saw that all this difficulty in speaking was getting in the way of cutting down trees, so he took his big kettle, the one that could make a thousand cups of coffee for a thousand men, and filled it full of snow. Then he chopped down a hundred trees to fire it, shoveled in more snow as it melted, and boiled a ton of water.”

“I get it,” the boy said. “It’s got a switch under its skin; you poke it and it talks!”

“Then,” Frog resumed in a stentorian voice that made interruption unthinkable, “Paul poured the hot water into a big frog pond near the camp, and it melted the ice and made the water so warm, that all the frogs forgot it was winter and hopped out of people’s throats and into the nice warm pond.

“Of course, the pond froze again, freezing all those frogs before they could hop back into people’s throats again. But it turned out that when spring came and everything got unfrozen, the frogs thawed and didn’t mind having been frozen that much. After all, encased in ice, there was no danger that they would be swallowed and eaten, which is the sad fate of many a frog-in-the-throat. So, that’s how we frogs learned how to hibernate.”

“How charming!” the little boy’s mother exclaimed. “Even if it is icky.”

Frog got poked again, and had to repeat the story over and over, trapped in its cover role. In the meantime, we weren’t getting any closer to finding Thor Olsen, and my worst-case scenario estimated return time of five P.M. was beginning to look a little shaky. I had visions of some family whose outboard wouldn’t start, and had to get down to an island in Wilson’s bay before sunset or lose a three hundred-dollar deposit on a cabin waiting desperately at my door, watching their vacation tick away and getting madder and madder.

Finally, I pushed my way back through people, intending to reach up and take Frog in mid-sentence and risk the consequences. I’d just raised my arms when the big robot Paul Bunyan called “Hello, everyone,” in a clear deep bass that penetrated through walls like the woofer of a boom box and everyone fell silent, including Frog. Paul’s vocal equipment had been upgraded, I thought, since I was a kid.

“The Paul Bunyan Look-Alike contest will begin in three minutes. Everyone that thinks they look like me should gather in the roped-off area just below Babe here. Again, everyone…”

Come to think of it, Thor Olsen would look a little like Paul Bunyan, especially if he wore a red lumberjack shirt. I didn’t know Thor so well that I thought I could pick him out of a crowd of big, full-bearded, guys in lumberjack shirts, however.

People were streaming out, and since Frog stopped talking, no one was hanging around. I held out my hands, Frog jumped down into them, and quickly slipped off into Ellie’s bag. We joined the crowd heading to the Paul Bunyan Look-Alike contest. I spotted Thor, with his wife and the kids, about halfway there. Elsa Olsen is six-five herself and that’s what clinched it.

“Thor, Thor!” I yelled. He turned his head, waved at me and kept on going toward the contest.

“Pagan!” a woman snapped at me.

I gave her a look and fought my way through the crowd toward Thor, hoping vainly that Ellie was able to trail along in my wake.

“Thor,” I huffed as I finally got close to him. “I need your help.”

“Oh, hello, Karl,” he greeted me, then took a look at his watch. “I’m due at the contest. It’ll have to be quick.”

I nodded. He really meant it, or he would have mentioned the weather. So I ignored the preliminaries too and just laid it on directly. “I’ve got an emergency hull job that needs some of that new diamond-aluminum composite Japanese stuff.”

“Diluminum.”

“Whatever. I need a four foot square of the stuff, right away.”

When a seven-foot, three-hundred-pound, giant frowns down on you, something happens to your self-confidence. I began to feel like I could probably explain things to that imaginary family whose vacation I was going to ruin by being late back to the shop.

“I, I need to replace the roof on my boat shed, too, so I’ll be needing about a thousand square feet. May as well pick that up, too.”

A twinkle came to the corner of Thor’s eye and he reached into his pocket and came up with a key.

“Go on over and start loading. I should be around in about an hour. Run you a little over three grand, I’d guess. But you’ll never need to roof again.”

“Whatever.”

We shook. I took Ellie’s hand and we started to work our way out of the crowd. We were almost out of the gate when someone hooked the handle of Ellie’s bag and dumped Frog and assorted things on the walk. Ellie was down in a flash, scooping stuff up, but not quite fast enough.

“Look!” cried a kid, “They’re stealing the talking frog!”

“Hey, he’s right. Hey you, stop!”

Someone grabbed my arms, someone else grabbed Ellie, and the kid’s mother grabbed Frog.

“RRRRibbit!” said Frog, and hopped out of the startled woman’s hand and toward the gate.

“Yuk, it’s real,” she screeched.

“Geeze it’s a big one!”

“I’ll catch it,” shouted half a dozen small boys, who ran off in hot pursuit of Frog.

The hands disappeared from my arms and melted anonymously into the crowd. The woman holding Ellie let go, backed away, and soon disappeared. I grabbed Ellie and headed for the parking lot. Somewhere in my head a small voice was telling me I was missing out on a major lawsuit.

The parking lot was swimming with frog-chasing small boys when we got there. We climbed in the jeep and in a quick moment of instant Grandpa-Granddaughter eye communication, didn’t shut the doors. It needed to air out anyway.

“Oh!” Ellie squealed as a green missile landed in her lap. “Am I glad to see you!”

“There it is!” shouted a young hunter, but we had the doors closed and were on our way before the disappointed frog posse reached us.

“We are becoming somewhat pressed for time,” Frog remarked.

“Especially if I have to load the roofing part of the buy. We’ll have to strap it to the roll bars, overhead.” I was not looking forward to lifting all that myself. But I shouldn’t have worried. When we got there, Frog was an amphibious dynamo. He located some angle iron and tongue-welded a couple uprights to the jeep’s roll bars to keep the Diluminum panels from sliding off. Then he hot-wired the forklift somehow. It was one of these new computer-driven models, so I guess he just cybernetically talked the thing into helping us. Anyway, by the time Thor Olsen got there we had her about all finished. The forklift was back where it had been parked, Frog was back in Ellie’s bag, and I was just tightening up the final tiedown.

“In a bit of a hurry, huh?” Thor remarked, looking very impressed. “That’s some heavy work.”

“I’ve seen worse. Got customers waiting.”

“Here’s the receipt. I’ll send a bill. And let me know how the roofing works out—I haven’t figured out a good way to fasten it yet. It treats drill bits like they were made of plastic.”

Now he tells me. How the devil was I going to be able to cut the stuff?

“Thanks for the warning.”

“No problem. You might keep an eye on the weather.”

“You bet.” I waved and he waved and we were off.

The trip back to Nisswa was a bit cooler with cloud shadows taking some sting out of the Sun. A shower or two would sure be welcome.

“Grandpa, it smells like rain,” Ellie said.

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Conditions are quite unstable,” Frog added. “Our models indicate the front has strengthened.”

I glanced at Frog in surprise. I’d kind of gotten used to him, but now this reminded me that Frog really was connected to, well, something bigger than the U.S. weather service anyway. Driving gives a person time to contemplate a lot of worst-case scenarios, and the rest of the trip was filled with a dark, juicy, suitably depressing worry. Just exactly what was I getting into?

We pulled up to the shop ten minutes late, and my worst-case scenario didn’t have it exactly right. But it wasn’t too far off. The irate family waiting for me to open turned out to be a black mother and daughter from St. Paul, and their boat was tied up by the boathouse with a broken spark plug wire. They’d actually rowed all the way in from Gull. Frog did something to the wire with his tongue while I had them looking the other direction and we got them on their way in fifteen minutes, in plenty of time to catch the fireworks at their resort. So they left all smiles.

It took another half hour for me to mark, Frog to cut, and Ellie and I to bend the shroud into shape. I figured we were starting down the home stretch; it was just a thirty-minute drive down to Steamboat Bay and we could rent a boat from Cragun’s or someone to take us out to the spaceship. From what Frog said he could do, installation would be maybe a ten-minute job in the water, so we’d be back by Ellie’s bedtime. I pulled on some swim trunks and threw a clean pair of work pants in my athletic bag.

Then I started calling around Steamboat Bay for a boat rental and discovered a flaw in my thinking. A last minute rental on the Fourth of July? With everyone and their uncle out on the bay fishing or getting ready to watch the resort fireworks display?

It could be worse. At least I hadn’t rented my wrecker out to someone. The Gull-Able was a flat bottom barge, gunwales lined with segments of old tires, with a square deckhouse and a winch crane. It could do maybe ten knots on its little diesel inboard-outboard drive. Gull Lake bends about fifteen miles north to south and Steamboat Bay is as far south as it goes and we are as far north, with thirty minutes of speed restricted channel between us and the lake. Almost three hours, I figured. So we loaded up some extra gas and Ellie, Frog and I putt-putted out of my service slip at about seven.

Frog said we were cutting it real close. I nodded, but told him I couldn’t get anything more out of this engine and still get there. Ellie would miss some sleep tonight, but then it wasn’t every day that one got a chance to play good Samaritan to some stranded extraterrestrials.

There was a bit of a breeze, but it was still hot as get out. Ellie wanted to take her shirt off, but I told her no, she was getting too old for that. We should have had almost two hours of daylight left, but it was dark as dusk so I put my running lights on. We were just under the bridge when I noticed all sorts of commotion at Bar Harbor. Flashing lights and County Sheriff cars.

“Grandpa!” Ellie shouted, “There’s Kim and Kate’s boat.”

That was it, all right, anchored just a ways offshore and rocking a little more than the waves seemed to justify, I imagined.

“No, it probably just looks like theirs,” I replied. All I needed was for Ellie to see Kate at work.

“I beg to differ,” Frog offered. “I am sure that boat is identical to the one on Kim and Kate’s trailer this morning. I suspect that it is considerably faster than this vessel, and that it could be hired with sufficient monetary inducement.”

“You got that part right, Frog,” I croaked, wondering if Frog understood irony.

“I will make good whatever it costs,” Frog added.

“Are Kim and Kate dancing on the boat?” Ellie asked.

A drop of rain hit me in the face. The runabout would be much more comfortable for what I thought we were in for. Ellie, I decided, was probably old enough to find out a few things. I headed for Kim and Kate’s boat.

“Ellie, about Kim and Kate. I think they’re done dancing tonight.” For the first time I could remember, I wished Ellie had gone to a big city high school; the kind where kids learn this stuff in the locker rooms and don’t have to embarrass their parents. Education at Nisswa Junior High kind of hits the high points and leaves the low points to the imagination. “Uh, you knowsomepeoplehaveboyfriends and girlfriends and wives and husbands to hug and kiss? But not everybody.”

“You haven’t had anyone but me since grandma died. And you don’t hug and kiss me that way.”

“Uh, right. Well, what I’m getting at is like, you know when their motor got broken and Kim and Kate rented a new one. Well some people kind of rent themselves out to people who don’t have anyone else to go out with. They aren’t supposed to, and we’ve got laws against it, but they do it anyway, for money. Now I don’t sit in judgment on the practice, but some people do and they can get very mean about it, so if you like Kim and Kate, you won’t tell anyone, OK?”

“I promise,” Ellie said, very seriously. “It’s like going sixty-five on highway 371, right?”

Kids have big eyes. I should probably have come clean then and there about innumerable other sins and explained that “Big Problem, little law,” wasn’t really the way people should live, and Ellie should do as I say, not as I do, but what I said was: “Whatever.”

We were near enough now for me to use the spotlight.

“Kim, Kate, it’s Karl Karlsson. From the marine service. I have to talk to you.”

“What the hell?” A male voice called out, followed by hushes.

It’s amazing how sounds carry over the water sometimes. There were some thuds and bumps and finally Kim emerged wrapped in a beach towel.

“OK Karlsson, this better be good.”

“Bar Harbor looks like a sheriffs convention.”

She looked back at Bar Harbor and saw the flashing lights. At the same time I saw a sheriffs boat start to untie from the dock. “Damn!” she said. “Kate, come up, we’ve got problems.”

Kate came up and I doused the spotlight. Not quite immediately, I’m afraid.

“Karl? Can you help us?” She asked.

“She’s not—” Ellie started.

“It’s OK, Ellie, it’s an emergency. Kate, I’d like to hire your boat to get us down to Steamboat Bay fast. Your friends could take the wrecker back. I know a dock they can use, real quiet. But we gotta move now.”

“I’ll do it,” she replied without any hesitation. “Come alongside.”

“Oh, God,” Kim groaned.

I nursed the wrecker alongside nice and easy, while Ellie and Kate handled the tie up and transferred equipment. Chores done, Kate smiled and shrugged. “I’ll be right back up.”

Ellie turned to Kim. “Grandpa told me about hiring dates. I think you’re pretty enough that you wouldn’t have to hire anyone if you just met people.”

Kim looked like she was going to choke.

“Ellie!” I barked.

“Ellie,” Kim said quietly. “We didn’t hire them, they hired us. I don’t happen to think it’s wrong when you really need the money, but it’s illegal and it’s something you just don’t talk about, OK?” Ellie nodded seriously. “One more thing I want you to remember, Kate is the best person in the whole world regardless of what anyone says about what she was doing with me, understand?” Another nod. “OK kid; I’ve got to go now.” Kim vanished into the cabin.

The two men came up first, looking embarrassed and lost, while Kim and Kate were having some kind of animated discussion in low tones. I figured I’d better break the ice.

“Karl Karlsson, boys. Sorry to bother you, but it could be worse.” I nodded to the sheriffs boat, which had just turned its engine over and turned on its running lights. “Can you handle this rig?”

“I’m Bill,” the taller one said and offered his hand after he scrambled aboard. He was really just a kid. “I grew up around here, I’ll get her in safe for you.”

“See that yellow light about ten degrees left of the harbor parking lot?”

“Got it.”

“Those people are in Minneapolis for the week. Just tie the Gull-Able up at their dock and you can walk back to Bar Harbor. I’ll pick her up tomorrow. Toss the keys in the deckhouse and lock the door after. I’ve got a spare set.”

“You bet. And thanks.” He shook my hand and went to check out the controls.

Then a big duffel bag hit my deck. I looked up and Kim and Kate had their arms around each other, fully dressed such as it went for them: shorts and tank tops.

“Are you sure?” Kim asked.

“Take it.” Kate insisted. “I want my amateur status back. You go get that M.D. I see what I want and I’m going to go for it.”

“Oh, god, just like that?” Kim stared at Kate until she nodded. “Well, take care, rookie.”

Kate nodded, they kissed, then Kim jumped onto the wrecker and looked at me the way a suspicious mother-in-law might look.

“Make her write, OK?”

“You bet.” Now wasn’t the time to try and figure things out; the sheriff’s boat had its spotlights on and was heading for us in the gathering gloom. “We gotta get going. You guys just drift a bit, lights off, in the dark. They should follow us. Got the shroud, and Frog, Ellie?”

“All on board, Grandpa. Got the ties loose too, except the one I’m holding.”

I could do worse in the granddaughter department. “Good,” I said, and jumped over into Kate’s boat pushing the wrecker away, along with Kate’s checkered past, I gathered. We let them drift about twenty yards in the freshening wind, then I pulled up the anchor and Kate started the engine. Dick had given them a Merc sixty, I saw. Ought to do twenty, twenty-five knots easy with that, maybe thirty.

“Turn on the running lights and head for that blinking light off the port bow,” I told Kate. “Just fast enough to plane.” Always keep something in reserve, I thought.

The engine roared and our nose went up, then settled down a bit, as we spanked the waves with our bottom in an irregular, surging rhythm. The lake was definitely getting rougher. I looked back and the sheriff boat was following us.

“Kate, why don’t you get below for a bit?”

She nodded and I took the wheel. The sheriff boat hadn’t turned on its siren or anything; it was just laying back and pacing us. I risked a little more RPM, and that did it; the rotating light and the two tone squawker came on, and the gendarmes rapidly closed the distance. I cut the throttle as they came alongside and gave the wheel to Ellie as we settled in. The spotlight played on us, and around like they weren’t seeing what they expected.

“Who are you?” the bull horn blasted.

“Karl Karlsson, of Karl’s Marine in Nisswa,” I yelled. “I chartered the boat to get to a customer with problems down south. The girl’s my granddaughter, Ellie. What’s up?”

Silence. Then: “We got a storm warning. Have you got life preservers on board?”

“In the deck box,” I yelled back, hoping the hell they were. On top of concealing space alien frogs, aiding and abetting ladies of the evening, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a boat safety violation would have just about done it. I recalled Garrison Keillor’s tale about the circus elephant with its trunk in some poor guy’s Volkswagen, getting food from his kids, and had visions of my headlines reading; “Investigation reveals grandfather error.”

More silence, then, out of the bullhorn: “Be careful. Lots of drunks on the water tonight.”

“You bet,” I yelled. “Thanks for the warning.”

And with that they killed the revolving light, revved up and headed back north.

“Can I gun it?” Ellie asked.

I nodded, and we were off. We found we could do twenty-eight knots, but I took over again and backed off to twenty-two to save the engine and fuel. The Sun peeked out from under the clouds to the northwest momentarily. It was still sticky hot, but the spray cooled us. With light to see again, I took us closer to the west shore, more in the lee of the wind, and our bumping backed down. It was an idyllic moment.

“Look, Grandpa, Kate, a rainbow!”

Kate was out of the cabin in a flash. “Oh, magnificent!”

“Could be worse,” I agreed. “Is there anything to eat around here?”

“Uh, a couple of cans of tuna, some granola bars—”

“I’ll take one!” Ellie shouted, having been reprieved from tuna.

“OK Frog, what keeps you going?”

“Anything that burns will be quite satisfactory. Perhaps a sip of your petrol?”

Kate and I had the tuna and we all cruised merrily along.

Then the rain started down on us.

“My shirt’s getting wet,” Ellie complained, and pulled it off and threw it into the cabin, daring me to say anything. Before I could say anything, Kate laughed, said “Mine too,” and did likewise.

Whatever, I figured. I pulled mine off and threw it in after theirs. We all laughed.

“Can Ellie take the wheel for a bit?” Kate asked.

“Yes!” Ellie said.

Who’s to argue? “Keep well out from the shore now,” I told her as she settled in.

Then I turned, and Kate had her arms around me, and her lips seeking mine. I kissed her back gently at first, then kind of let myself get into it. We cooled it before Ellie got too much of an eyeful and stepped away from each other, holding hands, eyes glistening. I don’t get excited about very much anymore, but this had me pretty worked up. Chemistry, I guess.

“You could use some help at the shop?” she hinted.

“Don’t know if I can pay a living wage.”

“Room and board will do for starters.”

“Kate, it seems like yesterday you were twelve years old and off limits. We’ve only had twelve hours to get to know each other, as, well, adults.”

“It beats twenty minutes,” she laughed. “Look, here’s what I know about you. You’re a competent craftsman, too honest to ever get rich. You’ve got enough of a sense of humor to listen to a talking frog and enough imagination to go with it. You care about helping people you hardly know, enough to take crazy chances. You’re loose enough to put up with a little girlish exuberance. You love the water and the wind the way I do. You’re fit enough that you’ve got at least ten more years in you than the calendar says. And you come with a kid that’s got my maternal instincts going crazy.

“What you know about me is that I’ve got a damn good body and I’m not afraid to share it. I’m adventurous and curious enough to team up with Kim for money. I just gave up six thousand dollars and my junior year of college for the chance that you’ll take me in. I really do take dance at the U, but I’m not that good, and it wasn’t what I really wanted. This,” she waved her arms around, “is.”

I glanced down at the deck. The rain had picked up to a bit more than a drizzle, the wind put a little chill into our passage, and I shivered. I looked out to the lake; the clouds above were lit from beneath by the lowering Sun in a riot of orange, white, and grays that seemed almost green. The far shore was golden and the whitecaps sparkled.

I looked at Kate, hope all over her face, water running freely over her shoulders, arms, shaking free of her breasts as they rose and fell freely and naturally with every wave we hit, running over her firm stomach, past her small navel and soaking the white shorts clinging to her boyish hips to near transparency. Sharing. Was Kate an “Ado Annie” who was all heart and just couldn’t say no? How would I handle that when other men became involved? Did she just want to be real good friends, or was she going for the rest of my life? Could I trust my business to Kate’s impulses, however warmhearted? Just how many foolish decisions could a man my age make in one day?

I looked at Ellie, a miniature version of Kate in her intense concentration, seeming to develop before my very eyes. How unconventional should I let her be? Was that really my choice? Would Kate be good for her, or make her a social outcast? How much did I owe society, anyway? Was Ellie old enough to make her own decisions about these things? All she’d seen was the up side: the cheerfulness, the joking, the freeness. Ellie hadn’t seen the down side of Kate: opening herself up to some fat, filthy pig for a few bucks. Ellie hadn’t been the target of schoolyard sniping and cruelty, which would happen as soon as Kate’s history got around, and which was a given in a town like Nisswa. Ellie hadn’t seen Kate turned away from jobs, get rejected by her family, told she could never run for office, or worrying about venereal disease because of a month of impetuous sophomoric wildness.

That made me mad to think about it, but I figured it would come, in a worst-case scenario.

But Ellie had spunk. She’d seen the downside of losing her parents and her grandmother, and bounced back. She was already showing her independence from the crowd, keeping her hair simple and functional, nails short, playing with mechanical things, and getting good grades at school.

Damn, Terri Ann, I wish you were here. You’d know what was best. Watching the water run over Kate made me think of that evening in Terri Ann’s dorm at Wheatson College when half a dozen of us, fortified with Mogen David and Seven-up punch, decided to streak the frat house in the rain, misjudged the time, and had to crawl back in through a bemused junior’s first floor window to get back to our clothes. “I’ve never felt so fucking alive in my life,” Terri Ann had gushed while catching her breath. They talked that way in girls’ dorms in the late sixties. I kinda let myself go, knowing it would be a little hard for Ellie and Kate to tell the rain from the effects of nostalgia.

I don’t believe in ghosts, but when you know someone real well, it’s as if part of them lives on in your mind, like a little semi-autonomous subroutine, just to answer questions like that. I could hear Terri Ann saying, as clearly as if she were standing next to me, “Let’s go for it.”

“Grandpa.” Ellie had to shout over the spanking waves and the engine noise as the exhaust occasionally rose out of the water when the nose of the boat went down. We were all having to hold on a little tighter. “Can Kate stay with us, please?”

“We’ll see, Ellie. Kate, I like you. I like you a lot. But we’ve got a lot more to talk about and work out before we do anything foolish.”

She nodded seriously.

“Some of it could be easier.”

She nodded.

“We could kinda feel our way through the rest of the summer, figure out if it’s what we really want…”

“Yippeee!” Ellie yelled, about that or the big wave we just went crashing over, I wasn’t really sure. Kate grabbed my hand and squeezed so hard I figured that she probably could help out in the shop.

“Excuse me,” Frog announced in a surprisingly loud voice. It was sitting on the dashboard, hanging on to the center windshield brace with both of its little hands. “We are approaching a funnel cloud formation.”

We looked up and there it was, underlit in the reds and oranges of the setting Sun, probing down our side of what was probably Sloan Point.

“Ellie, let me take over. Go in the cabin and put anything loose away and lock the latches.” I tried to gauge the drift of the cloud. North, and maybe a bit east. I swung us over toward the west shore and poured on the gas. The boat leaped forward in a leaping rolling motion as it struck the storm waves at an oblique angle. I edged the heading back south after we rolled almost ninety degrees.

Hanging on tight to a dock cleat, Kate dug out the life preservers, which were right where I’d told the sheriff they were. A squall hit us, wind whipping up to forty knots, I suspected, and my skin stung with hailstones. I couldn’t see Kate four feet away from me, and my heart almost stopped. Then things cleared up a bit and she was pushing a life jacket into my hands. She steered while I put one arm through at a time, holding myself down with the other. When I was set, she opened the cabin door, and timing a roll just right, slipped in to give one to Ellie.

Boat sense speaks well of a woman.

I got a glimpse of the cabin layout as she went. Bed-benches in a V shape running forward into the bow under the foredeck, a tiny closet of a head midships left of the door, to the aft deck across from an equally tiny galley. The floor was now about an inch deep in water. Ellie had a floorboard up and was bailing the bilge water into the six-inch galley sink. She had a gash on her head that she was ignoring. I looked for a bail pump switch, cursing myself for not checking it out better. It had one, and a little tinny buzz added itself to the rest of the racket.

We rolled up in a trough that must have been fifteen feet high, and for a sickening moment the lake looked like it was above me. Then we rolled back. I was too damn scared to get sick. By rights, we ought to be swimming for our lives right now.

On the crest, I could see the funnel cloud bearing down on us, just barely visible in the ruddy twilight. I think it touched the lake momentarily, throwing tons of water skyward, then shrunk back.

A downpour drenched me and the boat wallowed, far too heavy now. The engine vanished momentarily as a wave seemed to roll over us, coughed, and caught again, as the crest lifted us up and out, sending water streaming over the transom. The prop and exhaust screamed in open air and we lost momentum. Then the stern crashed down again and we leapt forward.

The rain let up a bit, but the wind turned ferocious. If we hadn’t taken on so much water, I’d have expected that gust would have capsized us. Tornado or not, I turned directly into the wind and waves, barely making headway, south.

The funnel cloud did a ponderous dance off my port beam, between me and the band of gray over the east shore, a black thumb sticking out of glowing clouds down to the lake. It was, I thought, I hoped, going by us. After a heart-stopping minute it did.

The wind backed off, to maybe thirty knots, from the north now. We surged forward as it caught us, and I eased off the throttle. The door opened, and Kate was by my side again.

“We’ve got flotation tanks in the bow and on both sides,” she screamed. “It’s supposed to be un-sinkable.”

“Thanks,” I yelled back. Now I knew why we weren’t swimming. “Frog, are there any more of those ahead of us?”

“No. In fact, it appears only partly cloudy behind the front. Not unpleasant, really.”

Behind the front, it was cool, maybe seventy as opposed to ninety, and I felt cold from the wind chill. We straightened out, and I started looking for the buoy off Sloan point, signifying the entrance to Steamboat Bay. I caught the strobe, eased to the right and backed off the throttle, managing to combine wind and thrust to head us toward it. We weren’t going to make it.

“Kate!” I yelled. “Can you pull the engine up by yourself?”

She looked a question, then grasped the situation, shouted “Yes!” and headed back to the transom.

I got as far west as I could, then cut the throttle as we brushed by the first reeds. “Now,” I yelled.

She struggled a bit, then rotated the prop up and out of the water. We crabbed sideways in the breakers, rose up, grounded on the bar, rose up on the next wave, grounded again, then floated gently in the lee of the bar into the bay. Despite the weather, the bay was starting to fill with running lights.

I pushed off the bar with the boat hook and Kate dropped the engine. In a minor miracle, it started. I got the running lights on again, gained headway, then put the stern to the wind and shifted to neutral as we drifted by the old Hunter Mansion. Did the family still own it, I wondered? I’d visited once as a kid and it was like going back to the previous century, servants, cooks, and everything.

“Ellie,” I called. “Want to trade for a bit? You steer and I’ll bail.”

She staggered up to the steps, but Kate stopped her and handed her her shirt.

“Lot’s of strange people around, Ellie,” she said. “Besides, it’s chilly now.”

Ellie gave a judicious nod, shrugged into the shirt, and climbed up to take the wheel. I slipped and sat down hard on the bunk bench opposite the little galley. I was exhausted.

“Me, too,” Kate sighed and bent down to continue bailing. I grabbed the pail. We had the interior waterline below the floorboards in another ten minutes; the pump could take care of the rest.

Done, she got out of her wet stuff, toweled off, snapped her net thing around her top, shrugged into a sweatshirt, and a dry bikini bottom all while grinning at me with the confidence of a bridge player that knew the only way to make the contract was to assume the unseen cards were in the right place. The last person that took me for granted like that paid for it with thirty years of marriage.

“Grandpa! Fireworks!” Ellie called. I heard a distant thump and a couple of bangs.

“I’ll be right up. See if Frog can point you toward his spaceship.”

“OK”

“I’d suggest a slight turn toward the left,” Frog told her. Then, “There, that should do nicely.”

“Karl,” Kate asked, “are you worried about a May-December thing? I’m not. I can handle it.”

“Uh, let’s not get ahead of things. Room, board, and work in the shop. If, and I say, if, things really develop in that direction, it might be a good idea if we take a trip to Ely, maybe in October after the first freeze, if things work out that long.”

That seemed to unsettle her. “You aren’t a deer hunter, are you? I mean it’s OK someone has to do it or they eat themselves into starvation, I know all that, it’s just that it’s not something I think we could share easily, but we don’t have to share everything, just—”

I held up a hand. “Nothing like that. I just want you to meet my folks. They rent canoes.”

“Your folks?”

“Yeah. Dad will be ninety-three in August. My stepmother is a couple years younger than I am, but she’s got a bad hip. Dad’s been taking care of her. Longevity, uh, runs in the family. Grandpa died when he got caught in a convenience store robbery in Saint Cloud and tried to stop it. He was a hundred and two.”

So if Kate was having ideas of being a middling wealthy young widow with a boat repair business all her own in her late thirties or early forties, well, she could probably do better.

But she giggled and kissed me. “Sounds better and better.”

The engine revved down and went into reverse, then idled.

“Grandpa, Frog says we’re here.”

We scrambled up to the deck. The night had changed dramatically; a fresh breeze was all there was left of the storm, and stars were peeking through billowing clouds, ghost-lit by a setting crescent Moon. We were about halfway to the island that splits Steamboat Bay in two, some distance from the fireworks and the rest of the boat traffic. It was warm again near the water; the brief cold front hadn’t done much to cool down the mid-summer-tepid lake shallows.

“They’re on the port side,” Frog said.

I got a flashlight and scanned the water, stopping at something that looked like a large propane tank floating on its side. But it had kind of a beach ball attached to one end by a lattice of open struts.

“I got it. The shroud is supposed to cover those struts, then?”

“Precisely.”

So this was an alien spaceship. I shivered as all the implications of Frog hit home again. It was too ridiculous to start with; then it had been one silly thing after another, Kim and Kate, and the overall significance of this really hadn’t sunk in.

“One would think you guys could do a lot for us,” I said finally.

“If we started, where would we stop? Oh there’ve been a few individual exceptions, but an effective large scale intervention would destroy your cultures—removing the checks and balances of war, disease, and aging would require compensatory checks on population growth which would, I fear, be vigorously resisted. And that is but one example. There have been some very large scale dynamic simulations on this, I assure you, and much may happen in the not too distant future. But for now, for most people, the cure would be assuredly worse than the disease. You have to come to understand the choices and make your own decisions. Not all members of all races we have encountered have wanted to accept the changes involved in easing even a harsh and brutal culture. It is not our choice, ethically.”

“You give me a look at heaven, and snatch it away.”

“To take your reference to heaven to mean eternal life, we cannot banish death; accidents and violence statistically limit biological life span even absent aging and disease. For snatching it away; as you are someone who risked so much for libertarian principle, I suspect you see the larger issue.”

Yeah, he had me there. I could see it all too clearly. What the hell do we do when chimps kill other chimps’ children, or tribal warfare, or superstition, breaks out among our fellow human beings? We sit back, take notes, and call it zoology, anthropology, peace and wisdom as long as we aren’t involved ourselves. We’ve no right to complain about the ethics of others not helping us.

“We’d better get this thing fixed and on its way.” I put the engine back in gear, edged us over to the spaceship and pulled it close with the boat hook. Kate tossed the anchor in.

The spaceship wasn’t quite as long as Kate’s boat. The upper part of the “beach ball” on the end of the tank was transparent. I saw immediately that it was a double sphere, the inner sphere freely rotating to keep down, down, no matter what else was happening. In this horizontal orientation, I could just see the edge of a platform in the transparent part, moving up and down with the waves. On that were what looked like two miniature army helmets side by side, each on four legs with long skinny jointed arms sticking out from under the helmets, each ending in a delicate spidery four-fingered hand. What looked like eyestalks protruded directly from the “helmet.” The left eyestalk of the being on the right was entwined with the right eyestalk of the one on the left. I didn’t need a degree to figure that out.

“Kate?”

“I’m here.” She was right behind me. I put my arm around her so the aliens could see it.

“Let’s wave.”

The two free eyestalks waved back.

“They wish to tell you of their thanks and relief,” Frog translated, “but they must hurry.”

“Right. Can they rotate that thing so it’s vertical, ball on top?” I asked.

“Certainly. They assumed their present attitude to reduce visibility and achieve some limited control over their movement.”

As I watched, the ball rose out of the water as the tank submerged.

“Ellie, we need the shroud. Wrap a line around it before you give it to me.” Didn’t want another one lost down in the muck. “Frog, time to get wet.” I was still wearing the life jacket, and I jumped in hoping it would keep me far enough up so I didn’t have to tread water continuously. It did.

There were sharp pieces of the old shroud stuck in the grooved fitting around the end of the tank. I was about to ask for pliers to try to pull them out when frog hopped up on the latticework and started to apply his tongue to the problem. The shards fell away, leaving a clean groove.

“Nice work,” I said. “Time for the shroud.”

Ellie handed me the shroud. The line wasn’t wrapped around it, but seemed to be fastened to it with a metal stud at a point opposite the open seam. I looked at Frog in the water next to me.

“What did you hold that with?” I asked.

“A rivet,” Frog said, “One, ahem, which I can readily undo once we have the shroud attached.”

“You bet. Let’s do it.”

Easier said than done. The shroud was a flapping, half bent piece of metal, and I quickly found I couldn’t get it into place by myself. I needed four hands. Kate saw me struggling, stripped off her sweatshirt and jumped in with me. More agile than I, she managed to wrap her legs around the tank and hold. Together, we managed to open the shroud enough to fit it over the latticework.

Frog’s measurements and cutting turned out to be almost too precise; it took a quite of bit of bending and worrying to get both ends seated. The seam didn’t quite come straight, overlapping a bit at the top and having a gap at the bottom, but Frog said it was close enough, and after he finished doing whatever he did with that fuzzy tongue, I couldn’t see the seam.

I knocked on the transparent dome. “That about does it guys,” I said, assuming Frog would translate. “Guess we’d all better be on our way.”

Something that sounded like crickets chirping seemed to come from the dome, but it might have been from shore. Frog was nowhere to be seen. Must have gotten on board the spacecraft somehow, I figured. But I didn’t need a translation to tell me that, even if it was a very small rocket, we didn’t want to be in the water next to it when it did its thing. Kate and I swam over to the ladder on the stern and climbed back in the boat. She got the engine going while I pulled in the anchor and we trolled out of there quietly enough not to draw too much attention to ourselves.

Ellie stayed in the back of the boat, looking wide-eyed at where we left the spaceship.

The fireworks display at the resort reached its climax then, and the sky to the south was filled with bursts, stars, and streamers right on top of one another so lavishly that I wondered what percent of everyone’s room bill went into it. Along the shore, various private cabin owners were lighting off their own rockets.

So when the one behind us took off, it didn’t really look all that different from everything else going on. Except it just kept going and going, up and over us and off through a hole in the clouds to the north. Kate cuddled up against my arm and whispered goodbye. Last we saw of it was a spark moving right by Polaris, maybe half as bright. Then it was gone.

“Wow,” Ellie said.

“Yeah, you don’t see that every day. I sure could use a cup of coffee for the trip back,” I hinted. Events had left me a bit drained, and I realized I was hungry too.

“I think I can manage that, and some granola bars. But why don’t we just anchor, stay here tonight, and head back first thing in the morning? We’ve got a couple of sleeping bags.”

“Yeah,” Ellie chimed. “I get to sleep in back, under the stars. Please?”

Kate giggled and snuggled against me more.

“Whatever,” I gave in. “You’ll have to throw in the anchor, though.”

Kate got Ellie settled and tucked in with a couple of granola bars, and we went below. Kate found the triangular piece that converted the bench beds on either side of the bow to one big, queen-sized, roughly heart-shaped platform.

“Uh, Kate. I’m kind of pooped and I suspect you’ve had about enough of you know what of the time being, and I wouldn’t—”

She put a finger to my lip. “No hurry.”

The last thing I remember was Kate snuggling up to me and saying “mmmm” or something like that. Then the sky was light in the east.

I found my bag, pulled on the work pants, went topside, and pulled in the anchor. It was a beautiful morning, but my thoughts had turned to more mundane things. I had a roofing bill of about three grand, another mouth to feed, and any promised payment from my erstwhile clients seemed beyond my powers to collect. I didn’t even have an address for the bill.

Ellie woke up and was out stretching in the rising Sun like some kind of Naiad. I frowned, but figured we were too early and too far from shore for it to bother anyone.

She caught my frown, and shrugged. “Grandpa, my clothes are still wet.”

I gave up and smiled at her. “Just be real careful about when and where you do that. Now it’s a little chilly and Kate ought to have a beach towel or something below to keep you warm.”

Kate came up just then wearing a big grin and carrying a couple of towels. She joined Ellie in the stretching and arm waving. Then they gave each other a high five and wrapped up in the towels. Some kind of female Sun ritual, I gathered. Could be worse.

“Ahem, I wasn’t frowning about you, Ellie. I was just worried about the uncollectable bill we acquired yesterday. I’ve got to pay Thor for all that roofing, and I don’t think I have the balance. Then we’ll have to pay Dick for the motor rental because Kate gave all her money away, and she won’t be able to pay us for fixing her engine, and I didn’t collect from our last customers yesterday because I was so embarrassed about being late back to the shop.”

Kate and Ellie nodded seriously, but blew it by giggling again. I shook my head and got the engine started after cranking a couple of times and playing with the choke. We’d need more gas, too; another thirty bucks. I left it on idle to warm up a bit. We’d asked a lot of it yesterday, and it was Dick’s engine. Maybe I could barter an overhaul. I shook my head.

“It all adds up, you know,” I groused. “Money situation could be better.”

There was a splash that sounded like a fish jumping, and a wet slap on the deck. I looked around.

“I’m sure something can be arranged,” Frog announced.

“Frog!” Ellie and Kate squealed.

I scratched my head. “Kinda surprised to see you, Frog, not unhappy, understand—just didn’t expect it. You sure you won’t be missed?”

“There’s little use for a robot of my unconventional configuration in space, and you do remember I mentioned that there are a few exceptions to the non-intervention policy? My talents might quietly increase the efficacy of your repair work, I should imagine. And a debt is a debt, is it not?”

“You bet. Welcome aboard then, Frog,” I said, just as if I had something to do with my own destiny. “You’ll start tomorrow morning. You too, Kate.”

Ellie cleared her throat.

I sighed. “Whatever.”

OK, I do have to admit Karl’s Marine Repair has been pretty prosperous ever since.