#
Some people said that we should have run Craphound and his kin off the planet,
out of the Solar System. They said that it wasn't fair for the aliens to keep us
in the dark about their technologies. They say that we should have captured a
ship and reverse-engineered it, built our own and kicked ass.
Some people!
First of all, nobody with human DNA could survive a trip in one of those ships.
They're part of Craphound's people's bodies, as I understand it, and we just
don't have the right parts. Second of all, they _were_ sharing their tech with
us -- they just weren't giving it away. Fair trades every time.
It's not as if space was off-limits to us. We can any one of us visit their
homeworld, just as soon as we figure out how. Only they wouldn't hold our hands
along the way.
#
I spent the week haunting the "Secret Boutique," AKA the Goodwill As-Is Centre
on Jarvis. It's all there is to do between yard sales, and sometimes it makes
for good finds. Part of my theory of yard-sale karma holds that if I miss one
day at the thrift shops, that'll be the day they put out the big score. So I hit
the stores diligently and came up with crapola. I had offended the fates, I
knew, and wouldn't make another score until I placated them. It was lonely work,
still and all, and I missed Craphound's good eye and obsessive delight.
I was at the cash-register with a few items at the Goodwill when a guy in a suit
behind me tapped me on the shoulder.
"Sorry to bother you," he said. His suit looked expensive, as did his manicure
and his haircut and his wire-rimmed glasses. "I was just wondering where you
found that." He gestured at a rhinestone-studded ukelele, with a cowboy hat
wood-burned into the body. I had picked it up with a guilty little thrill,
thinking that Craphound might buy it at the next auction.
"Second floor, in the toy section."
"There wasn't anything else like it, was there?"
"'Fraid not," I said, and the cashier picked it up and started wrapping it in
newspaper.
"Ah," he said, and he looked like a little kid who'd just been told that he
couldn't have a puppy. "I don't suppose you'd want to sell it, would you?"
I held up a hand and waited while the cashier bagged it with the rest of my
stuff, a few old clothbound novels I thought I could sell at a used book-store,
and a Grease belt-buckle with Olivia Newton John on it. I led him out the door
by the elbow of his expensive suit.
"How much?" I had paid a dollar.
"Ten bucks?"