I really should come down here more often, Josse thought as he reached the bottom of the steep stairs that led into Chlurp’s cellar. The vast, hidden space under the polished floor of the warehouse café seemed even more cluttered than usual, with assorted apparatus blinking away, shelves of mystery supplies lining the walls and crates of unexplained tools every which where.
And of course, right in the middle, the stricken spacecraft hovering two feet above ground, securely tethered in place to stop it bobbing away at the tiniest nudge. A contact-avoidant hull is a great safety feature, but it tends to get tiresome when you’re dealing with dents and bent frames.
Josse’s arrival with Minuit by his side elicited a cheerful wave from the hostel’s resident alien, who was dangling above the craft’s access iris from the end of a boom. A short burst of symbols zipped across the midriff display of his exosuit, likely echoing his gurgles of welcome.
“Hey Chlurp,” Josse called out as he waved back. “Do you have a minute?”
Minuit’s translation of this opening gambit flashed across the space’s multiple TV screens. There was at least half a dozen of those, all strategically positioned by the ET to ensure that he could always see at least one.
“Sure,” Minuit translated back. “Just let me get down from here and I’ll be right with you.”
The man and the cat looked on as the alien pivoted the shuddering boom to one side, lowered the end and unclipped his harness.
“What can I do for you, Jos*?”
“We have a bit of a problem,” Josse replied. “We have to let an outsider in in two days. He needs access to the back wall, and he can’t see your stuff. Everything needs to look… perfectly unremarkable.”
Once upon a time, he might have said ‘normal’. Since then, he had learned that normality is in the eye of the beholder – far too vague a term to accomplish useful results.
“No problem,” Chlurp replied via Minuit. “The possibility had long since had my flora clumping.”
“It had what now?” Josse shot Minuit a puzzled glance.
“Go figure; this is translated word for word. My vocabulary is still very basic – idiomatic expressions go way over my head.”
“What’s your best guess?”
“My best guess is he had a gut feeling.”
“Ah,” said Josse, redirecting his attention to Chlurp. “So you had a hunch, is that right? And you’ve worked out a solution?”
“Well, I have many, many large bits of tarp,” Minuit channelled in response. “And I have this!”
The alien stepped forward and punched a large red button set on the wall. From below Josse’s feet, a mechanism in the floor responded with a sharp hiss.
“You might want to step back.”
An entire brick wall rose out of the ground in front of their eyes, sealing off most of the cellar. It even had a convincing old door, of the much-painted, abundantly chipped wooden variety with a wobbly handle. All anyone would see as they came down the stairs was an empty corridor.
“How did this wall pull up so quickly? It must weigh several tonnes!”
“Hollow bricks,” Chlurp replied.
“Mais encore?”
“Not sure,” Minuit replied. “He’s saying something about a reverse 3D printer using pulsed antimatter jets. Subtractive rather than additive.”
Josse knew next to nothing about antimatter, but some very distant memory chimed in about particle accelerators, containment and vast quantities of energy. All of which coalesced into one single question.
“How?”
“Apparently, that thing over there is not a fridge, and for some reason it contains a tube of plasma that accelerates a tralala-schtroumpflala to create a wikiwakeywhatsit.”
“OK, I have lots of questions, but I don’t have time. That said, who’s paying for the electricity?”
“The process produces its own power, apparently, with plenty to spare. He says he’s got much of upstairs hooked up to the device. The espresso machine and the jukebox, plus the glitter ball and all the stage lighting. He says not to worry, though – he uses teeny-tiny pulses in the attogram range.”
“Oh well, that’s alright then,” said Josse, who had no idea what any of it meant, and who wouldn’t have recognised an attogram even with a label attached. He was just relieved that Chlurp seemed to have it all under control.
Still, the whole thing seemed extravagantly insane; he couldn’t let it lie.
“But why not just make hollow bricks if you wanted hollow bricks? Or, better yet, why not just build a nice plasterboard wall?”
“Where would have been the fun in that?” Minuit aptly conveyed Chlurp’s apparent surprise. “And would you really want me firing bricks down here?”
Whereas cobbling together a makeshift particle accelerator and blasting the masonry with antimatter had clearly appeared perfectly normal in the eyes of this particular beholder, so far as Josse could tell.
“There are quite a few pursuits I would have blacklisted if they had ever occurred to me,” Josse replied. “We’ll debrief this whole thing later. But, just out of interest, how come your hollow bricks don’t collapse?”
“They’re lined with that new compound Mistress Adelphine invented,” Chlurp belched, according to the cat.
“Oh yes,” Minuit commented under his own steam. “Remember when Adelphine accidentally created the world’s hardest candy? And had to throw away the pot, with the spoon still stuck in the stuff?”
It appeared that she had shared her invention with the alien, for possible use as additional shielding on his return journey home.
* Josse or Jos? Minuit, Chlurp and just about everyone else these days use the more contemporary name. The difference matters only in writing, obviously, as the pronunciation’s the same, but there’s only so long an immortal can go unnoticed with a medieval moniker that’s fallen into disuse. That said, he’ll always be Josse to Adelphine, who knew him before, and to Tildie, who knows who he is in his heart.