Unpopular Science

Unexpectedly he was free and he crashed onto his feet. If he hadn’t landed on sand he might have snapped a bone.

“Ouch! That hurt!”

“Lower your voice,” Remo growled.

Howard glared at the village. “We’re a half mile away.”

“It’s the desert. Sound carries. You already woke up everybody in town with your racket and your lights.”

“I didn’t see anybody.”

“Yeah. They saw you and everybody was wondering who the fool was who didn’t know enough to douse his lights and turn off his car when he comes into a sleeping village.”

Mark Howard was getting his wind back. “Remo, look,” he said angrily. “I’ve got about a hundred reasons to be pissed off at you right now. You refuse to stay in communication with us, you ignore our messages, you make me come down to get you in person! You know how long I’ve been wandering around Arizona trying to find this place?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care. Go home.”

‘Tm not going home. I came here to give you a mission briefing.”

“A mission briefing?” Remo asked incredulously. “Listen, braniac, did you or the emperor in the ugly clothes ever stop to think about why I put up the Do Not Disturb sign?”

“We need—”

“It’s so I won’t be disturbed.”

“We have a situation that requires your involvement.”

Remo folded his arms on his chest, staring at the village. It wasn’t just that CURE was interrupting his vacation time; it was that Sun On Jo had been violated by this intrusion of Remo’s other world. “Junior, go tell Smitty I don’t want a mission briefing and I don’t want to be involved in any situation. I want to have some time. That’s all. Just a few days of peace and quiet.”

Mark Howard was fretting. “Do you know what we had to do? It was an intolerable breach in security to try to reach you through Mr. Roam.”

“Speaking of intolerable, go away.”

“Remo, we need you to do your job.”

“I’m not a doctor. Junior. I’m not on call one hundred percent of the time, okay?”

“Your contract says you are,” Howard replied. Remo rolled his eyes to the brilliant night sky.

“It does?”

“Yes.”

“So what?”

“So you’ll be in violation of your contract if you refuse this job.”

“In three or four days, I won’t refuse it. Come back then.”

Howard’s face became stony. “In four days the U.S. might not have a functional military.”

Remo waited. Howard waited, too, and he was deadly serious.

“Do we really need a functioning military?” Remo asked hopefully.

Howard said nothing.

“Aw, crap.”

Mark Howard was surprised to find several men gathered around his little rental car, which was sitting on its rear fender and leaning with its roof against an adobe wall, exposing its underside.

“Hey, you can’t do that!” Howard barked. “You’re gonna scratch it all up!”

The gathered men turned to Mark Howard with faces like dark auburn sandstone, their features sharpened by the harsh blaze of a drop-cord light hooked to the underside of the car. They began to chuckle, a low grumble.

“What’s so funny?” Howard demanded.

‘You the prince we heard so much about?” asked the only young man in the group.

Mark Howard didn’t know how to respond to that.

“Got a message for Smitty,” said Winner Smith. “Will you take a message to Smitty for me?”

Mark Howard looked desperately at Remo, who was no help whatsoever.

“What’s the message?” Howard asked, as noncommittal as he could.

“‘Rot in hell, you pale-faced son of a bitch,’” Winner said. “Got it?”

Howard’s brain was spinning.

“What’s the matter with the car?” Remo asked.

“Bent rim,” Sunny Joe Roam replied. “Oil leaking from somewhere. Suspension’s whacked out of joint. You’re about to lose this transmission.” Roam cast a benign gaze at Howard. ‘You went off the road, I guess. I told you not to come out here in the dark.”

“I tried to follow your directions,” Howard protested. “It would help if they had road signs out here. I bottomed out in a creek bed.”

There, were more chuckles from the men. “Road signs,” Winner said. “Why didn’t we think of that? I’m going to go write my congressman right away.”

“It’s not driveable, is it?” Remo said.

“Someday, who knows?” Sunny Joe said. “But not now.”

“Fine. We’ll take mine.”

Howard shimmied nervously into the precariously propped-up car and retrieved his bag as Remo quickly and quietly said goodbye to the men. Then, while Remo went into a nearby house, Mark stood there, trying to not look uncomfortable and failing miserably. It wasn’t that the Sun On Jos were trying to be unfriendly—except for the jerk who didn’t even look like a Native American—but it was clear to all present that Howard was an outsider and not necessarily a welcome one.

Remo emerged from the house with his luggage, which consisted of a sleeping mat rolled around some new, still-in-the-plastic shirts and pants exactly like the chinos and T-shirt he wore now.

“C’mon, Junior.”