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the suit design still has a couple of hoops to jump through.
Anyway, just to make sure, I’ll strap on my second-best until the final testing’s over with, and leave this with your grandfather. If anything unexpected happens—not likely at this point—he can hold onto it until you’re old enough to learn to use it wisely. Your mother and I have made other provisions, financial ones so you’ll never have to worry, but this is personal.
We both love you.
Your father,
Mac
    The tissue-plastic crinkled, loud in the empty room, covering up other noises Berdan wouldn’t have wanted anyone to hear. After a while he wiped his eyes on a sleeve and began unwrapping whatever his father’s briefcase contained.
    Inside the thin plastic lay, rolled up upon itself, a wide, heavy belt of the same color and texture as the case. Along its length were flap-lidded pockets, at least a dozen of them, containing one unfamiliar artifact after another. Berdan recognized an inertial compass and a big, unpowered folding knife.
    The belt hadn’t been cut straight, however, and it supported more than just a series of utility pockets. From the right-hand side, where the leather had been formed into a gentle, low-hanging curve, an open-topped holster had been suspended.
    And in the holster, dark-finished and deadly-looking, rested the bulk, inert at present, of an enormous fusion-powered Borchert & Graham five megawatt plasma pistol.
     

Chapter V: Spoonbender’s Museum
    The place did look more like a pawnshop than a museum as Berdan paced the sidewalk just outside the door, trying to make up his mind. In one hand he held a small zippered Kevlar bag containing everything he owned and cared about. From the other hung the leather-covered briefcase containing his father’s Borchert & Graham.
    No closer to a decision, he pushed through the membrane, hearing the annunciator—music, he supposed someone might insist on calling it—burst forth with Wagner’s Valkyrie played on a row of bicycle horns, in all probability by a trained seal, accompanied by an entire orchestra of bagpipes.
    A few feet in front of him stood a partition with two doors, one at either end of the small room the partition formed, and a single, barred, arch-topped ticket window. The wall itself was a riot of color and motion, ablaze with giant holograms.
    Spoonbender’s Museum of Scientific Curiosities
    —And Friendly Finance Company—
    Checks Cashed—Loans Arranged
    Music Systems Installed—Computers Repaired
    Fine Art While-U-Wait
    We Also Walk Dogs
    * * *
    The advertisement was repeated many times in several dozen different languages, not all of which were human in origin or which Berdan recognized. From behind the small counter at the window, a wrinkled, ropy, carrot-colored periscope with a black faceted lens the size of Berdan’s fist, peered out at the boy. “ Sorry, we’re closed today—deliveries at the rear! ”
    Berdan dropped his overnight bag and the briefcase and slapped both palms over his ears. It felt as though someone had stabbed his eardrums with a pair of icepicks.
    “Oh, I’m extremely sorry!”
    What had been an excruciating high-pitched squeal now became a normal-sounding human baritone, almost a bass. The orange periscope rose with a series of jiggling motions until Berdan could see it was rooted in what looked like an old-fashioned army helmet, painted fluorescent pink. From beneath its bottom edge a fringe of rubbery gray-green protuberances undulated as the freenie they belonged to, and whom they served as feet and hands, climbed up the ramp built for it behind the counter, crossed the surface to the window bars, and stuck its periscope neck and glittering eye out from between them.
    “Please forgive me sir or madam, I was just speaking to my mother on the ’com and forgot to downshift frequencies. I hope I haven’t caused you too much discomfort.”
    Sir or madam indeed . Berdan was indignant. Any member of a species boasting seventeen