Inventions

"So," I began hesitantly, "What all do you invent, anyway?"

Inventions didn't take his eyes from the e-mail he was typing. "You name it." He finished writing up a brief description of the grappling hook gun harness he'd just tested, and started attaching closeup pictures. Mercifully, none of the pictures featured the terrified assistant who'd been holding onto his back.

"You invent anything?" I asked. "Mechanical? Electronic? Hydrodynamic? Nuclear?"

"Yep," he replied. "Though I've only cranked out about three inventions that relied on nuclear processes." He snorted. "And one of them was just a better radioisotope thermal generator. Boring as hell."

That alone was impressive. "Spacecraft?" I asked.

"Nah," he said. "After my first two I lost interest. Everybody thinks space ships mean exciting space adventures. Hah! Now there's an oxymoron. Once you're out of the atmosphere, you're just coasting. And coasting. And coasting. With nothing between you and the next planet except the tiniest wisp of solar wind."

Holy cats. "Have you actually been to space?"

"Not officially," he winked. "Launching without getting international permission first is illegal, you know."

I gulped uncomfortably. "My gods. I'm almost afraid to ask if you've built a perpetual-motion generator or a time machine."

Inventions frowned. "Actually, I did invent a time machine."

My eyes practically popped out from their sockets. "A real — a time machine? A real one? A real Back-to-the-Future, travel-into-the-past, go-back-and-kill-Hitler time machine?!"

"I invented it three times, as a matter of fact," Inventions said. "First two times, future me came back to the present and prevented me from inventing it. The third time . . ." He looked uncomfortable. "The third time, Adolf Hitler came forward to the present and prevented me from inventing it."

I shook my head, trying to come back to my senses. "How many patents have you filed, anyway?"

"None," he replied.

"You're an accomplished inventor," I asked incredulously, "And you haven't filed any patents?!"

"Well, I haven't. Sandy always does it for me."

"Who's —"

"Sandy," he finally turned to look at me, "My patent lawyer. Well, not my patent lawyer. I mean, he's his own person. They outlawed slavery in, what, 1865? But he pretty much makes his living filing patents in my name. I send him the relevant details, he fleshes them out into a proper patent application and sends them off to the U.S. PTO. He also draws up the contracts for royalties on the patent rights, and sends me my cut. I haven't checked the books in a while, but I think he's still splitting the proceeds fifty-fifty. Half for me, half for himself and Chan."

"Chan?" I asked.

"Sandy's business partner," Inventions said. "He's the one who really knows how to find buyers for the patent rights. I suppose the two of them could both be screwing me out of a lot of the deals, but it's not likely. They know what a cash cow they have in me. If they screwed me over on one invention, they wouldn't get to reap the benefits of anything I invented afterward. Keeps 'em honest. They're probably multimillionaires right now, at least. All I care about is paying the rent on this shack, and keeping myself rolling in equipment and parts."

I half-chuckled. "And keeping the lights on too, right?"

Inventions shook his head. "Not an issue. This building's off-grid."

I squinted. "How are you powering it?"

"Solar panels, up on the roof. With a battery bank of my own design in the basement, for when the sun isn't shining."

I frowned. "Your rooftop's big enough to provide that much power?"

"More than big enough," Inventions said, turning back to his keyboard. "They're Pamu photovoltaics."

"Uh," I scratched my head, "What are those?"

"You've never heard of Pamu photovoltaics? They were all over the solar power trade journals for a while."

"I don't read any —"

"They're another one of my inventions," he said with a twinge of smug. "Twice the efficiency of the best cadmium solar cells. NASA is hugely interested in 'em for satellites and probes to the inner planets. Only problem is, their manufacture creates a lot of really nasty pollutants. They'll probably never be commercially viable for land-based power generation; no sane government would license anybody to manufacture them in bulk." He smirked. "Of course, the ones on my roof were never manufactured for sale."

He finished the last attachment and hit Send. "Now get back to your anthraquinones. No one's manufactured T-Stoff since the fall of Nazi Germany, so I can't exactly pick some up at the corner drug store."

"Sure thing," I said, and headed back to my workbench.

I'd just made it there when someone started knocking on the front door. The knocking quickly became a hard pounding. I looked over at the door, and at that instant, it flew open. The sun was behind our unannounced visitor, making it hard for me to make out details — but the shadow he cast on the floor was . . . impossible! It was the silhouette of nothing but bones. I could see daylight between his ribs, and between the bones of his forearms and forelegs, and the gaps within the palm of his hands. And the head didn't look like a head, it looked like a skull.

I blinked, and as my eyes adjusted to the glare, I could see our guest directly. He was exactly what his shadow said he was. A skeleton. A standing, walking, clattering skeleton! There was no skin, no muscles, no cartilage, no ligaments, nothing to hold it together and nothing that could possibly be making it move. Just bones, banded together in the shape of the skeletons you might see in an anatomy classroom, and somehow, impossibly, walking into the room.

"You still here?" the skeleton said. It spoke! No lungs, no voice box, presumably no tongue, and yet here it was, moving its lower jaw and articulating perfectly understandable English words. It was talking to Inventions. "You're so predictable!"

"Oh no," Inventions moaned, burying his face in one hand. "Not him again."

Without taking his eyes off Inventions — or rather, without taking his eye sockets off Inventions — the skeleton pointed at me. "I see you've bamboozled another unwitting peon into slavery." He started walking toward me, foot bones clattering on the hard floor. I shuddered. "What scared away the last one? Your reckless endangerment, or your egomania?"

Inventions sighed, and gestured toward the terrifying assembly of bones stalking toward me. "Sam, meet Dr. George Herkamer."

The skeleton stopped, and whirled to face Inventions. "George Herkamer is dead! I am the Skeleton Monster!"

Inventions snorted. "And you say I have a flair for the dramatic!"

The Skeleton Monster turned back to me again, and said, "You know, I'm feelin' thirsty." He clattered all the way up to my chem station, and grabbed a half-full beaker of clear liquid off the workbench.

"Don't!" I gasped, "That's caust—"

He raised the beaker to his jaws and poured its contents down his non-existent throat. The liquid fell clean through between his bones and splashed onto the floor. I finally jumped up and away to avoid the splatter. That was damn near pure hydrogen peroxide that had been in that beaker. It would take my skin off. Just breathing the vapor could scar my lungs.

"Ahhhh," the Skeleton Monster said when he'd finished "drinking." "That hits the spot."

"You wanna play tough, huh?" Inventions stomped over to the glass-covered box on the wall — the one that read "IN CASE OF SKELETON MONSTER, BREAK GLASS" — and broke the glass. From inside, he pulled out a black handle with a spiked metal ball on top, and brandished it. It was a mace. A medieval mace! The kind you might see at a gathering of the Society for Creative Anachronism. He walked forward, swinging the top-heavy club left and right so haphazardly I was afraid he'd hit one of his own inventions. "You wanna play tough?" He deliberately smashed a nearby tabletop. "You want some o' this?!"

The Skeleton Monster cringed, visibly cowed. "Now now, take it easy!"

Inventions approached, mace in hand. "You've got your own damn lab. Get the hell out of mine!"

"Easy, easy!" the Skeleton Monster said, scampering for the door. "I'm not here to ruin your stuff this time, I'm here to challenge you!"

"Challenge me?" Inventions puzzled.

The Skeleton Monster pointed back at him from the doorway, and spoke deliberately. "Pedal. Powered. Car Race."

Inventions put his hands on his hips, never letting go of the mace. "You've gotta be kidding me."

"Your design against mine," the Skeleton Monster continued, undeterred. "Each of us the only occupant. Danson racetrack, tomorrow noon. Ten laps — no, two laps, so you won't have any excuses about muscle fatigue."

Inventions chuckled. "You really think any car you could build would stand up to one of mine? I doubt yours would actually hold together all the way to the finish line, much less —"

"Two! Laps!" the Skeleton Monster insisted, holding up two skeleton fingers. "And I will beat you this time!"

Inventions let his mace hand droop. "All right, George, you're on. I'd say it's your funeral, but you already had one of those years ago."

A skull has no facial expression other than an eerie smile, but I swear I could almost see the Skeleton Monster fuming with rage. "Tomorrow at noon," he wagged a finger at Inventions, "And I will win, mark my words!"

He stormed out and slammed the door shut behind him.

Inventions strolled back toward the box he'd gotten the mace out of. I gathered what remained of my wits, and asked, "Wh—who —"

"The late Doctor Herkamer," Inventions said. "Old rival of mine. A pathetic second-rate inventor with delusions of grandeur, if you ask me. He thought he'd found the secret to immortality, so he tested it on himself. Turned out it only made his bones immortal; the rest of him pretty much disintegrated." He replaced the mace in the box, then opened a cupboard next to it and pulled out a replacement pane of glass — already stenciled with the right words — from a stack of at least fifteen identical panes.

I blinked in bewilderment. "And you're gonna . . . race it — him — tomorrow? In a car you'll be pedaling yourself?"

"Looks like it," Inventions said. He'd already finished repairing the glass-front emergency box. It looked as though it had never been used.

"So, how close to finished is your pedal car?"

"Not at all," Inventions shrugged. "Haven't started building it yet."

"And you're racing it tomorrow?" I said.

"I know, right?" Inventions replied. "That's way more time than I'll ever need. I could do a custom paint job, scrape it off, and put on another one, and that still wouldn't use up all the time George is giving me. It's like he's handing me another win on a silver platter."

Without another word, he threw himself into one of the lab's many piles of would-be junk, and started tinkering away. I glanced back at the emergency mace cabinet, and figured I'd better sweep up the broken glass.

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