The Stranger - Max Frei [290]
“Now that makes me prick up my ears,” I said grinning. “It’s a painfully familiar state.”
I sped up so that talking wouldn’t be necessary.
We drove into Echo at dawn. Even Shurf’s boldest predictions turned out to be too modest. Noon, had he said? When we arrived in Echo, a fat, pleasant-looking sun had just begun to peek over the horizon, trying to figure out what people had managed to do in the short time it had been away. I waved at the puffy-cheeked luminary and turned into the Lane of Northern Paths. Oh, what a beautiful name! I had never heard it before. I had to slow down considerably, but there was nowhere to hurry to, and Echo in the morning seemed to me to be the most beautiful place in the World. In this World, in any case. In other Worlds there were a few rivals. But now Echo was the best place in the universe, because I was coming home, and my heart loved what it saw, without regretting what it had lost.
“You’re going to take a wrong turn,” Lonli-Lokli warned. “What’s wrong? Don’t you know this part of town?”
I shook my head, and Shurf took the task of navigation upon himself. After a good earful of his instructions, I noticed with surprise that we were already on the Street of Copper Pots, approaching the House by the Bridge.
“Are we here?” I was even short of breath from anticipation.
“We’re here. I’d like to go home, but I guess my wife will still be asleep. At this hour she won’t even be glad to see me, all the more since I don’t look like myself these days. You know, she didn’t care at all for Sir Glamma Eralga.”
“It would be convenient if Sir Kofa happened to be on duty. He could reverse the spell right away.”
I parked the amobiler by the Secret Entrance to the Ministry of Perfect Public Order, and was suddenly stupefied. The vehicle began to disintegrate. Lonli-Lokli’s reaction was lightning quick. His arms shot upward, then dropped slightly to his sides, and tiny strands of metal and wood remained poised in midair.
“Get out of here, Max!” he roared.
He didn’t have to ask twice. I flew out of the amobiler like a bullet. How I managed to grab the carton of cigarettes remains a mystery to me to this day!
I turned around when I was already in the hall. Shurf was pensively removing our traveling bags from under the debris of the amobiler.
“Give me a hand. What are you looking at?” He smiled as naturally as if he had been doing it for the last hundred years.
“You really are a fantastic racer, Max, if I do say so myself. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life!”
“If there’s anything this guy can do, it’s travel far and travel fast,” a familiar voice sounded from behind me.
I turned around and stared at Sir Juffin Hully in delight.
“You wouldn’t believe me, Juffin, if I told you how long I’d been waiting for this meeting,” I said in the ingratiating voice of Sir Mackie Ainti, and burst out laughing at the unexpectedness of it.
“Stop it, Mackie!” Juffin exclaimed merrily. “I can’t listen to that. Now try to greet me again, Max.”
“Juffin, what’s going on?” I said in my own voice, and laughed, my head a-spin.
“That’s better. Good morning Shurf. This fellow totaled the amobiler, just as I predicted. And it was an official Ministry car, if I’m not mistaken.”
“He’s a superb racer,” Shurf insisted, dragging his valuable carpet out of the rubble. “Max, perhaps you’ll help me with this?”
I grabbed the bags nimbly, leaving my friend to deal with the carpets, and Juffin and I went into the office to drink some kamra and shoot the breeze. The prospect was so tempting it made my mouth water.
I got carried away, and talked without a break for four hours.
During that time, Juffin had managed to return Shurf’s own natural-born face to him by some surreptitious gesture. (“It’s easier to destroy than to create, boys. Why should we wait for Sir Kofa?”) I was even slightly shocked at first. I had completely forgotten what Shurf looked like.
“So that’s that story,” Lonli-Lokli drawled thoughtfully