OF COURSE WITH an extravagant signature like that, Teasel Marchmont had to be an entrepreneur. Only it appeared such glories were very much over as he washed dishes in a down-market eatery at the back of Savoury Drive. He seemed a forlorn figure. Blomp watched him discreetly while he officiously inspected the kitchen of the Stuffit Inn. The manager was most helpful on the qualifications of his employees.
'Good lads, most of 'em,' he said. 'Nice and clean. Take that Teasel there,' and the man flinched on being noticed, especially where any sentence spoken in his hearing implied being taken somewhere. 'Quiet worker, well organised. Likes the late hours he does. Got a future in scrubbing things clean, a vocation, a lifetime of it perhaps.'
'Seems fitting,' Blomp said inscrutably and then changed the subject to floor scrapings before pretending to sign off on a certificate which would be delivered to the establishment in due course.
'What organisation did you say you worked for again?' the manager said as he mopped his brow with relief and showed the bulky figure the back door, lest customers spotted him.
'Fit To Eat,' Blomp said casually. 'Check our on-grid presence. You might find you've been awarded a Spit Mark.'
'Excellent, good day.'
'Indeed,' and the Tinker quickly sauntered along Savoury Drive in search of a connecting route to the Wisdom District, which quite wisely kept well clear of certain areas of Cherryball Flats.
It was his favourite district for here would be found attempts by mortal beings to fathom the eternal by the instrumentality of induction. Unravelling the mechanism of the universe was great fun in its way but could be overwhelming to some, especially those on the cusp of intellectual revelation, those troubled individuals known affectionately as students.
A little knowledge goes a long way, dangerously at times and in the corridors of Academia that knowledge could trip up the most conscientous investigator.
It took a while for Tinker Blomp to find him, and when he did so he realised he had been just in time to save a talented mind from an irretrievable meltdown.
There he sat in a garden shed away from distractions known to some as parents. He was surrounded by printouts and flickering tablet screens that showed graphs and figures and three dimensional gridography that impressed the Tinker not a little.
Stane Mallix had the seed of genius in him. Shame really.
'Relax, boy,' Blomp said softly as he saw the fretting figure scan documents with desperate gestures. A hand gently resting on the squat figure's shoulder seemed to relax him a little. 'It has been taken care of.'
'Really, uh professor?' a croaking voice said. Curious how Blomp's officious persona was perceived as a professorship to this lad, the Tinker observed to himself quietly. Curious indeed.
'Yes. You were right in everything you did, except for that decision to take on the assignment in the first place. That was a bit of poor judgement. Singing rockets, hmn?'
'It did seem silly in retrospect,' Stane replied, relaxing enough to let some of the papers fall to the ground in front of him. Blomp took one up.
'See, this is quite right, in line with Mole's gravimetric algorithm.'
'You know about it then? This distortion of the fundamentals, professor?'
'Ah yes. A bit of a quantum anomaly got entangled in the machinery I'm afraid. Got called in to fix it. Check your figures again with the source data.'
The engineering student did so, having refused for so long to look at what seemed to him an inexplicable impossibility of universe-distorting proportions. Such a supposition had made him physically sick and he dared not glance over such an abomination again. Yet there was no hesitation this time and he plunged right in.
The expression on his face changed. His eyes brightened at what he was seeing. The error was not his, the error was not a world out of sync with reality. The error was a typo caused by a quantum array insertion amid crucial energy level vectors. Obviously.
'So my rockets would have done as they were supposed to,' he cried happily, looking around. 'Professor?'
He found himself alone, except for what looked like an ower note on the floor just by a slowly closing door. Stane Mallix went over to it, stretching stiff limbs for he had been squat down for some hours in turmoil, and gazed at the slightly grubby rectangle of this paper. He recognised his signature and an unreadable scribble that must belong to the advertising guy. Briefly he wondered what happened to him and whether it might be possible to get in contact with him again. Then he flipped the paper over, noting something was written there in strange emerald ink with a metallic sheen.
'Don't even think about it,' was all it said.