Jojo shrugged gracefully, and seeing that Charlotte began to hate her in earnest. Either she was pretending to be ignorant or she was a fool, and she didn’t seem like a fool, so there it was: pretense. Charlotte didn’t like it when people pretended to believe things you knew they couldn’t really believe; it was just a brush-off, an arrogance shading toward contempt. By this gesture she was saying Charlotte wasn’t worth talking to.
Charlotte shrugged back, a crude mirroring. “You’ve never heard of the offer too good to refuse? You’ve never heard of a hostile takeover succeeding?”
Jojo’s eyes went a little round. “I have heard of them, of course. I don’t think an offer like this reaches that level. If you say no and they don’t go away, that’s when you should start worrying.”
Charlotte shook her head. “They’re interested, okay? That’s enough to worry about, you ask me.”
“I save my worrying for things farther along the worry pipeline. It’s the only way to keep from going crazy.”
“They’ve made an offer, I said. We have to reply.”
“You can’t just ignore it?”
“No. We have to reply. So the time is here. We have a situation.”
“Well, good luck with it,” Jojo said.
Charlotte was about to say something sharp when her pad played the first bars of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Charlotte tapped the pad.
“Excuse me Miz Armstrong, it’s Amelia Black, I live in the Met when I’m in New York? I was trying to reach Vlade but I couldn’t get him. Are you by any chance with him?”
“No, but I’m going to join him now, we’re putting a new guest into the hotello in the farm. What’s up?”
“Well, I’ve got kind of a situation here. I made a mistake, I guess you’d call it, and then it all happened so fast.”
“What?” Charlotte began walking toward the elevator, and for some reason Jojo came along.
“Well,” Amelia said, “basically my polar bears have taken over my airship.”
“What?”
“I don’t think they really have, but Frans is flying us, and the bears are on the bridge with him.”
“How does that work? Aren’t they eating him or something?”
“Frans is the autopilot, sorry. So far they’ve left him alone, but if they accidentally turn him off or tweak him, I worry that it could be bad.”
“Is the autopilot something a bear could change?”
“Well, he answers to verbal commands, so if they roar or whatever, something might happen.”
“Are they roaring?”
“Well, yeah. They kind of are. I think they’re getting hungry. And so am I,” she added miserably.
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the tool closet.”
“Can you get to the pantry?”
“Not without going through, you know, bear country.”
“Hmm. Well, wait just a second, I’m almost to the farm and Vlade is there. Let’s see what he says about it.”
“Sure, thanks.”
Jojo raised her eyebrows when Charlotte looked at her, and said in a low voice, “Sorry, I just want to hear what happens here, if that’s okay. And check in with Franklin again.”
“Fine by me,” Charlotte said. The elevator doors opened on the farm floor and the two women hurried over to the southeast corner. Vlade and Franklin and the boys and their elderly friend were all gathered outside the hotello, seated on chairs and little gardening stools.
Charlotte interrupted them: “Vlade, can you help us a second here? I’ve got Amelia on the phone, and she’s in a situation on her blimp there, the polar bears have gotten loose.”
That got their attention instantly, and Vlade said loudly, “Amelia, is that true? Are you there?”
“Yes,” Amelia said unhappily.
“Tell me what happened.”
Amelia described the sequence of questionable moves that had gotten her locked in a closet on an airship filled with polar bears on the loose. Vlade shook his head as he listened.
“Well, Amelia,” he said when she finished. “I told you never to fly alone, it just isn’t safe.”
“I always fly alone.”
“That doesn’t make it safe.”
“It makes it dangerous,” Franklin opined. “That’s what her show is about.”
“I can hear that,” Amelia reminded them. “Who is that?”
“Franklin Garr here. I live on the thirty-sixth floor.”
“Oh hi, nice to meet you. But, you know, I don’t mean to contradict you or anything, but it isn’t all true what you said, and anyway it doesn’t help me now.”
“Sorry!” Franklin said. With an uneasy glance at Jojo, now standing beside him (which had pleased him greatly, Charlotte saw), he added, “Are you in touch with the autopilot? Can you fly the thing?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe try tilting the blimp as straight up as it will go, see if the bears fall back down into their room? Kind of a gravity assist?”
Vlade glanced at Franklin with a surprised look. “Worth a try,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, you haven’t lost anything by it.”
“But I don’t know how well we’ll float when we’re vertical.”
“Just the same,” Franklin said confidently. “More or less. Same amount of helium, right? You could maybe even accelerate upward. You’d put a little downward force on the bears.”
Again Vlade agreed this was a good idea.
“Okay,” Amelia said. “I guess I’ll try it. Can you stay on the line?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, dear,” Charlotte said. “You’re like a radio play.”
“Don’t make fun of me! I’m hungry. And I have to go to the bathroom.”
“There’ll be a bucket in most tool closets,” Vlade said.
“Oh my God I’m tilting, the blimp is tilting up!”
“Hold on,” more than one of them urged her.
“Oh my God they’re out there.” This was followed by some loud thumps. Then radio silence.
“Amelia?” Charlotte asked. “Are you okay?”
A long, tense pause.
Then she replied. “I’m okay. Let me call you back. I’ve got to deal.”
The call went dead.
“Yikes,” Franklin said after a wondering silence. Charlotte saw Jojo elbow him in the ribs, saw him wince and then ignore it, eyes slightly crossed.
The others stood around, uncertain what to do. Charlotte gestured at the hotello door. “Have you had a look inside yet?”
“No, we were just going to do that,” Vlade said.
“Might as well. Our cloud star will get back to us when she can.”