Lawless Sign Part Three (Fiction)

Chapter Five: So Much For What We Know, Avocado

Second Lake Bank of Commerce and Industry, West Lake Street, West Side of Chicago, Northern Cook County, Northeastern Illinois, Midwestern United States. North America, Earth,  Spin Central Sector, Milky Way Galaxy, System of Control Collubia, Coded Space,  Prime Material Plane. Day three of the survey. Maybe.

Blood pumped to my eyes and soon my vision was clear. I spotted Honey’s controls moving on their own across the compartment. Bringing the cockpit seat upright, I scanned  the bank’s interior for traces of Windy.

She’s a tight, slowly churning whirlwind. Normally I can’t see all of her. If she were in the bank at the time, I might have spotted where she was by the movement of objects around her.

She had already gone through the Old Navy clothes. By the way she had strewn them on the floor, I could tell that I had made a few mistakes. I don’t think she much cared for the instrument either, but to a  less vehement degree.

Windy was purposing 112% of Honey’s energy. Given that my queen of space was damaged, I wasn’t too happy.

Wind kicked up dust as the back door slowly clicked shut. “Good morning, special one.”

“Good morning, Windy,” I responded.

“From what you said, you never saw a person on Tiamore with their flesh on. It wasn’t as if they had just died. And none of them were in any different of a state. It was just your conjecture that the event might still be going on. And you didn’t pick up any signals until you put a signal out,” Windy said. Her voice, no matter how close, always has the quality of an echo.

I reached over to the seat next to me, my hands in search of a half finished Tabasco flavored Slim Jim. “One doesn’t necessarily follow the other. The sensor sweep came up negative when I first landed. It wasn’t until a bit later that I put out a hailing. And the only thing that could have picked up the hailing was Countess Rezvulga’s brain box—“

“—Which you never did find.—“

“—Which did not respond. Then, sometime later, I detected the radar.”

“You didn’t detect the radar before then. Nor was there any real use for this radar. Nor any rational reason for it to be on just then.”

It was a little early for this, but she did have a point. “The only purpose the radar being on seems to have had was to draw my attention.”

As is usual, the next idea that jumped into Windy’s head jumped out of her mouth: “Do the police here exist solely for the purpose of hauling away teenagers?”

“I haven’t seen a police officer around here, yet. You get that idea surfing the web?” I asked her.

“No. From walking around the block,” she said. “Our bank has been closed since the Martin Luther King Junior riots.  Curious they never turned the water off. Would you like the power back on?”

“Mister Nasus has been paying the water bill here for at least four years. I wonder why not the electric? Trust the wires?”

“Let Honey heal it for a day and we should be good.  You will need to find new fixtures. The input box is obsolete and needs to be replaced.”

I asked  “Won’t they notice the power draw? From an accounting perspective?”

“That is taken care of.”

“Outstanding, Windy,” I said. “About the clothes. I have made some error here?”

“Yes. A one season baseline wardrobe will cost you twelve thousand dollars.”

“Eek! For an itinerant musician?”

“For a New Age Cool Jazz instrumentalist. Yes.”

She wasn’t being inaccurate. She was lying. Glancing back at the ship’s canopy, I observed “If you keep this up, Honey is going to smoke.”

“I’m not the one who drove  her through a Voliant Wave interface.—You forgot ‘lecherous interlopers’.”

“What?”

“Your parting shot before you took off. You forgot lecherous interlopers and myopic pinchers of statistics.”

“I did. I will remember that the next time I tell the universe off.”

She asked “Any idea where we are?”

“We are in coded space.”

“Narrowed it down to the prime material plane, have you?”  

“And not scab space.”

“Does scab space have coding?”

“It could have it, but it wouldn’t need it.”

“I thought the Voliant Wave only went to scab space.”

“So much for what we know,” I concluded. “All I really know about the Voliant Wave comes from passing disabled generator casings on my walk home from school as a kid. From what I can recall—and correct me if I am wrong—the Voliant Wave doesn’t actually go anywhere. It’s just a method of distorting time.”

Windy should correct me here. Windy should know this. Windy may have even seen a Voliant Wave box in operation at one time. But Windy doesn’t know. Instead, she fields a guess, with authority: “If it was a transmit of some kind, the other end of the portal should be right here.”

But it isn’t. And the idea that we just materialized here in this bank on our own is somewhat out of the question. There is a back-story to this. To give you a shorthand course in Spaceman, the Voliant Wave is like a microwave oven. You put things in it to help you get things done. Instead of cooking food with radar waves, the Voliant Wave box extends time. For every one second that takes place in real time, fifteen seconds are taking place inside the Voliant Wave area, or scab universe. To cite a common use, a student could pop into a Voliant Wave box for a real five minutes of study time and wind up spending an actual hour studying. Or sleeping. Or what-have-you. Before the technology’s use was discontinued 150 years ago, it was quite the boon. Entire factories were placed in Voliant Wave event areas.

As far as we know, Voliant Wave events shouldn’t go anywhere. The area phases out for a short duration and then phases back into real space. The space itself, the area itself, doesn’t move. Or so it was thought. About 150 years ago all of the Voliant Wave areas that were at that time in operation went somewhere and did not come back. That would be like having all of the microwave ovens that were on at the same time, all over the world, suddenly and spontaneously disintegrate the food—and the cooks. You would stop using them, pronto. We lost cities full of people. The technology was systematically eradicated, the principles by which it functioned rendered secret.

I’m too young to have ever seen the Voliant Wave in action. My pet ghost Windy doesn’t remember anything about it because all memories of such have been  sucked out of her mind--leaving nothing in its place other than the impression that the Voliant Wave is dangerous. I think this says something negative about the society that I am from.

That said, in my thirty-eight years of being a professional spaceman, the subject of the Voliant Wave has never come up before. Perhaps the thinking is that if you have occasion to need to know the mechanics of Voliant Wave physics, your fate is already beyond salvaging. Not a happy explanation, but  a sound one.

On a happier note, I have only scant visual evidence that it was a Voliant Wave device in the first place. The universe is a big place and a lot of things that look alike are really quite different. As opposed to a Voliant Wave chamber, I could have gone through some unknown make of transporter. We know of two types.  One is a Zoom Tube, a link or portal between remotely located spaces. This is a door at the back of your flat in New York which leads to the back of your flat in Los Angeles. You do not travel through Omaha or Carson City to get there. Instead, through the mechanics of this device, your two remotely located flats are joined together exclusively at the portal. The second type, an Assembler Drive, functions via a more familiar type of method. It chops you into little Lego bits and sends you flinging across space to another box that then puts your Legos back together in the right order.

Neither of these devices are here at our bank. Both would have required more energy than this bank has ever been able to purpose. I doubt the bank has the electrical integrity to purpose enough for an incandescent bulb right now.

“Maybe we should stick to mysteries that we can solve,” I said and then pointed at Honey “You need to pull the power draw way down.”

“You would lose my inflection. I am trying to make a point,’ she said politely, but insistently. “When you reached the city, the device in the wedding chapel powered up. But it wasn’t used on you. It being powered up did help you pick the facility out from the other buildings.”

“I think I know where you’re going here. Some of this has dawned on me.”

“Would we be looking for plasma battery discharges if he hadn’t discharged the weapon at you? Or he may have been trying to warn you about the weapon—“

“—Or he could have been trying to defend himself. I sprang on him, right after I had destroyed the lab. Like I said, I mistook him for drapery.”

She continued “When you do get here, there’s no immediate danger. If you look at it one way, he’s left us clues. The bottles with the names on them. The tool kit with the brain box in it.—“

“—It’s entirely probable that he led me here.. If your point is that I was never in hot pursuit of whomever wiped out the people of Tiamore, I am certainly willing to concede  it. The problem I am having is with what the brain box said, what the sky is saying. If the sky and the brain box are correct, it’s been four years since I left Tiamore. It hasn’t been three days ago. It’s been four years and three days ago. That the trail is cold is one thing. I don’t have any memory of the last four years. From my perspective, it seems like I left Tiamore two days ago.”

“I don’t have any memory of four years having just taken place, either. And Honey’s system log isn’t showing any additional system use,” Windy said, perhaps dismissively.  Since there wasn’t anything we could do about it, she may have concluded that it did not matter. “Did you have a chance to go over what Toovy’s tool extracted from the brain box as yet?”

“I glanced at it. All that effort for an accounting log.”

“You might want to put what your helmet picked up from Miles Nasus into it, too.”

“The bit about the desk made out of avocado Jell-o? I’m not sure what good the tool is going to do in enhancing the memory of a report he read.”

“You know, this Elvis person you’re analogous to had a very unhappy end. His wife left him for a physical fitness instructor. He was a drug addict and a paranoid. He died grossly out of shape, from straining stool.”

“Mister Nasus had a positive impression of him. I’m just going off that. Elvis gave away expensive cars to strangers. He had sex with Ann-Margret. He shot televisions because he could. He was the ever living king of rock and roll, whatever that is.”

“It’s a type of music.”

“I bet he didn’t have a twelve thousand dollar one year baseline wardrobe.”

“Wrong! I’ll show you.”

“Why don’t you finish illustrating your point on this, first. Without purposing 112% of Honey’s atorec.”

Windy dissipated. I settled back into Honey’s cockpit.

Windy is fairly adaptable. She’s followed me through two careers. This isn’t what we normally do, at all. We’ve never been utterly marooned before. The unspoken question at hand is whether I continue with this quest or whether it is wiser to focus on simple survival.

Honey’s canopy sealed, the windshields darkened. I reclined in the seat. Windy’s voice was now coming out of my belt buckle.

“As you noted, the report stored in the brain box is an accounting ledger. It’s highly annotated up to a certain point. The thing was live and current, right up to the moment we… our accident with it. The ledger covers the operation of three ships in succession, all of which had the same owner. The owner is a single person, operating space vessels over a period of forty some years. The ledger goes on for an additional eighty to a hundred years after the economic transactions have ended.”

I asked “He’s been dead eighty years and he still owes money?”

“The ledger isn’t his or the ship’s. It covers some other cost function. Since the ship was still doing something, the ledger is still measuring it. At least in theory.  The first two ships are operating at a ten percent profit per run over operating costs. The first one is a smaller vessel. The entry states ‘Castaway.’”

I added “Castaway is probably the model of the ship. This has to be a very urban route. Space traders around us operate at a 500% margin or it’s no go.”

“Our traders have to contend with pirates,” Windy said. “Obviously this vessel is dedicated to some routine run. No passengers. No crew, other than the operator and various generations of mechanicals. He seems to be paying for everything out of savings. Or there are no investors. Or no banking system. He trades in the Castaway for another ship, Comet Cruiser. This ship is larger, but it seems to be doing the same thing. It makes the same set of what I am assuming are port payments as the last ship. After fifteen years of operating that vessel, he trades that in for yet another ship. I am at a loss as to what this last ship does.”

I said “Unless this culture is utterly foreign, it seems unlikely that he was a spring chicken when he bought the first ship. Changing operations forty years into  your career is curious.”

“Whatever it was, it wasn’t a good idea,” Windy said. “He wasn’t at it for long. He made two port calls. Last entry said he was in transit, but holding at a position away from port. There’s nothing near his ship. Nothing approaching his ship.—“

“—He’s at a powered halt, which is unusual. Without the context there’s not much we can tell. He has the systems set to hold that exact position. But he doesn’t seem to need to be compensating for anything. No extra-solar winds. He’s outside of a system. He’s not in orbit. He’s near no bodies. There’s no gravitational drift.—“

“--All systems are normal. The ship is empty of cargo. He has no passengers. All of the mechanicals are stationary, on conservation mode.  Then we get this long list of damage all with the same time stamp.”

“Just a guy out in the middle of nowhere doing nothing with his cargo of zero. I’m not sure what this ledger is,” I said. Ledger was just a guess on our part. The culture this document came from was far removed from our own. Even if Toovy’s wonderful tool could help us translate the wording, we were still missing quite a bit of the context. “Looks like the ship became non-viable in one second. No distress call. No attempt to abandon ship. Just one last process it keeps repeating over and over again.”

A glowing red hexagon appeared on Honey’s canopy. I recognized the symbol instantly. “Lawless Sign.”

Windy explained “It’s putting out a stasis plasma field in that pattern. All remaining resources are dedicated to doing just that. Note the solid triangle inside. I believe that is a number.”

“Event identifier,” I guessed. “The classic Lawless Sign doesn’t have an event identifier. The Lawless Sign is an archaic navigation symbol: avoid with emphasis, as in stay away at all costs, non negotiable hazard, do not investigate, do not go here.”

“Keep it in mind,” she said. The hexagon disappeared. It was replaced on Honey’s ceiling by a road map. “The jagged line running east to west is Lake Street. The line running north to south on the far west is Mannheim Road. As you can see, all of Sulfur’s triggers are off these two roads.”

All of Sulfur’s plasma discharges were in the shape of Lawless Signs. Each had the same triangular event identifier as from the ship’s disaster. I asked “What are these places that he’s clustering at?”

“Northlake, Stone Park, McCook, Indian Head Park, Keeneyville. Towns. Small towns.”

“Right here at Lake and Mannheim, that’s a railroad yard. And here at Mannheim and Irving Park, that’s an airport,” I said.

“All of the locations seem to be industrial, especially McCook. McCook has a population of under 400. Indian Head Park isn’t exactly swarming, either.”

I asked “Anything peculiar about these towns, compared to the others near them?”

“Other than Northlake, they are all very small. Indian Head Park and Keeneyville are hard to read, but I would say all of them have more industry than would be typical.”

“Why is Northlake ringing a bell?”

“Doctor Pierre Colbert’s offices are at North and Lake, in Northlake.”

“Where does Stan Goodman live?”

“Mr. Goodman is near Irving Park and Laramie, actually on Sunnyside where Laramie dead ends. Not in the target areas. Chances are he’s either a policeman, fireman or teacher.”

“Get that off the internet?”

“It’s one of two areas city workers typically live. Yes.”

“Find me a place where I can purchase a circuit breaker near him. He will be my first stop. Hopefully I can catch him at home.”

“I have 53 cellular exchanges routed to your helmet now. The same ones to Honey. You might want to get a cell phone, though. Unless you want to go traipsing around in your spaceman suit.”

“My spaceman suit is my stage gear. Does that shave anything off my twelve thousand dollar baseline one season wardrobe?”

“Musician is a very wardrobe intense profession here.”

“Please keep in mind that my back up gig is livery driver—which in itself strains credibility, given that I don’t drive.”

“We can get most of the clothes you need off Michigan Avenue.”

“That sounds ominous. Circuit breaker and cell phone, first.—Did you get anything off that medical node I picked from Sulfur’s bedding?”

“Yuck. Necrotic bile. He’s in tough shape, if he’s…”

--If he’s alive at all. I wasn’t going to say it, either. It’s important for everyone’s sanity that we assume Sulfur is not what he appears to be, but rather just one sick spaceman. “Looks can be deceptive,” I said. “We don’t even know who this log belongs to.”

“There’s some connection somewhere. It’s the exact same symbol for the exact same event.”

“And our little bank here is a black projects facility. Now I need to get with Mister Nasus to determine if the locations of Sulfur’s signals somehow cross check with the buildings he is the custodian of.”

“That way we can be certain that we’re not just coincidentally knee deep in dog poop,” she said. “Does this Mister Nasus know what our building was being used for?”

“Not a clue. All he recalls is that it is one of a set of buildings that was involved in a corporate espionage incident between two defense contractors.”

“The defense contractors were spying on each other?”

“They were not playing nice in some way. Whomever Mister Nasus replaced as the custodian of these buildings did a very poor job of arbitrating the dispute. Oddly, arbitrating disputes between contractors operating clandestine facilities is most distinctly not within Mister Nasus’s portfolio of responsibilities. In any case, nothing has happened in four years. Not since Mister Nasus came in. Mister Nasus is just a government contractor himself. Up until the moment I walked through his door, the entire job had been found money.”

“Do you trust him?”

“I trust that his memories are his own and not planted. He seems like a rational actor,” I said. “By the way, are we the only people from outer space here?”

Replacing the map on the screen was a light skinned creature with two arms, two legs and a very large head with slanted black eyes. Several representations appeared around the composite, most of them naked.

“I’m going to say that we are probably it as far as alien visitors are concerned. You may disagree. Since 1940  there have been numerous portrayals of alien intruders who conform to this general archetype,” she explained.

“What does a human baby look like?” I asked.

“Pretty close. I noticed exaggerated eyes in their artwork.”

“These people project quite a bit. I am not buying the neck.”

“No match to any primary land predator or scavenger archetype.”

“I wouldn’t match, either. Formal contact?”

“Possible crash landing here in the United States. Supposedly recovered wreckage and remains. The ships are pretty consistent, too.”

Various elliptical vehicles, some rather detailed, replaced the aliens on the canopy.

“Thoran invasion cruisers?” I guessed. “Any topside photos?”

“No. None. No topside views of the vessels. Nothing credible. The slanted eye child people are not a known Thoran cohort, in any case. I suppose they could have found some Thoran vessels. There are some motion pictures, both fictional and presented as real which seem to conform to the known Thoran operational profile.”

“Blowing stuff up left and right?”

“Pretty much. Thorans are distinct, with detectable technology and fixed sets of behavior. I’ve found no evidence of them anywhere on Earth. On the other hand, the Thorans would be in the oceans, if they were anywhere.”

“Let’s rule the Thorans out for a moment. Do these baby human looking creatures have any pattern to their operations?”

“Kidnapping. Cattle mutilation. Sexual and anal probing.”

“Alright, I disbelieve,” I said. “Are the humans themselves from Earth? I mistook them for Zeds or some kind of Arak.”

“Everything on Earth is comprised from material originating within this system. Each atom is a son of the system’s sun. The humans are related to a succession of species originating on Earth. Their resemblance to Araks or all Arak forms is coincidental.”

“Most Araks aren’t related to each other, either. It was worth a shot.”

“Everything said, I don’t think the people of Tiamore were exactly Araks. They probably wouldn’t look like humans,” Windy said.

“Their society was somewhat similar. As was their technology. But I didn’t find any pictures of the people of Tiamore. Or even statues. They didn’t have any representational artwork at all. Possibly for religious reasons. They had radio and radar, but not television. Rockets, but not airplanes.”

“I wasn’t there. Poor visual acuity would be my guess,” Windy said. “There is another common representation the humans have for aliens  You’re not going to like this. There’s like 600 films, but they seem to be fictional.”

Several gigantic creatures were displayed.

“Crap. Well, if they were really here, we would definitely see evidence. They’re not subtle. Discounting their propensity for dream reach, these are most likely just upsized versions of Earth animals.”

“Think so, huh?”

Then she showed me the turtle.

“If the turtle sprouts engines from its orifices, I am going to be very, very afraid.”

It did. Luckily, if the thing really was around, we had an established method of communicating with it. I instructed Windy to scan for it once the sensors were up and at full.  Honey was at 78% of total repair at that point.

At this point, I got out of Honey and went to finish my repairs on the toilet. Windy did not particularly care for the modifications I had made to my instrument, declaring it yet more evidence of my propensity for turning everything into a pneumatics project. She said it looked like a tuba without an escape or a self-eating saxophone. I was building it while I was fixing the toilet, so I guess it is somewhat plumbing inspired.

It did get some strange looks when I played it later on in the day. I had not intended to display it as yet, but I got in touch with Reynold. He had a gig for me.

Reynold began his proposition with the not very promising phrase “I’m not sure how much this pays. Can you get to the Old Orchard Shopping Center? The gig starts promptly at noon and ends at exactly two. You have to be there by noon, though.”

At 8:00 in the morning, that didn’t seem to be a problem. Initially I had intended to make my purchases and visit Mr. Goodman, but that became derailed almost immediately. I could not get a cab to come. I gave good directions. I called three of them. All three said they were coming, but none showed.

At 9:30 I walked the three blocks and got on the El. I was in full Captain Meteor gear. Reynold told me to “play what you play” and I assumed he meant for me to bring the space suit.

This El trip I received far fewer strange looks. I did have the helmet’s shield raised and was wearing Cody’s face. I had five fingers. This, coupled with the now expanded Captain Meteorphone, made it clear that I was some sort of whack job one man band bum and not a roving nomadic space alien. Weirdly, this made people less likely to want to talk to me, largely out of fear that I would ask for money or, heaven forbid, actually play the chunk of plumbing.

It took me until 11:20 to get to Old Orchard Shopping Center, a confusing mass of buildings with sidewalks but no roads. My venue was in a three story department store at the end of the complex. At 11:40 I found the black grand piano on the second floor by the escalator and started to set up.

I shut the helmet’s shield. Promptly at noon, the first notes of Night Under The Springs second airing began to play. This was augmented by a synchronized percussion section built into the tubing’s pneumatics. Judging by the reaction, I don’t think anyone had ever heard such a thing before.

People seemed to like it. I was soon attracting women and small children. Invariably one of them would make a request. If they knew the song well enough, I would play it.

The only person who wasn’t entirely pleased with me was Cliff Fulton, my actual patron. This store’s music program is entirely his idea. My playing had drawn him closer. That much he liked, in fact was quite taken with. The suit was a big no go. Its sighting made him think that I was begging or hawking CDs or advertising a web site. Obviously, there was nothing I could do about it at this point.

As the slick haired, black business suit clad Cliff Fulton approached, some tone I had previously played reminded him of the theme from the movie The Third Man, which he was very fond of. I immediately transitioned into this, stopping him dead in his tracks.

He smiled and let me continue, slowly working his way around the curve of women in front of me and coming to my right side. I concluded my rendition of The Third Man, which was followed by the usual golf clap. Cliff then tugged on my elbow and introduced himself.

“Sorry about the uniform,” I whispered. “I have a kids show at 2:30.”

“Quite alright,” he said. “It was short notice.” He had decided that the uniform wasn’t in that bad of taste, somewhat resembling a drum major’s outfit--if I changed the helmet. In short, he had changed his mind based on the reaction I was getting from the crowd. His real concern is that he had only received formal approval for a piano player. Hence the piano.

The piano player showed up at 12:45. She was a narrow bell in black, scampering up the escalator. Her curvy body was clad in dark red fabric with black diamond swaths. Escaping out from under her long black skirt was an array of translucent crimson pointed strips. The edges of her barely elbow length sleeves matched this fabric. Her dark red front bangs were in a style similar to the strips—muted spear tips. The rest of her hair was a thick helmet of dark brown to black, interspersed with occasional merging deep red. Her thick eyebrows were this deep red also. Dark brown to black hooded her eyes. A long scarf displaying piano keys ran across her broad shoulders.

From a telepathic perspective, she was hostility in waves. The general became specific the moment she caught sight of me.

She didn’t wait for me to stop playing before slipping in to sit behind the piano. She let the old ladies golf clap at the end of my rendering of Happy Birthday and then ran her black painted fingers over every key. Her fingers only fully depressed two keys. One key had the wrong attack. Another key hit a string which was—still!—out of tune.

“Why don’t you go bugger off and do some balloon tricks?” she whispered at me through a clenched smile.

I didn’t feel like it. And I didn’t bring any balloons. Instead I remained silent and motionless.

Cliff Fulton reappeared. Before he could say a word, she quietly said “I was running late. Sorry about the C-L-O-W-N.”

My helmet’s blast shield raised. “I am not a clown. I am a spaceman.”

“When you’re not the long lost member of Wham UK,” she said, still quietly. “Menudo lose a Menudo? Back Street Boyz lose one of their Boys to Men? Layoffs amongst the Mouseketeers?”

Cliff asked “Have you two been introduced?”

“Her name is Vrecky Tomlinson,” I said, placing a hand against my temple. “Although her real name is Irene.”

“Obviously, he knows Reynold,” Vrecky said.

“Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials, then. Play nice,” Cliff said, nodding at our audience. He turned his back on us and stepped away smartly.

She played the overture from Cats followed by Mack The Knife, which I was able to keep up with. Then she attempted to stump me with Romanian folk dances. It forced me to return the Captain Meteorphone to the voice I had used for The Third Man. I kept it on that voice for the remainder of our recital—specifically because Vrecky liked it.

Her liking the instrument’s tone did not, however, stop her from trying to shake me again. After another spate of show tunes, she improvised for about thirty seconds. Even she didn’t know what her next note was. I broke this up by triggering the pneumatics to sound a random pattern.

She turned to me abruptly and asked “Where the hell are you hiding the marimbas in that thing?”

“Why don’t you play something?” I said to her in Romanian, ordering my blast shield to slowly close. I think she had gotten to me. There was a fading gold reflection bouncing off the shield’s interior. That was flaw in the Cody mask. Vrecky had seen my eyes glow gold as the helmet closed.

Her retort, in Romanian, was  that my parents were obviously siblings. She then saw my eyes glow through the blast shield.

This didn’t startle her in the least. (Nor was it my intent. The intensity of the glow is an involuntary reaction. As I have stated, the glow itself is a medical issue.) If anything, my display confirmed that I was one of “those people”: an actor/clown, someone who was simultaneously taking classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music and at Second City. She wondered if Ringling Brothers was in town, since I was the type they hired as advance men to teach clown school.

I frankly didn’t care what she thought of me. At 2:00 sharp, our concert ended. I had been standing, nearly motionless throughout our playing. Putting the Captain Meteorphone under my arm, it was my intent to get as far away from this woman as possible. For her part, Vrecky stood up and took one last up and down look at me. “An electric zither. Wow.”

She then whirled and went down the escalator. Oddly, this woman would go on to be my best friend on Earth. At that moment, however, I was happy to be rid of her. My current best friend on Earth at the time, Miles Nasus, phoned me soon afterward.

I was on the bus when Nasus’s call came into my helmet. I did answer it and started talking before realizing my error. Getting a phone call  meant having a phone present. And I didn’t have a phone. Then I figured I needed to press something against my face, so I went for the detachable compartments on my bandolier. That proved problematic. I did not want to talk into a Charliq mine. Ditto the hexagon of Outlaw matter. In fact, there was nothing on my bandolier that I in any way wanted pressed against my face. So I went for Toovy’s wonder tool on my belt, which, although it might pass as a cell phone-like object in a pinch, proceeded to erupt with an entire pinball machine’s worth of racket at my touch.

I’m lucky that the people on the bus are so used to disruptive passengers that they only took a moment’s notice of me. Still, it seemed as if I was talking into an overly loud Gameboy.

“What is that noise? Where are you?” Nasus asked.

“I’m on the bus.”

“You don’t have a car?”

“I’ve only been here two days. I cannot drive.”

“Sounds like you’re in a casino. Can we be overheard?”

“Only my end,” I said, making a telepathic sweep of the bus. “Not that anyone seems interested.”

“So Elvis, is there anything that you’ve ever heard of that wipe out someone’s mind? Like a weapon or something like that?”

“Not bad for a morning’s fishing, Colonel,” I said. “Yes, there is. It’s a very common system, on a continuum with the weapon deployed on Tiamore.”

“And this thing can wipe out memories, implant false memories or fry someone’s brain utterly?”

“Not normally, but yes. The intention is normally to disable the crew of a ship.”

He asked “Do you have one of these weapons?”

“Do I need to have one? How helpful would it be?”

“No holding out on me, Elvis. If you had this thing, could the process be reversed? Can the effects be reversed?”

“I’ll say yes. I can’t make someone not dead.”

“Let’s say near brain dead.”

“If the system caused it, it is possible to reverse it. Which is not to say that this system is the only method for causing someone to miss some memories. There may be another system, which I can neither detect nor do anything about. That is, assuming that I am not four years older than I think I am.”

“Very confusing, Elvis. Let’s stay positive. Assuming it is the system that you know about and that the effects can be reversed, would you, Elvis, be able to reverse this effect?”

“I’m not the most technical person in the world. Unless someone abused the system, the target should snap out of it on their own. But I do have tools that might snap someone out of it. Several, actually. And I do have a defense against it.”

“Then you win. Because a chance or two is more than what they got.”

“I’m going to send you some addresses. I need to know if these are also clandestine facilities.”

“You want to email me, instead of hijacking my ‘puter like that?”

“My apologies. I will put email on my list of things to learn.”

“I don’t suppose you can get to Paducah tonight?”

“Does the RTA—“ Before I could finish, Toovy’s tool had already told me that the bus system did not go to Paducah. “Do you mean Kentucky?”

“I’m going to take that as a no. You know what, screw them. Let them come to Elvis. After all, they’re the brain dead ones. We’re the ones with the cure.”

“This is going to lead me to Sulfur?”

“They know something and they’re needy. I’ll get back to you.”

“How mildly disturbing of you, Colonel.”

Per Toovy’s wonder tool, Miles Nasus was an actual Colonel in the Air Force at one time. And Nedor Services, a defense contractor with no known domestic operations is who he is talking about. (Nedor is owned by a division of Dirtbag Services, itself a subsidiary of Global Dirtbag, owned by the pocket lint of a shell company in the Cayman Islands. Perhaps being so encased in fiction is what caused their brains to die.) All things I intended to keep under my hat for the time being.

The tool also extracted the incident I had plucked from Nasus the moment I met him. The first thing that came to his mind was a report he had to acknowledge reading before he signed on to the job. As I suspected, the tool did little to illuminate the incident.

The letter Nasus read was a short story. As framed it took place in the 1970s. The objective seems to be to define the role of the custodian towards government contractors. In the story, the custodian shows up for work on his first day and is greeted by a mysterious contractor. The contractor has changed the custodians office and claims to be able to perform all sorts of miracles. At this point the custodian  challenges the contractor to change his desk into something. After some give and take, they agree that the custodian’s desk should be transmuted into avocado Jell-O. They talk a little more and the custodian suddenly discovers that his desk is already avocado Jell-O. The contractor and the custodian then decide to go out for drinks. As they are about to go out for drinks, the contractor asks for a favor: the next time the custodian wants his desk turned into Jell-O it would be nice to choose a flavor that Jell-o actually comes in. End of story.

One assumes that this is an analogy of some sort. It was not. It was an account. We found the actual letter later.

The hardware supply store Windy had found for me was on Irving Park, eight blocks east of Goodman’s house. A circuit breaker box of the type I needed was a bulky, twenty-five pound item. The helpful hardware man asked me if I needed wire with this.

I called Windy from my helmet. Bad move. Wire would be good. She also wanted twenty-four outlets, a dozen light switches and a dozen light sockets.

(Later, after we had installed all this crap and were still in the dark, she mentioned light bulbs.)

Couple these purchases with the Captain Meteorphone and suddenly I was one laden spaceman. I was going nowhere on the C.T.A. I will tell you that much. So I hailed a cab. This time one came.

My driver, a squat brown man in loose clothing, seemed to lose interest in me the moment I gave my destination. It seems that any trip that is not to downtown or the airport is something of a waste of his time. As it was, my trip was maybe two miles.

Then I started speaking his language. He abruptly cancelled his cell phone call and we made small chat for a few minutes. My objective here was to secure transport back to my Lake Street base, a place cabs seemed not to like to go.

He would certainly take me. In fact, he insisted on it. He gave me his cell exchange and told me to call after my meeting with Mr. Goodman was over. The ride ended with him telling me that God was great and my wishing that the sea of peace should embrace him.

The moment I arrived at Stan Goodman’s house I realized something was most distinctly wrong. First off, it wasn’t a house, but rather a three story brown brick apartment building. There is a universal look that rental property has. It was the only such building on the block and was well kept. For some reason it didn’t seem like the type of place that a middle aged city worker would stay at.

Goodman owned a boat. He had intended to knock the bank and the building next to it down to build a warehouse for this boat. And yet he domiciles himself in a three story walk up that he does not own. Nonsense.

There was a possibility that he didn’t live here at all. As a city worker, he may have been required to claim to live in the city, in which case this is just an address of convenience. For reasons I can’t set words to, I discounted that.

Instead I braced myself for a surprise. My feeling was that I had strayed onto Sulfur’s operations. I kept a mind to look for things which might have been out of place. That may have been a waste of time.

There were no names on the six doorbells. Through the window I spotted a pair of bicycles stuffed behind a staircase. The mailboxes were unmarked and the door was locked.

I triggered my helmet and the door unlocked. The first two floors of this building belonged to the Ortiz-Gonzalez clan, sisters married to brothers. They had five school age children between them. Their parents lived on the second floor with a twenty year old and a pair of teenagers. Most of the adults in the clan worked. The school aged children were cared for during the day by their grandparents, collectively.

It was a copy of my own living arrangements, at one time. I would have been one of the teenagers, sharing a room with my brother in our grandparents’ unit.

The mail here came as a bunch through a slot in the door. Anything that wasn’t marked Ortiz or Gonzalez was left on the third stair for the mysterious Mr. Goodman.

Of course Goodman lived on the third floor. So that’s where I went, with my circuit breaker box, and Captain Meteorphone and an entire arm’s full of electrical wires. Grandma Ortiz smiled at Cody from a crack in the door. Obviously, I was there to fix something electrical, probably in the big apartment on the third floor, which had not been rented in months. Not that she was up for questioning white men, in any case.

Stan lived in the crappy apartment, a  studio that the Section Eight people had lived in before. As far as Grandma Ortiz knew, he worked evenings, possibly at a bar. He got back by dawn. He left at sundown. He worked every day, even Christmas.

He hadn’t been much of a neighbor, but compared to the Section Eight people, he had been an improvement.

Stan was home. He had been up for a half an hour, long enough to shave and shower. Long enough to assess if he had to have his limited wardrobe cleaned. He was sitting at the table in his breakfast nook, eating his fill of oatmeal. Best to eat now, while there is still light coming in through the window. Because he didn’t want to run the electric.

Not exactly your typical yacht owner’s mindset. He did the same things everyday, with only the most rudimentary branch pattern. I instantly knew what I was dealing with. I had just told Miles Naus that I possibly had a way of reversing this weapon’s effects. My methods were about to be tested.  

Perhaps if I broke the branch pattern, he would snap out of it. Or go stark raving nuts.

I knocked on the door.

“Coming,” he responded, just loud enough to be heard. Never make noise.  Don’t draw attention to yourself. He was deeply conditioned. I was probably one of the Ortiz boys, asking him to move his car so that they could get the lawn mower out of the garage.

He opened the door and after looking at me, politely asked “May I help you?”

“My name is Captain Meteor. I am from outer space.”

“Thank you, I don’t think I need any.”

“Outer space? Everyone needs some. I insist.”

“I would love to, but I am about to leave for work.”

“This will only take a moment. And I do insist.”

“Ok. How much do you want for it?”

“The outer space? Allow me to demonstrate it. May I come in?”

“Sure!”

“Close the door behind me, Stan.”

And he did.

That should have triggered something, but Stan had little to fear from Cody. At six foot four, Stan showed signs of having once been a very powerfully built man. I later learned he had spent twenty-five years as a prison guard in the Cook County system. His barren and jowly face was accented by grey and diminishing hair that he kept slicked back with some sort of goo. A lot of money had gone into that smile he flashed so easily.

Stan was standing inside the door, haloed in dusk light. He was dressed in a white shirt with a tan leather apron over it. Moonquest Tavern was printed in cursive across the chest area. He had on black slacks, suspenders and black shoes. He was naturally the calm type, although I doubted that he was naturally this friendly.

“It seems like it’s very nice. I don’t have credit cards, so you know, it’s got to be cash,” he said, seemingly pointing at the circuit breaker. 

“Save your money, Stan,” I said, putting my parcels down. “You know, the refrigerator doesn’t work unless you plug it in. The same for the television and the radios. No phone, Stan?”

“No. I have a phone. Cell phone.”

“May I see it?”

He pulled it out of his apron and handed it to me. I noted that it was on. My helmet sucked out its information. Casually handing it back, I said “It’s very nice. How much does it run?”

“I don’t know. I don’t pay for it.”

“What do you pay for, Stan?”

“Rent. Utilities.”

“And how do you pay for them?”

“Money orders.”

Per Windy, that was less traceable. “What about your car, Stan?”

“Paid for. I get free gas, too. Got to take it to this place in McCook. Got to make sure I have enough gas to get there. And that I get there at the right time.”

“Ever drive your car anyplace else? Besides work and home?”

“No. Why would I?”

“Do any other places actually exist?”

“No. Not really.”

“So where do you take the boat?”

Mention of the boat caused him to blink for a moment. “You know, I really have to get going,” he said.

“To the Moonquest Tavern. Where is that?”

“Mannheim. Stone Park.”

“How long have you worked there?”

“I don’t know. Years?”

“Do you eat oatmeal there, too?”

“No. Peanuts. And those cherries. Sometimes the limes, if they’re not just rinds.”

“Losing a little weight, aren’t you?” His clothes seemed a little baggy, not that I was an expert.

“Yeah, no more Weight Watchers for me.”

“Is that what you were eating before you started working at the bar?”

“No. Not Weight Watchers. It was something else. Dinner By Design!” His expression changed. He seemed surprised.

If I knew anything at all about the concept of dieting, I possibly could have snapped him out of it just on this line of inquiry. But I didn’t, so I went with a non sequitur  based on the two ideas which had netted a reaction. “So is that what you eat on the boat?”

“No! You don’t eat on the boat. You drink on the boat!” He was suddenly smiling.

“I have a boat. My boat’s name is Honey. What’s your boat’s name?”

He started scratching his brow. First with one hand, then with both.

Stan looked a little unsteady. “Here, why don’t you sit down?” I took him by the elbow and guided him to a mangy brown couch in front of an unplugged television.

“Dizzy,” Stan said, sitting down.

I am not sure how much of what I was doing was safe. In retrospect, that is. If Stan suddenly died of a heart attack, it would have been worse than my having done nothing.

“Chi-Chis,” he said. “It means tits.”

“The boat’s name? Were there tits on the boat?”

“That was the idea.”

“How many tits?” Thank the god and gods in their heaven and heavens above and below that this wasn’t going down for posterity. The moment I said it I felt like a nitwit.

“Let’s see. Ex-wife. Girlfriend, girlfriend, girlfriend. Not counting my step- daughters, because that’s creepy—“

“—What are your step-daughter’s names?”

“Ellen and Nancy.”

“Seen them lately?”

“No. They moved to Florida.”

“When did they move to Florida?”

“What the hell are you dressed up as?” He was looking at me with a full range of expression for the very first time.

“I am a spaceman.”

“It’s very convincing. That was my second guess.”

“And your first guess was?”

“Extraction squad. Prisoner extraction.”

“It’s an improvement over undead Nascar Driver.”

“Why am I talking to you?”

“I was selling outer space and you invited me in.”

“Where are we and why aren’t the lights on?”

“You live and eat oatmeal here, when you are not working at a tavern in Stone Park.”

“No, I don’t. I retired to Florida.”

“What’s the last thing you remember, Mr. Goodman?”

“I’m thirsty.”

“I’ll get you something,” I said, rising. Given that the fridge was unplugged, I went for the cabinets by the sink.

“I sold my bungalow. I settled my dad’s estate. I packed up all of my stuff. I put them in one of those Pods things. Two of those Pods things. I moved to Florida.”

Inside the cabinets I found a half empty bottle of Yukon Jack and a prescription vial with Stan Goodman’s name on it. It had been prescribed by Pierre Colbert. I was guessing it was narcotics. I asked “What did you do with the boat, Chi-Chis?”

“I was selling my half of it to Sal Lieberman. That’s exactly what I was doing.”

“Sal Lieberman is?”

“The other Jewish prison guard. He’s on full disability. Has a cracked sternum. Now he’s a kosher butcher.”

“Did you sell it to him?” I asked, having crossed back into the seating area with the bottles in my hands.

“No. Not that I remember. We were supposed to go down to Belmont Harbor so that I could get my personals out of the boat, but I don’t recall us getting there.”

I offered Stan the bottle of Yukon Jack, but he shook his head no. Whatever it was in this bottle was something Stan would never voluntarily ingest. I asked him “Is Pierre Colbert your doctor?”

“My doctor’s name is Patel. I was going to get another doctor once I moved to Miami.”

I handed Stan the prescription bottle and asked “Could you open that for me?”

He took it from my gloved hands and said “Why? Problem?”

“The instructions on that cap are gibberish.”

He got the bottle open, but I am still unclear as to how. Stan said “This isn’t mine. It’s got my name on it, but I don’t take this sort of stuff. ‘For occasional anxiety.’ I don’t have any of that.”

I took the bottle from him and poured out a few pills. “Small pill, powerful pill. In your galaxy as well as mine. Your method for naming chemicals leaves much to be desired.”

“I will take that up with the authorities, Mister Spaceman.”

I am very lucky that Stan Goodman is a naturally calm guy. He never got angry. He was more confused. His first defense was to crack a joke. Very admirable, I thought. Continuing, I asked “So you don’t recall selling the boat?”

“I had gone to Sal’s butcher shop in Lincolnwood. He had a half pound of chopped liver and a box of crackers. Melba toast.  We picked up a case of beer.—“

“—What kind of beer?”

“Weird beer. Yuppie beer. Not in cases. Four six packs. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale! Like they know beer in Carson City!”

“Was it any good?”

“No. I don’t remember,” Stan said. “Do you know where my boat is?”

“It’s not at your bank.”

“My bank. Ha! That was a laugh at my divorce. ‘You own a bank.’ No, I do not own a bank. I own a bank building and she can have it if she wants it.  That lawyer of hers thought I was hiding money all over the place. The bank cost me five thousand dollars to buy, plus seven thousand dollars in taxes. It was going to cost me another forty thousand to tear down the bank. That, they didn’t tell me. And that was just an estimate.”

“Sort of a raw deal. What did you wind up doing with the boat?”

“Why am I drawing a blank here?”

“Go back to you and Sal getting beer.”

“We got the beer and then there was something else. I want to say sea food.”

“I am not a master of Earth geography, but we couldn’t be further away from a sea if we tried.”

“Sal’s got this restaurant provisioning sideline. He gets deals on stuff. Not from the Chicago Fish House or Water Market. It was someplace else. I am coming up short.”

“Why are you moving to Miami?”

“Ellen and Nancy are attending school down there. I bought them a condo, so that they don’t have to dorm it. I have a condo in the same building, a one bedroom.”

That did not bode well, but I didn’t want to say anything. I asked “What time of year did this take place?”

“Late April. Early May. We missed the first run to get the boat in. The warehouse! That’s it! The warehouse,” Stan said, his hands now moving. “The guy who ran the warehouse where we kept our boat was renting space to this jobber. In another warehouse. A frozen warehouse. Frozen foods. That’s where we were going after getting beer. The guy had a load of lobster tails or something like that and he wanted Sal to take a look at them. We pull up to the place and this guy waves us in an open dock door.”

“Do you remember where this place was?”

“Chicago and Avers. Right behind the building where we kept the boat.—We drive on in and the place is like an automatic carwash. Stuff was beating on our windows. Not like water, but like a fog, if that makes sense. Then this thick green fog came up out of the car’s air vents—“

“-What did it smell like,” I asked, telepathically fishing for a reference. “Vinegar?”

“Formaldehyde. Something like that. Sal tried to get out the car door. I tried to get out. And that’s the last thing I remember.”

“Have you seen Sal since?”

“No. I don’t think so.—Do you have an explanation for this?”

“I do. But you are not going to like it.”