Mr. Monk in Outer Space

by Goldberg, Lee

  “The commander of the Discovery and his concubine psychic from Umgluck.”

  Stottlemeyer rubbed his forehead again. Monk started rummaging around for something in the minibar. There was an awkward silence. I could feel the interview spiraling away from us.

  When the captain spoke again, it was in a controlled voice, the kind he usually reserved for dealing with Monk.

  “I meant in real life,” he said evenly.

  Hibler stared at him. Stottlemeyer stared back.

  “Kyle Bethany and Minerva Klane,” Hibler said. “What planet have you been living on for the last thirty years?”

  “Earth.” Monk yanked the 7-Up can out of Hibler’s hands, startling him. “You should try it sometime.”

  “What are you doing?” Hibler said.

  “Enforcing law and order.” Monk handed Hibler a bottle from the minibar.

  “What’s this for?” Hibler said.

  “It’s a V8,” Monk said.

  “I can see that,” he said. “Why did you give it to me?”

  “This way you only have to hold one drink,” Monk said.

  “But I don’t like vegetable juice,” Hibler said. “I like 7-Up.”

  “It’s for your own good,” Monk said. “It’s a very tasty, even beverage. You’ll thank me later.”

  I was still thinking about Kyle Bethany. I had a big crush on him when I was a kid. I didn’t like science fiction very much, but I could always count on two things in a Beyond Earth episode: that Captain Stryker’s shirt would get torn off somehow and that he’d end up in a romantic clinch with a female alien. And if there were no female aliens around, there was always Starella, the space shrink with the cosmic halter top that seemed to defy gravity.

  Bethany was a romantic hero, always jumping into danger and making passionate, chest-heaving speeches about freedom, democracy, and humanity. I don’t remember the speeches, but I haven’t forgotten the chest-heaving.

  After Beyond Earth was canceled, Bethany did some guest shots on shows like The Love Boat and Jake and the Fatman, but he basically disappeared and I shifted my unrequited romantic longing to Rick Springfield.

  Minerva Klane was on The Young and the Restless until she became one of the Old and the Incontinent. I saw her picture not long ago in the National Enquirer while I was waiting in the checkout line at Safeway. She’d had so much work done to her face that she looked like someone wearing a Minerva Klane mask.

  “Why didn’t Bethany and Klane show up?” I asked. “It’s not like they’re busy working.”

  “They’re part of the Galactic Uprising.”

  “You’ve lost me,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “They’re leading the Fen in the rebellion against the reimagining of the Beyond Earth-verse.”

  “I’m still lost,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “The UBS Network is producing new episodes of Beyond Earth.”

  “Isn’t that what you’ve been fighting for ever since the show was canceled in the seventies?” I asked.

  “Yes and no,” Hibler said. “They’re bringing it back with a new cast, new writers, and what they’re calling a grittier take on the storytelling. A lot of the fans feel betrayed.”

  “How did Stipe feel about it?” Monk asked. Now that Hibler was holding a V8, Monk could focus on the case.

  “That’s one of the questions we wanted to ask him,” Hibler said. “The suits at the network brought in a new executive producer, the guy who did the Eat Your Flesh movies. But they couldn’t have done it without Stipe’s approval.”

  No wonder the fans were upset. I’d seen a few minutes of Eat Your Flesh III on Cinemax. It made snuff films look like Disney cartoons. The Eat Your Flesh films were incredibly bloody and inexplicably successful horror movies about a sadist who kidnaps nubile women and hunky guys and puts them in grisly situations where they have to chew off their own arm or eat someone else in order to survive. If you ask me, films like that are worse than pornography.

  But they made money. Lots of it.

  “The fans in this Galactic Uprising—” Stottlemeyer said.

  “The Fen,” Hibler interrupted.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Stottlemeyer continued. “How upset would you say they are?”

  “They want to prosecute Stipe for crimes against fandom,” Hibler said. “They are out for blood.”

  “You think they’d go that far?” I asked.

  “Beyond Earth is their culture and their religion,” Hibler said. “Go back through history and look at what people have done to protect what they’ve believed in from being destroyed. Remember the Crusades? The Spanish Inquisition? New Coke?”

  That’s when the crime scene investigator returned. He was in his twenties and looked, judging by his pockmarked cheeks, like he’d spent half of those years picking at zits on his face.

  “The swabs came back negative, Captain. No GSR. He’s clean.”

  Stottlemeyer nodded. “Okay, Mr. Hibler, that wraps things up for now. All that’s left is for Lieutenant Disher here to take your statement.”

  “And blood and urine samples,” Monk said.

  “What for?” the CSI asked.

  “Drugs,” Monk said.

  “We aren’t looking for evidence of drug use, Monk,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “We don’t have to,” Monk said, looking Hibler in the eye. “It’s right in front of our faces. If we’re lucky, it’s not too late to rescue the virgin.”

  “Lots of men my age still live at home with their parents, ” Hibler said indignantly. “That doesn’t make us virgins!”

  “I can vouch for that,” the CSI said.

  “Thanks. That’s good to know.” Stottlemeyer took Monk by the arm and pulled him out of the room. “We’re leaving now, Monk.”

  “I’m very sexually active,” Hibler yelled after us. “With other people!”

  8

  Mr. Monk and the Bad Breakfast

  “I understand that the behavior of these Beyond Earth fans offends your sensibilities,” Stottlemeyer said to Monk in the hallway. “But if you can’t see past that, you’re no good to me or this investigation. I need you to control yourself.”

  “What about them?” Monk gestured to two women who were walking past us.

  Both of the women were dressed like Starella and had four breasts, two of which I presumed were falsies. I didn’t want to contemplate the alternative.

  “They don’t work for me,” Stottlemeyer said. “You do.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Monk said. “But it’s going to be an ordeal.”

  “It usually is,” Stottlemeyer said. “I’m going to the Belmont with Randy. I’d like you to stay here and see if you can spot anything that doesn’t fit.”

  Monk glanced at the two women again. They each had a tail.

  “It’s all wrong.”

  “You’ve got to learn about the show and the world of these fans,” Stottlemeyer instructed Monk. “You don’t know what’s normal in this particular world yet.”

  “There’s nothing normal about them.”

  “Not to you or me, but I guarantee you that they’ve got their own rules,” Stottlemeyer said. “Once you know what those rules of behavior are, you’ll immediately see what’s amiss and the murderer is as good as caught. That’s your gift.”

  “And my curse,” Monk said. “I’d like a copy of the security camera footage of the shooting.”

  “Sure thing,” Stottlemeyer said. “We’ll meet up later at the Belmont or at headquarters and compare notes.”

  He gave us two “all-purpose passes” to the convention and walked away.

  I really admired the way the captain had handled Monk this time and made a mental note to copy the technique myself. Stottlemeyer gave Monk a clear mission, a structure for dealing with the madness around him. If Monk focused on the underlying framework of everyone’s behavior, he might not be so distracted by the behaviors themselves. It was a brilliant strategy.

  In fact, Monk seemed calmer and more
centered already.

  “Let’s go visit the convention,” he said, taking a deep breath. “Have your wipes at the ready.”

  “They always are,” I told him.

  We headed for the convention center, stopping first at the registration desk to pick up a program book. According to the schedule, there were three parallel tracks of panel discussions every hour throughout the day.

  The panel topics included “Earthies vs. Earthers: Charting the Evolution of Beyond Earth Fandom,” “The Galactic Economic Impact of the Cosmic Commandments of Interplanetary Relations,” “Theories on the Creation of the Holocaust Satellite,” “How to Write Compelling Beyond Earth Fanfiction,” “Interspecies Sexuality and Captain Stryker,” and “When Will Trekkers Give Earthers the Respect We Deserve?”

  It might have been fun to listen in on a few of those panel discussions, but when we got to the convention center, there was a sign announcing that the entire program for the day had been canceled out of respect for Conrad Stipe.

  The lobby outside the main hall was crowded with costumed attendees sharing their grief and seeking consolation. They were hugging each other, sobbing, and looking generally shell-shocked.

  Monk had the same look, only for entirely different reasons.

  “What is wrong with these people?” he said.

  “The creator of the show they love was just killed, Mr. Monk. Surely you understand grief.”

  “Yes, of course I do,” Monk said. “What I don’t understand is their devotion to a TV show.”

  “Beyond Earth wasn’t a typical series,” I said. “Stipe created an entire universe of his own and then told stories within it. If you wanted to watch the show, you had to learn all about his universe and how it worked. You couldn’t watch it as casually as your basic cop show. I guess some people got into it a lot more than others.”

  I thought about Hibler and his ears and cringed.

  “How do you know so much about Beyond Earth?” Monk asked.

  “I participate in this thing we call American popular culture.”

  “I wouldn’t tell too many people that you’re a member, ” Monk said, lowering his voice. “If word gets out, it could come back to haunt you.”

  “Everyone in America and in most of the civilized world is steeped in it,” I said. “Except you.”

  “What if you ever decide to run for public office? The press will dig up your involvement. Your name isn’t on any of their membership lists, is it?”

  “There isn’t a list, Mr. Monk.”

  “There’s always a list,” he said.

  I decided to drop the subject before I got one of Stottlemeyer’s Monkaches.

  “Do you want to know about the show or don’t you?” I asked.

  “I guess I don’t have much of a choice if I want to solve this murder.”

  “Okay, so it goes like this,” I said. “When Earth’s first starship Discovery broke the boundary of our galaxy, it passed an alien satellite that had been sitting there for millions of years and triggered its automated program.”

  “That’s the show?”

  “I’m just getting started,” I said.

  “Oh God,” he said.

  “The satellite fired a missile that destroyed Earth, then it generated a wormhole and sent a signal of some kind through it. An instant before the wormhole collapsed, the Discovery flew into it and was hurled light-years into the unexplored reaches of deep space. So with Earth destroyed, the multiethnic crew of the Discovery, the planet’s best and brightest, are all that remains of humanity.”

  “That’s a terrible show.”

  “I’m still at the beginning,” I said.

  “There’s more?”

  I explained that the crew soon discovers that they aren’t the only ones in this terrible plight. They join up with the survivors of other worlds that met the same fate. They band together and create the Confederation of Planets. Their shared goals are to find the evil alien race responsible for this galactic genocide and prevent it from happening to any other worlds, to find new planets on which to reestablish their races, and to promote peace and understanding throughout space.

  There were about a dozen characters on the show, but I told Monk about only the major ones.

  The big three were the adventurous Captain Stryker, of course, and the sexy and mysterious Starella, and the brilliant Mr. Snork. But there were others also: teenage stowaway Bobby Muir, and the intellectual scientist slug-creature Glorp, and pioneering surgeon Dr. Kate Willens, and, finally, the unspeakably evil Sharplings, the aliens with inside-out bodies who ate souls for snacks.

  “How could their bodies be inside out?” Monk said to me.

  “Their organs were on the outside of their bodies instead of inside.”

  “Then what was inside?”

  “Their outsides,” I said.

  “That makes no sense,” Monk said.

  “But it was scary,” I said. “Whenever the Sharplings came on, I had to watch the show from outside the room.”

  “How could you be scared by something that makes no sense?”

  “You’re scared of phone booths,” I said.

  “But that makes sense. They’re death traps,” Monk said. “That’s why you don’t see them anymore.”

  “You don’t see them anymore because now we have cell phones. Phone booths aren’t scary at all. But aliens with intestines hanging from their bodies who can suck your soul out through your eyeballs are terrifying.”

  In fact, as I said it, someone dressed as a Sharpling walked past and I almost grabbed Monk for protection. I knew it was just someone in a suit, but it still gave me the shivers.

  “Phone booths exist,” Monk said. “Sharplings don’t. They have no basis in reality.”

  Neither did Monk, but I didn’t say that.

  “Not all shows can be as good as the Weather Channel, ” I said.

  “I can’t believe that a show with inside-out characters was a success.”

  Okay, he had me there.

  “Actually, it wasn’t,” I said. “Beyond Earth was canceled after only two seasons. But it came back ten years later as a cartoon, with the original actors doing the voices.”

  “Did anyone watch that?”

  I shook my head.

  “So why are they bringing the show back now?”

  “Maybe because there are so many people who are still passionate about it, thirty years after it was canceled.There aren’t a lot of TV shows that inspire that kind of devotion.”

  “You say that like it’s a positive thing,” Monk said.

  We walked into the convention hall, where I saw that Stipe’s murder wasn’t stopping the fans from shopping. The place was mobbed and the dealers seemed to be doing a brisk business in Beyond Earth merchandise.