by Ira Nayman
“Many people in this reality have Dimensional Portal™ s,” I told her. “We just have to find one and get back to our world. Marcy – we – did you hear me? Marcy?”
She was staring at the sun, which was grinning at us.
I took Marcy’s hand and quickly led her to the tallest building on the lot. It didn’t help that the street, which had started out gravelly, became pillowy soft, then hot tar gooey (without, thank goodness, the heat), then kind of sandpapery (or, perhaps, emery boardish – I had more important things to think about than the most appropriate metaphor for the consistency of the road).
I needed to distract Marcy before she lost it completely, so I asked, “Why would Alfredo Soss-Tiramatsui send us into the * UNHINGED ZONE *?”
“I don’t know!” Marcy whined as a six foot Snickers bar fell to the ground next to her. I knew if we got out of this alive, she was going to have Freudian nightmares about that for months.
“If you want to be a Transdimensional Authority investigator,” I calmly insisted, “you will have to learn to focus under pressure. So, why did Alfredo Soss-Tiramatsui send us to the * UNHINGED ZONE *?”
There was silence. Just when I thought she wasn’t going to respond, Marcy weakly suggested, “because he programmed the Dimensional Portal™ in a hurry and got the coordinates wrong?”
“Okay,” I said as enthusiastically as I could given my generally dark nature. “I don’t think so, but nice try. I mean, he makes his living traveling through the Dimensional Portal™ – I seriously doubt he would make a mistake like that. And, in any case, he just had to transfer the coordinates from the Home Universe Generator™ we were all looking at. What other possibilities could there be for what happened?”
“Dimensional Portal™ malfunction?” she offered, more gamely this time.
“That only happens in Star Trek,” I responded.
“He was in on it,” Marcy said, excitement creeping into her voice and kicking doubt’s ass. There was real, honest to goodness detective logic happening here! “Oh, my god, of course! The smuggling onion ring must have used his Dimensional Portal™ to move the goods between universes!”
“Very good!” I encouraged. I do that, sometimes. Encourage. Oh, come on, you know I do. Right. I didn’t have time to say anything else.
We made it through the double doors of the building a fraction of a second before they turned into 10 foot tall stone statues of Roger Rabbit.
“Now how are we going to get out of the building?” Marcy said, panic sucker punching the excitement that had been in her voice.
“Through a Dimensional Portal™ that will take us home,” I firmly told her. I didn’t feel the need to point out the open windows next to where the doors used to be – that would only have confused matters.
We made our way through the building, looking for signs of life. Eventually, on the third floor, we found a receptionist sitting behind a desk. She had three heads and four tentacles where each of her arms should have been. One of the heads (the one with blue hair) was talking into a headset; another (the one with the red hair) was focused on a computer; the third (the one with the yellow hair) was watching one of the tentacles filing one of the other tentacles. The rest of the tentacles were either typing, dialing, filing or drumming a catchy tune on the desk. At first, I thought she might be some kind of robot, but she seemed awfully…squishy. She must have been some kind of genetic experiment that had gone horribly awry, but happily had found itself a useful trade.
I strode up to the desk and asked, “Who’s in charge, here?”
The head with the yellow hair looked up from its filing and asked back, “Who wants to know?”
“I’m Barbara Brundtland-Govanni,” I told her in my best ‘take command’ voice, “Special Agent Working With the Transdimensional Authority and this is Marcy Chicklins-Montmorency, Investigator-in-Training.”
Without batting an eyelash, the receptionist said, “Can I see some ID, please?”
I gestured at the spacesuit I was wearing. “That could be a little difficult.”
“Sure,” Marcy said. She did some contortions inside her spacesuit and showed the receptionist her student ID through her faceplate. She was very limber, I have to give her that.
The receptionist grunted softly and said, “Have a seat. I’ll see if Mister Gorgodzilla will see you.”
“I’ll stand, thanks,” I said. I was about to suggest Marcy do the same, but she had already squatted to sit on a chair which turned into a butterfly just as her ass was about to make contact with it. She fell to the floor with a thud just as I was about to say something. Ah, well. We all have to learn from experience: compromised causality often leads to cheap physical humour.
The receptionist pressed a button on a console. “Mister Gorgodzilla?” she said. “There are some interdimensional cops here to see you.”
Marcy hopped to her feet.
Three bubbles floated out of the console. They did a little dance in front of the receptionist, then from the last to the first, they burst. The blue-haired head turned towards us as the yellow-haired head went back to its filing.
“Mister Gorgodzilla said he is incredibly busy,” she told us in the same bored monotone. “You’re welcome to wait, but he told me to tell you in no uncertain terms that he checked his daybookplannerthingie and he was scheduled to be on the phone until well into the evening, so you’d probably be wasting your time. Hey, it’s your time to waste, but I wouldn’t bother if I was you.”
“You got all that from three bubbles? I asked incredulously.
“Those bubbles are very expressive,” the receptionist coolly responded, “when you know how to hear them.”
“Can you please tell him that we only need a minute of his time,” Marcy stated. “We just need to borrow his Dimensional Portal™ so that we can get home.”
“So you can get home?” the receptionist acidly repeated. As it dripped from her mouth, it burned one of her hands, and three of her other hands had to stop what they were doing and rub the wound with tissues from the box on the desk.
“Really,” Marcy insisted. “It won’t take any time at all!”
All three heads turned towards her. “Naah,” they said in unison, “I think you’ll just have to wait until Mister Gorgodzilla is ready to see you.”
“What if I don’t want to wait?” Marcy got huffy. She had clearly been paying attention in the lecture on ‘Dealing with Recalcitrant Receptionists!’ “What if I just march right into his office?”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the heads hissed. If looks could kill, Marcy Chicklins-Montmorency would have withered to nothing in her spacesuit. Unfortunately, because this was the * UNHINGED ZONE *, looks had the potential to kill. You just never knew. So, she came back to me.
Turning our backs on the receptionist, Marcy asked, “Okay, what now?”
I was about to answer when we heard a huge WHOMP! We slowly turned our heads to see that a 10 ton weight had appeared out of nowhere and crushed the receptionist. Not wanting to miss the opportunity, I shouted, “Hurry!” and rushed through the doors beyond the receptionist’s desk.
Down a hallway was a huge set of wooden doors with ornate carvings of what appeared to be chipmunks. As we ran towards it, the door receded. The faster we ran, the further it moved away from us. I hate when that happens!
“What do we do now?” Marcy, winded from the running, asked.
“Turn around,” I told her.
So, we ran down the hallway backwards in our spacesuits. I’m sure we were quite the sight. I’m sure the scene would make a great visual gag in a movie of our adventures. Good thing one is never going to be made.
Marcy and I thudded to a halt at the door. I felt for the handle, pushed it, and we fell backwards into the room. We were on our feet in no time at all – we were professionals, after all. We found ourselves in a largish room. On one wall was a waterfall. I would like to think that it was there because we were in the * UNHINGED ZONE *,
but I suspect it was just a sign of the hubris of the wealthy. Along the opposite wall was a Dimensional Portal™ – yay! In front of us was a glowing tan on an otherwise unexceptional man. He blew three bubbles out of his mouth and into a cellphone before he even noticed us. When he did, he blew three more bubbles into the phone and hung up.
Then, the man blew three bubbles at me. They undulated their way towards me before popping more or less at once.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t catch that.”
The man blew three bubbles at me again. They undulated in the same way and popped simultaneously. I thought I caught snatches of words such as “…oing he…” “…usy man y…” and “…o call the…”
“Umm, just one more time,” I asked.
The tan seemed to be exasperated, but the man blew three more bubbles at me. And, I understood them to mean: “What are you doing here? I’m a busy man, you know. My cellphone is vibrating enough to satisfy a dozen women! I hate to think what deals this interruption is going to cost me! If you don’t scram at once, you will force me to call the cops!”
Marcy and I looked at each other in astonishment. Obviously, she had understood him, too. “How are you able to say so much with so few bubbles?” she asked in amazement.
The man blew three bubbles of different sizes which moved in a straight line with only a slight side to side sway. Then, the middle one popped, then the last one, then, finally, the first. And, we…sensed, more than heard, that the man had said, “Actually, the bubbles contain a tremendous amount of information, everything from the shape, the movement in space, how long they hang in the air and the order in which they burst. What I don’t understand is why you need 26 letters to communicate – how decadent! Now, if we’re done with the linguistics lecture, I will ask you one last time to leave my office!”
“We just need to use your Dimensional Portal™ to get back to our home universe,” Marcy insisted. Now that she could see a way home, a peppy, can-do attitude had knocked her worry out of the stadium. “Surely, you –”
The man held up a perfectly manicured hand. With his other hand, he pressed a button on a console on his desk and blew three bubbles into it, which we interpreted as, “Miss Thingie?”
To Marcy’s surprise, the receptionist replied, “Yes, Mister Gorgodzilla?”
As the man explained to his receptionist that he wanted her to call the police, Marcy turned to me and said, “I thought the receptionist was dead!”
I shook my head. “Death isn’t necessarily permanent in a place where cause and effect have been severed. Somebody can always go back in time and change the chain of events that led up to your death or remove you from the scene at the last possible second. You may have powerful powers of recuperation you never knew you had until you needed them. It could just have been a flesh wound. There is only one thing that can permanently hurt you: an Acme Oblite-RAY-tor 2000.”
Which Mr. Gorgodzilla just happened to be pointing at us. “Now, if you’ll just have a seat by the waterfall,” he bubbled at us, “you can wait for the cops while I get back to work.”
“I thought you can’t be killed in the * UNHINGED ZONE *,” Marcy blurted.
“Not by traditional means,” Mr. Gorgodzilla bubbled explanatorily. “But, the Acme Oblite-RAY-tor 2000 doesn’t kill you; it traces your life back to the moment you were conceived and…unconceives you. It makes it as though you were never born. Your existence is completely erased from space-time in this and all other universes. Okay. You get the idea. Now, I really am running out of patience, so –”
Marcy pointed off to his left. “Oh, look!” she shouted. “A crystal chandelier!”
Mr. Gorgodzilla rolled his eyes. “You don’t think I’m going to fall for that old gag, do yo –” he condescendingly bubbled, just as a chandelier flew out of the waterfall at him, bursting his bubbles and knocking the Acme Oblite-RAY-tor 2000 out of his hand. He and Marcy jumped for the gun. He got his hands on it first, but she wrestled him for it before he could aim it properly.
The gun went off and tore a hole in the ceiling. Kittens started raining into the room through the hole. Out of nowhere, I found I had an umbrella in my hand. I opened it up. The material seemed to be too thin to be of any use, but it repelled the felines like a little kitty trampoline. I noticed NASA’s logo on the handle. What? Space engineers can’t be whimsical?
As the grappling continued, the gun flew into the waterfall, where it noisily shorted out, taking half the wall with it. Watching Marcy and Mr. Gorgodzilla go at it, I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t step in. I could have easily gotten my new chopsticks out, but I couldn’t see how I could deploy them in the spacesuit. So, I decided that this was Marcy’s fight, and let her go at it. In the end, Mr. Gorgodzilla lay unconscious on the floor.
I rushed to the control panel of the Dimensional Portal™ and started punching in the coordinates of the Transdimensional Authority headquarters on Earth Prime. “Good job,” I said. “We may have been bushwhacked, Marcy, but we kept our wits about us and we’re going to get out of this alive. Marcy? Marcy?” As I finished keying in the coordinates, I turned and saw that Marcy was also lying unconscious on the floor. I rushed to her side but, before I could do anything, three bubbles floated into the room from the hole in the ceiling. A police siren! It was near and getting louder! Hoisting Marcy over my shoulder, I ran to the Dimensional Portal™, pressed the big blue button and rushed through it.
It was only after we had arrived in the Transdimensional Authority parking lot that I noticed that half of Marcy’s helmet was covered in blood.
In the battle with Mr. Gorgodzilla, Marcy’s helmet had apparently cracked. I could make out the crack against the backdrop of the blood. There was even a small hole in the crack, a hole that had been plugged by her earlobe. The earlobe had been slowly sucked out of the helmet and into the * UNHINGED ZONE * – the doctors that examined her found that most of it was gone. The real question was: how much of the crazy had gotten into her head during the battle? Taking no chances, the Alternaut Academy gave her a reduced class load for the remainder of the term and she was carefully monitored for signs of Causal Distress Disorder.
Two days later, Transdimensional Authority investigators raided the house of Alfredo Soss-Tiramatsui; unfortunately, the Alternate Reality News Service reporter had been murdered and his Dimensional Portal™ had disappeared. Boolie Blitzen was back as lead on the case; he only had control of three fingers and had to speak through a voicebox, but he was back. It was like what might have happened if Stephen Hawking had been a detective. Wouldn’t that be amazing? I would watch that television programme, and I don’t even have a television set! Anyway, Boolie figured Soss-Tiramatsui had called his boss, the leader of the church organ smuggling onion ring, in a panic after we visited him. The boss had him killed and took the Dimensional Portal™ to keep up the racket. (We gave the Alternate Reality News Service a stern talking to and they revised their work at home policy.)
By then, the pieces were starting to come together: Boolie noticed, for example, that Soss-Tiramatsui had published articles about his trips to alternate realities at around the same time as the stolen church organs appeared in them. The case we built against him was airtight except for one detail: you can’t prosecute a dead man. We’ve tried. It’s just ugly. As for the red-haired man, he disappeared completely.
Time passed. I visited Marcy when I could. She seemed to be doing well, except for her habit of interdimensional recursion. Whenever I arrived at her apartment, she always seemed to be watching herself on her Home Universe Generator™ watching herself on her Home Universe Generator™ watching herself on her Home Universe Generator™ watching herself on her Home Universe Generator™ watching herself on her Home Universe Generator™ watching herself on her Home Universe Generator™ watching. After five or six iterations, the picture got too small to make out, but you knew it just went on forever. A little…different, perhaps, but not as strange as what some people did with their H
ome Universe Generator™s.
You have to understand that Marcy had become something of a legend to her fellow students at the Alternaut Academy. She had been to the * UNHINGED ZONE *…and survived! The * UNHINGED ZONE * was, for most of them, a bogey man their parents used to emotionally blackmail them into doing what their parents wanted them to do. “Eat your organically grown, genetically modified broccotash, or I’ll send you to the * UNHINGED ZONE *!” “Help your Vacubot 3e-27 clean the zombie droppings from the floor in your room or, I swear, I’ll throw you into the * UNHINGED ZONE *!” “Stop worrying so much about the * UNHINGED ZONE * or I’ll find a way to send you to the * UNHINGED ZONE *!” You know – that sort of thing. So, for many people – not just her fellow students, either – spending time in the * UNHINGED ZONE * and living to tell about it made Marcy Chicklins-Montmorency a hero…at least, until she blew the back wall out of her apartment building.
The police were the first on the scene. When they found out who they were dealing with, they called in Alternaut Academy officials. They soon found themselves in over their heads, so they called in the Transdimensional Authority. They weren’t sure how to proceed, so they called me. At three in the morning. They told me that Marcy had already destroyed her apartment and was holding everybody hostage with a weapon that could devastate the whole area. Of course, I sped over there as quickly as I could.
There were at least 27 officers of various forces, most standing around, drinking coffee. They had a competition going to see who would be the first to win a prize in Tim Hortons Rrrrrroll Up the Rrrrrrrrrrim to Win Contest valued at $1,000 or more. Everybody has priorities. After I had identified myself, I was immediately led to Marcy’s apartment.