Before the captain could answer the detective’s curious position on the sensational event that had just occurred, another police officer arrived with two young men in handcuffs. They each had the glazed eyes which Lieutenant Schmet immediately recognized. The arresting officer brought them to the captain.
“We found these two hiding in a shed just up the street.”
“Really?” The jovial Begfendopple laughed some more, still twirling his moustache.
But Dogumanhed Schmet found nothing humorous about the situation and immediately began interrogating the prisoners, both of whom were not entirely at their sharpest.
“What are you doing here?” the lieutenant asked sharply.
The two young men were instantly terrified by the waxen visage of this frightening investigator—his bright yellow hair, one blue eye and one brown eye, the same turquoise suit of plush velvet. One of them glanced at Schmet’s hand, the one with the cat’s screeching face.
“Dude, that is one awesome tattoo…”
“I have the power to put you both into a tiny holding cell, squeezed in together with a few unpleasant thugs who might want to rough you up while the guard takes a long cofee break. Would you like that? I doubt it, so kindly leave the ’dude’ crap outside for now. Sit down, and if you answer my questions without a hassle, I’ll let you get the Hell out of here so you can go home to your spoiled middle-class lives.”
A guard brought over a pair of folding chairs, and the two terrified fellows sat.
“What are you doing here in Joytown 8?”
The taller of the two answered. ”We came because there is a wall inside that building…”
“Yes,” Schmet interrupted. ”I figured that. How did you find out about this building with the wall?”
“I don’t know. Everybody.”
“Everybody? Who’s everybody?”
“Everybody at school.”
“Where do you go to school?”
“Sea of Nectar State University.”
“Everybody at Sea of Nectar State University knows about the building with the wall?”
“A few kids.”
“Can you give me the names of some of these ‘few kids’ who know about this place?”
“Most of them are here tonight.”
“Any of them dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“The only good thing about tonight’s charming discovery is that a few missing persons cases will be solved as soon as we identify the corpses.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Oh. And while we are on the subject, can you fellows explain to me why you are out here and not stuck inside with the others?”
“Oh. Well, we had a plan.”
“A plan?”
“Yes. A plan. Because any time we have been here before, we always got stuck inside—”
“You have been here before?”
“Yes, Officer. A bunch of times. Anyway, it is very hard to leave because of the color. It shuts down your brain. And if you look at the color while your brain is shut down, it keeps it turned of, and everything becomes unbelievable. The bad thing is that you forget to leave, and you forget where you are. So we figured out a system—we brought along a rope and we each took turns going in there. After twenty minutes, the other two would pull out whoever was in there. Then we’d trade places so everyone would get a turn—”
“I noticed that there was a rope. But there are only two of you. Where is the third?”
“He’s still inside the building. As soon as we saw the cops, we tried to pull him out, but the rope broke. We just hung around because we didn’t want to leave him.”
“How noble of you. So the both of you can say with complete clarity that you were inside that building, purposefully exposing your minds to the fourth primary color.”
“Yes. We each must have gone in twice.”
“Here is the question of the day. The only reason we are sitting here in this dump and having this pleasant conversation instead of you two pulling each other by ropes so you can go into that Hellish room and freak yourselves out, the only reason why we are all here, is this…”
Lieutenant Schmet pulled out the Omni-Tracker Belwin had carefully retrieved after rescuing several of the more serious starvation cases. The device that Slue decided to leave behind. The device she stole from the police car.
Both boys looked at it, and one scratched his head. Schmet continued to speak, and the beads of sweat that ran down his face were
truly ofensive to look at.
“I’m a bit lost as to how this got there. A police Omni-Tracker. It was inside that room, smack in the middle of the mess, on the floor between a couple of mattresses, and most intriguing of all, its distress signal was turned on. Somebody placed it there. Somebody wanted the police to come here. I can’t understand why. If you can help me figure out who left this here, then you two can leave.”
“It’s a tough one, Officer. No ofense, but among ourselves and all our friends, the last thing we wanted tonight was for the police to show up.”
“No ofense taken. But, certainly, not everyone tonight was from your school.”
“True, there were loads of people we didn’t know.”
“Anything strange about anyone tonight? Anything out of the ordinary? Was there anyone who might not have approved of this scene?”
Suddenly, the taller of the two perked up, as if he had just remembered something.
“Wait! There was somebody!” He turned to his friend. “Remember that kid with the goggles?”
“What?” Detective Schmet interjected. ”Did you just say goggles?”
“Yeah. There was a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy. He was with a group of friends. He was arguing with me about the room with the wall.”
“If I were to show you a picture, do you think you could identify him?”
“Sure.”
With his inhuman face barely expressing the slightest bit of the excitement he felt inside, Lieutenant Schmet lifted his arm and pressed a pair of small buttons on his wristband device. A two-dimensional, slightly translucent image of Hieronymus Rexaphin’s high school yearbook portrait flashed into the air and hovered just in front of the two college students.
“Yeah, that’s him!” they both said at the same time.
Schmet could hardly contain his pleasure. He knew, he could feel with that same feather that had tickled his spine, there had been a connection somewhere.
“Wonderful, fellas. Now, this boy with the goggles, think carefully. Was he the one who carried the police Omni-Tracker?”
“Now that I think about it…” the other boy replied, his eyes half closed, wracking his brains to remember, "it was a girl. Yeah, a girl. Actually, she also wore goggles, but more stylish than his. He was with a One Hundred Percent Lunar Girl. And she had blue hair…”
“Really?” the detective exclaimed. “My gosh…” He pressed a few buttons on his wristband, searching for a menu that might be useful. “One Hundred Percent Lunar Girls with blue hair—now how unusual can that be?”
An image of Slue appeared in the air, replacing the one of Hieronymus, also taken from the Lunar 777 High School yearbook.
“Could it be her?”
“Definitely,” one of them replied.
Schmet could not believe the gold mine of witness evidence he was uncovering with these two boneheads. Stoners. Absolute kazzer-bats. He hated them, but what they just told him confirmed his belief that sooner or later the lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis vermin would start working together. First in teams of two or more. Then there would be armies of them. It was only a matter of time.
“Describe to me exactly what happened.”
“Well, you see, the three of us arrive at the domed building over there, and we get out our rope and we tie one end to our car and just as we are ready to start taking turns going in, this really awesome-looking vehicle pulls up, I think it was a Prokong-90…”
“A Prokong-90?”
�
��Yes, now that I think about it, Officer, it was definitely a Prokong-90.”
“Prokong-90…” Lieutenant Schmet said softly, no longer paying attention to the college student who proceeded to give detailed descriptions of the vehicle and the driver and especially the eccentric-looking girl in the front passenger seat. The students’ words faded. He realized that he had heard everything he needed to hear from them.
“Captain Begfendopple,” the man with the waxen, doll-like face said as he turned to his friend and commanding officer. ”Captain Begfendopple, I request an all-points bulletin for any Prokong-90 traveling on this side of the Moon.”
“Can we go, Officer?” one of the Sea of Nectar students asked.
“Yes—wait, no, not yet.” Something came to the lieutenant’s attention. His two eyes—one artificial, one real—stared intensely at them.
“You. And you. You said Sea of Nectar State University?”
They glanced at one another with expressions of terrible dread.
Schmet looked deeply into their bloodshot eyes with extreme contempt, then he stood up and ran to the door. Outside, rescue robots were piling the half-dead in front of ambulances, and the dead in front of morgue trucks.
“Belwin!” he shouted to the silver figures. ”Belwin! Come here!”
The mirror-shiny mechanical man reported to the waxen detective. They returned to the frightened students.
“Belwin, won’t you kindly scan these two gentlemen? Is it true that they are students at Sea of Nectar State University?”
“Yes, Lieutenant. They are enrolled as philosophy majors at SONSU.”
“Have you scanned the people you have rescued from that lovely circular room where these fine young men before us were so intent numbing their brains?”
“I have indeed, Lieutenant.”
“Have you scanned the corpses?”
“Of course. Identifying the deceased is a very important part of my—”
“Belwin, please do some math for me. Quickly. Tell me the percentage of people, both living and dead, whom you have removed from the Techbolsinator, that are associated with Sea of Nectar State University.”
“Certainly—that would be sixty-six percent.”
“Wonderful. Now, of that sixty-six percent, how many are philosophy majors?”
The robot had the answer before Lieutenant Schmet had even finished his question.
“My records indicate that one hundred percent of the SONSU students here tonight are philosophy majors.”
This bit of curious information sent Schmet into a raging fit. Belwin was a little surprised, as it seemed so irrelevant.
“So! Boys! It appears that we are not here just for the thrill of it all! How can it be that there are so many philosophy students from Sea of Nectar here?”
“Sir?”
“There is a rumor going around. It’s an old rumor. A rumor about a book. With three missing chapters. I myself read them a long time ago, but I destroyed my copy because I know how dangerous these ideas are. How quaint it must be that a copy somehow turns up at Gordon Chazhofer’s wonderful little alma mater! Don’t pretend you don’t know what I am talking about!”
“Sir?” mumbled one of them, petrified.
“Nothing I hate more than a goddamned BARRELHEAD who thinks he is a philosopher because he looks at that goddamned color and thinks it makes him smarter! Real philosophers enlighten themselves with hard work! Years and years of intellectual dirt under the fingernails! Forgoing stupid parties because you have to finish reading Hegel and Decartes and Plato! You spoiled little bastards—bad enough you look at that damn color for kicks—but to be pretentious enough to think it can enlighten you!”
He turned to Captain Begfendopple, who had not the faintest idea what Schmet was upset about.
“Send these two and anyone they associate with to the compound at Aldrin City! Order an immediate police raid on the philosophy department at Sea of Nectar State University! All reading material, especially any older versions of any works by Gordon Chazhofer, is to be impounded! Bring in all professors from that filthy department for questioning!”
Wiis Begfendopple stared at his old friend with the sweaty waxen face. Never in his life had he ever heard of such a preposterous request. And from that school?
Schmet didn’t wait for objections.
“Belwin!” he yelled as he charged toward his own car. ”Belwin! Come with me. The night is far from over!”
Next stop—traffic control. It should not be too difficult to track down the activities of a Pixiedamned Prokong-90 on this side of the round rock, especially if those kids decided to take Highway Zero. Where else could they go? He looked down at the cat tattoo on his hand.
If you quietly wait by the hole in the wall, sooner or later the mouse will forget you’re there…
chapter sixteen
The library was indeed hidden away. It took them so long to find it, even Clellen, who had been the longest in held-out expectations for dancing and rockin’ all night, was exhausted and bored and no longer cared about anything at all. Hieronymus had been wondering if he should try and call his uncle directly on one of Pete’s communication devices when Slue announced, "There it is. Up ahead, Pete. Don’t you see it?”
They had left Highway Zero at exit 399 and were riding along West Gong Road, which was little more than a dirt path through a series of small jagged mountains. Here, there was almost no plant life. It was a desert. The sky was darker, and Hieronymus thought to himself that this was probably what the entire Moon looked like before it was terraformed, back in the days when the Moon was just a moon…
And their destination turned out to be a little anti-climactic. Here, the road came to an abrupt end. The entrance to the library was a simple door on the fat side of a concrete cylinder that led into the colossal mountain. The only indication this was a place for books was the neon tube sign just above the door—blue neon letters that flashed on and of every few seconds with one word: liBrary.
“Library?” Pete asked.
“Yeah,” Slue replied. “We did tell you that we were on our way to a library.”
“Right, but doesn’t this library have a name? There is nothing for hundreds of kilometers in every direction and suddenly, we see this word, written in flashing neon, and it’s like they couldn’t decide to at least name it the something-something memorial library, or the Great Far Side of the Moon Library?” Pete put on the emergency brake and turned the engine of. There was nothing that signified any parking spaces, so he just decided to leave the vehicle exactly where they stopped.
As all fve of them left the Prokong-90, Clellen decided to weigh in on the flashing sign.
“I don’t know, Pete. I like it just the way it is. It’s funny. It’s also sexy. It looks like a forbidden club where only swingers go.”
“I agree with Clellen.” Slue was wondering how she was going to drop the pretense they were going to a happening party instead of an utterly boring excursion into the world of paper books deep in the bowels of an endless library where there was nothing to do but research authors and subjects, each long dead…
Pebbles crunched beneath their feet. They arrived at the door and when Hieronymus tried to pull it open door, he discovered that the entrance was locked.
“Oh!” he exclaimed. “What the Hell is this? It’s locked!”
“It is something like three-thirty in the morning,” Pete said.
He banged on the door, but it had no effect. It must have been made of a very thick alloy.
“This must be a Hell of a party,” Clellen remarked. "They keep the light flashing, but they don’t let anyone in.”
“There’s no door buzzer?” asked Slue, a hint of desperation in her voice.
“Nothing.” Hieronymus noticed a raised square plate of to the side. In the middle of the plate was a slot. ”Wait, what’s this for?”
Pete squinted as he bent over to take a closer look.
“Oh,” he replied with a resigned d
isappointment in his face. ”It’s an old-fashioned card reader. My father used to have one at his old job. You need a special card, probably one that is associated with the library, to get in.”
A collective sense of defeat overcame the fve of them. Pete because he really wanted to come through for Slue after the clumsy and insensitive way he had dumped her. Clellen because that flashing neon light had re-ignited in her the hope they were going to get to a super-cool late night party after all. Bruegel because he was hoping to find a bar and maybe a number of less uptight college girls he could meet and stop being the stupid loser odd-man-out that he had spent the entire evening being. Slue because she knew, she knew, she knew that inside this mountain, in the law section, was all the proof she needed to keep Hieronymus out of prison. Hieronymus because that locked door represented the end. He would get caught. His life was over. Damn his life. Damn it all…
They stood staring at the door. All fve of them. They could all hear the wind whistling through the nearby mountains and hills. The comet remained in the same position above their heads. Bright and illustrious, but only temporary.
Then Bruegel reached into his pocket, pulled out his fake ID, looked at it for a quick second, reached forward, and inserted it into the slot. Like magic, the forbidden door opened, and a mechanical voice rang out, "Welcome back to the Library, Houseman Reckfannible! We hope you have a pleasant research session!”
Slue hugged Bruegel and gave him another huge kiss on the cheek, and this time he smiled. “At least my date knows how to say Open Sesame!” she exclaimed.
They all laughed. Then the fve friends entered the library entrance, shocked by what they had encountered.
Somewhere up ahead, deep inside the complex, was loud thumping music.
Hieronymus and Slue exchanged incredulous expressions.
Could it be? they both thought at the same time, that there really is a party here?
They walked through the cylindrical corridor. With its black painted walls, it already looked like a club. Clellen was walking right next to Pete, and she was just in front of Hieronymus as they traveled through the long tunnel. As the music got louder, she turned around and stuck her tongue out, then mouthed the letters P-A-R-T-Y with her wonderfully shaped lips, and Slue began to laugh. Bruegel began to boast in his old manner, and Hieronymus was relieved his old friend was returning to his old self…
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