by Paul Anlee
Chef was apoplectic.
The Maître D’ rushed over to do damage control. He was, as always, the icon of diplomatic service in expression and posture. “Monsieur, how can I be of service? What seems to be zee problem?” he cajoled.
“Your cook is incapable of preparing a meal according to simple requests,” Timothy responded, electing to keep his voice at an embarrassingly high volume.
“Perhaps monsieur would be 'appier with room serveez,” suggested the Maître D’.
Timothy could only guess at what room service might entail; he didn’t like the sound of it. “My good man, I have not taken lodgings at this inn, nor do I intend to. And had I a room here, I assure you, I certainly would have no desire to partake of an evening meal therein.”
The Chef and Maître D’ exchanged exasperated glances. The guest’s dress suggested money or upbringing. His rude and demanding behavior, however, did not lead one to believe him well bred. He must be a man of considerable first-generation financial means. It was odd that neither employee recognized him. It was their job to be familiar with important people around the city. The man was either newly arrived, newly rich, or an imposter.
“Eet ees, of course, our policy and our plaisir to ensure our guests’ special needs are met, monsieur.” The Maître D’ was determined to deduce this person’s status before subjecting poor Chef to any further humiliation. “Perhaps monsieur could provide one of hees credit cards and we would be 'appy to charge zee special meal to eet.”
Timothy began to panic. Lord Chattingbaron’s usual approach in dealing with such situations was not having the desired effect. Maybe politeness would be more effective. “Surely you can put it on my account. M’Lord will be happy to settle with you next time he is in your fair city.”
The Maître D’s face hardened. Bingo! He finally had the measure of this overdressed imposter. He bowed and gestured toward the entrance of the restaurant. “If monsieur would be so good as to accompany me, we shall see your desires are attended to immédiatement.”
That’s more like it—Timothy thought. He stood and accompanied the Maître D’ to the entrance. They must be moving me to a private dining room as befitting a gentleman. My many years of observing my Lordship have come in useful. I wasn’t sure I could master the tone, but I seem to have convinced them. He walked with a confident swagger, emulating his Lordship.
The Maître D’ gestured to the two bellmen standing at ease near the entrance to join them. “Our…guest...seems to have confused us with one of the soup kitchens,” the Maître D’ explained to them, his French accent giving way to Mid-West American. “Perhaps you could point him in the right direction.”
The glorified bouncers regarded the formal wear of the offender and eyed the Maître D’ for assurance.
“Don’t be fooled by his attire,” the Maître D’ said. “He has neither the wealth nor breeding it suggests.”
The men took hold of Timothy’s arms and escorted him, feeble protests notwithstanding, to the main entrance. As the door parted, they gave him an extra little shove for good measure.
“Get outta here, ya bum,” scoffed the larger of the two, and returned to his post inside the main door.
Timothy stared, entirely dumbfounded. What will I do now?
The second bouncer walked up to Timothy and leaned in close. Timothy cowered. Reaching into his pocket, the man pulled out two ten-dollar bills and pushed them into Timothy’s hand.
“Listen,” he said. “I was in your shoes once, a long time ago.” He stood back and admired the Footman’s outfit. “Well, maybe not in those shoes,” he laughed. “There’s free food at the soup kitchen two blocks up.” He pointed toward the trees of Central Park, barely visible a few blocks away. “You won’t be able to miss it. There should be a long line of scruffy men outside. If you hurry, they may even have a bed for you tonight.”
“Thank you, sir. That is most kind,” replied Timothy. “As you can see, I am far from home in this strange city.”
“Yeah, no kidding. Well, take care. It’s a rough world out there.” The bouncer returned to his post, shaking his head the whole way.
Timothy hastened toward the soup kitchen, already salivating at the thought of a meal. He didn’t know it could hurt so much to go without food for such a short time. Had someone back in DonTon told him this, and had he been self-aware at the time, he wouldn’t have believed it.
The line of men waiting for a free meal was exactly as described. He reached into his pocket and rubbed the two bills for comfort. Even if the meal were free, lodging might have a fee. Timothy boldly joined the line.
The arrival of a well-groomed man dressed in a tuxedo and white tie drew curious glances from the queue. Few appraisals were favorable. A couple of men moved in uncomfortably close behind him. They whispered and guffawed among themselves, growing louder by the minute.
A tall, emaciated man in a filthy, ragged suit a few positions back couldn’t resist an easy target. “Hey man, nice duds. You know, I don’t think they serve Lobster Thermidor in there.” This elicited uproarious laughter from his companions.
Timothy did his best not to react. He had learned that Lord Chattingbaron’s haughty approach was not much appreciated in this city.
“You never know. Maybe they hired a chef from the Hilton,” said the man behind him. Fresh laughter erupted.
Encouraged, the stranger poked Timothy’s shoulder hard enough to sway him off balance.
Timothy faced his heckler. “Now see here, my good fellow,” he began.
“See 'eah moy good feh-lah,” the man exaggerated, making fun of Timothy’s accent. His friends burst out laughing.
Timothy grew angrier. He gripped the man’s worn lapels. “Listen,” he seethed, and lowered his voice to an ominous level, ready to deliver a serious tongue lashing.
The dangerous glint in his adversary’s eyes ended Timothy’s tirade before it started. He released the man’s jacket and took a step back.
“Hey!” objected the next man in line when Timothy bumped into him. The Footman turned to apologize. A hand on his shoulder whipped him back around to face the belligerent group behind him.
“With a fancy suit like that, you oughta have plenty of dough on you,” deduced the group’s de facto leader. He placed a hand on Timothy’s shoulder in false camaraderie and pulled the footman toward him. “Why don’t you share with your new buddies?” The others nodded eagerly.
“Well, I couldn’t. I mean, I need... I mean, I don’t have anything,” spluttered Timothy.
“Now, that can’t be right,” said the man, an ugly look rising on his face. “Gentlemen,” he addressed his followers. “I believe this fellow is lying to us.”
“Oh, that’s not good,” said one of his compatriots.
“No. No, that’s not good,” echoed two men behind.
The man pulled Timothy closer to his side and rested the full weight of his arm over the footman’s shoulders. He softened his voice to a confidential tone. “If you just spare a bit of your wealth, we’ll leave you alone. No harm done.” He spat sideways onto the street.
Frightened, Timothy extracted the two tens from his pocket and held them out for all to see. “I am a fair man,” he began. “This is all I have. I would be happy to share one of these bills with you. I’m afraid I must insist on keeping the other.”
The group roared at Timothy’s earnest response, and the man tightened his grip to a headlock as he snatched the two bills. “I think we’ll just take both of these and thank you for your donation, Gov’na,” he added, with the same sneering accent he used before.
“Give those back,” said Timothy. He reached for the man’s hand. The ruffian yanked hard on Timothy’s far shoulder, twirling him backward.
The footman regained his balance and charged angrily at the thief, intending to teach him a good lesson about stealing from an Englishman, even a servant.
His tackle drove the hooligan back into his followers. That was the best shot he�
�d land. A small group gathered around him, punching and kicking.
Timothy dropped to the cement and protected his face and abdomen, while the men beat him. He’d never experienced such pain.
Seconds later, he lay nearly unconscious, bruised, and bleeding on the sidewalk. He didn’t hear the police whistle that broke up the gang and saved him from certain death.
The officers took him to a hospital and let the doctors administer to his lacerations before questioning him. Luckily, the beating had been interrupted before any significant internal damage was done. The police accepted his story that his identification was stolen by his assailants. Another lie. The hospital treated him efficiently, without charge, and let him back onto the streets with an admonition to be more careful and to report to the British Embassy as soon as possible.
He passed a few more days stumbling around New York, watching for better methods to acquire food. He stole what he could from street vendors and shops with outdoor displays.
Other indigents sometimes held out a plastic cup or a cap into which passersby would drop coins. Cash was important in this city, and begging was viewed by the police as preferable to theft. He found an empty Styrofoam cup laying in the street, and set up a few blocks from something called United Nations Headquarters.
For weeks, he survived on spare change from wealthy strangers, and food from the nearby street carts. His clothes became worn and dirty. His beard and hair grew long and unkempt. Every few days he would accumulate enough spare change to access a room and shower in one of the cities shelters.
It was in this thin, disheveled, and impoverished state, hunkered over a cup of coins and slowly losing his brand new mind, that Darya first noticed him.
9
Greg and Kathy were stumped. Once the police let them back into their lab, they spent four weeks testing, probing, and prodding the mysterious gray sphere. They were no closer to understanding it than when they’d started. The orb was not giving up its secrets.
They threw all sorts of matter and energy at it: light, sound, electrons, and, one evening after a little too much wine and exasperation, an overripe banana.
The sphere absorbed everything equally, resisting nothing. As far as they could detect, it emitted nothing beside a trace of Hawking-type radiation, which manifested as a dull light lending the sphere’s its muted color. It grew in proportion with the mass of everything they fed it, and with everything being absorbed incidentally.
One fitful night, just before dawn, Kathy woke with a startling realization. “Oh, my God. Greg, we have to stop the experiments on the microverse. Immediately.”
“What? Why? Just because we’re not getting anywhere….”
“No, I just realized we’ve been ‘feeding’ it. The bigger it gets, the more surface area it has, the harder it becomes to contain, and the more danger it poses.”
They halted their experiments abruptly, erected a plexiglass box around the sphere and had a construction crew move the entrance of the lab to prevent any accidental encounters. Any more accidental encounters.
The following Tuesday, the light was just right and Kathy noticed a few twinkling dust particles gently drifting toward the sphere inside its box. Strange. There shouldn’t be any moving air in there. Curious, she set up some investigations with canned smoke and traced the air flow around and toward the sphere.
“Uhh…Greg? You’d better look at this.”
He poked his head out of the office. “Can it wait? I’m….” His eyes instinctively tracked the wisps of smoke wafting toward the sphere. “Oh, crap!” Greg muttered, slapping the heel of his hand against his forehead.
“Of course! What was I thinking? Even if we don’t feed it, the microverse is consuming the air it contacts. Man, how could I miss that?” He let fly a stream of colorful cusses describing his poor observational skills, lack of theoretical rigor, general stupidity, overall incompetence, and a host of other transgressions.
Kathy had to stop him before he plummeted into self pity. “Wow, don’t be so hard on yourself. We both missed it. You’ve gotta cut yourself, both of us, some slack. It was an easy oversight. We’re exhausted. Our minds are still dealing with the tangled-up mess of Darian’s data dump. It amazes me we can still string two thoughts together.”
Greg waved her away. “It was a critical mistake. We can’t afford to make any more. It doesn’t matter that we’re stressed and exhausted. We have to be a whole lot more careful.”
Despite his years of advanced education and lab experience, despite the intellectual and technical advantages of his growing dendy lattice, he’d never felt so lost or hopeless. What on Earth did you create here, Darian? What are we missing? Surely, you didn’t make something this deadly with no way to collapse it.
If his nephew were here right now, he’d be saying something like, “Oh-oh! We’re in some reeeeeally deep doodoo now, Uncle Greg.” Yeah, kiddo, we’ve got some monumental doodoo here, alright. Monumental.
“I think it’s time to suck it up and call in the big guns,” he said.
They secured the lab, and shared their concerns with Dr. Wong, who talked to President Sakira, who activated a special emergency budget.
“If we can choke off the supply of new material to the sphere, including the air around it, we can buy some time to figure out a solution,” Dr. Wong had proposed.
“Done,” said President Sakira. She didn’t need any convincing.
They cordoned off an extra-wide buffer zone around the sphere’s plexiglass cage, and had the construction crew build a vacuum chamber the size of a walk-in closet around it. One end of the new chamber was going to jut into the hallway.
“Not a problem,” Dr. Wong said. He instructed the crew to remove the original wall, and divert the hallway into the storage space beside the lab. That became their new entrance. It had the added benefit of partitioning the lab off from the rest of the wing and from casually prying eyes.
President Sakira resisted the scientists’ urgings to alert the Prime Minister’s Office in Seattle or call in the National Guard. “There’s no point in panicking the government just yet. You said we can safely contain it in the chamber for quite a while, right? Before I make that call, I need you to focus on containment, risk assessment, and figuring out what the hell that thing is and how we can shut it down. If you scientists do your job, maybe we’ll be able to avoid the call altogether.
“Dr. Wong, I trust you will support them in whatever they need to carry out their work, and keep me informed. I’ll figure out how to spin the emergency budget expenditure so nobody asks too many questions.
“And not a word of this to anybody outside this room until we know what we’re dealing with. I mean it.”
Potential disaster averted for the time being, everybody got back to work.
* * *
Detective Lowry was not happy. What he’d hoped was a simple, straightforward shooting, turned out to be neither straightforward nor a shooting.
Was the guard’s death a homicide or a science experiment gone horribly wrong? Maybe criminally-negligent wrong. He wasn’t sure. Nobody, not even the two remaining scientists who worked here, understood the floating gray orb that killed the man. All he knew was that it was too soon to be back here on another case.
Only a few weeks earlier, he’d been poking around this same lab for fresh leads on two scientists who disappeared without a trace. Now, this.
The missing persons case was still open. There were no bodies, no sightings, no calls or notes. No activity on their phones, bank accounts, or credit cards. Nobody had received any kidnap demands, and no one was claiming responsibility. Anyone of interest had been interviewed multiple times and cleared. There were no fresh clues. That case was as bizarrely mystifying as this one.
The detective had had the dubious honor of meeting the famous Darian Leigh after some deranged lunatic tried to assassinate him during a public lecture downtown. That file was pretty much open and shut. They’d arrested the shooter on site, and
the guy swore he’d been operating alone. The Chief had been pleased. Lowry wasn’t convinced; he’d had a hunch there was more to it. Now, he was sure.
Come to think of it, I must have met Leigh’s missing employee back then, too. Odd—aside from the photos we got in the missing persons file, I’m drawing a total blank on him.
These two don’t seem especially worried for their safety, considering the events unfolding around them—Lowry noted. He’d grilled Greg and Kathy separately, at length, trying to poke holes in their stories.
They stuck to their stories, and insisted they knew nothing that could help the investigation. They had “no idea” where the deadly sphere came from or what it was. Right...of course not. But he couldn’t trip them up on the details or tie any wrongdoing to them. Much as he didn’t like it, he had to let them go.
“Don’t leave town, either of you. If Dr. Leigh or Dr. Rusalov show up, we’ll be going over your stories again.”
Kathy and Greg had exchanged guilty glances.
I saw that—Lowry said to himself. If I keep up the pressure, one of you is going to break. And I’ll be waiting.
* * *
Kathy and Greg were as mystified by the sphere as the detective. But, as scientists, they were also fascinated. They hadn’t figured out how it fit with Darian’s theories, but they were sure the orb had something to do with the RAF generator. That it materialized sometime between Darian’s jubilant call and his disappearance less than an hour later was too much of a coincidence.
“Do you think it’s some kind of black ops thing?” Greg speculated. “Maybe they’ve been watching our work and waiting to pounce once we got the thing to work? I know that sounds crazy, but think about it. Darian’s earlier research was classified top secret and sealed. He was never allowed to publish it.”
“A little crazy, but any crazier than the truth?” Kathy replied. “Honestly, I don’t know, but I doubt it’s that.”
“Whatever the truth is. If we do tell them what we know and how we know it, that wouldn’t make things any clearer for them, and it would likely land us in the hands of some secret government agency for an indefinite period of…‘interrogation’, if you know what I mean.”