Muggles Bereaved

by Vernon C Moyse

  “ How did he, she or it escape the first time,” asked Newton.

  Jim put his hand up miserably.

  “Well, that’s not a surprise,” said Newton. “so how does it feel having an anti-matter kitten inside you.”

  “It’s a bit like indigestion,” said Jim, thinking Newton was really interested in the answer.

  “Let us hope that The Needful One does not let that anti-matter kitten escape the Boyd-Karlssohn meniscus and annihilate itself with atoms of Jim Bean! But of course we shall have to use a particle beam on Jim Bean just to rid the world of a demonic pussy!” Though this was merely Newtonic scorn, no one person present could be sure of that.

  Jim’s gulp was very audible, as were Tracy’s sobs. Lim looked very pained and felt that, as leader, he should have had more control over Jim’s actions. Louis just felt that teenagers were not the ideal agents of The Quintessence. Perhaps God made mistakes too.

  “Well,” said Newton, I had arranged for a session with the linear neutron accelerator at the Oakridge National Laboratory. It could certainly pierce the silicene cloak and probably annihilate the dark matter, but it would make a real mess of a Jim Bean! Basically, Jim, we have got to get that kitten out of you. Any ideas?”

  Jim shook his head miserably.

  “just do one thing,” said Newton, “throw out another cloak, but towards that table, not towards any of us.”

  Jim thought angrily about The Needful One’s trickery and threw out a perfect, sparkling cloak that settled over the target table and clung tightly to it. The cloak was not accompanied by a kitten.

  Tracy was staring at Jim’s face, looking beyond the disappointed misery. “Jim?” she said.

  The others turned and looked. Jim’s features swirled the chocolate and cream swirl that they associated with portal transport. The features settled gently into an unmistakable Jim Bean look but with a kittenish likeness overlaying it. Another swirl and then the face of Christ crucified appeared as an overlay. With ginger hair and beard. Jim tottered and fell to the floor and Tracy rushed to help him.

  “Sir Isaac, do something, please,” she begged.

  But Newton had no clear idea what could be done. He was intrigued and fascinated but beyond that he had no theory or solution. He was more interested in experimenting on the silicene cloak draping the mess hall table. He lifted it experimentally and could scarcely feel anything at all.

  Jim was carried to a first aid room and made comfortable on the bed with the silicene prison sack beside him on the floor. Louis took the opportunity to examine the meld between Jim’s hand and the sack holding the prisoner who had now morphed into Dali’s version of Christ crucified. The silicene sack made no sound as it shifted. It might have been a liquid. Where it joined Jim’s hand it was part of his flesh and could not be pared away, unless by amputation of the hand. The better solution was to pass Jim through a portal as that had previously separated a silicene ‘prison’ from his hand. But there were no portals in the silo.

  Lim and Tracy asked to be alone with Jim and after they promised to do nothing that might release The Needful One, the others withdrew. In quiet accord, Lim and Tracy knelt beside Jim and laying one hand on each of Jim’s hands and joining together their free hands, they said a prayer. They prayed separately and silently and then together. Jim lay quiet and unconscious with his face remoulding with each morphed caricature of Christ. The morphing was now in synchronisation with that of the Prophet slumped in the silicene bag. It was the best The Needful One could do by way of attempting to re-unify itself.

  “What did you pray for,” asked Lim.

  “I prayed for a power that would enable me to help Jim, since I have no power that is as yet unselfish. I do not think my slimming further would help Jim at all.”

  “It would not, said Lim, “you are now Jim’s perfect woman. He told me so. “ He looked away bashfully, “I also prayed that you might be the agent of Jim’s salvation.”

  “You did?”

  “I did.”

  “But the key,” mused Lim, “has to be the way silicene separates from the creator in a portal.”

  The creator. What a description for shy, fumbling, error-prone Jim. Tracy sobbed despite herself. She feared that anti-matter might be the ultimate poison and might carry Jim away from her forever. She shrugged her shoulders. It was her way of signifying that a spiritual “pulling together” of self and spirit was needed.

  “What is it about a portal that might help,” she said.

  “Well, matter dissociates into atoms, then energy and is transported, It then reforms in the distant destination. That strange chocolate and cream swirl at the start – that appears in Jim’s face too. Between morphed images.”

  “How do you separate cream and chocolate?” asked Tracy.

  “Dunno, said Lim, “we could ask the base cook. They use a lot of chocolate here, sometimes mixed with that nacho cheese stuff.”

  They both shuddered.

  “I know that when you are using cream and overheat the mix, or over-stir the mix it can curdle or separate. Domestic science, two years ago.” Said Tracy.

  “Yes,” said Lim, “I was in that class too, though I loathe cream and chocolate. But separation and mixing are functions of temperature. Can we heat or cool Jim so much that a separation occurs?”

  “We can try,” said Lim, “a base like this may have a sauna!”

  It transpired that there was a sauna in the base commander’s suite of rooms, though the base commander did not use it. Lim first insisted that Jim and his captives be cooled in the base cold storage room, to see if the swirl of the images could be reduced. Newton, who thought that absolute zero or a bath in liquid nitrogen might work better, callously overlooked that Jim would certainly be destroyed by those methods. ‘Unsentimental’ was clearly Newton’s middle name. He thought that using the lower temperature of the cold storage room was like tickling an elephant with a feather. As it happens, Newton was wrong. You heard it here. Newton was wrong. The low temperature slowed the swirling images remarkably well. And while this was happening, Lim got the commander to fire up his sauna to full heat. Louis nodded to the commander, giving the OK to this request. Best humour the teens, they both thought.

  Jim and silicene cloaked prisoner were quickly transferred to the commander’s rooms on a kitchen trolley and Lim hefted Jim into the pine cabinet that was the sauna. There was just room for the three of them, Jim, Lim and a bag full of The Needful One. Lim inched the door shut and sat with Jim in his arms. “Come, on old bean,” he said

  The heat grew more and more oppressive and Lim thought the skin would peel from his face and drip down to the floor. His contacts had long since become useless, fogged up in the cold room and steamed up in the sauna. This had never happened before. He took them out and stashed them in the case. He wiped his fore-head with his arm. His clothes were now soaked with sweat and Jim was a damp bundle of rags in his aching arms. Despite the scorching heat, he held on and rocked Jim gently.

  “Come on, baby,” said Lim.

  “Steady on, Lim,” said a familiar voice, “people will get the wrong idea!”

  Lim wiped his forehead again again and looked at Jim’s normal, cute, freckled face. Not that he would tell Jim that he was cute. Ever. Beside them, there were now two silicene bags, one with a Warhol Christ in it and the other with a small, furry, shrink-wrapped ginger kitten. Neither silicene bag was connected to Jim in any way.

  “Do you really think I’m cute,” said Jim, still cradled in Lim’s arms.

  “Well you were when you were half kitten, half copper top! I’d say anything to get you out of that union with The Needful One, wouldn’t I,” said Lim, blushing furiously.

  Jim grinned impishly, “but you actually thought it, didn’t you!” His grin broadened, “you can give me a kiss on the cheek if you want.”

  He was dropped into the sauna’s narrow footwell with a thud.

  “Don’t tell me you can read minds now?” said Lim
.

  “I think I can actually,” said Jim, “it appears to be my second Superpower. I have to get permission first though.”

  “You didn’t get my permission.”

  “Oh that was just a first-use error. The mind reading app is now fully working and secure. Want me to read your mind again?”

  “No, thanks and you’d better warn Tracy. She has some pretty florid thoughts – I imagine.”

  “Come on,” said Jim, “I’m famished. I could even eat that nasty nacho stuff if they haven’t got any real Cheddar or Stilton.”

  They jumped out of the sauna to the delight of the waiting Tracy. She hugged Jim to her as if he might explode or vaporise. Jim was as much delighted as he was embarrassed. No, he was more delighted than embarrassed. He would have been very glad if he could have wrapped them into their own silicene bag, opaqued with a pink the colour of Tracy’s lip gloss and shrink wrapped for close encounters. As it was, he just blushed.

  “Steady, old girl, we’ve hardly been introduced,” he quipped.

  Newton, having easily forgotten his negative attitude to Lim’s idea of a solution, was delighted to have two separate parts of The Needful One in his hands. The kitten would get irradiated first, he opined and the rest of The Needful One would also be blasted if the destruction of the kitten was accomplished. Everyone in the room, including the hardest soldier thought his ideas plain ghoulish. Microwave a kitten? Newton explained that bombarding with neutrons was much more vicious than mere microwaving. Vicious and Terminal.

  “There’s a problem, Professor,” said Lim, “we cannot get you out to the linear accelerator at The Oakridge National Laboratory because of the mobs outside. We can’t get helicopters in because those boys out there have some serious weaponry.”

  “There must be something we can do?” said Tracy. She resolved to ask her slimming out-of-world agent Baldering Semapro. She had been planning to contact him if the application of heat had not separated Jim from his demons. She slipped away to the toilet, behind a door charmingly labelled “Heads” by some Navy designer. There she got her phone out and accessed the DiataKoinonia web site. Baldering Semapro leered at her without any further formalities.

  “You’ve returned,” said Semapro. “Boob job? Nose job or loose flesh tuck?

  “None of those things,” said Tracy, “ I just wondered if you knew any way of creating portals.”

  “You want to step through a hole in your universe and come visit me here?” Semapro redoubled his leer.

  “Not exactly, but it would be nice to move about a bit.”

  Semapro looked at a manual hanging beside him. “OK, kiddo, I will send you an app for your phone. It’s called Holy Moley Hackers’ Holes and it is a cheap and easy way of setting up a portal.”

  “just like that,” puzzled Tracy.

  “Not quite just like that. Hackers portals are a bit risky. They flare sometimes and it has unwanted results. Usually reversible but causing delays.”

  “Do they have a Harbourmaster?” asked Tracy.

  “Oh, you have those old-fashioned portals do you,” said Semapro. “The Holey Moleys allow you to input a destination and then show you the nearest equivalent matches. It’s just common sense.”

  “Why doesn’t everyone have this app,” asked Tracy.

  “Not everyone turns me on,” leered Semapro, “and I am the number one hacker in twenty adjacent universes. Your one good turn deserves another.”

  “How did you pick on me,” asked Tracy, “and how come I did you what you call ‘a good turn’?”

  “Once you put your face online, honey, you launched my boat.”

  “I’m only a teenager...” began Tracy.

  “And a slim and grateful teenager,” said Semapro, “and I can wait. The app is on your cellphone.” He clicked off and Tracy’s cellphone cleared to show the login for the Holey Moley app. It was just a swirl, like a rapidly rotating spiral nebula. She let the hand holding the cellphone drop to her lap and considered if she was feeling nauseous for any particular reason. She decided, no, it was just the effect that the Semapro creature had upon her. She was glad to leave the toilet and rush back to her friends.

  Her appearance alarmed Jim, “Are you Ok, Tracy,” he asked solicitously, putting an arm around her shoulders. She shrugged him off, not quite ready for any form of human contact.

  “Yes, she said, “but I think I may have discovered a way out of here.”

  Jim relapsed to his boyish anti-charm, “you mean there’s a tunnel out of the ladies loo?” He was the only one who thought that funny. Lim thought it was a funny peculiar reference to a certain toilet at Hogwartz.

  “No,” she said, “but that DiataKoinonia web site had a downloadable portal app. I want to try it out. Stand back everyone.”

  They stood back when Louis repeated the instruction, “Stand back and let Tracy try her portal app.”

  “I am not sure how it works, it may just throw us all into a portal. But here goes.”

  She pressed select and nothing happened for a moment or two. Then a line of text appeared. It read ‘tailored for Tracy by Baldering Semapro, press select again.’ She pressed select and another box appeared saying, ‘Enter destination’. Jim and Lim were looking over her shoulder with Louis and Newton close behind.

  “Well, Professor,” asked Lim, “do you know of a portal near to Oakridge?”

  Newton looked up and in the effort of concentration lifted the two silicene sacks to his chest as if about to pray – without letting go of the sacks. “Just try Oakridge.”

  Tracy keyed in Oakridge and a list of locations under the heading ORNL appeared. There was not just one portal in Oakridge, but several.

  “Let me see,” said Newton curtly, “ahhh, ORNL Spallation Neutron Source. That is the place.” He did not hand the phone back to Tracy but pressed select without further thought. The cellphone buzzed the incoming message buzz. The screen said, ‘Foreign holder detected. Was this a Tracy request?’ Tracy retrieved the phone with a look of contempt. She showed the message to the others thrusting it almost in Newton’s eye. She lowered the cellphone and keyed ‘yes’ with a logon finger. The phone scanned her fingerprint and took an iris snapshot. It buzzed again and three foot away from Tracy appeared a small rotating area of nothingness. The phone message read, ‘point the phone to an unoccupied area of space of at least one cubic metre.’ Tracy pointed out into the spacious mess hall and pressed select again. The nothingness expanded into a swirl of foam edged blackness like an oval mirror. About 7 feet in height. The phone said;

  “This is your portal to ORNL, Tracy.”

  “I am not sure we should just use it,” said Jim, “not without a test, something like a message in a bottle.”

  Newton was impatient, “Look,” he said, “Let’s get on with this. You can be the guinea pig, Jim. Fold into that portal and call us here on a landline. They will have secure landlines there.”

  “No,” said Louis, “Jim is one of our three main assets, so he stays here. We have no idea where that portal goes to. It may whisk a person off to Baldering Semapro’s lair on some other planet and in another universe. I’ll go. If I appear, Semapro will surely send me back pronto.”

  Before anyone could demur, Louis stepped forward and, in a chocolate and cream swirl, disappeared into the portal. There was an anxious wait extending some minutes and Newton was becoming agitated.

  “It’s bloody security, you may bet.” He said, prompting Jim to breathe a “language, Timothy!” comment which no American present understood.

  Newton raged on, “they’ll be giving Louis the third degree and refusing him even one landline call. Commander, let us call Oakridge and I will speak to Professor Zoltan Slovic.”

  The Commander reached for the wall phone which rang seconds before he could lift the handset. It was Louis.

  “Come and join me at Oakridge, they make Italian coffee freshly for each cup and it is excellent!” he said.

  It was decided that the th
ree “assets” should go through with Newton and Tracy promised to try and keep the portal open in case the base staff should need it, but the Commander felt that his Quartermaster should go with them and organise supplies including Somniac crowd dispersal sprays.

  One by one, they folded into the portal and found themselves on a campus that was green, delightful and full of sunshine. Louis waved at them from a nearby doorway and they noted that the portal was screened by barriers and armed security men in dark glasses. Lim, with his weak eyes suddenly understood why so many Americans wore sunglasses in films. The glare was quite intense.

  Oddly, the silicene sacks had passed through the Semapro portal without incident.

  They joined Louis and were introduced to the science staff including Professor Slovic who looked nothing like a nutty Professor and was wearing a very thick cardigan against the cool of the air conditioning. The coffee was indeed good and the donuts were, Jim opined, delicious. Professor Slovic and Newton were instantly caught up in a discussion about the silicene bags and their contents, which Newton refused to release from his aching hands. While Jim demolished donuts, Newton and Slovic debated the likely effects of bombarding silicene with neutrons. Slovic was very keen to ensure that there were no explosive results likely to damage his neutron collider. It was agreed that Jim should express another cloak for experimentation.