An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  But the aliens remained visible and apparently solid even when Cletus pushed them into his patrol car for the three-block ride to the jail.

  “I’m going back to the office,” said Forrest. “The jail is another thing we don’t need more pictures of.”

  “I’m staying on it,” said Rob, preparing to limp the three blocks. The chase had aggravated his bad knee.

  When he arrived, Cletus was just locking them up in Britfield’s single jail cell. It consisted of two walls of metal bars butting against two corner walls of the office, and it was roomy enough to accommodate the usual Saturday night collection of drunk cowboys when you took out the folding table that was usually stored in there. They’d have to find somewhere else to put those two before night rolled around – assuming the aliens hadn’t used their unknown mental powers to escape by then. “Did you take their death rays?” Rob demanded.

  “Huh? All their stuff is in the top desk drawer.”

  Rob riffled through the drawer. A futuristic container made of something like a flexible plastic, disguised as a woman’s purse. A thing like a wallet, but not exactly leather, containing three twenty-dollar bills and several small plastic rectangles whose purpose was a mystery to Rob. The bills were… almost right, but not quite; if he’d had a bill that large on him, he could have pulled it out for comparison purposes.

  “Have to get ahold of the bank manager,” he murmured, jotting a note about the funny money. Britfield Savings and Loan was about the only place in town that would have large-denomination bills.

  Right at the bottom were the two metallic, rectangular objects his elderly witness had described. They were terrifyingly thin and light: the strongest evidence of alien technology he’d found. Each had a blank grey rectangle embedded in its top half and a set of alphabet keys, much too small for human fingers, in the bottom half.

  “Wonder what these are for?” Cletus mused, picking up one of the alien devices and poking keys at random.

  “Don’t touch that!” Rob snatched it out of his hands. “We don’t know what it’s capable of doing. Cletus, I need to interview those two – people – or whatever they are.”

  Cletus shrugged. “Be my guest. I gotta get back on patrol with my partner, or he’ll bust my ass.”

  As he ambled out Rob snagged the desk chair and wheeled it over to a position just out of reach of the cell. The aliens looked as hot and tired and dispirited as real people; Rob had to remind himself that it was all an act. Underneath her disguise the ‘girl’ probably looked like something slimy and disgusting instead of the hot babe she was pretending to be.

  It was a very good pretense. Not just the legs, but the bosom that heaved under the thin fabric of the blouse… Rob surreptitiously pinched the skin between his thumb and forefinger to remind himself to stop drooling and start interrogating. Probably that disguise had been designed specifically to distract male humans. A woman might be a better interrogator, but there was no way he was going to let Mary Lee Wilson, lady editor of the women’s page, in on this interview. He’d just have to practice self-control. Look at the eyes or something. Wasn’t there always something wrong about the eyes?

  “What are you doing here?” he began.

  “What does it look like we’re doing?” the ‘girl’ snapped. “We’re sitting in the lousy jail of this lousy one-horse town.”

  “Inside a jail cell is probably the safest place you can be right now,” Rob told them. “When I came in, the people in the street were getting kind of excited about aliens in town.”

  “I happen to be an American citizen,” said the ‘girl,’ “and it’s rude to talk about illegal aliens. We say ‘undocumented immigrants.’”

  “Honeybunch, you can say anything you want to,” Rob told her, “but it’s no good spouting that line. I already know you aren’t a citizen. Not in my America, anyway,” he amended, remembering that story in Galaxy about parallel worlds. “So you can go ahead and tell me what you’re doing here and why you haven’t already used your special powers to escape.”

  “I’m too tired,” the ‘girl’ said, “and besides, that redneck cop handcuffed Colton and me to the table. Even I can’t teleport a whole table.”

  Aha! The disguise was slipping. “Tell me more about this ‘teleport’ power.”

  “You’re not equipped to understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “For any continuous function mapping a convex compact set onto itself, there must exist a point x0 such that…”

  “Okay,” Rob conceded, “you’re too far ahead in technology for me to catch up. Let’s get back to something simpler – which, by the way, you still haven’t answered. What are you doing here? What is your mission?”

  “We wanted to see the Coca-Cola bottling plant?” the ‘man’ suggested.

  “Very funny. What are you up to here on Earth?”

  “On Earth? What do you think we are? Aliens from outer space?” the ‘girl’ snorted.

  “We already know that much, so there’s no point in denying it,” Rob bluffed. “You might as well go ahead and tell me everything. If I write a sympathetic story perhaps they’ll go easier on you.”

  The two prisoners exchanged glances.

  “He really does think we’re space aliens,” the ‘girl’ said.

  “All right, let’s be space aliens,” said the ‘man.’ “That should be a really good message to the future.”

  After that puzzling exchange they told Rob everything and then some. Not only did they confirm all his surmises, they lifted the curtain on dazzling superpowers and technologies that their race was willing to share with Earthlings – just as soon as they were set free. Rob’s hand cramped from scribbling in his notebook.

  “About the letting you go thing? I’ll see what I can do,” he promised. “Unfortunately, it’s kind of… well, it’s not really up to me.”

  An extremely embarrassing incident

  Chapter 18

  I spent the night in the apartment I shared with Ingrid, planning to give her a hard time whenever she deigned to return from Britfield. Lensky was out of town anyway, so abandoning the condo wasn’t much of a sacrifice.

  Problem was, Ingrid never showed up.

  I worried about that while I was walking to work the next morning, but when I got to the office I discovered a whole new set of things to worry about.

  “Dr. Verrick did what?” I repeated to the stranger in a suit who had seated himself at Annelise’s desk.

  “As a result of the furor created by his bigoted statement to the press,” the man said, “Dr. Verrick has stepped down from his position as director of this Center. He has also turned over his teaching duties to subordinates, but that does not concern you.”

  ”What ‘bigoted remarks?’”

  The man in the suit gave me a tight smile. “Come, come. Don’t try to tell me you are unaware of the social media furor that his statement caused.”

  Of course I was aware of that, Annelise had told us about the fuss. But who gets fired – or, at best, eased out of his position – because some idiots twitted, or twittered, or whatever, a stupid misinterpretation of someone’s comments? Dr. Verrick was the polar opposite of bigoted: he barely noticed secondary sexual characteristics, let alone race or sexual orientation.

  “Apparently that’s not considered ‘tolerant’ any longer,” Ben said when I asked him what the hell? “To be acceptable now you have to be extremely conscious of all fifty-two gender identities and avoid stepping on any of them.”

  My head hurt. “Fifty-two gender identities?”

  “Well, it was fifty-two last week. By now it may be up to sixty.”

  And people think pure mathematics is complicated. It’s got nothing on sexual orientation and gender in the modern age.

  I was already feeling somewhat disoriented by the time Ben and I had this conversation. As soon as the man in the suit announced that he was the new Director, before he’d even bothered to tell us his name, he had taken grave exceptio
n to Mr. M.’s existence.

  And Mr. M. had returned the compliment.

  When he began the conversation by slithering out of my belt loops, the new director screamed like a sorority girl looking at her dues bill. “It’s alive!”

  Okay, Lensky had had a similar reaction initially, but within minutes of Mr. M.’s lecture on proper respect for Babylonian turtle mages he had apologized for failing to use Mr. M.’s preferred pronouns and had accepted him as a working member of the group. More or less.

  This time Mr. M. had to deliver his lecture while zipping around the public side at high speed while our new Director chased after him with a stick. It was not quite as impressive that way. Finally he – Mr. M., I mean, not the Director – remembered to take refuge behind the wall that blocked off the private side.

  The new Director stormed up to the wall and hit it with his ruler. “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s a wall,” I said. I was not in a helpful mood.

  “I can see that! What’s behind it?”

  I shrugged. Ben shrugged. We exchanged a glance that said, as clearly as words, “We’re not going through while this creep is watching.” The private side would be Mr. M.’s refuge only as long as it remained hidden.

  “Well, it’s coming down,” the new Director declared. “It probably creates a hiding space for all sorts of vermin.”

  We had the feeling that telling him our offices were behind the wall would only support this take.

  By mid-day we had learned the new Director’s name (Scott Myers), attitude (“No more of this nonsense about paranormal powers. From now on this Center will focus on actual, real-world applications of topography – oh, all right, topology, what’s the difference?”) and background (“We’re being dictated to by somebody from Math Education?”)

  If Lensky already thought we were intellectual snobs, his opinion would only have been strengthened by hearing Ben and me talking over lunch. After that brief exchange about social media and gender identity, we had sat by the Turtle Pond and discussed the inferiority of everybody who had any connection with a department that had “education” in its title, the innumeracy and general ignorance of the math education people we’d encountered, and Dr. Scott Myers as example of a new category even lower than the one in which we put education majors. Yes, it was snobbish. It was also very soothing to our outraged feelings. What it wasn’t, was any sort of solution to the problem.

  “He is almost certainly,” Ben summed up, “the kind of jerk who has business cards printed up saying “Scott Myers, Ph.D.” in large print.

  “With the ‘Ph.D.’ italicized.”

  Most serious academics feel that the only people who put “Ph.D.” on their business cards are (a) people who are still astonished that they got one or (b) people with degrees in non-subjects like Education Administration. Ben and I concurred.

  When we got back from lunch, Scott Myers (we refused to call him Dr. Myers, even in private conversation) had taken over the office next to Lensky’s and was sitting there with the door shut, making phone calls. Jimmy looked at us and whispered, “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” Ben and I took the opportunity to cross the wall to our own offices, and yes, we took Jimmy with us. We are not completely without compassion.

  Just… mostly.

  Especially when it came to Myers.

  Once he got over the queasiness that being escorted over the Möbius band always caused in him, Jimmy filled us in on the bad news.

  The new bad news, as opposed to what we’d already learned before lunch.

  Myers had ordered a door cut in the wall separating the Research Department from the public session.

  He had fired Meadow, saying that he saw no reason to pay a robotics expert. Jimmy figured he was next on the chopping block.

  He was presently trying to hire a pest exterminator to get rid of Mr. M. So far the businesses he called had said, “We don’t do snakes, get somebody else,” but we couldn’t count on our luck holding. If nothing else, he could call the city and request Animal Control.

  “Deluded fool!” was Mr. M.’s response to this news. “He has not the power to trap the greatest mage of Babylon.”

  I had my doubts about this. Mr. M. took a lot of naps.

  Finally, Myers had ripped the log book from the chain attaching it to Annelise’s desk, saying that there would be no more unauthorized absences on the patently false excuse of teleportation and he expected every member of the Research Department to apply nose to grindstone immediately.

  “Fine,” I said, “we won’t tell him I’m teleporting to Britfield.”

  “You’re teleporting to Britfield?” Ben said.

  “Clearly, something has gone wrong for Ingrid and Colton. I’m going to lead a rescue mission.”

  Ben objected to this – not the idea of a rescue mission, but the notion that I should be in charge of it.

  “Somebody needs to stay here to convince Myers that the entire Research Division hasn’t disappeared,” I said. “Just keep lying to him. Say I went to the bathroom or something. Say Ingrid went home with cramps. Whatever you can think of.”

  Ben reluctantly agreed to this – in principle. He just thought I should be the one to stay.

  “Toss you for it,” I offered. “Winner goes to Britfield, loser deals with Myers.”

  Naturally, I won the toss. Ben really hasn’t been paying enough attention to undramatic things like small object control.

  “Why is he going?” Ben demanded, aggrieved again when I took Jimmy’s arm.

  “He’s the only one left who’s actually seen Britfield. I’m counting on him to guide us. But that reminds me,” I said, “I’ll need to sugar load before and probably after. Would you mind just popping over to the Student Union and getting us a dozen or so candy bars?”

  “Why that many?”

  “In case of emergency. Am I the only one here who ever thinks something might go wrong with our plans? Whatever happens, I don’t want to be stuck foraging from local food sources. And Ingrid and Colton will probably need to sugar load too.”

  Ben grumbled but complied.

  Feeling slightly ill from gobbling three Hershey bars, I took Jimmy’s hand to piggyback on his visualization of Britfield. We stepped into the in-between and, after a few colorful and dramatic seconds, popped into the air in what Jimmy said was the park in Britfield.

  “You’re sure?”

  He pointed. “There’s the statue of Jim Bowie.”

  Nobody had noticed our appearance, so we were free to look for Ingrid and Colton.

  My search of the hospital and the morgue (conveniently located in the hospital basement) turned up empty, to my relief. Wherever Ingrid and Colton were, at least they weren’t dead or even seriously ill.

  Jimmy, meanwhile, had taken a different tack. Remembering the fuss Ingrid’s parents had made on their previous jump, he wandered around the town square asking if anybody had noticed strange occurrences like people suddenly appearing from thin air.

  Not only did he come up empty, but he got a downright unfriendly reaction from most of the people he talked to. Finally he got a part of the story from an old man who had actually, as a child, witnessed the event that nobody wanted to talk about.

  “According to this guy, fifty or sixty years ago there was an extremely embarrassing incident, and Britfield hasn’t gotten over it yet. Some reporter claimed he’d seen space aliens in the town, and he was convincing enough to cover the front page of the paper with screaming headlines. The excitement spread as far as Austin, but when the FBI and the Society for Paranormal Research showed up, he wasn’t able to produce any aliens – and neither was anybody else in town, including a police officer who swore he’d locked them in a cell from which they vanished into thin air. I think people in Austin felt equally embarrassed at having fallen for what was evidently a hoax. For several years there were jokes about how people from Britfield ought to move to New Mexico, since they obviously thought they were in Area 51. The kids who were b
used to the county high school – back then Britfield didn’t have enough high school age kids to justify a school of their own – got teased about UFO’s. Constantly. But eventually the fuss died down, and nobody in Britfield ever mentioned any paranormal event again. To this day!”

  “Must have been one hell of a fuss.” I thought it over. “Not that it can possibly have anything to do with our people… but how reliable is your informant’s memory?”

  “He’s a bit vague on what happened last week,” Jimmy said, “but he’s clear as a bell on half a century ago. He was actually the boy whom the photographer paid to run back to the newspaper office and get pictures of the aliens developed, and he’s still chortling about being paid a whole ten bucks for the errand. I guess back then it was worth more.”

  I took out my phone and did some quick research. “It sure was. Seventy to eighty dollars in modern currency! Either newspaper people got paid lavishly back then, or this photographer was very sure he had a scoop.”

  “He also claims he sneaked a look at the pictures.”

  “What did he see? Little green men with antennae on their heads?”

  “Not exactly… You’re the only person I know who says antennae instead of antennas.”

  “Betcha Ingrid does too.” I had a sinking feeling. “Or… did. What did he see, then?”

  Dramatic pause. “Two almost normal-looking people.”

  “Almost?”

  “Dressed funny.”

  Jimmy and I looked at each other. I don’t know about Jimmy, but I was looking with a wild surmise. Possibly even wilder than that of stout Cortez when he was silent upon a peak in Darien.

  “It can’t be,” I said eventually.

  “Of course not,” Jimmy said, and started off across the park.

  “Wait! Where are you going?” I had to run to catch up; blast all tall men with their long strides!

  “The morgue.”