One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (35 page)

Hieronymus opened the door and slid into the back seat of the vehicle next to Bruegel. Slue followed, sat next to Hieronymus, and closed the door after herself.

“Well.” The One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy grinned. ”Here we all are…”

“So, Mus…” Clellen smiled as she turned from her position in the front passenger seat, her winning smile hiding the utter madness that navigated every moment of her life. ”What about this party! Slue-Blue told me about this amazing party, but Bruegel has just informed us that the party was moved?”

Slue was about to answer when, at that moment, the Prokong-90 turned a corner, and they suddenly found themselves on an avenue they had been on before. Straight up ahead was the terrible domed building. The number of cars parked outside caught Pete’s attention.

“Hey! That must be the party you guys were talking about!”

“NO!” Slue shouted. ”Pete! Turn around! Don’t go there! Don’t go there!”

But Pete just glanced at Slue for a quick, grinning second. ”I don’t know,” he declared, heading directly for the building with the wall inside. ”If Slue thinks we should stay away, that can only mean that it must be FUN!”

Hieronymus leaned forward to Pete.

“Listen, man, you don’t even want to go near that place. It’s not a party.”

As they drove closer, Hieronymus and Slue realized yet another car had arrived a short time earlier and parked very close to the entrance. There were three men in their early twenties who were busy with a rope—one fellow had tied it around his waist and the other end of the line was attached to the car. He was walking toward the entrance and his comrades were uncoiling the rope.

Pete drove right up to them.

“Hey!” he called out from his window. ”What’s up? What are you guys doing?”

They looked up at him with worried expressions.

“Are you a cop?” one of them called.

“Do I look like a cop?”

They exchanged glances, their eyes wide with nervousness. Then Pete continued before they could answer.

“Look, I’m not a cop, okay? I’m still in high school for crying out loud. What’s going on—is there a party in there?”

“Pete!” insisted Hieronymus. ”I told you, it’s not a party!”

“What’s with the rope?” Pete then added.

“We need it. We can only go in one at a time. After twenty minutes,

we pull the other out, and then another one of us gets to go in.”

Pete laughed. ”What’s going on in there? You need a rope to pull each other out? Don’t tell me—it’s an orgy!”

“No, no, nothing like that!” one of the fellows insisted.

Slue leaned forward. ”Pete! We have to get out of here!”

Then Clellen leaned forward.

“Did you just say there was an orgy in there?” she asked with an odd sort of spark.

Before Pete could answer, he sniffed the air.

“Ugh! What is that rank odor?”

The stumbling figure of a nineteen-year-old girl emerged. Like the bearded fellow they had encountered earlier, she looked and smelled like she had not bathed in weeks. She wore a disheveled paisley dress. Her dark hair was hopelessly matted into large filthy clumps. One of her stockings was ripped all the way down to her ankle. She wandered right up to Pete as he poked his head from the car window, her eyes extraordinarily bloodshot. For the first time, the athletic teenager heard the moaning and bizarre chanting from the domed building. The filthy girl pressed herself against his car.

“Hey!” the healthy tell ball player exclaimed as he rolled up his window. “Don’t touch my car!”

“Obscura Camera Projection Techbolsinator!” the girl exclaimed with a parched voice.

Pete stepped on the gas pedal and the vehicle began to go forward, but Slue reached forward and touched his shoulder.

“Wait. Don’t go yet.”

“That weird girl outside touched my car!” complained Pete, who stopped the vehicle nevertheless. The mysterious girl with the bloodshot eyes caught up to them and pressed her face to the glass. Clellen laughed, then said mockingly to her fellow Loopie, "Bruegel! Your girlfriend is here!”

“Shut that rat cage you call a mouth, Clellen!”

Hieronymus reached forward and faced Clellen just inches from her nose, mouthing the words
Don’t don’t don’t…let it ride, don’t answer
. And while Clellen fumed, Slue leaned over to speak to Bruegel, who was quietly brooding.

“Bruegel, do you have the Omni-Tracker I gave you earlier?”

He nodded, reaching into his pocket and handed her the instrument.

Without explaining anything to anyone, Slue quickly exclaimed, "I’ll be right back!” and opened the door and jumped out.

“Slue!” Hieronymus shouted as he watched her jump over discarded cables and piles of junk, carrying the Omni-Tracker, running past the boys with the rope, running right back into the entrance of the domed building.

“Would someone please explain to me,” Pete, who was utterly confused, shouted, "just what the Pixie Hades is going on!?”

Hieronymus didn’t answer, all he said was "Wait!” as he too jumped out and ran directly toward the terrible domed building.

One of the young men who was preparing the rope so his friend could go inside without getting trapped, realized Hieronymus was wearing goggles.

“Hey! Look! It’s a One Hundred Percenter!” one of them shouted. They automatically blocked his way.

“Show us your eyes!” they immediately demanded.

“There’s plenty of this eye color where you’re going,” he answered.

They paused, and then just nodded to each other. ”True,” one of them simply remarked. Then the fellow who had the rope attached to him came up with a bold proposal.

“How would you like to make some money?”

“Guys, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not here to hang out. I know what’s in there, and the only reason I’m even standing here talking to you is because you are in my way, and I have to get my friend, who just disappeared into that hellhole you three seem so eager to visit.”

“Yeah, but you have LOS—that color in there won’t have any effect on you. You can be our guide. You bring us in, make sure we have a nice place to sit, then bring us out so we don’t get all caught up in it all and starve to death. We’ll pay you.”

“There are dead people in there!” Hieronymus shouted. ”The place smells! And that color! You shouldn’t even be looking at it! Don’t you know what it does to your head?”

One of them smiled.

“Oh, we know. We’ve been here before.”

“You’re crazy! You spend enough time in there and you will destroy yourselves!”

“That’s why we have this rope, man.”

“You are a complete fool! You’re willing to mess up your head just so you can have a cheap thrill like this?”

“Dude, you are so wrong,” the fellow who stood in the middle of the three added.

“Wrong?” exclaimed Hieronymus.

“Wrong. We are not here for any kind of cheap thrill. We are here to experience truth. Just because we cannot comprehend the fourth primary color does not mean it can’t exist.”

“You’re right about that. It exists. But you shouldn’t mess with it, either.”

“We are not messing with anything. That color exists in nature— your eyes prove that. We have the right to experience it just as much as it is your right to live your life without having your eyes covered by goggles!”

“Fellas, I would love to get into a discussion with you on this matter, but you don’t understand—”

“You are the one who does not understand. Your eyes and your mind accept this color, so you miss out on the incomparable experience that we have when we see it.”

“I have to go. I don’t know what happened to my friend. My other friends are waiting back there in the car.”

But the three young men continued to blocked his path. Hieronymus noticed that one of them wore a sweatshirt that had Sea of Nectar State University spelled out in big letters.

“Suppose I were to tell you that if you were to go into that room, you would experience something incomprehensible, something like death, for example,” the man said.

“Death?”

“Death.”

“There are dead people in there already. Why don’t you ask them?”

“What if, in that room, the incomprehensible spectre of death could be experienced for a temporary moment. Would you not be curious?”

“That’s a false and morbid and stupid comparison. Now get out of

my way.”

“I only say death because it’s impossible to imagine. It’s the opposite of consciousness. The fourth primary color exists because you say it does, and the government says it does not. When we look at it, we see it for a brief and strange moment, but then our minds push it away, like a forgotten dream. That’s why there are all those silly stories about Jesus and Pixie and how it is the Devil’s color, but in reality, our mind is simply comprehending the abyss of truth, and in that moment, the truth of physical reality far surpasses our own means to comprehend it.”

Hieronymus looked at the young man’s sweatshirt. Of course it made sense. These fellows were all students at the Moon’s most notorious party school.

“Is that what you study at Sea of Nectar State University?”

“Not oficially. The three of us are philosophy students.”

“Oh. And is this your homework assignment?”

“No, but our professor told us about this place.”

“Yeah, well he sounds like an irresponsible kazzer-bat. There are dead people in there.”

“Don’t knock SONSU. Gordon Chazkofer, one of greatest philosophers ever, wrote
The Perceptive Analysis of Social Mercantile Transgression
when he was a graduate student there.”

“Right. A hundred years ago. When it was a good place. Now it’s nothing more than a beer distributor’s wet dream. Look at you guys. You’re just a bunch of stoners.”

“Do you know that we have an original edition of The Perceptive Analysis in the philosophy department?”

“Sweet. Ask me if I care. I read it last year. It’s a wonderful book, but there is nothing in it that says you should tie a rope around yourself and go into a room full of half-dead people so you can blow your mind on a color you should not even look at.”

“The original edition has three missing chapters—all of which go into great detail on the fourth primary color.”

Their conversation was suddenly interrupted by the loud honking of the Prokong-90’s horn. Pete was getting impatient. Slue was taking forever, and the three students just told Hieronymus something unbelievable.

He looked at the boys with the rope.

“What did you say?”

“We have an original edition of
The Perceptive Analysis of Social Mercantile Transgression
. It has the three missing chapters that put Gordon Chazkofer in jail. It’s the only published analysis on the fourth primary color. Of course, it was banned.”

This was new. Hieronymus paused.

These college stoners. Losers. Could they be serious?

“What does he write about?”

“He talks about what happens to a human being who sees the fourth primary color in a controlled way—how exposure to it in short intervals, over a long period of time, can lead to the most profound intellectual enlightenment.”

“Intellectual enlightenment? By looking at a color?”

“You see? Already you don’t understand. But it’s real. The mind shuts down. It reboots. And you come out different. You are better. You are sharper. The greatest philosopher of the last century did it. Short intervals over a long period of time. It changes you.”

Hieronymus did not know what to make of these guys. They looked like enlightened barrelheads. Or barrelheads who just got too lazy to play tellball. But philosophy students? They stood there outside the most horrific place on the Moon, trying to figure out a way to go inside as if they were mountain climbers preparing to descend into a live volcano. Three guys with a rope long enough to hang themselves if they decided to travel to the very bowels of Hell itself.

Seconds later, Slue emerged from the building, running. She brushed past the rope holders, took Hieronymus’ hand, and led him back to Pete’s Prokong-90, whose engine was still idling in that perfect humming kind of way.

The girl with the matted hair sat on a bundle of cables, saying that strange word again over and over,
techbolsinator, techbolsinator, techbolsinator
…

They climbed back inside, and the Prokong-90 began to move.

“Drug addicts,” Pete sighed. ”Disgusting!”

“That must be a real Buzz parlor,” Clellen commented in a strangely neutral voice, as if she could not decide whether it was a good thing or not. ”That girl looked like she was flying on a refrigerated popsicle of three-tone S-Jam, or maybe she just looped her veins in a knot of Kip-Kap. Sledgehammer chozen-burr, those boys with the ropes were prepping on a disskener cycle kan from the seven ache. What do you think, Bruegel?”

Bruegel appeared to be so depressed that he only looked up and shrugged while Pete gave Clellen a slightly wary glance. He was a little uncomfortable with Clellen’s sudden knowledge of drug terms that were so alien to him.