One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (38 page)

“No? Well then what do you suppose had happened to my men?”

“They are fine for now. Most likely, they are having a reaction to the fourth primary color.”

“I think they are hostages who need to be rescued.”

“No one is being held hostage.”

“Really? Well, in about ten minutes, we are going to storm that building. There are already dead people in there, and the smell—did you get a whif of it?”

Dogumanhed Schmet did not answer, as he had lost his own sense of smell many years ago.

“Captain, if you go in there with your guns blazing, you will only accomplish two things. You will accidentally kill innocent people. And the officers that you send in there will all succumb to whatever is paralyzing the other officers. You will be in the exact same predicament you find yourself in right now, only worse.”

It did not take very much for Detective Schmet to convince the captain and the other police brass around him to try his own plan, which was incredibly simple. Let Belwin the robot go in there first and report back. As no one, even the SWAT team, nor the fifty or so other police officers who had been dragged from their comfortable beds to provide back up in this perplexing situation were in any way enthusiastic about storming the old domed building, it appeared to be a logical solution. Everyone just wanted to go home. And to go back to bed.

The detective and the robot walked across the parking lot, past the cars that had been parked there for months, and others more recently left. One car had a rope tied to it leading directly into the building. They climbed up the three or four steps, then entered into the disheveled lobby with the shredded furniture. Dogumanhed Schmet stopped before the old deteriorating painting.

“Wilson MacToolie,” he uttered, recognizing the portrait.

“Sir?” Belwin asked.

“Oh, nothing. That’s a portrait of a wonderful man. His name was Wilson MacToolie. He was a political leader who was in charge of a movement known as the Regime of Courage. It happened about ninety years ago. Some misguided people today would call it the Regime of Blindness, but they are wrong. It was a courageous thing to do, to build these places, these camps. You see, Belwin, human beings don’t naturally belong on the Moon, but we’ve forced ourselves to come here, and we forced the Moon to change to accommodate us. As a result, nature itself stepped in and decided to try and change us. This change is manifested in lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis, but the ones who are born with this condition are completely incompatible with the rest of humanity. They should live separately, and Wilson MacToolie tried to do just that. Either remove their eyesight, or banish them. If someone with LOS has their eyes removed, then they can live with the rest of humanity. If not, then they should be banished, one way or another…”

Belwin studied the unusual face of the lieutenant. Even a machine could tell there was something cruel and inhuman about this man. He turned and walked into the curving hallway. Schmet stayed behind, naturally, and shifted his gaze to the oficial words carved in the wall.

“Obscura Camera Projection Techbolsinator,” he quietly said to himself. “What an extraordinary discovery to find this here!”

In his pocket, his fingers touched the small aluminum box he decided to carry after all. He began to calculate.
Do I tell them about this? Or do I freelance with this? What a dilemma! They would bestow me with such honor if I presented them this discovery! Or, I could use it myself. If the MacToolie Group knew I was keeping this from them, they would throw me out, maybe even kill me. How could I hide it from them, those shadowy bastards, controlling everything behind the scenes. No. I must tell them, but under my conditions
…

He was thrilled—so thrilled that he almost brought the little box out and opened it.

Belwin did what he was manufactured to do. Rescue people. He entered the circular room. What he found were dozens of people on mattresses and on the floor in strange states of euphoric agitation. Some were unconscious, and some were dead. He immediately scanned the DNA, respiratory, circulation, and nervous systems of every person and determined within seconds who needed immediate medical care. He sent a message back to the assembled police officers that several ambulances had to be brought forward to the entrance of the building right away. He also scanned the circular wall surrounding him. The extreme presence of the fourth primary color would make it virtually impossible for any normal human being to enter this chamber, so he requested the assistance of several rescue robots to assist him in safely removing the incapacitated, as well as the deceased, from this den of horror.

The kind robot went to a young woman who lay emaciated on the floor. He sensed she was about to die, so he chose her first, and with the agility of a ballet dancer, he gently picked her up and carried her outside, where a waiting ambulance sat with its lanterns spinning, its medics waiting, its oxygen tanks full, its IV solutions ready, and its antibiotics prepared in clean little packages designed to save as many lives as possible.

While Belwin set about his task, Schmet wandered back to his friend, Captain Wiis Begfendopple, who was happily ordering his officers to return home. Crisis solved—send for more rescue robots, ambulances, cofee, and snacks. The captain went up to the lieutenant and good naturedly slapped him on the back.

“Well done, Dogumanhed! Well done! You were right! You were right to send in that rescue robot! No terrorists, no crazed drug addicts, no hostage situation. Just a goddamned wall with that goddamned color! What a story! I just hope no one has any more of that paint!”

“Paint, Captain?”

“Yes, Dogumanhed, paint!” Begfendopple laughed while twirling the pointy tip of his moustache with his thick fingers. ”Imagine if punks like these find more of that paint to start coating more walls in other squats like this one!”

“That wasn’t paint, Wiis,” Schmet whispered. ”Listen, I suggest you keep this as quiet as possible. That room is a relic from a past era. This ghost town? Someone should reconstruct the wall that used to surround it, and nobody—
NOBODY
should talk about what happened today.”

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.