One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (37 page)

Three separate squads were dispatched to the location of the OmniTracker. All three disappeared.

Naturally, this chain of events sent alerts up and down the communication structure of the police that something very bizarre had happened in some long forgotten corner over on the far side.

Lieutenant Dogumanhed Schmet had gone to bed. He was immensely pleased with himself. There was something so deeply satisfying about a hunch that reveals itself as truth. That is why he was an excellent detec tive. A small tickle in the back of the brain. A microscopic idea floats up. It is normal for a father to tell a lie to protect his son. If he had had a son of his own, he would tell a million lies a day to protect him, too, if he had to. But as it turned out, he did not have a son, nor a wife, nor a family—he only had his work as a detective, and part of that lonely existence was to find out who broke the law and who didn’t. That man, Ringo Rexaphin, broke the law. You cannot lie to the police. It is a severe crime to do so. His son, Hieronymus Rexaphin, had been identified as the ocular assailant, to use the technical term. And, of course, it was a hunch of his very own that led him to single out this One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy amongst so many others. It started with the way the father had lied. All lies are apparent to anyone who knows what a lie really is, and Lieutenant Schmet could feel them. Like a feather tickling the top of his spinal chord, just under the skull. A guilty fabrication. That boy was the one who had gotten away two years ago. If they had locked him up then, he would not be out in the streets, showing those dangerous eyes of his to innocent people. Clearly, the young man was a genuine menace, and now he was on the run.

Where is your son
?

I don’t know.

Where is your son?

I told you, I have no idea.

Give me the names of all your son’s friends.

I don’t know who his friends are.

Some father you are
.

Are you here to insult me?

I am here to find out where your son is
.

Well, I don’t know where he is. He left a few hours ago.

He was seen at LEM Zone One, in a hotel lobby, accompanying a girl from Earth who had obviously been negatively affected by exposure to the fourth primary color
.

I thought the fourth primary color didn’t exist?

You should stop covering for your son. There are two witnesses
.

I told you. My son was at home. He was tired. He went to sleep early.

How do you explain my witnesses
?

I don’t. They are confusing my son with someone else. Or they are lying. Those goggles can make a lot of sixteen-year-old boys look alike.

Where is he now
?

I don’t know.

Well, I guess you will have to stay here until you decide to cooperate
.

I am cooperating. Now let me go home. My wife is a very sick woman. She is unable to take care of herself.

I’m sure she’ll be fine. She’s an adult. Anyway, we’ll let you go as soon as you confess that you have lied to us, and that your son was out all night
.

I need to call someone who can go over to our apartment. My wife needs someone to take care of her.

No
.

I have the right to call a lawyer.

No, you don’t
.

Excuse me?

Just kidding. Of course you have that right. We all do. But you need my permission to call a lawyer. As it turns out, I have a lot of administrative work to do right now, so I don’t have the time to speak to you any longer. The very second you sign a confession, my administrative duties shall cease, and then I can hear your request regarding phone calls to wives and friends and lawyers
.

You are a complete bastard. I will get you into a lot of trouble for this.

You will do nothing of the sort. You will wait. You will worry about your wife. Eventually, you will resent your son for putting you into this predicament. Then you will sign the confession that I have drafted for you. In this confession, you will state that you knew full well that your son, Hieronymus Rexaphin, was at LEM Zone One during the evening I have specified and that you have lied to authorities to cover up for your son’s illegal activities. This confession will also make it clear that you or your family were under no threats from me and that you signed it under your own free will
.

Lieutenant, you are a very strange-looking man. Has anyone ever told you that your face looks like it’s made out of waxy plastic? It’s as if you were just a doll, a badly manufactured doll. Just looking at you, I can’t help but wonder—if someone were to slice your head in half, would it be a solid mass of the same strange material that all those beads of sweat run across?

That night, Lieutenant Schmet was certain Hieronymus Rexaphin would turn up somewhere. Probably by morning, the boy would be spotted sneaking out of a friend’s house, or would get stuck anywhere he needed to show his identification, or he would be found sleeping in a car. The girl from Earth was still in her cell, and she told him nothing because he asked her nothing. She knew the boy’s name, but he refused to ask her. She only mentioned the Ferris wheel as their rendezvous point by accident, and that was before she realized the boy was still a fugitive. The lieutenant decided to post extra agents in the amusement park at LEM Zone One just in case the kid decided to return to the scene of the crime, which they often did, for inexplicable reasons. Of course, the biggest expectation was for Hieronymus to go home and see to his crazy mother, especially once he got wind of the fact that his father was gone. Schmet figured that the One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy would last about fve minutes at home before twenty squads showed up to arrest him. And that would be that.

He left instructions with several police department jurisdictions to alert him if anything unusual were to happen during the night that might have to do with lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis. He slept well, but he had the usual horrible dream about an unfortunate event that happened to him as a boy. He woke up in a furious sweat, and then he calmed down. He sat up. He looked for his medication. He closed his eye. The image of her slapping on the glass, trying to get away from the fire, and he shook his head as if sad thoughts could be cast away from his mind like sand from a shovel. Mathematically, it was impossible to make sense of it, but at least once an hour for his entire life he would ponder why they were there at that particular time.
If only we had left fve minutes later
…

He bowed his head. He had a strange, inexplicable desire in his fervent post-nightmare state to rush to the door of her cell and make sure she was all right and curl up on the floor just outside her room, like a sleeping guard dog, protecting her from the unpredictability of the horrible accidents conjured in his mind. But as his senses returned, he realized, alas, she was not Selene.

In the small table next to his bed, he had a small square box. About two inches square, it was made of brushed aluminum. Sometimes he secretly carried it with him. He never dared show it to anyone, and it had been a terribly long time since he opened it himself. But he kept it as a reminder—all tragedies could be avoided. All fires need not ignite. All routes have their detours. And memories are tattoos that haunt the unfortunate with images of what could have been.

And then they called. It was not about the boy, Hieronymus Rexaphin.

When he arrived in Joytown 8, he found the abandoned buildings swarming with an army of police, all of them keeping a distance from the domed building, which they had surrounded. He shook his head at their clumsiness. Accompanying him was the slim and completely silver figure of a rescue robot—Belwin, on permanent loan from his friend in the Lunar Fire Command. The robot, despite the fact that it had no face at all, spoke in a very elegant manner and walked as gracefully as a deer in a field.

“So, Belwin,” Detective Schmet said. ”Once more, this is not a normal fire rescue mission.”

“I understand that, Lieutenant.”

“You are familiar with the phenomena of lunarcroptic ocular symbol - anosis?”

“I am, now that I have uploaded the fles you have sent me.”

“You understand, of course, that this fourth primary eye color will have no effect on you?”

“How could it? I am not a living thing. I don’t even have eyes, and even if I did, what good are eyes to a robot if there is no consciousness to perceive meaning out of a visual field?”

“True, Belwin. Very true. Indeed, I borrowed you tonight because I have a feeling this event has a lot to do with the fourth primary color.”

“I am at your service, Lieutenant Schmet.”

They arrived at a makeshift command barricade in an old rundown garage directly opposite the domed building and its parking lot of forgotten cars. There were police officers everywhere, but none could be seen out in the open. Captain Wiis Begfendopple was organizing squads of riot police with helmets and shields and rifles poking in every direction. He was a stout man with a long and large red handlebar moustache. He was dressed in a thick padded police SWAT uniform. As soon as he saw Lieutenant Schmet, his eyes lit up.

“Ah! Dogumanhed! I am so happy you have come! And just in time. We are getting ready to storm that building over there.”

“Which one?”

The captain pointed with his gloved hand

“The big one with the dome. That is where they are hiding.”

“Who?”

“Renegade drug dealing goggle-freaks, that’s who!”

“You think there is a group of people with lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis in there? You are certain of this?”

“Am I certain? Listen to this…”

The captain picked up a small silver object—a police radio—and increased the volume. It was the unmistakable sound of people lost in the trance of exposure to the fourth primary eye color. Lieutenant Schmet had never heard so many voices making that particular type of moan all at the same time.

“We lost another two-man squad just under an hour ago. That makes eight. Eight police officers assaulted by those lunatics with their insane eye color!”

“Explain to me what happened,” Schmet said to the nervous captain.

“Well, as you know, we received a report that a missing OmniTracker was giving out a distress signal. We sent out a normal squad of two officers to investigate. They came to the scene, they reported that there was an abandoned ’town,’ or former base of some kind—”

“It was an Ocular Internment Camp,” Schmet, who was well aware of this place’s history, interrupted.

“Whatever,” Captain Begfendopple continued. ”As the officers arrived, they noticed several people milling about the outside. College students, drifters, drug addicts, homeless, the usual riffraff that decide to form squat parties. The officers were surprised that anyone would travel this far over to the far side of the Moon when there were already enough abandoned buildings in our urban areas. As they entered the building, they reported seeing corpses. Then a few moments later, nothing. Just the sounds of what you hear on their radio.”

Detective Schmet watched more of the clumsily dressed police officers arrive and take positions in the concrete shells of all the dilapidated buildings in the area. These guys were amateurs. They couldn’t give a damn—they’d rather be of doing traffic duty somewhere or sitting in a cozy office down in Glennville. To them, this was a sort of game, and they had no idea,
no idea
, what they had just stumbled upon!

What a big mess, and in more ways than one. All these camps were supposed to have been completely razed to the ground—how could this one have survived? Did some bureaucrat eighty-five years ago just forget to cover up his tracks? Perhaps they thought no one would be able to figure out what Joytown 8 was. This police captain here certainly did not, nor did the officers who went into what was most certainly a genuine Obscura Camera Projection Techbolsinator. Their idea that there were One Hundred Percent Lunar People hiding out in that building was absurd—anyone with the fourth primary color in their eyes would have fled long ago. Only a real Techbolsinator, left over from the Regime of Blindness, could affect so many people like that. If only he could pry of a piece of it—or even better, take possession of that whole building. But how could he? Even he would be susceptible to the color of its wall inside. Still, there had to be a way.

The captain continued, but Lieutenant Schmet was only half listening, the sweat rolling down his face as he contemplated the enormous power that sat in the building across the parking lot.

“Naturally, whenever a squad disappears like that, another is automatically assigned to follow up. In this case, two more pairs of officers were swallowed up by whatever is going on in that building. So, more of us came in and surrounded the place. Once it was clear that a large police presence was in the area, all the riffraff that were milling about went inside. We sent in two more officers to negotiate with the terrorists, but they too disappeared.”

“There are no terrorists inside there,” commented Schmet with a certitude the captain found a little of-putting.