Chapter 24. Vacation Plans Cancelled
The next morning I woke up feeling really good and looking forward to Angel and everything else the TSA had to offer, in that order, but it was not to be. I got myself showered and shaved and dressed, and when I touched the doorknob to leave my room and get myself some breakfast, a Voice spoke. It was pleasant and female and businesslike and seemed to be speaking right into my ear.
"Mitchell Wynand," it said, "would you please report to Dr. Kirk's office after breakfast."
I was looking around madly to see whether there was someone there and where the voice was coming from. "Huh?" I said.
"Is the message unclear?" asked the Voice, sounding kind of hurt.
"Uh, no, ma'am," I replied. "I was just kind of surprised. Who are you? Where are you?"
"I am a computer-generated messaging system. My mainframe is located under the lab."
"Wow." I thought about it. "You're very intelligent for a computerized system—I bet you could pass the Turing Test."
"Thank you," said the Voice warmly. "I'm delighted to have been able to serve you this morning."
"Thank you," I said. "I, uh, I'll go to breakfast now. Then I'll go see Dr. Kirk."
"I'll let him know you've received the message and will be with him shortly," said the Voice. "Goodbye."
"Goodbye," I replied. I wondered how the Voice—no, the computer—had known when to give me the message. Oh—I guess I'd triggered it when I touched the door. I wondered what time it was, and how long Kirk would expect me to spend eating breakfast, and why there were no clocks in the TSA, so how would I know how long it had been anyway? Then I thought to wonder why he wanted to see me.
When I stepped out of my room, Shep was just coming out of his.
"Kirk wants to see us," he said.
Us? I looked kind of blank, I guess, because he went on.
"This intercom thing told me just as I got to the door," he explained.
"Me too," I said. "But she, I mean it, just said 'you.' How did you know it meant both of us?"
"Because you got the same message, genius."
"No, I mean before that. When you came out, you said 'us.'"
Now Shep looked kind of blank. "I just assumed," he said. "I mean, why would he just want to see me?"
Good point, I thought. Note to self: I was obviously a lot more conceited than Shep, and a little humbleness would not be out of place.
"Pretty good timing," said Shep. "I mean, that we both woke up and came out at exactly the same moment."
We started down the stairs to the common room, and I suddenly had a blinding insight that made me forget I was supposed to be feeling humble.
"No," I said slowly, working it out as I went along. "I think time inside the TSA is a very, um, fluid, very contingent sort of thing. I think the duration of time when we're apart, when anybody's apart, is irrelevant."
"Huh?" said Shep, and then, into the hatch, "Waffles with strawberries, fresh strawberries, maple syrup, and whipped cream. Juice. Coffee." His tray appeared.
I don't know how he can eat all that sweet stuff for breakfast and not crash halfway through the morning. I guess he has a faster metabolism than I do or something.
"Scrambled eggs," I said. "Two eggs, not too dry. Bacon. Whole grain toast. With butter. Honey. Juice. Coffee." My tray appeared, and we went and sat down at a table that was "outside" in the sense that it wasn't actually under the ceiling of the common room. It was nice, like being at a sidewalk café.
"You were saying?" asked Shep.
"What I think is," I explained, "say you go to sleep in your room and sleep seven hours and wake up. And say I go to sleep at the same time in my room and sleep nine hours and wake up. And when we come out, it's the same time—we come out at the same time. It wouldn't matter if one of us only slept three hours, or didn't sleep at all.
"The TSA somehow makes everything match. Think about it. It would have to—there aren't any clocks, and yet people's days are coordinated, they fit together as if everyone had an alarm clock to wake them up and get them to the office, the lab at the same time. And when we went to dinner at the Kirks—we got there when we got there, and they were expecting us when we got there."
Shep chewed and swallowed. "Well, buddy, don't get a swelled head, but that actually makes a lot of sense." He shook his head. "This really is a cool place. Good waffles too, almost as good as your mom's."
"So are the eggs, and you're right, it's absolutely a cool place. The more we find out, the more it just gets better and better." Only I was thinking of Angel again, of course.
After breakfast and teeth-brushing and a sanitary stop, we once again emerged onto the landing outside our rooms at exactly the same moment and ambled over to Kirk's office.
After we'd all said good morning, I asked him, "Sir, how much time has passed in here, for you, since you told the computer-generated messaging system to ask us to come over?"
He grinned at me for a long moment before answering. "Very shrewd," he said then. "And if you're thinking what I think you're thinking, you're right. For me, essentially no time at all—a couple of minutes."
I grinned back. I'm ashamed to admit that I was now feeling not the slightest trace of humbleness.
"So, what's up?" Shep asked after a moment.
Kirk looked at both of us in a considering way. "A situation has arisen, or actually it's been discovered," he said finally. "We would like to make use of your services again."
"Sure! Great!" said Shep immediately.
"No problem," I added. "We'd be glad to."
"Well," said Kirk, "I'm not completely sure that there's no problem. We sent you back, remember, so that you could ask your parents about doing us a favor. They agreed, and you did it. Now we're asking you to help us out again, for a second time. They didn't sign up for that."
Shep opened his mouth, then shut it again when I raised my hand slightly.
"Sir," I said, aiming for earnest and sincere, "we understand your, your scruples. But when we got our folks' permission, it wasn't specifically for one specific job. We didn't know it was one specific job—we had no idea what you would be asking us to do.
"So what they actually gave us was sort of a blanket permission, to come back to the TSA and do—whatever. Whatever it was that you needed us to do. Without any specifying of exactly what that was or how many separate episodes it involved. We got permission for the, the adventure.
"Now, you could put us back, and we would wake up Monday morning, the morning after the weekend we spent at home, and we could say, we've been back to the TSA and done a little job for Andrew Kirk, and now he wants us to do another one, and I'm sure they would say okay.
"Or we could do the second job, whatever it is, and then get back home, at exactly the same time we would have, and tell them we helped you out with a couple of little jobs. I'm absolutely positive they won't say, wait, you were only allowed to do one job. I don't think they'll see it like that. So I really don't think that extra step is necessary."
"What he said," added Shep, nodding violently.
Kirk was trying not to smile.
"If it were Angel, sir, who was in our position," I went on, "would you feel she'd deceived you?" I didn't give him time to answer. "No, you wouldn't, because first of all there was no intention to deceive. And if you'd known you might need us again, you would have told us to ask for permission to do two jobs, or five jobs, or whatever, and since to them no time at all would have—will have passed before we get back anyway, if they said yes to one, they'd have said yes to however many. As I'm sure you would have, if it were Angel."
"Absolutely," said Shep. "Exactly." He was still nodding.
Now Kirk was smiling. "You're very persuasive," he said. "And I have to admit that I do think you're probably right. It certainly wouldn't be any trouble or take much extra time to send you back"—I opened my mouth, but he went on before I could say anything—"but I really don't think it's necessary."
He got up.
"Come with me," he said, and he led us down the hall into the other wing of the building and up the stairs to the lab.
"It'll be easier to show you," he said as we walked. "Alan was doing some independent research—he's a very enterprising young man—trying to find out why the Ys only exist in World A. He was looking at the worlds directly adjacent to World A, and in one of them he ran across something very interesting—or, I should say, very alarming. Let's call it World Kappa, K for kidnapping.
"In Kappa, shortly before the attempt on Halloway that you thwarted in World A, during a period of five weeks, seven children from the same pre-kindergarden class were kidnapped. Seven, from a class of twenty-three. No ransom demands have been made for any of the children, and no sign of them or of their kidnappers has been found."
We'd arrived at the lab, where Alan and Jean and Nick Durwood were sitting in three of the six chairs that were lined up in front of something that looked like a giant fish tank, maybe three yards wide and two yards high, set into the wall. The tank was dark inside and looked empty, but very deep, as if it went into the wall for a mile or two.
"Here we are," said Kirk, taking one of the empty chairs. I noticed he didn't apologize for being late or say anything about how long it had taken us to get there, so probably they had arrived right before we did. "I want Mitch and Shep to see the interview."
He turned to us. "Sit down, boys. This is from an interview done after the third child was taken, when it had become apparent that there was a common factor in the kidnappings, namely the school they all attended. Excellent work, by the way, Alan."
Alan went bright red, including his ears, mumbled something, and turned to a control panel at the edge of the tank. What we saw then was—hard to describe. Don't think television or movie. It was as if we were looking into a real room. No, it was more as if we were actually in the room. It was hard to believe that the people in the room couldn't see us, and I couldn't shake the idea that I had to be very quiet so they wouldn't hear me.
There was a young woman sitting at a table. There was a box of tissues on the table. The woman was holding a tissue, and there were several wadded-up tissues in her lap. She was crying.
Two men in civilian clothes were sitting at the table with her, one young and slender, one middle-aged and stocky. There was a tape recorder on the table and a uniformed policeman at one side taking notes.
The middle-aged man said, "Please don't cry, Ms. Balzoni. You know no one is blaming you for anything. We're just trying to sort this out, maybe find a lead."
"I know," she said, "but it's so awful! All the children are frightened, and most of the parents won't even let them come to school anymore. And I can't help thinking about poor little Abby and Eddy and Jessica, how scared they must be—whether they're hurt, whether they're even"—she let out a wail and pressed the tissue to her eyes—"still alive!"
"Let's not think like that," said the younger one soothingly. "Let's be positive. We have to assume that they're all fine, and we have to concentrate on getting them home to their families. Let's try to go back and find a reason, why your—why this class was targeted." It looked to me as if they were playing good cop – good cop. I assumed Ms. Balzoni was not under suspicion.
"All right." She sniffed, nodded, sat up straighter. "What do you want to know?"
"We've already established," began the older man, "that these three children were not related, and that they weren't close to each other in any other way."
"All the children are close!" she protested. "It's a very cozy, friendly, close-knit class!"
"Yes," sighed the middle-aged one, "but they didn't, these three didn't—don't live near each other, play together after school, go to each other's houses, have play dates and sleepovers. Abigail's best friend was—is Mia, and Jessica's best friend is Emily, and Edward's best friend is Michael. Right?"
"Yes," she nodded.
"All we're saying," the young one went on, "is that the children were connected through being in the same class, but not in any other way. So did anything happen in the class recently, to all the children or just to these three, that was unusual? Any field trips? Any guest speakers?"
"They're a little young for that," said Ms. Balzoni. She smiled, which made her look much prettier. "And it's so early in the school year. There isn't really anything—except, well, the pictures. If that counts."
"What about the pictures?" asked the middle-aged one. "What pictures? Did they paint them?"
"No—I should have said photographs," she said. "Right after school started, Ms. Greenberg—you talked to her, she's the principal—she was approached by a new photography studio. They'd just started this local studio, and they were hoping to take over doing our class photos every year. We always use a national school-picture corporation, and class pictures aren't taken this early in the school year, but these gentlemen were very persuasive. They offered to photograph one class absolutely free, to show us their abilities and competence and so on." She'd put down her tissue and was absorbed in the story she was telling. The two men were leaning forward, hanging on her every word.
"Well," she went on, "I doubt Ms. Greenberg would ever switch, but she decided it wouldn't do any harm to let them photograph one class. And it was free. She made sure there would be absolutely no charge, not to us and not to the families, and then, at their suggestion, she chose my class. I guess because missing half a day or a day of pre-kindergarten is not such a big deal as missing a day of school for the older ones.
"So we picked a day, October ninth, and I sent a sheet home with each child and also emailed the contact parent, so the children would all be present that day and looking nice, and the men came and took their pictures, several of each child alone and one of the whole class.
"I must say, the gentlemen were extremely pleasant and personable, and very good with the children, and the pictures were really excellent. I wouldn't mind if they became our regular photographers, but of course it's not my decision."
"Do you remember the name of the men, or of the photography studio?" asked the older one.
"Oh, yes!" she answered. "They were the McDowell brothers, and that was the name of the studio, McDowell Brothers Photography, on Border Street in Lincoln."
"Holy shit," said Shep. "I mean, sorry."
The tank faded back to black.
"Bear in mind," said Andrew Kirk, "that the McDowell brothers don't exist in Kappa."
"So Kirk A must have sent them," I said, "from World A. And—what? They must have taken the kids?"
"That's our assumption," he replied.
"But why?" asked Shep. "And where are the kids now?"
"Exactly," said Kirk.
"What do you want us to do?" I asked. "Whatever it is, we're in."
"Totally," said Shep.
"You don't need us," said Jean. "Alan and I'll get back to work."
"Hint, hint," said Nick Durwood with a grin. "Let's get out of their way. Come into my office, guys."
When we were settled in Nick's office, Kirk went on. "Our idea is to link the two of you again and implant you into the McDowells again, so you can go along when they take these photographs. You can see what they say to each other, maybe find out what's going on, and you can see what they do afterward.
"Because a week later, after all the photographs are delivered to the proud parents and before Abigail is snatched, the lease is cancelled on the studio and the McDowells disappear from Kappa. Or do they? We think it would be very interesting to find out."
Shep was nodding, but I thought of a problem. "You want us to ride along with the McDowells for over a week?"
"Not quite," said Nick. "That would be pretty intense and pretty tedious both, and who knows if it would be useful? You might find out everything we need to know the first morning, before they even go to the school to take the pictures. In which case you'd both be bored out of your skulls—or out of their skulls, actually—and dying to get back here and give us the information.
"What we thought we'd do is pull you out for debriefing every night when they go to sleep and then put you back, if circumstances warrant it, before they wake up the next morning. You can be here for a day or two, or however long you need, while one night goes by for them."
"That sounds much better," I said.
"Yeah, great," added Shep.