“I have to warn the convenience store.”
“Get out of here,” the chief snorted, and plopped back down in his chair. He took a giant bite out of his donut and barked, with his mouth full, to no one in particular, “Did I ask you or what?”
Dillon left the station and did as he promised. The cashier at the convenience store did not recognize him or even ask him who he was. She was quite content to take an early break and clear the place out. Dillon advised her to take any precautions she felt necessary, so she stuffed all the money from the register into the pocket of her overalls, ordered the handful of customers out of the place, left after them and locked the door behind her in plenty of time.
Dillon had by then returned to the sidewalk, where the Commander was waiting by the car. At the time he predicted, the sinkhole appeared as advertised, only moments after the paramedics and police cars previously summoned by the Commander had arrived on the scene. While the fire chief and the coffee spiller were being pulled from the wreckage and loaded into an ambulance (there was no sign of the unremarkable “other guy”), Dillon and the Commander drove off towards the air strip. On the way, he had her place a call to the roadkill observer, advising him to have that creature removed before it was responsible for any more mischief.
On the flight home Dillon received a call from the talented and renowned Karen Clyde.
“Where are you?” she wanted to know.
“En route,” he replied “And you?”
“I'm in Denver,” she said. “And I hate Denver. I could be home in two hours.”
“Have you penciled me in?” Arrangements with Karen could be quite complicated. Dillon was only one of her four regular boyfriends, and her calendar was in a constant state of flux. She seemed to spend more time organizing her love life than actually living it. Three of her lovers resided in California, which simplified matters to some extent. Jasper Coleridge, the part-time celebrity chef and full-time hipster CPA, lived in Beverly Hills. Vitaly Fleschko, world heavyweight wrestling champion, also lived in SoCal. Only Joey Mangiamo, Fiat mechanic and all-around regular guy, made his home outside the state, in Brooklyn, New York. Dillon made sporadic attempts to get to know these fellows, but he was not the most sociable fellow, and didn't really know the rules about polyamorous camaraderie, so his attempts were generally few and fairly feeble.
He recollected the one time he'd arranged an awkward, supposedly impromptu meeting with Jasper Coleridge, ostensibly a consultation about food and wine pairings, during which Dillon accumulated a great deal of quite useless information which he promptly deleted from his memory. He saw nothing in Jasper Coleridge, a man who owned dozens of pairs of sunglasses and three identical cherry-red Corvettes but who was otherwise as indistinct as a blue kite flying on a cloudless day. He made no impression but droned on and on. His dealings with the other two had so far covered a total of perhaps a dozen words and even fewer minutes, but he remained intent on doing something about it someday. It seemed like a thing to do.
“I said I 'could' be home in two hours,” Karen sighed, “but unfortunately I can't. I have a shoot tonight. It's so dumb. I'm literally supposed to sit on something and twirl. It's just an ad for a chair, but they're paying me you wouldn't believe how much.”
“Ah, that's too bad,” Dillon said. “I would've liked to be with you tonight.”
“Really?” she seemed surprised. “You on a case or something?”
Karen knew that Dillon's interest and energies hinged largely on his detecting activities. When he had no obscure and/or impossible problem to solve, he tended to sink into a discouraging apathy which extended into his love life. During those periods he spent most of his time working out on his balcony elliptical machine, scouring the AllDat Corporation's database for unusual facts and references. His grandparents' company not only owned but also stored all of the information in the world, so there was never any shortage, but it took a lot of effort to absorb as much as he Dillon did. His brain seemed to have an infinite capacity, while his personality waxed and waned like the moon, following the irregular yin and yang pattern of thoughtful intake and active output that characterized his existence.
“If you enjoy avocados,” he told Karen, “I'd recommend you find some way to stock up, although I don't believe they preserve very well.”
“Why avocados?”
“They're about to go extinct,” he told her. “Bio-engineering won't help. The Earth will no longer be a suitable habitat for them.”
“Okay,” she said, blinking and shaking her head, a not uncommon reaction on her part to the often ridiculous things her favorite eccentric billionaire came up with.
“Something important happened today,” he said. “A change that will have far-reaching effects, a slight realignment of the magnetic fields of this planet. Oh, and of Mars and Neptune as well, but that will have less impact here of course. You will see it mainly in the price of oil, in the growing cycle of certain crops, in the chemical composition of balsa and other soft woods, in the normal range of hearing of coyotes (and also wolverines, but I'm not sure there are any of those remaining), also in the basic transitive properties and the smell of freshly moved lawns. Subtle changes, it's true, but from tomorrow on the world will not be quite the same. I know it never is, really, but I mean even more so.”
“You do know that you're not making any sense,” Karen said. “They can always make fake avocados.”
“That chair won't sell,” he said. “Your employers are wasting their money on this ad. Come home tonight.”
Karen thought about it for a moment, and then replied,
“All right. Consider yourself penciled in.”
Dillon sat back and smiled, and then placed a call to his grandfather. He needed to ask the old man whom he thought should be notified about the previously undetected volcano that was about to split the state of Oklahoma in two.
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