Planet America (24 page)

But something different was happening here tonight.

There was a thirteenth man being held. He was not drunk, though at the moment he was dying for a cup of coffee, a beverage he'd become addicted to by simply smelling it a couple of times. Nor was he in his late twenties or early thirties like the rest of the prisoners. In fact, he was much, much older.

It was Pater Tomm. Charged with demonstrating without a permit, proselytizing without a license, and creating a public nuisance, he'd been in the cell for nearly twenty-four hours, sharing the place with a constantly changing cast of characters, but never as many as now.

The police had arrested Tomm outside the national cathedral early the day before. He'd been carrying on a spontaneous one-man protest, complete with a crude sign that read:
Why Doesn't Anyone Worship Anymore
? on one side and
Repent! The End May Be Near
on the other. This was his way of displaying outrage at the nonuse of the huge, ornate national cathedral he'd found so dusty and vacant. He, too, was awaiting arraignment.

Tomm had never met a crowd he didn't like. As the holding pen began filling up, he'd started talking religion to the assembled drunks. At first, his fellow prisoners ignored him. Then they threatened him. Then they challenged him. But by midnight, they were in awe of him as he spun tales about the majesties of Creation that he'd seen all across the universe. Tomm had preached so much, he soon ran out of stories to tell. No matter. He simply began repeating the ones he'd already told, and his fellow prisoners never seemed to notice.

But there was a catch to all this. His new flock was paying such rapt attention to him not so much because of what he was saying but how he was saying it: literally hovering one foot off the ground.

Some of the twelve were convinced this was a trick; some thought they were in the DTs and hallucinating. Some simply could not believe their eyes. But Tomm had shown his little bit of levitating skills to get the attention of these men, to instill in them the necessity of getting one's butt to church on a regular basis and committing some time to prayer before it was too late. It was the same message Tomm had preached up and down the Five-Arm for two centuries with mixed results. But just because he was in another place didn't mean he stopped being a man of the cloth. In reality, there was nothing else he could be.

He'd been sermonizing like this for about two hours when two guards entered the hallway outside the holding pen. At the first sound of their keys clinking in the door, Tomm crashed to the floor, scattering his disciples and banging both knees. He quickly bounced back up to his feet though, performing a long, dramatic bow as his startled cell mates showered him with ragged applause.

"Which one of you is Peters, Thomas ... ?" one of the guards called into the tank. "You're being moved."

The drunks all looked at each other and did a kind of group shrug. Then they glanced over at Tomm, who was examining his scraped knees.

"Peters, Thomas?" he finally replied. "I guess that would be me."

Tomm was put in a car with two D.C. police officers and driven across town to a nondescript building on the other side of Washington.

He was brought in through a side entrance and led to a freight elevator. Two men in blue suits and dark glasses were waiting here. They took custody of him and without a word ushered him onto the elevator and up to the thirteenth floor.

He was escorted down a long, dark hallway to a room whose door was marked No Entry. One of the men knocked three times. The door opened, and Tomm was nudged inside. The room was small, dark, with a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. There was a table right next to the door with five chairs around it.

Sitting in one, casually smoking a cigarette, was Zarex.

Tomm barely recognized him. Gone was the explorer's grandly ragged space costume. He was now dressed in baggy checkered pants, size twenty sneakers, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap turned backward. He was smoking the very end of an un-filtered cigarette. His eyes brightened when Tomm walked in.

"Padre! You are well!"

"Only by God's grace," Tomm replied. "But yes, I am."

The men in suits removed Tomm's handcuffs and placed him in a chair one over from Zarex. The two spacemen shook hands quickly as their handlers retreated to the far corner of the room.

"And I am so glad to see you, my brother," Tomm whispered to Zarex.

"As I am you, Padre," Zarex replied, "though I fear the game is up as related to our keeping a low profile on this world. Frankly, I may have made too much of a stir."

Tomm patted him twice on his forearm. "We all make mistakes," he said.

The huge explorer took a deep drag of his near-depleted cigarette, then stiffly waved the cloud of smoke away.

"I'm afraid I found this whole place rather intoxicating, Padre," he said with a bit of concern. "I fell prey to temptation, though I'm not sure why."

"Yes," Tomm agreed. "
Intoxicating
is the exact word."

Zarex finally crushed out the cigarette and let the last plume of smoke fill the room.

"Why did they arrest you, Padre?"

The priest just shrugged. He was loathe to tell Zarex that he, too, had broken their agreement to stay low key while studying the planet.

"It was less an arrest than a difference in philosophy," he finally said. "I discovered grave neglect here on behalf of the people of this city and tried to right the wrong. The authorities disagreed with me. But they will see the light one day. And you, brother. Why were you taken into custody?"

"I beat up my boss," Zarex replied simply.

Tomm looked at him for a long moment, then just shrugged. "Well, I'm sure he had it coming," he said.

Three more knocks came at the door. One of the suits opened it, and a third prisoner was brought in.

It was Hunter.

His colleagues were not that surprised to see him. Their fortunes were now fully reversed. Hunter, too, looked different. His hair was wild, his beard grown in. He was also sporting a tan. They exchanged quick embraces, and then Hunter was put into a seat next to the priest and the explorer. The guys in suits locked the door and sat down across from them. The light hanging from the ceiling had an adjustable shade on it. One of the suits twisted it so the glare of the single lightbulb was shining directly into the space travelers' eyes.

At that point, it became clear to Hunter that these weren't the Betaville cops they were dealing with here—and this certainly wasn't the Betaville police station. He'd been taken here directly after his apprehension in California, having crossed the western sea in a high-speed police boat, pulling in at Baltimore and then rushed to this location. He knew the two men in suits were FBI agents; his handlers had told him so. This place was one of the Bureau's most secret interrogation cells.

Finally, one of the agents spoke.

"You three have been charged with a number of local crimes," he began. "But that is not why you're here. You're here on a federal warrant. And we can make this very simple. In fact, we just want to ask you one thing."

The three space travelers just stared back at him. "OK," Hunter finally said.

"
Where is she
?" the agent asked.

Hunter looked at Tomm and Zarex, who both shrugged.

"Where is who?"

"Don't get cute!" the second agent erupted. "You three are going to jail for a very long time, anyway. It might go a little easier on you if you tell us where the body is."

The three space travelers were completely bewildered.

"You think we
killed
someone?" Zarex asked incredulously.

"My God ... tell us who," Tomm pleaded with them.

The agent angrily pulled a photograph from his shirt pocket and threw it on the table in front of them.

"Her..."

The spacemen looked at the photo, looked at each other, then started to laugh. This infuriated the FBI agents. One nearly came across the table at them. Tomm reared back, ready to hit him. Zarex began to growl.

Finally, Hunter calmed everybody down.

"May I get something in my pocket?" he asked the agents.

In a flash, both agents pulled out enormous hand guns and pointed them directly at Hunter's temple. "Get whatever you have to get, punk," one agent told him.

Hunter reached into his knee pocket and pulled out three small boxes. He laid them on the table in front of him. He pointed to the yellowish box and looked at Tomm and Zarex. Both men nodded solemnly.

Hunter pushed the small button on top of the box, and a stream of greenish mist came pouring out. It collected next to Hunter's chair, swirling and sparkling; then there was a bright flash. When the glare dissipated, in its place was standing Agent Lisa Lee.

The FBI agents' mouths dropped to the floor. Lisa was frozen in the exact same position as when they had put her into the Twenty 'n Six back in Betaville: Back on her feet, her left hand was reaching out in front of her, just as she was offering her car keys to Hunter, her other hand was up to her mouth, as if she was suppressing a scream.

She came to life a second later. Her eyes darted about the room. Finally, she took her hand from her mouth and pointed at the door.

That's when the scream came.

Not a second later, the door exploded in a storm of smoke and splinters. A small army of black-uniformed men rushed into the room. They were carrying enormous rifles with gun sights that emitted high-intensity light. This served to blind everyone. Three of the armed men surrounded the FBI agents and with firm hands, kept them sitting in place. Another held Lisa back. Three others ran around to where Hunter, Tomm, and Zarex were sitting, picked them up out of their seats, and pushed them through the shattered door. All this happened in about five seconds, barely enough time for Hunter to grab the three small boxes.

"You know where to send the bill," one of the armed men said to the FBI agents on departing.

The spacemen were hustled down a long set of stairways. At every landing, there was another man in a black uniform, holding a rifle. They reached the basement of the building and were thrown into the back of a black, windowless panel van. The doors were locked behind them, then the van screeched away, going up the delivery ramp and careening out onto the empty street.

Hanging on as tightly as they could, Hunter, Pater Tomm, and Zarex just looked at each other tight-lipped. They were not sure whether to laugh or cry. This certainly was a strange turn of events, but they were getting used to such things by now.

Finally, Zarex broke the spell.

He said to Hunter, "Excuse me brother, you don't have a cigarette on you, do you?"

The van traveled for nearly an hour, never slowing down and frequently tossing them about the blacked-out interior. The noise of tires screeching and a very loud engine made conversation nearly impossible.

Finally, the vehicle squealed to a stop, and they were pulled from the back. They were at the entrance to a tunnel that led directly into a huge mountain. There was a guardhouse surrounded by several layers of electrified fencing. Six soldiers in black uniforms stepped from the guardhouse and escorted them through the entrance. It was about three in the morning by this time, a dark and windy night. The sign next to the guardhouse read Weather Mountain Research Facility.

Once through the main gate, they were put into a smaller van and driven into the tunnel. After several minutes of plunging deeper into the mountain, the van stopped in a small parking area near a set of elevators. The spacemen were taken out, put on one of the elevators, and then began a very long journey not up, but down, deep into the belly of the mountain.

When the elevator finally stopped, they stepped out into a large chamber. It had a very low ceiling but was expansive, with strings of blue lights running everywhere. One wall was dominated by a visual screen. At the moment, it was filled with nothing more than rows of ever-changing numbers.

There was a narrow oval table in the center of the room. Seven men were sitting along one side of it. They were all rather elderly for this planet. Each man wore longish gray hair, and several had long, gray beards as well. Their faces were wrinkled unlike any Hunter had seen since coming to this world. The seven men were all dressed casually, mostly in denim, and each was wearing a large red ID badge attached to a chain around his neck.

There were only three letters visible on these badges: CIA.

These men weren't brimming with antagonism as the FBI agents had been.

They politely asked the spacemen to sit down, and coffee was passed their way. Tomm slurped down two cups before anyone else could be served. Zarex silently accepted a cigarette; he was soon lit up and puffing away. Hunter was half hoping someone would turn up with a bottle of Seagram's.

There were no formal introductions. They were a top-secret government intelligence group, the man sitting in the center chair told them, and he was their spokesman. He looked slightly younger than the others, was clean-shaven, his skin red and robust, a wry look around his eyes. His name was Gordon.

"Unlike our dull-witted cousins over at FBI," he began, "we know who you boys are. We know you're not from this planet. We know you landed here about a week ago. We know you split up shortly after arrival. We know you all spent time in various parts of the country."

The three spacemen were surprised by this news but didn't say a word. This was their third trip to an interrogation room in less than a week. They knew by now that it was best to keep their mouths shut.

"And how do we know all this about you?" the CIA man asked.

He pulled a sheaf of papers from a folder. They were newspaper clips. He held one up. It was from the
Newark Ledger
. Its headline read, "Mystery Man Arrested for Diner Assault— Defendant Said to Possess 'Strange Powers.' " He flipped to another. It was from the
Washington Post
. It read, " 'Priest' Said to Be Performing Miracles Outside National Cathedral."