“Impossible?” said Parker.
The likelihood of his friends finding a swift means out of this mess seemed to be decreasing with every noisome whistle of Jack’s nose.
“Yes,” said General Ramsey. “Impossible.” He turned to Parker. “Let’s take a walk.”
“Just me?” Parker asked. He desperately wanted to remain with his friends, lest they find out firsthand what it meant to be taken care of as Jim had offered. Parker even wanted Colby to hang around.
General Ramsey surveyed each of them in turn. He narrowed his eyebrows and squinted his eyes as if he’d misplaced his eyeglasses. Parker could feel the anticipation pouring out of Sunny and Bubba. Colby sat stiff and upright in the black leather chair at the head of the conference table. He looked worried.
“For the time being,” began General Ramsey, “I think it best if,” he paused mid-sentence and Parker wanted to kick him in the shins, “your little friends . . .,” General Ramsey grinned, “accompany us. For now.”
Parker exhaled, as did Sunny and Bubba. Colby leaned back in his chair. Even the four suited men standing nearby looked relieved.
“Mr. Kelly. Call up to the hangar,” said General Ramsey. “Tell them we’re on our way. Dismissed.”
“Yes, sir!” In perfect unison Jim and the other men stepped back sharply and faced about, then departed through the various doors.
“Follow me.” The General turned on his heel, spinning around to face the opposite direction just as the other men had. Parker wondered if the maneuver was meant to impress or if it were more the result of the intense training and deeply ingrained discipline required to fight for freedom. He envisioned his dad, surrounded by empty streets and crumbling buildings. Sweaty in his dirty helmet and salty uniform. Holding his black assault rifle. Snapping off a sharp salute, then turning on his heel as the General had, leading a swarm of proud American teenagers into battle. Into the smoke and fear of a deafening gunfight. The tireless struggle for freedom.
The General cleared his throat.
He stood at the hidden door with Sunny, Bubba and Colby. They were all waiting for him.
“Parker,” said Sunny, “General Ramsey asked if you’re coming.”
“Actually I asked if you preferred I carry you to the hangar by your ankles.”
Parker’s mom had always told him to respect authority figures. His dad told him to know when he was being mistreated. “You attract more flies with honey than with vinegar, General. Isn’t that right, Bubba?”
“That’s what my mom says every time I forget to say, ‘please,’” said Bubba.
No one spoke. In the absence of Jack’s howling septum, the conference room was truly quiet. Parker heard a faint ringing in his ears as air molecules collided with his eardrums.
At last, General Ramsey spoke. “Your mother sounds like a very wise woman, Mr. Black. My apologies, Parker. I meant no disrespect. However, if I am curt with you it is because time is of the essence.”
“‘I think fast and I talk fast,” said Colby, “and I need you to act fast if you want to get out of this. If my help’s not appreciated, lots of luck, gentlemen.’ ‘So he hid the watch in the one place he knew they’d never find it: his ass.’ ‘I gotta have more cow bell.’” Colby clamped both hands over his mouth, muffling his voice as he continued speaking.
“Is he okay?” asked General Ramsey, looking at Sunny and Bubba.
“He does that,” said Sunny. “He’s on medication.”
General Ramsey nodded, watching as Colby went on muttering beneath his hands clamped over his mouth.
“Why?” demanded Parker. “Why is time of the essence? What are we doing here? What is this place? What is going on?”
“And how do you know my last name?” asked Bubba.
“Time will tell,” said General Ramsey. “Please, bear with me just a bit longer. All of you.” He surveyed each of them.
Parker was seriously considering plopping his fanny down in one of the big black conference chairs and refusing to bear with General Ramsey one more iota until he started coughing up some actual answers, not this ‘time will tell’ hogwash. Still, beneath the blatantly forced smile on General Ramsey’s tanned face, beneath the calm exterior of his perfect haircut, shiny shoes, and immaculate medals, Parker knew there lurked a man quite capable of carrying him by his ankles to places thus far referred to only as ‘the hangar.’
“Parker,” said General Ramsey, “would you kindly allow me to escort you upstairs? I think you’ll find some of the answers you’re looking for.”
This was the General’s attempt at extending the proverbial olive branch, withered and forced as it may be. Parker went to the door and walked through. The others followed. Colby brought up the rear, with both hands still clamped over his mouth.
General Ramsey led them through a hallway identical to the first. For a moment it seemed they must have left the conference room the same way they had entered. At the far end of the hallway, they boarded another elevator. The shiny silver doors swept shut and Parker opened his mouth to ask the General if they were by chance going back the way they’d come.
“A visually unremarkable structure with a maze-like interior will be disadvantageous to an attacking enemy,” said General Ramsey. “You’re not the first one to wonder about these boring hallways.”
“What do you mean by dis . . . advan . . . contagious?” said Bubba.
“He means they’ll get lost,” said Sunny.
“Quite right, Miss Harper,” said General Ramsey. “Clever girl.”
“‘S.R. Hadden.’ ‘The pit is completely enclosed.’ ‘And it’s full of leathery objects, like eggs or something.’ ‘Oh no, not again!’” Colby began to sing: “‘Hello my sweetie, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal—’” He clamped his hand over his mouth again.
“How do you know our names?” asked Bubba.
“It’s my job to know things,” replied the General.
“So you knew I wasn’t Colby Max?” said Parker.
“That’s correct,” said General Ramsey.
“Then why go through all that jazz about pulling teeth and Colby’s picture getting lost? And all that stuff about Jim and the donuts?” asked Parker.
“It was a test,” said the General, “of them. And you.” He looked at Parker, then at Colby.
Colby spoke in an out-of-breath whisper, “‘Everything is a test.’”
The elevator trundled along to who knew where for several minutes.
“Are we going up or—”
“Down,” said General Ramsey, answering Parker’s second question, again before he’d had the chance to ask it. “That’s a good question,” added the General, “it’s wise to know your location at all times. You may need to escape. Or, heaven forbid, be rescued.”
“Rescued from what?” asked Parker.
“Exactly,” said the General.
Parker felt another twinge of disgust and impatience with General Ramsey’s return to his archaic form of speech.
At last the elevator chimed, and then shuddered to a halt. The doors slid open to reveal a hallway. This one, however, looked different from the others. Instead of being lined with anonymous doors and nauseating fluorescent lights, the walls, floor, and ceiling were shiny silver just like the elevator doors. It looked like a giant air duct. He remembered the occasion when he’d been left with no other alternative than to go for help after Bubba had accidentally wedged himself into the air duct supplying cool, ionically-filtered air to his apartment. After standing on chairs and deftly unscrewing the air vent from the wall, he and Bubba had been in the process of crawling through the ventilation shaft. They thought surely they could establish a clandestine shortcut between their bedrooms. They hadn’t gone more than a few yards before Bubba became lodged in a particularly tricky u-bend in the ductwork. Three hours later, the Sky City South Fire Department had pulled Bubba out by his feet, his entire body covered in a silicone-based industrial lubricant they used in maintaining their firefighting hel
icopters. Bubba looked like a wooly mammoth had sneezed on him.
Parker smiled to himself, wishing he could share the memory with Bubba. Despite Bubba’s insistence that Parker promise to never again mention the incident, he knew Bubba would laugh about it.
General Ramsey stopped at the end of the hallway and opened a small panel hidden in the wall. Inside lurked a computerized keypad. The keys beeped as he rapidly punched a string of numbers. “Blast door,” said the General. “A five thousand pound bomb could go off on the other side and you’d hardly feel it.” He smiled proudly. There was a longer beep and the wall began to slide, revealing it to be not a wall but a massive door. Behind it lay another long silver hallway, a mirror of the one in which they now stood.
“Confusing, huh?” said General Ramsey, clearly pleased with the notion. He proceeded on and Parker followed him, as did Sunny, Bubba and Colby.
At the end of this identical silver hallway, General Ramsey again opened another small panel and punched a string of numbers.
“You guys sure have a lot of doors,” said Bubba.
“You have no idea,” said the General.
The wall slid open and behind it was a massive white room, the other end of which was too far away to see. The vast room was divided by a long hallway with walls made of a clear material Parker thought had to be transparent aluminum like on the monorails back home. More transparent walls subdivided each side of the room into many smaller compartments. The hallway and the subdivided rooms were alive with clusters of men and women wearing white lab coats, all bustling about, hovering over workbenches or staring into microscopes, climbing up and down ladders beside bizarre electronic and mechanical objects. The whirring sound of power tools could be heard, muted on the other side of the glass-like walls, along with the sounds of air wrenches and electric drills, even the stutter of electricity from an arc welder shooting up a fountain of blue and gold sparks.
“What’s with the shower caps and booties?” said Colby.
Parker glanced over his shoulder at Colby, who until now had been silent, managing to contain his obscure outbursts.
“Those are clean rooms,” said General Ramsey. He motioned to the men and women wearing blue and green elastic on their heads and feet. “Helps prevent static electricity, too. A lot of expensive nanoprocessors in here. They don’t mix too well with static charge.”
The General moved on down the hallway. “Sorry about all that teeth-pulling business back there,” said the General. “You gotta look tough when you’re the boss. I’m really not a bad guy. I even have children of my own. Of course, they’re grown now and are about ready to start families of their own. They don’t seem to call anymore or stop by just to say hi to their old mom and pop, like they used to. I guess people just get busy.”
Colby burst out in song again, “‘Cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon . . . .’” He clamped his hands over his mouth again.
They reached the end of the hallway and the last two clean rooms, between which lurked a massive silver door. The General paused and looked into one of the rooms, at a petite woman preparing to lift a heavy-looking metal block with a sleeve-like robotic arm.
“My dad’s away, fighting in the war,” said Parker. “And my mom’s . . . .”
“My dad’s off fighting the war, too,” said Bubba, picking up the conversation where Parker left off.
“So are both my uncles,” said Sunny. “And my brother died at the Battle of Sydney.”
The expectation of an explanation seemed to turn to Colby. “My parents are in New York. My mom is my manager though I doubt she could manage to gain weight. My dad’s my agent. He says I’m going to get an executive producer credit on our next film. If I ever get out of here.” Colby looked blandly away from the tiny woman wearing the robotic arm as she waved the big metal block over her head like a feather.
“I was a military brat, too,” said General Ramsey. “My dad was a decorated fighter pilot. He was shot down when I was about your age.” He and Parker’s eyes met. “I was in bed asleep when a missile slammed into his plane half a world away. Two days later, at his funeral, my mom cried behind her dark sunglasses as they folded an American flag into a triangle and handed it to her. The guns went off and the jets flew overhead in the missing man formation. Then she handed the flag to me.”
“You must have been very sad,” said Sunny.
“Yes, my dear, I was,” said the General. “But, my dad was fighting for freedom, and for me that’s enough. That’s what I’m doing, too. And, to be perfectly honest, I need your help. I don’t want to sound melodramatic, like in some bad movie,” – he turned to Colby – “no offense,” – Colby rolled his eyes – “but the whole world needs your help.”
“For what?” said Parker. “This little tour has been great and all these science projects look real interesting and everything, but you still haven’t said why I – we – are here. And don’t say time will tell again.”
General Ramsey grinned. “My friends, what I’m about to show you is the culmination of my life’s work. And that of many, many other people as well, some of whom have even lost their lives in the process. On the other side of these doors is something you will never forget.”
Chapter 10
The Real Deal