Agent Johnson made a facial expression that I guess was a smirk.
“Then we’ll have the Suffolk County Animal Control Agency take him into custody.”
“If Louie was a dog,” Lita says, “that would be an excellent idea and absolutely legal. I could not object. However, as you have been arguing ever since we first met, Louie is not a dog, in fact, as I know you’ll agree, he is not any sort of animal. He, and all the FFs, are not warm-blooded, which is the common definition of an animal or mammal, but rather most all of his characteristics—with the possible exception of his intelligence—are those of a plant. As a plant, Louie is, I concede, subject to the regulations of the Department of Agriculture, but as far as I know, Louie has not broken any plant laws. I should also add that as far as I know there is no law against aiding and abetting a plant.”
Ya gotta love her. And I do. But only because I never try to argue with her.
Agent Johnson was a lot smarter than I thought. Saying not a word he turned and left the room. He was letting us go. For the time being.
* * *
When we got home the next day (ABC put us up in a hotel whose bathroom was larger than our living room) there was no sign of Louie. The media, of course, invaded our lawn and driveway and email and answering machine, begging us for interviews, to star in a new reality TV show recreating my first meeting with Louie—you name it, they’d pay us tens of thousands of dollars to do it.
Carlita and I told the boys not to say a single word. The only way we’d be rid of them was with total silence. Not even a “no comment.” It took three days before the cable channels decided that no news whatsoever from the Mortons was no longer headline news.
When we got up two mornings after the great TV interview, Lita checked her computer and found an email from Louie.
Hi, Friends.
Thanks for all the fun and help you’ve given me and my friends. Molière says we ought to make all four of you “Honorary Ickies.” But the government is following your every fart these days so it’s impossible for me to renew our contact. I’m off to safer waters—whether on land or sea still not determined. As we say in Ickieland, keep on rollin’.
Your pal, Louie.
Well that pretty much ruined our day. Our week. All four of us moped. Life without Louie suddenly seemed to us to be life without life. We managed to get the boys off to school, but Lita and I decided not to do anything that day and concentrate on moping. Then, about two o’clock that afternoon Agent Johnson knocked on the door and brought us out of our mope: he told us Carlita was under arrest.
“On what charges?” she says. There were three agents: our pals Johnson and Wall, and some tall skinny guy.
“Aiding and abetting a suspected terrorist and known bank robber,” says Johnson.
“And how did I do that?” asks Carlita.
“By hiding the terrorist under your maternity dress,” says Johnson. Got to hand it to him, he didn’t give her a “gotcha” look when he said this, just his usual “just the facts, ma’am” poker face.
“And what evidence do you have to support this charge?” says Carlita.
“Five witnesses will testify that they saw you eight months pregnant at the beginning of the show, and we know that at the end of the show you had on an extremely loose-fitting dress over a… a slender body. Two witnesses will testify they saw the alien emerge on the floor right near you before he bounced onto the stage.”
“That’s all you’ve got!?” says Carlita, acting as if the whole case against her was based on an eyewitness account by a blind man.
“You’re under arrest, Mrs. Morton,” said Johnson with his usual cool. “I’m afraid we’ll have to handcuff you.”
“Hold it,” says I.
All my life—well, since my late teens anyway—I have rarely been able to like cops, even when they wear suits and are polite. All during the late sixties after I’d gotten back from ’Nam, I’d battled cops for one reason or another, and thus must have built into myself a sort of automatic reflex that still lived after another forty years. These three guys were about to drag my wife off to jail. No way, Charlie Brown.
“You guys lay a hand on Carlita and I’ll level all three of you.” You must realize that although I was more than seventy years old, I felt like I was still in my fifties and thus quite capable of taking on three cops.
“Don’t be silly, Billy,” says Lita, who had no great love of cops either, but is a lot smarter than me.
Johnson nodded at Wall, and the big man took out a pair of cuffs and went up to Carlita.
I leveled him with a roundhouse right. I really did. Hit him hard in the side of his face and sent him to the canvas. Ali couldn’t have done it better. Hurt my shoulder though.
Then I turned to take out the tall skinny guy, took a step toward him with my arm cocked, and felt my jaw explode. Where the hell did that come from? You’ll be proud to know that I wasn’t KOed but rather staggered backwards two stumbles, righted myself, and tried to figure how someone had hit me without my seeing it.
“That’s enough, Agent Rand,” Johnson said. “Don’t try to resist, Mr. Morton.”
Wall had picked himself up off the hallway rug and came slowly at me. I gave him another roundhouse right that knocked a lot of air particles out of their normal flow but missed all of Agent Wall by about ten feet. The next thing I knew a battering ram had slammed into my stomach and I doubled over. As I was planning my next brilliant move, I felt Wall’s knee slam into my forehead and I went to the floor. Lita leapt onto Wall’s back and began scratching his face, but Johnson immediately dragged her off and got her in a chokehold.
I was lying on the floor wondering what those two big black shiny blobs were only inches from my nose, but it wasn’t until I awoke fifteen minutes later on my couch that I realized that the blobs were probably Wall’s shiny shoes.
* * *
So we were both arrested, Carlita for aiding and abetting a terrorist and aggravated assault on a federal law enforcement official, and me for two counts of aggravated assault on federal law enforcement officials. I guess a swing and a miss is in the eyes of the law as much a crime as an Ali haymaker. I asked Lita if there wasn’t a law against law authorities aggravated assault on a citizen, but she said they’d repealed that law after 9/11.
* * *
Agent Johnson’s plan was simple: if Louie would come in and surrender to law enforcement, all charges against Carlita, and now me also, would be dropped. If not, Lita would be held without bail until her trial—our wonderful anti-terrorist laws making indefinite detention pretty easy.
Despite my long misdemeanor record in the sixties, I got out on bail. It would have taken my friends several days to raise the money (one of them was Sheriff Coombs), but while they were doing that, Lucas and Jimmy came by taxi to the Riverhead Court House with twenty-five thousand in cash for bail, money from that stash I’d carelessly left in the bilge of Vagabond. When the judge asked Lucas where he’d gotten the money he replied that both boys had been saving their allowances. Ya gotta love that kid.
’Course it was Louie who told the boys where they could find some bail money—told Jimmy actually. During his class on American history about how all the Native American Indians had suddenly died of old age, he got a note from the principal’s office that he should check the bilge of Vagabond.
* * *
The boys and I attended Lita’s bail hearing. The courtroom was packed, most all media, and they normally wouldn’t have admitted nobodies like us, but being family, they did. Lita still had her license to practice law in the State of New York and so the judge allowed her to represent herself.
“Your Honor,” she begins. “The most serious charge against me is aiding and abetting a terrorist. Is this correct?”
“You know it is,” the judge says. “Get on with it.”
“I plead guilty to bringing into the television studio under my clothing our pet Arctic retriever ‘Dr. Bulge.’ I admit that I did not pre
vent the dog from escaping from his confinement and bouncing onto the stage. However, I do not see how this constitutes an act of aiding and abetting a terrorist. I might be guilty of letting an animal loose where animals must always be on a leash, but of no more than that. And if the State argues that the alien is not a dog, but a plant, then I am only guilty of failing to take proper care of a plant.”
“Mrs. Morton, don’t play games with the court,” says the judge. “This alien creature, who you say is your ‘dog,’ has confessed to robbing banks. More importantly, the prosecution has presented evidence that it illegally hacked into the National Security Agency’s systems, which by the law of the land is an act of terrorism.”
“That may be true, Your Honor,” says Carlita, “but this alien creature is not a human being. It therefore cannot be accused under current US law of being a terrorist. And as a result, I am innocent of the charges against me.”
The judge was suddenly less talkative. After a long pause, he says: “The creature hacked top-secret government systems. That is an act of terrorism.”
“I’m sure it is, Your Honor,” says Carlita, as polite as ever. “And my husband spanked Dr. Bulge for it. But the fact remains that the creature is not a human being and therefore not subject to human laws and, by extension, I am innocent of aiding and abetting a terrorist.”
Judicial silence.
“I must respectfully ask, Your Honor,” Lita goes on. “if a chimpanzee had hacked into a top-secret government database, would the government have the right to prosecute him? I suggest the answer is ‘no.’”
“This creature,” the judge says, his face now a bit red, “although he does not have the body of a human being, unlike a chimpanzee has intelligence, has the ability to talk, to make friends, to steal. It has all the attributes of a human being except shape.”
“I’m afraid, Your Honor, that the law does not yet see it that way. When new technologies come along, new laws must be passed to take into account these new technologies. When the automobile replaced the horse, new laws had to be passed to control traffic and pedestrian safety. When e-tailers began selling their products online, new laws had to be passed to regulate their actions and to collect sales taxes from them. I submit that the appearance here in the United States of a creature never before encountered is identical to the appearance of a previously unknown technology. Until Congress passes new laws, the creature, as were the technologies, is outside the law.”
Judicial silence.
“And if our dog, Dr. Bulge, is not a human being, then he cannot be a terrorist. And if he is not a terrorist, then I cannot be guilty of aiding and abetting a terrorist. Therefore I cannot be denied bail. I therefore respectfully request that I be granted bail for my other offense.”
The judge stared a long time at Carlita.
“Sounds pretty sensible to me,” says I loudly.
Cost me five hundred bucks for contempt of court.
“I am adjourning this bail hearing until tomorrow morning at this same hour,” says the judge. “Court adjourned.”
* * *
That evening, I’m happy to say, the people following the case were mostly for Lita. On Facebook and Twitter and those sorts of places, people thought it was a gas that she might get off because she claimed Louie was her dog and not a genius from another universe. Most people still liked Louie because of his Cirque du Soleil performance during the TV show. ’Course there were a lot of angry patriots who thought Lita was a traitor who was helping some commie aliens to overthrow our capitalist system.
But the public’s attitude made it tough for Agent Johnson and the judge. If the judge denied her bail for “letting her dog loose” (as one tweet had it) then there might be a public outcry. Unfortunately for Johnson and the NSA, the judge was one of those who took the laws of the land seriously. His decision the next day was that until Congress passed a law defining these new aliens as human beings, the government had no right to prosecute them. And if the creature couldn’t be prosecuted for acts of terrorism, then the defendant, Carlita Morton, could not be prosecuted for aiding and abetting a terrorist. He set Carlita’s bail on the lesser count at twenty thousand dollars.
SIXTEEN
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 115–123)
For two weeks after our brief stint as TV stars, the FFs stayed out of our lives. Then one nice sunny day in mid-November I got a phone call from the sort of dull robotic voice used to tell people their prescription was ready at the pharmacy: “This is a recording. Please take Jimmy fishing in your Boston Whaler. Thank you.”
And then the dial tone.
I tried for a few minutes to figure out which of my friends was playing some minor indecipherable joke on me, but came up empty.
* * *
Out on Peconic Bay in the small Boston Whaler we kept around for family outings, we’d barely dropped anchor when Louie popped up out of the water and into the boat, first going to Jimmy and giving him a hug, and then changing himself into a talking gray life preserver—in case the government had a drone someplace keeping an eye on an old geezer out fishing with his son.
“I thought you’d broken off diplomatic relations with us, Louie,” says I.
“I knew the NSA would be monitoring all your emails, so I sent that note so they’d think I was done with you and your family.”
“Well, you could have let us know that we’d see you again. The boys have been pretty upset.”
“I’m sorry,” says Louie, and bounces over to Jimmy to get and give another hug.
“What’s that?” says Jimmy, and I see him pointing at a softball-sized growth on one side of Louie’s sphere and then on the life preserver he morphed into.
“Yeah, what’s the lump, Louie?” says I. “You FFs get cancer?”
“I’m pregnant,” says Louie.
“No, I mean what is it?” says I.
“I mean I’m pregnant,” he says again. “Three weeks pregnant. Little guy should be born in the next week.”
I frowned. I’d always thought of Louie as a male, and though he’d told us all FFs could have kids, his announcing he was pregnant made it sound like he was a female.
“What will your… uh… baby be like?” I ask.
“Well, splitting off rather than mating as mammals do, means that all FFs are somewhat alike. My baby will be a miniature me. In our universe, smart creatures like Ickies developed who reproduce by dividing, and keeping most of what each of us has learned. So in a way we all keep getting smarter and smarter. In other universes…”
“By the way, how’d you discover other universes?” I ask.
“Too complicated,” he says.
“Hey, I got B pluses in algebra and geometry one week in 1963. Figuring out how to get from one universe to another can’t be that hard.”
“We discovered how to do it by accident,” he says.
“Accident!”
“Creatures often discover the most important things by accident. Of course, it’s only after they’ve been wrestling with a problem for decades or centuries that chance can provide the nudge that lets them break through.”
“So how’d you do it?”
“We discovered that if for thirty-six seconds you rubbed the legs of a Kwabi—a kind of frog—against a six-inch square of the skin of a Blipgo—a kind of small elephant—while chanting the ancient FF mantra ‘Loosen lighten let go’ and were in an exact spherical shape, that you were suddenly transported to another universe.”
“Wow!” says Jimmy.
“Unfortunately, having arrived in this other universe the FF discovered he was stuck there since neither Kwabis or Blipgos existed in the new universe.”
“So… so how did the first FFs get back home?” I ask.
“It took him several years to mutate a frog-like creature into a Kwabi and an extremely fat human into a Blipgo. But finally—”
“Oh, shit, Louie, you’re bullshitting us!”
Louie laughed—a laugh that was an e
xaggerated version of a Santa’s “Ho-ho-ho.” Made me think he was about to sprout a beard, pot belly, and red nose. It was a really annoying laugh.
“The actual discovery is way too complex and too long and boring to explain.”
“How different is our universe from the other ones you’ve visited?” I ask.
“Ah, Billy, you haven’t the slightest idea about how many fantastic different ways of existence there are. One reason we FFs travel so much is that new forms of life are endlessly fascinating. What’s interesting about you humans is that you’ve developed this incredible computer power while still having brains only slightly more advanced than those of chimpanzees.”
“Chimpanzees can be really bright,” I says.
“And you’re only the second universe in which we’ve found creatures that have developed the power to destroy most all life on the planet while still having such diminished intelligence that you keep thinking of using that power.”
“I guess we’re pretty special.”
He didn’t annoy me with a “ho-ho-ho,” but I felt him smiling. But then Louie the life preserver bounced down to help Jimmy get a worm on the hook, then back into his life preserver.
“I could use your help, Billy,” says Louie.
“What do you need me for?”
“I and other FFs can’t yet become fake human beings. We need human helpers to do things for us that only humans can do—hold money in various accounts that we can use when needed, get humans in positions of power in the corporations and trusts and businesses we’re acquiring or creating. We want both you and Lita to assume a few false identities and open up false accounts so we can launder money and turn our bank transfers into cash.”
“How the hell do you manage to steal so much money?”
“It’s called capitalism, Billy. Your economic system is based on two principles. First, to those who hath, more shall be given. Without having a brain in their heads, rich people can’t avoid making money even if they don’t try. Second principle of capitalism: to really make money, find ways to cheat. When you control a corporation and control the media and control the regulatory agencies, and control governments, and control the courts, then sticking faithfully to the law is rather unnecessary. In fact sticking faithfully to the law is downright immoral to the shareholders. It is a moral duty to maximize corporate profits. Therefore, it is your moral duty to cheat.”