“Hold it,” said a loud, deep voice.
I turned and there on the seat at the stern nestled Louie, looking no different than when I’d first spotted him on the boat’s cabin roof so long ago—ten days maybe.
“You’re late,” says I, pretending not to be surprised that he could talk.
“I’ve been checking a few things,” says Louie. He sounded like a sportscaster intoning just before a Superbowl, his voice deep and meaningful. Been watching too many newscasts.
“Thanks for the money,” I says. “Is someone going to be missing it?”
“Oh, yes,” says Louie.
“You hacked someone’s bank account,” says I.
“A bank’s bank account, Billy. Thus no harm done.”
I put Vagabond in neutral, turned off the engine and went aft to sit near him on one of the few feet of seating on the port side of the stern.
“I guess, Louie, it’s time you tell me what you’re all about.”
“Good idea,” he says.
“When did you learn to talk?” I ask. “Or could you talk all along but decided to hold back for a special occasion.”
“No, I only learned how to do it a few days ago. A friend taught me.”
“Human or other?”
“Other. While I was spending my first month on Earth learning to communicate with dolphins, killer whales, sea turtles, and minnows, he was in France moving among people, so he learned how to make human sounds much faster than I.”
“Well, that’s great. And where’s your home town?” I ask.
“Ah, my home town,” says Louie, a small area of hairs seeming to part and swish with the passage of air. “It’s in a different universe,” he answered.
“Yeah, that’s what I figured. We get a lot of tourists from there in the summer and fall.”
Damned if Louie didn’t reach out and poke me with a foot-long projection from his belly, as if he’d appreciated my joke.
“I love your style, Billy. You don’t seem to take things seriously.”
“At my age, with death knocking on the door every other Tuesday, I can’t afford to take things seriously.”
Although we were side by side on the aft seat, swaying to and fro with the motion of the boat on a slightly lumpy sea, I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me or not.
“Are you looking at me, Louie?”
“Every second, Billy, although it took me a long time after I first arrived—six or seven minutes—to reduce my sensory input so that I saw only what the porpoises see or what you humans see and not the other million wavelengths our… people see.”
“Same with hearing?” I ask.
“Same with all human senses. Most of what I’m experiencing is irrelevant to human life. Even after I’ve read all your encyclopedias and surfed all your nets and explored the NSA and other government systems, I’m still filled mostly with data and programs that have nothing to do with life here on Earth.”
“I guess we’re pretty boring, huh?”
“Not at all. Humans are the most interesting creatures on this planet and more interesting than a lot of advanced creatures we’ve encountered in other places.”
“What makes us interesting?” says I.
“You’re so intelligent and so incredibly stupid. We’ve never encountered a species with so much brain power that was so stupid.”
“Well, we’ve had a lot of practice,” says I.
“Yes, you have, and you’re getting better and better at it, especially here in this country.”
“Oh, yeah,” say I, “America’s the Greatest at everything. Especially stupidity.”
He bounced twice about a foot off the seat, maybe his way of laughing.
“So what are you here for, Louie—on Earth I mean?”
“You mean what’s my purpose?”
“Yep.”
“No purpose at all, Billy. We’re here to play.”
“Then what’s with hacking the CIA and sending money from some bank’s bank account to me. And probably a dozen others.”
“I’ve hacked into hundreds of bank and corporate accounts, Billy. Soon to be thousands.”
“Why?”
“Just for the fun of it, Billy. Just for the fun of it.”
“Fun, huh.”
“What you have to understand is that primitive creatures need to base their lives on purpose and surviving—to find food, shelter, safety. But when creatures find their existence is no longer endangered, they can develop a second way of living: play. They begin doing things ‘for the hell of it.’ We see hundreds of different creatures acting in the play mode when they’re young—puppies and kittens and bear cubs and human children. Children racing each other from one tree to another, but not caring who wins. As soon as a child cares if he wins, then it becomes purposeful and stops being play. And you humans took a wrong step on the evolutionary road when purpose became your primary mode and play was seen as childish. In our evolution we chose play. And see seriousness as childish.”
“Wouldn’t work with us.”
“But you’re playing all the time, Billy. What do you think all your bullshitting exaggeration is? It’s play.”
“Maybe.”
“Remember, that though you’ve been evolving for a few hundred thousand years,” Louie says, “in other universes creatures have been evolving for billions. Which might explain why some are a bit more developed than you are.”
“You seem to—what the hell!?”
A small porpoise had leapt right over the whole boat just missing my head and plopped back into the water.
I stood up and turned to Louie.
“You see that!? In all my days at sea—”
The damn porpoise suddenly burst up from the other side, seemed to be aimed right at my head, then just missed me on its way back to the sea.
I leaned over to see what it was doing, but it had disappeared. I shook my head and, as I turned again to Louie, heard a flapping on the coach roof.
Damned if the porpoise—but it was a porpoise with no eyes or mouth—wasn’t flopping like a dying fish on the coach roof.
“Hey, how you doing?” says Louie, and when I turned to him I sensed he wasn’t talking to me but to the fish.
I looked back up to the coach roof and the fish was gone and sitting there was a… midget human, legs crossed, arms raised as if in triumph. Its head had ears and a nose, but no eyes or mouth. With his body covered with the thin silver-gray hairs that were the FF’s trademark, he looked less like a human than a skinny, eyeless, toothless chimpanzee.
“Pretty good, right?” says the midget.
I slowly sat back down next to Louie.
“Yep,” I says. “Pretty good. The last creature that cavorted on my coach roof was just a round beach ball.”
“Louie has no imagination,” says the midget. “He’s all brains but lacking in elasticity.”
“Thanks,” says Louie.
“You going to introduce me to your friend?” I says to Louie.
“This is… the friend who taught me to talk,” says Louie.
“So exactly how many of you guys are there swimming around our planet?” says I.
As I spoke, the fake human shrank back into a sphere, came off the roof and bounced over to sit beside Louie.
“Hundreds,” says the new FF. “And aren’t we having fun?”
“Oh, yeah,” says I. “You got a name?”
“My friends in Europe call me ‘Molière,’” he says. “After a writer who enjoyed writing plays about human follies.”
“Well, Molière, glad to meet you. You into robbing our banks too?”
“Not yet. I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with your absurd Homeland Security and NSA bureaucracies. We recently ordered a branch of the NSA to investigate two-thirds of the people in the CIA. At the same time we hacked into the CIA computer systems and got them to begin investigating six thousand people in other branches of the NSA.”
“Jesus, they’re going to l
ove you guys when they find out.”
“And we’ve found a whistle-blower,” says Louie, “who’s gotten material to the Los Angeles Times that shows that the NSA has terrorist files on over forty-five million Americans based on whether they have visited anti-government websites, both left and right, or communicated with people who have.”
“Hey,” says I. “I must be on that list!”
“Of course you are,” says Louie. “Only people who have no opinions at all are safe. If you’ve never expressed an opinion on any serious subject then you can have sex with anyone you like, visit child porn sites, cheat on your income taxes, extort money, bribe officials, anything at all in fact, just remember not to express any opinion on anything. That makes you an upstanding American who can go about his business without the NSA giving a single damn.”
“Although it will still watch every single move you make,” says Molière.
“Getting that sort of stuff published doesn’t seem to make much difference,” says I. “People don’t seem to care if some government agency knows every time they burp.”
“Of course not,” says Louie. “They know they’ve got no control over their government so why worry about how much power it has.”
“What else have you been up to?” I ask Molière.
“I’ve been working on getting Homeland Security to transfer eight hundred of their Certified Public Accountants to the IRS and get the head of the IRS to use them to audit big corporations. But Louie makes bank robbing sound like more fun.”
“Well, I like it,” says I, remembering the duffel bag of cash sitting forward in the anchor locker. “But how do you get an IRS director to do what you want?”
“We blackmail him,” says Molière. “The NSA files are filled with information that they can use to blackmail hundreds of thousands of Americans. We’re borrowing some of that info to get people to be more sympathetic to our requests.”
“Jesus, you guys play rough, don’t you?” says I.
“Just playing by the rules your society has set up,” says Molière. “We’ve found that blackmail and extortion are as American as apple pie.”
“Apple pie and blackmail,” says I. “Not often you hear the two in the same sentence.”
“This old one is a very superior type of human,” says Louie. “One of the very few I’ve found. He knows he is stupid and knows nothing, and thus is at a very advanced stage for a human.”
“Thanks, Louie,” says I. “I always figured it would take a genius to appreciate me.”
Suddenly both FFs rolled off the seat onto the floor and in under the coach roof. At first I thought it was their way of laughing together at my joke, but then I heard a distant sound that turned into a rising roar.
I stood up and saw a helicopter approaching from the Connecticut side of the sound. When I turned to tell Louie and Molière, I saw two small power boats coming at us at full speed, their wakes so high on either side I could see them a half mile away. I went forward to the helm and turned on the engine.
“Don’t bother,” says Louie.
“See you,” says Molière, and with a single bounce he was over the side and into the water.
“Aren’t you going too?” I ask Louie.
“No, I think I’ll stick around.”
I could barely hear Louie with the roar of the helicopter overhead, but as the two power boats came plowing up on either side of Vagabond, the chopper swerved and headed slowly away.
The first boat to come up was an unmarked twenty-five-foot speedboat with four men aboard, one of them my old buddy Agent Johnson. The other three were all in suits, but I didn’t recognize any of them.
The second boat, a small Coast Guard speedboat about the same length as Johnson’s, pulled up on the starboard side. I noticed Agent Wall trying to put a bumper down between the Coast Guard boat and Vagabond and almost crushing half his fingers.
I turned off the engine and went inside the cabin for a weapon. I pulled out a bottle of Jim Beam, grabbed three coffee mugs, and went back out. Carrying my armaments, I sauntered aft as coolly as I could—an old man with balance problems never actually saunters; he mainly staggers or wobbles. I sat down, crossed my legs, and poured a shot into one of the coffee mugs.
As I was doing this, Agent Johnson climbed awkwardly aboard Vagabond—looked like a cripple trying to get over a fence.
“You want a drink, Louie?” I says, figuring he was probably biologically a teetotaler.
“Thought you’d never ask, Billy. Thanks.”
Well. I should have figured. Humans tend to drive people to drink, even those from other universes.
I poured a good shot into a second mug and held it out to Louie. He reached out a… limb, then created some fingers—three I think—and took the mug.
“Cheers,” he says and knocks his mug against mine.
“Hey, how’s it going, Mr. Johnson?” says I. “You like to join us in a drink?”
Agent Johnson was straightening his clothes from his fence-climbing, but when he noticed Louie his eyes widened in surprise. As he stared, Louie reached up with his “limb” and “fingers” and coffee mug, and poured all the Jim Beam on the top of his sphere. I gotta say Louie had a unique way of drinking. Agent Johnson looked frightened.
“Is this… is this the… Arctic dog?” he says.
“This is Louie,” I says. “Visiting us from another universe.”
The seas were just rough enough to have the boats on either side of Vagabond bouncing up and down almost a foot every few seconds, rubbing against each other, and I could see the other agents aboard the unmarked boat looking a little green around the gills. Agent Johnson didn’t look totally chipper either.
“Come on over and have a seat,” says I, picking up the last mug and pouring a double shot for the needy agent. He stood there with one arm balancing himself on the coaming and then straightened and came aft and stopped in front of Louie and me.
“You’re under arrest,” says Agent Johnson to Louie. Always a good way to greet a new friend.
Louie immediately sprouts five or six short limbs out of his sphere, and raises these arms straight up in surrender.
Agent Johnson doesn’t bat an eyelash.
“We have evidence that you are responsible for the invasion of several government and corporate systems. Also for stealing well over three million dollars from at least five corporations.”
“Actually, I’ve so far stolen twenty-one million five hundred and sixty thousand dollars from eight corporations and three banks.”
Confession may be good for the soul, but I thought Louie’s was a bit early: he hadn’t even been tortured yet.
Louie shrunk down his limbs and morphed back into his sphere.
“You’re admitting you are the perpetrator?” Johnson asks.
“I am.”
“Then I’m taking you to Riverhead where we can formally charge you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“We have six armed men on either side of this boat. An Apache helicopter a quarter mile off.”
“Congratulations.”
“We might have to shoot you.”
“Violence!”
“What’s going to stop us?”
“Me,” says Louie.
You gotta give him credit, he had a lot of balls, or at least one big one.
Agent Johnson reached under his suit jacket and took out a gun that looked big enough to put a hole in a rhino.
“Let’s go,” says Agent Johnson. Then he turns to the boat he came in on.
“Graves, Backstrom,” he says. “Come aboard and take this ma… creature into custody.”
Well, you and I know that all Louie had to do was bounce once and he’d be in the water and fifty-foot deep before you could say “anchors away.” Still, these guys had guns and Louie seemed a bit too relaxed about what he was facing. Could bullets kill him?
Two agents clambered over the coaming onto Vagabond, both big guys who looked like they could
handle Hulk Hogan if they felt like it. They moved toward me and Louie, both of us still sitting in the stern. When they were only a couple of feet away they stopped and stood over Louie, who never batted a hair, which, considering he had about two million of them, was impressive.
Then one of them reached down to grab Louie. The next thing I knew the bruiser flew head over heels off the stern into the water. Louie had somehow grabbed him and thrown—it was so quick I don’t know how he did it.
The other bruiser looked a little less confident. In fact he took a step backward. As he pulled out his own howitzer, he turned to Agent Johnson.
“What do you want me to do, Chief?” he asks.
By now two Coast Guard guys had thrown the first bruiser four or five life rings, one of them almost knocking him out cold, but they still managed to pull him aboard.
Agent Johnson came up beside the other agent.
“We’re not going to shoot you…” he says.
“Louie,” says I. “His name is Louie.”
“We’re not going to shoot you, Louie, but we’d like to be able to question you and we’d like you to stop robbing our banks and hacking our systems.”
“That seems reasonable,” says Louie. “At least the first part.”
“What are you doing here? Why are you hacking into everything? What are your intentions?”
“To have fun.”
“Robbing banks is your idea of fun?”
“One of thousands,” says Louie.
“What happens if we shoot you?”
“I don’t know. None of us has ever been shot.”
“You don’t seem too worried about it,” says Agent Johnson.
“The worse that could happen,” says Louie, “is that I’d return to the ocean and feed the fish.”
Just then Agent Johnson’s cell phone began playing “America the Beautiful,” and he took it out of a suit-jacket pocket and eased away from us toward the cabin.
“That reminds me, Louie,” says I. “How did you and Molière get in contact with each other when he arrived from Europe?”
“We FFs are in contact whenever we’re within fifteen or twenty miles of each other. Even as I’m now talking to you, Molière and I are communicating both with each other and with another FF that’s within range. Every second I know much of what Molière is thinking and he knows a lot of what I’m thinking. FFs within range of each other are not separate beings but one.”