The Lonely Whelk Page 4

  “John always hides his key in a different place,” he continued, walking towards the fountain in the main part of the garden, “but usually there is always one in a fountain somewhere.”

  The main fountain hosted a sculpture of a giant man holding a well-placed pitcher. On his head he wore a hedgehog. Maxwell began to feel along the edge of the pool, looking for the loose stone that housed the key. Maddy stayed back to keep watch.

  “Excuse me,” a man said, stepping out from behind the man and the hedgehog.

  Maddy shrieked.

  Maxwell gasped. “What were you doing hiding behind that there statue? Now you’ve startled Maddy!”

  “Who is Maddy?”

  Maxwell frowned and turned towards her. “Don’t be rude! She’s standing right here!”

  “I see.” The man raised one eyebrow.

  “What do you want?” Maxwell asked haughtily.

  “Well, my name is Rock and I am head of security here at the Globe. I noticed that you appear to be looking for something. Can I help you?”

  “Oh, probably not.” Maxwell swallowed and looked back and forth from the fountain to the Globe building. He couldn’t give away his plan, not when he was so close. “I seem to have lost my… my…” His eyes lit on the statue. “…my hedgehog.”

  “Oh really.” Rock gestured towards the nearby fountain. “Does your hedgehog habitually hide in fountains?”

  “Oh, ha ha,” Maxwell pretended to laugh. “Hedgehogs are funny creatures, aren’t they? Aren’t they, Maddy?”

  Maddy nodded. “Yes, they are!”

  He turned back to the security guard and gave his head a definitive nod. “See? Maddy agrees.”

  Rock frowned slightly in Maddy’s direction. “Well, I don’t mean to be rude, but this is government property. You either need to be an employee, or signed in as a visitor. If you sign in with our front desk then I will be glad to help you look for your lost… hedgehog… myself.”

  “Oh, no, no, it’s no problem. He’s probably run home!” Maxwell said. He could feel himself getting agitated and anxious. All of this lying was hard work. “Hedgehogs are sneaky little creatures. I will just be going then, won’t I? Since I don’t see him here. Maddy, come along.”

  “Well, okay then,” Rock said. “Next time he runs away, just come sign in at the desk and you can look for him all you want.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Maxwell said, and, grabbing Maddy’s hand, walked rapidly out of the gardens.

  Kaia followed John around the corridors of the Globe, watching him stomp and mutter as he passed different rooms. Occasionally a scientist would stop him to ask a question or make a suggestion, and John would give a cursory nod or a long-winded reply, depending on his interest in the subject.

  One man stopped and looked at Kaia for a moment.

  “She’s fine,” John said, before the man launched into some explanation about rocket fuel.

  After he left, she asked, “Am I allowed to know everything that goes on around here?” She was surprised that no one felt the need to whisper about their projects or was concerned that a stranger was listening in.

  “No, but you have pretty high clearance,” John replied. “You’re working in the Door Room, and it’s nearly impossible to control everything that comes through the Doors. As a result, anyone that works in there has to be able to keep a secret.”

  “What’s the biggest secret I’m allowed to know about?” Kaia asked, curious.

  John pursed his lips for a second. “Probably the Whelk.”

  “The one that landed on Septimar?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” Kaia frowned. “I know all about that already.”

  “No, you know what they tell you,” John answered, still striding forward at a rapid pace. “You don’t actually know what you think you know.”

  “So what’s the secret?” she asked.

  “We will discuss that in time,” he replied, “but for right now, I have work to do!”

  They rounded a corner in the hall, and John abruptly stopped in front of a doorway. He turned to Kaia.

  “I have to teach, because I am a teacher.”

  Kaia nodded. “What would you like me to do?”

  “Sit in on the class, of course!” He straightened his tie and buttoned his jacket. “You don’t need to always sit in on classes, as you mostly know everything I will be teaching, but I may ask you to some days. This is one of those days. It will happen more often in the beginning, while you’re still meeting people and getting the lay of the land. I think you’ll enjoy it, though. I’m an excellent teacher.”

  Kaia grinned. She had seen some of his public lectures at different universities and also on television. He was an excellent speaker and both entertaining and informative.

  She followed John into a classroom where six students sat, chatting quietly. The room was large, round, and painted like a cold, rocky beach. Strange-looking iridescent bulbs swung from the ceiling, creating an unusual atmosphere.

  “Who can tell me what a Door is?” John asked, striding to the center of the room as the students fell quiet.

  Kaia slipped into a seat in the back of the room, as one of the other students muttered to himself, “Seriously, does he think we’re dumb?” She turned and frowned at him.

  “Stewart.” John pointed at another student who held his hand in the air.

  “A Door is an inter-dimensional object which allows matter to traverse great lengths of space with only a very small amount of energy,” he stated clearly.

  “Thank you,” said John, “for providing us with the textbook definition. But the textbook definition doesn’t apply here. We are working with a scientific phenomenon, the likes of which have never been seen before. I’d like you all to meet Kaia, our newest intern.” All the students in the class turned to look at her. “Kaia, please tell us: what is a Door?”

  “Well…” she said slowly, thinking carefully, “a Door is literally a door, except that rather than allowing your physical body to move from one space to another in close proximity, it allows you to move from one room to another room which may be zero or hundreds or billions of miles away. It’s like a bridge over huge oceans of space.”

  “A bridge – perfect. A Door is a bridge!” John turned and drew a picture of a bridge on his teaching tab. It appeared on the wall behind him. “So a bridge takes you from one side of a river or a gorge or a chasm to the other, correct?” His eyebrows began dancing around his forehead. Kaia stared at them, fascinated.

  “But what if—”

  The student who had muttered to himself when Kaia came in, interrupted John in a very straightforward manner: “Mr. John. The Doors are so different than anything we’ve ever seen before – scientifically speaking – in a new science, hypotheticals just don’t make sense.”

  John frowned. Kaia decided that she didn’t like it when John frowned. The expression didn’t quite seem to fit on his face.

  “First of all, Boris,” John began. His voice sounded harsh; it almost had a metallic ring. “Doors have been around for longer than this planet has been colonized. It is not a ‘new science.’ While the government spreads the propaganda that Door travel is illegal and unsafe, here we are traveling through Doors every single day without harm. In fact, there are Doors all over this planet in people’s homes, basements, freezers – and they know about them. And we know about them. It’s not rare, it’s not new.

  “Secondly, you should always apply hypotheticals to science — old or new! How are we supposed to ever think of new things if we never allow ourselves to think outside the box? There are many ways to think outside the box, and hypotheticals are one very useful method that nearly everyone can follow.”

  John stopped talking and stared at Boris.

  Boris shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He didn’t meet John’s eyes.

  Kaia raised her hand. “So, if we know so much about them, what is left to hypothesize?”

  “Excellent question,” Joh
n replied, removing his glare from Boris and turning a smile towards Kaia. “And the answer is, apparently, a lot.”

  He turned and looked at the bridge. “As I was saying, a bridge takes you from one side of the river to the other. But what if the bridge took you from one side of the river to three other sides of the river? Or three different places on the river?”

  Kaia frowned. “You mean like it splits in the middle once you go through?”

  “Exactly!” John straightened his tie with an unconscious gesture. “It splits! You’ve all seen those massive highway systems that the people on Earth like to build, right? Giant concrete structures which are so huge they are barely comprehensible, massive feats of engineering which allow you go any number of directions without seeming to leave the road, even though the signs indicate that you are moving from one road to another.”

  “Would there be signs inside the Doors?” another student asked.

  “That, Felicia, my favourite tree-hugging biologist,” John answered, “is where cognitive mathematics comes into play!”

  The group of students groaned.

  “Did anyone in here pass cognitive mathematics?”

  Kaia raised her hand. “Barely,” she said. Only two other students raised their hands.

  “Why is cognitive mathematics so hard?” John asked the group.

  Stewart raised his hand. “Because it’s like trying to do brain surgery on yourself.”

  “Excellent analogy!” John gave an excited hop. “It’s just like brain surgery!” He looked over at Kaia. “Kaia, why do you think it’s so hard?”

  She took a deep breath, as formulas from her last cognitive mathematics class began to flood into her brain. “I don’t think it is hard as much as it is weird. You have to take the way a person thinks and translate it into a series of numbers, and put them into prediction formulas. If you get it right, and apply the math to yourself, it’s almost like looking into the mirror and seeing the future you. It’s weird...” Kaia shrugged, and then looked around the class, hoping someone would jump in and help. “I think it’s so hard to learn because there is something in our brain that won’t let us. It works just fine without us knowing what and how we’re going to think next.”

  John erased the bridge on his teaching tab and began to scribble numbers and formulas. “What if you used Abramson’s formula for psychological prediction?”

  Kaia watched as the massive, never-ending formula appeared on the wall.

  “…and combined it with the Peach Normative Theory of Spatial Sequencing…”

  A few of the students began to scribble rapidly in their notebooks. Boris groaned loudly and Kaia stared at the wall, her jaw hanging open.

  “…and then added Falmouth’s Coefficient… I hope you like math… and ended with Anna’s Function of Round—”

  Kaia’s brain seemed to vibrate as she absorbed all the numbers and variables and symbols, fitting them together in her mind like a confusing and frustrating puzzle.

  “That can’t be real!” she exclaimed. “If a Door like that existed, it wouldn’t just take you to three places, it would take you to... to... a million! Billion! As many Doors as existed in the universe! And it would be a traffic control nightmare because all other Doors would lead back to it!”

  John looked up from his teacher’s tab. A smile slowly blossomed over his face as he listened to Kaia stutter.

  “You, my lovely intern,” he said, “are a genius.”

  He walked over to her desk and reached out his hand. She shook it in a daze, her mind still analyzing and restructuring the numbers and formulas in front of her, thinking that she must have made a mistake.

  “Not as much of a genius as me, of course,” John added, as he walked back the front of the room, “because I figured it out first.”

  All at once, a flurry of murmurs arose from the students in the room.

  “Is this possible...?”

  “How was this discovered? What… what are the consequences?”

  “Does the government know?”

  “We are the government.”

  “This is ridiculous!” Boris roared over the noise. “How can you expect us to believe that this actually exists?”

  “Look at the math!” Kaia jumped out of her seat and strode to the front of the room. She began to pound her finger against the wall. “It’s right there in front of you! It would be easy to build with this formula... well, not easy, but it’s certainly plausible!”

  “I want proof!” Boris demanded. “None of us can sit here and do that math in our heads! Do the problem – prove it! Or I’ll walk out and tell the whole world.”

  “First of all,” John said raising his hands. The class quieted and Kaia scooted back to her seat. “You wouldn’t get that far. Our new head of security is quite good. He found all my hidden keys. Every single one. Secondly, no one would believe you. The average citizen of Pomegranate City hasn’t even heard of cognitive mathematics and they would think you were just trying to cause trouble. Which, obviously, you were. And thirdly, if you did that, you would be arrested and stuck in jail for the rest of your life on charges of treason. I suggest you just sit back and learn, and try to be a little less stubborn.”

  Boris slouched down in his seat. “Of course, Mr. John. My apologies.” Kaia noticed that he was gritting his teeth and snapping a rubber band against his wrist. She wished she understood non-verbal communication better.

  John turned to the rest of the class. “I think it’s almost time... for you to have lunch! Go eat. Except Kaia. You come with me. Someone have a pretzel for me! Now go!”

  The rest of the class cheered and packed up their things, while Kaia rapidly scribbled the formula in her notebook so she could double check later to make sure she had memorized it correctly. This was turning into a very interesting day.

  Kaia stood, gazing at John’s office for the first time.

  It was a massive room with five walls; the desk squatted in the center like a giant turtle. In fact, it was a giant turtle with four elephants standing on its shell. A giant disk lay across the backs of the elephants – this disk seemed to be the surface of the desk.

  The walls were painted a soft green, and the floor was tile. An entire tree appeared to grow out of one wall and beautiful paintings hung everywhere, including the ceiling. One was a school of freshwater whales chasing after a freshwater, underwater bird; another was a winter snow on a small cabin in the woods; a third was of three small girls playing in a pool; the fourth was black with green squares which had a hundred tiny elephants painted in each. Kaia deduced that he must like elephants quite a lot.

  “It’s beautiful!” Kaia said.

  “I just had it redecorated,” John replied, grinning. “I had calculated the volume of my old desk so many times I just couldn’t take it anymore. I’m still trying to measure this one accurately. Haven’t had time to do it properly.”

  “What’s that?” Kaia pointed to a small shadow box hung next to the window.

  “Oh, that’s my magic pencil!” John replied. He walked over to the wall and gazed at it for a moment. Then he looked at Kaia. “Not really magic, you understand – just lucky. Sentimental.”

  Kaia nodded. “We all have stuff like that,” she said.

  He began to rummage in his desk drawer, and pulled out a small box.

  “You’ll need these,” he told her, handing her a pair of old-fashioned 3D glasses.

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see.” He pulled out a second pair and slipped them into his coat pocket.

  Kaia looked closely at the glasses – one blue lens, one red lens. They weren’t used anymore; she wondered where he had found them.

  “John.” Quin’s voice boomed behind her.

  Kaia jumped, startled. She hadn’t noticed the door opening.

  “Rock has an interviewee in a bit. He wants to throw a few different tricks at him to see if he breaks under pressure and thought we would start easy first.”

  “Ah,
fun!” John grinned and his eyebrows began to dance again. “I love fun!”

  A few minutes later, they all stood around Rock’s desk in the room with all of the screens. It was like looking through the multi-faceted eyes of a kry-ma bug that was looking through the windows of every room of the Globe. Kaia carefully kept her eyes averted, so she wouldn’t become distracted and miss everything that was being said. A few other security guards in black suits and glasses stood silently in the back of the room; she tried to avoid looking at them as well, particularly because they scared her just a little bit.

  “I was hoping for two things,” Rock stated. “One, I would like for you to hide some keys.” He held out a handful of keys to John. “When I say, ‘go,’ you run around and hide them. They aren’t real, obviously.”

  “Easy!” John replied.

  “And Kaia,” Rock said, turning to her, “I was hoping you would play the role of…”

  “…a distraction!” John finished. “Perfect, genius, splendiferous, positively magnificent!”

  Rock’s buzzer buzzed.

  “He’s here,” said the receptionist.

  “We should make him wait fifteen minutes,” Rock decided. “To test his patience. Then we’ll run some tests, and afterwards send him to your office, Quin. You may need to take over at some point too, in case I get called in to deal with Mad Jack. The nurses said he was having a bad day.”

  “No problem,” Quin replied.

  “He looks nice.” Kaia shrugged. “Aren’t security guys supposed to look meaner?”

  All three men turned to look at her.

  “Sometimes the nice-looking ones are the scariest,” Quin replied.

  “How good are you at flirting?” Rock interjected.

  “Um… not very. I don’t really date.” Kaia made a face. “Just that one guy that John doesn’t like.”

  “Great. It’ll be really awkward then,” Rock said. “We need you to go out there and just be awkward.”

  “Sit in the seat next to him.” Quin pointed at the lobby screen. “Even though there are a bunch of seats available.”