Part 8 (2/2)
Roger frowned. There was something about this fellow that he didn't quite trust.
Perhaps it was his agitated manner, always jumping from object to object or topic to topic. Perhaps it was the way he looked through Roger, as if the latter wasn't even there. Or perhaps it was that MacPhee sported a pencil-thin mustache.
Roger knew that he shouldn't judge people on appearance, even in the Cineverse.
Simply because both Doctor Dread and Menge the Merciless had pencil-thin mustaches was no reason to condemn MacPhee out of hand. The significance of the well-manicured mustache in a fifties' monster world was probably entirely different from its meaning in, say, a forties' crime setting. Still, the a.s.sociations brought to mind by the facial hair were, to say the least, unsettling.
”Well, what did your instruments tell you?” Davenport prompted.
”Well, I did mention the Boatner Board and the Ittelson Effect,” MacPhee said defensively.
”Yes, certainly,” Davenport replied, her tone suddenly changing. ”Surely something like that must have been at fault. I'm sorry, Professor. You must be awfully tired from your recent ordeal. Why don't you take a break? Roger and I can watch the computer room for a while.”
”Do you think so?” MacPhee asked in obvious relief. ”Well, I could use a breather. If you'll excuse me?”
And with that, he was gone.
”I think we could all use a rest,” Dr. Davenport admitted. ”A lot has happened to us in the past few minutes.”
Roger studied the scientist standing beside him. He wondered if he should ask the obvious question that had sat in his brain ever since they had escaped the sand and surf.
”You're probably wondering,” Dr. Davenport said after a moment's silence, ”how I could be two such different people on two different worlds. It's one of the secrets of the Cineverse, and one of the things we study at this Inst.i.tute of Very Advanced Science. Still, it's painful to think of what I had become. I shall never be able to hear a giggle again without s.h.i.+vering.”
She paused to fish in the pockets of her lab coat, finally pulling out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. ”Still, Dr. Davenport and beach bunny Dee Dee are one and the same.”
She shook a cigarette free and stuck it in the corner of her mouth, then offered the pack to Roger. He politely refused. She fished in the pockets again and found a slim rectangular lighter. ”As I said, it is one of the secrets of the Cineverse-and one we were pursuing at the Inst.i.tute! There are certain worlds, we have found, where you will find yourself in immediate danger; there are other worlds that you or I might consider paradise. But for every single person in the Cineverse, it seems, there is a special world- a world where that man or woman belongs all too much.” She paused to light the cigarette. She took a long, nervous drag, then blew the smoke toward the ceiling. ”Oh, how I remember that sand and surf and sun, and that relentless surfing beat! Part of me wants to go back there even now. More than that. Part of me needs to go back there.” She stared down at the glowing end of her cigarette for an instant before going on. ”It was like an addiction. I was-” She cleared her throat. ”I am a beachaholic!”
”A beachaholic?”
Dr. Davenport puffed on her cigarette for a moment, her eyes focused somewhere far away, perhaps on a place where summer never ended. ”It was a pleasant enough life, I guess. If you hadn't rescued me, I would have wanted nothing more for the rest of my sunbathing, go-go dancing days.” She s.h.i.+vered and looked around for an ashtray.
”I'll always have to live with that, you know-the fact that, on some level, that was the world where I belonged. It's difficult, sometimes, to confront your true self; to look in the mirror and see a blond beach bunny in a bikini. My mind wants to test the limits of science, but my body and soul want to frug throughout eternity!”
She found the ashtray on a small shelf immediately below the Carver Switch. She flicked off the ash, then stubbed out the cigarette. ”Ironically, that was one of the subjects we were studying here at the Inst.i.tute-the hidden relations.h.i.+ps between personality type and movie world. As highly theoretical as all this was, we'd even come up with a name for it-Movie Magic.”
”Movie Magic?” Roger repeated, despite himself. He remembered Louie's stories, and his own experiences, with this primal force of the Cineverse. But could there really be a scientific explanation for all of this?
Dr. Davenport struck her fist into her open palm. ”There's so much about the Cineverse that we still don't know!” She looked down at her closed fist and laughed ruefully. ”I had no idea, when I went to search for the origins of the Slime Monster, that I would stumble into my own personal experiment!”She looked around the room. The whirring, blinking, and clicking of the great computer seemed to calm her. ”But all that's behind me now. I can return to my work, guiding research here at the Inst.i.tute. What do you think of our computer? It's the very latest design; it can compute complex mathematical equations in mere seconds.
And that's only the beginning! Someday, computers will manage many of the mundane aspects of our everyday existence, leaving mankind free to pursue loftier goals. Of course, those computers will have to be much larger than our prototype here, taking up whole city blocks-but I digress.”
She leaned closer to Roger, frown lines etched deep into her tanned forehead. ”What is your opinion of Professor MacPhee?”
Roger was a bit taken aback. Did Dr. Davenport also distrust the man with the pencil- thin mustache? He wondered how candid he could be concerning an Inst.i.tute em- ployee he didn't even know. He decided, after a few seconds' thought, to act in the best public relations tradition, with the exact proper mixture of honesty and politeness: ”He did seem a bit evasive.”
”I thought so, too,” the doctor agreed. ”Especially since I can't see how the monster's escape could have possibly affected the Boatner Board. Still, I have been away from the Inst.i.tute for quite some time. Perhaps there are changes here that I am not yet aware of.” She paused, her voice taking on a wistful edge. ”There were other reasons for my going on that ill-advised field trip, you know. I also hoped, somehow, to find my father, the brilliant scientist who founded this Inst.i.tute.”
She paused, her eyes again focused somewhere far away. ”One day, when all this strangeness first began, he came to me and said something very odd, just before he disappeared in a puff of blue smoke. I never saw him again after that moment.”
”Something odd?” Roger asked, telling himself to stay calm. But what if both of them were looking for the same thing? ”If it's not too personal, could you tell me what it was?”
”I wrote it down,'' she said as she fished inside her plastic pocket pen protector, ”so I wouldn't forget it.” She pulled out a well-creased piece of paper and unfolded it.
”Here it is. There were two separate thoughts. The first one makes some sense. The second one, though-”
”May I?” Roger asked, holding out his hand.
She pa.s.sed the paper to him. His heart raced as he read the neatly printed words: 1. SCIENCE IS THE CORNERSTONE OF TOMORROW'S SOCIETY.
2. ROUGHAGE IS YOUR STOMACH'S BEST FRIEND.
Roger recognized the tone of these messages. After all, he'd seen them spelled out in secret code on a thousand cereal boxes. This could mean only one thing.”Roger?” Dr. Davenport asked as she studied the look on his face. ”Is it that terrible?”
”Oh, no, not at all.” He tried to smile rea.s.suringly as he handed the paper back to her.
”It's just that I've seen messages like these before. I think your father may have had a-how can I put it?-a secret ident.i.ty.”
The doctor did not seem rea.s.sured. ”What do you mean?”
”Have you ever heard of-Captain Crusader?” Roger asked gently.
She nodded distractedly. ”Why, of course. Every school child in the Cineverse has.
But I had always considered him a legend. I had certainly never seen any hard scientific evidence of his existence.”
Roger smiled at that; it only made sense. ”I'm sure that's the way your father wanted it. He could use this world, and the Inst.i.tute that he founded here, as a safe retreat from his battles in more violent realms of the Cineverse. And he could use the resources of this establishment of Very Advanced Science to perform the crime- fighting research he needed for his cause. The more I think about it, the more I'm certain.” He allowed his smile to widen to a grin as he announced: ”Dr. Davenport, your father is Captain Crusader.”
”My mother always thought highly of him,” Dee Dee agreed, still a bit uncertain. ”Yet it is a bit of a shock, finding out your father is a hero among heroes.” She looked again at the piece of paper in her hand. ”Of course, it would go a long way towards explaining the blue smoke.”
Roger shook his head. ”What a coincidence that I should rescue the daughter of Captain Crusader! Unless it isn't a coincidence at all. I can't help but feel that everything that has been happening around me, perhaps around all of us, is somehow interconnected. If only I could figure out how- or why.”
”It's interesting you should make that point,” Dr. Davenport agreed. ”It's one of the main fields of research that we at the Inst.i.tute of Very Advanced Science have put our resources behind. Why, did you know that before my father disappeared in a cloud of blue smoke, we weren't even certain of the existence of the Cineverse? Oh, we knew about it from folk tales, and there was the occasional report of blue smoke, although our armed forces liked to dismiss those sightings, saying they were either swamp gas or weather balloons.
''I suppose I should have given this back to you already.'' She reached in the pocket of her lab coat and pulled out Roger's ring. ”You know, we had to design one of those things ourselves, from scratch. Here-I'll show you the results.” She walked over to one of the control consoles and flicked a switch. ”Look up at that television screen.”
A panel slid aside high on one of the metal walls, to reveal what Roger thought of as a video monitor. The screen showed a blurred, circular image. Dee Dee twisted a pair of k.n.o.bs on the controls. The image came into focus. It was a Captain Crusader Decoder Ring!
”You can see the problems we had,” she explained as she looked down at Roger's ring, still in her hand. ”I suppose it was rather like trying to reconstruct an extinct animal from its fossil remains.” She pointed back to the television. ”See, we thought it should be made in one continuous piece, not broken in four. And we completely missed the concept of chewing gum as an adhesive!”
Roger cleared his throat, and attempted to explain that his ring was not in perfect working order. As a part of his explanation, he managed to fill her in on much of what had happened to him during his adventures in the Cine verse. Occasionally, she would interject a comment to determine if she fully understood him, usually words or short phrases such as ”Sidekicks?” ”Nut Crunchies?” or ”The Secret Samoan?” But for the most part, she only listened politely.
”So you see,” Roger concluded, ”that's how it happened, in a nutsh.e.l.l.”
”Now I see what you mean when you say all you've been through is more than coincidence,” was her reply. ”Certainly the plans of this so-called Dr. Dread suggest there exists some sort of master plan, if only because that is the plan Dr. Dread is attempting to subvert. And your part in it seems a.s.sured by the fact that Dread sent one of his a.s.sistants to eliminate you.” She paused, and her eyes wandered to the Fernstetter. ”I wonder if Dread has sent a.s.sistants to sabotage any other part of the Cineverse.”
Roger followed her gaze. He remembered who had most recently driven the Fernstetter; the same man who had been alone in this room when the Nucleotron had gone out of control! ”Do you mean-”
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