“Just come on,” Andie Mae said. “Can you manage the stairs? What in God’s name did you do to your arm?”
When she was in this sort of mood, nobody argued with her. Xander stepped back into the suite without another word, and Al meekly followed where Andie Mae led.
On her way up the stairs, she was already having second thoughts about the venue she had chosen, given that the events of which she had to tell Al had actually transpired in the very same room in which they were about to be confessed to — and this would occur to Al himself eventually, with unpredictable consequences. Andie Mae led the way in silence, rehearsing her story in her head, coming to the conclusion that the best defense was possibly opening with a salvo that deflected attention. It was in the spirit of this, then, that she pointed Al to a seat as they walked into her room and turned to busy herself with the coffee machine on the counter.
“So, then,” she said, before he had a chance to do more than carefully collapse into an armchair, taking care not to jostle his arm. “I was actually on the point of phoning the hospitals and the police. What happened to you?”
“If you’d phoned Mercy General Hospital, they probably would have told you. On the way back to the hotel — I was coming straight from the printers, with just one detour on the way — some idiot with a black SUV rammed me at an intersection. Quite aside from this — ” he indicated the sling with a toss of his head — “… which was quite enough by and of itself, but on top of that, I seem to have temporarily lost my marbles somewhat, as well as my phone and those wretched posters, which were all apparently in the car when the wreck was towed. By the time I staggered over here… there was no hotel to be found.”
Andie Mae kept her eyes on the coffee pot. “How do you mean?”
“I mean it wasn’t here, dammit, Andie Mae,” Al said. “That many marbles, I hadn’t lost. I had the address. The cab dropped me where you should have been. But you were not there. How about your turn, now? How did you manage to spirit away an entire hotel?”
“Who said it was spirited away?” Andie Mae asked carefully.
“I may be a fool sometimes, but I’m still quite sane and sensible when it comes to the things I can judge using empirical evidence,” Al said. “I said it was spirited away and I meant exactly that. I helped you scout this place, remember? I know where the walls had been standing. And said walls were noticeably absent. And what’s more those walls seemed to have developed a vested interest in convincing me that they had never been there at all, really. The more I looked at the place where I should have been seeing the hotel, the less I could remember there having been a building there at all in the first place. It was as though there was something — I don’t know — a veil, and beyond that I could not look.”
“Not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” Andie Mae murmured.
“What?”
“No, you’re right, I’m sorry. The best I can come up with is something that someone came up with in the control room after we… afterwards. There was an SEP field in play, down there.”
“Down where?” Al said, confused.
Andie Mae sighed. “It’s hard to explain,” she said.
“Yes, tell me about it. It was really hard to explain when your two actors showed up…”
“They came?” Andie Mae yelped, her eyes widening and snapping to meet Al’s.
“Of course they came, all the arrangements had already been made,” Al said with a touch of impatience. “But they seemed as confused as I was. So I told them they were there for a charity photo shoot and actually they were very good sports about it — I have a photo of them shaking hands, standing there on the bluff, and then one with me with both of them — but that’s just the thing — those photos — where’s your computer?”
Andie Mae indicated the bed with a toss of her head. “The laptop’s under the bed. That’s where I usually stash it when I leave it in the room, remember?”
Al rooted around in his pocket with his good hand and came up with a USB stick, flourishing it in Andie Mae’s direction. “I’ve got something to show you,” he said. “Bring it over here.”
Andie Mae retrieved the laptop and set it up on the low table in front of Al, leaving it to boot up while she went to deal with the coffee, which had announced that it was done by a series of melodious chirps from the coffee machine. By the time she came back with two mugs and placed one within reach of Al’s uninjured arm, he had already plugged in his flash drive into the laptop and was tapping something out slowly and laboriously with his good hand. And then, after staring at the screen for a moment while waiting for his photos to come up, he finally turned the machine towards Andie Mae.
“There. Look.”
She stared at the photograph on the screen for so long that Al actually reached out and turned the laptop fractionally back toward himself to check that she was actually looking at the right thing. Andie Mae tore her eyes from the screen at that point and settled back onto her haunches where she had been kneeling on the floor beside the table.
“I was wondering what it all had to have looked like, at Ground Zero,” she said. “Weird.”
“Weird?” Al exploded. “That’s all you’ve got? There’s a great big honking charred hole in the ground where the hotel was supposed to be… and none of us noticed it or could see it… and we all acted like we’d been fed happy pills for a week… and then everyone shook hands and went home and it’s only after I looked at the pictures that I saw the reality behind the illusion screen — and what did you mean, SEP?”
“That’s apparently what they set up,” Andie Mae said faintly. “The androids.”
“The androids? You’re telling me that you think that it was Spiner and…”
“No. Real androids.” Andie Mae lifted her eyes from the computer screen and back to Al’s face. “They flew us to the Moon.”
Al stared at her in silence.
Andie Mae’s eyes filled with unexpected tears. “I was so worried,” she said. “I didn’t know what had happened to you — and then — well — look, this is going to sound totally unhinged. I know. But while you were out with those stupid posters… they turned up. The androids. Four of them. They had alphanumeric names like one of your high — security passwords, but Xander renamed them so that we could actually remember a name by which we could tell them apart — and they turned into Zach, Bob, Helen… and Boss.”
“Boss,” Al said. He seemed to have developed a nasty habit of repeating everything that Andie Mae said, but couldn’t seem to stop it. “This was the boss Xander just blabbed about?…The one that you… How do you have a fling with a robot?”
Andie Mae flushed a bright scarlet, and took a sip of her coffee to hide it.
Al said, “The Moon. They flew you to the Moon. What the hell does that mean?”
“It means they quite literally… wait a minute. I have pictures too.”
She put down her coffee cup and hauled out her phone, tapping on the screen and then sliding around photos with her finger until she found one she wanted and handed the phone to Al.
“Here,” she said. “look.” She tapped on the screen with her finger as he took the phone from her and stared at a picture of Andie Mae standing in front of the windows in Callahan’s Bar, with the Moon filling what should have been just open sky behind her. “The Moon. They literally took us to the Moon. The whole hotel, I mean. Picked it up and flew it out…”
“Andie Mae,” Al said, “that’s ridiculous.”
“Look harder,” she said. “I suppose I might have faked that at some point, in all the copious spare time I had while this convention was up and running and I had everything to prove from the Chair — but look harder. It may not be obvious, but what don’t you recognize in that photo?”