Then the saucer-shaped craft blinked once and was gone.
13
There were twelve drunks Inside the Metro-D.C. Police's 3rd Precinct lockup.
This was an overflowing crowd for the ten-by-fifteen cell, the result of a warm fall Friday night and the anticipation of the big Redskins-Raiders game that Sunday. Usually, with a crowd of inebriates this large, the cell floor was awash in vomit and other body fluids, providing a stink of despair as each man waited to get bailed out.
But something different was happening here tonight.
There was a thirteenth man being held. He was not drunk, though at the moment he was dying for a cup of coffee, a beverage he'd become addicted to by simply smelling it a couple of times. Nor was he in his late twenties or early thirties like the rest of the prisoners. In fact, he was much, much older.
It was Pater Tomm. Charged with demonstrating without a permit, proselytizing without a license, and creating a public nuisance, he'd been in the cell for nearly twenty-four hours, sharing the place with a constantly changing cast of characters, but never as many as now.
The police had arrested Tomm outside the national cathedral early the day before. He'd been carrying on a spontaneous one-man protest, complete with a crude sign that read: Why Doesn't Anyone Worship Anymore? on one side and Repent! The End May Be Near on the other. This was his way of displaying outrage at the nonuse of the huge, ornate national cathedral he'd found so dusty and vacant. He, too, was awaiting arraignment.
Tomm had never met a crowd he didn't like. As the holding pen began filling up, he'd started talking religion to the assembled drunks. At first, his fellow prisoners ignored him. Then they threatened him. Then they challenged him. But by midnight, they were in awe of him as he spun tales about the majesties of Creation that he'd seen all across the universe. Tomm had preached so much, he soon ran out of stories to tell. No matter. He simply began repeating the ones he'd already told, and his fellow prisoners never seemed to notice.
But there was a catch to all this. His new flock was paying such rapt attention to him not so much because of what he was saying but how he was saying it: literally hovering one foot off the ground.
Some of the twelve were convinced this was a trick; some thought they were in the DTs and hallucinating. Some simply could not believe their eyes. But Tomm had shown his little bit of levitating skills to get the attention of these men, to instill in them the necessity of getting one's butt to church on a regular basis and committing some time to prayer before it was too late. It was the same message Tomm had preached up and down the Five-Arm for two centuries with mixed results. But just because he was in another place didn't mean he stopped being a man of the cloth. In reality, there was nothing else he could be.
He'd been sermonizing like this for about two hours when two guards entered the hallway outside the holding pen. At the first sound of their keys clinking in the door, Tomm crashed to the floor, scattering his disciples and banging both knees. He quickly bounced back up to his feet though, performing a long, dramatic bow as his startled cell mates showered him with ragged applause.
"Which one of you is Peters, Thomas…?" one of the guards called into the tank. "You're being moved."
The drunks all looked at each other and did a kind of group shrug. Then they glanced over at Tomm, who was examining his scraped knees.
"Peters, Thomas?" he finally replied. "I guess that would be me."
Tomm was put in a car with two D.C. police officers and driven across town to a nondescript building on the other side of Washington.
He was brought in through a side entrance and led to a freight elevator. Two men in blue suits and dark glasses were waiting here. They took custody of him and without a word ushered him onto the elevator and up to the thirteenth floor.
He was escorted down a long, dark hallway to a room whose door was marked No Entry. One of the men knocked three times. The door opened, and Tomm was nudged inside. The room was small, dark, with a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. There was a table right next to the door with five chairs around it.
Sitting in one, casually smoking a cigarette, was Zarex.
Tomm barely recognized him. Gone was the explorer's grandly ragged space costume. He was now dressed in baggy checkered pants, size twenty sneakers, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap turned backward. He was smoking the very end of an un-filtered cigarette. His eyes brightened when Tomm walked in.
"Padre! You are well!"
"Only by God's grace," Tomm replied. "But yes, I am."
The men in suits removed Tomm's handcuffs and placed him in a chair one over from Zarex. The two spacemen shook hands quickly as their handlers retreated to the far corner of the room.
"And I am so glad to see you, my brother," Tomm whispered to Zarex.
"As I am you, Padre," Zarex replied, "though I fear the game is up as related to our keeping a low profile on this world. Frankly, I may have made too much of a stir."
Tomm patted him twice on his forearm. "We all make mistakes," he said.
The huge explorer took a deep drag of his near-depleted cigarette, then stiffly waved the cloud of smoke away.
"I'm afraid I found this whole place rather intoxicating, Padre," he said with a bit of concern. "I fell prey to temptation, though I'm not sure why."
"Yes," Tomm agreed. "Intoxicating is the exact word."
Zarex finally crushed out the cigarette and let the last plume of smoke fill the room.
"Why did they arrest you, Padre?"
The priest just shrugged. He was loathe to tell Zarex that he, too, had broken their agreement to stay low key while studying the planet.
"It was less an arrest than a difference in philosophy," he finally said. "I discovered grave neglect here on behalf of the people of this city and tried to right the wrong. The authorities disagreed with me. But they will see the light one day. And you, brother. Why were you taken into custody?"
"I beat up my boss," Zarex replied simply.
Tomm looked at him for a long moment, then just shrugged. "Well, I'm sure he had it coming," he said.
Three more knocks came at the door. One of the suits opened it, and a third prisoner was brought in.
It was Hunter.
His colleagues were not that surprised to see him. Their fortunes were now fully reversed. Hunter, too, looked different. His hair was wild, his beard grown in. He was also sporting a tan. They exchanged quick embraces, and then Hunter was put into a seat next to the priest and the explorer. The guys in suits locked the door and sat down across from them. The light hanging from the ceiling had an adjustable shade on it. One of the suits twisted it so the glare of the single lightbulb was shining directly into the space travelers' eyes.
At that point, it became clear to Hunter that these weren't the Betaville cops they were dealing with here — and this certainly wasn't the Betaville police station. He'd been taken here directly after his apprehension in California, having crossed the western sea in a high-speed police boat, pulling in at Baltimore and then rushed to this location. He knew the two men in suits were FBI agents; his handlers had told him so. This place was one of the Bureau's most secret interrogation cells.
Finally, one of the agents spoke.
"You three have been charged with a number of local crimes," he began. "But that is not why you're here. You're here on a federal warrant. And we can make this very simple. In fact, we just want to ask you one thing."