The bad news is: I've decided not to finish it. I keep thinking about the sequel to the sequel. So I'm going to give you this, tell you where I expected the characters to be after they get out of this mess, and move on to the sequel to the sequel, henceforth known as TSTTS.
I thought about having my podcast buddy, "Uncle" Warren Bluhm, voice these nine chapters, but I'm going to reserve that favor for the unleashing of TSTTS later this spring.
Maybe someday I'll come back and finish this "unfinished symphony," but the plain fact is in six months I haven't been able to get Pete and Snooky out of bed. (You'll understand when you reach the end of Chapter 9). When you hear where the characters are in Chapter 1 of the next book, you may understand my dilemma.
I'm going to post these with descending dates, so Chapter 1 will always be on top. However, I'm also going to post a list of chapters near the top so you can follow along conveniently day by day.
This is presented under a Creative Commons license. I may at some point allow for folks to tinker with it; I'd like to see how this part of the story evolves - but for now it's an Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives license. Thanks - and enjoy!
— B.W. Richardson
THE IMAGINARY LOVER
Tenets of Imaginary Physics
1. The power of the imagination is unlimited.
2. Matter still can’t be created or destroyed.
3. What’s done is done.
1. The power of the imagination is unlimited.
2. Matter still can’t be created or destroyed.
3. What’s done is done.
Chapter 1. Circuses and bread.
It seemed to take forever to get the binding loose, but Bob Whelan’s hands finally were free.
While the guard dozed, Whelan quietly undid the rope tying Pete Wong, his partner, to a chair. He gave Pete a meaningful glance, holding the rope in one hand and gesturing at the guard with another.
Bob snuck up on the guard and eased around behind the sleeping man. With an awkward lunge, he draped the rope over the man’s neck and pulled as hard as he could. Needless to say, the man woke up in a hurry and not in a very good mood. The good news was he dropped the rifle he was holding, which clattered across the floor. He began to thrash violently, but Whelan hung on with all of his might.
“Little help here, Pete?” he sputtered.
Pete Wong picked up the rifle and saw that Bob and the guard were grappling too close together to risk a shot, so he grabbed it with both hands and slammed the gunstock into the guard’s temple, several times, while Bob continued to pull hard with the rope. After a minute or two, the guard stopped moving.
And Bob Whelan woke up in a sweat.
Damn. A light from the outside of the complex cast a dim glow into the apartment. Damn, damn, damn.
“How long is this gonna go on?” Whelan muttered, craning his neck to see the bedside clock. 5:15. Great. Too late to go back to sleep, too early to get up. He got up anyway.
The dreams had started coming shortly after it had happened in real life. He had never had a dream that simply relived an incident from his waking hours, but then he had never killed a man before, either. It didn’t seem to matter that the man was instructed to kill him and his partner if they tried to get away, or that the man belonged to a group of mercenaries who had already killed a few people in their quest to obtain an imaginary bomb, or that when they failed in that quest they’d blown up the moon. No, it didn’t matter that he was a pretty bad guy. The act of killing him still haunted Bob Whelan in his dreams.
“Jeez, we’re just truck drivers,” said the captain of the cargo ship Betsy Ross as he prepared his wakeup cup of coffee. “How the hell did we get mixed up in that crap anyway?”
And then he remembered. Government agents hijacked his ship — called it commandeering for purposes of planetary security — and then pirates hijacked his ship to get what the government was transporting, which turned out to be the ignition disk for the imaginary bomb. And then the mercenaries hijacked his ship for their assault on the building where they were developing the bomb technology.
And then he remembered what he said after his ship was hijacked three times in a month.
“That does it,” he had said. “I’m gonna buy myself a gun.”
* * *
The runner at third base danced beckoningly, teasing the pitcher. George Hermann tried to tighten his grip on the bat; he stepped out of the box, grabbed some dirt and rubbed his sweaty palms together. Two out, bottom of the ninth; the Dodgers, down 3-2, were on the verge of losing the Series. The crowd was wild, but Hermann tried to screen out the din and concentrate on the pitcher, who scowled back at him under huge, bushy eyebrows.
“Come on, George,” he muttered to himself. “Just meet the ball. Meet the ball.” Every muscle in his body tensed as Bushy Eyebrows sprang into motion, and the small, spherical item Hermann hoped to meet sailed towards him at 94 miles per hour. He fought the urge to swing at the ball and regretted his decision instantly, when a burly man behind him screamed, “Steeeeeee-rike!”
The crowd was aghast with outrage. Hundreds of epithets were hurled regarding the burly man’s heritage, but after a few seconds the spectators settled back into a surly but enthusiastic din. Despite his effort to concentrate on meeting the ball, George began to hear snippets of encouragement aimed in his direction.
“Come on, George, this bum couldn’t pitch his way out of a paper bag.”
“That looks like a frickin’ caterpillar on his forehead!”
“Park one and let’s go home, Georgie!”
Hermann hated to be called Georgie; under the circumstances, he let it go.
The noise built to a fever pitch. He could feel a single bead of perspiration finding its way down from under the bill of his cap down his forehead. Bushy Eyebrows scowled, shook off a sign, and then nodded with a sly sneer. He brought his hands together, leaned back, kicked his leg high into the air, and hurled the ball as hard as he could right down the middle of the plate.
Swing, swing, swing! his senses shrieked. George Hermann jerked the bat in a swift, tight arc and met the ball.
With a soul-satisfying “TWAK!!!“ the white sphere sailed high over Bushy Eyebrows’ head; George was only dimly aware of the shortstop craning his neck to watch the flight. As he charged towards first base, he instinctively calculated the ball’s flight path as it reached apogee, and he knew it was headed over the wall. The crowd sensed it, too — what had begun as a hopeful roar turned into delirious exhilaration as the ball flew unerringly to the field’s outer reaches. The exhilaration evinced itself in a primal scream of joy as the small white object struck the steps in the aisle in left-center field, 12 rows out of the forlorn outfielder’s reach. A small mob of people chased the ball down, and a young man ended up holding it high over his head in triumph.
The Dodgers win! The Dodgers win! George Hermann felt a giddiness like none he’d ever encountered as he circled the bases. As he rounded third, he was escorted to home plate by a jumping, shouting throng of men in white pinstriped uniforms and hysterical young men and women who had leaped over the railing to rush the hero of the day.
When he crossed the plate, George was crushed by a sea of humanity. All of his senses were as alive as they ever had been — the press of his friends, colleagues and fans; the smell of popcorn and beer; the ear-bursting shouts of unbridled joy; the smiles so wide and the faces wet with tears; the tap on his shoulder — the tap, tap on his shoulder — the tap, tap, tapping on his shoulder?
“Mr. Hermann. Mr. Hermann? We’re going to shut it down now.” Suddenly the crowd, the smells, the sounds all shimmered and disappeared, quietly and without fanfare.
The echo of the cheers lingered just for an instant, then was gone. George Hermann was alone in a plain room with white walls, or as alone as a man can be with two other men in business suits standing next to him.
Hermann turned to greet them with pleasure and anger fighting for possession of his face. “That — was — GREAT!!!” the pleasure cried before surrendering possession to: “Why the hell did you turn it off? I gave strict instructions to leave me alone!!!”
“I know, sir, but you also gave strict instructions to interrupt whenever the word came down from PC-3.” The two young men ruined the effect of their crisp business suits by fidgeting like children in a long line to the restroom.
“What? What? What?” Hermann barked before he remembered what he wanted to know about the third planet in the Proximi Centauri system. “The bar! You’ve got an answer about the bar!”
“Yes, sir,” said the man who had tapped George on the shoulder. “But I’m afraid it’s still bad news. She absolutely, positively refuses to sell.”
The jagged scar under George Hermann’s mouth twitched. “You’re kidding me. How could a trailer-trash barmaid refuse that much money?”
It was a rhetorical question, but the messenger wasn’t bright enough to catch that. “She told our people to stick the money where the sun don’t shine — um, doesn’t shine — and had her bouncer escort them to the door. So you see, we have a little bit of a problem.”
“It’s no problem at all,” George Hermann said as he accepted a towel from the other, silent man. “Send one more, especially persuasive salesperson. And if that still doesn’t do the trick,” he added with a wink, “have her killed.”
* * *
Moments before, these several dozen people had entered a small room with white walls, plain except for the odd rows of colorful chairs, firmly welded to the floor but with a harness to strap them in. Now, these several dozen people were screaming.
Don’t worry, it was good screaming. The warm wind flew against their faces as the chairs, having sprouted wheels, rushed downward at 55 miles per hour. As they were pushed into a loop-the-loop, many of them thrust their hands skyward — well, when they were upside-down, the hands would be thrust groundward, but only for a second — and there were squeals of delight as the imaginary roller coaster spun into a second loop, and then a third.
Then there was another long, slow, agonizing climb, and some of the kids spoke excitedly among themselves: This is it, this is why this one’s the best, wait’ll you see this, can I get off now? At the top of the seemingly endless climb, there came a spectacular view of the San Antonio River winding its way to the Gulf of Mexico, but then the view was rudely yanked from their consciousness as they hurtled down a precipice as steep and as deep as any of them had ever seen — so steep that their tense bodies strained against the harnesses and their eyes bulged as they held their breaths, or screamed, depending on their preference. Later, they would be told that the MegaDemon reaches 100 miles per hour down this drop; for now there was just a flicker of doubt that “later” would ever come.
Then, the rails spun them back towards where they’d begun, and the tracks took a more reasonable angle parallel to the ground, and the adventure rolled to a close. The sights and sounds of the amusement park faded away, quietly and without fanfare, and they were back in that quiet little room in Seattle, only not so quiet anymore with everyone laughing and chattering with excitement.
In the front row was a very large man who probably would be considered fat except for the way his shoulders and biceps bulged out of the tanktop shirt. He sat there for a moment, a myriad of emotions playing over his immense, rubbery face. Finally, he sighed with a wide smile — only kind of smile his wide features allowed — and said loudly, “Aw, cool!!”
“You like the ImagCoaster, mister?” asked one of the little boys who had shared the front row with him.
“There ain’t nothing in the galaxy like a coaster,” the big man grinned, and then — with a wink — “an’ I seen the galaxy, too.”
“Yeah, right, I suppose you’re Baxter Hetznecker and you beat the moon terrorists,” said the other little boy with more than a slight hint of sarcasm.
“As a matter of fact ...” the grin turned into a humongous smile, but the big man just winked and turned without completing the sentence and strode away. Two astonished little boys watched him go. That night, their parents would scold them for making up wild stories. Everyone knows interplanetary heroes don’t ride ImagCoasters.
Next: Chapter 2. The good ship.
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