by Pat Murphy
“Oh, this one’s a good one, Tommy,” he remembered his father saying. Every episode was a good one, according to Dad. Thinking about it now, Tom wondered about why his father—a practical man who worked hard for living—had had such an affection for the show. “The strangest things can happen, Tommy,” his father had said. “Anything is possible.”
Tom watched the blinking light that Susan said was a UFO. His father might have agreed with her. “Yeah,” Tom said. “I used to watch The Twilight Zone with my dad. He loved that show.”
“Do you remember the part at the beginning,” Susan said. Tom smiled and mimicked the music of the theme song.
“Yeah, there was that,” Susan said. “Then Rod Serling would say, ‘You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension.’ You remember that part?”
Tom nodded. “Sure. This door would come looming out of the darkness.”
“That part always made me shiver,” she said.
Tom remembered how the eerie music and the looming door had affected him. “That was a scary door. Not quite as scary as The Outer Limits, where they took control of your television set, but it was still scary. I can see why you would shiver.”
“It wasn’t just that it was scary.” Yes, Susan was definitely drunk, Tom thought. She was speaking with exaggerated care. She had the thoughtful air of someone who had drunk enough to make commonplace occurrences seem very profound. “That door made me think that anything was possible. I could step through the door and escape into somewhere strange and different. All I needed was my imagination.”
Escape, he thought. Maybe that was part of the attraction for his dad. Escape from work, from his nagging wife, from the day-to-day chores.
“My mother didn’t like me to watch the show,” Susan was saying. “She said I already had too much imagination. She said I didn’t need to watch that weird stuff.”
“But you watched it anyway?” When Tom was a kid, he had defied his mother at every turn.
She nodded. “Every chance I got.”
She fell silent, gazing out to sea. He watched her face. The wind caught her short hair, mussing it, but she did not reach up to try to push it back into place. He liked her new haircut. He liked this slightly drunk, much more relaxed Susan. He felt like reaching up and playing with her curls, but he fought the urge.
“Submitted for your approval,” Tom said, mimicking Rod Sterling’s measured tones. “A cruise ship, passing through the Bermuda Triangle. The vacationing passengers are looking for sunshine and relaxation. They don’t know that this vacation will take them into …” He paused dramatically. “… the Twilight Zone.”
“That’s all right,” Susan said very seriously. “Some of us don’t mind a visit to the Twilight Zone. What do you think will happen?” He shrugged. “Hard to say. But as long as all the meals are served on time, most passengers won’t even notice.”
She glanced at his face. “You’d notice, though. You and Max. You’re both always paying attention. Keeping an eye on everything and trying to make sense of it all.”
“It’s my job.”
“Even if it weren’t your job, you’d be paying attention,” she said. She stared at the waves. “Ian told me that Mary signed into the beauty salon as Mary Maxwell. I know the guy you’re looking for is Weldon Merrimax. What do you think is going on?”
He shrugged. “A couple of Max’s fans are having some fun,” he said.
“Do you really think so?”
He shrugged. “Best explanation I can come up with.”
“There are other explanations,” she said. “Suppose, just suppose, that those people really are Max’s pen names. Somehow they are …” She hesitated, then went on. “Somehow they are leaking through from some other dimension. Like on an episode of The Twilight Zone. What are you going to do about it?”
Tom kept smiling, willing to go along with the joke. She was so very sweet and so very drunk. “Well, I don’t see that I have to do anything, really. I can’t confirm that any crimes have been committed. Oh, there was one drink that didn’t get paid for, but that’s minor. Max is getting strange fan mail slipped under his door, but he told me that writers have to get used to that sort of thing.”
“Didn’t Weldon Merrimax cheat someone at poker?”
Tom raised his eyebrows. Ian had been talking. “Nothing illegal about gambling on board,” he said. “We’re in international waters. It’s against Company Policy, but all I can do is advise passengers of that.”
“Didn’t he stab Patrick Murphy?”
“As far as I can tell, no Patrick Murphy was ever on board. The man who reported that incident now says it never happened. So it’s tough to make much headway.”
She nodded. “Maybe it was just a dream,” she murmured. Tom studied her face. She was smiling, but her eyes were drooping, like the eyes of a tired child who didn’t want to go to bed just yet. “I’ll think about it more in the morning,” she said, stifling a yawn. “It’s past my bedtime.”
“Can you find your stateroom?” he asked. “I’ll just wander around until I find it.”
“I’ll escort you there,” he said. “No telling where you’ll end up if you get lost in the Twilight Zone.”
“No telling,” she agreed.
At her stateroom door, he said, “I’ll check on your UFO.”
“Okay,” she said. “See if you can find out what galaxy it’s from.” She closed the door behind her.
It was past Tom’s bedtime as well, but he still felt restless. He headed up to the bridge, figuring he’d see if anyone on duty knew what Susan’s UFO was.
The bridge was the highest point on the ship. A broad bank of windows offered a view of the observation deck below, the sun deck below that, and the dark ocean waters beyond them both. A light over the main control console spotlighted Michael, the officer on duty. Lights from instrument panels glowed brightly in the darkness. As always, a quartermaster kept watch through the windows. Lounging on a chair beside the quartermaster was Geoffrey, the ship’s navigator, a lanky Brit. All three men grinned when they saw Tom.
“Hello, Tom,” Geoffrey said. “You all done on the observation deck? I was planning to do my monthly sextant check and I didn’t want to interrupt anything.”
“Nothing to interrupt,” Tom said easily. “just having a pleasant chat.”
“About the moon and the stars,” Michael said. “I know where those pleasant chats lead.”
A little romance between passengers and crew was not unusual. Some officers made a habit of it, keeping an eye out for single women who might be open to a vacation fling. Tom had never taken advantage of such opportunities. He’d been involved with other crew members—with an Irish woman who worked in one of the bars, with a back-up singer in one of the shows. Nothing serious; nothing that lasted beyond a few cruises. But he had avoided any involvement with passengers.
Tom shook his head. “We were talking about an unidentified flying object crossing our bow. Maybe a satellite.”
“Where?” Geoffrey asked.
Tom stepped to the window beside the navigator. He scanned the sky, locating where the light had been and checking the area where he expected it to be. The blinking light had vanished. “No sign of it,” he said.
Geoffrey shrugged. “Must have been your imagination.”
Susan lay in bed, her thoughts swirling cheerfully, drunkenly. It had been such a confusing evening. She kept thinking about Mary Maxwell. She was just as Max had described her.
As Susan drifted to sleep, she thought about Max’s pseudonyms. It made sense that they would show up. Max had named them, Max had believed in them. So here they were. Just as naming the Flaming Rum Monkey had caused it to come into being.
It made sense. Not that hard-edged logical sense that Harry had always favored, but a fuzzy, intuitive sort of sense. The sort of thing that Harry would say made no sense at all. It made sense to her, and that was enough.
She fell asleep, soothe
d by Rum Monkeys, lulled by the gentle rocking of the ship. She dreamed that she stood on the recreation deck, surrounded by wolves.
The animals were all around her, but they weren’t paying any attention to her. They were exploring the area, sniffing the stacked deck chairs. One of them found a towel and picked it up; another grabbed the free end, beginning a tug of war that involved several animals.
A big black male pawed at one of the ropes that held a net over the swimming pool. When she stepped toward him, he looked at her expectantly, wagging his tail.
“You want to go swimming?” she asked the wolf. She always talked to dogs. The wolf kept wagging his tail.
She circled the pool, untying ropes. At the last rope, she hauled the net out of the pool and piled it on the deck. The first wolf was already in the water. Another joined him as she watched.
She sat on the deck by the pool, dangling her legs in the water and looking up at the stars. The UFO was there, a blinking golden light. She wondered whether there was a pattern to its blinking. Was it trying to tell herself something?
In her dream, she heard a sound—someone opening the door that led out onto the recreation deck. The wolves had already found the stairs at one end of the pool and gotten out. As she watched, they blended into the shadows. She wondered if she should go with them.
Pat opened the door to the stateroom quietly—but even so, she disturbed Susan. Susan did not wake, but she turned over in her sleep, leaving the dream behind. The wolves fled into the shadows. The recreation deck was empty.
BAD GRRLZ’ GUIDE TO PHYSICS
BAD GRRL CONSIDERS MAX MERRIWELL
Things are a little strange aboard the Odyssey. And the strangeness seems to center on our friend Max Merriwell, the man with too many names.
Earlier tonight, Frank Robinson, the bartender at Aphrodite’s Alehouse, made the world’s first Flaming Rum Monkey—a lovely, tasty, and dangerous drink. Frank invented this drink because a woman named Mary—the same Mary that Susan met in Hamilton—requested one. Mary told Susan this was a drink that didn’t exist. Mary had come up with the name and had decided to look for a bartender who could make one.
All well and good.
Then Max ambled into Aphrodite’s and asked what that flaming drink was. He seemed startled and pleased to learn that it was a Flaming Rum Monkey. “That’s Mary Maxwell’s favorite drink,” he said.
Strange. A woman named Mary asks for a drink that Max invented for a pseudonym named Mary. A product of the imagination takes on reality. The only question is: whose imagination was it? Max’s or Mary’s?
Then there is the matter of the Clampers and the elephant. Susan mentioned that Wild Angel describes a jailbreak involving a group of Clampers and an elephant. Tonight, the Clampers on board the Odyssey were celebrating some event from the Gold Rush involving a jail break with an elephant.
They weren’t at all clear on the details. I asked three of them and got three different versions of the story—all including an elephant, a jail, an orphan, and a lot of drinking, but differing in other respects.
Max told us that he made up the story about the elephant and the Clampers. And when he found out that the Clampers told a similar story as historical fact, he smiled and had another Flaming Rum Monkey.
Susan disappeared with her friend Mary; Tom went off in search of Susan; Ian and I stayed in the bar with Max, drinking Rum Monkeys and talking about coincidences and dreams. After Max went to bed, Ian and I stayed up, drinking Rum Monkeys and talking about the intriguing Mr. Merriwell.
As I jokingly told Ian earlier, Max lives in a vortex of potentialities. He spins around and flings out possible realities, inhabited by Mary Maxwell or Weldon Merrimax, populated by wolves and flying saucers. From what he told Ian, he’s been living alone in a Greenwich Village apartment for the past couple of decades. Plenty of time to generate possibilities.
And now these possibilities are manifesting themselves. Why?
After a few Rum Monkeys, Ian was claiming that all the strange events could be blamed on the Bermuda Triangle. I had had a few Rum Monkeys too. Under the influence, I proposed a more scientific explanation: Max is a man who is in touch with many potentialities. He ordinarily exists in a stable state, but something has destabilized the system.
I wonder if that destabilization has something to do with my friend Susan. I have always thought that Susan had more than her share of unrealized potentialities.
All properties of quantum entities or systems are emergent properties—things that are about to happen. That’s Susan in a nutshell. She’s loaded with emergent properties.
One other thing: when two quantum systems meet, their potentialities overlap to make a new, combined system that has different properties than either of the original systems. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Could it be that the quantum aspects of Max’s life have met the quantum potentials of Susan’s and stirred up something entirely new? Could it be that I’ve had too many Rum Monkeys? Doesn’t matter. It’s bedtime. Here, for future reference, is the recipe for a Flaming Rum Monkey, courtesy of Frank Robinson, Mary Maxwell, and yours truly.
SIXTEEN
“I thought I was safe,” Ferris said. “I didn’t realize …”
“You find monsters where you least expect them,” Gyro said. “That’s just the way it works.”
—from The Twisted Band
by Max Merriwell
Tom woke up sneezing the next morning. He skipped his morning rounds and headed straight for his office. When he arrived, he was sniffling and wondering whether he could go back to bed. No such luck. He already had a dozen messages from the purser’s office. Passengers with cabins on the recreation deck had been complaining of strange sounds in the night. “Drunks outside my window howling like a pack of wolves,” one said. “Some idiots howling,” said another.
Wolves, Tom thought, remembering Susan’s drunken ramblings of the night before. A pack of Clampers, most likely. Tom checked the security log. The guard patrolling the recreation deck had found the net off the main pool, something that happened every now and again when some drunken passengers decided to go for a midnight swim. The guard had put the net back in place, checked the deck for any passengers, and found no one.
Tom went to the recreation deck. The sky was overcast; the sun was a hazy patch of light beyond the gray. It was unlikely that the passengers would be rushing to the pool, but Ernesto, one of the deck stewards, had just finished putting out all the deck chairs. When Tom hailed him, he was placing a fluffy white towel on each deck chair, preparing for an eager throng of passengers. Ordinarily, Ernesto was a cheerful fellow, but that morning he was not smiling.
“Good morning, Ernesto,” Tom greeted him.
“Not a good morning,” Ernesto said, shaking his head. “Not good at all.”
“What's the trouble?” Tom said, expecting to hear that passengers had been partying on the recreation deck the night before and had left a mess. It happened—drunken passengers, broken bottles, dirty glasses.
“Animals!” Ernesto said, scowling. “I don’t know what they were doing last night.”
Tom nodded sympathetically. “They left a mess, did they?”
More than a mess, apparently. It took a while for Ernesto to describe all the things that had been done. The pool was full of hair Ernesto showed him the pool filter. It was clogged with short white, gray, and black hairs. Ernesto showed him a towel that had been torn in several places.
Ernesto told him that someone had peed on the deck. “Not just in one place,” he said in an outraged tone. “But there and there and there.” He waved his hands to indicate several spots around the pool. The deck was wet where Ernesto had hosed it off. “There is a restroom just inside the door over there,” Ernesto said, waving his hand. “Just a few feet away. And that is not the worst of it.” Ernesto beckoned Tom to a nearby trash bag, opened the top, and gestured for Tom to look inside. In the white trash bag was a pile of
what was unmistakably shit. Dog shit, by the look of it, from a very large dog. “Who would do such a thing?” Ernesto asked. “Animals!”
Tom had no answers for Ernesto. He told the irate deck steward that he would arrange for extra security staff on the recreation deck. He called the purser’s office and told them the same thing.
Drunks, he figured. A drunken party that broke up just before the security guard came through. A drunken party of older men who were shedding their gray and white hair. A drunken party of men who liked to tear up towels and had no compunction about where they peed.
Of course, that didn’t explain the dog shit. Tom shook his head and blew his nose. The head cold was making him feel slow and stupid. There had to be a reasonable explanation. Once or twice, a crew member had smuggled a pet on board: a kitten once, a toy poodle another time. But the turd in the trash bag hadn’t come from a toy poodle. That had come from a sizable animal, too big to be easily smuggled aboard.
Sure, it looked like a pack of wolves had been swimming in the pool and marking their territory on the deck, but that made no sense at all. There had to be an explanation, but he couldn’t come up with it just now.
That morning, he met with security staff and told them about the problems on the recreation deck. He told them about the dog shit by the pool and advised them to keep an eye out for dogs. He in creased the patrols on the recreation deck.
Not much else he could do.
Susan’s eyes felt gritty. She had woken that morning with a dull pain in her head, the aftermath of too many Flaming Rum Monkeys. Ibuprofen had reduced the headache to a distant sort of throbbing—still there, but far far away.
She didn’t feel quite herself. The rumble of the ship’s engines was a steady trembling in her bones; it set her nerves on edge. She felt the movement of the ship as it rose and fell on every swell, a subtle shifting that left her disoriented and uneasy. She wasn’t hungry—her stomach was unsettled.
