Call Me Ishmael

Chapter 15

Author's Note: Don't look directly into the beam.  You can buy this book at Amazon, B&N, and at Smashwords for any other device.

The landscape was altered beyond my comprehension.  It was like  a puzzle you buy from Wal-Mart, back in the toy aisle.  Those puzzles always have a nice scene, like boats, or a castle, and always with lots of detail and clues to figure out where the pieces go.  In my scene, there had been a bright yellow bus, green grass, blue skies, and houses in rows.  If that picture was made into a puzzle, the houses would be tough to assemble, because they were all identical.  Still, the prospective would make them  slightly different in size, and maybe an alert puzzler would have little difficulty.  Trees were always the hardest parts of a puzzle for me.  In the typical photograph turned into the typical puzzle, one leaf looks pretty much like every other leaf, and I usually wound up just trying one piece after another until one snaps in.  I could put a puzzle like that together just as easily up-side-down as not. 

The landscape before me was precisely that bland, light brown back-of-the-puzzle cardboard color, the same color of the inside of a cereal boxes.  Dry, cardboard tan ground, and sky, as far as I could see, in every direction.  Everything was gone except the three of us.  It was the backside of the puzzle.

Bety snorted and spit.  The dry ground sucked his saliva up immediately.  “Huh.   There isn’t going to be anything to hunt.  We’re going to get mighty hungry if we get stuck here.”  He eyed Splice, and I saw the look of the gourmet chef travel up and down her form.  “Maybe we’ll be okay,” he finished.

I spun in a circle, searching for a clue, some guidance for our next step.  There was nothing in any direction for as far I could see.  “Where’d the bus go?”

“Who cares?  That driver was creepier than a blown circle-form board.”

I nodded.  It sounded like Splice was getting her head back together.  Creepy or not, though, the driver had brought us here, and it was logical to think the bus could do the reverse. 

“Well, all I can think to do is to start walking.  I don’t know which direction we should go, though.”

Splice looked around.  “If only we had thought to bring a pair of nanospecs!”

“Why?  What are nanospecs?”

Splice kicked the dust with a booted toe.  “The sunglasses from the red bucket at the Base.”

I fished around in my pockets.  I found my wallet, my watch, my keys, two receipts I’d been meaning to record in my checkbook, a few coins, and a twisted pair of sunglasses.  “One pair of nanospecs,” I announced, “I didn't know that's what they were called.”

Splice grinned and grabbed for them.  “One pair’s plenty.  The cones and rods in your eyes reset after you look through them, so we can pass them around.  Bety last, though.”  She perched them on her pert nose, and, since Finnie was not around, I admitted that she looked quite fetching with her now strawberry fiber-optic hair and the old-school style glasses.  Sort of like a anime librarian, if there were such a thing.

I watched Splice's head do a complete circuit, looking at the ground, the sky, and us.  She frowned, took off the glasses, then shook them.  She put them back on.

“How did you break these?” she asked.

“What do you mean?  All I did was wear them.”

“They’re not working.  Here.”

I received the glasses and put them on.  I waited for the brown landscape to lift, for something amazing to appear, but nothing happened.  “Well,” I said slowly, “They worked before.”