“I’m not crazy.”
Professor Ronald Sweet was not a tall man. He did not command respect through movie star charisma or political gravitas. He was, however, one of the most brilliant biochemists in the northern hemisphere. His work was pioneering, and had produced breakthroughs in cancer treatment, human cloning, organic nutritional supplements, and even weight loss. That commanded plenty of respect from the only people Sweet cared to have respect him.
At least it did until recently.
The morning after “the event,” as he referred to his unearthly encounter, and every morning since, he faced a stranger in his mirror. His cheeks were perpetually red from the competing pressure of belief and disbelief trying to assert themselves in his mind. To calm himself, he recited the human genome sequence to 160 pairs of amino acids. Then, just to be sure, he repeated them in reverse. When he had finished, he concluded there could be no doubt: he was thinking clearly, had complete control of his faculties, and was, in fact, as he had adamantly stated, not crazy.
He did not believe in aliens, UFOs, or other such nonsense. But he had an equally unshakable certainty that he had been abducted by aliens.
“We don’t think you’re crazy, sir,” said the preppy blonde kid with the electronic tablet. His shoulders were broad like a football player’s, but a crimson ascot and a crisp, white V-neck sweater was his uniform of choice. It was his trademark look, and his fans adored it, each one shelling out $5.99 per month for unlimited access to the hit web series Enigmas, Unlimited. They left him hundreds of adoring messages on the show’s message boards. “We just don’t usually get called in to debunk someone’s own eyewitness account.”
“Well, Ted, there was the Curious Case of the Haunted Amusement Park,” piped up a mousy little brunette who busied herself with an array of computer equipment, set up in the increasingly crowded bedroom.
“That doesn’t count, Hilda,” said the petite coed who possessed posture and curves that hadn’t graced humanity since Ann-Margret. She carried no equipment, and did not seem to perform any function other than to flit about the room touching things. Currently she was holding a framed certificate made out to Professor Ronald Sweet for contributions to the field of genetic engineering from some outfit she had never heard of out of Sweden. “That guy had Multiple Personality Disorder, and was actually abducting himself.” She set the frame back on the dresser and it promptly fell on its face, miraculously not breaking the glass.
“Miss, please!” Professor Sweet gasped. “My Nobel!”
“Like, Disaster Magnet Diana strikes again.” This second young man, apparently the cameraman, had missed a few haircuts, and his rumpled t-shirt and jeans hung on his gangly form as though he were a scarecrow fresh from some cornfield. “But not to worry, Ted,” he said to the leader of the video crew. “Nothing broken this time.”
Diana huffed and set the frame back aright. “Sorry, Professor,” she mumbled. “Sorry, Ziggy,” she added sarcastically.
The gangly young man responded with a florid bow.
“Does she have to be here?” Sweet whispered to Ted, who was tapping notes into his pad.
“Diana’s our producer, Professor,” he said cheerily. “We couldn’t do our jobs without her.”
“She pays the bills,” Hilda volunteered without looking up from her equipment.
“And for all the fancy equipment,” Diana added petulantly. “Not to mention the food.”
“Speaking of which, what are we doing for lunch?”
“For gosh sakes, Ziggy, we just got here,” said Ted. “It’s only nine o’clock.”
“I’m sorry,” said Professor Sweet. “I think maybe this whole thing was a mistake.”
“Don’t worry, Professor,” Ted assured him. “It’s always like this at first. But once we’ve got everything set up and ready to go, Enigmas, Unlimited operates like a well-oiled machine. Ziggy, is the camera ready?”
“Got it right here, Teddy my man!” Ziggy patted the palm-sized digital device and aimed it in their direction. “And, like, action!”
“Okay, Professor, why don’t we start with you going over your story again, from the top?”
Sweet took a steadying breath. “All right,” he said. “It was well after —”
“To the camera, if you don’t mind, Professor,” Ted interrupted, gesturing to Ziggy, who grinned and waved.
The professor turned. “It was well after midnight. I know this because I had trouble getting to sleep that night. I had a press conference that next morning about a breakthrough my team had made with my…with a special project. The more I told myself I needed to rest up for it, the harder it was for me to fall asleep. The last time I saw the clock it was already nearing twelve.”
“Midnight, the witching hour,” Ziggy said spookily.
The professor rolled his eyes. “I’m a man of science,” he huffed. “I don’t believe in such poppycock.” He pursed his lips for a moment and took a calming breath. “That’s why I can’t accept what happened next. I awoke with a start, and realized I was about three feet over my bed, rising into the air.”
“Did it feel like you were floating? Flying?” Ted motioned to Ziggy, who zoomed in on the professor, searching for a dramatic angle and failing.
“No, not at all,” Professor Sweet replied. “It felt as though someone had lifted me in their arms. I could feel it. But there was nobody there. I started to struggle, but I was held fast. And then I floated right over to the wall and through the window.”
Hilda looked over at the window, then at the professor. “No disrespect intended, sir, but that doesn’t seem possible.”
“The whole thing seems impossible,” Sweet concurred.
“Not the whole thing, sir,” she said. “Just the part about you floating through the window. Begging your pardon, but there’s a childhood story about a stuffed bear and a honey tree that springs to mind.”
Sweet’s face reddened. “Young lady, I don’t mean to imply that I was carried out the window,” he said. “I was carried through it; curtains, glass, wood and all—as if they weren’t even there!”
Ted and Hilda exchanged glances, eyebrows raised, their silent communication interrupted by the barking of a large dog, itself followed by the doorbell.
“Who could that be?” Professor Sweet groused. “Are there more of your crew?”
“Just Ruby-Lou,” Ziggy said. “But she doesn’t usually ring the doorbell, she just barks.” As if to underscore Ziggy’s point, there was another bout of barking, followed by another ding-dong.
Sweet opened the door to a man with a gaunt face, high cheekbones, and curiously thick wrists. “Chiun, please leave the dog alone. It has a collar on, so it has to belong to somebody,” he said to his companion, an elderly Asian man who stood eye-level with the unusually large dog leashed to the Enigmas, Unlimited minivan.
Chiun’s eyes widened until they were almost round. “You lie,” he exclaimed. “No dog would be strong enough to pull this gaudy conveyance the way this one has obviously been tethered up to do.” He clucked disapprovingly, and the Great Dane, straining at the end of its leash, barked again mere inches away from the unflinching, wizened face of the ancient Master of Sinanju.
“Can I help you?” Sweet asked doubtfully, casting glances back and forth from the thin Caucasian to the elder Asian.
“Does that sound like a horse to you, Little Father?” Remo asked, ignoring Sweet for the moment. A scrawny kid with an attempt at a hipster beard squeezed his way out of the door between Remo and Sweet.
“Ruby!” he called out. “Ruby Lou! Heel, girl. Sit!”
The dog ceased barking and gave a mild whimper, before sitting on its haunches, its face still level with Chiun’s. Through all the barking, the old man had never flinched.
“Then it is true,” he said, directing his attention now toward Ziggy. “This is a dog?”
“Great Dane,” Ziggy responded.
“Korean,” Chiun said, giving the young man a deadly, withering look. “And ‘great’ is an insulting level of understatement when addressing the Most Excellent Master of Sinanju.”
“He means the dog, Chiun,” Remo interjected, saving the young man’s life.
Sweet, having had his fill of chaos in what had until recently been a quiet and solitary existence, looked as if he were about to have an aneurysm. “Enough!” he shouted apoplectically. “Who are you and why are you here?”
Remo turned. “You the alien abductee?” he asked.
“I am Ronald K. Sweet, Ph.D.,” Sweet replied huffily.
“Remo D’Cantrill, MoS,” Remo said flatly. He held out an ID that identified him as an agent of the Department of Transportation, then quickly tucked it back into the pocket of his chinos. “We wanted to talk with you about your experience with the little gray men.”
“Green,” Chiun piped up musically, examining Ruby like she was a thoroughbred breeder of champions.
“And who is he?” Sweet demanded.
“That’s Chiun,” said Remo. “He’s an expert on alien races and cultures.”
“Among other things,” Chiun added, feeling along Ruby’s ribs. “This beast has much muscle mass. Does she have pups?”
“She’s been fixed,” said Ziggy, happy to talk about his best friend.
“Very wise,” the ancient Master of Sinanju said, nodding. “One less competitor. Where would one find a pair of these Great Danishes if one wanted to breed them?”
“No!” Remo interjected. “Chiun, we both know who would end up walking the things, and I’m not carrying around a pooper scooper the size of a snow shovel to clean up after them.”
A frail-looking withered yellow hand waved him off. “I was talking to the shaggy-headed youth,” he said, resuming his conversation with Ziggy.
Remo sighed and shook his head, resigned to deal with it later. “Professor Sweet, honestly we don’t give a rat’s patootie whether the aliens were gray, green, or purple,” he continued. “We’re more interested in the bridge.”
Ted rushed outside with his camera at the ready. “Wait! Wait! We need that recorded.”
Remo cast Ted a disgusted look. “Record him,” he said. “Keep me out of it.” The camera would not have been able to capture Remo’s image clearly, in any case. Remo had long ago learned how to blur his features to cameras by vibrating his facial muscles. However, sometimes being the only blur in a photo was more conspicuous than being clear, so Remo found it simpler to just avoid any and all cameras when he could.
Ted swallowed hard and blushed just a little, complying by taking up a position beside Remo so he could keep him out of the angle of the camera, then signaled Sweet that they were ready to record.
Sweet looked more uncomfortable than ever now that he was outside his home discussing things. “Well,” he started nervously, “after I was taken from my room, someone must have administered something to render me unconscious.”
“You passed out,” Remo said.
Sweet’s face reddened. “I went unconscious,” he repeated. “When I awoke, I was in a strange room, bare of anything except steel walls and a porthole window. I looked out into the darkness and, when my eyes adjusted, could see that we were hovering over a river. I could almost make out a bridge, and then suddenly it was lit up from a beam shining from beneath the craft I was in. I could see the bridge clearly, but I didn’t recognize it. And then, almost as soon as it was lit up, it began to fall apart.”
“You mean it disintegrated?” Diana could not hide the incredulousness in her voice as she stepped out from behind the Professor.
“No,” the Professor said. “Not like in science fiction movies, anyway. It just began to crumble into the river. Then the beam shut off, I started to feel woozy again, and the next thing I knew, I was back in my bed. I thought the whole thing was just a nightmare, until I saw the bridge on the morning news!” He trembled a little and his body sagged. “I couldn’t dismiss it. I was so rattled that I completely ruined my reputation. When I stood up at the press conference I had called to talk about my advancements on the 3D Bioprinter, I blathered on and on about my floating experience. Now instead of going down as one of the greatest scientists in modern history, I’m looked at as a conspiracy kook.” He seemed close to tears.
“Can we get a look around the room where this took place?”
“Of course,” Sweet said, beckoning them back to his bedroom.
“Great,” said Remo. “Chiun, you coming?”
The elder Master of Sinanju slipped a piece of paper Ziggy had given him into the folds of his kimono. “Of course. How could I miss seeing the place where a conspiracy kook takes his rest?”
The bedroom was even more crowded with the addition of Remo, Chiun and Ruby Lou, who tugged at her short leash. As the professor gestured at the window that had been the focal point of his earlier tale, Remo looked at the floor. The carpet fibers appeared uniform to the casual observer. Remo knelt down low, putting his cheek to the floor, like a golfer inspecting a green.
“What is he doing?” Diana whispered to Chiun.
“He is observing the footprints,” Chiun replied, mimicking her secretive tone.
Diana wrinkled her nose. “You can’t see footprints in carpeting,” she replied.
“Looking for footprints?” Ted said loudly, standing beside Remo. “That’s a great idea.”
“Yes!” Diana added enthusiastically. “Hilda, have you got any infra-red, uh, footprint detector things?”
As Hilda launched into a lecture on what science could and could not do, and what equipment they did and did not have, Remo walked over to Chiun.
“Well, someone other than Sweet was in this room, and recently,” he muttered low enough for Chiun to hear.
“Of course,” Chiun replied. “Someone of considerable weight.”
“At least five hundred pounds,” Remo said. Then he looked at Sweet. “Or someone over three hundred pounds carrying an unconscious two-hundred-plus pound man. Or some thing.”
“But you do not ask the obvious question,” Chiun said.
“Which is?”
Chiun inclined his head toward the wall with the window. “Why does the trail lead to the wall and not the door?”
“Ted says they can’t find any evidence of footprints,” Diana said, interrupting their conversation. “That means it had to have been aliens levitating him out. This is going to be such a great story! We’ll probably get a trillion views!”
“I don’t think there are that many people in the world,” Remo said gently.
“There don’t have to be,” Diana said. “When it goes viral, people will watch it over and over.” She beamed over at Ted, who stood with his chest out and talking into a microphone about how they were going to continue the investigation and prove once and for all whether aliens existed or if the professor had been hoaxed. She gave a nearly-inaudible sigh of longing.
“Do not waste your time,” Chiun said. “He is gay.”
Diana’s head whipped around to face him. “What? Ted?”
“Gay.”
“Chiun, don’t…”
“Gay.”
“He is not!” Diana sputtered. “He can’t be. Ted’s the heartthrob of the series!”
“Gay.”
“That’s enough, Chiun,” Remo said curtly. “I’m sorry, he’s old and sometimes he gets…” With his index finger, Remo drew circles in the air beside his temple.
“Yes, I am old,” Chiun said. “And senile. I cannot be held accountable for my actions. Excuse me.” He glided across the carpet toward Ted and muttered into the tall blonde man’s ears. Ted’s eyes lit up, and he looked over at Remo and Diana and grinned as Chiun continued.
When Chiun came back, there was a definite flush to Ted’s cheeks.
“Chiun, what did you do?”
“I could not bear to see affection go unrequited,” he said. “So I told him the young lady saw him as the heart pulse of their audience.”
“Oh no,” Diana moaned. “You didn’t!”
“Indeed,” said Chiun. “And then I gave him a present.”
Remo cringed. “Dare I even ask what it was?”
Chiun brightened. “Nothing much,” he said cheerily. “Just some numbers. He seemed quite grateful for them.”
“What numbers did you give him?”
“The ones Smith uses to excite the bird that lives in that little box he makes you carry.” Humming satisfied to himself, Chiun left the room.
Diana looked at Remo, confusion crossing her face. “You have a bird in a box?” she asked.
Remo groaned. “No,” he said. “He gave him my phone number.”