Fantastic Metropolis

“One minute more. It’s now up to you, Selbeam. Lift your rifle into firing position, pointing towards your office door. When I say ‘zero,’ we re-enter. By now Noigandres is convinced that I’m not there. He has already stormed your office. It is now your wife and child who are in grave danger. Be swift and noiseless. Okay. Zero!”

The white-faced man threw Mommy on the bed and jumped on top of her. The blue-faced man stood still in the dining room, just to the left of the bedroom door. David shivered. The man was now looking at him. “A kid!” he said. Now David knew he was no longer invisible. He knew he should not be looking into the bedroom, at Mommy and the man, and the other man was going to hit him. But he never did. A giant explosion made everything stop. The blue-faced man fell backwards. The other man rolled off Mommy and started to get up. His pants were sliding down and he pulled at them, but David couldn’t see the rest because there was another big explosion and someone stood in front of the bedroom door.

Merkouros held his breath. When he heard the second shot he sighed with relief. Re-entry could not have been more perfectly timed. Sports gear from the closet was strewn around the office floor. The papers on Selbeam’s desk had been only mildly disturbed, but folders full of manuscripts from the file cabinets had been scattered in every direction around the room. Noigandres must have assumed, quite logically, that wherever Merkouros was, his case-notes were with him. The Chief’s much-vaunted Imagination had not been Creative enough to guide him to the obvious—to the document right under his nose, as in Edgar Clemm Poe’s story “The Stolen Letter.” Now, thought Merkouros, it was the job of Interplane Central to spirit away the two bodies, but if they could not do so without gross violation of the Plane-7 sense of cosmic propriety, then an equivalent mass of any other dead matter would do. Official communication with Plane 7, if it should ever begin, would have to open up on a much more positive note.

Merkouros lifted the intact manuscript of his case-notes from beside Selbeam’s typewriter. With a little revision, they should do fine for a full report, he thought. The sooner he transvected now, the better. But first he must return those interleaved pages from the writer’s own manuscript. Could there have been any better disguise than a cover page—so innocent-seeming, so thoroughly deceptive—which began

David squeezed his toy dog to his chest so hard its plastic eye popped off.

THE END

“A Möbius Trip” was originally published in Collages & Bricolages (Spring 1995) and later reprinted in Daniel Pearlman’s short story collection The Final Dream & Other Fictions (Permeable Press, 1995).