Prepare for Action

Patrick had the best lunch he ever had eaten (for one thing, there was enough food for everyone, although no one else seemed to think that was significant). During the meal his curiosity about these people grew sky high. They were all very kind; that became obvious to him very quickly. They all used polite table manners, even if some needed help as their hands and bodies were twitching, and for some chewing properly was not that easy to control either. But no one was left out; they all had white linen napkins and they obviously had practiced ways to work around and overcome most of their disabilities. And hearing them talk—Patrick liked this—it was a caring kind of talk that he had never heard before either, and all people at the table were included. There were no hesitations, no shame—as if disabilities didn’t matter. In fact, they all seemed proud. “How come?” Patrick was amazed.

“Okay, wake up Patrick!” Tobias smiled and poked Patrick gently in the side.

Patrick had been listening as if he were in a dream. Next to him, Eve had entertained him by talking about herself, others there with them, and various places he never had heard of before. Even though he felt overwhelmed, he picked up here and there that Eve was a clever conversationalist; she was definitely no dummy, as her looks implied.  However, she needed time seemingly to process words, those coming to her and leaving from her, and Patrick learned to compensate quickly. He enjoyed talking to Eve slowly; for once there was no rush. She smiled and laughed a lot and touched him on the hand or arm as if they were good friends already.

But… for the first time Patrick realized, “I’m black, and no one here is black too?” He had never talked to white people before, not like this. But here he talked with ease and felt welcome like nowhere else.

Patrick felt Tobias pushing him again. “Now you two have to stop blabbing,” Tobias said to both them with a grin. “Patrick needs to be properly introduced to us all.” And then he was.

There were about twenty-five of them sitting around the big oval table. Politely and respectfully, they all introduced themselves to him, Mr. Zed as well. He didn’t present himself as the leader or anything—no one did. Patrick felt a bit strange about that, especially as Tobias obviously showed the deepest respect for this man. Tobias—who had shown no respect for Shaggy, his gun, or those big fellas handling Shaggy and his gang at the car—he honored Mr. Zed, this crumbling, twitching old man looking like nothing for the world. However, that was just yet one of all the mysteries that Patrick hoped to have explained to him later on.

But Mr. Zed was not alone sticking out among the crowd.  There was a young woman, Eleanor, who was attractive and, unlike many others there, quite normal apart from having no arms. At the table she used her feet and toes to handle her knife, and she did it with style.

At the opposite end there was Gustav, a blind Swede who did not look at his plate while eating. But he by some kind of sense was able to know exactly where to cut the meat with his knife and pick up the beans with his fork. Patrick had never thought of it before, how strange it felt seeing a person you dine with looking elsewhere than the plate while eating.

However and whatever their disabilities were, some kind of respect started to build up in Patrick about these people. None of them was any mental case at all, just as Tobias had told him, but outside in society they most certainly would be considered differently.

 Tobias turned to Patrick and said seriously, “Okay, now that you have met most of us staying here, I, or rather, we have something we would like to show you. We’re not going to just leave Liam and Eve alone with this Cantini fellow; we are going to be present too, but without him or anyone else knowing,”

“But how?” Patrick asked.

“Well, like I wasn’t alone at your school, and like you haven’t been completely by yourself either, even if you thought so. You have a talent you don’t know of yet—at least one of us had said so—somewhat similar to Mr. Zed here, who is a very, very special person. The one who identified you is Mr. Green, but he’s not here now. I hope to be allowed to take you to him next week or so, if you decide you want to stay with us, that is.”

Patrick nodded shyly as the others around the table looked at him approvingly. “A place to stay.” Okay, he sort of had that, but what he had wasn’t his choice.

Tobias leaned over and interrupted Patrick’s thoughts, “But first we’re going down to the basement—this you will enjoy seeing.”

Tobias stood up and walked to the stairway, with Patrick and some of the others following him. When they each got on the steps to go down, once again it was like they were floating down them, which Patrick thought was a funny feeling but not unpleasant.

Once they hit the bottom floor they entered a common basement door, but inside was this huge room that looked like a space center or something vastly technical like that. Patrick didn’t recognize a thing in that room.

Tobias took him to something that looked like a big screen, about three feet wide, with rounded corners and a strange joystick attached, with a mouse, a keyboard and… was it a headset, or what? There were all sorts of strange-looking goggles, strange tools… well there was a lot there. The screen looked funny, as if it were alive itself in three-dimensions or something.

Oh God, it was displaying his classroom, here, but from where…? There was no camera installed in his classroom, that Patrick was pretty sure of.

Tobias sat down in one of the two chairs in front of the screen and started to maneuver that joystick thing a bit with his left hand. “Here—look Patrick. From here we cannot just see your classroom, we can actually access it.

With the stick Tobias made the image move around as if a camera were floating in space, viewing the teacher’s desk from all angles. The gun was gone, but Tobias’s paper bag with all his things in it was still there on the floor, like nobody had dared to touch it. There were no people in the room and the door was closed.

“I guess everyone’s out at lunch. What do you say—shall we pick my things up?”

“Can we do that?” Patrick asked, a bit stunned.

“Yes we can,” Tobias said with a smile. “Look!”

With his right hand, Tobias grabbed the mouse-like thing and pointed with it at his paper bag. There was a red spotlight projected on the bag’s surface, and Tobias did something to make the red spot grow until it was surrounding the bag, and then he moved it. Patrick watched closely as the bag moved with the red light around it, flew through the air towards the camera, and then came out from the monitor towards him.

“Grab it!” Tobias urged him.

Patrick hesitated.

“Go on,” Tobias said, and Patrick stretched out and grabbed the bag as if were any ordinary bag, and it was.

“You see, this is not any ol’ display; in fact it’s not a display at all. This is one of Mr. Zed’s early creations, and what it does, it actually takes you there. Think of it like a tube, a periscope thing, where you start to see only from where the tube ends. With this stick here I can maneuver the tube and make its length vary. In fact, I can expand the tube many miles if I like, and it’s fast. I can lock the tube’s end to cars on the road and have a look inside if I want. This is how we made that basketball and gun trick in your classroom happen, with other screens and some of the people here helping me.”

“But the gun didn’t go off—I saw Shaggy pull the trigger… real hard, too?”

“Yes, he did. But he couldn’t make it go off. With Frogman here,” Tobias showed Patrick the mouse thing in his right hand, “I can lock things in space, and I can lock the trigger so it doesn’t move in relation to the gun and make the gun stuck in space too, if I like. Moving the gun was easy; you just enter some coordinates on the keyboard here, then press enter, and it happens as you set it up to happen.”

“But how? I don’t understand any of this.” To Patrick it all looked so easy, and yet he had never heard of such things before. Tobias saw the confusion in his face and gently smiled back at him. He put Frogman down and let go of the stick. Then he took Patrick aside to a nearby table and they sat down.

“It’s a long story, you know. But think of Mr. Zed as a scientist—a very, very good one, one of the best. He’s not alone—there are more of the most advanced scientists in our community, too. They are each unique, and we call them Wizards. Why that name is a long story, too. But what they’ve discovered and have managed to control are forces more powerful than anything else anyone has discovered yet.

“You know, ordinary scientists, physicists, you see them on television now and then; they sometimes talk about atoms and even smaller particles, and they all try to be the first to discover the smallest particle there is; like the particle that all the universe is built upon. It’s like a race, you know, and they think what they’ve discovered is the absolute truth, like Einstein you know. Have you heard about him?”

Patrick nodded while listening intensely.

“Anyway, Mr. Zed knows what that smallest particle is, and those other ordinary scientists out there haven’t got a clue. Mr. Zed and the Wizards are way ahead in applying their science to technology, and that tube display you saw is one way this knowledge can be used.”

“But how? I mean, what is it? That smallest particle, I mean?”

Tobias smiled like only a magician can, having performed his final trick and received an ovation.

“It’s nothing! You know, that smallest particle there is, is nothing. To understand that and how that works in practice, I think only Mr. Zed, or maybe some of the other Wizards, can do fully. It’s been explained to me several times, and I’m can’t really grasp it all.

“As Mr. Zed has told me, this nothing is everywhere and nowhere, because nothing can’t really exist. Think of space far out there in darkness: there is something there, isn’t it? Otherwise it couldn’t be, could it? Like think of that vast, endless, empty space in between planets, galaxies, and such; what is it? But somewhere out there past the universe there must be an end, right? And at the end, there must be something ending it—at that very edge of the universe, there is nothing? Right? But not quite so.

“Mr. Zed says that this nothing at the same time is what the universe surrounds, like surrounding nothing. The universe actually surrounds itself. And what about the edge of the universe then, do you think? It’s everywhere, within us, and yes, even in hard stone.”

Patrick thought he might understand some of this, but at the same time he didn’t really understand any of it. This was way beyond what anyone could understand, he thought, and a certain respect for that old crumbling, twitching man started to grow.

Tobias saw that Patrick had had enough of Mr. Zed’s philosophies for one day, but he had gotten Patrick interested; it looked that way, anyway. Tobias felt very pleased with how Patrick had listened, plus how he had met all the others. There was something about Patrick that he really liked. He had been told that Patrick was special, but that potentiality was not what appealed to Tobias. If Mr. Zed was hard to understand, Mr. Green was impossible, and yet with Patrick….

Few had even met Mr. Green—Tobias had met only once, and those eyes were not from this world, he had thought. That first impact could take the breath out of anyone, that he was pretty sure of.

“Okay! Enough with Mr. Zed’s thinking for today, don’t you think?”

Patrick nodded as if he were in a trance.

“Right! Come on, we’ll move over to the others who are planning for this evening’s action. You and I are not going to participate at the scene, since we’re somewhat known, as you can imagine. But we can take part by listening in and later watching the show, so you can get a picture of how it all works, who these magicians are, like me, and about the elves and what they do.”

Patrick seemed to wake up from his dream. “Yes,” he thought, and followed Tobias. If Tobias was excited about all this, then he definitely wanted in. And he didn’t feel worried about Liam and Eve anymore meeting that nasty Cantini guy. But to collect that money, $50,000, how on Earth were they going to pull that stunt off? Patrick had no doubt that they could, with all the things he had been shown by Tobias, plus that bag he just picked up from far away and all. But it all sounded too fantastic to believe … and he wouldn’t want to miss this for the world.

…

To be continued next Friday.