Chapter 6: Knights of the Obscure and Obtuse

By Clayton Ray Randell

>Beep…Beep…Beep.

“Dr. Kimberly?” A disembodied voice speaks from the intercom on the wall.

“Yes.” Albert answered.

“ Your team will be assembling shortly. I will be at your room in thirty minutes to show you to the lab.”

“Thanks Sybaritia.”

Albert showered and shaved. He found a brand new lab coat hanging in the closet. He removed the I.D. tag from the lapel and pinned it to his own lab coat. Albert’s lab coat had been with him on three worlds and dozens of projects. It was bright purple and had eight sterling silver buttons shaped like each of the planets in the solar system. Embroidered above the right hand pocket was ‘Al’.

After drinking a container of tangerine juice from his small fridge, Sybaritia rang his bell.

Albert opened the door right away and instantly felt embarrassed that he might seem to excited to see his beautiful tour guide.

“Hello Albert.”

“Sybaritia. How are you this morning?”

“Good; and you?”

“Not bad”

“How was your dinner last night, Dr. Kimberly?”

“Excellent. If all the food here is that good I’ll get fat?”

“Well I am sure you will work up a good appetite. Speaking of which, I think that everyone should be ready to receive you now.”

They headed down the corridor to the elevator. After reaching the 38th floor. They walked down another hallway to the lab shuttle. Unlike the other elevators the shuttle moved in three directions; up, down and diagonal. It could reach any of the fifty-one labs, and had a direct route to the underground maintenance and manufacturing levels.

The shuttle hummed along, first traveling straight up then slowly changing direction to follow the slant of the outside of the pyramid. As it did so a wall to the left of Albert seemed to melt away and become transparent. The Martian landscape was crisp and crimson in the early morning twilight.

Albert couldn’t shake the visions in his dream last night. He wasn’t sure what, if anything the dream had meant. Mentioning it to Sybaritia might make him feel better he thought. Before he could say anything the shuttle came to a halt and the doors sprang open with the whine of pneumatic tubes.

“Were here Albert.”

Albert looked out the door to see a rather ominous looking hallway. The rest of the facility was quite well lit, but this particular corridor was lit dimly, with a hint of blue and was quite long. At the end, almost fifty meters away stood the door.

Sybaritia stepped into the hall and when Albert hesitated she gently took his hand and led him out of the shuttle. The walls were lined with dark vertical tubes. The dark paneling on the floor sloped up forty-five degrees to the white wall from a foot away. The ceiling was the same only inverted. Over all it gave Albert the impression of walking through the woods.
As they walked the walls glowed around them, and their tiny bubble of light followed them to the large door.

To the right of the door was an optical scanner and below that a palm identifier.

“Eat me. Drink me.” Albert said, almost unconsciously.

“What?”

Albert realizing how perverted that might sound said. “ It’s from an old movie.”

“I know.” Sybaritia said. ” I guess that makes me the White Rabbit?”

With that she peered into the optical scanner and placed her hand on the palm identifier.

The door which appeared to be much like the other doors in the facility was actually almost twenty inches thick and swung on gigantic hinges. The door was seven feet high on the hallway side, and expanded to be almost fifteen feet on the other side.

Inside the lab, Albert found himself looking at five of the solar systems better known scientists running around like children at a carnival.

A funny little old man with glasses and a decidedly English lisp was relating to the others just how impressive a ‘static graviton suppressor’ really was. Not that the others were listening to him. Several of them were toying with robotic arms or testing the ability of the lab computers to model DNA and chemical reactions.

When Sybaritia said “Hi kids.” The respected scientists dropped what they were doing and lined up before her like a troop of boy scouts.

Collectively from the doctors. “Hello Ms. Fields.”

“Kids, I would like for you to all meet your new Lab leader. Dr. Albert Kimberly.”

An Asian gentleman spoke up. “Oh, Dr. Kimberly, you were the one who was able to reproduce the DNA from the algae on Halley’s comet.”

“Only because I couldn’t keep the samples alive on the trip back to Earth.”

Sybaritia cut in. “Are English friend in the glasses is Dr. Slater. From the United Asian Space Engineers, we have Dr. Shoji Watanabe. In the pink dress is Dr. Sandra McCalistair from the Stanley Gene Lab orbiting the moon. With the dreadlocks is Dr. Caesar LeBeau.”

“Everybody calls me Smokey, man.”

“On the end is Deirdre Mazer, she is your lab assistant.

Professor Malton spoke up. “She is also a fabulous niece”

Albert wondered how Malton managed to sneak up on them when the enormous door to the lab was closed. Turning to his left he saw how. An elevator that must have been flush with the ceiling when it was all the way up was lowering Malton, who was not alone. Standing beside Malton was a man dressed in the blackest material Albert had ever seen. The man seemed to suck light out of the space around him.

Malton, ever placid “So, I see you have all met. Not to over whelm you but I would like to add one more face.”

And what a face it is, thought Albert. The man’s eyes had no color. What white he saw was nearly inked out by shinny blackness. Albert couldn’t tell if there was no iris, completely black iris’s or total dilation.

“This is Fenian Samizdat, with the Bureau of Knowledge. He will be observing how we run this facility for awhile.

And with a nod Fenian was suddenly an unexpected fixture of the lab.