Chapter Twenty-Six: The Big Room
The strange mutant hybrids or whatever they were, tried to follow the gang down the long black, somewhat Freudian hallway, until Monster started shooting them with mild electrical shocks, like you might get from a doorknob during a static-charged winter month. The little beasts backed off at that point, and mostly sat in large heaps of soft flesh, licking at their own genitals. “Your tax dollars at work,” Emu commented.
“Maybe yours,” Jennifer said. “I don't pay my taxes.”
“Monetary rebellion,” Omen remarked. “That's my code for shop-lifting as well.”
The long black hall had a few side-doors leading off of it, but all the doors were locked, and this time with key-locks, instead of the little pass-code panels that Hal could get through. Behind some of the doors were strange sounds, like scratching, crying, and in one case, the sort of hyperventilated breathing you might expect to hear from a particularly active set for a porn movie. The gang did their best to ignore the sounds, and proceeded down towards the end of the hallway.
The hall ended at a big pair of double doors that swung open easily. Beyond the doorway was a large, almost impossibly vast, room. A room painted as dark as the hall, though with big round lights hanging from the ceiling. The lights hung about halfway down from the ceiling, which had to be at least a hundred feet high.
“A hundred and forty feet,” Hal mentioned, doing the geometry in his head, “from ceiling to floor.”
“How interesting,” Omen said, half-ignoring Hal.
The room held darkness, shattered ever so slightly by the pools of light which descended from the ceiling.
Also, the room was full of space-ships.
There were about a dozen of the things, all in different shapes, but mostly all the colour of old metal. A few looked pretty banged up, and a couple even had obvious fire-damage, at least on their outsides.
They were all different shapes; one looked sort of like an upside bowl, another like a slim fat saucer. One looked like a big, ugly cigar, and another like a sort of injured top-hat. One looked a little distressingly similar to a giant rubber face-mask carved into the profile of the face of Richard Nixon, but that may have just been a trick of the lights and shadows of the place.
“Can has?” Monster said to Jennifer.
“No,” Jennifer said, staring at the strange machines. A few seemed to be hovering, just an inch or two above the floor. “And don't touch them, either.”
“:(” Monster said angrily.
“No, that's a good idea,” Hal agreed. “Not touching them. They might be alarmed, or radioactive, or anything, really.”
“What if I could present a really good argument as to why I need a spaceship?” Omen asked.
“Nobody's taking a spaceship out of here,” Hal said. “Besides, what are you going to do, squeeze it back up the elevator shaft?”
“Well, how'd they get them down here?” Omen asked him back.
“One question at a time,” Jennifer told them.
The team walked semi-silently, almost stoically, through the crowd of potentially unidentified flying objects. Monster reached out for one that really looked like it needed a friend; it struck her as somehow lonely. She reached out for it, nearly pushing her fingertips against its side, but she hesitated, and didn't quite bring her hand into contact with it, even with her Robot Gloves on. It was hard to say what might have happened if she had touched it, but sufficed it to say, she was better off for keeping her hands to herself.
At the far end of the spaceship hanger, was a normal-sized white door.
“So they built the room around these things?” Omen asked, considering the size of the door.
“Try not to think about it too much,” Emu suggested.
“That's what the drugs are for,” Omen agreed.
“Yeah,” Emu agreed, taking one last look around at the darkened room full of spaceships, “I'm getting drunk tonight.”
The group pushed on past the white door.
