Azure

 

[A moment of shocked silence. A man-sized burlap bag is lying on the ground just inside the (now closed) station door. Will is lying where he fell, on the ground. Chris is crouched in fear. Pete and Meg are in their rooms, their doors closed.]

CHRIS:

[Under her breath, in fear.] The rat...

[Will's beeper goes off: a pleasant female voice announces, ``You have new mail.'' A hiss of static. He is startled, then quickly tears the backpack off his back to get at the miniature antenna-laden terminal inside. The backpack begins pulsing with barely concealed heat and light as Will makes connections to the terminal. Thick cables now lead to the terminal from his backpack. He cracks open the terminal's case, and green light from the display pours onto his face in the semi-darkness. He starts to read the display, but is evidently bothered by extremely poor reception--he can't sustain a connection.]

WILL:

[Cursing.] Low-rent son of a switched bit.

[Chris watches with timid curiosity.]

[Will goes to one of the windows, opens it for better reception, thinking to stick one of the antennae out. Immediately the bats overhead go wild and red steam pours in from the grey. A growing growl. Will quickly slams the window shut again and normalcy returns. He looks for a power outlet instead.]

WILL:

[Unable to find an outlet.] Are there any Edison jacks in this place?

CHRIS:

If you mean your common household power outlet, no. That is, none working. Our supply of 120-volt sinusoidal power seems to be... defunct. [She flips a wall switch in illustration. Nothing happens.] Unpaid bills. Or grid disturbances. Maybe a simple occultic exclusion principle at work. Solar flares? The year two thousand?

WILL:

That's not what I asked. I asked if there was an Edison jack, not because I need 60 Hertz 117-volt root-mean-square amplitude alternating current, necessarily, but to tap into the metallic cable grid solar-particle antenna you call ``power lines.''

CHRIS:

Well, why didn't you say that in the first place. [She is examining his backpack closely.] Not everyone carries a generator on their back.

WILL:

Don't touch that! It's not a generator.

CHRIS:

[Surprised by what she's seen.] Hey, I've seen those things before. That symbol, with the yellow and black triangles. That's...

WILL:

No it's not. You've never seen one of these before.

CHRIS:

Yes, I have. Back of town, inside the hyperboloid concrete, buried deep, surrounded by water.

WILL:

No, you haven't. This is one of a kind. Unique.

CHRIS:

Where'd you get it?

WILL:

I stole it. I borrowed it. I found it, in a cheese warehouse marked 137-B. It was secreted there to prevent the world from finding it, so having found it I took it with me, to keep the secret safe.

CHRIS:

Is it an N-ray detector? A Ronald Reagan Mark I Audio-Animatron? The Heart of Gold? An Infinite Improbability machine?

WILL:

It's a portable fusion energy device. A small prototype, fed sea water semiannually [Confused.] -- or bimonthly. [Recovers.] My own stellar engine, the hottest point in the universe. A glowing ring kept captive by invisible force. [Beat.] They're not supposed to exist.

CHRIS:

And you carry that on your back?

WILL:

I've been around the world with it. I've seen the whole it has to offer. I've seen things that made what was on my back look like birdsong, like pre-Newtonian physics or ring-theory algebra. I've visited the place where magnetic monopoles are mined, and chatted with the monkey who wrote Macbeth. I've flown over the desert in a purple rhinoceros, and seen the sets for the Apollo moon landings and Elvis' funeral. I've roller-bladed inside Area 51 and played gin-rummy with the Caldwell aliens. In exchange for my silence, JFK's true killer taught me the operating procedure for Stonehenge and [Indicating his shoes.] gave me this pair of shoes found near Abbey Road. I've materialized in labs, I've seen the macabre results of Crest Test #57 and the Holy Hand Grenade. I mastered interspecies telepathic communication, and gabbed with gators selling tupperware. I carefully cultured a taste for roller derby and named a hundred of the closest million stars.

CHRIS:

But what good is any of that?

WILL:

What good is it? Do you realize that in this machine, I have Beethoven's 11th symphony and the complete text of Kubla Khan? I have a digitized copy of Fermat's lost notebook, in which he concisely proved his last theorem and made mention of several more interesting. In a hundred twenty-eight bytes I have the location of Noah's Ark, Atlantis, God's lost dice and Gilligan's Island. I can fold proteins like origami. I can prove the travelling salesman problem in polynomial time, I can break any iterative encryption algorithm, I can factor thousand-digit numbers in my head. For this I have travelled, these things I have sought--I have found! I have returned.

CHRIS:

From Sumatra?

WILL:

In Sumatra I met a little man not-quite-human who lived in the wind-chest of the first manual of a bamboo organ in the dense jungle temple that Amelia Earhart founded after her crash. He revealed to me that Fluoridation and Daylight Savings Time really were communist plots, and provided the supporting documentation. He showed me a copy of the blackmail note British Petroleum sent Pons and Fleischmann. It was impossible to determine whether his cat was living or dead, but in the room where it was kept I found proof that professional wrestling is legit, and a short solution to the halting problem. Before I left, I was given a thick folder: a report on an MI5 operation involving a poisoned apple, a known homosexual, and an infinite tape. These are the things I have travelled the world to discover and learn. Now I am complete; now I am whole. I can score the accuracy of the Weekly World News, and send the appropriate threats when they approach the truth too nearly. I can use Einstein's unpublished Unified Field Theory to explain the mysterious non-presence of dozens of sent red roses. To silence any doubters, I have these!

[He produces two items from his bag, which he hands reverently to Chris]

CHRIS:

A book and a rock?

WILL:

A petrified pellet from one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse--last sighted in Arizona, creating a swath of destruction a mile wide!--and a tome that was miraculously out on loan when the library at Alexandria burnt.

CHRIS:

[Handing them back.] I'd rather have one of the moon lander props.

WILL:

These are mere toys. The secret to my success is this: I have thrown off convention, discarded authority, set off on my own to create new predicates upon which my world-view is built. I've discarded the postulates of both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. My knowledge is mine alone; I tap the technological state-of-the-art to ride the information wave. There is nothing I do not or can not know. I laugh at nuclear dynamics--this [Gesturing towards the fusion reactor.] is Pong compared to the potential of the information age; the software I used to install is buggier than last week's roadkill--compared to the adrenaline rush of pure information! I can make up my own mind, choose my own facts, avoid preconceived notions of scientific method and right or wrong. Electrons transcend locality. Wired spatial constructs decompose. The old superstitions of Tobo and Elvis and the Sumatran Rat are outdated, obsolete.

CHRIS:

That sounds mighty familiar.

WILL:

What is the Giant Rat of Sumatra other than simple rattus rattus, a ship rat grown large? Or maybe a Cricetomys gambianus, the African giant rat, which I personally consider a delicacy when topped with its parasitic companion, a crunchy wingless cockroach? Perhaps the Rat is nothing but an Indian giant squirrel, Ratufa indica, a rodent, sure, but not the Rat of childhood fears. Perchance what we consider the giant rat is in fact the curious and ill-known animal known as Echinosorex gymnurus, the ``Moon Rat'' native to Indonesia, closely related in fact to the hedgehog, and secreting a musky substance which gives it a highly characteristic smell...

[Chris and Will sniff in union. There is definitely something odd in the air.]

Perhaps you have not heard the tale of the Matilda Briggs?

CHRIS:

I invented the tale as a girl.

WILL:

So this is the Smith family.

CHRIS:

[Suspiciously.] How do you know about the Matilda Briggs?

WILL:

I must have heard it in my travels. The story's well told.

CHRIS:

No, you didn't. I smell a rat, and it's not travelling with roaches. You didn't hear that story from a stranger; the world is not yet ready for the truth of that tale: only me and my brother Will know it.

WILL:

Perhaps it was your brother who told it to me.

CHRIS:

[Realizing that the stranger is her brother Will.] I can put two and two together to make five as well as anyone, William Smith.

[Will freezes. Brother and sister stare each other down.]

Mom! Dad!