Interview: Stanford Filbrick Pines

(October 2, 2015)

Near Washington, DC: Headquarters for the Covert Agency for Paranormal Investigation (CAPI)

The elderly man, his heavy tortoise-shell-framed glasses doing nothing to soften his pale ice-blue eyes, sat behind a bare desk in a bare white room. "Thank you for coming, Dr. Pines. Please be seated."

"An invitation from the Agency is more like a command," Ford said, taking the chair opposite him. They might have been a mile below the surface of the earth, or (except for the normal gravity) high in orbit aboard a top-secret satellite.

Actually, they were underground, but not that far.

This was only Stanford Pines's second visit to the Washington (or near enough) headquarters of the Agency, but the place had changed a lot over more than thirty years, though its clandestine nature had not. He had followed the directions carefully—memorized directions, because writing them down would have been a major sin. Perhaps even a capital crime.

Pause. Rewind.

To enter the Agency's stronghold, you have to know which urban tailor shop (Del Florio's) to enter. It is five steps below street level. If you are a stranger, like Ford, you have to ask the old man who is at the pressing machine near the front, "Can you help me? I've lost my ticket, and I want to see if my blue pin-striped three-piece suit is ready." You must say exactly those words. The old man is no longer a field agent, but he is known for having assassinated seventeen spies, eight of them behind enemy lines, during an almost forgotten war. Oh—that was when he worked for another Agency, gut one just as secret.

He will point to the back of the shop. "Manager's office." His tone is flat, but not unfriendly. Or, if you don't ask the question in just the right way, he will say in a surly voice, "You some kinda idiot? Go find your ticket, then we'll talk." He may even pull up his shirt to let you glimpse the .38 Police Special he carries holstered to his belt. In these days, that is an outdated weapon, but he is old. He is a sentimentalist.

But we'll assume you have said the words correctly, and he points, and you walk back to the unmarked door. You open it. It opens not into an office, but a closet. You close the door behind you, push the hanging suits to one side, duck, and step under them and into the depths. The closet is deeper than it looks. You hear a faint whirr as your body is imaged, from top of head to the sole of your feet, by sensors far advanced over those in airports.

If you get a clean bill of health—Agency slang for not carrying or containing weapons—the entire back wall of the closet slides to one side. It is wallboard on the closet side, six inches of metal on the other, pretty much bombproof.

You step into a wide corridor. The wall closes almost silently. Then you notice a smiling elderly lady at a desk. She motions you over and has you spread your hand and press a metal plate, which reads your fingerprints.

It buzzes, and the woman says, "I'm sorry, I didn't notice. Let me reset it to polydactyl mode. There. Once more, please."

You press your six-fingered hand down on the plate again. This time a chime sounds. The woman says, "Very good, Dr. Pines. Lean down, please."

Then she has you look into a camera-like device, which registers the patterns of your retinas. If, like Ford, you have ever worked with the Agency in any capacity whatever—not as a field agent, or as an assassin of dangerous aliens, foe of sorcerers, or enemy of supernatural creatures, but only as a mere consultant—the monitor will also chime.

Then the receptionist will smile, stand to pin an ID badge to your jacket pocket, and say, "He's expecting you. Straight down the corridor to your right and take the elevator down to the third floor."

Walking the corridor, you pass closed doors with no windows.

The elevator is upside-down. That is, you are now on the first floor. The second floor is below you. The third floor is below that. If you were curious and pressed elevator button number 2 accidentally on purpose, nothing would happen. The doors would not open, even if you pressed the emergency release button. The elevator wouldn't budge until the guards came and freed you from that trap, perhaps hauling you to a somewhat larger cage to think over how you misbehaved.

The buttons now recognize your fingerprints, you see.

But if you're Ford, you obediently press button 3. The elevator descends. In five seconds, a soft bell dings at the second floor, but the doors do not open. Twenty more seconds pass. Twenty-five. Thirty-three. And finally the bell sounds, the elevator doors open, and you walk out God only knows how many feet below the surface.

Your tax dollars at work.

You emerge in a bustling hive of shoulder-high cubicles. Younger workers are busy at desks and workstations here, and one of them, an attractive woman about thirty or so and wearing a silvery-gray uniform a little like a nurse's scrubs, leads you to the door of the Chief of CAPI. No title or name is on the door. He has a name, but generally everyone calls him the Professor.

"Ah," he says, smiling in his pruny way, but with his pale eyes still stern, ice-cold, "Thank you for coming, Dr. Pines. Please be seated."

And that brings us up to date and up to speed.

"Sorry for not giving you more warning before the summons," the Professor said, after their handshake. "How is the family?"

"Well, thank you, Dr. Haverall."

"Still enjoying your retirement?"

"Yes. Of course you know I'm married now."

"I do indeed. Congratulations. It suits you. You're looking—" the Professor squinted, his bushy white eyebrows bunching above his horn-rimmed specs—"twenty-one years younger than when we had that little contretemps with Northby Northwest."

"I'm sure you know why."

"A vacation in Florida has a way of rejuvenating a man," the Professor said mildly. "Well, you may also congratulate me, if you wish. I am eighty today."

"I didn't know," Ford said. "I do congratulate you, sir. If I'd realized it was your birthday, I would have brought you a present."

"Oh, that's still possible," the Professor said. He had a craggy, rather aristocratic face, with a long upper lip and a thick shock of hair still more gray than white, except for those shaggy eyebrows. "What are you doing in your retirement, Stanford? If I may ask."

"Of course. Well, I'm researching and writing and trying to learn how to live a normal life again. And keeping an eye on the uncanny goings-on in Gravity Falls."

The old man nodded. "Mm. I'm glad you and your family were able to settle that Brujo business. That was a signal accomplishment."

"I had a great deal of help," Ford said, smiling. "From the Agency, but even more from my great-niece and great-nephew, my brother Stanley, and our friends. And of course, we're very grateful that the Agency was able to save my great-nephew and his girlfriend last summer when they were lost at sea." He sighed. "I suppose you now need a return favor from me, Dr. Haverall?"

"Oh, please. We're being informal, and we both have doctorates. Make it Anthony. As a matter of fact, no. Not a favor. I do want to ask you a simple question that requires only a yes-or-no answer. Of course, you will desire details, but first let me put the issue before you. Would you care to head the Agency?"

Ford jerked convulsively, as though he were being offered a live, angry, coiled king cobra on a silver platter. "What!"

"I have now reached the official mandatory retirement age," Haverall said. "I must step down within six months. Let me explain what is involved, Stanford." He spread his arms and his thin-fingered hands. "Do you expect I mean all this? Stuck in Headquarters, tombed up in this office? Don't worry. You don't have to put up with this, not in this age of technology. You would be free to remain in your own home town. This is not an onerous job, if you don't care to make it one. The Director is not a field agent, but a coordinator. We could quite easily establish a branch office in Gravity Falls. Even use your own secret laboratory—oh, yes, we've known about that for three years now—if you wish." The old man looked at his wristwatch. "However, I see it's time for lunch. Come with me and we'll talk it over."

They rode a different elevator up to a garage, where a tough-looking young man in sunglasses and a black suit ushered them to a Lincoln and saw them into the back seat. Dr. Haverall took out a pocket watch—surprising Ford—and gazed at its face.

"It isn't a watch," the old man said without even glancing at Ford. "It's the world's most sophisticated bug detector. I would trust Lawrence, our driver, with my life, and in fact I often have, but I always check the automobile, just in case."

They drove to a classy restaurant overlooking the Potomac—Ford suspected it was an Agency front—and the headwaiter took them to a private room upstairs. Haverall put his pocket bug detector on the table and ordered lunch.

They gazed out the window at the river, broad, blue, and calm, and at the autumn-painted trees on the far side. Beyond the trees lay Arlington and a small forest of tall cranes. Something was always a-building. When the food had been brought, the wine poured, and the waiter had retired—"Don't return until we call for you," the Professor murmured—the old man said, "Well, now."

"First, again, happy birthday to you—Anthony," Ford said, raising his glass.

The Professor smiled. "Thank you, Stanford. At my age, it's an occasion just to have another one! But really, thank you, my boy. Shall I continue as we eat?"

"I warn you, I'm inclined to say no."

The old man nodded amiably. "Perfectly all right, Stanford. But do hear me out."

"Very well. This is excellent wine."

"I'm glad you like it." As they ate their way through a salmon piccata, Haverall spoke of the situation: "I have been trying and succeeding in reining in this organization. When you came on board as a consultant all those years ago and I was only Second Advisor to the Director, the Agency had come to be used for partisan politics."

"I remember being on the team that designed the mind-control tie," Ford said. "I didn't know what it was to be used for until it had already been deployed."

Haverall sipped his wine thoughtfully. "Yes, that was regrettable. We no longer do that kind of work. For the past fifteen years, I've slowly brought the Agency back around to its original mandate: Protecting the country from paranormal threats. That is what I would like to see continued."

"But I'm an outsider."

The Professor nodded agreeably. "And that makes you an ideal candidate. Your work day would be, oh, four hours a day for most of the time. If an outbreak occurred—and you know what I mean by that—you might have to be on the scene for a few days or a week. Ordinarily, you would receive a daily briefing and situation report, half an hour's teleconference and fifteen minutes to an hour of reading. Once every three months, no more, you would need to come here to National Headquarters, or perhaps to the Western Headquarters in Boulder, it would be your choice, for a routine three-day series of meetings with regional administrators. If something happened, you would determine the authenticity and severity of the threat, and you would order the appropriate level of response to any outbreak and direct that response. And you would be welcome to study any entities or artifacts that you might encounter."

"That doesn't sound too demanding," Ford admitted.

"Oh, it isn't. I found out when I turned seventy-five that my presence is rarely required even when we have a case. However, we do still have overzealous agents and regional administrators—Gravity Falls used to be under the purview of the Boulder office, and that very nearly got your brother arrested and spirited away at the time the dimensional rift occurred. I was too slow to be of much help then, because the regional administrator—he is working elsewhere now, not with us—kept things from me. You would have to be alert to that sort of staff misbehavior."

"But I don't know the people."

Haverall shrugged. "I will stay on for six months to mentor you. I can advise you about your crew. I think, Stanford, that you probably remember from your University days how forthcoming I am."

"I do, indeed," Stanford said. "You were my favorite professor. And I have to say, you're making this job sound too good to be true."

Haverall pursed his lips and appeared to think that over. "I don't mean to. There will be times when you're driven frantic by some flare-up: Vampires in New Orleans, a mysterious eruption of ghostly activity in San Jose, the apparition of a volcano goddess in Hawaii. Those seem to happen about once a year, and generally they're not terribly hard to contain if one moves quickly."

"I've had some independent experience of that sort of thing," Ford said, smiling.

"Then you know that when they do happen, there's never enough time and always many unknown factors. You will probably be awakened in the middle of the night about once every other month for a potential emergency that almost all the time fizzles out on its own. That happens more often now that we have good, experienced people working for us."

"Better not to have an emergency."

Haverall nodded. "Good people, as I say. And you have, well, an obscene budget to draw upon. The Agency holds more than a thousand patents that bring in income not under the control of Congress. They don't even know about it. More, the armed services even cooperate with us, though generally they have no idea why they're helping or what's really going on. We have facilities all across the country and spotted here and there in thirty foreign locations. Your salary will be one hundred thousand dollars a year, by the way, plus expenses up to thirty-five thousand dollars, and if you take advantage of that, save your receipts."

"The money isn't the important part," Stanford said.

"I knew it wouldn't be with you, and that's why I mentioned it last." They had finished their meal. The Professor poured a final glass of wine for each of them. "Stanford, shall I tell you why I want you to say yes?"

"Please do."

"Because we need a man like you in this position—a thinker, someone who is versed not only in the dangers but also in the opportunities. Someone who will not overreact to, oh, say a report of zombies threatening a little town in the Pacific Northwest. Someone who's seen quite a bit of the Multiverse. A man who is reasonable and reasonably sane, and a man who isn't afraid to stand up to the powers that be. Someone who can say 'yes' and edge it with a caution or say 'no' and make it stick. You, in fact."

"Sir, you make it very hard to refuse. What if I say 'no' right now?"

The old man shrugged in a genial way. "There will be no hard feelings. We'll shake hands, my driver will drop you off at the airport, I will go my way, hoping that the powers that be will not appoint a lunatic or a fanatic to take my place, and you will go yours. However and alas, I shall not give you the antidote to the poison you just swallowed in your wine."

"Then I have to—" Stanford's eyes flew open wide. "Wait, what?"

Chuckling, his eyes twinking, Anthony Haverall said, "Gotcha. There is no poison, and you are perfectly free to refuse the offer." He turned his wine glass in the light from the window, sending purple reflections across the tablecloth. "Here is another possibility, Stanford. Call it an added inducement. What would you say to overseeing the establishment of an institution of higher learning? Not in Gravity Falls, not with its high weirdness quotient, but quite nearby, within twenty miles or so? It might even be called the Pines Institute of Arcane Studies. It would begin with a small faculty, twenty or so, and no more than three hundred students. It would be highly specialized and designed to standards you would work out with a team of specialists."

"That was an old dream of mine," Stanford admitted.

"I know it was. And I foresee a need for students of the, shall we say, alternative sciences. We will need to recruit bright and dedicated young people in the future. And we certainly have the money to find or build a facility and to make that happen, if we have the right man for the job."

"You really want me in this position," Stanford said. Why?"

The Professor leaned forward and his expression became solemn. "Because—all my cards on the table, now—I'm afraid that someone like Agent Powers may succeed me as Director f you don't. He's a good man in his way, but—he has a certain adversarial mind set. It limits his effectiveness, I would say."

"Hmm. May I go back to the hotel and discuss this with my wife?"

Haverall tented his fingers. Slowly, deliberately, he said, "You may tell her you have been offered a consulting position with an official agency. You may not go into details."

"She can't know?"

"If you take the position," Haverall said, "Lorena—may I call her that? Thank you. Lorena may, at your discretion, become a deputy Agent and may be informed of anything up to Security Level 3. If you turn down the offer, no, you may not give her any details."

Stanford bowed his head in thought. And this is what ran through his mind:

Mason is all but certain that the boy Billy Sheaffer is Bill Cipher. The Axolotl and the Oracle are trusting him and Mabel to be able to civilize Bill in this new form. But—Cipher will ALWAYS be Cipher. If I had the power of the Agency behind me—I might be able to help.

He looked up. "Do you have the afternoon free?"

"Oh, quite. I've put in my four hours today," the Professor replied, smiling. It made his craggy old face look like a relief map of pink badlands, all wrinkles and creases.

"Then will you come and meet Lorena?"

"I shall be delighted."

He did, he was charming, and in front of the Professor (who had checked the hotel room for bugs), Stanford told Lorena as much as he reasonably could. "So," he finished, "the decision is ours. You know of some of my concerns and worries. I am inclined to say yes to this management opportunity, but I wouldn't commit without your knowing this much."

"When would you begin?" Lorena asked.

Haverall said, "Technically, I must relinquish the office by January, although I can maintain an ex-officio presence through the first of June. I would use a good part of the next six months to help Dr. Pines settle into the position—if he decides to take it."

"Of course, he'll take it," Lorena said.

"I will?" Ford asked, grinning. "Just like that?"

"You certainly need something to keep your busy!" Lorena said.

"Well," Ford said, and he kissed her, politely. "Dr. Haverall—Anthony—please agree to accompany us to dinner tonight. And please accept my 'yes' as your birthday present."

"It is the best one I've had in years," the old man said.

The End