Future Tense

(July 2018)

13-Field Report

To Dipper's surprise, Stan had them all—he, Wendy, Teek, and Mabel—pile into the Stanleymobile, and he drove them out of the Valley. "Where are we going?" Mabel asked.

"Never mind," Stan said. "You'll know when we get there."

"Stan," Wendy said from the backseat, "watch your speed, man. You're driving angry."

"Yeah, can't help it," Stan growled, but he slowed to the speed limit and hunched forward a little. "That damn Punt gets on my last nerve! Mabel, don't tell Sheila I said 'damn' in front of you, OK?"

"Damn straight," Mabel said. "I know the rules!"

Dipper, in the backseat with Wendy, guessed their destination within minutes, but he told her silently, holding her hand. –Stan's driving us to Ford's Institute. Must be something up.

Yeah, I'll bet Ford's found something on Punt. Or Amy has. Why are we using telepathy, Dip?

–Because Ford thought Punt might have planted bugs everywhere.

Yeah, well, if he did, he probably planted a GPS bug, too. But no sense in letting Punt know what we're saying, I guess. Nice day for a drive. Remind me to show you a spot off the road along here where the river pools up. Sweet place for a moonlight skinny dip!

–Oh, I'll be sure to remind you of that!

"Now I know where we're going!" Mabel exclaimed from the front-seat shotgun position. "We're—"

"Don't say it, Sis!" Dipper said, cutting her off. "We all know, anyway."

"Why—oh. Right," Mabel said. "Got it."

The Institute for the Study of Anomalous Sciences—to give it one of its names, because it had several, including the students' informal Scare U—had once been an abandoned rural high school, but since its establishment a few years before, it had grown impressively. Now it boasted not just one classroom building, but three, connected by covered walkways, plus four complete dorms and two more under construction. There was a library, an auditorium, a gymnasium—regular college stuff, as Soos might say.

And the necessary student and faculty parking lots. Stan surprised Dipper by not parking in one of them, but driving around back of the main building, pressing a garage-door opener, and then as the door in what looked like a one-car garage swung up, down a ramp and into an underground lot where a dozen cars could park and seven already had.

Behind them the garage door closed again. Stan said, "Sit tight a minute. Poindexter's scanning us with some doojigger that McGucket built."

They sat, Mabel uneasily squirming. "I hope they can't tell I'm not wearing a bra," she murmured.

Stan shrugged. "Meh, if they don't catch that I'm goin' commando, they won't notice that."

"Oh, T.M.I, you two!" Wendy said laughing.

"It's hot in a sweater!" Mabel said. "Look, Teek's all red in the face!"

An AI voice said, "Scan complete. Vehicle clear. Passengers may exit."

"Come on," Stan said, opening the driver's door. "There's an elevator this way. Probably take us two trips, though."

The elevator car was a tight space, and Wendy, Mabel, and Teek rode up together first. When the doors opened again, Stan and Dipper got in. "I didn't know this was here," Dipper said.

"Yeah, my brainiac brother's getting paranoid in his old age," Stan said. "Wait a minute, we're the same age! In his late youth, let's say. Guess it comes with runnin' the Guys in Black outfit."

The elevator had only two buttons, DOWN and UP. The UP one took them to a windowless room furnished with a long conference table at which eighteen people could comfortably gather, though at the moment only the ladies, Teek, Fiddleford, Agent Hazard, and Ford were there. "Here we are," Ford said. "This is a secure room. I've been hearing about Punt's distressing behavior at the debate. Well, well, everyone be seated and Agent Hazard and I will bring you up to speed. Lights at level one."

The lights dimmed, and then a holographic pad that covered most of the table projected three-dimensional images—the first one of three men, all of them in their forties, all of them unpleasant-looking. The black one looked like a boxer gone slightly to seed, a little jowly but with an angry face. The bald one was muscular and white, with a squash3d nose, a squint, and a red face, reminding Dipper a little of Mr. Poolcheck. The sandy-haired one wasn't as buff, but had a suggestion of wiry, sinewy strength about him.

"These the mooks that tried to murder Jeff's people?" Stanley asked.

"Correct," Ford said. "Although because of the amount of venom they absorbed, none of them can clearly remember that. They're all from the East. Cheetham there is from the Bronx. He's an impressively powerful man, but he got that way from spending about a third of his life in prison. Burke, the bald man, is from Alabama originally and was in the fight game for ten years before he settled down to run a gymnasium in Yonkers. The last fellow is Duquesne, French-Canadian, who was Punt's personal security man when the television program was running and stuck with him as bodyguard after the series went off the air. He's the only one with a solid link to Punt."

"What's gonna happen to them?" Stan asked.

"Hard to say. They'd have to be tried in the Valley—we don't let outsiders know that the Gnomes aren't circus dwarfs, but a separate species of humanoids. At that, I'm not sure they'd get a fair trial. So far, Gnomes have kept the peace among themselves, and the police, such as they are, haven't charged any Gnome with violating a human law. By the same token, Gnomes haven't served on juries. I suppose twelve human citizens of the Falls might be counted on to consider the men's offense and bring in a just verdict, but unless the punishment is strict, the Gnomes might not be satisfied."

"We just could turn 'em over to the Gnomes again," Stan said.

"Dude, no," Wendy said. "I mean, they'd probably just give 'em back to the spiders!"

"Spiders has to eat, same as anybody," Fiddleford said mildly.

Ford sighed. "Well, for now they're hospitalized and under false names. Punt's had his people asking around town about them, but they haven't picked up the trail so far. All right, next on the agenda, Agent Hazard."

"Thanks, Director," Hazard said, standing up. She operated a tablet, and the holographic image became the Dutch Colonial mansion she had investigated. "First off, there are two alarm systems, one that monitors all the doors, all the windows. Second, there are three cameras that limit the approach to the house across the grounds. Let me flip this."

The display went vertical, like a detailed map as seen from above hanging in mid-air. "One camera covers the approach to the front, and it's here. This is the field of vision." A red dot over the front door flicked on, and a broad red pie-wedge showed what it could see.

"Back yard and entrance to the cellar and the back door is here." A green light and surveillance wedge showed that coverage area. "Finally, at the rear of the property another wide-angle surveillance camera is mounted on a pole and looks toward the house." That one showed up in purple.

"Bet I can whomp up an invisibility field generator by Sunday," Fiddleford said. "That would fox them cameras, I bet."

Hazard shook his head. "Good idea, but hear me out. Now, there are means of infiltration here and here that lie outside the coverage area," Hazard said. "This one puts us against the left side of the house, looking toward it from the street, at the corner, and the other one on the right side leads us to the chimney. That's the one I used. The chimney was a difficult climb, but I could do it. Scrambled up onto the roof—"

"Weren't you afraid that the backyard camera would pick you up?" Dipper asked.

"No," Hazard said with a smile. "I was out of its field of vision. I checked."

"How?" Mabel asked.

Hazard raised an eyebrow. "How would you do it?"

"I'd go up the pole from behind and reach around and spray black paint on the lens!" Mabel said. "Whoosh! By the way, next time you want to climb a chimney, I'd recommend a grappling hook!"

"Well, I didn't do that," Hazard told her. "Any other guesses?"

Wendy said, "I'd try to hack into the system, check the view with like my phone or a tablet."

Hazard turned toward Ford. "Hire this girl if you want a good agent," she advised. "Yes, that's what I did. The camera view cut off below the attic windows. And it couldn't see the space on my side of the chimney at all. Anyhow, I got to the roof and scouted. There was a small skylight that wasn't wired for burglar detection. It gave down onto what was probably built as a light well—there's a central stairwell open from the ground floor all the way to the roof. I unlocked it, swung inside, and looked around. No motion detectors inside. There was an attic bedroom on one end of the house, an empty room on the other side, and in the center some attic space. The quarter-round windows were wired into the alarm system, so I hacked in from there to disarm everything."

"And what did you find?" Ford asked.

"First, since I thought we might want to get in again, I found a spot behind a radiator where I could plant an RC-2202 unit."

Fiddleford beamed. "One o' mine. It's an override you can access by radio signal from a half-mile away. Jest turn it on and then you can disarm the burglar alarms an' even switch off the cameras. And turn 'em back on after you make your getaway, by crackity!"

"I tested it out, and it worked. I switched everything off and then went through the place. It's furnished already. The master bedroom's down on the second floor, takes up three-eighths of the space. Smaller bedroom and playroom on the other side of the house. I'd guess that would be the nursery and later the bedroom for the boy. Few antiques in those and other rooms, but mostly good-quality stuff from the 2000s."

She verbally sketched out the ground floor—entryway, stairs winding up, living room, den, big dining room, kitchen, an office or study. The cellar stairs were in the kitchen. "Cellar's damn dusty, so I couldn't creep around much without leaving tracks. Concrete floor, some old water stains on the rear wall. Disused furnace and what was probably a coal bin, empty now, and beside that a more modern HVAC system. I used the GPR unit to sound out the basement floor—no telling what might be buried there—but aside from drainage pipes, nothing. Anyway, time was getting on, so I made sure everything was closed and that I hadn't left traces, then lefty by the back door and walked across the lawn. When I got off the property, I remotely re-armed the system, got a positive ping, and that was that. I have photos, but I think only one is interesting. Here."

She showed them a picture of the back yard, from ground level. "There's the anomalous green patch," Ford said.

"This is night-vision, but color corrected," Hazard told them. "Director, the patch contains just grass. Same grass as the rest of the yard, but elsewhere it's pale, and here in this irregular oval it's deep green."

"It's been dry this month," Ford said. "Is there a sprinkler active in that one area?"

"I checked, but none showed up. However, beneath that area, at a depth ranging from three to eight feet, there's a solid base. Almost solid."

"What could cause that?" Stanley asked. "Fall-out shelter?"

Wendy said, "Old swimming pool. Filled in."

Hazard grinned at her. "Honey, I so want you on my team!"

Stan glanced at his brother. "OK, somebody got tired of the swimming pool and shoveled in some dirt. So what's the payoff? I don't get it."

Slowly, Ford said, "What if they weren't just filling in the pool? What if they were burying something?"

"Treasure!" Mabel said.

"No," Ford said solemnly. "A body."

To be continued