CHAPTER TEN
Mar.7,2007 late afternoon and evening
Jarod, Miss Parker, family, and guest landed at the San Bernardino airport, and decided to take in the sights. Well, it was not Los Angeles, nor San Francisco, but the dead beat had a post office address here rather than at the coastal town that he was staying. Trouble was that Jarod did not know which town it was. All he knew was it was between Los Angeles and San Francisco and a bedroom community serving one of those two centers.
He took his camera, inserted a 125 mg smart card, and checked to see if the batteries were charged, (hoping to see the subject in question), walked over to the Post Office information center, and showed the woman a photograph of the scum bag.
"Yes he was here last week."
"You wouldn't know his address would you?"
"Really sir, we can't divulge that information," said the woman who had the look of someone that not even prying open her fingernails would get her to volunteer.
"Even if I were to tell you that he has a daughter who needs a medical operation and the mother cannot afford to pay for it and he did not even pay alimony. Skipped out when the kid was in hospital and he's used the money to play the horses and …" He handed her the advertisement for the Yacht Club.
She straightened her glasses, and a shocked expression came on her face as she moved her head from side to side, nodded to Jarod and with her head tilted and her eyes in the direction of a bald man in a worsted suit and whispered into Jarod's ear. "If you have a map of the area, I'll mark the towns with that particular yacht club. That'll narrow the field."
It sure did and Jarod walked out and over to Miss Parker. "I got four possibilities. So what one will we try first?"
"We can do it after shopping." She had the children out of their seats, and started to walk away, hoping they would follow. Unfortunately, Dominant children at that age were into the same type of mischief as homo sapiens at two years old and Jeremiah was an instigator, encouraging the children to scatter in all directions, and acting like the typical older brother who wanted to pull something on their parents and distribute the blame between all of them. Fortunately, both Miss Parker and Jarod were able to wind up the children before they did any mischief.
"While we're searching for the Deadbeat, we have to make sure that he doesn't suspect us," said Jarod, "and being this is my area of expertise, I would suggest we dress in the native costume. We'll need some extra clothes, swimming trunks, bathing suits, gaudy shirts," said Jarod.
"We're in California, not Hawaii. You've been watching that Elvis movie!"
"That is the appropriate customs for tourists and will make the Deadbeat not suspect us, but I doubt that'll help. If we were alone, we could dress in a more Princeton or severe type manner appropriate to those on a sabbatical from a University. However, even with the loud shirts, none of us, with the exception of MacLean, look the American Mid West tourist type."
"Do you think Sabbatical from University might work? Most professors are so busy at work they do not have time for the kids. Why do you think they hired nannies for, to have something to talk to? What's wrong with you?"
"So we act like academics whose babysitter is not available. We take the children to the museums, and anything intellectually simulating. We act as if we're trying to be good parents, but are rather nervous. We look at the How To Parent manual and if the children need changing, you act all flustered and nervous as if someone else did it for you. Now where's a high class clothing store that sells children's wear?" He started to look around, finally spotting one, started towards it.
Now came teaching the others to act the part. The children were elated, being Progenies, but MacLean could not see the fuss and the only higher education Miss Parker, the Centre provided by having a section set up as a Private school, and furthered the illusion by taking her on a convoluted route so she first imagined that she was driving out to the country. Later Miss Parker went outside the Centre proper and took a tour of the grounds. She soon found that the door that no one could open and when she raised her right hand above the door jam, she found a small indentation that she pressed and opened the door. It led to a hallway and the floor had recently been repaired as if something heavy about the size of the car had been there and she spotted two large heavy electrical outlets on the floor at either side of the hall. She continued down the hallway until she came to some rooms that resembled her schoolroom, entered an elevator that led her right into her Mr. Parker's office and remembered that when she was ready for college, they brought in tutors, and she had the extensive use of the library. Consequently, she had never sat on a seat in a lecture hall and listened to a Professor spouting the History of English Common Law. She had never walked by the Professors in a hallway, nor heard their manner of speech.
Jarod, having seen everything, knew how to act. In fact, he had been a Professor once. Lewison had remarked that he was a natural Chameleon, but that was not a compliment. He could not qualify for the Chameleon program just as he could not become one of their Nobility. The Centre had destroyed that chance and although Geraldo had purged it of its evil influence, no one could remove that bar chip from his skull, a chip that could detect his every move.
Now the compact that Miss Parker had was just a location device. Pressing it numerous times would not cause him to experience intense pain, nor pressing a certain code could not turn him into a robot, nor holding it a certain way, could not program his brain to accept certain commands. When the scientists under Mr. Parker's direction, invented it, they did not want their Pretender or Pretenders to do things seemingly against their will. The drugs they gave them had made the Pretender more compliant and besides the chip might paralyze them if it were more than just for identification. The Centre did not want vegetables.
The chain he wore around his neck with the crucifix, however, had something in it that would cause excruciating pain if Miss Parker got annoyed. Jarod figured it was a transmitter to all parts of his body, but he did wonder why they chose a crucifix, since although the Parkers were supposedly Catholics, he had been raised without any religious morals. He supposed that Miss Parker decided that she had better raise their children better then her father and uncle did with her. It was not because Major Charles and Margaret were also Catholics and he had been baptized. This fact he had learned from a tape between Catherine and his mother, secretly recorded by Sydney who had given it to Miss Parker after the Centre takeover. She would have destroyed it otherwise.
Deciding to use this information, Jarod figured the MacLean would be a close friend, the buffer who would try to get them to open up, and be more, as it were, human? "When we meet a Father, we say, 'Good afternoon Father,' and when we go to a restaurant and order a miniature adult meal with wine for the children, you say it is inappropriate, but not in those terms."
"And if I see a poster for a symphony concert and there's a poster for Bozoo the Clown, I say that I'll take the children to the former and you suggest the latter, Mr. MacLean." said Miss Parker.
Jarod had a field day, taking pictures of the San Bernardino museums, remarking in erudite terms, "do you know that…" and added some particular detail as to how they found the particular stones used in its construction and to which Miss Parker said something like "very interesting" but in a more snobbish tone.
In the evening, they went to an intellectually stimulating production of Shakespeare rather than to the more mundane movie production of some Spanish American kids fighting androids. MacLean, of course, did the usual protests.
Jarod noticed that MacLean kept looking at the book for references instead of watching the play, and his constant moving could be bothering the other patrons. "What's going on with you?"
"I'm looking at the explanations in this book. Now why do they call the doctors, medicals? Isn't that an adjective?"
"The terms are made so not give others a wrong impression. Medics would construe someone only with battlefield experience, healers would make one think of a female with a gift of herbs, and that would lead to shaman, meaning a tribal medicine man with the gifts of sorcery, along with the appropriate costume of feathers, beads, shaking sticks, and chants."
"Why man talk skull?" asked Jarvis, giving him a poke as they listened to the famous lines spoken by the famed Danish prince in a graveyard made possible by a few buckets with fake dirt on a floor with plaster of Paris tombstones and a mausoleum painted on a grey backgdrop with dark clouds to give a somber appearance.
Alas,
poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of
most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand
times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge
rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not
how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your
flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar?
Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
Now
get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let
her paint an inch
thick, to this favour she must
come; make her laugh at that,"
intoned the actor, his voice rising to the occasion, as he held the
skull in his hand while two other actors, dressed in variegated and
torn costumes, listened.
"Oh that's Hamlet. He's looking for evidence of his father's murder," said his father while Miss Parker gave them a stern look and shook her head. "Now be quiet. Mr. MacLean, we are superior to homo sapiens, yes even me. It would be beneath us to call us by names meant for a native tribe."
"I would see how that would confuse others." MacLean turned to another section. "Is the merging like on Star Trek?"
"No. It's supposed to keep us Favorites from killing our owners. We got a bottle of the finest wine from Lambourni afterwards. Watch the play." Jarod put his arms around Miss Parker and kept his eyes on the children who were also engrossed in the drama. He also sensed there were other Dominants in the area, since leaving Mexico, the first place they came to was California and that whenever he wanted the police to believe they disappeared, they set their houses on fire. Hide in plain site was a Dominant strategy. He thought little more of this fact, but something in his mind told him that his own kind might assist him in bringing down the Deadbeat.
