Note: Partway through this chapter, Tank listens to "Enter Sandman" by Metallica. If you want to hear the same version of the song on YouTube, look for the music video or the version with just the lyrics, not the live version.
Chapter 7: Appendix A
The party was over.
From the base of the spruce tree, the families of the departing students emerged with their luggage. As organizers of the party, the Tanglefoot family was there as well, to make sure this last step went smoothly. Squirrel and dove parents scrambled to get everything arranged (they were not helped by the fact that the nearby street light was out), and the students dealt with many tearful goodbyes from the family members not coming along on the trip. Herbie, as a veteran of such a trip, was asked multiple questions from sophomores and their parents about flying on an airplane and how to deal with the "dreaded jetlag".
Isabel Chestnutt stood next to her neatly organized pile of luggage, her daughter Beth's hand grasped firmly in her own. She looked around the crowd for Tammy, who had disappeared from the party earlier, but had not been found in the family's apartment. Her search ended with a cry from above.
"Good bye!" drifted down a voice. "Have a great time!" Looking up, the Chestnutts, Herbie, and a few others saw Tammy on a branch far overhead waving at them.
Isabel put her hands on her hips. "You take care of yourself, young lady, you hear me!" she cried.
Beth swiftly crawled up her mother to get on her shoulders. "Bye, Tammy!" she screamed, even louder than necessary. "I love you!"
"You, too, Beth!" replied Tammy after a pause.
Professor Hoppernickel looked up at a large clock mounted next to the bus stop located under the spruce tree. "Hurry! We only have a few minutes!"
It's rather rare for animals to travel using human conveyances, but they have a few tricks to employ when they do. Those going on the trip climbed into a ventilated plastic box labeled "Careful - Live Animals" and addressed to a lab in Uttar Pradesh, India. The box appeared to be a standard animal carrier, with a fake lock on the outside, while inside it resembled the inside of a small-animal scale airplane, complete with comfortable and secure chairs and a mechanism for opening the box.
As Herbie and the other animals left, a human bus pulled up to the stop and the driver got out to load the box for the first stage of its journey. Most of the remaining squirrels and doves re-entered the tree to begin the climb up the stairs to their apartments. The more adventurous squirrels climbed up the bark of the tree, while the stronger doves flew up into the moonless night, circling the tree in a corkscrew pattern. Among those preparing to take the latter course was the Tanglefoot family, despite complaints by Herb.
"So, son," he said, putting a wing around his younger son. "Now that you're back from school, what say you put your book learning to use building an elevator in this tree?"
Herbie looked up the trunk of the tall tree incredulously. "I don't know..." he said. "I guess it's doable. Maybe with Gadget's help..."
Herb's shoulders slumped. "Never mind," he muttered.
Tank smirked. "You know, you will have to introduce yourself to her at some point."
"Come along!" entreated Binkie, before taking to the sky.
Herbie winced as the dead streetlight he was looking at suddenly came back to life. He spotted a fly speeding away from the light, possibly Zipper, but he couldn't be sure. The dove made sure his chest pocket was fastened shut before following his family into the air. As he caught up, he found that his mother had been commenting on the party in mid-air.
"...and besides," she said, "what were the Rescue Rangers doing making a speech anyway? We didn't ask to know who their newest member was."
Herbie rolled his eyes. "Enough, Mum. Please, just give it a break."
This of course had no effect on Binkie's tirade. "And Tammy - wasn't she supposed to be the guest of honor? I figured she would have been there for that speech, but she skipped out on her own party!"
Herbie was about to reply, when he suddenly remembered a moment two years ago, when a frustrated Tammy was about to drop out of the Academy because of slipping grades.
"I'm going to fight through this, Herbie," she told him, "because if I don't graduate I don't see how I can ever be a deserving Rescue Ranger."
"Rescue Ranger fan," Herbie had corrected her.
"Yes...Rescue Ranger fan."
Herbie had a sudden suspicion of what Tammy was probably up to with her plotting tonight. He hoped she wasn't too disappointed.
After what seemed an eternity to Herbie with his mother's prattling, the family finally reached their home in the tree canopy. Waiting for them on their front porch was Tammy. She had her Rescue Ranger scrapbook in her lap and was idly turning the pages.
Now a dove home in the spruce tree was much different from a squirrel home. The doves preferred living out in the open, letting the foliage take the place of the squirrel's round walls. Only their living quarters and a little bit of storage space were enclosed in bubbles carved out of the larger branches. This made the Tanglefoot porch a stand-alone structure, two steps up, a few steps across, and another two steps back down again. The porch served four vital functions. It was a marker of where their property began on those rare occasions when anybody cared. Second, it was a place to put the barbecue. Third, it was a place to sit and gossip. And fourth...
Herb triumphantly crossed over the porch into the space "inside" it (differing in no way from the space "outside" it). "I'm home!" he proclaimed, hooking thumbs into the corners of his shirt and inflating his chest with pride. "Home, sweet home!"
"You know you always look like a pigeon when you do that," observed Herbie, but only Tammy appeared to notice what he had said. Tank deliberately bumped him on the way to his room. Almost immediately, the sinister opening chords of a heavy metal song emerged from Tank's portable radio, eventually followed by raspy lyrics: "Say your prayers, little one. Don't forget, my son, to include everyone."
Binkie was not going to ignore Tammy's presence, however. "Well, good evening, Miss Chestnutt," she said.
"Good evening," Tammy said, standing up.
Herb turned around. "Well, are you going to stay out there all night?"
"Herb's right," agreed Binkie, putting her planned grilling of Tammy off until later. "You must come inside. You'll catch your death of cold."
Tammy looked in confusion back and forth between the two sides of the porch. "Well, I don't mean to stay long."
"You just want to talk with Herbie, hmm? You two sure talk a lot. Well, I'll fix you both some lemonade. Come along and help me, Herbie."
Herbie silently followed his mother into their home. There they carried out private conversations that Tammy couldn't help but overhear, since there were no walls to block them.
"When are you going to ask her out?" was the first thing out of Binkie's mouth when they reached the kitchen.
"Mother!" Switching tacks, Herbie asked, "Weren't you just complaining about her behavior at the party?"
"She's a young woman. She's allowed to be contrary."
In the "front room", Herb turned the switch on a portable television set, and groaned loudly when nothing happened. He turned the TV around, removed the rechargeable battery from its back, then marched over to Tank's room and opened the door.
"Exit light! Enter night!" proclaimed Tank's stereo.
"Hey! Doesn't anybody knock?"
Herb grumbled, closed the door, and knocked.
"Yes?"
Herb opened the door ("Take my hand. We're off to Never-Never Land!"), reached out, and claimed the battery powering Tank's radio.
"Hey!"
"The TV battery's dead. Can't expect me to miss my shows now, do you?"
"Really, Dad," Herbie said as his father walked past, "that TV seems to have taken over all your entertainment. I can't remember the last time I saw you reading anything."
"I read the TV Guide!" Herb said, walking past his son without looking and immediately installing the fresh battery. "Did you read the article about the barbeque recipes of the stars? I've got to try out one or two of those."
"I stand corrected," Herb said dryly. Tank meanwhile took the dead battery over to a treadmill that Gadget had converted into a battery charger and got to work.
Binkie walked by with two glasses of lemonade on a tray. She walked onto the porch, deposited the glasses on a small table formed out of a chewed-off branch next to Tammy, and turned to return to the kitchen as Herbie sat down across from Tammy. "Don't mind us," she told Tammy. "We're going to bed anyway."
"What was that?" asked Herb. "I couldn't hear you because you were outside."
Binkie leaned over so her head was now "inside". "I said we're going to bed. It's quite late."
"Don't anybody move!" said the voice on the television. "I've got you all surrounded, single-handed! This is a shakedown!"
Herb pointed at the set and pouted. "You heard what Barney Flute said! We have to stay and watch the episode."
Binkie walked in by the "door" of the porch, turned and walked to the TV, and switched it off.
"Aw," said Herb, deflating.
Bink took his wing and led him like a child to their bedroom. "Bed, Tank," she said to their elder son as they passed.
"Aw, but..."
"You can charge the battery tomorrow. Besides, don't you have football practice tomorrow morning?"
"Wait, isn't school out?" asked a befuddled Herb.
"Hush," said Binkie.
"Yeah, practice!" said Tank, warming to the idea. He punched one balled-up wing into the other, giving Herbie a look that told him that he would be the victim of "tackle practice" at least once tomorrow, before returning to his room.
Herbie groaned. Tammy shook her head. "Isn't it great to be back home again?" she asked with a grin.
A few minutes passed while the two graduates silently drank their lemonades. Then Tammy reached across the table and took Herbie's wings in her hands.
"Herbie, be honest with me - do you think I'm a good fan?"
Herbie's brain froze. "Ah, well, that is...there's all kinds of fans...you're what I'd call an 'active fan'."
Tammy took back her hands. "And you're very much in the 'passive' category. You're the kind of fan I wish I could be, Herbie, you know that? You know everything about the Rangers, but you always remember to tell everyone about the things the Rangers want everybody to know about, and keep quiet about the rest. When they need help, you're there, and when they need some space to do their work, you're nowhere to be seen.
"I've been looking through the clippings," she continued, gesturing at the scrapbook beside her, "and I spotted myself in seven different photographs, twice nearly stealing attention from the Rescue Rangers. You're nowhere to be seen, exactly as a fan should be."
"There's nothing wrong with being enthusiastic, Tammy. I might spend the rest of my life as nothing more than a fan, but you stand a good chance to become a freelance detective someday. Do you remember the time we were looking for Professor Dottmeyer's lost beetle?"
"Yeah, that was fun."
"You were amazing, Tammy. I don't think even Chip would have tracked Bubbie down as fast as you did. And don't say it was luck. You've got an eye for detail, if you don't let yourself get carried away with preconceptions, like on the class trip."
"Well, that's just it, isn't it? I'm always letting myself get carried away. I tried to join the Rangers tonight, Herbie. The Rescue Rangers! What was I thinking? I'm nowhere near their class. Okay, maybe I found a beetle and some jewelry..."
"...and the Lost Tribe of the Huachi."
"Will you quit bringing that up? The fact is, I'm not what a Ranger fan is supposed to be. I trip up the Rangers when they are working, invite myself to their picnics, and try to act like Gadget's long-lost baby sister and play 'what's this do?' with her inventions all summer. I don't even know why she puts up with me the way she does."
"I don't think Gadget minds, Tammy. I think the two of you have something in common."
Tammy shrugged. "I guess. The only reason I haven't locked myself in my closet for the rest of the summer is because I found out about Foxglove being added before I had the chance to make an even bigger fool of myself than usual."
"So they don't know you were planning on joining?"
"No, and I hope they never find out."
"So, what are you going to do now?" Herbie asked. "It's too late to join the trip."
"Well," replied Tammy, "I guess I just have to continue to be the best fan I can be this summer, and try not to be so annoying."
"As long as we're on the subject of fandom, would you like to see that letter I got this morning?"
"Sure. Just to make it official: as president of the Rescue Ranger Fan Club, I hereby call this extraordinary meeting to order. Secretary Herbie, please present the only order of business."
Herbie paused for a moment in his unfolding of the notepaper he had removed from his chest pocket to give Tammy a confused look, then adjusted his glasses and began reading:
To President Tamara Chestnutt and Secretary Herbert Tanglefoot, Jr.:
My name is Alison, and I would like to join your club.
I found out about the Rescue Rangers five years ago, when they saved my friend Ptolemy from a gruesome fate. At the time, nobody believed me.
You can just imagine my excitement, then, when this morning Ptolemy showed me the minutes of your first meeting, which he had obtained at the public library. I am writing this letter in response to the call for new members, regardless of species.
"It appears that our decision to send that out to every animal library in the state has come back to haunt us," Herbie interjected.
"I don't see why you should be upset about it," replied Tammy.
"Wait until you hear the rest," Herbie said, before continuing:
Is the offer still good? I noticed that the report was from three years ago. Is there still a Rescue Ranger Club, and if so, are you still taking new members? I live rather far away and I suspect a meeting in person would not go so well, so perhaps I could be more of a pen pal member? There was no mention of membership dues in the minutes, but just to be safe, I have enclosed an acorn and some birdseed.
Tammy laughed. "I do believe that Alison is attempting to bribe the judges!"
"I'm afraid the acorn didn't survive the rigors of the avian postal service intact," Herbie said seriously. "As for the seed, if the mailbird didn't eat it, Tank did."
If everything is agreeable, you can send me meeting minutes at my address below, and I'll reply with my thoughts and anything regarding the Rangers I've found on my own. As an example, you will find my response to that first meeting on the second page of this letter. If you agree to this unusual request, I must insist that any correspondence be addressed directly to myself and using the acronym of your group on the envelope rather than the full name, as I would rather that my family did not know about this.
Regardless of your decision, I would like to thank the two of you for creating a fan club for a great group of heroes like the Rescue Rangers.
Sincerely,
Alison Worthington, age 13
Harmony Farm
Lisbon, NY
"Would you like me to continue on with the second page, Miss President, or is page one enough for you to render a render a verdict on this application?" Herbie asked facetiously.
"Can you summarize it?" Tammy asked.
"Well, we covered the 'Risky Beesness' case for about ten minutes in that first meeting, as you may recall, and that's all that Miss Worthington's notes are about. Speculation about the size of Queenie's hive, the harmonics used in Irwina Allen's invention, that sort of thing."
Tammy nodded. "As I suspected. Yes, I think she would make a good member."
"Are you sure?" Herbie asked. "You do know what she is, don't you?"
"Of course I do," replied Tammy, smiling, "although I think you've come to a different conclusion than I did. Let's review the facts:
"We can see that the letter was run through a copier machine, probably to change its size. She states that a meeting in person would be a bad idea, and she doesn't want her family to know that she's dealing with us. And finally, she lives on Harmony Farm. What do you conclude from that?"
"I conclude that Alison Worthington is a human. A Speaker with a pet named Ptolemy who doesn't know the Rules."
"On the contrary, it's equally obvious that she is a honeybee, probably a royal daughter of a queen bee, with Ptolemy a young drone. I believe I saw a human selling jars of Harmony Farm brand honey at a farmer's market outside the Academy a few weeks ago. The case of Queenie notwithstanding, insects and small mammals have never gotten along very well, hence her desire not to visit and simultaneously not to tell her family that she follows the doings of us furry/feathered creatures."
"I'm not convinced."
"We can always ask the Rangers if they ever had a bee-related case in upper New York State before doing anything."
"Agreed."
"Besides, even if she were a human, there are a few of them that can be trusted. The Rangers, for example, have two human FBI agents that they trust, named 'Mulder' and 'Scully'."
Trying to change the subject, Herbie pulled his prize out of his chest pocket. "Speaking of seeing the Rangers, Gadget will be putting on a quite interesting scientific demonstration tomorrow. I think you should come along and see it."
"Yes, you told me about that earlier," said Tammy. "So, what exactly is she demonstrating?"
"Making contact with alternate universes." Herbie said this cautiously, watching Tammy intently to see how she'd react.
"Comic book territory?" asked Tammy incredulously.
Herbie shrugged slightly. "I can't fault Gadget's mathematics, but it contradicts the conventional wisdom. Physicists have known for some time now that on the subatomic level, everything is pleuripotent: anything that can happen, does happen, all at the same time. If you point a single photon of light so it can go through either of two slits with a fifty-percent probability, it will go through both at once, like it split in half. Only when that photon has to interact with the outside world is it forced, after the fact, to have gone through one or the other."
Tammy nodded. "'Quantum weirdness', right?"
"Yes. Physicists have spent decades trying to make sense of this, but essentially, they only have two possible explanations. The 'Many Worlds Hypothesis' states that every one of the possible outcomes actually occurs, but in an alternate universe. There's a universe where the photon goes right, and one where it goes left. This would mean that there are an infinite number of universes out there: one where Columbus never discovered America, one where the Tungunska Comet was really the vanguard of an alien armada, one where we never formed the Rescue Rangers Fan Club, even one where you have one more hair on your head than you do right now. Since every imaginable outcome must be represented, including universes operating on completely different sets of physical laws, Lewis Carroll's Wonderland is probably floating out there in one of those universes. Most physicists reject this theory.
"Instead, they follow the 'Copenhagen Interpretation', which states that all of the various possible outcomes mash into each other at the moment of observation to become the outcome that we see. Since each event has only one outcome, there is no longer a need for multiple universes. The physicist Richard Feynman had a method for determining the outcome for this scenario, called 'sum of histories'..."
"'Sum of histories'?" asked Tammy. "I think I had to do that in my Advanced Physics class. Is it the one where you plot out all the possible outcomes along with their probabilities on a sheet of graph paper, then add up the vectors?"
"Yeah, that's the one."
"Well, every time I did it, the probabilities added up to more than one hundred percent."
"You made a mistake."
"That's what the teacher said. But maybe it added up to more than a hundred percent because there's more than one universe."
"Um, I don't think it works that way. Probabilities can't add up to more than a hundred percent."
"Can you prove it?" taunted Tammy, leaning forward.
This flustered Herbie. "It's simple math!"
"But can you prove it?"
"Look, I'll check out my textbooks tonight, and I'll get you your proof tomorrow. Deal?" He held out his wing.
She shook it. "Deal. So I take it that Gadget belongs to the 'Many Worlds' camp?"
"She does, but not merely by choice. You see, back in February, the Rangers tried to stop Professor Nimnul from invading another universe." He told Gadget the story that Chip and Dale had reenacted at the party. "That device failed, but Gadget found that Nimnul's device for spying on alternate universes actually worked. Gadget thinks that Nimnul did not make the viewer, but instead found it in a government warehouse."
"What happened to Nimnul?" Tammy asked.
"When his machine failed, he totally lost it, and was thrown in the nut house."
Tammy glared at him over the nut reference.
"Oh, sorry, insane asylum."
"Apology accepted."
"He's been there ever since. Anyway, Gadget thinks that the DV (Dimensional Viewer) was originally built for spying - you set the device to pick up somebody's brainwaves, and then the machine would show you everything they were looking at, no matter where in the world they were.
"At some point somebody figured out that you could adjust more than just which subject you were spying on. You could also tune in the brainwaves of the subject's counterpart in any one of thousands of other universes."
"Does Gadget explain how this works?"
"That's where String Theory comes in. String Theory is an attempted 'Theory of Everything' that makes tiny vibrating strings the basic building block of the universe. The theory is really complicated, and so far impossible to prove.
"Gadget took the metaphor of the strings vibrating like musical instruments and made it literal, applying theories of harmonics to explain how different strings interact with each other. She claims that there is a fundamental 'overtone' produced by the combined vibrations of every string in the universe, and that alternate universes have slightly different overtones.
"The DV, in Gadget's view, modulates the brain waves it picks up, changing the overtone. Once that is done, you are no longer looking at the thoughts of somebody in this universe, but the thoughts of that someone's counterpart in another universe. At least, I think that is what she's saying - Gadget's logic was rather hard to follow."
"You're doing a lot better at following 'Gadget-think' than I ever could," said Tammy. "So, Gadget gets her hands on this device, plugs it in..."
"You can't run it on conventional electricity - it interferes with the signal. You have to use a tremendous amount of static electricity. In short, lightning storms. The Rangers must have been traveling to every thunderstorm for hundreds of miles around for Gadget to pick up the data she's used in her paper."
"So, what did she find?"
"She found lots of different universes, each of them with counterparts for the Rescue Rangers and Foxglove. She has a chart at the back listing the 36 universes most different from our own. She named this earth 'Earth-1', and the others are numbered from 'Earth-3' to 'Earth-37'. She spent most of her study on 'Earth-A', the one Nimnul was studying."
"Why does 'Earth-A' get a different kind of name than the rest?"
"That was Dale's idea." Herbie flipped through the paper until he found the passage he was looking for, which he read out loud. "'My colleague Dale suggested the name for this universe, on the theory that if members of 'Earth-1' and 'Earth-2' ever met, they might get into a fight over which universe gets to be called 'Earth-1', so we agreed to call this world 'Earth-A'. I did not inform him about the names given to the other universes, as I did not have 35 other alphabets/numbering schemes from which to extract the first member."
"Sounds like 'Dale-think' to me. What's 'Earth-A' like?"
"Weird. Lots more colors, several additional physical laws, and what Gadget calls 'true three-dimensionality'. She made some pictures of Rescue Ranger counterparts in Universe-A." He pulled out the loose photographs Gadget had given him and handed them to Tammy.
Like Professor Hoppernickel, she turned the pictures around several different ways, to reach a similar lack of results. "Nope, I can't see a thing with these, although they do seem familiar somehow. Maybe you need special glasses or something."
Herbie handed her the notes. "Gadget claimed to be able to understand them. Claimed they made a lot more sense in motion. She also thought that all of the animals on Earth-A were feral."
"What, all of them?" Tammy asked incredulously.
"All of the counterparts the Rangers were able to observe were feral, and they never saw any signs of sentient animals. Not one Caretaker. Gadget was very sure on this point."
"No Caretakers...I can't imagine any civilization of sentients allowing ferals to fend entirely for themselves," Tammy said reluctantly, turning back to the notes. "Gadget certainly is thorough," she said after flipping through the pages and seeing the frequent tables and charts. She stopped near the end. "Here's that chart you were talking about. 'Appendix B: A Brief Survey of Nearby Universes'" she read aloud. "Wow! I bet Dale loved this one where everyone was half robot. Hm...there's a footnote: 'Labeled "Borg Earth" by my colleague Dale'. I should have known."
"I wonder who watched that episode of Star Trek first?" asked Herbie. "Was it Gadget or Dale?"
"Gadget. I was visiting at the time. But Dale was the one who really got into it."
"Makes sense. I wouldn't put it past Gadget to make a working model of a warp-drive."
Tammy opened her mouth for a moment to say something, then thought better and closed it - she had promised Gadget never to tell another living soul, after all. "Wait," she said, changing the subject, "if this is Appendix B, what's Appendix A?"
Herbie took back the paper, then looked around to see if any doves were still up at this hour. "Um," he whispered conspiratorially, "I'm not sure you should see Appendix A."
"Why not?" she whispered back.
After some hesitation, he showed her the section's title.
"'Appendix A'" she read aloud, "'Signs That Earth-A Is...'" Her eyes bugged out. "She did not write that." She grabbed the paper from Herbie and checked again. "Yes, she did." In a barely audible voice she read, "'Signs That Earth-A Is The Real World.'" She put the paper down with an awed expression.
"That's the Great Heresy, isn't it?" asked Herbie, still keeping his voice down. "The belief that this world isn't real, that we were all invented by some human in the 'Real World' for the sole purpose of entertaining human children." He looked up uneasily into the sky, as if he expected to see a vast audience of young humans up there watching his every move.
Belief in the Great Heresy was almost as old as animal sentience, and it had always been an obstacle to its advancement. After all, if this universe only exists to entertain children, why bother to do anything serious with your life? Not to mention the possibility that boring your "Audience" might have fatal consequences. Even among its believers, the Great Heresy was always spoken of in whispers; for fear that the Creator might be insulted that his creations were "breaking the fourth wall." It was only in the last couple hundred years that the majority of sentient animals had gotten past the problem of the Great Heresy, by pretending that nobody had ever thought up that unpleasant idea.
"You know," said Tammy, "my great uncle was institutionalized for saying what you just said out loud, and that was only forty years ago." She looked down at the notes in her hands. "There is no way she's going to be able to publish this."
"Well, she could always leave Appendix A out."
"Wait, I want to see why she thinks the Writer lives on Earth-A," she said, skimming through the section. Stopping suddenly, she stabbed emphatically at the page with a finger. "Did you see this? Did you see this? She says the Rescue Rangers have their own cartoon show on Earth-A. Foxglove's counterpart is a pet bat owned by a human who once saw an episode of the Rescue Ranger's own cartoon. That's amazing!" She thought about this some more. "But a cartoon? Don't the Rescue Rangers deserve live action? I wonder if I'm in any episodes?"
Herbie smirked. "I wouldn't be surprised if you were in the series: you'd show up as a background character seven times..."
"...and nearly steal the show twice. Funny, Herbie, funny. I wonder what kind of commercials the kids get when the Rangers are not doing anything interesting. I'd hate to think that all this time their lives were being sponsored by Hungry-Hungry Hippos. 'Buy our game, kids, or the Rescue Rangers ceases to exist!'" Amazingly, Tammy managed to say that with a straight face, like it was something she had often pondered on sleepless nights. She looked down for a moment at the papers in her hands. "Do you mind if I borrow these tonight, for a little midnight reading? I don't exactly relish having the apartment all to myself."
Herbie nodded. "Go right ahead. Gadget said that she would have the power problem fixed tomorrow morning. Hopefully you'll be caught up on her theory when we visit the Rangers and try the viewer out ourselves."
Tammy smiled as she tucked the papers and photographs into her Rescue Ranger scrapbook. "You actually want to try it? Who's the 'active fan' now?"
"I have my reasons," Herbie said mysteriously.
Tammy raised an eyebrow, then frowned when Herbie refused to explain himself. "I've got my own reasons for visiting the Rangers tomorrow, as a matter of fact. I'll tell you about them if you will walk me back to my place."
Herbie bowed formally and presented his wing. "It would be my honor, Madame."
A few minutes later, Tammy finished her tale of the Ranger's encounter with Winifred by pointing at the Ranger Tree. "...and they are keeping a watch for her return all night."
Herbie looked at the tree, where a single light was on in the window next to the entrance and a face with binoculars could be seen observing the ground below. Walking over to the edge of the branch outside the Chestnutt apartment, both Herbie and Tammy leaned over for a look themselves, but there were no signs of any humans on the paths.
When Herbie turned, Tammy was looking into his eyes. "Then there's the matter of the Rangers' mysterious memory loss," she said. "It appears to be quite serious."
"Yes, I observed that myself tonight. I'm sort of surprised something like this hasn't happened to them before."
Tammy was confused. "What do you mean?"
"Bacteriological warfare. Knowing Nimnul, I wouldn't put that sort of thing past him. After all the times he was defeated, surely he must have some sort of final ace up his sleeve, a Doomsday Scenario that would activate if he was ever put away for good. Well, the Rangers put Nimnul away for good in February, and now his delayed revenge is taking effect. If that's the case, losing their memories will just be the beginning."
Now Tammy was shocked. "Wh-where would you come up with something like that?"
"I dunno," Herbie replied, shaking his head. "Just...forget I said anything, OK? The Rangers are probably just tired or something."
Tammy wondered briefly exactly what kind of childhood Herbie's elder brother had put him through to put those kinds of thoughts in his head. "Well," she said, finally, "here we are at my front door. Good night, Herbie. I'll see you around eight?"
"Sounds good," Herbie agreed, blinking rapidly.
They stood there rather awkwardly for a moment.
"So, um, would now be a good time to tell me whatever it was you wanted to tell me?" Herbie asked.
Tammy sighed. "As good a time as any. You see, for the last three years..."
She was interrupted by the sound of a distant clock tolling midnight. At the third strike, night suddenly flashed into day for a tenth of a second.
