9

Paperwork be damned, they threw everything they had at her. In photos they noticed an odd shimmer or blur behind Amanda that was barely discernable to the naked eye. The camera specially designed to capture auras showed only a prismatic blur. Ray's goggles picked up the faint shadow or whatever it was that seemed to outline or follow her. Her image beneath the electrode-bearing helmet showed only a normal, living, human female…but the normally intense colors were faded as though the signal they transmitted was weak. The EMF meter was all over the board, so all they learned from it was that the girl existed but seemed electromagnetically unstable. Likewise, the ion meter was unable to settle on a simple average reading in her presence.

Finally Egon returned to the Zener cards. The deck featured five each of five designs, simple black line depictions on a pristine white field: a five-pointed star, a plus sign or equal-armed cross, a square, a circle, and a set of three wavy lines side by side that Ray like to think of as water and Peter referred to as bacon.

Dr. Spengler had already explained to her how he would set the top card from the deck facedown between them, and then she should tell him what she thought it showed either by guess or through concentration.

He sat expectantly across from her, a notepad balanced on his thigh beyond her sight, a pen at the ready. She stared at the card for a while, glanced up into his eyes and smiled shyly, then furrowed her brow as she considered. Finally she told him softly, "Butterfly."

Egon's mouth twisted to one side. He wanted to explain to her that butterflies were not one of the choices, but decided to see what she had identified as such anyway. Perhaps it was the star or the plus sign…. He reached forward, lifted the card and stared at it. His features fell. He turned the card for a look at the back, to make certain it had come from the same deck. When Amanda glimpsed the line drawing of a butterfly on it, she clapped her hands with pleasure. Frowning, the man lifted the remainder of the deck and fanned it in his large, long-fingered hands, reassuring himself that each depicted a star, a square, a plus, a circle, or bacon. Watching his subject, he shuffled anew and pulled the top card to place neatly between them.

Amanda leaned forward over her crossed arms, bright-eyed and smiley at the game she thought they were playing. "Car," she announced.

Egon's thick brows knitted. He lifted the edge of the card for a peek underneath. There was a neat line drawing of a Passat on it. He let his gaze slide to the side, then withdrew the card from the table and set it to the side. When she correctly identified the next one as a kitten, he studied the deck again. They remained Zener cards…aside from the butterfly, the car and the kitten.

Raymond had been observing from behind Egon, leaning against a counter. He sauntered forward, drew a card and glanced at it quickly. He asked, "What is it?"

"Bologna," she said, grinning with mirth.

"Ah-ha!" he exclaimed. "Wrong!" Then dropped the sandwich he was holding instead of a card.

Peter's jaw dropped and Winston looked like he thought it high time he armed himself with a proton pack—just in case.

Ray toed the sandwich. The white bread parted, revealing a smear of mayo on the sliced meat.

"What is she?" Peter asked breathlessly. "Is she…is she a genie?"

Egon fixed him with a dubious stare.

He shrugged. "Just askin'."

Ray stepped around the sandwich to approach the table. "If I said I wanted…split hooves and goat's horns-"

"No, no, no, no, no!" cried Peter, chuckling uneasily. "Amanda, if I said I wanted to party with fifty Playboy bunnies-"

"Peter," interrupted Egon, shaking his head.

"Where's the harm in that?"

"The harm is that there are too many stories where things like that go horribly wrong somehow."

"Like The Monkey's Paw," said Ray.

Said Pete, "I wasn't gonna ask her for a monkey's paw."

"I think I remember an incident…many years ago…where this little boy…he could, like, do anything he wanted, and he made his family watch the same TV shows over and over and if he got mad, he'd banish you to a nearby cornfield. Forever."

Winston scowled. "Ray, that's an episode of The Twilight Zone."

Peter clapped his hands, capturing everyone's attention, then rubbed them together briskly as he neared the girl. "Can you make all the PKE meters work again?"

The teen looked puzzled for a moment, then shrugged and nodded. Egon blinked and Ray shrugged while Winston went to retrieve one. He returned with all of them and they worked fine…until Ray pointed one in the girl's direction. He sighed. Peter snatched it from him and pointed it in the opposite direction. "Let me turn it off. Then I'll just turn it back on again," he said slowly and pointedly. It worked just as he'd hoped it would.

"Intriguing," murmured Spengler. Louder, he asked, "What are you?"

The girl shrugged. "Quasar."

"Quasar?" echoed Stantz.

Winston asked, "Isn't that some kind of a space anomaly?"

Wondered Ray, "Maybe it's a military code word or designation." He bent toward the girl. "Are you the property of or work with or for the United States government or that of any other country?"

Peter swooped in to squeeze her shoulders between his hands and laughed. "Right now she belongs to us!"

Egon said, "I wonder…what she has to do with the containment unit?"

"You want her to refill it?"

"No, Peter. But…perhaps if she could restore things to the way they were before…."

"Monkey paw," warned Winston.

"Aw, C'mon, guys! You find me a new toy and then you won't even let me play with it!"

"Especially you," Egon mentioned to Peter, who rolled his eyes.

Ray's eyes went wide. "Guys. Do you hear that?"

They all froze, listening.

"Phone!" he said, scampering off to answer it.

Said Winston, "What if she has nothing to do with the containment unit?"

"Oh, we don't need that," Peter gushed, bending to give the girl a more affectionate squeeze. "We have Amanda now!"

"But what if she is somebody's property? What if they're looking for her right now?"

"Then we make our wishes fast before they come for her."

"I believe more testing is in order before-"

"Egon, if we didn't keep preventing you from testing everything, you'd have starved to death years ago."

"That was just a phase," the tall, bespectacled man muttered.

"I think we should find out where she belongs and get her back there," Winston said. "Then we'll deal with whatever other strange phenomena is going on here."

Egon said, "I suspect her presence is linked to the containment unit…and probably also the fact that we weren't able to detect anything out of the ordinary at that apartment building earlier."

Pete stood, one hand roughly massaging the girl's right trapezius muscle. "So…you think…she's like ghost repellent?"

The four were silent while that sank in.

Finally, Egon said, "I sometimes imagine what it might be like to return to a university setting."

Winston grumbled, "Guess I could always go back to construction work."

Peter hugged the girl from behind. "And we could be a hit on late-night TV!"

Before anyone could protest, Ray yelled, "Got one, guys, and it sounds like a big deal!"

Peter asked, "Ghost repellent?"

"While I'd love the chance to experiment further," Egon told him, "I think for now we should take care of the jobs that we're paid for."

"Amen," concluded Winston.

"But, we're bringing her, right? We are, aren't we?"