The far wall cracked and about a quarter of the potential hole in the wall fell away.

Martok did not make a very big target since he stood so short. Only his head and shoulders stuck out above the lab table, but all the same, he caught a bullet in the facemask in his cape. The cape hardened immediately and rejected the bullet, but not before the bullet pushed into his lip and he bit his own lip with his very sharp teeth. He ducked down and let out a very loud roar in his frustration. That sound caused every person in all three rooms to stop what they were doing and tremble, but Martok could not worry about that. His anger flared, and he grabbed the nearest chunk of Reichgo equipment and heaved it toward the far wall. This time the wall collapsed entirely, and Martok shot the box he saw with his laser-gun. The box had blinking lights, and those lights went out instantly. In the same instant, the three men in the next room as well as the two in the quarantined room collapsed, unconscious.

Martok ran and jumped into the quarantined room without waiting for the fire extinguishers to put out all the flames. Teacher Nancy came right on his heels. “Glen, you are not escaping me. I don’t care how strange you get.” She spoke with as much volume in her words as she could muster and still whisper. The whisper, though no longer necessary, made Martok smile at the thought and feel good about the sentiment. It abated his anger.

After a quick examination of the room, he headed straight for the box, which sat on a table in the center of the room.

David and Pickard came to join them after a moment while the others removed the brain controllers, as they were calling them. Goldman collected them and carefully to be sure he got them all. He did not want one of these scientists slipping one in a pocket for later examination.

“What is it?” David asked when he arrived.

“A computer,” Martok said, as he took off the cover to see what damage he did.

“Don’t be daft,” Pickard objected. “Computers are great big things with reels of magnetic tape and stacks of punch cards. This can’t be a computer.”

“Well.” Martok paused as he looked inside. He took a moment to put his hood down and sent his helmet back to where it came from, while he called for Mishka’s black bag. He pulled out the magnifying glass and examined some of the silicon chips to be sure he had not melted them. “Actually, this unit probably has more computing power than every computer currently working on the Earth put together; but this is only a relay system.”

“No.” The scientists arrived and did not believe what they heard.

“What are these?” One man held up what looked like a pair of headphones. Martok glanced over. There were about twenty on the table there and several unfinished ones as well.

“Brain controllers. Probably the only way Earth technology could make them, but they would have the same effect as the neck chips if worn.”

“No.” That one man seemed determined not to believe any of it.

Martok found a speaker that he could turn into a microphone. He ripped the hot wire out of his laser contraption and turned to David. “Unplug.” David ran back through the other rooms to where he could pull the plug. He brought the whole extension cord into the quarantined room while Martok wired up what he called the relay computer. When it got plugged in, he immediately rattled off a long string of numbers. Then he switched off for a minute. “Gentlemen.” He turned to face the crowd but looked at Goldman. “You need to see who else may be unconscious in this building and be sure to get all of the brain controllers removed, starting with the Director.”

“The Director?” Nancy asked. She wondered if it would be safe since Doctor Mishka appeared so concerned that they not touch him.

“He should be fine by now,” Martok said, and again, he did not add the words, I hope. “But you and David can stay with me. I will need your help.” Then he paused while the others grumpily left the room. They were certain they were going to miss something important. “Pickard.” Martok caught the man’s attention at the last minute. “Please make sure Goldman gets them all. If anything scares you, the idea of controlling people’s minds in that way should be at the top of the list.”

“Oh, it does. It is.” Pickard responded. “On this planet, we just overcame a fellow named Hitler not that long ago. I shudder to think what might have happened.”

Martok nodded and waited for them to close the door before he turned on the relay computer and spoke. “Reichgo. This is the Kairos. The Kargill will be informed concerning what you tried here. If you try it again, I will be very angry.” He switched off, began to dismantle the console and added for the two present, “They do not want to get me angry.”

“I can believe that.” David said, as he and Nancy looked around at the room for the first time. They held hands, needing the human touch at that moment. It did not take long for Martok to dismantle and break the relay computer and his makeshift laser gun so they could not be rebuilt and would yield no real information to close examination. He did slip a few pieces into Doctor Mishka’s black bag, but otherwise he left the junk where it lay. When he turned to the couple, Nancy surprised him by reaching out to touch his alien, bloody lip.

“Just blood.” Martok assured her. “We are more alike than you know, but I will be fine.” He tried to smile despite his puffy lip but decided his best option was to go away. Doctor Mishka returned. “And now there is but one more thing to do.” She turned to her bag and pulled out what looked like a bug bomb. She set it off where it would seep into the corners of all the connected rooms. She escorted David and Nancy into the hall and went to the unconnected rooms across the hall to toss something like a horse pill into each—a pill that split on contact with the floor and fogged those rooms as well.

She assured Nancy and David that the fog would not hurt the unconscious people in those rooms. “It is merely an anti-viral that should clean up any residue of the pox on the men and the equipment.” Then she smiled for her teacher before she turned to David with instructions. “Tell Goldman to collect all of the Reichgo equipment and the homemade brain controllers as well and lock them away in his own building. Tell him I will be along to collect them at some later date. Now, be sure he gets them all and everything. Please, David. There are some things the human race does not yet need to know. I only have you to depend on.”

Nancy voiced her thought. “I assume the Reichgo decided if they got the smartest minds in the nation under control, it would not be hard to get the rest.”

“Not to mention they needed those minds first because they would be the only ones bright enough to figure out how to build more controllers with the limitations of the technology.”

“It is hard to think that way,” David said. “The Labs was always years ahead of the rest of the world, but all of this makes me feel like we have not begun to learn anything yet.”

“And the scary part is realizing how close we came to being taken,” Nancy said. The others looked at her without verbalizing their questions. She got it, though, and fleshed out her thought. “We would not have known anything if Bobby Thompson had not gotten sick.”

“Quite right,” Mishka agreed. “The Reichgo might have succeeded if one of them had not had a cold.”

“Kind of H. G. Wells in reverse,” David said.

“Indeed.” Mishka spoke as a wry smile broke out on her face. “Mister Wells was a strange man, but nice in a way.” Nancy and David looked at her and then smiled at their own thoughts. Mishka spoke again. “Now I believe it is time we got back to school.”

Nancy looked quickly at her watch. “My God, David. It’s eleven-thirty. The Moms will all be showing up.” She stuck her hand out and David reached for his keys. “I have to get Glen back before his mother wonders where he is. I’ll bring the Hudson right back after we are closed up.” She reached down, picked Glen up off the floor and hugged the boy. Without realizing it or noticing, Mishka had vanished and Glen had finally been allowed to return to his own time and place. As Nancy carried him and followed David to the front door, where one of the security guards tried in vain to wake the other one, Glen put his head down on Teacher Nancy’s soft shoulder. He yawned a big yawn. It had to be his naptime.

************************

MONDAY

While Bobbi and Lockhart flew off to collect Glen (and Alice) the Vordan attacked the home base of the Men in Black. Until Monday, Happy Reading

*

Goldman, David, and Nancy kept whispering “Quiet” to the others, but these were men of science, not Special Forces operatives. They had questions, and the Princess simply could not answer them all, in part because she herself might risk endangering the future if she said too much.

“Hold it!” That word sounded a bit loud, but the room quieted for a second. “I promise I will show you all something, but first you have to promise that you will not make a sound no matter what.”

“Okay. Fine. Sure.” They were not even quiet saying that.

“Now I mean it.” The Princess reduced her own voice to a sharp whisper. “I am going to change and I don’t want to hear one peep out of any of you.”

The men all nodded, two leered, but as the Princess looked at her special friends. David, Nancy and Goldman knew what she was talking about. The others had no idea. When the Princess vanished and Martok, the Bospori came to be in her place, three men had their mouths covered by other hands, Pickard had his own hand over his own mouth, but of the two uncovered mouths, one man shrieked, and it came out rather loud. Everyone stood still. Someone knocked on the door.

“Professor Braun, everything okay in there?”

David grabbed the man and shoved him toward the door with a whisper. “Yes, yes. My hand just slipped with the screwdriver.” He wrapped Doctor Mishka’s handkerchief around Professor Braun’s hand. The men in the room quickly ducked down behind the table and equipment while Braun cracked the door. Braun looked back once, but David, who stood behind the door, nodded to encourage him.

“Yes, yes,” Braun said. “My hand just slipped with the screwdriver.” He said the line like a hack actor, but then he grinned and held up his hand wrapped with the handkerchief. There was a long pause before everyone heard the voice again.

“Okay. Just be careful.”

“Oh, I will, I will,” Braun said, and he smiled and shut the door.

They waited until they were sure the man had moved on. Martok worked the whole time, piecing a few alien and human bits of equipment together and attaching it to the laser array. He had Pickard, Braun and several others looking over his shoulder by the time he finished. “Don’t go on the stage.” Martok suggested to Braun at last. “Your acting stinks.” He turned with a smile, but there was no disguising the deep alien tone and tenor of Martok’s Bospori voice, even in a whisper, and then his eyes were also yellow and cat-like, or perhaps snake-like. Braun almost let out another shriek, but this time he bit down on his own hand, hard—the one wrapped in the handkerchief, and a few drops of blood appeared on the white linen.

“What will it do?” One man on the other side of the lab table, one who had not gotten a glimpse of those eyes, asked.

“Nothing yet. I need a power source. This equipment is all dead.”

People started to look around the room. One person picked up a Bunsen burner while another pointed to the wall outlets. Braun said, “Mmmph” through his hand and handkerchief and went to a cabinet where he pulled out fifty feet of heavy-duty outdoor extension cord.

“Good.” Martok immediately cut the end and hot-wired the cord to his contraption.

“One-ten or two-twenty?” a man asked.

“One-ten will do,” Martok said, and he nodded when he felt ready.

“But what will it do?” The same man asked the same question.

“Watch,” Martok said, and he lifted the contraption and pointed it at the wall, only to lower it again before he switched it on. “Any fire extinguishers in this room?”

One of the men grabbed one off the wall, and Braun took a small one out of a drawer while everyone backed up a giant step. They had been crowding the place where he pointed the laser. Martok lifted it again but paused and lowered it a second time as he spoke.

“You realize, I did not have time to check every circuit. I hope this thing doesn’t blow up, funny as that might be.”

Everyone took another giant step back, or two, and Martok whipped the laser up and immediately began to cut a hole in the wall. “Better than a blow torch,” he quipped, as the wallboard proved no match for the laser. Unfortunately, an old plaster wall stood under the wallboard and that took a little longer to cut, but not much. Martok felt a bit afraid that the laser might be scorching the next wall over, but he knew they were three rooms from the quarantined room and he knew it would not go that far. In all it did not take more than a minute and Martok switched off his toy. He handed it to Nancy who took it in her shaking hands and dared not move a muscle, while he stepped forward to examine his handiwork. Martok came from the Bospori world, a planet with a heavier gravity than Earth. He looked short, only stood about five-feet tall, but he weighed more than an ordinary human, being more densely built than a human, and on Earth, he was about as strong as a gorilla. In this case, all he had to do was tap the wall section and it fell away. It made a great racket in the process.

“We need to move fast.” Goldman stated the obvious while the man with the big fire extinguisher sprayed the edges of the opening to cool them so people could go through. Martok went first and noticed that the second wall had indeed been scorched. Others ran to the door to lock it in case the men outside were inclined to check out the noise. Martok found something in that room to enhance the power of the laser and it took a few seconds to work it into his contraption, but he reduced the range of the laser and went right back at it. The second wall came down faster than the first.

David ran back to the first room and pulled the plug as they had reached the end of their tether. “I hope you haven’t cut through the power lines,” he said, as he plugged it into their current room. Meanwhile, Martok studied the next wall and used his sensitive hearing to listen in. When he was sure, he turned to everyone in the room.

“Gentlemen. Nancy. They have invaded the next room so we have to be prepared for a firefight.”

“My room?” Pickard asked, knowing full well whose room it was.

“I hope we don’t damage anything vital, but we have to go through that room to reach the quarantined room. I will be cutting a little higher than normal in case Rupert is still slumped against the wall.” He paused and found one of the scientists who had served in the Navy and knew something about firearms. That man got David’s gun, over David’s objection, and he and Goldman each took a side of the lab table to give them some cover. He made everyone else go back into the last room and promise not to stick their heads into the opening in the wall. “You would be no more than rabbits in a shooting gallery, so please keep your heads down.” He turned the laser up to full power with the hope that he might cut through the wall to Pickard’s room and the wall to the quarantined room at the same time.

Martok called to the Traveler’s helmet—a Greek looking helmet with a faceplate that left two eye openings. It appeared like magic and covered his whole head, and he pulled the hood of his cloak over the helmet as well and caused the cloak to grow and come together over his mouth and nose, like he would if he walked through the desert, or got caught by a sudden snowstorm. He put goggles overall, but there was not much he could do about his eyes. He needed to see what he was doing, but in that way, he became as protected as possible from any bullets that might come in his direction.

He touched the on switch and a brilliant flash of light flared once and went out. Martok let out a few words in his alien tongue and banged his makeshift laser on the lab table. Immediately, it flared up again, and this time, with the enhancements, it made very short work of the wall. It also started the wall on fire in several places and that might be a problem if they could not get to it quickly.

“Ready?” Martok asked his gunmen, but he did not wait for an answer. He picked up an engine casing, something too heavy for a human to lift, and chucked it at the wall. It exploded the wall and caused the three men in that room to jump back. Goldman got off the first shot and miraculously caught one of the men in the shoulder despite all the rubble that flew through the air. Then one of the men returned fire, and the navy man realized it was his turn. He did not hit anything, but then the bullets flew. Martok ignored it all. He had picked up another smaller, but more solid piece of equipment, one about the size of an oversized softball and he threw it as hard as he could for the far wall while he prayed that the laser had cut that far.