“I know this man!” says Martell Mandell out loud. She couldn’t help it. “Fieldon!” she tacked on, thinking about 300, thinking about a lot of other stuff. Like time and space shifts. She begins to prepare for telling her alien boss, Abbey Abdominator, about the discovery. “We *must* investigate,” he says back to her in a daydream. Hopefully her imagination turns out to be correct.
—–
“There! Told you!”
“Just because it’s a New Jersey substation of Nautilus and just because he likes to wear grey doesn’t mean he’s the same guy, Martell,” says Abs back to her upon seeing the “proving,” remotely taken photo in his mind. “I’m Grey. If I were standing in front of, say, a New Jersey welcome sign would you also think I was Harry, hmm? Besides, he denied he was Harry — said he was instead Jerry. I read the report you sent me. I’m not that detached from my position here at Star Team Interplanetary.”
—–
“If only Collagesity were still around,” she lamented while they looked at another photo she’d found in the Archive, hope waning.
“If only we could follow this probable route still up Highway 13 and down Highway 14 around and around…”
“Wizard,” says Abs to this. “Cube.” Her world turned inside out. And the Grey was the Man on top. Superior. *Not* a humbug.
“Look around, Martell. Where do you think you are? They are appearing all over the place. We have a way to go back *now*.”
“The… Void?” she answered, hallucinating the past. Shirley?
Still sharing her pictures, Abbey sensed a discrepancy between red-violet and yellow-green. These were not the same cubes. “No. Not The Void, Martell. I’ve changed my mind. We’ll go back to Nautilus… Jersey. But in that special way like we did before. And heading in backwards just for kicks.” Maybe that will solve the discrepancy I sense, he says to himself.
Sunklands 