The Third Day, Between Pages Six and Seven, Second Attempt
“Well, well, well! There’s a how-do-you-do — if it isn’t the world famous Duckeroo Bonsai, Himself!” blurted Rhodólphos KosmiKomikon from behind a panel of humming steel gadgetry, replete with blinking lights, enumerated dials, hissing hydraulics and wildly fanning meter needles.
“The Man with a universe in his head and his head up his ass.” Sitting hick in the corner, hidden by a beetle-eaten thatch hat, a lone piece of straw jutting from her lips, Lorelei Nosegay launched a spitball of tobacco tar at the dusty ground littered with rat pellets, horseshoes and iron nails. She pushes off the ground to stand aggressively breast-to-breast with Jeronathon, a tissue-bulging scar squiggling down the left side of her face where an eye used to be. “You remember us?”
— It is a curious thing to ask of the eraser what the pencil has once written. If I look at a map, I can read stories of geography and geometry, but only the mad blind bat would know the relief of how Earth feels from outer space. Show Me who you are.
As Jeronathon speaks, cherubim play coronet in the sanctified art worlds of the Renaissance into the new ear of a God.
Through a haze of hookah smoke, “Only the blind know how the earth feels from outer space,” Guy Barfly coughs, “and only You knew how to slip between the gears of Armageddon and return unscathed and unaltered, by Jove!” He manages a frantic hand wave to disperse the fog. His merlot velvet jacket is tattered in places, both waist pockets torn and dangling. Pomade gel streaks arrow through Guy’s detailed hair and must be responsible for the dramatic curl in his mustache.
With superhuman swiftness, Jeronathon pops into a martial stance, prepared for direct confrontation, should it come to that… but something… intervenes… comes to mind.
— Yes. Yes. Yes! (His tone changes from musing to excited) “Yes! Chums! My dear madcap Chums of Chance!” He grabs each of the three in turn, “Would I still be The Cosmos Kid, without my trusty sidekicks The Chums of Chance? “ Lorelei’s straw hat flourishes to the floor from the headlock and nuggie. “What’s up today, Chums? Where in the Universe are we flitting off to this time, gentlemen?” He bows apologetically, “and lady!”
While the spirited and jocular mood is welcome, it cannot simply wish away the pall that fell over the crew. It’s Captain Rhodólphos, fair voyager of the seas, skies, and now systems, who feels compelled, both by station and substance, to speak first.
“Cosmos, you’ve returned at… an opportune time, to say the least. We’re taciturn with concern for our two youngest ones. You see, they’ve both gone missing…” A sniffling gasp is heard from the other two Chums. “And we fear not by their own design.” Short mewls of despair are hummed aloud.
Jeronathon crosses His arms and stroked His chin. “You mean, What’sname and Ho’evershewas?”
Capt. Rhodólphos blinks. “Yes, well, Hermann Myrrmann, the feisty and elusive uranium dwarf with the radioactive personality…” Lorelei yucks her chin up in interruption, “But nobody got their twisted knickers overturned when he went missing!” And not to be outdone, Guy flips up the jacket’s chardonnay collar, expounding “No, sir, it was merely right of us, nay incumbent upon us, to assume that, while we were stranded here in this pocket, Myrrmann would wander about to find some uninstantiated cranny crevice to guzzle numerous and bounteous pours of ale!”
Commandeering attention with a stomp of his knee-high engineer boots, Rhodólphos continues, “Hermann had gone missing and that was not infrequent. But the disruption we felt when we couldn’t find young Darby Nursemilkstress stung all the more for that initial oversight.”
The other two Chums emphatically assented with vigorous nods.
“But! We are not without hope, Cosmos Kid…” Rhodólphos points to the vessel’s far corridor that leads to the communications cockpit. “We have been able to make contact with Myrrmann’s Cataloger.”
Lorelei stretches out the suspender of her denim overalls, offering, “So, at first we thought, cock shoot, this’ll be just what we need to start tracking them down!” Poking his head under Lorelei’s plaid-flannel arms, Guy adds, “But, as certain as it was inevitable, it wasn’t so simple. The Cataloger is responsive to our queries, but returns only gibberish.”
Rhodólphos steps briskly in front of both of them. “Gibberish is so… pedestrian or philistine… bourgeois a word. It is clearly some sort of encryption designed to protect his privacy. Unfortunately for him and us, it is sound and successful. And even though she may not look it,” Lorelei gives a Fonz-smirk and thumbs up to herself, “we have the best block-hacker this side of Black Eye in our midst.”
“And zilch. I got nothing.” Guy, just now seeing her lost hat, picks it up and returns it to her with a quick brush-off. “It’s responding with clear language phrases, but they don’t make no sense. They don’t map back to any cryptographic algorithms we ever did see. And a whole IA of probable alternatives as well.”
The Cosmos Kid considers Himself atop a hill, standing stridently on a bronze pedestal from an ant’s eye vantage, His towering presence blocking out the sun to a beaming corona around His silhouette, only His embroidered hero’s cape in motion as a flutter on the breeze. He ponders the quandary, and comes to decisive conclusion: “Take Me to talk with this ‘Cataloger’ — I’ll get to the bottom of this!”