Lisa scanned the trio's arrest report. They had tested negative for drugs and alcohol — or at least nothing showed up on the local cops' sobriety devices. And though they looked ridiculous, the three men seemed coherent and intelligent. They were also extremely curious about their surroundings, studying in minute detail the ashtrays on the table in front of them, the slowly rotating ceiling fan above, the extremely dirty cups the Betaville cops were using to drink their hot, black, foul-smelling coffee.
"We don't know where we are," the diminutive guy in the priest costume finally said. "We thought we did, but now we're not so sure."
"OK," the second cop said. "How did you get here then?"
"But we've told you that at least a half dozen times," the guy in the ripped shirt with all the muscles said. "How many more times are you going to want to hear it?"
"At least once more," the first cop said, trying to suppress a grin.
All three suspects groaned, again in unison. The big guy and the one in the superhero costume wearily looked over at the priest. He'd done most of the talking, one of the state cops told Lisa. Almost as if he was their spokesman. She made a special note of this in her book.
The little man began their story again. He started off by explaining how he and the guy in the caped costume were actually interplanetary travelers. They'd hooked up with a group of soldiers who roamed outer space looking for honorable battles to fight; they were called the Freedom Brigade and were quite heroic. Many of these soldiers eventually died, though, in a war on a moon at the end of the galaxy called Zazu-Zazu. They'd traveled to this Zazu-Zazu place because somewhere on the tiny satellite there was once a beacon that swept the entire universe, looking to bring all of their lost brothers back home again— here, to this planet. The guy in the cape learned about the beacon and thought he was one of those being called back. So when he and the priest found one last dying trooper on the battlefield of Zazu-Zazu and were given the barest directions by him, they set out to find the Home Planets, the place the beacon was calling everyone back to. Along the way, they had battled a huge death star, space pirates, had met princesses, and discovered a long lost world covered with ghostly robots. That came after the muscle man had joined their quest.
Lisa had scribbled about half of this down in her notebook before she gave up. It was just too funny to go on. The state cops could barely contain their amusement. Pretty soon, all three of them were laughing out loud.
"I drove all the way down here and got lost for this?" Lisa groaned. The state cops laughed even harder.
"We've been here for five hours," one of them told her. "And it gets better every time!"
Lisa finally composed herself and pushed a button on the wall nearby. This opened a link with one of the interrogating cops in the other room, via a hidden earplug.
"Ask the guy with the muscles this question: "Is there a chance that you might be hallucinating this?"
The interrogator did as told. Surprisingly, the man nodded in the affirmative.
"Ask him to explain why," Lisa told the questioners.
The muscle man complied. He stated that everything on this planet looked so bizarre to him, he felt like he might be inside a "bender dream."
And what was that?
"The result of ingesting too much slow-ship wine.
"Or maybe I'm actually on a transdimensional holo-trip," the muscle man went on. "That's an excursion that comes with activation of one of the top-of-the-line holo-girls, like an Echo-623 or even a 773. Haven't you people ever heard of these things? Such mind trips can last up to a month — though not in real time. They usually take you to a deserted island somewhere in the thirty-fourth dimension, where there is no need for any bodily functions except to breathe, sleep, and have sex, sex, sex."
The state cops were howling by now. Lisa felt her face go flush at the man's insistent repetition of the word sex. How the two Betaville cops were managing to keep straight faces, she would never know.
"Did you say you suspect this might be a 'holo-trip,' is that the right term?" one of them asked the muscle man.
"A transdimensional holo-trip, yes," was the reply.
"Well, how do you know mat isn't what's going on here then?" the interrogator asked.
The muscle man just shrugged. "Because if this is a holo-trip," he said sadly, "where are all the girls?"
"Good answer!" one of the state cops said. They began laughing again, and so did Lisa.
"Ask the other one what he thinks of all this…" she was just barely able to whisper to the interrogating cops without cracking up again. "The guy in the superhero costume."
Of the three, he was obviously the most reluctant to talk.
"It just seems like a very odd place," finally came his reply. "On one hand, this town seems very primitive to us. It really does. The buildings, the streets, the vehicles. The way you are all dressed. But, at the same time, everything here looks new to me, or by some frame of reference, modern. As I told you before, I've been to a number of uncharted planets. The people on many of these worlds have no idea that a vast empire rules most of the Galaxy. Some weren't even aware that there were inhabited planets within their own solar systems or in the star systems close by. On all these planets though, the pace of civilization has been more or less constant. No one was living in caves and running around unclothed.
"But this place is different. It seems as if you have progressed to a certain time frame — and then stopped. People are obviously living, walking, talking, and going about their lives here, but it is almost as if someone had blasted you with a Time Shifter centuries ago — and never bothered to turn the activation switch off. The result being that all progress had ceased at exactly that point or at least slowed down in a very drastic way."
A pause. More laughter from the other room.
Then the priest from outer space said, "Either that, or you people just like it this way."
The interrogation went on for another ten minutes.
It almost became even more amusing, with the priest again doing most of the talking. The suspects' claims were so outlandish, even the craziest tabloid would have taken a pass on their story. Yet Lisa had noticed something. While providing no small entertainment for those on hand, the three men were not really saying anything specific about how they happened to arrive on the outskirts of Betaville or about the huge explosion on the farm nearby. It was almost as if they were intentionally deflecting those questions by going on and on about being from outer space.
So, Lisa made a notation in her book: "Shared psychotic persistence," and for a moment, she wondered if she might have just coined a new term for the lexicon of criminal psychology. All wackos began ranting after a while. Sure, some would start off rationally enough, even persuasively. But usually after ten minutes or so, the cracks in their head would start to show, and many would devolve into foaming, maniacal wrecks whose pronouncements became more outlandish with every breath.
But not these guys. They had a wacky story — and they were sticking to it. In other words, they were persistent in their shared psychosis.
Finally, the state cops had had enough. They drained their coffee cups and started gathering their things together.
"I'm not sure how the Feds want to tag this one," one told Lisa. "But unless we find pieces of a UFO or evidence of a small nuclear device out there, this one gets the loony wrap from us."
Lisa was inclined to agree with them. But she was here for the night anyway, and dealing with these kooks might provide her an education for future cases. Besides, she needed something to bulk up her first-ever solo report.