"Hey, you're Mongo!"
"Dr. Frederickson," Bill Jackson's mother said sternly, correcting her son.
"'Mongo' is fine, Mrs. Jackson."
"We'll compromise," the woman said, shooting her son a sharp glance. "You can call Dr. Frederickson 'Mr. Mongo.' And don't get too excited; you talk too much when you get excited." She took a deep breath, looked back at me. "Janet told you what we agreed on, Dr. Frederickson?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Aw, Mom," the boy said. "I know all about what happened. Mr. Mongo's not going to upset me."
"I'll decide what's going to upset you, Bill," the woman replied, stepping back and holding the door open for me. I stepped into the spacious house, redolent with the scent of flowers and other growing things.
Mrs. Jackson brought me a tall, cool glass of lemonade, and I went off with her son to his room which, like Tommy's, was decorated with fantasy posters and Lord of the Rings memorabilia. Bill closed the door, turned to me. His eyes were filled with tears.
"What happened to Tommy and Rodney was so terrible, Mr. Mongo."
Mrs. Jackson had known what she was talking about, I thought as I squeezed the boy's shoulder. "Thank you, Bill. Let's not discuss that, okay?"
"Okay." He wiped his eyes, brightened. "Boy, Mr. Mongo, it's really something to meet you. It's like meeting Frodo."
"I understand Tommy used me to score a lot of points."
"Yeah; that's because you're always getting involved with weird things. You know about Sorscience?"
"A little. I'd like you to tell me all about it. You scored points by matching real scientific phenomena with places and events in Lord of the Rings, right?"
"That's the basic idea, yes."
"Can you give me an example of how you'd score?"
He thought about it, shrugged. "Sure. Take Water Gel, for example. It's a clear paste that won't burn or transfer heat. If you cover yourself with it, you can walk through fire. Firemen are starting to use it."
"The correlation would be Frodo going inside Mount Doom to return the ring?"
"Right! Actually, there are a number of correlations, but that would probably be the best. Hey, you've read Lord of the Rings?"
"Where do you think I get my inspiration?" I asked with a wry smile.
Bill Jackson laughed. "I like you, sir."
"And I like you. What are some other examples?"
"Oh, changing lead into gold. Physicists have been able to do that in atomic reactors for years, but the process costs more than the gold is worth."
"Ah, yes, elementary wizardry; something Gandalf might do as a limbering up exercise before breakfast."
That earned another chuckle. "Yeah," the boy said, "but knowledge of the process isn't worth many points. First, none of us could duplicate it; second, Gandalf never actually changed lead into gold. You could score a couple of points by arguing that he could have done it if he'd wanted to." He paused, snapped his fingers excitedly. "Here! Let me show you something! I just charged up this stuff this morning."
He opened a deep drawer in a desk and took out a capped cylinder full of what looked like water but which smelled vaguely like a dentist's office when he took off the lid. He went across the room and took a fat gerbil out of its cage. Holding the wriggling animal by its tail, he came back to the desk and unceremoniously plopped the gerbil into the solution; the animal paddled around, its pink nose sniffing the air. I started to protest when Bill pushed it under and screwed the cap on.
"It's okay, Mr. Mongo, I'm not going to hurt him. As a matter of fact, he likes this. Watch."
Sure enough, the gerbil seemed to like it. I gaped in astonishment as the animal, obviously having undergone the experience before, didn't even bother trying to come back up to the sealed-off surface; it paddled about in the depths of the liquid, to all appearances as content and adjusted as your average trout. At first I thought that Bill had somehow taught the gerbil to hold its breath, but when I looked closer I could see its rib cage moving as if it were breathing. Since that was obviously impossible, I examined the surface of the desk, the wall behind it, and even the ceiling, for mirrors. There weren't any.
"That's one hell of a trick," I said. "How's it done?"
"No trick," Bill said, beaming with pleasure. "It's Fluosol-DA, an oxygenated perfluorochemical; PFC, for short. As a matter of fact, it's a distant cousin of Teflon. The Japanese have been making the stuff for years. It's used as artificial hemoglobin, and the FDA has approved its use for blood transfusions in certain circumstances, like with Jehovah's Witnesses. It exchanges oxygen and carbon dioxide, just like blood. As you can see, lab animals can actually 'breathe' the stuff, if it's been oxygenated."
"What purpose does that serve?"
"None. It's just an interesting phenomenon associated with Fluosol-DA."
The boy seemed to be immensely enjoying my stunned silence as he opened the cannister, plucked the gerbil from the fluid, and returned it to its cage, where it began plodding happily on its running wheel.
"How many points is that worth?"
Bill shrugged. "I think Obie was awarded twenty-eight out of a possible hundred for that. It's spectacular, and he had physical possession, but the correlations are weak. Nobody actually breathes underwater in Lord of the Rings. He matched it to the slaying of the Seeker in the lake. The Seeker could have been air-breathing, and the slayer had to hold his breath for a long time."
"Obie is another player?"
"Yes, sir. Obie-Auberlich-Loge. His father was the official scorer and arbitrator. In fact, Dr. Loge invented Sorscience."
The name Loge, Richard Wagner's God of Fire, rang a big, Nobel Prize-winning bell. Loge was certainly not a common name, and the Dr. Loge I knew of had earned doctorates in virtually every one of the life sciences. He'd won two Nobels-one for the invention of his Triage Parabola, a statistical model used for predicting the survival rates of various endangered species. But Siegmund Loge was into animals, not plants; he certainly didn't grow corn. Indeed, Siegmund Loge didn't do much of anything any longer, except make a fool of himself. At the age of seventy-four he'd gone instant bonkers, resigned all his positions, abandoned his research projects, and when last heard of was roaming around the country as "Father," a new brand of mystical messiah preaching Armageddon and Resurrection to people in the wilderness communes he had set up around the world. At last membership estimate, he'd passed the Rosicrucians and was breathing hard on the neck of the Reverend Moon. Some people will insist on believing anything.
"Do you know this Dr. Loge's first name, Bill?"
"Siegfried, Mr. Mongo. Like in the opera."
It had to be the son, I thought. Siegmund, Siegfried, and Auberlich; it sounded like an invitation list to a cast party for Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. Rings within Rings. I made a mental note to myself to drop Garth a cryptical postcard saying that the doings in Peru County were more fun than a three-ring circus. "What does Dr. Loge do?"
"He heads the Volsung Corporation. That's all I know about his work."
"Have you ever met him?"
The boy shook his head. "No, sir. The scientists never come out of there. They're flown in and out."
"Obviously, Obie must have come out."
"Yes, sir. He was going to school here, at the university."
"The extension program?"
"No. He was a regular student. He must be nineteen or twenty. He hung around with us because we were all interested in fantasy."
"Obie boards at the university?"