gone_byebye | Entries tagged with plot with tentacles in

Monday, October 6, 2008
14 North Moore Street
Manhattan
Morning

While Admiral Calavicci was technically in charge of the Paranormal Threat Reduction Agency, in everyday practice, virtually all information relevant to the United States' paranormal defense and response passed through the Firehouse eventually. This being October, 'eventually' meant 'somewhat before the Fulton Fish Market opened in the morning':

- The Harlem Hellfighters unit stationed in northern Manhattan was experiencing poltergeist struggles between two apparent factions of restless spirits in the vicinity of Fort Washington Park, massive levels of PKE activity from the vicinity of the Doomsday Door under Second Avenue, and the birth of a fire-breathing sea lion at the Bronx Zoo.

- The Intangibles unit, in Chicago, was swamped with 'demon baby' calls and haunted municipal offices, and a building on Wacker Drive that only existed if approached from a very particular direction.

- The New Orleans Swamp Rats, under the command of a former state trooper named John Raymond Legrasse III, had been visited by a little old lady who thanked them for being 'such nice young folks comin' to make sure them young rowdies learned some manners' before disappearing. Upon consultation of local records, the little old lady matched the description and existing portraits of the late Marie LaVeau.

- The Galveston Stormwatch, very much on edge given what almost got called out of Galveston Bay in 2006, was faced with rains of distinctly non-standard rain items four days running. Fish, perhaps, they could understand- waterspouts, after all, did that. Red stuff from the sky, too, as there had been red tides in the region before without blood being involved. Even the rain of what appeared to be sea sponges could be understood. The clear, gelatinous substance that splattered into the Galveston area and dissolved into a fine grey dust upon being picked up in sample tubes was something else again.

- The lights in the sky over Alcatraz had nothing whatsoever to do with on-site electric equipment, the San Francisco Miners unit reported. The prison walls were starting to bleed at random intervals, though; that was probably related. At least the ghosts of baseball players the 16th Street Safeway supermarket security cameras caught wandering the aisles were largely behaving themselves.

- Dr. Tsybenko, the ex-cosmonaut who'd signed up for the Paranormal Responder Corps as soon as the announcement was made on the condition that he get an assignment somewhere warm, reported that every single one of the Caribbean hotels he'd been assigned to investigate was plagued with guests reporting nightmares and visions, regardless of prior psychic senstivity and experience or the lack thereof.

- And the satellites aimed at Point Nemo as part of the implementation of the Waller Protocols were reading a peculiar slow, steady rise in local sea temperature, coupled with significantly less oceanic wildlife than usual.

It was enough to make a man wish he'd never gotten out of bed in the morning. Honestly, some days Ray almost wished it was still 1905.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Clyde Tombaugh Science Operations Center
Boulder, CO

"Move over, Charlie," called a woman's voice from down the hall. "Dr. Bishop and the guys from Jodrell Bank are here."

"Thank you," said another woman's voice.

Charlie Rapoza grinned and started scooting chairs away from the custom-built, specially low instrumentation panel. T-SOC had been planning for a visit from Britain for months, and these days anything involving British space science involved Dr. Campbell, and by default, Dr. Bishop. Sure enough, the distinctly tinny sound of Dr. Campbell's piped-out voice spoke up: "I do hope you've got something promising for us today, after all the rot they put us through to get here..."

The go-kart wheeled around the doorframe and into the control room, Dr. Campbell's cylinder gleaming under the fluorescent lights. Dr. Campbell had achieved an amazing amount of mobility and control over the thing since his return to Earth last December, but it was still a little unwieldy. "Hallo, Rapoza," the cylinder called. "They tell us you've been getting some nice snaps from the Pluto Kuiper Express?"

As the rest of the English delegation- three scientists Rapoza didn't know and Dr. Bishop, who'd become Campbell's inseparable companion almost as soon as they'd stepped off the spaceplane- filed into the room, Rapoza nodded. "Sure have," he said. "Alice, LORRI, and PEPSSI're all churning out the kinds of feeds we used to only dream of. Need any help hooking yourself up?"

Campbell's cart fit snugly into the space allotted in the belly of the instrumentation panel. "No, I'm fine, thanks," the cylinder answered. "Dr. Bishop, everyone?"

A murmur of assent went up from Dr. Bishop and the English scientists.

"All right, then," said Campbell's cylinder. "Let's see what your girls have to show us."

Rapoza nodded and signaled the other engineers. The control room for the Express was at APL, in Maryland, but this was where the scientific instruments were controlled from, and they got the first look at all the incoming data. Alice was the probe's ultraviolet, X, and gamma imaging spectrometer. PEPSSI was the plasma sensor. As for LORRI, the images coming in off the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager were up on the room's main screen. Pluto wasn't much more than a glimmer in the distance, of course, but considering the technology involved it was one of the most detailed glimmers in NASA history. The British scientists were chattering excitedly to one another and to Dr. Ciaglia, the woman who'd brought them in, mostly asking about comparisons to earlier deep visual field imaging taken from Earth orbit. Rapoza was more than happy to let her handle that. Alice was his baby, and it warmed his heart to see that Dr. Campbell's own monitoring screen was flooding with data from the spectrometer.

With very strange data from the spectrometer.

"Dr. Campbell?" said Rapoza, leaning forward to peer at the screen. "What in the hell are you looking at?"

"I was about to ask you the same thing," the cylinder said grimly. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Pluto proper that cluster of pixels just right of center?"

"Coulda sworn it was," said Rapoza. "Let me try something with my controls-"

The image that Alice was returning looked... well, honestly? If he'd seen a visual spectrum camera spit up an image like that, he would've told somebody to go wipe the lens off. It looked like Alice was doing the equivalent of peering through a huge, distorting raindrop. They'd all been looking forward to getting a look at Pluto's atmosphere, but Alice shouldn't've been able to pick up on that just yet. Hell, the Express wasn't even as close as Neptune's orbit yet. No way it ought to've been picking up that kind of gamma distortion. It looked-

"Son of a bitch," Rapoza swore. "That thing's the size of Earth! What the hell?"

"It's not there on LORRI," said Dr. Ciaglia, peering over Rapoza's shoulder. "There's nothing at all in the visual spectrum- Dr. Campbell, would you mind?"

Obligingly, Campbell switched the image on his screen for a visual of corresponding size and placement. Pluto was exactly where they'd left it, but in the space marked out by Alice's scans there was no corresponding object. There were even a few stars visible in the distance. Campbell's cylinder hummed briefly as the disembodied scientist fiddled with the two images, and then superimposed LORRI's readout over Alice's.

Either Pluto's atmosphere was sufficiently large and active in the farthest gamma portion of the EM spectrum as to mimic that of a planet the size of Earth, or something was very, very wrong. Rapoza swore under his breath and turned back to his panel. "It was working five minutes ago," he muttered. "It was just fine five minutes ago. I've got the damn diagnostics-"

"I don't doubt you do." Campbell's tinny voice was surprisingly gentle. "I doubt very much that this is a flaw in your machinery, Mr. Rapoza. This is something else entirely."

Dr. Bishop's fingers tightened on the top-most part of the cylinder.

"'The sun shines there no brighter than a star,'" Campbell quoted, his voice not much more than a mechanized whisper, "'but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples...'"

There are times when the good and the bad aspects of a job are the same. For Catherine, this most often happened when she tried to work from her home office rather than her architectural firm's building in Freeport. It meant she could be around her family more- which was good- but it also meant she had to deal with them being around her, which . . . well, was not always so good. If she had to work from home it usually meant that something enormous was in the works. The last thing she needed just then was to be interrupted for anything less than a real emergency. As she pressed the palms of her hands against her desk and counted to ten, telling herself not to go ballistic at Alex just because he was loudly sulking again, she heard the most wondrous of sounds: the front door, opening and then closing.

"DAAAAAD TELL JOEY IT'S MY TURN TO-"

"NUH UH, IT'S MY TURN, I FOUND THE REMOTE-"

Still the noise, still the chaos, but at least it wasn't directed at her. She could practically feel her husband's sympathy from the other side of the door as he deftly navigated the gauntlet of whining boys ("I have to hang up my coat") and made for the rec room ("If you keep this up another two seconds, I'm going to decide what you two watch, and you won't like it at all").

It occurred to her as the boys fell quiet that they hadn't been this whiny the whole time her brother had been working with them. That wasn't a thought she was really prepared for; she pushed it aside and turned her attention back to the-

"But Dad-"

"No buts! You had your chance, the both of you. Now sit."

"But it's the news! It's boring!"

"Look, I told you, if you two kept it up I'd choose what you watched. Boring is as boring does. Sit and watch and consider it your punishment for not behaving."

"But-"

"I said sit down."

. . . no, they'd definitely never needed to be told that many times.

"Joey, put that down right now."

"I'm not touching it!"

"I didn't say stop touching it. I said put it down. If your mother saw you doing that-"

She grimaced, eyeing the convention center schematics on her computer screen, but not really seeing them.

". . . sorry, Daddy."

"Good. Now." And the sounds of the evening news started to flow.

The boys had been sullen at first after she'd banned her brother from the house. Then they'd gone disobedient, and then whiny. It hadn't just been with her and Alan, either. Joey's teacher had reported that none of the other children wanted to play with him because he wouldn't talk except to complain, and Alex- well, Alex's teacher ha d been after her to get him checked for sudden-onset ADHD, particularly the H part. The hockey coach at Mennen had said the same thing. About the only people who hadn't noticed the change in the boys' behavior were. . . well, the people at the karate school. Sensei Chris and Sensei Darren weren't having any problems at all. Not disobedience, not aggression, not anything. They'd even gone so far as to mention Alex's attention to form and discipline several times since-

"CATHERINE!" Alan suddenly bellowed. "GET IN HERE!"

Alan never yelled. One of the boys must've done something really awful. She leapt from her seat immediately. As she arrived in the rec room, though, there was no sign of that. All the furniture was in place, nothing was broken, all the pictures on the walls were where they belonged. Even the boys were sitting on the couch, quietly wide-eyed, next to their father.

Alan gestured mutely at the TV with the remote.

"-not alone. The unidentified assistants, both human and otherwise, have been credited by the Ghostbusters and NASA alike with significant responsibility not only for the rescue of the astronauts, but with foiling a longstanding plot to hold Houston Space Center to ransom with explosives."

There was a text crawl that said something about the first successful orbital passenger flight by a private concern, which probably explained the strange red-and-white planes in the background, but she barely saw it. That was the President on the screen.

And Vice President Lewis.

And Richard Branson.

And her brother.

Shaking hands.

"Wow," said Alex, who was too raptly interested in the news report to turn away. "The Vice President looks an awful lot like Uncle Ray."

Saturday, December 9, 2006
8:43 PM
NYC

Ray was on the roof of the Firehouse practicing with his 'sabre when the creaking sound of the hinges alerted him to an incoming visitor. He froze; sometimes Slimer followed people, and the spud didn't realize how dangerous that blade could be. "Who's there?" he called.

"It's just me, Ray," said Janine. "You've got a phone call."

"How come you're still here?" asked Ray, taking the cordless handset from her.

"Egon forgot his Nextel," she said. "We had to come back and get it. See you tomorrow."

Ray switched off the 'sabre and pinched the phone between his shoulder and his ear. "Dr. Stantz here," he said. "Who's this?"

"Uncle Ray?" came a very small voice.

It was a lucky thing he'd turned the 'sabre off, because he nearly droped it in his startlement. "Joey? What the- Joey, what are you doing? Does your mother know you're-"

"Mom and Dad are out," Joey said. "Sally's watching TV."

"Oh, man," said Ray, running his free hand over his hair. "Shouldn't you be in bed?"

"I was. I had a bad dream."

Ray winced. "Everybody has bad dreams sometimes, Joey," he said. "How bad was it?" It didn't occur to him to tell his nephew to tell the babysitter about it, or to say it was only a dream. Once, maybe, he would've said that. Not after what happened with the sandman in the animated continuum, though.

There were fidgety sounds on the other end. "Real bad," Joey said at last.

Ray nodded, but no more was forthcoming, so he prodded gently: "You wanna tell me about it?"

"I dunno," said Joey. "It might come back."

"Maybe," Ray admitted. "Maybe not. I usually manage to keep mine away by talking about them afterwards. What was it?"

More fidgets. Ray waited.

"... big green shiny things like on the Christmas tree tried to eat a man and there were these bats and they were pink and they were trying to smoosh you but there was this giant and he was scary but he was okay but people were getting shot and there was this guy and this thing and there was a lot of fire and something really really big came out of the ocean and that's when I woke up."

Ray had been nodding sympathetically as his nephew talked, prepping the 'no, honestly, it was only a dream' speech. It died a-borning upon hearing the last few words. Fools! You may have won this time, but Cthulhu cannot be destroyed! He waits and dreams in the deep, and the cities of man shall fall before him!

"Uncle Ray?"

"I- I'm here, Joey." Ray shook his head. "It's okay. I'm sorry. You just reminded me of something, that's all."

"Oh."

"It was a good something, though," Ray said, willing himself to believe it. "I mean, we won."

( I say the tragedy is how you're gonna spend / the rest of your nights with the light on )

When the group from Milliways arrives in New Mexico, ( Here be mega-thread summary! )

There was, as has been noted, somewhat limited passenger space on the Enterprise. Something of an argument most likely ensued over who got to go and who didn't. Eventually, two things were pointed out:

- that Kirk, for all that he was from the future, was used to dealing with lower tech than Romana; and
- that Hellboy was more intimately familiar with the supernatural.

It was then pointed out that Mission Control had, after all, lost all contact with the Station not long after Major Hogarth's untimely demise. And that they had quite a lot of data from events leading up to the ghastly incident, and... well, since much of the technology was planetside...

Well, in the time it takes for the Enterprise to get within striking distance of orbit, it's also possible to get one young Time Lord a hefty security clearance and a free trip to Houston for an intimate tour of the Mission Control Center. So there we are.

Every so often the world throws the good guys a bone. In this case, the bone is nothing more and nothing less than a flawless launch. The VSS Enterprise is fastened securely to the Eve mothership without a hitch. The takeoff of the twinned vehicles has no glitches or errors. The skyward arc from the sands of New Mexico is as perfect as any described in a calculus textbook, as is the one that comes after separation, as Eve heads back to Earth and Enterprise continues her upwards arc.

"Egon," says Peter, "if I hear one word out of you about 'too quiet', I'm gonna pop you one."

"I haven't said anything this entire flight, Peter."

"I could hear you thinking."

Ray would shake his head, but he's busy staring out the sizable porthole (Branson knows his audience; every seat on this thing is a window seat, and every window is big) as they climb higher and higher into the black. Somewhere along the way- he never notices where- gravity ceases to work. "All right, everyone," comes the voice of the Enterprise's pilot, an Englishman named Stephen Johnson, "we're about to start a serious burn, so if you wouldn't mind pressing the 'high acceleration' buttons on your arm-rests, my co-captain and I would appreciate it. We've got a space station to catch, after all."

It's not much of a warning; the acceleration takes over for the lack of planetary gravity mere moments after the last seat eases into position, and the lights of the stars outside and Earth below smear with the motion... There'll be no slowing down until the spidery silver-grey lines of the International Space Station swell into immensity, dangling overhead as Captain Johnson silently docks the Enterprise with the thing's looming, freshly swollen artificial bulk.

The door opens into a perfectly civilized waiting room that could be at any airport anywhere in the early twenty-first United States if it only had a few dozen more people and a good deal more chaos. As it stands, the Virgin Galactic facilities at Spaceport America are considerably more organized than anything currently in commercial operation. Life's good when you've got a vertical monopoly.

At the moment Peter Venkman- looking younger than the one from the Bar, and with somewhat blockier but still recognizable features to those who've met him- is talking with a few people in sober grey suits. One of them glances up at the newcomers, eyes going wide; Peter turns. "Okay, see," he says to the blonde woman nearest him, who's got the Virgin Galactic logo on the tag hanging from her suit jacket, "that would be what the President was talking about when he said extraordinary resources. Hey, kids. They've got the ship all ready for us."

"Maybe not entirely ready," says the VG representative. "We're going to need a couple of minutes to switch in a slightly bigger chair..."

"Yeah, you do that." Peter grins. "Okay. Now. Can I get some names here before we head off into black-sky country?"

As Ray moves forward to start making introductions, a woman's voice with faint traces of Punjabi and English accents comes over the loudspeakers. "Final preparatory tests are complete. Once boarded and secured, VSS Enterprise is ready for launch."

Ray's been reading. It hasn't made him happy, but then again, a lot of the reading he does for his job isn't exactly designed to make people happy. This is just a case of things he knows man was not meant to know but has to know and wishes he weren't the man to know it.

.... no, really, it makes sense in his head.

In any case, he's been reading, and he's been talking to the Bar. He's got a little stack of papers and booklets, and he's got a very very large folded pile of orange cloth with a little sign marked 'Hellboy' on it.

New Mexico or bust, kids.

With the briefing done, Ray rubs at his face with one hand. The whole thing just feels too wrong for his liking, and he's positive he's missing something. Between the sound files Mission Control didn't relay, and the half-familiar words of the incantation, and- well- everything-

Well, he has to do some research in Tobin's at the very least, but damn, there are people he needs to talk to.

Ray hung up the sign on the message board a while ago, after making his announcement to the Bar's patrons in general: Houston, we have a problem, and I have never in my life meant that more literally. Now he just has to hope that people interested in lending a hand with a potentially enormous, distinctly horrible situation in space actually showed up.

At least the chairs in room 2342, where he's waiting for the interested parties, are more comfortable this time than last time.

"Hokay. So," Peter said into the silence that fell over the room. "Summoning ritual, huh?"

"Mmmmmyep."

"Who's it summon, Ray?"

"I don't... know," Ray says. "Not for certain. I'd have to look it up in Tobin's."

"You do that." Peter turned back to the men in suits. "Okay. Dr. Stantz here's already on the case, but what else do you want from us? The space station's a little far away for our proton packs, and I don't think waving a PKE meter at the screen is going to do anything."

The President and the Secretary of State exchanged looks. Eventually, the President cleared his throat and leaned forward, hands folded neatly in front of him.

"We are aware," he said, "that you gentlemen- Dr. Stantz in particular- have access to some pretty extraordinary resources."

"Let's just assume for all our sakes that it's the stuff you took with you when you guys cleared out Foliage Census," Flaherty added.

"Even if it's people, Mike?"

"Especially if it's people, Mr. President."

"All right." He turned his attention back to the Ghostbusters. "We'd like the four of you to go up to the Space Station and investigate in person-"

"WHOA!" shouted Winston and Peter at the same time. They blinked; Winston won. "Seriously, Mr. President? Into outer space?"

"I'm told that the ISS's orbit only counts as 'space'. Outer space involves getting past the moon."

Winston would not be dissuaded. "As in, zero gravity? Don't people have to train for months to do that?"

"Yeah, ordinarily," said Flaherty. "But, uh... we don't have months." He gestured at the image still on the wall. "I don't even know if we have days. There's still five other people up on that station, and one of them probably did that to poor old Tom. We don't know what that nutjob's planning to do to the others."

"Whichever nutjob it is," the President added. "That's where you boys come in. Up to the Station you go, just as soon as humanly possible. Find out what's going on and put a stop to it before the Station and the other astronauts wind up bubble-wrapped too. You do whatever you have to in order to get this situation fixed, all right? You've got my official permission, wink wink nudge nudge."

"Uh, Mr. President?" Flaherty had a strained expression. "You're not supposed to say wink wink, nudge nudge."

"I'm not?"

"No, Mr. President."

"Oh. Forget I said that, then?"

The Ghostbusters looked at one another. "Well. . ." Peter began. "Egon? How're you with this whole idea, huh?"

"I'm beginning to think my choice of free diving as a hobby was a fortuitous one." Spengler slid his glasses back up his nose. "It's as close as an Earthbound human can get to microgravity conditions without bringing an oxygen tank. And I wouldn't mind finding out how the proton packs work in those conditions."

"Okay. Winston?"

Winston shook his head. "Mr. President, I'm going to need a lot of Dramamine for this."

"That can be arranged, Mr. Zeddmore."

"Great. Ray? What do you think?"

I think we're in over our heads just by being in this room and looking at what happened to that poor man, he wanted to say; but what came out was, "I've still got my PADI dive certification. That should help, right?"

Peter nodded. "I'm gonna pretend I understood what you just said. Mr. President, I assume the job pays well?"

Flaherty scribbled a number on a piece of paper and slid it in front of the President, who nodded and passed it to Peter.

"Wow," said Peter. "Would you look at all the zeroes. Okay, I'm good- let's do this. Houston, here we come."

"More like New Mexico," said Flaherty.

"Huh? Why New Mexico?"

"The, uh..." Flaherty glanced pleadingly at the President.

"We're a little low on working shuttles at the moment," said the President. "Virgin Galactic okay with you guys?"

Monday, December 11th, 2006
Presidential Briefing Room
The White House
Washington, DC

It wasn't the Oval Office after all, so Ray didn't feel too bad about the fact that the only thing between him and nodding off was blind, unreasoning terror. And coffee. But mostly the terror. That…. whatever it was… that had smacked him between the eyes from inside while he was asleep on the plane had left a lingering dread that not even a Baha Men earworm could dispel. Nevertheless, he did his best to smile and nod and let the Secret Service men do their searches, and to shake hands when he was introduced to the President. Peter could do the talking, so far as he was concerned. He just had to find out what was going on, not be a PR monkey.

"-so I’m sure you gentlemen will be interested in seeing this first of all," said Secretary of State Flaherty in his slightly reedy voice. "Mission Control in Houston keeps tabs on all the ISS's transmissions and observation cameras as a matter of course. This happened a few hours ago-"

He pressed a few keys on a laptop almost but not quite as slender as Ray's holocomputer, and one wall of the briefing room lit up with an exterior shot of metal, floating in space.

"Thrillsville," said Peter, settling back in his chair.

"Yeah, well, it gets better," said Flaherty. "It's a monitoring camera. Keep watching."

A few moments later the form of an astronaut hove into view. "That's Major Thomas C. Hogarth, one of the two American astronauts on the ISS. The rest of the crew is an American woman named Dr. Zenobia Bishop, an English astronaut named Ramsey Campbell, two Russians, Konstantin Pavlov and Arkadii Tsybenko- and of course the tourist, Henry Kuttner. Major Hogarth is one of the most experienced spacewalkers NASA has. This was supposed to be a routine check-up on the AE-35 antenna array."

As the astronaut set about his work, radio-crackly voice reporting back to the station and to Mission Control, status messages scrolled across the bottom of the screen from the sensors in his suit. To Ray, who knew very little about biology and only the basics of first aid, they looked normal.

On the wall, Hogarth's image turned its head. "What was that?" his recorded voice said.

"What was what?" someone answered ("Frank Belknap. Mission Control specialist.").

"I just heard something. Did someone let Kuttner near the radio again?"

"Tom, I don't think-"

"Oh God," Hogarth suddenly said. "Oh God. . ."

The status messages started changing, even as Belknap's voice demanded that Hogarth speak to him again. The astronaut didn't seem to be listening. In fact, he didn't seem to be doing much of anything beyond holding onto one of the station's external struts. If the status messages were right, though, his heart rate was soaring-

And then plummeting like a brick, and then soaring again, even as his blood pressure numbers and other indicators Ray couldn't recognize started leaping and falling all over the place like a bucket full of Superballs dropped from a second-story window.

Ray's mouth felt oddly dry as he leaned forward, watching with a kind of curious horror; he was only dimly aware that the others were doing the same. Hogarth's form on the wall was starting to spasm and kick, bucking furiously in ways that did not look comfortable- or healthy, for that matter. "Tom!" Belknap was shouting. "Tom, can you hear me? Tom?"

Hogarth managed to squeeze out a few hoarse, horribly compressed-sounding words. "Somebody tell Natalie- aaghghck-"

And then the status messages froze, and Hogarth stopped moving, and a peculiarly iridescent green-and-blue sheen began to spread itself over the astronaut's form. Within moments it had encased him entirely and started expanding into a perfect sphere.

"Tom!" said Belknap one last time before the Secretary of State stopped the playback.

There was silence, the sort of silence that normally precedes the deployment of a single well-chosen obscenity.

The President cleared his throat instead. "I'm sure you gentlemen can see why we wanted your assistance," he said. "We. . . haven't been able to contact Dr. Bishop, or any of the other people on board the ISS for that matter."

"Wow. Um. That's. . . bad," said Peter, staring at the frozen image. "You sure that's not. . . oh, something mechanical or something? Somebody planted a prank in his suit and it went wrong on him? I mean-"

Flaherty gave Venkman a long-suffering look. "Buddy, every single item that's gone up to the space station's been checked over and accounted for. Nobody brought any make-your-own-homicidal balloon kits, okay? That is not normal. And neither is this."

"Neither is what?" asked Winston warily.

"An internal radio transmission that we think might be what the Major there said he heard. . ." Flaherty clicked a few more buttons on his laptop. The screen image didn't change, but a man's voice started to speak:

"EZPHARES, OLYARAM, IRION-ESYTION, ERYONA, OREA-"

Flaherty stopped the recording and glanced down the table. "Dr. Stantz? Are you okay?"

"I'm- I’m sorry, Mr. Secretary, but I've heard those words before."

"Really?" The President and the Secretary alike were watching him intently now.

"Yeah. It's part of a summoning ritual, a very old one that I last heard being spoken by a Sumerian apocalyptic deity in a truly eschatological mood." Ray raised one shaking hand and pointed at the image on the wall. "I think," he said with the greatest of care, "that we're all in an enormous amount of trouble. Major Hogarth was only the beginning."
( the tragedy is how you're going to spend / the rest of your nights with the light on. . .)

Ray leaned back in his seat and tried to sleep. It didn't help.

"Man, when the President says there's no time to waste, he really goes all out, doesn't he?"

"Peter, we should really be using this time to go over the briefing materials the representative from the State Department gave us-"

"Relax, Egon, willya? I already had a look. Blah blah astronaut blah blah lost contact blah blah horrible something or other captured on tape, film not available at eleven because we're the federal government and we're into secrets."

"He's right, Peter, we should at least be trying-"

"Jeez, Winston, not you too. Ray's gonna be on your side next."

"I think Ray's trying to sleep, actually-"

"Yes," Ray said without opening his eyes. "I am. I'd like to be able to meet the President and get briefed in person without falling asleep all over the Oval Office."

"Sorry," Winston said. "We'll try and keep it down."

"Thank you," said Ray.

It was really a very nice airplane seat, which made sense, considering it was a private government plane. In fact, it was the first time in memory that Ray found he could lean back and stretch out without banging his knees on the seat in front of him. And since Peter and Winston and Egon really were trying to keep it down for once, he managed to drop off to sleep somewhere over New Jersey.

Monday, December 11th, 2006
A Moderately Disgusting Hour of the Morning
14 North Moore Street
Manhattan

"Guys… guys… wake up!" said Janine. "Hey! I'm talkin' to you!"

"Remind me to give you a raise sometime, Janine," mumbled Peter. "That way I'll have something to take away from you."

"Ha, ha, very funny, Doctor Venkman," Janine answered. "There's somebody from the White House on the phone. And it's not about the EPA thing, either."

Ray had been trying to sleep just a few minutes more, but nothing brought him awake quite like hearing those three little letters. He sat up and blinked at Janine. "Did they say what they wanted?"

"They said they wanted to talk to one of you guys and that it was really, really important," Janine said. "Somebody better get downstairs and pick up that telephone toot sweet."

Ray and Peter looked at each other. With a sigh, Ray said, "I'll take it."

Very little in the world could send Ray into a state of lower enthusiasm than interaction with the Federal government. Not even using the pole to get downstairs was enough to liven his mood. By the time Caller ID had confirmed the source of the call and the White House spokesman introduced himself, Ray was about ready to dig Janine's airhorn out of the desk drawers and just blast it into the mouthpiece. Still, a modicum of manners prevailed. "I really hope this is important, Mr. Bondek," he said instead.

"We wouldn't be bothering you if it weren't, Dr. Stantz. Believe me, the President would be just as happy to leave you alone as you'd be to be left alone, but this is an emergency and there's really no one else in the country capable of responding."

"Uh huh," said Ray, shifting his weight a little as he turned to ignore Peter's frantic 'tell me what's going on' gestures. "So what is it?"

"Well, to make this as simple as possible- we've lost an astronaut."

Ray looked at the Caller ID, and looked at the nearest clock, and felt no shame at all in answering, "Have you tried looking in the refrigerator?"

". . . ex. . . cuse me?"

"It's amazing how often stuff winds up in there when someone around here thinks they lost it."

"Dr. Stantz, I'm serious. One of the two American crewmembers on board the International Space Station went out on an EVA last night-"

"It's still last night," Ray muttered, but the spokesman wasn't listening.

"-and something happened to him that I’m not at liberty to describe over the phone. The scientists at Mission Control are unanimous in stating that there's no way that what happened could've been the result of any natural phenomenon any of them know of. We need your help."

Ray looked at the clock again. "Mr. Bondek," he said, "after what happened in Montana, I ordinarily wouldn't touch a job offer from the Federal Government-" ("WHAT?" said Peter; Ray ignored him) "-with a full-on NBC bunny suit and the tongs of Saint Dunstan. Especially not after an October like we just had. Since you guys've been so cooperative about the whole EPA mess, though, I'll tell you this: the day Nikola Tesla and Charles Proteus Steinmetz are national heroes, I'll consider it."

"Actually, Dr. Stantz, do you get CNN?"

"Huh? Yeah, sure- why?"

"Turn on your television, please."

Ray found the remote and pointed it at Janine's little desktop television.

"-emergency session of Congress called an hour ago, President Winston presented an extremely unusual request: the posthumous award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to scientists Nikola Tesla and-"

"Will that do, Dr. Stantz?" said the spokesman in an only marginally smug voice.

Monday, December 11th, 2006
A Really Disgusting Hour of the Morning
The White House
Washington, DC

"Mr. President?"

"mrphn?" said Randall M. Winston, Jr., who was a third awake at best.

"Mr. President, there's been a problem with the space station."

Maybe it was a dream. Randall pulled a pillow over his head. "Go away. I didn't turn on the bat-signal."

"I really can't do that," said the Secret Service agent whose unfortunate lot in life it was to sound almost exactly like Kevin Conroy. "Mr. President, this is a first-caliber emergency."

Randall sighed and shoved the pillow aside. "What? Don't tell me it's come out of orbit. Is it going to hit Chicago?"

"No, sir."

"Is it going to hit anywhere inhabited?" He rubbed the sleep-crud away from one eye, trying terrifically not to wake up his wife, who was a sounder sleeper by far.

"Sir, it hasn't come out of orbit at all."

"Then what's the emergency?"

One Video Transmission Later

"Well," said the President, blinking at the final image frozen on screen. "That's not good."

"No, sir," said the slightly crackly voice from the speakerphone. "It really, really isn't."

Randall adjusted his glasses. "Has anybody called Mike Flaherty yet?"

"The Secretary of State's been informed, sir," said Agent Batman. "He's on his way."

"I didn't think that kind of thing was possible."

"Technically, sir," said the speakerphone, "it's not. That would be why they call it the supernatural."

"Ye-e-e-es. . . Ah! Mike! You're here. Fantastic." Randall beamed as the Secretary of State was ushered in. "Maybe you can help the good folks at Mission Control and me make sense of this."

One More Video Transmission Later

Flaherty stared at the screen, biting the first joint on his thumb as he considered what'd just been shown.

"Anything at all, Mike," said the President. "Any time now."

"I'm thinking, Mr. President," said Flaherty, and went back to biting his thumb and staring.

"We don't really have time for much more of this," said the speakerphone. "Contact's completely unreliable and there's still four other crewmembers on the Station. This is a matter of life and death for them."

"No kidding," said the President. "Mike? You in there?"

"I'm sorry, Mr. President," said Flaherty, looking up. "I’m trying to remember the Ghostbusters' phone number."

Thursday, September 21, 2006
14 North Moore Street
Manhattan

"Egon, I'm getting a little tired of the ganzfeld rig. Can we please get this wrapped up sometime before lunch?"

"Sorry, Ray," came Egon's voice over the noise-dampening earphones. "Your situation is a little unprecedented. The information we're getting from these tests is going to constitute a clinical baseline for future experiments. I wanted to be sure we had all the data we could carry."

"And you know I totally support that, but we don't have to set the entire baseline at once," Ray pointed out mildly. "Are we nearly done? This thing itches."

"I was going to say five more minutes, but I suppose we can come back another time," Egon reluctantly allowed. "Go ahead and take it off."

"Thanks." Ray started peeling the giant hollowed-out Styrofoam half-spheres away from his face and blinked wildly. "Gaah. Bright light, bright light." After a few shakes of his head he looked up. "Did you get anything statistically interesting?"

"Unfortunately, not so far," Egon said. He scowled briefly at his notes. "I'm hoping a contrasting pattern'll emerge when I sit down and analyze it. Sorry, Ray."

"That's okay. I was just wondering."

"Understandable. The other man adjusted his glasses. "I'll call you if anything comes up. What're you going to do about lunch?"

"I was thinking pizza with the menagerie," Ray said. "Can I get you anything?"

"Considering what usually happens when we order pizza these days, I think that would be an extraordinarily bad idea."

Ray laughed and headed for the pole.

". . . yes, I know I already said pepperoni. I mean another layer. Also another layer of the mushrooms."

Janine slid her glasses up her nose with one finger as Ray finished the call. "Ya know, Dr. Stantz," she said, "they're gonna stop delivering to the Firehouse at this rate. That or give you a medal for saving their business."

"I know," Ray said. "I don't mind. I'm going to have a talk with Slimer about eating lunchtime food that isn't pizza sometime."

She shook her head. "You're crazy. Why do you even keep that thing around, anyway? It gives me the creeps."

"I guess I feel sorry for him," Ray said, sticking his hands in his pockets. His eyes were on the little green blob excitedly circling Ecto. "He's not really all that bad, if you can just get priorities through to him. I don't think he was ever a person, so it's not like he could've learned how to behave when he was alive."

"But I thought ghosts were people when they were alive," Janine said tentatively. "Aside from what happened at the Fulton Fish Market."

"Not necessarily. Slimer has some interesting readings coming from his ectoplasmic cortex with the right instruments. They don't seem to have the vibrational decay rate you'd expect from a ghost that once had a living pattern." He glanced down at Janine's skeptical expression and hastily translated, "Human ghosts have a tendency to lose definition and form over time by the very nature of being dead. Slimer's a little too internally consistent to match that."

"That or he eats enough preservatives to keep him in one piece," Janine muttered. "So what is he, then?"

"I don't know. A sentient embodiment of the concept of 'appetite', maybe."

Janine snorted. "Sounds like Slimer, all right. You want the paper until the pizza arrives? They got another article about that Kuttner guy. And the American astronauts. I know you like those."

"Please."

She handed him the New York Times and went back to her filing. In the background she could just about make out the sound of Ray's voice reading the article off to the car and the little green ghost, and their occasional comments back. Another day, another dollar, I guess, she thought. Eh, could be worse.

Wednesday, September 6, 2006
14 North Moore Street
Manhattan
Morning

"Hey, Pete, check it out," said Winston, holding out the morning paper. "Hometown boy of yours is heading to the Space Station."

"What? Gimme that." Peter grabbed the Daily News from the other man's hand. "Huh, whaddya know. 'Brooklyn-born entrepreneur and space enthusiast Henry Kuttner will be replacing Indian businessman Sunand Joshi as the fourth space tourist to visit the International Space Station after it was revealed that Mr. Joshi had a previously undetected medical problem that would exclude him from participating as a crew member.'" He set the paper down on the table. "I always like to see a local boy get a- GACK!"

"Gnerzblfrgnht!"

"RAY!" Peter bellowed, futilely trying to wipe the freshly acquired ectoplasm out of his face. "You got five seconds to get your spud the heck out of Dodge or I'm gonna stick him in a trap and mail him to Abu Dhabi!"

Ray hastily abandoned his bagel in favor of escorting the overexcited ghost off the premises. He needed a walk anyway.

***

Ten minutes later, after a lot of explanation about why he needed to stay out of sight- Ray was pretty sure that whatever else the spud might have been once, he'd sure had one heck of a case of ADD- the merrily babbling ghost had been introduced to spiced watermelon seeds from Ray's favorite Chinatown candy store. The little green blob orbited Ray's head like the most eccentric of dwarf planets, yammering with glee every time another handful of seeds was parceled out. Ray had bought a bag somewhat larger than his own head, so the rationing served two purposes: one, to keep the spud occupied while Peter calmed down, and two, to give Ray time to think.

Douglaston had gone spontaneously quiet, which was a little worrisome in a calm-before-the-storm kind of way. Egon was out there regardless, taking soundings at some of the synagogues and Hebrew schools. Once he was done gathering his information it would be a week of analysis and general research, unless something big erupted. (You could never really rule that out, after all.) The question was-

"Shnzibbbt, rngelblap?"

"Oh, yeah, here," Ray said, holding out another fistful of the seeds.

"YIIIBBLY!" squealed the ghost, diverting course into a higher upward spiral this time. Ray just shook his head and made a note to wear a baseball cap next time.

Anyway. The Douglaston data shouldn't take too long to correlate and nailed down. After that, though, there were too many point-sources of both ghost and psychic activity cropping up around the city lately for Ray's liking. Nothing like the sort of ramping-up they'd seen before Gozer's arrival, but it was September. They were less than a month from their most insanely busy time of year. Compared to last September, the city was positively crawling with spook activity already. He'd be lucky if he got any sleep outside of Milliways at all this October. And there was the question of Joey, who had apparently progressed to levitating ball-point pens. . . well, maybe Foxtrot could help with that. They'd have to tell Catherine eventually, of course-

"Fnah! Hngherfngerhblibblyrmp?"

"Sure, but you have to promise not to eat them directly over my head."

"Snrgl," the spud agreed, taking off with the next batch of seeds.

Honestly, it was enough to make a guy forget that he was turning thirty-four, sometimes.