The hum of moving machinery echoed throughout the lift as the two men stood side by side. The Commissioner stuffed some more tobacco into his pipe, lit it and placed it to his mouth. As one would normally do with a pipe.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Do you mind if I smoke, Mr. President?”
“Go ahead, sir. Next to a dog, a pipe is a man’s best friend. Do you mind if I shadowbox?”
“Fine by me,” the Commissioner puffed on his pipe, leaving Lincoln to begin boxing against his shadow on the back of the lift.
“Well Mr. Lincoln, it’s like this. We’ve been getting a lot of weird activity from space. A lot of really strange stuff keeps happening lately, the sort of stuff that would make your hair stand on end. We’re not exactly sure what it is, but frankly, we don’t like it.”
“That’s awfully vague of you, Commissioner. Any chance you can be a bit more specific?”
“Not at this time, I’m afraid. It’s all classified, top secret, hush hush, top of the chain, need to know sort of thing. Only those who need to be in the know need to know.”
“Not at this time, I’m afraid. It’s all classified, top secret, hush hush, top of the chain, need to know sort of thing. Only those who need to be in the know need to know.”
“Do I need to know?”
“Apparently not. Not even I’m really sure. But let me put it like this-last week alone, London was plagued by atomic bowler hats, Venice was menaced by a jetpacked moose and Chicago was attacked by solar powered showgirls.”
“That’s…very hard to believe.”
“I would have said the same thing, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Hell, I did say the same thing despite seeing it with my own eyes. If my eyes hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it. Were it not for..,”
“I think I get your point, Commissioner. But I don’t see what that has to do with me. Even in my youth, the worst I ever had to handle was bears, Democrats and the Southern United States. I don’t know if I’m the type of person you need for these…these supermenaces.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, sir. We think you may in fact be the only person who can stop these threats, which is why we went through all that trouble of resurrecting you in the first place.”
The Commissioner turned to Lincoln. “Mr. President, would you mind awfully not shadowboxing anymore? You’re making quite a lot of dents in the elevator.”
“Oh, sorry,” Lincoln put down his fists. “I’ll see you dead yet, you crafty swine,” he muttered to his shadow self.
“That’s better. Now before I take you to the Director, I think it might be best if we take a visit to the library. We need to get you up to speed with modern times.”
“Ah, delightful. I’m looking forward to seeing how things have progressed since I was…shot.”
The Commissioner glanced at Lincoln’s mournful expression. “I’m sorry, Mr. President. I know it must be a painful memory.”
“More painful than you imagine,” Lincoln rubbed the back of his head. “One thing’s for sure, I’ll never go back to that theatre again. Terrible acoustics. Couldn’t hear half the words the actors were saying.”
“Or the footsteps of an assassin, eh Mr Lincoln?” the Commissioner bumped elbows, and instantly regretted it. Not only had he bruised his elbow against Lincoln’s biceps, that were like unto a thing of iron, he also realised that, relative to Lincoln’s time awareness, the joke fell on the socially unacceptable side of the ‘too soon’ line.
“Ah, here we are!” he sighed in relief, as the lift opened up to the library. “Welcome to the Information Super Storage Facility!”
“The what?” Lincoln was roused from his melancholy by confusion.
“Forgive me, I mean, welcome to the library. Sorry, but it’s the policy here at WIPE to make sure all our rooms have the most extravagant names possible. So the library here is the Information Super Storage Facility, the meeting room is the Consultation and Advanced Decision Making Nexus, and the garage is the Shelter for Advanced Vehicular Assistance Machines.”
“That must make things…very confusing.”
“It can take a little while to get used to, yes. And good luck trying to fit all the names into the guidebook. It took us a team of cartographers just to get the entrance map looking good.”
The Commissioner typed his access code into the library’s security lock, and invited Lincoln inside.
“Aren’t you coming too, Commissioner?” Lincoln asked.
“I’ll join you in a moment, Mr. Lincoln. Right now I got to make a visit to the Human Waste Removal and Sanitising Department.”
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