Alpha Prime’s eyes narrowed as he looked at me. “After we got away from the gravity well, I told you to make me solid again, but you said it was a bad idea. In fact, you didn’t make me substantial until after Mouse was gone. What was that about?”
“The gravity well seemed to trigger after we came into the room,” I answered.
“A booby trap,” Electra concluded. “Similar to what Buzz experienced.”
“Yeah,” I stated with a nod, “and I figured there’d be more of them.”
“Well, it turns out you were right,” Alpha Prime stated. “We did a sweep of the Vault after Mouse left and found two more of the gravity-balls. They didn’t turn on when we located them, so presumably they only trigger when Mouse is present.”
“So once he departed, all his snares went dormant,” Luna noted.
“Apparently,” Alpha Prime concurred, then looked at me. “But I think this really highlights how important it is to have you be part of this search effort, Jim. You know how Mouse thinks, what he’s likely to do, and so on. I’m not sure anyone else would have considered Mouse setting that many traps in the Vault.”
“That brings up another question,” I said. “What was he doing in there?”
There was a quick exchange of glances between my father, Buzz, and Luna. Obviously my question touched on something of import.
“As you know,” Alpha Prime finally said, “the Vault houses a lot of weapons that we’ve collected over the years.”
Electra nodded. “Yeah, we saw the display cases that hold some of them.”
“Well, yes and no,” my father said, waffling a hand from side to side. “The stuff in the display cases is, for one reason or another, completely defective. They’ll never work again. They pose no risk, and we really just keep them out for those occasions when we have distinguished visitors.”
“So they’re just conversation pieces,” I summed up. “Things you can show off when some bigwig – say, a government bureaucrat – drops by. You make him feel important by showing him an area that’s off-limits to almost everyone, but they really don’t get to see anything that’s worth the price of admission.”
“Now you get it,” Luna chimed in.
“Okay,” said Electra, nodding her head. “So where do you keep the good liquor?”
“The walls,” I interjected, reflecting back on what I’d seen Mouse doing in the Vault. “They serve as some kind of additional storage system, like rolling stacks in a library.”
“Very good,” my father said with a smile. “The walls, the floor, the ceiling…everything. That’s where we keep the stuff that’s still worrisome.”
“Behind walls and stuff?” Electra intoned skeptically. “Sounds kind of flimsy, even if they are inside a vault.”
“You probably didn’t get a good look at it,” Buzz commented, “but the walls, floor, and ceiling are even thicker than the blast doors at the Vault’s entrance. Trust me, anything we put there is safe.”
“And we also have a few offsite storage facilities,” Luna added, giving Alpha Prime a knowing look.
I understood without asking that she was referring to my father’s hidden retreat, which was where a number of destructive devices were stored. I had never been there – didn’t even know where it was – but it didn’t seem relevant at the moment.
“So now we get to the nitty-gritty,” I remarked. “Mouse was at one of the wall storage sections. So the question is, what did he take?”
Once again, the three adults in the room spent a moment looking at each other. It gave the impression that the answer wasn’t going to be palatable, and it wasn’t.
“We’re not sure,” Alpha Prime finally confessed.
I gave him an incredulous stare. “What do you mean, you’re not sure? Don’t you guys keep an inventory list or something along those lines?”
“Of course we do,” my father replied. “We’ve got a state-of-the-art system to keep track of stuff like that. But I’ll give you three guesses who designed it, and you won’t need two of them.”
“Mouse,” I said flatly.
“Yes,” Luna confirmed. “Our index, catalog, and itemization process for weapons and such is his baby.”
“So what’s the problem?” Electra asked.
“Apparently during his little house call, Mouse scrambled the inventory system,” Buzz answered.
“In essence, you don’t know what you have anymore,” I concluded.
“That’s true to some extent,” Alpha Prime concurred. “But the real issue is that we don’t know what he took.”
“Well, what can the stuff in there do?” I asked.
“Everything up to and including destroying the world,” Buzz said. “Not to mention just taking it over.”
“Well, good thing that’s not on Mouse’s list,” Electra said.
Once again, the adult League members were silent, as if they weren’t sure how to respond.
“Oh, come on,” I droned. “You can’t believe that Mouse is planning to take over the world.”
Buzz shrugged. “He’s joked once or twice about how much easier things would be if he just took charge. It’s something all of us occasionally kid each other about. But now that he’s off his rocker, who knows?”
“More importantly,” Luna added, “why take something that can only be used for global domination if that’s not your intent?”
“But nobody knows what he took,” I reminded them. “Or if he took anything at all.”
“We’ve got people working on it,” my father assured me. “They’ll figure it out. And there’s also a little bit of a silver lining.”
“Which is what?” I asked dubiously.
“The devices in the Vault that can actually do harm are all disassembled,” Alpha Prime stated. “They’re in pieces that aren’t kept together. So, at best, Mouse got one component of some device, but it won’t do him any good without the rest.”
“Mouse is a genius,” I reminded them. “If he’s got a device that’s missing a component, he can just build it.”
“If he’s got the resources,” Luna chimed it. “But I don’t think that’s the case. I think he’s alone and isolated, without a lot of assets.”
“Other than hacking skills, gravity wells, and frictionless grease,” I noted. “Not to mention anything else he might have up his sleeve.”
Luna looked as though she
