“I need to go see this club room of yours for myself,” the Doctor said. “Can you take me there right now?”
“First, class is about to begin,” I said. “All of us need to at least report in for roll call. Second, visitors need to register at the office- and I’m certain they’ll need more of a name than ‘Doctor.’”
The Doctor shrugged and grinned. “Well, I have used an alias from time to time,” he said. “Dr. John Smith should be good enough for today.”
My heart stopped. Koizumi blanched. Even Yuki froze in place.
“Beg pardon, did I say something wrong?” the Doctor asked.
It took a moment for me to get my hard back down my throat. “It is absolutely, vitally important,” I said at last, “that the name John Smith not be heard or seen, in any way, shape or form, by Haruhi Suzumiya in any connection whatever with this school.”
“Oh, it’s such a common name,” the Doctor waved it off, “I’m sure-“
“He is correct,” Yuki said. “The use of that name risks massive and unpredictable changes in the data underlying this section of the universe. The Data Overmind believes any chance of exposure of Haruhi Suzumiya to that name to be too dangerous.”
She looked directly at the Doctor and added, “Believe me.”
I’d used the threat of John Smith to scare Yuki’s superiors into not deleting her in the same manner as Ryoko Asahina. It was the nuclear option- except using that option made a nuclear threat look like a baby’s cork gun. Nobody with any sense would risk setting the blast off by accident- or worse, by carelessness.
“But it’s only a name,” the Doctor persisted.
“Oh, really, Doctor!” Sarah Jane said. “We’ll register under MY name. Is there any danger in the name ‘Sarah Jane Smith’?”
“Threat assessment negligible,” Yuki replied.
“Fine. I’m here to do an article on Japanese schools for a British magazine. Doctor, you’re my photographer, but the equipment has been held up in Customs, so you’re just looking for suitable locations, personalities, and things to shoot when the cameras arrive. Sound good to everyone?”
The Doctor wasn’t listening. As soon as he’d walked in the gates he’d taken a sharp turn to the right and stopped cold. He was staring at the gate pillar I’d noticed the day before, the one I supposed had been brought to replace the existing one. His ever-present smile had vanished, replaced by a serious frown of disapproval and concern.
“I SAID, sound good to everyone, DOCTOR?” Sarah asked pointedly.
“Oh? Yes, yes, you’d better do that,” the Doctor muttered. “Have one of the children show you to the office. Not you three,” he said quickly, gesturing to us to come closer. “I’ll find you inside later, Sarah. See if you can pick up on any strange disappearances recently.”
“Right,” Sarah nodded, and walked off.
When she got halfway to the doors, the Doctor spun and shouted, “Sarah, WAIT!”
Sarah froze and dashed back to the Doctor. “What is it?”
“I just remembered,” the Doctor said. “Be sure to take off your shoes by the lockers as you go in. It’s very poor manners to wear outdoor shoes inside in Ja-“
“Oh, you!” Sarah giggled, cutting the Doctor off. “I’m sure I can figure it out!” She walked away briskly, shaking her head.
The Doctor watched her go, then stepped over to the replacement gate pillar. It stood about three meters tall and one wide, gray masonry in the bland, unremarkable style of so many gated high schools across Japan. It must have weighed hundreds of pounds; how did it get into the yard without so much as a mark in the dirt? And for that matter, why? I looked at the old gatepost and couldn’t see a thing wrong with it.
“Let’s start with the psychic,” the Doctor said. “What do you see in front of you, Mr. Koizumi?”
Koizumi blinked. “I see a tree to the left, the school walls to the right, and a very large blind spot directly ahead,” he said quietly. “What am I supposed to see?”
“It’s a gatepost,” I said. “A gatepost that’s twin to the one right next to us, except that it looks like it got here all by itself. No drag marks, no cart or tire tracks on the dirt, nothing.”
“Well spoted, Kyon!” the Doctor said, but his encouraging voice wasn’t matched by that toothy grin. “And now for what it really is… Yuki, is it?”
Yuki stepped forward to the pillar. “It is a transcendental dimensional pocket,” she said, “camouflaged imperfectly to match its surroundings and further protected by a mental broadcast device designed to discourage attention.” She put a hand on the stone, stroked it up and down for a moment, and then added the word, “Sad.”
“Yes,” the Doctor said. “It has good reason to be. Can you see it now, Koizumi?”
“Yes,” the esper said, looking at it carefully. “What is it doing here?”
“Not a lot, just now,” the Doctor said. “But what it’s done already is bad- Miss Yuki, what is it?”
Yuki had left the transcendental gatepost and walked over to the tree. She knelt down by its roots, reached down, and picked up a small object. “Nagawa-sensei,” she said, her voice expressing neither surprise nor dismay nor any other human emotion.
The Doctor stepped briskly over to her, leaving Koizumi and myself to trot over. “Show me,” the Doctor said, his voice almost as quiet and flat as Nagato’s.
The thing in her hands looked a little like a rag doll at first, the way its arms and legs hung limply from Yuki’s grip. That impression lasted only a moment before the horror sunk in; the rag doll was a man. Not just an action figure or model, but an actual human being shrunk down to about fifteen centimeters tall. Specifically, Nagato’s old homeroom teacher- the one Mr. Strame had conveniently replaced.
I looked at the Doctor just in time to catch a glimpse of a deep sorrow- as if the little figure in Yuki’s hands was one of his closest relatives laid out for a funeral. “I was afraid of this,” he said quietly. “Now I know why I was brought here.” He looked at Yuki. “This was your teacher, was it?”
Yuki shook her head slowly. “Is. Not dead.”
“That’s impossible,” the Doctor replied. “The Tissue Compression Eliminator kills any living matter it affects. It simply isn’t possible to survive the effects.”
“Stasis field,” Yuki replied.
The Doctor blinked, fished in his pocket for a moment, and pulled a jeweler’s loop out and placed it to his eye. “You’re right!” he said. “But how? He wouldn’t bother, and in any case there’s no sign of a projection unit to maintain the effect.”
Excuse me? I was left behind several sentences back.
“I’m guessing Suzumiya,” Koizumi said. “For some reason she regards this school as something special, or perhaps under her protection. I don’t think she could possibly imagine death coming to these grounds, so her power protected Nagawa-sensei.”
The Doctor pondered this. “Is she truly that powerful?” he asked.
“Potentially,” Koizumi said. “But only if she realizes it. As it stands, she-“
She was just now coming through the gates- just as the bell rang.
Haruhi looked hung over, or at least how I imagined hung over to look. She glanced over at us, stopped, and then shouted, “What are you three doing over there? Do you know how it will look if the entire SOS Brigade is late to classes! I won’t have it!”
“That’s her, is it?” the Doctor muttered.
“That’s her,” I replied. “Please excuse us.” I didn’t have time for any other words, because Haruhi had marched over to us, grabbed my wrist, and begun dragging me at a trot for the school doors. Yuki caught up to us just long enough to say four words, and then we were separated, changing shoes in the anteroom, then rushing to classes.
“I will protect him.”
Your shrunken teacher, the Doctor, or both? I wish I could have asked, but with Haruhi acting as my personal truant officer there was no way.
(Posted Tue, 14 May 2013 03:12)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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