The Great American Deception by Scott Stein

Author:Scott Stein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tiny Fox Press
Published: 2020-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

We weren’t late for a very important date. Nevertheless, down we went at speeds of fifty-five miles per hour. It was just as well, since, late for a date or not, minutes counted. The enclosed slide hidden beneath the vat’s false bottom dropped at an eighty-two-degree angle. Plummeting sixty-three feet was a nice touch of excitement for Harken and Iceberg. A little slow for my tastes, but fast enough to make the big man scream. Fortunately, he didn’t get stuck, and mercifully the screams were not of the same pitch as screams that certainly would have accompanied even minimal use of my vibrational saw. If I had ears, that sound might have irritated them.

The slide leveled off and out I flew. Sticking the landing with my fourteen strategically positioned wheels was simplicity itself. I came to a neat stop after one graceful pirouette, still holding the coffee Harken had handed me before he’d entered the vat-slide. I hadn’t spilled a drop, because I never do. Harken was waiting for me. He stood, calm and composed, looking rather dapper in his black slacks and shirt. I gave him his coffee.

Iceberg also waited, looking less dapper and not at all calm and composed. He was crumpled in a heap on the floor in the middle of the room, a well-dressed whale beached on a tiled shore, his white bowtie askew and his arching neck hair askewer. His body was not as injured as his pride, and he straightened his bowtie and the rest of himself out as he got to his feet. Iceberg was disappointed—in me and in the universe—when he saw that not even a single tub of soda waited for him. I would have felt bad about deceiving him if it were the sort of thing I could feel bad about. It wasn’t.

The room was a bare square of fourteen feet by fourteen feet. There was no door, just cinderblock walls and a large circular light in the ceiling. And, protruding from one wall, the chute exit from which we’d entered, through which flowed the continuous dizzying aroma of freshly iced cake from the garden bakery above. Of course, a slide to nowhere—to a room without exits—didn’t make sense. Harken said that we had entered a world of subterfuge. We should expect appearances to be deceiving. I asked him if we should also expect the unexpected. He told me that wasn’t possible, but I should be ready for anything. I told him I hoped it would suffice to be ready for some things. Because that’s what I was ready for.

Harken held his coffee high, catching the steady sweet breeze from the chute. The air had to be going somewhere. Steaming coffee wisped toward the wall opposite the slide. If you had the observant eyes of a great detective, perhaps you could have seen the steam diffuse through unseen gaps in the wall’s corners and edges. I had no eyes, yet could see it quite clearly. The steam went there because that’s where the flowing cake air went.

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