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CHAPTER 14

  CAR WASH

  A true friend is someone who is there for you when he'd rather be anywhere else.

  - Len Wein

  Fortunately, on this December evening the week before Christmas, only a few car-obsessed individuals were using the car wash. Bates was able to immediately pull into a do-it-yourself cleaning stall equipped with hot and cold high-pressure hoses.

  "Question Bates?" said Mel, clearly puzzled.

  "Shoot," replied Bates.

  "Well, in the ten years I've known you, I've never known you to wash a car.”

  "True enough," admitted Bates. "It's a vain waste of water. I have my principles you know.” He didn't have to mention that he was cheap, lazy, and enjoyed doing lots of things more than he did cleaning cars; his friend Mel already knew that.

  "So what are we doing at a car wash now?" asked Mel.

  "Well," explained Bates, "we need to clean and patch up Barns. If we go to a hotel in the shape he’s in they'll call the cops. If we take him to a hospital they'll patch him up and have him committed to a mental institution, in his current state. But we can't afford to lose him; since he is the only one of us that knows much about the Ra. We can't take him home with us either, since that's where they'll look for us first."

  "OK, but why a car wash? And how on earth did you even know there was a car wash here in my neighborhood?”

  "Elementary, my dear Mel," replied a smiling Bates as he climbed out of the Nitro and motioned Mel to follow. They closed the doors gently so they wouldn't wake Barns.

  "Remember last summer when I borrowed your charcoal grill?”

  "Sure," said Mel. "Actually, you borrowed it three summers ago, and returned it last summer.”

  "Whatever," continued Bates. "The point is, on the way to your house to return it I remembered that I hadn't ever cleaned it. I didn't want more trouble with Jane, so I VISICOMed for the nearest car wash, and discovered this place."

  Sudden understanding flashed on Mel's face. "That's why the grill was all wet when you returned it?”

  "Sure," affirmed Bates.

  "I wondered about that one for months," confessed Mel. "I speculated that it had to do with condensation. I even took the grill for a couple of test rides in the trunk of my own car to verify the hypothesis, with negative results. But that only explains the water. Even when it was dry, why did the whole grill smoke when we used it?"

  Bates thought for a moment. "That was probably the coat of car wax I gave it. The car clean and wax process shined the grill up nicely, but I guess I should have skipped the hot-wax cycle."

  Mel smiled, clearly pleased to have found the answer to another mystery of the universe. Now he thought that he understood his friend's reasoning at last. "You wanted to clean something, so you thought of the car wash where you cleaned the grill, correct?"

  "Almost," replied Bates "I suspect that the smelly stuff on Barns is some kind of barbecue sauce. That made me think of the grill, which reminded me of this car wash."

  This utterly pointless discussion was usefully interrupted by Jane parking nearby. When Mel walked over to greet her however, she got out of the car and stared at him in total shock. Then she attacked. The verbal abuse was loud and delivered in Jane's native tongue, Swedish, but the two men understood enough words and gestures to at last realize that in all the excitement Mel had left work without changing back into the three piece suit that Jane had dressed him in that morning.

  Mel stood cowering, dressed in three layers of old sweaters that supplemented his raggedy jeans, sneakers, and flannel shirt. The Nobel Prize winning physicist clearly understood that he was in deepest trouble.

  Bates finally stepped in bravely to save his companion. "Jane! Thank you for coming on such short notice. We have a very serious national emergency on our hands, and we do badly need your help.”

  She turned unsmiling from Mel to face Bates. She clearly wasn't buying this.

  "And," continued Bates, backing up strategically a step or two, "of course we need Mel. But it's a messy job. That's why I made him take off his good work clothes and put on some old clothes that I had."

  Jane looked at Mel, then Bates, then Mel again, while she tried to decide if the explanation Bates had given made any sense whatsoever. She knew Bates too well to take everything that he said at face value. A key factor, Bates now realized, was the fact that he was six inches taller and over seventy pounds heavier than his diminutive friend Mel. Could the clothes that Mel now wore possibly belong to Bates?

  Fortunately, to be on the safe side, Mel always bought his casual office clothes several sizes too big. They hung on him loosely, with errant folds that threatened to trip or suffocate the thin scientist with every move. At an office party Mel once boasted that the probability that he would ever outgrow any of his favorite clothes was less than that of finding Schrodinger in a cat's litter box. This tremendously poor little joke went over well enough with the physicists and chemists at the party, but demonstrated once again that physics humor wasn't ready to be mainstreamed.

  Mel looked like a homeless bum. Fortunately, that's exactly how Bates also looked when he wasn't at work; a fact that was well known to Jane. Jane suddenly grabbed Mel by his protruding ears, bent down, and kissed him.

  Bates breathed a sigh of relief. She had bought it!

  "I'm sorry Poopsy," she gushed. "I know this isn't YOUR fault.” But her expression again hardened as she turned to face Bates. "So OK, Bates, what's really going on here?”

  "It's a little hard to explain," began Bates.

  "I'll bet!” interjected Jane.

  "It's a matter of national security, and a matter of life and death," added Bates.

  "Ours!” offered Mel.

  It was not the right thing to say. "What?" roared Jane. "Someone IS threatening my Poopsy?” She cradled Mel's balding head lovingly, and gave him another kiss, but again turned her ire on Bates. "Why would you put my Mel in danger Bates? Don't you understand how irreplaceable he is?”

  Jane was still unusually hostile, and Bates wasn't yet sure why. She released Mel and advanced on Bates again, with index finger leveled between his eyeballs. "It’s cloak and dagger stuff again, right? Mel is again going places that nobody can be told about and doing who knows what? I thought that was over years ago! When Mel told me they had put YOU in charge of DOD I should have seen something like this coming. Why anyone would ever put you in charge over my Mel, I just can't understand!"

  This last remark at last gave Bates the insight he needed. Of all the crazy things, she was jealous of his recent promotion to Head of DOD! ”Well of course the Government couldn't sacrifice the valuable time of a world famous scientist like Mel to do the silly administrative duties of a mere Department Head! Mel's scientific work is far too valuable to disturb,” Bates explained. And he meant it.

  "Well, sure, of course it is!” Jane was forced to agree. Bates could tell by the way she said it that she hadn't thought of it in quite that way before.

  Bates pressed his advantage. "But unfortunately, the price of fame is sometimes danger, and right now, you must help me save Mel!”

  She looked frightened for the first time. "Mel is really in danger?”

  "I'm afraid so," said Bates. "We all are."

  "How?" she asked. "And from whom? And why?”

  "Well, it's too complicated to explain everything right this minute; you just have to trust us, Jane. I promise that before the night is over you'll know every bit as much about what's going on as any of us. But right now we really do need your professional help."

  "My professional help as a nurse?" she asked incredulously, much calmer now.

  Bates led Jane over to the Nitro and pointed into the back seat. "Poor Dr. Barns needs to be washed and patched up by a competently nurse."

  She opened the car door and looked in. "My God! What happened to him?” She lifted a fold of blanket, exposing more of the sleeping Barns. "He looks terrible!”

  "Even
worse than usual," agreed Bates.

  "He smells much worse!” added Mel.

  "What happened to his clothes? And why does he have a fishing hat on his head?" asked Jane.

  From that point on Jane's nursing instincts kicked in. After they somehow convinced Jane that the car wash, not a hospital, was the place to take care of Barns, Jane, assisted by Bates, set to work bathing him in the carwash stall behind the Nitro, while Mel cleaned up the inside of the car and transferred supplies from his wife's car. In the meantime they gave her an abridged version of what was going on, though for the moment they didn't tell her that the bad guys involved were space aliens. She was especially sympathetic when they told her something of Barns’ ill-fated honeymoon.

  The chief obstacle to the Barns clean-up process actually turned out to be the fishing hat. They had to use scissors and wire cutters to first separate the blanket from the hat, before Jane expertly removed the cruel lure barbs from Barn's scalp. It turned out that during her years as a nurse she had removed dozens of fishing lures from scalps and most other parts of the male anatomy.

  When Jane and Bates removed the fishing hat itself, half-a-dozen data cubes fell out! Bates realized immediately that these had to be Twig's cubes, the ones that Barns said that he retrieved from the Ra space ship. Barns thought that he had lost them during his flight from the Ra, but at some point, he must have had the presence of mind to secure them under the fishing hat. This was an important find. What secrets did these cubes hold, he wondered?

  They didn't have time to find out right now. After making room by taking out a couple of milk-bones for a grateful Milo, Bates put the cubes in his shirt pocket, where they joined the cube containing the DOD safe contents, and buttoned them all in securely.

  Even the cleaning and awful hat and hook removal procedure didn't wake the exhausted ex-U.S. Senator. With the hat and its terrible lures gone, the car wash apparatus actually did a good job of cleaning, cutting through dirt, blood, smelly brown sauce, and everything else that covered Barns from head to toe. A couple dollars’ worth of warm soapy spray and fifty cents of clear rinse did the trick. Fortunately for Barns, they remembered to skip the hot-wax cycle. Bates held Barns up while Jane did most of the washing, but Milo got in a few good licks, in an attempt to atone for his earlier attack on the ex-Senator.

  The cold was nearly as cruel to everyone as the lures. It was unusually warm for mid-December, perhaps fifty degrees Fahrenheit, but Jane and Bates were soon splashed wet and shivering themselves, while poor naked Barns was being sprayed clean by streams of icy cold water, before being patted dry by several towels that ended up so bloody and nasty that they had to be thrown away. Fortunately the ex-Senator, though thinner than normal, still had adequate layers of blubber to help keep him from freezing to death during the ordeal of his cleaning.

  When Barns was at last expertly cleaned, bandaged and dressed by Jane, the administrator certainly looked and smelled much better. Bates had to essentially carry the shivering ex-Senator to the Nitro and prop him up in the rear seat. He wandered idly if Barns was the first U.S. Senator to shower naked in a public suburban Washington DC car wash in mid-December. Probably not, but at least Barns had the good fortune to essentially sleep through the entire rather undignified affair.

  Jane insisted that she would go with them to take care of Barns for the next few hours until she was more confident of his recovery; she wasn't about to leave a patient at the mercy of Bates and her husband. So Barns ended up warmly wrapped and comfortably cradled in clean clothes and blankets and in Jane's arms in the back seat of the Nitro.

  Frankly, it was an enviable position to be in, thought Bates wistfully, as he stared at Barns through the back window. Jane was a very attractive woman. Just then, a curious thing happened. Barns opened his eyes for a few seconds, glanced up at Jane and winked at Bates before closing his eyes again. He had a big smile on his face.

  Bates chuckled as he climbed into the driver’s seat. That old son of a gun! He wondered how much of the time Barns had actually been awake while Jane was taking care of him?

  In the meantime, Mel and Milo competed for the front passenger seat. Mel tried to persuade the dog to get into the back of the Nitro, but Milo wasn't about to give up his seat so easily. They ended up compromising, with Milo on top and head out of the window, and Mel with lap, arms, and face full of wet dog.

  Unfortunately, now that he was wet, Milo smelled nearly as bad as Barns did before he had been washed. Fortunately for Milo, the company determined that they didn't have the time or the quarters to also soap and rinse down the dog.

  Bates started up the Nitro and pulled out of the car wash stall at last, but stopped the car when he reached the street. Should he turn left or right? Where should they go now, and what should they do? Bates realized suddenly that he didn't have any idea. He simply hadn't really had a chance to plan beyond this point. The Nitro sat idling noisily in the car wash exit as Bates tried to plan their next move.

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