I have located the school that Rob Franklin was attending at the time of his disappearance. It is Jefferson Elementary School in Oak Park. According to my cybernetic snooping, the closest class mate of Rob Franklin geographically at this time is Philip Brookens. He works at Roy’s Bike Shop at 3143 Turner which is in walking distance of your house if you and Lilly are not overly allergic to exercise. This makes for one mission where you need not depend on adult accomplices, who have been too generous lately and on whose generosity you will be imposing again in the near future. I trust your ingenuity for getting interesting information out of Mr. Brookens concerning a class mate whom he will most likely remember.

In checking up on THAT accident, I find that you have a most urgent errand to visit Dr. Harvey Schmidt in Room 1643 in the Malone Memorial Hospital where he is recovering from injuries received in THAT automobile. If necessary, you could take the suburban train to Union Station and take another hike, but you will probably want to have an adult conspirator drive you on that mission. LOUISE

The deafening squeal of brakes jarred me out of my early morning sleep for the third morning in a row. I only had time to turn over in bed half-way before the door bell rang and I heard the patter of little feet heading down the stairs. I shuffled out of my room where I was greeted by a blast of cool air coming up from downstairs. There was Kevin in his pajamas, standing in the doorway and signing for another Federal Express package.

“Did you like the papers you received yesterday?” asked the carrier, a smart-looking young woman. Her uniform did not seem to fit her, and her question seemed a bit odd to be asking a recipient of a package.

“Be sure to think about what you read and keep putting the pieces together,” said the carrier.

Kevin looked like a cat who had swallowed a canary as he carried the package to the breakfast table. The truck's engine roared, and a silver arrow shot down the street. That was enough to make me wonder if I should call the company and report this eccentric driver of theirs. It took Kevin about half a second to open the package and spread the papers all over the table. Apparently he was going to eat the latest Paul Schuler papers for breakfast. When I started sleepily making coffee and pulling out some cereal for myself, he didn't seem interested.

“Just because a woman is good-looking doesn’t mean she’s easy to live with.”

Kevin fell to devouring the papers while I tried to figure out how I was going to begin a heart to heart talk with my son before things got out of hand, as if they hadn't already. Before I managed to think of anything, Lilly came into the house, armed with a stack of computer printouts, and seated herself at the breakfast table as if she lived there..

“No,” she replied, sounding like the most innocent of girls, as if I didn’t know better.

“Uh—Lilly, I love your presence very much, but Kevin has school this morning—“

“You see,” Lilly explained, “Kevin and I have to read these papers and then we have to go see a couple of people.”

“We can walk to the first guy we’re going to see,” said Kevin, “so we don’t need your help for that. We need a ride for the second person we have to see, but I don’t suppose you’re nice enough to take us there.”

“My Daddy has enough sense to help me out when I have something important to do and you don’t!” said Lilly stoutly, “and don’t you dare insult my Daddy again!”

“I’m not insulting your father,” I replied. “It is just that it seems to me that he shouldn’t let you skip school like this.”

I didn’t like the ingratiating smile on Lilly’s cute face and I liked even less Kevin’s laughing up his sleeve at me. I sipped some coffee and pretended to look at the morning paper. I was, of course, trying to figure out what to do with these two children.

“Why that slimy crook of a doctor!” Kevin cried as he read a printout Lilly had brought over.

“Do you mean to say that you two kids are hacking the private files of a doctor?” I thundered.

“As long as Louise does the hacking, we won’t get put in jail for it,” said Lilly with more complacency than I liked.

“Do you think it’s moral for a doctor to do everything he can to wreck a patient?” Kevin asked me.

“Looks to me that this doctor is just doing his job, trying to do something with this brat of a client.”

“DO YOU MEAN TO SAY THAT YOU’RE TAKING THE DOCTOR’S SIDE?” Kevin yelled. “DO YOU MEAN TO SAY YOU’RE IN FAVOR OF TAKING A BUNCH OF GREEN CHILDREN AND SENDING THEM AWAY TO ANOTHER PLANET?”

“Green children?” I asked, hardly believing my ears in spite of the absurdities these children were believing already.

“There are some green-skinned children who got sent to the same planet where Tim Hawkins got sent to because some people in this world didn’t want to have any green children around,” Lilly explained.

Lilly saw fit to laugh at me for saying what I said in that tone of voice. Kevin was too angry to laugh.

“I suppose that religious order you told me about is taking care of these children?” I asked, trying to keep my voice at a reasonable pitch.

“Of course they’re taking care of the children,” Lilly replied. “They’re Christians, aren’t they?”

“When you believe that Jesus is worth following,” said Lilly, as if she were talking to a small child, “you do things like take care of children that nobody else cares about.”

There was so much fire in Lilly’s eyes that I decided right then and there I wouldn’t want to run into her if she ever became a preacher.

“I’m still not comfortable about your receiving these hacked files,” I told Kevin.

“The Bible says that the things that you whisper in the closet will be yelled from the housetops,” said Lilly.

“Do you mean that God authorizes computer hacking?” I asked. “Or, do you think God is some Cosmic Hacker?”

“God knows everything everybody put into every computer without having to hack anybody,” said Lilly.

“Dad,” said Kevin, “when you and Mom got divorced, you said that sometimes it’s hard to know what the right thing to do is.”

“Sorry,” said Kevin, his nose stuck back into the article he was reading. “You get divorced whenever you like, I’ll read hacked computer files whenever I like, and we’re even.”

That was too much. I stomped out of the house, knowing I had lost that round, but determined to get even. The first thing I did when I reached my office was ring up Janet Langston to have it out with her. It gave me a gratifying surge of power when the secretary put me straight through at the mention of my name.

“This is Nigel Sharperson. I regret to have to say this, but I think you are screwing my son’s head all out of shape with the papers you are sending him.”

“Well, Dr. Sharperson, the problem that you don’t see is that certain events have been screwed out of shape and something needs to be done about them. In fact, the matter has become quite urgent, given the information that Kevin has reported to me.”

“Surely you don’t believe that there is a monastery on some other planet where the monks and nuns are taking care of green children exiled from this planet?!!”

“Unfortunately for your point of viewlessness, the information that Kevin and Lilly have collected dovetails rather nicely with the information I have been forwarding to them. I suggest you keep an open mind. Have a nice day.” Click.

Defeated on that front, I looked up Tignor Nedrick, better known as Tiger, just as he was about to leave for his class. I must admit that I didn’t know him very well. His constant harping on the sins of the white race, for all its truth, tends to fray my nerves. When I approached him, I couldn’t help but be amused at the thought that such a tall, heavy-set man could be manipulated so mercilessly by a little girl. But then he was a single parent, and that has its difficulties, as I know very well. Only then did it cross my mind that nobody seemed to know what had happened to his wife. Was she dead? Divorced? None of the above?

"I hope Lilly Nedrick was pulling my leg when she said you were letting her out of school for yet another day,” said I.

"I hope so, too," Nigel replied with rather relaxed good humor. "I don't know how to refuse her anything and I don't want to learn."

"That makes things awkward for me, with Kevin demanding the same privilege you’re granting Lilly."

"Honey child of the Illinois prairie,” said Tiger, “you'll just have to find your own way so say 'No' to your son if you want to do it. I can't teach you that.”

“I would like for my son to receive an education, even if you do not think it necessary for Lilly to receive the same benefit.”

"Bully for my colleague in the academic wasteland of America," said Tiger with a breezy smile that didn’t improve my disposition.

"I hope you realize that these kids have their own notions about what they think they should do with their time this week,” I informed my colleague.

"Lilly's been known to have her own notions about things before,” said Tiger. “I wouldn't put it past Kevin to have his own notions as well.”

“I can’t tell you how pleased I am that Kevin has become Lilly’s friend. It’s been a lonely life for her until now. I am sure that my sweet little girl and your darling little boy will put their time to good use. After all, it doesn’t take much to learn more on your own than you can learn in the public schools in this fair state of Illinois. Besides, Linda Hoffman is tutoring our children in what Lilly calls emergency research. As for where the children are going: I can tell you that one of the places is Malone Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago, because I am taking them there myself this afternoon. I have a class to teach now, so I will have to leave you to shoot the breeze with other colleagues, if you aren’t teaching any 'headpieces filled with straw, alas.'"

What do you mean the world of music? There are many worlds of music; an infinity of them. How do we communicate with other musical worlds? By listening with the ear of the heart until we get a hint of what that world of music is hearing from other musical worlds. Listening is communication. --- From The Witless Wisdom of Rolland Fletcher.

I feel terribly foolish about putting this unbelievable narration on paper, but it must be done for the sake of those whose lives have been blighted by a great conspiracy of silence. All I can do is state the facts as I experienced them as conscientiously as I list information that I learn from any other source.

I was still a graduate student in medieval history at the University of Chicago on this fateful day when I entered the university bookstore, one of my favorite haunts in those days. I was always intrigued with the way that store had of the ambience a cave, an effect partly achieved by the store’s being about four feet below street level. I moseyed over to the corner where I often found the most interesting books on early medieval history. The lighting there was not good, and it was easy for me to imagine that the walls were made of damp stone and that the paperback I was looking at was really a vellum manuscript. I was quite absorbed in looking at a new study evaluating Celtic claims regarding St. Brendan's discovery of America when I felt a weird touch at the top of my head. I jumped a mile or two before I turned around and found myself staring into the impish face of Rudy Fairfax, impudent adolescent and self-appointed musical genius, the prize music composition pupil of Darrell Stewart.

"I only scratched your head a tiny little bit," said Rudy. "I wouldn't be Rudy if I wasn't rude, would I?"

"Thanks for the compliment. Now, did I really hurt you? Even a tiny little bit?”

"No, you only startled me out of a deep contemplation on the mysteries of Irish history," I replied.

“The mystery of whether or not Saint Brendan of Clonfert and his monks discovered America a thousand years before Columbus did.”

“An Irish monk who led twelve monks from his community on a voyage across the Atlantic to America in the sixth century.”

“They sailed in a leather boat. It has recently been demonstrated that it can be done.”

“Well, maybe a few, since there have always been a few monks who don’t follow all the rules.”

Rudy smirked, but he didn’t seem all that interested in mocking other people’s sexual foibles.

“We really don’t know. I would think that Saint Brendan would have tried to convert them to Christianity.”

“Do you think that Irish monks like Brendan might be the first to discover new planets if they had a space ship or a space-warp device instead of a leather boat?” Rudy asked with a smile that was a bit unnerving.

“It would be very much like Saint Brendan to explore other planets if he could,” I replied, slightly amused at the thought.

“Would you know an Irish monastery if you saw one?" Rudy asked me, the look on his face so fiendish that I should have known enough to be on my guard.

“Are you asking if I could evaluate somebody's model of a reconstruction of an Irish monastery?" I asked Rudy.

"No, Silly. I mean, if I took you to a monastery, would you know if it was Irish or not?"

“Are you suggesting that you can conjure a sixth-century Irish monastery out of thin air just to help me with my research?”

I gave Rudy a hard look. For all the mockery in his eyes, his demeanor seemed quite serious.

“Am I supposed to believe that you are as good a magician as you are a musician?” I asked.

“This is one of those cases where it is hard to tell where one begins and the other leaves off,” Rudy replied.

“I could show you if you want or if you dare. Then you can draw your own conclusions.”

I was shivering by this time. Maybe Rudy would not have looked so sinister if he weren’t so deep in the shadows of the corner of the store where we were talking, but I began to fear that something strange and upsetting was about to happen to me, although I couldn’t imagine what that was going to be.

“You seem pretty confident about your ability to present me with a medieval Irish monastery on a silver platter,” I said to Rudy.

“I don’t know about the silver platter,” said Rudy. “For that matter, I don’t know about the Irish monastery, either. That’s where you come in. You can tell me whether or not it’s an Irish monastery that I’ve found in my extra-dimensional travels.”

I did so, all the time wondering what Rudy was really up to. Rudy started to sing a song as strange as any I had ever heard, featuring notes I was sure had never before been conceived my human ears. He still had a command of a treble range and his voice was deceptively sweet for a boy who was in the process of doing me in. I glanced over to the student at the cash register. He was punching in some keys and the little beeps seemed to prevent him from hearing the weird serenade I was being treated to. As Rudy sang, thick green threads appeared to break through the wall of the store and curl about my feet. Like snakes charmed by a snake charmer, these threads moved in the rhythm of Rudy’s song. My head fell into a tailspin and my balance fell apart. When I felt a firm hand my wrist, I could only pray it was Rudy Fairfax and not an intergalactic monster. After a horrible moment of total disorientation, my head cleared up a little and was relieved to see that it was indeed Rudy Fairfax who had a grip on my wrist. Wherever I was, it wasn't the inside the University bookstore.

“Okay?” Rudy asked, genuinely seeming to care whether or not I had weathered this strange journey.

There is no sense in describing the confusion I experienced in this strange environment which, at first, seemed to be little more than a green soup. I will go on to describe the scene as I saw it once I was tuned into it. Actually, not everything was green, but green was the dominant color. Its greenness, however was not caused by growing things. Rather, the landscape appeared to be totally barren, being composed of green rock. Yet the rocky ground was softer under my feet than any rock I had encountered before. Other colors were mixed in with the green, mostly light orange and purple. The sky itself seemed to be a pale green with, apparently, more than one sun, unless these were moons shining through the haze. These sources of light were a bit bright for me to look at them and count their number. The temperature was rather comfortable, though maybe a trifle cool. All this time, I was hearing a bewildering array of high-pitched sounds that I could make little sense of. However, as long as Rudy remained unconcerned about the sights and sounds here, I was not about to allow myself to be carried away by fear.

Not far from us was the edge of what I took to be a wooded area. That is to say, it was a cluster of objects that looked something like trees. When Rudy walked on up towards this “grove,” I stayed close by him. I then noticed that a small fair-haired boy was sitting in a wedge made by a branch and the trunk of one of the barren “trees,” absorbed with playing a violin as if he and his instrument were a world unto themselves. The violin’s tone was amazingly sweet for a player so young. More amazing still was the weirdness of the music that sounded like an echo of the weird song Rudy had just sung to bring us to this place.

Upon a closer look, it was evident that there were no leaves on the branches on these “trees,” at least not in this season, but a few of them bore a fruit or flower of some kind growing on them that looked curious. From a distance one might take them for chrysanthemums. Closer up, they looked like baseballs made out of flower petals. I don't know how else to describe them. They were white with red streaks in the same places as the threads on baseballs. I tried to pick one of these fruits, but Rudy restrained me.

“I wish I knew,” Rudy replied. “I’m afraid that I don’t know much about this place.”

That was comforting. If Rudy didn’t know much about this place, how safe was I with him? Meanwhile, the other high-pitched sounds began to sound like boisterous children’s voices. A look through the "trees" that gave us a natural hiding place for observation purposes revealed a group of children playing a game very much like soccer. In fact, to my amazement, every indication showed that they were indeed playing soccer as I understood the game. The only perceptible difference was that instead of a clear field, the children were playing on an obstacle course that looked dangerous. Strange shapes, something like cacti in a desert, grew out of the ground. The children seemed to relish the challenge of working around the obstacles and using then as blockers against the other team.

A short distance beyond these children loomed an architectural monstrosity that had the unmistakable trappings of buildings pretending to be a monastery, capped by a Celtic cross at the top of a church. This was not a monastery built out of beehive huts as Irish monks would have built it, neither was it a Gothic structure such as would have been erected by European monks of the Medieval period. Rather, the church and cloister looked suspiciously like a set of light tan pre-fab units strung together that were crumbling from the stress caused by greenish vines growing out of the ground that threatened to choke the life out of the monastery.

The children were dressed in fashions that would have thought a little out of date. They could have been a normal group of children of diverse ethnic origins engaged in a normal child's activity, except for two things. First, the children's skin appeared to be tinged with green. To retain my sanity a bit longer, I stubbornly tried convince myself that their skin was reflecting the ground or the nearby forest. The other thing I observed was that, noisy as the children were, I heard nothing that could be construed as intelligible speech, not even in a foreign language. As my ear became attuned to the situation, I realized that much of the yelling was melodic. The children were singing to one another, but not in words.

“Do the children really have green skin, or am I seeing things?” I asked Rudy.

Off to the side of this play area, two nuns and a monk were standing, keeping an eye on the children and talking a bit with themselves. The monk wore a tonsure in the Celtic style, with the hair shaved off across the front but allowed to grow long in the back. Obviously, Rudy was not kidding when he offered to take me to an Irish monastery.

As I watched the children play soccer, I couldn't help but notice that one little girl, for all her efforts to participate, was being systematically left out of the action. No matter how open she was in the field, her teammates never kicked a pass to her. Several other girls were very much involved in the game, so it wasn't just a matter of the boys snubbing the girls. The other smaller children seemed to get their chances with a good grace by both teams, so it wasn’t her size, either. Then I realized what it was. This girl was the only child who did not have a greenish tinge to her skin. She looked like a normal white American girl, with her brown hair done up in a pony tail. That observation brought on another thought and I glanced up at the boy sawing away on his violin. Like the girl, he too lacked the green tint that marked all the other children.

"Is this the sixth century Irish monastery you want me to look at?" I asked Rudy in a low voice.

“What do you think?” Rudy returned with a generous dose of mockery in his smile.

A loud bell interrupted the game. The musical yelling stopped immediately. One of the boys picked up the ball, and all of the children hurried towards the church. The solitary girl called out a melodic signal and waved to the boy with the violin. The boy stopped playing his instrument and hopped down to follow the other children, carrying the violin in his hand. At this point, Rudy stepped out of hiding and whistled to the children. When they saw us, they shuffled over to Rudy and each slipped an arm around his waist and sang out in tones so mournful they were enough to break my heart.. In his turn, Rudy and threw an arm around the shoulders of each child. I must admit that I was amazed to see Rudy drop his arrogant precocious adolescent mask and show himself to be a feeling human being to those two children.

Their inarticulate singing took on a happier tone, and the two children almost smiled.

“That’s good,” said Rudy. “I will prepare a place for you as soon as I can and then I will bring you to it. Scout’s honor.”

Seemingly satisfied with this promise, the children let go of Rudy and ran towards the church.

“Any comments about how authentically Irish this monastery is?” Rudy asked, once we were alone.

“The monk watching the children wears his tonsure in the old Celtic way,” I replied.

“It’s the term for the way a monk shaves and cuts his hair. Have you seen pictures of medieval monks with their hair shaved in the middle, leaving a crown of hair around the edges?”

“That’s called a tonsure. The Celtic monks shaved their heads across the front, leaving it long in the back, like the monk I saw out there just now. The Celtic monks and the Roman monks had a big fight over their different hair styles. As with their other bones of contention, the Romans won and the Celtic tonsure disappeared.”

“And the church has been telling people how to cut their hair ever since,” said Rolland. “I guess that’s more important than believing in Jesus.”

Not knowing how to react to expressions of piety that I don’t share, I held my tongue and was rewarded by the sound of weirdly beautiful chanting coming from inside the church. Rudy motioned me to follow, and walked over to the church. On our way, I took a closer look at the obstacles on the soccer field. At closer range, some of the shapes were recognizable. One could have been taken for a semi-abstract Madonna and Christ Child as a contemporary artist might conceive it. Another had the shape of a dragon springing on a victim. We approached a back window of the church where a green vine had worked its way through and smashed the glass. It made me wonder if anybody repaired anything in the monastery. A look at the other buildings suggested that the answer was No. The corner of a nearby building was crumbling in the grip of vines crushing it like a boa constrictor and selected portions of other buildings were in a similar state.

The inside of the church, however, was something else again. The sanctuary was decorated by a riot of swirling colors with a Risen Christ emerging out of the design. It was Celtic art all right, only it was even more disorganized than usual for this style of art. I suspected that the painting had been done by a committee with nobody in charge of it rather than a single artist. Several men and women dressed in religious habits stood in choir stalls on one side of the church. Again, the heads of the monks were tonsured across the front from ear to ear in the Celtic way. The monks and nuns were all mostly white, but there was a token black woman and one monk had oriental features, but none of them had the greenish tint on their skin that the children did.

The children stood in the opposite choir from the monks and nuns. Most of them were singing in an odd sort of way, but without words. A few children and adolescents played along on musical instruments. Among them was Rudy’s friend. As before, he appeared to be lost in his own musical world. The girl, who had been ignored by the other children, was playing a cello while the green-skinned boy next to her stuck his elbow into her arm a couple of times. There is no way to describe the music itself except to say that it was stranger than anything Charles Ives or Darrell Stewart ever wrote. The children often seemed to do their own thing with no reference to anything else that was going on. And yet at one point, I thought the children sang a snatch of Ave Verum Corpus by William Byrd, but again, without the words.

“Is there a chance that’s William Byrd they’re singing?” I whispered to Rudy.

“Yes, there a very good chance,” Rudy whispered back. “That is, William Byrd with spontaneous modifications.”

“The art in this church strikes me as a modern rescrambling of early Celtic church art,” I observed, “but I don’t think any medieval Irish monks or nuns or their foster children would have made music remotely like this.”

As it happened, our entranced listening to this music was rudely interrupted by the hum of a distant motor. For the longest time, all we saw was a dot on the horizon. Then we could make out a truck coming our way. For the first time since taking me to this strange place, Rudy showed some anxiety.

“Better hide in the vines,” Rudy suggested. And so we did, although I received such a strange feeling from the vines that I wasn’t sure it was a safe thing to do. "Now, take a good peek,” Rudy urged. “See if you can get the license number of the truck. Then we'll get out of here."

Feeling like a sheriff in a western spying on some outlaws, I carefully raised my head above the vines to take a look at the semi truck as it backed in towards the door of a monastery building. A nun, followed by most of the children, came running out of the church, close to where Rudy and I were. We flattened ourselves against the wall to keep them from seeing us. The children mobbed a heavy-set, ruggedly handsome man as he jumped out of the cab. He was dressed in a light green uniform with a cap whose ensign I couldn't read.

"Same to you, Sister Agnes," the driver boomed. "I've got a good shipment of treats this time."

The driver patted the heads of those children nearest him as he made his way to the back of the truck to open it. How he could stand to touch such strange children was something I could not relate to at the time, but I admired the love and care that he showed them. When Mr. McCarthy became absorbed in placing food packages into the outstretched arms of the children, Rudy’s arm crept along the wall and then past it. I held my breath when Rudy closed his fingers around the cap and snatched it off the man’s head. Mr. McCarthy did not react. Rudy seemed to have gotten away with his act of pilfering.

“Now let's get out of here,” Rudy whispered. “Get a good hold of my wrist and don't let go until I say to."

I obeyed Rudy without question during another dizzying moment when there was no telling where I was in which universe. When the world began to slow down again, the two of us were standing together in the same dark corner of the University bookstore that where we were before Rudy took me on this strange journey.

Rudy gave me a smile that was all mischief and half concern for another human being. He twirled the cap in his hands then showed it to me. Even close up, most of the letters were small, but I could make them out.

"So it does,” said Rudy. “How would you like to take on a research project?"

I opened my mouth to say that I didn't need another research project when I realized that I smelled the presence of a serious injustice, and I was not about to let such a thing pass unnoticed.