Grandma Chrys must have mentally summoned Ren, and Stuman, because they along with Daddy, Momma, Mrs. Anderton, and Jacob all came into her living room. I still had Gee's head on my lap. There was a large semi-circular sofa in her place that faced a wall sized window with a view of the kingdom. We were so high up though that we really couldn't see much more than the towers of a few buildings. Everything else was obscured by clouds. We did have an incredible view of the blue sky stretching on until forever.

The Grand Keeper indicated that we should all take seats on her enormous white couch. It reminded me of the Keeper's dais upstairs, only curved in instead of out. When we were all seated she said, "I'm sure that you can all surmise that the town of Burns is in an uproar. The newspaper publisher Mr. Ashe has printed a special edition of the Gazette, with a headline that shouts 5 BURNSITES MISSING! It names all four of you, Wishes, Freck, Emma Anderton, and Al Arthur. The recently deceased Tyrone Tieg is also listed. It continues to say that the only clue to your whereabouts is a wallet found on Emma Anderton's desk. The billfold, according to ID found inside, belonged to Jacob Foster. The same man who disappeared from Burns twenty some years ago."

Mrs. Anderton gasped. "Wait...I didn't hear about Tyrone's death!"

Grandma Chrys sweetly acknowledged her, and said, "It was just yesterday, Emma. Tyrone was killed by a lair-beast like the ones who menaced you in the forest. The town can search for him forever, but rest assured he will never be found. The rest of you need to return to Burns to calm the people down. But you have to have a viable story about where you went, and how you disappeared. Remember your knowledge of the Kingdom must always be kept secret for the good of humankind. Should our existence be revealed before the proper time, it would cause great upheavals topside.

"Stuman and Ren, please vocalize your comments. Our guests are not yet able to hear your thoughts."

Stuman spoke, "With your permission Grand Keeper, I would like to make a couple of observations." He waited for her nod. "The townspeople have many theories about the forest and the frightening things they hear in there. They have seen the colored lights from our floaters in the night sky while we keep tabs on the lair-beasts. Our visitors, with the exception of Al, don't know that part of the Solver's responsibility is to make sure than none of those foul monsters ever leaves the woods. They love the new moons when it is darkest. That's usually when they surface to hunt. They loathe one another and love to fight each other as much as they need to hunt for food. Their viciousness is unmatched.

"What if we sent telepathic suggestions to the townspeople that they were all killed by monsters in the woods? If the people came to believe it they would stop looking."

"That's worth consideration," Grandma Chrys responded, "but we need their services to continue our mission. If they are unable to return to their homes we will lose what they are uniquely qualified to provide."

I decided to jump in with a suggestion. "I've heard all kinds of ideas about what causes those noises and lights in the woods. One of the most popular is UFO abductions. We can pretend that we were taken and had our memories erased so we couldn't tell them what happened."

Ren said, "That might work. If we took all the floaters up and circled nose-to-tail around and around it would appear, if you weren't too near, to be the shape of what topsider's call a flying saucer. Then we could all land at the same time and let our visitors out. Then we'd all raise in unison, still nose-to-tail, and fly up and away. Anyone watching would swear in a court of law that they witnessed an honest-to-goodness real-life UFO."

Everyone was talking to each other about this idea all at the same time. The pros and cons led to some lively debates, but since no one came up with a better plan, it was decided that the UFO abduction story would have to do.

Grandma Chrys said, "All right, let's get together and make this work. We have to defuse this as soon as possible. I suggest tomorrow night. That would gives us time to map out a detailed plan. It would allow Wishes to go to the hospital again and have his leg checked and re-bandaged to look like something they would recognize.

"Just a second." She said, and closed her eyes to listen to something that I couldn't hear. "I'm getting information from one of our field agents, Jant, the look-a-like June bug Wishes saw on the publisher's wall. Not only are all the resident's of Burns planning to scour the woods, but this has become such a big story that the State Police have been called in. Citizen volunteers are flooding into Burns from Tampa and all over to join the search. The governor of Florida offered to send in National Guard troops if the mayor requests them.

"This is a greater crisis than we realized. The UFO ruse really must go off without a hitch. The whole Kingdom is resting on your success."

I gulped. What if something went wrong? The terrifying history of the Magic Woods would, for a while, keep people away at night, but would the National Guard share the same fear? I agreed with the Grand Keeper. It had to be tomorrow, and it had to be executed perfectly.

Grandma Chris said, "After your checkup at the hospital in the morning Wishes, I would like to have another visit with you and Freck if that is all right. Now though, I would like to invite the adults to stay for a little while. Zahn would you please escort the kids back to their Palace residences and make sure they have everything they need to be comfortable? I would also ask you to keep them company until their parents arrive. It shouldn't take very long."

"Of course, Grand Keeper," Zahn said, and he led us out of the room to the nearest water-vator.

"Wait Zahn," Grandma Chris called out. "Before you leave there is one more passenger, if that is okay."

"Of course, who is it?"

She said, "Gee would like to go with Wishes and wants to spend time with Freck too. I told him that I didn't think anyone would object, do you?" Since there weren't any objections, she turned to Gee and said, "Have a good time!"

Gee scooted up to us and waited beside us to board the 'vator. I don't know who was more excited, me, Freck or Gee. Imagine the Whistlin' Salamander was coming to our Palace homes with us! No one in Burns would ever believe this. If we tried to tell them, they would think that we'd gone completely out of our gourds. I suppose that is another good reason to stay silent about the keepers. Spending the rest of our lives in a nut house would be the awfullest thing I could imagine.

Once inside Zahn asked, "Is there anything else I could show you on the way to your homes?"

"I don't know about you Wishes, but I'd like to see where they store all the knowledge."

"Me too Freck. Zahn can you show us that?" I asked.

Zahn answered, "There isn't much to see, but because you are curious we can make a stop at the storage and recording center. Here we are."

Instant travel is still so new to me that I'm always surprised. One minute we are at Grandma Chry's apartment, and whoosh we are now at what Zahn called the Recording Center. Zach must have telepathically notified the Keepers because there was two of them waiting for our arrival.

Zahn said, "The information I could provide would be less than what those who work here could tell you, so I've asked them to join us if that's all right with you two. He introduced us to the man and woman that he called Recorder Supervisors. I didn't catch their names because I was too fascinated by everything I was seeing.

We were standing at the entrance of a gigantic hall with numerous canyons of black boxes stacked one on top of each other with multicolored lights and wires everywhere. It was so huge, I swear that if we yelled it would echo.

Zahn caught my thought and said, "You are correct it would echo, but I would advise you to not yell in here. The sound could startle people attentively working at their tasks. The are used to the hum of the devices, but not shouting. We wouldn't want to startle them, would we?"

The woman recorder spoke loudly enough to be heard over the soft whir of machinery, "What you see in front of you are the devices connected to the knowledge pool. It relays information for sorting, cataloging, and made ready for instant retrieval. Let's board the trans-plat for a closer look." We were now pretty experienced at stepping onto the virtually invisible platform. Gee even hopped on. Once we took hold of the gold rail it began to move.

"What's the knowledge pool?" Freck asked.

The slender woman, dressed in what I began to understand were supervisor robes, said "We will show you the pool, but the simplest answer is that every bit of information we collect is delivered by various means to the knowledge pool which we call KP for short. As you can imagine the KP is very large and capable of expanding to accommodate the flow of data coming into it. When the human population was small, the KP was much smaller too. Now with the Topside population in the billions the KP has increased geometrically in size."

"When we say size," the recorder man with bushy eyebrows and thinning hair spoke, "we really mean depth. We don't continually widen the Palace based on knowledge flow. KP began very shallow but now it is so deep that none of us is very certain how far down it goes. Of course we can make educated guesses. And we do. The KP keepers keep tabs on the in-flow and distribution.

"The pool itself, as you might have surmised, is a semi-conscious entity. It isn't a totally inanimate body."

We were going pretty fast and still had not come out of the black box canyon. That's probably what Zahn meant when he said there wasn't much to see. These canyons of equipment go on and on. I asked, "As far as I know there ain't nothing on earth like this place. If you get your information from humans and we don't have anything this advanced, how did ya do it?"

Bushy eyebrows responded, "Almost everything we have is from mankind's original thought, collected from topside. Almost. Sometimes we acquire knowledge from others who are not human. Over the millennia your earth has been visited by species from many other worlds. The information they bring with them goes into the knowledge pool also. As you know, we are charged with the task of gathering and recording everything learned topside. If it happens there it goes into the KP.

"We needed a way to store and sort better so the KP was engineered to fill that demand. It was constructed primarily from information we received from your star visitors."

And then we came out of the canyon of recording machines into a huge room with a giant bubble in the center. Radiating out in every direction from the bubble were storage towers like the canyon we just came through. The bubble was several stories high. I couldn't see from this angle how far around it was.

"This," said the slender woman, "Is the Keeper's Pool of Knowledge. You will notice that it is very active inside. There are what appear to be roiling clouds, lightning-like flashes, and multi-colored idea bursts every few milliseconds. Topside you picture someone getting an original idea as having a light bulb over their heads. That is a pretty accurate representation. When someone has an aha! moment, the brain sends out a wave of energy. The KP attracts that energy. You will see it on the dome surface in the form of colored bursts. The bigger the idea the larger the burst. It's like looking at the sky on the 4th of July isn't it?"

I said, "But it's like a constant grand finale."

Freck was awestruck. I'm pretty sure I was too. Her eyes were really wide. Her mouth was slightly open. She looked a little dazed at this sight and the explanations given. She exclaimed, "Wow, I'm bowled over. I thought this would be interesting, but this...this is much more than I can even wrap my mind around. Are you saying that every time I have a good idea it comes here and goes right into the pond?"

"That's right." The woman answered. "By observing the dome you can see that most of the idea bursts are pretty small. Some are so weak they barely register at all. From time-to-time we see really huge bursts. Those come from your geniuses. The difference between the mind of a genius and a normal every-day mind is the energy behind their imaginations. We've seen some new discoveries blast through so hard that the burst covers the entire dome.

"It is a tragedy that many brilliant people have difficulty coping with their genius. The constant flood of ideas is overwhelming. It can be physically painful to them. Too many resort alcohol or drugs to get release. If that doesn't work, suicide or madness may result."

I was curious about something I noticed, "I don't see any wires going into the pool or going out to the black boxes. If they ain't connected how does it work?"

Bushy eyebrows responded to my question by saying, "It operates on the same principle as your radios and televisions. Signals invisible to the eye flow out in waves. Without a receiver you wouldn't even know they were there. The KP receives your waves, does a preliminary sort and directs them to the correct storage units.

"The reason the KP is so deep is that it stores everything indefinitely. It is our failsafe backup in case of recorder problems."

"That way," I said, "nothing is ever lost, right?"

"That's correct Wishes. If anything should happen to the KP we will have failed in our duty to the Gardner. He stopped, looked up, made the same squiggle sign over his chest that I saw Zahn make earlier, and said with reverence, "Praise the Gardner."

***

The vator took us back to the side door of my house. Zahn and Gee accompanied me and Freck in. I heard, or thought I heard Freck say, "This is nice."

I was a little surprised to hear it because Freck has been here thousands of times. "Why did you say that Freck?"

"Say what Wishes?"

"Why did ya say that my house is nice?"

"I didn't say nothing," I could tell by the confused look on her face that she had no idea what I was talking about.

So I said, "Sorry Freck, it must have been Zahn. Thanks Zahn for the compliment."

"I didn't say anything either," Zahn replied.

"It was me, and I didn't say it, I thought it. I cannot speak aloud, you know, I can only whistle."

I looked down at Gee. "Did I hear you inside my head?"

"Of course. How long did you think it would take before remembering how to communicate mind-to-mind? You are half-keeper after all."

"Hey, this is terrific! I'm talking to Gee inside my head." I told Freck and Zahn.

Zahn didn't seem a bit surprised, but Freck was really curious. She said, "Wishes if ya can talk to Gee that way, do ya think I could too?"

Gee telepathed me, "Since Freck is all human it will take some time and practice to learn how to do it, but she will be taught."

"Gee says that you can learn how to do it, but it will take some time and practice Freck."

"Imagine that, me speaking without even moving my lips. It would be kinda like being a ventriloquist."