Chapter 14 – You Shall Not Pass! (Part III)

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A queue of people had already begun to form in front of the MU basement theater. The university had set up a small ticket office there adjacent to the gift shop along the corridor that led out into the amphitheater area—where the ASU Improv did their shows for larger audiences. The movie poster for The Day the Earth Stood Still dominated the wall with its seven-foot-tall Gort staring out from his standing position next to the UFO landed in a field.

A trio of volunteers took students’ Sun Cards (the ASU ID equivalent) and ran them through a card reader before waving them into the dimly lit interior. Clusters of students clotted together at the entrance, chatting to one another, as the line slowly shuffled forward. Frog broke away from her conversation with Brad to hook up with Elaine again when she saw her exit the elevator. Osborn bashfully excused himself and went to join the rest of his team as they fanned out onto the end of the line.

“Excited?” Frog asked, gesturing to the poster.

“I am intrigued to see the resolution to the puzzle,” Elaine said. About the project, though, she had mixed feelings. She’d missed the last part because she had too much to do pertaining to the case and the new addition of the smudge on her academic record didn’t help. These sorts of things sorted themselves out in time—after all, her professors knew her better than that and wouldn’t have given her failing grades without warning her first.

“Zane has been singing your praises ever since we left the lab, you know,” Frog said. “You two make me jealous. I’ve always wondered what it might be like to have a sibling.”

“You’ve never met Blaine,” Elaine said. “Zane and I are probably only so close because together was the only way we could surpass his technical brilliance. Similar thinking and the ability to cooperate became a survival necessity in my house.”

“You’ve done a good job of it,” Frog said.

Immediately ahead, Zane and Casey handed over their Sun Cards and the machine that read them bleeped cheerfully as the volunteer passed the card through. Elaine stepped up behind Casey and the student volunteer—a girl with short brown hair and bored almost-stoned look on her face. At this point, the line split into to lines, Frog stayed with Elaine and the students behind them went into the other lane to the other student volunteer. The white noise of the chatter around them increased the closer they got to the entrance to the theater.

Elaine handed the volunteer her card and the girl hit a key on the computer while sliding it through the reader. This time, though instead of bleeping amiably at her card, the machine blurted out a grim low note brrt. She frowned at the card and glanced at the screen. She shook her head and slid the card through again with a similar result.

“I’m sorry,” she said holding the card for Elaine to take it back. “Your card says that you’re barred from extracurricular events because you’re on academic suspension. I can’t let you in.”

The machine behind them bleeped as another student had their card swiped next to them and another student shouldered past.

“It’s a mistake,” Frog said to the girl. “We’re working on fixing it right now. We have business inside.”

Bleep. “No,” the girl said, her face remained slack and bored as she held her hand out for Frog’s card, but she wasn’t handing it over. “My supervisor is right over there, if he seems me just letting you in after your card gets rejected I’ll get in trouble.”

Frog planted a fist in her hip and raised her card like an admonishing finger. The student volunteer plucked up her card and ran it through the reader. The machine bleeped.

“You, on the other hand, can go in,” the girl said.

Elaine watched with a dire serenity as Zane, Brad, and Casey vanished through the double doors and into the darkness within unaware of what had just happened. She could let Frog argue her case with the volunteer’s supervisor; but she doubted that would go anywhere. Alternatively, she could hack the ASU reader system to trick it into allowing her entrance into the theater. The ethical problems with that solution didn’t phase her much, after all the suspension could be nothing more than a computer snafu. Hadaly could have it done in a matter of seconds.

Problems arose from that route, however, that could endanger her case with the Dean of Engineering. After all, she mused, it would be cheating for her to break into the system and change its parameters without using the system itself to resolve her problem. She visualized the issues as a threat diagram: here the risks certainly outweighed the rewards—and further, she had a job to do tonight when it came to dealing with the data analysis of the grades for the dean’s case.

During her reverie, Frog had gone to do exactly that, she berated the girl at the kiosk for not letting Elaine into the theater and demanded to see her supervisor. Her friend had looked tense a moment before, her lips frowning and her muscles taut as if she were preparing for a hand-to-hand melee; but Frog noticed that the “supervisor” was actually an attractive older college student. Her entire body relaxed and her pert lips turned up a little at the edges. She winked at Elaine.

Elaine shook her head put her hand on Frog’s arm.

“The way is shut,” she said. “It was made that way by the bureaucracy. And the bureaucracy keeps it.”

Her friend leaned close to her, her green hair falling to frame her face. “Let me just flirt with him a little,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. “I’ll have him eating out of the palm of my hand.”

“He’s married,” Elaine said; she gestured to the glint of silver on his left-hand ring finger as he stood a short distance away speaking with the student who had quit her kiosk. “Thanks, but I think I can sit this one out. I have a lot of work to do tonight. You go and enjoy yourself. There’s no need for you to miss this.”

“Is there a problem here?” the girl’s supervisor asked.

Frog gave Elaine a pleading doe-eyed “please” look.

“No problem here,” Elaine said. “I’m leaving and my friend will be going in to enjoy the movie.”

“Well, do it soon,” the supervisor said with a haughty sniff. Elaine watched the interest go out of Frog’s eyes—a moment before he may have been an actual target as one of her love interests, but the snap ruined that prospect for her. “You’ve already held up the line too much. Could I at least ask you to move to the side?”

Elaine turned to walk away, to open up room in the line, when Frog grabbed her wrist and held her fast.

“No,” Frog said. “Wait right here, I’m going to go tell Zane what happened—he probably has his phone turned off anyway—and then I’ll come back out and we can make a night of it.” She leaned close again, and whispered, “I’ll bet he can stream the entire thing from his phone anyway.”

She bolted away from the line, weaving her way though the other students filtering through the door. She paused only a moment before vanishing through the double doors, just long enough to cast a sour look at the supervisor and the girl who had barred Elaine entry.

When Frog re-emerged from the theater with Zane, Elaine had already gone.

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