Chapter 32 — In Custody

When Marvin arrived at the police station, he thought:

"This time I'm really in big trouble…"

They brought him in an office where he sat on a chair, with his handcuffs on.

A police officer was sitting on the other side of a desk, ready to take note of what Marvin had to declare.

They interrogated him about his motivation.

Marvin thought he'd better come up with something clever, something that could be defended in court.

"It wasn't me!"

"Come on… We've got you on tape."

"Errr… Well, I'm an environment activist. I did this for the planet… To shed some light on the fact that we're destroying our planet…"

The policemen received his declaration with apparent boredom.

"You could have thrown some soup can at a painting. That was trendy a few years ago. But destroying an ancient Egyptian object?"

"I didn't mean to destroy it."

"Then why has it been shattered to pieces just after you trying to get at it?"

"I don't know."

"And what exactly are you protesting against?" asked another cop. "The Exolibs have already warned everyone about the environmental crisis. We've got the Gaia government now to handle the situation. Who needs you for that?"

"I… I don't know."

Before being brought to the cell where he was going to spend the night in custody, Marvin was given the possibility to give one call home.

"Listen, don't worry, honey. I'm at… Yeah… At the police station. I think I'm gonna have to spend some time here… I don't know. But don't freak out. I'm safe here… Fluffy? I don't know… But don't worry… Look, I'll have to go now… Yeah, me too…"

The cell in which he was pushed was small and smelling bad, with only two very basic couches and a toilet.

There was already a guy in there, sitting on a couch, some Jamaican dude with dreadlocks.

"Hey! Sssup?" he said after they'd put Marvin in and shut the door.

Although a bit worried that it might not be too clean, Marvin sat on the other couch.

The guy in front of him seemed a bit amused. Probably because he was finding surprising that someone like Marvin was thrown in that place.

"How come you arrived in here? You look like no criminal…"

"Hum… It's a mistake."

The other guy laughed.

"Ya, fo sho man."

Later in the evening, Marvin heard through the bars of his cell a distant conversation between the policemen.

"After all, maybe it really was an Exolib attack at the museum." said one of them.

He was seemingly showing something on the screen to the others.

"Look! They're saying that a small spaceship landed in the courtyard just in front of the British Museum. This was posted ten minutes ago."

"Wow! Look at that!"

"It's… golden. And all round."

"It doesn't look like a regular Exolib vessel, though"

"How can you know? The footage is poor quality. It could be anything."

"Anyway, we know very little about their spaceships. It could be one of the small capsules they use to go down to the surface."

"That would be the first time."

Marvin pricked up his ears. He thought: "Could it be… Fluffy's Golden Fleet? They finally came!"

"And look! There's a small thing jumping on the ground… Rewind. Yeah, right here. Look, it seems to jump inside the space capsule!"

"Fluffy!" thought Marvin. 'She made it!"

"Yeah!" he shouted aloud.

"Huh?" said the other prisoner, surprised. "What's wrong with you, man?"

"Hum, nothing… Sorry."

Marvin went closer to the bars of the cell to hear the conversation.

"Where is it now?" asked another policeman.

"They say it disappeared right away. Look. Here. It's gone."

"Wow. Crazy stuff. Have you seen it move? I haven't."

"It's so fast. Nothing like we know on Earth…"

"Come on, guys." said another voice, probably the police captain. "We have to go there, to check what's going on. Come on."

Marvin saw them move out hastily.

Two of the police officers that remained in the precinct kept on speculating:

"So maybe that huge laser beam that was reported this afternoon… Maybe it was them."

"Yes, that would make sense. It would not be the first time that the Exolibs shoot lasers at a city building. Remember that time, in Canada I think it was?"

"But if it was the Exolibs… It means that the guy we caught…"

"Yeah. Probably he's not done much harm."

"He will still enjoy a night in custody…"

After they had finished talking, Marvin went back to sit on his couch.

"Fluffy has probably made it to her spaceship." he thought. "That's good. Maybe things are not going so bad…"

After one night spent in custody, they will probably release him. If the Exolibs were to become the main suspects, it would mean no one could accuse him anymore. So there was a big chance he would not be sent to prison. And hopefully he could be free soon and see his family again.

For now, Marvin felt so immensely tired from that long hectic day that he just laid down on the bed and fell deeply asleep.

Later during the night, he got waken up by some loud disturbing noise.

The policemen had brought another man in Marvin's cell. They had thrown him inside and shut the door behind him.

The new prisoner was a big muscular man with an aggressive and bearded face. He looked very angry and was shouting obscenities at the policemen.

Marvin, who was barely emerging from his sleep because of all the racket that was going on, noticed the unusually big muscles covered in all sorts of tattoos.

The man stopped shouting, just to take a long threatening look at Marvin.

The other prisoner, the Jamaican guy, was snoring softly on his couch. He seemed undisturbed.

So the muscular man, in silence, went directly to Marvin and gave him a top-down, compelling, stare.

"This is my bed." he growled.

"What bed?" mumbled Marvin, still half-asleep.

"The one you're sitting on, you idiot!"

"Oh, this one…"

And realizing that this big hulk could probably crush him under his right thumb, he slowly got up.

"All right, go on, you can have it."

Turning his back on the man, Marvin went to relieve himself in the toilet.

"Hey! That's my toilet!" shouted the big man. "Don't piss in my toilet!"

"Hey, what's going on, here?" That was the Jamaican guy who just woke up.

"That guy is pissing in my toilet! That's what's going on."

"Why is it so crowdy in here, man?" asked the Jamaican dude. "Don't they have enough cells for everyone tonight? Anyway, there's only one toilet for the three of us, man. Calm down."

The big guy shouted "I don't care! Nobody pisses in my toilet!"

"Come on." replied Marvin zipping up his pants. "Give me a break."

"What?!"

The huge man was almost suffocating.

"What did you say to me?"

Marvin gulped all of a sudden when he saw the man stepping furiously right towards him.

He stepped back until he hit the wall and wasn't able to move any further.

"How dare you speak to me like this? I'm gonna punch your teeth out!"

Marvin just couldn't call for help, nor move away. He was cornered.

The man lifted up his huge clenched fist.

"Watch this, you little…"

But at that very moment, a sharp noise interrupted the action.

It was something like a high-pitched drilling sound that was vibrating through the walls.

They all paused and looked up at the ceiling of the cell, through the half-darkness. There was something very bright, shining up there. It was something small, looking like a golden sparkle, or a tiny star, that was seemingly burning through the ceiling.

Then, the luminous sparkle began to move slowly across the ceiling in what seemed to be a circular movement. The three prisoners, intrigued, were all observing it while it was going along its path, burning a perfect circle through the plaster.

"Careful!" warned Marvin when the sparkle was about to meet the starting point of the circle.

The muscular man had just enough time to jump aside. One more second and he would have been flattened by the heavy round block that detached from the ceiling and finally fell down in the middle of the room with a violent blast of dust.

"Wh… What the hell?!"

There was now a big round open gap in the ceiling. Through it, the light of the nightly sky and of the city was descending in the cell as in the bottom of a dark pit.

But there was also an unexpected kind of pale golden swirling glow added to the natural light.

The muscular man that had fallen on the ground, and the Jamaican guy, still in his bed, where now watching Marvin while he was stepping inside the cone of light coming from above.

Marvin looked up at the sky. In the dark starless night, there was something hovering up there, just above the circular opening. When his eyes got used to the strong light, Marvin could see that it had the smooth shape of a giant egg and was apparently made of some kind of pure radiant gold.

The unexplained object was floating high above, at a constant altitude, but was seemingly spinning slowly around its central axis.

"Fluffy's spaceship…" he whispered.

Then, some sort of magnetic ring waves descended from the golden egg towards him.

Marvin, all of a sudden, felt a weird sensation, as if gravitation was suddenly abolished. He felt weightless, pulled upwards with great ease, and realized that his feet were not touching the ground anymore.

The two prisoners, down in the cell, were speechless while Marvin was ascending through the ceiling, lifted up by an invisible force, and finally disappeared in a flash of blinding golden light.