‘A pleasure to meet you,’ replied the slightly plump man with a silver goatee. ‘You certainly did us all a big favour by finding it.’
‘Indeed, you did,’ nodded the general. ‘And, on my left, Doctor Semenova who heads up our Psychological Evaluation Committee at the facility.’
Arthur nodded shyly
‘So, let’s get down to it then, shall we? The reason why we’ve come here today is because we urgently need your help. More specifically, we need you to try to remember back to this summer, to your opening of the box. Do you think you can do that for us?’
‘Yes,’ Arthur said.
‘Excellent.’
Peter took out his mobile phone and pointed it at him. ‘It’s so we can recall exactly what you said,’ he explained.
‘Please go ahead and describe for us how you opened it and what happened next?’ prompted the general.
Trying not to look at it, Arthur cleared his throat and for a moment wondered where he should start. It all sounded so strange in his head that he was sure if he mentioned the cat and, even worse, the fish, that they’d all think he’d cracked.
‘Well, um, at first we tried to open it using some of the tools from my grandfather’s tool shed, but it was impossible,’ he began.
‘Just a moment, please. You said we,’ interrupted the general, looking surprised.
‘What?’
‘Yes, you said that we tried to open the box. Who was the other person with you?’
Shooting a look at the cat, who’d just jumped up onto the windowsill, he blushed.
‘No one. Sorry, there was no one else there. So, anyway, when I couldn’t open it with tools I… I began to think about the words written on it, you know, about wanting to know things and having to say “open” three times.’
‘And you worked that out by yourself, did you?’ asked Peter, rubbing his chin.
‘Well, yeah… I guess.’
‘Good. And that’s what you did?’
‘Yes, I said “open” three times.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘Well, everything went really bright and then really dark and the room I was in turned into, like, a floating map.’
‘A floating map?’
‘Yes.’
‘And why do you think it was a map?’
‘I don’t know. I mean, it looked like a map—like a star map. Like something I’d seen at the planetarium with my dad.’
‘And did you recognise any of the planets?’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘And can you tell us anything more about this map?’
‘Not really. But I remember that some of the planets were just kind of spinning, and some of them were grouped around what looked like suns.’