Danger in the Fourth Dimension (#118)

Danger in the Fourth Dimension is a dumb title. The measure most commonly called the fourth dimension is time. The danger of time is that in the end, it saps us of our vitality, gradually taking our youth and leaving only decrepitude before we eventually die. It’s a long-term danger, one hardly able to be done justice to in a 150-page children’s detective book.

Also: Frank and Joe are not subject to the ravages of time, the bastards. It holds little danger for them, given that it has been 88 years since their debut, and they are still going — not as strong, perhaps, but still going. All it will take is a decent movie or cartoon or TV show and — voom, they’ll be as strong as they ever were.

Anyway, that’s a little off topic. In Danger in the Fourth Dimension, Fourth Dimension is a sci-fi theme park in South Carolina. Fenton Hardy has asked his sons to meet him there to help with an investigation, but when they arrive, he has vanished. Frank and Joe are told he checked out suddenly, and they are left in South Carolina with no guidance and no idea what they are supposed to be investigating (other than where Fenton is). Seems like a bit of a flaw in the Fenton Hardy Inc. operating procedures, but what do I know?

I’m not going to go into the suspect pool on this one; suffice it to say when Frank asks himself, “Were Fenton Hardy’s kidnappers too clever for them?” (81), the answer appears to be yes. Frank and Joe have trouble even discovering what Fenton was investigating: the first person who says he hired Fenton is park designer Justin Maceda, who tells the boys he needed Fenton to find blueprints that were stolen from him, while Bayport-resident-on-vacation Ernest Brody says he hired Fenton to foil a retirement-community scam. Unfortunately, even after they get somewhere on the second case, Frank and Joe are completely unable to recognize the villains once they take off their wigs. (Danger in the Fourth Dimension retroactively devalues every time Fenton fooled the boys with a disguise in the canon, as they are completely unable to recognize a couple of mooks who put on wigs and costumes, and they are unable to recognize Brody even though he matches the description of the old guy looking for them exactly.) They manage to catch the ringleader (Maceda) only because he forgets to flee at the end, thinking his holograms will be able to hold off the Hardys.

Frank and Joe search for their father at a leisurely pace, making sure not to stay up late or put too much effort into the task. They could get others to help, but they do not. Do they alert park management? Not really; they’re not sure who to trust. That’s not a bad idea; security is so awful at the park that they hand out keys to the boys willy-nilly and do not react to massive failures in the exhibits or the Hardys fighting a man on a roller coaster. Do Frank and Joe call the police? No, because the kidnappers might kill Fenton if they do that. Also, the local police are awful; they think the only way to be able to arrest — not successfully prosecute, but arrest — the villains is to catch the two low-level scamsters in a transaction. I admit catching the two red-handed makes a better case, but it’s not necessary. However, they say the only way to arrest — again, arrest — Maceda is to get his confession on a recording, which is stupid. They could get the two underlings to testify against their boss, and if they had just moved quickly, they would have gathered a huge amount of evidence against Maceda and arrested him without a chase. Hmm … perhaps this is why Frank and Joe are so remarkably successful: Their competition in law enforcement is pathetic.

So Frank and Joe have to race against time to save Fenton … except it isn’t much of a race. The villains keep threatening Fenton’s life, but they never do anything, even when Frank and Joe refuse to stop investigating. It becomes clear about two-thirds of the way through the book that either Fenton is dead or the criminals lack the stones to kill him — either way, Frank and Joe shouldn’t be deterred. I mean, they aren’t (ever), but they shouldn’t angst about it. Eventually they find Fenton, but not until they’ve been fooled by a hologram of Fenton (under the Hall of Holograms, natch). Really, without Brody, they would have been in trouble.

As a book, Danger in the Fourth Dimension is going to succeed or fail on the strength of the Fourth Dimension park. So what’s it like? The basic idea seems to be based around retro sci-fi kitsch — metallic-colored jumpsuits, jet packs, robots, automated homes, BEM (bug-eyed monsters). The housekeeping staff at the park hotel wears garish overalls, because what says “utopia” better than people wearing ugly utilitarian clothing semi-willingly? The café in the park is called the Interstellar Snack Shop — not embarrassing, but I have trouble believing they couldn't have come up with a better name. The park uses a monorail for internal transportation. It has EPCOT-type buildings called the Hall of Holograms, Biosphere, and the Science Fiction Exhibit. (The entire park is a science fiction exhibit. Perhaps it should be called the Science Fiction Museum?) The park also has a home of the future, which has a “rock-o-matic chair” — that’s exactly what you think it is, a self-rocking rocking chair. Rocking chairs do not need the improvement, although Maceda manages to almost subdue Joe with the chair.

It’s not entirely EPCOT; it does have rollercoasters and a video arcade (with Mega Baseball!), and Frank and Joe play in the “Space War Gladiator Game,” although it’s not clear whether the Laser Tag-type contest is something park guests can participate in or if it’s some sort of staged entertainment for visitors to watch. The park also has a solar system mobile, which has scale-model planets hanging dangerously over the crowds; while standing under them, Frank once again proves a law of motion: a suspended object, once no longer suspended, will fall directly toward (but not onto) the nearest Hardy male.

But occasionally Fourth Dimension transcends its retro futurism. In a 1993 book that uses the “National Network” — “the network that links computers in universities and libraries,” which was called “ARPAnet” or “NSFNET” at the time and “the Internet” today — the video arcade has working virtual reality games, which would be impressive today. The park has literal — literal! — flying cars and working laser pistols. I am not joking about either of these. What is described as a hovercraft flies over a low part of a roller coaster, and the book sells the idea that Frank and Joe are scared for their lives when shot at with one of the laser pistols.

It seems Maceda, the park designer, has created these devices — the same park designer who’s running a real-estate scam to get the money to open his own sci-fi theme park. If he wanted money, he should have sold the patent to the flying car he invented. The army would love real, working deadly laser pistols. It doesn’t matter if either is practical for large-scale manufacturing; they both represent such a step forward that companies would offer millions for them. But no, the guy decides to try to bilk the olds out of their money. Honestly … Maceda was bitter against his boss because his boss sees the theme park “merely as a money-making operation” (35), showing Maceda hasn’t thought about capitalism very much.

But hey — at least Fourth Dimension will stand as a lasting monument to Maceda’s genius. Or maybe not. The owner might sell it to Disney, who’d make it into a Star Wars park, or maybe it will just go under because Maceda isn’t there to contribute his innovations. Plenty of abandoned theme parks in the world, after all.

The Alaskan Adventure (#138)

Frank and Joe head to Glitter, Alaska, a small Athabascan Indian town on the Yukon River, to visit their friend David Natik. David visited the Hardy home in an unpublished adventure, so Frank and Joe decide to return the favor by visiting David just a few days before his first Iditarod. Because that’s exactly what you want, just before you enter your first 1,100-mile dog sled race: a pair of visitors distracting you and keeping you from training.

But it’s good Frank and Joe arrive when they do: David’s aunt and uncle’s home is burned down just minutes after the boys arrive, and a few minutes later, a burning log is thrown through the window of David’s parents’ cabin, where the family has taken refuge. This is just one of many acts of vandalism and destruction that have occurred in Glitter. Obviously something is wrong, and the locals have no idea what it is; in fact, they don’t really link any of the events into a coherent whole …

But Frank and Joe do! Unfortunately, they don’t know why these crimes are being committed. They toy with the idea that old conflicts in the town coming to the fore; they think it might have something to do with David’s and his ex-friend Gregg’s rivalry; perhaps it has something with the theme-park company that wants to come to Glitter and make it into a giant living history exhibit?

Yes, that’s it — the last one. It takes Frank and Joe a while to latch onto that idea, but they figure it out eventually. Suspects include Curt Stone, a theme-park rep who remains friendly to the boys despite all their questions and his inability to tell the difference between “accusations” and “insinuations”; Lucky, a miner and living history exhibit himself, who gives Frank and Joe the helpful advice that they need to “be careful whose nuggets they put their hands on” (38); and Gregg Anderson, who suspects Frank and Joe are behind his troubles, calling the brothers David’s “gangster friends” (122). That comment transformed Gregg from insufferable jerk to all right guy.

None of these is the criminal, of course. The criminal’s grand plan is to get the locals to approve the theme park so he can sell native handicrafts to tourists for a profit, which seems like a lot of work for a small payoff. He seems luckier than good, as well; in a little town where everybody’s got their nose in everyone else’s business, he’s fortunate he hasn’t been seen in his villainous comings and goings. (The worst was when he punctured a boat in the middle of the night; people heard the sound, which was likened to chopping wood, but no one decided to look outside to see why someone was chopping wood in the dark.) The culprit also pulls one of my least favorite Hardy Boys’ villain maneuvers: the hemi-glutteal food theft, in which all of someone’s food is stolen, but rather than taking it away totally, spoiling it, or eating it, it’s abandoned somewhere nearby, allowing Frank and Joe to recover it via their superior woodscraft. (The best example of this is the original Mystery of Cabin Island.)

It is extremely ironic that Frank and Joe oppose the efforts of someone who wants to turn an entire town into a theme park. For the Hardys, that’s what travel is for: you watch the locals and see the neat, weird things they do. Everything they do is put on for your benefit, and you get to eat their local foods. At the end of the trip, you get to claim you “understand” or “helped” the natives. In Alaskan Adventure, Frank and Joe see a real “Native American healer” in action, ride a dogsled, are menaced by local wildlife, buy stuff from a general store, attend a native potlatch, and visit Lucky’s mining operation. They don’t meet David’s parents because — and I swear to God this is true — the elder Natiks are in Fairbanks working at a snowshoe factory.

The author seems to sympathize with the anti-theme park side, since a theme park supporter is causing all the damage and David’s extended family all oppose the park. The sole argument for the park — money — seems shallow compared to the … we’ll say “rich traditions” Frank and Joe witness in Glitter. David’s cousin says her father believes the park will make Glitter’s residents “animals in a circus, showing off for visitors instead of being free to live our lives the way we always have” (29). Sure, the town has its problems, but they mostly stem from a single jackass destroying things to get people to vote for the theme park. But at the end of the story, David’s uncle begins to cave to the theme park idea, claiming he thinks Glitter can work with Stone’s company. Capitalism rules!

Despite the downer of an ending, which shows the power of capitalism, Frank and Joe might get a reward: a testimonial letter from an Alaskan State Trooper commander. Wow. We’re a long way from the early books, in which rewards of hundreds and thousands of dollars just tumbled into their laps.

Frank and Joe have always treated their travels as tourism, as shown by their first trip to Alaska (just after it became a state) in The Mystery of Devil’s Paw. The boys stopped Iron Curtain spies from recovering a lost rocket in Devil’s Paw, which is a lot more exciting than putting the kibosh on a vandal, but whatever. In that book, the Hardys met local Native Americans and ate local foods; unlike in Alaskan Adventure, which featured moose steak and moose-head soup at a potlatch, in Devil’s Paw they ate bear steaks, rice-lily bread, raw salmon, stewed rabbit, and wild rose fruit while attending a native wedding. The wildlife shifted slightly in the nearly four decades between the books: both had the Hardys escaping brown bears, but Alaskan Adventure substituted wolves for Devil’s Paw’s skunks.

The story ends just before David and Gregg take off for the Iditarod, which means the story ends in early March. Unfortunately, neither won, but David is prepared for this. After mentioning Gregg wants to be “first in everything,” David says, “Life’s not like that” (14). It might not be like that for you, brother, but it is for Frank and Joe. Wisely, they refrain from correcting him, but we the readers know the truth.

Random Iditarod facts: In 1996, the year in which the book was published, Californian Jeff King won his second Iditarod behind his lead dogs Jake and Booster. He finished the course in 9 days, 5 hours, 43 minutes, and 13 seconds. Forty-nine competitors finished the race; eleven more dropped out before the end. The fastest first-timer, Cim Smyth, was 18th, finishing more than a day behind King. King won $50,000, while Smyth received $6,000 for his finish. King went on to win two more Iditarods. 1996 was the first time the competition had been completed in less than 10 days; King’s record stood until 2000, when Doug Swingley (along with Stormy and Cola) beat it by almost five hours. The shortest time was set in 2014 by Dallas Seavey, who finished in 8 days, 13 hours, 4 minutes, 19 seconds.