The Age Altertron Read online

  Wayne could not help it that he felt things stronger than his brother. That was just the way he was. And it wasn’t that he minded hearing that Rodney had just made a crackerjack observation that was astute and right on the money. He only wished that every now and then the Professor might say the same thing about him.

  Wayne wondered sometimes if the Professor and his Aunt Mildred and all his friends and perhaps even his father thought he wasn’t as smart as his twin brother Rodney. Once he had even found the courage to ask his Aunt about it—to find out if it were true. “Rodney smarter than you? Oh, for Heaven’s sake, what a question!” she had replied. As she tousled his hair with affection, she had added, “You’re both equally bright young men. It’s just that Rodney reads more than you do and pours a lot more information into his head.”

  After talking to his aunt, Wayne had felt a little better. He also vowed to read more books and start pouring more information into his own head. He started with Treasure Island but he could not get very far with it. Then he picked up Huckleberry Finn but could not get very far with this book either. He kept reading the lines over and over again, because his mind kept wandering, and he could not stop thinking that there were three whole Mighty Mike comic books, which his friend Grover had lent him, that were still untouched on his nightstand—just lying there waiting for him— calling to him: “Hey, Wayne! Come read me! It’s your pal, Mighty Mike! Who needs pirates and Tom Sawyer and all those…words!”

  The Professor must have sensed that Wayne had lost some of his cheer, for he chucked him under the chin with his knuckles in a fatherly way and said, “If we succeed in our latest mission, I will treat the both of you to a hamburger at the Hungry Chef Diner.” The thought of eating his favorite hamburger piled high with pickles and tomato and onion was just the thing to return Wayne to his former good mood, though his chin now smelled a little of sardines.

  “Now let us take our stations, gentlemen, and put this baby into gear!” The Professor put Wayne at one end of the machine, which looked very much like a washing machine with knobs and dials in odd places, and he put Rodney at the opposite end. And he put himself at the controls. “Now boys, our implementation must be careful and gradual so that the pigment atoms detach themselves slowly and individually and do not affix themselves even harder through molecular trauma. Remember that when the frequency is potted all the way up, boys, the machine will begin to vibrate and then to shake quite fiercely and you must be quick about screwing everything back in before it all falls apart. Now we cannot have that, can we?”

  Rodney and Wayne shook their heads as one. Rodney took a deep breath. Wayne steadied himself before the machine.

  With a flip of the switch the Peach Pigment Evanescizer began to hum.

  “It’s building up steam,” said the Professor. “Not real steam. That is just an expression.”

  The hum grew louder and then became a groan. The groan grew louder and then became a whine. The whine then became raised in pitch as if someone were playing a flute and taking the notes higher and higher. When the whine had reached a shrill screech it was hard for the twins not to drop their screwdrivers and Wayne to drop his canine earmuffs and throw their hands over their ears. (Wayne had considered putting on the earmuffs himself, but they were much too small to be wholly useful.) At that very same time the Evanescizer began to vibrate, just as the Professor had said it would, and now it looked like a washing machine in a different way, for it had begun to bounce and agitate as if someone had filled it with a load of heavy shoes. Gizmo decided quickly that she had had enough of the racket and went scampering out.

  Within moments, the whole laboratory was shivering and shaking, and a long row of glass test tubes on one of the Professor’s worktables began to tremble and clink and then one by one each of the test tubes began to pop! in just the way that crystal glasses shatter when an opera singer reaches a high note.

  Wayne and Rodney watched as the Professor turned the frequency dial even farther in its clockwise direction, taking care not to pot it up too quickly. The sound rose even higher in pitch, and now other glass objects began to shatter all about the room, including the glass panes in all the windows! Rodney wondered if this would be the means by which the peach pigment problem would be solved—by destroying everything to which the color was attached!

  A moment later the boys heard the sound of someone pounding his fist upon the Professor’s back door. When no one went to open it, the door flew open on its own, revealing Officer Wall of the Pitcherville Police Department’s Loud Noises Unit. Officer Wall stood with his hands over his ears shouting, “We cannot have this, Professor Johnson! No, no, no, sir! This cannot be! I will have to cite you! I will have to cite you!”

  But the Professor paid Officer Wall no heed at all. He turned the dial even farther to the right, and then suddenly the high shrill screech gave way to silence. Or, rather, the machine moved to a frequency that could no longer be heard by human ears.

  “Now, that’s more like it!” said Officer Wall, enjoying the sudden quiet. He remained in the doorway, poking his fingers into his ears as if clearing his ear canals were a way to restore his temporarily-crippled hearing.

  “Not done yet, Officer,” said Professor Johnson from the control deck of the Evanescizer. The Professor had hardly gotten the words out of his mouth when a howling began in the next room—just as he had predicted. Then the howling moved into the laboratory, and there was the little dog that was doing it: the Professor’s Scottish terrier Tesla. With one hand Wayne continued to screw in the wobbling screws that were working their way out on his side of the machine and with the other he tried to put the canine earmuffs around Tesla’s head as he had been instructed to do. But it was not an easy thing to do because Tesla would not remain still. He kept running back and forth and wailing and complaining, and it was almost heartbreaking to see him in such a state. After a little struggle, Wayne finally succeeded in getting the muffs around Tesla’s delicate ears, and it was no time at all before the little dog stopped complaining and sat down to study what the humans in the room were doing.

  Unfortunately, the other dogs in the town of Pitcherville had no one to put canine earmuffs on them and so they all began to moan and howl and whimper and caterwaul and bark and some to growl in one great town-sized canine chorus. And then something very strange happened! Every dog that was able to get itself out of its house or yard took it to mind to come directly to the Professor’s house, some perhaps to discover the source of their discomfort and put an end to it, others in obedient response to the loudest dog whistle they’d ever heard. A couple of old junkyard mutts who were deaf joined the large pack of dogs for the sheer fun of joining a large pack of dogs!

  Together they stampeded through the gate that had been left open by Officer Wall, and then scrambled and tumbled right up to the back door and then right through the back door—all dust and fur and peach-colored paws and peach-colored muzzles and jangling collars and scruffy collarless ruffs and wagging tails and a few bared fangs. Right through the door they came, knocking Officer Wall completely off his feet. And down upon the floor he went, landing with a thud and then promptly becoming—against his own wishes—one very trampled human dog mat.

  Within a moment or two, the laboratory was filled with yowling, howling, insistent dogs, all demanding in their dog-like way that Professor Johnson put an end to the hurtful noise that only they could hear, even as the noise had begun to do its job. You see, the sound vibrations emitted by the Evanescizer had begun to make the pigment detach itself from everything that it had affixed itself to—from Mr. Lipe’s car and Mr. Edwards’ car; from Mrs. Carter’s bruised head and Mrs. Wyatt’s bruised head; from every tree and every mailbox and every tiny blade of grass; from all the dog muzzles and Tesla’s canine earmuffs; from the cushions of the booth at the Hungry Chef Diner where the boys would soon be enjoying their well-deserved hamburgers; from all of Aunt Mildred’s spice jars (each of which contained only cinnamon) and all the
town’s television antennas; and even from Officer Wall’s Noise Complaint Citation pad, which was now stamped with muddy paw prints.

  “Look around! It’s working!” cried Rodney, as a Great Dane whined right into his ear.

  “Another moment longer and everything will be restored to its natural color,” said the Professor. ”There will be tons and tons of pigment dust to be cleaned up from this town, but at least it won’t be attached to anything.”

  “My bottom hurts,” said Officer Wall, rubbing the place where he had fallen so heavily.

  “Arf!” said Tesla, who seemed to like his noise-proof canine earmuffs and the company of all of his dog pals.

  Gizmo, for her part, had retreated to the Professor’s bedroom upstairs, where she was vengefully using one of his walnut bedposts as a brand new scratching post.

  As Professor Johnson frequently liked to say: “There is always a price to pay for science.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  In which the Professor’s theory is shared with Petey, the steel-head-plate boy, and explained to the reader as well

  On their way to school the next day, Rodney and Wayne found their young friend Petey Ragsdale standing patiently next to his bicycle in his peach-pigmentdust-covered driveway. (It would be many days before all of the pigment dust was shoveled and bagged and put into the town dump.) The fact that Petey was waiting for Rodney and Wayne was nothing out of the ordinary, for almost every morning Petey joined the twins for the second half of their ride to school. Petey was only eleven and wished that he were older so he could grow a few inches taller and be the same size as his friends. Then other children would not make such fun of him (he was quite short, even for his age), and would not make equal fun out of the fact that one side of his head was covered with a large steel plate. The plate had been put there when Petey was eight and had had brain surgery. The surgery had been successful and the doctor had said that Petey should expect a very long and healthy life, but he should be careful when he turned his head in the bright sun or the reflection from the shiny skull plate would get in people’s eyes and possibly cause a traffic accident.

  Rodney and Wayne never made fun of Petey. They did not care that he was short or had a shiny steel plate in his head (which he usually kept covered with a baseball cap). They did not even mind that he walked around with a Cub Scout backpack so filled up with books and school supplies that it looked as if he were about to take a two-week hike. So the three boys became good friends, although it was sometimes hard for Petey to keep up with the twins. They generally ran faster and peddled faster and even talked faster than Petey, who was a bright boy, but had lost the part of his brain that understood the letter “b.” This meant that words that had the letter “b” in them looked or sounded foreign to Petey, and would have to be replaced by other “b”-less words—not a big problem but sometimes a small inconvenience.

  There was something very comfortable and familiar about the way that Petey waited for the twins every morning, and this morning was no exception. But this particular morning there was something different about Petey. He was holding a large object in his hands. As the boys drew closer on their bikes they could see that it was, in fact, a round cake, covered with peach-colored frosting.

  Petey smiled. “This is from my mother. To thank you for saving the town from the invasion of the peach color.”

  “Petey—” said Rodney. “We can’t take that cake to school with us, and there isn’t time to get it back home. You’ll have to return it to your mother and tell her that we’ll be by for it after school.”

  “Okay,” said Petey. “Wait for me.”

  Rodney and Wayne nodded.

  While the two were waiting for Petey to come back out without the cake, a car slowed down and then stopped. It was a brand new aqua-colored Buick super sedan with white-wall tires, and it belonged to the father of Rodney and Wayne’s friend and classmate Becky Craft. Becky sat on the passenger side of the front seat. She was waving at the boys even before she had fully rolled down her window.

  Becky had straight dark brown hair and a round face, bright blue eyes and a button nose, and it was hard for Rodney and Wayne not to smile at her, when she smiled at them. Becky was—generally speaking—a happy girl, though she had lost her mother at the very same time that Rodney and Wayne had lost their father. Mrs. Craft had been the town librarian, and she had been very good at her job. After she disappeared upon that fateful night when Rodney and Wayne’s father and Professor Johnson’s assistant had disappeared, the library was turned over to Mrs. Craft’s volunteer helper Miss Joyner, who did not have the skills to be a good librarian. For example, Miss Joyner decided that it would be better to group all the books on the library shelves by the colors of their covers and spines. Conversations with Miss Joyner at the library usually went something like this:

  “Good afternoon, Miss Joyner. I have to write about wool in my social studies class. Would you tell me where I could find a good book on wool? Or a good book on sheep or goats—the animals that give us wool?”

  Miss Joyner would think for a moment and drum her fingers on her lips as if she were playing a musical instrument with them, and then she would smile and nod and say, “I have seen a book on natural animal fibers in the blue section. That’s where you’ll find it!”

  And generally it would take the remainder of the day for the person to look at all the books with blue covers for one that was about wool and flax and other natural fibers. It would not be wrong to say that most library visitors greatly missed Mrs. Craft and her respect for the card catalogue.

  “You have done it again!” said Becky to the boys. “You and the Professor have saved the town from another disastrous calamity.”

  “Yes, thank you, boys!” added Mr. Craft from behind the wheel of his new Buick. Mr. Craft had to tilt his head in a funny way to look at the boys through Becky’s window. “I was worried that I would have a very hard time selling any of the appliances at my store. People want white refrigerators and white ovens. They don’t want peach-colored ones. Which is why I am greatly indebted to you and Professor Johnson for keeping me in business.”

  Mr. Craft owned the largest appliance store in Pitcherville. The appliance business had been good to him and allowed him to buy a new car every year and to put his only daughter into nice clothes. It was sad not having Mrs. Craft around, but she was replaced by a gardener and a maid and a cook with the name of Smitty (though she was a woman).

  “And to show my appreciation for what you have done, I have asked Smitty to bake you a cake. It is in the back seat, if you’ll open that door and take it out.”

  Rodney looked at Wayne and Wayne looked at Rodney and neither knew what to say, for Mr. Craft wasn’t Petey and could not be spoken to so frankly. Luckily, Becky came to her friends’ rescue: “Oh Daddy! Do you really expect Rodney and Wayne to be able to take the cake now! For goodness sake! We’ll give it to them later.”

  Mr. Craft smiled and shrugged. “You boys better hurry on to school or you’ll be late.”

  “See you in class!” chirped Becky, as the Buick drove away.

  “What did I miss? What did I miss?” cried Petey. He had just come out of his house and was now running down his front walkway. Petey was always arriving after something had already happened or was just finishing up.

  “Mr. Craft’s cook Smitty made a cake for us,” said Wayne. “Aunt Mildred is going to laugh when she hears that we now have two cakes on the way! That’s three cakes in all, when you add the one that she’s baking us herself!”

  Petey climbed upon his bicycle, which, because he could not think about any words that had a “b” in them, he called his “Schwinn cruiser.”

  The three boys rode to school together on their Schwinn cruisers, Rodney wondering how in the world they were going to eat three whole cakes, and Wayne thinking about how lucky he was to have three whole cakes to eat.

  At school, as they were rolling their bikes into the bike rack, Petey said, “My mot
her wanted me to ask you something.”

  “What is it, Petey?” asked Rodney.

  “She wants to know if the Professor has told you how long these calamities are going to keep happening to the town. She said she doesn’t trust the articles in the paper that say they come from sunspots. My mom is a nervous woman, and it makes her even more nervous not knowing what tomorrow has in store for us.”

  Rodney and Wayne both recalled the conversation they had had with Professor Johnson when the sixth in the long series of troubling events had occurred. This was the time that everything mechanical and electrical in the town began to run backward. Clocks ran backward and cars ran only in reverse, and the boys could not get their bike wheels to go forward no matter what they did. (Mr. Dean, the editor of the town paper, the Pitcherville Press, had written an article—the latest in a long series of articles—which had repeated his belief that the mechanical and electrical problems that the town was experiencing were—like all the other calamities —caused by sunspots. Unfortunately, the very odd, bug-eyed and frizzy-haired editor could not get his printing press handle to turn in a forward direction; so he was left to stand at the window of his upstairs office at the Pitcherville Press, and shout the word “sunspots” at all the people who passed below as another means to get across his minority opinion.)

  As Professor Johnson was working with Rodney and Wayne to build a Chrono-Gyro-Restorifier to correct the problem, he offered the finer points of his theory: “Pitcherville, you see, is an ordinary town that has apparently been picked to undergo a series of most extraordinary permutations. Hand me that number seven wrench, please. Do you boys know what the word ‘permutation’ means?”

  “Changes,” said Rodney.

  “That’s right. Different, um, transmogrified realities.”

  “’Transmogrified’—now what does that mean?” asked Wayne, looking in the toolbox for the right wrench.