The Age Altertron Page 3

  “Well, it means changed but in a most bizarre way.”

  Wayne laughed. “Gee, that would be Pitcherville all right!” He handed the Professor the wrench he needed. “But why do you think that is, Professor?”

  “Well, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering our situation. Why have we been singled out for such recurring calamities? Why, every few days, do the laws of science and nature stop applying to the town of Pitcherville? Why do things happen that are sometimes funny like everything being the color of lemons, and sometimes scary like the time that the town found itself entirely under water— like the lost ocean city of Atlantis—and all the electrical appliances shorted out? Why is this?”

  “And what have you concluded, Professor?” asked Rodney, holding a bolt in place so that the Professor could put in the screw that it required.

  “Here is my theory—and it is only a theory. The day that your father disappeared—that same day that Mrs. Craft and my assistant Ivan and two of the other professors from my college all disappeared —that was the day that the experiments began.”

  “Experiments?” the twins asked together in one curious voice.

  Professor Johnson nodded. “You see, I believe that Pitcherville has become a laboratory of some sort. Just like this laboratory in which we’re now working—just like my other laboratory at the college. But instead of being a place of beakers and Bunsen burners and vacuum tubes and electrical circuitry, it is a laboratory of houses and streets and trees and people. Of dogs and cats and cars and swing sets and tree houses and go-karts and television sets and electric razors and toasters and flower gardens and everything else that marks the lives of average Americans in this modern year of 1956. I believe, boys, that there is a force out there—the same force that took your father (for I cannot believe that the two things are not related)—which is responsible for these experiments. They—whoever they are—want to see how we react to each new situation.”

  “Like they want to know,” said Rodney, “if we can live in a world in which everything that was once hard and solid has become like Jell-O and everything that was once soft and squishy has become hard and solid.”

  “Or if we can live in a world with millions of bubbles,” added Wayne. “Or in a world where people speak in numbers instead of words. Isn’t that right, Professor?”

  “Right on the money, Wayne.”

  (Wayne smiled. He had been right on the money!)

  “Of course those who are conducting these experiments, boys— they probably never realized that they would have Professor Johnson and Rodney and Wayne McCall to contend with. For every time a new experiment has been put into place, there we are—like flies in their ointment—busy at work on a new machine that will end the experiment and put things right back to normal!”

  “Oh, I’ll bet they’re not happy about that at all!” laughed Wayne a little raucously. “And who cares!”

  Rodney and the Professor could not help laughing along with Wayne. “Hand me those pliers, Wayne,” said Professor Johnson with a chuckle.

  Rodney’s gaze now went to one corner of the laboratory where the Professor had been constructing a different machine. “How is the Force Field-De-Ionizer coming along?” he asked.

  “Not as well as I would like. It is a most difficult thing to learn the make-up of a force field when it is invisible. And without a proper chemical analysis of the molecular structure of the field itself, I cannot hope to build a machine to remove it.”

  “And you believe,” said Wayne, “that the force field, which keeps us from leaving Pitcherville, was put up by the same people who are doing the experiments on this town?”

  “I do, Wayne. What better way to keep the guinea pigs of these experiments–us!—from escaping from our town-sized cage! Yet I am hopeful that it will only be a matter of time before I am able to solve the riddle of the force field. For is it not turned on and off at times and in certain places to send the radio and television signals on to us? Or to place the things we need to survive upon the shelves of the town warehouse? Say, Wayne, what makes you think that it is people who are conducting these experiments?”

  “Who else could it be?” asked Wayne, his eyes rolled upward in thought. “It couldn’t be horses or—or elephants—or Venus Fly Traps doing this to us.” (Wayne was fascinated with Venus Fly Traps and all other plants that had the ability to take revenge upon members of the Animal Kingdom, and so he sought whenever possible to bring a Venus Fly Trap into a conversation no matter how very much it did not have to do with Venus Fly Traps!)

  “Did you ever stop to think that perhaps our experimenters might not be earthly at all!” posed the Professor.

  “You mean that they could be Martians?” asked Wayne.

  “Or maybe beings from some planet we’ve never even heard of before!” marveled Rodney.

  “I have no idea who it could be. Perhaps we should start to gather the clues that will someday give us that answer. What, for example, do we know of our situation here besides the fact that we are subjected to these periodic calamities?”

  Rodney thought for a moment and then said, “That we are cut off from the rest of the world.”

  The Professor nodded.

  “And that we cannot send letters or make telephone calls to anyone who lives outside of Pitcherville,” continued Rodney.

  “And nobody calls us,” sighed Wayne, “or sends us letters. Or birthday cards. Or Christmas cards or anything.”

  Rodney nodded and brought forth a sigh of his own. He was thinking of how much he missed his father and how the force field kept him from going to look for him. But it was not just their father whom the twin brothers missed; they also missed having a mother around—for Mrs. McCall had died when they were born. They missed all of their relatives who lived outside of Pitcherville whom they wondered if they would ever see again: Grandpa and Grandma McCall (who was the sister of their Great Aunt Mildred) and their Uncle Doug, who was a traveling magician, and even their father’s friend Trixie, who was a dancer and would sometimes come to town and laugh too loud and get on Aunt Mildred’s nerves. There were a lot of people whom Rodney and Wayne missed seeing and whom they would miss even more if they were destined to live the rest of their lives trapped in Pitcherville.

  And there it sat: the Force Field-De-Ionizer all in pieces, because the Professor had little clue as to how he should put it all together in such a way as to do the town some good and remove its invisible fence forever.

  “So that’s the Professor’s theory, Petey,” said Rodney, summing things up. “And he could be wrong, but it sounds like as good a theory as any other that I’ve heard.”

  Petey agreed, and said that his mother would be glad to hear it. It would be good for him to give her a possible reason behind all the Troubles—to give her some theory that had nothing to do with sunspots (which few people believed anyway). But Petey said this using only words that did not contain a “b.”

  “Of course there is one other thing that Mom wants to know,” said Petey. “She’d like to know when the next experiment is going to happen. She said she wasn’t very prepared last time, and doesn’t want that to happen again.”

  Rodney shrugged. “Sometimes we have two whole weeks between calamities,” he said.

  “But gee, other times,” Wayne joined in, “there’s hardly even time to take a good breath.”

  “A good what?” asked Petey.

  “A good inhalation,” said Rodney, thinking of a “b”-less word that means “breath.”

  The school bell rang. This meant that it was now time for all the children who had been talking and chasing one another upon the front lawn to go inside and begin their school day. Rodney and Wayne didn’t hurry, for they knew what would be waiting for them in their classroom, and wanted a little time to prepare what they would say. And, of course, their guess was right on the money; there it was: a cake—a big peach-frosted cake baked by their teacher Miss Lyttle “to thank you boys and the Professor for ending yet an
other town catastrophe! Have a piece, boys. We’ll wait to begin class until after you’re done.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In which Rodney and Wayne wake to discover that they have been sleeping like babies because they ARE babies!

  Nothing new happened for several days. Each morning Rodney and Wayne woke to a bright and sunny room, with nothing whatsoever out of place. Down to breakfast they would go to eat their cinnamon biscuits and their cinnamon-sprinkled grapefruit (which, though it sounded strange, actually tasted pretty good), and to gather their books for school, and then to jump upon their bikes. Petey would be waiting, patient as usual. Mr. Craft’s aqua-colored Buick would pass the boys on its way to the school, and Becky would roll down her window and wave and sometimes she would shout, “Don’t you love this good, beautiful, normal day!”

  Some days the three boys were joined on their Schwinn cruisers by Rodney and Wayne’s friend Grover. Grover was a stocky boy in the twin’s eighth-grade class whose mother was Professor Johnson’s housekeeper and cook, Mrs. Ferrell. Grover was always trying hard to lose weight. In fact, the Professor had built an exercise machine for him that was like no other exercise machine in the world. It was part rowing machine and part stationary bicycle, but also had a medicine ball that came out of its own accord and pushed at him here and there, which Grover had to fend off when he wasn’t looking. He never used the machine without acquiring a bruise or two, and finally, the Professor was forced to concede that the “Grovercizer” needed further work. It was Grover’s dream to lose weight and not have to shop in the husky young men’s section of Lowengold’s Department Store, but he would prefer to do it without acquiring bruises.

  Grover hoped to grow up to be a champion wrestler like the wrestlers he saw on television. His favorites were Whipper Billy Watson, Bobo Brazil, Killer Kowalski, and Gorgeous George who preened and strutted in a silly way and made Grover laugh. Sometimes Grover would pull one of the twins down to the ground without warning and pin them and shout, “You’re pinned! I win! I win!” even when the boys had not been aware that there had been a wrestling match in progress. But Rodney and Wayne could not help liking Grover who just like Becky and them, had only one parent, and who, just like the two boys, had never even met one of his parents. You see, Grover’s father had died in the Battle of Guadalcanal in World War II. He had died a war hero, and Grover kept all of his medals in a little box next to his bed.

  Rodney and Wayne spent their normal school days listening to their pretty, young eighth-grade teacher Miss Lyttle talk about the differences between reptiles and amphibians, and the differences between acids and bases, and the differences between Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt. And all of these noncalamitous days were generally good days, except that they were sometimes a little boring.

  And a little bothersome. The bothersome part went by the names Jackie Stovall and Lonnie Rowe. These were two boys in Rodney and Wayne’s class who had no friends other than each other. There was a very good reason for this: nobody liked them. And there was a very good reason why nobody liked them: they tried their best to make trouble for their classmates whenever possible. Lonnie liked to put out his leg and trip anyone walking past. (Most of the students in the class had learned to give him a wide berth.) However, Jackie’s mischief was more cunning. He would think of things to hurt people that no one had ever thought of before. And it was not only children who were the victims of his naughty behavior. Sometimes he would steal the newspapers left by the paperboy in the early morning. (This would have a double benefit to Jackie; people would have to start their day in a sour mood without their Pitcherville Press Morning Edition, and they would blame the paperboy for not delivering it.)

  Sometimes Jackie replaced the milk that the milkman left on the porch with milk bottles filled with soapy water. He was always careful to cover his tracks and pretended never to know anything when it was time to get to the bottom of something bad that he had caused. Once he slipped away from school and disguised his voice and called Principal Kelsey on a pay phone to tell him that he had better hurry home because his wife had left the faucet running in her bathtub before she left the house and there was a cascade of water coming out of his upstairs bathroom window. The absentminded principal was halfway home before he realized that there was no upstairs floor to his house.

  And that he did not even have a wife.

  But Jackie Stovall reserved his most illustrious acts of mischief for Rodney and Wayne, because he was envious of the boys and all the good things they had done for the town through their work with Professor Johnson. Sometimes it would be a little thing like replacing the boys’ bologna sandwiches with mud sandwiches. But sometimes Jackie’s stunts were of a far more serious nature—like the time he put itch powder in the boys’ costumes when they played Pilgrims in the school Thanksgiving pageant. Several people in the audience had watched the twins jumping and wriggling around on the stage and had pointed at them and laughed in a way that Miss Lyttle (who had written the Thanksgiving pageant herself) had not intended. One woman had said in a loud voice, “Those two Pilgrim men must have to go to the bathroom! Take those Pilgrim men to the bathroom, Chief Wahunsunacock!”

  All went well for so many days that the citizens of Pitcherville began to wonder if the calamities had stopped altogether. “Wouldn’t that be marvelous!” exclaimed Aunt Mildred, who was working late in her kitchen to make cinnamon fudge for Professor Johnson. (Aunt Mildred, you see, was quite fond of the bachelor professor and he liked her too, during those occasional moments when he could think of something other than his work.)

  Then it happened: it was early in October when the mornings had gotten a little cooler and the leaves on the trees were just starting to show a little color that was not green.

  Rodney woke, as he usually did, without opening his eyes, and knew that this was going to be one of those days. How did he know this? Because his arms and legs felt funny. They felt somehow smaller than usual. How could such a thing be? he asked himself, and do I dare to open my eyes to find out? Not only did his arms and legs feel funny, but his pajamas felt several sizes larger than they did when he went to bed. And where was his pillow? He reached about his head and could not feel it.

  This is terrible, Rodney thought. I have been shrunk to a miniature size! Rodney had wondered when this might happen. Only a few weeks before, he and Wayne had sat down and made a list of all the different bad things that had yet to happen to the town of Pitcherville, and Rodney, remembering the problems of Alice in Wonderland, added to the list the possibility of everyone in the town being made very tiny. “And now it’s happened!” he said aloud, his eyes still squeezed tight.

  “Now what’s happened?” Rodney had never heard this voice before—it was very high and very squeaky. And yet there was something a little familiar about it.

  “Open your eyes, fraidy cat!” said the voice, now taunting him. And this is what Rodney did. He opened his eyes and glanced in the direction of the voice—in the direction of his brother’s bed— and there, sitting up against the wooden headboard that had been painted with a long wagon train, was a chubby baby of somewhere between one year and two years of age (Rodney was not good at telling the age of babies and toddlers since he didn’t spend much time around them). The baby looked very much like Wayne had looked when he was very young, for it had taken at least two years for Rodney to gain some weight and Wayne to lose some weight and the two to look more like twins. This is the way it often is with identical twins: one is born bigger than the other, and it takes a while before they grow into their identical-ness.

  The baby looked quite comfortable and casual sitting against

  the headboard. But he did not look entirely happy. “Will you get a load of this? I’m a baby!” he said in a not-very-happy voice. “And you’re a baby too. And I would have woken you up sooner but you were sleeping so peacefully. You were sleeping like a baby.”

  Rodney stretched out his little arms and stretched out his lit
tle legs and knew now for certain that he was a baby too.

  “Has everybody in Pitcherville been turned into babies?” asked Rodney in his own high and squeaky voice.

  Baby Wayne shook his baby head. “I don’t think so. I heard Aunt Mildred a little earlier singing in the bathroom. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t singing in a baby voice.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense!” said Rodney. “Usually, when a bad thing happens to the town, it happens to everybody equally.”

  At just that moment the boys could hear the bathroom door open.

  “Now we’ll find out!” said Wayne. “AUNT MILDRED! COME IN HERE!”

  A moment later Aunt Mildred stepped into the room. She had a turban on her head made out of a bath towel. There was something very different about her that the boys could not put their finger on (besides the fact that she wore a towel turban—something they never remembered her doing before).

  “I wondered when you were going to wake up,” said Aunt Mildred cheerily. “You were both sleeping so peacefully. You were sleeping just like babies.”

  “Because wearebabies. Look at us,” said Wayne. “And why aren’t you a baby?”

  Aunt Mildred shrugged. She had a smile on her face that did not go away.

  “Why are you smiling?” asked Wayne testily. “Are you enjoying the fact that your great-nephews have been turned into babies?”

  “I wasn’t enjoying that at all! I was merely taking momentary pleasure in the fact that when I looked at myself in the mirror this morning, it seemed as if I had grown at least ten years younger!”

  Rodney nodded. It was making perfect sense to him now. “Aunt Mildred,” he said, “how old would you say Wayne and I look right now?”

  “Well, if I can remember back to when you actually were babies, I would say you look as if you’re about eighteen months old.”

  Rodney calculated aloud: “Wayne and I are around eighteen months old. Yesterday Wayne and I were thirteen years old and two months. That means that we have had a little over eleven-and-ahalf years chopped off our physical ages.”