The Great Interactive Dream Machine (10 page)

In ten minutes I was up in his room. I didn't tell him about the dream because it wouldn't cut any ice with him, but I was really trying to talk sense to him.

“Aaron, we were getting into enough trouble even before The Watcher—”

“Watcher, smatcher,” he said, cool as a cucumber. “There are a lot of electronic outlaws and owlhoots out there in cyberspace these days. We're talking wire fraud. We're talking an expanding menu of electronic snooping.” He squared his bony shoulders. “I'm already working on a more sophisticated encryption program. Nothing is future-proof, but—”

“Aaron, the cat's already out of the bag. The Watcher—”

He waved a small hand. “Try to keep calm.” His mind had already switched to one of its other compartments. “Let me give you a little update on my recent progress on the formula.”

“Aaron—”

“It's nothing personal. I'm just downloading some imagery. I'm probably not pulling in enough power to interactivate a tenth of our body weight. Believe it.”

I didn't even understand it. But now Aaron was back in business, playing his keyboards like a pipe organ and doing all the stuff he does. I edged back on his bed. The whole room hummed. His screens displayed something in a flash too fast to see. A curl of smoke rose from his set-top box. It was Frankenstein stuff.

But we were still there and in our regular bodies, so it was okay, right?

Then we heard a small scream.

Aaron's sneakers shot up. His arms flew out, and he was looking in his lap.

“Aaron. What?”

A weird and unexplained moment passed. Then he began to swivel slowly around in his chair. At first I didn't see anything but his face. He had that half-electrocuted look.

Then I saw something in his lap, something strange. A mound of matted fur. Two shiny marbles for eyes. A small bow on her topknot. A mop with paws. She looked around and screamed again.

Aaron's face fell into his hands. “No,” he said, “no, no, no, no.”

“Aaron, is that Nanky-Poo?”

“How many shih tzus do you know?” he moaned.

“Maybe she got in by herself.”

“Are you kidding me? Like she pole-vaulted up and unlocked Miss Mather's front door? Then she got on the elevator and pressed Penthouse? And how do you think she got past Ophelia? Ophelia would have had her for dinner. To Ophelia, she'd be a Tender Vittle. Then what? She turned herself into a letter and slid herself under my door?”

We looked. Aaron's door was closed. Nobody our age leaves his bedroom door open. “And how did she get on my lap? She didn't jump up. She materialized. Her need lined up with my numbers. It's Ophelia and Heather all over again. All Nanky-Poo wants is to go out.”

Her pink tongue poked through her mustache. Panting lightly, she sank a small claw into Aaron's knee.

“It's my formula. I'm not getting anywhere with it. The Watcher is right. It's stone age. I'll have every dog in the building up here. They all want out. I'll have to open a kennel.”

“Aaron, we've got to take her back. You know Miss Mather. She's probably dialed 911 already. She'll have us in juvenile court for dognapping. She'll have us in
family court.
Nanky-Poo is family to her. She'll alert her lawyers, and I just stopped being grounded.”

Aaron and Nanky-Poo sat there. “We'd get caught,” he said. “The woman sees through doors. It'd be a prank, our second offense. Why don't we just wait? This is only a minor glitch, probably—an electronic hiccup. As soon as Nanky-Poo's Emotional Component runs out, she'll probably cellular-reorganize back home on her own. She probably doesn't have much of an attention span anyway.”

“Aaron, by then Miss Mather will have a dragnet thrown around the city. She'll be slapping up road-blocks at the bridges and tunnels with her bare hands. She'll be going door-to-door. Nanky-Poo is her whole life. They even look alike.”

Aaron thought about it. He wasn't that happy about sitting around all night with a lap full of shih tzu. He handed Nanky-Poo to me. She peered at both of us. We were vaguely familiar, but she couldn't quite place us. Aaron dug around in his clutter and came up with a shopping bag from The Sharper Image. “Put her in this. She's used to a carrier bag.”

We crept out through the dark penthouse and past dozing Ophelia. Then we were ringing for the elevator.

“Here's the plan,” I said. “We push eleven. When we get there, you keep the elevator door open. I run out, drop the dog, ring Miss Mather's bell, and beat it back to the elevator, and you push Penthouse.”

Aaron nodded.

Then the elevator door opened. And somebody was inside.

We blinked.

It was a little guy, not that much older than we are, not that much bigger. He was in some kind of costume: a short jacket with rows of brass buttons. On his head was a little round hat held on by a strap under his chin. He blinked back at us. He wore a glove on one hand.

We were in the elevator before we could think. But here's the really weird part. It wasn't our elevator. It was like a big birdcage. You could see out to the walls of the elevator shaft. There was a bench you could sit on.

Now the little guy in the costume was pushing a gate across the door with his gloved hand. “What floor, sports?”

We stood there stunned. Finally Aaron said, “Eleven,” in a crackling voice.

We began creaking down. It was a ghost elevator from the days before automation. The guy was a—what do you call it? An elevator operator. We dropped to eleven, real slow, kind of clanky.

“Have a nice night,” Aaron said in a wobbly voice as we walked out past him in a dream. The door clanged shut behind us.

“Aaron. What?” Nanky-Poo was still swinging from my hand in her Sharper Image bag. She whimpered.

“This is going to be a tad trickier than we thought,” Aaron muttered. We were standing in front of Miss Mather's door. But making a dog drop, ringing her bell, and making a break for the elevator wasn't an option anymore. We were on different turf now.

Aaron turned the knob, and the door opened. “Her door's unlocked?” I said. “She'd never leave it unlocked.”

“They wouldn't bother to lock their doors in the olden days,” he said. “Back then, the doorman and the elevator operator were protection enough. Besides, there'd still be cops on the beat.”

“Aaron, what are you saying? Are you saying that—”

“We're going inside,” he said. “We don't know who's in there. We don't know when it is. We don't know anything. We don't speak.”

We teetered on the threshold. There was a front hall, dark, and past it the living room, lighted. We crept in. Nanky-Poo whimpered again and scrabbled around in the bag. We stood at the edge of the living room. Aaron stuck his head around the doorway. He went on. I followed.

We'd never been in Miss Mather's living room before, believe me. It was fairly nice: a big crowd of antique-type furniture and pictures in silver frames. Eerie, but what we were doing was practically breaking and entering.

I wasn't thinking a nanosecond ahead, but Aaron just stood there, scoping out the room. He pointed to one corner. There was a big vintage combination radio and stone-age record player. On the front it said STROMBERG CARLSON. The radio dial was glowing, and from inside, a tinny voice was singing,

There was a table by the sofa with a picture of an old man in a frame and a couple of magazines. Aaron's finger fell on
The Ladies' Home Journal
and moved to the date on it: February 1942. The cover on the Life magazine was about the fall of Singapore.

Nanky-Poo whimpered again. She didn't want to be here. Neither did I.

Aaron peered up at me. Then we heard the front door open. We jumped a foot, and the next thing I knew, we were huddled behind the sofa with Nanky-Poo in her shopping bag between us.

There was murmuring in the front hall. Then somebody said, “Hush. Papa will hear.”

“Only a moment, dearest,” a deep voice said. For a second I thought I knew that voice. But how could I?

If they come in the living room, we're dead ducks, I thought. Nanky-Poo was
this close
to one of her screams.

Their voices came nearer. But then she said, “No, Teddy, you'd better go. It's hopeless. Truly it is. I'll write as soon as you are overseas. Tell me where to write, and I will. I'll—knit you a sweater.”

“Margaret, for once in your life,” he said, “you must think of what you want.”

They seemed to be as near as the doorway.

“Darling, marry me now,” he said, “tonight.”

“Oh, Teddy, you know I can't. Papa—”

“Let me talk to him, Margaret. Go and wake him.”

“No, Teddy,” she said, panicky. “You know how Papa is. There would be a dreadful scene. I can't send you away like that. After the war when you come back—”

Aaron's eyes came up over the back of the sofa. So did mine. It was like we had to see them. They were standing in the doorway. She was a young girl, not very tall. Pretty. Her hair flowed down over her shoulders, and there was a flower in it. The skirt of her 1942 dress was short.

He held her in his arms. He was a lanky young guy in a World War II army uniform.

“Don't tell me you'll wait for me,” he said in a harder voice. “It will be no different later, and you know it. Marry me now, Margaret. Fling caution to the winds. It is now or never.”

She pulled back from him, and her face dropped into her hands. She had bright-red fingernails.

“Oh no,” she said through her hands. “This is not how I will want to remember this moment.”

 

As soon as she said that, it happened. Maybe her words made it happen.

It was like a 747 roaring through the room—that quick and that loud. It wasn't my cells reorganizing this time. It didn't hurt. It wasn't happening to me, but everything around us changed. The lights blinked and surged. The upholstery on the sofa back changed color. So did the walls. They'd been blue or something. Now they were white. The pictures on the walls rearranged themselves in quick moves. The magazines melted. The picture in the silver frame clicked. The old man in it became somebody else, a young guy. For a second I thought I recognized him, but how could I? We felt the sudden rush of air-conditioned air.

I looked over at the Stromberg Carlson, and now it was a TV—not new, but from modern times.

The room sizzled and settled. Our knees were on a different rug. Miss Mather was standing in the doorway, alone. All these years later, she was a little shorter. She was wearing a bathrobe and a nightcap with wisps of gray hair sticking out. When she began to lift her old face from her wrinkled hands, we ducked down.

But Nanky-Poo jumped out of her shopping bag. She waddled away, twitching her little flag of a tail, happy to be home now. She circled the sofa, heading for Miss Mather.

We didn't breathe.

“Naughty Nanky-Poo,” Miss Mather said in her old voice. “I turn my back for... a moment, and you vanish.”

We were looking under the sofa at them with our chins on the rug. Nanky-Poo's flag tail was all over the place. Her claws dug into the carpet. When Miss Mather's hand reached down for her, she ducked. Nanky-Poo was looking back past her tail, across the floor, under the sofa, at us. She let out her version of a growl.

Now she whipped around, and her weird little chin was on the floor, like ours. Her mustache drooped on the carpet, and her hindquarters were sticking up. Her tail was going like a windshield wiper. Her marble eyes were beady, zoning right in on us, letting Miss Mather know we were there. She was like a bird dog, and we were dead ducks.

Then we saw Miss Mather's robe being grabbed up. She made a dash for the fireplace. We heard her grabbing a poker out of her fire tools.

So this is how it ends, I thought. I'm fifty miles from soccer camp, and still I'm going to get my brains battered out.

“Door,” Aaron said. Without a thought in our heads, we came out of a crouch, vaulted over the sofa, and made a run for the front hall. Aaron took a flying leap over Nanky-Poo, who was screaming in circles. I had the Sharper Image shopping bag in my hand. I guess I didn't want to leave any evidence.

“Halt!” Miss Mather yelled behind us. “This is a citizen's arrest!”

We hit the front door. There were three locks on it: high up, middle, and down by the floor. Light flooded the front hall, and we were trapped. I saw the shadow of a poker sweeping across the locked door.

“Turn around nice and easy,” Miss Mather said, “hands high, feet wide.” We obeyed. The Sharper Image bag hung from one of my high hands.

The poker rested on Miss Mather's shoulder, and she gripped the handle with both hands. It was like she was coming up to bat. Her old eyes burned big holes in us. “You are the boy who—”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“And you are the boy with—”

“Here,” Aaron said, like she was calling roll.

“Back into the living room.” Her poker pointed the way. We filed past her. Nanky-Poo sat in the doorway with crossed paws like she didn't have anything to do with it.

We settled on the edge of the sofa, and Miss Mather bent over us, leaning on her poker. “How interested I will be in your explanation for this unwarranted intrusion. I will be glad to hear, and there is nothing wrong with my hearing. It is alibi time. What do you have to say for yourselves?”