The Great Interactive Dream Machine (13 page)

We'd told her we had to do a Victory in Europe oral report, and it had to be good because Mr. Thaw was on our case. We'd been to tea with her two or three times. We didn't mind it after a while, though I was personally up to here with vanilla wafers.

“You were in World War II?” Aaron gave her an owl look. “On our side?”

“Of course I was in World War II. Did you imagine I would sit at home while the world caught fire? And women won that war. If it had been left to the men, we'd still be in bomb shelters.”

Aaron stroked his jaw. “That uniform doesn't look too American.”

“It is the British W.V.S.,” she said. “I crossed the Atlantic on a destroyer chased by U-boats in order to join. I am not British, of course, but the founder of the W.V.S. was the Marchioness of Reading, a great friend of Papa's.”

Aaron looked thoughtful. “Your papa let you join up in the war?”

“He was a great patriot,” she said. Then she looked out to the hall and across at his room. “And I suppose he would rather have seen me dead than married.”

Silence fell, and you could see these little nebulas of dust dots in the slanting sunshine.

“I have a scrapbook of my wartime career,” she said, dragging it out of a dresser drawer. “You will be interested in it. It will be invaluable for your report.”

In her uniform she moved like a young girl. She dropped down on the end of her bed and motioned Aaron and me to sit with her. Nanky-Poo jumped up to join us, thinking this was teatime.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Whatever I was assigned to do,” Miss Mather said. “I developed a talent for driving staff cars and ambulances during air raids. Women are better drivers than men, you know. Men are too easily distracted. The Blitz was long over before I reached Europe, and so London had already been thoroughly bombed. But then in the summer of forty-four, the Nazis sent over their secret weapon.”

“The doodlebug,” Aaron said.

Miss Mather had opened to a scrapbook page that was snapshots of bomb craters. “So you know about the doodlebug.” She turned to me. “It was the flying bomb that could come over anytime, day or night.”

Aaron nodded. “I've got doodlebug data stored in my Inline Memory Module.”

“So do I,” Miss Mather said in a long-ago voice.

She talked us through the scrapbook of her doodlebug summer until the room began to get shadowy. The book was full of black-and-white snapshots: Miss Mather working under the hood of her ambulance, Miss Mather on parade in her dress uniform, Miss Mather in a London park, drinking tea in her metal helmet. “This is my gas mask carrier, not a purse,” she said, pointing it out. “We never knew what Hitler would send us next.”

I wanted to ask her about Teddy, but I didn't know how. I wondered if she'd joined up in the war so she could find him. He wasn't in her scrapbook.

Then Aaron said, “What happened to your boyfriend?”

The room dimmed a little more.

“I had several,” she said softly, “naturally.”

“Did they all come back?”

“Not to me.” She closed the book.

She stood up, and it was time for us to go to the park. Somehow I wasn't in a big hurry to leave, though Nanky-Poo was beginning to get desperate. She was out at the front door, hurling herself against it again.

“I'd like to get you on tape for our report,” Aaron said. “With your data, Miss Mather, we'll be a shoo-in for an A each. You'd be like oral history—I mean oral current event.”

“Certainly not,” she said, showing us out. “I do not speak to machines. Besides, it won't be necessary.”

Whatever that meant.

 

I dreamed that night. It wasn't about The Watcher. It was even realer than that.

Aaron was in it, and he looked ridiculous. He was in dress code, but it sure wasn't Huckley's: boxy little striped jacket, flannel shorts with his knobby knees showing, long socks, a little cap with a bill on his head. Hilarious. I looked down, and I was wearing the same. We were British schoolboys, with gas masks.

I looked around, and we were in a crowd of other British schoolboys, outdoors somewhere. I looked up into a gray sky, and I thought it was full of Fuji Film blimps. But they were barrage balloons sent up on cables to try to keep the Nazis from dive-bombing. Somehow I knew we were outside a railroad station. You couldn't tell. Every wall was sandbagged. We were waiting for a train to take us all out of London, away from danger. We were being evacuated.

Then we heard an eerie sound—a distant
putt-putting
high up. People began to duck. There it was, a small black sliver shape, like a needle in the sky, sewing the clouds. It angled in,
putt-putting
louder, with a flame in its tail. My heart was in my mouth. It looked like home-delivery death.

A khaki-colored ambulance with blacked-out headlights pulled up at the curb, and Miss Mather jumped out. It was the young Miss Mather in her W.V.S. uniform.

We all stood like statues, watching the doodlebug bomb get bigger. Its engine quit. The
putt-putting
stopped cold. That meant the bomb had reached its destination. It was falling now, on our heads.

Miss Mather made a run for us. She could run like a deer. She had us all inside, somehow, at the last moment. We were in the echoing station, and the bomb fell somewhere just outside. A thump you felt in your stomach sucked all the air out of the world.

We were sprawled on a floor, just barely safe. Glass rained. There was grit in my mouth from the sandbags. If this was a dream, it was a real production.

I struggled to sit up, and I was sweating buckets. The sun was coming in the window of my room. It was a school day.

Later Aaron said it was fate that drew us back to the Black Hole that afternoon.

We were into oral reports in History. Zach Zeckendorf and Pug Ulrich were being chased all over North Africa by Rommel. Then Mr. Thaw would horn in to tell us where they got their facts wrong. Our own report was just a question of time, and we were getting down to the wire. After school when we were buying lunch at the deli, Aaron said we'd better go back to the Black Hole to work. He was having trouble seeing his ThinkPad screen in the glaring sun of the park.

If it had been an overcast day, we'd have gone to the park. Fate.

The halls at school had emptied out. Aaron handed me his salad and Snapple and dug for his key. But the media center was unlocked. We went in through the book area. Aaron's hand was on the knob of the Black Hole door when he froze.

He put up a finger. “The computers are booted up,” he whispered. Nothing wrong with his hearing. We listened.

A voice from inside the Black Hole said, “Plastic or cash. I don't take IOU's.” A somewhat familiar voice.

“Okay, stand right there,” the voice said to somebody in the Black Hole, “and really concentrate.”

We didn't breathe.

Then we heard a click and a sizzle. The door vibrated.

We burst in.

Formula—it looked like Aaron's formula—was displayed on both screens. Somebody sat hunched between them. He spun around. Fishface Pierrepont.

Aaron lunged. He was going for Fishface's throat, and my hands were full of lunch. The Snapples jumped out of my hands. Salad went everywhere.

I had Aaron in a hammerlock. Fishface was clutching both sides of his own head. He had terror written all over him. Also guilt.

“Fishface!” I said.
“You're The Watcher.”

Aaron was trying to be calm. I eased up on him. “What's this?” he said in a dangerous voice. He was pointing to a pile of money on the table. Reasonably big money. There was a fifty-dollar bill. Aaron picked up a major credit card. I read it over his shoulder. It belonged to Dud Dupont.

Fishface was plastered against the screens, dreaming of escape. In the voice of a mouse he squeaked, “I was just playing some Sim—”

Aaron started to lunge again, but I held him back. Rage rippled through him, but he said, “Let go of me, Josh.”

Fishface's desperate eyes were on the door.

“You're not going anywhere,” Aaron said, nose to nose with him. “Talk. You've been hacking. You've been snooping. You've been all over us. You've called up my formula, and you're a cybernetic illiterate. You don't know a hologram from a hole in the ground. You don't—”

“You think you're the only one who knows anything.” Fishface was a trapped rat with a mouse voice. “Your formula was stone age. I upgraded it. I zeroized and reexpressed some of your cockamamie mathematics.”

Cords stood out in Aaron's neck. “What's this money about? Where's Dud Dupont?”

“In cyberspace,” Fishface said, and stuck out his lower lip.

 

We stood there. Fishface could be bragging. He made a quick move.

“Don't even think about it,” Aaron said. “Make my day.”

I couldn't believe it, but Fishface had turned Aaron's formula into a business—like a travel agency, for Pete's sake. He was charging people for trips to cyberspace.

The full horror of it hit us. Aaron smacked his own forehead. “Fishface, how long have you been doing this?”

“Just today,” he muttered. “This was like my grand opening.”

“Fishface, how many? Who's involved here? Tell me it's just Dud Dupont.”

“It is,” Fishface said, “plus Wimp Astor and Pug Ulrich.”

“No.” Aaron's face dropped into his hands. “No, no, no, no. You mean you just moved them out—boom, boom, boom?”

“I told you I improved your formula,” Fishface said with quiet pride. “I made them pay, and I sent them away.” He even had his own advertising jingle.

Aaron grabbed the air. “But money won't do it. It takes Emotional Component to interact with the formula. They really have to
want
to go.”

“They did. I told them to want to go someplace, and they went,” Fishface said. “They're rich guys. They always get what they want.”

We reeled.

“Get out of the way.” Aaron swept Fishface aside and settled at the screens. His hands hovered over the keyboards.

“They have to come back on their own,” Fishface said, “like you guys did when you seniorized. That's basic.”

“Shut up, Fishface,” Aaron moaned. “My formula was already virused. Who knows how it operates now that you've hacked it around? Who knows if they're ever coming back?”

He signed off and sat round-shouldered in front of the dead screens. Silence fell. Time stood still.

“We better stay here,” I said, “in case they—”

Aaron shook his head. “It's like the watched pot. It never boils. And why do I have the feeling they're not coming back here?”

He turned around to glare at Fishface like he still wanted to pop him right in the retainer. “This is totally your fault. If there's a rap to take, you'll take it. If Pug and Wimp and Dud are gone for good, we're talking network news here. We're talking national manhunt. We're talking lawsuits and court dates and adult involvement. We're talking
Hard Copy.
And all because you messed with something way over your head.”

“Like you didn't,” Fishface sneered. Quicker than the eye, he swept up the money and Dud's credit card.

He nearly made it to the door when Aaron said, “Freeze.”

Fishface did, and Aaron said, “Just keep your distance, Fishface. If we have anything to say to each other, it'll be fax to fax. I've got a little jingle for you:
Stay off our cases and out of our faces.”

Fishface fled.

The next day Pug Ulrich, Wimp Astor, and Dud Dupont weren't in History. They were Absent Without Leave the rest of the week. Fishface was there every day, of course, with his hands clasped on his desktop like a choirboy—perfect attendance. Aaron would stumble into class pink-eyed and green-faced. He was piping in CNN on one of his home screens all night, listening for this news to break internationally. He was calling me up every evening.

“Look, if we could just figure out where they wanted to go, we could try cellular-reorganizing ourselves and go find—”

“What we?”

“But they've probably gone in three different directions anyway. Who knows? With whatever Fishface has done to my formula, they could all three end up as a dinosaur's dinner.”

I was pretty worried too. For one thing, we hadn't been gone this long when we'd cyberspaced ourselves. Also, I had a bad feeling we'd end up getting busted for this. Don't we always?

 

It was a long week followed by an endless weekend. I basically walked through it. On Monday Aaron and I got to History early. We'd been coming in early every day, hoping against hope. Aaron slumped into class, dragging his ThinkPad. He'd lost some weight.

And there they were.

Pug. Wimp. Dud. They were swaggering around as usual, except they all had great tans. Pug was beginning to peel. Fishface was at his desk, smiling quietly into his clasped hands.

My knees buckled with relief.

Aaron zeroed right in on Pug. “Okay, let's hear about it. Where you been?”

“Since when are you taking attendance?” Pug said. Pug's pretty pompous, and Aaron and I aren't exactly in his peer group. “Provence, if it's any of your business,” Pug said, “the south of France.”

“I know where Provence is,” Aaron snapped. “Go on.”

“My parents have a country house there for the summers. I dropped in. Flew back last night on Air France. First class, of course.”