The Age Altertron

by Mark Dunn

  “Petey? Petey is that really you on the phone?” asked Mr. Ragsdale into the telephone receiver.

  “Yes, Dad. It’s me: Petey.”

  “Well, I’ll have to admit that it certainly sounds like you. But how can I be sure that it really is you?”

  “I have a metal plate in my head and the little toe on my left foot doesn’t have a toenail.”

  “But everyone knows that, son. Tell me something that only Petey and his mother and father would know.”

  “I know!” offered Wayne from his high chair. “Ask him what he had for lunch at school yesterday.”

  Mr. Ragsdale nodded. “Petey, son, tell me what your mother put into your Hopalong Cassidy lunch carrier yesterday.”

  “I don’t have a Hopalong Cassidy lunch carrier, Dad. I have a Roy Rogers lunch carrier.”

  “Yes, yes, you’re right! A Roy Rogers lunch carrier. Now tell me what your mother made you for lunch.”

  “A round meat sandwich and a yellow monkey fruit and some root juice.”

  “Oh, that’s right!” exclaimed Petey’s mother. “I packed him a bologna sandwich and a banana and a bottle of root beer. It’s Petey! Only Petey would have said it just that way without any ‘b’s!” Mr. Ragsdale held the phone receiver out for his wife to speak into. “Where are you, honey? Tell us where you’re calling from.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know where you are?”

  “No, I don’t, Mom.”

  “What does it look like?” asked the Professor, speaking on the upstairs telephone extension.

  “It doesn’t look like anything. Is that you, Professor?”

  “Yes, it’s me, Petey. Now try very hard to give us some kind of idea as to where you are.”

  “Okay. It’s very foggy. And there are clouds.”

  “And vapor. Is there vapor?” asked the Professor, jotting the facts down in his pocket notepad.

  “Yes sir. Vapor and clouds. Oh, and fog. And also some steam.”

  Mrs. Carter could not help herself. She cried out, “Is my girl Lucinda with him? Ask him if Lucinda is there!”

  Mr. Ragsdale nodded. “Petey, Mrs. Carter would like to know if her daughter Lucinda is there with you.”

  “Well, it’s not easy to see everyone. There is too much vapor and clouds and fog and steam. I think she’s here, though. Let me ask. LUCINDA? LUCINDA CARTER, ARE YOU HERE?”

  A tiny voice replied, “I’m over here!”

  “Yes, Dad. Tell Mrs. Carter that she’s here.”

  “What about Armstrong’s kids, Darvin and Daisy?” asked Mr. Craft. “Ask about them.”

  “Did you hear that, Petey?” said Mr. Ragsdale into the phone. “Are Darvin and Daisy Armstrong there with you?”

  “Gee, I don’t know, Dad. I’ll find out. DARVIN? DAISY? ARE YOU HERE?

  “They’re right here!” replied Lucinda. “I’ve got them with me.”

  “They’re here too, Dad,” said Petey. “Say, Professor, what’s going on? What are we doing here? When do we get to go home?”

  “We’re just starting to put all the pieces together, Petey. I’m afraid it will take a little time to get everything figured out. Now, do you have the sense that you are in a room, son? Or out-of-doors somewhere?”

  “There are no walls that I can see, Professor,” answered Petey. “Not even a ceiling or floor. It’s like we’re all sort of floating inspace.”

  “Most curious,” said the Professor, making notes. “And how old are you, Petey? How old are the other children?”

  “The same age we were yesterday, I guess. I can’t see much of a difference in the way we look except that you can kind of see through us like we’re ghosts or something.”

  “Ghosts!” Mrs. Ragsdale shrieked. “That can only mean one thing!”

  “Corporeal transparency could have many possible causes,” said the Professor in a calming voice. “Now, Petey, how did you find the telephone?”

  “Gee, I don’t know, Professor. It just sort of appeared. Hey, are Rodney and Wayne there? They’re not here with me.”

  “Yes, Petey. They’re here,” answered Mr. Ragsdale. “But they’ve been turned into infants and I don’t think they know how to talk on the phone.”

  “Yes we do!” said Wayne, offended by the put-down.

  Mr. Ragsdale made a shh sign with his finger and his lips, and then spoke into the phone. “Thank goodness there are telephones wherever you are, son. Now you take good care of yourself until the Professor can put everything back the way it was.”

  “I will, Dad. In fact, I’m doing more than just taking care of myself. It looks like I’m the oldest one here. And the tallest. I’ve never been in a place where I was the oldest and the tallest. I guess it’s up to me to look after all these children until we get to go home.”

  “That’s a fine thing, Petey. You make your mother and me very proud.”

  Mrs. Ragsdale pulled the phone receiver over to her mouth so she could say something else to her son: “Is there a number there where we can reach you?”

  “I didn’t understand the first part of what you said, Mom.”

  “A number, Petey. A phone number.”

  “Yes, there’s a phone here. I’m talking on it.”

  “No, you don’t understand, honey.” Mrs. Ragsdale began to cry. “Oh Drew—I can’t think of another way to say ‘phone number.’ Is there another way to say it so that it doesn’t have a ‘b’ in it?”

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” said Mr. Ragsdale.

  “I can hardly hear you, Mom.”

  “You’re fading too, sweetie. But don’t go yet! Don’t go!”

  “I love you, Mom! I love you, Dad!”

  “We love you too, honey.”

  “So long!”

  “So long, son.”

  Mr. Ragsdale handed the phone receiver back to Aunt Mildred and wiped a tear from his cheek.

  A moment or so later, the Professor returned to the kitchen. A somber quiet had fallen over the room, with the exception of the scratchy sound Aunt Mildred made sweeping sugar into her hand from the messy table.

  “There is a name for the place where Petey and all the other little children of the town are being kept,” he said softly. “But Petey wouldn’t have understood. The place is called ‘limbo.’”

  CHAPTER SiX

  In which Rodney and Wayne and Becky and Grover have an encounter with two preschool fugitives from the law

  he next three days were very busy ones for Professor Johnson and for Rodney and Wayne. Although they were not able to help the Professor with the construction of the invention—dubbed the Age Altertron—whose job it would be to end this latest calamity, the boys nonetheless spent as much time as possible with their friend in his home laboratory. They even helped him to give a name to the new calamity. It would forever be called The Age-Changer-Deranger-Estranger.

  Aunt Mildred didn’t mind rolling the twins back and forth between the two houses in their big double stroller because it gave her more opportunities to bring fudge and pie and all the other special foods that Mrs. Ferrell had told her the Professor liked. Aunt Mildred would sometimes sit and watch Professor Johnson bolt down a slice of cinnamon-rhubarb pie (so that he could quickly return to his work) and she would let out a little wistful sigh and wonder what life would be like if she could bake for him everyday as his wife. When it was time to go, Professor Johnson would steal a glance at Aunt Mildred through his window and think about what a good cook she was, and how much he liked to see the cheerful lift in her step when she walked.

  Rodney and Wayne were busy in large part because the Professor’s house and laboratory at 1272 Old Hickory Road had become a very busy place. All day long Mr. and Mrs. Ragsdale and Mrs. Carter and all of the other parents of the missing children (except for Mr. Armstrong who could not be coaxed from his bathtub) would drop by to find out if they would soon be able to hold their little ones in their arms again.

  The Professor’s students
from the college, who had once been eighteen- and nineteen- and twenty-year-olds, and who were now seven- and eight- and nine-year-olds, came to visit with the Professor as well. Now that they had the bodies of young children, they could no longer while away their free hours doing the goofy, prankish things college kids generally did, like leading a milk cow up four flights of stairs to the roof of the science building. Now that they were incapable of doing anything more prankish than covering a very short tree with toilet paper, they could spend more time assisting the Professor in those areas of his work that did not require a steady adult hand.

  In fact, there were so many people gathering at the Professor’s house that he could scarcely get any work done. “I don’t care how you do it, boys!” he had said to Rodney and Wayne on the third day of the calamity. “You simply must figure out some way to keep everyone away from here who isn’t being helpful to me. It’s a circus in this place and it only delays my work and hurts this town.”

  So, here is what Rodney and Wayne decided to do to help the Professor: they set up a reception room in his front parlor. No one was allowed to go to the back of the house to see the Professor unless he or she had a very important and urgent reason.

  “I have an idea!” said Becky, sitting with the boys and their friend Grover on the Professor’s front porch. “Let’s make it into a real office, like we have our own company. I’ll be the receptionist and Rodney and Wayne, you can do the interviewing since you know better than anyone else whom the Professor would be willing to see and whom he would not.”

  “And what will my job in the office be?” asked Grover. Grover sat at one end of the funny row of chatting babies, each with serious faces and furrowed brows—faces usually only seen on babies with poopy pants.

  “There are plenty of things you can do to help our brand new company,” said Becky, who was convinced now that they should turn their work for the Professor into a fully-fledged business operation.

  Mrs. Ferrell was watching the four chattering toddlers from the window of the Professor’s front parlor. She smiled. She was pleased that Rodney and Wayne and Becky were including her son Grover in their plans. She had gotten very worn-out lately trying to tend to her chubby baby boy who was not content to simply sit quietly in a playpen and roll a toy car back and forth. At the same time, Mrs. Ferrell still had to cook and keep house for the Professor. She got so worn out that sometimes she fell asleep standing straight up, propped against the Professor’s dusty fireplace mantle.

  “I know what Grover can do!” said Wayne. “Grover can be our right-hand man.”

  “What does a right-hand man do?” asked Grover.

  “All kinds of odd jobs,” replied Rodney. “Let’s say, for example, that someone comes to see the Professor and won’t take no for an answer. Well, it will be your job to show him to the door.”

  “But what if he doesn’t want to be shown to the door?”

  “Then you’ll have to be forceful about it.”

  “But how can I be forceful?” asked Grover. “I only learned how to walk yesterday.”

  Rodney and Wayne and Becky all nodded at the same time. Slowly they had been learning how to walk all over again. Running and riding bikes and tramping through the woods and flying kites and playing football—all of these things were out of the question now. For the four children who sat in a little row that day upon the top step of Professor Johnson’s porch, being so young had become a most cruel thing to be.

  Not so, though, with the adults in the town. Being made younger worked very much to their advantage. Down the street at just that moment, Mr. Williford rode by on his son’s bicycle, with his arms waving above his head. And there, directly across the street from the children was the butcher’s wife Mrs. Garrison, taking a quick turn upon a sidewalk hopscotch court. And not too far away, the children could see Mr. Watts happily bouncing down the street upon his daughter’s pogo stick.

  “You would think by the way they’re all acting, that they’ve all been turned into children again!” grumbled Rodney.

  “Better children than little monkeys like you!” said someone coming from the Professor’s side yard. The foursome looked down from the porch to see Jackie Stovall and his chum Lonnie Rowe snickering at them from the Professor’s flower bed, where they had just trampled most of his autumn chrysanthemums.

  Jackie and Lonnie, who had both been put back a grade, and were, therefore, a year older than the four sitters on the porch, had easily crept up on legs that functioned just as well as any older child’s. (They did, after all, have the bodies of three-year-olds to work with.) Jackie was the taller of the two boys, but Lonnie had a strong, stocky build, like a young gorilla.

  Becky stood up and said in the very serious voice of a nononsense receptionist: “Good afternoon, Mr. Stovall. Good afternoon, Mr. Rowe. Have you gentlemen come to see the Professor, because he is only seeing people with the most urgent emergencies.”

  “No, we don’t have to see the Professor, monkeys!” crowed Jackie. “We just want to use his house for a hiding place. We’re fugitives, you see. The law thinks we did something that we didn’t do.”

  Rodney stared hard at Jackie and his fellow fugitive. He felt like a judge glaring down at a convicted criminal from his high bench. “What crime did you not commit that someone thinks you committed?” he asked in his official interviewer’s voice.

  “Somebody—really two somebodies—just ran through the Pitcherville City Park and overturned all the baby carriages. And there were about a dozen of them. Maybe more.”

  “Maybe two dozen,” said Lonnie.

  “How do you know?” asked Becky with a skeptical look. “Were you there?”

  “No,” snapped Jackie. “But that’s what we heard. Two wild boys—oh, maybe just our size, went on a rampage through the park and knocked over about two dozen…”

  “Maybe even three dozen,” interrupted Lonnie Rowe, smiling proudly.

  “Three dozen—shut up, Lonnie—three dozen baby carriages, most of them with the babies still inside.”

  “Maybe four dozen,” said Lonnie.

  “I told you to…” Jackie suddenly took something from one of his little-boy-dungaree pockets that was floppy and black. He hit Lonnie over the head with it. “…to shut up,” he concluded.

  “Do they have a description of the rampagers besides the fact that they were about your size?” queried Rodney.

  “Yeah, they were wearing black bandit masks.”

  “You mean like the black bandit mask you just hit Lonnie with?”

  “Uh—uh—this isn’t a black bandit mask. It’s my black handkerchief. Isn’t that right, Lonnie?”

  Lonnie nodded. “Jackie likes black handkerchiefs because they hide all the dirty crud that comes out of his nose.”

  Jackie hit Lonnie on the head again.

  “And for some strange reason,” guessed Rodney, “the police think it’s you two who did all that rampaging.”

  “That’s right, monkey. Because whenever anything bad happens in this town, it’s always Lonnie and me they point the finger at. So why don’t the four of you be good little monkeys and stop blocking the stairs so Lonnie and I can find ourselves a good hiding place inside the Professor’s house?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Wayne sternly. Then he put one arm around his brother Rodney’s shoulder and one arm around his friend Becky’s shoulder, so that they could together make a better barrier against the two bully-fugitives.

  But Jackie would not be deterred. He tried a friendlier tack: “Come on, you guys! I heard that the house had this great big basement, and there’s an even bigger one beneaththat one! Wouldn’t it be swell to explore them?”

  Wayne softened a little. “Two basements? One on top of the other?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Wayne turned to his brother. “The Professor never told us he had a secret sub-basement!”

  “Waaayne!” Becky pursed her lips. She squinted her eyes and gave Wayne a scolding look.
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  “I don’t care if the Professor has basements going all the way down to China, Jackie, you can’t come into his house,” said Rodney sharply.

  Jackie fixed his lips into the beginnings of a snarl. “I bet you’ll let us hide out in this house after I get finished slugging you with this fist, monkey.” The smarter and louder and more self-confident of the two bullies took a menacing step toward Rodney, his fingers already curled into a fist. Just as suddenly, though, his fingers relaxed.

  “No, no. I’m not going to use my fist. I’m going to use my head. Just like my old man does to get what he wants. I can’t wait until I’m as old as he is and then I can be mayor myself and all you monkeys will have to do what I say!”

  Jackie had hardly finished speaking when the squeal of a whistle pierced the air. “Uh oh,” said Lonnie, who wasted no time in running off.

  “This isn’t over, monkey,” threatened Jackie from over his shoulder as he raced off in the same direction as Lonnie.

  The foursome on the porch watched as the two partners in crime disappeared behind a neighbor’s dwarf fruit tree, which had toilet paper all tangled up in it. Then they watched as two police officers ran up the cobbled walk from the sidewalk. One of them kept going in the direction that Jackie and Lonnie had gone. The second of the two officers stopped. He was very winded and gasping for breath. “Don’t—stop—Stillwell!” he called to his partner between gasps. “I’ll—catch—up with—you—in a—minute!”

  The officer looked up at the children on the porch. “I have asthma,” he wheezed. “It’s better than it used to be, but it’s still with me, unfortunately.”

  Rodney and Wayne knew the police officer well. Officer Wall used to work in the Pitcherville Police Department’s Loud Noises Unit but was now detailed to a brand new police unit that had been created to handle an outbreak of toddler crime.