by Mark Dunn
“But then, Wayne, I remembered that you once said you wanted to be a space cadet like ‘Tom Corbett, Space Cadet,’ on TV, so I thought it was okay to tell you something that I didn’t have much of a chance at either.”
“Why did you think that I couldn’t grow up to be a space cadet?”
“Because there isn’t such a thing as a space cadet,” said Becky. “Being a space cadet is a made-up job. Just like Tom Corbett is a made-up character.”
“You don’t think some day there will be astronauts, Becky?” posed Rodney. “Astronauts who will pilot their spaceships all the way to the moon and back?” Rodney glanced at the moon as he said this.
“Or to distant planets?” asked Petey, also looking at the moon but with a starry-eyed gaze.
“I suppose,” said Becky. “But by then, we’ll probably all be too old to go.”
The children walked on for a moment thinking quietly to themselves. Then Wayne broke the silence. “I wish that some day Professor Johnson would make a freezing machine that could put a person into a big ice cube and keep him there until after all the calamities are over and the force field is down, and then thaw him out when things are much better than they are now.”
“How do you know that things will be better in the future?” asked Becky.
“Well, don’t things usually get better? We don’t live in caves any more, do we?”
Becky could not hold back a smile. She was thinking of Wayne wearing a wooly mammoth fur, with a bone through his nose. “I guess you’re right about that.”
The four turned a corner and stopped. There was the Ferrell house with all of its lights turned on. And there, sitting on the porch swing, was a large middle-aged man. The man was mostly bald. You could tell this because his head was bowed and the top was all that you could see. It was moving up and down a little as if he were crying.
“What should we do?” whispered Becky to the others.
“Well, I guess we should first find out who he is,” said Rodney. “He might need our help.”
“I hope no one has died,” said Becky.
“Excuse me,” said Wayne, approaching the house. The man looked up. Wayne and the others could tell immediately who the man was. It was their friend Grover, many years older.
“Who is it?” asked the middle-aged Grover. He was squinting at the moonlit lawn and wiping his eyes with his knuckles. “I can’t see very well. I think I need glasses.”
“It’s Wayne. And here is Rodney and Becky and Petey.”
“Hi Petey. Welcome home,” Grover said, taking a handkerchief from this pocket to blow his nose with. “I—uh—guess I’m getting a cold.”
“I’m not feeling all that well myself,” said Petey. “I woke up with arthritis.”
“Come up here. I am just sitting here thinking about things.”
“What are you thinking about?” asked Becky.
“Mama mostly. Suddenly she’s very old. Is this a new calamity?”
Rodney shook his head. “No. I think it was the Professor’s machine—the Age Altertron—that did it.”
“Well, whoever or whatever did it, Mama now has to take very tiny steps when she walks. It took her three-and-a-half minutes just to get from her bed to the bathroom. How will she be able to clean and cook for the Professor? She’ll lose her job and then we’ll both have to go to the poor house.”
“Grover, the same thing is happening to half the citizens of Pitcherville,” said Rodney. “My Aunt Mildred can’t even get out of bed. Something will have to be done to help all of the old people until Professor Johnson can fix this problem.”
“How do you know that the Professor can fix it?” asked Grover. “How old is he now? He must be at least one hundred!”
“Well, I think he’s actually older than that,” said Rodney. “But if he is like Aunt Mildred, his mind will still be sharp. Maybe he’ll have to work slower, but I don’t think things are hopeless. We’re going to his house now. We need your mother’s key.”
“I’ll get it.”
Grover got up from the porch swing. He had been a large boy. Now he was a very large man. The floorboards of the porch creaked loudly as he walked across them.
At the same time that Rodney and Wayne and Becky and Petey and Grover were mounting the stairs in Professor Johnson’s house to gently wake the Professor, a robbery was taking place at Toland’s Supermarket. The two perpetrators, each of whom wore black eye masks to conceal their identities, and each of whom held shiny new revolvers in their hands, had surprised the store’s night watchman, Mr. Roessler. He had been dozing in a chair in the produce section and woke to the sound of something large being hurled through one of the front glass doors of the store.
As he tried to wake up and get his bearings, Mr. Roessler was approached by the two bandits. It was at this moment that something disturbing came to his attention—something even more disturbing to sleepy Mr. Roessler the night watchman, than the fact that his employer’s store was being robbed. He was old. Very old. And very tired.
Even if he hadn’t become suddenly very old and very tired, there was little that Mr. Roessler could have done to protect the store, since Mr. Toland, Sr., the owner of Toland’s Supermarket, didn’t believe his night watchmen should be armed. As a result of this policy, all that Mr. Roessler could do now was stand with his trembling hands up in the air, and hope that the intruders wouldn’t shoot him.
Each of the two masked men carried a large duffel bag over his shoulder. Mr. Roessler wondered from the size of the duffel bags how much money the masked men were hoping to steal from the store that night.
“This is a stick up,” said the taller of the two men. “I can see that,” said the night watchman. “But I should tell you: I don’t have the combination to the office safe. I don’t even have a key to the office. I’m just here to chase away all the mice who come out at night to nibble on Mr. Toland’s fruits and vegetables.”
“We don’t wantmoney, Gramps,” said the tall man. “Do you think we would have brought these duffel bags if we had wanted money?”
Mr. Roessler shrugged. “I just figured you were being optimistic.”
“Why don’t you just be quiet, you stupid old man?”
“I do look old, don’t I? It’s the strangest thing. I feel old too, but I’m only thirty-three. So what have you come for? Why are you pointing those guns at me?”
“Direct us to the cereal aisle, Gramps. My partner and I will be taking all the oatmeal, Cream-of-Wheat and other soft cereals you have.”
“But I don’t understand,” said the night watchman. “There are fresh T-bone steaks and rib-eyes in the meat section. If I were robbing a supermarket that’s what I’d take.”
“And that would make you stupid-times-ten, old man. Now show us to the cereal aisle, and when we’re done there, take us to where you keep the Jell-O and soft custard. And you’d better be quick about it, if you know what’s good for you.”
Mr. Roessler did as he was told, and stood by as the two masked men filled their duffel bags with all manner of soft food, and then disappeared into the night.
“Professor? Can you wake up, Professor?” asked Becky. “Tap him again,” said Wayne. “Tap him harder.”
“Well, I’m not going to hit him, Wayne. He’s in a deep sleep.
We’ll just have to wait for him to wake up.”
“We can always wait, of course,” said Rodney, “but then again, Wayne and I are his apprentices. This is what he called us last night: his trusted and worthy apprentices in the field of cataclysmic science. And as such—”
“That isn’t what he called us,” interrupted Wayne. “He called us his worthy and trusted apprentices. You got it backwards.” “My point is…”
“You don’t have to tell me your point, Rodney,” said Becky. “I’ll shake him a little harder.”
“That won’t be necessary, Miss Craft,” said a groggy Professor Johnson, opening his eyes into thin slits. “I am awake now and more than willin
g to bring you all up to speed. But first, Rodney, tell me who these other people are, crowded around my bed. And if you will all take a step back from this bed, I should be able to
breathe a little better.”
Everyone took a step back to give the Professor more breathing room.
“Well, it’s Wayne and me, and Becky, of course. And that large man over there is Grover. And that smaller man over there is Petey Ragsdale.”
“Oh, Petey! It’s nice to see that you have come down from the clouds. How were you transported here? You must make detailed notes that I can put into my log. Write down everything you can remember about the experience.”
Petey nodded.
“Well, hello to the rest of you children. Of course, you’re no longer children any more, thanks to me. Someone help me sit up in bed. I haven’t much strength.”
Grover and Wayne helped the Professor prop himself up in his bed. “Thank you, boys. I could sleep another twenty years. Just like Rip Van Winkle. Of course, the result would be the same as what has just happened, wouldn’t it?”
“Give or take about thirty years,” said Rodney.
“Yes, I see what you mean. You’re all looking a bit long in the tooth. Well, blame me for it. I did it. I was right there to see the end-product of my stupidity. My punishment started immediately, for I could hardly get myself up all those stairs. You see, I have now only a small fraction of the energy that I used to have. And I must
have a little rest for all the days of work that lie ahead. By my calculation I am now in possession of the body of a one-hundredand-seventeen-year-old man.”
“Wowee!” said Petey.
“And what would that make us?” asked Wayne.
“Let me see,” said the Professor. “You were all born in 1943, is that correct?”
“Our birthdays are all within six months of each other,” said Becky with a nod.
The Professor did a calculation in his head. “Then you would all be around sixty-six-years-old, give or take a few months.” “I’m sixty-six?” asked Becky with a look of distress. “But you don’t look anywhere near that age, Becky,” said Wayne. “Thank you, Wayne. That was sweet,” said Becky, who was beginning to resign herself—at least for the moment—to her present state of “Age Change-Derangement-Estrangement.” The Professor heaved a heavy sigh of fatigue. “I suspect, though, that none of you will be able to guess why the machine has added so many more years to our physical ages.”
Rodney and Wayne shook their heads.
“It was my fault—entirely my fault. I wasn’t thinking. I suppose it was because I was too tired. I had two pieces of paper. On one piece I had written ’eleven years, eight months, one week, four days, thirteen hours, ten minutes, and forty-five seconds.’ That is how much aging would have to occur to restore us all to the age we were at the moment when the original age reduction occurred. On the second piece of paper I had jotted down ‘sixty-four years, seven months, two weeks, one day, three hours, fifteen minutes and fiftyeight seconds.’ That was my exact age at the pivotal moment of the age reduction. You see, I had been using my own age as a base variable to calculate the constant that represented the difference between the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ of our ages. I accidentally inputted this second figure—my age—when I was setting the coordinates for the machine.”
Rodney looked at Grover and Petey who were both scratching their heads. “In other words,” explained Rodney, “instead of having eleven-and-a-half years added to our ages, the machine added sixtyfour-and-a-half years.”
“That’s right. Due solely to human error. My error. It was a disastrous, numskull mistake that will now have grievous consequences for us all.”
“What kind of consequences?” asked Grover, who did not like the word “consequences” even when the word “grievous” wasn’t attached to it.
“Well, you no doubt see them all about you, already. There is no one left in this town now who is below the age of fifty-two. There are no more children—no more spry young people to give our town energy and vim and, and…”
“Verve?” asked Grover.
“Yes, verve. There are, conversely, people now living among us— if you call lying in a bed and sleeping for most of the day living— who are as old as 153—for I know of at least two residents of Shady Acres Nursing Home who had already passed the century mark.” “But I don’t understand, Professor,” said Wayne. “It seems like a pretty easy thing to fix. You just go back down to the lab and enter the correct age coordinates and ‘Wham! Bam! Allakazam! We’re all back to our right ages again.”
“If only it were that easy, Wayne,” sighed the Professor. “But unfortunately, as I found myself in the midst of that rapid aging process a little while ago—a process that was wholly unexpected, and which startled me immensely, well, I let out a most frightening shout of dismay. Right there in my laboratory I screamed like a terrified little child. And the intensity of this unexpected eruption from my vocal cords surprised Gizmo, my cat, who had been sleeping soundly next to me, and she sprang into the air in that way that cats sometimes do, in which all their limbs become extended and all of their claws protracted, and she came down not upon that same spot on the floor in which she had uplifted herself, but she came down—I am sorry to report—right upon the back of my poor terrier Tesla, protracted claws and all, and a most terrible row
between those two ensued.
“I reached into the fray to break them up, and in so doing I lost my balance—for this is the way with people of advanced years: they sometimes lose their equilibrium and stumble and fall—and I did so in a most inconvenient and destructive way! For I fell directly into the Age Altertron and jangled loose its circuitry board and caused a
little unintended arcing between its electrodes, and this produced a little fire, which grew into a slightly bigger fire, and before I knew it, I was spraying my arcing, flaming, smoke-belching Altertron with a fire extinguisher. And when the smoke cleared and all the extinguisher foam had dissolved away, there was nothing left before
me but a broken, wrecked shell of what that machine had once been—a testament to fatigue and stupidity and the tendency of dogs when attacked by cats to defend their canine honor at all costs. “Everyone was counting on me and I let them down. I let you down.” The Professor shook his head and closed his eyes and became very quiet.
Rodney and Wayne and their friends exchanged looks of concern. “You didn’t let us down, Professor,” said Wayne. “No,” agreed Becky, “you just made a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes.”
“We just have to build ourselves a brand new Age Altertron— an Age Altertron II!” said Rodney with forced cheer.
“How long do you think that will take?” asked Wayne. Professor Johnson opened his eyes. “You boys will have to be the ones to build it. Under my direction, of course. Because I am much too weak and frail to do anything but to tell you two what to do. Do you think that you can do it?”
Rodney and Wayne nodded. “Excellent. Then all is not lost. But first, let me sleep, for I am very tired. I must have twenty-four hours of rest to recuperate.
While I am sleeping, boys, go down to my laboratory and take an inventory of all of the parts of the wrecked machine.” (Yawn.) “Set aside those which you think we can reuse and throw out those you think we cannot.” (Yawn.) “And feed Tesla and Gizmo their breakfast.” (Yawn) “And tell your mother, Grover, that she isn’t to overly tax herself at her now-advanced age, and may come to my house to cook for me only when she feels she is able.” (Yawn) “For that matter, I cannot eat much solid food in my present state anyway, but will be nutritionally satisfied with some oatmeal or Cream-of-Wheat or some other form of soft cereal or custard. If my cupboard is bare, then please go to Toland’s Market, Grover, and procure soft foods that I can gum. Goodnight, children. I will speak to you again in twenty-four hours.”
CHAPTER TEN
In which Jackie Stovall finds his voice and a worthy mission
o ther
e it is,” said Rodney, using one of his father’s favorite phrases.
“Yes, there it is,” said Wayne in agreement.
The two boys stood in the Professor’s laboratory surveying the damage from the stumble and the fire. It was morning now, and Grover and Becky and Petey had gone home to rest. “We should get back home ourselves and make breakfast for Aunt Mildred,” said Rodney, stepping over Gizmo, who was crunching her cat food. In the other corner of the laboratory Tesla was eating dog kibble, but keeping a wary eye on his now-mortal feline enemy. “Let’s stop at the market and pick up some food that Aunt Mildred can eat.”
The boys passed the Professor’s key-rack mounted on the wall next to the door to the garage. A special key chain hanging there caught Wayne’s eye. He stopped and pulled it down to give it a closer look. The key chain dangled from a woman’s head sculpted in metal. The woman’s hair was flowing straight back as if she were facing a strong wind. “Hey, look at this, Rodney! It’s just like the hood ornament on the Professor’s car.”
“That’s because the key chain is probably made by the Nash Car Company. Put it back, Wayne. We have to get to the store.” “Why can’t we take the Professor’s Nash to the store? He won’t be able to use it any time soon.”
“Because it’s the Professor’s car, not your car. Put the key chain back.”
But Wayne didn’t obey his brother. Instead, he opened the door to the garage and turned on the light. There sat the Professor’s 1946 Nash Ambassador convertible. Even though it was ten years old, the car looked as if it had just rolled off the car lot. It was black and sleek and outlined in glistening chrome. Like most of the cars of its day, it was sloped and curved as if it had muscles. The tires had white walls to them that had not even the slightest smudge of dirt. “Isn’t she a beauty?” said Wayne. “I’ll bet the Professor has someone come in to clean and polish her every month.” “I’m not going to let you drive the Professor’s car, Wayne.” “But I’m sixty-six years old!”