He suspected his half-brother had something to do with engineering his lapse in sanity, but he couldn’t work out how he’d done it. He’d halfheartedly tried to go without the medicine Angstrom had prescribed him after his miraculous cure, but he’d felt the old symptoms setting in the longer he’d delayed taking it. He analyzed the substance and found it to be an obscure fungus native to the Amazon rain forest, and it mystified him. How on earth could South American jungle fauna cure my dementia? He wondered, and how on earth could my brother have known I needed it? The only answer he could come up with was the obvious one; he was being controlled. Nevertheless, he reasoned, it’s all mind over matter, so he’d flushed it down the toilet a few days ago.
“There’s the bug in your ointment, Doc!” Hunter startled him out of his reverie by sneaking up behind him.
“The what?” he asked, turning to see Angstrom’s two goons standing behind him.
“The pesky tyke who ruined your experiment,” Hunter beamed, pointing at the monitor. “There he is!”
“Oh yes, I see,” Leitz said, smiling.
“I’ve been with the kid for a while, and he doesn’t seem to be anything special to me,” added Hunter.
“Perhaps he’s not—I may be wrong,” Leitz said thoughtfully.
“Well, it’s bad luck for them if you are,” Hunter chuckled.
“Meaning what?” Leitz asked.
“Meaning their situation is terminal from here on in,” said Hunter, running a finger across his neck while adding the appropriate sound effect.
“Terminal! Why?”
“Orders,” Hunter ventured. “They know too much already, even if you’re wrong.”
“My goodness,” Leitz warbled; he’d never considered such consequences.
It’s strange, Steve thought, he’s right here at the center of things, and he still can’t quite work out what’s going on.
“Well, we’ve done our job,” Hunter boasted. “It’s all up to you now.”
As the two of them left Leitz listened intently until he was absolutely sure they would not return. He was feeling very confident, and finally he could relax. He stared at the monitor intently and reflected, I have all of the ingredients for success right in front of me, and I have a date with destiny—whoever she turns out to be! He found himself giggling uncharacteristically at the childish thought that came from nowhere, and wasn’t even particularly funny. Mind over matter, he thought… mind over matter.
***
The four kids managed to struggle free of their ropes, and after ripping off their blindfolds, they scrambled up from the floor. The moment John had been dreading had finally arrived; they were all free with nowhere to go, and just as he suspected the three of them turned on him straight away and began backing him into a corner.
“Don’t worry,” he told them. “Your folks will report you missing, and the police will come get us.”
“My folks are in Las Vegas,” said Cal.
“And mine,” added Tex.
“Mine too,” Kate echoed.
“I guess all our parents went!” John muttered feebly as he backpedaled.
“Now suppose you tell us why we’re here?” asked Kate menacingly.
“And while you’re about it, tell us how we get out of here,” Cal demanded.
After each step John could feel the wall getting closer, and his heart beating faster.
“Yeah, we’ve all seen the movie, we just came along for the ride,” Tex quoted. “Do you remember what happens to the guys that just come along for the ride, Johnny?”
John’s mind was tumbling, and his thoughts were running around in circles like unruly kids. He could hear the blood rushing through his ears, and his nerves screamed at him to get the heck out of there.
“Give me a moment,” he stuttered. “I’ll think of something.”
“Do you have a magic wand up your sleeve?” Kate asked. “I don’t think so!”
“Do you have a time machine?” Tex demanded. “I don’t think so!”
“Well, we don’t have any of those things either, Johnny,” Cal taunted, “but we can sure make our anger vanish by taking out our frustration on you!”
John had reached the wall, and with nowhere left to go his mind suddenly focused like a laser beam on the word ‘vanish,’ and that’s just what he did—he vanished.
Chapter 9
OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND
John watched the fabric of reality around him disappear as everything dissolved into nothingness before his eyes. It was a stunning shock to his system, and he wondered how he had managed to maintain his awareness long enough to watch it go. He had expected his consciousness to fade at any moment, but it didn’t happen. The world was gone and he was alone; even though he felt exactly the same within himself as he always had, he knew without a doubt that something deep down at the core of his being was different.
Nothing like this had ever happened before. His previous changes had been unconscious and swift, but this new change was a pure unadulterated enigma. He had been dropped into a complicated maze, and his only option was to rationalize it, or go completely mad.
His normal walking-around self—the eyes and soul that stared back at him from the mirror—stayed the same. But his reflection self, his solid self, his weight and substance, had shifted to his space self; his empty self. It was as if he had stepped into another world, a world right beside the solid world that was the empty world; the space-in-between-things world.
Instantly, he knew that this world was vast and teeming with promise—the promise of things dreamed and undreamed. It wasn’t the beginning, it was the place before the beginning; it was the womb, the crucible from which the magic of creation bubbles forth. A dark, empty space so thick with the atomic soup of consciousness it vibrated with energy—an energy pregnant with potential, an energy that existed to be shaped—and the tool used to shape it was thought.
He couldn’t believe he was thinking this stuff—it wasn’t the normal thing kids thought about, but then again he was no longer a normal kid. He was everywhere and nowhere. Traveling at the speed of thought, his thought stretched out like a map that owned this hidden territory, and just by squeezing it with his mind he could shape it into anything he wished.
“You are beginning to understand,” said a voice, and it was true, he was. He understood that time could not exist here in the normal sense; time had to be what you wanted it to be, backwards, forwards, or even none. Time was just an ingredient that matter used to measure itself by; time lived in the other world—the world of solid stuff.
“Where are you going?” asked the voice.
“Huh?” answered John.
“Where are you going in such a hurry?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” John volunteered. “Who are you?”
“I’m the random burst of energy you just passed through. Where are you going?”
“Anywhere but here I guess; I’ve got big problems!”
“Oh, you’re running away then?”
“What else do you do when you’re being pursued by trouble?”
“Well it’s a novel idea, but I’ve always found that facing up to it helps.”
“Oh, yeah—then I’d really have a problem; I’d be dead.”
“I didn’t say fight it, I said face up to it. Be flexible; find another way to defeat it.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“No, that’s because you’re being pursued by ignorance, and to compensate you are fleeing to ignorance. Isn’t that strange?”
The whirlwind blowing through his mind began to subside, and a gentle breeze of reason wafted on the air. He felt giddy, the way he felt when he’d been spinning around in circles and suddenly stopped. Behind him a raging gorilla was beating its chest and screaming wildly, and before him a chimpanzee was entreating him to keep on running away as fast as he could.
“Is there another way?” he wondered.
“There’s always another way, but you
must remain still if you wish it to find you.”
“You’ve got it the wrong way around,” John stated. “You mean wish to find it!”
“Who told you that?”
“Just about everyone.”
“Well, just about everyone is wrong; energy doesn’t work that way.”
“No? How does energy work?”
“Everything you see, everything you feel, everything you think, everything you hear, everything you say, is energy, and your only job is to balance it so that it can work through you.”
“I can’t even trust myself; how on earth could I trust energy that may turn negative?”
“Energy only becomes negative when it’s out of balance.”
“And how do I balance it?”
“Give in to it; stop fighting it and making it negative.”
“I don’t think I even know how to give in!”
“This is your first journey through the Subatomic World, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” John replied. “Before I just arrived; this time I traveled.”
“You must remember in the Subatomic World anything is possible; that is why you have to learn to focus. You are propelled by thought, but you must be guided by volition.”
“Volition! What’s volition?” John asked.
“It’s your will; it’s your aim. It must be like iron and you must never deviate from it, otherwise your thoughts will tumble down into chaos and confusion and you will be lost.”
“I’m lost now; I’ve deserted my friends, and run away. I’m a coward and a loser,” John whined.
“As the thought goes, so does the will.”
“Huh!” John grunted.
“The will is strong.” explained the voice. “If you think you are a coward and a loser, your volition will create the best coward and loser there ever was. If that is what you wish, let it be. On the other hand, if you wish to prove to your friends that you are a hero, saving them is the best way to do that.”
“Yeah, but how do I do that? It’s a gargantuan task.”
“One step at a time,” replied the voice. “Nothing is revealed beyond the next step. Propel yourself with thought and steer yourself with will. Open the vault, free your friends, and deal with the next step when you take it.”
“How do you know about the vault?”
“I see through your eyes,” answered the voice.
“How do you see through my eyes?”
“You are an element of the Subatomic World, and I am the energy that guides you,” said the voice.
“So you’re a part of me?”
“No. I am an extension,” the voice replied. “You need me, and I need you. Without me you would have perished the very first moment you were thrown here. But I could not allow that, because you are the only one who can remove the danger to our world.”
“Now you’re scaring me again.”
“One step at a time, remember. Now you must return to your world and help your friends,” the voice commanded. “And no more questions.”
John had to admit he had a million questions; in fact, his life had become one gigantic question. Initially, he had not wanted to believe that any of these incredible things were happening to him. Like an ostrich he had wanted to thrust his head in the sand. But now he realized he had entered into a strange new reality, one he had to come to terms with, because it wasn’t going away.
“I’m going back,” he stated, “I’m going to do what I need to do.” He imagined wanting something so badly that he couldn’t wait for it to happen. He thought about the night before Christmas and how he couldn’t wait for the next morning to arrive. He imagined that powerful feeling of wanting was his will, and he tried as hard as he could to conjure it up from deep within his memory.
To this feeling he added the strong desire of wanting to rescue Tex, Cal, and Kate, and he added to this concoction of thought and will an urgent need to return to the world as himself; but not to the location he’d disappeared from; he wanted to be outside the vault, so he could open the door.
As had happened before, everything began to whirl around in his mind, but this time he had willed it to happen; this time he was out of control by choice. Just as it had dissolved, the fabric of reality reappeared. Even though he had moved from the darkness of the Subatomic World to the darkness of the basement, he sensed that change had taken place. He stretched out his hand and grasped the huge metal wheel that opened the door, and he smiled.
It’s all a matter of trust, he thought. He could trust his enemy to attack, and he could trust a friend to support him, but there was no virtue in any of that if he couldn’t trust himself to challenge every situation to become something more than just his own expectation.
Chapter 10
CONFUSION
Tex, Cal, and Kate were stunned. John had just dissolved into a cloud of shining particles that dissipated into nothingness right in front of their eyes. The shock had frozen them into strange statues carved from disbelief. For the longest time no one spoke—they just stared at the bright white wall where John had dematerialized, and tried to comprehend the deep mystery.
“What the heck happened?” asked Tex in a shaky voice.
“He left!” Cal whispered uncertainly.
“Yeah! But how?” Kate wondered in astonishment.
None of them wanted to admit what they had seen, but there was no doubt it had happened. The proof was right in front of them: John had gone, and what rendered them speechless was they didn’t know whether to feel guilty, or amazed.
Tex knew he hadn’t hit John, and he had also never seen anyone punched so hard they exploded. He had to admit though, that he was so angry that if he had gotten his hands on John he would not have been responsible for what happened. He was conflicted; he felt culpable, but he wasn’t really sure why!
Kate had heard of spontaneous combustion. Sometimes, for absolutely no reason at all, people just exploded. There was no explanation for it, and nobody knew why it happened. But what if they were the reason why? What if John felt so threatened by them he just blew up? She would be guilty of murder; it made her sick to her stomach.
Cal didn’t have an explanation, although he did wonder about the strange things John had alluded to. He had referred to a spaceship and aliens in silver suits. This information gave Cal reason to believe he had just witnessed an alien abduction, which both stupefied and revolted him at the same time.
“I think I killed him!” Tex wailed miserably.
“No! You didn’t touch him,” Kate commiserated. “It was internal combustion.”
“You’re both wrong,” Cal cried. “He was absorbed by an intergalactic star cruiser, and he’s probably halfway to Pluto by now.” The three wild theories flew out into the room and hovered there just waiting to be shot down.
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Tex thundered.
“Oh yeah?! More ridiculous than your killing him when you never even touched him?” Cal shot back.
“You’re both nuts,” Kate screamed. “He just blew up because he couldn’t take the stress from you guys ragging on him.”
“Okay! If he blew up, where’s all the blood and gore and bits and pieces?” Cal asked triumphantly.
“He’s got a point there,” Tex agreed.
“You obviously didn’t see the documentary I saw,” Kate explained. “When a body combusts spontaneously, it burns up from the inside out, and there’s only a little pile of ash left.”
“Well, I don’t see any little pile of ash,” said Cal. “Do you see a little pile of ash, Kate? How about you, Tex, do you see a little pile of ash?” He looked back and forth between the two of them as they silently stared at the floor. “Thank you! So by a process of elimination, my theory is the correct one,” he gloated.
“The ash could have blown away,” Tex offered idly.
“Or there could be only a microscopic amount left,” said Kate in her most self-assured tone.
Cal frowned, his idea was
crazy, but theirs was crazier! “There’s no wind in here!” he declared.
“Well, there are no aliens either,” Tex countered with certainty.
“There are no aliens, period!” Kate added huffily.
“Oh, ‘there are no aliens period’, but people can explode for no reason at all?” Cal mocked. “Give me a break.”
“Why are you guys so hostile?” Kate asked.
“Because we’re not girls,” Cal said with a hint of malicious teasing.
“Hey, man, give her a break,” Tex fired back at him.
“Give her a break! How about I give you a break, in the face?” Cal snapped.
In a second the two guys were chest-to-chest, staring steely-eyed at one another.
“Any time you wanna try, bat boy,” Tex challenged.
“Oh, I’m sorry—did I get under that thin pigskin of yours?” Cal mocked.
Kate tried to get in between them, but there was no room. “Boys, this is about John; it’s not about you,” Kate said firmly, like a parent.
The Subatomic Kid Page 9