Hunter smiled and lifted his gun back up. “Well, what do you know, reinforcements!” he said as Doctor Angstrom wheeled himself out of the dark interior of the truck and gently negotiated the incline of the ramp. A huge dark umbrella attached to the wheelchair shielded his sensitive eyes and skin from the early morning rays of sunlight.
“Who’s this dude?” Tex asked.
“Sure doesn’t look like the pizza man!” Cal replied abjectly.
“He looks real creepy,” Kate added. John stepped out in front of the three of them; whoever this dude was, he wanted him to know he wasn’t intimidated.
Kurt Angstrom brought his wheelchair to a halt at the end of the ramp. “Well, John,” Angstrom hissed. “It’s nice that we could meet in this rather depressing setting.” He extended his hand out beyond the edge of the umbrella. But when John ignored the gesture of friendship he drew it back into the shadow, lest the rays of the sun should disfigure his pigment.
“Who are you,” John demanded to know, “and how do you know my name?”
“Why, John! I’m your new father, Doctor Kurt Angstrom,” he chuckled.
“You’re not my father,” John said unequivocally.
“Oh, but I am,” Angstrom said, relishing the word game. “I am the father of you as you are now, and I shall always be that.”
John suddenly remembered the strange presence he had felt inside when he took on the form of Doctor Leitz, and instinct told him this bizarre creature sitting in front of him was responsible for that alien feeling. “What do you want from me?” John asked.
“What do any of us want?” Angstrom mused. “Eternal youth, an endless supply of money, and the ability to know what our friends and enemies are up to.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” John countered.
“I had it all,” Angstrom continued, “all of that and more, until you came along and robbed me. Quite simply, I want back what you have stolen. You can either give it back to me in terms of service to my cause, or I shall take it along with your life. You are already stranded in this pathetic world; your options are few.”
“Wow! I can’t remember the last time I had such a pleasant invitation,” said John sarcastically.
“It’s a business proposal, John, one that could make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.”
“Doing what exactly?” John asked.
“Anything that is necessary to create a new world—my world,” Angstrom crooned. “A world that is under our control.”
“You want me to be your lapdog?” John laughed. “Your pet, or your watchdog—which is it?”
“We shall create order from the chaos, and install ourselves as overseers,” Angstrom whispered.
“Oh, so you want to enslave the world and make it bend to your will?” John sneered.
“With you by my side, my son,” Angstrom promised with a mirthless smile.
“I’m not your son, and you’re not my father,” John declared emotionally. “You’re my enemy.”
Angstrom cackled. “I’m not the enemy, John; the world is a cruel place, and people will climb all over you if you let them. But I don’t let them.”
“You’re power-crazy, paranoid, and you have delusions of grandeur,” John spit out. “I’ll bet when you were a kid you used to pull the legs off spiders and watch them try to move.”
“Ah, yes,” Angstrom said, “but not all of them. You had to leave at least one on; then you can watch them go around in endless circles until they die.”
John could not believe the rampant egotism this wizened old serpent displayed. “You don’t scare me,” he proclaimed.
“I don’t intend to scare you,” Angstrom said arrogantly. “To me you are merely an investment, and I am here to collect my profit.”
“I’m not a commodity to be traded,” John declared. “I’m a human being.”
“A very noble sentiment but, nevertheless, a redundant one.”
“The only interest I have in your mad scheme,” John added, “is to do everything in my power to stop it.”
Listening to the exchange, Hunter was impressed by this young whippersnapper’s pluck. He also knew what he was capable of doing, and he wondered if Angstrom did.
“You’re confused, John; you need time to think,” Angstrom warned. “Your brain has short-circuited; the neurons and synapses have shut down. You’re just a crazy mixed-up kid who needs my strength, my support, and my love.”
John was astounded at the arrogance of this imbecile. “You talk about love, but it’s my guess you’ve never had it. And as for support, I’m sure you never give it. And strength…you don’t have it old man; strength requires character and you don’t have that either.”
“My, you’re a tiresome child,” Angstrom sighed. “I give you the opportunity to create an empire such as the world has never seen, and you turn me down with misguided ethics and a warped sense of dignity.”
“An empire created from a lust for money and power, and built on a foundation of fear and distrust, is an empty shell,” John said, wondering where these words were flowing from so effortlessly.
“What about your friends, John? They expect something from you. They expect you to save them, not to abandon them in this ill-forsaken wilderness.”
“We might be kids, but we’re not stupid,” Cal interrupted, glad to get a shot in.
“Yeah, we don’t need your brand of freedom,” Tex added.
“And your skin is really flaky,” Kate said. “You should use more lotion.”
John smiled. “You see,” he said, “it doesn’t matter what you’re selling; we ain’t buying.”
Angstrom laughed; he hadn’t enjoyed himself this much in years. “Well, I’ve tried, Mr. Hunter, to bring this poor deluded child under my wing—you’ve witnessed that. But if he and his friends prefer the uncertainty of this vapid wilderness over my offer, then who am I to stop them?”
“Would you like me to take care of them, Doctor Angstrom?” Hunter asked.
“It is tempting,” Angstrom replied, “but I have a far more entertaining finale in mind.”
Again John felt that cold dark shadow of fear sweep through his nervous system like a burst of bad electricity.
“Well, John, I’m bored with your petulant behavior,” Angstrom crowed. “But I had an inkling you would be difficult. That’s why I brought your brother along, so that he could take care of you.”
“What are you talking about?” John laughed. “I don’t have a brother!” But the laughter turned to shock and horror as a figure stepped from the darkness of the truck and walked toward Angstrom.
The three kids gasped in amazement; Hunter couldn’t believe his eyes, Steve completely lost his place in the reverse alphabet, and Angstrom beamed with satisfaction. “John Smith,” he said, referring to John, “let me introduce you to John Smith.”
John stared at the new arrival. It was himself down to the most minute detail, except for one thing—the new John Smith looked extremely angry, like a professional wrestler eager to rip somebody’s throat out. Understandably, John was shaken, so much so that he reached back into his mind, found the emergency cord, and tugged as hard as he could.
Chapter 31
SUBATOMIC INTERLUDE
It was one of the most nerve-racking, nail-biting, mind-numbing visions John had ever seen in his whole life, and a barrage of emotional bombs screamed out of the sky of his mind and carpeted his nervous system. He was completely devastated. It was one thing to look in a mirror and see your reflection, but it was quite another to stand and look at a living, breathing replica of yourself.
This sordid experience bathed him in repugnance, and he suddenly realized what Doctor Leitz had gone through when he had pulled the same trick on him. Something told him this was no trick though, because before he had seen his other self exit the truck, he had been feeling the presence of a dark energy—a hostile force that reached right into his gut and twisted it up like spaghetti rolling onto a fork.
The evil Doctor Angstrom had baited him, hooked him, and damn near reeled him into his net of skullduggery. It was a close shave, and he realized if it weren’t for his ability to take refuge in the Subatomic World, he would have been a trophy on Angstrom’s wall by now.
He stretched himself out to infinity and purified his shattered being in the metaphorical waters of the subatomic stream. He calmed the monkey chattering in his mind and he let the undulating forces of the stream take him where they wanted him to go. He no longer had a say in his destiny; change had robbed him so many times of his well-thought-out conclusions that he wanted no part of the future.
From now on he would exist within the confines of each passing moment and expect the unexpected.
“You have reached the first level of knowing,” the Master of the Perfect Word declared. “By choosing to leave the future to its own devices, you have freed yourself from the illusion of control.”
“It’s a burden I can no longer carry,” John replied. “I just came face-to-face with myself, and I didn’t like what I saw.”
“I believe you mean you didn’t like the feeling it gave you,” said the Master. “Your eyes merely identified another version of yourself.”
“It’s true,” John admitted. “That other me creeped me out like a horror movie.”
“Why did it creep you out, as you say?”
“Because it was seething with anger and frustration,” John replied.
“It’s understandable; up until the event that transformed you, it was you. But when you split apart, it took on all the anger and resentment you didn’t feel, and since that time it has festered and grown.”
“You speak of it as if it weren’t human,” John pointed out.
“Well, truly it’s not. It’s the worst case of arrested development there could possibly be. It represents all of your childhood frustrations and fears, and until you dispense with it you won’t be able to grow.”
“Dispense with myself!” John said with astonishment.
“You can’t think of it as you,” the Master said reasonably. “It is the danger at the heart of the Subatomic World, and it is the reason you are suspended in an alien world. The only way to resume your life is to overcome it.”
“I am the problem, and I am the solution.” John said, in a blinding moment of realization.
“Yes,” agreed the Master.
John saw it all in glorious Technicolor. As a child his future had been planned down to the smallest detail. Rarely did anything unforeseen happen, because it was one long party to which chance and change had not been invited. As a result, he really hadn’t had to pay too much attention to anything. His mom and dad had done all of the thinking, and he had been free to indulge himself in the pleasurable aspects of life.
That had been the best deal in the world, and one that understandably he didn’t want to end, but becoming the unwilling participant in a scientific experiment that changed his molecular structure created a new John Smith—one who had to think on his feet and act decisively, one who was no longer a child. But physics dictates that the outcome of an atomic experiment has two possibilities: the one that’s expected, and its complete opposite.
Therefore, a willful, angry, and resentful John Smith had been born, one who refused to let go of the hedonistic pleasures of childhood, one who raged like a maniac across worlds, one who caused havoc and chaos with time, space, matter, and energy—one who had to be stopped.
“It’s me or it’s him isn’t it?” John asked.
“I’m afraid so,” replied the Master matter-of-factly.
John felt the familiar tug of the subatomic stream pulling him back to face his destiny.
Chapter 32
STANDING ON THE EDGE OF TIME
Our universe is just an atom in a far larger structure, unknown and uncharted. Beyond this universe and out to infinity is endless space, a space that is filled with countless atoms, and each atom is another universe, where time spins an endless web of intrigue around the galaxies that energy creates.
Time between universes is irrelevant, and time within a universe is completely independent of that governing another. Thus, a day spent in one can equal a lifetime spent in the one next door. This phenomenon has been charted by early travelers—the shamans and mystics whose reports are known today as fairy tales and myths. One of the stories common to each culture is that of the spirit double. From the Vardøger of the Norse, to the Ka of the Egyptians, to the doppelgänger of the Germans, strange replicas of living people have been known to appear from unknown realms representing evil or misfortune.
Doctor Leitz’ experiment had given John Smith an accidental super power, a power that enabled him to shift his shape and traverse another universe. But messing around with atoms is a risky business, because atoms reserve the right to create more than one outcome from their manipulation. And as Doctor Leitz, in his eureka moment, reversed the atomic signature on that experiment, he never suspected for a moment that what he would catch would be a doppelgänger.
Outwardly he was John Smith, but inwardly, he was a ticking time bomb. Adrift and driven by the enchanting lure of memory, he had raged and plundered through time and space in search of his past. He had woven in and out of the endless structure of parallel worlds. He had lived many lifetimes that were just the blink of an eye on our world, yet he had never aged. His mind was still that of a child—an angry, resentful, and cruel child—and his quest was simple: to find the one who had stolen his life, and take it back.
Such is the magic of the atom: it can pass through another like a ghost, and the Wild Cruel Child who once was John Smith had learned much about the forces that governed it. He intimately knew the subtleties of their signals and the ambiguity of their nature, and when he felt the puny force of Doctor Leitz’ electromagnetic ray trying to reel him in, he easily grabbed it and pulled the whole laboratory to him.
Angstrom had instantly recognized this Child as a kindred spirit, for he had been broken too by the same slings and arrows of outrageous fate. Never being one to walk away from a situation he could manipulate, he sallied forth with his snakelike charm and oiled the ears of the new arrival. Normally distrustful and offensive, the Wild Child had listened to Angstrom’s oily rhetoric; he liked being told what he wanted to hear, and Angstrom was an expert at the art.
From that moment on, the two were united by virtue of their pain and Angstrom’s cunningly worded speech that hinted at revenge by enslaving a world—the world that had stolen Angstrom’s legs, and the world that John Smith had stolen from the Wild Child.
Aching for revenge, he sorely wanted a world of his own, a world in which he could punish indiscriminately, inflicting the pain he felt upon others. Angstrom knew what it was to have a chip on your shoulder, and he was stunned by the amount of empathy he had for this boy; so much so that he began to think of him as the son he’d never had, heaping him with praise for his deceitful nature and lauding him for his vengeful attitude.
Angstrom’s acceptance of his cruelty as a virtue imbued in the Wild Child an emotion he had not felt for a long time; the emotion he remembered when he’d had a father, a feeling he had missed mightily. So moved was he by this torrent of sentimentality that, in his childlike way, he had confessed to Doctor Angstrom that he had reeled them all into a strange new world. It was a world where bowling was a religion; a world that collected slaves from other worlds it intersected with; a world built purely on the foundation of weird physics: The World of Science.
When Angstrom learned this wanderer through space and time had dragged them all into a new world, he needed clarification. Why had he performed this feat of extraordinary prowess? The answer was poetry to Angstrom’s ears. The Wild Child had simply and easily detected that the atomic signature came from his birthplace, and had deduced that on the other end was the accursed creature who had stolen his life. Angstrom was delighted by this turn of events, for it meant that he could abandon the pursuit of John Smith and his friends and leave the
m imprisoned in this world from which there would be no escape.
To his consternation, the Wild Child would have nothing to do with this plan; he wanted John Smith dealt with summarily. He wanted a confrontation, the opportunity to tear him limb from limb and to scatter his parts across the infinity of space. It warmed the cockles of Angstrom’s heart to hear this, and he was immediately aware of the wealth of wile and cunning that would be at his disposal if he were the instrument that delivered John Smith to his new partner in crime.
So he regaled him with tidbits from his vast knowledge of the pleasures of revenge, like punishing your victim slowly to prolong the agony. The Wild Child grinned with delight as Doctor Angstrom spun his delicious web of intrigue.
“I will meet John Smith face to face and offer him an ultimatum,” Angstrom had proposed. “I will tell him to give up his quest for truth and justice, and urge him to conspire with me to plunder and pillage the Planet Earth. With his misguided morality, it’s almost certain he’ll refuse the offer. That’s when you, the Wild Child, will step from the shadows and reap the revenge that is your heart’s desire.”
The Wild Child had drooled over the plan; it was cunning, and wicked, and lovingly deceitful. So they had cooked up the pizza scheme together, figuring the kids were bound to get hungry sooner or later. Then they had left a flier on the car, hijacked a pizza van, and waited for their call; and now the moment of truth had arrived.
***
For the first time in his short life, John realized he was alone in a life or death battle to save himself and his friends from destruction. Doctor Angstrom by himself was nothing, but combined with the super powers of his angry evil twin, he was a force to be reckoned with. There was nothing else to do but fight, to the death if necessary, to stop these two maniacs from getting together.
The Subatomic Kid Page 28