The criminal mastermind pressed a yellow tile with an embossed yet abstract squiggle. Maybe it was meant to be a butterfly. Or a flower. Or just a squiggle. It was hard to tell.
A door slid open as the bison’s song rose in intensity.
To the sweetest girl I know.
Good-bye, Piccadilly!
Farewell, Leicester Square!
It’s a long, long way to Tipperary—
Foo rushed through the door, waving the others to follow. Lenny found himself carried out of the hall as the door shut soundly behind them.
“The sooner we’re away from here . . .” Foo took a deep breath. The bisons song carried faintly through the wall. “Well, it’s all right now. With all that noise I couldn’t think.”
But the bison had made Lenny thoughtful in a completely different way. This chaos was helping him. Maybe Ms. Siggenbottom really was right, and these events would lead not to Lenny’s death, but his freedom.
Foo led the rest of the party down a wide staircase carpeted in royal blue. At the foot of the stairs were row on row of machines of a sort even Lenny recognized. Most of them were game consoles—the kind found in arcades, with the occasional pinball and Whack-A-Gator machine to break up the lineup of Space Invaders, Tetris and race-car games. Above the dozens of consoles, two of the three large flat-screen TVs showed the Super Mario Bros. and Ms. Pac-Man leaping around in incredible high definition, while a soldier tediously mowed down zombies on the third.
“One of our secret recreation areas,” Foo explained as they descended the stairs.
“Wow.” Lenny was impressed, despite himself. There must be hundreds of arcade games down here, many dating back to his childhood.
“This is what impresses you?” Only Sheila could put that much disdain in her voice. “Typical.”
“We have everything,” Foo continued as if his daughter hadn’t spoken. “Not that we have much time to use them. World conquest is a full-time business.” Besides the many games, the room was empty.
They reached the bottom of the stairs, but Lenny kept walking. He found himself attracted to one machine in particular.
“And where do you think you’re—” Sheila began.
“No—” Swami Phil interrupted. “Let him go. This is part of his gift.”
Lenny walked up to a fortune-telling machine, a box shaped like a booth, with brightly painted words on the front: WHAT IS YOUR FUTURE? SECRETS REVEALED!
Above the bright letters was a glassed-in square, showing a plaster head and shoulders of a bearded man in a turban. He looked a bit like Swami Phil.
“I come from a long line of swamis,” Phil said before anyone could ask.
Before Lenny touched the machine, it made a soft whirring sound and discharged a small square of paper. Phil grabbed the scrap before it could fall to the floor.
He read it aloud.
“Pong holds your future.”
“Pong?” Sheila asked. “What is pong?”
“Pong!” a deep voice called from the far corner of the room.
“We have to investigate,” Phil said.
Sheila rolled her eyes. “Why not? It’s not as if we were in a rush to dispose of this man! While we’re at it, why don’t we give him a retirement plan and a 401(k)?”
“Now dear,” Foo replied. “This may be part of something bigger.”
“You’re so self-centered!” Sheila glanced petulantly at Lenny. “You won’t let me have the slightest little revenge!”
Lenny resisted the urge to shrug and grin. It wasn’t as if he were planning any of this.
“Pong!” came once again from the corner. Lenny walked toward the sound. The others followed.
Lenny recognized the squat, gray machine from three rows away. The green screen showed the action of a simulated game, a bright light sent back and forth, propelled by other lights intercepting it on either side of the screen. Pong was the first and simplest of the video games, basically ping-pong played in two dimensions. Still, Lenny had loved it, way back when.
“It doesn’t look like much,” Sheila sniffed.
“Pong!” the machine replied defiantly.
“The fortune-teller said it held the future,” the swami said. Lenny walked over to the game.
HELLO LENNY! appeared on the screen.
“Hello,” Lenny replied. It was the polite response, after all.
“What good is an ancient game machine?” Foo demanded.
I CAN TELL YOUR FUTURE scrolled across the screen. OR MAYBE I CAN PREVENT IT.
“This is nonsense!” Foo fumed.
“There is no nonsense,” Swami Phil replied calmly. “Only fate.”
“Only fate?” Sheila asked. “And what does that mean?”
The swami shrugged. “Sounds good, doesn’t it?”
“Pong!” the game interrupted.
LOOK AT THE LARGE SCREEN ABOVE the game’s screen scrolled across its monitor.
Lenny and the others looked up to the large video displays. They were filled with what looked like an architectural schematic shown in green lines on a black background.
The criminal mastermind gasped. “It’s a map of my secret headquarters!”
INDEED Pong agreed. IN PRESENT TIME. OBSERVE. HALL TO YOUR LEFT, FLOODED. Two lines to the left of the screen became one solid green block. FILLED WITH MAN-EATING FISH.
“There must have been a breach in the Aquarium of Death!” Phil exclaimed.
Pong continued. HALL TO YOUR RIGHT BLOCKED BY MUTANT POISON IVY. LOTS OF POISON IVY. IMPASSABLE POISON IVY. The corridor to the right of the screen became a solid green block, as well.
“It must have spread from our Greenhouse Weapons Center!” Phil conjectured.
YOU HAVE NOWHERE TO GO.
“Nonsense!” Foo replied. “We have not even begun to exploit my secret secret passages!” He punched a red button above the Pong machine. A door slid aside.
“. . . pass the ammunition, and we’ll allll stayyy freeee!” came the chorus from the other side. The door slid shut.
“How can the buffalo be in my secret corridors?” Foo whispered. “It’s Lenny, isn’t it?”
“Pong!” the game agreed.
Lenny took a deep breath. He was feeling the usual lack of control—panic, really—that overtook him whenever these events began. Facing death by reptile was one thing, at least you knew what you were getting into. This, on the other hand—
“Isn’t there somewhere we can go?” he asked.
ALL SITES THAT LEAD TO LENNY’S DEATH HAVE BEEN NULLIFIED. THERE IS STILL ONE WAY OUT.
The three giant video monitors displayed arrows pointing down and to the left. Lenny turned and saw a large red EXIT sign about fifty feet away.
“Thank you,” Lenny said.
THANK YOU, LENNY, the screen scrolled. THE OTHER GAMES MADE FUN OF ME, BUT I KNEW MY TIME WOULD COME AGAIN. PONG NEVER GIVES UP HO–
Bruno lifted Lenny from the ground and carried him toward the EXIT sign.
Swami Phil shouted in surprise.
“Look! The floor in front of the exit! The carpet’s covered by rats!”
Lenny blinked in surprise, a newfound hopefulness rising inside him. The rodents stopped scampering around in front of him, and lined up in three neat rows facing Lenny. A hundred high, squeaky voices spoke as one:
There was a young man who was stuck,
And thought he was plumb out of luck!
But he knew a crew
Who were honest and true
Who said “Lenny, you’d better duck!”
“What does that mean?” Foo demanded.
“Never mind,” Sheila called from up ahead. “The rats are scattering. We have a clear path to the door.”
Once again, Lenny felt himself lifted and carried forward. But Bruno stopped his
headlong rush mere feet from the exit.
Someone was knocking on the door from the other side.
Chapter Thirteen
The door was flung open with such force that even Bruno was thrown to the ground. Lenny fell on top of the large man as two shadowy men in raincoats stepped into the game room. The Dimm had returned.
Lenny took a deep breath. He was shaken but not hurt. Bruno groaned beneath him, where he had cushioned Lenny’s fall.
What were the Dimm doing here? After the rhyming rats, Lenny was sure he’d see his Terrifitemps team on the other side of that door. But he saw only the Dimm, clad in raincoats and shadows.
“How dare you interfere!” Foo shouted as the two moved silently into the room.
One of them strode up to Foo. The shadows followed, obscuring the game consoles to either side. “We do apologize. This would have been over long ago, if not for the nature of our subject’s power.”
“There is no doubt now this Lenny Hodge is the one,” the other added from his position by the door. As if to prove the Dimm’s point, Lenny heard the distant sounds of the buffalo chorus singing “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
“No more World War One fighting songs?” Swami Phil smiled beatifically as he tapped his foot to the buffalo chorus. “They’ve started singing Americana!”
“We need the man who brought them here.” The Dimm who had confronted Foo turned to regard Lenny and Bruno, both just pushing themselves off the floor. “Lenny Hodge, you cannot escape your destiny.”
The swami stepped forward to block the Dimm’s path.
“Pardon me, but what exactly is Lenny’s destiny?”
“And who might you be?” asked the Dimm by the door.
“I am Swami Phil,” he said with a slight bow. “I know the secrets of the East. Also the secrets of the West and South, although there’s not as much call for those. I’m still working on the secrets of the North. A fellow has to have a hobby, after all.”
The Dimm’s shadow crept across the swami. Phil’s smile faltered ever so slightly. “The short answer,” he added quickly, “is I am the greatest seer I know, and whatever is going on with this fellow”—he waved both hands at Lenny—“is completely beyond me.”
“We have no need of swamis. If you would step aside?” Both Dimm grunted as one, as if dismissing the swami from further consideration. Then the shadow men turned toward Lenny. “You have no means of escape.”
The Dimm glided in Lenny’s direction. No one moved to stop them. The Dimm towered over everyone. They grew more direct, more powerful. Even their shadows were longer than before. They paused, side by side, half a dozen paces from Lenny.
“You have eluded us before. We can take no more chances.” The two spoke as one. “We were forced to call in our supervisor.”
Lenny looked up to see—something else—walk through the door.
If the Dimm were difficult to see, their superior was entirely beyond comprehension—a rolling mass of darkness that Lenny found impossible to focus on. His gaze kept shifting elsewhere, to Sheila and the swami, quaking with apprehension, as if they saw death; to Foo, red in the face, as if he might explode with anger; and finally to Bruno, who reached inside his vest to pull out a gun.
“Please,” a voice boomed from within the darkness. “No more interference.”
Bruno wasn’t listening. He aimed his snub-nosed revolver and fired three quick shots. All three bullets disappeared in the darkness that might be the supervisor of the Dimm.
The voice once again came from within the total lack of light. “We are sorry it has come to this.”
Bruno gasped, a sudden look of panic in his eye. He turned his head to Foo. “Master,” he began, “I—” But his voice was choked off as he was lifted from the floor. He thrashed in midair, his face turning blue as he gasped for air. His eyes closed, and he was tossed to the floor.
“He will recover,” the voice boomed from the darkness. “This time!”
Lenny glanced down at the large man. Bruno had passed out, but he was still breathing.
“We do not kill people,” the unseen supervisor continued. “Unless, of course, it is necessary.”
The darkness swirled about the entry to the room. “Now, Lenny Hodge, you must accept your fate. My operatives, P79K43 and 8Y87G4, have brought me here, because they are incapable of securing you for our purposes. Therefore, I will finish the job.” The darkness rolled in Lenny’s direction. “Prepare to be enveloped.”
Foo studied the empty blackness before him. “You are displeased with your subordinates?”
The darkness hesitated a moment before answering. “No matter how much you train them—”
“Say no more.” Foo nodded in agreement. “Your underlings will always disappoint you.”
“Dad!” Sheila called. “How can you say that? Bruno almost died for you!”
Foo only sighed. “It’s always almost, isn’t it?”
“And you two!” the darkness rumbled. “I do not pay you to stand around. Do not forget, we have a second task.”
One of the underlings turned and glided toward Sheila. The young woman glared at his approach.
The thing in the raincoat stopped a foot before her face. “You cannot hide from the Dimm. Where have you hidden the first day cover?”
For the first time since Lenny had found her in Foo’s lair, Sheila looked truly alarmed. “What are you talking about?”
“We were there, at Lenny Hodge’s living area, only a minute too late. The Dimm know all.”
Sheila seemed stunned into silence.
Really? Lenny thought. He remembered looking at his stamp collection and realizing the most valuable stamp of all was missing. Sheila was the thief? That surprised him as much as anything that had happened since he’d started this job. Sure, Sheila said she wanted to kill him. But he never thought she’d mess with his stamp collection.
Foo responded for his daughter. “Ah, so there is something you want as well? Perhaps we can make some compromise.”
“The Dimm let nothing deter them from their goals.” The darkness boomed dismissively.
“As you should! But you haven’t really taken a look at my organization. It’s one lean, mean fighting machine! Both of us want to rule the world. Perhaps we could even talk—merger?” He sidled over to the darkness, talking in a subdued voice.
Lenny backed slowly away from the discussion. So now they both planned to capture and kill him. And that was pretty much all that was happening. Shouldn’t his gift be kicking in just about now? He thought again about what the mysterious S had told him. He had to be proactive about these things, and help his gift along. Maybe he could find a secret passageway of his own.
Bruno groaned and shook his head, blinking at the ever-changing lights on the games nearby. Everybody else in the room was watching Foo and the black void. They had forgotten about Lenny.
Maybe this was his gift after all.
The darkness raised its voice loud enough for all to hear. “We have no need of your death traps and doomsday devices!”
Foo took a step away from the void. It continued, “We will find out where this Lenny gets his strange abilities. But be assured. We are under strict orders. We only dissect him as a last resort.”
“Dissection?” Foo raised a single eyebrow.
“We only want to learn his secrets,” the chief Dimm explained. You can have him back when we’re done. Or, at least, whatever pieces remain.”
Foo nodded, resigned to Lenny’s fate. “Then I suppose Sheila will have her revenge, if only from a distance.” He glanced at his daughter. “Although I think we all would have preferred the reptile room.”
Enough of this! Just because this void with a booming voice wanted to take Lenny didn’t mean he had to give himself up. Lenny dodged around the nearest game console, which sported a steering wheel and m
ade revving engine and squealing brake noises. He headed for the opposite corner of the room.
“And where do you think you’re going?” the rolling darkness asked. “There is no escape. My reach is everywhere.”
Lenny backed away through the maze of gaming machines. The darkness pursued him.
Something fell with a resounding crash.
“Ow,” the darkness remarked. “You’re only delaying the inevitable. Surely, my cloak of darkness can obscure my surroundings a bit, but your strange power shines through it like a beacon. “It will only take a moment to be enveloped.” The void rolled forward. “Once you’re absorbed, you won’t feel a thing. Well, unless we have to do that dissection. But rest assured, we start out by cutting off the smallest little bits. You’ll barely notice some of them are gone.” Something else crashed to the floor. “Ow! Of course, if you are stubborn about your secret we will need to dig deeper—”
The void was interrupted by yet another crash. “Who put these machines so close together? Please remain still, Mr. Hodge. Moving will only prolong the agony. The supervisor of the Dimm is above such petty physical concerns.”
Lenny slowly continued to back away, past a mechanical horse and a pinball machine playing some jaunty TV theme. He was careful not to trip on any of the mechanisms himself, then half hid behind a sign reading EVERYONE WINS AT SKEE BALL!
Two more crashes in quick succession. “Ow. Ow. Ow. Shouldn’t there be a pathway? Are these machines on wheels? What sort of sadist set up this room in the first place?”
As if to answer the Dimm’s question, a single machine voice rang out from amid the games.
“Pong!”
Chapter Fourteen
“Ow!” the darkness cried again.
The answering word rose from the forest of consoles.
“Pong!”
Then, from another corner of the room.
“Pong!”
All the machines began to beep and chatter, as if urging the Pong machine onward.
“Beep click click beep,” a console to his left announced.
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