The Genius Factor: How to Capture an Invisible Cat

by Paul Tobin

  “Your body temperature has risen 1.4 degrees. You are flushed. Are you thinking romantic thoughts?”

  “What? No! Are you not listening? Urgh! I’m debating humanity with a talking car! Everybody’s temperature goes up when they’re arguing with a talking car that doesn’t have a driver but is still driving down the highway at, let’s see, one hundred and twenty-three miles per hour, because …”

  Wait.

  How fast were we going?

  I looked at the speedometer again. Now it was one hundred and thirty-two miles per hour. The other cars on the highway seemed almost like they were in slow motion. Faces in car windows were watching us go by, agape at our speed. The trees of Krallman Forest were a brown and green blur.

  I said, “Betsy? We’re going awfully fast. Like, way too fast.”

  She just started speeding up again and mumbling (can cars mumble?), “YOU’RE the one who’s going too fast! Nathan is sharing his secrets with you? Thinking about KISSES with—”

  “Betsy! Slow down!”

  “Oh,” she said. We were driving at one hundred and forty-four miles per hour, like a comet on wheels. “Oh, I see,” she said. “You meant I was driving too fast and … oh, now I’m the one who feels flushed.”

  Our speed dropped to a hundred miles per hour. To ninety. Eighty. Seventy. Finally, to sixty-five. Betsy was still talking, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. There were only soft murmurs as if she was talking to herself.

  Then: “Driver Delphine Cooper?”

  “Yes?”

  “I believe I may have … emotions.”

  “It does seem that way.”

  Silence for a time, then Betsy said, “Emotions are painful.”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Most of the time they’re great, but—”

  “Other times they feel like an airflow sensor is miscalculating the appropriate amount of fuel delivery, resulting in sporadic surges of acceleration. Or perhaps emotions are like misfiring spark plugs that fail to ignite my fuel in the first place.”

  I said, “Yeah. That’s pretty much how it goes.”

  “Are you dating Nathan?”

  “No. We’re just friends. I’m not even sure Nate cares about girls. He really only cares about science, and machines.”

  “Oh!” It was Betsy’s most girlish exclamation. “Machines?” Our speed began to creep up, again.

  I said, “Betsy? Careful with the speed.”

  “Oh! My apologies, Driver Delphine Cooper.”

  “You can just call me Delphine. It’s what my friends call me.”

  “Oh.”

  Silence again. I was watching cars go by. Then Betsy said, “It is good to have a friend. This emotion is satisfactory.”

  “Thanks, Betsy,” I said, patting the dashboard, wondering what body part a dashboard corresponds to in a car. Is it like an arm? A leg? A face? Was I affectionately patting Betsy in her ear?

  “Does … does Nathan have many friends?” Betsy asked.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “What?” Betsy said, shocked. “But Nathan is the best!”

  “Maybe he is,” I said. “But … he doesn’t trust other people. It doesn’t come naturally to him. It’s something I’ve been thinking about.”

  “You’ve been thinking about Nate?”

  “Not that way. Don’t worry. It’s just that … here’s what I’ve been thinking. It takes me a long time to learn science. I love it, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. I have to study. On the other hand, it’s easy for me to make friends with people. That’s just who I am.”

  “Like with us,” Betsy said. “We’re already friends.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “But Nate is the opposite of me. Science comes naturally to him, but friendship is more difficult. He has to learn to trust friends even when there isn’t any pertinent data, or even when the data says otherwise.”

  “Hmm,” Betsy said.

  “Yeah. Hmm. I’m not worried about it, though. Nate loves learning.”

  “Hmm,” Betsy said again, which did not inspire much confidence on my part.

  “You think he can learn to trust things besides a mathematical calculation?” I asked. She’d known him far longer than I had. She was the expert.

  “Hmm,” Betsy said yet again. But I decided against worrying about it. After all, I was trusting Nate.

  We rode in thoughtful silence for a bit, then Betsy said, “The wind feels good. Similar to friendship, this too is a pleasant emotion. One of comfort.” Then, next to me, the window rolled down. I hadn’t touched it.

  “Feel the wind,” Betsy said. “It is something we can share.” I stuck my hand out the window, and then my head. I felt a little like a dog, which was okay. I stuck out my tongue in a manner entirely like a dog. I opened my mouth so that wind could puff out my cheeks. I hawked up a massive loogie and spat it out, watching the wind whoosh it away.

  “Emotions are okay, I suppose,” Betsy said.

  “Yeah,” I said. I was hawking up another wad of spit, one that I wanted to be a world champion, and just when I was unleashing my creation I looked up and there was a car right next to us in the other lane. And there was Vicky Ott, staring at me.

  Vicky Ott’s eyes went wide in dismay as she watched me spit, and she looked up to her mom (driving the car) and said something that I’m just going to go ahead and guess was, “Mom! I just watched Delphine Cooper spit, and it was … amazing.”

  (I’m really proud of my spitting.)

  Betsy said, “Is that Vicky Ott?”

  “Yes! Now all we have to do is scan her, and AHHHH!”

  “Ahhhh?”

  “Yes. Ahhhh!” I was starting to hyperventilate. After all, looking at my phone, I saw there were only eighteen minutes left until Bosper couldn’t hold Proton anymore, and then—BOOM—the giant devil cat would be unleashed on Polt. By now, the poor terrier was undoubtedly exhausted.

  Betsy said, “Is there a problem?”

  “Yes, there’s a problem! We need to scan Vicky Ott for the molecule thingy and for the secret code that Nate stupidly, purposefully stupidly, put on her, and Nate’s not here because he flew off with his belt, and he … took … the … scanner!”

  “Probably because he knew that I have a built-in molecular scanner. As do all cars.”

  “You have one? Great! But, uh, no, not all cars have built-in molecular scanners.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m pretty sure of that.”

  “Substandard,” Betsy said, and then I heard a humming noise, and a fizzing burst of electricity covered the front passenger window, so that for a second it looked like blue-colored static on an old television screen.

  “There!” Betsy said. “Got it!”

  “You do?”

  “Certainly. I’m transmitting the data to Nate as we speak. Why do you sound so surprised?”

  “Well, we had trouble with some of the earlier scans. There were hippos, and we fell out of a plane. Stepped out of a plane, actually. And there was a toad.”

  “I see,” Betsy said. “Incidentally: ring ring.”

  “What?”

  “Phone noise.”

  “Come again?”

  “Nate is calling. Do you want me to answer it?”

  “Oh. Yes!”

  Almost instantly, Nate appeared in the driver’s seat, which was weird because he was only about two feet tall, standing there, facing me.

  I said, “Did you get shrunk? I thought shrink rays were too hard?”

  “This is just a holographic projection. It’s part of Betsy’s phone app. Are you and she getting along okay?”

  “We’re friends,” Betsy and I said at the exact same time.

  “Good,” Nate said. “You must have caught up with Vicky by now, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And we scanned her. Betsy just sent you the information.”

  “Excellent. I found Marigold.”

  “Any problems? Strange catastrophes? Accidental tornadoes?
Bizarre life forms?”

  “None of the above.”

  “Good! Let’s meet up at the parking lot, then? Return Proton to his normal size? Save the day?”

  “It’s a plan!” Nate said. “Now that I have all six of the messages, I should have this secret formula figured out by then.”

  “Excellent!” I said. After all the stress of the morning, after all that had gone wrong, it was quite a relief that things were going so well.

  chapter

  9

  Things were not going so well.

  Bosper was alone in the parking lot.

  Even with my special goggles, I couldn’t see Proton anywhere.

  The cat was … gone.

  Nate was sitting on the pavement staring at his phone when Betsy and I arrived, shrieking into the parking lot at a speed I will not mention and skidding to a swirling tornado of a stop, with Betsy saying “Wheeeeeee!”

  “What happened?” I asked Nate, hurriedly stepping out of the car.

  Nate looked to Bosper, who was sitting at attention, but the terrier was refusing to look my way.

  “Tell her,” Nate said, tapping Bosper on the back.

  “Cat got escaping!” Bosper said. He still wasn’t looking my way.

  “Already? But I thought we were in time? Aren’t you, like, total math dog? You had it planned to the second! What went wrong?” I was trying to walk around to Bosper’s front, but every time I did he would turn the other direction. Finally, Nate reached out and held him firmly in place.

  “Bosper?” I said, looking down into the terrier’s face.

  “Bosperhadtopoo,” he said. It was a murmur. I could barely hear him.

  “What?”

  “Bosper had to poo,” the dog said.

  “You had to … ?”

  The terrier jumped up, walked a few steps, sat down again, and stared me in the face. “Time was clicking and Bosper had the sausage breakfast and was anxiously many times farting and the bathroom-going was needed. Bosper snuck behind building, but … made mistake. Sonic leash dropped during poo-time!”

  “Oh,” I said. And then, “Oh,” again. I could see why he hadn’t wanted to tell me. It’s difficult to sound heroic when saying, “Sorry I let that gigantic deadly cat-monster loose on the entire city, fully knowing it would bring about Armageddon and cause untold suffering, but I was in the toilet.”

  “Well, where’s the cat now?” I asked.

  “Not sure how to track it,” Nate said. “I’m starting to think it was a dumb idea to make it invisible. And to have it absorb all sound. And be odorless.”

  “And monstrous,” I said. “Let’s not forget monstrous. If Proton was a normal-size invisible and silent cat, it literally wouldn’t be that big of a problem. I mean, we have a cat at our house, and Snarls, that’s his name, is basically invisible and silent, anyway. That’s just how cats are. Sometimes it seems like we wouldn’t even know we had a cat except for all the cat hair.” I was walking around Nate and Bosper, trying to cheer them up.

  I said, “C’mon, Nate. You need to think of something!” I was tugging on his arm, trying to get him to stand up. “Quit being so dense!”

  He looked up at me, and seemed entirely defeated. But then, a glint in his eyes, which suddenly widened, and he said, “Wait a second! Say that again!”

  “Quit being so dense!” I said, speaking loudly and with great enthusiasm.

  “No. Not that part. I meant that part where you were talking about cat hair.”

  “Oh. Well, I said that we’d never know we had a cat at home except for all the cat hair.”

  “Right!” Nate said. He was the most excited anyone has ever been about cat hair. “We can track Proton by the hairs he sheds! Once they’re off his body, they won’t be invisible anymore!” He reached into his shirt and pulled out a canister about half the size of a soda can. It had a twist top. Nate struggled with it, grunting, wiping his hands on his shirt, straining with the effort.

  “Give me that,” I said. He did, frowning. I twisted off the top and handed the canister back to him after glancing inside.

  “It’s empty,” I told him.

  “Not really,” he said. “It’s full of robots.”

  I took it again. Looked inside. Handed it back to him.

  I said, “No. It’s empty.”

  “Pull your goggles down,” he said, reaching out and tugging them below my eyes. “Now look at the can.”

  I looked at the can. Still nothing. Was this a joke?

  “Wait for it,” Nate said.

  I said, “Nate, there’s a rampaging monster out there in Polt as we speak. This is no time to be showing off, and no time to be waiting for things, and no time for—”

  A strange wave of color began coming up out of the can. It looked like smoke. But solid smoke. This makes it sound like I wasn’t sure what it looked like. Which is true. “What’s this?” I said, moving my hand through the strange color.

  “Robots.”

  “It is not robots. I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve seen, like, a thousand movies with robots. They do not look like solid smoke or intangible cloth. They look like robots.”

  “It’s robots,” Nate said. “In fact, it’s approximately a million robots. And they’re all geared to Proton’s genetic code.”

  “They must be very small robots.”

  “Nano-machines,” Nate said. “Each of them smaller than the head of a pin. In fact, hundreds of times smaller than the head of a pin.”

  “And you made them? It hurts my eyes to look at small print when I’m reading comic books. How could you have sat still and made millions of tiny robots? And how did you ever have enough time? Even if it only took a second to make a robot, making a million of them would take—”

  Nate said, “Two hundred and seventy-seven hours. Well, close to two hundred and seventy-eight hours. I’m rounding it down. It doesn’t matter, though; I only had to make a few of the robots, and then they made the others. Easier that way. I started production as soon as Proton escaped so that … ah, look!”

  Strands of hair were suddenly hovering in front of us. Long, thick strands of hair.

  “They already found some hairs!” Nate said, reaching out and taking one of the hairs that the robots were holding.

  “How do they know the hairs are from Proton?” I asked.

  “Genetic markers. They match with Proton’s DNA code.”

  “You just happened to have your cat’s DNA code handy?”

  “Sure. Doesn’t everybody?”

  “I don’t think so. I think most people put their pets in dog collars or cat leashes and I think hardly anyone else would even think about having their pets’ genetic codes handy like it was a friend’s phone number in case they needed to call and, well, I guess I’m trying to say you’re strange, Nate.”

  He frowned. His shoulders slumped. He started wrapping one of the giant cat hairs around and around his index finger, just in an offhand and unthinking manner, around and around.

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.” He was so glum and gloomy that I had no choice but to take drastic action.

  I punched him in the shoulder. Hard.

  “Ow!” he said. “What was that for?”

  “Bad science. Your bad science. You jumped to a conclusion with a lack of evidence. I said you were strange. I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it. Being strange is better than being like everybody else. It means that you’re you. So, yeah, you’re strange, but special. Everyone else just blends in, but, well, you’re the one worth paying attention to.”

  “Oh.” He was smiling again. He actually has an okay smile. His teeth are a little crooked, and his eyes are a little crossed, and he usually has at least one streak of machine oil on his face, but for all that he manages to be one of those people who, when they’re smiling … make me smile back. Unless I’m falling from an airplane or something like that.

  “You know,” Nate said, “you punch really hard.”

  “It’s
because I’m special,” I told him. “Now let’s go save the entire city.”

  We ran for the car.

  chapter

  10

  I could go into great detail about the harrowing car chase. There were lots of interesting parts. For one thing, I kept forgetting that the car, Betsy, could drive herself, so it kept freaking me out when Nate would suddenly crawl into the backseat to get some sort of technological gadget, or crawl out onto the hood as we raced through downtown traffic so that he could hold up the tracking device for the tiny robots. Plus, Nate and I almost sneezed ourselves to death, because we turned out to be allergic to getting buried in giant cat hairs, and the robots kept delivering them. The cat hairs, up to two feet long, were building up in the car until they were almost a half-foot thick, like a very ugly carpet. We were sneezing. My eyes were watering and I felt like I was choking, and every time Betsy swerved (which was often) the hairs would tumble all over us and I’d sneeze again.

  With every sneeze, we blasted the orange and white hair all over inside the car, further irritating our allergies. We were in a vicious cycle of cat hair.

  “Ahh-chooo!” Nate sneezed, frantically gesturing at his book bag in the backseat; he was sneezing too hard to retrieve it. I grabbed the bag and brought it into the front seat. It took me about four seconds. And by that I mean about fifty sneezes.

  It took me another seventeen sneezes to open the bag.

  Inside, I found a bottle of pills. It was labeled “Gravity Dispersal” in Nate’s handwriting. I held it up to Nate. He shook his head. We both sneezed. I was wishing his robots would bring us tissues instead of cat hairs.

  I found a bottle of pills labeled “Lightning Breath.” No idea what that was. Nate shook his head. I kept digging.

  I found a bottle labeled “Giggle Powder” and another labeled “Underwater Breathing Pills” and one labeled “Outer Space Breathing Pills” and one labeled “Intangibility Pills” and one labeled “Pills for Breathing While Intangible,” and there was one called “Allergy Pills” and one called “Make Any Animal a Zebra” and another one that …

  Wait.

  “Allergy pills!” I said. I sneezed four times while saying it. It wasn’t pretty.