by Lauren Child
Homer Pinkerton, props and special effects. Worked on a number of films alongside Victor von Leyden.
Everything was connected.
It wasn’t that junior agent
Baker wasn’t friendly.
He was, he was more than nice,
he was super nice …
… it wasn’t that he wasn’t generous or helpful or skilled at working as part of a team, because he was all these things. In fact, he seemed to have no flaws, not one. He was perfect, horribly perfect, and the kid from Colwin City found it was impossible not to be eaten up with a desire to see him fail, and the nicer junior agent Baker was, the more the kid hated him.
It was during the final field test that the kid had a vision of how things could be, would be, if only the boy, Bradley Baker, were out of the picture; if only Bradley Baker was wiped out, and wiped out permanently.
An accident, a stupid mistake, dumb luck, a regrettable but very fatal incident.
Chapter 24.
Hypocrea asteroidi
THE VERY LAST THING RUBY WANTED TO DO at 4am that Saturday morning, aside from run into the Count again and perhaps be buried alive, was to get back into the freezing cold ocean and swim across to the Observatory on Meteor Island. However, if she was going to find out more about LB and Baker, and what the link was between them and whatever was going down between Pinkerton, Spectrum and the Count, then she didn’t have a whole lot of choice.
This time she had brought with her a pencil and a notebook, which she zipped inside her Superskin.
She took the bus to Desolate Cove, swam the short distance to the rock, dived down to the underwater door, and held her breath while she waited for the question to pop up on the code panel.
CASSIOPEIA.
She tapped in the constellation and the door slid open.
Once she was in the water chamber she set about searching for the tiny fly image. When found, the chamber emptied and Ruby climbed the ladder to the vault room.
Ruby was faced with another error-correcting code – she wasted no time in figuring out which rows and columns had the wrong parity bits, and punched in the resulting four-digit number. The door swung open and she was in.
Ruby decided to return to the Pinkerton file first. She wanted to read the information she had failed to copy on her last visit. She thought perhaps if she read this, she might discover the connection between the professor and Baker. Actually, what she discovered was the name of the life-prolonging plant Homer Pinkerton had discovered. It was a fungus called Hypocrea asteroidi, something he had dubbed the Mars Mushroom or the memory mushroom.
She took out her book ready to make some notes, but when she pressed the pencil to the paper nothing happened. Somehow the pencil had become useless, unable to make even a mark. Not an accident, thought Ruby – this was by design.
OK, don’t get side-tracked, just get on with it, she told herself.
Ruby set down the pencil and notepad and instead drew on her memory skills.
She would have to absorb as much information as she possibly could and get out of there in the thirty-three minutes the clock had allowed her.
Why? thought Ruby. Why the Mars Mushroom? Did Pinkerton believe this plant had actually arrived on Earth from Mars? She read on and it seemed, yes, he did. She considered this for a moment. It wasn’t so far-fetched; a lot of scientists believed that the Earth was seeded by organic matter from outer space. Pinkerton was convinced that the fungus arrived stored in an ancient meteorite which had hit Earth many hundreds of thousands or even hundreds of millions of years ago.
If Ruby allowed herself to think like Clancy, or rather to feel for answers like Clancy, then she would have to say there was something about Pinkerton’s file that made her uneasy.
Was he troubled by Spectrum, or was it the other way around? Either way, there was something about the tone and wording that suggested there might have been some kind of rift or perhaps even a fervent disagreement between them.
But about what? Ruby wondered. She read on, and as she digested what the file contained, it became apparent that part of the falling-out seemed to be to do with the lack of information on where this Mars Mushroom grew. Spectrum wanted to know; Pinkerton wouldn’t say.
Why? thought Ruby. Why would this professor not want to share such a valuable discovery? A plant which could not only halve one’s seeming biological age but also double the amount of memory and information one’s brain could hold …
Could it be that Pinkerton wanted to protect humanity from this miraculous plant? Had he perhaps agonised about what might happen if the privileged few were able to purchase long life and heightened intelligence in exchange for thousands of dollars, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of dollars, so allowing society’s luckiest to reap the benefits?
And what about his other breakthrough, his pioneering research into the erasure of traumatic memory? A power for good, but in the wrong hands a power for evil. Did he wonder what might happen should either of these discoveries – the life-giver and the memory-taker – leak out into the wider world?
Or was it he who was the dark force here, seeking to wield power by holding onto his secrets and selling to the highest bidder?
Ruby considered this version, but it just didn’t fit with Mrs Digby’s description of the nice old gentleman sitting on the porch; the charming fellow who was kind to everyone.
Mrs Digby had rated him highly and Mrs Digby was a good judge of character.
This was as much as this file was going to tell her … Except no, there was one other piece of information. That logo again, the same as the one stamped in Baker’s file, and some letters this time too: JSRP, printed in a sky blue:
Underneath it said:
PARTICIPATED IN THE JSRP CLEAN-UP OPERATION.
She ran her hands along the file wall until she found a file of the exact same colour, but when she tried to pull it from the wall a message flashed up on the control panel to the left of the door, declaring it was level two access. She pressed the violet button and the panel revealed a keyboard.
File Code Two – Chromatic.
The keys for one chromatic scale were numbered.
Below this was a button simply saying: ACCESS.
So Ruby pressed it.
A tune played. Then a robotic voice said, ‘Enter code now.’
Ruby frowned. Some kind of missing-note sequence?
She pressed ACCESS again.
Another tune played. ‘Enter code now,’ said the voice. ‘One attempt remaining.’
Ruby didn’t need another attempt – she’d been listening carefully. Not for the first time, she was grateful to have perfect pitch, and she knew both the notes she had heard and the sequence they were following: the Mongian shuffle.*
Quickly, she pressed the keys for the notes she hadn’t heard, the final four notes in the sequence: 2, 11, 1, 12.
A beep, a hiss and the file was released. She pulled it from the wall.
‘JSRP’ was printed on the cover, and underneath the letters was that pattern of dots again, this time embossed on the paper. Not a logo, thought Ruby, a language. Braille.
She read each letter: together they spelled: LARVAE.
Larvae were undeveloped flies. Spectrum used the fly as its symbol for active agents. So was the word ‘larvae’ being used here as the collective term for junior spies?
Could this be what the ‘JS’ in ‘JSRP’ stood for? And what was the ‘RP’ – a recruitment programme, perhaps?
Then she thought back to the chalk message: beware the child who yearned to be Larva. Did something go wrong with one of these junior spies?
Though much of the file was encrypted, it was possible to conclude that Spectrum had indeed once upon a time recruited children, intending to train them up as agents, she supposed. The only child agent Ruby had ever heard anyone talk about was Bradley Baker. She had not been aware that there was a whole troupe of these spy kids – why had no one ever told her? But it seemed that Bradl
ey’s successful transition from tiny recruit to teenage fully-fledged agent had made an impression. And so six years after Baker’s recruitment, Spectrum had decided to roll out the programme. They had found their recruits by printing what appeared to be kids’ quizzes and puzzles on the back of cereal boxes and milk cartons. However, to the genius child it was only too obvious what they were looking at. These were no ordinary puzzles, but in fact highly-sophisticated, highly-secret application forms.
The next surprise was that this exciting-sounding programme was abandoned only months after it had been set up. This was due to a near-tragic incident which had taken place during an overseas training exercise. There was a report on this drama that had led to the dissolving of the JSRP.
It detailed a story of attempted murder, of how one agent had tried to murder another. It would have been an unpleasant enough tale had these agents been beyond school age, but the fact that they were both still children added an extra twist to the gruesome story.
It had happened in the northern territories of Australia, crocodile country. It had been set up to look like an accident. The recruits were striking camp and planning to paddle upriver. The victim had been busy loading up his raft with his camping gear when somehow the rope that moored it became untied. When he reached for his paddle, he found it wasn’t there. Not only was he now heading for the rapids, but his raft was taking on water – someone had scuttled it. Had he not been rescued, his raft would have sailed him over the waterfall where he would surely have drowned, or perhaps worse still, his sinking raft would have landed him in the river where the crocodiles swam.
While this drama was unfolding, so another was taking place – the screams of a boy who had apparently fallen into the shallows, but managed somehow to scrabble onto one of the rafts. He had incurred a life-threatening injury from a fifteen-foot crocodile, but he was lucky – his cries had alerted rescue and he was dragged from the river before he could be taken by the reptile. The boy suffered severe shock and could not be questioned about the incident.
One of the strange things about this report was the lack of information when it came to those individuals involved.
Only two of the junior agents were named.
The first was the victim of the sabotage, thirteen-year-old Bradley Baker. The second, the boy who was almost swallowed by the crocodile, was named as Art Hitchen Zachery.
Ruby paused when she read this. Could it be …? she wondered. It seemed unlikely, but it could be, couldn’t it? The name was so similar. It could be Hitch? But then why wouldn’t he have told her? What was really interesting about the report was how Bradley Baker had been saved. It was not down to his skill or experience as a field agent, nor to some lucky river current carrying him to shore. It had been an incredible fluke.
A local kid had been camping out on the riverbank, fishing or some such. This kid had seen it all and raised the alarm; not only that, but had bravely climbed across the rocks and caught hold of Baker’s raft and dragged the unconscious boy up and out of the water.
Question: who were these kids?
Who had sought to kill, and who to save?
Beware the child who yearned to be Larva,
disguised as a fly, but emerged a spider.
Ruby searched the rest of the JSRP files hoping to find a name, a clue to who might be responsible for the attempted murder of Bradley Baker.
By the time she was two-thirds through, it occurred to her that she had yet to see the face of a girl staring back from one of those inch-sized squares of photographic paper. Had yet to read a name that clearly belonged to someone who was not male.
All these Larvae recruits had been taken on twenty years before Ruby was born. A sign of the times, she thought. Not such a great time to be a girl if you were the sort of girl who liked action, adventure or even the chance of a challenging job.
Ruby’s eye caught sight of the clock on the wall.
Ten.
Geez gotta fly.
Nine.
She grabbed the file up.
Eight.
Pushed it into the slot.
Seven.
Snatched up her notebook from the floor.
Six.
Where is the door’s release switch??
Five.
Don’t panic.
Four.
Switch found, door opening triggered …
Three.
Tripping, almost falling …
Two.
Pushing through the vault door, door closure triggered …
One.
Thunk.
Sinking to floor breathing heavily.
‘I’m outta here.’
Chapter 25.
Mushrooms from Mars
IT WAS APPROXIMATELY 6AM when Ruby returned home. She fixed the DO NOT DISTURB sign to her door and had barely crawled into bed when the lobster phone began to ring.
‘Rube, it’s us, your mère and père.’
‘Bonjour, c’est moi, vôtre fille Ruby.’
‘Hello?’
‘Howdie.’
‘We’re coming home!’
‘Quand?’
‘Bless you.’
‘No, when are you coming home?’
‘Mardi.’
‘Tuesday?’
‘No, Sunday.’
‘You mean Dimanche?’
‘I thought that meant dinner.’
‘No, it means Sunday.’
‘Oh.’
‘C’est merveilleux nouvelles.’
Silence.
‘This is wonderful news!’
‘Oui, we agree! Can’t wait to see you, bye bye bye.’
‘Au revoir au revoir au revoir.’
Ruby found herself unable to drift back to sleep because she was going over and over what she knew about Bradley Baker. It seemed to her that the two most significant things that had happened during his life were the way he had died and the way he had almost died. Of course, he had also had that nasty near-death encounter with the Count, but this, though traumatic and certainly terrifying, was not nearly as sinister as being killed by one of your own. So if LB had been the woman responsible for ending his days by destroying his aircraft, then who was responsible for attempting to end his days at the crocodile rapids? Why would a kid want another kid dead? Jealousy, envy, ambition? Could it be that simple?
And why might LB have decided to terminate Baker’s life? She shuddered; the phrase ‘terminate his life’ gave her the chills. How much easier, how much more palatable to consider this agent’s life being terminated, like a machine being switched off; much more palatable, say, than issuing orders to have him killed in cold blood. Either way, the question still remained: why?
And then there was the question of what linked Baker to Pinkerton. And what Pinkerton’s involvement had been in this ‘JSRP clean-up operation’. If she wanted to know then she was going to have to go back.
Oh geez! she thought.
The one thing she could do without having to swim back to Meteor Island was to see if she could find something out on these memory mushrooms from Mars, and she knew just who to ask. She decided it could wait a day: Saturday she would devote to sleeping.
When she arrived at Little Mountain Side the following morning, there was something of a commotion just up the hill from the grocer’s store. A whole crowd of people had gathered there and they were all looking up as if searching the sky. Curious, Ruby wandered along to see what the attraction was. What she saw was a man climbing what looked to be a pretty unclimbable tree. He was perhaps seventy or eighty feet off the ground.
‘He’s got it!’ shouted a man.
Got what? thought Ruby.
It was only when the climber got a whole lot closer that Ruby saw he was clutching some kind of animal.
‘Is that a cat?’ said Ruby.
‘Uh huh,’ said the woman next to her, ‘that’s Ginger, all right.’
‘Who’s that with him?’ asked Ruby.
‘Why, that’s Mo
from Daily’s,’ said the woman. ‘Isn’t he magnificent?’
‘That’s one word for it, I guess,’ said Ruby.
Applause broke out as Mo reached earth, and people walked over to shake his hand and slap him on the back. Ruby waited until the fuss had died down and then followed him back to the store.
‘Quite the action hero, aren’t we?’ said Ruby.
‘It’s been mewing all night,’ said Mo. ‘Someone had to get that fur-ball down.’
He passed the cat to Ruby. ‘Here, take it, would you? I’m not a cat person. Too much hair, too many claws.’
‘Yet you can climb seventy feet up a two hundred foot Sequoia,’ said Ruby.
‘Trees never bothered me,’ said Mo, plucking the orange cat hairs from his jacket.
‘So what, you used to be a construction worker, a lumberjack, a high-wire walker?’ said Ruby.
Mo shrugged. ‘In a past life maybe.’
‘With skills like that you might want to join the circus or the fire department,’ said Ruby.
‘Nah,’ said Mo, ‘I like an uneventful life.’
‘Uneventful? Are you kidding?’ said Ruby. ‘You think grabbing cats from crazily tall trees is uneventful.’
‘So what are you doing up here, anyway?’ asked Mo. ‘I told you, the maitake won’t be in for a couple of days.’
‘I know, but I wanted to ask you about another kind of mushroom,’ said Ruby, ‘seeing as how you’re such a mushroom expert and everything.’
‘Mycologist,’ said Mo.
‘Exactly,’ said Ruby.
‘So try me,’ he said.
‘Have you heard of a Mars Mushroom?’
‘Sounds like a question for Walt,’ said Mo.
‘I’m serious,’ said Ruby.
‘Are we talking mushrooms from Mars or mushrooms which look like alien things?’
‘Don’t all mushrooms look like alien things?’
Mo shrugged. ‘Does it have a proper name, this Mars Mushroom?’
‘Hypocrea asteroidi,’ said Ruby.
‘That sounds kinda familiar,’ said Mo. ‘I feel like I must have read about that somewhere. I can have a look through some of my journals and specialist books if you’d like me to?’