David was watching the game screens over Martin’s shoulder. The scent of his butter-rum bubble gum kept wafting into Martin’s face.
“Hoo boy!” he cried. “Did you see the look on that postman’s face when the goblins ripped off his mailbag?”
“He didn’t really look different,” said Martin. “I think he’s only designed to look one way.”
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could do this for real? We’d have monsters roaming the streets!”
Martin remembered the energetic woman in the lab coat. “Nah, real life’s weird enough for me.”
The aroma of butter rum dissipated. A few seconds later, Chip leapt to his feet and barked. Martin turned to find David stepping cautiously toward the dog. Chip’s hackles were up, and he was backing away.
“You better not!” Martin jumped up and pried the purple chip from David’s hand. “You know what I said about resetting him!”
“Yeah, yeah, you’ll pound me,” David said carelessly. “But, listen, this’ll be great. We’ll take Cinder’s circuit board and put them in your dog’s gel to make a cat as big as a dog.”
Martin had a fleeting vision of a German shepherd–size house cat. Mom would have a fit!
“No way,” he said. “My dog’s sensitive about resets.”
“So what? Okay, if you don’t like that idea, then let me hook the handheld to his board to see how he walks on walls. I don’t know what I did wrong with Cinder.”
Martin gave David’s gray cat a sympathetic rub behind the ears. Cinder woke up and purred. She was curled up in a neat circle on the wall by David’s desk next to a poster of the Bruised Bananas.
“She walks on walls, all right,” Martin said.
David tossed a foam dart at his pet. “Yeah, but now she won’t come near the floor.”
“Well, you’re not gonna mess up my dog like that. Come on, Chip, let’s go.”
“Hey, wait! What about the game?” David asked, following him down the hall. “You know we won’t get a chance to work on it next week, thanks to those loser freaks.”
“Says who?” Martin wanted to know, pausing on David’s doorstep.
“Says Principal Thomasson,” David answered. “She says we gotta be walked to school like a marching band, and no playing outside.”
“No, who says that’s because of the Exponents?”
“Says everybody,” David said. “To keep us from picking on them, because Jimmy complained. Stupid brats! Not your sister, though,” he added without much conviction.
“You’re a moron,” snapped Martin. “This marching-to-school thing isn’t about my sister or any of the other Xs.” In a flash, he remembered the sequins lining the suburb’s walls. Of course! It was about the inspection.
As he stepped into the street, he glanced up at the steel dome overhead. On one side, the skylights glowed brightly, like gigantic light fixtures. On the other side, they were dark and dull, as if it were already night. While Martin watched, the brilliant skylights rapidly dimmed and a gray pall fell over the suburb.
Bug had been outside and had come back a drooling madman. What had he seen out there? Had he found a world so different from theirs that he couldn’t stand the sight of it?
“You’ve got this really stupid look on your face,” David said.
“David! Hey, David, guess what!”
Matt came charging around the corner, wildly excited. Then he saw Martin and stopped.
“Well, what, doofus?” David asked.
“Nothing,” Matt answered. “So, taking off, huh?” he said to Martin. His face wore the same expression Dad’s did whenever something important happened at work.
“You better go ahead and tell me,” Martin said. “I’m not leaving till you do.”
Matt shrugged. “Okay, but don’t get mad at me. So I was hanging around the basketball hoops, watching the big guys play, and they started griping about how they wouldn’t be able to finish their tournament next week, you know, because of the Wonder Babies.”
“Not because of the Wonder Babies,” Martin said.
Matt shrugged again.
“So anyway, they said they oughta teach the little freaks a lesson for running to the principal, so that’s what they’re doing right now. They knocked teeth out of this one first grader down by the swings. David, you gotta come watch!”
“Oh no! Cassie!” cried Martin. “David, did she say she was going home? Did she go to Julie’s?”
“How should I know?” David said. Martin took off running.
Cassie wasn’t at Julie’s house. Julie thought she might be at Jessica’s. But what if Cassie had gone to the park instead? Martin didn’t know what to do.
“Chip, run home and see if Cassie’s there,” he said. “If she is, I want you to keep her there. If she isn’t, check the park. Find her and don’t let anybody mess with her. Do whatever you have to.”
Chip sped off down the street like a large furry bullet.
Martin was gasping for air by the time he reached Jessica’s house. Cassie wasn’t there, but another little blond girl was, and she was crying. Jessica told him the girl was afraid to go home.
“Brandon came by and told us they knocked out Arthur’s teeth,” Jessica said. “Abigail lives by the park. They’re bound to catch her on the way home.”
“But it’s almost dinnertime,” sobbed the little girl. “I said I’d be home before dinner.”
“You live near us,” Martin said. “I can get you home.”
Oh, that’s great, you moron, his brain remarked. Cassie needs help, and you’re taking on charity cases!
The little girl laced her sneakers, and they set off. She trotted along bravely, but her legs were so short that Martin thought they were barely moving. “Fighting is wrong, isn’t it?” she wanted to know. He ignored the question at first. But when he glanced down, her big blue eyes were riveted on his, and she looked eerily like Cassie.
“I guess it is,” he said.
“If it’s wrong, then why don’t the adults ever try to stop it?”
This is all I need, he thought. On top of everything else, I’m stuck with an Exponent trying to learn something meaningful from the threat of getting beat up. “I dunno,” he muttered. “It’s just one of those things people turn their back on.” That phrase upset him, and he hurried to replace it. “Mr. LaRue says it’s good for us kids; it teaches us to get along.”
She looked puzzled. “How can we draw lessons of social concord from acts of capricious violence?”
“I dunno. Listen, Abby—”
“It’s Abigail.”
Martin counted to ten.
“Listen, Abigail, we’ve gotta get somewhere, so you need to shut up, okay?” And he sped up his walk so that she would have to run.
They walked by house after house of soft pink brick, surroundings so familiar that he felt more than saw the houses pass by: picture window, front door, garage, and the slant of a driveway. They turned a corner and walked down the short side of a block. The houses changed to slate blue, but the pattern was the same: picture window, front door, garage, and the slant of a driveway. Martin could have found his way home blindfolded.
The street curved, and a scene of capricious violence came into view. Two big boys stood over a smaller one, pummeling him with their fists.
“It’s Jimmy!” Abigail cried.
Jimmy crouched on the curb, holding his stomach. “I don’t see—what you’re hoping—to gain by this,” he gasped. “I’ve already said—I surrender.”
“We don’t care what you say,” said one of the boys, reaching down to smack him on the ear. Martin knew the boy but didn’t like him. He had a big nose, and he snored whenever he fell asleep in class.
Patches sat up on Jimmy’s shoulder and bared his buckteeth in a long hiss, lashing his hairless tail from side to side. “Hey, look at the freak’s toy!” shouted the other boy. He seized the thick tail, whirled the rat around in an arc, and launched him into space.
“P
atches!” Jimmy shrieked.
The rat hit the sidewalk and rolled end over end, squealing the whole time. The second he managed to right himself, he was off in a black-and-white streak. In an instant, he vanished down a drain.
“Patches!” Jimmy cried again. Then he burst into loud tears.
Martin felt the blood sing in his ears and lurched forward, swinging his fists. Then everything seemed to happen in a fast blur, like those fights in cartoons. “You messed with his rat!” he heard himself shouting. “Don’t mess with a little kid’s rat!” He felt the jolt of his fists landing again and again.
The scene came back into focus, and he saw the two boys gaping at him as if he were a monster out of a horror movie. A bright stream of blood flowed from the snorer’s big nose, and he looked like he was going to faint. Martin raised his fists again, and the two boys took off down the street. He sucked on a split knuckle and watched them go.
Jimmy had crept to the drain and was calling his pet in a husky whisper.
“Doesn’t he have to obey you?” Martin asked.
“No, he doesn’t,” Jimmy said. He tried to sound matter-of-fact, but his voice trembled and his face twitched with pain and misery. “He doesn’t. I told you, he’s real. I don’t think he’s coming back.”
Martin helped the leader of the Exponents limp to the curb. He talks like an adult, but he’s not, Martin thought. He’s still just a little kid. The blond girl stood on the sidewalk, crying so hard that she couldn’t see. That’s all they are, thought Martin, herding them both down the street. They’re just a bunch of little kids.
He walked Jimmy to his front door and listened while Jimmy’s mother chewed the boy out. “I can’t believe it!” she cried. “I send you to the store for one item, just one item, and you get yourself in another fight!”
“It wasn’t his fault, ma’am,” Martin said, but she spread her hands as if to push his words away.
“He has to learn how to get along with people. He has to!”
When Martin arrived at his own house at last, he found Chip in front of Cassie’s bedroom door. The dog greeted Martin as enthusiastically as oxygen entering an air lock.
Cassie was sitting on her bed, typing away on her handheld. “Your dog has been pretty strange,” she said. “He tried to follow me into the bathroom, and when I told him no, he stood in the hall and howled.”
Martin gave Chip a hug. “Good dog!”
Cassie giggled. “If that’s what you call it.”
Martin sat down on the bed and watched her type for a minute, thinking about what he had seen. She was so skinny and little. She could get hurt so easily.
“I don’t want you playing at your friends’ this week,” he said. “If you’re not in this house, I want you with me.” He hoped she would argue with him or, better yet, laugh at him. But the look in her eyes told him that she understood perfectly, and this made him feel even worse.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I have work to do. Next week, I have to teach the class about isomers and isotopes.”
“Hoo boy!” muttered Martin.
“Dr. Church lost on yesterday’s show,” she said. “They asked him for six commercial uses of calcium carbide, and he knew only four. We Exponents are already missing him.”
Martin tried not to think about the old man. He was a criminal, he reminded himself. He deserved it. It’s like Mom says: just turn your back.
“Maybe they’ll have him on the show again,” Cassie said, “since he was so famous.”
Martin flopped back on the bed to stare at the ceiling. Chip took this as an invitation to jump up and curl into a big fuzzy ball beside him. “I doubt it, Cass,” he said wearily, petting his dog.
“Do you want to hear what I’ve got ready to teach so far? It’s about alpha decay and beta decay.”
About as much as I want my teeth drilled, Martin thought. But he remembered Jimmy and stopped just in time.
“Sure, Cass,” he said. Then he spent the next half hour perfecting an interested expression.
Dinner was a gloomy affair. Dad was delayed at work so long that Mom decided to serve the meal without him.
“Martin, eat your brandied pepper steak,” she said. “I spent all afternoon on it.”
“Sorry?” he asked vaguely, struggling to unknot his brain from gamma rays and neutrinos. He hadn’t been exposed to so much science in weeks. It had left him feeling mutated.
“All afternoon!” Mom repeated. “If I don’t get three red diamonds in a row on the cooker, it doesn’t make brandied pepper steak!”
“Three diamonds,” he speculated. “Doesn’t that come up, like, every eight thousand tries?”
“Odds of one in four thousand,” corrected Cassie. “There’s two diamonds per reel. You’re thinking of three lemons in a row: prime rib.”
“Oh, wow! Prime rib.” Martin was jolted out of his academic muddle by the memory of succulent beef. “Man, I wish we could have prime rib again.”
“Cassie!” Mom scolded. “It isn’t right to know all that math.” His little sister visibly deflated at the rebuke, and Martin lost his temper.
“Look, I don’t see what’s wrong with it! So she’s smart. They’re all smart! What’s the problem? Why can’t people leave them alone? Beating them up, slinging Jimmy’s rat down a drain—”
“No!” said Cassie.
“He asks for it,” Mom said grimly. “Walking around here like he thinks he’s better than everyone else.”
“Yeah, and maybe he’s right!” Martin said. “He’s smarter, looks better, a whole lot nicer—”
“Martin!”
“So maybe he is better, what about that? Maybe he really is!”
The door opened, and Dad came in. He stumbled over the step from the garage as if he were very tired, or very old.
“Walt, you need to tell your son to mind his manners!”
Dad didn’t answer her. He stopped at his place at the table and stood leaning on his chair, staring down at his plate. They waited for a few seconds, but he didn’t make any move to sit down.
“Are you all right?” Mom asked. “You’re acting funny.”
Dad glanced up. His eyes looked puzzled and a little hurt. He studied them each in turn, as if wondering how they came to be there. Last of all, his eyes rested on Cassie.
“Daddy?” she whispered.
But Dad didn’t seem to have heard. He turned and walked out of the kitchen. They heard his feet shuffle slowly down the hall and the bang of his bedroom door.
“Well! Eat your brandied pepper steak,” said their mother.
When the national anthem began playing the next morning, Dad was already out of the house.
“Special business,” Mom said. “Very important. He told me to vote for him.”
“Is he all right?” Cassie asked in a small voice. Martin knew not to ask. He could tell by the set to his mother’s mouth that she didn’t understand either.
After school, he wanted to check on Dad, but he had to walk Cassie home. Several of her friends came with them, seeking sanctuary, and he had to drop them off at their houses along the way.
Dad worked late again that night—so late that Mom put his dinner in the refrigerator. Martin had been in bed for some time before he heard his father come home. Immediately, he began to plot his quiet transfer to his listening post by the living room door, but before he could get up, he heard Dad walk by on his way to bed. That put an end to that.
“Special business?” Cassie guessed when her father wasn’t in the living room the next morning. Mom just gave a shrug.
That afternoon, Martin was determined to get Cassie safely past the bullies and then sprint back to spend some time in the loading bay. But several more Wonder Babies had black eyes and bruises from encounters the day before, and when school let out, a whole crowd of them tagged along on the walk home. David and Matt stayed away from Martin, dismayed at his obvious weakness of character, but Martin didn’t have the heart not to help the children. He
shepherded his little charges from street to street, disposing of one after another.
“I wish I had a big brother,” a kindergarten boy said solemnly, walking at Martin’s side. “But Mama says it’s too expensive for the stork to come twice.”
Martin hadn’t realized before how much his existence sheltered Cassie. Even though Mom got angry with her and Dad lectured her, Martin was there to tickle her, play games with her, and boss her around. Cassie still skipped and giggled in spite of her isotopes. Martin didn’t think this small boy had giggled in years.
“I wish you had a big brother too,” Martin told him. “Someone’s gotta be there to teach you baseball.”
“I know about baseball,” the little boy said. “The airflow around the stitches creates a turbulence that causes the ball to curve. Baseball is fundamentally about physics.”
“That is just so wrong,” Martin said sadly, and for the first time in his life, he allowed a child other than Cassie to hold his hand.
And so the workweek went. He found his mornings and evenings embroiled in Wonder Baby difficulties, and Dad simply wasn’t around.
Martin woke up on the first day of the weekend determined to find out what was wrong, but Mom announced over the breakfast table that she had other plans. “We’re cleaning every square inch of this house,” she informed the children, and the stress of the last week showed on her face. Martin knew what he would hear if he argued. It would be useless. The work took them all day.
But today is going to be different, Martin decided when Rest Day dawned. He called Chip and left the house as soon as breakfast was over, before Mom could find anything else for him to do.
When Martin got to the loading bay, his father looked happy to see him. In fact, Dad seemed almost normal. But there was a strange look in his eyes that deepened when Martin tried to tell him about the week he had missed, and Dad kept interrupting his news with short errands. Still mystified, Martin gave up on conversation and sat down on the floor to pet his dog.