Brainboy and the Deathmaster (16 page)

“Come on, man. You only got ninety seconds to go.”

But BJ was using Darryl’s technique of visualizing the entire path before starting. He didn’t move the little figure till there was less than a minute left, and he made it through with three seconds to spare.

“Beege rules!” Boris cried, clapping him on the back.

The words

appeared on the screen. BJ typed:

“Crud,” Boris said. “No Neen.”

BJ typed:

Breathless, BJ typed:

“I can’t believe it,” BJ said in a choked voice.

“Ask him about Neen!” Boris cried.

BJ typed:

“We were right!” BJ said. “It
was
Keith Masterly!”

“Come on!” Boris cried, shaking BJ’s shoulders. “Ask if Neen’s there!”

But instead of an answer, the opening screen for StarMaster 3 flashed up on the monitor.

M
r. Masterly stepped out of the elevator and strode over to the computer console.

“Got a nibble?” he asked.

“I think s-so,” said Snoodles, who’d been eating lunch with Darryl.

“You look excited, Darryl. Somebody smart?”

Darryl was vibrating like a tuning fork. He’d volunteered for lunch duty, and when the flashing red light came on, he miraculously hadn’t frozen up. And now he’d gotten through to BJ!

“He doesn’t look too good,” Mr. Masterly said. “He’s not even hunting for star gates. Probably got lucky with the maze.”

“But we just started, sir.”

After watching a while, Mr. Masterly clucked his tongue. “Why are you toying with him like that? For heaven’s sake, he hasn’t recruited a single Individualist. Finish him off and come with me.”

In spite of everything Darryl had been disappointed when he’d gone into Bio that morning and found the three injected rats as old and crusty as the uninjected
one. But all that seemed meaningless now that he’d contacted BJ.

“You better go look at the rats, sir. I don’t think it worked.”

“Damn. I thought you might be onto something. Here, let me.”

Mr. Masterly took over the keyboard and finished BJ off in short order. Only then did he go into Bio.

Darryl remained at the computer, hoping against hope that the red light he’d so feared yesterday would come on again. But it never did.

At Nina’s suggestion they both skipped gym period that day in favor of naps. After dinner they napped again, and later, once the rest of the team went to bed, they crept up the emergency stairs to E, put on their cross-training shoes, and crept back down to S. Hedderly was chopping celery for tomorrow’s soup when they walked into the kitchen.

“Midnight snacking, kiddos?” he said.

“Yup,” they answered.

They slipped into the pantry, pulled off the vent cover, and slid in. Darryl had hoped that his fear of heights might have dissolved along with his fear of flashing red lights, but the bottom dropped out of his stomach when he peered up the dizzying tube.

“So what’s this chimney thing?” Nina whispered.

The chimney technique was meant for climbing vertical rock chutes and involved pressing the back against one side of a shaft and the hands and feet and even the knees against the other. Using one hand to keep from slipping down, the climber used the other hand and both feet to inch himself upward. Darryl’s parents had made it look easy, but he now learned what a tiring method of climbing it was. The Teflon shaft was slick, too, and that first night neither he nor Nina made it beyond the place where the stove vent merged.

The next night they did a little better, and the night after that a little better yet. But the fourth night they couldn’t train at all, for when they got to the shaft, water was trickling down it, making it perilously slippery.

“It must be raining out in the world,” Nina said wistfully.

“I always complained about Seattle weather,” Darryl said. “Now I’d love to feel some rain on my face.”

“Why do you think there’s no cap up there to keep the rain out?”

“Maybe we’re way underground and he doesn’t want somebody walking by up there to notice anything.”

“But somebody might fall in. They’d notice that.”

They couldn’t explain why the top should be open, but the next night the vent was dry, and they both made it up to a seam that allowed them to catch their breath.

There turned out to be seams every ten feet or so, making good rest stops. After a week Nina reached the third seam—about thirty percent of the way out. Physically, Darryl probably could have reached the third seam, too, but even though he made a point of never looking back down the shaft, the whirring in his gut got so bad by the second seam that instead of going higher, he climbed back down to the first seam and then back up again. On the night of their escape, he would just have to suck it up.

Mr. Masterly had been popping in and out of Paradise Lab in his usual unpredictable way, but one evening at dinner toward the end of August he announced over the PA that he would be gone for a full week to help launch a new division of MasterTech. After the meal, when Darryl went back to room eight to rest up for that night’s training, he found a note on his pillow.

Flattered in spite of himself, Darryl spent the next day studying the computer-generated image of G-17. He ran the molecule through X-ray crystallography and
pored over the results. Over those next few days he became convinced that the reason for his failure was the breakdown of the G-9¼ molecule. He finally concluded that G-17 had two natural divisions, not just one. On the Thursday before Labor Day he got Snoodles to whip him up a fresh blue freckle and spent the morning in Accel dividing it. That afternoon he subdivided G-9¼ into G5 and G-4¼; then he diluted the entire new compound and injected some into one of the crusty old rats.

B
oris had spent that same week sleeping in the bottom bunk in the Walkers’ basement. It had struck BJ that two heads would be better than one in solving the mystery of Paradise Lab—and as for his mother, the story of Boris losing his sister had naturally melted her heart. Boris grumbled about BJ’s no-smoking-in-the-house policy, but otherwise the two boys had been getting on surprisingly well—probably because they hadn’t spent much time together. After coming up blank in an internet search for Paradise Lab, they’d started canvassing Seattle area laboratories, and there were so many, they’d had to split up.

By the time BJ walked out of Capitol Hill Laboratories that Thursday afternoon, he’d come up empty for the ninth straight time. There didn’t seem to be a lab worker in the city who’d so much as heard of a Paradise Lab. He shuffled home up Pike Street feeling pretty discouraged—until he got to Capitol Hill Mercedes. As he peered in at the spanking-new models on the showroom floor, a woman’s voice echoed in his head:

“
But didn’t he report the car missing to you? It
is
an S-GPS Special.
”

BJ was decently dressed for his lab visits, so when he went in to inspect the cars, the salesman, a balding man in a brown suit, was reasonably polite. BJ told him that his mother was thinking of buying his father a Mercedes for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

“She’s kind of dumb about cars, so she asked me to stop in. Do you have one of those S-GPS 600’s?”

The salesman looked doubtful but led him over to a sleek burgundy sedan with a mushroom interior. “Is your mother aware of the sticker price?” he asked, pointing to the specs sheet on the back window.

“Oh, money’s no problem,” BJ said breezily. “Both my folks are execs at MasterTech.”

“Would you like me to take you on a test drive?” the salesman said, suddenly perking up. “You won’t believe how smooth and quiet she runs.”

“That’s okay, I’ve ridden in all kinds of Mercedes—everyone on our street has one. I was just curious about the S-GPS stuff. What’s it mean exactly?”

“GPS means Global Positioning System. Take a look.”

The salesman opened the driver’s side door for him, and in spite of his vast experience with fancy cars, BJ was amazed by the rich smell of the leather bucket seats and the dashboard’s resemblance to the instrument panel on the shuttle craft in which Captain Geomopolis escapes
the conspirators who take over his starship in
Star Voyager.

The salesman got in the passenger side. “The GPS works without the ignition,” he said, pressing a button on what looked like a little TV set mounted below the radio and CD player. A map of the Capitol Hill area appeared on the screen, with a pulsing dot marking their location. “If you’re in a strange city, you can find your way anywhere.’’ He pressed the button again, and the map changed to all of Seattle, with the pulsing dot still indicating their position. He pressed it again and the map became all of western Washington State. Then the whole state. Then the entire western United States, a pulse showing in Seattle, in the northwest corner. “And here’s the special feature,” he said, opening the glove compartment. “Your personal tracker.”

The personal tracker was a little bigger than a cell phone, a little smaller than a GameMaster. The salesman flipped open the screen and pressed a button. A map of Capitol Hill appeared on the tracker, complete with pulsing dot.

“You carry this in your pocket or briefcase and it always shows where the car is. So if it’s lost or stolen, you can locate it instantly. It’s becoming a popular feature.”

The salesman gave BJ a brochure describing all the car’s luxuries, and BJ left him with the assurance that he
would be back soon with his mother. However, he neglected to mention his visit to the dealership to his mother that evening at dinner.

After dinner he and Boris adjourned to the basement to compare notes on their days.

“This one guy at this lab on Western knew about a Paradise
Club,
” Boris said. “But he said it’s a stripper joint. How’d you do?”

BJ just grinned.

“What, man? You come up with something?”

“An idea.”

“What?”

He told him about the Global Positioning System. “We could stash one in Masterly’s helicopter. That way we can track where it goes. It’ll be just like in
Star Voyager.
”

“Huh?”

“The movie. You’ve seen it, right?”

“Uh-uh.”

“You’ve never seen
Star Voyager
?” BJ said incredulously.

“You think my old man gave us movie money?”

“It was on TV. Twice.”

“So? It’s one of them outer space things, right? I go for bank heists and prison breaks, stuff like that.”

“There’s this great part where Captain Geomopolis sends a cyborg on a suicide mission to stick a magnetic
detector on the outside of a—”

“That’s just what I mean. Sci-fi’s whacked. How can you send a cyborg on a freakin’ suicide mission? They ain’t even alive. They’re just nuts and bolts. How can they commit suicide?”

BJ heaved an exasperated sigh. “I only mean ‘suicide mission’ in the … in the …”

“In the what?”

“Listen, the point is the magnetic detector. It’s the same principle.”

“That right? Ours was this old bat with a face like a Salisbury steak.”

“What?”

“Salisbury steak. It’s this crud they give you at the shelter. It’s like the worst cut of meat you can get, so they pound the crap out of it so it won’t be so tough, except it doesn’t work. It’s got these stringy things that get caught in your teeth.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” BJ said, bewildered.

“Mrs. Crushmeier. Our old principal.”

“I didn’t mean school principal, I meant the same principle, like … the same idea. They put this magnetic detector on the starship so they can track it right through the meteor shower. Same idea as putting the GPS in the helicopter.”

“Right, and real life’s just like the movies.”

“I don’t see why it shouldn’t work. We could borrow Grimface’s. We’ll go up to the shelter in the morning with your toolbox. The GPS is in the car, and the personal tracker’s probably in her handbag.”

The corners of Boris’s mouth turned up. “Ripping off Grimface, eh? But even if we get the thingamajig, how do we get it in Masterly’s helicopter?”

“We put it there.”

“How?”

“We saved Keith Jr.’s life, didn’t we? You think he won’t give us lunch and a tour of the place if we show up?”

“You think?”

“What do we have to lose from trying? Unless you’ve got a better idea.”

“Me? How am I supposed to think when I can’t smoke?”

W
hen the two boys got to the shelter the next morning, the sky was the same steely gray as Ms. Grimsley’s hair, but at least it wasn’t raining, and a bunch of the orphans were playing football on the side lawn. One thing BJ and Boris had managed to agree on was that BJ had better people skills and Boris had better burglar skills. So Boris remained crouched in the rhododendrons with his toolbox while BJ walked into the Shelter.

The office door was ajar. BJ opened it wider and said:

“Morning, Ms. Grimsley”