Brainboy and the Deathmaster (18 page)

Mr. Masterly turned from the transformed rat to Darryl and again laid his hands on his shoulders. In spite of what Nina had said about it being impossible to hypnotize an unwilling subject, Darryl felt himself falling under the spell of the dark, gleaming eyes. Suddenly Mr. Masterly broke into a huge grin. It brought out crow’s feet and lines around his mouth, but made his face more appealing than Darryl had ever seen it.

“You’re brilliant,” Mr. Masterly said, and then he hugged him harder than his father ever had. “Absolutely brilliant.’’ He released him and shouted: “Everyone, in here!”

In a trice the whole team, Snoodles included, was crowding into Bio, Billy carrying a test tube of mercury.

“Look!” Mr. Masterly cried, pointing at the denizens of cages one and two. “These bright-eyed young fellows
were just like those”—he pointed at the decrepit old rats in the other cages—“till they were injected with a new isomer of G-17. And who do you suppose we have to thank for this breakthrough? This ingenious young man right here.”

As everyone clapped, Darryl swelled with pride, no longer wanting to squirm out of Mr. Masterly’s grasp.

“We’re going to have to add a wing to the trophy case just for Darryl,” Mr. Masterly said when the ovation ended. “But you’ve all been working hard. You all deserve a great deal of credit. Take the rest of the day off, everybody.”

“Really, sir?” said Ruthie. “What are we supposed to do?”

“It so happens I brought a new movie, straight from MasterTech’s cinema division. Get a little exercise and have some dinner, and I’ll pop it in for you.”

A
fter a leisurely lunch on the Masterlys’ terrace, BJ and Boris got to ride back across the lake in a limousine. The passenger section was like a living room, with plush facing sofas and a TV and a CD player and a phone and a bar stocked with liquor and soft drinks. But what caught Boris’s attention was a big jar of macadamia nuts.

“I wouldn’t eat that Dungeon crab if I really was stuck in a dungeon,” he declared, gobbling nuts. “You’d think with all that dough they’d get something decent like burgers.”

“Well, we did what we came to do,” said BJ, who’d actually liked the crab.

“That was pretty slick, I gotta admit.”

While checking out the helicopter before lunch, BJ had managed to slip the GPS under the pilot’s seat. He flicked on the personal tracker now, and a map of the east side of Lake Washington appeared on the screen, a pulsing dot marking the Masterly estate on Hunt’s Point.

Halfway across the floating bridge, the limousine stopped, and the driver lowered a tinted dividing window
to inform them there was a jackknifed tractor trailer up ahead. BJ flicked off the tracker and flicked on the TV. Boris immediately grabbed the remote, and they spent the next forty-five minutes haggling over which show to watch.

When they got home, at around four, Boris raided the fridge while BJ cleaned out the litter box and fed the cats. BJ then flopped down on the living-room sofa for a snooze, but Boris came in and blasted a cop show on the TV. Rolling over to give him a piece of his mind, BJ felt the personal tracker in his pocket.

He pulled it out and turned it on. The map that appeared wasn’t of the east side of the lake, it was of the whole western part of Washington State.

“Check this out.”

“Jeez,” Boris said, scooting over beside him. “It’s way up in the freakin’ mountains.’’ The pulsing dot had migrated all the way from Hunt’s Point into the northern reaches of the Cascade Mountains. “Think it’s that lab place?”

“Maybe. Or maybe he’s just on a business trip.”

“What kind of business they got up there? It’s just rocks and trees and them iceberg things, right?”

“You mean glaciers?”

The front door opened.

“For goodness’ sake,” Mrs. Walker said, closing the
door behind her. “What are you boys trying to do, wake the dead?”

“Hi, Ma,” BJ said, pocketing the tracker and muting the TV.

“Hey, Mrs. Walker,” said Boris.

“For the long weekend,” she said, depositing some videos on the table behind the sofa. “Gosh, these shoes are killing me.”

As soon as she went into her room to change into slippers, BJ dashed out to the Nova and fished a road map of Washington State out of the glove compartment. Down in the basement he and Boris compared the map with the much smaller one on the personal tracker.

“There?” BJ said, approximating the position of the pulsing dot on the larger map.

“Higher,” said Boris.

After considerable arguing they managed to agree on where to put an X on the map.

“What now?” Boris said.

“We see where he goes next. Then we mark another X. Then another and another. If he goes back to the same place a lot, it’s probably the lab.”

“Hey. It’s dead.”

The screen on the personal tracker had gone dark. BJ picked it up and pressed the On button. Nothing happened.

“Crud. Grimface must have called the cops. They’d call the dealership, and the dealership would call the satellite company.”

“You mean after all that work all we get’s one lousy X?”

“I guess.’’ After staring at the map for a considerable time, BJ added, “Too bad you left the toolbox at the shelter.”

“How come?”

“Might have been useful.”

“What for?”

“Breaking into the Kirbys’ house on Alder Street.”

Boris snorted. “I don’t need no toolbox to break into a house.”

“You don’t?”

“Cripes, no.”

W
hen Darryl steered his movie pod off to the right, the entire Milky Way came into focus, stretching out before him like an endless white-pebble driveway. Down and to the right, he discovered a spiral galaxy in the process of forming. Soon a couple of other pods crowded in beside him—Paul and Ruthie—so he moved off on his own and stumbled on a red giant in the final stages of collapse.

The new movie,
Mastering the Universe,
was a feast. After witnessing the dramatic explosion of a supernova, Darryl entered a solar system with twin suns. He hardly knew where to turn. And fresh wonders kept replacing the old ones. When he guided the pod back through the flickering waters to reinvestigate the Milky Way, he found himself in one of the gaseous tides around a Cepheid. And the spiral galaxy had become the moons of Jupiter, all laid out for him to explore. And the collapsed red giant had become a black hole.

But breathtaking as the spectacles were, Darryl’s mind began to wander. This might have been explicable if he’d been worrying about the planned escape on
Monday night. He and Nina had only that night and two more left for training, and neither one of them had yet made it even halfway up the shaft. But he wasn’t thinking about the escape. He was reliving his triumph. He could feel Mr. Masterly’s fatherly hands on his shoulders, hear the applause. When he submarined through the blue pinwheel in the Triangulum constellation, the stars around him actually seemed to arrange themselves into the atoms of the G-17 molecule.

Mastering the Universe
was a hit with the rest of the kids. Once Abs let them out of their pods, they all stood around on the pod platform comparing notes, complaining about all the things they’d missed, wishing the movie would run again right then and there. It was well after eleven before they trooped off to their rooms. So Darryl and Nina couldn’t meet to train till after midnight, by which time even Hedderly had called it a night and gone to bed. They were so tired, they didn’t even attempt going beyond the second seam.

Back in Nina’s room afterward they collapsed in her velvet chairs.

“Do you think we’ll make it, Darryl?”

“I don’t know.”

“You still want to escape, don’t you?”

He wasn’t altogether sure that he did, but he said, “Of course.”

“I wish we didn’t have to train so late at night.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, yawning.

The next day her wish came true. In the middle of breakfast Mr. Masterly’s voice came over the PA system, announcing that everyone had the weekend off.

“You’ve earned it. It’s Labor Day weekend, and you’ve all labored brilliantly. So enjoy yourselves. The new movie will be running continuously.”

An enthusiastic cheer greeted this last piece of news, and everyone scurried off to AquaFilm—everyone except Billy and Suki, who went to play tennis, and Nina and Darryl, who headed for the pantry. By lunchtime Nina had reached the fourth seam—her personal best. After lunch Darryl made it to the third, and if it hadn’t been for the swarm of butterflies in his gut, he, too might have made the fourth.

On his way to dinner he was a little disappointed to see no Darryl trophy in the trophy case yet, but a few minutes later a different kind of honor was bestowed on him. Hedderly was just carrying the first platter into the dining room when Mr. Masterly’s voice came over the PA again.

“Darryl, I was hoping for the pleasure of your company at dinner. If you’d care to join me, go to the elevator.”

Like the time he’d been called down to L, the others
looked gratifyingly jealous—except Nina, who looked distinctly troubled.

“Guess I better go,” he murmured, setting his napkin on the table.

As soon as he stepped into the elevator, the door closed, and up it went, swooshing right past E. The door opened on a rosily lit room not unlike his bedroom except that it was over twice as big, with higher ceilings and a spiral staircase in one corner.

“Welcome to my humble home away from home,” Mr. Masterly said, stepping in through an archway to a farther chamber. “I rarely have visitors. In fact, I never have visitors. But this is an occasion.”

As he approached his host, Darryl’s apprehensive excitement turned to stupefaction. Mr. Masterly smiled.

“How old would you guess I am?”

“You barely look twenty-five!”

“A good age, I think. Not too young, not too old.”

It was incredible. He’d shed twenty years since yesterday. The bags under his eyes were gone; his complexion had a youthful glow, his dark hair a shiny luster.

“Have a seat, Darryl.”

As in the rooms on S, there were two red velvet chairs pulled up to a low table. Mr. Masterly moved a battered briefcase off his chair before sitting down.

“How much did you take?” Darryl asked, eyeing a
vial of turquoise solution on the table.

“Six cc’s, diluted ten to one, after breakfast. It took longer to work on me than the rats—a couple of hours. I had another dose after lunch. I’m hoping three a day will keep Father Time at bay.”

Mr. Masterly picked up his remote and pressed a button. As music filled the room, he leaned back with a contented smile on his youthful face.

“Do you know
The Well-Tempered Clavier,
Darryl? Johann Sebastian Bach. Now
there
was a man with a deep understanding of time.”

“What’s a clavier, sir?”

“Good for you to ask. There’s no more valuable trait than curiosity. Combine it with a will to conquer and nothing can stop you.”

“Then why do they say curiosity killed the cat?”

“Well, I guess it’s because everything of true value entails risk. But non-risk-takers are of no interest to people like us, are they?”

Darryl shook his head, wondering what Mr. Masterly would say if he knew the risk he and Nina were going to take on Monday night.

“A clavier,” Mr. Masterly said, “is a an old keyboard instrument—an early form of piano. Do you like fish brains?”

“For what?”

“Dinner. Fish have rather small brains, so you need quite a few for a meal, but it’s the most refined source of protein there is, and what little fat they contain keeps your skin elastic. I’ve trained Hedderly to make quite a good fish-brain mousse.’’ Mr. Masterly pressed a button on his wrist gizmo. “Send up two fish-brain dinners, will you, please, Hedderly? And two carrot juices, and a diced spinach salad with tofu.”

He spoke far more politely to Hedderly than Ruthie ever did, and before long an amber light on the wall started blinking. Mr. Masterly stepped over and pressed it. Darryl heard a swishing sound, then a panel slid back, revealing a food cart.

“Is that a dumbwaiter, sir?”

“The one exception to my rule of keeping dumb things at a distance,” Mr. Masterly said, setting out their dinners. “Eat up.”

The fish-brain mousse, which wasn’t even warm, tasted like slime, but out of politeness Darryl ate about half of it, washing down each bite with a swig of carrot juice.

“Maybe it’s an acquired taste,” Mr. Masterly said after cleaning his plate. He took an eyedropper out of the vial and squirted about six cc’s onto his tongue. “I did a little homework on you, young man.”

“You did?”

“Your first name’s not Darryl.”

“No, that’s really my middle name.”

“Your first name’s Martin.”

“Yeah, after my dad. They named my older brother after my mom’s father, so I got named after Dad. Everybody always called me by my middle name to avoid confusion.”

“So your initials are MDK.”

“Uh-huh.”

“My middle name is David.”

“So you’re KDM.”

“Exactly. The reverse of yours. Interesting, no? And you were born almost thirteen years ago. It was almost thirteen years ago that I started planning all this.”

A phone rang in the farther room, and Mr. Masterly excused himself to go answer it, giving Darryl the opportunity to squirrel away the rest of his fish brains in his napkin. While waiting for Mr. Masterly’s return, his eyes fell on the battered briefcase. It seemed out of place. Everything else in the room was so new and state-of-the-art.

There’s no more valuable trait than curiosity.

After checking to make sure Mr. Masterly was still off in the far room, Darryl opened the briefcase and pulled out a worn spiral notebook. Scrawled on the cover in faded red ink was the word “MasterPlan.”
Underneath this was the month and year of Darryl’s birth. He opened to the first page—and for a second thought he was looking at a sketch for the needlepoint family tree that used to hang over the mantelpiece in his grandparents’ house. But the branches and leaves of this tree didn’t hold the names of his or anyone else’s ancestors. Carved into the trunk, like a girlfriend’s initials, were the letters CT. Higher up, the trunk divided into three main limbs, each with a word carved into it: Capital, Workforce, Brainpower. Higher up the Capital limb was the word Profits, and above that it branched out into limbs etched with the names of familiar MasterTech games like CastleMaster and CyberJinx. Higher up the Workforce limb was the word Expendable, and above that it branched out into limbs with unfamiliar initials carved into them: WWSMF, CWSMF, etc. Higher up the Brainpower limb was the word Shelters, and the branches above that also bore mysterious initials.