Brainboy and the Deathmaster (2 page)

“Come on, brainiac, there’s only fifty seconds left,” Boris said, whacking Darryl on the back.

Darryl didn’t reach for the mouse till the countdown reached thirty. It took him twenty seconds to guide the figure through the labyrinth.

“Way to go!” Boris cried as a new message flashed onto the screen:

This message was soon replaced by the same game list as on Darryl’s GameMaster, except here StarMaster
2 had been upgraded to StarMaster 3. Intrigued, Darryl chose that. Familiar rules scrolled across the screen:

Darryl clicked to the opening game screen, but instead of the usual intergalactic map, three words appeared on the screen.

What else would he want to do? But when he clicked on Start again, nothing happened.

“Maybe you got to answer,” Boris said.

Darryl shrugged and typed in:

The answer popped up immediately:

HighFlier was clearly a made-up name, so instead of typing in Darryl Kirby, Darryl typed in his initials, MDK. His full name was actually Martin Darryl Kirby.

As soon as Darryl typed Yes, the map of the universe unfurled on screen.

What he loved about StarMaster was that it required multiple skills. First you had to locate the strongholds of the Controllers and the hideouts of the Individualists, avoiding the Controllers’ barrages and picking up the Individualists’ radio transmissions. And unlike MasterTrek, StarMaster didn’t let you simply ignore the impossibility of exceeding the speed of light. To travel between galaxies, you had to locate wormholes and star gates, always well hidden and jealously guarded. Only when you’d mapped the universe, shading the Controllers’ galaxies in red and marking the locations of the Individualists with green dots, could you start enlisting the Individualists’ help in overthrowing the Controllers. But the Individualists never risked divulging their hiding places and merging their scrappy troops with yours unless they’d decided you were shrewd enough to conquer the Controllers. So they tested you.

After color-coding the universe, as he almost always managed to do, Darryl contacted his first Individualist leader, who gave him twelve seconds to come up with the square root of 529. It took him five seconds to type in “23.” The next one he located gave him sixteen seconds to answer a riddle: What occurs once in a minute, twice
in a week, and once in a year? After thinking hard for ten seconds, Darryl typed, “THE LETTER E.” The next gave him fourteen seconds to come up with the approximate half-life of uranium 238, which Darryl happened to know was four and a half billion years. The next Individualist asked him an easy one: five seconds to type in the common name for sodium chloride. SALT. But the next was less accommodating, giving him only ten seconds to answer this: How much dirt is in a hole two feet deep, three feet wide, and four feet long? After six seconds Darryl was on the verge of typing in 24 cubic feet, but at the last instant he realized it was a riddle, not a math problem, and typed in “NONE.” There was no dirt in a hole.

“What a freakin’ whiz!” Boris cried as Darryl snagged his fifth Individualist battalion.

His troops assembled, Darryl attacked one of the Controllers’ more poorly defended outposts, using a favorite technique of sending a small force on a direct frontal assault and, once the Controllers were engaged, deploying his main force to attack from the rear. This worked twice. But when he tried it a third time, the Controllers only pretended to engage, and when Darryl initiated his rearguard action, they were ready. Not only did he have to order a full retreat, he lost ten percent of his hard-won rebel army.

“I can’t believe it,” he muttered. “In my GameMaster
they always react the same way.”

“Maybe you’re not playing the computer,” Boris said. “Maybe that HighFlier guy’s a person.”

“How could that be?”

“You got me, Einstein.”

“It must be the upgrade. They reprogrammed it so it learns.”

Darryl started varying his attack strategies. But the Controllers varied their defenses just as skillfully. It was the stiffest resistance he’d ever encountered. Finally, getting desperate, he had to seek out more troops.

One of the few Individualist holdouts posed this question: A Saturnalian snail wants to get out of an iridium mine. The snail manages to crawl up the mine shaft three feet each day, but at night when he rests he slips back down two feet. If the shaft is thirty vertical feet, how long will it take him to get out? Thirteen seconds.

After racking his brain, Darryl typed in 28 DAYS, and—presto—the Individualist joined his force.

“Way to go, brainboy!”

So saying, Boris slid his hand down and grabbed the GameMaster out of Darryl’s belt. For a second Darryl was horribly torn. All his instincts were against abandoning the game. But the same instincts revolted against the theft of his beloved GameMaster. Finally he swiveled in his chair. The thief was yanking the pillow and backpack out from under his covers.

“I’m bailing on breakfast,” Boris said, slipping the GameMaster under his pillow and flopping down on his bed. “Keep it down, willya?”

Darryl’s eyes returned to the computer screen. While his back was turned, the Controllers had mounted a counterattack. He’d never seen anything like it!

But even so, forsaking his GameMaster was more than he could stand.

“It’s mine,” he cried, jumping up.

“Hey. I said keep it down. Your smokes is right there. That was the deal.”

“What deal?”

“What do you think I was doin’ all night, cuttin’ my freakin’ toenails?”

“I don’t want any cigarettes. I don’t smoke.”

“Never too late to start.”

Glancing back at the screen, Darryl saw his troops being engulfed by Controllers. It was hopeless.

He grabbed the carton of cigarettes and tossed it onto the other bed. “Give me my GameMaster,” he said.

The boy leaped up and pulled something from his pocket.
Click.
A knife blade glinted half an inch from the end of Darryl’s nose.

“You gonna shut your pie hole, or am I gonna have to cut you?”

“I
do appreciate your help, sugar pie. This is the one that always gets to me—those two long flights of stairs.”

“No sweat, Ma.”

BJ Walker got out of the car and went around to the trunk and pulled out the bag with the MCS tag pinned to it. It was full of books and videos. His mother worked for the Seattle Public Library, and on Saturdays she took books and videos to a couple of nursing homes, some hospices, and this place: the Masterly Children’s Shelter. BJ had started helping her three weeks ago, when his summer vacation started, and on his first visit to the shelter he’d been awed by its grandeur. It was in an old mansion with a huge crystal chandelier at the foot of the front staircase and a paneled dining room with a table big enough for a skateboard course. But once he’d gone from room to room on the second and third floors, collecting old library books and handing out new ones, his awe had turned to pity. He’d always felt unlucky for never having known his father, but the kids here were totally alone in the world—wards of the state, waiting till strangers picked them out. When BJ
got back into the car that first Saturday, he leaned over and gave his mother a hug.

“What’s that for, sugar pie?”

“Oh, nothing.”

The shelter wasn’t all that far from their house, and this morning they’d made it their first stop. He said, “Morning,” to the plump Mexican-looking woman in the yellow uniform who was setting out boxes of breakfast cereal on the table in the dining room; then he poked his head in the half-open door beyond the stairs. Ms. Grimsley, the boss of the shelter, was in her office, leaning back in her desk chair, reading a paperback. Though around his mother’s age, Ms. Grimsley was about as different from her as a person could be, thin and pale and dry as straw, with steel-rimmed glasses and a mouth set in a natural frown. But this morning she didn’t look as cheerless as usual. On the cover of her paperback a wavy-haired white guy was crushing a delicate woman in his muscular arms.

“Morning, Ms. Grimsley.”

She let out a yelp and nearly toppled over backward. As soon as she steadied herself, she thrust the paperback into a handbag that was hanging off the chair back.

“Sorry, ma’am. Just wanted to give you the new videos.”

“Yes, yes, of course. I’ll collect the old ones and leave them for you on the hall table. You can go on up—everybody should be awake. Breakfast’s in ten minutes.”

He gave her this week’s videos and headed up the front stairs with the bag of books. The shelter had a high turnover. According to his mother, they tried to place the kids with foster parents as quickly as possible—but the sneering redheaded girl who liked horror stories was still in the first room on the second floor, as was the wild-haired boy with the nose ring next door who didn’t “read no books.” The third bedroom on the second-floor hallway, empty last week, was now occupied by two Asian boys, clearly brothers, who politely accepted the first two books he offered. The black boy in the next room, who’d liked books about the sea, had been replaced by an Eskimo-looking boy who chose a book about wolves.

There were only a couple of rooms up on the third floor. When he knocked on the first door, no one answered, but he opened it anyway, remembering last week’s lodger: a boy who’d lain in bed, totally unresponsive, staring at the ceiling. BJ had actually thought of him a couple of times during the week. Of all the kids in the place, that one seemed the saddest case, the most dazed with grief. He was still there—but today he was sitting up in bed while another boy, a skinny kid with a
greasy ponytail, was holding a switchblade to his nose.

“Who the freak are you?” the boy with the knife demanded.

“BJ Walker,” BJ said. “Who are you?”

“None of your friggin’ business.”

BJ stepped in and set his book bag by a laptop on the desk. All the rooms here had laptops. “You guys want something to read?”

“You nuts? Can’t you see we’re busy?”

“What about you?” BJ asked the other boy.

“Hey,” the first boy said, turning the knife on BJ. “You think I’m talking to the friggin’ walls? I said get out of here.”

“What’s that?” BJ asked, shifting his eyes to the window.

As soon as the boy looked that way, BJ had his wrist. He twisted the arm till the elbow was pointing at the ceiling and the knife clunked onto the spiral rug between the twin beds.

“Let go of me!”

“Whatever you say.” BJ shoved the scrawny boy facedown onto the bed nearer the window, his head at the foot, and sat on the small of his back.

“Get off me!”

“Put a sock in it,” BJ said, smiling at the other boy, who looked about his age, though a lot smaller. His blue
eyes were glazed, and his dirty-blond hair was every which way, as if he hadn’t combed it all week. “What’s your name?”

The boy said nothing.

“Don’t you have a name?”

The boy took a deep breath and said: “Darryl.”

“Why’d he have a knife on you, Darryl?”

“I don’t know.”

“Get your black butt off me!” squealed the pinned boy.

“I said put a sock in it. You don’t know how come he pulled a knife on you?”

Darryl reached between other boy’s running shoes and pulled something out from under the pillow.

“Wow,” said BJ, who’d been saving up for a GameMaster for months. “You mean they give them out here?”

“It’s mine,” Darryl said.

“It’s mine!” the other boy squealed. “We had a deal! I got you them cigarettes.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“You’re killing me, man! You weigh a friggin’ ton.”

A bell rang in the distance. Footsteps sounded out in the hall.

“Breakfast time,” BJ said. “Hand me that knife, will you?”

Darryl set his GameMaster on the table between the beds, collected the knife off the floor, and gave it to BJ, who closed the blade.

“Surprised they let you in here with something like this. What’s your name?”

“What’s it to you?” the pinned boy said.

“Just being friendly.”

“If you want to be friendly, get your smelly butt off me.”

“The only thing that smells around here is your shoes, Nabatw.”

“What you call me?”

BJ poked the tattoo on the boy’s arm. It was of a flag, but instead of stars and stripes inside, it had the letters NABATW.

“That’s not my name.”

“What is it then?”

“None of your business.”

BJ bounced on him, making him gasp.

“Okay, jeez. Name’s Boris.”

“If I let you up, Boris, are you going to be nice?”

Boris sniffed. BJ bounced on him again.

“Okay, okay. I’ll be nice.”

When BJ stood up, Boris jerked into a sitting position, his face scarlet, his smelly shoes wide apart on the rug, his slitty eyes shifting between BJ and Darryl.

“Give it to me,” he said, his eyes stopping on BJ.

BJ slid the knife into the pocket of his baggy jeans. “You can get it back from Ms. Grimsley”

“You can’t give it to Grimface!”

BJ sat on the bed by Darryl.

“How old are you anyway, Boris?”

“Fourteen.”

Pretty runty for fourteen, BJ thought. “Where you from?” he asked.

“What’s it to you?”

“Just curious.”

“Eugene.”

“Oregon?”

“No, Hawaii. What do you think, dipwad?”

“What are you doing up here in Seattle?”

“’Bout six months ago my sister and me got tossed in a place like this down in Portland, but the second morning I come down to breakfast—no Nina. They don’t let boys and girls share rooms in these joints, even if they’re related. Anyhow, somebody must’ve done something really crummy to make her take off without telling me.”