Brainboy and the Deathmaster (3 page)

“You sure they didn’t stick her with foster parents?”

“That’s what the dorks that run the place said. But Neen wouldn’t’ve gone without telling me. Since then I’ve been looking for her. I’ve been to Yakima,
Centralia, Tacoma, all over the friggin’ place. Figure she’s gotta be somewhere in the Northwest.” He dug a worn cowhide wallet out of his back pocket and showed them both a dog-eared photo of a girl who looked a lot like him, except she was kind of pretty and wore glasses and her blond hair was curly. “Seen her?”

“Sorry,” BJ said.

“If I had a nickel for every time I heard that,” Boris said, “I’d be rich as that Masterly jerk.”

“Hey, who are you calling a jerk?”

“What’s it to you? Like you know Keith Masterly or something?”

“Well, not personally,” BJ admitted. But he knew all about him: how he’d invented the GameMaster when he was only nineteen years old, how he’d founded MasterTech when he was only twenty, how instead of hoarding his billions, he financed charitable causes: hospitals for the mentally challenged and shelters like this one for orphaned or abandoned children.

“What about your parents?” he said. “Are they dead?”

“My mom is,” Boris said.

“And your dad?”

Boris spat on the floor. “Far as we’re concerned.”

“How about you, Darryl?”

Darryl turned and stared out the window.

“He’s a space case,” Boris said. “But I got to admit, he’s a friggin’ whiz at that GameMaster stuff. He’s as good as Nina.”

“Where’d you get your GameMaster?” BJ asked. “You rich or something?”

Darryl didn’t respond.

“What’s your favorite game?”

At this Darryl seemed to perk up a bit. “StarMaster.”

“Never played that. Could you show me how?”

Instead of picking up his GameMaster, Darryl moved to the desk chair. When he hit a key on the laptop, the word MondoGameMaster appeared on the screen, each vibrating letter a different color.

“They’re like big GameMasters?” BJ said, moving over behind him. “Is that because Keith Masterly owns this place?”

“I guess,” Darryl said. “But it’s weird. I think you play against somebody. First you have to get through this maze, though. Huh. It’s different this time.”

An unbelievably intricate maze had appeared on the screen.

“They only give you two minutes to get through
that
?” BJ said, seeing the countdown in a corner of the screen.

But to his astonishment, Darryl guided the figure
through the maze with twenty seconds to spare.

“Wow,” he murmured as congratulations appeared on the screen.

There was quite a long pause; then a game list appeared. Darryl clicked on StarMaster 3.

“Skip the rules,” BJ said. “I’ll just watch.”

Darryl answered the question “Want to play?” and learned that his opponent was called LabRat. After Darryl identified himself as MDK, a map of the universe appeared.

“It looks like the beginning of
Star Voyager
,” BJ said. “That’s my favorite movie of all time.”

“Same here,” said Darryl.

“Is Captain Geomopolis in this game?”

“Nah. What you have to do is … first you have to find out where the Controllers and the Individualists are.”

“The what?”

Darryl explained as he played, and before long BJ was totally absorbed. Darryl’s dexterity in steering his ships out of trouble was as remarkable as his knack for locating star gates, but what left BJ agog was his ability to recruit the Individualists by answering their questions. He’d never seen anything like it in his life.

“How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

Same as him. He turned to ask Boris if his sister was as good as this.

Boris wasn’t there. BJ looked under the beds. Under the one near the window was a battered suitcase covered with National Park stickers. Under the other there were only a couple of dust balls.

“Where the heck did he go?”

The desk chair squeaked as Darryl swiveled around. His eyes went straight to the tree out the open window.

“Think he climbed out?” BJ said, going over there.

There was no sign of Boris in the madrona tree. When he turned back, Darryl’s face was as white as the pillowcases on the beds.

“What’s wrong?”

Darryl’s eyes were fixed on the night table. The only things on it were a lamp, the library book BJ had left last week, and a paperback called
The Expanding Universe.
The GameMaster was gone.

“H
ere he comes now,” Ms. Grimsley said as BJ rounded the curve of the lower staircase.

“Sugar pie,” said his mother, “I’ve been waiting half an hour.”

BJ said nothing as he joined the two women—one fat and chocolate colored, the other pale and stick thin—on the Oriental rug under the chandelier. Through an archway he could see kids eating breakfast in the dining room.

“What’s the matter?” Mrs. Walker said.

BJ shrugged.

“What took you so long?”

“I was talking to this kid, Darryl,” he mumbled. The truth was, Darryl’s brilliance had shaken him.

“Were you really?” said Ms. Grimsley. “He hasn’t said boo in eight days. Not even the counselor could get a word out of him. What were you talking about?”

“Nothing. He was playing this game, StarMaster 3.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that. Maybe he’s coming around.”

“Coming around from what?” BJ asked.

“He’s been in shock. He lost his entire family in a fire.”

“No!” Mrs. Walker cried.

“I’m afraid so. It was over on Bainbridge Island.”

“Good lord, I saw something about that in the paper,” Mrs. Walker said. “A family reunion, wasn’t it?”

“His grandmother’s birthday, I believe. The house went up in flames in the middle of the night. Nobody got out alive.”

“Nobody?” BJ gasped. “How about Darryl?”

“He was sleeping in a tree house in the backyard. He lost his parents and his brother and his grand-parents. An aunt and uncle and cousin, too. We’ve been running a search for other family members, but so far we’ve come up blank.”

“Can he come over for dinner, Ma?” BJ said, his jealousy turned to sympathy.

“Well, sweetie, that’s a kind thought, but I’m not sure …”

“Are the kids prisoners here, Ms. Grimsley?” BJ asked.

“Prisoners? Not at all. But Darryl’s been traumatized. He’s barely eaten. He’s fine, physically, according to the doctor, but he’s in denial about the whole episode. What we do in these situations is we wait for the child to work himself out of it a bit before trying to place him.”

“Bet you ten bucks he’d eat Ma’s cooking.”

“BJ,” Mrs. Walker said, smiling in spite of herself.

“You’ll like him, Ma. He’s smarter than me.”

“That I doubt.”

“No, you will.”

“I mean I doubt he’s smarter than you. BJ’s been top of his class the last two years.”

Though Ms. Grimsley’s mouth wasn’t made for smiling, it did its best. “Good for you, young man. And I appreciate your taking an interest in Darryl. But at this point I think it would be best if he stayed put. He hasn’t even cried yet. It’s all still bottled up inside him.”

“Poor guy,” BJ said. “First his family, now his GameMaster.”

“What do you mean? The GameMasters are bolted down.”

“Not the laptop—his. That Boris guy grabbed it and took off out the window.”

“What!”

“Who’s Boris?” Mrs. Walker said.

Ms. Grimsley’s natural frown was back. “Boris Rizniak. He showed up here a few weeks ago and we tried to place him—then he disappeared. He claims he’s looking for his sister, but he’s a dreadful liar. And a trouble-maker. He must have had a rough upbringing—he has some ugly scars on his back—so when he showed up
again yesterday, hungry and tired, I didn’t have the heart not to take him in. But stealing! Next time it’s juvenile detention.”

Boris seemed to be in plenty of hot water already, so BJ didn’t mention the cigarettes, which had also disappeared, or the switchblade in his pocket.

“Where’s this Darryl from?” Mrs. Walker asked. “Bainbridge Island?”

“No, that’s where his grandparents lived,” Ms. Grimsley said. “He’s from here in Seattle, just over on First Hill. A small house, mostly mortgaged. The parents didn’t have any money to speak of. Very outdoorsy, apparently. They led hiking parties in the mountains.”

“Sounds as if he might be able to use a little home cooking.”

“Well, you may be right,” said Ms. Grimsley. “But—”

“Great, Ms. Grimsley,” BJ said, grabbing the old videos off the hall table. “We’ll come back after we finish our rounds.”

D
arryl sat slumped on one of the beds. He hadn’t felt much of anything over the past week, but now that the broad-shouldered black boy in the baggy jeans had left, he was feeling a little lonely.

Eventually a scuffling noise drew his eyes to the window. A squirrel was climbing up the madrona tree, circling the trunk like a stripe on a barber’s pole. The same tree the other boy had climbed down with the GameMaster that had been given to him by …

It was as if he’d sucked in the vapor from a hunk of dry ice and quick-frozen his lungs. A woman’s kindly voice rang in his head—
The only trouble with him is his brains. Super-smart people always think too much about things
—and his windpipe seemed to constrict so he could barely get a breath. Raking the room, his eyes fixed on the laptop.

For the third time he moved to the desk chair and hit a key. The colorful word MondoGameMaster comforted him.

He made it through the maze, and when the game list appeared, he again clicked on StarMaster 3. This
time his opponent was called NABATW—which seemed strangely familiar, though he couldn’t think why. Whoever it was, NABATW adapted to his moves even faster than HighFlier or LabRat, and in spite of having no distractions, he suffered a humbling defeat, his loyal troops all either killed or captured.

Annoyingly, a new maze popped up instead of the game list. But he negotiated it and quickly reintroduced himself to the mysterious NABATW. So began the most hard-fought struggle of his whole GameMaster career. The battle for the universe raged for nearly two hours until at last, partly by luck, partly by a skillful flanking maneuver, Darryl and his rebel troops forced the Controllers into surrender.

No maze popped up now: just a map of the universe, the setting for a third StarMaster 3 game. The deciding match was as grueling as the last one. NABATW was nothing like the preprogrammed opponent he was used to. Every time he devised a new strategy for securing wormholes and star gates, NABATW absorbed it, so if he tried it again, the Controllers were ready. The tide of the war kept shifting until, after two and a half hours, he and his Individualist legions were cornered near the Crab nebula. As the Controllers closed in, Darryl shot off a desperation vortex ray from his lead ship. It missed its target—the Controllers’ command module—but
triggered the explosion of another supernova behind it. Darryl just had time to put up his defensive shield while the debris from the monster star explosion completely annihilated the enemy.

Lucky as it was, he basked in his victory, grinning at the bosky-green universe. Then the screen went black and dark-red letters bled onto it, forming the name of a game he’d never heard of. It remained there alone, the only choice—DeathMaster—till it was replaced by the image of a face: a hairless, skull-like face with milky eyes and skin as wrinkled as an old paper bag. The face was so ancient, you couldn’t tell if it was a man’s or a woman’s.

Slowly the face faded away, and the screen filled with words.

Suddenly, instead of playing a game, Darryl was reading a science text.
To understand the nature of matter, we must have a theory that accounts for both the qualitative and quantitative observations of matter and its behavior. …
After he’d read several screens full of information, a question popped up:
Lead has an atomic weight of 207.21 and a density of 11.4 g. per cc. What is the volume occupied by 2 gram-atoms of lead?
Applying what he’d just soaked up, he made his computation and typed in his answer: 36.4 cc. The ancient face reappeared, a slight smile on the fleshless lips.

The face vanished; more text appeared: about the
periodic table and molecular bonding and Faraday’s laws of electrolysis. Darryl’s head hurt, there was so much information, but as soon as another question popped up, his pulse quickened, even though there were no Individualists to win over, no wormholes to find. This question was about isotopes. Once he typed in his answer, the face reappeared, smiling again, but this time not quite so ancient, minus a couple of wrinkles, the eyes not quite so milky.

After six sections and six correctly answered questions, the jowls on the face didn’t hang down so far, and you could tell it was a man. After ten sections and ten answers, the face got a facelift, and a few hairs popped out on the head. Just as the face was beginning to seem somehow familiar, a red light flashed in the left eyeball.

Next thing Darryl knew, someone was shaking him by the shoulder: the boy who’d saved him from the punk with the knife that morning. Darryl blinked at him, clueless as to how long he’d been sitting there frozen, sipping the air as if through a straw.

“Talk about lost in space. Too much StarMaster?”

Darryl grunted.

“We thought maybe you’d go for some home cooking. My mom’s going to make her Swedish meatballs.” The boy gave him a friendly punch. “You got a sweat-shirt or something? It’ll cool down later.”

Darryl’s eyes flicked to the bed nearer the window, but he looked away when BJ pulled the battered suitcase out from under it. Mrs. Grimsley had sent someone over to Darryl’s house to get some of his clothes, and they’d brought them back in his mother’s suitcase, which he’d immediately shoved out of sight.

“Cool, a MasterTech sweatshirt,” the boy said. “Come on, Ma’s waiting down in the car.”

Five minutes later Darryl was sitting in the front seat of a Chevy Nova with a woman who introduced herself as Birdie Walker. She wasn’t very birdlike. She took up half the front seat. But she radiated warmth, and as they drove out of Madrona, the shelter’s neighborhood, into the Central District, Darryl felt himself unfreezing a little.