Brainboy and the Deathmaster (8 page)

His shivering abated, Darryl wiped his mouth with his PL napkin and followed Mr. Masterly out the door into a corridor with the same thick carpeting and gentle rosy lighting as the bedroom. Between Darryl’s door, numbered 8, and the next, numbered 7, was a glassed-in trophy case. The figurines on the trophies looked like ordinary girls and boys, and Darryl soon got a glimpse through a doorway of the models, sitting around an oddly shaped table in a sumptuous dining hall. There were six kids: four boys and two girls. They all looked cheerful except the youngest-looking one, a girl about his age who seemed strangely familiar. She had curly blond hair, and her eyes looked sad—though this might just have been because they were magnified by thick glasses.

“They’re just starting lunch,” Mr. Masterly said,
leading Darryl past the doorway.

“Is the girl with curly hair from Seattle?” he asked.

“Nina? No, she’s not.”

“Huh.”

At the end of the corridor Mr. Masterly pressed a button and an elevator opened. He stepped inside.

“Coming?”

Darryl hated elevators. He had ever since his cousin Barry’s sixteenth birthday up in the Space Needle. The Space Needle’s elevators were like capsules, and after squeezing into one behind his brother and Uncle Frank, he’d found himself pressed up against a door that was almost all window. As the elevator whooshed upward, seemingly through open space, people oohed and aahed at the expanding view of the city. But Darryl fainted. If the elevator hadn’t been packed, he would have sunk onto the floor in a heap. As it was, he slumped back against his brother, who gave him a sharp jab and hissed, “What’s your problem, wuss?”

“I’m not going to bite you, Darryl,” Mr. Masterly said.

Darryl took a deep breath and stepped in. It didn’t bother him at all: he felt pleasantly numb. Moreover, it was a pretty unscary elevator. There were no windows, and only four buttons. The top button had a keyhole in it; the others were:

E
S
L

According to a lit panel above the door, they were currently on
SLEEP SUSTENANCE
, but they soon dropped smoothly down to
LIBRARY LABRATORY
. There was nothing rosy about L: it was as bright as an operating room, so bright Darryl had to squint as he followed Mr. Masterly into a sleek, eight-sided room. The entire ceiling glowed. Again there were no windows, but each of the eight sides had a door. In the center of the room was an octagonal console with eight computer stations, at one of which an Asian girl with long, lustrous black hair was eating a sandwich. Except for her, and the plaques on the doors and the Paradise Lab screen savers on the monitors, the only thing in the octagon that wasn’t gleaming white was a globe of red glass mounted on a pole above the console.

“Darryl, meet Suki,” Mr. Masterly said.

“Hi, Darryl,” the Asian girl said, wiping her mouth with a napkin.

“Nice to meet you,” Darryl said.

“Any nibbles, Suki?” Mr. Masterly asked.

“Not today, sir.”

“Once you’re accepted here, Darryl, you have the
run of the place, twenty-four hours a day. We have no locks in Paradise, do we, Suki?”

“Of course not, sir.”

Darryl glanced curiously at the elevator, which had the keyhole in the top button, but Mr. Masterly pointed at the next door over, labeled Emergency. “Stairs, in case the elevator breaks down. Though that never happens.”

Mr. Masterly showed him through the third door, marked Books, and it was like traveling back in time. A long mahogany library table with green-globed student lamps was flanked by bookshelves so tall that there were sliding mahogany ladders for reaching the top shelves. The only modern touch was the computers in the study carrels.

“How many books are in here, sir?” Darryl asked, wide-eyed.

“You tell me.”

Darryl quickly counted the books on one shelf, the number of shelves in each case, and estimated the number of cases.

“Ten thousand?”

“Very close. It’s our scientific library.”

Darryl came up with a similar estimate of the number of tapes in the next chamber, which was called Video. The tapes were of lectures and demonstrations
given by the greatest scientific minds of their time. The next room, Bio, was a laboratory where high-powered microscopes were arrayed on stainless-steel tables flanked by shelves holding everything from slide racks and tweezers to glass jars containing dead frogs and pig fetuses suspended in formaldehyde. At the far end of Bio were stacks of cages containing crusty old white rats and what looked like aquariums, except with insects flitting around inside instead of fish.

“Fruit flies?” Darryl guessed.

“Exactly,” Mr. Masterly said.

Next came Chem, another laboratory, with Bunsen burners, and racks of test tubes, and nozzled tanks, and more microscopes, and a device for X-ray crystallography, and setups for chemical experiments with rubber and glass tubes connecting beakers with various colored liquids in them. Here the shelves held brown glass jars labeled with the names of chemical compounds, acids, and elements, along with tanks containing gasses. In the rear of the room was what looked like a big, sunken, stainless-steel bathtub, for mixing chemicals.

The next room, Accel, was dominated by what looked like a gigantic steel beehive.

“A circular accelerator, for splitting atoms,” Mr. Masterly said.

When they came to the last door, marked Snoodles,
Mr. Masterly knocked. It was opened by a stooped old man with a crescent-shaped scar on his forehead.

“S-s-sorry, s-s-sirs!” he stammered, shuffling out in a droopy white lab coat. “I thought p-p-people was at lunch. Want me to cook up some more of that p-p-polliwog?”

“Polymer,” Mr. Masterly gently corrected him. “No, I just wanted you to meet Darryl Kirby. He may be joining us. If you need toxic chemicals mixed, Darryl, or need your microscope cleaned, Snoodles is your man. He keeps things shipshape.”

“S-s-snoodles, at your s-s-service,” the elderly man said, bowing. “Twenty-s-s-seven hours a day.”

“Twenty-four,” Mr. Masterly murmured.

“S-s-sorry, s-s-sir,” Snoodles said, bamming his fore-head with the heel of his hand. “I’m s-s-such a knuckle-head.”

After saying good-bye to Suki and the stammering old man, Mr. Masterly led Darryl back into the elevator, and they quickly swooshed up to E. The most spectacular gym Darryl had ever seen, E
XERCISE ENTERTAINMENT
was win-dowless, too, but bathed in a soft yellow light, as if morning sun was slanting down from the high, scaffolded ceiling. Mr. Masterly introduced him to an extremely muscular man in a gym suit who was mopping the rubber mat in the free-weight area.

“Darryl, Abs. Abs, Darryl Kirby.”

Abs quit mopping to shake Darryl’s hand, nearly crushing it. His biceps were as big around as Darryl’s waist.

“Abs will help you with your fitness program. Won’t you, Abs?”

Grinning broadly, Abs nodded his head, which had the same sort of scar on the forehead as Snoodles’s. After giving Darryl’s arm a squeeze, Abs grinned even more broadly, as if to say that there was plenty of room for improvement there. Then he led them onto a gleaming hardwood basketball court, where he picked up a loose basketball and swished it from forty feet. In the gymnastics area Abs performed flawless routines on the rings and the parallel bars and the pommel horse, never breaking a sweat, and on the tennis court he jumped the net to shake hands with an invisible opponent. In the cardiovascular center he demonstrated the treadmills and stair climbers and rowing machines, and in the strength-training center he ran through the state-of-the-art muscle-building machines. He didn’t jump into the sparkling Olympic-sized swimming pool or the whirlpool bath beside it, but in the track-and-field area he ran a sprint and heaved a discus and threw a javelin the entire length of the field.

Leaving the gym, the three of them passed under an
archway with the word AquaFilm pulsing over it in aquamarine neon. Looming before them was a white ball, over fifty feet in diameter. Above it, suspended from the ceiling, was a platform reached by a two-way escalator rising up like one of those conveyor belts for carrying grain up into grain silos.

“What is that thing?” Darryl asked, eyeing the huge ball.

“Come see,” Mr. Masterly said.

Normally Darryl wouldn’t have stepped onto the narrow escalator for the world, but now he calmly rode all the way up to the platform with Abs and Mr. Masterly. On the platform a dozen clear-plastic containers were grouped like the petals of a flower around a central hole. They looked like big eggs, or small blimps, each about six feet long and three feet high, each with a foot pedal in front, a seat and steering wheel in the middle, what looked like a scuba diver’s tank in the rear, and rotors and rudders mounted on the tails. Mr. Masterly unplugged the front egg—they all seemed to be charging—and lifted the lid on its top.

“Hop in,” he said.

“What are they, sir?” Darryl asked.

“I call them movie pods.”

“Movie pods?”

They were a bit reminiscent of the Space Needle’s
elevators, and normally Darryl wouldn’t have gotten near one. But normally he would have been a wreck just being up on that dizzying platform.

Abs deposited Darryl into a pod as if he weighed nothing.

“The pedal controls rotor speed,” Mr. Masterly said, fastening Darryl’s seat belt. “The whole thing lasts about ninety minutes. When it’s over, just steer back up to the top. If I’m not here, Abs will be. Have fun!”

Before Darryl could ask
what
lasted ninety minutes, Mr. Masterly closed and sealed the pod’s lid. The pod slid forward and tilted down and plopped through the hole into the top of the huge sphere. Suddenly everything was darker than BJ’s basement room at night—and for a second Darryl actually pictured BJ. But BJ seemed far, far away, the inhabitant of another world, and the thought of him slipped away like a space eel.

Though Darryl was all alone, locked in a clear egg that seemed to be slowly sinking in the darkness, he felt surprisingly calm. He experimented with the steering wheel and the pedal. By pressing the pedal, he increased the rotor speed, and the pod seemed to rise. Easing off the pedal decreased rotor speed, and the pod sank.

It dawned on him that the huge round ball was actually a tank of water, and for a moment, as glimmers of color began to dart by his see-through submarine, he
thought they were tropical fish. But in fact they were just flickers of light. The flickers grew brighter; off to his right the water took on a brilliant green glow. Intrigued, Darryl turned the wheel that way and pressed the pedal halfway down. As he approached the glow, it came into focus, becoming a primeval forest full of trees even more exotic than the monkey puzzle in his old backyard. As he neared the treetops, two gigantic birds leaped off a branch and flew right at him, the flapping of their wings deafening in his ears. He jerked the wheel to the left and floored the pedal. The birds whizzed past the pod, barely missing it. Except they weren’t birds at all. They were pterodactyls.

Darryl guided the pod back out into the middle of the tank. He quickly recovered from the shock of the attack of the winged dinosaurs and steered his little submarine toward a reddish-brown glow that resolved itself into a volcanic crater with a bubbly surface. When a jet of molten plasma spat right at him, Darryl jerked the wheel to the right and sped back to the middle of the tank. But before long a bluish glow lured him down and to the left. A lagoon. As he hovered above it, something gurgled; then a bizarre shape broke the surface: the head of a dinosaur with a breathing hole on a bump on its forehead. This time Darryl didn’t flee.

The lagoon supported an astonishing variety of life
forms, ranging in size from dragonflies to bronto-sauruses. In his clear pod Darryl felt as if he was part of the ecosystem, and he got so caught up in every nook and cranny of it that before he knew it, the hour and a half was over and the tank turned dark again, leaving only a ring of red light at the top of the tank. He guided his pod up toward it.

When the pod plopped back onto the platform, there stood Mr. Masterly. He unsealed the lid and opened it.

“But I only saw the lagoon!” Darryl cried. “Can I go back and see something else?”

“You liked it?”

“It’s fantastic! How in the world does it work?”

“Well, the tank’s made of a special nondistorting Plexiglas we developed at MasterTech. The exterior’s sprayed with a special material used for rear-projection movie screens. We use six different projectors. Needless to say, it’s a wildly expensive format, but the great thing is, you can see it over and over without getting bored. Or you don’t have to watch the movies at all. Some of the kids like just to ride around and enjoy the light show. We have some kinks to work out with the sound system, but it’s coming along.”

“I don’t know why I stuck to that lagoon. There was so much to see! Can you run it again?”

“Once you’re through orientation, you can come back any night after dinner.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

“What’s orientation?”

“It basically brings you up to speed on the work we’re doing here. That is, if you’re interested in joining us.”

“The work about … communicating with the dead?”

“Among other things.”

“Are there more openings? My friend BJ’s top of his class.”

“I’m afraid there’s just one at the moment. And if you take it, I’m also afraid you’ll have to cut off ties to those you knew. As I said, we’re top secret.”

Darryl thought of BJ and his mother. But they seemed as distant as the Vulpecula galaxy.

“I suppose you could have one more go,” Mr. Masterly said. “Pop into this pod over here. It’s charged up, with a full air supply.”

Darryl hopped eagerly into another pod. “Thanks!” he said, scrunching down so Mr. Masterly could seal him in.

“C
ops!” Ronnie Johnson cried.

As a squad car nosed into the parking lot, kids scattered in all directions. Big T sprinted up Cedar Street, but BJ headed in the exact opposite direction: due west, across the glinting railroad tracks. A siren wailed. But BJ had Big T’s number-two board, and once he was sailing along in the shade of the Alaska Way Viaduct, the wailing at his back diminished. It seemed only fair that the police weren’t chasing
him.
He’d felt a twinge of envy watching Big T pry the silver jaguar off the hood of that car, but he’d just stood around with his hands in his pockets, an innocent spectator.