Lost in Cyberspace (7 page)

“Rub it in,” I said.

“And I'm not writing it down,” he said. “This could be dangerous information in the wrong hands. I'm keeping it up here.” He tapped his temple. “The human brain—”

“Is the ultimate computer,” I said. “Aaron, I'm doing my best, but I still can't buy in. Numbers on a screen, clustered. Visuals. The whole forty-eight-character ball of wax. But how does it get you ... there?”

Aaron looked a little worn, like a teacher after seventh period.

“Let me give you a metaphor, Josh. It's the best I can do. You can fax a letter, right? You can fax a document, right? You can fax a photo, right?” He dropped his voice even lower. “Josh, you can fax yourself.”

I stared.

“You helped,” he said. “You scared me about Buster. You gave me the boost. Adrenaline is a definite factor. I just lined up my numbers with my need and ... went.”

“But you didn't have your laptop with you. How did you get back without entering your formula or whatever?”

“Good point,” Aaron said. “Important point. I didn't have to. I hadn't needed it the other day up that tree in Central Park. Cellular reorganization is a temporary condition. In layman's terms, when your time's up, you're back. It's fairly painful both ways.”

“So you're—”

“That's right,” Aaron said. “I'm bidirectional.”

I stood there, trying to stare him down, trying to see into his quirky brain. Skeptical dies hard.

“How long were you gone?”

“Not long,” he said. “Minutes. Then I was back. But I was locked in here for the night. I had to sleep on the floor.”

“I covered for you,” I said. “I told your housekeeper you were sleeping over. I told her we were putting up a tent in my living room.”

“Nobody older than third grade does that,” he said. “Couldn't you think of anything better?”

Which was the thanks I got.

“Okay, Aaron. Let's get down to basics. Where did you go?”

His eyes shifted away from mine. He'd nibbled his apple down to the core. Also, he probably had to go to the bathroom. “Zero distance,” he muttered.

“Meaning you weren't up a tree again?”

“I was right here in this room. But it was then, not now. Way back then.”

“Aaron. When?”

“Put it this way,” he said. “I've just eaten an apple that I estimate to be about seventy-five years old.” He showed me the core.

 

A shadow fell over us. A voice spoke. “Are you boys losing track of time?”

It was Mrs. Newbery in the doorway. We jumped. “You've practically missed Mr. Headbloom's homeroom,” she said. “If you don't cut along, you'll be late for Linear Decoding.” We started to cut along.

“I'll take my key if you don't mind.” Mrs. Newbery put her hand out. Then she said to Aaron, “Better tidy up before you go to class. You look like you've slept in those clothes.”

 

In Linear Decoding, Aaron was sitting across the room from me. We were reading
The Time Machine
by H. G. Wells, a dead English writer. I didn't see Aaron in Science or Gym. I didn't see him at lunch. He'd be diddling his data again.

This gave me time to get skeptical again. True, he'd vanished before my eyes. But it could have been an ... optical illusion. He could have been messing with my mind.

After school he turned up and said, “Let's walk home.”

“What about muggers?”

“Muggers, shmuggers,” Aaron said. “I haven't been outdoors since yesterday morning. I could use some air.”

As we turned down Fifth Avenue, I decided not to ask him anything. If this whole thing was a scam, I didn't want to fall for it. Then I couldn't think of anything to talk about. We trudged along for a few blocks. Aaron sticks his feet out funny when he walks.

At the Eighty-sixth Street light I said, “We've got another O Pear.”

“Tell me about it, Josh.” But he was listening with only half an ear.

“She's different from Fenella. Way different. Her name's Feona Foxworthy. She's okay, I guess. The funny thing is, Heather likes her.”

Aaron froze. “Heather?” He doesn't have that much of a relationship with Heather. And she calls him Pencil-Neck.

“Feona got Heather into Camilla Van Allen's peer group, so Heather likes her. Feona's horsey.”

Aaron quivered. He pulled on his chin in a thoughtful, weird way. “Tall girl? Long face? Plenty of teeth? Ponytail? Riding hat?”

“That's her. You see her on the elevator or someplace?”

“Someplace,” he said. “Where are they now?” His hand was closing over my arm.

“Heather and Feona?” I said. “Who knows?”

“Yikes,” Aaron said. “This could be the day.” He was so hyper, he was almost doing a dance.

He started running down Fifth, dragging me along. I didn't know he could move that fast. He should go out for track instead of always signing himself out of Gym.

“Where are we going?” I gasped. But he was saving his breath. We almost vaulted the hood of a cab at Eighty-second.

“Whoa,” I said at the light on Seventy-ninth, which has traffic both ways. But he was jogging in place and breathing hard. He was stretching his neck to see down Fifth Avenue.

He wouldn't wait for the light to change. He made an end run around a crosstown bus, stopping a van in its tracks. Then we were streaking down the sidewalk again, coming up on my mugging site. Yellow cabs flowed south, and we almost kept up with them.

Then it was like the world stopped. All the cabs screeched to a halt. So did Aaron. So did I. Cabbies leaned on their horns. Metal crunched from a couple of fender-benders behind us. The cabbies were rolling down their windows and yelling in every language but English.

“Too late,” Aaron said. “And we were this close.”

The cabs weren't going anywhere now. He darted out and sprinted between them down Fifth Avenue. Then we got there.

Two horses—big ones—were in the middle of the street. One was reared up with its hooves fighting the air. Our 0 Pear, Feona Foxworthy, was on it. One of her boots was out of the stirrup. Her riding hat was slipping off. She'd lost the reins and had the horse's neck in a death grip. “Daddy!” Feona shrieked. “Mummy!”

The other horse was stamping on Fifth Avenue pavement, and its eyes were rolling. Connected to it by a rein was Heather. She was stretched out in the middle of the street in a new top-of-the-line riding outfit: velvet hard hat, tweed coat, riding pants, and boots. Some gray snow was sticking to her, so she must have been thrown off in the park and dragged here into traffic. You could tell the horse didn't like her.

A cop and a couple of cabbies were trying to talk Feona's horse down. And they were getting between Heather and her horse to keep it from kicking her in the head.

Heather was gazing glassy-eyed into the winter sky with one arm up because of the rein. The cop and the cabbies were trying to untangle her. But she must have been stunned because she yelled, “ ‘Ere, stand aside, you miserable gits.” Then just as Aaron and I got up to her, she fainted, or seemed to.

“Too late,” Aaron said again. “This is the future I saw from my tree the other day when my numbers were a little off. This was the accident.”

“Whoa, Aaron,” I said. Heather's horse looked at me.

“But I guess we couldn't have headed off the accident anyway.” Aaron gave a helpless shrug. “I couldn't even believe it was Heather at the time. That riding outfit's new, right? She'd never been on a horse before, right?”

“This looks like her first lesson,” I said.

“This was the future I cellular-reorganized into, Josh. I saw all this happen more than a week ago. I was up that tree.” He pointed into bare branches.

“You're not up there.”

“Not now. I left before we got here. I left while Heather's horse was just dragging her over the curb into traffic. I didn't know who the other girl was.”

“Mummy!” Feona was still shrieking as she slid down the side of her horse, or its flank or whatever. “Daddy!”

“Aaron—”

“I'm not going into the future anymore,” he said. “Like I said, it's too big a responsibility. I'm going to stick with going back into the past.”

Mom said, “Feona goes,” and she went, that night.

The last we saw of her, she was lugging her saddle onto a British Air flight. She looked back and gave us a big toothy smile from under her velvet hard hat. “Do write!” she called out. Then she galloped onto the plane.

In the cab back to the city Mom sat with her eyes closed for a while.

“I am getting very near the end of my rope,” she said.

I knew we were going to have to go over it again, even though we'd been over everything already. Heather stared out the window.

“Fenella tried to smuggle you into that
crack house
club where you might have been drugged for life or arrested. Or both. And the two of you followed along like a pair of geese. And Feona was worse. She was practically homicidal. Heather, what was your first mistake?” Mom waited.

“The riding clothes,” Heather said in a sulky, mouselike voice. “On your credit card.”

“I haven't even had my first paycheck from Barnes Ogleby,” Mom said. “And you can't take them back to the store, not after that wild horse—that mustang—dragged you over half of Manhattan Island. And you cut school.”

“Feona said it was the same as school,” Heather mumbled. “At her school, riding lessons are part of the curriculum.”

“That awful girl was all talk. She could have used a few more riding lessons herself. She must have fallen off her horse too often. On her head,” Mom said.
“How's your seat,
my foot. I've come to the conclusion that Au Pair Exchange is a criminal outfit. I'm thinking about reporting them to the Better Business Bureau. I blame myself there.”

If Heather was taking most of the heat and Mom blamed herself, I figured I could relax.

“And by the way, Josh,” Mom said. “I ran into Mrs. Zimmer in the lobby. She wanted to thank us for having Aaron sleep over. I really didn't know what to say since I don't recall Aaron sleeping over. When you can come up with a good explanation for that, I'll be glad to hear it.”

I sank lower in the seat and passed up that great nighttime view of Manhattan: twinkling towers, lit-up bridges. But I had a lot on my mind. Usually I think about now. But I was hung up between the future and the past that night. Way hung up.

 

At school the next day Aaron was in and out of class all morning. He's usually in business for himself, but today he was really hustling. He was late for Mr. Headbloom's Linear Decoding. Swinging past my desk, he dropped a sheet of paper on my copy of
The Time Machine.
It was a Xeroxed page from an old
New York Times.
It was black and white and blotchy, but I could read it.

A dim picture showed the Vanderwhitney House part of the school when it was brand-new:

Cuthbert Henry and Lysander Theodore?

At the bottom of the sheet Aaron had written:

This must mean he thought he'd cellular-reorganized back to the early days of the Vanderwhitneys' house. I missed him at lunch. He was late again for History. When he bustled in, he dropped another Xerox copy on me on the way to his desk.

“Zimmer. Freeze,” Mr. Thaw said. He's Huckley's hardest teacher and the oldest. He should have retired long ago and gone to the Old Teachers' Home. “Number one,” he said to Aaron, “you're late. Number two, you're passing notes. These are both misdemeanors in this class.”

Aaron blinked.

“I'm doing an independent study,” he squeaked.

“Zimmer, we don't do I.S. until—”

“I know,” Aaron said, “but this is about the history of the school. Josh Lewis and I are putting together a program on it for Parents' Night.”

This was quick thinking. But why drag me into it?

Huckley teachers are pretty careful about parents. Even crusty old Mr. L. T. Thaw. He stroked his straggly beard.

“Very well, Zimmer,” he said, after giving it some thought. “I'll follow up to make sure that you and young Lewis make a presentation on Parents' Night. And make it good. The grades of both of you will depend upon it.”

Thanks a lot, Aaron, I thought.

Mr. Thaw went back to the lesson. We were reading up on the presidents of the United States. At least Mr. Thaw was. He could probably remember most of them personally.

I had time to glance over Aaron's latest Xerox copy. It was a clipping from a 1923 New York Times: