The Great Interactive Dream Machine (5 page)

“Aaron, you may have crunched your last number. You may have diddled your last data. We don't know where we are. We could be in some other time zone. We could be in some other time. We could end up with our faces on milk cartons. Aaron, we're
missing.”

He climbed to his feet like an old man, which he sort of is. “Come on, give me that leash, Ophelia,” he said. She can nip you and keep the leash in her mouth at the same time. But he got it on her collar. It was a strange scene. Aaron in Huckley dress code with Ophelia on her leash, and we could be in Saudi Arabia or somewhere.

I got up and we started trudging. First one dune and then another. We came to some tall grass bending in the breeze. Aaron examined it, and Ophelia did her business. We moved on. Ophelia pranced ahead, showing off as usual.

Aaron's foot hit something in the sand. He reached down and dug around. Then he held it up: an empty Diet Pepsi can.

“Well, that narrows down the time frame,” he said.

Pretty soon we came to a lifeguard's tower. Then we began to see roofs and finally a sandy sidewalk. We started walking along a street. There were some big shingled houses in long yards under trees. At one place they were having a party. Porsches were lined up outside. Then we came to a public phone under one of those round plastic domes.

“This must be an upscale community,” Aaron said. “Nobody's stolen the phone book.”

It was the Yellow Pages for Netherhampton, Long Island.

We were about a hundred miles from home.

“The Hamptons,” we said. “We're in the Hamptons.”

“But why?” Aaron asked. “Ophelia just wants to go to the park. She wouldn't know the Hamptons from a hole in the ground.”

“Forget Ophelia,” I said. “What time is it, anyway?” We checked our watches. It was a quarter to six.

“Anyway, we know where we are,” he said. “We can take a train home.” We pooled our money to make sure we had enough. “I've got a phone card. You can call home and say we'll be late. And then your mom can call my mom.”

“Why me, Aaron? We're going to have to tell big fibs, because who'll believe the truth? Why don't you call your mom, and she can call my mom?”

“It's my phone card,” he said. So I guess that meant I had to call my mom. It was eerie. Half an hour ago I thought we might be eaten by dinosaurs on a prehistoric beach. Now I was direct dialing via AT&T. Heather picked up on the first ring.

“Muffie?”

“Josh.”

“Why aren't you home? It's almost dinnertime. Mom's beginning to get steamed.” Heather sounded happy.

“I'm with Aaron. I guess we lost track of time. We're ... still at school. We're ... studying.”

“Please,” Heather said. “If I couldn't lie any better than that, I'd never get to go anywhere.”

“No, really. But listen, Heather, was there a power outage in our building?”

“I thought Aaron was with you,” she said. “No, the electricity's on. What's your angle here? Are you going to try to tell Mom you're late because of a blackout?”

Aaron nudged me. “And call Aaron's mom,” I said. “Tell her we've got a lot more studying to do—at least three hours—for a quiz tomorrow in Mr. Headbloom's class.” I hung up fast.

“What quiz?” Aaron said.

 

We found the Long Island Rail Road station without too much trouble. We bought our tickets from a guy at the window and only had to wait a little while for the train.

“Heather says there wasn't a power outage at our building.”

“So?” said Aaron.

“Aaron, you were there. The whole room blew apart. The walls fell off. Your technopolis experienced extreme meltdown.”

He put up a small hand. “That was just our perception of what was happening. It was our cells reorganizing. It wasn't the room disintegrating. We were. My equipment will be fine, but I have a major fiddle to do on that formula. Back to the drawing board.”

“About the formula, Aaron. I—”

But the train roared in, and we got on. Ophelia rode free.

At Remsenburg a few more people got on. A guy in a cap came around to punch our tickets. Ophelia lunged at him but missed.

We didn't get back to Manhattan till after ten. Then we had to get a cab from Penn Station because you can't take a dog on the subway, unless it's a guide dog, which, believe me, Ophelia isn't.

It had really been one of those days. I was wiped out. And I'd had to booktalk Mom all the way through Jack Finney's
Time and Again
to prove to her Aaron and I had been studying for the quiz. And still she wasn't satisfied.

“Josh, don't think you can stay out till all hours. Just don't start with that.”

But Heather of all people came to my rescue here. “Mo-om,” she said, “you don't need to know where we are every minute. Especially me. If you're going to be on our case all the time, we'll end up druggies. Especially Josh.”

I couldn't wait to get into bed. Then I had to shake all that sand out of my pants. Then could I sleep? Forget about it. My cells just wouldn't settle down. Finally as I was drifting off, the truth hit me.

I sat straight up in bed like Aaron on his dune. Heather. I remembered what Heather had said. It was like she was right here in the room, repeating herself. “Two words,” she'd said. “Muffie McInteer.” Heather wanted to spend the summer at Muffie's house in the Hamptons. The one with the servants and the heated pool and the boys on the beach. Parties.

It was probably my fault, but Aaron's formula had picked up not only Ophelia's need, but Heather's too. It was a two-for-one deal. We got Ophelia's body and Heather's wish, which was better than the other way around. Though when you think about it, Ophelia and Heather aren't that different. They both whine. They both think they're great looking. And they both want to go out all the time.

The force field or whatever had reached four floors down to our apartment and Heather's room. Probably at the very minute Aaron was entering his formula, Heather was thinking about the Hamptons, counting the days.

In a way it was more interesting than Aaron's boring computerized schematics of dinosaur days.

But where would it end? I really wondered. Then I was sound asleep.

 

Aaron wasn't on the bus Tuesday morning, missed homeroom, and barely made it to Headbloom's class for the quiz. I know Aaron. He'd been hacking all night, and he'd come to school early to keep on working at the terminals in the Black Hole. He looked terrible. Red hair, greenish face, staring eyes, and stumbling around. He kept running into desks on the way to his.

Class was about to start, but I couldn't wait. As he lurched past me, I grabbed him by the dress code. “Aaron,” I muttered. “One word. Heather. It's Heather who thinks if she doesn't spend summer in the Hamptons, then her life is over. Nobody needs like Heather. Your formula picked up on her.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “I figured it was something like that.”

Which was the thanks I got.

“Meet me in the Black Hole at lunch,” he said. “We're on a roll.”

I decided not to.

Leave Aaron alone. Let him refiddle his formula back to normal and send himself to computer camp. Who cares? Let him fax himself to the moon. He's more trouble than he's worth. He looks funny, and he acts funny. If he wasn't my best friend, I wouldn't have anything to do with him.

Then I realized I was going to have to eat lunch alone in the lunchroom while Terrible Daryl and his peer group made mincemeat out of me.

 

The BOTH COMPUTERS DOWN sign was on the door as usual.

I entered the Black Hole.

Mrs. Newbery wasn't around. Aaron was by himself between the terminals with formula on both screens. “Come in,” he said, not looking around, “but don't think.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” I said, with my back against the door.

“Just keep your mind blank,” he said. “You know, pretend you're in Math class. I don't want us projecting any particular need close to these terminals. They're not state-of-the-art anyway. They're practically vacuum tube.”

Now he was hunched between the screens, one hand on a keyboard, one hand on a mouse. A pointer drifted along and stopped.

“See that digital cluster? A bug, maybe even a virus, is skulking around in that particular part of the formula, but I can't—”

“Aaron, I—”

“But look what happens when I bypass.” The screens blanked, and something else popped up.

“What is it?”

“Just what it looks like,” he said. “A chemical equation.”

We don't do chemistry till upper school.

“It either expresses the sedimentary composition of the K-T boundary or something else. I'm not sure. It could be the chemical contents of a dinosaur's stomach. Who knows? But anyway, I'm getting there. Computer camp, here I come.”

He spun around in his chair. “If it's lunchtime, why aren't we eating?”

“We should have gotten there earlier,” I reminded him. “You know how Daryl—”

Aaron stood up. “Josh, do you know how much tuition our parents pay to send us to this school? We're talking five figures here. We're laying out that kind of money, and we can't have lunch? Please.”

This was tall talk from the shortest kid in class.

“Are we going to let Daryl—”

“And his peer group including Buster,” I said.

“And his peer group including whoever deprive us of basic nutrition and a balanced diet?”

It was a good speech. I wished it was coming out of somebody bigger. I wished it hadn't been half alto. But Aaron was right, and I was hungry.

We started to leave for the lunchroom while we still had the nerve. But Aaron went back to store his formula.

Then it happened.

And this time it hurt.

The walls bulged. The floor buckled. The terminals blurred. I seemed to be seeing Aaron through one of those fun-house mirrors. He'd laid one finger on his keyboard, and it was all happening again:

I went blind for a minute. Pains shot around me where I'd never had them before. Feet, spine, you name it. Somebody had thrown a rope around my neck and was trying to strangle me. Somebody—Daryl?—had me in a hammerlock and was pinning my shoulders. But at least I wasn't falling this time. In fact, I seemed to be getting higher in the room.

Then it all stopped.

There was a little steel-gray haze drifting in the room. At least it was still the Black Hole and not the Hamptons. But why was I hurting so bad?

And where was Aaron?

Not that I was alone. I was hurting too bad to think, but somebody was in the Black Hole with me. At first I thought I knew him. Then I didn't. Over by the computers was this big, red-headed guy. Upper school at least. He shaved. In fact, he needed a shave.

There was something else you really noticed about him. He was wearing Huckley dress code like anybody else. But it was six sizes too small for him. His shoulders were busting out of his blazer. His big wrists hung way down from his sleeves. His pants stopped a foot from the floor. He swallowed, and the collar button on his shirt cut loose and flew over his Huckley tie.

I was still being strangled, but it wasn't Daryl. It was my shirt. My collar button popped too. We both watched the buttons roll around the floor.

“Who—” we both said, except it wasn't my voice.

“Aaron?” I said in my dad's voice.

He blinked, and they were still Aaron's eyes, pink and dazed.

We were both twice our size and trapped in our dress code. I could get my tie loose, but my pants were cutting me in half. Aaron winced and stooped down to untie his shoes. His pants made a ripping sound. He eased out of his shoes, and feet popped out. They couldn't be Aaron's feet. They were about size eleven. There's always a hole in his sock. A huge toe with a thorny nail poked through.

I couldn't bend over without snapping every stitch of my clothes, but I could kick out of my shoes. Then my feet sort of sprang to life, and they were as big as Aaron's, maybe bigger.

“Look at you,” we said.

“Who are we?” we said.

“What have we done?” Aaron smacked his forehead.

I didn't know. I couldn't think. I scratched my chin. I needed a shave. And another thing, we were tall. Aaron was five ten, easy, and I was looking down at him. I was so tall that when I looked down, I got dizzy.