The Secret of Zoom (19 page)

It was almost as if, somewhere deeper inside the rock, there was a strong, broad vein of zoom lying hidden.

How deep did it go? Could she melt it and just walk right in?

But there was a layer of stone over it. How could the zoom respond to the vibrations of her pitch, with all that rock in the way?

Christina looked at the mountain before her. Leo Loompski had said that thoughts had vibrations. Would it help if she could somehow focus her
thoughts
while she sang?

She shook her head, setting the helmet's tubes swinging. Of course Leo had figured out a way to make it work for the plane, but that didn't mean it would work without inner mechanisms and the—

The helmet. The plane was gone, but she still had the helmet.

She touched the long flexible tubes hanging down; she
looked at the couplings on the ends, and suddenly felt like a fool. What did she think she was going to do—plug them into the
mountain
?

She felt a sudden urge to laugh hysterically. Of course it wouldn't work. How dumb, how ridiculous, how absolutely
stupid
, it was as stupid as dancing chickens, as stupid as
math
.

Christina paced three steps in one direction and three steps back, grazing her knuckles against the rock as she turned. She sucked on her hand where it had started to bleed again and put her back against the cliff wall. All right, what else, then? What other options did she have?

She stared blankly into the dark. Nothing came to mind.

Below the cliff, pine boughs shifted uneasily in the night breeze, making a lost, forlorn sound. Christina's wet clothes stuck clammily to her skin, and she wrapped her arms around herself, shivering as the wind picked up.

The thought of Nanny suddenly filled her mind: Nanny, large and huggable, running a hot bath, tucking her into a warm bed piled high with quilts . . .

Christina felt like slapping herself. What was she doing, thinking about warm quilts when her mother was trapped inside a mountain, needing her?

She clenched her hands together and shut her eyes in concentration. She needed a great idea, and she needed it
now
.

After a moment, she found she was thinking of blueberry pie and dry clothes.

Christina felt a slow flush spread from her neck to her cheeks, and she slid down to sit with her face buried in her arms. Of
course
she couldn't think of a great idea. She wasn't
used to real problems, in a real world. She was used to being babied and taken care of and kept safe behind a fence.

Not like the kids she watched through her telescope, who figured out things on their own all the time—new rules for games, stunts on their skateboards, how to find their way in the dark on Halloween.

Not like Taft, who had learned math in spite of poor teachers and hardly any school and had taken care of Danny besides.

Not like her mother, who was trapped but had still sent message after message, never giving up hope. Now it was Christina's turn to do what she could. Which, unfortunately, turned out to be nothing at all.

Christina tried very hard not to cry. She was mostly successful. After a while she wiped her nose and looked up.

The night sky was salted with stars. Somewhere in that bright scattering was a star that had once shone through her nursery window, a star her mother had put in a song. There was no way to tell which one it was, but it was still shining on her, that much was certain.

A lovely thought. Completely useless at the moment, of course. But it gave her a little spark of courage.

Was
her first idea worth trying? Plugging a helmet into a mountain sounded like the brainless idea of a very stupid person, but then she had thought she was stupid at math, too, and Taft had shown her that wasn't true.

And even the dancing chickens, annoying as they were, had
never
held signs in their beaks that said
WAY TO GIVE UP
! and
HOORAY, YOU QUIT
!

Christina gazed past her knees, thinking. The pine tops spread out below the cliff like a restless dark sea, and far beyond, down in the valley, she could see the winking lights of Dorf, like a bowl of fallen stars.

Okay, so maybe she
could
try her idea.

But could she use the power of zoom if she didn't first believe it would work? She couldn't be sure that her song would work through solid rock, or that she could rescue Taft or her mother or the other orphans, or that she could even save herself.

She blinked up at the stars, considering this. And then her little spark of courage flared into a tiny bit of hope.

She could
act
as if she believed it. She could begin by doing the first thing, and she could go on to the next. And maybe, if she kept on going, the belief, or the focused thought, or
whatever
it was she needed, would come to her. At any rate, she didn't intend to fail for lack of trying.

She looked at the stone wall, now completely dark again. Step by step, Taft had said when he taught her math. All right, then. What did she know for sure?

Well, she knew that zoom worked. It was mysterious, but it worked all the same.

She looked at the dangling tubes. The zoom had been drawn up from the fuel tank, through the tube, and into the helmet, where it had been as close to her brain as was possible. Then the zoom had gone back down the other tube and back into the plane.

The mountain had no fuel chambers, no internal switches, no delicate mechanisms. It was crude, raw—just rock and
zoom and nothing else. If the helmet was going to work, the tubes had to go straight into the zoom.

Christina sang a soft, high G-sharp, and scanned the surface of the rock as the threads of zoom grew luminous. Was there any place where the threads seemed to be a little thicker? Could she just shove the tube in somewhere? The couplings would have to come off first.

Christina pulled out the jackknife from her pocket and cut off the ends of the tubes with two sharp motions. The couplings went flying. One hit the canister of zoom with a small
ting
.

She looked at the canister thoughtfully. Yes, that might work. It would be just like the plane, only simpler.

Christina's hands trembled slightly, whether from cold or excitement she didn't know. She dangled the helmet's left tube into the canister's gelling zoom. She pressed the open end of the right tube against the rock wall, a quarter inch into the thickest spot of zoom she could find. And then she began to sing.

A high G-sharp pierced the air, clear and pure, and the zoom began to gleam and soften. Beneath the surface of the stone, thick veins of pink and green started to glow, faint at first and then with more intensity. The liquid from the canister moved slowly up the tube like a milk shake through a straw; it coiled heavily through the helmet and then through the other tube and into the mountain.

The threads of zoom opened up, melted, began to stream down the rock face in a shining skein. Christina pushed the right tube farther in, took a fast breath, and sustained the
tone. She focused her thoughts the best she could, on the melting zoom, on the zoom deep within the rock, on what she hoped was on the other side—her
mother
.

And with that thought came a wave of longing so sharp, so strong, it filled her mind just as the sound of the G-sharp filled her ears, and she shut her eyes and tipped back her head and sang with every ounce of air in her lungs, with all the power and passion and belief that she had.

The mountain trembled beneath her. There was a series of abrupt noises, like pistol shots, and Christina opened her eyes to see bits of the rock flaking away, and the green and pink glowing liquid pouring out, flooding out, it was a
river
of zoom—

CRACK
. The cliff split. The gap widened, lengthened, spread down and across, opened under her feet. The rock crumbled beneath her.

She fell into darkness.

S
HE
was screaming, she was sliding, she was moving with terrible speed down a glowing, brightly colored vein of zoom. It threaded her into the roots of the mountain like a sock through a winding laundry chute and dumped her out at last on a sandy floor, where she rolled and bumped and skidded and finally rammed into something extremely hard. Her head promptly snapped sideways and bashed itself just above her left ear, and everything went black.

Sometime later she opened her eyes.

The face over her was wrinkled, with a faded blue gaze and a kindly, befuddled smile. Above the bushy eyebrows was a nimbus of white hair, and below the dumpling chin was a dirty white lab coat and a name badge.

Christina blinked twice and the name came into wavering focus.

“Have we met?” asked Leo Loompski.

Christina felt the lump under her hair and thought that she must have banged her head pretty hard.

And then another figure came into view, silhouetted by a lantern that hung behind. Christina heard a sudden intake of breath and then a thin arm reached swiftly back and unhooked the lantern, raising it high.

Leo Loompski turned with evident relief. “There you are, my dear. Is this little girl someone we know? I seem to have forgotten her name.”

Christina, flat on her back, looked up and saw a woman's face.

It was a familiar face, one Christina had seen before. It was older now, and pale and unwell looking, but the eyes were just like the photographs, and the hair was still the color of honey.

“Mom?” whispered Christina. She swallowed past the pressure in her throat and struggled up onto her elbows. “I got your message.”

 

For a long time, all Christina's mother did was hug her daughter and cry. But at last they began to talk and share bits and pieces of their lives.

“I thought of you every single day,” said Beth Adnoid. She wiped her eyes, coughing, and dropped a kiss on the top of Christina's head. “How old you were, what your interests might be, what made you laugh. Some days, it was all that kept me going.”

Christina leaned against her mother's side. She pressed her cheek into the hollow formed between shoulder and collarbone, and listened to the quiet wheeze of her mother breathing in and out. It was odd to suddenly have a mother after all these years, but Christina was sure she could get used to it. Something
inside her was deeply contented in a way she couldn't remember ever being before.

She looked up at the ceiling of the vast cavern. She didn't feel quite as closed in and claustrophobic as she had in the other tunnel, but maybe that was because this cave was huge and vaulted like a cathedral. High, high above was an opening, and through it poured the light of the moon.

Around the edges of the cavern hung shaded lanterns, turned down low for the night. Equipment, stacks of papers, counters full of test tubes—all reminded Christina of the cave she and Taft had explored, and indeed this was part of the same system. Her mother had shown her the other side of the cave-in that had buried half of Leo Loompski's secret laboratory.

“There was some kind of explosion aboveground. Lenny had been working up there—who knows, he might have caused the explosion himself—and the rock slide cut off our way out. There was no food, but luckily there was an underground stream that gave us fresh water. You can imagine how thankful we were on the third day when we heard Lenny Loompski shouting to us through the hole in the roof.”

Christina looked up. Moonlight streamed through the hole in a shaft of pure light, pooling on the floor of the cave. Her mother followed her gaze.

“That's where I stand every night and sing,” she said, nodding at the moonlit sand.

“A lullaby,” said Christina slowly. “To the tune of ‘Largo,' from the
New World Symphony
. I saw the sheet music in the scrapbook you started.”

“Did you?” Beth Adnoid gave her a fond smile. “I knew you couldn't hear me—not really—but all the same, I would sing as strongly as I could, straight up at that opening. I liked to think that the breeze would carry the tune to your window.”

So that was how the orphans had learned it.

Christina found it hard to speak. Her overwhelming weariness combined with powerful emotion made her feel as if she were a very small child again. She pressed her face against her mother and shut her eyes. Her mother was so warm.

“Now where was I? Oh, yes—Lennard Loompski. Well, I don't know what he was doing aboveground those three days—”

“He was blowing up your other laboratory and telling everyone you had been in it,” said Christina, her voice muffled.

“No doubt.” Beth Adnoid coughed, turning her face away. “But of course we didn't know that. He lowered a basket to us with food and said he would bring rescuers and lifting equipment and get us out. He told me to send up my wedding ring—it would give Wilfer something to hold on to, he said—and then we waited.”

“And waited,” said Christina, guiltily passing over the subject of the wedding ring.