The Subatomic Kid (29 page)

Since their world had begun running out of water long ago, water was now rationed by the state, but even if he had lots of it, he wouldn’t use it to wash with. Water was for drinking and cooking, and washing was something best done once a week…or once every two weeks if you could get away with it.

The other one was clean too, but Copernicus knew he was stupid. He didn’t seem to have any idea what was going on. He had a vacant look in his eyes as if his head had long ago been emptied of all its contents and he was just left with enough sense to put one foot in front of the other.

But no matter, the pair would be good sport for the bowling match. When they lost they would become the property of the state, as all their predecessors had. Copernicus amused himself thinking about the Off-Worlders being forced to work as laborers. Laborers ensured that his society always had plenty of leisure time, so that he and his clones could lie around and think about the art of thinking, and how it could be improved.

***

A crowd had begun to gather around the lane as Steve sauntered over to the ball carousel. He had the gnawing feeling in his gut that he was today’s entertainment, entering the arena to face the emperor’s elite gladiators, even though the gladiators were pimply-faced geeks.

He ran his fingers through the stream of air that blew out of a vent at the center of the carousel. His palms were sweating, and his mind was racing. The challenge was clear—they had to make every ball count; their liberty depended on it. The only problem was he hadn’t bowled in years.

He watched Hunter join Copernicus at the scoring desk, and he wondered how on earth they had ended up in this ridiculous situation. He scanned the faces of the growing crowd. It was unmistakably eerie—apart from minor variations in skin tone, hair, and eye color, all of them looked exactly the same. It made him want to vomit it was so gross, and it pushed the whole idea of equality into the realm of the sublimely absurd.

At that moment a bowling ball tumbled out of the return chute and dropped onto the carousel. He had never seen anything quite like it before. It was deep blue and gold with streaks of silver running through it, and the odd thing was that the silver streaks seemed to spell out his name.

He understood that he may have been hallucinating; after all, he was under a tremendous amount of stress. But even if the ball didn’t have his name on it, he still thought it was stunning, and if he had to choose a weapon with which to do battle, then this was it.

The ball rolled over and stopped directly in front of him. He felt like a young King Arthur being presented with Excalibur and asked to draw it from the stone. He reached out his hand and inserted his thumb and two fingers into the holes to test the grip, and what followed was uncanny. He would never swear to it, but he had the oddest sensation the ball adjusted itself to accommodate the unique span of his hand.

This truly is an enchanted ball
, he thought, and if ever there had been a glimmer of hope shimmering from the dark despair of a lost cause, this must surely be it. He lifted the ball off the carousel and gauged the weight; it was perfect, neither too heavy nor too light. Having never before ventured into the realm of superstition, he found himself a stranger to its charms and comforts, but nevertheless a welcome stranger whose heart had found strength and resolve in the power of belief.

Stepping up to the lane, he took his opening position, feet together and ball held out in front of him. He gazed intently over the top of it, and an exquisite roar of silence filled his ears as he, the ball, and the pins became one. The transition between concept and conviction is much like safe cracking. Listening to the tumblers fall into place, Steve became convinced that all his senses were aligned and the delivery of the ball was the final twist that would unlock the door to victory.

He stepped forward, employing the twinned forces of momentum and gravity, as he pushed the ball away from his chest and it dropped, falling gracefully and following a proscribed arc measured by the length of his arm from his shoulder to his fingertips. Swinging his arm up to its zenith behind him, he gently added muscular power, and the duo became a trio playing poetry in motion as the ball traced the same arc in reverse, gathering speed and power.

His nimble footwork had brought him to the edge of the lane. Planting his toe immaculately a hair’s breadth from the foul line, he locked the musculature of his body solidly into place, giving extra oomph to the ball as it swung forward on the fulcrum of his shoulder joint.

The last moment was upon him; he crouched to bring the bottom of the ball level with the floor as he released it like a guided missile set to seek and destroy. That was the theory anyway, but it didn’t happen because he couldn’t let go of the ball. Instead, the fabulous amount of momentum he had gathered carried the ball around in a full circle, attached to the end of his arm like a windmill in a gale-force wind.

The crowd gasped in equal amounts of amazement and horror as Steve was tugged off his feet high into the air, then he soared half the length of the lane before landing with an almighty thump. The bowling ball, still held firmly in his hand, an arm’s length in front of him, dragged him along the remainder of the lane and hit the pins with a resounding crash. The pins leapt up in the air as Steve shot beneath them, but having no further to go, he could only lie there as the pins rained down upon him, pummeling him all over.

The crowd stood openmouthed, stunned into silence as the lonely ping of the electronic scoring device rang out and proudly displayed a glowing X on the wall above the dazed and confused chump. It was a strike! And quite possibly the first strike any of them had ever seen with so much body behind the ball.

Steve was a tough cookie, and miraculously his head had been stuffed into the trough behind the pins, and thus had been spared the indignity of a brain-crushing blow. As he stirred, the errant bowling ball released his fingers and rolled away into the return shoot. He dexterously managed to remove himself from the area as the pin-retrieving device descended to search for survivors.

Shakily, he rose to his feet, thankful for every workout to which he had subjected his body and had endured since he was a teenager. It had been his musculature that had saved him from any major bodily injury, and as he traversed the lane in what he considered to be a walk of shame, he was surprised to hear the crowd burst into spontaneous applause, although he surmised it was no accolade for his prowess.

***

When John had disappeared, protesting an inability to deliver a brainy bowling ball, the kids had been worried. Cal had immediately thought John was annoyed because he was telling him what to do, but that really wasn’t the case. He was just making a suggestion based upon his observations. Perhaps he did have a tendency to appear a whit too bombastic on occasions, but he was a guy, and that’s just the way guys are. He didn’t tiptoe around the edge of a problem and hint at a solution—he grabbed it by the throat and shook the life out of it.

Well, that was what Kate had told him he did, and that turncoat friend of his, Tex, had agreed with her. This, of course, had enraged him no end, and he’d wondered openly what had happened to the “one for all, and all for one” attitude they had discussed back at the school. That innocent comment hit home and really put the cat among the pigeons, because feathers flew, and tempers flared, and the two of them virtually accused him of destroying it.

He had never heard anything quite so ludicrous in his life; he wasn’t destroying the camaraderie, they were. Tired of fighting on two fronts at once, he gave up the battlefield and retired to the remote seclusion of his observation point behind the lane. While his onetime friends conspired in whispers a frosty distance away, he licked his wounded pride and ignored them.

When Steve started bowling, and his arm started spinning like an airplane propeller, he knew something was up and he called Tex and Kate over. They arrived to see Steve sail through the air, crash land on the lane, and skid into the pins. It was a moment of triumph, and they all began jumping up and down elatedly, giving the high-five to one another, and shouting “Strike One.” It was a victorious event that buoyed all their spirits, but Cal’s happiest moment came right after that, when they all fell into a big group hug. He was back in the gang again, and he finally felt vindicated.

***

Copernicus smiled long and hard; this was going to be way easier than he thought. “I dig your friend, man,” he said sarcastically to Hunter. “When he bowls, he rolls, with body and soul.”

Hunter wasn’t laughing; this whole thing stank of a setup. What Steve had just done was an absolutely brilliant piece of choreography. It wasn’t bowling in the traditional sense, it was some kind of freeform improvisation with bowling as a theme, and he knew with certainty that Steve could never have come up with that move on his own, not in a million years—he just didn’t have the requisite brainpower. He suspected foul play, and he suspected these pimply Nerds from galaxy geek were behind it. “If you guys are gonna cheat,” he said, “I’m scoring that as a strike.”

“Cool your jets, man, you’re weighing me down,” Copernicus said. “We dig the rules and we dig ‘em deep. This ain’t no gyp joint, and we ain’t into no bamboozlement.”

“Well, you sure could’ve fooled me,” Hunter replied. “I think you guys are into winning any way you can! This whole thing’s a sham concocted to assuage your guilt.”

Copernicus stood up, crossed to the carousel, and cooled his fingers in the air stream. “You ain’t angry at me, man, you’re angry at yourself for falling into our web. You all whine and moan ‘cause you can’t bowl; you should’ve learned when you had the chance.” He selected his ball, a cute black and pink number, turned the finger holes to the top and held his hand poised above it, ready to pick it up.

“In a fair match I could out bowl you any day, pimple brain,” Hunter said.

“Well, this is the only shot you got,” Copernicus mocked, and as he spoke the blue and gold ball rolled into the carousel, nudged the ball beneath his fingers out of the way, and changed its color to pink and black. “Dig the roll man; I strike each time, and when I’m through, your ass is mine.” He laughed as he slipped his fingers into the ball and hoisted it up.

***

Hunter turned away from him in disgust. If it had been any other place, at any other time, he would’ve popped this turd and rolled him into the gutter. But there are times in life when it pays to be patient, and this was definitely one of them. It didn’t matter how much humiliation he had to suffer; there was a chink in their armor somewhere, and he was determined to find it.

“Damn ball wouldn’t let go of my fingers,” Steve complained, returning from his encounter with the pins and shaking his hand.

“You did well under the circumstances,” Hunter praised.

The comment confused the heck out of Steve; he was expecting to get reamed since he had just made an absolute fool out of both of them. Everything was upside down, inside out, and the wrong way around, and if he didn’t know better he would have thought he had fallen down a rabbit hole. “Thanks,” he said uncertainly, “that means a lot.”

“Sure it does,” Hunter bragged confidently. “We’re winning at the moment.”

***

Copernicus stepped up to the lane, brimming with the confidence born of a lifetime’s dedication to bowling and its multi-faceted idiosyncrasies. In actuality, he had more than a lifetime’s knowledge; he carried the game in his genes and he’d known everything there was to know about the game at the age of three.

All he’d had to do was apply the mechanics as he grew, and by the time he was thirteen he was a grand master. It was a rank that entitled him to live the privileged life of a gatherer as their world intersected with others and enticed potential slaves to cross the highway and check out the bowling alley.

In any other world he would have been considered a cheap hustler, and a trader in misery. But laws are created by people with an agenda. In this case universal right and wrong had been tossed out the window, replaced by egotism and greed and disguised as the law of the land.

Copernicus himself was blissfully unaware of the suffering of others, because he had never suffered himself. People like Hunter and Steve were his beasts of burden; they were gathered and put to work doing the unpopular things in society nobody else liked to do. It was the way it always had been, and for him this was just another day’s work.

He sighted the pins; he’d done this so many times before, he could do it in his sleep. He swung the ball nonchalantly behind him; it was so predictable it was almost boring. He stepped lightly up to the foul line, bringing the ball forward with a tremendous amount of force for such a frail looking individual, and released it smoothly onto the lane.

It was a perfect delivery, and everyone watching could tell it was right on course for a strike. But as Copernicus followed the ball with his eyes and ears, he observed a couple of strange anomalies. First, the sound was all wrong…it seemed oddly reversed; and second, rather than rolling forward as balls normally did, his appeared to be spinning backwards so fast that it was actually slowing down.

It was unbelievable! By the time it was halfway down the lane the ball had lost almost all of its forward momentum, and yet it continued to spin faster and faster until it began to leave a smoldering trail of burned wood and varnish behind it. He stared with mounting disbelief as the ball came to a complete halt. The low rumble of its intense backward spin was the only sound to be heard in the whole place.

Then the unthinkable happened: The ball gained traction from the deep groove it had burned into the wooden floor, and it suddenly shot back up the lane like a cannonball. He saw it coming but he was too confused to move. It was all he could do to reach out his hands in a feeble effort to catch the thing, but it was moving much faster than he thought and it hit him solidly in the stomach. The force of it squeezed the wind out of him; and then, adding injury to insult, the ball dropped squarely onto his toe, rolled off into the gutter, and was gone.