Tom Swift and His Dyna-4 Capsule (5 page)

"No big deal. I outweigh her. But if she does get crazy, if something happens—

"No, nothing’s gonna happen. I’ll just be out of touch for a night, maybe another, and now you know why. The story. Even before my Mom and Dad.

"
Well Tom
. There it is.

"See you, all of you, in a day or two."

A day or two passed.

Another.

Another.

No Bud.

THE TRIP to Niagara Falls from little Shopton was an easy one for TSE TSE, even with its humiliated windshield. Bud took a motel room in a little tourist hamlet with a view of the silvered cataract a couple miles distant. He waited until, as arranged, his cellphone brought Rose Reb to his ear.

"You said a public place, Reb," Bud reminded her. "My room isn’t a public place, not even if I leave the door open."

"I know what I said." Her tone was neither angry nor sad, but oddly
distended
in an other-worldly manner.
Jetz
, Bud thought,
she’s phoning in from the capital of Lower Schizophrenia!

He went on, "So what’s your pleasure, Reb? Dinner somewhere? Casual dress this time, hunh? No tapioca."

She ignored the gibe. "I’ve found a good place for us to meet, just a little place, like a patio. We can walk to a restaurant." She gave him directions to an open-air plaza next to some shops.

"Got it," Bud said.

Before he could go on, Rose Reb interrupted in a sudden rush of obscure emotion. "Bud, I’m—I’m so sorry about—about everything. I broke into your apartment... the windshield... My meds make me kind of obsessive, really out of control—"

"Those are great meds, Reb."

"
I don’t need that!
" she snapped, her mood flipping on an instant. Then it switched channels to maudlin dripping. "Oh, it’s... sad but wonderful. I’m getting married..."

"You told me."

"I haven’t known him long. He can
handle
me. He’s not like
you
, Bud. He can... understand. He helps me make sense of things."

The San Franciscan had an intuition. "He’s the one who pushed you to see me again. Right?"

"He thought it would be good for me. I need to put all this away. I want my life with him to be unencumbered. See? No more past. Cut time off with a knife."

A knife.
Knew I shoulda come packing a repelatron
, Bud thought wryly. He wondered how hard it would be to tune Tom’s selective force-ray to "girl."

"Reb... not to be rude. But you’re not going to make a scene or anything. Are you? We’ll both live through this? Al body parts still attached?"

She giggled—another flip of channel. "No, I’ve swallowed a bomb! You’ll never grow up, spaceship kid. You’ll always be just somebody’s comical sidekick—
Tom Swift’s!
Time has you prisoner... frozen time. Time’s meat locker." Click. "I’m just joking, Bud. You were always so sweet and caring. Your eyes... I still see your gray eyes. Black lashes."

"Still have ’em. Both. See you in twenty, Rose Reb." Bud anticipated a reply, and clicked off the cell to forestall it.
This is what I did to her
, his conscience asserted.
Shut up
, he replied.

He drove to the spot and parked nearby. Climbing out of his convertible, he paused to glance back. "I really need that old bumper sticker," he muttered.

I’D RATHER BE FLYING

"
So much
‘rather’," he said. He wanted to be free. He wanted to own his days—
had
to. Why did life ladle out this indigestible
gruel
?—though gruel wasn’t quite the word.

The plaza was not wide, but was fairly lengthy, narrowing to a sidewalk at either end that meandered among trees and shops. It was new and concrete-flat, with concrete slabs for benches, and planters with sides that swept up in smooth curves like the waves of a nervous sea. One side gave a view of the Falls, brightly lit in defiance of the twilight of day. The other side of the plaza was fronted with silent shops, closed for the evening. As Bud stood looking about, tall lamps came on, making disks on the concrete.

It was public, all right, but the public was absent. An elderly couple crossed the plaza at a shuffling gait and disappeared down the further sidewalk. A young boy clattered through in a dash. Music played somewhere, tinnily; it took Bud a moment to find the hidden speakers. He was alone with the breeze.

He shuffled his feet uncertainly. Should he sit down? But it might be better to meet Reb on his feet...

A noise came out of the distance and grew—the rasp of skate wheels. A skater on a board popped out of the sidewalk behind Bud and glided across the plaza to the far end. He did a little jump-stunt, then whirled and proceeded on his way down the sidewalk. The sound diminished—paused—and rose again.

The skater erupted back into view—a lean tight-muscled guy in his mid-twenties, thin scraggling goatee, woven skater cap with cobwebby hair dangling down. Bud had heard such people described as
drunges
. He spun past Bud on the left, calling out, "Got th’ time, bud?"

"Mm, about seven forty-five."

"Grac’, man." The skater looped back, passing on the right. He popped up on a bench slab, took the length of it, and dropped back down, control perfect. He swerved back toward Bud and braked-up, stopping. He gave Bud a toothy grin.

"Sweet work," said Bud distractedly.
This is the public, I guess,
he thought.

The skateboarder gave a nod and resumed, hopping the end of a bench, with a smooth drop-down. Then he slowed to a modest cruising speed. "Cat gotcher tongue?"

"Huh?"

"Just sayin’—not even a little impressed, man? That I know your name?"

"You do? You recognize—"

"Said it, didn’t I? Dude, I called you
Bud
! Right?"

"Oh," said the youth. "Sorry. I thought it was just, you know, like—"

The drunge did another stunt, using the upsweep of a planter as his launch pad. He casually skate-sauntered past Bud, passing near, saying: "Seven forty-five. Guess that’s when she told you to meet her, hunh, bo?"

Bud’s muscles clenched top to bottom. "Who are you?"

"Just sayin’, bo." The drunge zipped away effortlessly, then sped back. He stopped completely and faced Bud from a distance of a few feet. "Know who I am? Who might I be? Guess it, buddy boy!"

The San Franciscan stared. "Where’s Reb?"

"Wasn’t the question. Stuck? I’m Gar Baxx."

"Do I need to know you—‘
bo
’?"

The boarder’s yellow grin, with gaps, broadened. "Need to or not, you’re gonna." He commenced skating around Bud in elliptical orbits, slow and easy and unnervingly close. "Pretty Rose Reb. Needs a friend. I’m gonna marry her—yeah, I’m the one. Time to settle down. But—

"There’s a code, Bodboy. Respect is owed. C’mon, you and Tom and the whole scringe posse know about
traditional family values
. When yuh’re gonna marry someone, when the hand is given, ring on th’ finger, you
don’t
go visit your ex-boyfriend. Not even to crack-off his car. You don’t leave love notes. You don’t
yearn
. Nope. Dissing ol’ Garton is a bad idea. Secret rendezvous—don’t think so."

"Look," snarled Bud. "She asked me to be here, in public. She thought it would help her end all this stuff from back in S’Fran. It’s not some violin-romance deal. I don’t have that kind of interest in her—"

"Hey!
You puttin’ down the woman of my future?
"

"She said you were the one who suggested all this, man."

Baxx chuckled as he swerved close. "Yeah? You believe what a crazy person says?" He stopped twenty feet away and the grin suddenly dropped off his face. "You’re not walking out of here, Bud Barclay."

Bud had been in many a fight. His fists knotted. "What did you do to her, Baxx?
Where is she?
"

"Aw, not so far away. As the crow flies." Baxx held up a hand. Bud noticed for the first time that his black gloves had small copper-colored buttons on the fingertips—and that wires led along his arms and under his shirt. "Nice. Worksaver. Say, did you know ‘TASER’ means ‘Tom A. Swift Electric Rifle’? Truth. But who needs a taser when you got The Glove?" He began to roll closer, very slow and steady. He extended his right hand. "Shake, dude!"

Bud knew he should run, but hesitated. His own respect, for himself, was being challenged. This was now moose-to-moose. He didn’t like to run. But then again... he
was
a runner. A good one.
Jetz, you can’t win a slugout with electricity!
he reasoned, trying to overcome the sheer maleness of his hormones and flooding adrenaline. He threw himself backwards away from Baxx and began to pivot.

But Garton Baxx was a pro. He knew his four wheels and board. His circling had been strategic, maneuvering Bud into a vulnerable position. Now, as the Shoptonian started to tear out, he heard the board ricochet off the planter near them. The boarder clomped down a couple yards in front of Bud, palm in front of Bud’s face like a stop sign.

Bud twisted and dropped violently, darting beneath Baxx’s arm, then popping up again. The maneuver cost Bud speed. Baxx was already correcting, zooming past and blocking the way, with a laugh.

Bud was corralled in a wild spiral of passes and charges on all sides. He couldn’t break through the one-man line, and he didn’t dare charge his opponent.

He decided to wait for whatever brief moment of distraction his foe might offer. As Baxx deftly flipped around ten feet away, Bud dug out toward the sidewalk and the narrow band of shrubs lining it.
Can’t skate through the tree roots,
his thoughts assured him.

But first he had to
reach
the tree roots. And he didn’t.

He barely registered the metal rush behind him, closing fast and deadly. Then something icy cold brushed the back of his neck. Bud noted, without any particular feeling, that his legs had folded up. He was down on the concrete like a laundry sack. His muscles twitched with shock. He couldn’t rise.

The board rolled into view, stopped. A scraggly head lowered into sight.

Baxx was panting and grinning, his blond hair, greasy with sweat, stringing down beneath his cap. Half kneeling, he extended a gloved hand. "Took a bad one, huh, Bud? Here, bo, let me help you up."

The glove came down on Bud’s bare forearm. And that was it for Bud.

BUD was surprised not to hurt. He lay on his back, on asphalt. There was sun on the other side of his eyelids, but the asphalt was cool, as if the morning were new.

His eyelids didn’t want to come up. He almost had to pry them. Then he looked, and pushed himself up on his palms to look again, turning over and raising his head.

"Okay," he breathed, "okay. Niagara Falls, where are you?"

There was a bad disconnect between eye and ear. He was sprawled on a street, in friendly sunlight, near the line down the middle. It extended off for blocks. Cars were neatly parked along the curbs, next to sidewalks, next to storefronts. Trees spread up and over from the neat square gaps in the walk, in spaces of dirt reserved for them. Telephone lines crossed above in sagging arches, from T-poles, from rooftops. There were streetlights on fluted columns, dignified and old-fashioned, with hanging globes. At the end of the block, a stoplight changed from red to green. The sky was pale blue, cloudless but a bit fuzzy, not a morning after all but a mild and dry middle of a day.

But there was no sound. No car rumbles, no squeal of brakes, no chirping birds, no scuff of shoes against the walkways. Babies did not cry. Dogs did not bark.

Silence.

Bud looked at his arm and saw a pinprick of red. "Injected me with something," he murmured.
Maybe one of Rose Reb’s psych meds
, he thought. Had it made him deaf?

But no. He could hear his own voice, his fingernails against the pavement.

The problem was not him. The problem was the world.

Nothing moved but the stoplight.

He struggled onto his feet, woozily. There were no cars rolling down the street. Only parked cars. No one was getting into or out of those cars. No one was gunning an ignition. The cars were empty. The sidewalks were empty.

There were no people.

"Well," he said aloud, "there’s
me
." He added: "I
hope
there’s me."

Bud Barclay wasn’t the sort of person to say,
Am I dreaming?
He knew he wasn’t dreaming. A drug may have knocked him out, but now he was wide awake.

How long had he been out? "Long enough for it to turn day," he reasoned. Long enough to ship him here—to a sleepy town for late sleepers, or something like it. But how many days? More than one? Several? Had he been forced, chemically, to unremember a week’s worth of events?

He took a step. It wasn’t as difficult as he had feared. He was doing okay.
Muscle boy
, he thought. Then:
high school athlete
. That phrase led him to an unwanted memory of Rose Reb.
What had her lunatic fiance done to her?

He trudged dully onto the sidewalk. Not that it mattered on that lifeless street with no traffic. "
After all, I’ve been just lying in the middle of it for a while.
" Maybe a long while.

He still wore the same clothes; he was dressed for a casual, if tense, dinner. They were wrinkled and stale.
But not on me long enough to cross over to majorly disgusting,
he thought. He felt black stubble on his chin. He checked his pocket, surprised to find that he still had his wallet, his cell, his keys, his cash, even his random change, just as he had counted it into his palm in the motel room. He absently flicked a finger against the watch on his wrist.
Funny kind of mugging
, he thought. But of course, it wasn’t a
mugging
. It was a jealous lover on a skateboard taking out a rival. "And having fun doing it." He envisioned Gar Baxx snickering somewhere nearby, out of sight. Hilarious. Electrocute your opponent, drug him, dump him in some sleeping half-dead town out in central nowhere. Bud remembered reading of a college guy who had returned to his dorm room to find that someone had constructed a compact car inside it...