Twistor (37 page)

Another afternoon storm was in full force in the world beyond the treehouse door-hole. There were pounding gusts of wind, and it had been raining hard for the past few hours. The tree groaned faintly in the wind. David had worried that the spherical hole carved by the twistor field might have weakened their tree to the point of collapse. But on consideration, he realized that the width of the treehouse cavity spanned less than a third of the tree's full diameter and took away a maximum of ten percent of the tree's cross section. It was probably OK.

When the rainstorm had blown up after lunch, they had quickly moved anything up into the treehouse that might have been damaged by wind or rain. After that, except for brief trips to the latrine, David and the children had stayed in the treehouse. They were relatively warm and dry, and a few lighted candles provided dim illumination. They'd eaten an early dinner, feasting on some of Melissa's smoked fish while it was still warm. But now the children were growing whiny and getting on each other's nerves again. And certainly on David's.

David sat at the big worktable. In the reflector-enhanced light from one of their new candles, the circuitry of the new mini-twistor prototype was slowly taking form. He was making wiretrap connections between small scavenged components, IC circuit chips, resistors, and small disk capacitors mounted on a rectangle of perf-board, perforated brown plastic that stood on four corner screw-legs.

He
stopped. Consulting his crudely pencilled circuit diagram, he realized that his last four wirewrap connections had been off by one pin. Damn. They'd have to be clipped out and rewired. He put the breadboard down on the table and rubbed his eyes. Time for a break.

'Hey!' he said, turning to the children. 'I think we've worked enough for now. What can we do that's fun? How about some songs?'

Jeff immediately turned from his argument with Melissa and walked over. 'What's today, David?' he asked.

David looked at his digital watch. 'Today's Wednesday, October twentieth, and it's six-thirty-two P.M. and twenty-three seconds, Pacific Daylight Time.'

'Then this is the day for our story,' Jeff said seriously.

'Yes, you should tell us more of the story about Ton, David,' Melissa added.

'You're absolutely right,' said David, 'this is story day.' They arranged themselves in a circle, the children perched on their sleeping bag and David sitting on the floor in front of them.

'OK,' he said, 'do you remember Ton discovered how to make the Urorb work?'

Two heads nodded.

'Well,' said David, 'Ton next picked up the strange pointed weapon, the Pricklance, and examined it. The book had implied that it was to be used with the Urorb. He thought about this, trying to imagine how that might be done. Then he lifted the crystal sphere with his left hand and looked into it. Ton was growing increasingly hungry, and he thought of the wonderful red apples that should now be ripening on the large old tree behind his father's forge. The tree, laden with apples, appeared before him in the Urorb. Almost reflexively, Ton lifted the pointed rod and made as if to spear an apple on its tip. He felt the weapon grow heavier, and when he looked, there was a beautiful red apple skewered on its pointed end.

'
When he placed the weapon on the rug and touched the apple, he found that it was not the illusion he was expecting. Instead, it was quite real. He wasted little time in eating it, core and all, before continuing with his investigations. After a few more apples had been speared and eaten, Ton decided on a broader menu. He recalled the many trips that he had made with his mother to the vendor stalls of the local village market. He concentrated on his memories until he could see the village marketplace in the Urorb. It was late afternoon and most of the vendors had left for the day, but one persistent old peddler was still hawking broiled sausages. Ton speared two of them, promising himself to repay the old man when next he had the opportunity. He completed his "shopping" expedition by carefully snagging the tie-strings of a leather sack of goat's milk. Shortly thereafter, his stomach pleasantly full, he took a nap.'

David studied his audience for signs that they might follow Ton's example. They were now lying on their sleeping bag, but appeared wide awake. He swatted at one of the blue flying insects that had taken up residence in their treehouse. It was a clean miss.

'Ton wasn't sure how long he had slept. When he awoke, he found that the Urorb would give only dim light, and he feared that he had worn it out with his "shopping expedition." But when he visualized his mother's kitchen, now lamp lit, the Urorb's light became reasonably bright. He realized that it was night in the outside world. The dimness of the Urorb mirrored the darkness outside.

'Ton tried to visualize the cottage of Zorax but could see only dimness, and he concluded that it was dark within and that no one was home. Then he remembered his brief exchange with Elle, the girl in the tower. He had never seen her face, but he remembered the lower part of the tower quite well, and presently through the Urorb he could see it faintly in the starlight. There was a light in an upper barred window. Through successive visualizations
which
made his head hurt behind the eyes, he was able to approach the window, to see inside, and finally to pass his viewpoint through the bars and view the room.

'Elle was there, and she was crying. It was the first time that Ton had actually seen her. He realized that she was very beautiful. He felt himself falling instantly in love with her and longed to speak to her. But though he called to her, it was in vain; she didn't hear him. He examined the steel-banded door of the tower and concluded that he had no way of opening it for her with his weapon. Finally he had an idea. He tore a blank page from the back of the leather-bound book. Using his own blood for ink and the point of the weapon as a pen, he wrote a brief note identifying himself and telling her that he was watching over her and would save her if he could. He folded the note, skewered it on the tip of the weapon, and, using the Urorb, he dropped it in her lap.

'He watched as she read the note and was delighted that she seemed to understand and to look around the room, smiling. Most of the rest of the night Ton watched over Princess Elle while she slept.'

David surveyed his audience again. This time they were, like Princess Elle, asleep.

It was eleven P.M. and very dark when his watch alarm awoke Flash. He was kind of groggy from the pills, but it wasn't too bad. Their time-released stimulant component made him feel fairly alert. He had just an hour before attempting the meeting with Vickie. In the darkness he slipped out the back entrance of the old house and headed west toward Fremont, putting distance between himself and Wallingford. He crossed over the Ship Canal on the Fremont Bridge, then ascended Queen Anne Hill using side streets and alleyways until he reached Aurora, six lanes of fast north-south traffic. There he connected with a bus to downtown, then transferred to another bus that dropped him off in the Broadway district.

Circling
around through a parking lot on Tenth Street, he entered the Broadway Arcade by the rear entrance next to the Washington State Liquor Store fronting on the parking lot. He climbed the back stairs to the upper level, a balcony mezzanine containing vacant shop space relieved by a record/video store, a hair stylist, a travel office, and a law office. At midnight these were all closed, and he was able to look down unobserved on the Pizza Haven at the first-floor rear of the Arcade.

His sister wasn't there, but neither was anyone who looked like Megalith muscle. Flash settled down in a shadowed doorway to wait. The pizza smells from below pulled at his empty stomach, but he dared not go down to buy any. He "sat listening to the exotic sounds from the arcade video games just below him and for a while imagined that he was playing the games himself.

He was really worried about his sister. After his mother had died of cancer when he was ten, Vickie had been the closest thing to a mother he'd had. He should have taken care of her. Those Megalith guys were nothing to mess with, and if they had snatched Sis . . . He shuddered. He was responsible. He had known they were trouble, and he should have talked her out of her crazy idea. But instead he fell in with the game of cracking their system like some little kid playing a video game. And now they had Sis. His mind whirled, constructing absurd baroque schemes for heroically rescuing his sister, for destroying the Megalith Corporation. He wiped a bit of moisture from the corner of his eye. This was real life, and he was just a kid. What could he do, really, except run away and hide out? He felt very low, depressed.

When his sister had not appeared at the Pizza Haven by one A.M., Flash decided to give up. His head felt like it was filled with mud. He walked to the opposite end of the arcade's balcony and waited by the big upstairs window until he could see a number 9 bus at the traffic light two blocks to the south, heading north toward
him
along Broadway. Then he sprinted to the pay telephone in the corner near the men's room and dialed 911.

When the emergency operator answered, Flash said, 'Please don't interrupt. My life's in danger, and I can't give my name. I have information that people working for a Mr Martin Pierce of the Megalith Corporation have kidnapped Victoria Gordon, a UW physics graduate student, at about six P.M. today. This kidnapping is related to the disappearances of Dr David Harrison and the Ernst children. Please notify Agent Bartley of the FBI, Seattle office. Goodbye.'

He hung up and ran down the stairs and out the front of the building, stepping onto the bus just as the door was closing. He showed his bus pass and scrunched low in a seat as the bus headed north, wondering where he could spend the night. In the past six weeks as a new kid at Roosevelt High he hadn't made any friends whom he knew well enough to ask for help. He had many good friends on the boards, but he didn't know their addresses or even what they looked like.

The bus angled downhill beside and under the I-5 freeway to where Eastlake crossed the Ship Canal, then halted at the University Bridge as the red-and-white barriers went down. The bridge operator, who Flash could see in his little brick tower, was raising the bridge for boat traffic. The span began to lever upward.

Hey, David lives around here, Flash remembered. He walked to the front of the bus and asked the motherly bus driver if she would please let him off, that he'd fallen asleep, missed his stop, and would have to walk a long way back. Looking straight ahead, she explained that Metro regulations did not permit passengers to exit between bus stops. Then she looked across at him, smiled, and the door opened. 'Oops, must have hit the wrong button,' she said.

Rash
smiled, waved his thanks, and exited. He threaded his way to the walkway through the stalled traffic waiting for the bridge.

He walked south along the bridge walkway, watching the sailboats go past, and then turned east to walk down through the parking lot of the Red Robin hamburger place next to David's apartment. Circling around back, he climbed through the steep brushy slope to David's well-remembered deck that faced north across the Ship Canal to the U-district. As he'd expected, the deck door was locked.

He removed the long wire-thin Allen wrench that he always carried in his billfold and expertly picked the lock of the sliding glass door, letting himself into David's apartment. It was dark in the apartment, but he remembered the layout from their visit last month. He headed for the small kitchen.

When he opened the refrigerator door the light inside came on, and he could see that David had a good supply of food. He selected a butter plate, half a carton of milk, a package of salami, a jar of dill pickles, and a chunk of sharp cheddar cheese from the shelves, then turned to put the food down on the kitchen table behind him.

He almost dropped the load of food when he saw the thing on the table. It was a white paper, official-looking with a seal and 'FBI' in bold letters across the top. Putting the food down carefully, he studied the paper in the pale light streaming from the open refrigerator. The document stated that the apartment had been legally entered and searched by agents of the FBI in pursuance of an authorized investigation. It said that they might return, and it gave a telephone number to call for more information. Spaces for the code number of the search warrant and the case number were filled in with blue ball-point at the bottom of the page, and the document was signed by one Agent Cooper.

Flash
felt scared. This was the one place he'd considered safe, and it had already been searched by the FBI. And they might be back. His mind raced. Would they come back? Only if there was reason to believe they'd missed something, or if there was something new to look for. It was probably OK for him to stay here, at least for a day or so. Until the food ran out. He made himself two sandwiches, ate them quickly along with three of the pickles, and finished off the milk.

He used the toilet without flushing it. Then he flopped on the bed still wearing his clothes and was immediately asleep.

Vickie came suddenly awake. Where . . . Then she remembered the phone call from William and the men who'd been waiting outside the door of the basement workroom. Her head hurt, and there was a bad taste in her mouth.

She opened her eyes and looked down. She seemed to be trussed up in a straitjacket. She wiggled erect and put her legs over the edge of the bed. Well, she could still kick. She studied the room. Bare, hospital-like, with a table, chair, and bed. The room had a window, a doorway to what looked like a bathroom, and another closed door. High in one corner was a small box. She wondered what it was.

She eased off the bed. A bit shaky, but she could walk. She went to the window and nudged the curtains aside with a knee. She saw barred windows and a frosted pane circled by aluminum alarm tape. She considered whether it was possible to break the window and saw through a strap with broken glass before the alarm brought interference. Probably not.