George Brown and the Protector (2 page)

He was turning to go when suddenly he noticed
a glimmer in the grass at his feet. Kneeling down he saw a
roundish, clear rock that sparkled in the sunlight. Fascinated,
George saw that he could see right through the rock as if it were
clear glass. The rock was about an inch thick.

He reached out and touched it. Instantly, he
felt an electric shock run through him from head to toe. He pulled
back in alarm. The rock lay in the soil, sparkling and winking up
at him. Then he quickly reached down and picked it up. It caused a
strange, tingly feeling in his hand and fingers. In spite of the
warm day, the rock was perfectly cold, like an ice cube. After
staring at it for a moment, George put the rock in his pocket. It
was time to go home.

While riding his bike home, George could feel
the rock pressing coldly against his leg. He had to reach into his
pocket every once in a while and move it from spot to spot to keep
his leg from freezing.

When George got home his mother was overjoyed
to see him, but not as pleased when he described the gray ball he
had seen half buried in the field. “Promise me you’ll never go back
there alone,” she said firmly.

“Aw, mom,” said George. “It’s just a big,
ugly ball in the ground. It can’t hurt me.”

“Promise me!” she said firmly, through pursed
lips. Ever since his father disappeared, she had distrusted
anything strange or unusual that George came across, and made him
promise to stay away from it if possible. He knew there was no way
of getting around it. “Oh, all right,” said George with a sigh.

In a strange way however, he was secretly
glad that she had made him promise to stay away from it. While a
strange fascination about the ball seemed to draw him to it, he had
to admit that he wasn’t sure he wanted to go back there because of
the eerie, cold feeling that seemed to cling to it.

As George went to his room he took the
little, clear rock he had found out of his pocket and stared at it
once more. It was still cold as ice, and made his fingers tingle.
At times it almost seemed to glow.

He was glad he hadn’t told his mom anything
about it. She would probably have insisted that he get rid of it,
just like she had forbidden him to go back to the fallen star. But
there was something strange and intriguing about the rock that made
George feel like he had to keep it. He looked carefully at it for a
minute. Even though it was clear as glass, he noticed that shadows
seemed to flicker across it at times. Finally, he put it back into
his pocket.

Anyway, he told himself, it was just a rock.
There was nothing too unusual about a boy finding a rock and
bringing it home.

Little did he know how wrong he was.

CHAPTER 3: Mid Summer Exams

“George. It’s time
to go. Are you ready?”

George was in his room, working on a model
airplane.

“Sure, mom. Be there in a minute.” He kept
working on the model. The last thing in the world he wanted to do
was go, but he knew he had no choice.

Midsummer exams. The most cruel, disgusting
thing that anyone could have dreamed up. Mr. Smith, the school
principal at Bartletville Middle School, had come up with the idea
a few years ago of giving a test to all of his pupils in the second
week of July, to see if they were retaining what they had learned
over the previous school year. Every parent in town had been
excited about the idea, but to the students themselves, test day
was like finding a big spot of mold on your sandwich after you had
already eaten half of it.

“George!” called his mother again. “Come on!
You’re going to be late!”

“All right,” answered George wearily, putting
down the model airplane. He knew there was no way of avoiding it.
As he passed his dresser on the way out of his room, he noticed the
clear rock he had found at the fallen star. It sat there silently,
seeming to beckon to him somehow. He picked it up. It felt cold as
always, and again caused his fingers to tingle. He put it in his
pocket, then went out to meet his fate.

The tests were every bit as disgusting as
George had expected them to be. The history portion was full of
questions about Lewis and Clark that George struggled with. He
didn’t do much better in the science portion on earthquakes. But
all of that was easy compared to the algebra questions in the math
portion of the test. George just sat in helpless frustration,
looking at question after question that he couldn’t answer. They
hadn’t covered this last year in school! How could he be tested on
something he had never learned?

As George sat staring helplessly at the math
questions on his desk, he suddenly realized there was something
very hot in his pocket. Reaching inside, he found that it was the
clear rock from the fallen star, which had been cold as an ice cube
just a short time before. George took the rock out of his pocket
and put it on his desk. It was almost too hot to touch. Then he
went back to trying to answer—or rather, guess—the impossible math
questions.

After making a few wild guesses, George moved
the rock and turned the page. The page was crinkly and wouldn’t
stay down. George slid the rock over the page, on top of some of
the questions. It made a good paperweight.

George was staring absently at the rock,
trying to decide what to guess on question 13, when he suddenly
noticed that he could see numbers on the page through the rock. At
first he assumed he was just seeing the math questions on his test,
but when he looked closer, he realized that there were other
numbers as well. In fascination he moved the rock—which was still
very hot—across the page. Whenever he moved it over a test
question, he saw not only the question itself through the rock, but
the answer as well! When he moved the rock away, the answer
disappeared.

This was impossible. How could a rock answer
math questions? George’s hand was trembling, even though it was not
cold. This was clearly no ordinary rock. What was it? Why had he
been drawn to it, and felt such a strange fascination every time he
gazed through it? Could it hurt him? Was it his for a reason?

George heard a noise from the front of the
class. Mr. Dalton, the teacher giving the test, was staring at him
in an unfriendly way. Quickly George picked up his pencil and went
to work on the math questions. At first he set the rock aside and
went back to trying to guess the answers. But the rock almost
seemed to beckon to him to use it, and soon he was sliding it
across the paper over the questions he did not know, rapidly
writing down the answers he saw through it.

Then a sudden thought occurred to George.
What if the answers were wrong? After all, how could a rock do
math, or know what the right answers were? Flipping back the page,
George moved the rock over the easiest question, the only one he
felt reasonably certain he had gotten right. He could see the
question and his handwritten answer through the rock. He then moved
the rock to the next question, one he had guessed at. This time he
saw not only the question and his handwritten answer through the
rock, but a red line through his answer and the correct answer
written next to it!

George stared at the rock again. It had
corrected his answer! This was impossible. But impossible or not,
there was the corrected answer in front of him. Slowly, George
wrote down the correct answer, then after correcting a few more of
his first guesses, flipped back to the page he had been on. He
continued to work his way through the test, writing down the
answers he saw through the rock.

This was definitely better than guessing.
Suddenly a new thought came into George’s mind. Was this cheating?
After all, he was being helped to answer questions he otherwise
could not have done. George pondered for a moment, not sure what to
think. Finally, he went back to answering the test questions. All
he knew was that he had never studied any of this in school last
year and he didn’t know any of the answers, or even how to do this
type of math. He finished the entire math portion of the test just
as it was ending.

While waiting for the next part of the test
to start, he stared at the rock in fascination. Clearly this was no
ordinary rock. But where had it come from, and why had it come to
him?

The next section of the test was spelling,
one of the few subjects George felt confident about. Once the test
began, he immediately moved the rock over the first misspelled word
to see what would happen. All he saw through the rock was the same
misspelled word. He tried the next one, and the next. The result
was the same. There were no answers. George also noticed that the
rock was cooling down, and was no longer as hot to touch, although
it still caused his fingers to tingle. He wrote down a wrong answer
to one question and moved the rock over it. There was no correction
this time.

What could it all mean? Could the rock do
math, but not spelling? Or had it just decided to give no more
answers for the day—if a rock could decide anything. With a sigh,
George pushed the rock aside and began working on the misspelled
words. He didn’t have time to try to figure out the secrets of the
rock now.

Spelling was the last portion of the test, so
George didn’t have a chance to try it out again. When the test
ended, he put it back into his pocket. The rock was once again as
cold as ice. George didn’t know what it all meant, but knew that he
would try out the rock on everything he could think of when he got
home.

Over the next several days, George tried the
rock on everything. He held it over the crossword puzzle in the
newspaper, but saw nothing underneath (except the empty crossword
puzzle, of course). He held it up to the TV screen during game show
questions, but never saw anything different through it. He got out
one of his dad’s old college algebra books and held it up to the
questions, but there were never any answers underneath. He held it
over newspapers and magazines, books and ingredients labels on cans
of food. Nothing. He even held it up to Door Jam’s eye and to the
back of his sister’s head (when she wasn’t looking) to see if he
could see any evidence of intelligent life through it. But other
than a twinkle in Door Jam’s eye, he saw nothing out of the
ordinary through it either time.

'What could it be? he asked himself again and
again. Why would it show him the answers to his midsummer math
exam, but nothing else? Why was it always cold as ice, but had been
hot during the math test when it gave him the answers? More than
ever, George wanted now to go back to the fallen star where he had
found the rock, to see if there were any other rocks like it, or
any clues about what it was or where it came from. But his mother
had again forbidden him to go there after she read an article in
the newspaper that scientists from the university had found it, and
were saying that it contained strange trace elements that even they
could not identify.

CHAPTER 4: The Dream

The third night
after the midsummer exams, George had the dream again. It was
always the same, and it always left him feeling confused afterward.
It had come to him often over the last year, ever since his father
had disappeared.

In the dream, he saw his father climb through
the window of his bedroom, come over next to George and sit down on
the edge of his bed. He didn’t say a word, and even though George
wanted to cry out, to call his name and jump up and grab him, for
some reason he couldn’t speak or move. His father then took
George’s right hand into his own hands and silently began writing
on George’s palm with his finger. George could never tell what he
was writing.

This went on for some time until George’s
father abruptly stopped, then walked over and climbed out the
window and disappeared, all still without saying a word. After
this, George always woke up. He would always jump out of bed and go
quickly over to the window, but his father was never in sight.

George had mixed feelings about the dream.
Part of him enjoyed it, because it allowed him to spend a few
minutes with his father again. But there was also something eerie
about it that made George feel uncomfortable. Maybe it was because
his father always looked so sad. Or maybe it was the strange,
tingly feeling he always felt while his father was writing in his
hand, a tingling that was uncomfortable and almost painful.

It was a different kind of tingling than when
he held the clear rock he had found by the fallen star. Yet
somehow, it was almost the same.

George lay staring at the ceiling for some
time after the dream, unable to go back to sleep. The dream had
seemed so real. It always did. Had his father really been there? It
would be both frightening and comforting if he had.

Suddenly, George noticed that there seemed to
be a glowing light radiating from somewhere near the foot of his
bed. Fearful yet curious, he sat up and looked over the edge of his
bed to where the light was coming from. It seemed to be glowing in
his pants pocket. Then George remembered that he had left the rock
in his pocket when he went to bed.

Slowly he got out of bed, reached down and
pulled the rock from his pocket. It was hot and glowing brightly,
but was not too uncomfortable to hold. As soon as he picked it up,
George felt strangely drawn to the window of his room. He stood
there for several minutes, staring out at the twinkling stars while
holding the glowing rock in his palm.

Suddenly, as he was gazing at a particularly
bright star, a very strange thing happened. George’s vision seemed
to zoom right out into space, as if he were looking through a high
powered telescope that was focusing on a distant object with
tremendous speed. The bright star he had been looking at grew
rapidly larger until George realized with a shock that it was not a
star at all. It seemed to be a spacecraft of some sort that was
glowing softly in the blackness of space.