The Subatomic Kid (28 page)

Hunter felt sorry for him; he remembered the first time he went toe-to-toe with death and stared him in the eye. It was a frightening experience, but one we all have to face some time or another. Surviving the encounter made life seem sweeter, with every moment more precious than the next.

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Hunter said. “I don’t understand it either. It’s like we’ve strayed into a real life ‘Twilight Zone’. These people are peculiar, their ideas are strange, and their customs are strange. However, these are the cards we’ve been dealt, and we have to play the hand; there’s no alternative.”

“We could get out of here, try to escape,” Steve said desperately.

“We’d never make it to the door,” Hunter said evenly, “and besides, everybody in the place knows about us. I’m pretty sure these geeks are in touch telepathically.”

“Boy, you sure like to indulge in negativity,” Hunter pointed out. “Get that thought right out of your mind, or you’ll just set yourself up for failure.”

“I’m sorry; I just don’t get this fatal bowling scenario.”

“There’s nothing to get,” Hunter commented, exasperated with his wimpy partner. “It’s just entertainment. When our game begins, everyone in the place will crowd around to watch because the stakes are as high as they can go—life or death. Take a look around you—everyone here looks the same. They don’t have an underclass to persecute, and if they persecute one another, it would be like harming themselves.”

“Every culture has its flock of black sheep; it’s been that way since the dawn of time. When we walked in here looking completely different from them, we became their scapegoat, and now we have to prove we have a right to exist by playing a game they’re really good at. Does any of this sound familiar?”

“Yeah, it sounds like ancient Rome,” Steve admitted.

“You see, it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are, or what the game is; it’s just human nature to elevate yourself by putting someone else down.”

“It’s just that Aristotle’s gonna roll a warmer, and I scoped you’d wanna eyeball,” he said with a smile, before he turned and slunk off.

“What did he say?” Steve asked curiously.

“His partner’s taking a practice roll,” Hunter interpreted, as they both turned their heads and concentrated on the alley.

Aristotle, who looked much like his partner, held the ball in front of him and sighted the pins, and then in super fluid motion, he rolled with commanding style, grace and strength. A hush fell upon the bowling alley as the ball rumbled along the lane in a skillfully controlled arc and struck squarely between the first and second pins, demolishing the whole formation with a resounding crash.

“They’re trying to intimidate us,” Hunter said.

“I know,” Steve replied, “I just wish they weren’t so good at it.”

LOST IN SUPERSPACE

John immediately felt badly about wimping out on his friends, but it was too late for him to voice his regret. Every tiny fiber of his being was sucked into the subatomic stream with such violent urgency his consciousness found it hard to keep up with his space and matter self. It was as if he had been thrown into an instant dream state, and was holding on by the tips of his fingers to the back of a fire truck speeding along a subatomic highway.

Gone were the allusions to clouds and birds. This was a Keystone Cops 911 call; he was traveling at speeds so fast all color ceased to vibrate, and everything was reduced to a harsh monochrome black and white, with all the contents of his mind, his memories, and his emotions stretched back behind him in a thousand-mile jet stream.

He was scared; had he transgressed some unwritten law of the universe? Was he being banished for good to an unknown region of deepest darkest space? Or worse, was he being thrown into the bowels of a black hole from which nothing, not even light, could escape?

He was mortified; he had denied he was capable of doing what he knew he could do. Betrayed himself in a moment of doubt, and left his friends behind in an untenable situation to fend for themselves.

He could still think, but he wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, and he didn’t look forward to spending eternity pondering his utter foolishness while chasing his scattered atoms around. It was at that moment he realized the emptiness he was traversing was shaped. Space had always seemed to him to be a massive amount of nothing that went on forever, but he was suddenly aware of a long, slow, lackadaisical contour to it.

He wondered why this thought had surfaced in his consciousness. It certainly wouldn’t help him with his present predicament, but he marveled at the way space curved and twisted into multiple Mobius strips connected by tunnels that assured a swift journey from one galaxy to another millions of light years away.

Perhaps he was preparing himself for his new role as space ghost: John Smith and his traveling circus of particles heading down a wormhole to haunt a galaxy near you in just a few millennia! He wanted to laugh, but laughter was an act that needed a body to get the full benefit.

Laughter and thought are the two truly human traits; they are what separates us from all other animals. He had known people who never thought, and he had known people who never laughed, and although he drew a line at calling them animals, he had to admit they were mere shadows of the humans they were capable of being.

It was set to be an interminable eternity if these were the kinds of things he was going to be thinking about. He wouldn’t even be able to seek refuge in madness because he was just a blob of consciousness floating through space, and he was pretty sure he didn’t have any emotions to plague him. Food wouldn’t be a problem; he didn’t need any. He had all the energy he would ever need locked in every tiny particle of himself. So what was there to do?

“Figure of speech or not, if the mere utterance of a few words turns you into a sniveling coward, then we may as well give up now because all hope is lost,” he roared.

John had never heard him so vexed. “Look,” he declared, “I’m a teenager; it’s part of my job to get under people’s skin. I apologize; I didn’t mean what I said literally.”

“If you don’t mean it, don’t say it,” the Master lectured. “The thought in your head is who you are. This information may save your life one day.”

“Thank you,” John replied, “thank you for everything.” And he meant it. He owed his life to this entity, whether it was in his head or a gazillion miles out in space.

“You are in very serious trouble indeed,” the Master continued in a low and even tone.

John already knew that, so he wasn’t quite sure how to respond. Not wishing to appear flippant or ungrateful, he erred toward caution. “We are,” he agreed, “but so far I’ve managed to deal with everything that’s been thrown at me.”

“You have,” the Master said, “and so far you’ve done a good job. Nothing has been forced, everything’s developed naturally and changes have begun taking place. The natural order of things is gradually being restored.”

“Cool,” John said. It was the first thing that came into his head, and he was genuinely pleased someone appreciated what he was doing. Nobody ever had before.

“However…” the Master began, and John thought,
Well, here comes the butt
; although no amount of coaching on earth could have prepared him for what came next. “…You have jumped worlds.”

He had heard the words, and he understood what each one of them meant; they were very simple and there were only four of them. But when they were added together they became completely incomprehensible. “I don’t know what you mean,” he confessed.

“Do you remember when you were driving the car? You came down the hill, and at the bottom there was a very busy freeway you crossed with apparent ease?”

“Other worlds are created when atomic events take place. On a subatomic level there are always two outcomes to an event. There’s the actual outcome—in this case the exploding of an atomic bomb—and a second outcome is the creation down to the most minute detail of another world in which the bomb does not explode.”

“Yeah,” John agreed. It was a concept he could appreciate because it had happened to him.

“Well, at some time in the 1950s that’s exactly what happened, and this world was created. It’s a World of Science. It has developed completely independently of the world that gave birth to it, and it’s a wicked and evil place.”

“Yeah; they have a very weird bowling alley! Full of very curious people!”

“All of the people who populate that world are clones of the scientists who run it. They run it on a feudal system. Each country is composed of many city states, and the head of each state is a scientist who creates replicas of him or herself to populate his part of the land.”

“This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“No, it isn’t. The scientists of that world understand a great deal about physics, so much so they have almost become scientific magicians. They understand the concept of Many Worlds. It was they who constructed that mythical freeway around themselves, and it was they who learned how to intersect other worlds. They lure innocent victims across the freeway to utilize them for sport, and their sport of choice is bowling.”

“No,” replied the Master, “and anticipating your next question, I do not know how you got there. There is some skullduggery afoot that I have not, as yet, divined.”

“You are reaching too far into the future, John Smith,” warned the Master. “For now you must try to get your friends and your pursuers out of that bowling alley.”

“Our pursuers!” John exclaimed. “Why would we want to rescue them?”

“You all entered that world at the same time; your fates are intrinsically entwined. I’m not saying you should rescue them, but it would be better for everyone if they also got out of that bowling alley in one piece.”

John was perplexed. They had been running away from these guys so hard they had run clear into another world; but now, in a wicked twist of fate, they all needed to run away from the other world. It was mind-boggling!

Cal had been correct; they needed to suspend the laws of physics, and if he had to become a bowling ball, then by hook or by crook he was determined to be the best bowling ball there ever was. He felt his consciousness stirring; it was like wind blowing over the surface of a still lake. Beyond, in the distance, he sensed mountains shrouded in mist. Never before had he thought of himself as a rock, but he knew that from now on he was going to have to be that solid if he wished to survive. It was all very mystical, because he also knew that the deep dark depths of the lake represented his subconscious, and he was going to have to call upon the innate knowledge that lurked there more now than at any other time in his life.

BALLS! BALLS! BALLS!

Copernicus knew with certainty they were going to win—they never lost to Off-Worlders, and these two in particular seemed to be the sorriest pair of wanderers he had ever seen in his life. The big one with the short hair—the one who called himself Hunter—looked too clean. He had no idea which world he was from, but he imagined it must have an abundance of water, because the pompous idiot looked like he used way too much of it.