The Subatomic Kid (30 page)

As Copernicus teetered around like a one-legged drunk, not sure whether to fall over or howl with pain, Hunter and Steve leapt from their seats with their hands in the air shouting, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”

Aristotle rushed to aid Copernicus in his moment of doubt and pain as the crowd, who had no formula with which to compute the aberrant behavior they had just witnessed, remained mute and unmoved—a state that differed little from their normal behavior.

***

Behind the lane, Cal, Kate, and Tex danced around in triumphant ecstasy, shouting: “Strike two, strike two, strike two.” It was all working so perfectly, and everyone in the bowling alley was flummoxed by the strange behavior of the balls.

“I’m really sorry I didn’t believe in your idea at first,” Kate told Cal, “but I do now. This is without doubt the best bowling match I’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah, you did good, buddy,” Tex yelled, slapping him on the back and knocking the wind out of him. “They should make this kind of stuff compulsory in this game, and then, heck, I might even take it up myself.”

Cal beamed; he knew that sometimes you had to hit a sacrifice fly for the team, and it wasn’t until the ball was caught that the runner could tag and try for home. That was what John had done: he’d hit a sac-fly, and hopefully, they were all tagging up in preparation for the run home.

BALLS TO THE WALL

Steve stepped aside as Aristotle helped Copernicus back to his seat. Hunter was beginning to detect the unmistakable waft of blood on the air, and he eagerly sought the opportunity to rub some salt into the wound. “I’m guessing there was a little too much backspin on that ball, Copernicus, old buddy,” Hunter said, employing the double insults, criticism and extreme familiarity to drive home his barb.

“You’ve been messing with my ball, man,” Copernicus wheezed painfully.

“Oh sure, that dog hunts!” Hunter laughed. “I never even saw your ball, so how could I mess with it?”

Copernicus needed a scapegoat, and he needed one fast. To lose to Off-Worlders was tantamount to treason; it meant spending the rest of his life doing the hard labor they would have done. He was staring down the barrel of a gun he’d turned on himself. “I don’t know how,” he rasped. “I just know my ball never acted that way till you showed up.”

Hunter knew he was getting under Copernicus’ skin because he’d begun to lose his stupidly affected manner of speech, and he was beginning to sweat. “I think you’re getting nervous because we’re winning,” Hunter divined correctly.

“You’re not winning,” Aristotle chimed in. “Nobody’s winning.” Hunter scrutinized the twerp and he was astounded. Couldn’t anybody around here speak in a regular accent? From the few words he’d heard, Aristotle had a dialect that landed somewhere between French and German: Swiss! That was it, land of chocolate, snowcapped peaks and hidden cash.

“Well, let’s put it this way…we’re the only team that’s hit the pins so far, and for that reason alone we’re winning.” He had spelled it out using kid-in-the-schoolyard logic that was hard to argue with.

“Well, I’ll show you who can hit the pins,” Aristotle sniped, crossing to the carousel.

That accent was messing with Hunter’s mind. It wasn’t made for greasy-haired, pimply beatniks; it was only suitable for old men sitting behind desks, peering over pince-nez glasses, adding up rows of figures while drinking hot chocolate, and occasionally glancing outside to meditate on the snowflakes.

“Hold on, dairy milk,” Hunter said. He was looking for a good taunt with Swiss overtones, and it was the best he could do. “I believe it’s my roll.” He gathered himself up like John Wayne and sauntered over to the carousel with the most intimidating manner he could muster.

Aristotle tried to outstare him, but he withered under Hunter’s superior gaze. “We can both roll at the same time,” he muttered as he reached for his ball.

Hunter was pleased. He never really had a plan for dealing with difficult situations; he liked to let them unfold and improvise with whatever came along. It was the bebop music of life. Like Charlie Parker riffing on a saxophone, he loved to chase the melody around the keys. He surveyed the carousel as Aristotle fiddled with his ball. The choices were pathetic until a beautiful purple, gold, and green ball dropped out of the return chute and rolled over toward him.

Apart from cigars and common sense, he had never been attached to anything in life, but this bowling ball had an instant and otherworldly effect upon him. It was the kind of effect that all advertisers wished for when they relentlessly pushed their products on television and in magazines. It defied logic, transcended intellect, and suspended disbelief.

He reached out his surprisingly delicate hand and lifted it from the tray. If there was one thing he knew about, it was weapons, and as he held the ball up and examined it, he knew instantly this was a weapon of mass destruction. It tingled with an indefinable power, as if every particle within it was eager to launch an offensive strike against the enemy.

“This is my ball,” he pronounced to no one in particular. He was just pleased to have found an ally in this hostile territory, and he wanted to show he had no fear. Like his beloved hero, Miyamoto Musashi, he had done all he could to determine the outcome of this duel, and he would accept nothing less than outright victory.

“It doesn’t matter which ball you use,” Aristotle said, “you will lose.” But the poisoned dart, which was intended for Hunter’s mind, missed its mark. His mind had already closed on the last chapter of the book, and he found no desire to rewrite his own upbeat ending.

The game was afoot, and the two opponents took up their positions. The crowd of onlookers had now swelled to enormous proportions as word had quickly spread about the strange occurrences in this match between the Gatherers and the Off-Worlders. Aristotle and Hunter gazed intently at their targets, each man lost in the silent stillness of a meditation so deep everything but the pins, the lane, and their balls had disappeared from consciousness. They were communing with the forces of motion. Like prehistoric hunters, they prayed that their weapons would move swiftly and strike hard with deadly accuracy.

As if by silent signal, the two opponents began their approach in perfect synchronicity, mirroring each other’s motion with uncanny precision, as if both bodies were controlled by one mind. Intellectually, they may have been on opposing sides, but emotionally and physically they were one. Their battle was over ideas, as all battles are. It is thought that separates us from animals, and it is thought that urges us to fight like dogs.

***

John now understood what all of those trips to the Subatomic World had been; they were an introduction to the microcosm he now inhabited like a ghost. The subatomic universe differed little from the actual universe; it was massive, it stretched out to infinity, and it was filled with space and matter. As above, so below: those were words he had heard somewhere, and it was true. He was in a mirror universe he could control with thought.

Well, he wasn’t actually in the universe, his consciousness was; and his thoughts weren’t really controlling anything, but that was just the contradictory nature of existence within the structure of matter. It was more like his consciousness inhabited every subatomic particle, and his will was the guiding force creating the erratic behavior that was wreaking such havoc.

Without his participation, the bowling ball could do nothing but roll when it was rolled, and stand still when it came to a stop. Adding consciousness to matter makes it do odd things. It begins taking on an identity and creating a pleasing shape for itself; butterflies and dinosaurs are just two examples of the diverse ways matter likes to display itself once it attains consciousness. John’s consciousness was merely on loan to the bowling ball though, so the poor thing would never get a chance to become something new.

John had fun gripping tightly onto Steve’s fingers and tugging him into the air. It was showmanship and it heralded the arrival of things to come. Changing color and the independent locomotion of the ball had been nothing; but the backspin, now that had really been touch and go. He had friction to thank for that working, although he’d had to spin super-fast because only a tiny part of his surface had been in contact with the varnished surface of the floor. It wasn’t until he’d worn the varnish away that he found enough traction to take off.

Now he was searching for a suitable finale to put the finishing touch to this performance, and he thought he’d found it. His world inside the ball was a world of particles crisscrossed by highways of energy, but those highways didn’t stop at the edge of the ball…they extended outward in all directions and interacted with everything else that existed. Everything was connected to everything. It was a spooky realization because it meant whatever you did was going to affect somebody, somewhere, sometime.

It was a phenomenon that held all sorts of ethical and philosophical repercussions if it were used to gain the upper hand over others. But he and his friends had been lured into this world against their will by individuals who had no concern for their human rights. As far as he was concerned, he had to use every means at his disposal to secure their swift and successful exit from this introverted society.

***

Aristotle and Hunter approached the line, their eyes blazing with the fire of total concentration. One of Hunter’s martial arts teachers had been a Taoist priest, and one of the exercises he had him do was to stare at a candle until he could affect the movement of the flame. He wasn’t sure whether he ever affected the flame, or just fell into sync with it, but one thing was sure: ever since that time, he had been able to concentrate like a hawk. Aristotle, on the other hand, was a product of repetition; he had probably bowled a few hundred balls a day ever since he could remember. He knew every subtle shift and nuance in his body, his concentration a product of sense memory.

The two men were an uncanny match as they swung their balls forward in perfect harmony, and released them like torpedoes onto the glistening surface of the lane. There was an instant when the crowd thought they had seen two of the most perfectly bowled balls they had ever witnessed in their lives. But it was just that, an instant, no more and no less, because it was closely followed by a moment, and in that moment, all hell broke loose.

Hunter’s ball leapt like a stallion across the boundary between the lanes and hit Aristotle’s ball with a resounding crack that sent both balls shooting off in different directions. The crowd gasped in astonishment; there had never been such an occurrence. It shattered every principle they held dear to their hearts and rocked the very foundation upon which their society was built.

Like guided missiles, the two balls found targets in the adjacent lanes. They swooped in at low altitude and struck two other bowling balls with a colliding force reminiscent of pool balls. Copernicus and Steve leapt to their feet, stunned by the utter derangement of the spectacle, and yet strangely unable to take their eyes off the mounting mayhem.

Four balls now sailed through the air recklessly ignoring any number of Sir Isaac Newton’s cast-iron laws, especially the one about gravity. In his many journeys into the abstract and the obscure, Hunter had never experienced anything quite as illogical as what he witnessed next. The four balls fanned out across the lanes and found four more innocent bowling ball victims, which they dropped on like hawks from the sky.

The following boom echoed through the place like cannon fire as the four balls struck in unison and became eight airborne missiles. Aristotle watched the squadron of bowling balls soar through the air like fighter jets, and what he saw was his well-ordered and privileged world disintegrating with every multiplication of projectiles.

Panic ran through the crowd behind him like a feral beast. Each individual concluded it was time to run at the exact same moment, and they gouged and scratched and punched the person next to them in order to achieve freedom. What they achieved, however, was as old as the hills, and as shallow as a puddle of mud: It was a brawl, a plain old knock ‘em down, drag ‘em out brawl. It was something none of them had ever experienced before, but now the cat was out of the bag, and there would be no stuffing it back.

The flotilla of bowling balls sought out and pounced upon every last straggler that had been bowled since the beginning of this bizarre fiasco, and their number swelled to sixteen. Beside himself in equal measures of fear, frustration, and abject horror, Copernicus lunged at Steve, grasping him around the throat with thin bony fingers, and squeezing with every ounce of strength that existed in his puny frame. “You two squares have ruined my life,” he screamed maniacally.

Momentarily caught off guard, Steve squawked like a strangled chicken, “Get off me, grease ball!” But worse than the throttling he was taking was the aroma of overripe blue cheese that emanated from beneath Copernicus’ uplifted arms. It was such a rotten stink it should have qualified as a weapon, and Steve knew he would have to do something quickly before he succumbed to its anesthetic qualities.

Through the fog rapidly filling his mind, he remembered Copernicus had lately been injured, and therefore should be particularly tender in those areas. Before passing out, Steve stamped on Copernicus’ foot and punched him hard in the gut with both fists, which dropped him to the floor like a rock. Turning to the side to take a breath of fresh air, he suddenly had to duck himself as a bowling ball whistled over his head, sailed through the scattering crowd behind him, smashed into a cola machine and created a real soda fountain.

Hunter stood at the center of the maelstrom as bowling balls hurtled through the air every which way. They smashed through walls, windows, doors, and if he didn’t keep his wits about him, one of them would have ripped his head off. He couldn’t help thinking this must have been what it was like when the British fleet met the Spanish Armada in one of the biggest battles ever fought at sea. But they weren’t at sea in the 16
^th
century; they were in an American bowling alley in the 21st.