The Subatomic Kid (8 page)

Hey, wait a minute, what the heck is going
on?
he thought to himself. He rolled into a steep climb that took him straight up in the air, and he very nearly got diced to death passing through a ceiling fan.

He landed and made his way toward a shiny metal band wrapped around the stem of the fan. Walking was extremely awkward because he had four more legs than he normally had, and he kept tripping over them. As he approached the convex surface of the metal, he saw the whole room, but it was broken up into a thousand facets, each one containing the same image. He shifted focus to just one of the facets, and behind and below him he saw three people sitting at a table. He wondered why he had never noticed them before; the exceedingly strange was expanding exponentially into the ludicrously absurd!

He pushed his face closer to the mirrored surface and what he saw filled him with revulsion. He had huge eyes shaped like disco balls, and a monstrous face covered with tiny hairs. He found it hard to pull himself away from the hideous visage staring back at him, but he finally managed it by absorbing himself fully in the scene below.

Amelia Moon stared at the image on the videotape and felt a pang of regret. “If it wasn’t for this stupid child, the experiment almost certainly would have been a success,” she enthused. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the idiotic Doctor Leitz staring at her like a puppy; he had no idea his days were numbered. “And as far as I’m concerned, we have to run the experiment again. I need conclusive proof that we have achieved the scientific equivalent of the alchemist’s secret.” She needed to be sure she would see her beloved Doctor Angstrom whole again, and immortal, like a god.

Peering down at them from the ceiling fan John encountered a problem; he didn’t think flies had ears. He could feel the slightest variation in the movement of the air around him, and he could see in a billion directions at once, but he couldn’t hear a thing. He decided to get a closer look, so he took off from the fan and began to fly around them in a circle.

“So, Doctor Leitz, do you agree with my summation?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” he concurred. “If it weren’t for the introduction of a foreign body, we would now be celebrating the success of my brilliant technological breakthrough.”

“And are you confident this is indeed the scientific equivalent of the Stone of Knowledge?” she pressed.

“Yes, my brilliant innovations have created equipment that acts just as the stone once did.”

Miss Moon pondered his enthusiasm as Leitz became preoccupied with a fly that buzzed between them. Hunter, who had been silent up till now, stared at him quizzically.

“Are you okay, Doc?” he asked.

Doctor Leitz had turned around to follow the movement of the fly. “I hate flies and I’m wondering how it got in here.”

“Let’s get back to business,” said Miss Moon. “Although the death of a child is unfortunate, we cannot let it stand in our way, and we need to run the experiment again to assure ourselves that it was the success we believe it to be . . . agreed?”

He moved closer to her and lowered his voice. “Therefore, we must also hypothesize that being human and having a brain, if an individual passed through the experiment unscathed, he would inherit the ability to manipulate his own molecular structure at will.”

She stared at him in disbelief and turned to Hunter, who shrugged his shoulders. They were deep into uncharted territory without a map, and anything seemed feasible at this moment.

At that moment the fly buzzed between them, landed on the table and began crawling around. They all stared at it. “He may not be that far away,” Leitz postulated. “For obvious reasons this building is sealed tight; we never get flies in here; they are simply too dangerous.”

Hunter and Miss Moon looked at each other curiously.

“I’m not sure I believe it,” Hunter said.

“No. But then again,” Miss Moon continued, “we
have
opened Pandora’s Box, haven’t we?”

John stood in the middle of the table looking up at the three of them, and through his fly vibes he had the strangest feeling they were looking down at him.

John’s fly vibes were now working overtime; he felt the urgent need to take off, and he wasn’t at all sure why. He buzzed his wings and suddenly hands were coming at him from every direction. He launched himself into the air and with some pretty tricky aerobatics, he narrowly avoided being crushed to death.

“There he goes,” Hunter cried out. “After him!”

Miss Moon watched the two men leap up from the table in hot pursuit of the fly. However much she felt that Doctor Leitz’ assumption may be correct, she surely wasn’t running around the room chasing an insect.

John flew for his life;
it is strange to be so small and have giants chasing me
, he thought. He flew around the room, unable to find a way out until he spied the door. He banked down toward the handle, and beneath it his escape route presented itself.

Doctor Leitz and Hunter scrambled for the door handle as John disappeared through the keyhole. They ripped the door open and rushed into the room beyond.

Hunter laughed out loud in support of the lie and slapped his partner in crime on the back, knocking the wind out of him. The two men turned and reentered the meeting room, breathing heavily and feeling ridiculous.

Miss Moon watched them return with a cold eye, and for a long time she stared at them both in silence. Deep inside she felt a hint of satisfaction, for she had very nearly joined in with the idiocy until common sense had prevailed and steered her back to sanity. “We shall say nothing further about this incident,” she whispered. “As far as I am concerned, it never happened.”

Hunter was pleased; his collusion in the affair was forgotten, his slate was wiped clean and he was guilt free. Doctor Leitz, on the other hand, was convinced he was correct and nothing on earth could change that conviction. He gazed back at Miss Moon; she was beautiful all right, but beauty always hides danger. Beautiful or ugly, human nature is always focused on one thing: getting its own way. “Forgive me, Miss Moon,” he lied, “I don’t know what came over me.”

She smiled at him; he had given her what she wanted and she was happy. “Mr. Hunter,” she said with authority, “You will find the boy, if he is still alive, and bring him in. Meanwhile, Doctor Leitz will prepare to run the experiment again.” She was satisfied, sanity had prevailed and things were back in order.

***

The secretary had returned to her work, mystified by the strangeness of the intrusion, when suddenly a teenage boy fell down from the wall and crashed to the floor. She knew that she saw what she saw, but somewhere deep in the back of her mind, she was already beginning to erase the memory.

“What are you doing in here?” she asked John with authority.

“I’m not sure,” John replied, rubbing his head.

My job should not involve this level of mystification
, she thought. Life was complicated enough, and she definitely wanted to ignore the last ten minutes of it.

“Well, you’re not allowed in here, get out,” she said forcefully. The sooner she got rid of him, the sooner she could forget the whole unfortunate incident.

John scrambled up from the floor, smiled at her confidently and left the room. She turned back to her computer, sighed deeply, shook her head, and began typing.

***

John slipped out of the office and out of the school without being seen. Outwardly, he looked like any normal teenage boy walking down the street, but inwardly he was seething in complete and utter turmoil. He knew nothing more now than he did when he had climbed into the back of the limousine, apart from one obvious and undeniable fact; he had been a fly, and at the same time he had been himself.

It horrified him to think that at any moment he could change into something else. He wanted to go away somewhere and hide, but there was nowhere to go to get away from himself, because wherever he went he would be there. There was only one thing he could do; he had to learn to understand the nature of change, and perhaps how to control it. He had to come to terms with his mysterious new talent, because it obviously wasn’t going away, and at the same time he needed to conceal it from the world.

He was acutely aware of the fact that nothing would ever be the same in his life again. The safety and comfort of childhood was over, and any thought he’d ever had of being normal had ebbed away on the tide of time. He was alone, utterly and completely alone, as we all are. Even standing in a crowd, we stand alone.

THE DATE

It was a Saturday morning for those who dealt in days of the week, but for the birds it was another sunrise and an opportunity to compose an entirely new dawn chorus. Maple Street was indeed lined with maple trees, a fact the birds found extremely convenient because the trees provided them with ample perch room from which to conduct their operatic warbling.

This morning the human accompaniment was the usual—the paperboy, the mailman, and the odd early morning riser off to play golf. But when a black truck appeared and parked across the road from number 414, the chorus hesitated momentarily, as if factoring in this strange new instrument.

Outwardly, the truck displayed its reason for being as: SID’S PLUMBING. But inwardly it was a different story entirely; the truck was actually full of video equipment, and out of a tiny hole in the D of SID’S name poked a tiny camera lens.

Inside the truck Hunter sat at a console manipulating a joystick that moved the camera around. He focused it on the door of number 414 and leaned back in his chair, admiring his handiwork on one of the many TV monitors that lined the wall above him.

The stakeout was his stock in trade; he was an aficionado of the practice. Long ago he had learned that a really successful stakeout could not be accomplished sitting in the front seat of a car drinking coffee and eating donuts for days on end. The downside was obvious; you could be seen, and the longer you sat there the more obvious you became, until you stuck out like a sore thumb.

This stakeout, on the other hand, was his carefully designed masterpiece. There were video cameras to record all the action so that nothing was missed even if he dozed off. There was a freezer full of TV dinners, a microwave, and even a toilet, so he never had to leave the truck.

The door opened and Steve entered from the driver’s cab wearing a false mustache. “I don’t see why I have to wear a disguise, Mr. Hunter. Nobody around here even knows me!”

Hunter turned to him and smiled. “That’s true, and that’s the way it will stay, because if anybody ever asks any questions, you will just be the guy with the mustache from SID’S PLUMBING. Now make some coffee, we may be here for a while.”

Hunter sat back in his chair and opened the newspaper; he’d forgotten more about the spy game than Steve would probably ever learn. Of course it was his duty to pass on the knowledge he’d gained, but the youngsters of today just didn’t have the juice he’d had when he started out.

He blamed it on a lot of things: the educational system, the divorce rate, the idiotic television programs, and the constant bombardment of advertising. They all contributed to the lackadaisical manner of today’s youth.

But this boy—this John Smith—if he truly was capable of doing what Doctor Leitz had hinted at, could turn the art of espionage on its head. Perhaps with his guidance the boy would become the best there ever was; who knew?

He gazed at the paper: more trouble in the Middle East, more trouble in the Far East, more trouble at home.
Opportunity is everywhere
, he thought.

***

John had been coaxed into consciousness somewhere in the second movement of the bird’s sunrise symphony. It was the moment the birds stopped singing that had awoken him, and when he heard a truck stop outside, he leapt out of bed.

He watched the driver park, and apart from his mustache, he looked vaguely familiar. In a blinding moment of recollection he realized who it was. It was the limo driver, the one with the gun. He wondered what he was doing working for a plumbing company on the weekends, and then it hit him like a sledgehammer; they weren’t plumbers, they were watching him. That was the reason they had chased after him when he was the fly; it wasn’t that he was a pest, it was because they suspected he had inherited certain abilities after the ray gun had blown him through that hole, and they wanted to check him out.