The Great Interactive Dream Machine Read online

  “That’s creepy, Aaron. So are you.”

  He shrugged.

  “So to get enough computing power or whatever for your new formula to work, you started soldering live wires with the power on?” I said. “Is this what I’m hearing?”

  “I’m under a lot of pressure,” he said. “I’m looking at a deadline.”

  “What deadline? You mean like final exams?”

  “Please,” Aaron said. He doesn’t set aside much time for schoolwork. “I’m working up a formula as a project for computer camp.”

  Computer camp?

  “You’re going to computer camp? This summer?”

  “If I can get in,” he said. “They don’t want you in the advanced-digit-head division till you’re twelve. I won’t turn twelve till August, and I don’t even look eleven. At our age we’re not old enough for anything. But a really high-concept project might get me in. I need a project that will knock their socks off.”

  “And what’s going to happen to me while you’re knocking their socks off, Mr. High-I.Q. A-to-Z man? I can’t go to computer camp. There’s no way I could get in the gate.”

  “That’s true.” Aaron shook his head sadly. “You wouldn’t know a modem from a mouse. You wouldn’t know a megabyte from a microdisk. You wouldn’t—”

  “Okay, okay. So you know where I’ll end up all summer.”

  Aaron nodded. “I’ll end up there too if I don’t take steps.”

  “Did your parents get the letter from the coach?”

  He nodded again. “Can you believe he’s still using U.S. post office snail mail in the age of the fax and e-mail?”

  The parents of every kid at Huckley School got the same letter. It was from the middle-school coach, Trip Renwick. He was setting up a soccer camp in Connecticut, and he wanted everybody to sign on.

  Soccer all summer? Fifty miles from the nearest bagel, bouncing balls off our heads? Vertically challenged Aaron and spindly me being pounded into a weedy field for two months? Living in bunks and listening to frogs? Please.

  “It will look good to parents,” Aaron said. “When summer comes, they’ve got to do something with us. They’re sitting ducks for a letter like that.”

  “Aaron, I’m depressed. Let’s get some air.”

  “But as soon as the power comes on again, I can get back to—”

  “Aaron. Think. You’ve blown the master fuse in a Fifth Avenue building. What about your parents? Where are they?”

  “My dad goes into the office on Saturdays. My mom’s at her aromatherapy class.”

  “Aaron, do you want to be around if they come home before the power’s back on?”

  “Not really,” he said in a mouselike voice.

  “Then let’s go. It’s called outdoors. You’d like it. We’ll go across the park.”

  “We’ll have to take Ophelia,” he said. “The professional dog walker doesn’t come on weekends. Weekends are for spending quality time with your pet.”

  “Aaron, let’s not take Ophelia. Picture it. Two undersize private-school guys with preppy written all over us walking a white poodle with a rhinestone collar in Central Park? That’s asking for trouble.”

  But at least he was willing to go. He reached for his small windbreaker. “Aaron, it’s springtime. The sun’s out. Forget the windbreaker.”

  As we were walking out of his room, a voice behind us spoke suddenly:YOU HAVE E-MAIL

  So the power was back on, but I got him out of there anyway.

  2

  Two Preppies and a Poodle

  Ophelia was in a fairly good mood when she saw her imported Italian-leather leash. She showed me her teeth in the elevator, and she showed them to Vince down at the front door. But she didn’t lunge. She was wearing her rhinestone collar. She’d been to the dog hairdresser. She was looking good and knew it.

  We entered the park at Seventy-second past the T-shirt salespeople. The benches were full of oldsters holding up sun reflectors to their faces. There were runners, walkers, people on stilts. There were bikers in and out of the bike lane. The puppet-show people were performing. The gangsta-rap people were out, and the moon-walkers. You name it. There was enough of a crowd so nobody paid any attention to two preppies and a poodle.

  We stayed away from the soccer field. Practically every sunny school-day afternoon Coach Renwick marches us over to the park, dragging along the net goals with us. We pray for rain.

  On our way to Bethesda Fountain, Aaron was nearly sliced and diced by a black-spandex flying wedge of Rollerbladers: big muscle monsters in Walkmans and earrings, with flying ponytails.

  “Aaron, for Pete’s sake, watch where you’re going,” I said. “They’ll flatten you like Wile E. Coyote.”

  But you know Aaron. He was wandering along with Ophelia’s leash in one hand and his other hand keyboarding like crazy.

  People were sitting all around the fountain, eating frozen yogurt. The lake was full of boaters. Overhead the Fuji Film blimp was bobbing and weaving in a blue sky. One of the great New York views. Was Aaron seeing this? Was he enjoying a perfect spring Saturday?

  “Look at it this way,” he said. “You’ve got your basic NCSA Mosaic to point and click while you’re browsing the Web, am I right?”

  “Who knows?” I said. “Who cares?”

  “Let’s take that another interactive step.”

  “Let’s not.”

  “The Internet as we know it—”

  “Aaron, what are you saying? That you’re about to come up with one of your cockamamie formulas again—that’ll black out our building and send you to computer camp and leave me in droopy shorts up in Connecticut, running my legs off after a soccer ball? Is that what we’re talking about?”

  But Ophelia kept dragging at her leash, so we strolled on. She did her business off the curb on Central Park West. Across the street was this big old building with towers and turrets. I like towers and turrets.

  “Hey, Aaron, look. It’s the Dakota apartment building.”

  Aaron snapped on a plastic glove and took a Baggie out of his jeans pocket. If you’re going to walk a dog in New York, you’re going to have to clean up after it. It’s the law.

  “So?” he said.

  “The Dakota. It’s where the novel Time and Again takes place.”

  “What novel?”

  I sighed. “The novel Headbloom assigned us. The novel we’re having a quiz on Tuesday.”

  “Ah,” Aaron said. He signs himself out of a lot of classes to work on the computers in the media center. “You want to fill me in on that?”

  “It’s not a bad book for an assignment. It even has pictures,” I said. “This guy named Si Morley goes back in time. It’s a top-secret government project.”

  Aaron showed a little interest. He dropped the Baggie in a trash container. “How’d he do his time travel?”

  “He did a lot of homework on the year 1882. He researched it.”

  Aaron nodded. “You can access that information on WAIS—Wide Area Information Servers. You can search information libraries stored on the Net.”

  “He didn’t use that,” I said. “He read books. Then he came over here to the Dakota, which was from the time he wanted to go to. He moved in. He wore old-fashioned clothes. He psyched himself back. It was like self-hypnosis.”

  “Fiction.” Aaron sneered slightly.

  “Of course it’s fiction,” I said. “But do you remember when you were first trying to cellular-reorganize yourself, you got into John D. Rockefeller’s bed at the Museum of the City of New York? You thought that might send you back.”

  “I was a kid,” Aaron said. “It was last winter.”

  “You said that really wanting to go is part of the deal. You called it—”

  “Emotional Component,” Aaron said. “Which is true, but it takes more than that. You’ve got to line up your need with your numbers. It’s like going on-line in the cosmic Internet. You have to find your way through setup strings, com-port settings, baud rates, in
terrupt conflicts ... quite a bunch of stuff. Interactively—”

  “Forget about it,” I said, and we trudged on uptown. Aaron would probably pass Headbloom’s quiz on just what I’d told him about the book.

  We were coming up on the Natural History Museum.

  “I ought to drop in here for a data search,” Aaron muttered. “Maybe a little Emotional Component.”

  “Aaron, not the Natural History Museum.” We do about a half dozen school field trips to this museum every year, and I was up to here with it. And on a sunny Saturday?

  “Why, Aaron?”

  “I need all the information I can get for my computer-camp project,” he said, not looking at me.

  But the guard at the main entrance took one look at Ophelia, and we weren’t going in. You don’t take a dog into the Natural History Museum. It’s mostly bones in there anyway.

  Dinosaur bones.

  “This computer-camp project of yours,” I said. “It’s not about dinosaurs, by any chance? Tell me it isn’t. We’re sixth grade. We should be over dinosaurs by now. They’re like Power Rangers.”

  Aaron strolled over to a bench outside the museum. He walks funny, like a duck. We sat down. Ophelia settled at our feet. She glanced at my ankle.

  “Aaron, dinosaurs have been extinct for a million years. Let’s just get on with our lives.”

  “Sixty-five million years, actually,” he said, “and that’s what my computer-camp project is about.”

  “We know they’re extinct, Aaron. Have you seen one lately?”

  “But why, Josh? That’s the question of the ages.” He tapped his forehead. “Why did this great doomsday of prehistory happen?”

  I didn’t know, but Aaron was going to tell me.

  “Picture it.” He threw one small leg over the other. “This giant asteroid, maybe five miles across, maybe ten, comes hurtling into the earth. And pow.”

  “Is this a theory or real?” I said. I try to be skeptical.

  “Real,” Aaron said. “They found the crater down in Mexico. It was over a hundred miles in diameter.”

  “Was the asteroid in it?”

  “No, it vaporized. That’s where the theories come in. One is that clouds of dust and sulfuric acid blew all around the world, shut off the light, lowered the temperature, and did in all the dinosaurs. The other theory is that the asteroid’s impact set off volcanoes on the other side of the world. They poured so much junk into the air that it was good-bye, dinosaurs. Either way, a K-T boundary happened.”

  “K-T?”

  “Cretaceous-Tertiary. A layer of clay covered the earth there—sort of asteroid droppings. And this layer was loaded with iridium.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which probably means we’re talking outer-space stuff. The rock that formed above the K-T boundary doesn’t have a lot of fossils. Now we’re talking Tertiary period.”

  “We’re talking way over my head, Aaron. Where does your computer-camp project come in?”

  His eyes shifted. “I’m working on a formula that’s half-fiddled already. It’s a sixty-four-character combination of numbers and letters, clustered, with—”

  “But what’s it for? Don’t tell me it’s supposed to reorganize your cells back in time sixty-five million years to check on the weather. I don’t want to hear that.”

  “Okay.” He shrugged and gazed off into space, maybe outer space. “Anyway, it’s only a theory. I’m just doing a spreadsheet on it for the computer-camp people.”

  By the way, Aaron’s voice is changing. It’s changing, and he’s shorter than I am. I don’t think this is fair, but it’s happening. Most of the time he talks in a regular sixth-grade alto. Then his voice hits a sound barrier and drops to baritone. He sounds like his dad, like a miniature Mr. Zimmer. Then sometimes in the same word he’s both alto and baritone. It’s like listening to the Vienna Boys’ Choir.

  “Come on. Let’s go home. There’s nothing to do in this town. We’ll grab a giant hot dog from the guy with the cart.”

  “I’m a vegetarian,” Aaron reminded me.

  “You can have the sauerkraut.”

  We came back past the Dakota. I tried one more time to get Aaron’s mind away from the K-T boundary and off dinosaurs and his formulas. I told him a story about the ancient apartment building, the Dakota. It was a story of the weird and unexplained.

  “Hey, Aaron, one night late this guy who lives at the Dakota was coming home. He looked way up at the windows of his apartment, and he was amazed. There were people in his living room having a party or something. All the lights were on. And there was a big old-fashioned gaslight chandelier blazing away in the middle of his ceiling. Are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he couldn’t believe it. He thought he was looking at the wrong windows. He counted up. He counted over. They were his windows, and guess what.”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t have a chandelier. Never had. So he raced upstairs and opened the door of his apartment. It was dark. Nobody was there. No chandelier. Is that eerie or what?”

  “Was he a substance abuser?”

  “Aaron, you’re no fun anymore.”

  “Just because I don’t believe that lame story about a ghost chandelier?”

  “It could be true. Strange stuff happens. There have been sightings.”

  “Nothing scientific,” Aaron said.

  “You want some frozen yogurt?” I said.

  By the time we got back to our building, Ophelia was beginning to whine. I hadn’t shared any of my hot dog with her, and she knew her walk was over. In the park she’d been prancing on ahead, showing off, looking down her muzzle at other dogs. Now she was pulling back. We got her past Vince and into the elevator.

  Then it happened.

  Somebody stepped into the elevator right on our heels. And not just anybody. It was Miss Mather. She’s the one who lives under us and says we’re jumping on her head. She’s the meanest woman in Manhattan. Which is saying something. She doesn’t like anybody, and she has a dog.

  Sort of a dog. It’s a shih tzu, so it looks like a small mop with paws. It doesn’t bark. It screams. Miss Mather isn’t that big either, and she’s incredibly old. They built the building around her.

  Suddenly the elevator was completely filled up with three people and two dogs. Ophelia whipped around, spotted the shih tzu, and lunged. When Ophelia attacks, she attacks. The pom-pom on her tail goes straight up. Her floppy ears seem to stand straight out, and she’s all teeth.

  The shih tzu’s eyes bulged through all the hair on her face. She screamed, backpedaled, rear-ending the door which was closed now, and tried to climb Miss Mather’s leg.

  “Nanky-Poo!” Miss Mather screamed. Nanky-Poo was halfway to her knee, but Miss Mather was kicking Ophelia with her free foot. Where else but New York are you going to see an eighty-year-old woman kick-boxing a poodle?

  I dreamed Saturday night. I was falling as usual. This time I was plunging out of the Fuji Film blimp and down to the K-T boundary. It looked like concrete. I was between a blimp and a hard place.

  Sometimes I wake up before I land. This time I hit the ground. Except it wasn’t the K-T boundary. It was a soccer field. I bounced at the foot of a terrible monster that ought to be extinct.

  It was Miss Mather. Nanky-Poo was with her, and in the nightmare Nanky-Poo was as big as a horse. They both started kicking me.

  3

  How Fossils Are Made

  On Sunday night I was looking ahead at another five days of school. At least I never have to decide what to wear. We have a dress code at Huckley School: black blazer, blue-and-white Huckley tie, big shirt, gray flannel pants, any shoes but sneakers. I had my dress code laid out on a chair, so all I have to do in the morning is walk into it.

  I was in bed and thinking about turning out the lights when Heather barged into my room. She feels free to drop in anytime, but don’t try going into her room. Heather goes to the Pence School for Girls, which has
a dress code too: a lot of Pence plaid and only one earring per ear. But for the last month of school they can wear what they want to. It’s a big privilege, and we’d been hearing about it all weekend.

  Heather was wearing combat boots and a long, flimsy skirt with flowers on it and an oversized denim jacket that sort of filled out her chest—everything from Urban Outfitters.

  “What do you think?” she said to the chair, where my school clothes were laid out. I’d arranged them so well, she thought they were me.

  “I’m over here in bed, Heather.”

  “What do you think?” she said, whirling around.

  “I think it’s still night. It’s not time to go to school yet.”

  She had on a lot more eyeliner than Pence or Mom allows. “Josh, I’m rehearsing. Like a dress rehearsal.” She spun around twice and held up handfuls of her skirt. “Of course, I’ll be wearing a backpack to complete the look.”

  “You look like a street person,” I said.

  “Like you know all about girls’ clothes,” she said. “It’s what everybody will be wearing.”

  “So isn’t that the same as a uniform?”

  “Let me explain,” Heather said. “When adults decide what you wear, it’s a dress code, and it’s wrong. When Muffie McInteer decides what you wear, it’s fashion, and it’s right.”

  Muffie Mclnteer is Heather’s friend for life. Last winter her friend for life was Camilla Van Allen, but Heather switched. She made herself at home on the end of my bed. She hadn’t come in here to discuss fashion. Her eyes were bright and beady. “I’ve got summer sewed up.”

  My eyes narrowed. “How?”

  “Two words,” Heather breathed. “Muffie McInteer.” She let that soak in. “Her parents have a big house on Dune Road out in the Hamptons. Servants. Heated pool. And a beach full of boys. This is where I’ll turn thirteen. I’ll enter my teen years with a perfect tan line and a boy on every dune. Parties, Josh. Summer nights under the moon. Perfect?”

  “Perfect,” I muttered.