Mark Dunn - The Age Altertron

“No I can’t, Daddy. It’s too late. It’s too late to be anything now but old. I hate this. Why do things like this have to happen?”

“We don’t know, Becky, but all is not lost.” Mr. Craft looked at Rodney and Wayne when he said this. “Is it, boys?”

Wayne shook his head. “We were just going over to see the Professor.”

“And ask him what needs to be done to fix things,” said Rodney. “Would you like to come with us, Becky?”

Becky wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and nodded. “Maybe the walk will do me some good.”

In which the Professor berates himself, and a supermarket is robbed of all of its soft food, the reason to be revealed later

Walking in the bright moonlight, Rodney and Wayne and Becky and Petey (who had decided that he would like to come too, to thank the Professor personally for rescuing him from the cloud place, even though he was now prone to arthritis) kept to their own quiet thoughts for a while. It was nice to be able to walk again, even though the no-longer-youthful muscles in their legs felt tired and tight.

It was a strange thing to be strolling along so late at night, bathed in the light of a moon that looked no different from every other full moon they had known since they were first told by their parents what that giant, bright orb was doing so high in the sky. It was strange to be moving down a sidewalk whose every crack they had counted and tried to avoid (lest they break their mothers’ backs), past all the trees they had climbed and from whose branches they had hung down like monkeys, past familiar green lawns, now browning in the change of season, past the same cars and hedges and mailboxes and stop signs, and past the same Halloween decorations — scarecrows and Jack-o-lanterns that came out too early every year. It was as if nothing had changed, although a great deal had changed. And a great deal had been lost. Each child wondered as Becky had wondered: would they ever get it back again?“ I didn’t know that you wanted to be a children’s doctor,”

Wayne said to Becky.

“Who works with puppets,” noted Petey.

Becky shrugged. “I thought you would make fun of me, the waywe used to laugh when Dr. Kelsey would forget where he put the knee thumper or his stethoscope.”

Becky’s three companions smiled as they remembered Principal Kelsey’s equally absent-minded brother who was a pediatrician.

“But then, Wayne, I remembered that you once said you wanted to be a space cadet like ‘Tom Corbett, Space Cadet,’ on TV, so I thought it was okay to tell you something that I didn’t have much of a chance at either.”

“Why did you think that I couldn’t grow up to be a space cadet?”

“Because there isn’t such a thing as a space cadet,” said Becky. “Being a space cadet is a made-up job. Just like Tom Corbett is a made-up character.”

“You don’t think some day there will be astronauts, Becky?” posed Rodney. “Astronauts who will pilot their spaceships all the way to the moon and back?” Rodney glanced at the moon as he said this.

“Or to distant planets?” asked Petey, also looking at the moon but with a starry-eyed gaze.

“I suppose,” said Becky. “But by then, we’ll probably all be too old to go.”

The children walked on for a moment thinking quietly to themselves. Then Wayne broke the silence. “I wish that some day Professor Johnson would make a freezing machine that could put a person into a big ice cube and keep him there until after all the calamities are over and the force field is down, and then thaw him out when things are much better than they are now.”

“How do you know that things will be better in the future?” asked Becky.

“Well, don’t things usually get better? We don’t live in caves any more, do we?”

Becky could not hold back a smile. She was thinking of Wayne wearing a wooly mammoth fur, with a bone through his nose. “I guess you’re right about that.”

The four turned a corner and stopped. There was the Ferrell house with all of its lights turned on. And there, sitting on the porch swing, was a large middle-aged man. The man was mostly bald. You could tell this because his head was bowed and the top was all that you could see. It was moving up and down a little as if he were crying.

“What should we do?” whispered Becky to the others.

“Well, I guess we should first find out who he is,” said Rodney. “He might need our help.”

“I hope no one has died,” said Becky.

“Excuse me,” said Wayne, approaching the house. The man looked up. Wayne and the others could tell immediately who the man was. It was their friend Grover, many years older.

“Who is it?” asked the middle-aged Grover. He was squinting at the moonlit lawn and wiping his eyes with his knuckles. “I can’t see very well. I think I need glasses.”

“It’s Wayne. And here is Rodney and Becky and Petey.”

“Hi Petey. Welcome home,” Grover said, taking a handkerchief from this pocket to blow his nose with. “I — uh — guess I’m getting a cold.”

“I’m not feeling all that well myself,” said Petey. “I woke up with arthritis.”

“Come up here. I am just sitting here thinking about things.”

“What are you thinking about?” asked Becky.

“Mama mostly. Suddenly she’s very old. Is this a new calamity?”

Rodney shook his head. “No. I think it was the Professor’s machine — the Age Altertron — that did it.”

“Well, whoever or whatever did it, Mama now has to take very tiny steps when she walks. It took her three-and-a-half minutes just to get from her bed to the bathroom. How will she be able to clean and cook for the Professor? She’ll lose her job and then we’ll both have to go to the poor house.”

“Grover, the same thing is happening to half the citizens of Pitcherville,” said Rodney. “My Aunt Mildred can’t even get out of bed. Something will have to be done to help all of the old people until Professor Johnson can fix this problem.”

“How do you know that the Professor can fix it?” asked Grover. “How old is he now? He must be at least one hundred!”

“Well, I think he’s actually older than that,” said Rodney. “But if he is like Aunt Mildred, his mind will still be sharp. Maybe he’ll have to work slower, but I don’t think things are hopeless. We’re going to his house now. We need your mother’s key.”

“I’ll get it.”

Grover got up from the porch swing. He had been a large boy. Now he was a very large man. The floorboards of the porch creaked loudly as he walked across them.

At the same time that Rodney and Wayne and Becky and Petey and Grover were mounting the stairs in Professor Johnson’s house to gently wake the Professor, a robbery was taking place at Toland’s Supermarket. The two perpetrators, each of whom wore black eye masks to conceal their identities, and each of whom held shiny new revolvers in their hands, had surprised the store’s night watchman, Mr. Roessler. He had been dozing in a chair in the produce section and woke to the sound of something large being hurled through one of the front glass doors of the store.

As he tried to wake up and get his bearings, Mr. Roessler was approached by the two bandits. It was at this moment that something disturbing came to his attention — something even more disturbing to sleepy Mr. Roessler the night watchman, than the fact that his employer’s store was being robbed. He was old . Very old. And very tired.

Even if he hadn’t become suddenly very old and very tired, there was little that Mr. Roessler could have done to protect the store, since Mr. Toland, Sr., the owner of Toland’s Supermarket, didn’t believe his night watchmen should be armed. As a result of this policy, all that Mr. Roessler could do now was stand with his trembling hands up in the air, and hope that the intruders wouldn’t shoot him.