Mark Dunn - The Age Altertron

Mr. Craft owned the largest appliance store in Pitcherville. The appliance business had been good to him and allowed him to buy a new car every year and to put his only daughter into nice clothes. It was sad not having Mrs. Craft around, but she was replaced by a gardener and a maid and a cook with the name of Smitty (though she was a woman).

“And to show my appreciation for what you have done, I have asked Smitty to bake you a cake. It is in the back seat, if you’ll open that door and take it out.”

Rodney looked at Wayne and Wayne looked at Rodney and neither knew what to say, for Mr. Craft wasn’t Petey and could not be spoken to so frankly. Luckily, Becky came to her friends’ rescue: “Oh Daddy! Do you really expect Rodney and Wayne to be able to take the cake now ! For goodness sake! We’ll give it to them later.”

Mr. Craft smiled and shrugged. “You boys better hurry on to school or you’ll be late.”

“See you in class!” chirped Becky, as the Buick drove away.

“What did I miss? What did I miss?” cried Petey. He had just come out of his house and was now running down his front walkway. Petey was always arriving after something had already happened or was just finishing up.

“Mr. Craft’s cook Smitty made a cake for us,” said Wayne. “Aunt Mildred is going to laugh when she hears that we now have two cakes on the way! That’s three cakes in all, when you add the one that she’s baking us herself!”

Petey climbed upon his bicycle, which, because he could not think about any words that had a “ b ” in them, he called his “Schwinn cruiser.”

The three boys rode to school together on their Schwinn cruisers, Rodney wondering how in the world they were going to eat three whole cakes, and Wayne thinking about how lucky he was to have three whole cakes to eat.

At school, as they were rolling their bikes into the bike rack, Petey said, “My mother wanted me to ask you something.”

“What is it, Petey?” asked Rodney.

“She wants to know if the Professor has told you how long these calamities are going to keep happening to the town. She said she doesn’t trust the articles in the paper that say they come from sunspots. My mom is a nervous woman, and it makes her even more nervous not knowing what tomorrow has in store for us.”

Rodney and Wayne both recalled the conversation they had had with Professor Johnson when the sixth in the long series of troubling events had occurred. This was the time that everything mechanical and electrical in the town began to run backward. Clocks ran backward and cars ran only in reverse, and the boys could not get their bike wheels to go forward no matter what they did. (Mr. Dean, the editor of the town paper, the Pitcherville Press , had written an article — the latest in a long series of articles — which had repeated his belief that the mechanical and electrical problems that the town was experiencing were — like all the other calamities — caused by sunspots. Unfortunately, the very odd, bug-eyed and frizzy-haired editor could not get his printing press handle to turn in a forward direction; so he was left to stand at the window of his upstairs office at the Pitcherville Press , and shout the word “sunspots” at all the people who passed below as another means to get across his minority opinion.)

As Professor Johnson was working with Rodney and Wayne to build a Chrono-Gyro-Restorifier to correct the problem, he offered the finer points of his theory: “Pitcherville, you see, is an ordinary town that has apparently been picked to undergo a series of most extraordinary permutations. Hand me that number seven wrench, please. Do you boys know what the word ‘permutation’ means?”

“Changes,” said Rodney.

“That’s right. Different, um, transmogrified realities .”

“’Transmogrified’—now what does that mean?” asked Wayne, looking in the toolbox for the right wrench.

“Well, it means changed but in a most bizarre way.”

Wayne laughed. “Gee, that would be Pitcherville all right!” He handed the Professor the wrench he needed. “But why do you think that is, Professor?”

“Well, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering our situation. Why have we been singled out for such recurring calamities? Why, every few days, do the laws of science and nature stop applying to the town of Pitcherville? Why do things happen that are sometimes funny like everything being the color of lemons, and sometimes scary like the time that the town found itself entirely under water— like the lost ocean city of Atlantis — and all the electrical appliances shorted out? Why is this?”

“And what have you concluded, Professor?” asked Rodney, holding a bolt in place so that the Professor could put in the screw that it required.

“Here is my theory — and it is only a theory. The day that your father disappeared — that same day that Mrs. Craft and my assistant Ivan and two of the other professors from my college all disappeared — that was the day that the experiments began.”

“Experiments?” the twins asked together in one curious voice.

Professor Johnson nodded. “You see, I believe that Pitcherville has become a laboratory of some sort. Just like this laboratory in which we’re now working — just like my other laboratory at the college. But instead of being a place of beakers and Bunsen burners and vacuum tubes and electrical circuitry, it is a laboratory of houses and streets and trees and people. Of dogs and cats and cars and swing sets and tree houses and go-karts and television sets and electric razors and toasters and flower gardens and everything else that marks the lives of average Americans in this modern year of 1956. I believe, boys, that there is a force out there — the same force that took your father (for I cannot believe that the two things are not related) — which is responsible for these experiments. They — whoever they are — want to see how we react to each new situation.”

“Like they want to know,” said Rodney, “if we can live in a world in which everything that was once hard and solid has become like Jell-O and everything that was once soft and squishy has become hard and solid.”

“Or if we can live in a world with millions of bubbles,” added Wayne. “Or in a world where people speak in numbers instead of words. Isn’t that right, Professor?”

“Right on the money, Wayne.”

(Wayne smiled. He had been right on the money!)

“Of course those who are conducting these experiments, boys— they probably never realized that they would have Professor Johnson and Rodney and Wayne McCall to contend with. For every time a new experiment has been put into place, there we are — like flies in their ointment — busy at work on a new machine that will end the experiment and put things right back to normal!”

“Oh, I’ll bet they’re not happy about that at all!” laughed Wayne a little raucously. “And who cares!”

Rodney and the Professor could not help laughing along with Wayne. “Hand me those pliers, Wayne,” said Professor Johnson with a chuckle.

Rodney’s gaze now went to one corner of the laboratory where the Professor had been constructing a different machine. “How is the Force Field-De-Ionizer coming along?” he asked.

“Not as well as I would like. It is a most difficult thing to learn the make-up of a force field when it is invisible. And without a proper chemical analysis of the molecular structure of the field itself, I cannot hope to build a machine to remove it.”

“And you believe,” said Wayne, “that the force field, which keeps us from leaving Pitcherville, was put up by the same people who are doing the experiments on this town?”