The Twin Powers Read online

  I got a cheer out of that. “Raiders rule!” The players trotted out to the field or lined up behind the plate.

  When the coach finally showed up, he had a guy with him. Coach yelled, “Listen up, Raiders. I want you to meet Hercules.”

  Somebody laughed and shouted, “Can he hold up the world?” because we were studying mythology in English class. But we all shut up when we got a good look at him. He was weird—short and skinny, with greasy black hair that stood up. Even though it was a chilly spring day, Hercules wore a sleeveless undershirt, gym shorts, and rubber shower sandals. And aviator shades. Coach would never let any of us come to practice like that. What was special about this guy? What position did he play?

  Hercules walked right up to me. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him before but there was something familiar about his face. He peeked over the tops of his shades. His bright green eyes gave me a chill. Alien eyes.

  “The great Eddie Tudor, Captain All-Sports,” said Hercules in a sarcastic voice that also seemed familiar. He picked up a bat and ball and pointed to shortstop, my regular position when I wasn’t pitching. “Let’s see what you got.”

  I didn’t like being ordered around like that. I looked at Coach. He grinned and nodded. He looked as if he was in some kind of a trance. An alien could do that. Tom had said they were back.

  I punched my glove and trotted to short. This was my territory. I felt sure of myself here.

  Hercules twirled the bat overhead, threw the ball so far up into the air that it disappeared for a moment, then slapped an easy grounder right at me. Too easy, I thought as I sidestepped into its path. Just as the ball was about to skip into my glove, it popped straight up in the air, then blooped over my head into center field.

  “Bad bounce, Eddie,” said Hercules in a fake-friendly voice. “Try this.”

  The next grounder was a sharp grass-cutter to my left, the kind of hit I usually gobbled up. I moved over quickly and stretched out my arm so my glove would block the ball. Two inches from my glove, the ball snaked left and into the outfield.

  “Keep your eye on the ball,” said Hercules.

  That frosted me but I didn’t let it show.

  The third hit off Hercules’s bat was a line drive right at me. I braced myself. When the ball smacked into my glove, I clapped my right hand over it. But once in my glove, the ball picked up speed and power. It drove me backwards. I lost my balance and fell on my can.

  Hercules laughed. So did the coach and the team. I kept a poker face. Never let them know they got to you.

  Then I heard the high voice of my little sidekick, Ronnie, from the bleachers. “You caught it, Eddie—that’s all that counts.”

  I gave him a little nod. Ronnie was a good guy, always trying to encourage me. We mostly talked about the past now. Waiting for the aliens to return had made us buggy. At least I had my teams. Ronnie didn’t seem to have a life. I was getting tired of Ronnie’s shaggy blond hair flapping next to me, his face always so serious. He’ll really be excited when I tell him the aliens are back, I thought.

  I hopped up off the ground and fired the ball right at Hercules’s head. Let’s see what you got.

  Hercules didn’t budge. Just before the ball smashed into his puss, he reached out and plucked it from the air like an apple off a tree. He tossed it back to me. I grabbed at it as if it might fly off again, but it was just a regular easy toss. Hercules grinned. He had gotten to me.

  “I hear you think you’re a pitcher, Captain Eddie,” he said. He strutted to home plate.

  I marched out to the mound. Give him some heat, then the curve. I didn’t bother to warm up, just reared back and fired the fastball.

  Hercules slammed it so far, it would have been a home run in Yankee Stadium. The team cheered.

  “Is that your best pitch?” said Hercules. “Don’t you have any imagination?”

  Imagination? I thought.

  You heard me.

  It was as if Hercules had picked the question right out of my mind. Then he sent another message back. As Mark Twain said, “Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.”

  I remembered that Tom had told me to use my imagination. I was beginning to understand what he’d meant.

  I waved Hercules back into the batter’s box. Then I reared back as if I were going to throw another fastball, but I switched my grip in mid-wind-up and tossed the curve. Just as the pitch reached Hercules, I imagined that it dropped suddenly and spun left. I concentrated as hard as I could, focusing all my energy on the drop and the spin.

  Hercules swung and missed so hard that he wrapped himself into a pretzel.

  The team cheered me this time. Ronnie let loose his shrill whistle.

  Hercules straightened himself out and nodded. Good start, Eddie. Now practice hard. Next time, it won’t be practice.

  He marched off the field.

  Five

  RONNIE

  NEARMONT, N.J.

  1958

  I HAD to grip the grandstand seat to keep myself from running out to Eddie on the mound. The waiting was over. No question. The aliens were back! I hoped Eddie understood that. He was the greatest guy in the world, but sometimes it took him a little while to figure things out.

  When practice was over, I hung around the locker-room door waiting for Eddie. He was surrounded by his teammates, who were slapping his back and saying things like “Way to go, Cap’n Eddie.” I trailed them by a few feet, feeling like a fifth wheel. Eddie didn’t seem to want me around so much nowadays. Eddie and his grandpa had given me a place to stay so I wasn’t homeless anymore, but I was wondering if it was time to hit the road again.

  Finally, Eddie was alone.

  “He’s one of them, Ronnie,” he whispered.

  “I think so too.”

  “What do you think he wants?”

  “To get you working on your powers, Eddie.”

  “Why would they want that? They’re our enemies.”

  “Not all of them. Not your dad. Or Grandpa.”

  Eddie stopped. He screwed up his face and cocked his head the way he does when he’s thinking hard. “You’re right. You think Dad could have sent Hercules?”

  “Maybe.” I didn’t really think so—Dad was Dr. Traum’s prisoner—but I wanted to keep the conversation going since Eddie and I hadn’t been talking much lately. “It was like he was pushing you to be better, Eddie. The way a coach does. Or a good teacher.”

  Eddie nodded. “First thing, I thought Coach brought him to light a fire under me for the season. But those green eyes. And he looked familiar.”

  “Like Dr. Traum,” I said.

  “That’s it!” Eddie whacked my shoulder. It hurt but it felt good, as if we were a team again.

  We looked at each other and shivered. Dr. Traum scared us. He had suddenly appeared in our school six months ago and taken over the jobs of both the football coach and the school psychologist. Very unusual. Later we found out that at the same time, he’d showed up at Tom’s school on EarthOne and taken over the jobs of guidance counselor and music teacher. Aliens could be in two places at the same time. Grandpa said Dr. Traum was using those green eyes to transmit back to the alien planet, Homeplace.

  In those days, Dr. Traum had been hunting Tom and Eddie’s dad, John Canty. Mr. Canty was the leader of the alien underground, trying to help human beings save their planets—either from self-destruction or, we’d found out later, from the aliens led by Dr. Traum.

  Dr. Traum had used Tom and Eddie as bait to find their dad. It had worked. Mr. Canty gave himself up so Tom and Eddie and the rest of us could go free.

  After Tom and Eddie’s dad was captured, Dr. Traum disappeared from both schools. So why would Dr. Traum send someone down to us now? What was he plotting?

  Everything was a mess.

  When the twins had switched identities the year before, Eddie slipping to EarthOne in the year 2011 and Tom slipping to my planet, EarthTwo, in the year 1957, I’d had no idea what was going on. All I kne
w was what I was told—the best friend I knew as Eddie Tudor had hit his head in a fall at Scout camp and couldn’t remember anything. He needed me to be like his guide dog in school. I liked that—I liked doing something for Eddie for a change. I didn’t always like the way that Eddie acted, though. I’d figured it was because of the accident, but it was because Eddie was really Tom pretending to be Eddie! It’s confusing.

  After Dr. Traum captured Tom and Eddie, it had been up to me to bust them out of the insane asylum where they were prisoners and drive them to safety. That was the best day of my life. I had never felt so strong and big and smart. I’d do anything to feel that way again.

  When the real Eddie finally came back to EarthTwo, we lived together in Grandpa’s house and talked all the time about joining up with Tom and his friends, defeating the aliens, and freeing Eddie’s dad.

  Now I wondered if it was ever going to happen.

  “What do we do now, Ronnie?”

  “Work on your powers.”

  “That’s what Tom said.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “Last night. He said he had a fight with a guy in school.”

  “Who?”

  “A skinny little guy in sunglasses.”

  “Was it Hercules?”

  “Could have been. The guy told Tom to work on his powers. Use his imagination.”

  “This is good news, Eddie. They’re back. Something’s going to happen.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Does Elvis have a pelvis?” I knew that would make him smile. It did. He put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Maybe we’ll get to see Dad and Tom soon.”

  Six

  ALESSA

  NEARMONT, N.J.

  2012

  I HADN’T seen Tom so excited in months. For the next forty-eight hours, we talked and texted about Hercules and the aliens and saving the Earths. For the first time in a long time, we went back and forth to school together. The three of us walked the halls like a six-legged creature. We kept saying the same things over and over.

  “It’s going down,” Tom said. “Maybe we’ll get to see Dad and Eddie soon.”

  “Hercules was just a test,” said Britzky.

  “For what?” I said. That was my line.

  “To see if I’m ready,” said Tom.

  “You better be ready,” said Mrs. Rupp, the history teacher. We hadn’t heard her come into the room. She put her laptop on the desk and yelled, “It’s time for . . . Mrs. Rupp’s . . . Timeline!”

  The class groaned. Mrs. Rupp makes us memorize dates. She says you can’t understand history unless you know the order in which things happened. She says that there are people who don’t know that there are nearly a hundred years between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. She tries to make it into a demento game show, but it still isn’t fun.

  Now we were studying the history of nuclear power, for bombs and for everyday energy, which could have been interesting, but not on Mrs. Rupp’s Timeline. No stories, just dates.

  “Oh-kay-doh-kay, here we go,” she shouted as her timeline flashed from her laptop to the screen in the front of the room. “Let’s look at nuclear testing, from July 16, 1945, the Trinity test in New Mexico, to January 14, 2012, when the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock to five minutes to midnight. Where did we leave off, anybody named Alessa?” She pointed at me.

  Britzky saved me. “August 1953, when the Doomsday Clock was set to two minutes to midnight.”

  “Righterooni!” yelled Mrs. Rupp. “Next?”

  “Why two minutes?” asked Tom.

  “The scientists thought the world was really close to nuclear war and maybe total destruction,” said Britzky. “That was based on—”

  “That’s enough, Todd,” said Mrs. Rupp. “We have many years to cover and this is only one blip on one of our timelines.”

  “But it’s interesting,” said Tom. “My dad always said history should be stories.”

  Mrs. Rupp glared at him. She’d never liked Tom. “Your father can tell you all the stories he wants, but we’re here to learn the order in which things happened.”

  “But I want to know why they happened and how they happened and what happened afterward,” said Tom.

  “Me too,” I said, to give Tom some support.

  Mrs. Rupp’s face got stony. “Moving right along. Next?”

  Tom said, “May 12, 1958. A thermonuclear explosion in New Mexico.”

  Mrs. Rupp checked her laptop and shook her head. “It’s not on my timeline. It couldn’t have happened.”

  “Maybe there was a cover-up,” said Britzky.

  “It was a big secret,” said Tom. “The government didn’t want people to know about it.”

  Mrs. Rupp looked confused and angry. She was figuring out what to do when I jumped in. “C’mon, guys. We’ve got another sixty years before they set the Doomsday Clock back to five minutes before midnight.”

  Britzky and Tom gave me the dirty looks they always do when I try to smooth things over. But they’re always glad afterward when nobody gets punished.

  “That’s good, Alessa,” said Mrs. Rupp. “But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.”

  “See you all in sixty years,” said Tom, putting his head on his desk and snoring.

  Mrs. Rupp ignored him and tapped her laptop, and the timeline moved on.

  Seven

  TOM

  NEARMONT, N.J.

  2012

  “THAT was pretty dumb,” Alessa said to me on the way home. “Mrs. Rupp hates to be dissed.”

  “I couldn’t help it,” I said. “It just popped into my head, like a tweet. I don’t know where it came from. I’ve never heard of a thermonuclear explosion in 1958 before.”

  “There was a rumor on a conspiracy website,” said Britzky, “of a blast that got hushed up.”

  We walked for a while in silence. I wondered if someone had transmitted that information to me.

  Hercules? Dr. Traum? Dad?

  Why?

  I could sense that Alessa and Britzky had something on their minds. I could almost hear their brains buzz. Finally I said, “What?”

  Britzky looked at Alessa. They’d been talking behind my back.

  She said, “Maybe it’s time we helped you work on your powers.”

  I was annoyed because she was right about that. It was time. Maybe past time. I’d let things slip the past six months, feeling hopeless.

  But I didn’t want her to feel too smart. “You know what I’m going to work on first?” I said. “Seeing through clothes.”

  Alessa gasped and Britzky said, “He’s messing with you,” and gave me an elbow.

  Alessa changed the subject. “You know what’s weird? All those kids recording Tom and Hercules in the cafeteria, and nothing’s showed up on YouTube.”

  “The aliens wiped them out, probably with sunspots,” said Britzky.

  We just looked at him. It sounded crazy, but he’s usually right about crazy stuff like that.

  We were at my house and I waved them in. I wanted to keep us together for a while. “Grandpa’s got peanut butter ice cream.”

  We were at the kitchen table spooning out the ice cream when Grandpa walked in. He didn’t say hello. He looked serious. “Stay in the now,” he snapped.

  “That’s what Hercules said,” said Alessa. I had told her some of the thoughts Hercules had sent me during our fight.

  “It’s a Primary People expression,” said Grandpa. “Hercules made contact with Eddie yesterday too.”

  “Is something going to happen?” said Britzky.

  “It’s already happening,” said Grandpa. “Look out the window.”

  I was closest and got there first. A gray metal spider with spinning helicopter blades hovered over the house.

  “A drone,” said Britzky. “It’s the kind the government uses in Afghanistan to spy on people and sometimes drop bombs.”

  “Why
would the government send a drone to spy on us?” said Alessa.

  “It’s got something to do with Hercules,” I said.

  We all looked at Grandpa, who nodded. “The government must have found out that aliens are back in contact with Tom. The drone is going to shadow Tom, shadow all of us, in hopes that we’ll lead them to the Primary People and Homeplace.”

  “We need to get to Homeplace,” I said. “And free Dad.”

  It got quiet. I felt excited and scared. Britzky was staring at his big knuckles and Alessa was thumbing her cell. I could tell they were feeling excited and scared too. For six months we’d been waiting for something to happen, and now it looked as if something was happening.

  “First thing,” said Grandpa, “Tom has to learn how to use his powers. We have to help him. It doesn’t happen overnight. Tom and Eddie are the only half Primary People, half human beings in existence, maybe the only ones ever. That rare combination of human imagination and Primary People rational intelligence is our only chance.”

  “To free Dad?” I said.

  “To keep the Earths from destroying themselves,” said Grandpa.

  We got quiet again. I was wondering and I knew Alessa and Britzky were wondering too: How could one old man and a bunch of thirteen-year-olds save the worlds?

  Eight

  EDDIE

  NEARMONT, N.J.

  1958

  WE were talking about our favorite TV show, Wagon Train, while Grandpa made scrambled eggs for breakfast. Ronnie had really dug the last episode when the wagon master, played by Ward Bond, met his old girlfriend. I told them I’d thought it was sappy—and didn’t have enough action.

  “I liked it too,” said Grandpa.

  “Because it was about an old guy,” I said.

  We always kidded around like that.

  After breakfast, Ronnie and I cleared the table and washed the dishes while Grandpa spread out the special map he keeps hidden away. He was planning a summer vacation for us, driving out to New Mexico. We would tell people we were going to visit Indian pueblos, but the real reason we were going was to check out the area where there had been rumors of an alien spaceship and nuclear testing. Ronnie and I wondered if it was a Primary People thing, but Grandpa didn’t want to talk specifics. We thought it was because he didn’t trust us to keep our mouths shut.