The Twin Powers Read online

  I was excited about the trip but I didn’t enjoy having to look at maps. Also, I was anxious to get to baseball practice. I was supposed to work on my pitching that day, and Ronnie was keeping a chart of my balls and strikes, as well as what kind of pitches I threw. I was working on a curve ball. I wanted to get better, especially after the duel with Hercules.

  “Okay,” said Grandpa, stabbing at the map with his finger. “Here’s where we’re going. Culebra de Cascabel. It’s in a valley in the desert. The coordinate numbers are 106:06W and 34:19N. I want you to remember that.”

  “I can’t remember that,” I said.

  “You can,” said Grandpa. “Don’t try to memorize it. Just look at it and let it print itself onto your brain.”

  “You can do it, Eddie,” said Ronnie. He was always cheering me on. “Like you remember football plays.”

  “It’s important,” said Grandpa.

  I looked at the map and recited, “Culebra de Cascabel. It’s in a valley in the desert. The coordinate numbers are 106:06W and 34:19N.”

  “Excellent,” said Grandpa.

  “I forgot it already.”

  “It’s embedded in your brain.”

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “It’s in the Primary People part of your mind.”

  There was a heavy knocking outside. Grandpa folded up the map and stuck it inside his shirt before he went to the door. He came back with two men in dark suits and hats. Grandpa gave us a warning look. “Eddie, Ronnie, these are federal agents.”

  My dog, Buddy, growled at them.

  “Like the FBI?” I said.

  “I hope you can help us out, Eddie,” said one of them, ignoring my question. He flashed his badge and ID card at me too fast to read. “I’m Agent Smith. This is Agent Jones.”

  Ronnie asked, “You hunting Communists?”

  “We’re not allowed to discuss the case,” said the agent, winking. “What can you boys tell us about this fellow Hercules?”

  Both agents pulled out notebooks and pens.

  Be careful, thought Grandpa. Nothing about aliens.

  Grandpa doesn’t think I’m so smart either. Just like Tom.

  “He showed up at baseball practice,” I said. “You should ask Coach.”

  “We talked to your coach,” said Agent Jones. “He said he didn’t remember. He said he had a headache and the whole practice was kind of a blur. What do you remember?”

  “You think there was something strange?” said Agent Smith.

  “For a skinny little guy, he could hit a ton,” I said.

  They nodded and wrote that down. “Anything else?” said Agent Smith.

  Grandpa said, “Boys’ll be late for baseball practice.”

  “We’re going to have to take Eddie to headquarters,” said Agent Smith. “Give him a lie-detector test.”

  “Eddie never lies,” said Ronnie.

  “We’ll find out,” said Agent Jones.

  “I’m not lying about anything,” I said. I felt hot and angry.

  “What do you think he’s lying about?” said Ronnie. “Let’s see your badges again.”

  Before I knew it, each agent had one of my arms and was pulling me toward the door. Buddy went to bite them, but Ronnie grabbed him.

  “Where’s headquarters?” said Grandpa.

  “Downtown,” said Agent Jones.

  “When will you bring Eddie back?” said Ronnie.

  “When he tells us what we want to know,” said Agent Jones.

  Stay calm, thought Grandpa. Remember, you have powers.

  Outside, Agent Jones got into the back seat with me. Agent Smith drove. Neither of them said a word all the way into the city. My mouth was dry. I took deep breaths and held them for a count of ten. That’s what Coach says to do if we feel nervous before an at bat.

  We pulled up to a dumpy-looking hotel near the river.

  “Is this headquarters?” I said.

  They didn’t answer. They pulled me through the hotel lobby and into an elevator. We got off at the fourth floor. The hall smelled of cigarette smoke. Agent Smith opened a door to a room containing a bed, some chairs, a television set, and a bathroom. It reminded me of a hotel room in a movie we’d watched on TV. In the movie, the cops were hiding a witness so he could testify before the grand jury. But the gangsters shot him through the window. I told myself to stay away from the window.

  “Take off your shirt, pants, and shoes,” said Agent Jones.

  When I didn’t move, they pulled off my shoes and socks and then my plaid shirt and chino pants.

  “Just relax, Eddie,” said Agent Smith. “Don’t open the door for anyone. We’ll bring you some lunch in a little while.”

  “Why am I here?” I said. I didn’t like the whine in my voice.

  “It’s for your protection, Eddie,” said Agent Smith.

  “From who?”

  They walked out with my clothes and locked the door behind them.

  I sat on the bed, trying to think, but my mind was spinning like a fishing reel. It was hard to concentrate. This had something to do with Hercules, so it had something to do with aliens. Were these guys hunting aliens? I was getting scared again and the deep breaths weren’t working, so I turned on the TV. I usually never watched TV in the daytime. Now I tuned in to a game show where you had to answer questions so you could connect the dots on a picture of a famous person. I couldn’t answer any of the questions, which got me so mad that I wanted the TV set to blow up. Imagining the TV set blowing up calmed me down. In fact, it felt so good that I stared at the set until my eyeballs felt hot.

  The TV set blew up.

  The door burst open and the two agents ran in. “What’s going on in here?”

  I imagined blowing on the burning TV set to fan the flames like we do in Boy Scouts to get cooking fires going. It was fun. Then I imagined sparks from the TV fire landing on the bed and turning it into a bonfire.

  A fire alarm sounded. One of the agents ran out of the room and came back with a fire extinguisher. He blasted the TV set. The other agent began beating on the blazing bed with a blanket.

  I took off, barefoot. I raced through the hall to the stairs, then four flights down to the lobby. I didn’t have any plan except to get out of there.

  In the lobby, people turned and stared. I realized I was wearing only a T-shirt and boxer shorts. Two guys in dark suits—looking a lot like agents Smith and Jones—shouted and ran after me.

  A yellow taxicab came screaming down the street and pulled up in front of a line of cabs at the hotel entrance. A back door flew open. “Get in,” the driver shouted. I jumped into the cab and it screeched into traffic before I had even closed the door.

  “Nice going, Eddie,” said the driver in a familiar voice. “As Mark Twain said, ‘Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.’”

  When he turned around, I saw it was Hercules. Whose side was he on, anyway?

  Nine

  EDDIE

  NEW YORK CITY

  1958

  HERCULES drove fast, making sudden turns that tossed me around the back seat. He was nodding as if he was listening to directions in his head. Was he getting a transmission from Homeplace? Was he telling Dr. Traum—or even Dad!—about what had just happened? That I was finding my powers and using them? That I understood imagination?

  After a while, he pulled the taxi to the curb alongside a park. He turned around and lifted his shades. His green eyes were glittering.

  “The word on you, Eddie,” said Hercules, “is nice guy, lightning reflexes, but your elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top.”

  “Who said that?” I was ticked off. “Tom?”

  “You could learn a lot from Tom. Of course, he could learn a lot from you.” Hercules got out of the cab and opened the back door for me. He was wearing a black raincoat and boots. He threw the car keys into the bushes. “We can always jack another one. Let’s book.”

  I followed Hercules into the park. There we
re long-distance runners on the dirt trails and women pushing baby carriages on the grass. It looked friendly. I don’t go into the city much, so I had no idea there were such big parks besides Central Park. I followed Hercules deeper into the park, off the paths and into groves of trees. I watched where I was stepping in the high grass. Snakes.

  “No snakes around here,” said Hercules, as if he was reading my mind. I hated that.

  “I’m not afraid of snakes,” I lied.

  “Tom’s scared of them, too.”

  “Where we going?”

  “To Tom’s planet. Get Tech Off! Day rolling. There’s a place near here where you can slip to EarthOne.” And then, as if I didn’t know, he added, “That’s Tom’s planet.”

  “You think I’m a dodo?” When Hercules didn’t answer, I said, “What about Ronnie and Buddy?”

  “They’re on their way.” He stopped and gestured at a pack of tough-looking kids sitting in an open field, smoking and drinking beer. They had baseball bats. “First, you’ve got a problem to solve, Captain Eddie.”

  “Is this another test?”

  “Life is a test, Eddie. Now, go straighten them out. A Dudley Do-Right like you has to be against ballplayers smoking and drinking.”

  “Who’s Dudley Do-Right?”

  “Another heroic dimwit. A little after your time.”

  I decided to let that go. “That’s not my team.”

  “They just picked you,” said Hercules.

  The guys had noticed us. Or at least me—Hercules had disappeared. They nudged each other, grinned, and slowly stood up. They were older than me and they looked mean.

  “Me against all those guys?”

  I could hear Hercules even if I couldn’t see him. “As Mark Twain said, ‘To believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the one only essential thing.’”

  “What’s with Mark Twain all the time?”

  “The Primary People consider Mark Twain America’s greatest writer and thinker,” said Hercules. “You should read Mark Twain. Start with Tom Sawyer.”

  “I started that book once. Too many words.”

  “A problem with most good books,” said Hercules.

  “Here they come,” I said.

  One halfie against only eight of them, said Hercules’s voice in my head. Not a fair fight. Try not to hurt anybody.

  The pack approached, spread out, and circled around me. One of them said, “Hey, loco. You can’t walk around here in your underwear.” They all laughed.

  I remembered I was still wearing only a T-shirt and boxer shorts. I was barefoot.

  “I’m a long-distance runner,” I said. Good answer. Something Tom would have thought of, if he knew anything about sports. I grinned at them, friendly-like. I didn’t feel scared because it seemed like a tryout for a team. Hercules wanted to see what I could do. He wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me. Would he?

  “Long-distance runner? Barefoot? You goofin’ on me?” The first kid looked angry. “Gonna cost you to be here in my park. You gotta pay a admission charge.”

  All of the guys laughed again.

  Remember, said Hercules’s voice, as Mark Twain said, ‘Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.’

  I was getting pretty sick of Mark Twain.

  The circle around me got tighter. “You deaf?” The kid who had been doing all the talking began slapping his baseball bat into his palm. The others picked up the rhythm. Smack, smack, smack-smack, smack.

  The circle was so close now, I could hear them breathing along with their smacks. Hunh, hunh, hunh-hunh, hunh.

  Don’t be such a dummy. Imagine something.

  What if the baseball bats turned into real bats, flapping their little black wings? But bats weren’t really scary. We’d caught some at Scout camp and turned them loose.

  Smack-smack, hunh-hunh.

  The bats were still baseball bats and they were coming closer.

  What if the baseball bats turned into . . . snakes? Just thinking about that made my knees freeze. I was ashamed, a Boy Scout afraid of snakes.

  I focused hard on the baseball bats, using my fear to make a terrible picture in my head of wriggling snakes, flashing their fangs.

  “Yeeeoow!” One of the kids dropped his bat.

  I felt a rush of home-run joy. I focused harder, pouring more fear and energy into my imagination. The fangs started dripping venom!

  Kids were screaming, dropping their bats, and running. One kid was crying.

  I raised my arms and yelled, “Raiders rule!”

  One by one, howling, the guys took off into the trees. Their bats were scattered around me. Plain old baseball bats.

  By the time I collapsed into the grass, exhausted, all the guys were gone.

  “Not bad,” said Hercules, reappearing.

  “Not bad? That was the grooviest.”

  Hercules offered a hand and hoisted me up. “Those were baby steps, making a bunch of wannabe gangsters think their bats were snakes. Your powers are more powerful that that. Eddie, you’re not groovy yet. You’re just a newbie boobie with a lot to learn.”

  Ten

  BRITZKY

  NEARMONT, N.J.

  2012

  WE hugged and jumped and yelled—even Ronnie, who was usually pretty quiet. Alessa cried. Buddy ran around Grandpa’s kitchen, licking everybody except Tom, who growled back at him. Eddie and I punched each other’s shoulders. In six months, I’d gotten used to Tom again, but now I remembered how much I liked Eddie, a nice, regular guy.

  Ronnie looked pale from the trip. Slipping between the Earths is a lousy ride. Galactically speaking, the distance is infinitesimal, but since time as well as space is involved—Eddie’s EarthTwo is fifty-four years younger than EarthOne—the trip lasts several hours and beats up your body. You feel as if you’re coming down with the flu—headache, chills, nausea, a stuffed nose. The symptoms disappear as soon as you land.

  After we quieted down, Grandpa spooned ice cream into bowls and passed around a plate of cookies. We ate and just sort of looked at one another, grinning. Eddie had borrowed some of Tom’s clothes, which were tight on him. When he’d showed up on EarthOne at the landing spot in the woods near the house, he’d been in his underwear. What a great story that was! Grandpa had Eddie, Ronnie, and Buddy hiding in the back of his SUV, under blankets, and he drove into the garage so the drone wouldn’t spot them. We pulled the shades in the kitchen and living room.

  As usual, Ronnie was wearing clothes big enough for someone twice his size. You’d never think Eddie’s little sidekick was the daredevil driver who had helped us escape from the insane asylum the year before by crashing through fences and construction barriers and running over one of Dr. Traum’s hologram thugs. Ronnie did it even though his feet couldn’t reach the pedals!

  Alessa banged a glass on the table. “Okay, guys, what now?” She was in her usual take-charge mode. I had a funny thought: Ronnie is a little blond boy who looks like a doll and Alessa is a big black girl who acts as if she has all the answers, and they both hide themselves in clothes as big as tents. I was so into that thought that Alessa had to yell at me.

  “Earths to Todd Britzky! Helloooo!”

  “It’s pretty obvious,” I said, stalling for time.

  “Obvious that you’re brain-dead,” said Tom. He can’t resist jabbing the needle. Just can’t help himself.

  “It’s obvious that Todd thinks before he speaks,” said Eddie. Nice guy. He can’t help himself.

  “We have to give Tom and Eddie a chance to work on their powers,” I said. “And Tom has to get a crewcut like Eddie, just in case someone spots him.”

  “Let Eddie’s hair grow in,” said Tom.

  “We don’t have a lot of time,” said Grandpa. “And it’s very important that no one sees Eddie and Tom together. That’s our big secret. Human beings can’t know that twin halfies exist.” Grandpa sounded serious. “Dr. Traum and the Primary People’s Council are meeting. It looks like they’ve decided that the
Earths need to be destroyed before they get a chance to destabilize the universe with extreme weather or nuclear explosion.”

  “When?” I said.

  “The clock is ticking,” said Grandpa. “It gets worse. There’s a federal agency here on EarthOne, like the one that went after Eddie on EarthTwo, that does nothing but look for aliens. They’re the ones who sent the drone. Whatever you decide to do, it has to be soon, before they know too much about us.”

  “Any ideas?” said Alessa. She was looking at me. We’d been discussing this, but just between us.

  “Well, Alessa and I’ve been talking,” I said. “How about what we did last year, Tech Off! Day? Only this time, we’d make it into more than just a day. Like a campaign. Petitions, marches, things like that.”

  “What’s that going to do?” said Ronnie.

  “It’s an old spy trick,” I said. “It’s called hiding in plain sight. If everybody is watching us, it will be harder for the government to kidnap us and put us away somewhere. Like they tried to do with Eddie.”

  Tom gave me a thumbs-up. I was glad he thought it was a good idea. Tom is smart.

  “Then what?” said Ronnie.

  “People will see kids trying to make things better and they’ll want to do it too,” said Alessa.

  “Meanwhile,” I said, “we can figure out how to rescue your dad. And when the aliens and the feds come after us, we’ll see who they are, maybe figure out how to take them down.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Ronnie sarcastically. “Like we’ve been doing.”

  “So don’t come along—stay here,” I said.

  “Not on this stinking planet,” said Ronnie. “You can see the air. The water’s dirty.”

  Eddie held up his hand and Ronnie shut up. Ronnie grabbed Buddy and held the dog on his lap.