Lost in Cyberspace (8 page)

Underneath, Aaron had put in a giant exclamation mark and a message:

Nobody was around as I slipped through the media center. There were afternoon shadows everywhere. At first I thought Aaron wasn't in the Black Hole. The only thing I noticed was a big metal frame where they store manuals, floppy disks, and back issues of Byte. It was pulled out from the wall.

Down in the corner I saw a flash of red. Aaron stood up. “Shut the door behind you and come over here, Josh.” Behind the metal frame were the original built-in shelves of the Vanderwhitney family's library. They were carved all around with wooden flowers, way too fragile to stand up to school use. “Look right there.”

Some of the wood was darker than the rest, like flames might have licked up it long ago.

“Like the newspaper said.”

“But it doesn't prove you went back there, Aaron.”

“No, but I did. And it was around that time. About 1923. It could have been before the fire, or after. But I was there.”

“Okay, what was this room like?” I said. “We've already heard about the table with the silver fruit bowl.”

“It was where the terminals are now. The wall between here and the media center wasn't there, of course. It was one long room. It was nice. Polished wood floors, not this crummy tile. Big vases of flowers were standing around.”

“Did they have electricity?”

“Of course they had electricity. It was 1923. And they were rich. But the lights weren't on. It was this time of day, more or less. Afternoon light was coming in that window.”

“What window?”

“It was right there. They must have bricked it up when that big apartment building was built between here and Fifth Avenue.” His voice trailed away.

“That's it?”

“I was only there for a few minutes. What do you want from that, a mini—”

“Was anybody in the room?”

He looked shifty and worried. “A couple of people,” he murmured. “They were kissing. It was kind of embarrassing.”

Kissing?

“Kissing each other?”

“Of course they were kissing each other. What else? She'd been crying. She took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and dabbed her eyes. The guy kept looking over his shoulder. They were both worried, like they might get caught. He had his arms around her, and they were whispering and kissing.”

“That's it?”

“The girl reached inside the collar of her dress and pulled up a gold chain with a ring on it. Maybe he'd given her the ring, and she was wearing it around her neck, hiding it.”

“Did they see you? Were you visible?”

“I don't know. They were kind of busy.”

“Then what?” I was watching him closely.

“I stood there a while, just hanging around. Then I wanted to see if I could pick up an apple. I could. I was really there. Then I felt myself coming back. I was kind of embarrassed by all that kissing. So then I had shooting pains, that type of thing, and left.”

The Black Hole was quiet. I wanted to go home now.

“Aaron, it wouldn't hold up in court.”

“I've got some more work to do on my formula. I'm still flying blind. I want some more control.”

“Well,” I said, “these things take—time.”

Aaron had me about half-psyched again. And I was really ready to go home. We'd missed the bus, but we could walk. We both needed the air. Muggers, shmuggers.

But he was going into action mode again. Now he positioned himself between the two terminals. “You stand behind me, Josh. Put your hands on my shoulders so I'll know you're right there. I'm going to try to go back without Emotional Component, so don't try to scare me or anything. Just be there.”

Already his hands were reaching for the keyboards.

“Wait a minute, Aaron.”

“What for? I said I was going back, and I am. I'm going to try the same formula again. Later I'll diddle my data and fiddle my figures. For now I want you here. Mrs. Newbery is liable to turn up any minute.”

“Let's say she finds me here in the room alone,” I said. “She'll throw me out and lock up as usual.”

“Then find a way of getting back in to spring me,” Aaron said. “Use your initiative.”

“But what if you don't—”

“Enough talk,” Aaron said. His fingers splayed out over the two keyboards. Both my hands dropped on his bony shoulders. Maybe I could even hold him back. The formula unfurled like a flag of hot letters across both screens.

But Aaron's shoulders didn't feel like a Baggie full of bees this time, though I heard buzzing. Instead, pain like I'd never felt raced up my fingers, and along my arms, and burst like a blown fuse in my brain.

My mind raged and reorganized. I realized Aaron was entering the past. And I was going with him.

We whirled through time without moving. I smelled something frying and hoped it wasn't us. The whole experience hurt worse than my mugging. Then we fell over backward. Me being there probably threw us off balance. We landed on a polished wood floor.

We were behind a carved table. The first thing I saw was the ceiling. It had fancy plasterwork now—then. And a tinkling chandelier.

I was still clinging like a monkey to Aaron's back. He jerked around. “What are you doing here?”

I blinked.

“You must have been in my force field,” he muttered.

Then we heard screaming.

We scrambled up in a crouch and peered over the table past a silver fruit bowl. There were two kids there: boys.

One was about nine or an overweight eight. He was wearing a full Indian costume: buckskin breeches, war paint over his freckles, feather headdress, and beaded moccasins. He had a tomahawk in his hand, and it looked like the real thing.

He was doing a war dance around a chair in the middle of the room. A smaller kid was tied to the chair by a lot of rope. Half the screams were his. The other half were the big one's war whoops.

“That is one hyperactive Native American,” Aaron said.

It must have been Cuthbert in costume. Lysander was trussed up like a turkey in the chair and screaming his head off. Then I noticed the crumpled-up newspaper around the chair legs.

My head was aching anyway, and the screaming and whooping didn't help. I still had Aaron in a near-death grip.

Then Cuthbert dropped his tomahawk, reached down into his buckskin breeches, and came up with a box of matches. Before you could think, he struck a light. You could smell sulfur. A breeze from the window that was there then sent the lace curtains billowing. The flame jumped onto them. But Cuthbert was too focused to notice. He leaned down and set the crumpled paper on fire under Lysander's kicking feet.

Flames licked up the curtains. More flames started licking Lysander's feet. Luckily he was wearing buttoned-up high-tops.

Aaron and I leaped up and skidded around the table. Little oriental rugs skittered under our feet. Cuthbert went on with his authentic war dance, waving his tomahawk around. Smoke drifted around the room, and Lysander was really yowling.

I didn't know what to do. “Quick,” Aaron said. “Get a vase.” There were flowers in glass vases around the long room. He grabbed one off a reading table, dumping out the flowers. Then he doused the burning paper under Lysander.

“Hey, no fair,” Cuthbert said. We were visible, and he was annoyed. But he didn't seem that surprised to see us. He was probably used to having a lot of servants around. And by the way, where were they?

The lace curtains were going up like dry weeds. There was a fireplace on that wall. Two vases of flowers were up on the mantel. I went for one and could just reach it. I dumped the flowers and ran over to the window. The curtains were gone, but the flames had jumped to the bookcase. When the fire hit shellac, it went wild and spread over the books. I let fly with a vase full of water. Aaron came up with another. We were both breathing hard. I wasn't sure the bookcase was doused, but we were out of vases. Flowers were everywhere.

“Who do you think you are?” came Cuthbert's voice behind us.

“Untie me at once!” Lysander howled in a higher voice. But he was all tied up and too busy screaming to notice us.

Aaron and I stood there panting. Then we heard foot-steps running down a hall that isn't there now. A big double door began to open. We whirled around, but I was having shooting pains all over like you can't believe. I reached out for Aaron, and his shoulder felt like a Baggie full of bees. We heard buzzing and a voice, but I blacked out for a moment. Hard fluorescent light hit us.

“What in the world!” Mrs. Newbery was standing there with her hands on her hips. “I didn't see you two at first. Have you been in this room all along?”

“Yep,” Aaron said, lightning-quick.

“Well, cut along home,” Mrs. Newbery said, “and let me lock up. And shut down the computers.”

I was ready to pull their plugs permanently.

We filed out. My head felt like a melon. You can get jet lag from this kind of behavior. We were walking out over the crummy tile floors of the Vanderwhitney part of school. Outside, raw winter weather hit us. There was some snow in the air, and the last buses had gone. We turned toward Fifth Avenue, trudging, silent.

 

“Anyway, now we know who extinguished the blaze before the hook and ladder company got there,” Aaron said.

“Us,” I said, totally psyched.

“How you got to go along, Josh, I can't figure at all,” he said. “You were standing too close or something.”

“Aaron, please,” I said. “I've got a headache the size of Lincoln Center.”

“No pain, no gain,” he said. “Josh, we both did it. We cellular-reorganized back like seventy-five years. We're not talking information superhighway here. We're talking a toll-free ten-lane expressway. And we're on it—in both directions. Talk about interactive.”

I let him rattle on. What choice did I have? He tried to walk out into traffic at the Eighty-sixth Street intersection. Part of me was still back in the Vanderwhitneys' library all those thousands and thousands of afternoons ago. I thought I could smell smoke in my dress code, under the Bulls warm-up jacket.

“Kids.” Aaron shook his head. “If that was Cuthbert's idea of playing, thank heaven for
Wolfenstein
and Sim City 2000. When you get right down to it, there's nothing safer and more user-friendly than a video game.”

But I couldn't get my mind away from where we'd been. “If we hadn't put out that fire, the room would have gone up like a torch. Curtains, rugs, polish on everything—that room was totally ...”

“Combustible,” Aaron said.

The whole idea that we saved Cuthbert and Lysander Vanderwhitney's lives, especially Lysander's, all those years before we were even born was still a hard concept for me. Now Aaron was quiet.

“There's more to this process than I thought,” he said after a while.

“Meaning?”

“Well, I've made three trips, right? The first time I saw Heather practically wiped out on a horse in traffic. The second time, when I went backward, I saw that girl and that guy doing all that worried kissing. They were like really furtive. This time it was a kid trying to barbecue his brother. Think about it.”

“Like they're all connected?”

“I'm afraid so. I never seem to run into anybody just reading a book or taking a nap. People sleep a third of the time, you know.”

“I know. So?”

“It looks like my formula depends on Emotional Component at the other end.”

“You mean—”

“Right. Every time I get there, somebody's upset about something. Turning up just in time for trouble could be a problem. I've got mega-diddling to do.”

We continued trudging home. When I got off the elevator on twelve, Aaron's lips were moving, but his mind was somewhere else.

 

Even though I'd taken a really long way home, Mom wasn't there yet. Without an O Pear, Heather and I were turning into a couple of latchkey kids. The apartment was all shadowy. But when I went into my room, all the lights were on.

A girl was sitting on my bed. She was in dress code: white blouse with collar, Pence plaid skirt. But she wasn't Heather. She was sitting on my bed in big shoes, legs crossed, making herself at home and talking on my phone.

When she saw me, her pale eyebrows jumped up high on her pale forehead. She slapped her hand over the phone. “Who do you think you are?”

“I think I'm Josh. I think this is my room.”

“Josh who?”

“I live here.”

“You're like Heather's brother?” Boy, was she annoyed.

I nodded.

“Heather never mentioned she had a brother.”

“Figures,” I said. “Who are you?” But I had a pretty good idea.

Her eyebrows shot up even higher. “Camilla Van Allen, of course. Just shut up a minute. I'm on the phone.”

Then she went back to her conversation. “Oh, Junior,” she said in a whole new voice, “I'm sorry. I was interrupted by some little creep in a Huckley tie. Heather's brother or somebody. I'd love to come to the party Friday night. Heather too. We'd bring her cousin, Feona Foxworthy, but Feona had to fly back to England for a point-to-point. What? Of course we can come. What do you think we are, seventh graders?”

It went on like that. Finally Camilla signed off.