A Larger Universe (2 page)

Tommy felt his mom's arm tighten, and he twisted his body to
look at her.  Her expression at the camera was mixed with some other emotion
besides stage fright. 

"Most nights, I make him stop working with his computer
and go to bed," she said.  "I’ve caught him up at two in the morning
staring at that screen."  A look of confusion crossed her face, followed
by one of determination.  She looked down at Tommy.  "I've always thought
that was a waste of time.  In spite of his success with this, I wish he showed
the same interest in his school work."

Tommy shrugged off his mom’s arm.  "Mom!  I do show an
interest in my school work when it’s not boring."  He leaned toward his
father.

The muscular arm his dad put around Tommy was almost as
thick as Tommy's head.  The look Tom Yates gave to the camera was one of
obvious pride.  "I got Tommy into math classes at Emory.  He does show an
interest in that.”

"What else do you like to do, Tommy?" the reporter
asked.   "Your mother’s right.  Sitting at a computer all day doesn't seem
healthy for a young boy like you, even if you’ve made a lot of money."

Tommy frowned and glanced at his mom.  "Well, I was
taking karate lessons, until Mom made me quit."  He paused.  "And I
ride my bike.  But, mostly, I read and work with my computer."

"I understand you've had some problems with the movie industry
about this product.  How do you respond to their claim that this will increase
the number of illegal downloads?"

Tommy felt his face flush as his father broke in.  "Tommy’s
program should increase their sales of movies.  We’ve agreed to sell the supplier
side only to legitimate movie distributors.  Unless they give away or lose the code
that creates the download files, they should have nothing to worry about."

"What do you plan to do with all that money,
Tommy?" the reporter said with a wink.

The reporter’s sudden smile made Tommy very uncomfortable. 
It seemed predatory, somehow.  "I don’t know.”  Tommy shrugged and looked
at his parents.  "We don’t know.  I’ll go to school, I guess.  Dad says
we’ll find something to invest in.  And, well, I’d like a new computer."

The light on Tommy's camera went out, and the reporter faced
the camera behind the sofa.  "And there you have it, folks, a problem we’d
all like to have:  how to spend a million dollars.  This is Bob Wilson.  Now,
back to Robert Hines in our studio." 

The phone calls started before the crew had dismantled their
equipment.  The calls came from realtors.  They came from investment counselors
and brokers.  They came from charities big and small.  They came from relatives
they knew and some they'd never heard of.  At first, whoever answered the phone
told the truth: they didn’t have the money yet; the product wasn’t even in the
stores.  No one believed that.  Hadn’t the reporter called Tommy a
millionaire?  Each call was interrupted by a call waiting beep.  Finally, they
stopped answering.  At 10 p.m. Tommy’s dad unplugged the phones.

The next morning, a Saturday, the front doorbell woke them
before 8 a.m.  After slamming the door in the person’s face, Tommy's dad
plugged in the phone long enough to call the police.  The doorbell rang three
more times before the police arrived.

Tommy's dad looked over the breakfast table at his son. 
"I hope we get the advance they promised us soon.  If this continues,
we’ll have to move."

Tommy slumped in his chair.  "But Dad, I like living
here.  My friends are here."

Tom Yates didn't respond.  Instead he turned to Tommy's
mother. "In the meantime, the police gave me the names of several
companies that offer protection services.  We'll have to use our savings to
keep people away from the house until the advance arrives." 

Rachel looked up from picking at her scrambled eggs. 
"I need an unlisted phone number or a cell phone, too.  I don't like being
cut off from my mother like this."

Tommy shoved his chair back.  "I never wanted all this
attention.  I wrote the program for
me
, because it was fun and interesting! 
I wouldn’t have shown it to anyone if I'd known this would happen, if you
hadn't insisted!  Selling the program was your idea!”

His dad sighed.  "It’s done.  We signed the contract,
and we can't back out now."

Tommy's eyes stung.  He hurried away from the table and
through the door to the deck before his parents could see him crying.  

The second story deck overlooked a tiny yard and small lake
beyond.  He had played beside that lake for as long as he could remember.  Towering
eleagnus bushes, left to grow completely wild, hid the deck and lake from the
front of the house and the cars that cruised his street.  On the lake, Canada geese
and mallard ducks swam in big circles.  The birds lived on the lake year-round,
and some were tame enough to take bread from his hand.

On the street side of the deck, unkempt eleagnus branches draped
over the rail.  The foliage shook, and a black and white cat with a diagonal
white streak across his face climbed through the vertical slats and brushed
against Tommy's leg. 

Tommy bent over to scratch the cat's back.  "What would
we do with you, Potter?  Cats don’t like to move, even when they're indoor
cats, and you're an outdoor cat.  You won’t know where you are.  You might get
lost, and I'd never see you again." 

Tommy sobbed and sat down in the middle of the deck, pulling
the cat into his lap. 

He usually liked the fragrance of flowering eleagnus, but
now the overpowering perfume made him feel sick.  He buried his nose in
Potter's back, trying to block the cloying odor with the smell of sun-warmed
cat fur.

The throbbing of helicopters coming from the west
overwhelmed Potter’s purring.  From over the trees on the other side of the
lake came a formation of military helicopters, in a straight line of three,
flying toward him.  He lay back to watch them go over, pulling Potter onto his
chest.  The Army helicopter flights were a regular occurrence and usually
passed to the north of the house.

Today the helicopters flew above his roof and stopped,
hovering, still in formation, about five hundred feet above his head.  The sky
flickered through the whirling blades spinning on top of each aircraft.  The
blade tips seemed so close that the slightest mistake by the pilots would have
caused them to hit each other, and bring the helicopters crashing down on him.

Impossibly, a square of pale red appeared in midair between
two of the aircraft, in the space between the turning rotors.  Inside the
square, he saw movement and the outline of a head. 

He tried to get up to run inside for his parents.  Potter’s
claws dug into his chest, and he saw a flash of light.

The hooded man leaned over the desk, propping his chin on
cupped hands, and watched the sleeping boy.  The viewing window converted the
mostly infrared, ambient light in the confinement room to visible wavelengths,
revealing a small figure, sprawled on his back with a black and white cat
stretched across his torso.  The boy’s narrow chest rose and fell slowly,
lifting and lowering the cat.

The child will never survive long enough to do the job he
was brought here for
, the hooded man thought,
even if he does have the
knowledge we need, and I don’t see how that’s possible, either.  No one that
young could know much.

The man stood and moved nearer the window for a better
view.  He pulled up his robe’s right sleeve and compared his own arm with that
of the boy.  At that distance and in the dim light, he couldn’t tell for sure,
but the boy’s upper arm looked smaller than his own wrist, and the hooded man’s
peers considered him undersized.  The television broadcast had stated that the
boy was thirteen.  If so, then he was very small for his age.

The boy moved his arms, and a thin, strangely accented voice
came through the speakers above the hooded man’s head.  “Mom?  Dad?  Are you
there?”  The boy lifted the cat off his chest and sat up.

The man returned to the controls on the face of the desk and
slowly turned up the illumination in the confinement room, allowing more
visible light to come through the window. 

“You’re awake,” the man said.  “It was time.  Wait.”  He
lifted a trapdoor behind the desk and hurried down a ladder to the passageway
below.  He had agreed to watch until the boy awoke.  His part in this would
come much later.

Tommy woke in the dark with pressure on his chest.  The
weight was furry and warm and had pointed ears; it had to be Potter.  The
surface under him felt leathery and padded, almost like a bed, but when he
spread his arms and legs, he couldn’t find the edge. 

This isn’t the deck
, he thought,
and it doesn’t
feel like a hospital bed, either.
  He had broken his wrist in his one
attempt at rollerblading and knew what a hospital bed felt like.  This wasn't
it.  And why would Potter be with him in the hospital? 

He took a deep breath. 
Why does my head feel like it’s
filled with mush?
  He rubbed his tongue against the roof of his mouth,
trying to eliminate a bitter taste. 

“Mom?  Dad?  Are you there?” his voice rasped in the dark.

The ceiling glowed faintly, revealing a small gray room with
padded floor and walls.  The light brightened still more.  He was lying in the
middle of the room.  Tommy carefully lifted Potter off of his chest and placed
him on the floor. 
That’s weird
, he thought. 
Cats don't stay asleep
when they're moved.

A voice came from somewhere.  "Thow air awake.  It was
time.  Wait.”

"Who's there?" Tommy shouted.  "Where am
I?"

He looked around the room, searching for the source of the
voice.  He saw featureless walls, broken only by two doors and a window frame
with more of the gray wall inside it.  One door had a handle set into its face,
the other a silver plate. 

Tommy got to his feet and walked toward the only objects in
the room, an open-topped flat box and two bowls on the floor next to the door
with the inset handle.  "Well, whoever they are, they've taken care of
you, Potter,” He said to the still sleeping cat.  “You have a litter box and
water and cat food."  He realized how thirsty he was.  “I wish they’d done
the same for me.”

Twisting the inset door handle and pulling open the door revealed
a smaller room containing a sink and a strange toilet.  After getting a drink, he
inspected the toilet.  The base was installed much farther from the wall than
any toilet he had seen, and the pipes entered the bowl from the side instead of
the rear.  The seat was half as high as the toilets at home, and, instead of
lifting, the seat split in the middle and folded to the left and right on a
hinge.  A lever in the hinge mechanism made both sides scissor out at once.  He
opened and closed the seat a few times. 
That could be painful.  I wonder
who invented that.

When he returned to the outer room, Potter stood up with his
spine in a high arc and his mouth gaping in a wide, toothy yawn. 
"Potter!  You’re okay!" 

Tommy sat down beside the cat and gave him a gentle hug,
which the cat resisted with claws half extended.   The resistance became a
leap, as Potter jumped to the food bowl.

Still coming from no specific place, a different voice
startled Potter away from eating and back to Tommy's lap.  “How are you
feeling?”  Or at least that is what Tommy made of it.  The voice sounded like
that of the clerk in the North Georgia store his family had visited.  Sort of
Southern, but biblical sounding, with some of the words clipped at the
beginning or end.  What he actually heard was “Ow air ye feelin?”

Tommy stood with the cat in his arms, then winced as he felt
a sharp pain inside his left elbow.  A needle mark inside a bruise marked his
arm.  “Where
am
I?" 

For the first time since he woke, he felt frightened.  The
throb of his heart pounded in his ears and he had trouble breathing.  He looked
anxiously around the room, waiting for an answer to his question. 

His shout frightened Potter out of his grasp.  "It’s
the money, isn’t it?  Why did you take my blood?" 

When he still didn't get an answer, he sat on the padded
floor, pulled his bent legs close to his body, and placed his head on his
knees.  He spoke again in a whisper.  "Mom said this might happen.  You’ve
kidnapped me for the money.  Well, we don’t have any money yet, so you can’t
get any.  Keeping me here won’t do you any good." 

He lifted his head and shouted again, "Where are you? 
Why can’t I see you?”

"My, ye do run on, din’t ye?" the voice said. 
"We will come to all thet.  Jist answer me.  Ow air thee?"

Tommy gave that some effort and decided the voice meant,
"My, you do run on, don’t you?  We’ll get to all that.  Just answer me. 
How are you?”

Tommy wrapped his arms around his body.  When he first woke,
he had felt calm in spite of the blackness.  Even the strange room hadn't
bothered him at first.  Now, his heart raced, and tears ran down his face. 
"Will I ever see my parents again?  On TV, kidnapped children are killed
if they've seen the kidnappers.  That’s why you aren’t showing yourselves,
isn’t it?"

"Ah.  The drug's wearin off.  It were time if we had
the dose rit.  Can’t always be zackly seur, though.  No, that not be the reeson
we’re not shewin airselves.  It be best to do this slow.  Ye can’t come out for
a while anyway, till the tests be done."

Tommy couldn’t stop crying.  Between sobs he said, "Do
what slowly?  What kind of tests?  I want to go home!"

"Maybe it be best if...," the voice said as Tommy
smelled a pungent odor.  The room darkened.

When he awoke again on the floor, Potter crunched at the cat
food bowl, making the only sound.  The pungent smell had been replaced by the
aroma of hot food.