Cloneward Bound (4 page)

“Yes,” his dad replied, trying to help free his hands. “I
was trying to apply my hair gel but FP jumped up and ate it.”

“What?!” Fisher said. “Is he okay?”

“Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe to eat—though I can’t imagine it tastes very good. He’ll be fine.”

“Well, okay,” Fisher said, “I guess if …” His eyes drifted up past his father’s head. “Um, are you
sure
he’ll be okay?”

“It’s completely nontoxic,” his dad said, finally freeing his wrists. “Why?”

“Because he appears to be glued to the ceiling.” Fisher pointed.

The family pet, and Fisher’s best friend, was named Flying Pig, usually called FP. Fisher’s mother had engineered the little fellow, a small pig with flaps under his forelegs that served as wings. He couldn’t really fly, but he was a pretty talented glider.

One thing he was not, however, was self-adhesive. Yet there he was, stuck to the ceiling like a twitchy pink mushroom.

“FP!” Mrs. Bas exclaimed, looking around for something to get him down with.

“You okay, boy?” Fisher called up to him. FP made a few squeaks. He sounded more annoyed than pained.

“Oh dear,” Mr. Bas said, scratching his head. “I should have guessed. The gel is made of adaptive materials. Its strength adjusts to its environment. FP’s body must be cranking the gel all the way up and sweating it out.”

Fisher found a long-handled broom and with a great effort managed to pry FP from the ceiling. FP squealed as he flailed his legs, trying to slow his descent to the floor. He hit with a thud—and his backside immediately attached itself to the linoleum. But at least he was on the floor.

Mr. Bas shook his head. “Well, this is a pickle. If the gel is in his system, he could be sweating it out for days. He’ll stick to anything he touches.”

Fisher sighed and poked at FP until his hooves were on the floor. His whole body was glistening with the powerful gel.

“I guess I’ll try and work up an antidote,” Fisher said, dropping his backpack on the floor and pulling out a folder. “Before you go, could one of you sign this permission slip? My science class is taking a field trip this weekend to LA.”

His mother, still halfway out of one shoe, hopped over and took the slip from Fisher.

“Oh!” she said, reading it over. “You’re going to a taping of
Strange Science
?” She bit her lower lip absently. Then she said with false casualness, “I think I’ll volunteer for one of the chaperone spots. Because, that is …” She thought for a moment. “Well, LA is a big place, after all, and it can be dangerous. I should insist on accompanying you.”

“Hmph,” Fisher’s dad replied. “You just want to get a chance to meet that Dr. Devilish. He’s nothing but a phony with a silly goatee and a too-tight lab coat. I bet he couldn’t reverse engineer an electron spectrometer if he had the instructions tattooed on his big, manly hands. He’s not a real scientist. Or even a real actor! He just
smiles at the camera, and everybody loves it. If you’re going to see a show produced, you should see
Sci-Fi: Survivor!
”

“Sci-fi
what
?” Fisher’s mom asked. She was blushing, and Fisher noticed she had not tried to deny that she wanted to see Dr. Devilish.

“A new show. It’s premiering next week. A group of people are put in a maze full of challenges based on different sci-fi genres, and they have to figure out clever ways to get past them. Now that’s a show where people really have to use their heads! Critical thinking, problem solving under pressure …”

“Oh,
that
show,” his mom said disdainfully. “It’s only getting hype because it comes on right before
Strange Sci
ence,” his mom fired back. “So Fisher, about that—”

“Er, sorry,” Fisher said quickly. “All the chaperone spots are taken.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Bas said, clearly crestfallen. “Well, I’m sure it’ll be a rewarding experience.”

There was a brief moment of awkward silence. Fisher’s mom finally managed to free her earring.

“So,” Fisher said, attempting to change the subject, “what’s the occasion, anyway? You almost never have nights out.”

His parents looked at each other, and his mother let out a long sigh.

“I wasn’t going to tell you right away, because I didn’t want you to worry about me,” she said. “But … due to setbacks and security risks, my AGH project has been shut down. I was ordered to hand over all samples of the chemical I’d kept in the lab.” For a moment, Fisher’s mom looked as though she might cry. “I kept a precise log of all of my supplies … but I still came up a centiliter short.”

“It’s not your fault,” Mr. Bas said, putting a hand on his wife’s arm.

Fisher folded his hands behind his back, then proceeded to squeeze them until he thought his fingers would break. One one-hundredth of a liter of AGH. Exactly the amount that he had used to create Two. Not only did his mother know that it was missing—so did the government.

“How … how do you think that might have happened?” he asked, struggling to keep his voice steady.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “It could have been as simple as a temperature change that caused a little bit to evaporate. Or maybe I incorrectly recorded the amounts. The fact of the matter is that the AGH is extremely powerful—and practically untested. For all we know, one centiliter could be used to engineer whole armies! The agency is extremely unhappy—I’m lucky I still have a job.”

“You’re the best scientist they’ve got,” Mr. Bas said valiantly.

Mrs. Bas gave him a weak smile. “Be that as it may,
the bureau is terrified. After Dr. X’s attempts to steal my formula, they believe it’s possible that someone succeeded in removing a sample. They’ve dispatched whole teams to investigate a possible security breach. If someone stole the AGH, he’ll be found, and caught … and hopefully thrown into a jail cell to rot,” she finished fiercely.

“Uh … huh,” stammered Fisher. He could almost feel the cold concrete cell pressing around him.

“Anyway, I just need a night to relax,” she chirped, suddenly cheerful again, “and get away from it for a little bit. I’ve been answering some
very
personal questions about our family and my methods all week. They’ve finally cleared me of culpability, but it was a very stressful experience.” Then she bent down, placing her hands on Fisher’s shoulders. “Listen, Fisher. I don’t know how long this investigation is going to last or whether any agents are going to come to the house to investigate further, but I don’t want you to worry about it, okay? I’ll be fine.”

“That’s good,” Fisher said as his vision blurred and the room started spinning. He thought he might faint. Through the haze, he saw his parents headed for the door. “Have a good time,” he said under his breath. It took his parents several tries to make it out the door, because Mr. Bas’s silk scarf and Mrs. Bas’s shawl managed to wreathe together and tie them up neck to neck.

When the door closed, Fisher stayed in place, not even
wavering, like he’d been nailed to the floorboards.

He had no idea how long he had been standing there when a crash from the kitchen made him whip around. He slipped up to the doorway and eased his head around, expecting to see a tall man in a black suit and sunglasses punching down the wall in pursuit of Fisher for his crimes.

Thankfully, the noise turned out to be a package of soup crackers that had been set down too close to the counter’s edge.

“Young Fisher,” came a voice straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. It sounded like an English butler, but was, in fact, the toaster.

“Oh, hi, Lord Burnside,” Fisher said, relieved. “Have a good day?”

“Well, I must confess that this morning I slightly over-crisped a slice of whole wheat. I’m afraid that dreadful blunder put me in the darkest of moods for much of the day. Luckily, your father likes his toast dark so at least my foul mood produced something of worth. But if I cannot reliably and consistently perform my function, what good am I?” Lord Burnside had small glowing spots on his side that served to indicate eyes, and they dipped into a melancholy frown.

“I wouldn’t let it get you down,” Fisher said, inching once again toward the hallway. He needed to think. He
needed a plan. “After all, just think how many pieces of bread would be left completely untoasted if it wasn’t for your hard work!”

“Dear me,” the little appliance said, eyespots growing wider. “All of that poor, cold, utterly uncrunchy bread! That would be disastrous. Indeed, perhaps I exaggerated the importance of one mistake, compared to the vast amount of important work that I do. Thank you, young sir. You have provided a very valuable perspective on the matter.”

“Anytime, your lordship,” Fisher said. He took the stairs to his room two at a time, slammed the door, and sagged against it.

His eyes landed on the cover of
Issue #412
of Vic Daring, Space Scoundrel, lying open and facedown on his bed. The artwork depicted the rakish adventurer catapulting himself free of a wrecked ship in a sleek chrome space suit, hurtling into black space, with no idea where the desperate escape might take him.

Fisher empathized. He, too, had to hurtle himself into the terrifying black space … of Los Angeles.

Twenty minutes later, Fisher was standing in front of a suitcase, which was, at the moment, still empty except for a solar-powered umbrella, a device that Fisher hadn’t really thought through before he made it. Fortunately, it worked very well as a portable power
source whenever it wasn’t actually raining.

“Oh boy! LA! City of Angels! The bright lights! The stars! The big time! Prowlin’ the mean streets!”

Once again, Fisher was conversing with a machine. It was CURTIS, Fisher’s AI companion. CURTIS sounded like a pizza delivery guy from Brooklyn, but he had an extremely powerful computing mind.

CURTIS had spent most of his time on the TechX mainframe being very bored, and so had downloaded vast amounts of TV from the Internet. It was all he’d really known of the outside world before Fisher had taken him. Now he was giving Fisher advice on all the sights to check out in LA.

FP was taking careful steps around the room, trying not to touch anything that wasn’t already secured to the floor. He wasn’t doing a great job. The gel hadn’t worn off yet, and two cough-drop wrappers and a crumpled-up page of Fisher’s calculations were stuck to his legs.

“I’m not going to sightsee, CURTIS,” Fisher said, looking through his sock drawer until he found his special, super-elastic, jump-enhancing socks. “I have important work to do when I get there.”

“You know something, kid? One time, Dr. Devilish made a levitating platform with electromagnets and then played a guitar solo on top of it!”

“I’m pretty sure the music was prerecorded,” Fisher
said, feeling along the upper shelf in his closet. He pulled down the camouflaging spray that he’d used to hide from the guards in TechX, along with a bagful of instant shrub seeds, which would sprout into a full-sized shrub within seconds of being watered.

“The legendary Hollywood Boulevard! The stars in the pavement! Bogart! Brando! And then there’s Grauman’s Chinese Theatre! Do you know what that place was like when
Star Wars
first came out? It was amazing, the displays of—”

“CURTIS!” Fisher shouted, spinning around to face the computer. “I’m not going there to look at movie stars or gawk at buildings. I’ve got to find Two.”

Fisher tucked a necktie into his suitcase. It was made of a material that would expand and stretch up to twenty times its length. That was a device Fisher had invented by accident; all he’d wanted when he made it was a necktie that he could successfully knot in a half Windsor without strangling himself.

The computer made a sighing sound.

“Fine, fine.” He chuckled a few times before going silent.

“Sometimes I miss only having a toaster to talk to,” Fisher mumbled to himself, zipping his suitcase closed.

Hours later, Fisher sat on the edge of his bed, a clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other. He knew he
should be trying to sleep, but he’d been turning and shifting so much that FP had leapt from the bed and perched, asleep, on Fisher’s in-progress Tesla coil, hidden under a draped sheet next to his desk. Fisher hadn’t mentioned to his parents that he’d been trying to construct an artificial lightning-bolt maker. His mother would overreact he was sure.

Fisher’s pencil flew frantically across the paper until it was warm in his hand. He wrote out dozens of equations about the mission ahead. First, he took the population of Los Angeles, the city’s size, and a few other factors, and calculated the odds that he would step off the bus and run right into Two. He hadn’t seen that many zeros to the right of a decimal since he’d fallen asleep on his keyboard with his nose on the 0 key.

He also made a few entertaining calculations just to ease his mind. The density of King of Hollywood franchises in the city, which was higher than the density of
humans
in some Midwestern states. The odds that, at any given moment, a seagull would land on his head. He didn’t actually know enough about the behavior of seagulls for that one, so he assumed that human heads looked really comfy to seagulls.