Interstellar Pig (9 page)

I was awakened by a crash downstairs.

I lay there, my heart pounding. There were no footsteps or voices. Despite the crash, the house was empty.

But not quiet. The windowpanes rattled in my room, the kitchen screen door was banging, the thudding of the surf sounded as close as the front porch. And it was strangely dark outside, though the clock told me it was not quite 6 P.M.

I raced to the window. The sky boiled with thick purple clouds, the usually placid bay seethed with foam. Beside the marsh, the stunted scrub pines were bent over and trembling. And the Volkswagen—with Joe and Mom and Dad—had not returned.

I raced around the house, shutting windows against the first raindrops. I picked up the living room lamp that had awakened me when it had been toppled by a gust of wind. Then I struggled to find a station on the radio that was not obliterated by static, listening continually for the Volkswagen. Finally I managed to find a crackling voice bleating something about small craft warnings. It was lucky the storm had come so late in the day. They would have been back on shore before it got rough. They were probably on their way home this very minute.

I hadn't been asleep all day. I had spent a lot of time in bed at first, waiting for Zena and Manny to show up, getting up frequently to look at them from the window. They were lying in their bikinis on the patio in front of their house, reading, occasionally eating. They were staying close to home to make sure I wouldn't get away—and at any moment they would come to get me.

It got too nerve-racking to lie there and wait for them, so I began trying to find a good hiding place for The Piggy. I did a long, thorough job, checking out every room in the house, using the flashlight to explore dark corners. I finally ended up in the living room. There were built-in bookcases on either side of the fireplace, crammed with books all the way from the floor to the ceiling. The books were so dusty that it seemed no one had even pulled one off the shelf for years. They all looked so boring and dated they would probably stay there untouched until they rotted. And I remembered a story I'd read about jewel smugglers. . . .

I climbed up on a chair. Very carefully, so as not to disturb the dust, I pulled out the most inaccessible volume from the right hand corner of the topmost shelf, where the brick chimney met the beamed ceiling. It turned out to be a yearbook from some local high school, class of 1950. It was not the kind of thing the neighbors would be interested in, even if they happened to notice it; and they'd never notice it because it was too high up, several feet above even Zena's eye level. With a kitchen shears I slashed a hold through the senior class photos, the girls with their sweaters and pearls and funny permed hair, the boys with crew cuts and bow ties, all of them with quotes under their pictures like Still Waters Run Deep (she must have been a shy, unpopular one), or We Are All in the Gutter, but Some Of Us Are Looking at the Stars (that quote elicited more interesting speculations). The hole was just over half an inch thick, from Linda Finkel to Polly Winters.

The Piggy fit easily inside. Since the hole was only a couple of inches square, in the middle of the pages, the book looked perfectly ordinary when closed. I replaced it on the shelf. Then, using Mom's makeup brush and cotton puff, I rearranged the dust on the shelf so carefully that even Sherlock Holmes wouldn't have suspected the book had been touched for decades.

The Piggy was safe now. And what was most brilliant about the hiding place was how brazen it was, right out in the open in the living room, where no one would ever think of looking, instead of in some dark obvious hole in the basement or up above the rafters. Let them find another excuse for searching the house, let them poke around wherever they wanted. They'd never get their hands on it now without information from me. And that would not be forthcoming until I received the information I wanted from them.

After all, if it was the real Piggy, and the game was real, then finding a good hiding place for it was only what I was expected to do, perfectly fair, according to the rules.

"But it's not real," I assured myself. I was beginning to lose track of how much I was talking to myself. I kept picking up books and throwing them down, pacing around the house as the afternoon dragged endlessly on, waiting for the Volkswagen to return. Every once in a while, I peeked out at Zena and Manny, still sunbathing on the patio.

A nap would be a good way of killing time until Mom and Dad came back. I lay down on my bed on top of the sheet, aware that The Piggy was nowhere near me, edgy about Mom and Dad. But I was also tired enough to fall asleep.

Until the sounds of the storm woke me up. After hearing the news about small craft warnings on the radio, I began to get really worried. Obviously Joe had taken them sailing to get them out of the way. They would have interfered with the attack on me. And when was it going to come?

And then I did hear the labored grunt of the Volkswagen motor ascending the hill, and the crunch of tires on gravel. What a baby 1 was to get myself so worked up! Mom and Dad were adults. They knew how to take care of themselves. I stepped out onto the front porch.

Zena and Manny, fully clothed now, were coming from the cottage to greet Joe. The roof of the convertible had been put up against the impending rain. The motor died. Joe stepped out of the driver's seat, his hair lifted by the wind.

It was too overcast for any kind of sunset. Behind the pink cottage, over the dark water, there was only the thinnest line of orange, shrinking quickly behind the clouds.

I waited. Joe locked his door, then went around to the other side of the car.

He made sure that door was locked, and the window rolled up. The few fat raindrops didn't seem to be bothering him as he slowly walked toward Zena and Manny, standing stiffly by their front door.

There was no one else in the car.

I didn't think. I ran. They didn't see me, turned away to enter their cottage. I grabbed Joe's elbow and spun him around. "Where are they?" I screamed.

Joe seemed startled, but his grin was easy and benign. "Didn't they call you yet?" he asked me.

"What do you mean, call me? Where are they?"

Joe laughed, then turned to glance at Zena and Manny, who were smiling.

"Barney, what a state you're in!" Joe said. "It's not the end of the world.

Your parents—who were quite amusing, by the way—" he put in to the others, "hit it off splendidly with the Powells, who invited them to have dinner at their house/'

"I don't believe it," I said. "I don't believe you even know those people."

Joe rolled his eyes. "You're being silly, Barney. Anyway, they're going to call you. I'm surprised they haven't done it by now. It was a good half hour ago."

"You don't have the number where I can call them?"

Zena giggled. "Do they still give you numbers to call every time they go out to dinner, Barney, at your age? Or maybe they usually hire a baby-sitter."

She had a point. Mom and Dad went out all the time at home without leaving me a way to reach them. Yet it seemed different this time. "No, they don't," I said, feeling foolish. "But you'd think they would have called me."

"Maybe you should check to see if the phone's working," Manny said, shivering.

"This wind's pretty strong. A wire could have blown over somewhere. Maybe they did try to call and couldn't get through,"

Joe was looking up at the sky, a calloused hand shielding his eyes from the thickening raindrops. "Looks like it's going to be a big storm," he observed.

"I'm going to check the phone," I said.

"Your mother asked if we would give you supper," Joe said, as I turned to get away from them. "I told her it would be our pleasure."

"Yes, Barney, you must have dinner with us!" Zena urged me, as hospitable as if the witch she had been last night had been a dream of mine. "Manny's a wonderful cook."

"We're having lobster," Manny called after me, as I reached the front steps.

"And lime pie. You better hurry back. We're starving."

The phone in our kitchen, as Manny had suggested, was dead. I slammed it down, angry and bewildered and scared. Everything Joe said made sense; it was a perfectly reasonable thing for Mom and Dad to do. Only it was all too conveniently neat. Last night the neighbors had suspected that I had The Piggy. Today, Joe takes Mom and Dad sailing. And then Mom and Dad happen to get invited to dinner, and then a storm happens to come up and the phone happens to go dead, so I can't check on it.

Did the neighbors have a storm-generating card among their attributes? And what was the next step in getting The Piggy—then step that made it necessary to get rid of Mom and Dad and the phone, so I would be alone and unable to call for help?

Maybe Joe had simply pushed them off the boat.

But I refused to believe they were dead. It was too dark in the kitchen now to see anything but the grayish light outside the windows. I twisted the switch on the nearest wall lamp, and the anchors and lighthouses on the shade winked on. At least the electricity was still working. Darkness didn't seem to be necessary for their plans.

I could always make the forty-five minute walk to the village, in the now heavily pelting rain. There might be a store open. Maybe even a police station, though I couldn't remember having noticed one. And what would I tell them, if I found one? The neighbors hadn't made any specific threats, hadn't done anything overt that anyone else would find suspicious. And of course they would cleverly deny it all. And everyone found them so likable. And they were adults and I was only a teenager. All I'd accomplish by going to town would be to make a fool of myself.

Or I could stay home alone and eat cold bologna instead of lobster. But that wouldn't keep them from coming over to get me—I'd just be missing a good meal, pointlessly. And they would tease me, and make me feel foolish for that.

I went upstairs and put on warmer clothes, listening to the rain as I changed. The sound reminded me to put on my slicker before I went out. I would have been drenched if I hadn't. As I ran across the dark lawn, I decided I had better keep an eye on Manny while he cooked. And I wouldn't take a bite of anything until I made sure the others had tasted it first.

"Isn't this quaint?" Zena greeted me. "Our first real storm. What is it they call them around here? Nor'easters, or something dramatic like that?"

There was a big roaring fire, and wonderful smells coming from the kitchen.

Zena took my slicker like a gracious hostess. Was I sure I hadn't dreamed her behavior last night?

Manny was banging things around in the kitchen. Zena and Joe had drinks by the fire, and there was a plate of munchies—crackers and cheese and Zena's ubiquitous sliced onions. "Let me get you something to drink, Barney," Zena said.

"I can get it myself," I said. "I want to see what Manny's doing in there, that smells so good."

Manny bustled about among the clouds of steam like a frenzied alchemist in a knotty pine laboratory. He was in his element here, as he certainly hadn't been yesterday on the windsurfer. "Help yourself to any beverage you want, Barney; we won't let on to your parents," he said, conspiratorially. He told me where all the drink ingredients were, but I took only ginger ale from an unopened bottle—I wanted to keep my head clear. I asked him about what he was doing, and he eagerly explained, never stopping in his work as he babbled on about the best ways to cook string beans and new potatoes.

"Of course, some people claim you lose nutrients by using so much water, but they don't know what they're talking about. It's the great amount of water that makes them cook fast, so they're green and crisp. ..."

I concentrated on checking the shelves and counters for any suspicious-looking substances, not paying much attention to what he was saying. "Uh-huh, that's interesting," I put in occasionally, noting the absence of rat poison, or any unlabeled containers.

"... although drowning everything in butter can be fattening, and detrimental for the heart. But if you'd like to make a little deal, Barney, I could let you have some liquid that would keep your body, including all your organs, in perfect shape forever, no matter what you ate or drank. The others don't have anything like it."

"Uh-huh, anything like it, I see," I murmured, noticing how dusty the top of the refrigerator was. They weren't very good housekeepers.

"A youth serum is what you'd call it," he said, peering into the pot of lobsters. "You could have all the remainder of it, Barney. Of course, you wouldn't want to take it right away. Wait a few years, until you're in your early twenties, say. Then you'll just stay in your twenties, for good. Not to mention, it has the amusing little side effect of making you irresistibly attractive, along with the eternal youth part."

"Hmm, eternal youth," I said vaguely. "Sounds great. . . ."I took a sip of ginger ale. Then I almost dropped the glass. "What?" I said quite loudly, as his last few sentences finally sank in.

"Shhh.'" Manny said, leaving his pots and pans now to pull me to the back door. We stepped just outside, under the roof overhang, out of earshot of the others. "It's wonderful stuff, Barney, believe me, I wouldn't kid you," he said, nodding enthusiastically. I was near enough to him now to see that the close-cut hairs of his beard were as uniform and symmetrically spaced as nylon bristles on a mass-produced brush. "It may not be literally eternal, but it lasts quite long enough," Manny went on. "Look what it did to me, I'm 138—relatively speaking, of course. It's also fine for the complexion. Just give me The Piggy, Barney, and it's yours."

"The Piggy!" I cried out, overjoyed. I didn't know what this eternal youth bit was all about, but at that moment it didn't matter. What was so marvelous was that finally one of them was being honest with me about The Piggy. "The Piggy! That is what you want, right?" I demanded breathlessly. "That's why you came here? That's what's behind everything?"

"Of course," he said, a little impatiently. "So how about it? Is it a deal?"

"But how come all of a sudden you're admitting you want The Piggy?"

"You brought it to this point, Barney, not I," he said, looking hard at me.

His childish enthusiasm was suddenly gone, his voice angrily petulant. "The beans are going to overcook if you keep me waiting any longer. The youth serum for The Piggy. Is it a deal or isn't it?"

My joy drained away. His "deal" was so insane that what he had said about The Piggy had lost its meaning. "I'm cold," I said, backing away. "I'm going to go sit by the fire."

"Don't forget my offer:" He came toward me, the rubber spatula in his hand raised like a club. "And you will not divulge one word about it to the others," he hissed, so threateningly that all I could do was nod mutely, feeling like a dog about to be whipped.

"Oh, Barney, you've kept me so distracted my beans might have gone limp!" he cried out in his normal voice, for the others to hear. "Get back out in the living room and amuse Zena and Joe, you cute pest! They're not doing anything vital."

I scurried away, trying to act as if nothing had happened. But Zena giggled at me from her comfortable chair by the fire. "Don't worry about Manny, Barney," she said. "He imagines it's the end of the world if the string beans aren't al dente." She nodded at the pink wicker love seat facing the fireplace. "Sit down. Relax."

I lowered myself onto the uncomfortable wicker. "Where's Joe?" I asked her.

"Removing his sheets and blankets from the clothesline. The dope hung them up to air out this morning and forgot all about them." She leaned toward me intimately. "Poor, absentminded Joe. He never contrived to get his hands on any intelligence booster." She paused, letting the words hang invitingly between us. "It's rare stuff, Barney. Very rare indeed. I won't inform you what I had to go through to get my hands on it." She put her hand on my knee.

"But I’ll give it to you, Barney. All you have to do is let me have The Piggy. Okay?"

Now she was doing it too. It was unnerving, but I wasn't as unprepared as I had been with Manny. "So you admit The Piggy's what you're after?" I asked. "You've been looking for a long time. And you found the document, and that's how you knew it was here, right?" She nodded. "But why? What does it really do? And why didn't you just—"

"Yes, that was very clever of you, stealing the document," she interrupted me, barely whispering. Her enchanting smile was so close to my face that she could have kissed me. "But you weren't clever enough to do it undetected, were you? Or to prevent us from discovering that you had The Piggy? You weren't clever enough for many things. But you would be." Not taking her eyes from my face, she moved to the love seat and sat close beside me. "Only a milligram halves your IRSC; two milligrams quarter it. You'd be the genius of your age, Barney, of your entire race. The greatest works of art, the world-shaking inventions would all come from you. And that wouldn't mean only wealth and fame, Barney. Think about it. It would mean power." She gripped both my hands. "You'd be the most important person on this planet. Inevitably. All you have to do is to give me that superfluous little trinket. Just say yes, Barney."

I knew there was a flaw in what she was saying, aside from the unreality of any "intelligence booster." But her closeness made me a little dizzy. I closed my eyes. What was the flaw? And my brain, feeble and unboosted though it was, came up with the right answer. "But why do you want Tlie Piggy, then, if its just a superfluous little trinket like you say?" I asked her. "What exactly does it do?"

I opened my eyes. She was smiling, but it was fixed, an effort. "There's no time for all that now," she said, her whisper growing urgent. "With the brain booster, you'll understand everything anyway. It's more precious than anything else, that's obvious." Her long nails bit into my wrist, but she kept on smiling. "They'll be back in a second. Don't say anything to them.

Just inform me where The Piggy is!"

The front door squealed and she was back in her easy chair, sipping her drink. I spun around. Joe stood watching us, his arms full of soggy sheets. "You two look like you've been having quite a cozy little chat," he said, water dripping down his nose.

"Poor Joe!" Zena said cheerfully. "So sad there's no extra bedding. I just hate to think of you sleeping on a bare mattress in this weather."

"Don't fret about me," Joe said, his eyes on her face as he wiped his nose on one of the sheets. "I'll just sleep over at Barney's. I know his parents wouldn't mind, under the circumstances."

I could tell by Zena's expression that she liked that idea about as much as I "Zena, you promised you'd make the salad," Manny whined from the kitchen doorway. "And if you don't hurry up, everything's going to be ruined."

Zena finished her drink and stood up. "Coming, Manny," she sighed and marched to the kitchen.

Joe trudged into his bedroom, which was off the fireplace end of the living room, and dropped the sheets on the floor. He turned on the light, then pulled off his damp shirt and reached for a towel. "Hey, Barney, come on in here for a second," he said, jerking his head at me.

I obeyed. I was getting a little weary of intense confrontations, but I was curious about what impossible thing he was going to come up with. I had already been offered eternal youth and beauty, unlimited intelligence and power. What else was there?