Brainboy and the Deathmaster Read online

  Brainboy AND THE

  DEATHMASTER

  TOR SEIDLER

  The author would like to thank

  Brad Arlett and Juan Gamboa

  for their help in matters scientific.

  For Milo and Lily

  CONTENTS

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  41

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  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  About the Author

  Also by TOR SEIDLER

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  “Darryl? Are you awake?”

  He was, more or less. He was lying on his back in the bed nearer the window, his eyes closed, but not quite all the way. His focus kept switching back and forth between his crisscrossing eyelashes and a spiderweb in a corner of the ceiling. They looked kind of alike.

  “Try and be quiet, Boris,” Ms. Grimsley said, lowering her voice. “Darryl’s been through a very traumatic experience. He needs his sleep.”

  “Aw, he’s faking it,” said a gruff-sounding voice.

  Darryl lifted his head slightly and, opening his eyes a bit wider, saw the boy who’d come into the room with Ms. Grimsley. He didn’t look so gruff. He was even scrawnier than Darryl, though perhaps a year or two older—thirteen, maybe fourteen. He had a greasy blond ponytail, a tattoo on his arm, and a beat-up backpack over his shoulder.

  “Boris is going to be sharing the room with you, Darryl,” Ms. Grimsley said. “Do try and make it down to dinner this evening. It’s been over a week—time to mix with the others.”

  Ms. Grimsley left, shutting the door behind her, and Darryl’s head sank back onto his pillow. Another fly had gotten caught in the spiderweb, the eighth or ninth new victim since he’d arrived at this place. The spider lurked in the center of the web, biding his time. Once the fly got tired of struggling, the spider would crawl over and wrap him up for future use.

  “Hey, fleabrain. Get off my bed.”

  Darryl heard the words but didn’t really put them together.

  “Hey! You deaf?”

  Something jabbed Darryl in his side: a smelly running shoe. After a third jab, Darryl got up and flopped down on the other bed, the one farther from the window. He couldn’t have cared less which bed he was in.

  “Got any money?”

  The most recently caught fly had quit fluttering around so much on the edge of the web, and the spider had moved half an inch closer.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you, dipwad. You got any money? Or a candy bar or something? I could eat a friggin’ horse.”

  A bell rang, far away: two floors down. Bringing him to this room, Ms. Grimsley had led him up two flights of stairs.

  “So what’s the food like in this joint?”

  In a quick dart, the spider was on the fly.

  “Hey, mush-for-brains! I asked you … aw, forget it. Touch my stuff and you’re dog meat.”

  The boy dumped his backpack on the bed nearer the window and went off to eat, slamming the door so hard, the spiderweb quivered. This didn’t seem to bother the spider, who was methodically turning the fly into another mummy. As the spider spun his silk, rays of the sinking sun bounced off the leaves of the madrona tree just outside the window, sending gold spangles across the room’s faded, flower-patterned wallpaper.

  After a while the daylight began to die out. Somebody knocked on the door. The plump, swarthy woman in the yellow uniform padded in. She set a tray covered with a cloth on the desk.

  “Don’t let it go frío again. Eat while it’s nice and caliente.”

  As soon as she left, Darryl jumped up and opened the window, then flopped back down and pulled the pillow over his head and lay there breathing his own breath. Though it was July, the night air was brisk, and once the room turned cool, he pulled his head out from under the pillow to find that the disturbing chicken-pot-pie smell had dissipated.

  Eventually another faraway bell rang. A few minutes later a shaft of light fell into the darkened room.

  “Darryl?”

  Turning his head slightly, he saw Ms. Grimsley’s narrow silhouette in the doorway.

  “Do try and be quiet, Boris,” she whispered. “Can you get to bed without a light?”

  “No problem.”

  The door closed softly. After about fifteen seconds the fluorescent ceiling light flickered on. Boris whipped the cloth off the tray on the desk.

  “Hey, dipwad, don’t you want your dessert?”

  Boris grabbed the eclair and wolfed it down. Then he sat on the sill of the open window and pulled half a cigarette and a pack of matches out of his sock and lit up, blowing the smoke out into the madrona. When he finished, he flicked the cigarette out into the leaves and fixed his eyes on Darryl.

  “You never said if you got any money.”

  He went over to Darryl’s jacket, draped over the back of the desk chair, and dug a pack of chewing gum and the stub of a ferry ticket out of the right-hand pocket. From the left pocket he pulled a small paperback book called The Expanding Universe.

  “Sounds like a real winner,” he said, tossing it on the night table. “You a nerd or something?”

  Darryl felt a pinch deep in the center of his chest.

  “Hey, this is more like it.”

  The boy had pulled something from the inside pocket of the jacket. Darryl sprang up and snatched it away.

  “Jeez, I wasn’t going to kipe it,” Boris said resentfully.

  Darryl sat back down on his new bed, gripping his GameMaster in both hands.

  “You must have dough if you got one of them things. I priced them one time for Nina.” Boris’s eyes were locked on the GameMaster. “I could unload it for you. They’re a cinch to unload. Or if you want it all up front, we could do a swap. You don’t dig chocolate? … How about red licorice? I’ll give you a big bag of Twisters for it.”

  Darryl stared at the darkened screen above the GameMaster’s small keyboard.

  “No? Then how about some smokes?”

  Smoke. Darryl’s throat tightened, and so did his grip on the GameMaster.

  “Smokes? Okay, I’ll be back by wake-up.” Boris stuffed his backpack and his pillow under the covers of his bed so it looked as if a body was lying there; then he flicked off the light. “If you don’t say nothing, it’s a deal. A carton of smokes.”

  As the boy climbed out the window into the madrona tree, Darryl squeezed his eyes shut, but the image of smoke just became more vivid: smoke rising from the charred skeleton of a house. Panicking, he flicked on the lamp on the table between the beds, and the sudden brightness washed the dark image away. But a faded alpine scene of rugged mountains painted on the lampshade ripped at his insides like fangs. His palms turned oily, and one of his hands slipped, hitting the GameMaster’s On button.

  As the game list appeared on the screen, his breathing instantly grew calmer. CastleMaster, MasterTrek, StarMaster
, StarMaster 2, CyberMaster, MasterJinx … His right index finger moved to the roller ball below the little keyboard. He clicked on MasterTrek, and the Rules of the Game started scrolling across the screen:

  The goal of MasterTrek is simple: to get Home. But the trek is not so simple. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE. You have just one hour to complete your journey, and though you know your destination, you don’t know your starting point. To establish your location you must answer five questions correctly. To learn the perils that await you on your journey—nests of space eels, asteroid belts, etc.—you must answer five more questions correctly, then choose the most efficient mode or modes of transportation. If you are deep in an iridium mine on one of the moons of Jupiter, you will need both a drill driver and an armored space shuttle; if you’re in a black hole on the edge of the Bellaphus galaxy, you will need a phase 6 space probe or, if attacks seem likely, a phase 4 space probe, which is slower but better armored. …

  Darryl had no need to read the rules. He’d played the game hundreds of times. MasterTrek, like all GameMaster games, required manual dexterity, but brainpower was far more crucial, and after his first few attempts he’d always made it home to Earth with minutes to spare. In fact, his secret objective these days was to make it in half an hour.

  Tonight his starting point was a steamy swamp that turned out to be on the planet Venus. Amazingly near Earth. But even so, he hadn’t even reached Earth’s moon in his space shuttle when the strange words TIME’S UP! flashed onto the screen, accompanied by an ominous clunk.

  Darryl jabbed the restart button in disgust.

  2

  It was eight-thirty in the morning when he heard a swear word and peered up from a bell-shaped nebula in the Vulpecula galaxy to see his new roommate tumble in the open window and sink down on the other bed, which was scattered with buttery pads of sunlight.

  “What a freakin’ night! The joker at the 7-Eleven wouldn’t sell to me, then this pinhead cop hangs out in the parking lot for like a year and a half. Then I had to bribe this bum who smelled like the back end of a garbage truck.” Boris pulled a carton of Marlboros out from under his sleeveless sweatshirt. “But I scored ‘em.” He tossed the carton onto Darryl’s bed and went around behind him. “StarMaster, eh. Jeez, level seventeen! You’re like Nina.”

  Darryl concentrated on negotiating a meteor shower on the outskirts of the distant galaxy. It had been a humiliating night. He’d needed four tries to get home in MasterTrek, and in his first two attempts at StarMaster 2, mental lapses had led to ignominious defeat. It was as if the charge in his brain battery was low. But in this third attempt, he was doing halfway decently, having led his rebel troops in a tricky slingshot maneuver around the black hole in M87.

  He was trying to secure an all-important star gate when the boy snatched the GameMaster out of his hands. Darryl grabbed it back—but too late. It let out a sickening splintering sound as a meteorite shattered his lead troopship.

  “Look what you did!”

  “So he talks. I thought maybe you was one of them finger geeks. That’s mine, you know.”

  As Darryl shoved the GameMaster under his belt like a gun, Boris’s eyes narrowed to almost nothing, sizing Darryl up. Then he turned and opened a laptop computer on the desk.

  “Ought to try this one.”

  His first day there Ms. Grimsley had encouraged Darryl to use the laptop, telling him it worked between eight-thirty in the morning and four in the afternoon. But he’d hardly given it a glance.

  “Trouble is, they bolt ‘em into the desk, and the desk’s bolted to the floor. You’d need a freakin’ chain saw to get it loose.” Boris flicked on the computer and stepped aside to give Darryl a view. The word MondoGameMaster, each letter a different color, flashed onto a screen ten times the size of the one on his GameMaster. Drawn irresistibly to the desk chair, Darryl hit the enter key. Instead of the game list, a maze appeared on the screen. He’d seen such mazes in puzzle books, with an entrance on one side and an exit on the other, but never one this intricate.

  “That’s the trouble,” said Boris. “You got to get through that thing. And they don’t give you no time.”

  A countdown of seconds was underway in the upper right-hand corner of the screen: 120, 119, 118 … All you got were two minutes to pilot the little figure through the maze. But instead of grabbing the mouse, Darryl simply stared at the screen. There were choices at every turning, and there must have been a hundred turnings.

  “Come on, brainiac, there’s only fifty seconds left,” Boris said, whacking Darryl on the back.

  Darryl didn’t reach for the mouse till the countdown reached thirty. It took him twenty seconds to guide the figure through the labyrinth.

  “Way to go!” Boris cried as a new message flashed onto the screen:

  Congratulations! You have earned the right to play any game you wish. Have fun—and do your best!

  This message was soon replaced by the same game list as on Darryl’s GameMaster, except here StarMaster 2 had been upgraded to StarMaster 3. Intrigued, Darryl chose that. Familiar rules scrolled across the screen:

  The goal of StarMaster 3 is simple: to save the universe. …

  Darryl clicked to the opening game screen, but instead of the usual intergalactic map, three words appeared on the screen.

  Want to play?

  What else would he want to do? But when he clicked on Start again, nothing happened.

  “Maybe you got to answer,” Boris said.

  Darryl shrugged and typed in:

  Who are you?

  The answer popped up immediately:

  HighFlier. Who are you?

  HighFlier was clearly a made-up name, so instead of typing in Darryl Kirby, Darryl typed in his initials, MDK. His full name was actually Martin Darryl Kirby.

  Want to play, MDK?

  As soon as Darryl typed Yes, the map of the universe unfurled on screen.

  What he loved about StarMaster was that it required multiple skills. First you had to locate the strongholds of the Controllers and the hideouts of the Individualists, avoiding the Controllers’ barrages and picking up the Individualists’ radio transmissions. And unlike MasterTrek, StarMaster didn’t let you simply ignore the impossibility of exceeding the speed of light. To travel between galaxies, you had to locate wormholes and star gates, always well hidden and jealously guarded. Only when you’d mapped the universe, shading the Controllers’ galaxies in red and marking the locations of the Individualists with green dots, could you start enlisting the Individualists’ help in overthrowing the Controllers. But the Individualists never risked divulging their hiding places and merging their scrappy troops with yours unless they’d decided you were shrewd enough to conquer the Controllers. So they tested you.

  After color-coding the universe, as he almost always managed to do, Darryl contacted his first Individualist leader, who gave him twelve seconds to come up with the square root of 529. It took him five seconds to type in “23.” The next one he located gave him sixteen seconds to answer a riddle: What occurs once in a minute, twice in a week, and once in a year? After thinking hard for ten seconds, Darryl typed, “THE LETTER E.” The next gave him fourteen seconds to come up with the approximate half-life of uranium 238, which Darryl happened to know was four and a half billion years. The next Individualist asked him an easy one: five seconds to type in the common name for sodium chloride. SALT. But the next was less accommodating, giving him only ten seconds to answer this: How much dirt is in a hole two feet deep, three feet wide, and four feet long? After six seconds Darryl was on the verge of typing in 24 cubic feet, but at the last instant he realized it was a riddle, not a math problem, and typed in “NONE.” There was no dirt in a hole.

  “What a freakin’ whiz!” Boris cried as Darryl snagged his fifth Individualist battalion.

  His troops assembled, Darryl attacked one of the Controllers’ more poorly defended outposts, using a favorite technique of sending a small force on a direct frontal assault and, once the
Controllers were engaged, deploying his main force to attack from the rear. This worked twice. But when he tried it a third time, the Controllers only pretended to engage, and when Darryl initiated his rearguard action, they were ready. Not only did he have to order a full retreat, he lost ten percent of his hard-won rebel army.

  “I can’t believe it,” he muttered. “In my GameMaster they always react the same way.”

  “Maybe you’re not playing the computer,” Boris said. “Maybe that HighFlier guy’s a person.”

  “How could that be?”

  “You got me, Einstein.”

  “It must be the upgrade. They reprogrammed it so it learns.”

  Darryl started varying his attack strategies. But the Controllers varied their defenses just as skillfully. It was the stiffest resistance he’d ever encountered. Finally, getting desperate, he had to seek out more troops.

  One of the few Individualist holdouts posed this question: A Saturnalian snail wants to get out of an iridium mine. The snail manages to crawl up the mine shaft three feet each day, but at night when he rests he slips back down two feet. If the shaft is thirty vertical feet, how long will it take him to get out? Thirteen seconds.

  After racking his brain, Darryl typed in 28 DAYS, and—presto—the Individualist joined his force.

  “Way to go, brainboy!”

  So saying, Boris slid his hand down and grabbed the GameMaster out of Darryl’s belt. For a second Darryl was horribly torn. All his instincts were against abandoning the game. But the same instincts revolted against the theft of his beloved GameMaster. Finally he swiveled in his chair. The thief was yanking the pillow and backpack out from under his covers.

  “I’m bailing on breakfast,” Boris said, slipping the GameMaster under his pillow and flopping down on his bed. “Keep it down, willya?”

  Darryl’s eyes returned to the computer screen. While his back was turned, the Controllers had mounted a counterattack. He’d never seen anything like it!

  But even so, forsaking his GameMaster was more than he could stand.