Brainboy and the Deathmaster Page 15

  Back in Nina’s room afterward they collapsed in her velvet chairs.

  “Do you think we’ll make it, Darryl?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You still want to escape, don’t you?”

  He wasn’t altogether sure that he did, but he said, “Of course.”

  “I wish we didn’t have to train so late at night.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, yawning.

  The next day her wish came true. In the middle of breakfast Mr. Masterly’s voice came over the PA system, announcing that everyone had the weekend off.

  “You’ve earned it. It’s Labor Day weekend, and you’ve all labored brilliantly. So enjoy yourselves. The new movie will be running continuously.”

  An enthusiastic cheer greeted this last piece of news, and everyone scurried off to AquaFilm—everyone except Billy and Suki, who went to play tennis, and Nina and Darryl, who headed for the pantry. By lunchtime Nina had reached the fourth seam—her personal best. After lunch Darryl made it to the third, and if it hadn’t been for the swarm of butterflies in his gut, he, too might have made the fourth.

  On his way to dinner he was a little disappointed to see no Darryl trophy in the trophy case yet, but a few minutes later a different kind of honor was bestowed on him. Hedderly was just carrying the first platter into the dining room when Mr. Masterly’s voice came over the PA again.

  “Darryl, I was hoping for the pleasure of your company at dinner. If you’d care to join me, go to the elevator.”

  Like the time he’d been called down to L, the others looked gratifyingly jealous—except Nina, who looked distinctly troubled.

  “Guess I better go,” he murmured, setting his napkin on the table.

  As soon as he stepped into the elevator, the door closed, and up it went, swooshing right past E. The door opened on a rosily lit room not unlike his bedroom except that it was over twice as big, with higher ceilings and a spiral staircase in one corner.

  “Welcome to my humble home away from home,” Mr. Masterly said, stepping in through an archway to a farther chamber. “I rarely have visitors. In fact, I never have visitors. But this is an occasion.”

  As he approached his host, Darryl’s apprehensive excitement turned to stupefaction. Mr. Masterly smiled.

  “How old would you guess I am?”

  “You barely look twenty-five!”

  “A good age, I think. Not too young, not too old.”

  It was incredible. He’d shed twenty years since yesterday. The bags under his eyes were gone; his complexion had a youthful glow, his dark hair a shiny luster.

  “Have a seat, Darryl.”

  As in the rooms on S, there were two red velvet chairs pulled up to a low table. Mr. Masterly moved a battered briefcase off his chair before sitting down.

  “How much did you take?” Darryl asked, eyeing a vial of turquoise solution on the table.

  “Six cc’s, diluted ten to one, after breakfast. It took longer to work on me than the rats—a couple of hours. I had another dose after lunch. I’m hoping three a day will keep Father Time at bay.”

  Mr. Masterly picked up his remote and pressed a button. As music filled the room, he leaned back with a contented smile on his youthful face.

  “Do you know The Well-Tempered Clavier, Darryl? Johann Sebastian Bach. Now there was a man with a deep understanding of time.”

  “What’s a clavier, sir?”

  “Good for you to ask. There’s no more valuable trait than curiosity. Combine it with a will to conquer and nothing can stop you.”

  “Then why do they say curiosity killed the cat?”

  “Well, I guess it’s because everything of true value entails risk. But non-risk-takers are of no interest to people like us, are they?”

  Darryl shook his head, wondering what Mr. Masterly would say if he knew the risk he and Nina were going to take on Monday night.

  “A clavier,” Mr. Masterly said, “is a an old keyboard instrument—an early form of piano. Do you like fish brains?”

  “For what?”

  “Dinner. Fish have rather small brains, so you need quite a few for a meal, but it’s the most refined source of protein there is, and what little fat they contain keeps your skin elastic. I’ve trained Hedderly to make quite a good fish-brain mousse.’’ Mr. Masterly pressed a button on his wrist gizmo. “Send up two fish-brain dinners, will you, please, Hedderly? And two carrot juices, and a diced spinach salad with tofu.”

  He spoke far more politely to Hedderly than Ruthie ever did, and before long an amber light on the wall started blinking. Mr. Masterly stepped over and pressed it. Darryl heard a swishing sound, then a panel slid back, revealing a food cart.

  “Is that a dumbwaiter, sir?”

  “The one exception to my rule of keeping dumb things at a distance,” Mr. Masterly said, setting out their dinners. “Eat up.”

  The fish-brain mousse, which wasn’t even warm, tasted like slime, but out of politeness Darryl ate about half of it, washing down each bite with a swig of carrot juice.

  “Maybe it’s an acquired taste,” Mr. Masterly said after cleaning his plate. He took an eyedropper out of the vial and squirted about six cc’s onto his tongue. “I did a little homework on you, young man.”

  “You did?”

  “Your first name’s not Darryl.”

  “No, that’s really my middle name.”

  “Your first name’s Martin.”

  “Yeah, after my dad. They named my older brother after my mom’s father, so I got named after Dad. Everybody always called me by my middle name to avoid confusion.”

  “So your initials are MDK.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My middle name is David.”

  “So you’re KDM.”

  “Exactly. The reverse of yours. Interesting, no? And you were born almost thirteen years ago. It was almost thirteen years ago that I started planning all this.”

  A phone rang in the farther room, and Mr. Masterly excused himself to go answer it, giving Darryl the opportunity to squirrel away the rest of his fish brains in his napkin. While waiting for Mr. Masterly’s return, his eyes fell on the battered briefcase. It seemed out of place. Everything else in the room was so new and state-of-the-art.

  There’s no more valuable trait than curiosity.

  After checking to make sure Mr. Masterly was still off in the far room, Darryl opened the briefcase and pulled out a worn spiral notebook. Scrawled on the cover in faded red ink was the word “MasterPlan.” Underneath this was the month and year of Darryl’s birth. He opened to the first page—and for a second thought he was looking at a sketch for the needlepoint family tree that used to hang over the mantelpiece in his grandparents’ house. But the branches and leaves of this tree didn’t hold the names of his or anyone else’s ancestors. Carved into the trunk, like a girlfriend’s initials, were the letters CT. Higher up, the trunk divided into three main limbs, each with a word carved into it: Capital, Workforce, Brainpower. Higher up the Capital limb was the word Profits, and above that it branched out into limbs etched with the names of familiar MasterTech games like CastleMaster and CyberJinx. Higher up the Workforce limb was the word Expendable, and above that it branched out into limbs with unfamiliar initials carved into them: WWSMF, CWSMF, etc. Higher up the Brainpower limb was the word Shelters, and the branches above that also bore mysterious initials.

  “Sorry about that,” Mr. Masterly said, striding back into the room. “Business.”

  With no time to stick the notebook back into the briefcase Darryl slipped it under his rump and sat on it.

  “Seems I’m going to have to make a few calls,” Mr. Masterly said. “If you like, you can go down to E and catch the end of the movie.”

  “Okay, sir.”

  As Mr. Masterly bussed their dinner dishes onto the cart in the dumbwaiter, Darryl coiled the notebook and slid it up his sleeve, like a sheath around his arm.

  “Thanks for dinner, sir.”

  “I hope it’s
the first of many,” Mr. Masterly said, turning to give Darryl’s mop of hair a fond tousling.

  36

  Nina was sitting in room eight listening to her favorite song when Darryl walked in. “Dinner must have been good,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him.

  “It was yucky,” he said, closing the door. “Fish brains.”

  “Then why do you look so happy?”

  He came over and sat in the other chair. “It’s my formula, Nina. Mr. Masterly could be his own son!”

  “You mean he took it?”

  “And it worked!”

  “So you’ll be world famous,” she said, without much enthusiasm. “What’s it like up there?”

  “Like this, but even fancier.”

  “Can you get out?”

  “I didn’t have a chance to explore.”

  “Want to go train?”

  “Um … okay. But first I’ve got to get some food in my stomach. What’d you guys have?”

  “Pork chops.”

  “Maybe Hedderly has some leftovers.’’ He changed into his cross-training shoes and, pulling something from his sleeve, tossed it on his bed. “Meet you in the pantry.”

  She had to change her shoes, too, but as she got up to follow him out the door, the spiral notebook caught her eye. She picked it up and started leafing through it.

  She was still standing there rooted to the spot when Darryl came back half an hour later.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

  She just stared at him.

  “What’s wrong? You look like a ghost.”

  “You didn’t read this thing?”

  “I just sort of glanced at it.”

  She held it out. He took it and sat down. As he read, the color gradually drained out of his face, so that when he lifted his eyes from the final page, he looked as ghostlike as she did.

  “We’re done for,” he whispered. “And it’s all my fault.”

  “You couldn’t know that.”

  “That DeathMaster game. I should have put two and two together. It was his face getting younger.’’ He tossed the notebook on the table and jumped up. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here!”

  “How?”

  “The vent. It’s our only chance.”

  “But what about the others?”

  He considered this.

  “It would be like murder,” she said.

  “Yeah, you’re right. But they haven’t been training. How could they get up that thing when we can’t?”

  “I guess we have only one choice.”

  “What?”

  “To take his advice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have fertile young minds. We have to open them up to all the possibilities. Make the new connections.”

  “New connections,” Darryl repeated.

  “This is a think tank, right? We’ve got to think.”

  37

  Awakened by a strange nois, Nina groped for her glasses and was astonished to see that it was five P.M. She’d slept the whole day away—all of Sunday!

  Then she remembered: she and Darryl hadn’t dragged themselves into their beds till almost seven that morning. Mr. Masterly, having given them the weekend off, must have turned off his wake-up recording.

  She dressed quickly and peeked out into the corridor. The sound that had woken her was Suki sobbing in the doorway to room five. Nina took her by the arm and led her back into her room and sat her in one of the chairs.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, pushing the beautiful hair off Suki’s tear-stained face.

  “It’s so horrible!” Suki said with a gasp.

  “What is?”

  “Okasan and Otosan—Mama and Papa. I never think of them at all!”

  “What happened to them?” Nina asked soothingly.

  “They were flying to Japan for my grandmother’s funeral and the plane crashed.’’ Suki covered her face. “It’s so horrible! And I never give them a thought!”

  “It’s not your fault, Suki, believe me. It’s the vitamins.”

  Suki dabbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. “The vitamins?”

  “They dull your emotions. So you won’t think about the past and stuff.”

  “But … but I took mine this morning.”

  “That was just an aspirin with a little blue dye. I made them up in Chem last night and replaced the real ones before breakfast.”

  “You did?” Suki sniffled. “Why?”

  Nina handed her the MasterPlan, then went out into the corridor and knocked on the door to room six. No one answered, but she opened the door anyway. Greg Birtwissel was sitting in one of his chairs staring at the movie screen. Frozen on the screen was an image of an avalanche.

  “Greg?” she said, shaking his shoulder.

  He didn’t shift his eyes from the screen, didn’t even acknowledge her presence. It took her a good ten minutes to coax out of him that his mother and sister had been killed in a rock slide near White Pass. He felt so wretched at having forgotten them that not even hearing about the vitamins brought him around. When she insisted she had something for him to look at, he just sat there, so she had to tug him to his feet and drag him back to her room. They found Suki sitting there holding the MasterPlan in trembling hands, her pretty, almond eyes glazed with horror.

  “I know,” said Nina, taking the notebook and passing it on to Greg.

  “What should we do?” Suki said in a hollow voice.

  “We better round everyone up. I’ll check the rooms if you’ll check E and L.”

  Half an hour later the whole team, except for Darryl, was gathered in room seven. They were a pretty cheerless group, and nobody’s spirits were lifted by reading the MasterPlan. Ruthie could barely decipher it because her eyes kept tearing up at the thought of her parents, both of whom had died cruel deaths from cancer.

  “What’s this?” she sniffled, pointing at the CT on the trunk of the tree.

  “You ought to know,” Nina said. “You say it every morning.”

  “Conquering Time?” Ruthie wiped her eyes with her sleeve and pointed to the initials in the high branches of the Workforce limb. “What are these?”

  “The asylums where he got the people to build this place. CWSMF. That’s Central Washington State Mental Facility.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “The workforce? They were expendable.”

  “Expendable?” Greg squeaked.

  “Except for Abs and Hedderly and Snoodles. He kept them on as staff.”

  “You mean he killed the rest?” Ruthie said.

  “It doesn’t say. Maybe he lobotomized them and sent them back to the loony bins.”

  “And what are these?” Ruthie was pointing to the higher branches of the Brainpower limb.

  “The shelters. It’s pretty ingenious, really. He picks orphans, with no family to care about them.”

  “You mean we’re expendable, too?” Ruthie said.

  “Once we serve his purpose.”

  “But whoever discovers the way to stabilize G-17 will be more famous than Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton and Christopher Columbus rolled into one.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Nina said.

  “You mean …?”

  “Read the last page.”

  Ruthie gave her eyes a good mopping and read the last page. When she finished, she looked as ghostly as the rest of them.

  “We’ll be blown to smithereens,” she whispered. “But … but it won’t happen till … How long have you been off the vitamins, Nina?”

  “Quite a while.”

  “And what have you been doing?”

  “Lately we’ve been training—Darryl and I. Climbing a vent in the pantry. We just wanted to escape. We had no idea what was in there.”

  “Well, we’re okay as long as Mr. Masterly doesn’t have what he wants. We can plot our escape. Or plan a rebellion. I just hope Darryl’s formula doesn’t work on people as well as it does on
rats.”

  Nina lowered her eyes. “That’s the trouble. It does.”

  “You mean it worked on Mr. Masterly?” Suki gasped.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “What!” cried Ruthie.

  “Where is Darryl anyway?” said Billy.

  “Yeah,” said Mario. “Where’s the traitor hiding out?”

  “You mean executioner,” Ruthie said grimly.

  “He’s got us killed!” Greg shrieked.

  “He didn’t know,” Nina said.

  “Where is he?” Mario demanded.

  “Sleeping,” said Nina, who’d poked her head into room eight a few minutes ago. “He and I were up all last night planning our escape.”

  This news seemed to lower the anti-Darryl voltage in the room.

  “What’s the plan?” Ruthie said.

  “Wait here. I’ll get him.”

  Just as Nina shut the door to her room behind her, the panel lit up at the end of the corridor. She barely managed to shrink behind the trophy case before the elevator door opened.

  Firm steps sounded in the corridor. An amazingly youthful version of Mr. Masterly passed by her and gave the door to room eight a firm rap.

  “Darryl?” The familiar voice chilled her. Mr. Masterly opened the door. “Napping, eh? I guess you need to catch up, after all your brilliant work. Listen, why don’t you come up and have a bite of dinner with me? Get dressed, I’ll wait.”

  Pressed back between the wall and the case, Nina trembled so violently she was afraid the trophies would start to rattle. Had Mr. Masterly missed the MasterPlan? Was he inviting Darryl upstairs to poison him?

  38

  Darryl wondered exactly the same thing as an oyster slithered down his throat.

  Once again he was sitting across from Mr. Masterly up in the private penthouse, and once again dinner—raw Hood Canal oysters—was about as slimy as could be. But the texture of the food was the least of his concerns. It was taking all his concentration just to hide his nervousness and keep his eyes off the battered briefcase by Mr. Masterly’s chair and the vial of turquoise liquid on the table.