Brainboy and the Deathmaster Read online

  It was as if he’d sucked in the vapor from a hunk of dry ice and quick-frozen his lungs. A woman’s kindly voice rang in his head—The only trouble with him is his brains. Super-smart people always think too much about things—and his windpipe seemed to constrict so he could barely get a breath. Raking the room, his eyes fixed on the laptop.

  For the third time he moved to the desk chair and hit a key. The colorful word MondoGameMaster comforted him.

  He made it through the maze, and when the game list appeared, he again clicked on StarMaster 3. This time his opponent was called NABATW—which seemed strangely familiar, though he couldn’t think why. Whoever it was, NABATW adapted to his moves even faster than HighFlier or LabRat, and in spite of having no distractions, he suffered a humbling defeat, his loyal troops all either killed or captured.

  Annoyingly, a new maze popped up instead of the game list. But he negotiated it and quickly reintroduced himself to the mysterious NABATW. So began the most hard-fought struggle of his whole GameMaster career. The battle for the universe raged for nearly two hours until at last, partly by luck, partly by a skillful flanking maneuver, Darryl and his rebel troops forced the Controllers into surrender.

  No maze popped up now: just a map of the universe, the setting for a third StarMaster 3 game. The deciding match was as grueling as the last one. NABATW was nothing like the preprogrammed opponent he was used to. Every time he devised a new strategy for securing wormholes and star gates, NABATW absorbed it, so if he tried it again, the Controllers were ready. The tide of the war kept shifting until, after two and a half hours, he and his Individualist legions were cornered near the Crab nebula. As the Controllers closed in, Darryl shot off a desperation vortex ray from his lead ship. It missed its target—the Controllers’ command module—but triggered the explosion of another supernova behind it. Darryl just had time to put up his defensive shield while the debris from the monster star explosion completely annihilated the enemy.

  Lucky as it was, he basked in his victory, grinning at the bosky-green universe. Then the screen went black and dark-red letters bled onto it, forming the name of a game he’d never heard of. It remained there alone, the only choice—DeathMaster—till it was replaced by the image of a face: a hairless, skull-like face with milky eyes and skin as wrinkled as an old paper bag. The face was so ancient, you couldn’t tell if it was a man’s or a woman’s.

  Slowly the face faded away, and the screen filled with words.

  Suddenly, instead of playing a game, Darryl was reading a science text. To understand the nature of matter, we must have a theory that accounts for both the qualitative and quantitative observations of matter and its behavior. … After he’d read several screens full of information, a question popped up: Lead has an atomic weight of 207.21 and a density of 11.4 g. per cc. What is the volume occupied by 2 gram-atoms of lead? Applying what he’d just soaked up, he made his computation and typed in his answer: 36.4 cc. The ancient face reappeared, a slight smile on the fleshless lips.

  The face vanished; more text appeared: about the periodic table and molecular bonding and Faraday’s laws of electrolysis. Darryl’s head hurt, there was so much information, but as soon as another question popped up, his pulse quickened, even though there were no Individualists to win over, no wormholes to find. This question was about isotopes. Once he typed in his answer, the face reappeared, smiling again, but this time not quite so ancient, minus a couple of wrinkles, the eyes not quite so milky.

  After six sections and six correctly answered questions, the jowls on the face didn’t hang down so far, and you could tell it was a man. After ten sections and ten answers, the face got a facelift, and a few hairs popped out on the head. Just as the face was beginning to seem somehow familiar, a red light flashed in the left eyeball.

  Next thing Darryl knew, someone was shaking him by the shoulder: the boy who’d saved him from the punk with the knife that morning. Darryl blinked at him, clueless as to how long he’d been sitting there frozen, sipping the air as if through a straw.

  “Talk about lost in space. Too much StarMaster?”

  Darryl grunted.

  “We thought maybe you’d go for some home cooking. My mom’s going to make her Swedish meatballs.” The boy gave him a friendly punch. “You got a sweat-shirt or something? It’ll cool down later.”

  Darryl’s eyes flicked to the bed nearer the window, but he looked away when BJ pulled the battered suitcase out from under it. Mrs. Grimsley had sent someone over to Darryl’s house to get some of his clothes, and they’d brought them back in his mother’s suitcase, which he’d immediately shoved out of sight.

  “Cool, a MasterTech sweatshirt,” the boy said. “Come on, Ma’s waiting down in the car.”

  Five minutes later Darryl was sitting in the front seat of a Chevy Nova with a woman who introduced herself as Birdie Walker. She wasn’t very birdlike. She took up half the front seat. But she radiated warmth, and as they drove out of Madrona, the shelter’s neighborhood, into the Central District, Darryl felt himself unfreezing a little.

  Mrs. Walker dropped the boys at home and went off to do some grocery shopping. Unlike Madrona, which had mostly big houses with views of Lake Washington, the Central District had mostly small houses with no views of the lake, and the Walkers’ house was smaller than most, only one story. But it had a nice sky-blue paint job and a well-tended rock garden in front.

  BJ led the way around to a backyard with a picnic table and a shiny red grill. The back door, which had one of those pet flaps in the bottom, led to a small storage-laundry room. On one side was a washer and dryer and ironing board; on the other, a stack of boxes, a bicycle with a basket on the front, and the biggest litter box Darryl had ever seen. As soon as they stepped from there into the kitchen, they were surrounded by half a dozen meowing cats.

  “Hey, guys,” BJ said.

  He pulled a big bottle of Pepsi out of the fridge and filled a couple of tall plastic glasses. When he put the bottle away, Darryl noticed a placard held to the fridge door by magnets: Knowledge is the ship to the Hesperides.

  “What’s Hesperides?” he asked, unused to being stumped.

  “It’s an island where they grow apples made of gold. It’s in the Sunday book.”

  “The what?”

  “This book we read out of on Sunday instead of going to church. It’s all about myths and religions of the world.”

  After scattering some cat treats on the kitchen floor, BJ showed Darryl the rest of the house: a hallway, a living room with a TV and VCR, and his mother’s bedroom.

  “Where do you sleep?” Darryl asked.

  There were two doors in the hallway: one to a coat closet, one with another placard on it: Knowledge is the stairway to Sirius. But the stairway that was revealed when BJ opened the door didn’t lead to any star; it led down to a spartan basement furnished with a bunk bed, a desk with a computer on it, a couple of hardback chairs, a shelf full of books, and a refrigerator. The refrigerator wasn’t plugged in: It was BJ’s closet. There was a small bathroom in the corner, and a small window up near the ceiling. Under the window was a poster of the Seattle Sonics’ point guard. The wall over the desk was plastered with newspaper articles about Keith Masterly.

  “I have this over my desk,” Darryl cried, pointing at a cover of Newsweek with Keith Masterly’s caricature on it.

  “Really?” said BJ. “Hey, you’re smart. What’s that mean?” He pointed to the caption, YouthMaster, under Masterly’s name. “Is it because he sells games to kids, or because he was so young when he started, or because he still looks so young?”

  “Maybe all three?”

  BJ pulled the switchblade from his pocket and stuck it in his desk drawer. “I still can’t believe that weasel copped your GameMaster.”

  “Me either. Have you got one?”

  “I’m saving up. But check this out.”

  BJ sat down and flicked on his computer. It was a dinosaur, a plodding old desktop, but it finally booted up. B
J clicked on an icon—at least he had a MasterTech mousepad—and a castle, familiar and forbidding, materialized on the screen. Flying from the tallest turret was a pennant with CastleMaster written on it.

  “Pirated?” Darryl said, pulling up the other chair.

  “Yeah. You’ve played, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Want to go first?”

  “Sure.”

  CastleMaster was the first game Keith Masterly had invented. It was far simpler than StarMaster or MasterTrek, but it was classic MasterTech in that it rewarded intelligence even more than eye-hand coordination. By answering brainteaser after brainteaser, Darryl gained access to the castle and evaded both of the evil duke’s bodyguards—Feros the Barbarian and Quadros the Four-Headed Pit Bull. He proceeded to rescue the prisoners from the dungeon, lock up the evil duke in their place, and liberate the treasure the duke had amassed by overtaxing the poor.

  “Jeez, I thought I was hot when I got up to Quadros in one turn,” BJ said as Darryl led a parade of grateful prisoners, arms heaped with treasure, back over the drawbridge. “I never saw anything like that.”

  “Luck,” Darryl said. “Your turn.”

  BJ got the first riddle (Q: When do elephants have eight feet? A: When there are two of them) but didn’t solve the math problem in time and so never crossed the moat.

  “I usually do better than that,” he muttered.

  While they played, the ceiling creaked above them, and before long Mrs. Walker called them up to dinner. Darryl’s family had been extremely fit, and when he sat down at the Walkers’ kitchen table, the sight of Mrs. Walker’s flabby arms and multiple chins didn’t restore his missing appetite. But to be polite he sampled one of the Swedish meatballs.

  “It’s delicious, Mrs. Walker.”

  “Why, thank you, honey. What’s the food like at that shelter?”

  “I’m not really sure.”

  “Judging by that Ms. Grimsley, it can’t be much. What’s the matter with you, BJ? Were you snacking?”

  BJ shook his head. He’d picked his fork up but put it back down without eating.

  “You’re not hungry?”

  BJ shrugged.

  “That’s not like you, sugar pie. What is it?”

  “Is Swedish meatballs brain food, Ma?”

  “Brain food? What do you want with brain food, smart as you are?”

  “I’m not smart.”

  “Of course you are! You’re top of your class.”

  “Compared to Darryl, I’m a birdbrain.”

  “That’s not true,” Darryl said. “I’ve just had more practice.”

  “You should see him on CastleMaster, Ma,” BJ said plaintively. “He don’t miss.”

  “He what?”

  “He doesn’t miss. He’s from another planet.”

  Mrs. Walker jiggled with amusement.

  “What’s so funny?” said BJ, scowling.

  “I’m just tickled you found somebody to challenge you. BJ!”

  “What?”

  “I saw that.”

  “But Aristotle’s hungry.” He’d slipped a bit of meat-ball under the table to one of the cats.

  “They have their own food. If you’re not going to eat yours, I’ll save it for leftovers.”

  She reached out for his plate, but instead of handing it over, BJ started eating. So did Darryl. Mrs. Walker was so kind and cheerful, he’d already stopped noticing how fat she was.

  With every bite he took, Darryl grew hungrier, as if the meatballs were reminding his stomach what it was for. He had seconds, then thirds, and still had room for a bowl of ice cream.

  The only time the cheerful expression deserted Mrs. Walker’s face during the meal was when BJ asked if they could catch the end of the Mariners game. “You were playing that computer game before dinner,” she said. “After dinner you’re doing some reading. That book on the Lewis and Clark Expedition.”

  “But what about Darryl?”

  “You can read aloud to each other while I do the dishes. Then I’ll drive him back to the shelter.”

  “Can’t he sleep over, Ma?”

  “I’d have thought you’d want to get rid of him, seeing as he makes you feel so stupid.”

  “Yeah, well, I was thinking about what you said. It’s like those old heroes in the Sunday book. They only do the cool stuff when they get challenged. Like Hercules cleaning out those stables.”

  The smile crept back onto Mrs. Walker’s face, and she relented on the baseball game, saying they could watch a few innings.

  6

  But the game was such a blowout—the M’s were getting pulverized by the Angels—that BJ soon clicked the TV off in disgust and introduced Darryl to the cats, who had joined them on the living-room sofa: Galileo, Booker T, Aristotle, FDR, Gwendolyn—”named after some poet lady”—and the runt, Confucius.

  “What about you?” Darryl said, scratching Booker T’s neck. “What’s BJ stand for?”

  “Bawana Jamal.”

  “Is that African or something?”

  “I guess. My dad gave it to me.”

  After a pause Darryl said, “Where is your dad?”

  BJ didn’t answer right off. His father wasn’t his favorite subject. But seeing as Darryl had lost his whole family, BJ got the wedding photo down from the bookshelf. “Is that your mom?” Darryl whispered, looking at a slim, smiling woman standing on church steps beside a handsome, athletic man.

  “Yeah.”

  “And that’s …?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Darryl pointed at the palm trees flanking the church steps. “It’s not Seattle.”

  “San Diego. My dad got drafted by the Chargers.”

  BJ explained how his father had been a star line-backer at UW—the University of Washington—which was where he’d met and married his mother. The San Diego Chargers had picked him in the eighth round of the NFL draft, but he’d torn up his knee in training camp, and instead of following his bride’s advice and giving up football for grad school, he’d had surgery and done intensive physical therapy and tried out for the team again the next summer.

  “He still got cut. But even then he didn’t give up.” BJ noticed that Darryl’s eyelids were drooping. “You bored with this?”

  “No, no. I’m sorry.”

  “Mom’s not big on talking about it, but I guess they spent the next three years traveling around in a trailer. Dad kept trying out for one team after another. You know, as a walk-on. Finally the Cards gave him a shot. But in the third exhibition game he tore up the same knee, worse than the first time. A few weeks later he had a head-on with an eighteen wheeler. That was three months before I was born. They found all these pills in his stomach—painkillers. So, anyway, you can see why Mom’s not too big on sports. Darryl?”

  Incredibly, Darryl’s head had fallen back against the sofa, eyes closed. The guy asked about his father, something he never talked about, then fell asleep in the middle of his story!

  But it was hard to stay angry at him, considering what he’d been through. Some of BJ’s friends were suspicious of white people, but there was something about Darryl he really liked. When his mother came in with her decaf, he said:

  “Why don’t you call Grimface and see if he can spend the weekend?”

  Mrs. Walker took a sip of coffee to hide her smile over “Grimface.”

  “I don’t see why not.” She went back to the kitchen and returned after a couple minutes. “I told her he’d eaten a big dinner and fallen sound asleep—so she said maybe home cooking was what he needed. She’s going to pick him up at eight o’clock Monday morning.”

  “Great.”

  BJ dragged their groggy guest down to the basement and put him to bed in the bottom bunk. Darryl still hadn’t appeared at noon the next day when BJ and his mother finished a chapter about the Mayans and their rain gods in the Sunday book.

  “I guess maybe we better wake him,” Mrs. Walker said, sliding the fat book back into its place of honor b
etween the dictionary and the Complete Shakespeare. “Otherwise the poor boy’ll be up all night.”

  It was a bright, sunny day, and after lunch—breakfast for Darryl—Mrs. Walker dropped them at Madison Beach, where the two boys spread their towels on the grassy slope above Lake Washington.

  “Keith Masterly lives over there,” Darryl said, pointing across the water.

  “I’ve seen pictures of the house in magazines,” BJ said. “It’s awesome. It’s got a helipad and everything. But they never say exactly where it is.”

  “Hunt’s Point. Above the floating bridge.”

  “How do you know?”

  Darryl didn’t reply.

  “How do you know, man?”

  “I knew someone who worked for MasterTech,” he said, just audibly.

  “Wow. Cool.”

  But he could tell Darryl didn’t want to talk about it—maybe it was someone in his family—so BJ dropped the subject.

  When they swam out to the diving float, BJ got a little revenge for the whippings Darryl had given him at CastleMaster. After baking for a while, he lobbied for going off the high board—and Darryl went as pale as when he’d lost his GameMaster. So BJ got to show off his flip and his half gainer while Darryl stayed glued to the float.

  Later they walked home up Madison. When they got to Cherry Street, a bunch of BJ’s friends came swooping around the corner on skateboards.

  “Yo, BJ,” Big T said, dismounting. “What’s happening, bro?”

  “Not much,” BJ said. “Where you been?”

  Big T flipped his board up with his foot and grabbed it by the front truck. “Myrtle Edwards,” he said.

  BJ didn’t have a board—if he’d gotten one, his mother would have taken an axe to it—and though Big T had lent him his number-two board a few times, he’d never gone as far as the Myrtle Edwards Trail, which ran north of the Seattle waterfront. To get there, you had to go through downtown, and if a friend of his mother’s spotted him there, he would be cooked.

  “Come on, we’re all meeting at the DQ.”

  “Um, this is Darryl. Darryl, Big T.”