I think I’m going to go for a swim now.
Love,
Mo
P.S.
Sooner or later you’re going to have to tell the kids they’re not Greek.
“Like hell,” Teddy said.
He didn’t try to get up. He let the weight of years roll over him and hold him there.
He wiped old man’s tears from his cheek, coughed to clear his throat. There were people to see, games to finish. He dialed open the closet safe and placed this final letter atop the stack.
Matty was waiting for him in the living room. He looked nervous.
“Don’t worry, kid,” Teddy told him. “You’re going to do fine. You’re a Telemachus.”
Matty grinned shyly. “Descendant of demigods.”
“Yeah, well, don’t believe everything you hear.”
He drove down Route 83, toward Mount Prospect. After a while he said, “So, Matty, when you’re up there, flying around, have you ever seen anyone?”
“What do you mean?”
“Other minds. Spirits, maybe. Souls.”
Matty thought about it. “You’re talking about Grandma Mo.”
Teddy sighed. “I suppose I am.”
“I’m sorry,” Matty said. “I…I don’t know if it works like that.”
“Fair enough, fair enough.”
“But I’ll keep looking.”
Teddy laughed. “You do that. That would be swell.”
They walked into the building where Destin Smalls had rented an office. Smalls, his arm still in a sling, met them at the door. He shook hands awkwardly with each of them, solemn as a wounded soldier greeting his troops. “I appreciate you coming in.”
“You didn’t give us much choice,” Teddy said.
“The boy’s still better off under our protection,” Smalls said, not denying it. “I have only his best interests at heart.”
“And yours.”
“They happen to coincide.”
“Fine, fine. Let’s get this over with.”
G. Randall Archibald waited in the next room, presiding over an array of humming transformers and control boards. The familiar Advanced Telemetry Inc. logo was stamped on the biggest pieces.
“Matthias!” the little bald man said. “Good to see you again. We’ll be using the large-gain detectors instead of the portable set—no danger of blowing up this time, I assure you.” He had the boy sit before the machine as before, and began wiring him up to the electrodes. “We’re just going to take another crack at the torsion field distortion. As you know, there’ll be no discomfort for you.”
“Right,” Matty said. The kid looked twitchy and nervous.
“Let’s try a little OBE, shall we?”
Matty closed his eyes and breathed deep. Almost instantly the detector needle bounced to the right.
Smalls gasped.
“Don’t get a hard-on,” Teddy said. “That’s my grandson.”
The needle hovered in the five thousand tau range. “Yes!” Archibald said. “Highest on record!”
“You don’t know what this means to the country,” Smalls said.
“Please,” Teddy said. “You’re just using him to get Star Gate re-funded.”
“We’ll make sure we keep his identity secret.”
“Just like you kept Maureen’s secret? How many people up at the Pentagon know her name? Know our name?”
Matty sat very still, his lips tightly closed. The needle edged even higher.
“We have to get the psi-war program back on its feet,” Smalls said. “Now that we have Matt, that’s possible.”
“Nope, sorry, not buying it,” Teddy said. “I don’t think you can ever keep someone like him safe. Not someone so valuable.”
“You think you can keep him safe, better than the government can?”
“Actually, no.”
Smalls seemed exasperated. “Then what are we arguing about?”
“Nothing,” Teddy said. “Nothing at all. Matty?”
The boy opened his eyes. He looked shocked at the gun in Teddy’s hand.
Smalls said, “You wouldn’t. Buddy made his own choice, but Matty has so much potential! You can’t do this.”
“To save his life, I can. I’m sorry, Matty.” He pulled the trigger. The micro-lepton gun whined, higher and higher, and then the capacitor discharged with a loud snap. There was no visual sign of the distortion ray. Teddy thought, This thing would be more impressive if there was some kind of laser effect.
The effect on Matty, though, was immediate. The boy shouted and gripped his head. His body began to shake as if he was having a seizure. Then suddenly his head fell back, and he slumped in the seat.
“What have you done?” Smalls exclaimed.
Archibald studied the main control panel. “There’s no signal. No field.” He looked up in surprise. “He’s inert.”
Teddy knelt in front of the boy. “Matty, talk to me. Are you all right?”
He looked around in a daze. “I feel…different,” he said.
“Do you realize what you’ve done?” Smalls said.
“We’re going home,” Teddy said. “Don’t bother us again.”
MATTY
He was afraid to speak until they reached the interstate. “So,” he said finally. “Did I overdo it?”
Grandpa Teddy laughed. “You, my boy, are a born showman. The shaking was a nice touch.”
“It just sort of came to me, so I went with it. But then, I wasn’t sure how the gun affected Uncle Buddy, and I worried that—”
“No! No! Kid, when a mark’s as committed as Smalls, it’s almost impossible to oversell. You reeled him in, my boy. Reeled him.”
Matty’s laugh turned into a giggle. He kept thinking of the look on Destin Smalls’s face when the micro-lepton gun went off. It was like he was being shot.
“I think you deserve a drink,” Grandpa Teddy said. “Something tropical.” They pulled off 294 and drove down Grand Avenue. “I had a pal loved the tropical drinks. I grew up with him, both of us loved the magic, wanted to be Blackstone. Both of us the shortest kids in class, a pair of pipsqueaks. Anyway, he turned into a pretty good escape artist, then started building tricks for people. A magician’s magician, you know? Great mechanical mind. Anyway, he never liked the hard stuff, but by God, give him a drink the color of Kool-Aid, stick an umbrella in it, and he’d drink you under the table.” He parked in front of a wooden shack with a gaudy sign out front: THE HALA KAHIKI LOUNGE. “You’re gonna love this.”
The inside was a movie set for a late-night jungle melodrama on WGN: walls of grimacing island gods, plastic leis and paper lanterns, and enough bamboo to build an Indonesian aircraft carrier. “Don’t worry, the Pusateris don’t have a piece of this.” Matty didn’t know he should have been worried about that until he mentioned it.
They took a table at the back of the room. The waitress, a plump, dark-haired woman in her fifties, greeted Grandpa with a kiss on the cheek. “Patti, this is my grandson, Matty. We’re celebrating. How about a piña colada? You like coconut, kid?”
“Virgin?” Patti asked Matty.
He felt his face heat. “Uh…”
“Semi virgin,” Grandpa said. “Give him a taste. Like I said, big day, big day.” He rapped his hands on the table, as full of energy as Matty. “So. How’s school?”
How’s school? He barely thought about school, even when he was there. Nothing seemed as real as the things that had happened to him this summer. After Nick Pusateri Senior, who could fear a high school senior? What could a math teacher possibly do to him?