Becky nodded.
“But this last hour hasn’t been easy for her.”
Becky shot her father a disapproving look, which told him to be quiet.
“I’m sorry, pumpkin,” said the very old Mr. Craft, whose face was creased with too many wrinkles to count. “I wasn’t thinking. So boys, did you hear that Mr. Armstrong is out of his bathtub now? He came out the minute his little Darvin and his little Daisy showed up. Of course they aren’t so little now, but he was glad to have them, and they were all so glad to be reunited with each other that they all climbed right back into that big empty bathtub as a family and just hugged and hugged on each other.”
“That’s so nice!” said Mrs. Ragsdale as she poured the coffee. “Would you like some coffee, Becky?”
“No, I don’t drink coffee,” said Becky curtly. “Maybe you’ve forgotten, but I’m still thirteen years old. Thirteen-year-olds don’t usually drink coffee. Thirteen-year-olds are hardly even teenagers. Oh, I just hate this! I absolutely hate it!”
Becky ran out of the room. The room was quiet for a moment except for the sound of Mrs. Ragsdale pouring coffee. Then Becky returned, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m better. This is very hard. If the Professor isn’t able to fix this, then we will lose a huge chunk out of our lives. I won’t get to be a pediatrician who makes children laugh with her hand-puppets.”
“You wanted to be a pediatrician! With hand-puppets! Oh how nice!” said Mrs. Ragsdale.
“You can still be a puppet-performing pediatrician, pumpkin,” said Mr. Craft to his daughter.
“No I can’t, Daddy. It’s too late. It’s too late to be anything now but old. I hate this. Why do things like this have to happen?”
“We don’t know, Becky, but all is not lost.” Mr. Craft looked at Rodney and Wayne when he said this. “Is it, boys?”
Wayne shook his head. “We were just going over to see the Professor.”
“And ask him what needs to be done to fix things,” said Rodney. “Would you like to come with us, Becky?”
Becky wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and nodded. “Maybe the walk will do me some good.”
CHAPTER NiNE
In which the Professor berates himself, and a supermarket is robbed of all of its soft food, the reason to be revealed later
Walking in the bright moonlight, Rodney and Wayne and Becky and Petey (who had decided that he would like to come too, to thank the Professor personally for rescuing him from the cloud place, even though he was now prone to arthritis) kept to their own quiet thoughts for a while. It was nice to be able to walk again, even though the no-longer-youthful muscles in their legs felt tired and tight.
It was a strange thing to be strolling along so late at night, bathed in the light of a moon that looked no different from every other full moon they had known since they were first told by their parents what that giant, bright orb was doing so high in the sky. It was strange to be moving down a sidewalk whose every crack they had counted and tried to avoid (lest they break their mothers’ backs), past all the trees they had climbed and from whose branches they had hung down like monkeys, past familiar green lawns, now browning in the change of season, past the same cars and hedges and mailboxes and stop signs, and past the same Halloween decorations — scarecrows and Jack-o-lanterns that came out too early every year. It was as if nothing had changed, although a great deal had changed. And a great deal had been lost. Each child wondered as Becky had wondered: would they ever get it back again?“ I didn’t know that you wanted to be a children’s doctor,”
Wayne said to Becky.
“Who works with puppets,” noted Petey.
Becky shrugged. “I thought you would make fun of me, the waywe used to laugh when Dr. Kelsey would forget where he put the knee thumper or his stethoscope.”
Becky’s three companions smiled as they remembered Principal Kelsey’s equally absent-minded brother who was a pediatrician.
“But then, Wayne, I remembered that you once said you wanted to be a space cadet like ‘Tom Corbett, Space Cadet,’ on TV, so I thought it was okay to tell you something that I didn’t have much of a chance at either.”
“Why did you think that I couldn’t grow up to be a space cadet?”
“Because there isn’t such a thing as a space cadet,” said Becky. “Being a space cadet is a made-up job. Just like Tom Corbett is a made-up character.”
“You don’t think some day there will be astronauts, Becky?” posed Rodney. “Astronauts who will pilot their spaceships all the way to the moon and back?” Rodney glanced at the moon as he said this.
“Or to distant planets?” asked Petey, also looking at the moon but with a starry-eyed gaze.
“I suppose,” said Becky. “But by then, we’ll probably all be too old to go.”
The children walked on for a moment thinking quietly to themselves. Then Wayne broke the silence. “I wish that some day Professor Johnson would make a freezing machine that could put a person into a big ice cube and keep him there until after all the calamities are over and the force field is down, and then thaw him out when things are much better than they are now.”
“How do you know that things will be better in the future?” asked Becky.
“Well, don’t things usually get better? We don’t live in caves any more, do we?”
Becky could not hold back a smile. She was thinking of Wayne wearing a wooly mammoth fur, with a bone through his nose. “I guess you’re right about that.”
The four turned a corner and stopped. There was the Ferrell house with all of its lights turned on. And there, sitting on the porch swing, was a large middle-aged man. The man was mostly bald. You could tell this because his head was bowed and the top was all that you could see. It was moving up and down a little as if he were crying.
“What should we do?” whispered Becky to the others.
“Well, I guess we should first find out who he is,” said Rodney. “He might need our help.”
“I hope no one has died,” said Becky.
“Excuse me,” said Wayne, approaching the house. The man looked up. Wayne and the others could tell immediately who the man was. It was their friend Grover, many years older.
“Who is it?” asked the middle-aged Grover. He was squinting at the moonlit lawn and wiping his eyes with his knuckles. “I can’t see very well. I think I need glasses.”
“It’s Wayne. And here is Rodney and Becky and Petey.”
“Hi Petey. Welcome home,” Grover said, taking a handkerchief from this pocket to blow his nose with. “I — uh — guess I’m getting a cold.”
“I’m not feeling all that well myself,” said Petey. “I woke up with arthritis.”
“Come up here. I am just sitting here thinking about things.”
“What are you thinking about?” asked Becky.
“Mama mostly. Suddenly she’s very old. Is this a new calamity?”