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In answer to Professor Johnson’s numerical inquiry, Rodney shrugged and said, “Fifty-seven.”

And this was why it took two full days for Professor Johnson to learn that Rodney and Wayne’s father, Mitch McCall, had also been among those townspeople who were later to be remembered as “The Vanished.” Until the Professor succeeded in completing his Alpha-Numerical Transferal Machine and activating it to correct this problem of words being turned into numbers, conversations between the boys and their new professorial friend generally went something like this:

“Five-hundred-fifty-four — four-hundred-and-nine — three— twenty-two,” said Rodney in a calm but worrisome voice.

“Sixty-six-thousand-and-one,” said Wayne, nodding eagerly.

“Thirty-three — six-hundred-and-seventy-two,”replied Professor Johnson with a perplexed look (because he had no clue what it was that the boys had just said).

“That Pandenumberum was far worse than this peach thing,” recalled Rodney.

Wayne nodded. “And the Hubbubblia was even worse that that! The town was so full of bubbles that you could hardly move without squeaking and feeling cleaner than a person generally cares to feel.”

“Remember last spring when everybody’s arms turned into flippers?” asked Rodney.

“The Flip Out? Boy do I!” replied Wayne. “It took me almost an hour just to put on my pajamas! And we couldn’t watch any of our favorite television programs because nobody could turn the knob that switches the set on.”

“And that lasted a whole week!”

“Because that was before we started helping Professor Johnson. Notice that he does a much faster job fixing these problems when we can lend him a hand.”

“Or a flipper,” added Rodney, with a grin.

CHAPTER TWO

In which the Professor and Rodney and Wayne work together to save the town of Pitcherville (yet again) while losing a few friends among its canine population

hen the boys reached the Professor’s house they found the tall, thin man (who looked a little like Abraham Lincoln, but without the beard and the stovepipe hat) diligently at work in his laboratory in the back. The laboratory had its own door, which was almost never locked. There was a good reason for this; when the professor was busy with one of his new machines, he was hardly ever aware of the sounds around him, including knocks — even very loud ones. So, Rodney and Wayne had gotten into the habit of letting themselves in and waiting for the Professor to notice their presence with a nod and a smile and a very long description of what he had just been doing. Sometimes his explanation made perfect sense. For example, he would say, “Boys, I am putting a metal plate here so all this delicate circuitry won’t be exposed.” At other times what he said made no sense at all. For example: “Boys, the master diode has a flux of seven when I require at least an eight-point-two.”

Rodney and Wayne and the Professor had become very good friends since the day he had come to their door eleven months earlier. With their dad now gone, the twins looked up to him as sons would look up to their father. The Professor was happy to have the boys for assistants and also to have them as his friends. The life of a college physics professor — a life spent teaching and reading and working on contraptions in his home lab that would save a town from all manner of continuing calamities — was a fairly lonely life. Rodney and Wayne made good company for the solitary professor, even when they weren’t handing him a wrench or a screwdriver.

“Hello, boys,” said the Professor. “Your timing could not have been better. How do you like my Peach Pigment Evanescizer? I have just this minute completed its construction.”

“Well,” said Rodney, looking over the machine, “it looks very much like your Lemon Pigment Evanescizer.”

“An astute observation,” said the Professor, wiping his dirty hands on his lab coat. “It works very much like the Evanescizer we used to remove all the lemon color from the town two months ago.” The Professor took a bite from the sandwich that his housekeeper and cook Mrs. Ferrell had left for him before she went off to the grocery store. It was the Professor’s favorite sandwich. In fact, it was the only kind of sandwich he would eat: sardines and Swiss cheese. Rodney and Wayne had tried it themselves once and secretly called it “Professor Johnson’s ‘Yuck’ sandwich.”

“It sounds to me,” said Rodney, running his hand along the smooth aluminum housing of the machine, “that the peach color will be just as easy to remove as the lemon color was.”

“One would think so,” said the Professor, extracting a small peach-colored sardine from his sandwich to give to his fish-loving half-Persian/half Siamese cat Gizmo. Gizmo sniffed the small fish (because it didn’t look familiar to her). Then, satisfied that it was fishy in nature, she took it directly from her master’s hand and gobbled it down. Then she carried her very furry body over to her sleeping pillow and began to clean the fish oil from her mouth with a spitty paw.

“But here is the thing,” the Professor went on. “The color known as lemon is very similar to its parent color yellow. There is very little variation in hue at all. And what do we know about the coloryellow?”

“That it is a primary color?” asked Rodney.

“You’re exactly right. Whereas peach is a combination of several different primary and secondary colors. It’s a much more complicated sort of color to dispense with. So, my frequency generator will have to be tuned to a much higher pitch. And do we know what happens when a frequency generator is tuned to a higher pitch?”

Rodney shrugged. Wayne shrugged.

“Think about it, boys. It has something to do with dogs. It has something to do with every dog in the town of Pitcherville.”

“I think it must be a frequency that only dogs can hear!” said Wayne proudly.

“But more than that—”

The boys thought about this for a moment but could not arrive at the answer.

“Dogs may be the only creatures to hear the high frequency, but will they like it?” hinted the Professor.

Wayne shook his head in large part because Professor Johnson was shaking his head to steer him to the correct answer.

“No siree, boys, they won’t take to it at all. We’ll have quite a bit of yelping and yowling to deal with until all the pigment has been shaken loose from this town, and you can bet that Officer Wall from the Pitcherville Police Department’s Loud Noises Unit will be at my door lickety split to write me a summons. Just you wait.”

“And there’s no other way to do what we have to do?” asked Rodney.

“I’m afraid there isn’t. It is the price that we must pay for science. Now, I have a very important job for the both of you. Here is a screwdriver for you, Rodney, and here is one for you, Wayne, and here are some canine earmuffs I have made for my little terrier Tesla. You will be custodian of those, Wayne. Now…when Tesla comes running in here howling and yowling you must catch him and put these on his ears, for it will be loudest here inside my house and I do not wish for him to be made too uncomfortable.”