Unfortunately, the other dogs in the town of Pitcherville had no one to put canine earmuffs on them and so they all began to moan and howl and whimper and caterwaul and bark and some to growl in one great town-sized canine chorus. And then something very strange happened! Every dog that was able to get itself out of its house or yard took it to mind to come directly to the Professor’s house, some perhaps to discover the source of their discomfort and put an end to it, others in obedient response to the loudest dog whistle they’d ever heard. A couple of old junkyard mutts who were deaf joined the large pack of dogs for the sheer fun of joining a large pack of dogs!
Together they stampeded through the gate that had been left open by Officer Wall, and then scrambled and tumbled right up to the back door and then right through the back door — all dust and fur and peach-colored paws and peach-colored muzzles and jangling collars and scruffy collarless ruffs and wagging tails and a few bared fangs. Right through the door they came, knocking Officer Wall completely off his feet. And down upon the floor he went, landing with a thud and then promptly becoming — against his own wishes — one very trampled human dog mat.
Within a moment or two, the laboratory was filled with yowling, howling, insistent dogs, all demanding in their dog-like way that Professor Johnson put an end to the hurtful noise that only they could hear, even as the noise had begun to do its job. You see, the sound vibrations emitted by the Evanescizer had begun to make the pigment detach itself from everything that it had affixed itself to—from Mr. Lipe’s car and Mr. Edwards’ car; from Mrs. Carter’s bruised head and Mrs. Wyatt’s bruised head; from every tree and every mailbox and every tiny blade of grass; from all the dog muzzles and Tesla’s canine earmuffs; from the cushions of the booth at the Hungry Chef Diner where the boys would soon be enjoying their well-deserved hamburgers; from all of Aunt Mildred’s spice jars (each of which contained only cinnamon) and all the town’s television antennas; and even from Officer Wall’s Noise Complaint Citation pad, which was now stamped with muddy paw prints.
“Look around! It’s working!” cried Rodney, as a Great Dane whined right into his ear.
“Another moment longer and everything will be restored to its natural color,” said the Professor. ”There will be tons and tons of pigment dust to be cleaned up from this town, but at least it won’t be attached to anything.”
“My bottom hurts,” said Officer Wall, rubbing the place where he had fallen so heavily.
“Arf!” said Tesla, who seemed to like his noise-proof canine earmuffs and the company of all of his dog pals.
Gizmo, for her part, had retreated to the Professor’s bedroom upstairs, where she was vengefully using one of his walnut bedposts as a brand new scratching post.
As Professor Johnson frequently liked to say: “There is always a price to pay for science.”
CHAPTER THREE
In which the Professor’s theory is shared with Petey, the steel-head-plate boy, and explained to the reader as well
On their way to school the next day, Rodney and Wayne found their young friend Petey Ragsdale standing patiently next to his bicycle in his peach-pigmentdust-covered driveway. (It would be many days before all of the pigment dust was shoveled and bagged and put into the town dump.) The fact that Petey was waiting for Rodney and Wayne was nothing out of the ordinary, for almost every morning Petey joined the twins for the second half of their ride to school. Petey was only eleven and wished that he were older so he could grow a few inches taller and be the same size as his friends. Then other children would not make such fun of him (he was quite short, even for his age), and would not make equal fun out of the fact that one side of his head was covered with a large steel plate. The plate had been put there when Petey was eight and had had brain surgery. The surgery had been successful and the doctor had said that Petey should expect a very long and healthy life, but he should be careful when he turned his head in the bright sun or the reflection from the shiny skull plate would get in people’s eyes and possibly cause a traffic accident.
Rodney and Wayne never made fun of Petey. They did not care that he was short or had a shiny steel plate in his head (which he usually kept covered with a baseball cap). They did not even mind that he walked around with a Cub Scout backpack so filled up with books and school supplies that it looked as if he were about to take a two-week hike. So the three boys became good friends, although it was sometimes hard for Petey to keep up with the twins. They generally ran faster and peddled faster and even talked faster than Petey, who was a bright boy, but had lost the part of his brain that understood the letter “b.” This meant that words that had the letter “b” in them looked or sounded foreign to Petey, and would have to be replaced by other “b”-less words — not a big problem but sometimes a small inconvenience.
There was something very comfortable and familiar about the way that Petey waited for the twins every morning, and this morning was no exception. But this particular morning there was something different about Petey. He was holding a large object in his hands. As the boys drew closer on their bikes they could see that it was, in fact, a round cake, covered with peach-colored frosting.
Petey smiled. “This is from my mother. To thank you for saving the town from the invasion of the peach color.”
“Petey—” said Rodney. “We can’t take that cake to school with us, and there isn’t time to get it back home. You’ll have to return it to your mother and tell her that we’ll be by for it after school.”
“Okay,” said Petey. “Wait for me.”
Rodney and Wayne nodded.
While the two were waiting for Petey to come back out without the cake, a car slowed down and then stopped. It was a brand new aqua-colored Buick super sedan with white-wall tires, and it belonged to the father of Rodney and Wayne’s friend and classmate Becky Craft. Becky sat on the passenger side of the front seat. She was waving at the boys even before she had fully rolled down her window.
Becky had straight dark brown hair and a round face, bright blue eyes and a button nose, and it was hard for Rodney and Wayne not to smile at her, when she smiled at them. Becky was — generally speaking — a happy girl, though she had lost her mother at the very same time that Rodney and Wayne had lost their father. Mrs. Craft had been the town librarian, and she had been very good at her job. After she disappeared upon that fateful night when Rodney and Wayne’s father and Professor Johnson’s assistant had disappeared, the library was turned over to Mrs. Craft’s volunteer helper Miss Joyner, who did not have the skills to be a good librarian. For example, Miss Joyner decided that it would be better to group all the books on the library shelves by the colors of their covers and spines. Conversations with Miss Joyner at the library usually went something like this: