“Good afternoon, Miss Joyner. I have to write about wool in my social studies class. Would you tell me where I could find a good book on wool? Or a good book on sheep or goats — the animals that give us wool?”
Miss Joyner would think for a moment and drum her fingers on her lips as if she were playing a musical instrument with them, and then she would smile and nod and say, “I have seen a book on natural animal fibers in the blue section. That’s where you’ll find it!”
And generally it would take the remainder of the day for the person to look at all the books with blue covers for one that was about wool and flax and other natural fibers. It would not be wrong to say that most library visitors greatly missed Mrs. Craft and her respect for the card catalogue.
“You have done it again!” said Becky to the boys. “You and the Professor have saved the town from another disastrous calamity.”
“Yes, thank you, boys!” added Mr. Craft from behind the wheel of his new Buick. Mr. Craft had to tilt his head in a funny way to look at the boys through Becky’s window. “I was worried that I would have a very hard time selling any of the appliances at my store. People want white refrigerators and white ovens. They don’t want peach-colored ones. Which is why I am greatly indebted to you and Professor Johnson for keeping me in business.”
Mr. Craft owned the largest appliance store in Pitcherville. The appliance business had been good to him and allowed him to buy a new car every year and to put his only daughter into nice clothes. It was sad not having Mrs. Craft around, but she was replaced by a gardener and a maid and a cook with the name of Smitty (though she was a woman).
“And to show my appreciation for what you have done, I have asked Smitty to bake you a cake. It is in the back seat, if you’ll open that door and take it out.”
Rodney looked at Wayne and Wayne looked at Rodney and neither knew what to say, for Mr. Craft wasn’t Petey and could not be spoken to so frankly. Luckily, Becky came to her friends’ rescue: “Oh Daddy! Do you really expect Rodney and Wayne to be able to take the cake now! For goodness sake! We’ll give it to them later.”
Mr. Craft smiled and shrugged. “You boys better hurry on to school or you’ll be late.”
“See you in class!” chirped Becky, as the Buick drove away.
“What did I miss? What did I miss?” cried Petey. He had just come out of his house and was now running down his front walkway. Petey was always arriving after something had already happened or was just finishing up.
“Mr. Craft’s cook Smitty made a cake for us,” said Wayne. “Aunt Mildred is going to laugh when she hears that we now have two cakes on the way! That’s three cakes in all, when you add the one that she’s baking us herself!”
Petey climbed upon his bicycle, which, because he could not think about any words that had a “b” in them, he called his “Schwinn cruiser.”
The three boys rode to school together on their Schwinn cruisers, Rodney wondering how in the world they were going to eat three whole cakes, and Wayne thinking about how lucky he was to have three whole cakes to eat.
At school, as they were rolling their bikes into the bike rack, Petey said, “My mother wanted me to ask you something.”
“What is it, Petey?” asked Rodney.
“She wants to know if the Professor has told you how long these calamities are going to keep happening to the town. She said she doesn’t trust the articles in the paper that say they come from sunspots. My mom is a nervous woman, and it makes her even more nervous not knowing what tomorrow has in store for us.”
Rodney and Wayne both recalled the conversation they had had with Professor Johnson when the sixth in the long series of troubling events had occurred. This was the time that everything mechanical and electrical in the town began to run backward. Clocks ran backward and cars ran only in reverse, and the boys could not get their bike wheels to go forward no matter what they did. (Mr. Dean, the editor of the town paper, the Pitcherville Press, had written an article — the latest in a long series of articles — which had repeated his belief that the mechanical and electrical problems that the town was experiencing were — like all the other calamities — caused by sunspots. Unfortunately, the very odd, bug-eyed and frizzy-haired editor could not get his printing press handle to turn in a forward direction; so he was left to stand at the window of his upstairs office at the Pitcherville Press, and shout the word “sunspots” at all the people who passed below as another means to get across his minority opinion.)
As Professor Johnson was working with Rodney and Wayne to build a Chrono-Gyro-Restorifier to correct the problem, he offered the finer points of his theory: “Pitcherville, you see, is an ordinary town that has apparently been picked to undergo a series of most extraordinary permutations. Hand me that number seven wrench, please. Do you boys know what the word ‘permutation’ means?”
“Changes,” said Rodney.
“That’s right. Different, um, transmogrified realities.”
“’Transmogrified’—now what does that mean?” asked Wayne, looking in the toolbox for the right wrench.
“Well, it means changed but in a most bizarre way.”
Wayne laughed. “Gee, that would be Pitcherville all right!” He handed the Professor the wrench he needed. “But why do you think that is, Professor?”
“Well, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering our situation. Why have we been singled out for such recurring calamities? Why, every few days, do the laws of science and nature stop applying to the town of Pitcherville? Why do things happen that are sometimes funny like everything being the color of lemons, and sometimes scary like the time that the town found itself entirely under water— like the lost ocean city of Atlantis — and all the electrical appliances shorted out? Why is this?”
“And what have you concluded, Professor?” asked Rodney, holding a bolt in place so that the Professor could put in the screw that it required.
“Here is my theory — and it is only a theory. The day that your father disappeared — that same day that Mrs. Craft and my assistant Ivan and two of the other professors from my college all disappeared — that was the day that the experiments began.”
“Experiments?” the twins asked together in one curious voice.
Professor Johnson nodded. “You see, I believe that Pitcherville has become a laboratory of some sort. Just like this laboratory in which we’re now working — just like my other laboratory at the college. But instead of being a place of beakers and Bunsen burners and vacuum tubes and electrical circuitry, it is a laboratory of houses and streets and trees and people. Of dogs and cats and cars and swing sets and tree houses and go-karts and television sets and electric razors and toasters and flower gardens and everything else that marks the lives of average Americans in this modern year of 1956. I believe, boys, that there is a force out there — the same force that took your father (for I cannot believe that the two things are not related) — which is responsible for these experiments. They — whoever they are — want to see how we react to each new situation.”