“And how will we do that, Rodney? I can’t even make my fingers work by themselves. Look. I’m trying to point at you but all the fingers are pointing together.”
“Then we have to train our hands the same way we will train our legs!” Rodney was trying to have a positive attitude but it wasn’t easy for him.
“At least I’m further along with the walking than you,” said Wayne, beaming. Wayne was proud of the fact that he had just propelled himself across the room upon his own two legs while Rodney was still having difficulty taking his very first step.
Rodney looked around for something he could throw at Wayne to put him in his place. Seeing nothing that he could even lift with his small arms, he just sat and sighed until Aunt Mildred came back into the room. She was no longer smiling. In fact, she seemed quite upset.
“It’s really quite terrible. I don’t even know how to say it.”
“Say it!” said Wayne. “Tell us what’s wrong.”
“Boys, that was Petey’s father, Mr. Ragsdale. Petey is gone. He wasn’t in his bed when everyone woke up this morning.”
“But if Rodney and I woke up as babies, then Petey would have woken up as a baby too!” said Wayne. “Has he been kidnapped?”
Rodney shook his head sadly. “I can tell you what has happened, Wayne. How many years younger were we when we woke up this morning?”
“A little over eleven-and-a-half years was our estimate,” said Aunt Mildred gravely.
“And how old was Petey yesterday?”
“He turned eleven in July,” said Wayne.
“So Petey hasn’t been kidnapped. It’s even worse than that: he hasn’t even been born yet!”
CHAPTER FIVE
In which the Professor puts his head out a window, Becky makes a mess in the kitchen, and a lost child places an important telephone call from an undisclosed location
Later that morning, Rodney and Wayne sat on the sofa in the room which their aunt called “the den” and which the boys called “the TV room,” and which their father had nicknamed his “bear cave.” Mr. McCall had given the room this name because it was the place where he watched all of his football games, roller derby matches, and championship boxing. This was the room in which Mr. McCall allowed himself to growl at the television and to be a grumbly bear when his favorite boxer or favorite football team did not perform their best. (Or when one of his favorite female roller derby skaters took a bad fall and eight other skaters skidded and tripped and landed right on top of her. Then the growl and the grumble would be replaced by a very loud ‘OOOF!’ or ‘YOWCH!’ or ‘MAN OH MAN, THAT HAS GOT TO HURT!’”)
Outside of this room Mr. McCall wasn’t much of a bear at all, but a soft-spoken man who made a quiet living writing books. Mr. McCall wrote serious, scholarly books about fairs and festivals and rodeos and circuses — any event in which people gathered together to throw balls at cans or watch animals do amazing things or observe people from other lands dressed in their native costumes.
When Mr. McCall was a young man, he attended the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair, at the time one of the largest world’s fairs that had ever been staged. Mr. McCall later wrote a book about the New York World’s Fair, and one could find within the den/TV room/bear cave many pictures and posters and souvenirs from the fair. The souvenir Rodney and Wayne liked most from their father’s collection was a tabletop model of the fair’s “Trylon and Perisphere.” The model sat on a little table next to Mr. McCall’s easy chair. The actual Trylon was a tall, pointy tower that rose into the sky like the Washington Monument. Its companion, the Perisphere, was so large in actuality that fair visitors could ride a long escalator right into the middle of it to find out what the “World of Tomorrow” was going to look like.
Becky’s father, Mr. Craft, who sometimes came to the McCall home to watch boxing matches with Mr. McCall and Mr. Lipe and Principal Kelsey, once picked up the model of the Trylon and Perisphere and tossed it back and forth in his hands in a disrespectful way, and made a funny comment about it. He said that the real Trylon and Perisphere must have looked to people like a gigantic golf ball that had fallen off its gigantic golf tee. Mr. McCall was not amused. He stopped inviting Mr. Craft to the McCall home after that remark.
But this didn’t stop Mr. Craft from returning to the McCall home on this particular morning. Here he was standing in the den holding his baby-sized daughter Becky in his arms. Mr. and Mrs. Ragsdale were also present. Mr. Ragsdale, looking very upset, kept running his trembling hand over and over again through his thinning hair. (Yesterday Mr. Ragsdale had been totally bald but now he had some hair.) Mrs. Ragsdale was wringing her hands and pacing alongside her husband. There were other worried people in the room as well, each looking about eleven-and-a-half years younger, and each of whom had come to crowd themselves into the small room to find out what was to be done. They had followed Professor Johnson all the way from his house to the McCall residence, peppering him with questions along the way: “What has happened to my little boy? Where did my little girl go?” People often turned worriedly to the Professor when a new calamity struck the town, but this time they were even more worried than usual, for there was the serious matter of lost children to be concerned about.
Mr. Craft had come on behalf of one of the salesmen at his appliance store, a man named Armstrong, who had that morning gone into the room where his six-year-old girl Daisy and his fouryear-old boy Darvin slept, and found their beds empty. He was so upset that he went into the bathroom and climbed into the tub with all of his clothes on and would not get out.
Mr. Dean, the newspaper editor, had also come to the house. He wanted to hear the Professor’s opinion about what had happened so that he could put it in his paper. Mr. Dean had already written the first few lines of his article about the latest calamity and was waiting for the Professor’s comments so that he could finish it. In the article Mr. Dean planned to remind his readers that the most logical reason for the disappearance of Pitcherville’s youngest residents was sunspots, pure and simple. But he had an obligation to give other possibilities, even if those other possibilities pointed to a Pied Piper or bad milk. It is the duty of a journalist to give all sides — even the ones that make no sense.
“So what is your theory, Professor?” prodded Mr. Dean. He rudely waved his reporter’s pad in front of Professor Johnson’s face as if he expected the Professor to write the theory down himself.
Professor Johnson pushed the pad away. He was feeling uncomfortable, because he didn’t like being trapped in tight spaces with a lot of people. He didn’t ride elevators for this reason, and he never played games in which the object was to see how many people could fit into a broom closet or large crate.
“I do have a theory,” said the Professor in an uneven voice. “It is the same theory as the one which my assistants Rodney and Wayne have come up with. Rodney, my boy, why don’t you tell everyone our theory while I put my head out this window for a breath of air?”
Rodney explained to all the people in the room how he believed that eleven-and-a-half-years of instantaneous reverse aging had put those children under that age into a pre-existing state. And that was why they were nowhere to be found — for there were no bodies around for them to occupy.