Numbed!

by David Lubar

  I walked over to her desk, looked at it, looked under it, looked at it again, and then spotted the key inside her empty coffee cup. “There it is,” I said. I could have gone right to the coffee cup, but I figured it seemed more impressive this way.

  “Thank you, Logan.” She took the key and opened the cabinet.

  “Maybe you can ask her to give me a break on the math test, since you’re always finding the key,” Benedict said.

  “I don’t think that would work,” I said. “Come on, let’s get going. My mom’s probably waiting outside.”

  My mom was picking Benedict and me up. She had to shop for my grandma’s birthday ­present and had promised we could ride along to the mall. Luckily, she wouldn’t drag us to the boring stores. We’d get to go off on our own.

  But first, she took us to the food court on the top floor and bought us frozen juice drinks. The orange-banana Slush Monster with extra honey is about as perfect a drink as you can get. It has enough fruit to make Mom happy and enough sugar to keep me hoppy.

  “Okay, Logan, I’ll meet you and Benedict right here in two hours,” my mom said. “Don’t be late.”

  “We won’t.” I’d learned that lesson the hard way. The one time I didn’t meet Mom on time, she’d had them announce my name over the mall loudspeakers. Talk about embarrassing. Especially the part where they described me as a “lost little boy.”

  “Have fun,” she said.

  “We will. Thanks.” I turned to Benedict. “Where do you want to go?”

  He slurped a long drink through his straw before answering. He’d gotten coconut cream with extra hazelnut syrup. “Well, she told us to have fun, so that means the game store, right?”

  “For sure.” We headed toward the escalator. I took a big drink too and then wished I hadn’t as a sharp pain jabbed my forehead. “Brain freeze!” I shouted.

  “Hah, you weakling. That never happens to me.” Benedict drained the rest of his drink in one huge slurp. “See? I’m invulnerable.” Then he grabbed his forehead and screamed, “Owwww!”

  “At least it doesn’t last long,” I said.

  By the time we reached the next level, my pain was gone. Benedict had stopped howling too. He glanced at his watch as we headed for the ground floor and then frowned and looked at me. “What time are we meeting your mom?”

  “In two hours,” I said. “You heard her.”

  “Yeah, I know it’s in two hours, but what time will that be?”

  “Are you kidding? You really did freeze your brain.” I checked my watch. It was 4:15. I opened my mouth to tell Benedict the answer. My mouth remained open, but no sound came out.

  “You too?” Benedict asked.

  “Me too.” I stepped off the escalator at the bottom. It’s four fifteen, I thought. In two hours, it will be …

  I had no idea what the answer was or how to figure it out. I couldn’t even think of the right way to get started, no matter how hard I tried. “I can’t do the math,” I said. The pain was gone. My brain wasn’t frozen anymore. But there was something wrong with my mind.

  “What do we do?” Benedict asked.

  I looked back up toward the food court. My mom wouldn’t be happy if we weren’t there when we were supposed to be. “I guess we have to go back right now and wait up there for her,” I said.

  “It’s that robot at the museum,” Benedict said. “He did this to us.”

  I remembered his words: You need to be numbed. That’s what was wrong with us. Our minds had been numbed. “I wonder how bad it is. Ask me a math problem.”

  “What’s 1 + 1?” Benedict said.

  “I have no idea. Nine?” I guessed. “Could it be nine?”

  “How would I know?” Benedict said.

  “Good point.”

  “This is worse than when you could only speak in puns,” he said.

  “A lot worse.”

  “Especially since you weren’t the only person to get zapped. I’m numbed too. I knew you’d get me in trouble.”

  “Me?” I shouted. “You’re the one who got us numbed, pushing all those buttons on the robot.”

  We argued about it all the way back to the food court. The only thing we agreed about was that we had to return to the museum as soon as possible to see if Dr. Thagoras could help us.

  We grabbed seats at an empty table. But Benedict didn’t sit for long. “I need a cinnamon bun,” he said. “We could be waiting here forever. I can’t wait that long without a snack.”

  He pulled out his wallet and walked over to the GooeyBun stand. I watched him as he looked up at the prices, then looked down at his wallet and then back up at the prices. He kept doing that.

  Finally, I went over. “What’s wrong?”

  He handed me his wallet. “I don’t know if I have enough money.”

  He had some dollar bills. I tried to count them, but I didn’t know how. So I took them all out of the wallet, went up to the counter, and asked the guy behind it, “Is this enough for a GooeyBun?”

  “You can’t count?” the guy asked.

  “We just had our eyes examined,” Benedict said. “We’re not supposed to use them for ­another hour.”

  The guy frowned, but he took the money and counted it. I watched what he did, but it still didn’t make sense. He smiled and said, “It’s just enough.”

  He handed me the cinnamon bun. I gave it to Benedict.

  “Thanks,” Benedict said. He turned to the guy and asked, “Shouldn’t I get some change?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure.” The guy reached into the penny dish and gave Benedict some coins. “Here you go.”

  Benedict stared at the pennies. I tugged at his arm. “Just be happy you got the bun.” We had no idea how much Benedict had paid. But I had the feeling the guy behind the counter had given himself a big tip.

  We went back to the table, where Benedict ate his bun and I wondered how many other things would be impossible if I couldn’t do math. I glanced at my watch again. I knew what time it was. I guess that didn’t need math skills—just reading. But I had no idea what time it had been five minutes ago or what time it would be an hour from now. I looked around at the menu boards in the food court. I could read the prices. I could see what a burger cost and what fries cost. But I had no idea what it would cost if I wanted both.

  “We really need to go to the museum,” I said.

  “Mmmfffflllgpp,” Benedict said, nodding in agreement as he chewed a mouthful of his cinnamon bun.

  “This really is all your fault,” I said.

  “Nnnmmmglubgulp.”

  I thought about getting a bun for myself, but I really didn’t want to go through the terror of buying it. I never would have guessed it would feel so awful to lose my math skills. Happily, Benedict broke off a big piece of his bun to share with me. That helped pass the time.

  “Logan, Benedict, I’m proud of you,” Mom said when she met us. She glanced at her watch. “You’re here right on time.”

  I checked my own watch. It was 6:15. Not that those numbers really meant anything to me.

  That’s when Benedict did something I’d never seen him do before—not even when he got smacked in the face with a soccer ball in gym class or the time he’d touched the coal stove in the Benjamin Franklin exhibit at the history museum to see if it really was red hot.

  “Waaaaaaahhhhh!!!!” Benedict started to cry.

  CHAPTER

  (6 × 2) ÷ (4 − 1)

  Like all mothers, my mom has an instant reaction to crying. “What’s wrong, dear?” she asked, kneeling by Benedict and putting an arm around him.

  “I forgot my hat,” Benedict said. He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. His face was all scrunched up, but I didn’t see any tears.

  Mom glanced around the food court. “I’m sure it’s here, somewhere. If not, we can check with lost and found. Do you remember which stores you went to?” Then she frowned and said, “Wait. You weren’t wearing a hat when I picked you up at school.”

/>   It amazed me how moms seem to notice unimportant stuff like that.

  “I left it at the math museum today,” Benedict said. “Can we go there?”

  Wow—I guess he’d really left his hat there. But until he realized we needed to go back to the museum, he didn’t care.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll go right there. I hope they’re still open.”

  We followed Mom to the car. She drove us to the museum and pulled up by the front entrance. I was glad to see the place hadn’t closed yet.

  “I’ll be right back,” Benedict said as he slid off his seat. “Come on, Logan.”

  I followed him in. We still had our badges from that morning. We ducked under the rope with the Restricted Experimental Area sign, went down the stairs, and found Dr. Thagoras in his lab. He was attaching wheels to the bottom of his robot. Benedict’s hat was sitting on a stool.

  I wrinkled my nose. The smell of burned plastic was still pretty strong. Dr. Thagoras didn’t look up. I cleared my throat.

  “Well, hello again,” he said. “Are you still here? That’s wonderful. There is so much to see upstairs.”

  “We left, but we came back.” I pointed at the robot. “That thing numbed us.”

  The robot turned its head toward me. But it didn’t raise a claw. I got ready to duck, just in case.

  “Numbed?” Dr. Thagoras asked.

  “Yeah, numbed!” Benedict shouted as he snatched his hat. “We can’t add, thanks to that stupid thing.”

  “Stupid?” the robot said. “I’m stupid? I can add. Can you add? Who’s stupid? I know 9 + 8 = 17. Seventeen is a prime number. Nine is a square, made of 3 × 3. Eight is a cube, made of 2 × 2 × 2. I love numbers. When you take 9 × 8, you get 72. Add the 7 to the 2, you get 9 again. That’s awesome! Take 9 × 9 and you get 81. Add the 8 and the 1, you get right back to 9. Super awesome!”

  “Hold on.” Dr. Thagoras turned off the robot. “Cypher does tend to go off on tangents.” He chuckled, as if this was some sort of joke, then said, “Tangents,” again.

  I relaxed as Cypher’s head drooped forward, because nothing it said about the numbers made any sense to me. And because, now that it was turned off, it definitely couldn’t zap us again.

  “This is serious,” Dr. Thagoras said. “You boys are telling me you’ve lost the ability to do simple addition.”

  “Yup,” I said. “I don’t even know what 1 + 1 is.”

  “I couldn’t even figure out how to buy a GooeyBun,” Benedict said.

  “This can’t be …” Dr. Thagoras glanced at the robot. “Any effect should have been temporary. Cypher runs on a very low voltage. Have you been exposed to any other sort of head trauma?”

  I thought back. “We both had brain freeze.”

  “Oh, dear,” Dr. Thagoras said. Give me a moment.” He pulled a huge book from a shelf behind his desk and started flipping around to different pages. After a while, he shut the book. “That explains it. The zap should have faded by evening, but the freeze made it permanent.”

  “Permanent?” Benedict said.

  “You have to fix us,” I said.

  “Hmmmm.” Dr. Thagoras stared at me for a moment and then glanced down the hall. “Well, there’s one thing that might work. If you can get through the tests in the matheteria, that will reboot your skills. The reboot could be enough to overcome the freeze.” He hopped off his stool and headed down the hall.

  “But how can we pass math tests if we can’t do math?” I asked.

  “Anyone can do math inside the matheteria,” he said. “It generates a special field that makes it easier for people to work with numbers. It was designed to help people overcome their fear of math. I’ve never encountered numbed brains before, but I’m pretty sure the field can handle even that. I guess we’ll find out in a minute.”

  “And then we’ll be fixed?” I asked.

  “That’s up to you,” he said. “The effect will fade once you’re outside the matheteria, unless you pass the tests.”

  We followed him all the way to the end of the hallway. He let us into a room that had a door on our left, a door on our right, and a door at the far end, marked Maintenance.

  Dr. Thagoras pointed to the door on the left. There were a bunch of plus and minus signs painted on it, circling the words Give and Take. “Step right in,” he said.

  “Will this take long?” I asked. “My mom’s waiting in the car.”

  “Not long at all,” he said. “Really, it will only take two minutes.”

  “Great.” That was a relief, even though I wasn’t sure how long two minutes was. I stepped inside the room with Benedict. It was smaller than my bedroom but a whole lot less messy. All I saw in it was a table with pads of paper and a bunch of pencils in a big cup. “So, we’ll be right out?”

  “Unless you fail the exit exam,” Dr. Thagoras said. “Then it could take hours to get you out. Maybe even days.”

  CHAPTER

  1 ÷ 2 × 10

  “Wait!” I screamed as the door swung shut. I couldn’t figure out what time we’d get out if we were in the room for hours, but I knew my mom would come looking for us way before then. And that would not be good.

  I heard a loud clank, like a big bolt had just slid into place. “Hey, wait. Don’t lock us in!” I grabbed the door handle and yanked at it.

  The door was locked. A hum came from the walls. I felt air rushing back into my head. Glowing bits of light swirled around me. Was that my math skills returning?

  “Okay, 2 + 2 = 4,” I whispered. Yeah, I could add.

  There was a small screen in the center of the door, with a keypad below it. The screen flickered. Then a message appeared. A familiar voice read the message out loud. I wasn’t happy when I realized that it sounded just like the robot.

  “Add the numbers from 1 through 99. Enter the total. Hurry—you have two minutes.” The word hurry flashed a bunch of times, and then the whole message vanished. A countdown clock replaced it. The display showed 1:59.

  Benedict reached for the keypad.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. There was no way he already had the answer. If he was a math genius, he’d kept that information a total secret from me his whole life.

  “Using the calculator.”

  “That’s not a calculator,” I said.

  “Sure it is. It has keys for the numbers.”

  “Yeah. And how are you going to add anything?”

  “With …” Benedict didn’t say another word. I guess he’d realized there was no plus sign or any other buttons for doing math. Beside the digits from 0 to 9, there was only one other key, with Enter on it.

  The timer had counted down to 1:47. “Let’s get to work,” I said.

  “How?”

  I grabbed a couple of pencils from the table and two sheets of paper. I realized, outside of this room, I wouldn’t have even been able to figure out how much paper to grab.

  “Let’s just do what it says and add the numbers.” I started to write out the whole problem, “1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5,” but I realized that would waste a lot of time. The display was now at 1:28.

  “It’s better to start with the higher numbers,” Benedict said. “What’s 99 + 98? Are you sure that’s not a calculator? It would really help to have one.”

  I figured it would be easier to add the smaller numbers first. But either way, it still looked impossible to finish the problem before time ran out. The counter was down to 1:05. It didn’t matter whether we added from 99 down to 1, or from 1 up to 99. There was no way I could do either of those things quickly enough to beat the timer.

  “You start with 99. I’ll start with 1,” Benedict said. “We can each do half. Hey—that’s actually a good idea.”

  “Wait!” As I thought about those two numbers— 1 and 99—I felt a jolt shoot from my brain through my body. I wasn’t used to having ideas hit me so hard. Especially not ideas as awesome as this one.

  “What?” Benedict asked.

  “Just a second. Let me think.” This
might work.

  “We’re never going to get out of here,” Benedict said. He threw down his pencil. We’re going to starve to death. And I don’t see a bathroom. Do you see a bathroom? This room doesn’t have a toilet!” He ran to the table, snatched up the pencil cup, and dumped out all the pencils. “Mine!”

  I ignored him and wrote, “99, 98, 97, 96, 95” on the paper. Under that, I wrote, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5” so the large and small numbers lined up in pairs. I held the paper up for Benedict to see.

  99 98 97 96 95

  1 2 3 4 5

  “Look.” The pattern jumped right off the page. I felt a chill run through me as I realized my idea would really work.

  “Look at what?”

  “We can take pairs and add them. See, 99 + 1 = 100. So does 98 + 2. And 97 + 3. Get it? That makes it a lot easier. Every pair adds up to 100. Hundreds are easy to work with. How many pairs are there?”

  “Why are you asking me?” Benedict said.

  “Good point.” I thought about it for a second, which was about all the time I could spare. The numbers from 1 through 49 matched up with the numbers from 99 down to 51. So there were 49 pairs. If the pairs added up to 100 each of those 49 times, that made a total of 4,900. I realized I also had to add in the 50, which didn’t get paired.

  As I rushed over to the keypad, I saw that the timer was down to 0:05. In five seconds, we’d be trapped.

  “It’s 4,950!” I shouted as I punched in the digits.

  “You sure?” Benedict asked.

  “No.” I pressed Enter.

  The lock clicked and whirled. The bolt slid free, and the knob turned.

  “I changed my mind,” I said as the door swung open. “I’m sure.”

  Dr. Thagoras was waiting for us on the other side. “Let’s see, 9 + 3?” he asked.

  “That’s 12,” I said.

  “And 7 – 2?” he asked Benedict.

  “It’s 3,” Benedict said.

  “Whoa!” I shouted. “Did you say ‘3’?”

  “Just kidding,” Benedict said. “It’s 5.”

  I looked at my watch. Altogether, we’d only been in the museum about ten minutes. It was nice to be able to add again. “We’d better get going.” I didn’t want to keep my mom waiting.