The Age Altertron

by Mark Dunn

  “Oh don’t say ‘chopped,’ dear. Say ‘trimmed.’ It’s a much nicer word.” Aunt Mildred could not help herself: she giggled. “And what an even more pleasant surprise forme! I’m not justtenyears younger! I’m eleven-and-a-half years younger! Let me see. Oh goodness! I was sixty-five and now I’m fifty-three. And what’s more, I don’t look a day over forty-nine. Please note how soft and supple my skin looks now!”

  Aunt Mildred pinched her cheeks so hard that they turned red.

  Wayne’s face now took on a pout. He looked like a baby who had just done a little business in his diapers. “Don’t you even care that Rodney and I are now helpless infants?”

  “Of course I care, dear. I care very much. But I’m not sure how helpless you are. Let’s see if you can walk so I won’t have to carry you around. But first, let’s get you out of these giant-sized pajamas so you won’t stumble.” Aunt Mildred went to Rodney’s bed and helped him out of his pajamas. He tried very hard with his little arms to be of some assistance but his tiny hands would not do what his brain wanted them to do. After Aunt Mildred had removed the top and bottom halves of his pajamas, Wayne started to laugh. It was very much a baby’s laugh, like a little baby giggle, but there was definite thirteen-year-old mirth involved. Mirth at Rodney’s expense.

  “What are you laughing about, you chubby baby!” Rodney squeaked.

  “You!” answered Wayne. “Those underpants look huge on you!”

  “And you don’t have on huge underpants yourself?” Rodney shot back.

  “I guess so,” said Wayne sheepishly. “I guess we both look pretty foolish.”

  “Oh you look adorable!” said Aunt Mildred as she picked Rodney up and put him down on the floor. Then she went to Wayne’s bed and began to undress him. Once the boys had both been set upon the floor, they attempted together to pull themselves up into a standing position by climbing their little hands up their bedposts. After some grunting and a great deal of effort, they got themselves to their feet. It was a good start.

  “Now come toward me, boys,” said Aunt Mildred, lowering herself to a squat. “Let me see if you are still babies or if you’ve reached the toddler stage yet.”

  Rodney took a step away from his bed and promptly fell down. Wayne took a step away from his own bed and then another step and then another, each one coming faster than the last, until he was hurtling uncontrollably toward Aunt Mildred, on a collision course with her bony knees. Just short of his great aunt’s outstretched arms, Wayne toppled headlong to the floor.

  “But that’s a good sign, isn’t it?” said Aunt Mildred, helping Wayne into a seated position and then clapping her hands gleefully together as if the boys really were babies who required encouragement. “It means that you just have to work at it a little and you’ll both be up and walking around in no time.”

  Rodney scowled. “What are youtalkingabout, Aunt Mildred?” he said through his tiny baby mouth. “We’re not going to stay like this! I’m sure that the Professor is in his laboratory right this moment working on a machine to undo this. Can you take us to his house?”

  “Right now? Right this very minute? But I have to get you some breakfast! I have to buy baby food! I have to go up into the attic and find your high chairs and find the double baby carriage that I used to roll you around in. It will take me all morning to get things ready for us to go to the Professor’s house. Why don’t I just call him up on the phone and have him come over?”

  Rodney and Wayne looked at one another and shrugged. It probably did work better for the Professor to come there.

  “Now crawl around if you like, but be careful and don’t pull any table lamps down on your heads.” (Aunt Mildred was always worried about things coming down on people’s heads and giving them amnesia as was always happening to the characters in her favorite radio soap opera Helen Grant, Backstage Nurse.)

  Rodney scowled anew. “Aunt Mildred, we might look like babies to you, but we’re actually thirteen-year-olds who are merely trapped inside the bodies of babies.”

  Aunt Mildred nodded. “I must remember that it is our physical bodies that have gotten younger and not our brains, or else you would not be able to talk to me the way you are and would be drooling a little. Please forgive me, boys. But I must say, though: it is such a delight to see you so young and adorable again. I so hated it when you boys had to grow up.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Wayne, trying his best to be agreeable, but still sounding like something the world had never before seen: a sarcastic baby.

  From down the hall now came the sound of a ringing telephone. “Speak of the Devil! That could be Russell—I mean Professor Johnson!” exclaimed Aunt Mildred, clapping her hands together excitedly.

  The now fifty-three-year-old Aunt Mildred who didn’t look a day over forty-nine put her hand to her chest as if to slow her fastbeating heart. “I wonder what the Professor will look like! Quite dashing, I’m sure!”

  Wayne and Rodney sat on the floor and stared at each other in silence as they listened to their aunt scampering down the hallway. Then they could hear her talking on the phone, although she was too far away for them to tell what she was saying.

  “You just watch, Wayne,” Rodney finally said. “I’ll be running all around this house before the end of the day. By tomorrow the both of us will be hard at work in the Professor’s lab, helping him to make this calamity go away.”

  “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.

  “Then where are they?” sobbed Mrs. Ragsdale. “What has happened to them? Will I ever see my Petey again?”

  Wayne stood up on the sofa, his legs bowing out like a baby’s and making him a little unsteady on his feet. Both he and Rodney were now wearing the baby jumpers Aunt Mildred had pulled out of the attic cedar chest. The jumpers had a pattern of little ducklings and goslings on them. Wayne placed one of his hands on his hip and raised the other into the air as Mighty Mike might have done when he was a super-hero infant.

  “The Professor is working on the problem,” he said. “You can be assured that this problem will be corrected and all of your children will be returned to you. Isn’t that right, Professor?”

  The Professor did not hear the question. His head was still outside the window and he was making a sucking noise, trying to draw more air into his lungs.

  Mr. Craft stepped forward and addressed Rodney and Wayne: “How can you be so sure that we will get the children back?”

  Neither Rodney nor Wayne knew how to respond, and the Professor wasn’t being very helpful. Before the boys could come up with an answer, the telephone in the kitchen rang. Aunt Mildred, who had been serving coffee to people, set down her coffeepot and went to answer it.

  “You all must be patient,” said Becky from the envelope of her father’s arms. “The Professor is working very hard. Even harder than usual.”

  “No he’s not,” said Mr. Dean, the newspaper editor. “He’s sticking his head out of the window.”

  “Well, if there weren’t so many people in this room making things so difficult for him!” Rodney and Wayne had never seen their little friend so upset before. It was even more unusual to see her large baby eyes fired with anger and her rosy cheeks even rosier than they had been earlier. It was usually Becky’s nature to be cheerful or at the very least, politely pleasant. But Rodney and Wayne could certainly understand the reason for this change in behavior. It wasn’t easy being a thirteen-year-old girl trapped inside the body of a rubber-limbed baby. Becky had wanted to help Aunt Mildred make and serve the coffee to all of her guests, but there was very little that she could do with her flimsy, nubby baby hands except stack sugar cubes upon a saucer, and even then, some of the cubes wound up on the table and on the floor. Finally, Aunt Mildred was compelled to return her helpless little helper to the arms of her father and thank her politely while getting the whiskbroom and and dustpan.

  Aunt Mildred had been gone hardly a minute when she returned to the den with a puzzled look on her face. It was as if someone had told her the answer to a funny riddle, but it made no sense.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?” asked Mrs. Carter, whose tenyear-old daughter Lucinda had also disappeared the previous night. Mrs. Carter was perhaps the most worried parent in the whole room, because she had quarreled with her daughter before sending her up to bed without supper. They had quarreled over the fact that Lucinda refused to eat her raisin and carrot salad. Lucinda had even stuck her tongue out at it, and right in front of Mrs. Carter’s friend Mrs. Edwards, who had made the salad herself and had tender feelings about it. Mrs. Carter was afraid that her daughter Lucinda had run away from home. For this reason, she had spent part of the morning standing on her front porch calling, “COME HOME, LUCINDA, MY LITTLE GIRL! YOU WILL NEVER HAVE TO EAT RAISIN AND CARROT SALAD EVER AGAIN. YOU ARE RIGH
T! IT TASTED JUST LIKE RABBIT FOOD!” This last part was said just as Mrs. Edwards strolled by with her dog. It was a very awkward moment for both women who were already on delicate terms with one another after the head-bumping incident.

  “Petey is on the phone,” Aunt Mildred said.

  “Who is on the phone? Who?” barked Mr. Dean, who had not heard the first part of the one-sentence report. Like a good newspaperman, Mr. Dean needed to know the “who,” the “what,” the “when,” the “where,” and the “why” of everything newsworthy that happened in the town.

  Mr. Dean’s raised voice drew the curious Professor’s head back into the room.

  Aunt Mildred turned to Mr. and Mrs. Ragsdale and said, “Your missing boy Petey is on the telephone!”

  With that, the Ragsdales dashed out of the den and down the hall to the kitchen. Mr. Ragsdale yanked up the phone receiver resting on the kitchen counter, and Mrs. Ragsdale leaned in to listen alongside her husband.

  “Where is your extension?” asked the Professor of Aunt Mildred as all the adults in the den went scurrying down the hallway to join the Ragsdales in the kitchen.

  “There is one upstairs in my nephew Mitch’s bedroom,” said Aunt Mildred pointing to the staircase behind her and smiling because she could be helpful to the Professor.

  “Thank you,” said the Professor with a nod of the head. With his now more youthful legs, he was able to take the stairs two at a time.

  In the den, Rodney and Wayne sat alone on the sofa thinking that they had been forgotten in everyone’s mad rush to find out if it really was Petey Ragsdale on the phone and from where on earth he might be calling.

  “HEY!” yelled Wayne. “SOMEBODY! ANYBODY!”

  In an instant, the normally absent-minded Principal Kelsey, who had shown up at the McCall front door concerned about how his school children would be affected by this most recent calamity, swept into the room and scooped Baby Rodney and Baby Wayne into his arms. With a grunt, he said, “You might be eighteen-monthsold, but you’re still just as heavy as two sacks of potatoes!” Carrying the boys, one under each arm as if they were, indeed, potatoes, the school principal conveyed them to the kitchen, which was now just as crowded as the den had been, and for want of any better place, set them down in their old high chairs.