The Age Altertron

by Mark Dunn

  Both of the boys’ heads looked gaunt and narrow in the temples, and furrowed in the forehead. The cheeks and jowls were wider and puffier, as cheeks and jowls often become with age

  “How old?”

  “Well, look at mine. How old do you think I look?”

  “About the Professor’s age, I guess. Probably a little older.”

  “How old is the Professor?”

  “Well, Aunt Mildred baked him a cake for his birthday in February and she wouldn’t put candles on it because she said it might burn the house down.”

  “That doesn’t tell us how old he is, Rodney. Will you wake up and think?”

  Rodney chewed on his lip for a moment. “I know that his birthday is February 29. It’s the leap year day that only happens every four years. And this year—1956—is a leap year, which means that the Professor has to be an age that is divisible by four. And so I believe he is either sixty or sixty-four or sixty-eight. I would say sixty-four.”

  “Do you think we’re in our sixties too?” Wayne felt the top of his head. “Hey, Rodney, I still have some hair.”

  “But it’s pretty gray.”

  The boys grew silent, each pondering their new predicament. Then Rodney said, “I think the Professor has added too many years to everyone’s ages. Instead of adding eleven years and eight months to put us back to where we were, he added over sixty years.”

  “Why would the Professor do that?”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t on purpose, Wayne. Remember that he said he wasn’t certain what might happen when he turned the machine on.”

  “What does that mean, Rodney, for the town?”

  Rodney thought about this for a moment. “Well, I would guess that if all those years have been added to our true ages, then all those years have also been added to everybody’s ages. That means we now live in a town with a whole lot of really old people.”

  “You mean like the Professor? Like Aunt Mildred?”

  Rodney nodded.

  “How old do you think Aunt Mildred is now?”

  “115. Maybe 120.”

  “Gee, that’s pretty old, Rodney. I hope she isn’t dead.”

  “Me too. Let’s go find out.”

  The two boys who now had the voices and bodies of men in their sixties, got out of bed and, without stopping to find some clothes, raced to their great aunt’s bedroom. The door was shut. They knocked. They waited.

  Then Wayne said to the door, “Aunt Mildred? Aunt Mildred, are you still alive?”

  “Don’t ask her if she’s still alive,” said Rodney. “Don’t ask people questions that can only be answered one way!”

  “But that’s the way I want her to answer it. I want her to say ‘yes.’”

  “Well, she isn’t saying anything. And she didn’t say anything when we knocked, either. We’d better go in and check on her.”

  Wayne opened the door, and the boys stepped inside. “Turn on that reading lamp,” said Wayne, pointing to the standing lamp that Aunt Mildred used to read her romance novels and her issues of Ladies’ Home Journal in her comfy arm chair. Rodney switched on the lamp. It cast a dim light around the room. But it was enough light for Rodney and Wayne to see their great aunt lying in her bed.

  “Get a little mirror,” said Wayne. “We should hold a mirror up to her mouth, like they do in the movies, to see if she’s still breathing.”

  “I have a better idea,” suggested Rodney. “I’ll take her pulse.” Rodney reached under the blanket and gently pulled out Aunt Mildred’s arm. It was very thin and scored with veins that ran up and down it. The skin was loose and blotched with dark age-spots. Rodney took the wrist between his fingers and felt for a pulse.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No—wait. There’s a beat. Okay, where is the next one? There’s another one. Her heart rate sure is slow.”

  “Probably because she’s the oldest person in the world, Rodney! But this is good. She isn’t dead.”

  Just then, Aunt Mildred opened her eyes. Calmly, she looked at the boys and said in a small and feeble voice, “Hello, Rodney. Hello, Wayne. Is it morning yet?”

  “No, Aunt Mildred,” said Wayne. He looked at the Big Ben alarm clock that sat next to the bed. “It’s just a little past midnight.”

  “What’s wrong? Why are you two out of bed and why do you both look like middle-aged men?”

  “Because we are middle-aged men, Aunt Mildred,” said Wayne. “Rodney thinks that we must be in our sixties. Say, is that middleaged or old?”

  “It depends on whom you ask, dear,” said Aunt Mildred. She spoke in a breathy, slightly labored voice. The boys leaned in to hear her better. “If you are thirteen, then someone who is in his sixties could be considered quite old. But if you are as old as I feel right now, sixty-something could be considered quite young.”

  “Well, you probably feel old, Aunt Mildred, because you’re 115, maybe even older,” said Wayne bluntly.

  ”Oh.”

  “Although that isn’t your real age,” added Rodney.

  “I know that, dear. My mind is just as sharp as it’s always been. It’s my body that feels worn out. Oh my word! I just thought of something.”

  “What is it, Aunt Mildred?”

  “My friend Mrs. Craddock at the Shady Rest Nursing Home— I knit socks for her and take her chocolate pudding—she must now be as old as one of those big ancient tortoises at the zoo. Maybe older!

  Rodney and Wayne nodded, not knowing how to respond. Wayne thought how strange it was that his great aunt should be talking about reptiles when he had just been dreaming of them. Sometimes Wayne’s mind wandered to things that were slightly off the subject at hand.

  “Well, let me rest, boys, and then in the morning, you will have to serve me breakfast in bed, because I don’t think I have enough strength to go down to the kitchen. I would like something easily digestible. And don’t forget the cinnamon.” Aunt Mildred closed her eyes.

  “I’m going to the Professor’s house,” said Wayne.

  “Right now?” said Rodney.

  “I have to find out if he’s all right.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” interjected Aunt Mildred drowsily. “If he’s like me he probably just wants to sleep.”

  “But I don’t think we should wait until tomorrow, Aunt Mildred.”

  Aunt Mildred didn’t respond. She had fallen back to sleep.

  “I suppose you’re right about checking on the Professor,” whispered Rodney to his brother as he closed the door behind him. “We’ll only toss and turn and worry the rest of the night. But we should first try to reach him on the phone.”

  The boys used the telephone in their father’s bedroom, happy to call someone without assistance. Wayne let the phone ring a dozen times but the Professor didn’t pick up.

  “Now I’m really worried,” he said.

  “Let’s go over there,” said Rodney.

  The two boys walked to their father’s closet and began looking for shirts and pants and shoes that they could wear, since all the clothes in their own closet were sized for thirteen-year-old boys. “I think we are now the same size as Dad,” said Wayne, just as Rodney pulled out his father’s favorite Hawaiian shirt. It was yellow and had pineapples on it.

  “Hey, do you remember this shirt?” asked Rodney, holding the shirt up to show his brother.

  Wayne smiled. “I sure do. Dibs!”

  “You can’t call dibs on something that’s already in the custody of another person.”

  “That shirt isn’t in your custody, Rodney. It’s still on the hanger.”

  “And I’m holding the hanger, goofball.”

  “So, do you want to wear Dad’s Hawaiian shirt, Rodney?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “But I want to wear it too…and it’s still on the hanger…and I said dibs.”

  “You’re such a goofball, Wayne. My hand touched it first. That’s what counts.”

  “Can we rock-scissor-paper for it?
”

  “No.”

  “So, go ahead and put it on, if you want to wear it so bad.” “Okay.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Okay.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “No, I changed my mind. You go right ahead. Here.” “No, I don’t want to wear it. You wear it.”

  “No…I don’t think so.”

  The boys grew silent. They were both thinking about their father, about how much he liked this particular shirt, which was the shirt he often wore when he was out trimming the hedge or washing his pride and joy: his two-toned blue and white 1955 Ford Fairlane. (This was a special memory of Wayne’s; he loved cars just as much as his father did, and was additionally crushed to learn that the Fairlane had disappeared right along with his dad.)

  Wayne reached out and touched another of their father’s shirts. It was a polo shirt—the shirt he liked to play golf in. Now they saw their father’s fishing shirt, with a lure still hooked to one of its many pockets, and the brown and white striped shirt he sometimes wore to his office where he wrote his books. Rodney had said that the vertical stripes made their dad look like a football official. “Better that than a convict!” laughed Wayne, thinking of the stripes going in a different direction.

  Wayne sniffed. He smelled a scent in the closet that he knew, the scent of Mitch McCall’s aftershave. It was almost as if Mr. McCall was right there in the closet handing the boys his clothes to wear.

  In the end, neither Rodney nor Wayne wore the Hawaiian shirt. They found a couple of old shirts and pants from the back of the closet. These were clothes their dad hadn’t worn for many years, and they didn’t carry such strong memories for the boys.

  On their way to the Professor’s house Rodney and Wayne noticed something very odd about many of the other houses up and down the street. They all had their lights on. Perhaps the same things were happening in these houses that had happened in the McCall home: children suddenly catapulted into middle and old age, older family members suddenly made very old and frail and unable to rise from their beds. There would then be urgent telephone calls between concerned relatives and concerned friends. And people would go to each other’s houses and drink lots of coffee and shake their heads and say “tut, tut” and “can you believe it?” and try to make some sense out of this latest calamity. It would end up being a very long night for many of the families of Pitcherville, just as it was proving to be a very long night for Rodney and Wayne.

  For one thing, the back door that led into the Professor’s lab was locked.

  “That’s funny,” said Rodney. “Professor Johnson hardly ever locks this door.”

  The twins took turns knocking, but no one came to answer the door. Wayne began to feel guilty. “What if he hears the knocking and he’s too weak to make it down the stairs?”

  “Well, there is only one thing we can do now, Wayne. We have to get a house key from Mrs. Ferrell.”

  On their way to the Ferrell house Wayne said, “I wonder if Petey’s back.”

  “And all the other children,” said Rodney. “Say, Petey only lives a block away. Let’s go over and make sure that he’s okay too.”

  As Rodney and Wayne suspected, the Ragsdale house had all of its lights on, like the others. Rodney rang the doorbell. After only a moment an old woman, perhaps in her eighties, answered the door.

  “Hello? What is it? Who are you?” she said.

  “It’s Rodney and Wayne.”

  “Oh my goodness! You are grown-up men. Rodney and Wayne—you won’t believe it! I’ve got my Petey Weety back! Petey! Petey! Come see who’s here! It’s your friends Rodney and Wayne McCall. They’re all grown up just like you!”

  Petey came to the door. He was completely bald. This fact made his steel plate stand out even more. Petey’s face had aged, but standing next to his mother he did not look so terribly old. Besides the plate in his head, there was another reason Rodney and Wayne were able to recognize Petey rather easily, even though so many years had been added to his age. It was his smile. Petey Ragsdale smiled wide. Sometimes his smile would stretch all the way across his face.

  “Hi Rodney. Hi Wayne. So I guess this is what we’ll look like when we’re old.”

  “I guess so,” said Rodney. “Welcome home.”

  “How did you get home?” asked Wayne.

  “No idea. One minute I’m trying to get some sleep in that crazy cloud place. It was really hard since there was never anything to sleep on. You just float. Then the next minute—kazam! Here I am on the floor of my room and there’s a pain in my side and my neck aches.”

  Rodney and Wayne remembered that their friend liked to sleep on the floor of his bedroom like an Indian. While this was an easy thing for an eleven-year-old to do, it would not be recommended for a man in his sixties.

  “Still, it’s great that I’m home. Look at Mom. She’s a lot older now. She doesn’t look it, though, does she?”

  Mrs. Ragsdale blushed. “That is what I’ve missed about my Petey Weety! He always says the sweetest things!” Mrs. Ragsdale reached over as if to tousle her son’s hair. But since he didn’t have any, she pulled her hand back and looked a little embarrassed.

  “Come in, boys. We are celebrating Petey’s return. We will do that for a while and then we’ll spend some time being appalled at what had to happen to bring him home. But for right now, let’s all be festive!”

  Mrs. Ragsdale led her two guests into the living room. Sitting on the sofa were two old men and a woman who appeared to be in her sixties. Rodney knew immediately who was who. “Hello, Mr. Ragsdale,” he said. “Hello, Mr. Craft. Hi Becky.”

  “Hi,” said Becky. She had a strange look on her face, which made it hard to tell how she was feeling about what had just happened to her. Her hair was gray and she had pronounced crow’s feet about her eyes. She also had some folds in her neck that were similar to those starting to show on her mother’s neck before she disappeared, although Becky’s were deeper.

  “Becky is very happy, aren’t you, Becky, that all the little children are back?” Mr. Craft patted his now sixty-something-year-old daughter on her knee. He did this slowly and stiffly as old people will sometimes do things, as if moving too quickly or fluidly was either an impossibility or was to be avoided because of the chance of injury.

  Becky nodded.

  “But this last hour hasn’t been easy for her.”

  Becky shot her father a disapproving look, which told him to be quiet.

  “I’m sorry, pumpkin,” said the very old Mr. Craft, whose face was creased with too many wrinkles to count. “I wasn’t thinking. So boys, did you hear that Mr. Armstrong is out of his bathtub now? He came out the minute his little Darvin and his little Daisy showed up. Of course they aren’t so little now, but he was glad to have them, and they were all so glad to be reunited with each other that they all climbed right back into that big empty bathtub as a family and just hugged and hugged on each other.”

  “That’s so nice!” said Mrs. Ragsdale as she poured the coffee. “Would you like some coffee, Becky?”

  “No, I don’t drink coffee,” said Becky curtly. “Maybe you’ve forgotten, but I’m still thirteen years old. Thirteen-year-olds don’t usually drink coffee. Thirteen-year-olds are hardly even teenagers. Oh, I just hate this! I absolutely hate it!”

  Becky ran out of the room. The room was quiet for a moment except for the sound of Mrs. Ragsdale pouring coffee. Then Becky returned, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m better. This is very hard. If the Professor isn’t able to fix this, then we will lose a huge chunk out of our lives. I won’t get to be a pediatrician who makes children laugh with her hand-puppets.”

  “You wanted to be a pediatrician! With hand-puppets! Oh how nice!” said Mrs. Ragsdale.

  “You can still be a puppet-performing pediatrician, pumpkin,” said Mr. Craft to his daughter.

  “No I can’t, Daddy. It’s too late. It’s too late to be anything now but old. I hate this. Why do things like this hav
e to happen?”

  “We don’t know, Becky, but all is not lost.” Mr. Craft looked at Rodney and Wayne when he said this. “Is it, boys?”

  Wayne shook his head. “We were just going over to see the Professor.”

  “And ask him what needs to be done to fix things,” said Rodney. “Would you like to come with us, Becky?”

  Becky wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and nodded. “Maybe the walk will do me some good.”

  CHAPTER NiNE

  In which the Professor berates himself, and a supermarket is robbed of all of its soft food, the reason to be revealed later

  Walking in the bright moonlight, Rodney and Wayne and Becky and Petey (who had decided that he would like to come too, to thank the Professor personally for rescuing him from the cloud place, even though he was now prone to arthritis) kept to their own quiet thoughts for a while. It was nice to be able to walk again, even though the no-longer-youthful muscles in their legs felt tired and tight.

  It was a strange thing to be strolling along so late at night, bathed in the light of a moon that looked no different from every other full moon they had known since they were first told by their parents what that giant, bright orb was doing so high in the sky. It was strange to be moving down a sidewalk whose every crack they had counted and tried to avoid (lest they break their mothers’ backs), past all the trees they had climbed and from whose branches they had hung down like monkeys, past familiar green lawns, now browning in the change of season, past the same cars and hedges and mailboxes and stop signs, and past the same Halloween decorations—scarecrows and Jack-o-lanterns that came out too early every year. It was as if nothing had changed, although a great deal had changed. And a great deal had been lost. Each child wondered as Becky had wondered: would they ever get it back again?

  “I didn’t know that you wanted to be a children’s doctor,” Wayne said to Becky.

  “Who works with puppets,” noted Petey.

  Becky shrugged. “I thought you would make fun of me, the way

  we used to laugh when Dr. Kelsey would forget where he put the knee thumper or his stethoscope.” Becky’s three companions smiled as they remembered Principal Kelsey’s equally absent-minded brother who was a pediatrician.