by David Pogue
He read it over, then ran his hand over his scalp. “Well, that’s not like the Abbmeister,” he said. “It’s too short.”
“It’s not just that,” his wife pointed out. “The truth is, I’ve been writing her back immediately, every time I get a note from her. Why would she send a note that doesn’t say anything but ‘please write back’? And what’s this one word by itself there?”
Mr. Carnelia turned to go. “I wouldn’t worry about it, hon. She must have gotten interrupted in the middle of writing, or she deleted something by accident. Just write her back and ask. I’m sure it’s fine—don’t worry about it.” And he slipped out.
But Mrs. Carnelia did worry. She hit Reply and typed:
Sent: July 7
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Hello!
Abby, honey!
Your last e-mail was so short and strange. Is everything OK? What do you mean “please, please write back?” I’ve replied to every e-mail you’ve sent!
Please tell us if everything is OK. We miss you, and can’t wait to see you in one more week!
Love,
Mom
Phil Shutter’s brain always seemed to be going in six directions at once. At mealtimes, it was usually his habit to flit from table to table, checking in with people, following up, getting ready for the day. So it wasn’t hard for Ben and Abby to find him at breakfast. 225
They waited, as politely as they could, until he was finished talking to one of the shepherds.
“Phil?”
He turned, beaming, opening his arms wide, as though he were going to hug them, and then changed his mind. “Ben and Abby! Good morning! Did you try the blueberry pancakes? They’re fresh blueberries. This time yesterday, they were still on the bushes!”
Ben ignored the question. “Hey, do you have a minute after breakfast? We have something sort of serious we need to talk to you about.”
Phil went into Fake Caring mode, the way grownups do when you’re four years old and crying because you can’t find your teddy bear.
“Oh, dear dear dear, I’m sorry to hear that! Not too serious, I hope? But by all means, by all means. My door is always open, you know that. You’re my Number One priority! We can meet in my office. I’ll have Ferd show you the way. How’s that?”
He smiled and gave each of them a weird little double pat on the shoulder.
“Okay . . . thanks,” said Ben unsteadily. “We’ll see you in a little bit.”
And that was that. He and Abby returned to their table and didn’t say much until breakfast was over.
“So you’ve secured a meeting with the big boss, eh?” Ferd said as he escorted them through the building a few minutes later. “I trust you’re not applying for a job here?” He was trying to kid around, but Abby and Ben were in no mood for it.
When they got to Phil’s office, the door was locked; Ferd knocked, and Phil opened it a moment later. “Come in, come in! Please. Sit. Here.” Phil indicated a couple of chairs across from his polished, walnut desk.
Abby scanned the office. She had to admit, it was absolutely beautiful. It was filled with shiny dark wood furniture, tall glass display cases, and high-tech gadgetry. There was a photo of two cute preschoolers on Phil’s desk, and four framed diplomas hanging on the wall. There were also some paintings here and there.
Phil sat down, too. “Okeydoke! Now what can I do for you kids? Everything all right with the food?”
Ben and Abby shifted uncomfortably. Who was going to speak first?
It was Abby. “We’d like to know exactly what’s going on here,” she said.
Phil didn’t bat an eye. “What’s going on here? Well, I think you know the answer to that, Abby.”
He smiled broadly. She freaked quietly.
“What’s going on here is a one-of-a-kind, advanced-placement program for extremely gifted young magicians. Our mission is to nurture your skills, to explore the boundaries of your powers, and to make you proud to be a Camp Cadabra graduate!”
“No it’s not.” Abby’s voice was low, with an intensity that surprised even her.
“No what’s not?” asked Phil, pretending to be confused.
“That’s not what this is all about, and you know it. And now we know it.”
Phil slipped into his singsongy, talking-to-kinder-garteners voice. “Abby, Abby, Abby! I want you to know that I am a very decent guy. I’ve been a dedicated scientist for twenty years. I’m interested only in the truth. That’s what scientists do. That’s what—”
“We want to see your business card.” Abby interrupted him in a way that would have earned her a dirty look from her mom. But she couldn’t listen to Kermit the Frog tricking her for one more minute.
“I beg your pardon?”
“We want to see your business card.”
“I don’t think that’s really important right now, Abby,” said Phil. “What’s important right now is—”
“Show her the darned card!” said Ben, almost yelling. “Or we’re going to tell the whole world about what’s really going on at this place.”
Talk about a magic trick. Before Abby’s eyes, Phil’s happy, goofy, singsongy façade completely disappeared. “Don’t you threaten me, young man,” he said, his voice like a knife. “You don’t have the first clue who you’re dealing with.”
Even so, Phil reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and threw a business card onto the desk. Abby picked it up to read it.
“Philip M. Shutter, PhD,” she read out loud. “Director of Product Development . . .”
And here she looked up to meet Phil’s gaze, with intensity you hardly ever see in an eleven-year-old. “. . . Calabra Pharmaceuticals.”
Phil didn’t say anything.
“This isn’t a summer camp, is it, Phil?” said Ben, finally. “It’s a drug company.”
Phil tilted his head back and dragged his hands down his own face before replying.
“Well, of course it’s a drug company,” he replied. “When have you ever seen a summer camp with facilities like this? When have you been to a summer camp with cabins or dining halls or—or prices like Cadabra? When have you ever stayed in rooms equipped like the ones you’re staying in? How do you think we pay for all that? Not from your parents’ camp money, I’ll tell you that!”
“Wait,” said Abby. She still didn’t quite get what Calabra had to do with Cadabra. “So your company makes drugs, but you’ve made some kind of deal with magic camps all over the country?”
“Don’t be silly,” Phil replied, glaring at her. “We don’t have deals with those magic camps. We built those magic camps! We own those magic camps! And we created the Cadabra camp system for one reason only: to find you.”
Phil seemed to be energized once more. Kermit began to sneak back into his voice. “We realized that there are a few—very, very few children who have these gifts. These abilities. We are the only pharma company with the insight to embrace you—to find you, to bring you together. We support you. We care for you. We encourage you. We entertain you. We try to help you blossom!”
He was breathing hard now. “Actually, I have a question for you, Abby Carnelia. I would like to know what gives you the right to come storming in here, into my office, when we’ve done nothing but try to make your lives magical, every step of the way?”
Abby said nothing for a moment; she was a little scared. But she pulled herself together.
“You haven’t explained why you’re doing all this,” she said.
“Why? I told you why. Because we love you! We want to make your lives special!”
Ben was getting impatient. “Okay, so if you want to make our lives special, then why are you going to hypnotize us?”
“And give us medicines, and stick us in a cat tube?” added Abby.
Phil looked back and forth between them. “Who told you that?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.
“Never mind,” Ben said. “
We just know it, okay? And you haven’t answered the question: why?”
Phil’s face looked knotted up, as though he couldn’t believe he was being interrogated by two middle-schoolers.
“Look. After all I’ve done for you kids, I’m not going to sit here and entertain these unhealthy questions. I’m a busy man, and I’ve got a busy day ahead of me. This conversation is over.”
“Okay, that’s fine,” said Abby. “I’ll just write on my blog about how you keep us locked in here, with one-way doors so we can’t get out. And how you won’t let us call home so our parents don’t know what’s really going on here. And how you’re turning children—little children, who can’t defend themselves—into guinea pigs for your science experiments! How you’re going to cut us up! Yep, I think the whole Internet should know about all that stuff. Don’t you, Ben?”
“I sure do,” said Ben, grinning. “I think they’d find it fascinating.”
Phil made a tiny gurgle; it sounded as though there was an entire fish stuck in his throat. Then he exploded— “like a volcano,” as Abby described it later.
“You just don’t get it, do you?” He leaned forward on his desk, supporting himself on both hands, and drilling into them with his eyes.
“This company is dedicated to saving lives and helping people,” he spluttered. “I’ve spent twenty years helping this company find the next miracle cure, the next medicine that will help people. At this very moment, your grandparents are probably taking our pills so their arthritis won’t hurt as much. Your fathers are probably alive because of our heart medicine. When you were babies and you got sick, your parents gave you our drops to help you stop coughing so you could sleep. How dare you treat me like I’m the enemy?”
Abby and Ben were frozen, too startled to move.
“You think we’re the bad guys? We’re the good guys! You want to know who the bad guys are? Do you?”
Abby nodded—a tiny, terrified nod.
“The bad guys are the other drug companies, the ones who copy our formulas. We spend a fortune to find the next miracle drug. You can’t imagine how hard it is—how long it takes, how much money it takes—to discover some plant, some rare fern in some South American jungle. Then we have to figure out what it’s good for, figure out how much to put in each pill, make sure it’s safe! So finally it’s ready. It saves thousands of lives, makes thousands of lives better. But then . . .”
Phil started to look pained, as though he had had a splinter in his finger for a week.
“But the law says that it’s ours for only ten years. Ten years! After that, any company can copy our formulas, copy our medicines, and sell theirs cheaper. They’re allowed to skip past all our hard work, our science, our discoveries. And do you know what that does? It makes it very hard for us to keep doing what we do. We have to keep coming up with new drugs, new medicines, new South American ferns, to replace the ones that the other companies are now copying.”
He paused to take a deep breath. He looked off to the side, as though talking to himself. “And right now, we’ve got nothing in the pipeline.”
Ben glanced at Abby. “What do you mean, pipeline?”
“I mean we’ve got nothing lined up. We don’t have the next blockbuster pill, the next lifesaving drug. If we don’t find something big, and something soon, there’ll be nothing left to keep this company alive.”
Abby almost felt sorry for the guy.
“But what does all of this have to do with us?”
“It has everything to do with you, Abby,” Phil said. Suddenly, he seemed more tired than angry. He sat back down at last.
“You kids are the last hope. That’s why we created the camps. To find you, to bring you here to our headquarters. You can help us. You can help save thousands of lives! You may wind up helping your parents and your grandparents—even your children and grandchildren!”
“But how? How is my spinning an egg going to, you know, make my grandchildren get well?”
Phil sighed deeply. There was no longer any reason to hide the truth.
“Okay, Abby, here it is. I’m going to level with you. Now, you know and I know that there is something special about you kids. Something remarkable. Something the world has never seen before. These powers might seem useless and pointless to you. But no matter how tiny these powers are, they’re changing the laws of nature.
“We don’t know how you’re different from everyone else. Maybe it’s a hormone you have, or an enzyme. Maybe it’s got something to do with your brain structure. Something in your blood. Your cells might be unusual, or your DNA. It might be genetic, or it might come from your environment. We just don’t know.”
Abby glanced at Ben. He was listening hard, but she couldn’t read his expression.
“But imagine if we did,” said Phil. “Imagine if we could tap into whatever it is that makes you special, and bring it to the masses. Inside your special hormones, or your special magnetism, or your special brain chemistry, might be the key to fantastic new drugs. Imagine a pill that would help athletes win more medals. Imagine if you could eat anything and never get fat, or if there were a spray that could heal any wound—or if we could figure out how to live forever! We just don’t know yet. But if you’ll help us out, we could bring happiness to so many people. Make people well. Make people better.”
“And make a lot of money for your company,” Ben concluded. “That’s really the point, isn’t it?”
Phil didn’t appreciate that remark. “Yes, there will be a lot of money. Every company tries to make money. But we intend to share that money with you, Ben, and Abby, and the other kids—of course we do. You are the ones who will make it all possible, after all.”
Phil had given a great speech, but Abby was feeling more annoyed than anything. “So if this is all so noble and so great, why are you keeping it all a secret? Why go to all the trouble of building a national chain of magic camps, just to find the kids who have powers?”
Phil smiled. “Well, we couldn’t just come out and advertise what we’re really doing, could we? ‘Kids! Got a special power that seems pointless? Friends make fun of you? Come to our labs where we can study you, examine you, and run you through our machines!’ I don’t think many parents would sign up for that program. And besides . . . that would tell the other big pharma companies what we’re up to. And we can’t have that, can we?”
Abby looked down at her lap.
“Look, Abby . . . Ben. I know this is a lot to handle. But we’ve been working on this project for years, ever since we first became aware that there were these specially gifted children. You have the power to help so many people. To save lives. And maybe, if you’re the kid who leads us to discovering your secret, to make a lot of money. Won’t you just stay for one more week, so we can have our Level 2 researchers look you over? It’s just a few days of . . . discomfort, in exchange for the possibility of helping us find a huge medical breakthrough. Can I count on you?”
Abby and Ben didn’t believe Phil for a second. They knew perfectly well that he wasn’t really giving them a choice; he had no intention of letting them go home before he was ready. If they were going to get out of there, it would have to be without Phil’s help—and the first step would be to play along.
“Okay, Phil,” Ben said, standing up. “Just a few more days.”
“Thank you,” said Phil. “And do we also have an understanding that this program needs to remain a secret? If you told anyone, like your parents or even the other kids here, it could destroy everything we’ve worked so hard to build here. Do we have a deal?”
Ben nodded.
“You, too, Abby?”
Her heart wasn’t in it, but she nodded anyway.
“Okay, then,” Phil concluded. “Enough serious stuff. You’ve missed half an hour of morning class already. Why don’t I have Ferd take you back to the labs? And I’ll see to it that a special yummy surprise is delivered to your rooms tonight, as my way of thanking you for your understanding.”
Well, you know what, Mr. Phil? The next trick’s on you.
Sent: July 7
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Yo
Dear Ryan,
Remember me? The sister you adore? First kid in our family? Word up, baby brother! (Code for “How are you, Ry?”)
They are treating me great here. Are you having fun at home? Keeping busy? Me, I’m busier than a beaver! Prisoner of happiness, that’s me!
This is a great trick I learned. Place a quarter on the table. Is it heads up? Really concentrate now. A picture should form in your mind, and you should say this chant. “Medicine man, witch doctor, evil eye! Company of wizards, make it FLY!”
They say that if you did it right, the quarter should drop right through the table. Are you seeing that, or did I explain it wrong? Editing the instructions might help, if I get time. My writing is not so great. E-mail is not so great for explaining magic tricks, either!
Can you believe I’ll be home in a week? You betcha! Pick a day that weekend for going to see a movie or something. Me, I don’t care what it is. Up here at camp, we see lots of movies, but it’s not the same without you!
Look at the time—I gotta go. Up late again, and I need to rest for tomorrow’s fun activities. Calabra Camps are the best—you should come next year, Ryan!
Love,
Abs
CHAPTER
22
Escape
BY NOW, ABBY HAD FIGURED OUT why her parents had been responding so weirdly to her e-mails: somebody at Calabra was intercepting every single e-mail message. Reading them over, editing them, changing them, cutting out sentences from the kids’ e-mails that might make parents suspicious, and anything from the parents’ replies that showed worry.
