“Yeah, I am! Just not officially. I’m like a scientist-to-be. A janitor-slash-scientist.”
“No, you’re not. You’re just a janitor-slash-janitor. That’s all you were EVER going to be. They were just using you to clean up their messes.”
“Who was?”
“All of them! From Palindrome on down. You were desperate, so they played you for an idiot.”
The words hit Tom like a slap in the face. In his head, he quickly replayed his whole history at CEASE, from his job interview to the moment when he lost half a finger wrangling Dr. Palavi’s black hole.
Deep down, he knew Marisa was right. And it hurt like nothing he’d ever felt before.
“Why would you say that?” he whispered.
“Because it’s true. People are horrible. Join the club.”
Tom could feel his own tears starting to well up. “Just because it’s true doesn’t mean you have to say it.”
When she heard the pain in his voice, Marisa realized how much she’d just hurt him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did.” He stood up. “All I’ve ever been is nice to you. I don’t know why you couldn’t be nice to me.”
“Tom! Wait!”
But it was too late. He was already gone.
By the time Marisa got up and out of the cave, Tom was twenty yards away, walking back toward the clan.
“Tom! Come back! Please! I’m sorry!”
Tom didn’t say a word. He just kept going.
She wanted to follow him. But he was headed back to a group of people who Marisa was pretty sure would kill her on sight.
All she could do was go back into her cave and cry some more, and curse herself for having been mean to the only person who’d showed her kindness in twelve thousand years.
For all the unfair things that had happened to her, this felt even worse.
Because this time, she knew it was her fault.
This is making me SO sad! See Storytelling 101: The Darkest Hour.
Meanwhile, twelve thousand years and a few hours later, Dr. Palindrome was working late in Marisa’s old lab at CEASE, putting his name on the last of her lab reports. The takeover was complete. As far as anyone could tell, he was now the creator and sole owner of Marisa’s solar panel invention. Once he announced it to the world, he’d become instantly famous and only slightly less instantly rich.
Finished, he sat back with a satisfied smile. It had been surprisingly easy to steal the entire life’s work of a brilliant but friendless orphan.
There ought to be a law against this, he thought to himself.
Then he thought again.
Actually, I’m sure there IS a law against it. Several, probably. And I’ve just broken all of them.
Good thing Dr. Morice was a friendless orphan, or I’d be on thin ice right now.
On his way out of the building, he stopped in the CEASE auditorium, where Dr. Vasquez was also working late. Her time machine was set to be revealed to the world in a press conference the next morning, and she was making some last-minute adjustments.
It had been quite a challenge getting the machine ready in time. Not only did the huge caved-in section and the dozens oflittle pockmarked dents need hammering out, but the remote control fetcher had mysteriously disappeared. Dr. Vasquez had tried to build a replacement, but the parts for it were so rare and difficult to obtain that it would’ve delayed the announcement for weeks.
So Dr. Vasquez had decided not to use a fetcher at all for the big announcement. Instead, she was going to demonstrate the time machine by taking herself back in time.
The world’s first time traveler!
(Actually, she’d be the third. But nobody in the present knew about Marisa and Tom’s one-way trip except Dr. Palindrome. And he was keeping his mouth shut, for obvious reasons.)
“Hello, Doctor!” Despite the late hour, Dr. Vasquez was very chipper.
“Hello to you, Doctor!” Dr. Palindrome was chipper, too. “All set for tomorrow?”
“Just about! I’ve finished fixing all the damage. Now I just need to pre-program the machine for my maiden voyage.”
“Have you decided where you’re traveling to yet?”
“It was a tough choice. But after the memorial service, I asked myself, ‘If I were Tom Edison, where would I want me to go?’ And I figured it out!”
“Not back to 10,000 B.C.?” Dr. Palindrome’s heart skipped a beat. If Dr. Vasquez went back in time and stumbled upon Tom and Marisa, it’d ruin his whole plan—and almost certainly send him to jail.
“Oh, heavens, no,” Dr. Vasquez chuckled. “It took me days to fix up this machine after the beating it took back in the Stone Age. You won’t catch me within a thousand years of THAT era again.”
Dr. Palindrome breathed a sigh of relief as Dr. Vasquez continued.
“No, I’m going back to 1879—to the exact date when the REAL Tom Edison invented the lightbulb! Then I’ll get him to sign that Star Trip poster in honor of our Tom. I think Tom would really appreciate that.”
“Oh, definitely!” said Dr. Palindrome, nodding vigorously. “It’s VERY touching. And SO much wiser than traveling back to the Stone Age. The LAST thing our Tom would want is to see you put the ‘Tom machine’ at risk by going back to such a dreadful era.”
“I’m so glad you agree,” beamed Dr. Vasquez. “I don’t know what was going on back in 10,000 B.C., but it must’ve been a real nightmare.”
“Indeed.” Dr. Palindrome headed for the door. “Good night, Dr. Vasquez—can’t wait to see you become rich and famous!”
“You, too, Dr. Palindrome. That solar panel idea is aces!”
“It really is, isn’t it? I’m SO glad I came up with it. Toodles!”
The sun was setting when a miserable Tom shuffled back into the clan’s cave. He’d done a lot of soul-searching since he left Marisa, and it had been very painful. Realizing you’ve spent your life dreaming an impossible dream…while the people you counted on to help make it come true have been feeding you a pack oflies while cruelly taking advantage of you…
Well, let’s just say it feels pretty lousy.
“Hey, everybody.”
The clan members grunted their hellos.
“Rrrr.”
“Hrrr.”
“Grrr.”
Dug was sitting on the ground with half a dozen small rocks spread out in front of him. As the clan’s men looked over his shoulder, Dug moved two rocks closer to the center of the spread. He muttered an explanation, and the others nodded.
“Whatcha up to?” Tom asked. “Working on some Rockball strategy?”
Dug looked up at him, confused.
“Rockball? Strategy?”
Tom tried to remember which words Marisa had taught the cavemen.
“Strategy. Uh…plan? Rockball plan?”
Dug shook his head. “Not Rockball plan,” he said. “Kill Marsha plan.”
“Oh, geez,” gulped Tom.
“Marisa!” Tom yelled as he ran into her cave.
Marisa winced at the sudden noise. “Watch out for the—”
“AAAH!”
“—bats.”
Startled into flight by Tom’s yell, a hundred bats flitted out of the cave. Several of them smacked Tom in the face on their way out.
As he flailed his arms and spit bat hairs out of his mouth, Marisa took the opportunity to apologize.
“I’m SO sorry for what I said before. It was mean, and stupid, and—”
“—also true,” said Tom. “Those scientists really DID dupe me. But don’t worry about that. We gotta get out of here! The cavemen are coming to kill you!”
“What?!”
“We gotta run! Far away! C’mon!”
Marisa followed him out of the cave. They headed across the wooded hillside in the opposite direction of the clan, moving as fast as they could in the dim light of the moon.
“Where are we going?” Marisa asked.
“It doesn’t matter! We just gotta get as far away as possible. Then maybe we’ll start our own clan. Or find a new one that doesn’t have such weird ideas about tigers.”
“Do they want to kill you, too?”
“Me? No. We get along fine! I think one of the women wants to set me up with her daughter.”
Marisa began to slow down. It was hard to run through a dark forest without tripping on anything. But it was even harder to run with all the guilt that was weighing her down.
“You can’t run away with me,” she said.
“Why not?”
“You need to stay with the clan. You’ve got a good situation there. I’m not going to ruin it for you.”
“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t let you go off alone! We’re in this together!”
Hearing Tom’s words made Marisa choke up a little. “Wow. You’re a really good person.”
“So are you,” Tom told her.
“I’m not, though,” Marisa said. “Or maybe I am, but I just don’t know how to show it. I’m TERRIBLE with people. I can’t talk to them, I can’t relate to them. Half the time, I don’t even want to be around them. But you’re just the opposite. You’re AMAZING with people. They love you!”
Tom was glad it was dark so she couldn’t see him blush. “You’re amazing, too! Just in a different way. You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met!”
Marisa snorted. “Being smart isn’t much good if you can’t get along with anybody.”
“Are you kidding? I’d MUCH rather have your brains. People skills without smarts aren’t that hot, either.” He held up his hand. “That’s how I lost half this finger to a black hole!”
The forest’s trees suddenly gave way to a clearing that allowed them to see for miles. Up ahead in the moonlight were the lake and the cliff where they’d first landed.
Marisa stared at the lake as she thought for a moment.
“No, Tom,” she said. “You have to go back. You stay with the clan. I’ll be fine on my own.”
As she turned to leave him, something in the distance caught her eye.
“You can’t just go—” Tom started to protest.
“Wait!” She was squinting in the direction of the lake. “Do you see that?”
“See what?”
“Over there, just off the shore. In the shallow water. Something is glowing.”
Tom followed her eyes. “Oh, wow! That’s weird. It’s like green Day-Glo. I didn’t think that existed in 10,000 B.C.”
“It doesn’t,” said Marisa. “We’ve got to get a better look. Follow me!”
She ran off—not downhill, in the direction of the lake, but uphill, toward the cliff where the time machine had landed.
Tom followed her.
It’s the fetcher!” Marisa yelped.
They were standing at the spot on the cliff where the time machine had first landed. A hundred feet below them and twenty feet from shore, Dr. Vasquez’s remote control glowed green in the shallow water.
“It must have fallen off the outside of the time machine when the boulder hit it!”
“Are you sure it’s the fetcher?” asked Tom. “I don’t remember it glowing like that.”
“It didn’t,” said Marisa. “The glow is coming from the radioactive ooze it’s leaking.”
“Will it still work?”
“Probably. But while it’s wet and oozing like that, it’s highly radioactive. It could be deadly to anybody who tries to pick it up out of the water.”
“Say no more,” said Tom. He started to walk off. Marisa grabbed his arm.
“Where are you going?”
“To fetch the fetcher!”
“Tom, if you pull it out of the water with your bare hands, it could kill you!”
“That’s what they pay me for! Handling deadly radioactive gadgets is my job!”
“But it’s a terrible job! I’m not going to let you risk your life for us!”
“What choice do we have?”
“There’s got to be a better way. Let me think about it.” Marisa chewed on her lip as she pondered the problem. “If we could just build some kind of a crane…and use it to pull the fetcher up out of the water…we could press the buttons with a stick and call the time machine back.”
“Great! So let’s build a crane!”
Marisa shook her head. “We can’t do that by ourselves. We’d need giant logs, huge lengths of vine spliced together—it’d take half a dozen men to build something like that.”
“We’ll get the cavemen to help!”
“But they want to kill me.”
“Oh! Right. I forgot we were running for your life just now. How about you hide, and I’ll get them to build the crane?”
“Do you feel like you can handle that yourself? Getting a bunch of cavemen to follow a complicated blueprint that’s not even written down, when you don’t speak their language?”
Tom thought about it. “I can handle the talking-to-them part. But the knowing-what-to-say part? That’d be tough. I’d need a lot of help with that.”
“I agree. For this to work, we need your people skills and my technical skills. So we’ve got to somehow convince the cavemen that they not only shouldn’t kill me but they should also listen to us.”
“How do we do that?”
“I have no idea. Are there any Star Trip episodes that might be helpful?”
Tom racked his brain. “Yes! Can you make yourselflook like a totally different person? Y’know, like with a cosmeto-transmogrification ray?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Oh. Well, then I’ve got nothing.”
Marisa was silent for a moment, thinking hard.
“I’ve got it!” she said.
“What?”
“Bat poop!”
“Of course! Wait—what?”
Minutes later, they were back in Marisa’s cave, feeling around in the darkness.
“EEEEEW!” Tom wiped his hand on the cave wall. There’s a TON of bat poop back here.”
“Perfect!” said Marisa.
“I am definitely not following your train of thought.”
“Bat poop is extremely high in nitrates, which are the main ingredient in explosives,” Marisa explained. “All we need are bat poop, human urine, dry tinder, some empty coconuts—”
“There’s a coconut grove down by the river!”
“—and a little bit of fire. Then we can build bombs.”
“If we bomb the cavemen, isn’t that going to make it hard for them to help us? On account of their getting bombed and whatnot?”
“We’re not going to hurt them. We’re just going to amaze and frighten them. If a flashlight and the Fruit Fight song were enough to get them to worship you, just think what a few bat poop bombs could do.”
Tom’s eyes widened as he broke into a smile. “GREAT idea! I’ll get the bat poop.”
The clan was still asleep around their smoldering fire when Tom tiptoed into the cave at dawn, holding a long stick with leaves tied around one end.
He stuck the leafy end into the fire’s embers. It lit up, burning brightly enough to wake Dug and the others.
“Morning, guys!” Tom pulled the small torch from the fire and scampered back outside.
The cavepeople all looked at Dug. He shrugged. Then he stood up, stretching the sleepiness from his body. The other men did the same. They had a big day planned. In the morning, they were going to hunt and kill Marisa. Then they planned to celebrate with an afternoon of Rockball.
They’d figured it would take at least a few hours to track down Marisa, so it was a surprise to hear her voice, yelling from the clearing.
“DO-DEE-DOOT-DOOT!”
Dug and the others looked at each other in surprise.
“DO-DEE-DOOT-DOOT!”
They all grabbed rocks and headed outside.
Marisa and Tom stood in the clearing, facing the cave entrance. Tom held the burning torch. Marisa held what looked like a coconut with a rolled-up leaf sticking ou
t of it.
Dug raised his rock, cocking his hand back to throw it at Marisa. The other cavemen did the same.
As they began to advance, Marisa yelled “DO-DEE-DOOT-DOOT!” again.
Dug snorted. Whatever power that sound once had over him and the others was gone now.
Then he saw Marisa hold out the coconut as Tom lowered the torch to it, igniting the rolled-up leaf.
Dug narrowed his eyes. Setting a coconut on fire seemed odd.
It seemed even more odd for Marisa to throw the burning coconut at them.
But those things weren’t nearly as odd as what happened next.
The coconut exploded in midair.
The cavemen shrieked in surprise, freezing in their tracks.
Marisa picked up a second coconut with a leaf sticking out of it. There was a small pile of them at her feet.
As the cavemen stared in awe, Tom lit the leaf-fuse again.
“DO-DEE-DOOT-DOOT!” Marisa yelled, throwing the second coconut at them. It hit the ground, bounced twice, and exploded just inches in front of Dug.
He screamed. Dug had never seen an exploding coconut before, let alone two of them.
Marisa picked up a third coconut.
“DO-DEE-DOOT-DOOT!” she yelled again.
The cavemen all looked to Dug for guidance. Dug looked at Marisa. Then he looked at the coconut. Then he looked at all the other coconuts still at her feet.
He let out a long, defeated sigh. “Arsha barsha Marsha,” he said.
And by that, he meant: “Gentlemen, I don’t like saying this any more than you like hearing it. But the evidence is clear.
“First of all, Marsha’s making coconuts explode. Raise your hand if you’ve seen THAT before. No? Me neither. It’s mind-blowing.
“Second, she killed our tiger god. Which I, for one, did not fully appreciate at the time for the massively impressive power move that it was.
“Third, I still don’t get the magic rock thing. But I’m no longer wondering why Tom took his cues from Marsha even when he had the magic rock.
Stuck in the Stone Age Page 9
