The Secret of Zoom

by Lynne Jonell

  “Can I go on the truck?”

  Christina stiffened. Was that Danny’s voice?

  Taft’s face was horrified. “No!” he breathed.

  The large-headed boy lumbered closer to the yard boss. “Pick me!” he said, patting his chest. “Pick me, boss!”

  The driver smiled broadly, pointing out the window, and the cheap ring on his hand gleamed red in the slanted light of late afternoon. “That’s a real Happy Orphan, boss. Let him come, why don’t you?”

  The yard boss shook his bristled head. “Nah. He’s only good for scrubbing and sweeping.”

  “But I want to get free!” Danny protested. “Go on the truck and get free! Like Taff!”

  Taft put his face in his hands and moaned softly.

  “You can’t even sing, boy,” said the yard boss. “I’ve heard you. What good would you be up on the mountain?” He loaded a cardboard box into the truck and waved at the driver. “That’s all this trip, take ’em away.”

  The truck driver lifted the children into the hopper. The yard boss turned aside. And suddenly a clear, sweet voice sang one pure note, high and lingering in the still air.

  Every head turned. Danny, swaying where he stood, was singing.

  The yard boss froze, his mouth open. Slowly he reached in his back pocket and took out the tuning fork Christina had seen once before. He tapped it against a rod and it rang out, silvery and piercing; the exact note Danny had just sung.

  “Well, boy, I guess you get your wish!” The yard boss grinned widely, slapped Danny on the shoulder, and propelled him up over the high edge of the hopper.

  “Go on the truck, get free!” Danny repeated, putting his glowing face out the back end.

  “Yeah, you’ll be free all right. Free to work!” said the yard boss. “Get back, get your hands in, or you’ll lose ’em!”

  The children’s hands pulled back instantly. A grinding noise started up.

  “No, NOT the red button, you doofus! The green button, on your left!”

  “Sorry, boss!” Barney called cheerfully. “My bad!”

  The ram panel crashed down. The truck started up with a roar. And as Taft stared helplessly from the ferns, the garbage truck carrying his friend chugged through the gates, up the forest road, and disappeared from sight.

  “No,” said Christina firmly. “We’re not going back to the ridge. I need to get home in time for supper, or they’ll come looking for me, and I’ll never get out again.” She brushed back the green vines that covered the entrance to Leo Loompski’s tunnel and gave Taft what she hoped was a stern look.

  “But Danny—” said Taft as she nudged him into the tunnel.

  “Look, it’s getting late. We won’t be any good to Danny stumbling around on the mountain in the dark, tired and hungry.”

  “He’ll be tired and hungry, too,” said Taft, very low. “And he won’t understand.”

  Christina took his elbow and steered him down the long tunnel, beneath bulbs that seemed dim after the bright outdoor light. “Let’s pack him some food. We’ll find him tomorrow, and even if we can’t rescue him right away, we can probably throw him something to eat.”

  Taft nodded, looking slightly happier. “He’d like that pie. Will there be any left, do you think?”

  Christina considered telling him that pie didn’t toss as well as sandwiches but decided against it. “If there isn’t, Cook will have another dessert he’ll like just as much. Have you ever had chocolate cake?” She rattled the big, square wooden door as she passed. Still locked.

  “No,” said Taft. “Is it as good as pie?”

  “Better,” said Christina.

  Their footsteps echoed in the tunnel, up the dimly lit stair, and across the slanting graveled roof of Christina’s house.

  “Are you going to tell your dad about your mom’s message in the test tube?” Taft bent to shut the attic’s service door behind him.

  Christina was already two rungs down the ladder to her room, but she stopped and rested her elbows on the attic floor. She had been thinking about that.

  “No.” She looked up at Taft’s serious gray eyes with their oddly thick lashes. “Nobody can help her now. And if I tell him, he’s going to know I got out, and you can bet I’ll never get free again. Besides”—she hesitated. “Lenny Loompski lied about my mom dying in a laboratory explosion. He’s probably lying to my dad about what’s really happening to the orphans. But he’s my dad’s boss, and until we know for sure how much my dad really knows—”

  “Ask your dad tonight at dinner,” Taft urged.

  “I can’t ask him straight out. He gets mad if I even mention the orphans.”

  “Hint around, then. Get him to talk about his work. He likes that, right?”

  Christina groaned. “He’ll just start talking about math, and a million things I don’t understand—”

  “You are so lucky!”

  “—and don’t even want to understand—”

  “That’s your whole problem.” Taft gazed at her intensely, his eyes dark in the dim attic light. “You think it’s impossible to understand your dad, so you don’t even try. It’s like you shut a gate in your mind, or something.”

  Christina glared at him. “And it’s staying shut, thanks. You have no idea how boring he is when he gets going.”

  “Okay, then, let me listen in. You can ask the questions and get him talking, and then you can just—I don’t know, glaze out or whatever you do—and I’ll do the listening and understanding part.”

  “What, you want to hide under the bed and hope my dad comes up again? He hardly ever does, you know.”

  “Then I’ll listen in at dinner. There must be some place you could hide me.”

  Christina thought. There were lots of places she could hide him . . . the hollow bench in the dining room, for one, or the hall cupboard that was hardly ever used . . .

  “It’s too dangerous,” she said. “Someone might see you. And then we’re both in big trouble.”

  “Well, so what if we are?” Taft’s voice scaled up. “Danny’s up there on that mountain—and so are a bunch of other kids. Maybe your dad knows what Lenny Loompski is up to—”

  “I bet he doesn’t,” said Christina suddenly. “My dad can’t know how bad Lenny is, or he’d have turned him in to the police. And for sure he doesn’t know what happened to my mother.”

  “But he knows something. If we can just find out a little bit more, it might help.”

  TAFT was very good at sneaking soundlessly around corners. He got past Nanny’s room and the study where Dr. Adnoid, just home from the lab, was reading the paper. He was almost past the overstuffed chair in the front hall when Cook backed through the kitchen door, carrying a stack of plates.

  Christina shoved Taft down. By the time Cook turned around, he was crunched behind the chair and Christina was staring fixedly at the portrait just above it.

  It was just another Loompski, complete with a medal in a frame. Christina tried to look fascinated by the dough-faced man with the lumpy cheeks.

  “That’s Larry,” Cook said as she passed. “Poor man.”

  “Was he one of the grandchildren?” Christina positioned herself so that Cook wouldn’t see Taft on her way back out of the dining room.

  “No—Larry was Dr. Leo’s brother,” called Cook, over a clattering of china in the next room. “He wasn’t much of a Loompski, though.”

  Christina looked at the portrait with new interest. This must be the brother who wasn’t scientific. But still, he had won a medal . . . she looked more closely at the copper-colored disc and read:

  Tidiest Desk Award, Grade Three

  Dorf Elementary—Everyone’s a Winner!

  Cook bustled past, digging in the linen closet for napkins. “Larry never had much of a head for science. He was a nice man, though—collected trash for the city of Dorf until he died. He was always very prompt, but I’m afraid all the admiration went to his scientific brothers.”

  Christina took the napki
ns from Cook’s hands. “I’ll fold those,” she said. “And set the table.”

  Cook beamed. “I always said you were a helpful child!” She disappeared behind the swinging door.

  Christina pulled Taft out, dusty and rumpled, and hurried him into the dining room. By the time Cook returned, Taft was wedged inside the long hollow bench under the window and Christina was setting out forks with a placid air.

  At dinner, Dr. Adnoid had little to say. He ate quietly, looking worried and unhappy, and now and then he stared at his fork as if he had forgotten how to use it.

  Christina, for her part, was trying to think of questions to ask her father. She couldn’t ask about the orphans, or zoom, without making him suspicious. And anything she asked him was likely to turn into a discussion of math. But she could almost feel Taft’s impatience from the hollow bench beneath the window, as Nanny made sprightly conversation about the difficulties of knitting striped socks and Cook brought up the interesting fact that she had used green peppercorns with the baked chicken.

  “Dad?”

  Dr. Adnoid looked up, his eyes unfocused.

  Christina gave it her best shot. “I was just wondering. Why did you come to Loompski Labs in the first place? What exactly do you do there?”

  Dr. Adnoid seemed to collect himself. “Well, Leo Loompski hired me. I’m a physicist, you know, and we were doing work on some rather startling theories of his in quantum mechanics. He hired your mother, too. She was a geologist . . .” His face sagged. The lines around his mouth deepened.

  Christina hesitated. “What’s quantum mechanics?” She braced herself.

  Her father’s face brightened. “Quantum mechanics is the study of matter and energy. It’s a mathematical construct for predicting the behaviors of microscopic particles—”

  Christina could feel her attention start to wander. She shook herself—this time, she was going to try to understand, at least—and put a hand on her father’s arm. “Dad. Could you make it simpler, please? I’m only ten.”

  Her father looked surprised. “Oh. Right. Well, see, on a molecular level, things don’t work the way you think they will.”

  Cook began to clear the table. Nanny took her knitting and sat in the next room.

  “What do you mean?” Christina asked as Cook clattered the dishes in the sink.

  Dr. Adnoid cleared his throat and leaned back in his chair. “You’ve learned about molecules, haven’t you? And atoms?”

  Christina nodded. “They’re tiny bits, so small you can’t see them, and they connect together to make up everything in the universe.”

  “That’s right. And have you learned that matter is mostly made up of space? This table, for example.” He smacked his hand flat on the wood.

  “It sounds pretty solid to me,” said Christina.

  “Yes, but that’s just because the tiny bits are attracted to each other. They want to stay close to each other—but not so close they touch—and in between, there’s a lot of space. Trust me on this.”

  “Okay,” said Christina. It was surprising, but so far her brain hadn’t gone completely numb. Maybe it was because he hadn’t gotten to the point of writing down numbers and making her look at them.

  “Now, my hand has a lot of space in between its molecules, too. And every time I slap my hand on the table, like this—”

  Christina smiled to herself. Her father’s expression was happy and interested again.

  “—all the tiny bits in the table bump into the tiny bits that make up my hand, and my hand stops.” He looked up, his eyes alight. “But quantum mechanics tells me that if I keep slapping my hand against the table long enough—for billions of years, say—eventually all the spaces would line up just right and my hand would go right through.”

  Christina looked at the table, and then at her father. “But it probably won’t, right?”

  “Exactly! It probably won’t—but it could. That’s the point, don’t you see?”

  Christina didn’t. She shook her head.

  Her father gave a dry chuckle. “Well, quantum theory is pretty hard to believe. But amazing things like that happen at the subatomic level all the time. And that’s what was so exciting about Leo Loompski’s work. See, he believed—”

  Dr. Adnoid glanced at Cook, who was just going through the swinging door, and Nanny, visible in the next room. He lowered his voice. “He believed that there were places where these wonderful and strange things were much more likely to happen. He looked for places where very ancient rocks had been thrust up from the deepest parts of the earth, places where the fundamental forces of nature—”

  He glanced around again as Cook left the room.

  Christina leaned forward. “The fundamental forces of nature?” she prompted.

  “—were poised to create a critical frequency—”

  What was he talking about? Christina wondered.

  “—with the vibrations of specific notes of precise pitch, with certain harmonic overtones—”

  Christina held her breath.

  “—to activate an element that—believe it or not—responded to thought waves.”

  “Thought waves?”

  “Well . . .” Dr. Adnoid looked a little embarrassed. “See, Leo Loompski was a genius, but he also was a bit of a crackpot. He liked to work on these crazy inventions now and then—a rocket-powered baby carriage was one, I remember—and he had these odd theories. One of them was the idea that thought had vibrations, too, just like light and sound. And if you could tune your thought frequencies, so to speak, to the other vibrations that were going on—if you could focus your thoughts very precisely in just the right way, then . . .”

  Christina looked at him, waiting.

  Dr. Adnoid fidgeted. “It’s hard to explain. At first I kept telling him there was plenty to investigate here on the quantum level—there were lots of exciting new advances in hard science that we could make without having to go in for this metaphysical mumbo jumbo. But his nephew Lenny was egging him on, telling him he should write up his research and try to win the Karsnicky Medal a second time. Leo began to leave the main laboratory work for me to supervise and go off on his own. He had your mother helping him up on the ridge, too. She was the one with the specialized knowledge about rocks.”

  Christina concentrated. “So are you saying,” she said slowly, “that in these certain special places, when you have certain rocks and certain sounds and certain very focused thoughts—”

  Her father nodded encouragingly.

  “—that you can just think something, and it will happen?”

  “Well, if you put it that way, it does sound silly,” said her father. “And it’s never worked for me. But of course, I don’t have perfect pitch—”

  He stopped. He pushed back his chair. “Perfect pitching ability,” he said loudly, “like in baseball, I mean. That’s why I went into science,” he added, avoiding her gaze. “I didn’t have perfect pitching. Pitching, you understand.”

  “I get it,” said Christina.

  “Anyway, I have work to do,” said her father, and went into his study.

  Christina glared at his retreating back. Her father explained every incredibly boring detail about numbers and math, but when it came to something interesting, something important, something she actually wanted to know, he clammed up.

  Perfect pitch, the orphans, her mother’s death—he wouldn’t talk about any of it, and he didn’t want Christina to ask questions, either. He wanted to keep her curiosity shut up behind a gate, too, and for what? Safety?

  Christina stalked past her father’s closed door. She was getting very, very tired of being kept safe.

  “WELL, that didn’t help much,” said Taft, flopping on the attic floor.

  Christina plugged a small lamp into the extension cord she had hauled through the trapdoor, and the attic was suddenly lit by a warm glow. “It was interesting, though. I mean, how cool would it be to be able to focus your thoughts and just make things happen?”


  Taft made a small, exasperated sound. “Leo Loompski might have been a genius, but your dad’s right—he was a total crackpot, too. Just think and things will happen? That’s not scientific. That’s just make-believe.” He rubbed his shoulders and scowled. “And did you have to wait three whole hours to let me out? I’m stiff all over.”

  Christina glanced at him in surprise. “I couldn’t help it that Cook decided to polish the dining room silver. And I had to wait for everybody to go to bed, so I could get you something to eat. Or should I have let you starve?”

  Taft rolled over and stared at the rafters. “We didn’t find out anything,” he muttered. “Not about where Lenny takes the kids, or zoom, or anything we can use.”

  Christina stretched her legs into the circle of light on the worn wooden floor and took the plastic wrap off the plate she had fixed for Taft. She was risking a lot, raiding the kitchen all the time. Pretty soon Cook was going to start wondering where all the food was going.

  “Here,” Christina said, pushing the plate across the floor. “Eat something. You’re too grumpy to live. And I thought I did a good job getting him to talk. I even understood him, for once.”

  Taft tore into a piece of chicken, clearly hungry—and then set it down, and looked at her miserably. “Sorry.” He rubbed his sleeve quickly across his eyes. “I’m just—you know. Worried.”

  “About Danny?”

  Taft nodded. “He’s alone, and scared—”

  “He’s not alone,” said Christina. “The other kids are with him.” She nodded at Taft’s plate. “Why don’t you try the chocolate cake? You’ll feel better.”

  Christina watched Taft eat, thinking that Danny was lucky to have a friend. Taft might be rude, at times, but it was easy to understand why, once you got to know him.