by Gene Curtis
Chapter 16
Revenge is a Dish Best Not Smelled
There is a time for every purpose.
Back at school, Mark waited for his friends in the Emerald dorm common room. Nick came in carrying two large, obviously heavy, suitcases.
“What’s that?”
“It’s just a little something that I cooked up for Slone and his crew.”
“Oh, yeah. What is it?”
Chenoa and Jamal walked in and saw Nick with the suitcases.
Mark said, “Nick’s cooked up something to get Slone back with.”
Jamal said, “Revenge is not a good thing. It only leads to more revenge.”
Nick said, “I’m not going to let him get away with what he did to us in the mall. That’ll only make him think that he can do anything to us, anywhere and anytime that he wants, and we won’t do anything back. Besides, it’s not really revenge. It’s a practical joke.”
Chenoa asked, “What kind of practical joke?”
“I’m going to make him and all of his buddies crap in their pants.”
Mark said, “Slone doesn’t scare that easy.”
“No, I’m not going to scare him. I’m going to make them evacuate, literally.”
“What are you going to do, put laxatives in their food?”
“No, I’m going to use an infra-sonic weapon.”
“What’s an infra-sonic weapon?”
“It uses sound waves that are so low that you can’t hear them.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You see, high-power, low-frequency sound has all kinds of effects, so you have to be careful with it. It vibrates you and can explode eyeballs or any other organ and stuff like that. You set the right frequency for what effect you want. Three point three hertz makes anyone in the sound field have an instant bowel movement.”
“You invented this?”
“Kind of. Nikola Tesla came up with the idea. He was a pretty famous scientist.”
Jamal said, “Yeah, I’ve heard of him. Wasn’t he the one that invented all that lightning stuff?”
“Yeah, that and a lot more. He did all kinds of things. He made an earthquake once and a death-ray gun that destroyed part of Siberia… Tunguska, I think.”
“So, Nikola Tesla invented it.”
“Well, not really. He did all kinds of experiments with frequency and resonance and stuff. He speculated about this kind of thing in his notes. My dad helped me with the calculations and I did the rest. The only problem is that it’s so big. I had to use surplus military parts from a submarine sonar system.”
“So, what do we do?”
“We need to catch them out in the open, away from everybody else, and we need to stay pretty far away, too.”
Chenoa said, “They practice swords out by The Island, every Saturday afternoon while we’re riding with Mrs. Shadowitz.”
Jamal said, “We finished that just before Christmas vacation.”
Nick added, “If we’re in the bleachers, that should work.”
Mark said, “Sounds like a plan.”
Nick said, “This Saturday is a flags match. It’ll have to wait ‘til next Saturday.”
Two weeks passed and the slated Saturday came. They were hauling the two suitcases to the eighth level bleachers by way of the stairs when Mr. Thorpe caught them. Mark’s being watched all the time definitely had its drawbacks.
“That’s rather interesting. What do you have there?”
The group stopped on the landing and turned to face Mr. Thorpe, who was coming up the stairs, smiling like a cat that had just cornered its prey. He pointed to the suitcases.
“Open them up; let me see.”
Mark said, “This is personal property, sir.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, now, let’s see it!” His voice vibrated them, inside, like he was an infrasonic weapon himself.
Nick unzipped the suitcase that he was carrying, revealing four soup-can-sized long tubes that had been painted black and some electrical cables. Mark unzipped his, revealing a battery bank and more electrical cables.
“So, you think that I can be fooled that easily, do you? We’ll see about that. March yourselves up to the next level and out onto the balcony. We’ll see what the engineering section has to say about this personal property.”
Mark and Nick zipped up the suitcases and lugged them up and out onto the fifth level balcony, as instructed. Jamal and Chenoa followed.
Mr. Thorpe held his elbows out. “You’re going to remanifest to the engineering section with me. Now! You two, I’ll deal with later.” He pointed at Chenoa and Jamal.
Mark and Nick touched his elbows and instantly they were standing in front of the door to the power generating facility.
“Follow me.”
Mr. Thorpe opened the door and strutted into the room with Mark and Nick following, carrying the suitcases, which were heavy before, but seemed much heavier now.
The figure behind the counter was examining some papers on a clipboard. He had short, curly brown hair and a handlebar moustache curling in a neat little spiral at the tips. He was tall and lanky and, without a doubt, surprised to see Mr. Thorpe.
“Mr. Thorpe, what brings you here?”
“These boys have something that I want you to take a look at.”
The man looked at Mark and Nick. “Hi, Nick. How’s your dad doing?”
The man was Johan Müeller, a frequent visitor to Nick’s dad’s underground laboratory and someone whom Nick had met on several occasions. Magi science labs outside of the mountains were typically hidden from public scrutiny by being built underground.
“Hello, Mr. Müeller. He’s doing all right.”
Mr. Thorpe threw his hands into the air. “Great, just what I need.”
“What you got there?”
“It’s my infra-sonic prototype.”
“So, you finally got it to work, did you?”
“Yes sir, only the power supply is too big and heavy.”
“Yeah, what are you using?”
“Ni-cad batteries.”
“You’d have to use enough of those to fill a suitcase.”
Nick pointed to the one that Mark was carrying. “That’s this one.”
“What are you using for emitters?”
“Towed-array sonar transducers, military surplus, not very good ones, but they work.”
“I see, you’re using them as a beat frequency oscillator, mixing the signals at a distance.”
“Yes sir, that’s it.”
Mr. Thorpe spun and huffed toward the door. “I’ll just leave you two chums to chitchat.” He continued out, leaving Mark and Nick stranded and officially in violation of the rule prohibiting students from being beyond the wall unsupervised.
Mark and Nick looked at each other, paused and then shrugged.
Mr. Müeller said, “What was he so annoyed about?”
Mark said, “He thought that he had caught us doing something against the rules or something.”
“Having that isn’t against the rules. In fact, you should get extra-credit for it. I’ll even suggest that to Mrs. Allen, your science teacher.”
Nick said, “Thanks. How do we get back? These cases are heavy.”
“Oh, just take an auto-car to Magi City and then hop on the subway. It’ll take you right back to the school’s underground platform.”
Mr. Müeller raised the counter to let them through to the auto-car station. Mark and Nick walked through the counter and started down the hall.
“Hold up a second. I’ve got some stuff that you can use to make that thing smaller and lighter.” Mr. Müeller disappeared into a room off the hall and returned a few minutes later with a canvas bag.
“There’s two, high efficiency, ultrasonic transducers in there along with a micro-fusion supply, a beat frequency oscillator chip and a few other things. You should be able to shrink the size and weight of that
thing, considerably.”
The bag couldn’t have weighed more than a pound or two. The wires alone in Nick’s prototype weighed much more than that. If what Mr. Müeller had said was true, then he could build a hand held model. Nick looked in the bag. It looked like everything that he would need.
“Thank you, Mr. Müeller.”
“You just show me what you come up with and that’ll be thanks enough.”
The ride to the subway station was much slower than they had experienced before. Its leisurely pace let them see part of Magi City. Two story frame houses lined the single street where they came in. Each house had a small sign out front that named the house’s occupants. Tree lined sidewalks paralleled the street on either side.
Several miles down, the street came to what must have been the business section. Small shops lined the street with a few people walking to and fro, not much activity at all.
The auto-car pulled into an open area and the car’s electronic voice said, “Destination reached, Magi City subway platform.”
This area had a crowd by Magi City standards, maybe as many as thirty people, all apparently waiting for the subway. It seemed odd that no one was dressed in tribe colors except for Mark and Nick. They lugged the suitcases out of the car and up to the area where everyone seemed to be waiting.
It was cold there, being January and all, quite a change from the climate at the school. Maybe all the different sections have their own climates. It was a strange idea, but it seemed to fit. How could the school have a year-round, at least so far, desert climate and less than thirty miles away be freezing cold? It didn’t make any sense according to normal thinking, but this place was anything but normal. The cold hadn’t settled into them yet, but it was on them, gnawing away at their thin tunics. Wearing just sandals on their feet didn’t help much either.
“You fellows lost?”
Mark and Nick turned to see who had spoken to them. It was an older man, bundled up in a parka, gloves, and a fur-lined hood.
“No sir. We just kind of got stranded in the engineering section and came here to catch the subway back to school.”
“Yep, figured it might be something like that. Most folks know that we elected to have season changes here and it gets a mite chilly this time of year. Train should be along any minute now. Don’t miss it or you’ll catch cold.”
Mark said, “Thanks, we won’t.” I have got to remember to put some warm clothes into Aaron’s Grasp.
The subway came and what looked like a hundred people got off. The thirty or so people waiting got on, including Mark and Nick. It was warm and comfortable inside for the fifteen minutes that it took to traverse the underground passage.
The subway station that was under the school was a place that none of Mark’s group had ever seen or heard of. It wasn’t listed on the mall maps, and certainly no one had ever mentioned it to them or given the slightest hint that something like that might even exist. And there were two sets of tracks.
The signs on the wall said that the subway to Magi City departed every twenty minutes on track A. Track B listed destinations, every hour, to the other six mountains starting at noon and ending at 5 p.m. The noon train went to The First Mountain; the 1 p.m. train went to The Second Mountain and so forth. Why are there trains to all the other mountains? Magi can just remanifest. That’s right, not everybody at the mountains are Magi.
The only exit from the platform was a set of stairs that led to the first level as well as farther up to the other levels. Mark hadn’t noticed the downward leading stairs in the past because his destination had never been any lower than level one. He thought, It’s funny how the mind works.
Nick said, “After we put the suitcases up, I need to come back down and buy some tools.”
“It’s too late to get Slone today. Do you think you can have it ready by next Saturday?”
“I’ll have it ready, no sweat.”
Nick used every minute of his spare time to work on the new device. Not a day went by that he didn’t skimp on homework and studies or skip lunch in order to make more time to work on it and test it. It took four days to complete it. The scopes and meters indicated that it was working just fine, only it hadn’t been field tested, yet.
It was a fine-looking weapon like it was straight out of some low budget, old science fiction movie where the evil aliens always had some sort of ray pistol that flashed a beam of light and whistled. This gun did no such thing; it was silent and had nothing to indicate that it was firing at all, except of course the intended effects, theoretically.
Saturday came and brought with it the usual things; breakfast in The Oasis, homework, practice, lunch, more homework and practice, and later, a chance to even the score. The group, especially Nick, was ready.
Chenoa and Jamal had watched Slone’s group from the fifth floor balcony last week while Mark and Nick were being taken away by Mr. Thorpe. Slone’s group had practiced until it was just starting to get dark. They expected them to do the same thing today. They planned to wait until Slone’s group was hot, tired and looking forward to returning to the school. Oh, they’d be returning all right, but not very much looking forward to it.
Slone and his crew were right where they usually were, practicing single and team combat. He had twenty-one followers now. Mark, Nick, Jamal and Chenoa sat in the bleachers and watched, waiting for the indication that they were ready to head in.
Shadows were growing long and a huge flock of starlings, a hundred yards wide and about a mile long, began passing overhead in their nightly journey from the farm fields to their nesting homes in the crags and crevasses in the waste lands on the other side of the school. Slone’s group sat on the ground, relaxing after a long, hard work out. Now was the time.
Nick aimed the weapon. A lone figure appeared on the field next to Slone. Nick began squeezing the trigger, slowly; he wanted to savor every moment of this event.
Mark pulled out his binoculars to see who the new figure was. “It’s Mr. Thorpe.”
Jamal reached out and pushed Nick’s arm up. “That’s Mr. Thorpe down there.”
Nicks finger pressure brought the trigger to the critical point when Jamal moved his arm. The weapon, pointed into the air, began firing, unnoticed. The starlings, tens of thousands of them, were passing through the beam, directly over Slone’s crew.
“So what. He deserves it.”
“Yeah, but Mrs. Shadowitz said no practical jokes on teachers.”
Nick continued unknowingly firing the gun. “I don’t care. It would be worth it even if I got expelled.”
“You don’t need to get expelled. We can wait.”
Mark said, “Bull’s-eye, we don’t have to wait.”
Chenoa said, “What do you mean, bull’s-eye?”
Mark said, “Use your binoculars.”
She looked through her binoculars and saw that it was raining great, gray globs on Slone’s crew. She followed the rain up to its source. A cloud of starlings was passing through the beam and jettisoning their foul, fowl cargo as they did so. Mr. Thorpe wasn’t getting hit; he had some kind of invisible shield around him.
Chenoa sucked in a hard breath, preparing for a belly laugh. “I don’t believe it.” A hysterical laugh gushed from her.
She was laughing so hard that Mark grabbed her binoculars before she dropped them.
Jamal and Nick both looked at them. “What’s so funny?”
Mark pointed at the field. Jamal took out his binoculars and looked, only to burst out laughing, too.
Nick didn’t realize that he was still holding the weapon, pointed and firing at the birds. He looked, realized what he was doing, released the trigger and looked at the flock of birds flying in the distance. He looked at the field and his eyes got big and his mouth dropped open. “It works!” He pulled out his binoculars for a closer look.
Starlings are an interesting bird in the fact that they are known to flock in groups of about a hundred thousand and that they don’t generally do droppings
until they are just about ready to roost for the night. One single starling usually leaves quite a large mess. This precipitated event had been no exception, times about fifty thousand.
Slone’s crew had been running in circles looking, hoping for something to dive under, while the enormous globs deluged them from high above. Every one of them was covered from head to foot. Occasionally a couple of them would run into each other, rebounding, falling into the slippery mess. Mr. Thorpe had already remanifested out of the area.
When the group’s laughter started to fade, they realized that someone else was there, laughing with them. Tim was seated higher up on the bleachers with his spotting scope out, watching the spectacle.
Mark said, “Hi, Tim.”
“Hi, Mark. You know, all the doors are not locked.”
Locks had been installed on all entrance doors after the incident of the thralls’ invading the museum, fifteen years ago. The locks activated a security alarm system on the door that they served. This was supposed to give just a little more time for able-bodied Magi to respond, which in most cases would mean all the difference in the world. The doors were routinely locked during flags matches and other events that normally degraded security and at night after regular classes and events. All teachers had keys, but keys weren’t needed from the inside. Six doors in all would have to be locked, leaving only the front entrance open.
“If the back and side doors were locked, then they would have to use the front entrance and go through some of the mall to get to a bathroom.” Mark put his binoculars into Aaron’s Grasp. “It would be a shame to let them slip into a backdoor, unseen. Come on, let’s go. Thanks Tim.”
“I did not do anything. No need to thank me.”
Nick said, “The closest stairs to the front entrance is through The Oasis and the closest bathroom is in the entrance hall by the theater, way through the mall.”
The group scrambled down the stairs and split up, heading for different doors. They managed to lock the doors long before Slone’s crew returned. Evidently, Tim had told someone, sparking a wildfire rumor that spread through the mountain in no time flat. Students, counselors, instructors, teachers and regular folk were crowding the front of the mall, waiting for the parade, when Mark, Chenoa, Jamal and Nick returned there.
Slone and his crew entered a short while later, marching through the crowd, quick time, eyes front, turning uproarious laughter into retching and gagging with their fetid fumes. The desert air outside had dried their sticky coating to thin cakes that had mostly cracked and fallen off. It did nothing for the reeking, putrescent funk that had permeated everything about them, and would remain with them for days to come.
Jamal leaned into Mark. “You know Slone isn’t going to let this go unanswered.”
Mark said, “Yeah, I know.”
Mrs. Shadowitz’s voice came from behind the group. “Mr. Young, Mr. Terfa, Mr. Poparov, Miss Day, I might have guessed that you were behind this, if Tim hadn’t seen it and reported to us.”
Mark and the group turned to face her.
Mark said, “It was really an accident.”
“Oh, yes, I know. Tim told us the whole story. He burst into my office just as Mr. Thorpe was relating how he believed that Benrah was developing a new style of attack, using birds. Mr. Thorpe cast Daniel’s Shield over himself and immediately remanifested to relate his speculations. It fails me as to why he didn’t cast the shield over the group, which he could have easily done, and mitigate this entire disgusting, smelly affair.”
“Now, as for the accident… you will receive no points for the flying fecal farce, but as it were, corpus delicti, ex post facto, the body of the crime, so to speak, after the fact, merits consideration. You locked the doors thus reviving the original intent of the failed joke and succeeded in doing so. You each receive the maximum of ten points. That totals to two hundred, twenty points for each of you and eight hundred, eighty points for Emerald Tribe. The others will lose forty points each and the tribe totals will be calculated later.”
Mrs. Shadowitz turned from the group to face some counselors. “Counselors, see to your charges. See to it that they get some lemon juice, orange oil and some kind of fragrance to mask that awful smell, or we’ll all be living with it for a month.”
Mrs. Shadowitz turned back to face Nick. “Mr. Poparov, to your credit you will be awarded a hundred extra points in your science class for that little invention. I am certain that you will get at least a paragraph about your invention and this incident in the next edition of “History of Scientific Thought” and I am certain that engineering is going to want you to consult on adding that weapon to our non-lethal armory.”
