The Secret of Zoom (17 page)

Taft took another step, and another. Christina bit her knuckles. Could she sing fast enough to start up the plane and get Taft out before the guard caught them? Probably not—but what else could she try? Taft was almost to the nearest upright slab. She backed up—she took a breath—

“AIIGGHH!” Taft's cry was choked. His hands flew to his neck; his knees buckled. He fell to the ground and lay helplessly, his legs twitching.

Torkel guffawed. “Got a shock, did you?” He grabbed Taft's arm and hauled him to his knees. “Now you know what happens if you go past the circle of stones. And there's an alarm that goes off in the guardhouse, too. So we'll be hot on your tail if you try it, fishbait.”

Taft knelt, swaying. Torkel began to pull him up, but Taft shuddered and lifted his head. “I bet,” he said, his voice faint, “you'd like me to sing the Happy Lenny song instead of the song I made up.”

“You got that right, wormboy.”

“I bet,” Taft went on, his voice a little stronger, “that you want me to sing it loud. Loud enough to drown out a Starkian harrier, if it started screeching.”

“Yeah, yeah. On your feet, Number One-oh-one.”

“You probably want me,” Taft said even more clearly, turning toward the rocks as he was led staggering away, “to sing so loud that you couldn't even hear somebody singing
six notes
!”

“You're a musical little squirmer, aren't you? You can start singing right now, if you're so excited about it. Go on, sing!”

Christina watched in agony as Taft was marched away, hunch-shouldered and skinny, his hair sticking up in little tufts over his ears that caught the moonlight.

Taft's voice came howling back to her, loud and raucous: “Oh, happy day, when Lenny caaame . . . Help me sing, you guys!” he cried as the guard propelled him toward the circle of staring children. In an instant, more voices were raised. “The Loompski of the greatest faaame!”

Christina took her fist out of her mouth and gave the plane an agonized glance. She couldn't abandon Taft, and Danny, and the rest—she
couldn't
leave them here—

No. She wasn't abandoning them. She was going to get help, and that was exactly what Taft was hoping she would do. He was covering for her, making enough noise so that she could sing the plane's engine through all the steps to ignition and takeoff. She couldn't waste what he was doing, or he'd never forgive her.

“To care for us, poor orphans dreary . . . to wipe our eyes when we are teeeeary . . .”

She gave a harrier's cry. She had the plane humming.

“Oh, happy, happy, happy weeee . . .”

Root. Third.

“Will always happy, happy beeee . . .”

Fifth. Minor seventh.

“We'll never whimper, never cry—”

The plane was droning beneath her, glowing blue, hovering. Christina sang the last high E, the note that resolved the urgent, singing chord, and the plane glowed violet and was aloft, speeding away by the power of thought. And as she skimmed the treetops, the wind in her face bringing tears to her eyes, she heard a last gallant, defiant shout—

“WE WILL BE HAPPY TILL WE DIE!”

M
IDFLIGHT,
Christina realized that she hadn't thought things through.

The plane still hummed its musical chord, the violet light was magical in the dark, whooshing air, and high above, the moon shone golden—but flying had lost its first ecstatic thrill for Christina, and she was worried.

Who was she going to get help
from
? The only one she knew who could possibly assist was her father, and if she told him where Taft was now, she'd first have to explain who Taft was. And that meant she'd have to tell her father that she'd gone against his direct orders.

For although she had obeyed Dr. Adnoid, strictly speaking, when he said not to go into the yard—she hadn't, she'd gone
under
it—she had known quite well that he wouldn't have wanted her to do that, either. And he would be even more unhappy to know that she'd hidden an orphan in their attic, almost killed herself falling out of a tree, exploded her
mother's ring, trespassed in a locked cave, and flown a plane full of zoom up to the Starkian Ridge.

Still, what else could she do but tell him? It wasn't as if she could leave Taft on the ridge at the mercy of the guards and Lenny Loompski, too.

An uncomfortable thought intruded, reminding her that she had once been perfectly willing to leave all the other orphans stranded on the ridge.

Well, that was before she had seen them up close. Now they had faces and names—now they were real to her, and she couldn't forget that they were in danger.

Christina frowned and aimed the plane at the lighted square that was the orphanage yard. The entrance to the tunnel was somewhere near there. She hoped it wouldn't be hard to find . . .

But it was impossible. Everything was the same deep, leafy dark, and she had no time to land and search.

Fine, then. Christina swooped the plane up through the trees and away, and straight toward her own house. That was a better thought, anyway. She could land the tiny plane on the roof behind the gargoyles, and no one would be the wiser.

She adjusted the helmet strap, which had loosened in the sudden turn she'd made above the tunnel, and zeroed in on the high gables of her own rooftop, dark but still visible against the moonlit valley below. Flying was beginning to get chilly. If only she had brought a jacket! She was thirsty, too, and so tired she didn't even
want
to know how long past her bedtime it was.

But although the roof of her house was dark, as Christina flew closer she could see that people must still be awake, for
the windows in the lower levels were bright with lamplight. In fact, the whole first floor was lit up, and this seemed very odd. It was certainly after midnight; why would people still be up?

She soared in as quietly as she could and lowered the plane gently into a flat space behind one of the gargoyles. The bottom scraped on the roof—why didn't she
ever
remember to put down the landing gear? Christina glared at the control panel. Now that it was too late to do any good, it said
LOWER LANDING GEAR
. It said
SET BRAKES
, too, but she didn't bother. The plane wasn't going anywhere, stuck on its belly behind a gable.

She reached out a finger to push the stop button and paused. Maybe she'd better make sure everything was all right before she killed the engine. The plane would wait, idling, while she checked things out. She unstrapped her helmet and climbed over the side of the humming plane. Its soft violet light shone on the parapet, on the stone gargoyle that was still twisted open, revealing the stairs that descended to the tunnel.

Christina seized the stone wings and pushed hard. The gargoyle scraped shut, and she breathed again. If anyone in the forest found the tunnel, at least they couldn't follow it to her roof now. She dusted off her hands and turned to the small service door to the attic—and stopped. Two police cruisers were parked at her front gate. And behind them, almost invisible behind the hedge, was another car, long and black.

 

“And I'm telling you, Wilfer, your synthesizer experiment is over. You know as well as I do that to extract the zoom we must have a
living
sound; a child's throat or a bird's. The resonance is all wrong otherwise.”

Christina sat at the top of the staircase, listening intently. Below, in the kitchen, Lenny Loompski's voice was loud and emphatic. “I'm far more interested in what you've been working on lately, you know, the polly—pollysticky—oh, you know, the stuff they make those little plastic toys out of?”

“Polystyrene,” said Dr. Adnoid.

“Yeah, that stuff. Anyway, you did good work on that, Wilfer, I must say. The plastic soaks up the zoom and then you can transport it and it won't explode—and better yet, nobody thinks you're carrying anything but a little, cute, plastic—”

“No, no, we found out it was far too dangerous,” interrupted Dr. Adnoid. “The polystyrene acts as a catalyst, and if the zoom is absorbed and then melted again, it becomes a hundred times more explosive than nitroglycerin. Simply out of the question—at least until I can create an artificial sound that mimics the harriers. No matter how good an energy source zoom might be, you
cannot
use children for something so dangerous.”

“Why ever not? Children
like
to be useful.”

Christina clenched her teeth in an effort to keep silent. Kids might like to be useful, but that didn't mean they liked to be
used
. Did Lenny Loompski think that little girls wanted to drag big heavy garbage cans to the curb, or that a boy like Danny would rather scrub plastic toys instead of going to school? And whatever it was that the orphans were forced to do up on the Starkian Ridge, she was pretty sure they weren't volunteering for it.

There was a silence. “Listen, I'm sure I can manufacture an artificial sound that works,” came the strained voice of
Christina's father. “I just need a little more time. And meanwhile, I think you should try again with the harriers. Maybe if you just tethered them? I know you said that cages didn't work, but it seems to me that you should try everything possible rather than using children—”

“You're still concerned about the orphans, are you?” Lenny sounded amused. “You know, they're
happy
working for me. Why, they actually compose poems in my honor—‘Lenny, oh, Lenny, we love him so'—you know the sort of thing. Primitive, but really quite touching—”

“I'm sure.” Dr. Adnoid's voice was dry. “But
why
didn't the cages work? You could bring the birds right down into the mines, get them close to that new vein of zoom you want to open up, and leave the children out of it. It's too dangerous for them, anyway, underground.”

“Still, we have the most advanced safety precautions in place,” said Lenny smoothly. “And strangely enough, we've found that if we want the birds' cry to have the right tone, they must be soaring free. There's something missing in their cry when they're restrained—something wild. But children—now
their
cries work best when they're afraid. And so we find it useful to keep a certain level of fear going. Very mild fear, I assure you; almost like Halloween, you might say. Trick or treat, you know.”

Christina stiffened in outrage, remembering the garbage truck's rusty hopper, and the small desperate faces looking out, and the steel panel crashing down. She was filled with a passionate longing to squish Lenny into the hopper with its smelly garbage and see how he liked it. Anyone who made kids afraid on purpose deserved that, and worse.

Besides, he was wrong about Halloween. Christina had watched through her telescope as kids in costumes went running through their neighborhoods with flashlights, and the one thing she knew for sure was that they weren't afraid—they were having
fun
.

“I wish I had asked these questions years ago.” Dr. Adnoid's voice was expressionless, but Christina, who knew him, realized with a shiver just how angry he was. “And where do you find all these orphans, anyway? I only know of one case in town where a child was left without both parents, and we sent the boy off to his relatives. What do you do, import them?”

Lenny Loompski chuckled. “There's no shortage of unwanted kids in this world. I can name you a hundred cities right now where I could just walk in and have my pick. Not all in this country, of course, and the trick is getting them past the borders . . . but I'm not going to tell you my secrets, Wilfer. Why do you ask? Are you thinking of going into the orphan business yourself?”

“I wouldn't touch your filthy business with a thousand-foot pole. If I had known this before, I'd have left long ago.”

“
Filthy
business?” Lenny Loompski's voice grew soft and cold. “I'm not clean enough for you pure scientists, is that it, Wilfer?”

“Well, if the shoe fits—”

“Just like the garbage business is filthy, is that what you're saying? Just like my father, Larry, wasn't as good as his famous and important scientist brothers, is that right?”

“Now, listen—”

“Of
course
you didn't mean it, Wilfer. I'm
sure
you understand. You have a child yourself; you comprehend the bond
between parent and child . . . where
is
your daughter, by the way?” he added casually.

Christina held her breath in sudden terror.

“My daughter is none of your business.” Dr. Adnoid's voice trembled.

“Are you sure, Wilfer? She could help those orphans you're so concerned about. Their pitch isn't always exact, sadly. We had an explosion just last night—”

“You keep your hands off her, you hear me? You try to even
speak
to my daughter and I'll tear you apart with my bare hands!”