Zombies of the Science Fair Page 3

  Tim paused for a moment. I could almost see his brain readjusting itself. Then he smiled broadly and said, “Boy, you’re not kidding. I feel as if I’ve got brainpower to spare.”

  Of course, just feeling that way was not enough to prove he really was smarter—or, to be more precise, that he was actually using more of his usually untapped intelligence.

  I remembered a math lesson we had had earlier in the week, and the trouble Tim had had with multiplying fractions.

  “What’s three-fifths times seven-twelfths?” I asked.

  Tim paused, looked at me oddly, then said, “It’s twenty-one over sixty, which reduces to seven-twentieths. Very close to being one-third, of course, if you’re just looking for a quick approximation. Or, you could do it in decimals, which would be .6 times .58333—I’m stopping at five places, since the threes would actually go on forever—which works out to be .349998.”

  The ray had definitely worked.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go show Beezle Whompis.”

  “Whatever you want,” replied Tim placidly.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long to find the Fatherly One’s assistant, since he was at his regular station in front of the Fatherly One’s office.

  “We need to give Tim the post-test now,” I said.

  Beezle Whompis looked a little startled. “That was fast!”

  I emitted the spicy smell of pride from my sphen-gnut-ksher and said, “When you’re hot you’re hot.”

  Beezle Whompis looked puzzled.

  “It’s an Earthling expression,” I explained.

  “Not one of overwhelming modesty, I take it,” said Beezle Whompis.

  I lowered my head. “Forgive me if I am too exuberant. I am excited about this project.”

  “How do you feel about it?” asked Beezle Whompis, turning to Tim, who had stood without speaking all this time.

  His eyes got wide and he shrieked, “I’m excited, too!”

  Beezle Whompis flickered a little around the edges. “All right, let’s go do a test.”

  * * *

  The results of the second test were interesting, but a little puzzling. Though Tim’s brain was obviously functioning at a much higher level now—“Startlingly higher,” according to Beezle Whompis—there were some odd bobbles in the test results, including a few areas where the brain activity had actually been depressed a bit.

  “This is going to take further study,” said Beezle Whompis.

  “It certainly is,” agreed Tim. “Also, if you are going to have an effective project, Pleskit, then I think you need to do some additional testing. The numbers on this GISMAT scale of yours will not mean much to the judges. You need something more concrete, like giving me some math and spelling tests before and after a treatment with the ray.”

  I looked at Tim in surprise.

  He grinned back. “This is fun!”

  Beezle Whompis, who was looking slightly worried, said, “Let me try something, Pleskit.”

  “All right,” I said, wondering what he had in mind.

  Turning to Tim, Beezle Whompis said, “I think you’re feeling a bit sleepy now, Tim. Don’t you? In fact, I bet you’d like to take a little rest.”

  Tim paused, thought for a moment, then said, “I don’t think so. In fact, I feel really wide awake.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” said Beezle Whompis.

  “What is?” I asked.

  “It appears Tim’s suggestibility is limited to whoever actually used the ray on him.” He shook his head, and sparks showed in his noseholes. “I would hate to leave the poor boy wide open to every suggestion that came his way. The commercials he’d see in just an hour of Earthly television would probably cause him to short-circuit!”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I said nervously.

  “I had,” said Tim.

  “Well, why didn’t you mention it?” I asked, somewhat crossly.

  “You didn’t ask.”

  I decided I was glad the ray was scheduled to wear off at midnight. But it was important that Tim get some use out of it before it was gone.

  “I think you should go home now,” I said gently. “I have a strong feeling that you want to work on your project. In fact, I think you’re going to be amazed at what a good job you do. It will probably be brilliant!”

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” said Tim. “In fact, I feel inspired!”

  Just for safety, we decided to have McNally escort Tim home. We were pretty sure his suggestibility was limited to comments that came from me. Even so, we didn’t want to take any chances.

  CHAPTER 8 [TIM]

  FROM RAY GUN TO SPRAY GUN

  When Pleskit zapped me with the Suggestibility Ray, at first I didn’t think anything had happened. The only difference I noticed was that I felt a little more calm and quiet than usual—also, a little like I was waiting for something.

  But when he suggested I was feeling terrific, it was as if someone had flipped a switch in my body and given me a jolt of pure health. I felt I could climb a mountain, swim an ocean, wrestle a tiger—all at the same time and with one hand tied behind my back!

  It was the same way when he suggested I was feeling smarter; I could almost feel my brain heating up. It was as if my head were a big old house where a lot of the rooms had been closed off for years, and all of a sudden the doors were being flung open, and fresh air and sunshine were flooding in. It was great—except I didn’t know what to do with it, until Pleskit asked me that question about fractions, which was so simple it was almost insulting.

  All the time that McNally and Ralph-the-driver were taking me home, I was thinking about possible science fair projects—and thinking clearly, quickly discarding things I knew I couldn’t do, even with my enhanced ability. Not only did my project have to be reasonable, it had to be something I could reasonably pull off by two A.M. Thursday morning, which was about the point that I knew I would totally run out of steam and collapse if I was trying to work really late.

  I was thinking so hard, I scarcely noticed when we pulled up in front of the apartment building, until McNally said, “Here you go, Tim. Wait a sec, while I pull your bike out of the trunk.”

  * * *

  When I went into the apartment, my mother was in the bathroom. She had a small plastic bottle stuck up her nose. She gave it a little squeeze. “Ah!” she sighed. “That’s better. I feel like I can breathe again.” She turned to me. “How’d you make out over at Pleskit’s, hon?”

  “Fine. I think I may actually be able to get a science project done after all.”

  She put her hand to her chest and staggered backward. “Will this be the year my dreams come true?” she cried.

  “You should audition for Comedy Central, Mom. I hear they’re willing to take even the really pathetic acts.”

  She rolled her eyes and turned back to the mirror. “Let me know if I can do anything to help.” She picked up a comb and worked at her hair a bit, then used a can of hair spray to shoot some mist at her head.

  “And another piece of the ozone layer bites the dust,” I said. I was still standing there watching her because an idea was starting to hatch at the back of my brain. I wasn’t sure what it was yet, but I wanted to give it a chance to get out of its shell.

  Mom snorted. “If you want to talk about saving the environment, let’s start with that toxic waste dump you call your bedroom. Besides, this spray is environmentally friendly. See?”

  She handed me the container. I studied the thing and realized she was right—it was a pump-action spray, no ozone-depleting chemicals.

  I thought about the nasal spray she had just used.

  The eggshell cracked and the idea rolled out. It was still a little wet, a little groggy, sort of blinking in the sunlight. But at least it had a shape.

  “I think I can get a science fair project out of this,” I said.

  My mother looked skeptical.

  “No, really,” I said. “Look, you were just using t
hat nasal spray. And here’s the pump on this hair spray. I could do a project on all the different ways people spray stuff. I can talk about pressure and velocity and droplet size and propellant techniques and things like that. I can compare things, make some charts—”

  My mother was looking at me in astonishment. “Tim, that’s actually a reasonable project.”

  “Well, what did you expect?”

  “Based on past experience? Oh, I don’t know. A plan to demonstrate do-it-yourself brain surgery. An idea for putting a mouse on the moon. A design for a working time machine. Schemes for nuclear—”

  “Mom, I’m serious here. Now, can you help me out with this a bit?”

  She looked even more astonished than before. “Sorry, Tim. I didn’t mean to be sarcastic. Actually, I think it’s a pretty cool idea. I guess the next thing we need to do is figure out how many different ways there are to spray things.”

  “Okay, that makes sense. Let’s get to work.”

  Half an hour later we had a collection of three dozen cans, bottles, and pumps of various kinds on the kitchen table.

  “A lot of these work the same way,” said my mother.

  “That’s all right. I only need four or five different types. We’ll check them out and eliminate the duplicates.”

  Which we did.

  I ended up with five things on the table: the bottle of nasal spray, a bottle that worked the same way as the hair-spray pump, another bottle with a kind of trigger that Mom used to squirt water on clothes when she was ironing, a non-ozone-depleting aerosol can, and one of my own squirt guns.

  “Not a bad collection,” said Mom.

  “It’s okay. I wish I had one more thing—maybe something older, to show how people used to spray stuff.”

  “Wait a minute!” cried Mom. She dashed out of the room. I heard her rummaging in the hall closet—which, believe me, is not one bit more organized than my bedroom. “Come on, Tim,” she called. “Give me a hand here.”

  I went into the hall. Mom passed me a box she had just lifted down from the top shelf. Then another, then another.

  “Do you want me to open these?” I asked.

  “No, just get them out of the way.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “You’ll see,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows at me.

  I sighed and set the boxes on the floor as she handed them to me.

  “Aha!” she cried at last. “Here it is.”

  She pulled out a box that clanked and clanged. When she put it on the floor and opened it, I could see that it was mostly garden stuff—little hand tools for digging in the dirt. She poked around in it for a minute and pulled out this weird device.

  “Voilà!” she said, handing it to me.

  “What the heck is it?”

  “Your grandmother’s bug sprayer.”

  I studied the device. The body of it was a long metal tube about the size of the cardboard tube inside a roll of paper towels. Mounted just under one end of the tube was a can, about twice the size of a can of vegetables, with a screw-off cap on one side. A wooden handle stuck out of the other end of the tube.

  “You put your bug spray in here,” said Mom, pointing at the cap on the can. “Then you pump with the handle to spray it out. Try it.”

  I pulled on the handle. A thin rod came out through a hole in the end of the tube.

  “Now push the handle back in,” said Mom.

  I did as she said.

  “Nothing happens.”

  “Well, of course not. It’s empty. Come on, let’s go in the kitchen and fill it with water.”

  We did as she suggested, first washing the canister out two or three times, to make sure there was no insecticide left in it.

  “Okay, now give it a try,” said Mom. “Here, I’ll open the window.”

  I pointed the spray gun at the window and pushed on the rod. A mist came shooting out from the other end.

  “Cool!” I said.

  “Gramma used to use this in her rose garden,” said Mom. “She claimed to have slain thousands of Japanese beetles with it.”

  I sat down at the table with all my spray devices and began to work. I worked hard and long, convincing my mother to let me stay up way past my bedtime. Then, about midnight, I suddenly felt as if the doors in my head were slamming shut. Five minutes later I was sound asleep, my head on the table, my snores (according to my mother) rattling the windows.

  RECOVERED COMMUNICATION (TRANSLATION)

  FROM: Skizzdor, just above the backward and barbaric but potentially very profitable Planet Earth

  TO: One who must remain nameless

  Glorious Leader:

  Events have played into our hands quite nicely. It now looks very much as if we will be able to intercept and abduct the ambassador’s brat at the time you have suggested.

  If we are successful, I will send the signal, and Urkding can swing down with the shuttlecraft to pick up me and the brat. We may have to bring one or two of the Earthling children with us, but that should be a minor inconvenience. We can always jettison them once we are in space.

  I await further instructions.

  Skizzdor

  CHAPTER 9 [PLESKIT]

  FAIR CHANCE

  I couldn’t wait to see Tim at school the next day so I could find out how he had made out with his science project.

  “It was great!” he said enthusiastically. “At least, until the Suggestibility Ray wore off. Then I crashed big-time.”

  “Did you hurt yourself?” I asked, deeply concerned. I did not want to have been the cause of an accident.

  Tim rolled his eyes. “It’s just an expression, Pleskit. It means I ran out of energy and fell asleep.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s all right. Sleep is our friend. It is nature’s way of restoring our strength. It is—”

  Tim began to laugh. “You’re like a walking science fair all by yourself!”

  “I just want to do well at this fair,” I replied. “I have made so many messes in such a short time, it would be nice to have something go right for a change. But I think I am in good shape with this project. However, we will need to give you another dose of the Suggestibility Ray tonight for me to complete my research and measurements.”

  “That’s fine with me! I’m going to need to have my brain running at top speed to finish my own project—though it would be nice if you could plan on it lasting a little longer this time. Last night it wore off at midnight, and tonight I’ll need to work until at least two in the morning.” He paused, then said, “Actually, maybe I won’t need to do that if I’m as smart as I was last night. But working until two on the night before the science fair is sort of a tradition for me, so I’d just as soon be prepared for it.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I promised.

  “Class. Class! I want you to come to order now!” called Ms. Weintraub.

  Once we were all in our seats, she began asking how people were doing with their science fair projects.

  “Remember, we’ll be setting up in the gym tomorrow afternoon, and I hope you’ll all have something that will make me proud of you. I know most of you are in good shape. Tim, I’m concerned because I haven’t seen much on your project yet.”

  This comment caused a number of laughs and snickers from around the room.

  “I changed topics again,” said Tim.

  Ms. Weintraub groaned.

  “No, no, it’s gonna be fine!” said Tim quickly. “I’m doing a report on how different types of spraying mechanisms work.”

  Ms. Weintraub blinked. “That’s a remarkably subdued topic for you, Tim.”

  “Subdued, but doable,” he replied. “I finally got that part figured out.”

  “What a brainstorm,” said Jordan Lynch, who never missed an opportunity to tease Tim.

  “And I suppose yours is all finished, Jordan?” asked Ms. Weintraub.

  “Almost,” said Jordan cautiously. “I still have to get a couple more computer parts, but they’re su
pposed to come in today.”

  Tim leaned over to me and whispered, “Translation: Some poor guy who works for Jordan’s father is going to finish the project for him today.”

  I looked at him in shock.

  “Trust me,” said Tim. “Science fair projects are not the kind of thing Jordan does on his own.”

  Ms. Weintraub saw us whispering and said, “How about you, Pleskit? Have you settled on a topic yet? I would be more concerned if I didn’t know how fast you can do one of these projects. But really, you do have to make a choice.”

  I smiled at her. “I’m working on a project to be called ‘A Study of Free Will and Intelligence in the Human Organism.’ I think you will find it very interesting.”

  “That’s odd,” said Larrabe Hicks. “Mine is called ‘Free Will and Intelligence in Woodchucks’!”

  “Nature boy strikes again,” muttered Jordan.

  * * *

  After school that afternoon McNally and Ralph-the-driver took us to Tim’s apartment to pick up the materials for his science fair project. Then we came back to the embassy. After Shhh-foop had given us a little snack (which Tim hardly touched!), we settled down to work.

  “Ready to give me another dose of the brain ray?” Tim asked eagerly.

  I shook my head. “I want to make some adjustments to it first.”

  “I hope it won’t take too long,” said Tim uneasily. “I’ve still got a lot to do on my project, and I’d rather do it with my brain in high gear!”

  “Just a few minutes,” I said, scooping the Veeblax off the counter and handing it to Tim. “I want to add a device so I can control the strength of the ray. It shouldn’t take me long.”

  While Tim amused himself by trying to get the Veeblax to imitate a cat—he had brought some photos with him for just that purpose—I worked on the Suggestibility Ray. It didn’t take long to add the adjustor. When I was ready, I called Tim over and gave him an extra-strength dose of the ray.

  “I bet you’re feeling good,” I said when I was done.