[["New York police have identified the victim as one of the so-called Rewound Children, Sandra Mellinfield, who was thirty-four at the time of her capture by the Holn. Her body was found in her bedroom late Sunday. Police say she apparently took an overdose of sleeping pills.
"Her husband, Paul, has said Sandra was despondent over what had happened to her. Mr. Mellinfield admitted the couple's marriage had been in trouble before, partly because of Sandra's inability to conceive. He also said she suffered from severe arthritis, although a spokesman for the Holn Effect Task Force said all signs of the disease had been eradicated. Presumably, the Holn also might have corrected the reproductive problem. Mr. Mellinfield, a top manager for the Global Bank of Commerce in New York, said the situation had caused difficulties that spilled over into his job. He did not elaborate.
"Marinka Svoboda, CNN, New York."]]
* * *
"Why are you such a hardass?"
Earl looked up at Walter, who regarded him calmly. "If I am, it's because I still have remnants of what I was before. I was a pretty sour old man, you know."
"So I've heard tell." Walter sat down at the kitchen table opposite where Earl sat slathering peanut butter on a banana. "You still blame yourself for the deaths of Aunt Edna and cousin Freddie."
Earl stared at the coated slice. "My whole family, dead long before I was, will be. If I had been a better father, a better husband . . ."
"The accident wasn't your fault."
Earl dropped the banana, leaned back in the chair. He wore only a pair of shorts, a mode of dress he'd adopted quite readily. "I blamed Star Wars, but of course, that's stupid. I had wanted the film for my theater because the buzz was so good, but Halyard beat me out. Freddie, being that age, was about to die if he didn't see it, so Edna took him to Superior. I stayed because we had a show, too. I don't even remember anymore what film it was." He ran a hand through his hair. "The old story, a drunk crosses the center line and death takes all." He jabbed the knife into the peanut butter. "They didn't need to go to Superior, she just wanted to get away from a surly husband. At least Freddie got to see Star Wars before . . ." He pushed the knife to the bottom of the jar. "Anger and sorrow have been constant companions."
Walter looked down, then back at Earl. "I'm sorry."
Earl shrugged. "If what has happened to us is supposed to be a reward, I'm the wrong guy."
"Is that what you think?"
"No." He straightened. "No. My number just came up in a strange lottery, is all."
Walter remained silent. Earl reckoned his nephew had reason to be upset. Two police officers had just left; they had been seeking a redheaded boy golfers were complaining was disrupting games. Lucas had been the prime suspect until Earl had entered the room. He refused to apologize, saying at seventy-nine, he didn't have to account for his actions. An officer countered with the possibility of trespassing charges.
"Between this and the Halloween incident, I just might have to toss you out."
"So a televangelist can swoop me up and put me on display as a Miracle Child?" He picked up the banana slice. "Oh, please, I'll be good."
Walter tried to bury a smirk by rubbing his chin. "This goes beyond tricks and trespassing, though. Many people I work with are religious and they seem to be finding you somewhat unsettling. At work, in the neighborhood, among the kids' friends, at school, we can feel an unease."
"Why do you surround yourself with assholes like that?" He shoved the banana slice into his mouth.
"I work with them, go to church with them."
Earl had to drain the milk from the glass before he could speak again. "What was the reaction of the family when your father up and brought his pregnant wife and four-year-old kid to Hawaii?"
Walter shrugged. "Not much, from what I understand."
"Because it was totally in character for an Othberg. We get tired of the status quo and often chase dreams. It's a big reason I ended up in the Holn ship, because it was new, and fascinating. I also did it for Freddie, but still, if this"—he gestured at himself—"had never happened, if I had dropped dead right afterward, I would have died happy. You have a dream, too, you told me. Do something about it."
"Earl, I'm quite satisfied. Marcia and I have good jobs, the kids are in a good school. It's not easy making ends meet in this place—"
"That is not an Othberg talking. For some of us, the dream comes first, the consequences later."
Uncle and nephew looked at each other for a moment, then burst into laughter.
* * *
[["The death of Perry Jerzy Stangle marks the third of the seventeen among the Rewound Children. Stangle, twenty-eight at the time of capture, allegedly was killed by his nephew, Hugh Stangle, who then apparently fatally shot himself.
"San Bernardino police say ten years ago, on Thanksgiving Day, Perry Stangle allegedly sexually molested Hugh Stangle when the boy was eleven and Perry Stangle eighteen. When Perry Stangle was turned into a child, Hugh Stangle apparently saw a chance for revenge, police said. Today, again on Thanksgiving Day, Hugh Stangle allegedly raped and sodomized Perry Stangle, then strangled him and threw the nude body down a staircase into the living room where family members had gathered for the annual dinner. Hugh Stangle shouted 'The circle is complete,' according to police, and then ran back to his own room and shot himself in the head with a .357 Magnum pistol. Police said a note left by Hugh Stangle detailed the years of sexual abuse and blamed the rest of the family for letting Perry Stangle get away with it. Family members deny knowing of the abuse before today, police said.
"Hugh Stangle was not married, but Perry Stangle leaves behind a wife with a three-month-old child.
"Brent Caseman, NBC News, Los Angeles."
* * *
"Three down, fourteen to go. If this goes on, we'll be free of the scourge soon. And I'm telling you people here in the studio and those listening in my vast TV audience, it cannot come too soon.
"Good thing the wife was pregnant before her husband went to the Holn ship."]]
* * *
"Where to?" Earl, biting into a flat piece of white-meat turkey, followed Lucas out the front door.
"Other Worlds," the boy said. "Jasper, Frank, and Carl are meeting us there."
"Indeed. And what other world are we going to?"
"That's the name of the place in Kihei. It's got VR games."
"Oh." Lucas was free because it was the day after Thanksgiving. Just two boys out on holiday, both in the off-duty uniform of T-shirt emblazoned with some kind of pop character, shorts and sport sandals.
And why am I doing these boyish things? Did I really never grow up? He shrugged, stuffed the rest of the turkey into his mouth.
During the ride on the electric bus, Lucas asked about Sandra Mellinfield.
"No, I hardly knew her. She and the others, Charlie and Perry, we met at times in the hospital. I struck up friendships with a couple of others."
And how are they doing, Marian with her cold sister and Aaron with his cold wife? He hadn't heard from them, to his dismay.
"Are you scared?"
"No, except for Sandra, they were killed by family members. You're not planning to do me in, are you?"
Lucas grinned. "Heck, no. Not when you're getting so good on a skateboard."
Other Worlds was jammed with youngsters, and the only game available was Battle for the World, and the only reason that was open was because the Maui champions, a loose group of nine wild-haired youngsters ranging in age from nine to fourteen who called themselves the Barracudas, were waiting for someone to accept their challenge "to be wiped all over the VR map." Lucas and his friends reluctantly agreed, so Earl paid for four hours. "You'll be dead in twenty minutes, you redheaded deadhead," sneered one of the younger Barracudas.
"You need an alias," Lucas said as they headed for the dressing room. "Like that kid who razzed you, he's called Sharkjaw."
"Sharkjaw, lovely. OK, how about"—he looked over at the pugnacious young Barracuda—"Redhead Deadhead?"
Earl studied the suit studded with wires he had to put on, then looked askance at the central control loop. It looked like some hacker's idea of a high-tech torture chamber. He'd read about virtual reality, of course, but as an arthritic old man, he hadn't expected to participate. Except—here he was, being wired in like a computer peripheral.
Once hooked into the scenario, he nearly got killed right off the bat. Lucas had to save him.
"Pay attention, will you?"
"I've never done this before, you know. I was sight-seeing."
"That can get you killed real quick."
To eyes not used to digital sophistication, the scenes around him were remarkable, obviously influenced by the old movie Blade Runner. Rising around him was an odd intermingling of futuristic and medieval architecture. Also lurking in the shadows, though, were several VR soldiers wanting to blow his image into itty-bitty pixels.
Earl found himself picking through a blasted landscape when he heard a low roar off to the left. The vehicle rumbling into view stunned him, bristling as it was with missiles and cannons and radar and IF and UV scopes.
"Analysis of vehicle."
COBRA, MAIN BATTLE VEHICLE OF BARRACUDAS a perisplay—"Peripheral vision display," Lucas had explained—informed him, then proceeded to display what was known about the structure. Earl thought he saw a flaw. He squeezed his VR self into a corner between two massive blocks of marble and sighted down the laser-guided missile launcher until the metal beast rolled into position. (And again, an old memory of a cold night and a metallic beast shuffling along a track played in the recesses of his mind.) He let fly with a Slimline Lo-Profile solid-fueled smart missile carrying a Hi-Ex shaped-charge MK-4 warhead. Flame lashed out everywhere around him, the light blinding him. Concussions hammered at his ears; he even could feel the pressure waves slamming at his body. He began to wonder if he'd included himself in the destruction. Finally the roaring diminished.
COBRA DESTROYED
"Way to go, Un—Deadhead!" Lucas shouted, seemingly right into his ear.
In the perisplay, six of the nine figures representing Barracudas went black.
"Calamitous!" another teammate shouted. "Everyone's been trying for months to bash that thing."
"Oh."
"And you ripped six 'cudas!" another voice shouted.
"Oh, my."
The Barracudas quickly showed why they were champs with the remaining three dispatching Earl's four teammates in quick order, leaving him to face the last one alone. Earl took stock of himself and decided he needed to beef himself up, although he already stood fifteen feet tall with arms the size of tree trunks and a punch able to knock holes into brick walls.
Wait a minute. In one world, I'm an adult inhabiting a kid's body, but in another world, I'm a kid with an adult's mind playing an adult operating a body three times the size of the biggest adult. This is getting confusing.
The battle got nowhere until Earl was warned the structure they were fighting under was close to collapse. He sent a couple of well-placed missiles in and brought the whole edifice down on the enemy.
A glum bunch of Barracudas met them in the changing room.
"I have a confession to make," Earl said. "I'm not your average kid. I'm actually seventy-nine years old, so you were battling a mind with lots of experience."
"How—" began a tall, skinny youth in black leather, "wait. You're one of those rewound dudes, aren't you? Now I remember. I saw pictures of you on TV."
"Yep."
"Were you in the army or something? I mean, you pulled some nasty tricks in there."
"A couple of years in the early fifties chasing and dodging tanks in war maneuvers. Nothing to qualify me for generalship or anything. As I said, just experience in the real world. So, actually, you guys are still tops. You very nearly got us anyway."
"Wow." All of the Barracudas looked at him differently.
"Here y'are, boys, the disk on your late Cobra," said an obese youth with bad skin from behind the counter. "Heh, heh."
"Don't worry, jellyass, we'll reprogram it and wipe you right out again."
"Next time put your fuel tank in a better place," Earl said. "That was your weak point. And try a different fuel. Gasoline is inefficient and too volatile. Even hydrogen stored in a solid medium would be better—"
"Uncle Earl, don't give them hints. We're going to have to fight them again some day."
"Boys, boys, boys. If there's one thing you should be learning from this machine it's that for every new weapon you devise, your opponent eventually will figure out a way to defeat it. How do you think we won the Cold War? We built a system, they built a countersystem. We built a counter-countersystem, they made a new weapon, we countered, they counter-countered, and so it went until someone raised a hand and said meekly, 'I quit.'"
Earl treated all of them—including the Barracudas—at the nearest ice cream salon, and they asked him a lot of questions, some about his first childhood.
"No computer chips when I was a kid. We were lucky to have anything that moved without a spring. Everything was made of metal and all seemed to have bad paint jobs. I had a good collection of comic books, though, including several first editions."
"And your mother threw them all away."
"Nope. I kept them. When I sold the collection, I made enough to help start my business."
"You saw the birth of rock'n'roll, too," said a boy with green hair (which, against Earl's red, fit in perfectly with the Christmas decorations draped everywhere).
"Yep, although I was a big-band fanatic in youth. Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Louie Armstrong, guys like that. I know this'll age me when I say I had a thing for the before-TV Dinah Shore."
"I heard being a kid growing up during World War II was kind of cool," another Barracuda said.
"Oh, it was fun in a way. We were too young and dumb to know what was really going on, the slaughters and mass killings and all. We were protected. No bombs fell on Wisconsin, no armies trooped through. Blackouts were a hoot. One time we set off Roman candles near a big gear factory during one. We nearly died laughing watching all those old coots in funny hats running around hollering and carrying on. 'Course, if we'd been caught, I'd still be in jail."
He was not surprised when the subject turned to sex. "What's it like?"
"Well, remember, this is a seventy-nine-year-old man telling you this, not a ten-year-old schoolboy. There's sex and then there's sex. I mean, you can ram yourself in and dump your load, but what's the fun? I'll tell you where the fun is, and that's when you and your partner take your time and make every move count. Right from the beginning, when you're undressing, especially if you undress each other. I'm telling you, one of the biggest turn-ons in life is s-l-lowly slipping a blouse off the shoulders of a woman and sliding it down her arms and back. And don't be afraid to get naked. The idea is to get as much of your skin in contact with hers as possible, skin against skin. Yeah. You caress her slowly, taking in the smooth feel of her skin and the sound of flesh rubbing against flesh and the smell and taste of her body. You've got five senses, use them. When the time comes for the main act, you're both so turned on every nerve is jamming your brain with signals. You start making those panting noises that sound so hokey in the movies but you can't help it because you're concentrating so hard and you get more and more excited and the action speeds up until the bedsprings are squeaking and she's twisting and moaning and you realize again this beautiful woman is naked and you're naked and you're together and you get even more excited until the climax comes and you fall right off the bed and lie in a heap, exhausted. But happy. Very, very happy."
He found himself surrounded by utterly still listeners with glassy stares and slack jaws, one boy with his cherry-laced cola halfway to his mouth.
Uh-oh.
"Uh, none of you guys are going out on a date tonight, or anything, are you?"
After the group came out of their reverie, the Barracudas went their way with some friendly words and short waves.
"That was weird," one of Lucas's friends said. "Usually they're bullies."
"They're just like you guys, they just like to show off a bit," Earl said. "Maybe your next game won't be so antagonistic. Any of you have a watch?"
One of the boys had a cell phone that showed the time when a button was pushed. "Shit," he said when he did, "I have five minutes to get home."
All three bid hasty farewells and hurried off across an open-air mall.
"Guess we'd better head home, too," Earl said. "Your mom will have both our heads if we're too late. Where's the bus stop?"
Lucas pointed and they headed in the opposite direction. "Do all your friends use four-letter words?"
"Oh, yeah, once in a while."
"Do you?"
"Um . . ." Lucas looked at his feet. "Mom makes me go to my room if I do."
"Well, try not to. Not because it's so bad, but because it's unimagin—"
"Evil one!"
Earl turned to face a thin man in white shirt and pants pointing at him. His face was red, seemingly from exertion, but Earl couldn't tell from what.
"One of the evil ones! I saw him on TV! Mr. Goth said one was in Hawaii! Here he is! Evil!"
"Come on, Lucas, we'd better get out of here—"
Two more figures in white blocked their way. "Evil!" said an emaciated young woman with stringy blond hair. "He's been remade evil!"
"Save the boy, the one in the red shirt! He's an innocent being corrupted."
By now, the strangely garbed people had surrounded them, and a couple grabbed for Lucas. He dodged them, but others moved toward him.
"Get away," Earl snarled. "We aren't dealing with you."
"Save the boy, the real boy!" someone half-chanted, half-shouted. "Get him away!"
A hand gripped Lucas by the wrist. "Leave me alone! Let go!" he shouted.
Earl grabbed the arm, but someone bumped him hard and he lost his grip, at the same time the one holding Lucas twisted away, hauling the boy around. "Let go of me!" The boy screamed as another man grabbed his other arm. Earl was being bumped and pushed farther and farther away from the struggling boy. A hard shove sent him against a raised planter and he half-fell into a spiny bush.
"Let him go! Right now! Move!"
The new voice was different, not the high-pitched chant but one carrying authority. Earl saw a dark figure flash by while the white ones suddenly yielded. When he managed to struggle out of the planter, he saw a policeman in dark shirt and shorts facing the pair who held Lucas. Immediately, another cop rode up on a bike. The policeman jumped off, letting the bike fall over next to his partner's.
"Let him go," the first officer said in an even voice.
"We are trying to save this boy from evil." The speaker was the one who had first pointed at Earl. "You cannot expect us to—"
"One more time. Get your hands off that boy."
"Officer, we are on a mission of mercy."
"We have witnesses to an attempted kidnapping of a juvenile," the second cop said, sweeping his arm around at the small crowd watching. "That and a charge of child abuse will bring the roof right down on your heads."
"We cannot—"
"All right." The first cop pulled out a pair of handcuffs, the second a nightstick. "Take 'em." Both started toward the captors.
Immediately, the pair released Lucas, who ran over to Earl, tears in his eyes.
"What's going—"
He grabbed the boy's shoulders. "All right. It's all right now. It's OK." The boy snuffled, turned toward the cops.
"OK, fine," the first cop said. "Now disperse. Clear the area."
No one moved.
The first cop raised his handcuffs. "Call for backup. We'll arrest all these bozos."
As the second cop reached for the radio switch on his belt, all of the white-garbed figures, as if on cue, whirled and disappeared in seconds.
The first cop let out a breath as he replaced the handcuffs. Then both came toward Earl.
"Are you all right?" The first cop's name tag said Leong.
"Who the fuck were they?"
"One of the religious cults that have sprung up on the Islands. That one is a little more, uh, intense, than the others."
"They usually don't cause this kind of trouble." The second cop's name tag read Amalu.
"I guess they recognized me—"
"I do, too" Leong said. "You're Othberg of the rewound group. I visited your house last week."
Earl looked away, clenching his hands into fists. He had to take three hard breaths before turning to Lucas and looking into the frightened face, the wide eyes with moisture still threatening to spill over where earlier tears were drying against the freckled cheeks.
"I-I'm sorry, Lucas. I couldn't help you. I couldn't do anything." He looked down at the two rows of toes lining the fronts of his sandals. Tiny toes, now. He looked back at the boy. "I'm no longer a man and I don't have the power of a man anymore. I'm sorry."
"I-it's all right, Uncle Earl. You tried. I-I know how you feel." The boy's gaze fell toward the ground.
He probably does, Earl thought. He himself probably had felt this kind of powerlessness before, but for Earl, that had been so long ago he'd forgotten.
"Where are you going?" Amalu said in a not-unkind voice.
"Home," Lucas said. "We have to catch the bus to Maalaea Anchor."
"We'll accompany you," Leong said. Both picked up their bikes. With the action over, most of the watchers had left.
Earl forced his fists to relax. He looked at the sky where thin clouds traced narrow patterns. The innocence was over, if there ever had been any. Charlie, Sandra and Perry dead; Harold and Alisa tossed out of their families' lives—Earl had a sudden feeling that leaving the Lovelace Hospital, leaving the group behind, had been a big mistake. Just being who he was had placed Lucas into danger. He would not do that again.
"Coming Uncle Earl?"
"Yes," he said, and fell into step behind the protective shadows of the policemen.