Yesterday Again Page 2

  Kyle winced at the stutter. His father stuttered on the words “how” and “why” — a side effect of the brain-wave manipulator. Another reminder of what Kyle had done.

  “I’m fine,” Kyle lied, shrugging.

  “You sure?” Dad came into the room and leaned against the wall, trying to look casual. But Kyle could tell there was something on his mind.

  “I’m fine, Dad. Really.” Kyle said it with all the earnestness he could project. He really didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  “I have to be honest …”

  Why? Is someone holding a gun to your head?

  “Mom and I are sort of worried about you.”

  “I’m fine,” Kyle said for the third time, annoyance beginning to creep in. He hated repeating himself. He especially hated repeating lies; why couldn’t people just believe him the first time? Then he wouldn’t have to lie so often.

  “You haven’t been talking much. At all, really,” Dad said, speaking as though Kyle hadn’t just served up a perfectly believable lie to end the conversation. “What about your new friend? Theodore? He hasn’t been around for a long time.”

  Kyle froze. “Theodore” was the name he’d given his parents for the Mad Mask, since the Mad Mask was hanging around the house a lot while they worked on Ultitron. Just hearing the name made Kyle depressed.

  “You’re quiet,” Dad went on. “You’re sullen. And you just spend all of your time alone in your room. You haven’t even seen Mairi in weeks.”

  Dad stopped talking and gazed at Kyle. Kyle realized that he was supposed to say something at this point.

  But he had nothing to say. So he just shrugged.

  “Look, did you guys have a fight or —?”

  “No, Dad.”

  “Did you disagree about something? Did you —?”

  “Dad, really — everything’s fine. Just leave me alone. I’ll come down for dinner when it’s ready.” Kyle flipped over onto his belly so that he didn’t have to look at his father anymore.

  “You’re not … you’re not coming to the time capsule burial with us?” Dad sounded shocked. Kyle didn’t care, and he showed it by not answering.

  “We’re worried about you,” Dad pressed. “Is there something else going on? Sometimes when, uh, when boys and girls get to be your age, um … things can get … complicated, you know?” Dad started stuttering; it had nothing to do with the brain-wave manipulator. “We just — your mom and I, I mean — we just want you to know that we’re here for you and if you’re having, you know, if you’re having, well, um, new feelings about Mairi or complicated feelings, well, Mom and I, we’re here for you….”

  “Please stop it,” Kyle groaned into his pillow. “Just. Stop. It.”

  “You probably think you’re alone in this. You probably think you have to handle it on your own. But Mom and I can help. We can teach you —”

  And that was it. Kyle couldn’t take any more. Teach? His parents, with their merely mortal brains, were going to teach him? Teach him what? How to waste six hours a night on the couch watching stupid TV shows?

  “Stop it,” he told his father again.

  “We’ve been there before. We know what you’re going through and —”

  Kyle rolled over and sat up so quickly that he was a blur. “Stop it!” he yelled at his father. “Just stop it! There’s nothing you can teach me!”

  Lefty scampered into a corner of his cage and cowered there, shocked.

  Dad swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He stared at Kyle for a long moment. Kyle returned the stare and didn’t back down.

  “It’s almost time for the time capsule burial —”

  “Go without me.”

  Dad mumbled something about money for pizza being on the kitchen counter and backed out of the room, shutting the door as he left.

  Good.

  What is good?

  What is evil?

  Philosophers and priests and logicians and scientists and even regular people have been wondering this almost forever. And don’t believe what they tell you in school or on TV: No one has figured it out yet. No one.

  The classic example, of course, is hurting someone. Hurting someone is supposed to be bad and wrong and evil. But what about self-defense? What about soldiers in war?

  Even in the case of something as cut-and-dried, as black-and-white, there are exceptions.

  I did something good. No one can ever convince me otherwise. Mairi was in danger and I did everything in my power to rescue her. I saved her from the Mad Mask and also saved the entire town of Bouring while I was at it. The Mad Mask could have hurt or killed Mairi, if not for me. Heck, she would have ended up Numero Uno on the government’s speed dial for dealing with the “Blue Freak” if not for me! And if losing a little, tiny piece of her memory is the price of not being maimed or murdered or locked up in a government dungeon somewhere, then I think that’s an okay trade-off.

  Right?

  I did something good! I saved my best friend’s life! I saved a lot of lives! I’m the good guy! I did the right thing!

  So why does it feel like I did something evil?

  Why do I feel bad and guilty?

  A knock at her window made Mairi jump in surprise. She spun around, and of course it was Mighty Mike, hovering at the window, grinning in at her.

  “I never get used to that!” she exclaimed as she opened the window to let him in.

  “It is pretty enterprising,” he admitted.

  Mairi thought for a moment. Mike had some odd combination of amnesia and brain damage, which made translating his mangled English a challenge at times.

  “I think you meant that it’s pretty surprising,” she guessed.

  Mike nodded slowly. “That sounds more likely, doesn’t it?” He sighed and his shoulders slumped, and suddenly — even though he wore a gaudy costume and a cape — he looked nothing like a superhero and everything like a depressed boy.

  “Don’t worry,” she told him. “Your memory will come back. I’m sure of it. And your speaking is getting better. It really is.” She patted him on the shoulder to reassure him.

  Mike shrugged. “I hope so. I get frustrated sometimes. When I say something and I can tell I said it wrongly, but no one will correct me. They just intend like they understand me.”

  “I know. People are afraid of offending you. Oh, and it’s ‘wrong,’ not ‘wrongly.’ And probably ‘pretend.’”

  “Okay. Thank you, Mairi. You’re my only real friend.” He gave her a sad smile and Mairi couldn’t help herself — she threw her arms around him and hugged him. It was like hugging something chiseled out of diamond, so dense and hard was Mike’s body, but she hugged him anyway. After a moment, Mike hesitantly returned the hug, careful not to crush her with his Mighty Strength.

  “You’re great,” she told him. “Be patient. Everything will work out.”

  After the hug lingered for a moment, Mike broke it and said, “Are you ready to go?”

  “Yep!”

  With a grin, Mike swooped Mairi into his arms. She shrieked with delight as he hurtled out the window and then they were airborne, soaring over the town.

  Mike had offered to fly Mairi to the annual burial of the Bouring Time Capsule. Every year for the past thirty years, the town of Bouring buried a time capsule just before Thanksgiving. There was a large parcel of land not far from the school that had been donated years ago for the purpose. It was divided into fifty sections, one per year. At the end of fifty years, the first time capsule would be dug up and opened; the fifty-first would then be buried there.

  So far, no time capsules had been opened yet, but the entire town turned out for the annual burial. The whole thing was like a carnival — businesses had booths, restaurants set up grills and cooked, the mayor spoke…. It was a big deal and lots of fun.

  Usually, Mairi and her family went with Kyle and his family. But this year Kyle was …

  Mairi decided not to think about Kyle. Instead, she tightened her arms around Mi
ghty Mike’s neck and enjoyed the feel of the air blowing against her.

  It only took a couple of minutes to get to the burial site. Mike could have gotten there even faster, but when he carried Mairi he had to fly a little slower — she could be hurt by the great speeds otherwise.

  There was a crowd gathered down there, milling about in the crisp late-November evening. Mike had flown Mairi a bunch of times now, but every time seemed amazing and brand-new. Especially a time like this, when she could see almost the entire town of Bouring down below her: her teachers, her parents, Kyle’s parents….

  Kyle was nowhere to be seen.

  Of course. Mairi was surprised to find that she wasn’t even surprised. Kyle had changed so much lately that she hadn’t really expected him to be here at all.

  The crowd began cheering as they spied Mighty Mike, and then Mairi’s stomach did that weird little dip it always did when Mike descended.

  “Easy,” he murmured in her ear. Mike knew she hated landings.

  In an instant, it was over, and she joined her parents in the crowd. Mike waved to the cheering townspeople and made his way to a spot in the field cordoned off with red, white, and blue ribbons. This was the spot designated for this year’s time capsule burial. The mayor and Sheriff Maxwell Monroe waited there, smiling and waving. Along with them was an older man Mairi didn’t recognize, who stood next to a large platform. The time capsule itself rested on that platform.

  It was roughly three feet high and two feet around, shaped like a bullet, with a small door set into it. It gleamed silver in the sun. Engraved along its nose-cone were the words: TOWN OF BOURING — MEMORIES AND LIVES, followed by the year. Anyone could put something into the time capsule each year in the two weeks leading up to its burial, and Mairi always did. This year, she had put in a photo album containing one picture for every day of the last year. The previous year, she and Kyle had goofed off and put in pictures of their pets — his rabbit, Lefty, and her cat, Sashimi.

  Kyle.

  She pushed the thought away. No point getting depressed. Not when this was supposed to be fun.

  The mayor spoke into a microphone, asking everyone to settle down and be quiet. When the crowd fell silent, she said, “I want to thank you all for coming out today. It looks like the weather is cooperating — I think this is the warmest it’s been since July!”

  Everyone laughed. The fall had been bitterly cold; today was the first day in a long time Mairi had been able to go out without a heavy coat.

  “I am so pleased,” the mayor went on, “to have with us today Mr. Walter Lundergaard, founder and CEO of Lundergaard Research, and the man who so generously donated the land for the time capsules many years ago. Mr. Lundergaard?”

  So this was the man who ran Lundergaard Research. The facility was located near Bouring and had always been a mystery to most of the town, considering that it did so much top-secret work for the government. Mairi thought maybe she’d seen a picture of Lundergaard once or twice, but he’d never come to a town event like this before.

  He stepped up to the microphone and cleared his throat annoyingly right into it.

  “It’s a real honor and a pleasure to be here today,” Lundergaard said, his voice slightly cracked, but still bright. “The town of Bouring and my own research campus have both suffered in recent weeks.” He paused while everyone thought of the devastation wrought by Ultitron.

  “It’s in times like this,” Lundergaard went on, “that it is imperative we pull together — as a community — to honor our past and look to our future.”

  The crowd went wild with applause. Mr. Lundergaard executed a small but polite bow, then stepped away from the microphone, yielding to the mayor.

  “Every year,” the mayor said, “we gather here to bury the town time capsule in this plot. Well, almost every year.”

  Everyone looked in the same direction: toward the plot reserved for the year 1987. It was part of the town legend. How the time capsule had simply disappeared overnight from its secure resting place the night before it was scheduled to be buried. No one knew what had happened to it, and so the 1987 plot was the only empty one from the past.

  “This year,” the mayor continued, “our usual team of diggers who dig the hole the night before and then fill it in afterward won’t be necessary. Because this year, we are proud to have the capsule buried by our town’s mightiest resident: Mighty Mike!”

  The crowd went wild as Mike took the microphone. Mairi clapped until her hands burned.

  “Thank you. Thank you,” he said. “I am ironed to —” He broke off for a moment, gazing at Mairi, who was shaking her head and mouthing honored to him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, grinning sheepishly. “I meant to say that I am horrored to be here and to be asked to participate in the time capsule burial. Thank you for making me a part of your town.”

  Oh, well. She tried.

  Mike handed the microphone to the sheriff, who cautioned everyone to stand back and watch out for “flying dirt.”

  And then Mighty Mike turned like a top, spinning so fast that he was just a green/gold blur, rapidly descending into the ground. Despite Sheriff Monroe’s warning, the dirt that geysered up from the ground formed a tight column that arced away from the crowd and settled into a neat heap. For a moment, Mairi had a flashback to the dirt monster that had nearly killed her a few weeks ago, but she pushed past it and clapped and cheered along with everyone else.

  It took Mike less than a minute to excavate a hole ten feet deep and five feet across. He popped up from the hole, covered in dirt, then spun once more in the air to shake off the dirt. The crowd applauded even more loudly.

  “Wait!” he said, holding up a hand. “Wait!”

  The crowd kept cheering. They couldn’t tell what Mairi could tell — that Mike was concerned about something. What was wrong?

  “There’s something down here already!” Mike called.

  The crowd’s raucous applause mutated into confused babbling. Something down there already? What was he talking about?

  Mike dived back into the hole and hauled out something bullet-shaped. About three feet high and two feet around. As dirt fell away from it, it gleamed silver in the sun.

  It was a time capsule.

  The crowd gasped in shock. At the front of the crowd, Mairi could see what most people couldn’t. Engraved along its nose-cone were the words:

  TOWN OF BOURING — MEMORIES AND LIVES — 1987.

  The entire town of Bouring, Kyle knew, would be at the burial of the time capsule. Usually Kyle enjoyed these events — he always tried to put something genuinely interesting and useful into the time capsule, though he also tended to put in practical jokes. He couldn’t help himself — he was a prankster by nature and the idea of pranking people fifty years in the future pleased him. One year, he had put in an envelope marked “URGENT AND IMPORTANT,” then stuck a sheet of specially treated flash paper inside it. As soon as someone opened the envelope, the paper inside would vanish in a burst of smoke and light. Heh.

  But this year, he just couldn’t be bothered.

  Erasmus was low on power, so Kyle scrounged around for his charging cable but couldn’t find it. Mom must have taken it again. She did that sometimes, when she left her own charger at work. So Kyle just plugged Erasmus into his computer with a USB cable and let him charge that way.

  His parents were at the burial ceremony, so Kyle was alone except for Lefty and Erasmus. Lefty cocked his head this way and that, following Kyle as he paced the bedroom.

  “I wish I could be in that time capsule, Lefty. Believe me. I wish I could just tuck myself inside it and go to sleep and wake up fifty years from now when they dig it up. Because then I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this nonsense. Mighty Mike and the Mad Mask and everyone in the world thinking I’m the Blue Freak and all of that. It would be so much easier to skip everything. Almost like having a …”

  He trailed off and stopped right in front of Lefty’s cage, staring down
at the white rabbit. He stared for so long that he lost track of time and probably would have stood frozen like that for hours if Lefty hadn’t gotten impatient and started rattling the cage door for attention.

  Kyle snapped out of it and fed Lefty a piece of dried papaya, then snatched up Erasmus and raced down to the basement. As soon as he slipped the earbuds in, he started barking to Erasmus: “Six feet of copper cabling! Three steel panels, measuring eighteen inches by thirty-one inches each! The guts of a PlayStation 2!”

  “Wait!” Erasmus cried out. “Wait! What are you doing?”

  “Inventory!” Kyle shouted. He spun around in the center of the basement. Yeah, he had a lot of junk. Leftover parts. Stuff that was useless.

  Useless until it was used.

  And there, tucked away in a corner, under an old garden tarp, were the remains of his father’s old motorbike, which hadn’t worked since Kyle was born. Kyle had started tinkering with it when he’d first gotten his superpowers, then had gotten distracted by the Mad Mask and by other plans.

  But his original plan for the bike …

  “Inventory? Why?”

  “I need you to index everything we have. All of it. And cross-reference it to the blueprints I uploaded for the motorbike. Do it. Now.”

  “The motor …” Erasmus didn’t breathe, so he didn’t really know how to gasp, but he did a decent digital impression. “But that means —”

  “That’s right, Erasmus!” Kyle chortled. “We’re building a time machine!”

  Moving at superspeed and with Erasmus’s help, Kyle soon had an accounting of all of the gadgets, gizmos, widgets, and leftover technological junk at his disposal.

  “It still won’t work,” Erasmus said. “We’re missing the material to make a power conduit — that copper wiring won’t be able to handle the massive amounts of electromagnetic energy from a time machine. And you can’t collect the stellar zero-point energy without some kind of super-reflective surface. And the —”

  “I know!” Kyle barked. “I know!” He resisted the urge to punch the wall in frustration — even though the concrete was almost a foot thick, he would still end up buried to his elbow, if not his shoulder.