The phone rang at one o’clock in the afternoon, just as Danny was readying Spider-Man for his big brawl with the supervillain Kraven.

He sighed and threw down the controller. He was still in a foul mood—all week long, he’d been trying to get the Terminator to work again, throwing it dozens of times a day to Joey in the backyard with zero success.

The name that flashed now on caller ID, Hunter Carlson, didn’t make him feel any better.

“Meet me at the park in a half hour,” Hunter said. “And bring your glove.”

“Why?” Danny asked warily.

From past experience, he had found it was always good to be leery about anything Hunter proposed.

Sure, he’d come up with a great name for the Terminator. But he was also one of those kids who was always dreaming up elaborate schemes for getting out of schoolwork, getting out of baseball practice, getting out of something.

Except those schemes invariably backfired and got him—and whoever else was involved—in trouble.

“Trust me,” Hunter said. “Think I have the answer to your problem.”

“You have the tuba I’ll be playing in the marching band this fall?” Danny said.

There was a pause on the other end.

“What?” Hunter said finally.

“Never mind,” Danny said. He turned off the video game. “All right, I’m not getting anywhere with Spidey, anyway. He’s looking totally lame against Kraven. See you soon.”

When he got to the park, he found Hunter on the small baseball field where the younger kids played. With him was possibly the nerdiest kid Danny had ever seen.

The boy appeared to be about sixteen. He wore thick black glasses, baggy black shorts, and a black T-shirt that said: I CAN EXPLAIN IT TO YOU, BUT I CAN’T UNDERSTAND IT FOR YOU.

He was so pale that the veins running up and down his arms stood out like blue tentacles. At the sight of Danny approaching, he quickly looked down at his shoes.

“This is Elmo,” Hunter said.

“Elmo,” Danny repeated. “You mean like the—”

“Muppet,” Elmo said, nodding but still not looking up. “Yes, unfortunately I was named after a furry red monster with a falsetto voice from a children’s TV show.” He paused. “My parents, you see, are a bit…unusual.”

What a surprise, Danny thought.

“Elmo’s here to help you with the Terminator,” Hunter said.

Danny studied Elmo again. This time he noticed he was holding a small video camera. A calculator and notebook protruded from a pocket of his shorts.

“Do you play baseball, Elmo?” Danny asked.

Elmo looked up with a horrified expression.

“Oh, no,” he said quickly. “I’m not very good at sports. You wouldn’t want me on your team. All you’d have to do is take one look at the way I throw. And catch. And hold the bat.

“In gym class, I’m always the last kid picked. It doesn’t matter what we’re playing, either. Sometimes the coach will just randomly put me on a team, because no one wants me to—”

Danny held up a hand. “We get the picture. No need to go on.”

“Elmo’s the smartest kid I know,” Hunter said. “He’s studying…what is it again, dude?”

“Experimental physics,” the boy said.

Hunter smiled proudly. “Right. Which of course is the study of, um…”

“…physical phenomena,” Elmo added helpfully. “To gather data about the universe.”

“Right,” Hunter said. “So you see where we’re going with this.”

Danny stared at both of them.

“Actually, I don’t,” he said. “I mean, it’s great and all that Elmo’s a high school physics whiz—”

“College physics whiz,” Elmo said. “I’m, uh, technically still in high school. But I take advanced physics classes at the University of Maryland. My teachers said I wasn’t being challenged enough in the sciences. I’m sure neither of you knows what that’s like, but it can be quite flattering.”

Danny felt himself doing a slow burn. He shot Hunter a look that said, Is this dork for real?

Turning back to Elmo, he said drily, “You’re right, I can’t imagine what that’s like. But I don’t need any help from you. Have a nice life.”

He turned to leave, but Hunter grabbed him by the arm.

“Dude, don’t you want to find out why the Terminator isn’t working?” he said. “Huh? Well, desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“Pretty sure I’ve heard that somewhere before,” Danny said.

Hunter shrugged. “Look, you got rocked by the Indians, right? And you’ve been working on it all week and gotten nowhere. You need to fix that pitch. What do you have to lose?”

“Okay, you got me there,” Danny said with a frown. “I have no answer for that. But I don’t need Professor Weirdo here slipping on his white lab coat and examining me and talking in that condescending tone.”

Hunter draped an arm over Danny’s shoulder and led him away from Elmo.

“Okay, the boy lacks some, uh, social skills,” Hunter said in a low voice.

“Ya think?” Danny said.

“But who cares as long as he can help you, right?” Hunter said. “Who cares if a doctor has a great bedside manner, as long as he prescribes the right medicine? Maybe that’s what this kid’s like. Will you at least give him a shot?”

Danny thought it over for several seconds. Finally, he sighed and said, “Okay, fine.”

Which immediately made him even more depressed.

Unbelievable, he thought. This is how low I’ve sunk. I’m actually agreeing to get pitching help from someone who looks almost too geeky for The Big Bang Theory.

When they rejoined Elmo, Danny asked, “I’m almost afraid to ask. But exactly how is he going to help me?”

Hunter smiled and said, “Tell him, E.”

“Certainly,” Elmo said. He squinted up at Danny. “What I propose to do is shoot video today of you throwing your secret pitch. We’ll measure the velocity of the ball approaching home plate, the angle of trajectory, rate of descent, your inverted arm-action ratio—”

“Inverted what ratio?” Danny asked.

“Please,” Elmo said, holding up his hands. “It would take too long to explain. And even if you understood the metrics behind that—which you wouldn’t, of course—”

Danny could feel himself getting steamed again.

“Uh, Elmo,” Hunter said quickly, “maybe we could just skip the metrics and get to the important part….”

Elmo nodded. “The data mean nothing without a base comparison level,” he went on. “In the simplest terms, we’ll compare the measurements that we get today to the measurements we get from old video of you pitching against, for example, the Rays. A game in which you dominated and the Terminator was at its most effective.”

“Then,” Hunter added, “maybe we can see what you’re doing different now. And why you’re kind of—no offense—sucking.”

Danny’s cheeks turned red. “Why would I take offense at someone telling me I suck? You meant that as a compliment, right?”

“Okay, okay, don’t get hot,” Hunter said. “Elmo, uh, why don’t we get started.”

Hunter grabbed his glove and went behind the plate. Danny paced off a distance of fifty feet and marked it with a line in the dirt. Elmo set up with his camera a few feet to the right of the batter’s box so it wasn’t looking directly into the sun.

“And…action!” he said, staring into the lens.

Action? Danny thought. We’re not shooting Bad News Bears IV here.

He warmed up by throwing a few lackluster fastballs. Then, for the next ten minutes, he threw the Terminator exclusively.

This time, the pitch felt strange leaving his hand. He could see the ball was doing very little as it neared the plate. The look of concern on Hunter’s face deepened with each pitch. Elmo peered into the camera, blinking furiously, and occasionally turned away to jot down notes and punch figures into his calculator.

After ten minutes, Hunter waved and shouted, “That’s enough!”

Shaking his head, he jogged out to Danny.

“Dude, I’m going to be honest with you,” he said. “You came to us just in the nick of time.”

“I didn’t come to you, remember?” Danny said. “You came to me.”

“Whatever,” Hunter said. “The point is, your secret pitch isn’t doing anything. I mean nothing. It’s not stopping. It’s not dropping. There’s no movement to it at all. It’s about as hard to hit as a beach ball.”

He popped a fresh piece of bubble gum in his mouth and chewed ferociously, his eyes locked on Danny’s.

“If you bring that weak stuff against the Yankees,” he said gravely, “they’ll kill us.”

Abruptly, he brightened. “But, hey, let’s not worry about that now! We’ll let Elmo work his magic with the video and the numbers and see what he comes up with. Then we’ll get back to you.”

He looked over to where Elmo was packing up his camera and scribbling a few final notes.

“I’m telling you,” Hunter said, smiling, “that boy is a genius. Did I tell you what he got on his SATs? Listen to this….”

But Danny was already zoning out, the rest of the story becoming so much white noise that really didn’t matter.

Because he had already decided whom he’d turn to for help with the Terminator.

And it wasn’t someone who looked like Sheldon Cooper’s even-geekier brother.