Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, was slumped on a couch. He and Lily were at his home of the future. It was a house made of concrete and plate glass and huge circular balconies and spiral staircases. It was supposed to be a home of the future, but it was now from a future that was far in the past. The Dashes’ place had been designed and built many, many years before, so the concrete was cracking and the glass panels were sometimes streaked and fogged where water had gotten in between the panes. There was a weird smell in the upstairs closets that never went away.
Lily couldn’t stand to see Jasper so upset. Normally, he wasn’t like this. He usually didn’t even notice setbacks, but strutted forward, eyes gleaming. He had been imprisoned in ice caves in Siberia and had been hung upside down in an Albanian gangster’s lair. He had escaped diamond smugglers in the Congo and flesh-eating firemen on one of the moons of Saturn.I
“Jasper,” said Lily, “I know it felt bad, but everyone’s going to forget about it. They were laughing with you, not at you.”
“I’m a fool,” said Jasper. “The world has moved on past me.”
“You’re not a fool!” said Lily. “Who else in the school has invented an atomic-powered cellular telephone?”
“Nothing I do works out anymore. My hovering restaurant was hit by lightning. My mining ray caused the Halt ’n’ Buy parking lot to collapse into a sinkhole. My flying Sky Suite fell and crushed a hotel in Delaware. My rocket-powered car can’t go faster than twenty-five miles per hour.”
“Yes, it can!”
“I can’t drive it anyway, because I’m still not old enough to have a license.” Jasper turned over on his back. “I’m not complaining, Lily. I’m just saying I don’t belong in this world anymore. I’m from a different time.”
“We’re calling Katie. She always knows how to cheer you up.” Lily reached into her pocket to get her phone, then stopped herself. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings. She pulled her hand out and pretended to fix her bangs. “Um, Jasper, do you maybe have a phone I could use?”
He looked at her with red-rimmed eyes. “Oh, just use the one in your pocket, Lily. It’s no use trying to make me feel better.” He flipped over onto his stomach. “Where is Katie, anyway?”
“Some Horror Hollow problem,” said Lily. “Conjoined twin serial killers. She was really sorry she couldn’t be here.”
Katie Mulligan, like Jasper Dash, was the heroine of her own old book series. As you may have noticed, in the town of Pelt, there were many washed-up characters from old series, which was one of the reasons Lily loved living there. There were the Manley Boys, well-built sons of ace detective Bark Manley, who solved mysteries. There was that lovable pooch Terence, a hyperintelligent cocker spaniel–poodle mix, who was always up to adorable mischief. There were some old, fat Photon Rangers who walked around in uniforms that looked like footie pajamas. And of course there were the Cutesy Dell Twins, two girls who always had crushes on hot guys and spent long hours asking each other, “I know he likes me—but does he, like, like like me?”
Katie Mulligan’s series, Horrow Hollow, had first come out in the 1990s, and it featured Katie being haunted, kidnapped, threatened, chased, lifted, dangled, dropped, and almost burned alive by creepy enemies. But she gave as good as she got. Hardly a month went by when she wasn’t slapping tiny little dragons with her flip-flop or reading spells backward to vanquish mean genies.
She was always there for her friends, though. She showed up pretty soon at Jasper’s house, sweating from biking over and from fighting off the conjoined twin psychopaths.II She took off her winter coat and her hat. Her hair was flattened and smeared all over her forehead.
“Why, Katie, it’s awfully kind of you to bike over,” said Jasper. “How is it going with the conjoined serial killers?”
“Sorry I’m late!” said Katie. “It’s been a tough mystery. Two sets of fingerprints, but only one set of footprints, you know?”
She scampered up the concrete stairs and playfully boxed with Jasper’s limp arm. “What’s happening, Jas?”
“I am done.”
Katie blinked with surprise. “Whoa! What’s wrong? Lily told me the science fair didn’t go so good, but, uh . . . What about all your pluck and vim and vigor?”
Jasper slowly sat up. “My pluck has been plucked.”
“What do you mean by ’done’?”
He said dismally, “When I began my adventures a long time ago, there were no computers. Airplanes were still new. Plastic was still thrilling. Astronomers had just discovered Pluto, the ninth and coldest planet in the solar system.”
Katie plopped down next to him on the couch and slung her arm around his shoulders. “Um,” she said, “hate to tell you, but Pluto: no longer a planet.”
“What?”
“They de-made it a planet. They decided it wasn’t planety enough. We only have eight again now.”
“See?” groaned Jasper. “Do you know how proud the Plutonians were, the day I told them they had just been declared the ninth world in our solar system? There were parades in gratitude to all earthlings, and they made a statue of a human in one of their public parks. They showered it with confetti of ice that fell glinting in the starlight. They all gave speeches about unity and brotherhood and ate huge festival salads garnished with fungi from Yuggoth.”
“Ja-a-a-a-a-asper!” Katie said, jerking her friend’s whole body back and forth. “Snap out of it!”
“Everything I know is gone.”
Lily asked him carefully, “What did you mean earlier when you said you were working on some kind of teleporter that would take people to the stars? Usually, you use rockets.”
Katie added, “You like the roar.”
Jasper shrugged. It looked like he didn’t want to talk about it. He just said, “Oh . . . It was just an . . . idea I had. . . . Something I’ve been tinkering with . . . Nothing much.”
Katie said, “Huh! You never mentioned it before.”
Jasper looked down at their feet. “I just . . . I got the idea for it recently. In the middle of the night. You know, chums. Suddenly you wake up, and there’s this whole idea in your head for an invention, and, Eureka! So I started building it. . . . It’s really nothing. . . .”
“Wow,” said Katie. “Can you just go anywhere? Instantly? And there, suddenly, you are, at the beach in California?”
Somewhat wearily, Jasper explained, “No. You have to have a teleporter booth to land in as well as one to send you. They send you back and forth.”
“Isn’t that kind of a pain?” Katie asked. “To have two booths?”
“Umm,” Lily pointed out, “otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get back. You’d appear on the beach in California and you’d have to drive back home.”
“Good point,” said Katie. “But how are you going to find teleportation booths on other planets?”
Jasper didn’t look right at them. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just . . . I had a dream, that if I built this teleporter booth . . . maybe there would be someone . . . who could . . . you know . . . receive me. I just felt like I had to . . . try it.”
Lily said, “But you wouldn’t go away to another planet without us, right? Your friends?”
Jasper smiled weakly. “Of course not, Lily,” he said.
But he didn’t look like he meant it.
Lily and Katie were worried about him. When it was time for dinner, they didn’t go home. Lily whispered to Mrs. Dash, “Would you mind if we maybe could stay for dinner? Jasper’s really upset, and we want to try to be here for him.”
“Why, of course, honey,” said Mrs. Dash. “Thank you for thinking of it. I’d be delighted.”
They ate a solemn dinner, and then Katie asked if they could hang out and watch a movie, but of course the only movies Jasper had at his house were old celluloid movies on huge reels. The movies had to be projected onto a screen. They watched a few from his collection.
That didn’t help. There in black and white was Jasper Dash in 1942, looking just the same as he looked now, climbing into a plane and waving. There he was shutting the hatch on his Bullet Submersible. There he was playing Frisbee with a robot dog who had long since rusted.
Jasper’s face fell as he watched the movies. Lily could tell he remembered what it was like back then when there was so much still to be explored and discovered in the world. She could tell he remembered what it was like to be inventing things, to be building, full of joy and hope in the future. And now the future had arrived and had passed, and it was over.
She and Katie were quiet when they left. They said they’d see him in the morning.
In fact, they would not.
Jasper stared out the windows at the distant stars of the Milky Way. His breath spread and shrank on the plate glass.
His mother was watching him, leaning against a pillar.
“Jasper?” she said. “I know there are times we don’t seem to fit in here.”
Jasper nodded.
She asked him, “Is there anything I can do, honey?”
He didn’t answer. He said, “Mother . . . What do you know about my father?”
“Who do you mean?”
“The one who sent the beam through space. From the region of the Horsehead Nebula.”
“Do you think of that as your father, buttercup? It was just some alien.”
“You never . . . met him . . . did you?”
“Of course not. And it might not have been a him or a her. I was just sitting at the observatory one night, looking through the telescope, when—goodness gracious me!—a tremendous beam of brilliant energy shot through the lens. My hair stuck straight out. Darling, I lit up like a chafing dish of flaming bananas Foster. I couldn’t see a thing. My eyes were filled with ones and zeros.” Dolores Dash crossed her arms. More quietly, she said, “When I woke up, everything was dark. I got up and went to tell the other astronomers what had happened. I slept on a cot right there at the laboratory so some of the medical scientists could keep an eye on me.
“In the morning, I got up, ate a full breakfast of eggs and bacon, and discovered that, well, I was still absolutely famished. I realized I wanted to drink specific chemicals, things I never would have thought of normally. Lots of them. I went down to the chemistry lab. I filled up test tubes with electrolytes and amino acids and powders and, goodness, who knows what all. I had very definite ideas. I kept mixing things up and drinking them down. They were delicious. I just knew what to do because of that beam of energy. And somehow, Jasper . . . my boy . . . my perfect, special boy . . . somehow, all those swizzled acids turned into you.” She smiled at him and held out her hand for him to take it. “Jasper?” she said.
He frowned and focused on the carpet.
“I’m sorry, Jasper. I’m sorry we’re alone. Is there anything I can do?”
He shook his head. “I’m going up to my laboratory,” he said.
She tried to make conversation. “What are you working on?”
“A transporter . . . to take people to other stars.”
“No jet rockets?”
“No rockets. It’s just an instant and then you’re there. If it works.”
“Of course you won’t use it without permission, honey.”
“No, Mom.”
He trudged to the staircase.
He stopped just before he went up. He thought for a while, and then he asked Mrs. Dash, “Do you think my father will ever come to get me?”
Jasper’s mother went to him. She enfolded her son in her arms. But he didn’t move or relax. He stood perfectly still, like he was waiting for her to stop.
She gave up hugging him and let go. Without saying anything else, he went up the stairs.
He dragged himself to his bedroom and sat down at his desk. It was covered with the plans for his Astounding Atomic Telephone Cart. He had left them there in excitement that morning, before the disastrous science fair.
In a sudden fury, he grabbed those plans and crumpled them. He tore at them. He couldn’t make the pieces small enough. He flung the blueprints at the wastebasket.
It was extremely unusual for Jasper to get angry, except at injustice and gangsters. This was perhaps the first time in all his ninety years of being thirteen that he had ever had a tantrum.
He sat with his elbows on his desk. Then, picking up a soldering gun, he went over to his transporter booth. It was almost finished.
He was squatting next to it, wearing magnifying goggles, when his mother knocked quietly at the door.
“Hi there, Mom,” he said.
She took one look at the booth he was working on and its huge metal projections. Then she said with some irritation in her voice, “Jasper Dash, is that your instantaneous teleporter?”
Jasper nodded. “Yes, Mother.”
“What are you planning to do with it?”
Jasper wouldn’t answer. He just shrugged.
His mother put her hands on her hips. “I’m only going to ask this once,” she said, “and I want a real answer. Are you thinking of transporting yourself to the space coordinates in the region of the Horsehead Nebula where that beam came from that created you?”
Jasper didn’t answer. He wouldn’t tell a lie.
“No!” said his mother. “No, and no, and for the last time, no. Really, honey. I let you do a lot of things. But a parent has to put her foot down somewhere.”
“Mother!”
“And I put my foot down when it comes to interstellar travel. You are absolutely not going to project yourself into the middle of a purple cloud of interstellar gas, and that’s final! Is that understood, Jasper?”
He stood up defiantly. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do! This is what I’ve wanted for years, Mother! And I just figured out the secret to the teleporter a couple of weeks ago! I want to—”
“I said NO, Jasper! No Horsehead Nebula!”
“Please!”
“Jasper Augustus Dash, I think I’ve been pretty understanding over the years. I never complained about you going to the center of the Earth. I never said a word about you fighting the ninjas in their secret assassins’ lair. I never told you that you weren’t allowed to build a deep-sea observation bubble in the Mariana Trench. And I said you could go out past Neptune as long as you stayed in the solar system and loaded the dishwasher first. But this—it’s crazy, Jasper. You don’t know what’s out there! So no. No, no, no.”
Jasper glared at his mother. For the first time in his life, he was furious at someone who loved him. For the first time ever, he was tired of being good and heroic and polite to his elders. He stood up and faced her.
“Don’t start, Jasper,” she said, holding out a warning finger. “Or do I have to confiscate your atom-smasher?”
“FINE!” he yelled. “FINE!”
Mrs. Dash was shocked. Jasper had never yelled at her before, except maybe things like, “WATCH OUT!” when a robot with machine-gun hands was firing through the kitchen windows.
In a tone she had never used before, Mrs. Dash said, “Sometimes, Jasper, I wish you did have a father to help me take care of you.”
Icily, he replied, “Sometimes, Mother, so—do—I.”
She turned white with shock. Then she stormed out, slamming the door behind her.
Jasper’s hands were shaking. He wanted to go apologize. He didn’t know what had come over him. He hated how he was being. He didn’t understand it. He’d never been this way before.
He sat down next to the teleportation booth. He pouted. Then he picked up a wrench and went back to work. He’d show her.
As Mrs. Dash lay in her bed, she thought about her son. She never wanted him to be hurt. Of course he’d be hurt sometimes—a bruise under the eye from secret agents, a leg broken by the yeti—but she never wanted him to lose his hope in the future. She decided that in the morning, she would apologize. She would explain herself better. She would warn him that finding his father might not be as easy as he thought. She would do it at breakfast, over pancakes.
She went to sleep, knowing she’d try her best to prepare him for the difficult road ahead. Maybe she would actually go with him in his teleporter. They could appear together, hand in hand, on some alien world to greet the being who had sent the instructions on how to grow Jasper. It could be a family trip. . . .
Dolores Dash fell asleep. She did not notice that at about three o’clock, her night-light dimmed, as if something in the house was using all the power.
The concrete house of the future was silent.
Outside, wind blew across the snowbanks and through the dead briars.
In the morning, when she went to wake her son for pancakes, he was gone.
I Which moon? Polydeuces, since you ask. See Jasper Dash and His Remarkable Methane Mittens.
II In Horror Hollow #43: Two Heads Are Badder Than One.