Mercury Man Read Free Page B

points where you could go from one world to another. Of course they were justin stories; you wouldn’t come across them, except as black holes or some weird aspect of physics. Even so, if they existed in physics they might exist in the world around him, even though no one had ever found one.
    Maybe the only way you could find one would be to tap into the right time warp. Without that, you couldn’t do a thing. And how would you know if the warp was there unless you tried?
    He shoved the scribbled paper into his pocket.
I must be losing my mind,
he thought.
    Some mumbling and groaning preceded his grandfather’s return to the kitchen.
    â€œDamn it all, where the hell’s the Sobranie got to!”
    â€œWant me to go get you some, Grandpa?”
    Jack laughed. “Thanks, but you’d have to walk pretty far to get a tin of that stuff.”
    Tom helped his grandfather wash up the lunch dishes. In the middle of this there was a knocking at the door — one of the old women owners had come about some problem. He heard Jack joking with her in the background. Carefully wiping his wet hand on his cut-offs Tom pulled out the scrap of paper and read the address.
    Harbour Street
. The old amusement park. And Fabricon Computers. An up-and-coming firm, people said, and its motto was
Read the Future in Us
. Tom winced. He felt suddenly ashamed of his crazy notions, of his thoughts of the past and time warps. With a sigh mostly of relief he crumpled up the paper and threw it into the garbage.

C HAPTER T WO
Weird Kids
    When he got back to the apartment Tom found a note pinned to the door. It was from his friend Bim Bavasi.
    â€œPete told me he got a job,” it said. “I need the money and I came back to check it out. Can’t spend the whole time shovelling cow dung, can I? See you later.”
    Tom smiled, but at the same time he was a bit puzzled. Bim back in the city? Complaining about being at his uncle’s farm? That didn’t make sense at all. His uncle didn’t make him work that hard and there was swimming and fishing and shooting squirrels, and, above all, an escape from the heat. There was nothing to do in the city that you couldn’t do any time. Bim must have come back because someone was pressuring him — his dad, maybe — to earn some money.
    Tom had no real sense of what it would be like to have a dad around. Sometimes when he thought of his own dad taking off like he did, he felt as if he could killhim. But there were times — when he felt free and easy and content — that he was glad not to have anyone around to push him. He saw how some dads leaned on their kids, making life hell over nothing, and he was glad to be out of it, although he knew it made things hard for his mother.
    Tom stripped off his shirt, went into the bathroom, and washed his face with cold water. The Mercury Man comics and the magic ring came into his mind. He had thrown away the piece of paper but he remembered the address. Frowning at his own image in the mirror, he thought,
What’s the point of having blue eyes with dark hair
? He rubbed his cheeks with his fingertips, checking the acne scars from his bad time, searching for the stubble that never seemed to come. Bim, who was eighteen, was shaving already, making jokes about Tom’s baby face. And Tom was always being taken for younger than he was. Even the new kids at Blanchard High looked older than he did.
    He stalked out of the bathroom and his eye caught the little table that held the telephone and his mother’s notepaper.
    Get it over with,
a voice from within said.
Who’s going to know? If you want to do it, go ahead!
    Tom hesitated, then with a sigh he sat down at the table and began to write out the necessary words: “Please send one Mercury Man Magic Ring. I enclose 25 cents. Yours sincerely, Tom Blake.”
    He wrote his address on it, stuck a quarter to a piece of cardboard with Scotch Tape, and found