The Schernoff Discoveries Read Free

forth like a lanky, bespectacled ball.
    They broke his slide rule.
    I think until then he could somehow have dealt with it. I know I was perfectly willing to
not
take on the whole team. They could rip your arms off like picking wings off a fly. But that slide rule was Harold’s soul, and when he landed on it and it snapped, something snapped in him as well.
    Nothing happened at first. A day went by, then another and another. I thought it was all over.
    But four days later, as we were going home, Harold stopped suddenly, snapped his fingers and smiled. “I’ve got it.”
    “What?”
    “How to get back at the team.”
    “Harold, it’s the
football
team. You can’t get back at them. They’re not like humans. They don’t feel pain.”
    “
Exactly
my point, and why it’s taken so long to come up with a solution. I decided we had to escalate.”
    “Escalate?”
    He nodded. “We can’t fight them on their ground. I’ve been doing research. With such a large and brutal enemy we have to use our brains against their brawn. We have to use technology.We must”—he took a breath—“escalate and use a weapon of mass destruction.”
    “You mean nuclear?”
    “
Exactly
.”
    “But …” The truth was Harold often dazzled me with his knowledge. He knew things that even adults didn’t know. About the mass of light, the speed of sound in water, how to figure the volume of a sphere, how to do fractions in his head. I had no doubt he had enough knowledge to make a nuclear weapon and I, for one, would have been perfectly willing to use it on the football team—especially if we could throw Chimmer somewhere near the center of the blast. “But don’t you need, you know, nuclear stuff for that?”
    He smiled and nodded. “We certainly do. And I know just where to get it.”
    “You do? Where?”
    “All in good time, my boy—all in good time.”
    And he wouldn’t tell me more. The next day in home economics he showed up with two huge cake pans and spent the whole hour making and baking two enormous chocolate cakes. I was busy with my own project—trying to make macaroni and cheese without melting apan—and didn’t notice Harold until I saw him off in the corner of the room with half the class gathered around watching him.
    “What are you doing?” I approached the group and looked over his shoulder.
    “Decorating these two cakes,” he said. “They’re for the team.”
    “Team?”
    “The football team.” He gave a tight little smile, about as funny as a cobra. “I thought they might appreciate a little peace offering.”
    He had used a pastry-decorating device to write on one of the cakes in large precise letters:
    GO TIGERS! BEAT WHITE RIVER!
    “This,” I said, “is your secret weapon?”
    He shrugged, smiling at the girls. “I thought we ought to patch things up if we could. There’s a big game tonight and they might like a bite of cake before they play.”
    When he was done two of the girls took the cakes to the locker room by the gym and left them there for the team and we went home, dodging Chimmer and the team, getting teased all the way.
    “Nothing’s changed,” I said. “We’re still targets.”
    “Wait.” Harold held his finger up as if testing the wind. “Just wait. It shouldn’t take long.”
    For a full minute I stood there and then it came to me. “Harold, did you put something in the cake?”
    He smiled.
    I felt a chill up my back. The smile was so flat, so cold-looking. “Poison? Did you put rat poison or something in the cake?”
    He shook his head. “Not rat poison. I don’t want to kill them. Well, to be
exactly
honest, perhaps I wouldn’t mind if some of them died but that wasn’t what I did.”
    “But you
did
put something in the cake?”
    He nodded.
    “What?”
    “Forty-three boxes of chocolate-flavored laxative.”
    I let that sink in, worked at the math for four or five steps. “That’s over a box a person.”
    “Yes. I had some concern at first. I didn’t