InterWorld (InterWorld 1)

I nodded. I knew what he was saying, and I knew he was right. It made it clearer what had to be done. Not easier, no, not by any means. But clearer.

I stood up. “Mr. Dimas, you’re a hell of a teacher.”

“Thank you. The school board doesn’t always agree, but they have used the words ‘Jack Dimas’ and ‘hell’ in the same sentence. Quite often.”

I smiled and turned to go.

He asked, “Should I expect to see you in class tomorrow morning?”

I hesitated, then I shook my head.

“I thought not. Good luck, Joey. Good luck to all of you.”

I was going to say something smart, but I couldn’t think of anything smart to say, so I just shook his hand and got out of there as fast as I could.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and handed my old Star Blasters plastic armor and ray gun—both sets—to the squid. The ray gun fired an infrared beam that a sensor on the chest plate picked up and registered—if you did it right.

He was thrilled—he’d always wanted the kit. “Jo-ee! Tinkoo!” He was way too young for them, but he’d grow into them.

In a way, I told myself, I’d be helping make sure of that.

I told Jenny she could have my CD and DVD collection, for what it was worth. She and I had pretty much the same tastes in movies—basically, anything that ends with the Death Star or a reasonable equivalent blowing up real good was okay by us. The music was problematical, but what she didn’t like she could either sell or grow into.

She was pretty suspicious of this sudden generosity, of course. I told her I had to go visit some remoter branches of our family, and I wasn’t sure when I’d be back. I didn’t add “if ever.” Maybe I should have, but if you think it’s easy saying good-bye to your younger siblings, maybe forever—well, it’s not.

Mom and Dad were harder still. I couldn’t just tell them I was leaving home, maybe forever—on the other hand, I wanted them to know somehow that I would be okay (even though I wasn’t 100 percent sure of that part myself).

I made a pretty big mess of it, all told. I told them I was joining “something like” the army. Dad said I don’t think so, and that all he had to do was make a few phone calls to keep that from happening, young man. Mom mostly cried and asked where she had failed as a parent.

I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that I would screw it up—after all, I didn’t exactly have a stel

lar record to date in taking care of people close to me. It ended with me promising not to “do anything rash” tonight, and we would “discuss it further in the morning.”

But I couldn’t wait until the morning. I had to do it quickly, while my gumption was up, as Granddad used to say. I stayed awake until two A.M., long after everyone else had gone to sleep—then I got dressed and headed downstairs.

Mom was waiting for me.

She was sitting in the armchair by the cold fireplace, wrapped in her bathrobe. At first I had the horrible feeling that I’d sleepWalked somehow and slipped into another parallel Earth, because Mom was smoking, and she’d quit that a good five years ago.

I was frozen, caught there in the light of the living room lamp like a rabbit in a car’s headlights. She looked at me, and there was no anger in her eyes—just a kind of resignation. Which was, of course, ten times worse than anger would have been.

At last she smiled, and it didn’t reach her eyes, and she said, “What kind of a mom would I be if I couldn’t read you after all this time? Did you think I wouldn’t know that you were leaving? Or that if I kept on sleeping I’d miss my chance to say good-bye?”

A thousand replies went through my head, some truthful, some lies, mostly a combination of the two. At last I said, “Mom—it would take too long to explain, and you wouldn’t believe any of—”

“Try me,” she said. “Just tell me. Tell me everything. But tell me the truth.”

And I did. I told her everything that I could think of. I told her the whole thing, from the beginning to the end. And she sat there and smoked and coughed and looked faintly sick (and I didn’t know if that last was because she hadn’t smoked in so long or because of what I was telling her).

Then I got to the end, and we sat silently in the room. “Coffee?” said my mother.

“I can’t stand the stuff,” I told her. “You know that.”

“You’ll grow into it,” she said. “I did.”

She got up and walked over to the percolator, and poured herself a cup of coffee.

“You know what makes it worse,” she said suddenly, urgently, as if we had been arguing about something and now she was coming back with the kicker, “what makes it worse isn’t worrying about whether or not you’ve gone crazy or you’re lying to me or any of that nonsense. Because you aren’t lying to me. I mean, I’ve known you for a very long time, Joey. I know what you do when you lie. You’re not lying.” She took a swig of her coffee. “And you aren’t crazy. I’ve known crazy people. And you aren’t one of them.”