Читать книгу The Dog Who Saved the World - Ross Welford - Страница 15

I have only ever seen scorpions in pictures and on TV. They’re not – I’m very glad to say – native to the north-east coast of England. But I know this much: they’re no bigger than your hand, and they’re usually poisonous.

This one reminds me of a huge, shiny black lobster, tinged with red, with an extra-long jointed tail that curves over its back. There’s a dark orange bulb at the end with a long spike. Its claws are like a crab’s and they snap together menacingly as the scorpion scuttles forward and then sideways on its eight jointed legs. I can see slight imperfections at the scorpion’s edges: a bit of blurring in the movement, like when the barman waved at me before.

Unfortunately, knowing that it’s a virtual-reality scorpion doesn’t make it much less scary.

‘Dr Pretorius!’ I shout. ‘Ramzy!’

Ramzy is frozen to the spot in fear, and all I hear in my ear is Dr Pretorius muttering, ‘Oh, for cryin’ out loud: not him again.’

The creature takes two scuttling steps towards me and I aim a desperate kick at it. To my astonishment, my foot connects with its claw. I feel my foot kick it – but still it comes forward. Without thinking, I run up the beach, away from the scorpion, which has raised itself up on its legs. It doesn’t appear to have eyes: instead, there are raised mounds on top of its head like glistening black half-footballs, but still – they seem to be looking right at me.

I notice a strange sensation as I run: it’s not exactly like running on sand. More like running on a bed of tiny metal balls, which shift beneath my feet, although right now I’m more interested in putting distance between me and a massive black scorpion.

‘Dr Pretorius! What is that thing?’ I yell. Ramzy has picked up the deckchair and throws it. His aim is good, but the chair passes straight through the scorpion, as though it is a ghost.

‘Tsk. Don’t worry,’ says Dr Pretorius through my earpiece, sounding more frustrated than anxious. Then she says, ‘Why, you little …’ but I think she’s talking to the scorpion.

Together, Ramzy and I retreat further up the beach, but still the scorpion comes at us, scampering through the sand two or three little steps at a time.

Then, without warning, it opens its pincers, rises up on its jointed, hairy legs and starts to sprint towards me. I turn to run and stumble forward, landing with my face in the sand at the exact moment that the band above my eyes goes dark.

Everything is silent.

When the pin lights come on again in the Dome a few seconds later, I’m still in the centre of the studio, panting. Ramzy is kneeling next to the upturned deckchair on the black floor where the scorpion was. Dr Pretorius comes out of the computer-control room and walks towards us through the floor of tiny steel beads, beaming with delight as I blink and pant.

‘Welcome to MSVR – multi-sensory virtual reality, kiddos! And congratulations on being the first people in the world to experience it.’ She clasps her long hands together and shakes her head, her halo of white hair quivering. ‘Nearly there,’ she says. ‘Nearly there!’

I’m still breathless after my encounter with the huge scorpion. Dr Pretorius notices and adds, ‘Aw, hey, honey. Sorry about Buster! He’s kind of a bug in the system. I must do somethin’ about that. He wouldn’t have hurt ya.’ Then she adds, ‘I don’t think, anyhow, ha!’

Ramzy and I sit on the long desk in the control room while Dr Pretorius bashes violently at the multicoloured keyboard like she’s playing whack-a-mole. In front of us we each have a can of supermarket cola and biscuits from a packet. If Ramzy is disappointed – I had promised him home-made scones – he doesn’t show it as he crams another two biscuits in his mouth. At our feet, Mr Mash snuffles around for dropped crumbs.

Dr Pretorius doesn’t look at us while she speaks.

‘You – bash-bash-tap – just sit there – tap-tap-BASH – and I’ll be with you in a minute – tappity-tappity-BASH-BASH – darn you! No – not you. Ah, the heck with it: I’ll sort it out later.’ She whacks the keyboard one last time and turns to us in her swivel chair. ‘It’s that darned scorpion. He’s gettin’ ahead of himself. He shouldn’t even be there.’

Ramzy and I nod as though we understand everything she’s saying.

There’s a slightly awkward pause before Dr Pretorius says, ‘So how was the Disney World Surround-a-Room?’ She practically spits the words and turns back to her keyboard as if the answer doesn’t matter, although it obviously does.

‘It was awesome,’ I begin, and then decide to backtrack. ‘I mean, awesome is probably overstating it. It was good. Very good. Pretty good. I mean, there are probably better ones. That is …’ I’m gabbling and I’m not even sure why.

Ramzy rescues me. ‘Do you know Surround-a-Room?’ he asks Dr Pretorius, more conversationally.

‘Know it? A little.’ She’s pretending she doesn’t care.

Ramzy and I exchange looks. For some reason, I think she knows it more than a little, but I don’t know why.

‘I just wrote some of the code, that’s all,’ she says. ‘The program that created it? The visuals, the audibles … that sorta thing. The massive goggles you had to wear. The rainforest Surround-a-Room is … well, it was like a child to me. A child that never grew up.’

Dr Pretorius gets to her feet suddenly and her voice is louder, the words tumbling out. ‘Remember the sand you touched? Remember how you could feel it – even though there was nothing there?’ I nod. ‘And the scorpion – when you kicked it, your foot connected, yeah? You felt it. But when you –’ she points at Ramzy, who jumps – ‘threw the deckchair at Buster, and it went straight through him? Did you wonder about that?’

‘Yes?’ we both say, slowly. I mean, I did wonder about it, but it was just one bit of a load of wondering I’ve been doing in the last ten minutes.

Dr Pretorius picks up the bicycle helmet that I was wearing and turns it upside down. The inside surface is dotted with tiny metal bumps.

‘Everything we see and hear and touch is processed in the brain. Without our brain, there’s nothing. Are you with me?’

Ramzy and I glance at each other, unsure where this is going, but Dr Pretorius isn’t even looking.

‘But your brain can be tricked. Optical illusions, magic tricks, déjà vu – they’re all tricks of the mind. We’ve been doing it since we lived in caves. And now this!’

She holds the helmet aloft like a trophy, glaring at us.

‘This, my friends, is the greatest illusion of them all. Or will be. The projector here –’ she runs her finger round the curved metal band that sat above my forehead – ‘deceives your eyes into seeing whatever scene is programmed. No more heavy goggles! But it is these that make the big difference. These nodes here, and here, and here …’ She’s pointing out the little metal bumps on the inside of the helmet that connected with my skull. ‘They send signals to the parietal lobe, and …’

‘Wait,’ says Ramzy. ‘To the what?’ I’m glad Ramzy’s here. For once, his habit of questioning everything is not an annoyance.

Dr Pretorius looks unhappy to be interrupted, but then she says, ‘It’s OK. It’s taken me a lifetime of study to understand this. The parietal lobe is the part of your brain that deals with touch and sound, and the other senses. With careful programming, the computer here can deliver signals to these nodes that will in turn send little electrical impulses to your parietal lobe and trick your brain into feeling, say, heat from a virtual sun. That’s actually an easy one. Sand is much trickier: to actually feel very fine grains running through your hands? That’s quite an illusion. I’m rather proud of it. Another cookie?’

I give her a blank look. I’m still trying to process this, and biscuits are not going to help. Ramzy, on the other hand, clearly thinks that they will help, and takes two more.

‘So, when I kicked the … that scorpion thing, it was what – a trick of the mind?’

‘Exactly! Just like the sand. The program tricked your brain into believing the scorpion was solid, and your foot felt it, just like your hands felt the sand – even though neither was there.’

‘And when I threw the deckchair –’ says Ramzy, spitting crumbs – ‘obviously, the chair just went straight through it.’

Dr Pretorius winks. ‘Smart kid. Though that’s something I’m working on.’ Then suddenly she claps her hands and gets to her feet. ‘Enough for today! There’s a lot more I have to do before it’s complete.’

‘You mean it’s not finished?’ queries Ramzy, taking the last biscuit as he hops down from the desk.

She says no more. Ramzy and I are silent as we follow Dr Pretorius out of the studio with Mr Mash and down the metal stairs to the empty loading bay. Instead of going to the door we came in, though, she doubles back and unlocks another door with a large, old-fashioned metal key.

‘Short cut,’ she says.

The door opens into the interior of the Spanish City arcade. There’s a noisy room full of slot machines and kiddie rides, the Gelato Parlour (which is just ice cream if you ask me), the expensive fish-and-chip shop and the Polly Donkin Tea Rooms. It feels like we’ve come through a secret entrance, although it was just a locked door.

The main arcade is a few metres in front of us, and we push through the crowd, but then I have to stop. Sass Hennessey’s mum has just served a plate of chips to a table outside the cafe when she catches my eye.

‘Hi, Georgie!’ she says as if Sass and I are best friends. Ramzy grins at her, even though he doesn’t know her, I don’t think. ‘Nice to see you, pet. And, er …’ She looks at Dr Pretorius curiously, probably wondering who she is.

I mumble, ‘Hi.’

‘How’s St Woof’s, Georgie? Saskia’s told me all about it,’ says Sass’s mum, gathering glasses from a table. I’m already hurrying towards the entrance and don’t answer. There is something in the way she looked at Dr Pretorius that has unnerved me.

I could be wrong. Maybe she does know who she is. Maybe Dr Pretorius is a regular in here. What do I know?

Dr Pretorius leads us out on to the busy street. ‘Come back same time tomorrow. And don’t forget: this is our secret! You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.’ She turns and goes back the way we came, and Ramzy and I watch her white hair bobbing above the crowds.

‘Well. That was pretty adventurous, wouldn’t you say, Georgie? Hey – Earth to Georgie!’

I’m miles away, staring up at the blacked-out upper windows of the Spanish City dome.

‘What can she mean, Ramzy? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet …’

‘Dunno. We’ll probably get to test out some weapons or something: the Battle of the Giant Scorpions! Or …’

‘No. I don’t think so. This isn’t about games. This is about something else.’

Ramzy gives me a quizzical squint. ‘You don’t trust her?’ he says.

I think about this.

Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like dogs.

Dr Pretorius was OK with Mr Mash. She definitely didn’t dislike him. She even tolerated his smelliness. (He dropped what Dad calls ‘a proper beefy eggo’ in the control room and she pretended not to notice. That was nice of her.)

On the other hand, we only met her this morning, and she’s already sworn us both to secrecy.

‘I don’t know,’ I say to Ramzy, eventually. ‘But there’s something going on.’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘let’s find out. Same time tomorrow. It’ll be an adventure.’

I smile at him. ‘OK.’

So that’s that. We’re trusting her, for now.

And mad scientists have to be mad for a reason. Right?