The Impossible Fortress(9)

The subtotal on the cash register crept higher and higher—$23.57, $24.79, $28.61—and I worried one of us had overspent. But after everything was bagged, the total with tax came to an even thirty dollars—exactly where we hoped to be.

“Is there anything else?” Zelinsky asked.

This was the moment of truth—the moment I’d rehearsed with Alf and Clark again and again. They’d coached me to keep my pitch exactly the same—to speak the words like I used them all the time: “Just some Tic Tacs,” I said, “and a Playboy.”

“Hang on,” the fat girl called, and she came running to the front of the store, waving a sheet of paper. “There’s a contest at Rutgers this month. For high school programmers. Anyone under eighteen can enter.”

I didn’t move. None of us did.

“First prize is an IBM PS/2,” she explained. “With a sixteen-bit processor and a full megabyte of RAM. You should enter your poker game.”

I couldn’t look at the girl, and I couldn’t look at Zelinsky, so instead I looked at the paper. She had found the rules on a CompuServe forum and spooled them through a dot matrix printer; the skinny perforated “tractor feed” strips were still clinging to the sides of the page.

“The judge is Fletcher Mulligan from Digital Arts,” she continued. “He’s coming all the way from California to judge the contest.”

“Seriously?” I asked. For a moment, I forgot all about the magazine. “Fletcher Mulligan is going to be there?”

Fletcher Mulligan was a god among computer programmers. My classmates worshipped athletes like Cal Ripken and Michael Jordan, but my teen idol was the founder of Digital Artists and the best game designer in the world. I’d often daydreamed about going to California to meet him, but never imagined that he’d come to our weird little corner of New Jersey.

Zelinsky cleared his throat, and the girl seemed to understand that she had wandered into something awkward.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing’s the matter,” Zelinsky said. “I was asking these businessmen if they needed anything else.”

The artery in his forehead was still throbbing like crazy. His tone made it clear that requesting a Playboy in the presence of his teenage daughter was a terrible idea, on par with unzipping our pants and exposing ourselves. Alf and Clark were taking little steps toward the door, ready to bolt. Zelinsky glared at them, and they froze like baby rabbits. “So answer my question,” he said. “Is there anything else?”

“Nope,” Alf said.

“Not me,” Clark said.

“Just the Tic Tacs,” I said.

Zelinsky flung a box of orange mints into the bag, took my money, and counted out the change.

“Well, the deadline’s in two weeks, if you’re interested,” the girl continued. “These PS/2s look incredible. They have twenty-megabyte hard disks. Twenty megabytes!”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

Zelinsky shoved the bag into my chest. “Go think someplace else.”

As soon as we hit the sidewalk, the guys ripped into me.

“Why the hell did you pay him?” Alf asked. “We went over this, Billy. You were supposed to run! If he freaked out, you were supposed to ditch the crap and run!”

“I didn’t see you running,” I pointed out.

“I couldn’t move!” Alf said. “I was paralyzed by your stupidity!”

I pulled off my tie and stuffed it into my pants pocket. Then I wriggled out of my sports coat and slung it over my shoulder. Outside the bike shop stood a pair of teenage girls, both dressed in tank tops and cutoff denim shorts. They tracked Clark with their eyes as we walked past, then exploded into giggles. He was too upset to notice.

“We were supposed to bring home Vanna White,” Clark said. “Instead we’ve got thirty dollars of pipe cleaners and thumbtacks. What are we gonna do with all this crap?”

We all agreed that the only appropriate course of action was an Amtrak Sacrifice. We walked over to the train station, followed the platform to its western end, then hopped a fence and continued hiking alongside the tracks. After a half mile or so, we reached a patch of woods where no one was likely to bother us, and then dumped our entire shopping spree onto the tracks. Since we had no use for typewriter ribbons or adding machine tape, we could at least take some small pleasure in watching everything get destroyed by a two-hundred-ton locomotive. We positioned the biggest items directly on the rails, using smears of Elmer’s Glue to hold them in place.

“You should have stuck with the plan,” Alf said. “?‘Get in and get out.’ That’s what we agreed. But instead you start chatting up Two-Ton Tessie.”

“She thought we were robbing the place,” I explained. “She saw right through the whole plan.”

Alf emptied a sack of Styrofoam peanuts between the rails, then shaped them into a neat pile. “That girl was hot for you, man.”

“No, she wasn’t.”

“?‘Oh, Billy, you should enter this contest!’?” He mimicked her voice in a high falsetto, then placed his hands on his hips and wiggled his bottom. “?‘And when we’re done, you can take off my clothes and make little piggy babies with me!’?”

“She never said that.”