that he gets to school early every day to brew up something. Gross, isn't
it?"
Willie nodded and wrinkled her nose. They had reached the
top of the stairs, and Katie peeled to the left, happily noticing that the
stench was getting stronger as they got closer to the lab. For once she was
actually pleased at the awful smell. Finally they stopped at a closed door.
"Whew!" said Willie. "That really clears out
the old sinuses, doesn't it?"
Katie smiled serenely. "I'm sure it's for the cause of
science," she said, putting as much sincerity into her words as she could
muster.
"If it's this bad out here in the hall, I'm not sure I
want to go in there," said Willie. "Maybe we should come back another
day."
"Oh, come on, Mom. It smells this bad every day.
Besides, maybe he's in the middle of finding the cure for cancer or something.
You wouldn't want to miss out on seeing a thing like that, would you?"
Before Willie could respond, Katie raised her hand and knocked sharply on the
door.
Katie tried not to gag as they waited for a response. Willie
had turned slightly pale and looked as if she were ready to run. Katie knocked
again. This time they heard a chair scraping the floor and footsteps crossing
the room.
An instant later Mr. Dracovitch opened the door just far
enough to stick his head out. At the same time a wave of stench rolled out of
the room nearly bowling Katie over.
"Why, hello," Mr. Dracovitch said, looking
straight at Willie and smiling. "What a wonderful surprise. Won't you come
in?"
Katie had never seen her mother look more flustered, and she
glanced back and forth from Katie to Mr. Dracovitch as if she couldn't make up
her mind what to do.
"I'm working on a marvelous experiment," said the
teacher, still looking at Willie. "I'd love to show it to you." He
opened the door wider, and Willie didn't hesitate any longer, marching into the
fume-filled lab like a fireman heading into a blazing building.
Katie plunged in after them. She couldn't turn back now. And
besides, things weren't going exactly as she had planned. Her mother was
actually ignoring the terrible smell as she followed Mr. Dracovitch into his
lab and toward his experiment table at the front of the room.
"Oh, gross!" Katie whispered as the fumes stung
her eyes. When she could finally open them enough to see, she noticed reeking
piles of garbage lying around the table and a small pot bubbling above a Bunsen
burner.
Mr. Dracovitch pulled himself up to his full height and
looked proudly at Willie. "As you probably know," he began, "the
world is drowning in garbage. Not just ordinary garbage, but Styrofoams and
plastics that take five hundred years to decay." His voice was rising
passionately like a minister's delivering a sermon. "Can you imagine what
this planet will look like with five hundred years' worth of discarded coffee
cups and disposable baby diapers everywhere? There are scarcely enough
landfills to hold them now. In twenty years they'll be up to our elbows."
And this is what it's going to smell like, too, Katie
thought, but when she closed her eyes, she could see mountains of Styrofoam
fast-food containers and disposable diapers lining the city streets and covering
the rural landscape. She blinked away the sight. Mr. Dracovitch was talking
again.
"I've decided to do something about it. I'm working on
a chemical that will break down these products, reduce them to a harmless ash
that can be buried in the soil. There's one more step in the formula that I
haven't devised vet. Just one more piece to the puzzle, and if I'm successful,
I'll be able to use the experiment in my classes and make a real contribution
to the world."
Katie frowned at the piles of garbage on the experiment
table and the tiny pot bubbling on the Bunsen burner. Mr. Dracovitch was more
weird than she had thought. How could he expect to find something that
important in the science lab at Wacko Junior High? Now Willie must surely be
able to see him for what he really was.