The Radio Magician and Other Stories by James van Pelt Read Free Book Online

the main office to send help. Maybe I was crazy, and Mr. Herbert was just an eccentric, or he was setting us up for an amazing lesson on John Steinbeck. I was in a classroom once where the teacher staged an argument with a principal. The principal came in and began yelling at her, but it was nonsense, like, “We don’t flatter pancakes when they are stuffed with raisins.” Then Ms Benda took an umbrella from her desk, put it in the corner of the room, while he pulled an apple, a bouquet of flowers and a flashlight out of a red backpack he carried, dropping them one by one into the trashcan. She walked to the black board and started writing, all the time they were still yelling. This went on for a minute, before she said, “Thank you,” and he left. She told us to write down everything that happened in detail in our notebooks. It turned out the whole façade was an exercise in observation and description.
    What if Mr. Herbert were doing something like that to us?
    Mr. Herbert opened the briefcase. I took a deep breath.
    He said, “The real question is what would you do if you met Shakespeare and Hitler in the same room. Would it be better to save the literature at the cost of the lives, or should the lives be spent? What if that was your only choice because you couldn’t come back in time with a weapon, not even a knife—your companions would know—but you could make a bomb?” When his hand came out of the briefcase, it held a switch. His thumb rested on the button.
    My fingers quivered above my phone. It wasn’t his words, so much, but the posture of his back, how his head jutted forward to scan us, like a vulture. And, of course, the button.
    He said, “The first row is dismissed. Take your books.” They filed out, sweat on their brows. One girl whimpered. I knew I didn’t need to text anyone. They’d get help. Mr. Herbert dismissed the fourth and fifth row. That left my row and Latasha’s. I sat in the back seat. She sat in a front seat, near the door. He walked toward me. “Everyone from here forward can leave.”
    In a minute it was just Latasha, Mr. Herbert and me. I said, “Why would you kill Shakespeare too?” Under my desk I thumbed a message, “I wll dstract & u run.” I hit send. The way Mr. Herbert was turned, he couldn’t see her. She shook her head.
    He sat on a student desk, his feet on the chair. His pants pulled above his socks, revealing a strip of pale skin. “What if a writer was only great because she wrote out of great suffering? What if she wrote about war and loss so well that she destroyed war forever after that? She’d have no destiny without Hitler. Better she write nothing at all than less than her best.”
    My phone hummed with a new text, but I couldn’t look down.
    Latasha said, “You can get help.”
    When he turned to look at her, I checked the message. “Rscue in t/hall.”
    “I don’t need help. I’m saving the world.”
    A sharp buzzing filled the room. Mr. Herbert’s button hand glowed blue and sprayed a shower of sparks. He howled as two men ran in. One tackled him, knocking over seats and desks. The other bent over the briefcase. I found myself standing, backed into a corner. I don’t remember getting out of my chair or stepping back.
    Latasha hadn’t moved. “You boys from the future too?”
    They looked at her. For a moment the scene seemed ludicrous. Mr. Herbert wasn’t moving. Maybe he was unconscious. The man who had tackled him put a device in his pocket that looked a bit like a toy gun, while the other man held up a box that he’d yanked from the briefcase. It dangled a couple of wires.
    “Uh . . . no. We’re . . . um . . . the police.”
    The one at the briefcase had two buttons in the middle of his shirt that were undone, and I’d never seen a police uniform that looked like his. Kind of cheesy, like one that you’d get at a costume shop. But I didn’t have much time to look because they both picked up Mr. Herbert and hustled him and the