Free Samantha Smart by Maxwell Puggle Page A

apocalyptic feel of this unfortunate alternate reality.
    She had, of course, been foolish to assume that there would be any grass remaining here, and Polly whimpered as if she had been robbed of a proper walk. There were a few little strips of sodded floating sidewalk that Samantha found and offered to Polly, who grudgingly did her business. Samantha picked up the dog-doo with a plastic bag and deposited it in a close-by trash can that had obviously been put there for just such a purpose.
Pew!
Samantha thought,
I need to start feeding her something else!
    They found a little beach and Samantha sat down, looking around a little nervously as it was about six-thirty or seven in the evening and pretty much dark already, though there were plenty of lights shining out from the city that apparently still never slept. She rolled up the sleeve of her sweatshirt and turned on the wrist-communicator. Tapping the big talk bar, she spoke into its tiny condenser microphone.
    “Professor? Professor, it’s me, Samantha. I’m at Battery Park now.” She tapped the ‘talk’ bar again and listened. A crackly, staticky voice came through the little speaker. She couldn’t quite make it out, so she turned the fine-tuning dial until she had a much clearer signal.
    “... mantha, are you there? This is Smythe, ‘comin’ back atcha,’ I suppose. As one of your Midwestern truckers would say.”
    “I hear you, Professor,” Samantha replied, tapping the talk bar on and off.
    “Samantha? Wonderful! How does the park look, Samantha?”
    “Like part of the bay. You should see the statue, Professor, it’s really sort of creepy. Like an end of the world sort of vibe.”
    “Yes, I can imagine what it might look like. Low in the water, I should guess.”
    “Yeah, it looks that way, more even than most other things.”
    “A trick of perspective,” the wrist-speaker squawked. “All right. Come on home, then–I just wanted to give this a real good distance test before we try to use it through time.
Hopefully by the time you get back I’ll have fetched us some supper. Do you like Chinese food?”
    “Sure!” Samantha beamed. She always wanted Chinese food, but her stupid brother was always taking all the mom-money and ordering pizza.
    “All right,” the speaker continued. “Get back as soon as you can. I’ll try to meet you at the front door so you don’t have to go through all that phone-security business. And I’ll try to make us up some nicer sort of beds. My back’s been paining me lately. Smythe out.”
    Samantha pushed the off button and sighed deeply. It was a nice, summer-like night, even though it was technically October. She took a moment to relax and think about things she had sort of put off thinking about, feelings she had put off feeling. She missed her mom a lot. There was this sort of gut-wrenching feeling she had that somewhere her mother was really worried about her, and she didn’t want her mom to worry. If she could only make a phone call to the world she was trying to get back to, to tell her mom she was all right, she would feel much better. But she couldn’t.
    She missed her friends, too. Hanging out with The Professor and doing exciting investigative things was cool and made her feel very responsible and grown-up, but sometimes she just wanted to let loose a little and have fun. She and her friend Brianna Knowles used to spend hours in Brianna’s penthouse apartment trying on clothes and dancing around, listening to Heatwavvve
CDs. Sometimes their friend Suki Han would come over too and show them the hottest new fashions of Tokyo, Japan, where she spent half the year with her father. She even missed her friend Marvin Santiago, who was a chubby sort of Hispanic boy who lived not far from her in Brooklyn. He was weird in that he liked computers as much as he liked basketball, and wrote equal amounts of computer programs and mediocre rap songs. Samantha smiled, remembering a day she had been sitting in Marvin’s