Free Samantha Smart by Maxwell Puggle Page B

room when he had just hacked into a distribution company’s files and switched two orders, so that a wedding catering company would receive fifty stun-guns and a prison upstate would be delivered fifteen boxes of lemon mousse and chocolate-chip cookies. “Move along, move along,”
they had taught his pet parrot, Flacko to repeat as they rolled on Marvin’s floor in laughter, imitating caterers prodding guests away from the conspicuously diminished desert table at some snobby wedding. Perhaps, upon reflection, it had been a trifle cruel to ruin someone’s wedding, but Samantha thought that since a lot of prisoners were probably happy for a day, it would make up for it. Most of them were there for not much good reason, as Marvin liked to point out.
    “Well,” Samantha said to her only remaining friend (other than The Professor), “thank goodness for you, Polly.” She picked up her little dog and hugged her tightly and Polly licked her face, returning the affection. “I suppose we should head on back, then.”
    After another pleasant but uneventful taxi-boat ride, Samantha found herself stuffing her face with Crab Rangoon–an absolute favorite of hers that The Professor had ordered in what Samantha thought was one of his especially
brilliant moments. The two sat and talked more about their predicament, the information they had and didn’t have, and tried to devise a plan for the controlled use of the mysterious Mayan time-machine. The night drifted on and they settled down to sleep on their respective piles of Peruvian blankets, listening to the slimy sound of Polly licking sweet and sour sauce from an empty food container.
    “Professor?” Samantha mumbled sleepily.
    “Mmmphh–yes, what? What is it, Samantha?”
    “Have you ever heard of Heatwavvve?”
    “Say again?” The Professor replied.
    “Heatwavvve.
An American singing group. Very popular.”
    “Oh, heavens no.” The Professor turned over on his side facing away from her. “Why?”
    “How likely would it be, Professor, that an immensely popular group that was topping the charts in our
timeline would also exist in this one?”
    “Hmmmpph. Extremely unlikely, I should think. Not impossible, but most unlikely indeed.”
    “Hunh... ” Samantha began to ponder his response, but the two were asleep within minutes, and the only thing still making a sound was Polly’s tongue.
    *
    Morning came again without a sunrise, as it always did in The Professor’s windowless cave of a basement office. The only way they ever really knew
it was morning was by the clock on his cluttered desk. Both he and Samantha agreed that the lack of natural light was getting a bit depressing, and they decided to both take Polly for a walk over at Belvedere Castle before diving into the risky and uncertain activity of time travel. The museum lobby was bustling with school children, and they slipped out largely unnoticed, Polly stuffed neatly into Samantha’s backpack. They hailed a taxi-boat and were soon disembarking on the island formerly known as Vista Rock; Samantha let Polly out of her backpack while The Professor paid the driver.
    “Sumptuous sunbathers!” The Professor exclaimed. “It’s quite nice out. I haven’t been getting out enough, what with all my time-machine researching and inventing spatio-temporal wrist communicators! Is it always this sunny, Samantha?”
    “Oh, yes,” Samantha replied, clipping Polly’s leash onto her collar. “It’s been like this every day. Very nice, really, though I imagine it’s easier than we might think to get a bad sunburn.”
    “To be sure,” The Professor said in a somewhat serious voice as he pulled a little folded-up cap from a pocket of his lab coat and fitted it onto his head.
    Polly was quite unhappy to be on her leash, with all the rare grass to run around on, and kept tugging insistently, dragging Samantha this way and that (as much as a Boston Terrier can drag anyone). She had to sniff every square meter of