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Russell—I mean Professor Johnson!” exclaimed Aunt Mildred,
clapping her hands together excitedly.
The now fifty-three-year-old Aunt Mildred who didn’t look a day over forty-nine
put her hand to her chest as if to slow her fastbeating heart. “I wonder what
the Professor will look like! Quite dashing, I’m sure!”
Wayne and Rodney sat on the floor and stared at each other in silence as they
listened to their aunt scampering down the hallway. Then they could hear her
talking on the phone, although she was too far away for them to tell what she
was saying.
“You just watch, Wayne,” Rodney finally said. “I’ll be running all around this
house before the end of the day. By tomorrow the both of us will be hard at
work in the Professor’s lab, helping him to make this calamity go away.”
“And how will we do that , Rodney? I can’t even make my fingers work by
themselves. Look. I’m trying to point at you but all the fingers are pointing
together.”
“Then we have to train our hands the same way we will train our legs!” Rodney
was trying to have a positive attitude but it wasn’t easy for him.
“At least I’m further along with the walking than you ,” said Wayne, beaming.
Wayne was proud of the fact that he had just propelled himself across the room
upon his own two legs while Rodney was still having difficulty taking his very
first step.
Rodney looked around for something he could throw at Wayne to put him in his
place. Seeing nothing that he could even lift with his small arms, he just sat
and sighed until Aunt Mildred came back into the room. She was no longer smiling.
In fact, she seemed quite upset.
“It’s really quite terrible. I don’t even know how to say it.”
“Say it!” said Wayne. “Tell us what’s wrong.”
“Boys, that was Petey’s father, Mr. Ragsdale. Petey is gone. He wasn’t in his
bed when everyone woke up this morning.”
“But if Rodney and I woke up as babies, then Petey would have woken up as a
baby too!” said Wayne. “Has he been kidnapped?”
Rodney shook his head sadly. “I can tell you what has happened, Wayne. How many
years younger were we when we woke up this morning?”
“A little over eleven-and-a-half years was our estimate,” said Aunt Mildred
gravely.
“And how old was Petey yesterday?”
“He turned eleven in July,” said Wayne.
“So Petey hasn’t been kidnapped. It’s even worse than that: he hasn’t even been
born yet!”

CHAPTER FiVE
    In which the Professor puts his head out a window, Becky makes a mess in
the kitchen, and a lost child places an important telephone call from an undisclosed
location
    L ater that morning, Rodney and Wayne sat on the sofa
in the room which their aunt called “the den” and which the boys called “the
TV room,” and which their father had nicknamed his “bear cave.” Mr. McCall had
given the room this name because it was the place where he watched all of his
football games, roller derby matches, and championship boxing. This was the
room in which Mr. McCall allowed himself to growl at the television and to be
a grumbly bear when his favorite boxer or favorite football team did not perform
their best. (Or when one of his favorite female roller derby skaters took a
bad fall and eight other skaters skidded and tripped and landed right on top
of her. Then the growl and the grumble would be replaced by a very loud ‘OOOF!’
or ‘YOWCH!,’ or ‘MAN OH MAN, THAT HAS GOT TO HURT!’”)
    Outside of this room Mr. McCall wasn’t much of a bear at all, but a soft-spoken
man who made a quiet living writing books. Mr. McCall wrote serious, scholarly
books about fairs and festivals and rodeos and circuses—any event in which people
gathered together to throw balls at cans or watch animals do amazing things
or observe people from other lands dressed in their native costumes.
    When Mr. McCall was a young man, he attended the 1939-1940 New