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Doreen they called her! Why not Cassandra? The stuff kids spout these days!

I gave her a foolish grin. I wanted Marge to get the idea I was really a family man at heart. “That’s very interesting, Doreen. Now look, there’s the baseball game. Let’s watch, shall we?”

We weren’t very late after all. It was the top half of the second inning, the score one to one, Erskine in trouble with two men on and only one down. The colors were beautiful. Marge and I were just settling back to watch when Doreen wrinkled her nose.

“I saw that game yesterday!” she announced.

“You couldn’t have, sweetheart,” I told her. “Because it’s only being played today. The world’s first ball game ever broadcast in color.”

“There was a game on Elmer’s TV,” Doreen insisted. “The picture was bigger and the colors prettier, too.”

“Absolutely impossible.” I was a little sore. I hate kids who tell fibs. “There never was a game broadcast in color before. And, anyway, you won’t find a color tube this big any place outside of a laboratory.”

“But it’s true, Bill.” Marge looked at me, wide-eyed. “Elmer only has a little seven-inch black and white set his uncle gave him. But he’s rigged up some kind of lens in front of it, and it projects a big color picture on a white screen.”

I saw that she was serious. My eyes bugged slightly. “Listen,” I said, “who is this Elmer character? I want to meet him!”

“He’s my cousin from South America,” Doreen answered. “He thinks grownups are stupid.” She turned to Marge. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said primly.

“Through that door.” Marge pointed.

Doreen trotted out, clutching her hat box.

* * * * *

“Elmer thinks grownups are stupid?” I howled. “Listen, how old is this character who says silly-zation is doomed and can convert a black and white broadcast into color?”

“He’s thirteen,” Marge told me. I goggled at her. “Thirteen,” she repeated. “His father is some South American scientist. His mother died ten years ago.”

I sat down beside her. I lit a cigarette. My hands were shaking. “Tell me about him. All about him.”

“Why, I don’t know very much,” Marge said. “Last year Elmer was sick, some tropic disease. His father sent him up here to recuperate. Now Alice–that’s his aunt, Doreen’s mother–is at her wits’ end, he makes her so nervous.”

I lit another cigarette before I realized I already had one. “And he invents things? A boy genius? Young Tom Edison and all that?”

Marge frowned. “I suppose you could say that,” she conceded. “He has the garage full of stuff he’s made or bought with the allowance his father sends him. And if you come within ten feet of it without permission, you get an electric shock right out of thin air. But that’s only part of it. It–” she gave a helpless gesture–“it’s Elmer’s effect on everybody. Everybody over fifteen, that is. He sits there, a little, dark, squinched-up kid wearing thick glasses and talking about how climatic changes inside fifty years will flood half the world, cause the collapse of civilization–“

“Wait a minute!” I cut in. “Scientists seem to think that’s possible in a few thousand years. Not fifty.”

“Elmer says fifty,” Marge stated flatly. “From the way he talks, I suspect he’s figured out a way to speed things up and is going to try it some day just to see if it works. Meanwhile he fools around out there in the garage, sneering about the billions of dollars spent to develop color TV. He says his lens will turn any ordinary broadcast into color for about twenty-five dollars. He says it’s typical of the muddled thinking of our so-called scientists–I’m quoting now–to do everything backward and overlook fundamental principles.”

“Bro-ther!” I said.