Read Online The Phantom Limb by William Sleator, Ann Monticone - Free Book Online Page A

whoever it was from hurting Vera—and him.
    Grandpa was asleep on the couch when he got home. Isaac wondered if he was tired or if he was slipping back into his disoriented state. Yesterday he had hoped that Grandpa was getting better, that thesituation with Vera might be bringing him out of the deep depression he had been in. Because that’s what it had been, Isaac suspected now: depression, not dementia.
    Isaac went upstairs to look at his collection of illusions. In general, he was most fascinated with the Menger sponge, the cube with the smaller and smaller holes. After toying with it for a minute, he looked up and saw the spiral aftereffect. Why hadn’t he noticed it the other day? It was a long rod with a wheel on the end of it. The wheel was white with a black line on it that spiraled into the center. When the wheel turned, it looked as if the spiral was zooming down into the center, pulling you along with it. Then, when you looked away, whatever you saw seemed to be zooming toward you. The effect was dizzying. It was a simple but powerful optical illusion.
    He heard footsteps behind him. Grandpa had woken up and followed him upstairs.
    â€œThe spiral aftereffect!” Isaac said with excitement.
    â€œThat particular model was almost as hard to find as the Menger sponge,” Grandpa said, then yawned.
    The white disk with the black line spiraling down into it was much bigger than the toy Grandpa had given him when he was five. It was about a foot indiameter. There was a dial with numbers from one to ten on the two-foot-long handle. Isaac picked the spiral aftereffect up, stared at the disk, and turned the dial that made the disk spin—which one you chose determined how fast it went. It turned slowly at first, and he watched as the black line began moving down into the disk, away from him, pulling him along with it. He turned the dial farther, until the disk was spinning faster and faster. Now he felt he was falling into it, and he actually stumbled forward.
    â€œLook away from it now,” Grandpa told him.
    Isaac followed his instructions. When he looked away, the table seemed to zoom toward him. It was so disorienting that he fell to his knees, closing his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, the table had stopped moving.
    â€œEffective, isn’t it?” Grandpa said with a slight smile. “If you stare at a moving object in a particular direction for even a short time, stationary scenes you look at right afterward appear to move in the opposite direction. Some people call it the waterfall effect. If you stare at a waterfall for about a minute, and then look at the rocks at the side of the waterfall, the rocks appear to be moving upward.”
    It actually made me fall down,
Isaac thought.
    He couldn’t get it out of his mind that he had fallen down after looking at the spiral aftereffect.
    Grandpa put his hand to his chin. “Maybe you could use it to your advantage?”
    â€œYeah!” Isaac said, excited now. “The way I see it, Dr. Ciano must be the one who’s ordered the amputation. So maybe I could somehow cause her to have an accident—something that would get her out of the way for a while, which would delay the amputation. That would give us time to get Mom out. Nobody would believe a
toy
could do that. And Grandpa … it was all your idea!”
    Isaac and Grandpa both started laughing. It wasn’t the situation that was funny—they were laughing because they had just solved a problem together.
This is how Grandpa and I used to laugh together before he got sick
, Isaac thought. He realized how much he had missed those times.
    There was just one thing missing.
    Vera.

 
    FTER THEY STOPPED LAUGHING, GRANDPA looked around at all the boxes. “There! I knew I made a point of saving the box the spiral aftereffect came in. Good thing nobody was dumb enough to throw it out.” He went across the room to get it, and Isaac thought,
I