stopped and quiet returned, except for the ringing in my ears. Dad had paused time once again.
“Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve earned yourself another question. Ready?”
I nodded wearily.
“Who said, ‘Success is 99 percent failure’?”
My mind was blank. I was thinking it was somebody Japanese, but—
“Answer the question, Daniel, or if you’d rather, we can play this level again.”
I racked my brains and did a quick search through the virtual Wikipedia I’d installed in my head. “Um,” I said, playing it cool, so Dad didn’t discover I had kind of, sort of, cheated. “Soichiro Honda, the guy who started the manufacturing company.”
“And I trust you see why that, too, is applicable to your current situation.”
“You mean I should assume Number 1’s going to have some serious failures coming soon because he’s had 99 percent successes so far?”
“I’m saying you can profit from your mistakes.”
“Ah,” I said, not following him, but once again not exactly having enough time to speculate. Because now I was standing on what looked to be a near present-day Tokyo street. Judging by the big white-and-orange concrete barriers lining it, it looked like it was closed off for a Grand Prix street-race course.
“Next question,” Dad continued. “What two words did General MacArthur, supreme commander of Japan in the years after World War II, say summed up the history of failure in war?”
This one I knew all too well.
“Too late,” I said.
Dad nodded and was gone.
My ears were still ringing from the car factory, but I detected a sort of roaring, thunder-like sound in the distance. And it was getting louder by the second.
Chapter 30
IT WAS NOT a mystery that took long to figure out. In a moment, I saw the source of the noise—motorcycles—1400cc Hondas, in all poetic probability.
Dear Old Dad had transported me right into the middle of a MotoGP exhibition street course in downtown Tokyo. A pack of overpowered, smooth-tired street racers was now rounding the corner about a half mile away and coming straight at me. They’d have plenty of time to stop or steer around me, assuming they took pity on me.
But it was soon obvious, mainly from how they were laughing and pointing, that they had no interest in avoiding me. The fact that the racers were barb-tailed, cloven-hoofed, red-horned demons—or, at least, a species of alien that very much looked that way—was also something of a warning sign.
Fortunately, the course was less than one hundred and fifty feet wide, so I didn’t need to sprint much faster than Usein Bolt to get to safety. When I glanced back at them from the side of the road, it looked like they didn’t care I was escaping. They were still speeding forward and laughing their pointy heads off.
I turned to see what they were looking at and spotted their real target: a little girl clutching a big Hello Kitty doll and frozen in pure horror at the sight of the approaching demon bikers.
“RUN!” I screamed, skidding to a stop at the barrier. This would be close—the demons were about to go by me, and the girl wasn’t much farther. If I was going to save her, there weren’t even seconds—
Time-out! If I could stop time, but I knew immediately I couldn’t dive below the surface right then. It’s one of those things you either can or can’t feel, and I definitely didn’t have the feeling.
So I did the next best thing. In an instant, I gauged the distance, studied the ground by her side, and teleported myself there.
“Grab hold of me!” I yelled
Teleporting others is not a good idea unless you happen to know the location and nature of every molecule in their bodies, because if you make any bad assumptions, well… just be sure to bring a bucket and a mop.
So that meant right then I had somewhere on the order of 1.043 seconds in which to physically carry her out of harm’s way.
She started to grab me as I turned and glanced into the yellows of the approaching demons’ loathsome eyes. I quickly calculated the leap I was going to have to make to get us airborne and to safety. But there was something wrong with how she was holding on to me—something painfully wrong. I turned to look at her and saw what it was.
She was no longer a cute little girl with a cute little stuffed animal in her arms; she was a long-tailed, red-skinned demon—a demon with very sharp teeth that she had just sunk into my left arm. The