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"Dad," she said, "you're really worried, aren't you? You're talking about
big
trouble, aren't you?"

He nodded and was silent for a moment. Then he said in a puzzled voice, "I really can't understand it. The store's always been successful. Okay, so maybe a sporting goods store isn't impressive like a huge corporation—so it's not IBM or GE. But it's always been a good store, Caroline. People in Des Moines have always come to Tate's Sporting Goods for their tennis rackets, for their golf clubs—"

He shook his head and stared out the window. "I've just never had any problems. A couple of months ago I had to fire someone because I caught him stealing some things. That was the biggest problem I've ever had at work." Herbie laughed sadly. "Big deal. I had to let the fellow who ran the computer go, because he took two tennis rackets. We didn't even prosecute.

"But I guess that was just the start of a run of bad luck. It's been a nightmare since then. I thought we were making plenty of money—we've always made plenty of money this time of year—but the money isn't there.

"I don't know where it went. And I'm in charge—it's my responsibility—it's my store. Meet your fate with Herbie Tate, right?"

He stood up with a rueful smile. "Back to the salt mines. I have three accountants in there trying to sort things out. And they're costing me seventy-five dollars an hour. Apiece."

Slowly he took out his imaginary pistol. This time he aimed it at his own head. "Blam," he said. Then he added quickly, with a nervous laugh, "Only joking."

Caroline watched through the window as he backed the car out of the driveway. Her throat hurt. He should have explained before, she thought. I wouldn't have minded baby-sitting. I would have come to Des Moines to help out, without even complaining, if I had known.

And I sure wouldn't have done what I did this morning, she thought, feeling a little like crying. Because I can't undo it.

Through the closed bedroom door, down the hall, she heard the little thumping and laughing sounds as the babies began to wake up.

Caroline arrived at the ball field with the babies in their carriage at the usual time, just as practice was about to end.

Out in center field, Matthew Birnbaum was industriously picking his nose. In right field, Eric the Beaver was hopping up and down, in circles, as if he were practicing ballet. Someone unidentifiable was lying on his—or maybe
her
—back in left field, getting a suntan.

Poochie was at bat, and J.P. was throwing to him.

"Pooch!" Caroline called. "Don't forget to—"

J.P. glared at her. "Do you mind?" he asked sarcastically.

"Well, I was practicing with him yesterday, remember?" Caroline called. "And I realized—"

"You want to take over as coach?" J.P. yelled angrily.

Yes, Caroline thought. I'd love to. And I could do a better job of it, too. But she didn't say that. "I'm sorry," she called to her brother. "I'll wait for you over by the bleachers. I want to talk to you after practice."

She steered the heavy carriage toward the bleachers and parked it so that the babies were in the shade. One of the twins—she peered in and saw that it was the one in the yellow hat—was fretful. She whimpered and pulled at her hat. Her face was flushed.

"Shhh," Caroline said impatiently and jiggled the carriage.

When practice, followed by all the usual after-practice insults, punching, kicking, name-calling, and crying, had ended, J.P. and Caroline walked home with the babies and Poochie. Caroline wanted to tell her brother about her conversation with Herbie. But she had promised not to tell Pooch, and Poochie was walking beside them.

"You know what we were talking about before, J.P.?" Caroline asked. "Something that you were going to do—actually, you already did it—and something that I was going to do?"

J.P. looked at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. She gestured toward Poochie to explain why she was being so secretive. "Yeah," J.P. said finally. "What about it?"

"Well, ah, is yours undoable?"

J.P. considered that. "If I undid it right away, it would be," he said. "But there's a time limit on that. Why?"

"Well," Caroline explained miserably, "I did mine this morning, and there's no way to undo mine. And I wish there were. I'll tell you why later."

"It had better be good," J.P. said. "Because only some gigantic reason would make me undo mine."

"This is truly gigantic," Caroline said emphatically.

Poochie looked up. "Like the Incredible Hulk, I betcha," he said.

"Exactly," Caroline said.

"Well, I don't understand that
at all,
" J.P. said. "How can he be on the verge of bankruptcy? We had steak for dinner the other night. And he gave me that baseball glove. Even though I hate it, it's probably worth forty bucks."

They were sitting privately on the back patio after lunch. The babies were having their naps, and Poochie was, as usual, crouched in front of the TV with his thumb in his mouth.

"I know it sounds weird," Caroline explained, "but I think when you're in HUGE financial trouble, you can still eat steak and chicken breasts. It's
small
financial trouble, like Mom has, when you have to eat hamburger and chicken livers. This is different."

J.P. picked at a splintered corner of the picnic table. "Yeah," he said, "I guess. And I feel bad for him in a way. But it must be his own fault. He must be a bad businessman."

Caroline stretched her legs out in the sunshine. She watched a bird hop from one end of a tree branch to another. She yawned. One of the babies had fussed during the night and woken her up several times. "I feel sorry for him," she said. "He said everything had always been just fine. And then a couple of months ago he had to fire somebody, and that started a whole run of bad luck."

"Why did he have to fire somebody?"

Caroline laughed. "The guy stole two tennis rackets. What a stupid thing to do. He probably made a good salary. It was the guy who ran Dad's computer. Wouldn't you think he could afford to
buy
tennis rackets?"

J.P. sat up straight suddenly. "Dad has a
computer?
"

Caroline shrugged. "That's what he said. What's the big deal about that? Don't most stores have computers these days?"

J.P. looked stricken. "I don't believe it," he groaned. "All this time, he has a computer down at the store, and he didn't even tell me. He's got me coaching this ridiculous baseball team, and I
could
have been down at the store hacking around on his computer. I
could
have been having a decent summer."

Caroline stood up. "I have to do the lunch dishes," she said. "I wish you'd quit feeling so sorry for yourself and start feeling sorry for Dad. You're having a rotten summer, true. But
he's
going to have a rotten
life
if he goes bankrupt."

But J.P. wasn't listening to her. He was slumped over, with his head hanging down and his elbows on his scrawny knees. "He didn't even tell me," he muttered. "I could have been in there all day. I could even have
worked
for him, running the computer. I wouldn't even steal stupid tennis rackets."

He was still muttering as Caroline headed for the house.

"Don't sit so close," she said automatically to Poochie as she passed, and he moved his head a fraction of an inch away from the TV screen.

One of the babies began to wail.

An hour later, Caroline was rocking the baby wearing the yellow sunsuit, trying to get her back into her usual good mood. But she squirmed in Caroline's lap, whimpered, and pulled at her own ear.

"Poochie," Caroline said finally, "please, would you turn off the TV for a while? With the baby crying, it's really driving me crazy. J.P.'s out back. Why don't you see if he'll toss a few balls for batting practice?"

Poochie turned the TV off, stood up, rubbed his eyes, and looked through the window. J.P. was still at the picnic table, staring into space.

Poochie frowned apprehensively. "He looks like he's thinking," he said.

Caroline leaned forward and observed her brother. "Yeah," she agreed. "That's his 'I'm thinking' look. Maybe we'd better not disturb him."

But suddenly, as they watched, J.P. leaped to his feet. He clapped his hands together. "Obvious!" he said aloud. They could hear him through the open window. "
Totally
obvious!"

He came charging through the kitchen door and let it bang shut behind him. He stood in the middle of the kitchen floor with his arms out and his shoulders straight and his chin up. He looked like Clark Kent immediately after he had changed into Superman.

"Totally, wickedly, completely,
awesomely,
OBVIOUS!" J.P. bellowed. "I have to call Dad. What's the phone number of the store, Pooch? I need it instantaneously."

Poochie shrugged. "I dunno. Wait a minute." He went to the refrigerator and took down a brown magnetized potholder shaped like a basketball. "Here," he said and handed it to J.P.

J.P. glanced at the potholder. "
'DINNER WILL WAIT,'
" he read,
'"FOR
—'" He looked up expectantly at Poochie and Caroline.

"
'HERBIE TATE,'
" they both replied.

"Very tasteful," J.P. said with a grimace. "But there's the phone number." He went to the telephone and dialed the number that was printed on the potholder.

Caroline gave the fussy baby a cracker and put her into the playpen next to her sister, who was chewing on a toy. She listened with interest to J.P. as he talked on the telephone to Herbie.

"Dad," J.P. was saying, "I can't be positive without coming down there to check it out, but I am almost positive that I know what's gone wrong at the store."

Caroline watched as J.P. listened impatiently to his father's voice.

"No," J.P. said, "Poochie's not listening. He's watching TV. Listen, Dad, if you'd just let me come down and check the computer system—"

There was another impatient silence as J.P. listened. His shoulders were stiff.

"I
know
I'm only thirteen, Dad. But I've been studying computers at school in New York for five years.
Age
doesn't matter; it's how your brain works. My brain works like a computer. I'm a crummy baseball player, Dad, but I'm a
genius
at computers !"

More tense silence as J.P. listened in frustration.

"Dad—"

He sighed and listened some more.

"Dad. I know you have the accountants there, and I know how much they're costing you. But I am almost
sure
that if you'd give me a chance, I could solve the whole thing this afternoon.

"Hey, Dad, how about letting me speak to one of the accountants? Just for a minute, okay?"

J.P. waited. His eyes lit up. He whispered across the room to Caroline, "He's getting the accountant. Maybe I can convince
him.
"

He turned back to the telephone. "Sir? This is James P. Tate, Herbie Tate's son. Listen, sir, I'm only thirteen, but I think I know what the problem is at the store. There was an employee who was fired a while back, and he had access to the computer. I think he sabotaged the financial records before he left."

J.P. listened for a moment. "Yessir," he said. "Thirteen. But, sir, I
know
computers. I know how he could have done it. And if he did what I
think
he did, the data base still has its integrity. Do you have a BASIC interpreter on the system?"

He sighed and listened. With his hand over the mouthpiece, he whispered to Caroline, "This guy doesn't know anything about computers."

He turned back to the telephone. "Yessir," he said, "I could. I don't want to just kludge something together, though. I want to write a system, a whole new interface with the data base, and then we could—"

The man interrupted, and J.P. waited.

"Thank you, sir," he said at last. "I'll be ready."

He hung up. His forehead was sweaty, and he was breathing hard. But he was grinning. "They're sending a car for me," he told his sister.

Caroline and Poochie watched from the doorway as J.P., wearing his enormous COACH shirt, but with his shoulders straight and firm inside it, was motioned over to a dark sedan by two men in business suits. Both of them were talking to J.P. at the same time.

J.P. was nodding professionally as he listened to them.

He interrupted them politely just as they reached the car parked in the driveway. "Of course you could be right," he said. "But I feel fairly certain that what we're going to find is a discrepancy between the data base and the report maker. Now that could be programmed into catalogue sales, or front registers, or both, and—"

He got into the car, looked back at Caroline and called, "I may be gone all night!"

Caroline nodded and waved. She felt very proud of her brother and very hopeful that her father's problems would be solved.

But Poochie let out a howl. "All night? What about baseball practice? The big game's day after tomorrow!"

Caroline put her arm around him. "I'll take over," she said. "I'll coach."

The phone rang late in the evening as Lillian and Caroline sat nervously in the family room pretending to be interested in a rerun of "Charles in Charge."

"It's for you, Caroline," Lillian said after she had talked for a moment. "It's J.P., and he says everything's turning out just the way he thought it would. Does that mean we're okay? I can't understand any of this."

Caroline nodded happily as she went to the phone in the kitchen. She felt very relieved for Lillian and her father. "I don't understand any of it either," she said. "Not the computer stuff, anyway. But if J.P. says it's all okay, well, then it's all okay. J.P. is a genius."

She picked up the receiver. "Hi, J.P.," she said, laughing. "I hope you didn't hear what I just said to Lillian. It would make you conceited."

"Is Lillian right there?" J.P. asked in a low voice. "I don't want her to hear this conversation."

Caroline glanced into the family room. Lillian had picked up some knitting. Then she cocked her head slightly, listening to something: a wail from the bedroom where the babies were. She put the knitting down and disappeared down the hall to check the twins.