Steve and Chris are worried that the bullies they meet outside their new secondary school are going to be the norm. But Steve tells Chris about his experience the year before, when he was new to his junior school and was confronted with the school bully, Meatball. Meatball was big and ugly, and had broken Chris's model lighthouse when Neil appeared on the scene. Neil, it seems, was a genius, and made sure everyone knew it! He fixed the model and then went on to invent and anti-bullying machine. Steve had not counted on this. The machine could shrink people, and Neil proceeded to shrink Meatball's two chums and even turned on Steve himself when Steve tried to stop him. All is well in the end when the boys realise that Neil really wants friends but doesn't know how to make them, and Meatball learns his lesson. The story ( a brief novel) is good in that the bullying comes from both sides, and even though the resolution comes from an impossible invention, the moral is valid. Comic-style line drawings.