Three

displaying rows of huge teeth.

  “Will it eat me?”

  “Definitely. One or two quick bites,” she says grinning. As the shark rushes up at them, she grabs an oar and gives it a hard whack on the end of its snout. It knifes down suddenly into the depths and disappears. Behind it a curving line of froth drifts upward to the surface.

  The Inspector is shivering with fright. “When I fell in back there, I think I came close to, what do you humans call it? Dying.”

  “Don’t you guys die out there in Zyllaton?”

  “In our galaxy no one truly dies. We cease. One minute we are there—and the next we are gone. It is simpler. There are no—what’s your word? Funerals. No weeping. No sadness. No cemeteries.”

  She tries to imagine what that would be like, what it would be like for her to lose Gailus, her brother---and not weep for him. It seems impossibly awful, impossibly heartless. “I hope it doesn’t disappoint you,” she says, “but you didn’t come close to dying.”

  “But I was frightened as humans are frightened. Especially when that huge shark swam up to us.”

  “Yes, I could see that,” she says.

  “It was an interesting sensation,” he says. “But you, Feena, were not really frightened.” He looks at her admiringly. “You are not only smart. You are what do you humans call it? Brave.” He looks at her closely, pursing his mouth. “You have also made me sense something else in you. What exactly is it? Some very human thing that I don’t see in myself. Fate can be harsh, even cruel, and you are able to accept it. You can lose, and it’s all right.” He thinks it over. “In my case, I must never lose. I must always win.” He looks grimly reflective for a moment. “To lose would be the end of me.”

  She laughs her tinkly laugh. “How can that be?” she says. “Everybody has to lose some time or other. You just have to live with it.”

  “Still, you don’t give up easily,” he says. “There are very few of you left, but you go on surviving.”

  He tries his hand at rowing their little boat. She can see he is continuing to think about how humans are different from Zyllatonans. Finally, he says: “There’s another difference between us that that’s even more important.” He reaches for the right words. “You humans have feelings,” he says. “Yes, that’s it. You care. I guess that’s why you saved me. You care about life. You want people to stay alive, to keep their aliveness.” He frowns and smiles at the same time. “Zyllaton is different. No one cares about life. No one even has feelings. No one knows what that means.”

  A sly look comes into his eyes. “The Visitors will definitely want to do this shark hunting. We’ll let them, but let’s make them actually jump into the water as I did. Jump in and turn red.”

  Now he laughs a big loud laugh like the one he laughed before. Feena suspects that, perhaps, the Inspector is not too fond of the Visitors. Perhaps, they are not fond of him either.

  “This will be fine,” he says. “Perfect entertainment.”

  The Commander is in his office—or what is now his new, much smaller office--talking urgently with the cartoon stove-pipe. He seems to have forgiven it for now, though not enough to take it down off the hat tree. “I can’t stand this,” he says. “Look at these tiny little quarters he’s crammed me into. I was the most important person on Earth a few hours ago. Now I am nothing.”

  “What about me?” says the freak. “Look where you’ve got me. At least take me down off this thing.”

  “Okay, I’ll take you down. Just stop whining.” The car wash ghoul now sprawls across the Commander’s desk.

  “You’re got more clout than you think,” it says, “especially now while they’re off in the South Seas. Who’s to stop you from taking command again?”

  “Easy enough for you to say. Take command of what? I can’t even control my own matons any more. He’s made it so they only obey him. And take your leg, or whatever you call it, off my desk. At least I can order you around.”

  An idea bursts into his head. “Leg, leg! That’s it. That’s the solution! But where the devil is it?”

  “What are you babbling about?” asks the gas station hoodoo.

  “That human leg the Captain brought back from the South Pacific. He called it Uncle Jebba’s leg. We can use a human leg to make super matons—new matons that work only for me. I’ll create a whole army of them. Where can it be?”

  He begins a frantic search of the office to find the leg, opening and closing dozens of file and desk drawers. He starts to open the file drawer in the desk that contains Jome’s head. Jome realizes he’s about to be discovered. It’s a scary moment. What should he do? Use up the last of his remaining imperatives, the one that would let him teleport himself away from there?

  He is saved by the car wash creature. “I found it!” it shouts. The leg is in a plastic bag hanging from the hat tree—right next to where the ghoul balloon has been hanging all along.

  It’s time for some bluster, the kind the Commander has been practicing since forever. “We need to get into that facility where they make replacements for the matons,” he says, “see if we can get them to make some Uncle Jebba copies.”

  “We? You mean you need to get in there,” says the yellow puppet. “They’ll never let me near it. It should be easy for you. Just turn on some of your evil charm. They used to obey you. I’m sure they haven’t forgotten how. Tell them the Inspector ordered it.”

  Some time later there’s a knock on the door of the Commander’s office. The car wash banshee goes to answer it. “I shouldn’t be doing this” it says aloud. “He should answer his own door.”

  When the door is opened, there stands the Commander himself—grinning hugely. His arms are full. It looks like a vast load of laundry, but it isn’t. “Well, I lied and I pretended and I prevaricated,” he says. “And amazingly they let me create a whole bunch of Jebbas. There’s one problem, though. They wouldn’t let me make flesh and blood copies—said they needed the Inspector’s permission for that—so they’re, well, er, balloons. But they sure look like the real thing.”

  He dumps the pile of “laundry” onto the floor, and it reveals itself to be a tremendous stack of rubber replicas of Uncle Jebba. “I told them the Inspector wants them for a birthday party. Now it’s all up to you, my friend. We’ve got to blow them up, and you’re the one with a blower.”

  “What happens to me?” asks the gas station ghoul. “I need that blower to be me, to stay blown up.”

  “You’ll have to be, shall we say, postponed,” says the Commander. “Your turn at the blower will have to wait till we’ve blown up every one of these guys.”

  “And what then?” asks the creature.

  “Then,” says the Commander, “we take back this planet.”

  “This is ridiculous,” wails his cartoon buddy. “All the Inspector needs is one seamstress with a sharp needle—and that’ll be the end of your army. Your scheme is doomed.”

  “Pshaw!” shouts the Commander. “Absolute pshaw! I command you to start blowing up these Jebbas now.”

  “You will have to do it, too. I can’t do it alone.”

  “I am the Commander here. I do not blow up balloons.”

  “Do you want the Inspector to utterly destroy you?”

  The Commander is hesitating. He runs his hand thoughtfully over his goatee. “I have decided that under special circumstances Commanders do blow up balloons.”

  It’s a frantic scene. Over the next several hours the Commander’s small new office, adjacent hallways, two men’s rooms and an exercise gym become jammed to the ceiling with dozens. scores, hundreds of bobbing, bouncing Jebbaesque inflatables.

  “Well, they do look impressive. Maybe the Inspector will take a liking to them,” says the stove-pipe guy.

  “No, that’s not what we want. We want him to be intimidated, overwhelmed, struck dumb.”

&nbs
p; “I suppose that’s possible, too,” says the puppet. It sighs. “But not too likely.”

  “He’ll take one look,” says the Commander expansively, “assume they’re real matons, quake in his boots and surrender to us.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Suddenly, the Inspector enters the Commander’s grand, former office out of thin air, back now from his South Seas trip. Feena is at his side. The Inspector’s imperious manner has abruptly changed. He now seems extremely concerned and distracted. “The Visitors will be arriving very soon,” he says nervously. “Why wasn’t the Commander here to greet me?”

  “How do you know they’re almost here?” she asks.

  “I just know,” he says. “They have an aura, an effusion that precedes them even if they are millions of miles away.”

  She is surprised. He always seems so cool and on top of it.

  Maybe the Visitors’ visit worries him more than he lets on. “Yes,” he says, reading her thoughts. “I am worried. The Visitors have incredible power, far more than was ever given to me. I have been with them when they were displeased,” he says. “Planets and whole solar systems have vanished in billows of fire.” Feena imagines her Earth disappearing in such a fashion. “They must be satisfied with their visit,” he says, “totally and completely satisfied that everything here is exactly to their liking. Or I hate to think what might happen to the Earth.”

  Suddenly, there is a loud, imperious rapping on the door of