“Yessir.”
“Would you please remove your helmet?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m flummoxed,” said Smek. “This has never happened before.”
“I told him that too, sir.”
“Maybe,” I offered, just to keep things moving, “maybe you could let us in anyway.”
“Was that you, Ms. Yogurt?”
“No, Captain. The Boov has a humansboy with him.”
“Girl.”
“A humansgirl!” said Smek. “Well, I’ve got to hear this. Make them wait the usual amount of time and then see them in.”
“Thank you, Captain,” said the receptionist. She motioned for us to sit in a little waiting area. “Captain Smek is in an important meeting right now, but he will be with you shortly.”
I was prepared to say something, but J.Lo took my wrist and led me away. So we sat.
Everything was very white. People tell you purple is the color of royalty, but don’t let them fool you. If you really want everyone to know how rich and powerful you are, you make everything clean and white. Only respect and money can keep it that way.
All the magazines were in Boovish, apart from a Ladies’ Home Journal. My chair wasn’t really designed for humans, and it was stickier than I like.
After about fifteen minutes, the receptionist pattered over.
“The captain will see you now.”
FOUR
We’d been in the office of the HighBoov for maybe a minute and a half, just J.Lo and me, and I still hadn’t spotted Captain Smek. It was a really big room. Imagine you’re an ant in an ostrich egg. Or maybe that’s not helpful; just imagine you’re in a really big room.
The Boov called it the Oval Office. J.Lo insisted that the office of the HighBoov had always been called the Oval Office and that it was just a coincidence. It was maybe seventy feet wide and at least a hundred feet tall, and the walls were made of all these rippling layers of frosted glass that were kind of disorienting. A thick pillar rose up from one end of the room and tapered off to a nub just below a skylight, high above. At the base of the pillar was something called the Great Seal of the United Boov, which was also a coincidence, and which in this case was an actual seal. They’d brought it back with them from Earth. It was pretty great, though. In the corner was also a parrot and an aquarium full of lizards.
I leaned closer to J.Lo, to the tinted blue helmet that concealed his head. “So how long do we just stand here—”
“Shhh!” J.Lo scolded. I was getting impatient. So far nobody but the seal had said anything.
Then the top of the tall pillar opened up like some weird flower, and there was Captain Smek. He was holding a long, hooked baton and sitting atop a blue, pillowy chair. Let’s call it a throne. When you design an entire room around a single chair, I think it’s safe to call it a throne.
He adjusted his hat, which looked like it would honk if you squeezed it, and pressed something on his armrest.
Suddenly a huge hologram filled the space between us.
“Aah!” I said. J.Lo fell over and bonked his helmet.
A blue, shimmering Smek head as big as a doughnut shop addressed us:
“MYSTERIOUS BOOV AND HUMANSGIRL. HELLO.”
“Hello!” said the parrot.
“HOW CAN THE VERY MODERN AND CAPABLE LEADERSHIP OF CAPTAIN SMEK MAKE YOUR LIFE BETTER?”
You could squint up at the top of the pillar and see that this hologram was just a projection of whatever Smek’s actual head was doing. J.Lo said, “Helmet,” and the blue glass fishbowl around his face snapped back down beneath his collar.
“Oh great Smek! The mysterious Boov is me! I.” He leaned in toward me. “Me or I?” he whispered.
“You can tell if you rearrange the sentence,” I told him. “Would you say, ‘Me am the mysterious Boov?’ Or would you say, ‘I am the mysterious Boov—’”
“But that is not how we do it in Boovish.”
“Then why did you ask me?”
J.Lo turned to face Smek. “The mysterious Boov am I!”
“I CAN’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING YOU PEOPLE ARE SAYING,” said Smek. A thin pole rose up out of the floor between us. “SPEAK INTO THAT.”
“I am the mysterious Boov,” said J.Lo, pointing to his face. “Me.”
“SHOULD I RECOGNIZE YOU?” Smek leaned forward slightly in his chair, and so the hologram head lunged forward several feet until it was rubbing noses with J.Lo. Metaphorically—neither Boov had much in the way of a nose. “I MEET A LOT OF PEOPLE, YOU UNDERSTAND. AND YOU’RE VERY FAR AWAY.”
“Far away, bwak!” said the parrot. “Bring me a Danish!”
“Maybe you should just come down here, then!” I shouted.
“COME DOWN...COME DOWN THERE. HMM.”
“Just a thought.”
“NO, NO—IT’S”—(sigh)—“IT’S EXACTLY THE SORT OF FRESH HUMAN THINKING THAT ENABLED DAN LANDRY TO DEFEAT THE GORG, I’LL BET.”
“This is kind of what we were wanting to talk to you about,” said J.Lo. “Actually.”
“HOLD ON.”
The hologram winked off, and the flower thing closed up over the throne again. I shifted around on my feet, waiting. The parrot filled the silence by asking for kisses. A few moments later there was a ding, and the captain appeared from around the back of the pillar.
He gave the Great Seal a pat as he passed, and ambled across the gleaming white floor to meet us. Then he gasped.
“You!” he said, pointing at J.Lo.
“Yes.”
“Younow!”
“Me.”
“The Squealer!”
“The Squealer! Bwak!”
J.Lo cringed. “If...this is what people are calling me...”
Captain Smek poked his hat. “Security!”
“Wait!” I said. “No. Just hear us out.”
“But I’ve already poked the hat.”
“We just want to tell you what really happened to the Gorg,” said J.Lo.
“We didn’t have to walk in here like this,” I said. “We could have just sent an e-mail.” I winced at J.Lo. “Why didn’t we send an e-mail?”
“Ten minutes,” J.Lo pleaded.
Captain Smek sighed and poked his hat again. “Never mind, security.” He looked squarely at J.Lo. “You have your ten minutes.”
Which wasn’t a lot of time, as it turned out. We did our best. J.Lo would falter; then I’d pick up the thread; then he’d fill in the parts I couldn’t explain; then I’d tell the parts he wasn’t there for. And let me tell you: our story does not work as a ten-minute anecdote. It sounds like a joke told by a four-year-old that you just know he’s making up as he goes.
Still, Smek was rapt throughout the whole thing. You could tell he was really thinking—he even started asking questions. By the end he was leaning up against the seal, which had fallen asleep, and tapping his teeth with the fat tip of his frog finger.
Then we finished, and no one said anything for a while. Smek was staring over our heads, tapping, tapping.
“It, uh, sounds ridiculous, we know,” I said.
“No,” said Smek. He looked at me. “It makes more sense than that Dan Landry’s story. We never could figure that out.”
“Landry’s a poomp!” said the parrot.
“So you believe me?” J.Lo said, bouncing just a bit on his little legs. His head was fluffing slightly, like it did when he was really happy.
“You are still the Squealer,” said the captain. “You still brought to Earth the Gorg.”
“Yes. I know.” His head collapsed a little, like a soufflé. “That business...that was some crazy fluke, I tell you. The signal should never have been so burly. I...I cannot explain it—”
“But if the Gorg hadn’t come,” I said, “then I—then we wouldn’t have learned their weakness and sent them packing. They’ll probably never come back! This whole solar system’s got ‘bad neighborhood’ written all over it now.”
“A remarkable story,” said S
mek, thinking. He looked just like his portrait in the exhibit downstairs. Like at any moment he might veto something. “Makes more sense than Dan Landry’s story, but is still hard to believe. The people would not swallow such a story without a leader to tell them to.”
J.Lo and I looked at each other. I couldn’t tell how well we were doing until Smek poked his hat again.
“Security!” he commanded in a clear voice.
“Wait,” I said. “What?”
“Security!” said the parrot. “Security!”
“Why security?” asked J.Lo, stepping back. “Whynow?”
“To detain you,” said Smek, coolly. “To take you to the detention nub in Sector Three. They can lead you out down the beige elevator, I think—past all the cameras.”
“You don’t believe us?”
“No, I do,” said Captain Smek. “I do. And you’ve backed me into quite the pickle corner, as you humans say.”
“We don’t say that.”
“You’ve heard of all this election nonsense? Some people think they should get to decide if I stay HighBoov or not. Some people think this Sandhandler should be leader.”
“Sandhandler’s a poomp! Bawk.”
J.Lo looked like a leaky pool toy. He was all squinched up and blinking. “But I...I am loyal to you, captain,” he said.
“And I thank you for your vote.”
I narrowed my eyes. “But...J.Lo’s worth more to you as Public Enemy Number One,” I said. “There’s nothing in it for you if you tell the truth.”
“Public Enemy Number One,” said Smek. “That is good. Do you mind if I use that?”
“If you put J.Lo in jail, then you get to be the leader who caught the Squealer.”
“I am so happy you understand.”
The only sunny side here was that the security guards still hadn’t shown up. I glanced behind us, to the door where we’d come in. Captain Smek noticed too, and poked his hat a few more times.
“Guh,” he groaned. “We switched to a new hat provider, and the coverage is just...I couldn’t be more disappointed.”
“Time to go, J.Lo,” I said, and grabbed his arm. Good thing, too, because it was like he was paralyzed with disappointment.
Smek was still holding that long baton, and now he swung it down and narrowly missed us as I pulled us away. “No!” he commanded. “You will go only where and when and in what manner I say!”
I yanked J.Lo’s arm and rushed back the way we’d come, forgot about the gravity again, and grazed my head against the top of the doorjamb as we passed underneath.
“Dang it,” I said through my teeth.
“Cans not believes it,” J.Lo muttered, in English. “The glorious Captain Smek.”
The receptionist waved to us as we bounded through like the whole palace was an inflatable party castle.
“Was your conference with our great leader everything for which you hoped?” she asked.
“Can’t talk!” I told her. “Escaping!”
“Tallyho, then!” she called. “Isn’t that what you humans—”
“No one says that!”
We blew out of the waiting room and back onto that awful skywalk, and that’s when we saw security finally responding to Smek’s call. A little phalanx of Boov in olive-green suits and helmets rattled toward us, blocking the opposite end of the bridge. Each carried a trumpety-looking weapon in his black-gloved hands.
“Crap,” I said. “Pardon my language.”
“The Squealer!” said one of the guards, and the others gasped. Then they grinned, like they were already imagining all the talk shows they were gonna be on.
I looked all around, but it was pretty hopeless unless I planned to jump us both off the skywalk and onto another platform fifty feet away and fifty feet below us. I could see distant Boov on that platform, pausing in their work to watch the ruckus on the skywalk above.
“Do not hurt the humansgirl please!” shouted J.Lo. “She has not done anything!”
The guard in front raised his gun, so the rest followed suit. “Lie down now,” he ordered, “and no one will hurt anybody.”
I remembered those Boovish guns that just erase things. No noise, no explosion, just boop, your head’s gone.
“If you erase us, Captain Smek will never have proof the Squealer was ever here,” I said.
“Except for all the cameras everywhere recording this,” said Smek, who had apparently just appeared in the doorway behind us. “But the humansgirl is right. No erasures.”
The guard in front looked down at his gun. “Then...what setting do you want us to use?” he asked.
“What is that, the K-pop-eighteen model?”
“No sir, the twenty-two is standard issue now.”
“Oh, weird, I don’t know the twenty-two,” said Smek. “What settings does it have?”
“Erase, Comasleep, Tummy Trouble, and Blue.”
“Interesting. What is ‘Blue’?”
“Turns things blue. It’s pretty self-explanatory.”
Meanwhile, J.Lo was trembling beside me. So I picked him up and hugged him, which was super easy ’cause in this gravity he weighed like six pounds.
“Human,” barked the guard as they advanced. “Put down the Squealer.”
“It’s just a hug!” I said. “Not at all suspicious!”
But they might have realized I’d been lying after I took a step and leaped off the edge of the skywalk.
FIVE
“AAH!” shouted Smek. “Tummy Trouble! Fire!”
“Fire! Fire!” squawked the parrot, distantly.
Tummy Trouble sounded like nails on a chalkboard, but the guards must have missed. We sailed though the sparkling air and I felt like a superhero. Why had I been bothered by this low-gravity thing? I was amazing. I made the jump easily and landed with a roll on the lower platform.
“EEEEEEEEE!” screamed the scattering Boov, who ran for either a narrow bridge or a glass slide that connected this platform to others.
“Oh man, I really wanna try that slide,” I muttered.
“Ooh!” said J.Lo. “Oooooh! My tummy!”
I set him down. “Are you okay? I thought they missed us.”
“It...must not work on humans. Feel like I could marf.”
Smek’s shrill voice followed us down. “After them! The Squealer is Public Enemy Number One!”
“Like I could marf right out my poomp,” J.Lo insisted.
I looked up to see each of the guards pull a rip cord and inflate his uniform. They swelled up all over like they were covered in swimmies and vaulted off the upper skywalk toward us. I lifted J.Lo up again and made for the slide as the guards released air valves on their backsides and shot like farting balloons across the gap. I jumped butt-first onto the slide and spiraled down to a larger platform below us. I’m ashamed to say that it was just as much fun as I thought it would be.
“I am ready to give up,” said J.Lo.
Boov scattered off this platform too, mostly to an elevator off at the far side.
“Oh, c’mon,” I said. “I think we’re doing pretty well.”
“Only a smatter of times before someone is hurt,” he answered.
One Boov on this platform rushed us—looking to be a hero, I guess—so I turned him over carefully and balanced him on his head.
“WAAAAAA,” he yelled, waving and wiggling his legs.
“And what if we get into the outside?” added J.Lo as he clutched his midsection. “Where could two such as us hide?”
He had a point there. And even though he was being nice about it, the real problem was me and only me. They wouldn’t even have to put a description of me on the wanted poster—they could just say “human.”
“I will go into jail,” said J.Lo. “You will be sent home. And at home you can send e-mails to New Boovworld, asking for my release. E-mails to this Ponch Sanderson, maybies.”
“You should listen to him,” said the Boov on his head.
This was beginning to make sense,
and I don’t know what I would have decided if I hadn’t looked up just then to see the security guards. They were on the disk above, gathered around the edge, and pointing their weapons straight down at us. I didn’t want to find out what another blast of Tummy Trouble might do to J.Lo, so I grabbed him and hurtled us toward the center of our platform just as the Boov fired.
Over the screech of the weapons I could hear one of the guards shouting. The barrage ended and he was still telling the others, “Not all at once! Not all at once! Too much sonic will—”
He was interrupted by a deafening crack.
A sliver of our platform’s glass disk was suddenly shot through with silvery webs—and then it shattered, musically, and the glittering shards of it dropped from sight. And the crack spread.
“Oh, jeez,” I said as I grabbed J.Lo’s arm. I took off running and the crack ran behind, and I dove off the opposite edge of the platform.
“Ooooooooooooh,” J.Lo groaned.
We tumbled downward, in slow motion, as another firecracker echoed above. I caught a glimpse of a bridge coming up fast, managed to get a toehold on it to push against, and launched us off in a new direction. And now we plummeted onto a globe suspended below, hitting the upper curve of it with a smack.
The chunks and splinters of the ruined platform above us showered down, smashed the bridge I’d just touched, and barely missed the big glass globe we were clinging to. We listened to the debris break a few other things on the way down and finally crash onto the roof of the coaster section with a sound like every waiter dropping every dish in every restaurant in America.
I’d lost my wind for a second. “Ow,” I said when it came back to me, my face smooshed against the glass. And then SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK, we slid, and I dragged an oily faceprint down the side of the globe. With my free hand I managed to slow us down a bit.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I am okay. I marfed a little and it made me feel better.”
Boov inside the globe were staring up at us. One of them did something complicated with his fingers.
“That is a very rude gesture,” said J.Lo.
Captain Smek and his inflatable commandos floated down to meet us now, seated on little scooters. They looked just like the antler scooter J.Lo had when I’d met him, and they made putt-putt noises as they hovered there. Smek had his baton. He bomped me a little on the head with it.