The Discovery

  56 Ax was going to get stomped or eaten, one or the other or possibly both.

  Nothing to do now but crawl out from under the bed and . . .

  Dingdong!

  "Get that spider, Spawn! That's the door. Probably rent-a-cops from the security company, the useless ... I told 'em not to bother." He muttered his way out of the room.

  I squirmed quickly out from beneath the bed, stood up, narrowly missed stomping Ax myself, and pushed Spawn the snake out of the way.

  I swept Ax up in my hand and leaped back to the computer.

  And there, on the screen, the fateful words: Your mail has been sent.

  I took a deep breath. I had a morphed Andalite in my hand. A deadly E-mail was on its way. David's policeman father could decide to come back up and resume his search. And I had a painful snake bite on my hand.

  At least there was no poison. Or I'd probably be dead by now.

  Unless it was one of those slow-acting poisons.

  From downstairs I heard, "Hey, look, I told your office I didn't need them to send you. Waste of your time. Probably just a false alarm. I have it under control."

  57 I guess he hadn't seen all the stuff Ax had accidentally broken.

  The sound of the door shutting.

  Now what? I wondered.

  The E-mail had gone out. David's dad was going to start searching again. And I didn't really want to leave the house. Trouble could start at any minute.

  Spawn, the snake, had slithered away into the closet. No time for Ax to demorph and then re-morph. There was maybe just enough time for one morph.

  Just time for one morph that could stay right here in the room and not be noticed. Or eaten.

  "Ax! I'm gonna morph! I'm putting you down."

  I tossed Ax onto the floor. I wasn't too worried about dropping him. He was in wolf spider morph and I'd done that morph before. They're tough little creatures.

  I focused my mind and began to morph.

  I began to morph the cobra.

  58

  Here's a news flash about snakes: They don't have arms or legs.

  I began the morph and the first thing I noticed was that my arms and legs were withering. Not just shrinking. Withering. Like if you took a strip of paper and put it at the edge of a fire in the fireplace. And it doesn't quite burn, it just sort of... withers.

  That was happening to my arms. It was bizarre. It was the kind of thing that would make any sane human being scream like a ninny. I mean, come on! You're looking at your arms and they have skin and muscles and hair, fingers on the end, fingernails, and all of that seems to crumple and weaken and shorten and shrivel.

  59 But as bad as that is, your legs are worse. You need them for standing.

  As soon as I realized what was happening I dropped to my knees. As quietly as I could, but I'm sure I still made some sound. Great! Now David's dad would definitely be coming back.

  I rolled onto my side and back under the bed.

  I twisted my head and realized that I was twisting it too well. My neck had grown. I could look straight down without crimping my neck.

  What I saw was my morphing suit and my skin both begin to be covered by a pattern. Like tiny, tiny diamonds drawn in my flesh. The scales of the snake. They were yellow and a sort of dirty brown.

  My arms were little twigs poking out from the trunk of my body. My legs were thinning and stretching, all muscle gone, my feet gone.

  I heard the eerie sound of my own bones turning watery and disappearing. I literally felt the sagging of my internal organs as they sort of lay there, unsupported by the usual bone and muscle.

  I could hear a faint "scrrrrrnnnnnchhhh" as my spine extended out, forcing its way down one of my withered legs. And then, all at once, the other leg whipped around like a fast-action ivy or something. It whipped around the leg with my spine in it and melted together to form a tail.

  60 Now, here's the gross part. Morphing, like I said before, is never logical. Things don't happen smoothly. Sometimes it's like they happen as weirdly as possible. Like the Andalite scientists who invented morphing had a twisted sense of humor or something.

  Because even as the scales spread across my almost totally tubular body, and my legs became a tail, and my arms . . . well, they were gone now ... but even while all this was happening, my head was untouched.

  I know I still had my normal, human head. Normal size . . . with a snake where the rest of my body should be.

  Yeah, get a good, clear mental picture of that. Think about it being you. And then think about just how much you'd want to scream right about then.

  I was a worm with a head.

  I've had two legs. I've had four legs. I've had six and eight legs. I've never had zero legs. Zero legs, zero arms.

  Fortunately, my lungs were tiny snake lungs and couldn't have forced a sigh up through my human mouth, let alone a scream.

  / am so going to have nightmares about this, I thought.

  Then, at last, my head began to change. It

  61 was a relief. I mean, either be human or be a snake. Don't be a little of both.

  You feel weird stuff during morphing. Never any pain, which is good, because seriously, you don't want to think about how much it would hurt to have half your internal organs disappear and have your spine shoving into new places where it doesn't belong.

  But you sometimes feel things like they're far off. The way you feel things in a dream. Like they're happening to someone else, but they're still happening, right?

  I could feel my windpipe, the part that goes to your mouth, push up, up through the roof of my mouth. Then I could feel it join with my nose. I have no idea why. All I know is, I couldn't breathe through my mouth anymore.

  My head was shrinking very fast now. The scales covered my neck, spreading up my cheeks like really bad acne, then across my forehead and over my scalp, replacing my hair.

  My mouth was getting bigger, relative to my head. A normal human mouth is maybe, what, five percent the size of the whole head? Well, now my mouth was about a third of my head.

  I felt my teeth suddenly turn mushy. They became puffy flesh, like rotten gums.

  1

  62 And then I heard the sound of something growing inside my mouth. I felt it, too.

  Fangs!

  They grew and curled back up against the roof of my mouth. Of course, Spawn had had his poison sacs removed. So ...

  Then it occurred to me: This morph was created from DNA. Surgery wouldn't affect that. The fact that Spawn had no poison did not mean I didn't.

  I had fangs. Hollow needle teeth. And above those fangs, up in my mouth, poison filled the sacs.

  Between those fangs my forked tongue whipped . . . out, tweedle-tweedle-tweedle as it wiggled. In. Out and tweedle, tweedle, tweedle. In.

  It was like smell. Only not. I was tasting the air. But tasting it with more refinement than the world's greatest food lover. I was tasting individual molecules.

  My sight was excellent. It was even in color, which was a relief. Different colors than normal, but color.

  In addition, I felt a new sense, a new awareness added to the others. It took a while to figure out. But then I realized: I could sense heat. Not like the difference between a hot stove and a block of ice. This was infinitely more refined. I

  63

  could sense the difference in heat between the side of a carpet strand that was toward the faint sunlight, and the side that was in shadow.

  The only real problem was hearing. Snakes don't have external ears, you know. Mostly I was hearing through vibrations in the floor that seemed to travel up my body.

  But then, I'm used to that. It's pretty much the same as when you're in cockroach morph.

  Mostly, though, I was a creature of sight, with that questing, tasting tongue to back me up and an eerily precise ability to sense minuscule differences in temperature.

  And that's when the snake's own mind appeared within my consciousness.

  Cold.

  Th
at's how it felt. Like a ghost was standing beside me. Like someone had opened a door in my brain and a rush of Arctic air had blown in.

  The snake heard the sound of footsteps approaching, climbing the stairs. It was wary. Not afraid, just. . . ready. Like Glint Eastwood walking into a saloon. Not afraid . . . just making sure his gun hand was free.

  Tongue out, tweedle, tweedle, tweedle. Tongue in.

  Wary and hungry.

  I sensed heat. Not much, since what I was sensing was cold-blooded. But enough. The wide-

  64 set eyes spotted jerky movement, eight legs motoring.

  «The human is coming again,» Ax said.

  The cold, calculating, emotionless machine that was my brain noticed the odd sound in my head and dismissed it. Irrelevant. What mattered was hunger and movement and warmth.

  Tongue out, tweedle, tweedle, tweedle. Hmmm. The musk of a bug. The scent of a spider. Movement, warmth, and taste.

  Movement and warmth and taste meant food. Food was the answer to hunger.

  «Marco, what do you think we should do?» Ax asked.

  I didn't answer. Instead, I reared up, cocked my head back, stretched the thin bones that spread my cobra cowl, and with speed as great as an Andalite's tail, I fired my head forward, mouth open.

  I ate Ax.

  I ate him in one quick swallow.

  65

  I felt him squirming inside my mouth. I felt the eight hairy legs kicking.

  «Did you ingest me?!» Ax demanded, sounding outraged.

  «Um . . . yes.»

  «Have you lost control of your morph?»

  «Well . . .» Okay, maybe I had. For just a minute. Now I was back in charge, though.

  It was slightly embarrassing. As a rule, you shouldn't eat your friends.

  Then something terrible occurred to me.

  «Did I bite you? How do you feel?»

  «Urgghh . . . groggy . . .»

  «Morph out!» It didn't matter anymore if

  66 David's father saw Ax. Ax would be dead in seconds if he didn't demorph.

  I spit the spider out, which was not an easy thing to do. My snake tongue didn't work like a normal tongue. It came flitting out of its own little slot, tasting the air every second or so. It was great for picking up the scent of possible prey. It was useless for pushing half-dead spiders out of your mouth.

  Fortunately, Ax was already demorphing. He was growing bigger and bigger in my snake mouth and pushing his own way out.

  And that's when David's father reappeared.

  "What the... Oh, oh, oh! What is that thing?"

  No choice. I had to contact the man. I had to use thought-speak. Of course, there was no law saying I had to tell the truth. And it's a fact that you can't tell where thought-speak is coming from.

  «Greetings, Earthling! Klaatu barada nikto! I come in peace!»

  "Yaa-ah-ahh!" David's father said and backed up a couple of steps.

  I saw him draw his weapon from a shoulder holster and point it at Ax. I couldn't blame him. Ax was about the size of a Beanie Baby, with eight hairy legs, blue and tan fur, a wormy sort of scorpion tail, and two very tiny arms.

  67

  «Do not fire your Earth weapon!» I yelled. «We come in peace!»

  "'We'? A second ago it was 'I.' How many of you are there?"

  Great. Count on a "law enforcement officer" to notice that. I recalled David saying his dad was a spy. What was he, FBI? CIA? Or a member of the shadowy secret force that's always giving Mulder and Scully so much trouble?

  «Um, well, Earthling,» I said, «there's just one of me. But I suffer from a sort of space mental illness. Split personality. Hey, it's a long, long trip from planet Xenon Five, I had to have someone to talk to!»

  Ax had grown to the size of a teddy bear. A really ugly teddy bear.

  "Whatever you're doing, stop it!" the man cried. "Stop growing!"

  «Hey! What the heck are you two doing in there?»

  It was Tobias's voice from outside.

  «I'm a snake, I bit Ax, he's demorphing so he won't die of the poison, the stupid E-mail got sent, and this guy is gonna shoot us!» I said. «Any other questions?»

  "Stop growing, or I'll shoot!" the man said.

  Click!

  He pulled back the hammer on the gun.

  "I said freeze."

  68 «You got new problems,» Tobias announced. «David's walking up.»

  «Earthling!» I yelled. «Your son ditched school early!»

  Don't ask me why I said that. I guess I had some instinct that maybe all parents are alike and even when faced with a weird, morphing alien, they'll focus on their kids first.

  The FBI slash CIA slash Secret Whatever Agency agent's eyes flickered. "He what?"

  «He ditched last period.»

  Now, let me step back and paint this picture for you: It's me, the snake, thought-speaking to a very suspicious guy, pretending to be speaking from a now cocker-spaniel-sized half-spider, half-Andalite, while getting information from a Bird-boy, announcing that some kid had ditched school early.

  Question: Is my life insane?

  Answer: Oh, yeah. Definitely.

  "I came home from work early," David's father said. "Hah! Got him! I'll ground him for a month!"

  The sound vibrations of a door opening downstairs.

  Ax was now more Andalite than spider. And he was morphing his way clear of the poison.

  "I told you to stop that," David's father said,

  69 snapping back to the fact that maybe, just maybe, having an alien in his house was slightly more important than catching his son skipping a class.

  «Marco, hang in there,» Tobias reported from outside. «l see an eagle, an osprey, and a falcon heading this way. Should be here in about ten minutes.»

  «That's great, as long as this guy doesn't decide to pull the trigger! 'Cause I'm guessing the bullet will take less than ten minutes to travel.»

  David suddenly appeared in the doorway. He stopped dead and stared at Ax.

  "Whoa!"

  "He says he's some kind of alien," his father said tersely.

  "Whoa-oah-oah!"

  "By the way, you're grounded."

  "An alien, noway!"

  I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself. In thought-speak I said, «Yes, way!»

  It would have all been stupidly funny. I mean, it was bizarre, that's for sure. But the humor vanished in the next instant.

  Because that's when Tobias said, «A limo, two Jeeps, and a moving van, coming fast, all together! Coming this way!»

  And I said to David and his father, in as calm

  70 a voice as I could manage, «Listen to me. All hell is about to break loose. The two of you need to hide.»

  "Hide? Why do we have to hide?" David said defiantly.

  «Because the alternative is to be dead.»

  71

  Dingdong!

  The doorbell rang.

  David's father kept the gun on Ax, who was now definitely an Andalite.

  «You don't want to answer that doorbell,» I said.

  Unfortunately, the real Spawn, the original cobra, chose that moment to slither out of the closet.

  Slowly, David's father turned his gaze down to me. Then back to Ax, then to me again.

  «Yes, it's me, the snake talking. Look, don't do anything stupid.»

  He jerked the gun toward me.

  BLAM! BLAM!

  72 I felt an impact. Not pain, just an impact. I jerked my snake head and saw a hole the size of a quarter in my body, just six inches up from the far end. I was seeing carpet through my snake body.

  Now David's father was taking more careful aim.

  Fwapp! Ax swung his tail like a bullwhip! The gun went flying. So did a finger.

  "Hey!" David cried.

  "Ahhh!" his father yelled.

  CRRRRUNCH!

  Downstairs, the door exploded in splinters.

  David's father clutched his injured hand.

  «TOBIAS!» I yelled in though
t-speak. «We're gonna need reinforcements!»

  There was a severe, house-shaking pounding as many large feet ran up the stairs.

  Two Hork-Bajir warriors leaped into the room, saw Ax, and cringed back.

  And then, between them, stepped another Andalite. Older than Ax. And in some way you couldn't quite put your finger on, very, very different from Ax.

  «Visser Three!» Ax sneered in hatred.

  «We heard shots. We thought maybe we could help,» the Visser said mockingly.

  "Get out of here!" David yelled.

  «Get out of here?» Visser Three said. «Why,

  73 I'm disappointed. I just got your primitive E-mail and I rushed right over.»

  "Y-y-you want to b-b-buy the blue box?"

  «0h, yes, definitely,» Visser Three said. «l do, I do. And I'm willing to pay anything. Let's see, what could I offer you for the box? I know!» He whipped his tail and pressed the blade against the throat of David's father. «I'll pay you with your father's life.»

  «You aren't getting the box,» Ax said calmly, stepping forward to tail-range with the Visser.

  «Then this human will be separated from his head. I understand that's usually fatal in humans^

  For a long moment, no one moved. Not Visser Three. Not Ax. Not David or his father. Not the two Hork-Bajir.

  No one moved. Except me.

  I was new in the morph. I hadn't really tried it out yet. And I had no idea how you're supposed to move if you don't have legs. But the snake's own brain knew.

  I slithered. Long muscles in my body contracted, shortening one side of my body, forming a half-loop. Then, I uncoiled the half-loop to push my head forward.

  I was silent. I was swift. But I was not invisible. And I was losing blood from the bullet hole in my tail.

  74 «What is this? Another Andalite in morph?» Visser Three wondered, cocking a stalk eye down at me.

  Sudden movement!

  David's father jerked his head back, away from the Visser's tail blade.

  David ran straight at the Visser, yelling, "Let him go!"

  Ax whipped his tail forward. Fwapp! But his attack was slowed by having to be careful of David.

  Fwapp! The Visser blocked Ax's blow!

  The two Hork-Bajir stopped looking like statues and leaped forward, blades flashing.