Mom rose and nodded as she straightened the kitchen.
“La nostra casa è la vostra casa,” she said.
“I wants to come,” said J.Lo. “Tipmom gave both us permission.”
It had been a few days since we’d met Dan Landry, and I knew from Mom that he’d be in his office down by the airport all day.
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. But Landry’s office is in a hotel by the airport, and people say that area is crawling with Gorg. We wouldn’t want them to sniff you out.”
“Ah,” he said. “Yes. It is fine. You know, I was wanting to wash my sheet anyways. Someone got cat hair and milk shake alls over it.”
So I drove to the airport, thinking of how he looked after he said that, thinking about how he really just nodded and lay down on the bed. He was spending more and more time in bed.
Up ahead, past a gas station, I saw the high-rise hotel where Landry watched over his district. I parked in the lot next to a big saguaro cactus. I was still getting used to cacti. They made the rocks and brush of the desert look like the bottom of some fierce ocean. I walked under a big awning hanging over the entrance to the hotel, dodging a lot of people that were coming and going. As I opened the glass door to the lobby, it reflected a hulking green shape bending over my car.
That wasn’t another cactus, I thought as I turned to look, knowing what I’d see. A Gorg walked around Slushious, peering in, keeping one scabby hand around a shoulder strap attached to either a large rifle or a small chimney.
“Um,” I said, stepping slowly back toward the car. Gorg didn’t move, but his bloodshot eyes snapped up and trained on my face. I could almost feel crosshairs there.
“A Boov made it for me,” I said. “Back in Pennsylvania. Really far away.”
Gorg drew himself up to his full height. His body uncurled like a centipede’s, and it made me think of the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, though not in a way that made my heart pound any less.
“WHO ARE YOU,” Gorg said, as if he’d read the same book.
“Um…Gratuity,” I said. “I guess…I guess I don’t really need to ask your—”
“THE GORG KNOW THIS VEHICLE,” he said. “THE GORG ATTEMPTED TO DESTROY THIS VEHICLE.”
“Oh…yeah. Hey, uh, was that you? Small world.”
Gorg approached, a mountain of muscle and beetle skin on legs. I could see other humans standing around the edge of the parking lot, watching. In the distance were three more Gorg walking in line with their rifles held in front of them like flagpoles. Then I could see nothing but Gorg stomach as he stopped in front of me, very close. I’ve heard a lot of foreigners don’t have the same ideas about personal space that Americans do, and I guess it’s true.
“DO NOT FLY THIS VEHICLE HIGHER THAN THREE GORG, OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON AGAIN,” Gorg said.
I guess he meant about twenty-five feet. “Oh, don’t…don’t worry,” I said. “It can’t even go that high. It only…it only goes maybe one and a half Gorg high. At most.”
“VERY GOOD.” Gorg nodded. He wasn’t really shouting. I think his voice just had a natural loudness because of his big head. Then he turned to leave, and I heard a familiar sound: the lawn-mower-over-whoopie-cushions sound of a Gorg sneezing. His head snapped back and his eyes, growing ever redder, stared at me hard.
“WHERE…” he said, then, “DO YOU…”
I tried my hardest to meet his gaze. These Gorg always seemed to get really angry after sneezing, and it had a way of making me feel guilty even when I’d done nothing wrong.
His face was crimson like a cherry, and stuff ran from his eyes and nose. But I thought as I looked at him that he couldn’t be the same Gorg I’d met before. His face was different. Wrinklier, anyway.
“YOU. YOU ARE HUMAN YOUNG. A…CHILD.”
“…Yeah,” I said, wondering if this would make him more or less likely to kill me.
“THE NIMROGS HAD CHILDS ONCE.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. Gorg stifled another sneeze with his fist.
“GO ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS,” he said, and walked off wiping his nose.
As he left, all the nearby humans looked in different directions and marched quickly away, trying not to draw attention. This Gorg encounter had gone much better than the last, I thought. Maybe you just had to get used to them.
I entered the hotel and had to give my name to a security-type guy in the lobby and explain why I was there, and then he said I couldn’t see Landry, and we had a really interesting and loud conversation about that, and then he asked if I was related to a Lucy Tucci, and when I said I was he let me go on up. And I decided that at the first opportunity I was going to make up some “Lucy’s Kid” T-shirts and wear them everywhere. I climbed nine flights of stairs and felt like a sap when I realized the elevators were working, and then I found the door I was looking for. It was dark wood with a brass knob and Daniel P. Landry, District Governor in gold letters. It also had one of those do not disturb things hanging on the handle, but I knocked anyway.
No answer.
I knocked again, this time to the beat of an old Gene Krupa drum solo. The door flew open.
Landry’s face was as angry as a dried cranberry. But as he looked down and saw who I was, it softened quickly into more of a peach, all pink and fuzzy. If that’s not forcing the fruit metaphor.
“Gratuity Tucci! As I live and breathe! How are you? Come in, come in. How’s your mom?”
Inside was the largest hotel room I’d ever been in. Granted, that’s not saying much—Mom and I always stayed in the sorts of places that posted the price right on a sign facing the interstate. But this room was easily big enough to play racquetball in.
“Hi, Mr. Landry—”
“Dan.”
“Hi, Dan,” I said, trying to make it sound natural. “If I’m bothering you, it won’t take long.”
“No! No bother,” he said. “Anything for Lucy’s daughter.” And I thought about my T-shirt idea again as I looked around the room.
If there had been a bed, it was gone now. On the deep green carpet stood plush chairs and a dark wood desk upon which Landry could have reanimated Frankenstein and still had room for his pens and golf calendar. But what really got me were the bookshelves. Landry had a library of big, hardback books. Heavy, serious books you could knock somebody out with if you swung hard enough.
“Ah, a book lover, are you?” he said, and paced in front of the shelves. “Before you are some of the greatest works of literature. Tolstoy. Pynchon. Ellison. Hemingway. Many are first editions. I’ve read every one. Each and every one. I read them, and I put them up there. You know my secret? I’m a speed-reader. Officially. They have a test you can take, my certificate is over there.”
I looked at the certificate.
“You see this one?” he asked, pulling a book down from the shelf. “The Grapes of Wrath. Pretty thick, right? I read it in one sitting.”
I began thinking that this was a guy who displayed his books the way another guy might display his animal trophies. Each wall of bookshelves was more like a wall of mounted heads, and the important part was not really the animal so much as how it was killed. “Here is the head of a Siberian tiger,” he might be saying. “One of the world’s most deadly beasts! The animal weighed six hundred pounds, but I downed it with one shot after two days of tracking.”
“Here, now, is Ulysses by James Joyce. Considered by some to be the most challenging book in the English language. It weighs in at 816 pages, and I read it in a day and a half!”
“Very nice,” I said. I could hear his nose whistle when he breathed.
“Well,” Landry said, and then there was silence, apart from the shaky monotone of the air conditioner. I suddenly thought I should have showed more interest in his hobby, so I put on a smile. But it felt weird, so I put it away again.
“How can I help you, Gratuity? You didn’t come to hear me drone on about my books.”
“No, no. They’re great.” I cleared my throat. “
Anyway, Dan—”
“Mr. Landry. You were right the first time.”
“Oh. Mr. Landry, have you heard of any kind of resistance group against the Gorg?”
Landry folded his arms.
“You know, your mom told me you were getting all worked up about this.”
“She said that?”
“Gratuity, you need to trust in your leaders. I know you kids might not think that’s ‘cool,’ but the Gorg have a lot to offer us.”
“Nothing that wasn’t ours already,” I muttered.
“On the contrary. They are driving away the Boov, first of all—the Boov, who thought one state was enough for an entire country. The Gorg are giving back the whole Southwest, and we’re very close to getting California as well. Did you know that?”
“But—”
“And there’s more than that. They have a big surprise waiting for us on Excellent Day, during the Nothing to Worry About Festival. I can’t talk too much about it yet.”
Darn right they’ll have a surprise for us, I thought.
“It doesn’t bother you that they’re asking us all to meet in one spot like that?” I said. “It doesn’t seem dangerous?”
“Have a little faith, Gratuity,” Landry said, his smile fading. “I’ve met with them. I understand them better than possibly anyone on Earth. They are a little rough around the edges, yes, but—”
“But I know them, too. I know a lot of stuff about the Gorg that nobody else knows. A Boov in Florida told me things,” I said, and it was sort of true. “Like that they’re all clones of each other.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Oh. Well…their ship? It’s also covered in Gorg skin, if you can believe that.”
“I can believe it,” said Landry, “because I knew it already.”
I frowned. “You did?”
Landry walked around to the other side of his desk and sat down. He looked like he was telling the truth. He wasn’t surprised at all.
“There are people resisting the Gorg. People fighting with the Boov, and humans working together against all the aliens. Yes. And they’re good Americans and brave citizens. But the best thing for everyone right now is to play along. Be good and obedient to the Gorg. They’ll all leave soon anyway.”
“Really? They said so? When are they leaving?”
He was up and pacing again, looking everywhere but at me. From time to time he’d stop and touch something, a paperweight or little statue.
“Of course they didn’t say so,” he said. “You’re being naive. But I know so.”
“How?”
“Their whole plan, their whole operation…it won’t work. It’s untenable. It’s like a galactic Ponzi scheme.”
I didn’t understand a word he was saying. “A Fonzie scheme?”
“Ponzi. Ponzi scheme,” he said, staring up at the ceiling. “Named for…for…someone named Ponzi. It’s the same as a pyramid scheme.”
I will admit that I was picturing Egypt at this point.
“And so…” I said.
“Their whole society is based on paying and feeding old Gorg by making new Gorg and conquering worlds. They have to keep making more and more, sending them out in every direction. They’re stretched too thin. Sooner or later they’ll have too many Gorg and not enough resources, and the whole operation will implode.”
I frowned. “Implode?”
“It’s the opposite of explode.”
“Wouldn’t the opposite of exploding be a good thing?”
“The point is,” he said, “if we bide our time and do what they ask, then fewer people get hurt. Eventually the Gorg will leave, or at least have to pull back their operation. And that’s when we fight, if ever.”
I stood up.
“I’m just saying…what if there was a way to fight them now—”
“I have to get back to work,” said Landry. “You can let yourself out.”
I sighed and walked away from the desk in a daze.
“Hmm. Maybe you can’t,” Landry said. “That’s the broom closet. The door you came in is over there.”
I turned and sped from the office, mortified.
When I got back home I told J.Lo everything that had been said. Except the part about the broom closet. He didn’t like what he heard.
“This…this Ann Landers fellow—”
“Landry,” I said. “Dan Landry.”
“This Dan Landry has the whole thing wrong. The Gorg have not ‘stretched thin.’ They will not run out of the resources; they have telecloning. They cannot run out.”
“Yeah…” I said, “but then why do they invade other planets? Why do they spend so much time taking other people’s stuff away if they can just make their own?”
“Fff. Because they are jerks!” said J.Lo, throwing his arms in the air. “They are poomps! Kacknackers!”
He called them all kinds of other Boovish words I’d have to bleep if I translated.
“I agree,” I said. “I totally agree. I’m just suggesting that maybe we don’t know everything about them after all. You said they can’t get sick, but I’ve seen two of them sneeze. Or the same one sneeze twice.”
“It could not have been a sneeze.”
“Their noses were running. Something was making them sick. Are you saying Gorg just make stuff come out of their noses for fun?”
“Yes!” said J.Lo, pacing. “For fun! Why not? Who wouldn’t want something coming out from his nose?”
He was as bad as I was—he’d say anything when he got this upset. I cleaned my fingernails and waited for him to calm down. He finally stopped and stared at the wall. He took a breath.
“Maybe…maybe it was a comfort…a comfort to think of the Gorg as unstoppable. It is not so bad to be beaten when you are believing the enemy is an army of perfect monsters.”
“I dunno,” I said. “I think maybe something has changed. You guys would have noticed these symptoms before. This last Gorg looked like he cried motor oil.”
J.Lo started pacing again. Somewhere in the casino, music was playing.
“You know,” I said, “back when Slushious’s tape deck actually played tapes, Mom and I would copy our music so we could listen to it in the car.”
J.Lo said nothing, but he stopped pacing.
“The copies we made never sounded as good as the original. And if we had to copy a copy? It got even worse. So, what if the Gorg never perfected complex cloning? What if they’ve been making clones of clones of clones, and getting weaker every time?”
Mom came home just then.
“Hi, Turtlebear, J.Lo.”
“Mom,” I said, “you met with some Gorg, right? Before J.Lo and I got here?”
“Yeah, a few.”
“Did any of them sneeze?”
“Sneeze? Not that I noticed.”
“You would have noticed,” I said.
“Then no.”
“Did they wipe their noses, or get teary eyes or anything?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing like that.”
“You’re sure?”
“I was right next to them the whole time.”
“That Landry guy said the Gorg were going to have a big surprise for us.”
“You talked to Daniel?”
“Yeah. He said there would be this surprise at the, uh…festival. I forget what it’s called.”
“The Nothing to Worry About Festival,” said Mom. “Isn’t that nice? No worries…”
“This surprise is gonna be bad news, Mom. I swear. Just ask J.Lo.”
“Yes. Ask me.”
“Turtlebear…” Mom said, sounding exasperated. “Look, don’t tell anyone else, because it’s really supposed to be a surprise, but the Gorg are bringing us the cure for cancer.”
“What?” I said.
“What?” said J.Lo.
“I know! Isn’t it amazing? They really want to earn our trust.”
I crossed my arms.
“Sounds like they already have our trust,” I said. br />
J.Lo gasped. When I looked to see why, he had one hand to his mouth and the other pointing at me.
“You…” he squealed, wagging his finger, “…your hand!”
I raised my hand to my face, turning it over and back again.
“What? What’s wrong with it?”
“You are bearing the mark! The mark that has been foretold! You are The One…The One who will bring peace onto the galaxy!”
“What, this? This is taco sauce,” I said, wiping it clean.
J.Lo stared at my palm for a moment, then turned back to the wall.
“Never mind,” he said.
There came a knock at the door, just two short raps, very functional. We scrambled around for a few seconds. Soon the Boov was in the ghost suit and Pig was in the car, which would be a good lyric for a bluegrass song, now that I think of it. I went to answer the door. J.Lo had rigged up some strange hinges and a lock, and I slid the bolt back and peered through the crack.
“It’s the Chief!” I shouted. His red cap was in his hand and his peppery hair was combed. He looked better.
“Hey, Chief,” I said. “Come on in.”
“Much obliged, Stupidlegs.”
Mom frowned at this, but took his hat all the same. She looked confused as J.Lo removed his costume and I retrieved Pig.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “who—?”
I hadn’t mentioned the Chief. It seemed whenever Mom heard any details about our trip she’d go pale and start crossing herself, so there was a lot I hadn’t mentioned.
“His real name is Frank,” I said. “He’s a junkman.”
Mom winced. “That’s not very nice.”
“Oh, no. I meant—”
“I used to trade and sell junk,” the Chief said.
I rattled off a bit of the Chief’s history. Without specifically mentioning the teleclone booth, I still managed to work in the part where the Chief got walloped by a Gorg.
“My God,” Mom breathed, and crossed herself. She looked shaken. “Thank you for protecting my daughter.”
“Don’t mention it.” He sniffed the air. “You have real food.”
“Just a little,” Mom said. “We’re still having milk shakes, mostly. But I have some potatoes and onions, and it’s no trouble cloning olive oil. Will you stay?”