What was I supposed to say to that?
“Don’t say anything. I’ll do the talking. But since we are going to be working together, we might as well get to know each other a little better.”
Working together? I thought in alarm.
The alien smiled. “I need your brain,” she said cheerfully, just before she put me to sleep.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Kreeblim
When I woke up again, I was in the alien’s home. I don’t remember going to sleep, so I assume she knocked me out before she took me there.
I have no idea how she got me out of the school. Lifting me was no problem, of course, since that wooden-spoon thing of hers had some kind of built-in antigravity device. But I’m not sure how she managed to get me to her car without anyone seeing. Maybe she put me in a big box. Maybe she shrank me and carried me out in her pocket. Heck, for all I know, she used some kind of alien fax machine to disassemble my molecules, then sent me over the phone lines. Who knew what these people could do?
Anyway, when I opened my eyes again, I was in a living room. Just a normal living room. It wasn’t bare, like Broxholm’s had been, and it wasn’t filled with weird alien furniture, either. It was just a room. The alien was sitting in a kind of beat-up-looking armchair, looking all green and scaly. She was wearing faded jeans and a blue sweatshirt that said Cornell University on the front. The clothes didn’t quite seem to go with the rest of her look. The slug-thing was hanging from the ceiling over her head, imitating her face.
“Welcome back to wakefulness, Duncan,” said the alien cheerfully when I opened my eyes. “My name . . . my real name . . . is Kreeblim. Well, not quite, but it’s as close as you’ll be able to get with an earth brain and an earth tongue. And this is my pet, Poot,” she added, pointing to the glowing blob on the ceiling.
The slug dropped down from the ceiling and wrapped around her hand. “Poot!” it said happily.
“Poot likes you, by the way,” she said. “I knew that when it made a picture of your face for me.”
Poot is a tattletale! I thought.
Kreeblim smiled. “Don’t be silly, Duncan. I didn’t need the poot to know you were the one using the mind enhancer. I was aware of it all along. Actually, I tried to arrange things so that it would be you, since you were one of the few kids in the school whom I could borrow for a while without causing too much fuss. I’m just surprised you hadn’t figured out who I was. After all, you had clues.”
She must have read the question in my mind. “Oh, come, come,” she said. “You were in the class when I burned my finger that first day—or, more accurately, when I burned a hole in the mask I wear over my hand.”
I wanted to groan, only I couldn’t on account of being frozen, or whatever it was she had done to me. Why hadn’t I realized what was going on? Of course, the fact that I had found Poot in the science-lab refrigerator and not in the home ec room had helped throw me off track.
“Ah, yes,” said Kreeblim, reading my mind again. “But if you’ll think back, you’ll remember that you found the poot shortly after the refrigerator in the home economics room had broken down. I had stored the poor baby in Andromeda Jones’s lab for safekeeping until my refrigerator was fixed.”
I remembered how Poot had been missing the next time I snuck into the lab; another clue I had ignored.
“Don’t be angry with yourself, Duncan,” said the alien.
But I should have figured it out! I thought fiercely.
Kreeblim laughed. “You had a lot of other things on your mind,” she said. “And you certainly didn’t have a lot of experience in using that newly enhanced brain of yours. However, I do have a real use for it—which is why I brought you here.”
That sentence had more possible meanings than I wanted to consider at the moment. On the other hand, my increased intelligence had stuck me with an incurable curiosity. What are you going to do with me? I thought, despite the fact that I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to know.
“I need you for communication purposes,” said Kreeblim. As she spoke, one of her lavender hairs made the mistake of prodding the poot. The slug seemed to absorb the end of the hair, which squeaked and pulled back in surprise, slightly shorter than it had been.
Kreeblim patted her head, and the hairs all bent away from Poot and started waving in the opposite direction. She turned her attention back to me. “You see, when your friend Susan forced Broxholm into an emergency retreat, it left me stranded here. Normally he would have come back for me fairly quickly. However, her interference created a slight crisis, and he received an emergency call to return to our home base.
“Even that wouldn’t have been so bad, except for the fact that it left me without some of my basic equipment. The worst loss was my communication device. I’m sure you’ve read enough by now to know how fast light travels.”
A hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second, or about five-point-eight trillion miles a year, said my brain, supplying the information without me even having to look for it.
Kreeblim nodded. “And you also know that even that incredible speed is inadequate for talking across the vastness of space.”
I would have nodded back, but being frozen sort of limits your nonverbal responses.
“What you probably don’t know,” continued Kreeblim, “is that we have developed a few ways around that kind of limitation. However, I don’t have the hardware to replace my trans-space radio device. So I have to use you instead.”
She smiled. “That, dear Duncan, is why I arranged for you to be connected to the brain enhancer. I needed someone to act as a communication center for me, and you seemed the most likely candidate. It was almost more than I could have hoped for when you started giving yourself treatments, since it meant I could delay the time when I needed to bring you here—which would also delay any fuss that might be caused by your disappearance.”
When she said that I felt a little surge of hope. Sooner or later someone was going to miss me and start looking for me. I tried to clamp down on that idea, but thoughts are hard to control.
Kreeblim sighed, almost as if she felt sorry for me. “Don’t waste your emotional energy thinking someone is going to come and rescue you,” she said. “After all, just last night you told your family you were going to run away from home. So no one is going to be all that surprised when you don’t show up for the next few days. And by the time they decide to look for you, it won’t make any difference.”
“Poot!” said the slug on her shoulder.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Forced Into the Field
Something started to beep upstairs. Kreeblim kept her right and left eyes fixed on me while she rolled the center one toward the sound.
“I need to go tend to something,” she said with a slight sigh. “I’ll be back soon. We can talk some more then.”
You call this talking? I thought bitterly.
Kreeblim made a clicking noise with her tongue. “Come, come, Duncan. Whether or not you are actually opening your mouth, we are exchanging ideas, which is what talking is all about. I’m sorry my language implant does not have a word adequate to describe the fact that your half of the conversation comes in thoughts rather than words. I rather suspect, however, that the problem has more to do with a lack in your language than in the device itself.”
The beeping upstairs continued. She turned and left the room.
While she was gone I tried to move. I strained as if I were trying to lift an elephant—and with about as much effect. I wasn’t cold, but I was frozen stiff as a popsicle. As I stood there, paralyzed, in the middle of the living room of an alien invader who happened to be masquerading as a slightly dippy home economics teacher, I decided that life is just so fascinating I can barely stand it.
The poot came over and rolled around my feet for a while. Then it started to climb my leg. That’s when I knew that whatever Kreeblim had done to paralyze me was foolproof. I couldn’t even shudder!
The poot kept c
limbing until it reached my shoulder, where it settled down like a small kitten. Even though I kind of liked the poot, I couldn’t quite convince myself that it wasn’t about to make itself real thin so it could ooze into my ear canal and suck out my fried brain.
Suddenly it reached up with a blob of itself—a pseudopod, my brain informed me, even though I hadn’t asked—and patted my cheek. Then it sent me a message.
Don’t worry!
If I could have blinked, shouted, jumped, anything to show my surprise, I would have.
Poot had talked to me!
Well, that’s not quite the way to put it. It had sent a message into my head, but not in words. It was definitely a feeling.
It patted my cheek again. Nice Duncan.
“Poot, you get down from there!”
It was Kreeblim. She had come back into the room while I was concentrating on the slug.
“Poot!” cried the slug in alarm as it slid down my arm. It made it to the floor faster than I would have thought possible.
“Bad Poot,” said Kreeblim when the creature wrapped itself around her foot. “Bad.”
The slug made several whimpering little poots. I couldn’t say for certain, but I think they meant, “Please don’t put me back in my Tupperware!”
Kreeblim ignored her pet. She looked troubled.
What’s wrong? I thought.
She looked at me in surprise. Actually, I was a little surprised myself. Why should I care that something was bothering her? Well, I suppose the fact that if she was in a bad mood I was in real trouble would be one reason to care. But this wasn’t that kind of thought. It just came floating to the top of my mind, as if I really did care.
Kreeblim flapped her nose at me, which I had begun to recognize as something that she sometimes did in place of smiling. “Thank you for asking,” she said. “Actually, it has to do with why you are here. That was an incoming message. Unfortunately it is so old it is of no value to me. I really must get you installed in the communication system. Curse Broxholm for leaving me in this situation anyway.”
That brought up something I had been wondering about. How come you don’t look like Broxholm?
Kreeblim smiled. “The universe is a very big place, Duncan. Broxholm and I come from different planets—different star systems, actually. We are part of an intercultural group performing a major study on your planet. Really, you humans are the most fascinating species. You have the greatest brain capacity of any animal in the galaxy, yet you behave like total idiots.”
Hey! I thought at her.
Kreeblim just clucked her tongue. “Oh, really, Duncan—you’re bright enough now to know that’s true. There isn’t another intelligent species in the galaxy that treats its whole planet like a sewer. No one else lets their children starve. Virtually every other intelligent species gave up war centuries earlier in their developmental cycle.”
Her nose swatted at a fly that had landed on the side of her face, then tucked the flattened insect into her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully for a second, then said, “I’m sure you can see what the problem is, Duncan. Now that you’re on the verge of space travel, you’re making every other intelligent species quite nervous. No one knows what you people might do once you get out there! That’s why we’re studying you, dear. We have to figure out what to do about you.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. But Kreeblim wasn’t willing to talk about it any longer. She tapped me on the forehead with her wooden spoon, then floated me up two flights of stairs to her attic.
She parked me in the middle of the room, then went to a panel on the wall and fiddled with some dials. Suddenly a blue beam stretched from the floor to the ceiling. I knew what that was; Susan had described it to me. It was the kind of force field Broxholm had used to hold Ms. Schwartz a prisoner.
“This is where you’ll be staying for now, Duncan,” said the alien.
NOOO!!
“Oh, don’t be silly. It won’t hurt you. Of course, it will be a little dull, since nothing happens in there. All your bodily processes will be on hold. Eating, drinking, breathing, digesting—you won’t have to worry about any of them. Your body will stop aging, too, though getting older is hardly an issue for you right now. Of course, you can think all you want. It may give you a chance to put together some of the learning you’ve been doing. After all, facts don’t do much good in isolation, do they?”
She pulled me over to the force field with her wooden spoon. My body was rigid, but my brain was fighting like crazy. Not that it did me any good.
Suddenly I felt a tingle in the top of my head. I was entering the force field!
It pulled me in like a vacuum cleaner sucking up a speck of dust. As I felt myself whooshed into the shimmering shaft of blue light, tiny forces began to adjust my body, pushing here, pulling there, until I was perfectly centered.
I couldn’t move my head to look down, of course, but from looking straight ahead, I got the feeling I was floating about a foot and a half in the air.
I was tingling all over.
“Comfortable?” asked Kreeblim, putting her hand against the force field.
GET ME OUT OF HERE! I thought desperately.
She looked surprised at the intensity of my reaction. At least, the eye in the middle of her forehead blinked.
“I’m sorry, Duncan, but I can’t do that.”
The weird thing was, I really felt like she really meant it.
She turned and went down the stairs, leaving me alone with my thoughts. That wasn’t altogether bad. I had been so frightened for the past few hours that I hadn’t been thinking clearly. Actually, with the radio and TV reception problems, it had been more like a couple of days since I had been able to think clearly. And what was the use of a magnificent brain like mine if I didn’t use it to think?
Unfortunately, all I could think about was what Kreeblim had said—the thing about the other intelligent species in the galaxy trying to figure out what to do about us. I was frightened—and ashamed. I had read a lot of history in the past few weeks, along with everything else, and it wasn’t a pretty picture. The idea that someone from outside had been watching all that, had been watching us bumble along, blowing each other up, starving ourselves when there was enough food for everyone, poisoning our own air—well, it was embarrassing.
It certainly is, said a voice in my head.
I felt a shiver of fear. Was I losing my mind? What was going on here?
Who is that?
Come on, Duncan—don’t you know who I am?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Across the Void
Peter? I thought in astonishment. Peter Thompson?
None other! Wait, let me try something here. . . .
Where are you?
Shhhh! Wait.
I was bursting with curiosity. But I waited.
“There, that’s better!”
This time I actually heard his voice, which was different than thought reading. To my astonishment, I could see Peter inside my head! The same brown hair, skinny face, big eyes. Except something was missing.
Where are your glasses?
“I don’t need them anymore,” said Peter with a smile. “They fixed my eyes the second day out.”
Where are you?
“In space, silly. Where did you expect I would be? Oh, Duncan, it’s glorious. The stars! I can’t tell you. But it’s frightening, too. There’s a lot going on. Big things. And Earth is right in the middle of it. We’re right in the middle of it.”
What do you mean?
“The Interplanetary Council—that’s sort of a galaxywide United Nations—is trying to figure out what to do about us. We’ve got their tails in a tizzy because our planet is so weird. From what Broxholm has told me—”
Wait! I thought. Tell me about Broxholm. Is he treating you all right?
“Well, that’s kind of weird, too,” said Peter. “I’m never quite sure what’s going on with him. But listen, I’ve got to tell you this stuff first, because
I’m not sure how long I can stay on, and you have to get word out to someone. Here’s the deal. The aliens are having a big debate among themselves about how to handle the Earth. And I don’t mean just Broxholm’s gang. We’re talking about hundreds of different planets here. As near as I can make out, they’ve narrowed it down to four basic approaches. One group wants to take over the Earth, one group wants to leave us on our own, one group wants to blow the planet to smithereens, and one group wants to set up a blockade.”
What?!
Peter looked grim. “They say it’s for the sake of the rest of the galaxy. They seem to find us pretty scary, Duncan.”
I don’t get it.
“Don’t ask me to explain how an alien’s mind works!” said Peter, sounding a little cranky. “As far as I can make out, they think there’s something wrong with us. Well, two things, actually. The first is the way we handle things down there. That’s why they’ve been sending in people like Broxholm; they’re supposed to study us and figure out why we act the way we do.”
So Broxholm was some kind of anthropologist from space, studying the whole human race like it was a tribe in the jungle?
“You could put it that way. Anyway, the other thing that has them concerned is how smart we could be if we ever got our act together. Broxholm actually seems jealous. Every once in a while he goes on about the human brain being the most underused tool in the galaxy. I get the impression they’re afraid that if we learn to use our full intelligence before we get civilized—”
We’re civilized!
“Not by their standards. Anyway, they’re afraid—uh-oh. Someone’s coming. I gotta go, Duncan.”
Wait!
But he was gone, leaving me floating in my force field to think about what he had said. I knew that at least part of what the aliens thought about us was true; my own growing brainpower had proved to me that we had the possibility of being a lot more intelligent than we act. I was beginning to understand that everything I had ever experienced was stored inside my brain. That’s why I knew words like synapse and anthropologist. They didn’t come out of nowhere. I had heard them sometime in the past. So they were in my brain, but until I had gotten my brain fried, I couldn’t use them because for some reason I couldn’t get at them. Were we all like that, filled with information we weren’t using? Why couldn’t we use it? Were we like computers with faulty disk drives or something?