His words gave me a shiver. I looked at the world below, and thought about The Button.
The end of the planet seemed to be getting closer by the minute.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Duncan, Duncan, Who’s Got the Duncan?
Unfortunately, going after Duncan was complicated by the fact that rumors about Andy seeing a giant alien in Miss Karpou’s house began to spread at rocket speed. The result was that the entire town of Kennituck Falls started to go berserk.
In any other town such rumors might have been laughed off. But people in Kennituck Falls knew that aliens existed; a lot of them had seen Broxholm unmasked at our school concert the previous spring. My going off with him had only made things worse, since most grownups couldn’t accept the idea that I had chosen to go, and so had convinced themselves that he had kidnapped me. Now they were worried that more children might be “abducted.”
We learned about the rumors through the equipment in Kreeblim’s saucer, which could pick up anything the police sent over their radios. We set it to record broadcasts from all over the state. The computer then scanned the broadcasts for key words like Duncan, alien, and invasion. Within hours we learned that people were locking their kids inside, buying guns, and stocking up on ammunition.
I thought the panic was in full swing.
Actually, it was just getting started.
We also learned that while the police search had not yet found anything unusual in Miss Karpou’s house, they were seriously considering digging up the backyard.
Broxholm ground his purple teeth at that news. “If they dig, they’ll find proof we were there. Then they’ll bring in the federal government, maybe even the military.”
“Will there be a war?” I asked, remembering what the aliens had said about their projections.
“No telling,” he replied, stretching his nose further than I had ever seen it go before.
To make things worse, the rumors convinced the Simmonses that Susan was being held prisoner by aliens. We learned about this when our news scans picked up an interview with the Simmonses. They were hysterical.
“Susan Simmons, phone home!” I said.
“Excellent idea,” said Kreeblim, as she began manipulating the control panel. “A call from Susan right now could do much to settle their nerves.”
The next thing I knew, Susan’s father said, “Greetings!”
It took me a moment to realize that Kreeblim had somehow dialed Susan’s home and reached the family answering machine. The message from Susan’s father ended. The machine beeped.
“Go ahead,” Kreeblim whispered, nodding at Susan. “Talk!”
Susan nodded back, then said, “Mom—Dad? Hi, it’s me! Just wanted to let you know that everything is going great. Kree—er—Miss Karpou and I are having a super time. I’m learning more than I ever expected to.”
Boy, did she say that line with feeling!
“Well, sorry I missed you. I don’t have the phone number for where we’re going to be next, so I’ll call again tomorrow. Hope everything is all right!”
She nodded, and Kreeblim cut the connection.
“I hope that makes them feel better,” said Susan.
“I suspect it will,” said Broxholm. “Which means our biggest worry now is retrieving Duncan.”
“I’ll be able to locate him with no problem,” said Kreeblim. “He was carrying the transmitter we gave him in Africa, and I can get a fix on that. But knowing where he is won’t tell us who has him, or how they’re treating him.”
“My guess is that the government will take custody of him,” said Broxholm. “Or at least send someone to keep an eye on him.”
“They won’t get much out of him if he doesn’t want them to,” I said. “Duncan’s an incredible liar.” I stopped, then added, “Well, I know he’s different now that he’s so much smarter, but brains don’t have anything to do with lying. It’s not like being smart makes you honest or anything.” That still didn’t sound very good, so I just said, “What I mean is, he’s had a lot of practice.” Then I shut up.
“It’s all right that you don’t like Duncan,” said Broxholm. “You don’t have to hide it from us, as if we would use it as evidence against the planet. Not every being in the galaxy gets along with every other being. I deal with many beings I can barely tolerate.”
“Then why are you so upset about us?” asked Susan.
“Because we don’t think disliking a being, disagreeing with it, or even getting furious with it is sufficient reason to kill it.”
“But that’s exactly what you’re talking about doing to our whole planet!” said Susan angrily.
Broxholm tugged on his nose. “It’s what some of us are advocating. And while I disagree with the idea, I can tell you at least two things that make it different. First, your species has a habit of killing; you do it all the time. We have never done anything like this before. Second, if we do do this, it will be for the sole purpose of trying to prevent a greater tragedy.” He paused. “Perhaps that is the real difference. We will see it as a tragedy. You may not have understood that from what you have heard so far. But I tell you truly, if we decide to end human life, we will not rejoice, nor brag in song of our conquests and all we have killed. There will be no victory celebration, but a time of sorrow. Indeed, we shall mourn as we have never mourned before, because such a thing was found to be necessary.”
If that was supposed to make me feel better, it didn’t work.
“So what do we do about Duncan?” I asked.
“I think we should try to get him back right away,” said Broxholm. “He may be good at lying, but I don’t know how long he’ll be able to resist the techniques they may try on him.”
“What do you mean, techniques?” asked Susan.
“Your government has ways of making people talk,” said Kreeblim. “Not all of them are pleasant.”
Susan’s eyes grew wide. “But Duncan is just a kid!”
Kreeblim’s purple hair leaned to the right. “Child though Duncan may be, if agents of your government feel the danger is sufficient, they will not hesitate to do whatever they convince themselves is necessary.”
I figured Kreeblim was just guessing at this—until I remembered Broxholm’s previous words about monitoring secret government transmissions. Then I shivered.
“However, I doubt it will come to that,” Kreeblim continued. “More likely Duncan will simply tell them what they want to know.”
Susan shook her head. “He’s changed, but he’s still Duncan—which means, among other things, that he’s incredibly stubborn. He won’t forget that you said if word of this got out, you might have to end the mission, that it could even cause a war. If Duncan believes the safety of the world depends on him keeping his mouth shut, he might try to tough out anything they do to him.”
“I think we should go after him,” said Broxholm.
“This is the kind of thing Big Julie is supposed to be watching for,” said Kreeblim uncomfortably. “Us getting too involved with the natives.”
I frowned. “Big Julie’s not here.”
“He’ll be back,” replied Kreeblim.
“Then we’d better hurry, hadn’t we?” asked Susan, her eyes flashing with anger.
“Child!” said Kreeblim. “Do you understand that the failure of this mission could lead to the end of your species?”
“I understand it, and I think it stinks!” Susan snapped. “But there’s not much I can do about that. You either, I guess. Personally, I think you’re a bunch of loons, but there’s not much I can do about that, either. What we can do is get Duncan, since he got into this by trying to shield us.”
Broxholm looked at Kreeblim. He pulled his nose and let it snap back into place.
Hair squirming, Kreeblim nodded and said, “We’d best start by figuring out where he is.” Turning to the control panel, she touched several of the spheres. After a moment, her nose began to twitch in agitation. Soon it began to slap against her cheek.
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“What’s the matter?” asked Broxholm.
Kreeblim’s wormy hair was writhing in dismay now. Her voice filled with astonishment, she said, “I can’t locate him.”
“What do you mean?” asked Susan.
Kreeblim returned her attention to the panel and began frantically manipulating control devices. Without looking at us, she said desperately, “Duncan has disappeared!”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Broxholm. “He’s got to be somewhere.”
“Do you want to work the controls?” asked Kreeblim, her nose slapping even more sharply against her cheek.
For a moment I thought they were going to have a fight, which was the last thing we really needed. But Broxholm simply said, “No, I trust you.”
“I don’t understand,” said Susan. “Even if something happened to Duncan, shouldn’t you be able to locate the transmitter?”
“Of course,” said Kreeblim. “That’s what makes this so disturbing. That transmitter is very powerful, and nearly indestructible. Even if it was taken from him and put at the bottom of a mineshaft, my sensors should be able to detect it.”
“Wait!” said Broxholm. “The monitors have picked up something.”
Silence fell in the cabin as the computer played back a police broadcast.
“Duncan Dougal has disappeared from custody,” said a deep voice. “Begin an intensive search for this boy; national security issues may be at stake.”
“What the heck is going on?” asked Susan, her eyes wide.
“I don’t know,” replied Broxholm. His nose was twitching with anxiety. “I truly don’t know.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Final Days
We spent the rest of that long night circling Kennituck Falls, trying to locate Duncan. We had no success. At last, reluctantly, the aliens decided we should return to our task, starting by preparing a new headquarters.
“Perhaps we should use the farm,” suggested Kreeblim.
“Probably the best idea,” agreed Broxholm. “It’s the most isolated of our places.”
“Your places?” asked Susan.
Kreeblim closed her middle eye. “We bought several pieces of property last year.”
Susan nudged me. “If the people who are upset about the Japanese buying American buildings get word of this one, they’re really going to wig out!” she whispered.
The farm was about ten miles from Kennituck Falls, and it was great—fifty acres of quiet countryside, with a big old house that was filled with nooks and crannies. It took us about half a day to get ready to move in. Most of that time went to creating a hiding place for the saucer, this time not beneath the house, but under the nearby barn.
Once the hangar was ready Broxholm and I used power tools from the saucer to dig a tunnel to the basement of the house. To my surprise I enjoyed doing the work. It was good to do something real, and I liked working side by side with Broxholm.
After we finished the tunnel, Big Julie returned from the New Jersey, one piece at a time.
“I CANNOT SAY IT IS GOOD TO BE BACK,” he rumbled after reassembling himself in his new room. “BUT IT CERTAINLY IS INTERESTING. THINGS ARE LOOKING BAD. HOW ABOUT LUNCH?”
Since Susan was busy with something else, I carried eight buckets of swamp water to his door by myself.
“THANK YOU SO MUCH,” he said when I was done. “IS IT SAFE TO DIGEST?”
“According to Broxholm, that’s one reason we’re on this farm—so you can burp without disturbing the neighbors.”
“GOOD,” said Big Julie, just before he set the walls to shaking.
As I was walking away he said, “BY THE WAY—I TALKED THE COUNCIL OUT OF CANCELING THE MISSION AFTER DUNCAN DISAPPEARED.”
I turned back and looked at his door. “Why?” I asked, which may have been a little rude, but was an indication of how astonished I was.
“THIS IS TOO INTERESTING TO END RIGHT NOW,” he said. Then, after a long pause, he added, “BESIDES, I LIKE YOU.”
He sounded embarrassed. I felt like I should say, “I like you, too.” Only I figured he would know that was a lie, so I just said, “Thank you. Very much.”
“DON’T MENTION IT,” he replied. “EVER!”
I had a feeling he was serious.
“You have my word,” I said.
The next morning, still fretting about Duncan, we started our research again. We had only a few days left before it would be time to return and make our report, and about the only hope we were finding was the fact that no matter where we went, no matter how bad things were, there were always a few people trying to make things better.
Memory: walking along a city street lined with homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks. I saw a man who lived in a cardboard box reading a paperback book on philosophy.
Memory: standing in a welfare hotel where the government was paying two thousand dollars a month to keep a family of five in a single room. My father had told me how much he paid each month for our house. As I watched the mother flick roaches from the baby’s bed, I tried to figure out why the government would pay three times that amount to keep people in a place like this. A rat ran across my feet, and under the bed.
Memory: spending a day in a school that was so crowded some kids had to have classes in the bathroom because there was no place else to put them. We went to another school where the kids couldn’t use the playground, because it was contaminated with toxic waste.
In case you’re wondering, that was all here, right in this country. Not that things were much better in other places. But it always seemed weirder to me when we saw it here, because our country is so rich.
“It’s amazing,” agreed Kreeblim as her hair writhed in confusion. “Your impulses are so good, and yet the problems go on. I don’t understand it at all.”
“BAD BLOOD,” said Big Julie. “SOMETHING SICK INSIDE.”
I hated it when he said things like that, partly because I didn’t know how to argue with him. We all knew by now that the problems weren’t universal; we had seen too many good things to believe that. But we also knew that the fact that humans did some good things wasn’t going to be enough to convince the aliens it was safe to let us out into the galaxy—not as long as they saw the rest of the things we were doing.
What I was really worried about was whether it would be enough to convince them to let us survive.
Sometimes after Broxholm and Kreeblim had gone to their own rooms, Susan and I would build a fire in the big wood-burning stove in the farmhouse kitchen. Then we would sit and talk. We knew Big Julie could hear us, but after a while we got used to that, and didn’t let it stop us—partly because we felt we had to talk, both to work through the things that we were seeing, and to try to find some way to make sense of it all.
Broxholm and Kreeblim didn’t seem to care how late the two of us stayed up. “Just make sure you get enough sleep,” Kreeblim said one morning, after Susan and I had been talking long into the night.
Usually Susan talked to her parents first. To convince the Simmonses that Susan was still traveling with Miss Karpou, the aliens set up a system where Susan could give her parents different long distance numbers that, when dialed, would get bounced to where we were staying.
Mr. and Mrs. Simmons often talked about the alien scare, and said that they were glad Susan was safely out of town.
“I miss my parents,” Susan confessed to me one night, after one of these conversations.
At least you’ve got parents to miss, I thought. But I didn’t say that, because I didn’t want to get into a game of “Who’s the most miserable.”
“Are you worried about them?” I asked.
“I’m worried about everyone,” said Susan bleakly. “I keep thinking about what will happen if the aliens choose Plan D. I have dreams about that button.”
“Me too,” I admitted.
As the end of the mission drew closer, the dreams got worse. Also Susan and I noticed something strange: even as we were seeing th
e planet at its worst, we were both falling more and more in love with it.
“I just want to fix things,” she said to me one night. “I want to make it better.”
Of course, she had always been that way. But now she had an even clearer idea of how much needed fixing!
The other thing that happened every night was that Kreeblim spent time trying to locate Duncan. “I simply cannot understand it,” she said nervously. “What could have happened to him?”
But for that we had no answer. Sometimes after I had gone to bed I would stare at the ceiling and try to make telepathic contact with him. A couple of times I almost thought I had something. But then I would get dizzy, and it would fade away.
Though the alien scare was pretty much confined to our state, it continued to get worse. For some reason a lot of people had decided that the aliens were ready to invade and that the government was trying to keep things quiet.
The more the rumors spread, the more the fear grew. The week after Andy had seen Big Julie, a small group from Kennituck Falls staged an anti-alien demonstration in the state capital. And two days before we were scheduled to return to the New Jersey our monitors picked up a police report that roving gangs of teenagers were attacking and beating people they accused of being aliens.
“See how you fear the other, the outsider?” asked Broxholm the next morning. “This is the source of many problems.”
“But there must be a reason for it,” said Kreeblim. “There must be some root cause for so much fear and hatred. If we could discover that root, maybe we could find a cure.”
It was the most hopeful thing that I had heard either of them say in a couple of weeks.
“Perhaps we should go to one of these demonstrations,” said Broxholm. “Maybe we’ll learn something from it.”
I wasn’t sure about this. I figured people would be saying—shouting—things that might really offend the aliens. When I mentioned that, Kreeblim replied, “What can we hear that is more offensive than what we have already seen? We have to return to the ship tomorrow. We may as well do this today.”