He stopped and took a deep breath.
“I poured myself into my work. I figured that was good; I’d make money, and that would be a good way to love my kid, because he would have stuff that I never did. Except it wasn’t good enough, because the one thing I had wanted most myself when I was a kid was exactly what I didn’t give him. I didn’t give him a father.”
Stay stony, I told myself. Keep your heart a stone or you’ll never be able to endure this.
“Anyway, this alien came to my kid’s school. Peter and his friend—she was named Susan, like your friend in the other room there—they figured it out. But they couldn’t get anyone to believe them.”
His shoulders sagged. “Peter never even tried telling me! I wish he had. I get mad about that sometimes, mad that he didn’t trust me, didn’t give me a chance. Then I realize he had been giving me chances for years, but had finally given up.
“Well, Peter was a bright one, like I told you. He loved to read science fiction. That came from me. I gave him his first science fiction books.”
I blinked. I had forgotten that!
“His one great dream was to explore other planets; he thought it was humankind’s destiny. So when his friend Susan figured out how to drive off the alien, what did Peter do?”
He paused, then announced in triumph, as if he knew I could never have guessed it, “He went with him! My God, do you realize how brave that kid was? What a thing to do!”
His eyes were shining with pride. He was proud—proud of me! I had never seen that before. I felt my stony heart begin to crack, begin to split inside me.
“For a long time I refused to believe what had really happened,” he continued. “I thought Peter had just run away from home. I traveled all over the state looking for him, going to every kids’ shelter I could find. That was how I met my girlfriend in there. See, she used to be Peter’s teacher. But she left because of the alien thing, and so she was working at this place. When I came here looking for Peter, she finally convinced me of what had really happened. She knew him better than I did, I guess. She was pretty rough on me for a while, wouldn’t let me forget what a jerk I had been with Peter. But even though she thought I was a clod, we had something in common. We had both lost something to the aliens.”
He paused, then said, “Funny how the worst things in your life can lead to the best things.”
“Sure is,” I whispered.
“Anyway, I guess the real reason I’m here, the reason I’m trying to help some of these kids, is that I hope if I do, maybe someone, somewhere, will help my boy, too. It’s my bargain with the universe, Stoney. I don’t know if the universe will hold up its end, if anyone ever will help Peter. But it’s the best I can do.”
He paused, then looked me in the eye again. “Let me tell you something, kid: if you love someone, don’t keep it a secret. Don’t ever let them get away from you without making sure they know that you care. I wish . . .” he choked a bit here, and the tears started to roll down his cheeks. “I wish I had told Peter.”
The stone that used to be my heart cracked in two.
“You just did, Dad,” I whispered.
Putting my fingers to my neck, I began to pull my mask from my face.
My father stared at me in astonishment. I could see his lips begin to tremble. Then I lost sight of him for a second, as I stripped the mask over my head. When I could see him again his whole face was twisted with a joy so deep it was almost pain.
“Peter!” he whispered.
He held out his hands.
I ran to him, and buried my head against his chest. Though I had sworn I wouldn’t, I started to cry.
My father cried, too. He held me tight, and I could feel him shaking as he wept for me, and for himself, and for everything that we had both lost, and then found again.
I didn’t have the heart, then, to tell him that this might be Earth’s last day.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
E Pootibus Unum
My father and I had a million things to say to each other, a million things to explain, to forgive. But before we could really start, before we could do more than hold each other for a minute, the ambulance arrived.
At the sound of the sirens, we raced out of the room where we had been talking, back toward the nurse’s office. We didn’t make it inside; the paramedics were there, and it was too crowded for anyone else to enter.
Dad put his arm around my shoulders. We didn’t wait long; less than five minutes had gone by when I heard a wail from Ms. Schwartz. Three paramedics came out of the room. Two of them, a man and a woman, were carrying a stretcher between them. On it lay Susan’s pale, unmoving body.
My father reached out and touched the third paramedic on the arm. “Is she . . .”
The man shook his head. “Not yet,” he said softly. “But we don’t have much hope.”
Susan!
I buried my face against my father’s chest and began to sob again.
But something weird was happening. I wasn’t sure how I was aware of it. I didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything. But I knew it anyway, in some place deep inside of me.
“What is that?” cried the man my father had spoken to.
Spinning around, I saw a jellylike blob oozing its way down the hallway. It stopped for a moment and lifted a pair of eyestalks. “Poot!” it cried.
Another poot was coming right behind it, and another after that. Turning, I saw them coming from the other direction, too. Kids were running into the hallway, crying, “Come back! Poot, come back!”
“Peter, what’s going on?” asked my father.
Before I could answer, the head of the ambulance team yelled, “Come on, let’s get out of here!”
“I’m sorry,” said Broxholm. “I can’t let you do that.”
He was standing in the door of the medical office, holding a little tube that looked like pencil. Unlike a pencil, it could melt a door shut. Of course, the people from the ambulance didn’t know that yet. They paused, but you could tell they were on the verge of bolting.
“What’s stopping us?” asked the leader of the team.
“Let me put it as a request,” said Broxholm evenly. “We need some time. Please bring the child back into the office.”
Poots were coming from all directions now, sometimes on their own, sometimes being carried by puzzled-looking kids. All of them were heading toward the little medical office.
“We need time,” repeated Broxholm.
“Let’s go,” said the woman holding the front of the stretcher. She began walking toward the door.
“Wait!”
Reaching up with one hand, Broxholm began to peel off his mask, revealing the lime-green skin and huge orange eyes underneath. Kids screamed. One of the men turned white and looked as if he was about to faint. My father drew me closer—though whether he was afraid of Broxholm or afraid I might go off with him again, I wasn’t certain.
The shock tactic worked. “What do you want?” asked the ambulance woman nervously as a steady line of poots oozed past her.
“Just some time,” said Broxholm. “Something is happening, I don’t know what. But we need to let it happen. I promise we will not hurt you while you are here if you will just take Susan back into the office.”
I thought that was clever of him. They might blow up the planet later, but they weren’t going to hurt the people while they were still here in the shelter.
And still the poots kept coming. Duncan and his friends had been busy. There were hundreds of them.
“Peter,” whispered my father, “what are these things?”
“Poots!”
“What are they doing?”
“I don’t have the faintest idea.”
The paramedics were still hesitating. Broxholm moved a finger, and a burst of light from the pencil-like thing burned a hole in the wall just above one paramedic’s head.
“Please bring Susan back into the office,” he repeated.
Without a word, the
paramedics did as he asked. Poots oozed their way in alongside them. After a moment Kreeblim called, “Peter, I think you should come in here.”
My father let go of me, and I pushed my way into the medical office, stepping over half a dozen poots to do so. Duncan was kneeling beside Susan’s body, crying. Ms. Schwartz was standing nearby, her face shifting between sorrow and fear.
“Peter, I’m going out there to help Broxholm keep things in line,” said Kreeblim. “You stay here with Susan.”
“Broxholm?” cried Ms. Schwartz, her voice sharp with fear. Then she saw me, saw my true face without its mask, and the look on her own face changed again. “Peter? Oh, Peter, your father will be so happy!”
“I suppose there’s not much need for this anymore,” said Duncan. Working gently, he peeled off the mask that covered Susan’s face. Then, with Ms. Schwartz still speechless in astonishment, he removed his own mask as well.
I went to kneel beside Susan.
I could hear Broxholm and Kreeblim in the hall, trying to decide how to keep people from leaving the building until we could get a decent head start.
I stopped worrying about them when I saw what the poots were doing.
It started when two poots met in the center of the room and flowed together. Soon a third joined them, and then a fourth. The poots flowing into the room moved straight toward the blob in the center of the floor. It continued to grow as poot after poot joined the gelatinous mass, making it two, three, four feet long.
And still the poots kept coming, by ones and twos and dozens, until finally we found ourselves facing an eight-foot poot.
Ms. Schwartz was standing behind me, her hands on my shoulders. “Peter,” she whispered, “what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Just watch.”
The mass on the floor seemed to writhe for a while, smoothing out lumps in its surface. I could see material flowing inside it, as if it was rearranging itself. Suddenly it thrust out a pair of stalks, each about as thick as my forearm, and bellowed, “POOT!”
Then it began to glide toward Susan’s body.
“Duncan, get back!” I yelled.
Duncan looked at me dully for a moment, then jumped away from the cot. The giant poot moved to the end of the cot and reared back, so that it was taller than I am. Then it fell onto Susan. As we watched in fascinated horror it engulfed her body, like an amoeba absorbing a bit of food. For a terrifying moment I thought it was eating her. I could see her shape through the creature’s sides, as if I were viewing her through a piece of glass smeared with Vaseline.
Before I could catch my breath a voice behind me said, “We have to go now.”
“Sharleen!” said Ms. Schwartz. “What are you doing here? And what do you mean, you have to go?”
“Ms. Schwartz, I really like you,” said Sharleen. “So try not to let this upset you too much, all right?”
Then Hoo-Lan reached up and pulled off his mask. I could tell how much of a shock his blue- skinned, big-eyed face was to Ms. Schwartz from the way her fingers dug into my shoulder.
“It’s all right,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “He’s my teacher.”
“How wonderful,” Ms. Schwartz replied in a weak voice.
“We have to go,” repeated Hoo-Lan. “Kreeblim has called the saucer. It’s overhead now, and will be touching down in the vacant lot next door as soon as we’re all outside.”
“What about my father?” I asked, a feeling of panic clutching my heart.
Hoo-Lan hesitated, then sighed. “It is unlikely I can get myself into any more trouble than I already have. I invite him to come. You too, Ms. Schwartz.”
Ms. Schwartz looked at Duncan and me. I smiled at her. “No force fields,” I said. “Right, Hoo-Lan?”
“A promise,” he said, holding up his hand. “You will be safe as long as Earth itself is.”
At the moment, that wasn’t much of a promise. But it seemed to be good enough for Ms. Schwartz. “I’ll come,” she whispered.
I could tell she was terrified. I understood that the real reason she was coming was to watch out for us three kids.
Kreeblim shouldered her way past Hoo-Lan and touched the end of the giant poot with a metal stick. The megapoot seemed to have gone totally inert. When Kreeblim lifted the stick, the huge creature (Susan included) floated into the air.
“That’s it,” said Kreeblim fiercely. “We’re going.”
Feeling gloomier than I could ever remember, I walked between my father and Ms. Schwartz to the saucer.
We docked the saucer in the chamber beneath the barn. Using her antigravity wand, Kreeblim carried Susan’s poot-wrapped body through the tunnel Broxholm and I had dug and into the farmhouse. In the kitchen she set the poot-pod down on the long farm table.
We all gathered around to stare at it.
“WHAT IS HAPPENING?” rumbled Big Julie.
“I’ll go explain,” said Hoo-Lan. “He might as well learn that I’m back in the game.”
Broxholm looked grateful.
“What is happening?” asked my father nervously.
“I do not know,” Kreeblim replied, her nose slapping back and forth in deep distress. “This kind of poot behavior has never been recorded before.”
It was the longest evening of my life.
“You do realize,” said Broxholm, late in the day, after we had explained all our adventures to my father and Ms. Schwartz, “that tomorrow we must return to the New Jersey to file our final report?”
“We haven’t found much hope, have we?” I whispered.
“More than I expected,” said Broxholm.
“Yet not enough, I fear,” said Kreeblim. “Rightly or not, today’s events will confirm the council’s worst fears. Your distrust of outsiders is so great, so deep, that I don’t see how you can ever enter the community of planets.”
“Will it be—The Button?” asked Duncan.
Kreeblim closed her middle eye. Her hair flat in a sign of mourning, she said, “I fear the worst.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Meeting of the Minds
There was no sleep for me that night. Even if I hadn’t been terrified about what was happening to my best friend, I would have been kept awake by the gut-turning fact that human life was about to end because we had failed in our mission.
One of those lives was that of my father, who was resting, probably as sleepless as I, in the room next door.
I couldn’t bear the thought of losing him now that we had finally connected.
And so many mysteries remained unsolved. What was the meaning of the vision I had experienced in the council chamber just before they sent us back to Earth? For that matter, what was the meaning of the vision I had experienced when I connected with Hoo-Lan’s brain back in the New Jersey when CrocDoc was examining my brain? Why had Hoo-Lan been dressed as a teacher? Why had I “seen” him destroy a television set in an act of sheer rage? And why had he been so frightened when I asked him about it that he had practically begged me not to tell anyone else?
I was considering going to his room and insisting that he explain it all when I heard Susan whisper, Peter? Peter, is that you?
“Susan?”
I sat up in bed.
But the room was empty.
Peter? she repeated. This time I realized that her voice was inside my head.
I’m here! I thought joyfully, feeling the same kind of connection I had felt with Duncan when Hoo-Lan’s machines helped me form a telepathic link to him, back when he was imprisoned in Kreeblim’s force field.
In fact, Duncan was the next to speak—or think, as the case may be.
Hey, I’m here, too! he said.
What’s going on? asked Susan.
You’ve got me! I replied. We thought you were dead. Then hundreds of poots got together and scarfed you up. Now here you are, inside my head.
Our heads, corrected Duncan.
I could feel Susan’s relief as she thought, So I’m not dead, right?
I sure hope not! I replied.
But you are wrapped inside the biggest poot in the history of the universe, added Duncan.
I felt a surge of panic, then realized it wasn’t my panic, but Susan’s, which I was experiencing as completely as if it were my own. I can’t move! she thought.
As I tried to send her feelings of calmness I felt another mind trying to join us. It was struggling to get in, as if there were some wall it could not pass. It was Hoo-Lan! I could feel his frustration and his sorrow that he was not able to connect to the melding of minds that had happened between us. His thoughts came through in bits and pieces—things about congratulations, and well done, and moment of triumph.
I went after him, to try to bring him into our meeting of minds. But I couldn’t find him.
Duncan, help me, I thought. We need to get him into this. There are things I want to know from him.
I can help, too, thought Susan.
I understood, without her having to tell me, that by working with us she would feel less afraid.
When I knew that, I suddenly understood that if I wanted, I could see/experience/understand everything about Susan or Duncan.
And they could understand everything about me.
There were no secrets left. Our love and our hate were all in the open now. Every thought I had, whether good or evil, base or noble, was going to be available to them. I began to pull back, fearful at the thought of being known so fully.
Duncan held me with his mind. Don’t go! he pleaded. We need to stay connected for this.
I surrendered. Together, it took us only a moment to reach out and pull Hoo-Lan into our union.
You did it! he thought in astonishment.
His thoughts were not as clear and open as the ones that passed between us three humans. Even so, he was right. We had managed to bring him in. Now, like us, he had no secrets. Yet he was still hard to understand, mostly because the information I was picking up didn’t seem to make sense.
Finally I asked him flat out, How old are you?
His amusement rippled through my entire being. That’s a very hard question. The response depends on how you define age, time, and a lot of other things.