She studies me, a bit intrigued. “Small things can be hurtful, too. I understand you have a nickname. Nicknames can be fun. But they can also be cruel.”
“They call me Alien.”
“I’m sorry. That must hurt.”
Due to the coincidence of my taking over the body of an outsider, I can answer truthfully without compromising the secrecy of my mission. “No, they’re right. I am an alien.”
“When we’re in our teens, we all feel that way from time to time,” Miss Schroeder says gently. “But why do you feel they’re right, Tom? Is it a lack of friends?”
On Sandoval IV, I have hundreds of dear old chums in every mud cluster. My GC friends and colleagues number in the thousands and are scattered across the galaxy. But here on Planet Earth, I’m surrounded by bullies and louts who treat me in cruel and illogical ways that I cannot comprehend. “Sometimes I feel isolated here,” I admit.
“So you think you don’t have much in common with your peers?”
My dear woman, I am a Sandovinian! I resemble a large Earth snail, I am more than two thousand years old, and I have an intellectual ability roughly thirty times that of an Earthling. “Not too much.”
“Tom, is your family close?”
I recall all my dear kinfolk back home. Is six hundred light-years close? “Not as close as I would like.”
“What separates you?”
“Space.”
She nods. “That’s a good way of putting it. Simple, but I’ve never heard it before.” She leans forward. “Have you ever thought of striking back against people at school who call you Alien?”
“No.”
“Never considered bringing a weapon to school?”
The Gagnerian Death Ray is on the spaceship, orbiting Earth at an altitude of more than six miles. If it is used to destroy species Homo sapiens, I won’t be the one calibrating it or flipping the switch. “Never.”
“I was talking to your English teacher,” Miss Schroeder continues. “You made a comment in class today about how we all might be destroyed soon.”
I look back into her big brown eyes. Evaluation is challenging and a grave responsibility. She is obviously worried. I attempt to put her mind at ease. “My point in class was that we’ve done a lot of damage to our beautiful planet earth and we’d better be more careful.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Miss Schroeder says, and writes a few quick notes on the pad in front of her. “Tom, I’d like to make a suggestion. I see that you don’t participate in any after-school activities. There’s a new club forming. An environmental group called the Teen Green Team. Since you have this concern about our earth, you might find it interesting and make some friends. Will you think about joining?”
“I will consider it. Can I go now?”
She nods. “Let’s talk again soon. My door is always open.” She stands and I stand also. “And for what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re an alien. I think you’re a really nice, sensitive kid.”
She holds out her right hand and I take it. You’re quite mistaken, madam. I am a snail creature from a planet of oozing red mud in a distant nebula. “Thanks.”
12
The bell rings, and a thunderous stampede immediately begins. We are free! I am caught up in the wild rush and feel an unexpectedly powerful sense of liberation. The oppressive, brain-shrinking voluntary incarceration is over for the day!
Out the exits we stream, down the steep stone steps of Winthrop P. Muller High School we scamper, and soon we are escaping down the hill. Most of the kids are walking in knots and bunches, with their friends.
I hurry home alone. I am grateful that Tom Filber is an alien. If I had inhabited the body of a boy with many friends, I would have to pretend to fit into his social network. I do not need a new challenge right now.
School has provided quite enough excitement for one day. I am looking forward to exploring Barrisford on my own. Also, I feel a strong need for a Flindarian Lapse, and that can only be accomplished in complete privacy.
As I walk home, I notice several kids riding swiftly by on primitive pedal-driven two-wheeled vehicles known as “bikes,” propelling themselves with aggressive movements of their legs. I access the consciousness of Tom Filber. Have you such a vehicle?
Piece of junk. In the garage, comes the unenthusiastic response from the Ragwellian Bubble.
When I reach the Filber residence I head into the garage. It is an old wooden structure in a state of disrepair. The door does not have a lock, which on Planet Earth suggests that nothing valuable is stored inside. Tom Filber must be right that his bicycle is a less than desirable model.
There are rusty tools and crude implements for cutting grass, raking leaves, and shoveling snow. I see deflated automobile tires and a pile of broken bricks. A tiny animal flees from me in terror. This is an example of order Rodentia, family Muridae—a mouse.
There is a pungent chemical smell in the garage. I push my way through the junk and spot cans of chemicals and dusty old glass beakers. They have been stored beneath a long workbench that is completely covered over with junk. Someone in the Filber family once tinkered here.
I inhale the stench of the chemicals and use a Ganchian Deductive Process to ascertain their composition. There are pigments, resins, and binders. Taken together, they are the ingredients of a liquid that can be applied to a substrate in a thin layer—commonly known as paint. I wonder who experimented with paints in this old garage.
Ah, here is Tom’s bike, hanging from two pegs. It is indeed not a new or impressive piece of machinery. The metal surfaces are dented, dinged, and rusted. But it appears functional.
I carry it outside the garage and get on. Balancing on a bicycle is not as easy as it looks. I almost fall off, and barely manage to catch myself by hurriedly putting down a leg.
“Hey, Four Eyes, did you forget how to ride a bike?”
It is my sister, walking home from school with a tall friend.
“No, I did not forget,” I tell her, “but thank you for your concern.”
“Your brother’s weird,” the tall girl observes. “I hear he tossed his cookies in science class today.”
“He’s such a loser,” Sally says, and she seems to speak extra loud to ensure that I can hear her words. “My mom and dad wish they could just put him back and pick again.”
The tall girl chuckles. “That’s harsh.”
I have figured out how to balance on the bicycle and glide by her. “Goodbye, sister,” I say. “As you can see I am quite a good bicycle rider.”
“What a freak show,” Sally grunts to her friend.
I pedal into the street and pick up speed. This primitive locomotive device is unexpectedly pleasurable to ride. The breeze blows in my face, and the handles that I am gripping vibrate slightly with the irregularities in the pavement of Beech Avenue.
I take one hand off experimentally and wave it around. The balancing is much harder, but I manage it. Ta-da! I head downhill and glide. Yes, this is quite pleasant indeed. The trees appear to reach across Beech Avenue and shake hands overhead.
It is time for me to find a private spot and enjoy a nice Flindarian Lapse.
13
I pedal the old bike to River Road and follow the bank of the Hoosaguchee northward. Factories spew out smog into the blue afternoon sky. I can smell the river, and it is not a particularly pleasant aroma.
How beautiful this must once have been, and how species Homo sapiens has fouled it up! In the entire galaxy, no other semi-intelligent species has ever been so foolish as to almost destroy the very place where it lives!
This is the third and final criterion the GC Preceptors have told me to use in deciding the fate of the human race. I must deduce whether it is inevitable that humans will ruin Planet Earth, or if it is still possible that they will recognize their folly and pull back from the brink. If the former, we owe it to the multitude of other life-forms here to transfer management to a wiser steward race.
I pass K
inderly Plastics Works. R&Z Refrigeration. A gray behemoth topped by twin smokestacks looms with a sign that reads harbishaw industrial paints. A wire fence with sharp spikes encloses the facility. My father mentioned the name Harbishaw, and there were the chemical ingredients for mixing paints in our garage. I wonder what my dad’s connection is to this forbidding factory.
I reach the end of River Road and leave my bike beneath a tree. No one ever stole it from the Filbers’ unlocked garage, so it seems unlikely that anyone would pilfer it in this remote spot.
I walk along the muddy, pebble-strewn bank. Amazingly, there is still much wildlife here. Frogs croak at me. A black-clawed mud crab pops out of the muck to squint at me and then quickly sinks back out of sight. In the river, a tiny brown fish with what looks like a silver sequin sewn onto its belly surfaces for a second and reflects sunlight in my direction.
Gray river mud squishes beneath my feet. I almost feel like I am home.
I choose a spot beneath two weeping willow trees whose long branches dangle to the grass and blot out the factories.
Birds warble from high above. Flies and gnats buzz all around me.
I lie back on the grass and close my eyes. For a long moment, the Lapse eludes me. Instead, the day’s worst moments vividly recur and swirl around.
I recall how it felt when Scott was on top of me, hammering me while young kids egged him on. I remember throwing up on Michelle’s shoes.
As these painful recollections come back, the Hoosaguchee River seems to rise up from the bank. I have the strange sensation that it seeps toward me in a noxious cloud of foul odors and toxins. The smell is acrid, biting. I tear up and gasp for a breath of fresh air. I seem to hear the different life-forms in the river—the fish, the frogs, and even the bugs—crying out to me in pain and misery.
A cool breeze blows and the awful smell dissipates. I try to concentrate on the sweet aroma of river mud, and on the trees and flowers.
I force the bad memories away and wipe my mind blank. All I hear now are the chirping of the birds and the thrumming of the insects. The breeze blows through me. I reach down deep into myself for the very essence of Ketchvar, and free myself from all boundaries.
Gone are the physical limitations of a boy with metal braces and ocular aids, and also of a snail creature that needs a shell at all times.
I float up through space. Ah, here is the ship, six miles above Earth, floating high above a mantle of white clouds. I melt inside and see my fellow crewmen going about their jobs. The Preceptor Supervisor is briefing GC Command. “First day of school is complete,” he is saying. “We’re waiting for the report.”
The Preceptor is a five-legged Turkloid from Omicron II, with a scaly, orange-yellow face. He clearly doesn’t like what he’s hearing back from the GC Supervisors.
“Of course I realize that the Lugonians are impatient,” he responds. “I would be too, if my sun were about to supernova. But I remind you that this mission was authorized by a full vote of the Senior Council. Ketchvar is very able, and we must give him the time he needs.”
I cannot interact in any way during a Flindarian Lapse, or I would thank him for the vote of confidence.
I pass on through the ship and see the Mission Engineers at their control panels, and the long shaft of the Gagnerian Death Ray with its shiny hood. Its monitor has been calibrated, and I see that the controls have already been set for all human DNA vectors. One touch of the glowing red button, a single violet pulse-flash, and it will all be over for the human race.
I melt out of the spaceship and hurl myself homeward. Stars swirl by me like snowflakes. They merge into a milky streak of white traced against a long wall of black.
And then two scarlet pinpricks in the distance. The twin suns of Sandoval IV!
I float down. It is evening, and the mud glows a cheerful shade of red.
As the sunlight recedes, the time of the Great Evening Squeak approaches.
Sandovinians crawl to the surface, stopping to greet each other. Those traveling longer distances zip through the air on silver floaters.
Here is Mud Cluster Seven in the Chigaboid Quadrant. I sink down into the cool clay to the Ketchvar burrow. The familiar tunnels of home open before me!
I glimpse dear faces. Ketchvar II is crawling a little slower these days but the crystalline eyes at the top of each cephalic tentacle are as bright as ever. He reaches the surface just in time.
The Squeak has begun! Millions of Sandovinians are lying in the shallow, cool water, sliding back and forth in their shells, forcing the air out in controlled puffs, celebrating and communing. Each whistle and squeak is a personal song, a sculpture of movement, a thread in the tapestry.
I float above the red ooze, and my essence becomes one with the Squeak. The great ideas of Sandoval are part of that squeak, and the news of the day, and the joyful birth announcements. There is a marvelous sharing . . .
The Squeak suddenly goes silent, and a voice like a sweeping wind whooshes out, “Answer me!”
The twin red suns dwindle to distant embers and blink out. I am yanked away willy-nilly through the cosmos against my will. This has never happened to me before! Such a precipitous withdrawal from a Flindarian Lapse is extremely dangerous, and can even be fatal.
The stars cascade into froth, the blackness of space swallows me in a sucking gulp, and I fear I will crash out and dissolve.
A voice demands, “What the hell are you doing here? Wake up and answer me or I’ll turn you over to the cops!” A hand shakes me hard.
I blink, disoriented, and look up into the angry face of a large man in a gray uniform.
14
I must have fallen asleep,” I tell the man. “Who are you?”
He looks enraged at the question. “I’m a security guard, get it?”
I am still recovering from my forced withdrawal from the Flindarian Lapse. “Do I get what?”
“Are you trying to be a wise guy?”
“No, sir.”
When I call him sir, he releases his grip on my shirt. “Don’t you know this is private property?”
“No, sir.”
“Well there are signs posted. Harbishaw Paints owns all the land to the river. What the hell are you doing here?”
I shrug, wondering why a paint factory requires such privacy. “Nothing. Just experiencing a lapse.”
He squints down at me. “Well, go home and snooze in your bed. Dogs patrol the factory grounds at night. They’re mean critters. Believe me, you wouldn’t want to have one of them biting you in the butt.”
“I believe you.” I stand up. “I will endeavor to follow all regulations in the future.”
“Make sure you do that,” he says. “Git out of here!”
I return to my bike and pedal toward home. I look back once over my shoulder and see the twin smokestacks of the Harbishaw paint factory belching black smoke into the clear sky.
The afternoon is giving way to evening. There is of course no Great Squeak here on Planet Earth, but the sky is turning a dark purple color and it is very pleasant. I see no kids out on the street. They must be home, eating dinner with their families.
I stow my bike in the garage and prepare to enter the Filber residence, but I stop when loud voices ring out from inside. “IF YOU DON’T LIKE TURKEY MEAT LOAF, NOBODY’S FORCING YOU TO EAT IT!” my mother screams.
“I like turkey meat loaf fine,” my father says back. “I only meant it seems like we’re having it every night—”
“WELL, WHY DON’T YOU COOK SOMETHING? OR EVEN BETTER, WHY DON’T YOU BRING HOME SOME DECENT MONEY AND THE MEAL PLAN AROUND HERE MIGHT IMPROVE.”
“I’m looking for work.”
“Yeah, well, don’t look too hard. You might actually find some.”
“Ruth, cut me a break—”
“YOU GIVE ME A BREAK.”
“NO, YOU GIVE ME A BREAK!”
My sister’s voice joins the hubbub. “WILL YOU TWO SHUT UP? I’M TRYING TO DO HOMEWORK.”
&
nbsp; “THAT’S NO WAY FOR A DAUGHTER TO SPEAK TO HER FATHER.”
“SHE’S RIGHT. YOU SHOULD SHUT UP.”
“MOM, HE HAS A POINT, TOO. THAT TURKEY MEAT LOAF IS WORSE THAN DOG FOOD.”
Much as I am sure I would enjoy sampling the turkey meat loaf with my delightful family, I decide not to enter the house right now. Instead I stroll into the backyard. The crab apple tree is stirring in the wind, and a tiny apple drops off and hits me in the head. As I bend to pick it up, I glimpse movement through a gap in the hedge.
A primitive wooden contraption with two benches is moving back and forth in the Peabody backyard. I believe it is known as a swing, due to its lateral movement.
I walk closer to investigate. It is a simple device, hung from a tree branch. Inside the carriage part of the swing are two wooden benches facing each other. Michelle Peabody is sitting on one of those benches, pushing a lever with her legs to make the swing move slowly back and forth.
I walk through the gap in the hedge and call out to her. “Greetings, Michelle. Do not be alarmed. It is not a stranger, come to harm you. It is only me, Tom Filber.”
She is wearing jeans and a Windbreaker and eating an apple. She cranes her head to peer at me. In the fading light of sunset, her blond hair looks like spun gold.
I walk up to the swing and stand before it, watching her glide back and forth. “How are you, Michelle?”
“What do you mean, how am I?”
“I mean, how are you feeling on this lovely evening?”
She lowers the apple and studies me for several seconds. “Fine. What about you? Are you still sick?”
“I am all better.” I lower my hands to my sides and slightly incline my head in a posture humans find penitent. “I’m sorry I threw up on your shoes today.”
“You should be.” Then she shrugs. “Don’t worry about it. Those snails were pretty gross.”
“Snails deserve respect, too,” I tell her. “Can I climb on the swing?”
She hesitates for several seconds. “If you want. Don’t sit next to me. Sit on the other bench.”