My Teacher Glows in the Dark

  While we ate, Fleef told me how to refine my next order, based on what I did and didn’t like in this batch of stuff. She was a good teacher, and I was starting to like her.

  After we had all had a bit to eat, Gurk said, “Here’s the question we were arguing about when you stepped out of the elevator. What would happen if—”

  Before he could finish, the lights blinked three times. “Better lie down, Krepta,” said Fleef, throwing herself to the floor. “You’ll be less likely to throw up that way.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Faster Than Light

  I stretched out on the floor beside Fleef and Gurk. After a second, I raised my head. Almost everyone else in the large room was on the floor with us.

  “Put your head down,” whispered Fleef. “Quickly!”

  I felt like I was in one of those stories where the king was about to come by, and everyone had to bow down. I stared at the ceiling, wondering if the aliens had some supreme high commander they treated like a god.

  At first, I thought the ceiling was made of green marble. Then I noticed that the swirls of color were slowly moving. I was thinking how pretty it was when an ear-splitting squeal sliced through the room, as if some monstrous claw had just scraped across the blackboard of the universe. A low moan rose from the aliens on the floor, the kind of sound you might hear if a thousand kids all began to feel carsick at the same time.

  It took me a moment to realize that my own voice was part of that mass moan. My stomach lurched. I clutched at it, trying to keep down what I had eaten. I didn’t want to disgust my new friends by throwing up on them! (I was also hoping they were not going to throw up on me. I was pretty nervous about what it might smell like if Gurk tossed his cookies—or whatever it is that giant pickles toss when they lose their lunches.)

  Suddenly I felt like I was being pulled apart. Only this was a thousand times worse than my first trip through the transcendental elevator. It was as if some giant had my head, another had my feet, and they were having a tug of war—with about a thousand other people pulling at the top, bottom, and sides of me just for the heck of it.

  About the time I thought I absolutely couldn’t stand it any longer, it stopped. I lay flat for a moment, wondering what had just happened to me.

  Gurk touched my shoulder. “Are you all right, Krepta?” he asked softly.

  I was so disoriented it took me a moment to realize he was speaking to me. “I’m not sure,” I whispered. “What just happened?”

  “The ship made a space-shift,” said Fleef softly. “Galactically speaking, it’s the only way to travel.”

  I opened and closed my eyes a few times. The ceiling didn’t seem so pretty anymore. In fact, it was kind of nauseating. I wished it would stop moving.

  “What’s a space-shift?” I asked weakly.

  “Instant transportation,” said Gurk, rolling over and pushing himself up with his skinny arms.

  “Like the transcendental elevators, but on a grand scale,” added Fleef. She was already on her feet, holding out a six-fingered orange hand to help me up. “The ship just moved several light-years from where it was when you joined us.”

  I felt an unexpected sense of loss wash over me. How far from home was I now?

  “Could you tell me a bit more?” I asked.

  “Well, do you know about the speed of light?” asked Gurk.

  “It goes 186,000 miles per second,” I said, trusting their implants to figure out what miles are. “It’s the fastest thing we know.”

  “It’s the fastest thing anyone knows,” said Fleef, patting her stalk to make sure it was all right. “Now that would make traveling around the galaxy nearly impossible, since even at the speed of light it would take you years to get from one star system to another. Centuries, sometimes.”

  “So the best method is to skip all that traveling,” said Gurk, sliding a wart across his forehead. “Which is what we just did.”

  I staggered to my chair, trying to keep my stomach from providing a review of everything I had just eaten. “Could you make that a little more clear?”

  Gurk punched some buttons on the food preparation device. A plate floated up, carrying a thick red noodle that had to be at least three feet long.

  “How can you eat so soon after that shift?” asked Fleef.

  “This isn’t a snack, it’s a demonstration,” replied Gurk. “Sit down, Krepta, and I will try to explain.” He picked up the noodle. “If you stretch out this bee-ranga—which, by the way, is the preferred snack on the planet Hopfner—you have a straight line. Now, if you were at one end, and the place you wanted to go was at the other end, you would have to travel the entire length of the bee-ranga to get there, right?”

  I nodded.

  “But if you join the ends of the bee-ranga, like this, all you would have to do is go from here—to here!” And with that he brought the two ends of the noodle together.

  “What does that have to do with us?” I asked.

  “That’s how this ship travels. We bring two parts of space together and then step across them.”

  “It’s the stepping across that’s the hard part,” added Fleef. “It makes most beings quite queasy.”

  “But how do you do it?”

  “I don’t know how it works,” said Gurk. “All I know is the basic idea.”

  That seemed strange, until I thought about how many people on Earth ride around in cars without having the slightest idea of how they work. I decided to switch questions. “If we just jumped several light-years, then where are we now?”

  “How do you expect us to know?” asked Gurk, popping the bee-ranga into his mouth. “We’re not the captain.”

  The sight of Gurk eating seemed to make Fleef queasy. “If my friend were feeling a little more polite,” she whispered, “he would mention that you could find out by asking your URAT. I would guess we’re heading back toward the center of the galaxy. If that was a typical jump, we probably moved about twenty light-years.”

  A strange feeling came over me. The fastest rocket ever built on earth couldn’t get this far in a hundred years, I thought to myself.

  With a shock, I realized I was homesick.

  Fleef tapped me on the shoulder. “Are you all right, Krepta?”

  “What? Oh, sure,” I lied. “I’m fine, just fine.”

  I figured there was no point in telling them how I felt. To begin with, I wasn’t sure I understood it myself. Besides, years of living with my father had taught me not to bother talking about things that upset me.

  “Good,” said Fleef. “Then maybe I can finally ask you my question. What we were arguing about when you first met us was whether or not it made any difference if we borrowed some of your planet’s children for a while.”

  “You mean like when Broxholm was planning to steal some kids from our school?” I asked.

  “No, no, no,” said Fleef. “We weren’t going to steal anyone—just borrow them for a while. It’s part of a research project. We would have brought them back! Which is why I don’t think anyone would have minded that much. But Gurk says people, parents especially, would have been terribly upset. So—which of us is right?”

  “Gurk is. Parents would have gone berserk. You can’t just go around stealing—er, borrowing kids like that.”

  “See!” said Gurk triumphantly. Actually, he didn’t say it, he pulled off one of his brown warts and waved it in front of Fleef’s face, which my translation device told me was a sign of victory.

  “But it doesn’t make sense,” said Fleef. She looked upset. Not just unhappy because Gurk had won the argument; she seemed genuinely disturbed.

  “What doesn’t make sense?” I asked.

  “Oh, ignore her,” said Gurk. “She’s just annoyed because she wants to believe you people don’t have well developed emotions.”

  “Why would you want to believe that?” I asked.

  Fleef didn’t answer. Gurk spoke for her. “Because then she won’t feel so bad if we have to blow up your p
lanet.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Room Service

  If you’ve ever just missed being in some terrible car accident, you know what I felt like. My hands were trembling, my heart was pounding, and my stomach wasn’t sure where it wanted to go.

  “You want to do what?” I whispered, staring at Fleef in horror.

  The stalk on her head was whirling around like crazy, the little knob going “Neep neep neep!” as if someone was trying to catch and kill it. According to my implant this was a sign of extreme emotional distress.

  Tough! I thought. Your distress can’t be any worse than mine.

  Sure, I’d had my problems with Earth. But these guys were talking about blowing up billions of human beings, including my father, Ms. Schwartz, Susan Simmons—and you.

  “You’d better go, Krepta,” said Gurk, touching my arm.

  “No! I want to know what this is all about.”

  Gurk rearranged a few warts, a signal that the topic was definitely closed. I decided leaving was a good idea after all. If I wasn’t going to get any more information, I needed some time and some privacy to think about what I had just heard.

  As I pushed myself away from the table, Fleef reached out and touched my arm. “Please do not take this personally, Krepta. We will discuss it more later.”

  I looked at her in astonishment. “You want to blow up my planet, and I’m not supposed to take it personally?” I asked.

  Shaking with fury, I stalked away from the table.

  At the transcendental elevator I asked the URAT to give me the code for my room. At once a pattern flashed on the screen. I punched it into the keypad, stepped through the elevator, and found myself in an egg-shaped space. Its curving wall was a soft brownish-orange color. Since there were no doors or windows, it really felt like being inside an egg.

  I liked the color and the shape of the room. Unfortunately, it was completely bare, with not a stick of furniture to be seen.

  Broxholm’s house had been bare of furniture, too. Was that the alien style? Did they expect me to just sit on the floor, staring at the walls?

  It’s interesting how much little things can distract you when you have something big on your mind. What I wanted to do was worry about the fate of the Earth. What I found myself fretting about was the fact that I didn’t have a chair to sit and worry in.

  I decided to ask the URAT. Flipping open the box, I said “Can I have some furniture?”

  “Certainly,” replied the mechanical voice.

  “Well, how do I get it?”

  “All you need to do is ask.”

  “I’m asking.”

  “You have to specify what you want.”

  “What kind of choices do I have?” I asked, trying not to sound too impatient.

  “We have an enormous variety of personal convenience items on file,” said the URAT. “You can also design your own. The possibilities are infinite.”

  “Is there a way to know what you have on file?”

  Instantly the wall in front of me began to display a picture. That was neat; the entire wall was like a giant television screen—except that the image was clearer than any television you have ever seen.

  The picture it showed now was actually a chart, with all kinds of furniture on it—and I do mean all kinds. Not only did it show chairs, desks, and beds, it had items that looked like everything from medieval torture devices to toilets designed for octopi.

  Which reminded me: “Is there a bathroom attached to this room?”

  “No.”

  “Then how am I supposed to go to the toilet?” I cried, suddenly feeling desperate.

  “There are many bathrooms available, simply none attached to this room, Krepta.”

  That made sense. After all, if a transcendental elevator could move you from one place to another instantly, there was no need to have your bathroom actually attached to your room. It could be fifty miles away, and it wouldn’t make any difference. Maybe you didn’t even have your own bathroom; for all I knew, the elevator just sent you to the first empty bathroom it found.

  “Give me the code for a bathroom, please,” I said to the URAT.

  “Insufficient data.”

  “What do you mean?” I cried, crossing my legs.

  “I do not know what kind of bathroom you need. We have fifty-three different types of facilities.”

  I remembered the octopi toilets, or whatever they were, that I had seen on the first chart. Given the variety of aliens I had met already, it made sense that the ship needed a lot of different bathrooms.

  “I’m glad I’m not the plumber for this place,” I muttered.

  “Yes,” agreed the URAT, “that would be a disaster.”

  “Look, I don’t need to be insulted by a machine. Just tell me how to find a bathroom!”

  The URAT informed me that it needed to know more about me. After it had asked fifteen or twenty questions, some of them very personal, it finally gave me a bathroom code.

  Not a moment too soon! I thought, as I punched the code into the control pad. I stepped into a bathroom that was only mildly odd—which is to say that it only took me about five minutes (five desperate minutes) to figure out how to use it.

  When I was done, I returned to my own room. The furniture chart was still on the wall. I wondered if it only showed available categories of furniture, since there was only one chair, one desk, one octopus’s toilet, and so on.

  “Can you show me other chairs?” I asked.

  Instantly, the image changed to a chart that held over fifty different kinds of chairs.

  “Can I have one of those?” I asked, pointing to a comfortable looking armchair.

  “Color?” asked the URAT.

  “What do you have?”

  A chart with about a hundred colors appeared on the wall. After I chose one I liked, the URAT asked about size.

  Size? Chairs are chairs, right?

  Not when you’re on a ship the size of New Jersey, filled with who knows how many varieties of aliens.

  By the time I was done answering questions, we had designed a chair that was as perfectly matched to me as a handmade suit would have been. This was neat!

  What was even neater was that after I finally gave the URAT all the information it requested I heard a humming noise. Less than five minutes later the very chair I had ordered popped through the door of the transcendental elevator.

  This was the ultimate in home shopping!

  Plunking down in my chair, I tried to think. From what Fleef and Gurk had said, while some aliens wanted to blow up the Earth, no definite decision had been made yet.

  Even so, it was clear that the planet was in danger. Only I got the feeling that since I had abandoned Earth, no one expected me to care.

  But I did care. Earth was in danger. I was the only one who could save it. And I didn’t have the first idea how to begin.

  Suddenly I felt very small, and very frightened.

  I held out my hands and stared at them. They weren’t big enough to hold the fate of the world.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Alien Council

  After I sat for an hour or so without getting any ideas, I decided to look for Broxholm. Maybe he would help me.

  Of course, for all I knew, he was one of the ones in favor of torching the planet.

  But somehow I couldn’t bring myself to believe that.

  The problem was, where to find him? The New Jersey had thousands, maybe millions of rooms. It seemed like an impossible task, until it occurred to me that given what I had seen so far, it was likely the ship had a way to keep track of folks.

  So I asked the URAT where Broxholm was.

  Within seconds, I had an elevator code. I punched a few buttons, stepped through the wall, and found myself staring at Broxholm’s back. This put me in the minority; everyone else in the room was staring at Broxholm’s front.

  “Everyone else” consisted of a group of eight aliens arranged in a half circle. Some were sitting, some s
tanding. One dangled from the ceiling in a sling. Another was stretched across a rack that held up its purple tentacles. At the top of the rack a nozzle released a lavender mist that kept the tentacles moist and gleaming.

  “We expect to reconnect with Kreeblim soon,” said the alien in the rack. “She should be able to rewire one of the earthlings so that—”

  The alien broke off when it noticed me. Broxholm, realizing that the alien was looking past him, turned to see what was going on.

  “Peter!” he said sharply. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you,” I whispered. I was frightened; it was clear I had stumbled into a place where I didn’t belong.

  The knobs on Broxholm’s head began to throb. “Return to your room,” he ordered. “I will be there directly.”

  I nodded and turned to go. But before I could leave, the tallest of the aliens, a huge sea-green creature who towered over even Broxholm, said, “Wait. As long as the child is here, let’s talk with him a bit.”

  He looked around the semicircle of aliens. They all made gestures of agreement, which in this case ranged from a simple nod to a triple armpit fart.

  “Tell us why you are here,” said the alien with purple tentacles.

  I thought for a moment before I answered. “Because I believe the human race was born to go to the stars,” I said at last. “It’s what I’ve dreamed of since I was old enough to understand the idea.”

  “Tell us about your school,” said another alien.

  I did as he asked. The aliens listened carefully, making gestures of agreement, or interest, or annoyance. Sometimes they seemed astonished—sometimes astonished and disgusted, as when I described our basal readers.

  “That will be enough for now,” said the sea-green alien suddenly. “Thank you for your time.”

  “Wait for me in your room,” said Broxholm, as I walked past him back toward the elevator.

  I nodded, and continued toward the wall.

  When I got back to the room, I was shaking. I don’t like talking in front of people. It makes me nervous.