Down in the armory, the bomb sphere turned green.
“Just press something!” said Katie.
Lily tried to remember how the Dirrillill had controlled the car. She blew her hair furiously out of her eyes.
Down in the armory, the bomb sphere started to flash.
“Just—THAT!” said Katie, and stabbed at something.
“That” was a mistake. With a lurch, the car revved, lifted, and, as the girls screamed, slid off the roof.I
* * *
I Katie and Lily are not the only ones with transportation problems.
When Busby Spence asked his parents if they could drive him to the Science-Fantasy Movie Spectacular, his father said, “We’re not wasting gasoline and money to take you to that stupid show.”
“It’s not stupid. And I got my own money.”
“Not for movies.”
“It’s mine.”
“You’re not spending it to see some Hollywood sap in a cape running around in someone’s rock garden.”
“It’s for war bonds.”
“Give it to me.” His father held out his hand. “Give it to me!” Busby’s father took the money from him. He stuck it in his own shirt pocket “for safekeeping.”
Busby, for the first time ever, started yelling at his father. He yelled that he was going to see that movie no matter what—no matter what!—and that he was Jasper Dash’s biggest fan ever. Then his father started yelling back about how Busby spent too much time reading those stupid books, and how dumb the Jasper Dash series was, and what a simp Busby was for reading that garbage, all those dumb stories about people imprisoned on other planets, and flying cars, and death rays and amazing escapes and clever heroes and victorious returns to Earth and after all, screamed Busby’s father, pushing Busby backward so the kid almost fell, after all, “Don’t you get that that’s not how the world really is? It’s not like that! Do you know what’s out there? Do you know what’s actually happening instead of in some stupid story about that dumb kid?” Busby’s father pushed him again. “Well, it’s time to wake up, Busby! It is time for you to open your eyes and wake up! Because none of what you want to be real is real at all!”
Busby’s father shoved the boy away, grabbed a coat, and slammed out of the house.
Busby stood looking after him. He felt very much awake. He felt like his eyes were wide open.
His father had taken his only money.
But Busby Spence was going to that Spectacular. And it didn’t matter what it cost or who got angry.
THE FLYING CAR
“Whoa!” said Katie.
“Aaaah!” said Lily.
The flying car slid forward . . . then to the side . . . then plummeted.
It was at this point that the girls said,
There was a whump.
They were no longer moving.
Carefully, they half stood up.
The flying car was clamped to the side of the tower by the force field. They were stuck between the force field and the wall like a nickel in a leg of someone’s tights.
“Okay,” said Lily, reassuring herself. “Okay. We’re okay. We just have to learn how to fly this thing. We have to figure out—I guess, in the next couple of seconds—how to turn off the force field before that bomb blows up.” She looked at the control panel. “We’ve got to be able to figure it out. It can’t be that hard, right?”
Katie looked at all the controls and made a face. “Um, except it looks like you need a bunch of different hands to drive it.”
Lily said, “Well, uh, we’ve got four.”
They stood side by side. Then they began to experiment with more buttons.
Bing! Bang! Bong!
They wobbled upward and slapped against the castle. They slithered sideways.
They spun around in circles.
The force field clutched them.
“We gotta break out of this dumb energy field,” said Katie. “Let’s gun it.”
“Gun it?” said Lily, who had never heard anyone use that phrase before.
“Pedal to the metal!” yelled Katie, slamming the palm of her hand down on something—and the flying car jumped forward . . . jetted toward the horizon . . .
. . . slowed . . .
. . . came . . . to . . . a . . . stop . . .
. . . with the force field stretched, stretched, stretched . . .
And then the car was catapulted backward.I
Toward the wall.
At a couple of hundred miles per hour.
Meanwhile, in the armory, the bomb sphere exploded.
* * *
I Speaking of cars, Busby Spence secretly got a ride to the Science-Fantasy Movie Spectacular in Harmon’s parents’ car. On the night of the show, Busby Spence sneaked out and took his bike and bumped and pedaled over the muddy roads of town and pulled up next to Harmon’s house.
Busby told Harmon’s parents that he’d gotten permission from his dad to go with them. “Great!” said Harmon’s parents. “All aboard for adventure!”
The car slid and slipped through the mud. Busby felt sick to his stomach with excitement or something. Harmon was talking very quickly and making jokes, but Busby didn’t say anything.
When they got to the Spectacular, Harmon and his parents went to buy their war bonds, which would get them into the show.
Busby didn’t have his money. His father had taken it from him to make sure he didn’t spend it on “that Dash sap.”
Harmon asked, “How’re you going to get in?”
“Scrap,” said Busby. “I got some scrap.”
He paid his scrap and went in and sat with the others, and the movies started. They showed a whole run of Captain Galactic episodes, and then there was a break for people to use the bathrooms, and then they showed the Jasper Dash picture. It was a doozy, with Jasper Dash discovering that the monster of Phantom Mesa was really the pet of Nazi agents who were building a giant bomb underground.
Busby and Harmon and everyone else in the theater screamed and yelled at the Nazis on the screen. They clapped and applauded when Jasper Dash lassoed the bad guys and dragged them to justice.
Busby Spence sat slumped in his chair and felt sick from the smell of popcorn.
His parents were waiting for him when he got home.
They were not happy.
RUMPUS ROOM GO BOOM!
The whole weird castle exploded. The Final Fortress of the Dirrillillim, a hundred floors of weapons, alien tech, and rumpus rooms, blasted to pieces, and the pieces blasted to pieces, and those pieces blasted into even smaller pieces, microscopic pieces, smithereened to atoms, and the atoms cracked apart and spat neutrons and electrons and protons spinning across the mountains like Good & Plenty.
As the tower ripped apart, it took most of the ancient city with it. The capital of the old Dirrillillim Empire became, briefly, a bright dome of energy, and blew a hole in the atmosphere itself for a few seconds, and breathed out old, musty gas toward Zeblion III’s pale moon.
Katie Mulligan and Lily Gefelty did not know what had happened at first. All they knew was that they were plastered against the wall in the flying car.
What they didn’t know yet was that they were lucky to have been flying in the air when the explosion hit, because instead of destroying them, the blast instantly destroyed the machine that created the force field—and sent the two girls and their shuttle shooting at hundreds of miles an hour toward the purple horizon.
Their faces were twisted by the speed, the g-force. Katie’s hair was spread out all around her head. “Another few seconds . . .,” she gasped to Lily, “and we’ll be crushed flat as a French pancake.”I
They hurtled over jagged, glassy mountains. They tore past another flying car. It was the Dirrillill. He’d ducked his car down into a crevasse to avoid the blast. He shot through arches of green, then burst back into the searing purple sky.
Katie and Lily struggled with the floating controls. Lily was starting to get the hang of them.
> The flying car was slowing down.
Lily’s eyes were fierce and concentrated.
“There’s the Dirrillill,” she said. There, miles back, was the Dirrillill’s jalopy, flirting with peaks.
Lily steered. She told Katie when to press buttons.
They were drifting through a mountain range where each peak had on it a weird antenna.
Lily said, “It’s around here . . . where we arrived in this world. It’s one of these towers.” She gasped. The Dirrillill’s car had just dipped down and disappeared from sight. “He must have landed,” she said.
She turned the flying car around.
“You’re really good at flying,” said Katie.
Lily didn’t answer.
They slowed down and scanned the hills for a parked car. They floated over gulfs and crystal ramparts.
There: an antenna tower. A car. Jasper and the Dirrillill has already landed and gone inside.
Lily and Katie exchanged a glance.
And there, running joyfully into the stone doorway of the antenna tower, was Mrs. Dash. She waved her arms.
She had seen her son go into the transmitter tower, and did not realize that he was hypnotized—that he was her enemy—and that their reunion was not going to be a happy one.
* * *
I Not as fluffy as American pancakes. But more eggy.
UNHAPPY REUNION
In the stone room beneath the antenna, the Dirrillill glowed with blue light. Beside him stood his servant Jasper, surveying the teleporter booth.
Behind them, the remains of the party rotted on a picnic table.
The Dirrillill was wearing a personal force field. It fit him well, and only dragged a little on the floor.
The Dirrillill said, “So you understand your orders? You will go back to your world. You shall secure your house against those other creatures. I shall send through the necessary pieces and equipment for the teleporter enlargement after you’ve gone through. Easy as pie. So. Got it, ’sonny,’ ha ha?”
Jasper nodded.
He stepped toward the teleporter booth.
Then a voice cried out, “Jasper . . .” It was his mother standing in the door.
The boy turned. He looked at her without interest.
“Yes,” said the Dirrillill. “You should kill her.”
“Jasper?” said Dolores Dash.
She looked through the glass of his helmet at his eyes.
They were the blue eyes she had always known. But there was something different about them.
They were hard. They were full of hate. They were glaring right at her. Mrs. Dash stepped backward in shock. She choked.
Inside Jasper’s head, things were very confused and angry. He thought this ridiculous woman standing before him was an imposter. He remembered with fury that she had tried to stop him from doing something he wanted to do. . . . She didn’t want him to meet his dad. Someone was whispering this to him, and it made sense somehow—made sense that he had to destroy her, the woman standing there—destroy her utterly. And yet he also somehow, somewhere, remembered who she was.
He raised his gun.
“Jasper?”
He aimed his gun.
“It’s me,” said Mrs. Dash.
He squinted and prepared to fire.
She said, “Love-beetle. It’s your mother. Remember the tire swing? The toasted cheese sandwiches? The volcano party? The afternoons spent coloring the periodic table while the rain spattered the windows in the house of the future?”
In a flat voice, the boy said, “Yes, yes, and yes, Mother. But I am controlled by a Dirrillill, and I have my orders.”
With that, Jasper Dash began shooting at his mom.I
* * *
I Busby Spence’s parents started yelling the moment they saw him wheeling his bicycle up the drive. Where had he been? and Did he go to that stupid science-fantasy show? and What had they told him? Busby yelled back at them that yes, he’d gone to the Spectacular, and it was the best thing he had ever seen.
“You didn’t spend your money, did you?” his father demanded. “I got your money. What did you spend?”
“I didn’t spend any money. I donated scrap.”
“Scrap.”
“Yeah. I donated scrap. Let me go!” He shook his arm free, and his father grabbed it again and squeezed hard.
“We were worried sick about you! We didn’t know where you went!”
“Now you know.”
“Don’t get fresh! Are you getting fresh?” Then they were arguing, both shouting into each other’s faces, with Busby kicking a chair leg, and with Busby’s dad demanding to know whether Busby had gone and borrowed money from Harmon’s fancy parents, because if he had, he’d never hear the end of it, and Busby said no, for the thousandth time, he hadn’t borrowed money from the Carmichaels, because there was a metal scrap donation drive, and Busby’s dad yanked his arm around and said, “Oh really? Then what? What did you donate?” and Busby told his father that, okay, okay, OKAY! he had donated that stupid statue! That dumb god of luck his father had sent from that stupid island.
He said, “You probably stole it off some dead person anyway. Some person you killed.”
At that, Busby Spence’s father released him.
Busby’s mother was crying on the back of the sofa.
Both of Busby’s parents just stared at him as he walked upstairs to his room.
He still felt sick, but he also felt proud. He walked a little taller. He wasn’t a little kid anymore, like when his dad had left to be in the Marines. They couldn’t boss him around anymore.
He didn’t feel so good when he got into bed. He just lay there.
Busby Spence’s house was silent through the night. No one talked to one another, but everyone was awake. The lights were out.
Spring rains fell on the mud and made the lake swell.
SHOWDOWN WITH THE DIRRILLILL
There could not have been many better mothers than Mrs. Dash. She brought up Jasper on her own. She taught him everything he knew.I
When he was little, he and his mother went on picnics together in the woods. When he was seven, she took him up on his first manned spaceflight, clutching her pillbox hat as gravity unclenched and let everything fly. That first blastoff, he sat on her lap, laughing at how their faces stretched during acceleration. When they were in orbit, he couldn’t wait to get to the windows and see the world he came from.
They looked down together and wondered where their house was. They saw the Earth standing bright and clear against a thousand billion stars. They felt small, but also big, because they were together and meant everything to each other.
The fact that the galaxy was so large, that its arms swept so many grains across the empty table of space—this glimpse of vastness was only a reminder that the two of them had a cozy home where they could sit playing board games in front of the fire, hearing the atoms snap in the reactor.
She was a wonderful, creative, and understanding mother. They made a great pair together, the two of them, alone.
So it was not very fair that, fifteen hundred light-years away from home, Jasper shot at her and tried to burn her to a crisp.
Mrs. Dash ducked. She rolled.
“Jasper!” she shouted. “What are you—?”
She hoped that he was playacting to trick the Dirrillillim, if indeed the hulking, glowing creature with too many arms and too many legs was a Dirrillill.
Jasper shot at her again, and this time hit.
Her suit’s old jetpack was blasted away, a crunkle of metal hanging from one strap off her scapula.
She lay before him. She could not believe she was about to be disintegrated at her son’s hands. She panted. She craned her neck to look into his eyes, but there was no pity there.
He did not smile or frown as he lowered the point of his death-ray pistol toward her helmet.
“Go ahead,” said the Dirrillill. “Listen to your ol’ unc.”—“Your pal.”—“Your pop.”—?
??Yes, Jasper Dash. Your dear ol’ dad. Listen: Shoot.”—“Shoot!”—“Shoot!”
Jasper hesitated a second. Perhaps there was briefly a conflict in his tech-warped brain.
Mrs. Dash’s eyes were wide. She croaked his name. “Jasper . . . Jasper Augustus Dash . . .”
He blinked.
There were Katie and Lily at the door.
Katie said, “Jasper! Jasper, you’re going to wake up in a little bit, and you’re going to be really sorry about all this.”
He did not flinch.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Dash had pulled out her ray gun and pointed it at the Dirrillill.
There are really too many ray guns in stories like this.
“Enough!” cried the Dirrillill. “Destroy all three of them!”
No sooner were the words out of some of his mouths than Mrs. Dash shouted, “No, Jasper!” and fired off a brace of blaster bolts.
They hit the Dirrillill’s force field—then skidded off and blew pockmarks in the stone walls. With that force field in place, whatever she shot at him would bounce right off.
The Dirrillill bragged, “I’m rubber, you’re glue,” and at the same time, another mouth jeered, “Just try and shoot at me and you’ll end up shooting yourself—like it’s Opposite Day, ha ha.” He hopped back and forth in a silly dance.
A final mouth said, “If you want to stop me from invading the Earth, there’s only one way you can do it: Fight your son.”
Katie gasped.
Lily turned pale.
Mrs. Dash was dazed. She didn’t know what to do. She saw the Boy Technonaut raising his death ray and pointing it right at her. She lifted her blaster pistol and held it unsteadily.
“Go ahead,” said a Dirrillill mouth. “Before he shoots you. Fight your son.”
The many mouths of the Dirrillill smiled. Some had chipped teeth, some had mustaches.
Jasper’s ray gun pointed right at his mother.
She saw how very alone he was. How he couldn’t trust even the creature who said it was his father. How much more alone he would be in a second. How he had no home, on Earth or anywhere else.