“No jet rockets?”
“No rockets. It’s just an instant and then you’re there. If it works.”
“Of course you won’t use it without permission, honey.”
“No, Mom.”
He trudged to the staircase.
He stopped just before he went up. He thought for a while, and then he asked Mrs. Dash, “Do you think my father will ever come to get me?”
Jasper’s mother went to him. She enfolded her son in her arms. But he didn’t move or relax. He stood perfectly still, like he was waiting for her to stop.
She gave up hugging him and let go. Without saying anything else, he went up the stairs.
He dragged himself to his bedroom and sat down at his desk. It was covered with the plans for his Astounding Atomic Telephone Cart. He had left them there in excitement that morning, before the disastrous science fair.
In a sudden fury, he grabbed those plans and crumpled them. He tore at them. He couldn’t make the pieces small enough. He flung the blueprints at the wastebasket.
It was extremely unusual for Jasper to get angry, except at injustice and gangsters. This was perhaps the first time in all his ninety years of being thirteen that he had ever had a tantrum.
He sat with his elbows on his desk. Then, picking up a soldering gun, he went over to his transporter booth. It was almost finished.
He was squatting next to it, wearing magnifying goggles, when his mother knocked quietly at the door.
“Hi there, Mom,” he said.
She took one look at the booth he was working on and its huge metal projections. Then she said with some irritation in her voice, “Jasper Dash, is that your instantaneous teleporter?”
Jasper nodded. “Yes, Mother.”
“What are you planning to do with it?”
Jasper wouldn’t answer. He just shrugged.
His mother put her hands on her hips. “I’m only going to ask this once,” she said, “and I want a real answer. Are you thinking of transporting yourself to the space coordinates in the region of the Horsehead Nebula where that beam came from that created you?”
Jasper didn’t answer. He wouldn’t tell a lie.
“No!” said his mother. “No, and no, and for the last time, no. Really, honey. I let you do a lot of things. But a parent has to put her foot down somewhere.”
“Mother!”
“And I put my foot down when it comes to interstellar travel. You are absolutely not going to project yourself into the middle of a purple cloud of interstellar gas, and that’s final! Is that understood, Jasper?”
He stood up defiantly. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do! This is what I’ve wanted for years, Mother! And I just figured out the secret to the teleporter a couple of weeks ago! I want to—”
“I said NO, Jasper! No Horsehead Nebula!”
“Please!”
“Jasper Augustus Dash, I think I’ve been pretty understanding over the years. I never complained about you going to the center of the Earth. I never said a word about you fighting the ninjas in their secret assassins’ lair. I never told you that you weren’t allowed to build a deep-sea observation bubble in the Mariana Trench. And I said you could go out past Neptune as long as you stayed in the solar system and loaded the dishwasher first. But this—it’s crazy, Jasper. You don’t know what’s out there! So no. No, no, no.”
Jasper glared at his mother. For the first time in his life, he was furious at someone who loved him. For the first time ever, he was tired of being good and heroic and polite to his elders. He stood up and faced her.
“Don’t start, Jasper,” she said, holding out a warning finger. “Or do I have to confiscate your atom-smasher?”
“FINE!” he yelled. “FINE!”
Mrs. Dash was shocked. Jasper had never yelled at her before, except maybe things like, “WATCH OUT!” when a robot with machine-gun hands was firing through the kitchen windows.
In a tone she had never used before, Mrs. Dash said, “Sometimes, Jasper, I wish you did have a father to help me take care of you.”
Icily, he replied, “Sometimes, Mother, so—do—I.”
She turned white with shock. Then she stormed out, slamming the door behind her.
Jasper’s hands were shaking. He wanted to go apologize. He didn’t know what had come over him. He hated how he was being. He didn’t understand it. He’d never been this way before.
He sat down next to the teleportation booth. He pouted. Then he picked up a wrench and went back to work. He’d show her.
As Mrs. Dash lay in her bed, she thought about her son. She never wanted him to be hurt. Of course he’d be hurt sometimes—a bruise under the eye from secret agents, a leg broken by the yeti—but she never wanted him to lose his hope in the future. She decided that in the morning, she would apologize. She would explain herself better. She would warn him that finding his father might not be as easy as he thought. She would do it at breakfast, over pancakes.
She went to sleep, knowing she’d try her best to prepare him for the difficult road ahead. Maybe she would actually go with him in his teleporter. They could appear together, hand in hand, on some alien world to greet the being who had sent the instructions on how to grow Jasper. It could be a family trip. . . .
Dolores Dash fell asleep. She did not notice that at about three o’clock, her night-light dimmed, as if something in the house was using all the power.
The concrete house of the future was silent.
Outside, wind blew across the snowbanks and through the dead briars.
In the morning, when she went to wake her son for pancakes, he was gone.
* * *
I Which moon? Polydeuces, since you ask. See Jasper Dash and His Remarkable Methane Mittens.
II In Horror Hollow #43: Two Heads Are Badder Than One.
WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD
Earlier that same night, in the state of Michigan, a couple of teenagers out on a date were abducted by a flying saucer.
For a month since the family Delb had been stolen away on a cold January night in the middle of a prologue, there had been saucer sightings across North America. They always happened in remote, strange places. You know how it is with aliens. Even though they’re supposed to want to make contact with our odd, half-hairy species and give us messages, they never just land in the middle of a city with a big crowd watching and step out of their ships waving their claws like the Queen of England. No, they always make contact with people in empty, desolate, out-of-the-way locations:
Flat farms in the Midwest. Nothing but the green of the fields and the white beam from the lightly bobbing ship up above.
Cabins in the woods. The knobs on all the doors start turning at once.
High up in the cold air above Alaska. An air force pilot turns and sees a disk heading right toward him.
The red desert, with a green evening sky. No town for miles. Electrical towers strung together by wires stand across the horizon like an alien army with their arms spread wide. They are motionless in the evening, the wires singing. Far off, a glint of silver light appears.
Swamps where men in rubber pants fish at twilight. There is a glow under the water. The pond starts to boil. Something rises out of it. Something bigger than a house, with water streaming off its metal hide. The men stumble backward. They will never be able to make it through the woods to the road. They will never make it.
Alien abduction is part of the American poetry of loneliness.
Young Jed Lostrup did not think it was going to be a lonely night. Nope. On the contrary. Jed got off work at the warehouse and drove to pick up his date. She was a girl called Shirley. He had been wanting to go on a date with her forever. Since the beginning of high school. Finally he got the guts to ask her out when they were both chosen to sing solos with the high school choir.
He had to rush to make it to her house on time after work. He rolled along the highway as fast as he could. He got off at her exit. He screeched to a halt in front of her hou
se and ran across the lawn, straightening his shirt. He rang the bell.
There she was. He couldn’t believe it. His dream. She looked beautiful in her sweater, with her hair.
“Hi,” they said awkwardly.
He said, “You ready, Shirley?”
She looked up and down the street. “Where’s, um, where’s your car, Jed?”
“Oh,” he said sheepishly. “I came right from work. I don’t have a car. I don’t own one.”
“So you came to pick me up,” she clarified, “in a forklift?”
“Yeah. Brought the forklift from work.”
Shirley smiled weakly, like someone who was about to make an excuse. “Oh. Great.”
“Come on, Shirl, just wait till you see this baby go!”
She held on to the door frame like it was something that floated and she was something that sank. “I don’t know . . . ,” she said. “Maybe sometime when you . . . have . . . a . . . you know. Car.”
“Come on.” He knew it was crazy, but he grabbed her wrist and pulled her out across the lawn. “I got it set up all special.”
He was not just talking about the fact that he had hung a mesquite air freshener in the cab of the forklift. Also, on the lifting forks, there was a . . .
Shirley said, “Is that an upright piano?”
“Yup!” He smiled proudly. “And not just any upright piano. A player piano. I wanted to make it romantic.”
He ran over to the forklift and climbed in. He started up the engine. It growled loudly. Then he pulled on a string, and the player piano started to hammer out “Some Enchanted Evening.”
Jed’s grin was so wide that Shirley couldn’t help smiling too. And then she started laughing. And then they both were laughing. And he held out a hand like a gentleman and helped her into the forklift. They puttered along through the suburbs with the player piano tinkling and banging away. People looked out their windows in astonishment. Jed put his foot on the gas, and they got up to ten miles per hour.
And it was, indeed, some enchanted evening, at first. They went to a J. P. Barnigan’s American Family Restaurant on the highway and they had as many waffle fries as a person could eat. They talked and found they had a lot in common. They made jokes about their choir director. The room was decorated with brass railings and old rowing oars and sports team photos and a shelf of dusty Jasper Dash books.
“It’s so sad!” said Shirley. “I bet no one ever reads these books anymore.” She lifted one down from the shelf. She and Jed took turns reading from it while they waited for the bill. They loved all the corny old exclamations like “Jupiter’s moons!” and “By gum!”
Jed was driving faster on the way home than on the way out. (There were free refills on Coke, and he’d had about seven.) It was a forklift, so that still only meant about fifteen miles per hour. But anyway, that was probably why he got off at the wrong exit.
They were a little lost.
They were driving along beside what was a cornfield in the summer. Now the stalks were all broken up and black. The trees were black too, and the road was black, and the sky was black and stormy. They didn’t mind, though. Shirley had very carefully started to lean against Jed, and the piano was playing “What a Wonderful World.”
Jed looked around. “Oh, shoot, Shirley. We’re lost. At ten miles per hour.”
He started to turn around in a field.
They bumbled back along the dark road.
Shirley asked, “What do you think the other kids in the choir would say if they knew we went on a—” Then she stopped.
There was something in the road.
Some one.
Caught in the forklift’s headlights.
A figure standing perfectly still in the middle of the road.
Outlined in black: a humanoid shape, but too thin and spindly to be a person, wearing a helmet with fins.
And then Jed looked to the side and saw that, in the middle of the field, there was a great white saucer sitting darkly, and he began screaming.
He struggled to turn the forklift around. The dark, tall figure walked toward them. The piano played “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”
Jed put his foot to the floor. The forklift trundled off the road and into the field. Its tractor wheels half sank in mud. Now it was going even slower. Jed didn’t pay attention. He leaned forward against the wind.
“Don’t you worry, Shirley! I’ll get us out of—Hold on!”
She held on to his arm as they went over bumps and troughs.
“Look back!” Jed shouted over the engine. “How we doing?”
Shirley swiveled her head.
The alien walked beside them at his own pace. He slowed down sometimes so he wouldn’t get ahead of them.
“Um,” she said.
The alien raised a glass wand.
There was a beeping sound in their ears.
And then they both fell asleep.
* * *
The frozen cornfield was empty except for an abandoned forklift.
A player piano on the front of it sadly and slowly played a song:
Blue moon,
You saw me standing alone . . .
* * *
The interrogation was terrifying. Brilliant white light. Weightlessness. Tumbling through the air.
“WHERE IS JASPER DASH?”
“WHERE IS THE HUMAN NAMED JASPER DASH?”
“IF YOU REMAIN SILENT ANY LONGER, YOU WILL BE SORRY!”
“YOUR WHOLE WORLD WILL SUFFER FOR YOUR SILENCE!”
All these voices screaming—until finally Shirley shouted back, “All right! All right! You don’t have to yell! He’s from—he’s from some stupid old books that no one even reads anymore!I The books say he lives in a town called Pelt!”
The lights shut off.
Shirley and Jed fell back asleep.
They awoke in a field.
It was morning. Steam was coming off the cold ground. Broken cornstalks lay around them.
Far away, the spaceship was headed for Pelt.
* * *
I This is not strictly true. You, after all, have a stack of the Jasper Dash books that you got at the church rummage sale. A couple of days later, the woman who owns the vacation house your family rented comes by to see if everything’s okay, and she sees the books and laughs. She says that the Jasper Dash books were in the house for years, and that they just gave them to the church rummage sale a few weeks ago to get rid of them.
She says, “Here they are back again. Like a bad penny!”
That is a weird coincidence. I don’t need to tell you this, but you think, That’s really crazy. Maybe there’s something cosmic in it. Like the books just belong in this house.
So one afternoon when your brother and a cousin are hogging the computer, you go up to the bedroom where all the kids sleep, even your annoying cousin Maxwell, who snores like a lumber mill. You reach under your bed and go through your duffel bag and take out Jasper Dash and His Marvelous Electro-Neutron Sled.
Sitting under a tree by the lake, you open it up. You begin to read.
What’s it about? The Alaskan wilderness . . . a wild search for an old sailing ship trapped in the ice a century earlier . . . Supposedly, there are priceless paintings still onboard . . . and Jasper Dash is whamming across the tundra in his Electro-Neutron Sled, seeking the lost treasure ship, racing against time and thugs. Every chapter ends with a cliffhanger: a shoot-out or a polar bear or a snow avalanche or a bomb. When you look up, it is almost evening. Your father is grilling things.
You wonder who the books used to belong to. You flip through the pages. On the inside of the front cover, someone, a long time ago, has written, “Busby Spence” in awkward letters. Then they wrote, “1942.”
You wonder who Busby Spence was, and you feel a ghostly shiver come over you. These books were originally from this house. You wonder what Busby Spence was like. You wonder whether he read this same book sitting in this yard, under this tree, by this lake.
r /> Slowly you reach down with a finger and touch his name. It is like you are touching him through time, through a pane of glass.
Busby Spence. He wrote his name there so long ago, he is probably a grandfather now, an old man, or dead.
GONE!
But Jasper had not been kidnapped from his bedroom by an alien spaceship.
That was the first possibility his mother thought of. (It had happened before.)
She frantically ran to the teleporter booth. The door of the booth was shut. A green light was on.
She gasped and stumbled backward.
Jasper had finished making his machine and had used it.
She quickly looked at the dials that set the coordinates for teleportation.
She put her hand over her mouth.
Her worst nightmare had come true: Jasper had teleported himself to the region of the Horsehead Nebula.
FAMILY VACATION
A million particles of Jasper Dash shot across the galaxy like a thousand tiny bubbles flurrying through a soda straw.
PANCAKES, PERIL, AND PANIC
Mrs. Dash stumbled back downstairs to the breakfast nook. She threw herself unsteadily down onto a chair, gasping. She clutched at her own robe. She looked down at the breakfast she had made her son. Here were his pancakes, still warm—and he was perhaps farther away from home than any human being had ever been.
She prayed that he was safely on his way to the Horsehead Nebula, and that he would still be safe once he got there.
She prayed that he would not be too horrified by what he found there, whatever it was. Because she knew this: Just because a thing sends a highly concentrated beam of information to a distant world to build a genius son doesn’t mean that it will be a father. It doesn’t mean that it will be kind or that it will care at all.
There are many reasons to send highly concentrated beams of information to distant worlds.
Mrs. Dash had known this day would come.
Jasper’s pancakes sat uneaten. His grapefruit was sliced in half. Beside his plate was his favorite breakfast drink: Choco-Vanilla Flavor Gargletine™ (“It’s Pep in a Pop-Top Can!”).I