Escape from Earth: New Adventures in Space

by Jack Dann

  The elf must have been holding on to something on the other side of that opening, because all of a sudden, instead of wriggling further out, he simply dropped the rest of the way, hit the ground, and rolled. It reminded Todd of the way a pooping dog will strain and strain, making very little progress, and then all of a sudden the poop breaks off and drops. He knew it was a disgusting thought, which made him regret that there was no one there to say it to. Still, he couldn’t help laughing, especially because this particular dropping was a stark-naked man about half Todd’s size.

  At the sound of Todd’s laughter, the man rolled over and, now making no attempt at modesty, said, “Oh, it’s you.”

  “Why, have we met?” asked Todd. “What are you doing naked in my backyard? I think that’s illegal.”

  “In case you weren’t watching,” said the man, “I just squeezed through the worm, so it’s not like any clothes I was wearing would have made it anyway. And what are you doing out here? You’re never out here.”

  “I’m out here all the time,” said Todd.

  The elf pointed to the backyard, around the corner of the house. “You’re always over there, throwing a ball at a fishnet. I admit I wondered why you haven’t figured out that the net will never catch the ball.”

  “Who are you, and what are you doing here, and why did Jared know about you and the rest of us didn’t, and where is my mother, what happened to her?”

  “Do you mind if I get dressed first?”

  “Yes, I do mind.” If this was Todd’s only chance to get his questions answered, he wasn’t going to be put off. If the stories about elves and leprechauns were true—and now he had to figure they must have some basis in fact—they were tricky and dishonest and you couldn’t take any of them at their word. Which meant that they would fit right into eighth grade. Todd was experienced at being suspicious.

  “Too bad,” said the elf.

  The elf started walking toward the fence that separated the side yard from the front yard. Todd got in front of him to block his way.

  The elf swatted him away. It looked like a swat, anyway—but it felt like the back of his hand sank two inches into Todd’s shoulder and shoved him out of the way with all the force of a bulldozer. He smacked into the bricks of the side of the house, and slid sharply enough that his arm was scraped raw. His head also rang from the impact, and when he reached up his sore arm to touch his face, the right side of his forehead up near the hairline was bleeding.

  “Hey!” Todd yelled at him. “You got no right to do that! That hurt ”

  “Boo-hoo, poor baby,” said the elf. He was kneeling now. It seemed he counted boards in the fence and then plunged his hand right down into the dirt in front of a certain board.

  Todd had dug in this hard-clay soil. It was hard enough to dig when the soil was wet; when it was dry, it was like trying to dig a hole in the bottom of a dish using only a spoon. But the little man’s hand plunged in as if the dirt were nothing but Jell-O and Todd began to realize that just because somebody was little didn’t mean he wasn’t strong.

  The elf’s hand came up with a metal strongbox. He punched buttons to do the combination of the lock, and then lifted it open. Inside were clothes in a plastic bag. Within a minute, the man had pants and a shirt on. They looked like they had been bought at Gap Kids—new enough but way too cute for a guy as hairy as this.

  “Where did you get those shoes?” asked Todd. They were like clown shoes, much wider and longer than his feet. Almost like snowshoes.

  “I had them specially made,” the elf said irritably.

  For the first time, Todd realized that despite the elf’s fluency, he had an accent—English' wasn’t his native language. “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “Oh, right, like you’d recognize the name,” said the elf.

  “I mean is it another country? Or . . .” Todd looked at the shimmering in the air, which was now way less visible and fading fast. “Like, another dimension?”

  “Another planet,” said the elf. “And your mouth can’t make the sounds necessary to pronounce the real name. But your mother calls it ‘Lilliput.’ ”

  “My mother?” said Todd. All at once it felt like his heart was in his throat. “She’s alive, like Jared said?”

  “Of course she’s alive, why wouldn’t she be alive? I warned Jared about the worm and he warned your mother, but did she believe him? No, he was just a child, so now she’s stuck there and she’s starting to get annoyed about it.”

  “Starting? She’s been gone four years.”

  “Time doesn’t work the same way back home. Your mother’s only been gone for about a week.”

  “Four years!” shouted Todd. “She’s been gone four years and why hasn’t she come home? If you can get here, why can’t she?”

  “Because she’s too big to get where she needs to go,” said the elf. “You think I’m small, but I’m a tall man in my world. Your mother—she’s a giant. Only she’s a big weak giant. A big weak naked giant because clothes don’t do so well coming through the worm—”

  “What worm? Where’s the worm?”

  The elf waved toward the shimmering in the air. “That’s the worm’s anus. The mouth is in the closet in Jared’s bedroom.”

  “So there really is a monster there.”

  “Not a monster,” said the elf. “A worm. It’s not out to get anybody. It just sucks stuff in at one end of a connection between worlds. You’d be surprised how much energy is released where worlds connect, if you can bridge them, and worms can do it, so they attach the two worlds together and process things through. Like earthworms. Only worldworms don’t move, they just sit there and suck.”

  “Suck what?” said Todd.

  “I told you, Energy. They suck a star’s worth of energy in a year.”

  “Out of Jared’s closet?”

  “No.” The elf sounded scornful. “Out of the friction between universes. The differing time flows—they rub up against each other because they aren’t synchronized. Four years for you, a week for your mother—you think that timeflow difference doesn’t burn?”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot,” said Todd. “How exactly was I supposed to know any of this? I didn’t even know your universe existed.”

  “Your mother disappears and you don’t suspect something?”

  “Yeah, we suspected that somebody pointed a gun at her and made her go with them. Or she maybe ran away from us because she stopped loving Dad. Or she died in some freak accident and her body simply hasn’t been found. But no, the idea of her disappearing into another universe with a different timeflow didn’t come up much.”

  “I heard Jared tell your father.”

  “Jared told Dad about a monster in the closet! For pete’s sake, if I hadn’t seen you come out of midair myself I wouldn’t believe it. What, are little kids taught all about the friction between timeflows in your world?”

  The elf looked a little abashed. “Actually, no,” he said. “In fact, I’m the scientist who finally figured out what’s going on. I’ve been coming back and forth between worlds, riding the worm for years. Not just here, either, this is the fourth worm I’ve ridden.”

  “So you’re like—what, the Einstein of the elves?”

  “More like Galileo. Nobody believes me on my end of the worm, either. In fact, most of my science and math come from your world. Which is why I expected it to be obvious to you."

  “Just because I’m from planet Earth I’m supposed to be a math genius? I guess that means that since you’re an elf, you make great shoes. You probably made those stupid clown shoes yourself.”

  The elf glowered at him. “I’m not an elf. And I don’t make shoes. I don’t wear shoes back home. I wear them here because unless I wear shoes with wide soles to spread my weight, I sink too far into the ground, which slows me down and leaves tracks everywhere.”

  “They make you look stupid.”

  “I’d look a lot stupider up to my ankles in asphalt.”
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  While they’d been talking, Todd had also been thinking. “You said Mom’s been gone for only a week.”

  “The timeflow difference fluctuates, but that’s about right.”

  “So she hasn’t even begun to miss me yet. Us. Yet.”

  “She’s a big baby about it. Cries all the time. Worse than your father.”

  Todd remembered hearing his father cry, how private that had been. “You spy on us?”

  “The worm I’m riding comes out here, and to get home I have to go into your brother’s bedroom. I’m not spying, I’m traveling. With my eyes and ears open.” The elf sighed. “OK, so I stop and gather data. I’m a scientist. You’re an interesting people. And you’ll notice I called you people, not some insulting diminutive derogatory name like ‘elves.’ ”

  “Why doesn’t Mom come home? If you can get through, why can’t she?”

  The elf—for lack of a better name—did a weird move with his fingers. He’d done it a couple of times before, and Todd finally realized that where he came from, it must be the equivalent of rolling his eyes. “Because like I said, in my world she’s huge. And very . . . light. Insubstantial. She can’t do anything. She can barely make her voice heard.”

  Todd tried to imagine what that might mean. “She’s some kind of mist?”

  The elf chuckled. “Yes, she has some fog-like properties.”

  Todd took a threatening step toward him. “Don’t laugh at my mother!”

  “If you’d seen her during a windstorm, trying to hold on to trees, anything to keep from blowing away—”

  “It’s not funny!” Todd tried to shove him, but it was like hitting a brick wall. It hurt his hands, and the elf didn’t even budge.

  “You still don’t get it,” said the elf. “I’m very dense.”

  “It took a moment for Todd to realize he meant dense like in physics instead of dense as in “kind of dumb.”

  “I want my mother back. And you’re a lousy sack of crap to make fun of her when she’s stuck in your world.”

  “Oh, and you didn’t make fun of me at all, I take it,” said the elf. “When I popped through naked, that wasn’t funny to you?”

  “It was disgusting. And if mother could fit through the wormhole in the closet, she must have fit through the worm’s . . . whatever, on your side. So she can fit.”

  “Anus,” said the elf. “The worm’s mouth is in your closet. Its anus, in my world, is on a lovely wooded hillside behind my house. And yes, it has a mouth and an anus on both worlds. It’s a single organism, but its digestive systems are bidirectional. It eats both worlds at once.”

  “Eats what?” Now Jared’s childhood fears of being eaten by the monster in the closet seemed too literally true.

  “Eats time. Eats dark matter. Eats dust. I have no idea. Why does gravity suck? I’m just starting to try to figure out a whole branch of science that neither your world nor mine knows anything about.”

  Todd’s mind jumped back to the real question. “My mother lives with you?”

  “Your mother is living in the woods because there’s more room for her there and she can avoid being seen. She can avoid having someone maliciously dissipate her.”

  “What?”

  “Throw rocks at her, for instance, until she’s so full of holes she can’t stick together and the bits of her just drift away.”

  “What kind of sick people are you in that world! ”

  “She’s a huge woman who looks as translucent as mist! The few who have met her don’t think she.’s alive! They haven’t been to this world. They’re ignorant peasants, most of them. It’s all very awkward.” The elf leaned in close to Todd. “I’m doing everything I can to set things right. But please remember that I didn’t take her to my world. She did that herself in spite of being warned. And I didn’t put that stupid worm’s mouth in your closet.”

  Then he got a strange look on his face. “Well, actually, I did, but not deliberately.”

  “You put it there?”

  “The worm is apparently drawn to inhabited places. I don’t know what it thinks we are, or if it thinks at all, but I’ve never seen a worm that wasn’t close to the dwelling place of a sentient being. It may even be drawn to people who might want to use it to travel from world to world. It might have been aware of my passion for exploration, which is why the anus showed up in my front garden.” Then, almost to himself: “Though it would have been much more convenient to have the mouth within easy reach.”

  “My mother didn’t want to travel anywhere,” said Todd. As he was saying it, he realized that maybe it wasn’t mother or even Jared who had drawn the worm to Jared’s closet. There was someone in their family who had a passionate desire to travel to other planets.

  “Your brother kept putting things through the worm,” said the elf. “I’d find them in my garden. Wooden blocks. Socks. Underwear. A baseball cap. Little model cars. Plastic soldiers. A coat hanger. Money. And once a huge, misty, terrified cat.”

  Todd thought back to all the times things had disappeared. His favorite plastic soldiers. His baseball cap. His socks. His underwear. His Hot Wheels cars. Jared must have been stealing them to make them disappear down the wormhole. He had no idea where Jared got the cat, but it would have been just like him.

  Of course, maybe Jared thought he was feeding the monster in the closet. Placating it, so it wouldn’t come out of the closet and eat him. Was this how the worship of idols began? You put things in a certain place and they disappear into thin air—what could you imagine, except it was a hungry god?

  And the kid was smart enough to figure out that if he needed to make stuff disappear, it might as well be something of Todd’s. Amoral little dork.

  “The first time I saw something appear in midair,” said the elf, “it was broad daylight. I knew what it was—I’d been investigating worms for some time. It was a . . . hobby of mine. But I also knew that if people found out I had one in our neighborhood, I’d either be inundated with curiosity seekers, or plagued by pious people determined to sit around and see what the gods would give them, or I’d be arrested for witchcraft.”

  “Witchcraft? That’s just superstition.”

  “Don’t get superior with me. I’ve been studying your culture for years. On television you marry witches, but in real life you burn them. And if somebody in your world saw me plop out of the sky ...”

  “Which I just did.”

  “. . . then what do you think would happen here?”

  “Scientists would come and study the worm and—”

  "You really are naive. No self-respecting scientist would come anywhere near something like this, because it would sound like pure tabloid journalism. They could lose their careers!”

  “Is that what happened to you?” asked Todd. “Have you lost your career? ”

  “I don’t have a career, exactly.”

  “You’re not a scientist?”

  “In our world, scientists are rare and they work alone.”

  Todd gave that the worst possible spin. “People think you’re crazy and pay no attention to you.”

  “They’d think I was crazy and pay a lot of attention to me if I hadn’t moved the anus.”

  It occurred to Todd that “moving the anus” could be rendered as “hauling ass,” which he found amusing.

  “Now look who’s laughing,” said the elf.

  Todd got back to business. “You can move this thing.”

  “With enormous difficulty and great risk.”

  “So you could move it out of our closet. You didn’t have to put it there!”

  “I didn’t put it in your closet. I moved it a hundred yards to a dense woods behind my house. I had no idea where it would go in your world. It moved a thousand miles. I couldn’t plan its location here, and I’m not going to change it now. It happens to be well-hidden and convenient to a town with a decent library. It’s perfect.”

  “Perfect for you. Really lousy for my mother and our whole family.”

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nbsp; “I told you, that was not my fault.” The elf sounded bored, which made Todd mad.

  “Listen, you little runt, you get my mother back and then you get your worm out of our house and out of my yard!”

  The elf was just as furious. “Listen yourself, you bug of a boy, don’t give orders to a ‘runt’ who happens to be dense enough that I could reach into your chest with my bare hand and pull out your beating heart and stuff it into the worm’s anus! You have ‘suppository’ written all over you.”

  There was a moment of silence while Todd realized that the elf was right. There was nothing Todd could do to threaten him; so it did no good to get angry or make demands. If he was going to get any help from the elf, he’d have to keep the conversation calm. So he said the first nonthreatening thing he could think of. “That’s like what they did in Temple of Doom."

  Exasperated, the elf said, “ What is what who did? And where is the temple of doom?”

  “It’s a movie. An Indiana Jones movie. They pulled the beating heart out of their sacrificial victims.”

  “I don’t have time to go to movies,” said the elf. “I don’t have time to talk to ignorant, pugnacious boys.”

  “What does pugnacious even mean?”

  “It means that I apparently have become much more fluent in your ridiculously misspelled and underinflected language than you will ever be.”

  “Well, you’re a scientist and I’m not.” And then something else dawned on Todd. If the worm had been attracted to Todd, then it must also have been attracted to this guy and for maybe the same reason. “You’re a space traveler.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “You travel between worlds.”

  “But not through space. My world doesn’t exist in your space. No light from our sun can ever possibly reach this planet. You cannot board any kind of imaginable spacecraft and get from there to here no matter how long you flew. I am not a space traveler.”

  “You get from one planet to another. And you didn’t have to build anything or get good grades in any subject or anything at all. It was just dumb luck, but you got to visit an alien world!”