Escape from Earth: New Adventures in Space

by Jack Dann

He tried to push the hose in. It went a little way, and to his surprise the water started squirting back at him, like when somebody covers the end of the hose with his thumb.

  “Yow!” shouted Jared. “Cool!”

  “You got it,” said Dad.

  “I can’t push it through,” said Todd. “I’m not strong enough.”

  “Or it only goes one way,” said Jared.

  “Help me!” Todd said to Dad.

  A moment later, Dad was beside him, gripping Todd’s hands over the hose. With his strength added on—or maybe entirely because of his strength, because Todd was certainly no strongman— the end of the hose suddenly moved and . . . disappeared.

  So did the water. Nothing trickled back down the hose. The water was flowing somewhere else.

  “Enema,” said Jared. “Cool.”

  Dad let go.

  “No!” said Todd. “We’ve got to move it.”

  “Where?” said Dad. “How?”

  “We’ve got the hose jammed into it, don’t we? Let’s use it like a handle and shove it somewhere else.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know,” said Todd. “I don’t think it matters. Eggo couldn’t predict where it would move on our side, he could only move it where he wanted on his side. So let’s move it where we want it and let the other side go wherever it goes.”

  “Maybe thousands of miles.”

  “What else can we do?” said Todd. “Wherever it is on that side, Dad, Mom hasn’t been able to get to it. So we have to move it, and then when I get there, Mom and I have to find it.”

  “But how?” asked Dad. “If you and Mom are . . . misty or whatever ...”

  “Dad,” said Todd. “It’s probably going to be pretty easy to find. There’s water coming out of it.”

  “Or fog,” said Dad. “If things are mistier there.”

  “Water, fog—something’s coming out of it right now. So let’s move the thing, if we can.”

  It was only hard because the hose was so flexible. Twice when they tried to move the thing sideways, the hose slipped out, squirting them for a moment before it settled back to being just a trickle. Finally Dad had the idea of using the handle of the rake from the tool shed, and that worked. He shoved it in beside the hose. It was rigid, and they were able to move the thing ten yards across the yard to the shed. The hose slid out as they went, spurting water for a moment when it did.

  The shed door was still open, so they easily slid the worm’s anus inside.

  “Don’t pull the rake out yet,” said Dad. “Hold it in place.”

  He ran to the house and came back out with the digital camera. He took pictures of the hose from several angles. “I don’t want to run the risk of not being able to get the hose back into it.”

  It was ten more minutes after that, but Dad got the printouts taped up on the inside walls of the shed. “OK,” he said. “Pull out the rake.”

  It was a lot easier in that direction. Out was the direction that the anus wanted things to go.

  Dad was all for putting the hose right back in, but Todd said no. “Think about it,” said Todd. “I’m not even there yet. And time moves a lot slower there. If we start pumping water, somebody over there is going to notice it. Because it better be noticeable in a big way, or Mom and I will never find it. ”

  “They’ve probably already noticed it,” said Dad. “Even that trickle of water wasn’t nothing. And what if somebody saw the rake handle?”

  “It wasn’t all that much water and it wasn’t all that long,” said Todd. “So give me time to get through and find Mom. Give me time to explain things to her. Eggo said it was hard to talk. Even if it only takes me ten minutes, how long is that here, where time goes so much quicker?”

  “I see,” said Dad. “Can we figure it out?”

  “Eggo said maybe it fluctuates. I don’t know. We don’t want to wait too long, because what if a storm comes up and blows Mom and me to smithereens? So I think maybe . . . tomorrow? It’s a Sunday.”

  “Too soon/' said Jared. “Take your time. What if Mom isn’t right there? What if it takes you a long time even to End her?”

  “Then when?”

  “Next week,” said Dad. “A week from now. I can tell the school you’re visiting your aunt and uncle,''though we’ll skip the hippie commune part. And next Saturday morning, we come out and give this thing a full-blast enema.”

  “Four years,” said Jared. ‘rWell, four years and four months. So that’s two hundred and . . . twenty-five weeks. Two-twenty-five to one.”

  “You’re doing all this math in your head?” said Todd. If Todd could’ve done that, he might’ve been able to become an astronaut.

  “Sh,” said Jared. “One week is 168 hours. Divide that by 225. That’s about three-quarters of an hour. Forty-five minutes.”

  “I don’t think it’s that precise,” said Todd.

  “Even if I’m off by double,” said Jared, “that gives you somewhere between twenty minutes and an hour and a half.”

  “You did that in your head?” asked Dad. “Why do your arithmetic grades suck so badly?”

  Jared shrugged. “They make me do all these stupid problems and ‘show my work.’ What do I put down? ‘Think think think’?”

  “I don’t know if that’s enough time,” said Todd. “I don’t know how long it will take.”

  “It also means,” said Dad, “if we run the water for 225 minutes, it will only be one minute on the other side.”

  “Yeah,” said Todd, “but it’ll mean that in one minute, 225 minutes’ worth of water will come through.”

  “Man,” said Jared. “That worm’s gonna be doing some serious puking.”

  “What I’m saying,” said Todd, “is that it’ll be noticeable.”

  “And what I’m saying,” said Dad, “is that if it takes you half an hour to get to the worm’s mouth, we’ve got to be running that hose for nearly a week.”

  “Are you worried about the water bill?” said Todd.

  “No,” said Dad. “Just thinking that in a week, a lot of things might go wrong on our end.”

  “Dad,” said Todd, “.so many things can go wrong on both ends that it’ll be a miracle if this works at all. But we can’t leave Mom there without even trying, can we?”

  A few minutes later, Todd was standing in Jared’s closet. Stark naked. No point in having his clothes just disappear or whatever they did if you tried to go through the worm wearing them.

  “Just make sure you have clothes waiting for Mom and me when we come through in the shed,” said Todd.

  “You’re going to see Mom naked?” said Jared, like it was too weird to imagine.

  “It’s that or never see her again as long as any of us live,” said Todd.

  “Mom won’t mind,” said Dad. “She’s in great shape, she kind of likes to show off.” He laughed, but it was also kind of a sob.

  “Here goes nothing,” said Todd.

  He reached out his hand.

  “Higher,” said Jared.

  And then the mouth had him. It wasn’t like something grabbing him. It was more like getting sucked up against the vacuum cleaner hose. Only instead of sticking to it, he got sucked right in.

  He thought he’d come right out the other end, but he didn’t. There was time. Like Jonah being stuck in the belly of the whale long enough to call on God to get him out. Only it wasn’t a whale, was it, or a big fish, or whatever. It was a worm, like this one. Jonah gets tossed overboard right into the worm’s mouth and then it takes him a while to find the mouth on the other side and then he comes through and he’s on the beach. He’s got to make sense of it somehow, right? So he tells people he was swallowed by a big fish and then God made the fish throw him up on the shore.

  That thought took him only a minute. Or a second. Or an hour. And then Todd got distracted by what he was seeing. Stars. All of them distant, but shifting rapidly. As if he were moving through them at an incredible speed. Faster than light. No spaceship aro
und him, no spacesuit, no way to breathe, only he realized that he didn’t need to breathe, he could just look and see space all around him until a particular star up ahead didn’t move off to the side, it came right at him, getting bigger and brighter, and then he dodged toward a planet and rushed toward the planet’s surface, going way too fast, reentry was going to burn him up.

  He didn’t burn up. He didn’t slow down, either. One moment he was plunging toward the planet’s surface and the next moment, without any sensation of stopping, he was being squeezed headfirst out of a tight space with waves of peristaltic action. Like a bunch of crap. He could see the ground below him. He couldn’t get his arms free. He was going to drop down and land on his face.

  And with one last spasm of the worm’s colon, that’s exactly what happened.

  It didn’t hurt. He barely felt it. He barely felt anything.

  He gathered his legs under him and got his hands in place, like a push-up, only the grassy ground felt like it was hardly there. Or maybe like his fingers weren’t there. Then he realized that the bushes around him weren’t bushes, they were trees. He was a giant here. A stark-naked, insubstantial giant.

  He felt a breeze blowing. And on the breeze, a distant voice. Calling his name. “Todd,” it was saying. And “no, no,” it said.

  He looked around, hoping it was mother, hoping she was off in the distance somewhere. It was mother, but she was not distant. She was entangled in the branches of some trees, not touching the ground at all.

  “Hold on, Todd!” she called. It looked like she was shouting with all her strength, but the sound was barely audible. She couldn’t be more than twenty feet away. Well, twenty feet compared to their body size—a lot farther compared to the size of the trees.

  Hold on, she had said, and now he realized that the breeze was tugging at him, making him drift. He was still in kneeling position, but he was sliding across the ground.

  Mother had the right idea, obviously. Get entangled in the branches. Get caught so the wind couldn’t carry him like a stray balloon.

  It took a while to get the knack of it. To move through the branches, heedless of how they poked into his skin. It didn’t hurt, really. More like tickling sometimes, and sometimes a vague pressure. He figured the tickling was twigs and leaves, the pressure the heavier, more substantial, less-yielding branches.

  Carefully, slowly, he made his way among the interlacing branches of the trees until he was close enough to Mother that neither of them had to shout, though their voices were still breathy and soft. “Don’t eat anything,” she warned him.

  “How could I anyway?” he said.

  “You can,” she said. “And you can drink. But don’t do it. It starts to change you. It makes you more solid.”

  “But isn’t that good?”

  “We could never go home,” said Mother. “That’s what he says, anyway. If I ever want to get home, I can’t eat or drink.”

  “You haven’t eaten or drunk anything in a week?” asked Todd.

  “What are you doing here?” she said. “Why did you come through the hole in the closet?”

  “Why did yow?” he said. “Jared warned you.”

  “How could I believe him?” She started to cry. “Now we’re both trapped here.”

  “Mom,” said Todd. “Two things. First, we have a plan. Dad and Jared are going to help us find the worm’s mouth. ”

  “Worm’s mouth?” she asked.

  “And the second thing. It’s been four years.”

  “No,” she said. “A week. It’s been a week.”

  “Four years,” repeated Todd. “Look at me. I’m older. I’m bigger. Jared is, too. Four years we thought you were dead.”

  “A week,” she murmured. “Oh, my poor children. My poor husband.”

  “Mom, you’ve got to be thirsty. You can’t last a week without any water. ”

  “I don’t get as thirsty as I thought I would. But yes, I’m getting very weak now. I expected—I thought that pretty soon I’ll just let go and blow away.”

  “Don’t let go,” said Todd. “Just hold on until they turn on the hose.” Then he told her about the plan.

  * * *

  It was the longest week of Jared’s life. He kept wanting to go out and check the worm’s butt to make sure it was there in the shed. Or sit and stare at the mouth in the closet. But he knew if he did that, he’d start wanting to throw things in it. Or go through it himself so he could see Mom. It wasn’t fair that Todd got to see her first, when Jared was the one who knew about it all along. But I saw her last, Jared told himself. That wasn’t fair either. And if I accidentally or on purpose go through the mouth, who’ll help Dad? Who’ll turn the hose on?

  Who’ll keep watch in case the elf comes back?

  Because what Jared knew about the elf was this: He wasn’t nice. He didn’t want Mom to come back. Hadn’t Jared begged him to bring her back, the first time he saw him after Mom went through? And the elf just shoved him away. It hurt so bad. The elf was so strong.

  What if the elf came back and went through the mouth and saw Todd and Mom and realized what was happening and . . . and killed them? He might. He was selfish and cruel, Jared knew that about him. He didn’t care about anybody. Oh, he asked questions, all the time, but he never answered any, he wouldn’t tell anything. “You wouldn’t understand anyway, you’re just a child,” he said. Well, children understand things, Jared wanted to scream at him. But he never did. Because if he got too demanding, if he got mad, the elf just left. And what if the elf shoved him again? He didn’t want the elf to shove him. It hurt, deep inside, when he did that.

  So Jared went through the days with Dad. Without Todd there, Jared and Dad had to do all kinds of jobs. He hadn’t realized how hard Todd worked, all the things he did. Or how lonely it got without Todd there to gripe at and play with and yell at and fight over the television remote with.

  He had thought all these years that it would be so nice if anyone would just believe him. But he hadn’t thought through what that might mean. Believe him and then what? Well, then they would do something about it. But he thought it would be like the government would do it, the police, the fire department. Somebody official who already knew all about everything and they could just say, Oh, lost your mother in one of those things, of course, happens all the time, give us a minute . . . there! There’s your mom!

  But of course it couldn’t work that way. Nobody knew anything about this. Nobody could just fix it. They had to do it themselves. So now the question was: Would Mom come back? Or had they just lost Todd, too? And if Todd couldn’t come back, either, would the cops think Dad had killed him and Mom both and lock him up and put Jared in foster care? A part of him wished they had just left things alone. Losing Mom was bad. But losing everybody else, too, wouldn’t exactly make anything better. If he had just kept it to himself. If he had just refused to put that sock into the monster’s mouth when Todd told him to.

  If . . .

  Then it would be Jared’s fault if Mom never came back. Even thinking like this, wasn’t that the same is wishing Mom would never come home? I’m selfish and evil, Jared thought. I don’t even deserve to have a mother.

  And then, underneath all the wondering and worrying and blaming, there was this, like a constant drumbeat: Hope. Mom was coming home. Todd would get her and Jared and Dad would show them where the mouth was on the other side by hosing the worm’s butt, and they’d all be together again and it would be partly because Jared knew and showed them and helped make it happen.

  He nearly flunked three different tests that week and the teachers were quite concerned at his sudden lapse in performance. It was hard to concentrate on anything. Hard to think that their stupid baby easy meaningless tests were worth taking. Hard even to listen to their sympathetic blabbing. “Is everything all right at home?” My brother just got swallowed up by the same monster that ate my mom, but we’ve got a plan, so, “Everything’s fine.”

  “Has anyone done anything t
o you?” Jared knew what they were asking, but apart from the Worm in the closet eating his mom and his brother, Jared had to say that nobody had done anything to him at all.

  And then it was Friday and he got to go home from school and fix himself some food and stay away from the closet because that would make him crazy, to sit and stare at the thing. Nothing was ever coming out of it, and nobody except the stupid elf was ever going into it again. There was nothing to see.

  Except there he was when Dad got home, the closet door open and Jared sitting on the floor just looking at it, remembering Mom’s look of panic as the thing caught hold of her and then how she looked, just her left shoulder and the rest of her body still in the closet, but not her head, not her right shoulder or arm, because they were going, and how Jared lunged and caught her but then she was torn right out of his arms. Like the thing had to get her in two swallows.

  In two bites.

  “Whatcha lookin’ at?” Dad asked. Softly, which meant he didn’t think anything was really funny.

  “It didn’t take Mom all at once,” said Jared. “What if it bit her in half? What if she’s dead and Todd can’t ever bring her home?”

  Dad took a slow breath. “Then Todd will tell us that when he gets back.”

  “And if he never comes back?”

  “Then we’ll move away from here. ”

  “And leave somebody else to find it?”

  “Jared, what can we do? Nuke the house? We didn’t make this problem. Especially not you. It was done to us. And we’re doing our best to undo it.” He came and sat beside Jared. “Things can get a lot worse. Or they can get a lot better. But at least we’re doing something, and we’re doing the best thing we could think of, and what more can anybody do?”

  Jared didn’t answer. There wasn’t an answer.

  “Let’s have dinner and watch a DVD tonight,” said Dad. “What about a Harry Potter movie? What about all of them?”

  “No magic,” said Jared, shuddering in spite of himself. “No crap about people turning invisible or going back in time or three-headed dogs or vines that choke you or chessmen that try to kill you or teachers with a face on the back of their head.”