by Georgia Byng
Miss Cribbins, the smooth-faced beauty with icy eyes, whose hair was now fire-engine red, sat in the seat behind the pilot with her pink cat-spider crouched on her shoulder. Nurse Meekles and the boy were in seats across the aisle.
Molly and Rocky hid in the same cubicle space as before, then they materialized. They listened to the nurse’s kind tones as she talked to the boy and to Miss Cribbins as she scolded him.
“No, you can’t play with that in the flycopter,” said Miss Cribbins harshly. “In fact, I’m confiscating it.” A large squashy dinosaur flew over the seat and landed in the cubicle on Molly.
“MMMWWEEERGHHHH!” it roared as though sounding the alarm. Rocky pulled a face at it.
“But he’ll be lonely in the back!” the boy cried.
“Oh, stop sniveling,” Miss Cribbins replied. Then her words were muddied by the sounds of the engines.
“Oooh my tummy!” the small boy screeched as they soared upward through the air toward the city at the top of the mountain. Molly peered out the window.
Nearer the mountain’s craggy top, she saw that the cloud-kissed city was far more lavish than she had realized. Its buildings were turreted with silver and glass and copper, and behind walls were marvelous gardens with fountains and trees and sculptures. The flycopter ascended higher and higher, up to the lofty peaks of Mont Blanc. They were approaching a palace far bigger than any of the other residences around it. It had ten or fifteen metal turrets and many ornamental gardens. Below was a cliff-side entrance. The flycopter flew in.
As the engines died down and the machine parked, the little boy clapped his hands.
“I’m so excited,” he shouted. “This is going to be so much fun!”
Miss Cribbins, Molly could see through a crack in the chair, had turned to face him. “Not now that you are four,” she said harshly. “This summer you are going to work hard, Micky Minus. Your lessons start with me. You won’t be lolling about with Nurse Meekles anymore.” She smiled, her strangely beautiful face made ugly by her malicious eyes, and then she chuckled. “You’re going to be so tired from work, young man, that you won’t have the energy to play. And you’d better work hard, because you know how the princess hates ugly things. You’re not the world’s most handsome child, are you now? You’d better make up for it by working, because if you don’t please Her Highness, she might send you to live with the mutants!”
Molly shot Rocky a look of horror, then mouthed the boy’s name. “Minus?” she questioned silently. Rocky shrugged as if to agree that it was a weird surname. Then Molly lifted them into a time hover and, feeling safe, she, Rocky, and Petula followed the party out.
They walked through a cavernlike aircraft hangar to a tall door and up a slope into a courtyard. Here Micky Minus clutched Nurse Meekles, hugging her leg. Only when Miss Cribbins had gone did he relax. As an entourage of servants brought their suitcases, the little boy charged down covered walkways and skipped through the gardens. He sprinted down paths, hopped past ponds, and galloped over tiny bridges. He stopped once to inspect a rainbow-colored parrot sitting in a tree. Then he ran on until he came to a tall green door. Beyond this was the courtyard nursery. He shot toward a pool there and peered in. Silver fish flashed in the water. Molly led Rocky and Petula behind a bush and let them all arrive in the time. The air here was cool and the sunlight a perfect brightness.
“I think the big furry fish has had babies,” Micky was saying. Then as the nurse came over to look, he confided, “Ai Mu, I don’t want to have lessons with Miss Cribbins.”
“You have to,” the Chinese woman said reluctantly. “I’ve told you, little Ping—it’s part of growing up.”
“I don’t want to go and live over there.”
“But they need you, dumpling. You’ve got a very important job to do. And you’ll be able to come and visit me. Look how near I am. And that stuff Miss Cribbins said about the mutants—well, that’s nonsense.”
“I don’t want to go!” wailed the small boy, and he began to cry.
Molly bit her finger. “I wish we’d gone straight to when he’s eleven,” she whispered. “This is horrible. I want to take him back right now, but we can’t. They’ll only send that Redhorn man to get him again.”
There was a BOOM as Molly took them into the future again. Nurse Meekles looked up.
“What was that noise?” Micky Minus asked.
“Don’t you worry, my little sugar.”
With elegant accuracy Molly’s red gem thrust her, Rocky, and Petula forward to the time when Molly would be the exact same age as Micky Minus. They came to an abrupt halt. A silvery, bright sun shone down. Molly placed Petula on the ground.
“Poor Petula! You’ve probably had enough of this. Go on—go and have a good sniff about.” Petula looked up at Molly gratefully, then cautiously began investigating the garden. She found a smooth stone on the gravel. She picked it up in her mouth and began sucking it.
“I’ll just have to hypnotize anyone who comes along,” Molly said. “We can’t keep carrying her.”
“I agree,” said Rocky. He was trying to sound relaxed, but Molly knew he was worried because he still gripped her arm tightly. “I hope,” he said, pointing to a camera attached to a small tree, “that the palace guards aren’t paying too much attention today.”
“We’ll sort this out now and then we’ll just zip back to the twenty-first century,” Molly said, sounding more confident than she felt.
Rocky nodded. His eyes ran around the windows of the nurse’s quarters. “Micky must be living in another part of the palace by now. Let’s go and find him.”
Molly whistled quietly for Petula. “Wonder why he’s called Micky Minus?” she whispered as they walked past the nurse’s rose beds into other colonnaded gardens. Treading quietly, the friends kept to the shadowy cloisters. Then they heard a noise.
It was Miss Cribbins’s cool snarl and it was coming from an open window nearby. Petula’s ears pricked up as she smelled the horrid stench of the cat-spider. Molly and Rocky crouched down and, commando style, crept to the window. Then, carefully and slowly, they raised their heads and peered in.
Miss Cribbins stood in front of a T-shaped stand. On this her cat-spider lay curled up, and beside it was a computer that Cribbins tapped with a spiky finger. Behind her, a screen showed the image of a human body. It showed the brain, intestines, heart, liver, spleen, lungs—the bits and pieces that chug away inside each and every one of us.
“As I hope you remember,” the tight-lipped woman was saying, knocking a fluorescent green sacklike shape on the screen with a baton, “this is your stomach. Well, not your stomach. These are healthy intestines. Your insides are more like this …” The sack on the screen, an empty, deflated balloon-type thing with pipes going in and out of it, now turned into something else. It became covered with red spots and growths and lumps.
“Looks painful,” said a thin voice. Molly lifted her head higher to see who had spoken. She saw the back of a boy. His hair was brown and curly. But he wasn’t sitting—he was reclining on a piece of furniture that was part stretcher, part chair.
“Of course it looks painful,” Miss Cribbins retorted. “It is painful, as you well know. Don’t try to wriggle out of it and deny it. THIS IS WHAT YOUR STOMACH LOOKS LIKE!”
The intestines on the screen became a moving picture, and the pustules and lumps on it oozed yellow slime. The boy said nothing.
“Which is one of the reasons,” continued his nightmare teacher, “why you are so WEAK.”
The picture changed so that now the model of the boy on the screen showed his muscles.
“These are healthy muscles,” said the horrible governess. “But these are yours.” Instead of thick biceps flexing in the moving image, now there were thin, puny fibers. Miss Cribbins switched the computer off. Her cat-spider rapidly awoke, sprang off the pedestal, and scuttled up her arm to perch on her shoulder. “It is tea now,” she said. “As usual, the food will make you feel ill. It’s pathetic tha
t you are so allergic. What kind of human are you?” Under her breath she muttered to her pet, “I don’t think he will ever get better. Do you, Taramasalata?”
“Thank you,” answered the weak voice, “and excuse me.” With that, as if on invisible ropes, the boy’s chair levitated and, humming, transported him through a door at the end of the classroom. Molly and Rocky saw his face as he turned the corner. It was the unmistakable face of Micky Minus.
Miss Cribbins stood alone. Her pet cat-spider picked its way down her arm.
“Keep him down,” she said, chuffing her sharp-toothed creature under its chin. “Reduce him, knock him, worry his dreams. Don’t destroy him, but keep him down.” The cat-spider began to purr.
Molly and Rocky dropped to their knees and exchanged a quizzical look. Molly put her forefinger to her head and, as if turning an invisible dial, circled it around twice. Rocky nodded and mouthed the word “nutter.”
Molly wondered what had happened to Micky. Had he been in a terrible accident? Then she, Rocky, and Petula wriggled away from under the window and followed the wall around.
The first door they came to was a tall white one and it too was open. Inside was a gargantuan playroom with a giant curling slide that spaghettied around and down the room. Across the space, from a high platform down to a lower mat, was a tight nylon rope.
“That’s a pulley,” Rocky whispered. “You get on that thing with the seat on it at the top and you shoot down to the bottom. It’s good fun.”
“Not for my brother,” said Molly. “He probably couldn’t even get up on it.”
Just then the far door opened and Micky buzzed in on his floating divan. Molly put her fingers to her mouth to give him a low whistle, but Rocky karate-chopped her hand to silence her.
“Not yet,” he whispered. “We need to know more about him.”
The boy silently drifted by into the next room, from where a thumping noise was coming. Molly, Rocky, and Petula edged sideways, crouched below the open window, and looked inside. There, they saw a sunken trampoline, and bouncing up and down on this as though her life depended on it was a little girl. She was wearing a mustard-colored dress with silver petticoats underneath. Bracelets jangled on her wrists while, amazingly, the girl’s hair, piled on top of her head in the shape of whipped ice cream, stayed rigidly in place.
“Lots of gel,” Molly whispered. Her own hair was now collapsing, and sticky strands of it fell about her face.
“Bet she’s a princess too,” said Rocky. “She must be the sister of the girl we saw before. She’s got exactly the same eyes.”
“Where are the parents in this place?”
The child’s high-heeled yellow shoes lay neatly on the floor beside the trampoline, and next to them was a pile of books. Molly noticed their titles. Astrophysics—volumes one, two, and three. Behind was a grand indoor swimming pool with pink lights glittering under the water.
“Tea,” Micky Minus said nonchalantly, his floating divan heading straight out over the water toward the far door. The small girl jumped very high, did a somersault, and then pounced onto a wheelless scooter. Without a noise it rose up in the air. The girl drove it on two airborne circuits of the room and then water-skied it over the pool before disappearing through the door too.
“Bwing my fings!” she shouted behind her. A hollow-faced servant in a medieval jester costume, who had been standing as discreet as a pillar, obediently trudged over to the yellow shoes and the books. The bells at the ends of his red felt hat jangled in the echoing room. His eyes were gray and empty.
“He looks hypnotized,” Molly said, her voice barely audible.
“Not a good sign at all,” said Rocky, checking behind them. “That creepy Redhorn guy must still be about.” Molly nodded. Hearing footsteps coming closer, they were both suddenly filled with alarm.
“Quick. Get in!” Molly grabbed Petula, and they all tumbled through the window. A soft pile of toys squeaked and jingled, squashing as they broke their fall.
In a room reserved for guards at the other side of the building, twenty small screens showed what the spy cameras about the palace were scanning. Each was a monitor for ten cameras, so the views flitted from one view of the palace grounds to another.
Three tall, handsome men sat with earphones on, their eyes trained on the screens. All were silent, their heads occasionally nodding forward because of the boredom of watching and listening to the predictable monitors. There hadn’t been any intruders at the palace since a wild bird had become trapped in the dining room six months ago. They had darted the bird. It had been interesting to see the strategically positioned, poisonous darts work.
The man on monitor one suddenly perked up. In room nine, two people—children, it seemed—had just entered through the window. The girl was carrying a bag of some sort. Now they were walking past the swimming pool.
“Impostors—Room nine,” he announced in a monotone.
Immediately the man beside him got up and inspected the screen. Making the decision not to fire poisonous darts at them, since an interrogation would be necessary, he ordered: “Intercept—Number Twelve and Number Thirteen. Keep in contact.”
Number Twelve, for that was the name of the tall, strong guard on monitor one, and Number Thirteen immediately got up. They removed their headphones and replaced them with walkie-talkie receivers that they plugged into their ears. Taking two gunlike weapons from a shelf, they left.
Molly and Rocky hurried toward the door at the end of the room. Beyond it was another garden—this one square and surrounded by sparkling walls. They began to move toward a silver door on the right, but just as they approached it, it made a bleeping noise. Molly and Rocky leaped for cover behind a bush. The jester servant they’d seen earlier walked past them as he returned to the swimming pool. The door bleeped again, giving Molly just enough time to pull her and Rocky through.
Inside, the space was aquatically blue. Molly and Rocky stepped nimbly into a dark-blue corner where they could hardly be seen.
“I wonder what’s in there,” Rocky whispered, nodding toward a dividing wall that hid the main part of the room. “I don’t like this, Molly—it’s weird here.”
Molly was feeling uneasy too, especially as a low, muffled moan and a squelching noise were coming from the room beyond. “It smells of seaweed and salt, doesn’t it?” Molly nodded.
Petula’s nose picked up more. She could smell the young girl in the yellow dress. This girl’s odor was very like that of the girl on the swing. She could smell a man too. An acrid stench of fear was coming from him. Both were behind the partition. Under the man’s panic Petula caught a whiff of books and paper and ink and the plastic of computers, as well as cheese. The man liked cheese. Petula tried to stretch her mind out to see if she could sense more of the man’s feelings, but all she got was fear. Intense fear.
“Wh-what is that noise?” Rocky stammered.
Petula hung back.
Molly gulped. Her blood was pumping through the veins in her temples at a galloping pace. She had a nasty feeling that the noise was Micky groaning. She stepped toward the screen and peered around it. Above her head, as if on hangers, hung the yellow dress and the high heels of the little girl. Beside them were a black all-in-one suit and a pair of brown rubber shoes. Then there was another partition.
Molly leaned forward and saw beyond it something giant and gelatinous and blue and watery. The thing squelched and quivered.
And then Molly caught a glimpse of the girl. She was dressed in a shiny turquoise sleeveless wet suit, with trousers that stopped above the knee. Molly couldn’t see who was making the pained noise. Now convinced that it was her brother being tortured, Molly decided to step up to the screen and take a proper look.
As she did, an extraordinary and shocking thing happened. The moment Molly entered the zone between the partition walls, a current—some sort of force field—surrounded her body, causing the zipper of her white outfit to unzip. But not only that. Quicker than Molly cou
ld react, her feet were tilted forward and an invisible force removed her sneakers. Her clothes were effortlessly peeled off and, in a flash, her precious crystal necklace was sucked off her neck. Before she could reach up and grab it, it was over her head and hovering three meters above her, along with her clothes, sneakers, and rucksack. The plastic strip that was one half of the hospital band that had once been around Molly’s twin brother’s wrist, with its letters GAN TWIN written on it, floated down to the floor. For less than an instant Molly was left standing stark naked, and then something even odder happened. Blue lights shone at her body, and before she could blink, she too was wearing a shiny turquoise outfit made of the glowing electric-blue material. All this happened silently and took no more than five seconds flat.
Molly touched her new outfit and desperately looked up at her necklace, dangling far out of reach. She shot a scared look back at Rocky. He had his hand over his mouth in horror. Then, hearing another moan, Molly inched toward the lower wall. She crouched down and poked her head around it.
Now she could see the blue squelching thing in all its glistening glory. It looked like a massive jellyfish floating high in the air. Its strands and tentacles dropped down into deep, slimy, bubbling water.
Beyond it was a platform and on this a seat. A man also dressed in an electromagnetic wet suit sat gagged, with his body and arms apparently constrained by invisible forces. He was desperately trying to release his hands. A silver dome crowned his head. In front of him the girl stood like a DJ at a panel of switches and controls. Molly wondered whether to run forward and hypnotize her. She felt sure the girl was about to do something extremely bad. But before Molly was able to make her decision a heavy hand grasped her throat and another caught her arms in a full nelson.
