by Paul Noth
But then I remembered I did have something that might protect me.
Letting go of the sill with my left hand, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the Perfect-O-Specs that I had taken from Frank Segar. Shaking them loose from the evidence bag, I hooked them over my eyes and stared at the heavy, glowing alien. It still hadn’t noticed me. It stood there in the breeze, holding its gun and looking for the little creature that had just bitten its finger.
I clicked the button on the side of the Specs. A beam of green light scanned over the creature—like a barcode at the supermarket.
I felt the Specs growing larger on my eyes. But then I realized it wasn’t just the glasses. My eyes and head were growing too.
But now my right hand lost its grip.
The force from outside yanked me up and out into the night. It flung me faster and farther than I could have imagined.
Just find them, I told myself as I began to black out. Find your family.
I woke up on a ramp surrounded by lights of a color I had never seen before—a color I had never been able to see. I took the enormous Specs off my enormous face and put them into the strange satchel I now carried.
I tried to stand up, but I had too many arms.
Also, my flippers were asleep.
CHAPTER 22
GUBBINS
Yes, aliens have big heads. That’s the one thing we got right about them.
But my big alien head didn’t make me any smarter. As far as I could tell, the big head wasn’t for thinking. It was for worrying about the big head.
There’s an old alien saying:
“Watch the head!”
Or sometimes just “Head!”
The second set of arms, I assumed, was for head protection. But why the long extendable neck? The last thing I wanted to do with my big head was send it off into the path of who knows what. The huge eyes, however, were excellent. Like a fancy new TV, they made everything sharper and more colorful.
I set out straightaway to find my family. First, I needed to find a way back into the enormous building I had flown out of, which looked like some sort of domed stadium.
But all my ideas about maneuvering the alien body proved wrong. I wasted an hour flopping around helplessly, which might have drawn attention if there hadn’t been so many others flopping around too. We were, after all, outside a large sports stadium, a location universally conducive to inebriated flopping around.
Most of the sky was the purest black I had ever seen. What faint light it had did not come from stars—there were none—but rather from enormous crisscrossing bands of strange clouds. Dark, churning, bubbly things, they appeared to be made up of perfectly round beads of all different sizes.
What are those? I thought, and I found my alien brain knew the answer. Those were not clouds at all, but moons, thousands and thousands of moons. These guys had more moons than they knew what to do with.
My alien brain knew a lot about these moons. For most of their history the aliens had called this planet by a name that meant “The Good Place Under the Moons.” But in more modern times, after making contact with the native inhabitants of several of the larger moons, they had changed their planet’s name from “The Good Place Under the Moons” to “No, We’re the Planet!”
Apparently an argument had broken out about who lived on the actual planet and who lived on “Just Another Moon,” a name we now applied to several of our neighbors.
My skin was mostly lavender. I had an orange mark in the shape of a ^ on my tunic.
Staring at this ^, I knew somehow that ^ meant “Gubbins.”
Repeating the name to myself made spots of orange appear on my skin. I felt happy to see them. But, as fear and confusion returned, the spots faded to pale grays and blues.
My new skin changed colors a lot, and it didn’t take me long to figure out that pale grays and white corresponded to fear, green to confusion, red to anger, orange to happiness, and the colors I had never seen before to feelings I had never felt before.
These changes weren’t voluntary. I couldn’t turn orange by trying to be happy any more than I could turn happy by trying to be orange. This must be a very honest society, I thought, if everyone can know how you feel just by looking at you.
An indescribable color and accompanying discomfort told me that I really had to go to the . . . I didn’t know what I had to go do. But I had to go do it BAD.
I let the body take over. My flippers flew me up one ramp, then down another, and into a small private room, where I relieved myself. I’ll spare you the details.
When I set out again, I stayed on the wide, main-street ramps that circled the great arena.
The city bustled with attractions and vacationers looking for a good time. This was typical of night-side border towns a short distance from Morning.
My alien-self knew lots of things instinctively. It knew that since a single day on this planet took over a thousand Earth-years, only the super rich lived in the Day. The Night housed its residents in ruins left by Daylight civilizations long past. Towns like this one catered to rich tourists from the Day, who came in search of the sorts of amusements prohibited by Morning Law, like Wrastlinsanity, which here meant captives from other worlds battling to the death in the arena.
The arena, I thought. Wasn’t that where I had been trying to go?
The more I acclimated to the body and let its instincts take over, the easier everything became. Soon, I cruised confidently along the ramps to the front gate of the arena.
Crossing under its arched entranceway turned my skin bright orange with happiness.
Inside, ramps branched toward many different levels of seating. Up beyond these ramps opened a vast domed amphitheater decked out in Wrastlinsanity lights and logos. Crowds had already started camping out in the stands for the next death match.
I knew that what I was looking for could be found on the levels below the arena floor.
Security guards, seeing the ^ symbol on my clothes, passed me through their checkpoints without question. I followed ramps marked “alien pens” downward to the floors below the arena’s floor, where I entered a maze of compartments.
I could look down into the alien pens from the walkways that crisscrossed above. I found myself wondering about the best ways to free the aliens. But then I thought: Why would I want to do that? Aliens were dangerous and had to remain in captivity—a point driven home by the sight of the giant spiked eel monster swirling around in its massive glass cell—one of the most dangerous creatures in the known universe. Destroyer of all competitors! A champion worth a fortune. And I, Gubbins, owned it! Freeing it was the last thing I should want to do.
Continuing along, into a different gravitational habitat, I came to a different pit-like pen, which read:
“Humans—Conklins.”
Looking down into this pen, I saw several units of the Conklin alien. But my mind only counted one being—an alien named “Conklin.”
I found Conklin strangely familiar, and yet repulsive.
One of the smallest parts of Conklin, a form that wore a band of fabric around its head, looked up and stared at me.
Suddenly, I didn’t feel good. Sickly blotches of conflicting colors popped out all over my skin. I turned the color of panic. I had to get out of there!
But then I heard comforting voices behind me.
“Gubbins,” said one.
“Gubbins,” said the other.
Turning, I saw two beings exactly like me. Both had the ^ symbol on their clothes.
“Gubbins!” I yelled.
I glowed bright orange as I flew toward them. I linked lower arms with them both, and they glowed orange too. At long last, I had found my family.
CHAPTER 23
FINALLY HAPPY
And so began the happiest time of my life.
For a Gubbins, being among family felt wonderful. I found every Gubbins fascinating, beautiful, and special. Because every one of them was my favorite person: me.
&n
bsp; No Gubbins ever bored me. Any story they told was something new that I had done.
“That’s brilliant!” I’d say, and then I’d savor the compliment.
Now and then, I would remember that I wasn’t really a Gubbins, but an imposter on a secret mission. This realization turned my skin all the gray shades of guilt, sadness, and fear.
Seeing my distress, the rest of the Gubbinses would rush over and cheer me up, until I turned orange again and had forgotten whatever had been troubling me. In this way, Gubbins maintained perfect happiness for every family member.
Whenever I felt lonely, I would find a big group of them. And whenever I just wanted to be by myself, I would find an even bigger group of them.
I felt so proud of myself for being Gubbins, and so proud of Gubbins for being me.
Then suddenly I remembered my real name: Hap Conklin. I remembered that my real family, the Conklins, were about to fight in the arena. To the death! I had to save them all from being killed!
Why did I keep forgetting this? I turned red in angry frustration.
Seeing my change in color alarmed all the other Gubbinses. Not wanting my anger to contaminate the rest of them, they rushed over to tell me how much I meant to them. They praised and honored me until I turned orange and forgot about everything except how happy I was.
A few minutes later, I remembered who I was again. I hated myself for forgetting about my family. The sight of me colored taupe with self-loathing sent a pale ripple of panic through the whole Gubbins family. They swarmed me with embraces, affirmations, and presents, including my own Lil’ Buddy the Walking Panini Press, a very popular item among the Gubbinses. It made me so happy that I turned bright orange and again forgot my real identity.
Around this time, Squeep! crept out of the shadows and tried to make contact with me. Not recognizing him at first, I wrapped him in focaccia bread and nearly made him into a panini. Luckily, at the lastminute, he stuck out his tongue, and I remembered him.
I set him gently on the floor and began following him through the different gravitational habitats. Now I know that he was trying to lead me back to the makeup compact, so I could take it to my family and we could all escape through the Doorganizer together. But at the time, I didn’t even remember that his name was Squeep!, only that I was supposed to follow him for some reason.
Then I became so distracted by the sight of the glass pen holding Florida Pete that I forgot all about the lizard. Pete looked completely wild and out of his mind with adrenaline, thrashing and pulling against his steel manacles and shackles. I stared down at him, trying to remember how I knew this giant earthling.
Two Gubbinses arrived bearing a load of raw meat to feed to Florida Pete. Pulling open a chute atop the cage, Gubbins began sliding the bloody cuts down a wide glass feeding tube to where Pete waited greedily. My Gubbins brain knew that this meat contained lots of special additives and chemicals that would make Pete more violent and uncontrollable, which would create the best show possible, for what we now called the Imperial Death Match.
In the short time since Gubbins had introduced Wrast-linsanity here, it had become the top TV program across several solar systems. And this tournament would be the greatest one yet, because the Emperor of the Galaxy himself would be attending in person! Emperor Galacto Supremo had never even been to our planet before. Gubbins needed to make this the most thrilling spectacle of blood and death in the history of the universe.
As I contemplated this, the other Gubbinses noticed me turning a darker and darker gray.
“Don’t worry,” they told me. “The death match will go fine.”
Then, before my fear could infect others, they hooked me under the arm and pulled me back to the main group of Gubbinses, where a pre–death match party was in full swing. Soon, I too was bright orange again and singing and dancing all the classic Gubbins tunes of old.
A bit later, I found myself more or less alone and looking down into the Conklin Habitat. That’s when, for the first time in several weeks, I saw my mom in person. She stood rocking Baby Lu and singing to her.
Reality hit me like a sledgehammer. I wanted to leap straight down to her, but I felt too ashamed about everything I had done—selling them to the aliens, choosing to be a Gubbins instead of a Conklin over and over again, and probably getting them all killed. I didn’t deserve to be called a Conklin anymore, or her son, or Baby Lu’s brother.
But I also couldn’t stay up here, among the Gubbinses.
Taking the Specs from my pocket, I hooked them over my eyes and flicked the switch to “Undo.”
The glasses, my head, and body all shrank down at once, until I was just ordinary Hap Conklin again in my dusty old suit. The only difference now was that my beard looked about three feet long.
I pulled open the hatch at the top of my family’s cell and slid down the glass feeding tube like it was a playground slide.
My mom and Baby Lu were the only ones awake in this part of the pen. Before I could express my sorrow and tell her how I didn’t deserve to be in the family anymore, she looked at me and gasped and shouted with joy.
Running toward me, she lifted me up in her arms alongside Baby Lu.
“Căci acest fiu al meu era mort,” said Mom, “şi a înviat; era pierdut, şi a fost găsit. Şi au început să se veselească!”
This meant, “I thought you were dead, but you’re alive!”
But it sounds a lot better in Romanian.
CHAPTER 24
REUNION
The next family member I saw, I almost didn’t recognize. She looked about Eliza’s age, but had freckles like Alice.
“Beth?” I said, in amazement.
“Hap?” said Beth. She hadn’t recognized me either at first, what with my long hillbilly beard.
Beth hugged me the moment Mom set me down.
“Wow,” I said. “So this is the real you, huh? You look great!”
“Ugh, yeah,” said Beth. “I hate it.”
“Well, at least you’re not a rat,” I said. “I knew you guys were just fraternal twins.”
“I wish we were identical,” said Beth. “I can’t get used to this, after looking like Eliza all my life.”
“Well, I like you better this way. But I guess it’s your choice now, since I brought you back these.”
“My Specs! Oh Hap! Hap! You brought me my Specs!”
The others began rushing in, yelling my name and hugging me. Dad, Kayla, Eliza, and even Alice hugged me. Everyone except Grandma, who stood a ways off, staring at me sullenly.
“Look!” cried Beth. “Hap brought me my Specs!” She had already put them on and transformed herself back into Eliza’s double.
“And my compact?” said Alice.
“Yes, Hap,” said Dad. “We need the makeup compact.”
“Where is it?” said Eliza.
“He doesn’t have it,” said Kayla.
“What!” yelled Grandma. “He didn’t even bring the blasted Doorganizer?”
“But . . . ,” I said. “I thought it was always connected to Alice.”
“The aliens knew we could link hands and escape through it,” said Dad. “So they found a way to separate it from Alice. I think they’ve trapped it in some sort of magnetic light beam.”
I smacked both hands to my forehead. This was what Squeep! had kept trying to tell me—to bring the compact! It was our only way of escape.
“Oh bravo, Happy Junior,” said Grandma. “Excellent rescue. Really superb. Now we’ll all be brutally murdered, thanks to you.”
“Don’t even start with me, Grandma,” I said. “This is all your fault.”
“My fault?” said Grandma. “You’re the one who sold us into bondage.”
“I was just trying to protect Baby Lu,” I said.
“Protect her from what?” said Grandma. “A Golden Hoop that would have prevented her abduction by aliens? Those Hoops would have protected all of us.”
“But you started the abductions!” I yelled. “
You sold the aliens the Flash Beacon! You sold them Wrastlinsanity. You created these death matches.”
“Of course I did,” said Grandma. “That was all essential to my plan. These depraved blood-sport tournaments. The decadent consumer goods. It’s all designed for the same purpose: to sweep through this galaxy like a virus, softening the Empire, eroding its bonds of power, until it is weak enough to be taken over.”
“Taken over?” I said. “By what?”
“By me, you idiot!” yelled Grandma. “By us! What do you think I’ve been working toward all these years—the perfect panini? As I told you, it was all by design. It was all to achieve the greatest possible destiny for this family. And it was working! Until you stuck your beard in.”
Looking around at my family, I could tell that Grandma had already confided her big crazy plan to them during their captivity.
“I’m not acting out of selfishness,” said Grandma, “or hubris. I just can’t stand to see such a glorious galaxy ruled by that brainless twit.”
Grandma pointed upward, toward a TV monitor mounted on the wall. It showed the vast arena packed to maximum capacity. All the aliens had turned toward an entering procession. The tens of thousands in attendance all bowed down at once, genuflecting before the Galactic Emperor. The camera cut to a closer shot of the small waving figure. I recognized the face as the same one that had been on all those bill bands wrapped around the money.
“What an imbecile,” said Grandma. “What a half-witted buffoon of an emperor. I would have been doing the galaxy a favor. If you don’t believe me, ask Kayla. She knows which future would have been better.”
I had forgotten about Kayla. I spotted her standing in the corner and making little faces to herself as she talked to Alphonso.
“Kayla,” I said. “When will they make us fight?”
“In twenty seconds,” she said, “the ceiling will open. The floor will rise, lifting us into the arena.”
