Escape from the Drooling Octopod!

by Robert West

  With the help of Beamer, Scilla, and Ghoulie, Solomon got his life back on course and booted the evil triplets out of his home. Now, Solomon had his own railroad and a city that was willing to listen to his ideas.

  Beamer didn’t know what he wanted to be yet — maybe a SWAT team member or an operative (isn’t that what they call a spy now?) for the CIA. Astronaut had a good ring to it if you could actually do some real exploring. Scientists were doing most of the exploring these days — in test tubes, accelerators, telescopes, and remote-controlled probes. Everything was viewed on monitors instead of up close and personal. You’d have thought the whole universe was virtual instead of real.

  Of course that wasn’t a problem for the Star-Fighters. Already in their tree ship they’d visited exploding planets, space platforms operated by robots, and ice moons with ice castles. They’d rubbed shoulders (or . . . whatever) with intelligent insects and cat-like humanoids.

  From his spot in the tree in his yard, Beamer could see into the attic windows. He couldn’t see the web inside. In fact, he hadn’t even been allowed in the attic since the attack on the machines. What kind of a spider sucks the power out of a machine? The scientists had been able to prove that the spider was no longer in the house. But how did she get in, and where did she go when she left? Of course, there were also a lot of other questions that began with the word why.

  Most spiders, of course, could get into a house through any little crack or cranny, but that wouldn’t hold for Molgotha. She was definitely one big mama! Judging from the size of the web fibers, the bug scientist guys had figured that the spider had a body anywhere from three feet to five feet in diameter. It seemed to Beamer that somebody would have probably noticed a giant spider strolling down the street. I mean, you add eight splayed-out legs to that body, and you have something right out of a Saturday-night monster flick clomping down the block.

  So, if she didn’t escape down the street, how did she escape? Beamer wondered. The wind suddenly picked up, making him rock and roll with the branches. A chill suddenly ran through Beamer’s limbs like an electrical shock. What if she made her escapes through a tree — as in this tree? Beamer’s eyes suddenly grew as big as fried eggs. He shot into the tree ship and slammed the door behind him. He then whammed all the windows shut, leaving one cracked open only enough for one scared eye to peak through.

  The wind stopped blowing, but he still heard the sound of creaking branches from somewhere. The sound got louder as more branches scratched each other. Something was coming! Suddenly he heard scuffling and a loud thump that shook the tree ship. A long thin something, about the shape of a giant spider leg, slapped the window point-blank in front of his eye. He slammed the window closed and lunged backward across the room. “Aiiiiii!” he screeched before he smacked into a plywood control panel. At the same time he heard a bang, followed by a blinding blast of light.

  3

  Monsters of the Deep

  “Beamer, are you having a fit or something?” asked the figure who stood with her hand on cocked hip, silhouetted in the bright doorway. It was Scilla. She had the cocking-her-hip thing down to a precision science these days.

  “Hey, what do you think of my new fishing rod?” asked Ghoulie, who threw open a window and waved a fishing rod.

  Fishing rod? Who brings a fishing rod into a tree? What’d he expect to catch, flying fish? Hey, it sort of looks like a giant spider leg. Anybody could have made the same mistake. Right? “Hey guys!” he said sheepishly. “I just figured something out!” Before he had time to say anything else, though, he heard a loud whoosh! He saw a spinning stream of colored light and suddenly felt like his stomach had turned into a washing machine.

  Then it seemed like the whole ship was in a washing machine. They were spinning around in a pink-and-white whirlpool. A whole wave of pink liquid washed in the door . . . air lock . . . whatever . . . and splashed Beamer into the bulk-head.

  The captain leaned against the door and struggled to close it before more liquid could wash in. Then she brushed back her hair and touched a tiny disc to one side of her mouth. “Ives. Lieutenant Ives!” she yelled. “Turn on the pumps!”

  Beamer spit out a mouthful of the pink water. “Yuck! It tastes like fruit punch — salty fruit punch,” he said as he ran to the water dispenser. He gargled and spit out several cupfuls.

  “Take it easy, MacIntyre,” said Captain Bruzelski.

  “But what if it’s full of deadly bacteria or radioactive?” he asked, gargling another cup of water.

  “Good question,” she murmured.

  Somewhere in the back of MacIntyre’s mind, Beamer wondered what would happen if one of them died in one of their adventures. Would they die back in the real world too?

  “Go ahead and gargle,” the captain said. “Where’s Lieutenant Ives?” she asked, looking around. “Ives!” she crowed again into her communicator. “What’s happening with the pumps? Ives, where are you? Ives! Respond!”

  Commander MacIntyre spit out one last gargle and charged after her onto the bridge. Static on the communicator was as loud as a heavy-metal band. Both he and Captain Bruzelski held their ears with a grimace. Then the static cleared; Lieutenant Ives’s voice came in loud and clear.

  “I’m out here, Captain,” the lieutenant said. “The view is terrific!”

  “There he is,” said MacIntyre, pointing toward the main view screen.

  The picture was something out of Captain Nemo’s world. Bizarre rock formations were the setting for multiple schools of fish, which swam back and forth like competing drill teams. In the middle of them was the lieutenant in a hard diving suit, bobbing around like a beach ball with bubbles coming out of his helmet. He held some kind of speargun with a large fish squirming on the tip.

  “What’d you catch?” the captain asked with a chuckle.

  “Good question,” the voice spoke through the ship’s speakers. “With four eyes and four fins, it doesn’t fit on any known-species chart.”

  The commander shook his head, momentarily remembering something about him having a fishing rod. Of course that was ridiculous; you can’t fish with a fishing rod underwater.

  At that moment the fish gave a frantic wiggle, broke loose from the speargun, and swam off. “Rats, I was looking forward to some lip-smacking fish and chips,” the lieutenant said with a sigh.

  “How about checking out that sunken ship behind you?” suggested the captain.

  Right smack in the middle of those twisted and jumbled rocks was a shipwreck. MacIntyre didn’t see a pirate flag, but it looked like it could have come right out of a pirate movie. The trouble was that the colors were all wrong. The shipwreck had torn light pink sails, a red hull with a big hole through it, and a thick coating of purple barnacles.

  “MacIntyre, get those pumps working,” the captain ordered as pink liquid washed across the floor.

  The commander jumped to it. “Hey, since when did our spaceship become a submarine?”

  “Multipurpose vehicle for a multifunctional universe,” answered Bruzelski proudly.

  Whew, that sounded impressive. Scilla definitely liked being in command. Of course, Beamer knew the feeling — on a tree-ship adventure, everything seemed to come into your head with hardly a moment’s thought. The truth was that, just like him and Ghoulie, Scilla had only the slightest inkling of what her fantasy self was talking about. But then they had a few years yet to catch up, knowledge-wise, with their fantasy selves.

  “Captain, we have to get out of here!” the lieutenant’s voice shouted in alarm. “There’s a whole school of something — something big — coming our way!”

  “Yep, I’ve got them on sonar,” yelled the commander.

  “Get in here, Ives!” the captain ordered. “As in make like a fish! MacIntyre, open the starboard air lock.” The ship began to lurch in the pink sea like a bobber on a fishing line.

  “Look, Captain, on-screen!” MacIntyre shouted.

  A huge shadow crawled across the seafloor
in front of them. Then something gigantic grew in size at the top of the screen as it passed overhead. Before MacIntyre could take a second breath, the creature filled the screen.

  Beamer thought of the opening scene in the first Star Wars movie — episode four, that is — when the huge Star Destroyer passed overhead. That long shot gave a sense of how huge the spaceship was. What was flying over them was no spaceship, though; this was a monstrous undersea creature.

  It looked something like a giant manta ray and was about the size of a basketball court. With each dip of its enormous fins, it fanned the pink sea into a turbulent froth that tossed their ship about like a plastic toy in a bathtub.

  “Captain, they’re all around us,” she heard the lieutenant gasp on the speakers.

  Sure enough, to either side was a whole fleet of these creatures moving in a V formation. Suddenly they both heard and felt a bang on their hull. All at once they were tumbling around the walls and ceiling like jeans and T-shirts in a dryer.

  The captain struggled to hold on to the water dispenser. “One of them tipped us with its fin,” she shouted. “Get us stabilized, Commander!”

  “As soon as I can, Captain,” stuttered MacIntyre as he pulled himself across the furniture toward his control station. He flailed about, fighting dizziness and a churning stomach. Finally, he reached the controls. The ship stopped rolling.

  “Hard to port — now!” ordered the captain.

  The ship immediately banked left. At that moment, Lieutenant Ives staggered through the door, looking like he’d just gotten off a corkscrew roller coaster. “Does anyone have a barf bag?” he asked with a wobble in his voice.

  “No time for that,” barked the captain. “Get to your station. Dive!” she shouted. “Dive!”

  “We’re diving into a canyon,” said the still-shaky Ives.

  Just then about twenty little globular ships appeared, coming toward them like giant bubbles underwater. “Uh, put on your best smiles and spiff up your uniforms,” said Captain Bruzelski. “We’re about to have company.”

  “I’m trying to contact them,” said Ives, “but they’re not answering.”

  “Did you bang on the universal translator?” asked the captain.

  “Aye, aye, sure did,” said Ives.

  “Here, I’ll do it.” She walked over and whacked the black box with her hand. “Ow!” She massaged her knuckles. “Why can’t they make these things out of rubber?”

  MacIntyre couldn’t quite see what kind of creatures were piloting those little globes. For a moment, he thought he saw Kermit the Frog. “Nah, couldn’t be,” he said to himself. Then he saw a whole bunch of little blips on his sonar screen. “I’m picking up something scarier heading this way,” he called out. “Torpedoes!” he shouted when he confirmed his suspicion. He pounded the alarm and heard the loud BLEE . . . BLEE . . . BLEE sound throughout the ship.

  “They could have at least tried a hello. Get us out of here, Commander!” Captain Bruzelski shouted. “Punch it!”

  Punch it he did as he spun the ship around. They sped through the undersea world like a supersonic whale.

  “The torpedoes are still gaining on us!” the captain shouted. “Punch it again!”

  MacIntyre felt the acceleration, but the torpedoes were still gaining on them like piranha on steroids.

  4

  Pink Wars

  Those torpedo piranhas were closing fast. Another couple of heartbeats and the ship’s tail would be blown to smithereens.

  Being buried at sea had always sounded kind of heroic to Beamer, but that was in a blue sea, not a pink one . . . and not until he had at least gotten past puberty.

  At the last moment, the ship shot out of the pink ocean and kissed the sky. “We’re free!” they all cried at once. The torpedoes leaped out of the water behind them, but having only propellers, they fell back into the sea.

  As if they hadn’t already had enough pink beneath the sea, they also faced a pink sky — a lighter shade, of course. Commander MacIntyre turned the ship to head toward what looked like a large island.

  “Holy tamole! Even the land is pink!” said the captain.

  She was sounding a little more like Scilla at the moment, thought MacIntyre. Hmm, who’s Scilla? He couldn’t quite place the name, but somehow he knew that she had always hated the color pink.

  MacIntyre shook his head. Whoever Scilla was, she wouldn’t like this planet. The dirt looked more pink than brown — a dark, orangish pink. Even the grass and brush were different shades of pink. A river wiggled through it all, also pink like the ocean. The least pinkish part of the landscape was a patch of land on either side of the river, which seemed to sparkle.

  “How in blazes do things work on this planet?” asked Ives. “Usually, it’s the chlorophyll in the green that soaks in sunlight for plants. Green doesn’t seem to even exist here! Pink plants — what kind of chemical works in pink to pull in sunlight?”

  “Let’s have a closer look,” said the captain. “Take us down, MacIntyre. Over there!”

  It occurred to Beamer that they’d never “landed” the tree ship before. They’d crashed and been pulled in by a tractor beam, but never just . . . landed. Luckily, Commander MacIntyre seemed to know what to do. It was weird having two minds in one head, but there were definite advantages in this case.

  The ship hovered for a moment and then settled down on the pink-orange earth.

  “The pink air seems to be breathable,” announced Lieutenant Ives, “though a little lower than earth standard on oxygen.” Then they stepped onto the alien world.

  “The air smells like peppermint,” said the captain in surprise.

  MacIntyre ran to the water’s edge and scanned it with his analyzer. Then he cupped a handful and tasted it. “Like I figured, the river tastes like fruit punch. It’s not salty like the sea.” He happily slurped a few more handfuls. “It’s sweet, very sweet.”

  “Captain, Commander, over here!” shouted the lieutenant from the edge of what had looked sparkly from above. “The trees . . . their leaves are — ”

  “Glass!” said the captain as she walked toward the trees.

  The glass leaves tinkled in the pink wind like wind chimes. They weren’t totally transparent. Like everything else on this planet, the glass leaves were shades of pink.

  “Yech, is that asparagus?” MacIntyre asked with a funny look, pointing toward a patch of plants nearby.

  They were shaped like asparagus but colored purplish pink. MacIntyre picked one and sniffed it cautiously. He scanned it with his . . . “thingamabob.”

  Beamer looked at the thingamabob through MacIntyre’s eyes quizzically. He didn’t remember seeing the tool before. It was one of those things that just happened to pop up on the ship when you needed it. He didn’t even know what it was called. Commander MacIntyre probably knew it, though.

  “This thing says that this asparagus stuff’s safe to eat,” the commander said.

  Yeah, right, that’s what they say about asparagus back home. Beamer had always wished that asparagus would get on the endangered-species list. He was sure it was only a matter of time before some terrorist figured out its potential for warfare. What better way to kill off the youth of America than by shoving asparagus down their throats?

  Lieutenant Ives suddenly took the pink asparagus from MacIntyre and nibbled it. “Tastes like candy,” he announced with a shrug. “Very sweet.”

  The lieutenant was definitely braver than MacIntyre had thought he was if he could chew a bite of asparagus without flinching. The commander reached for something that looked like peas in a pod, except, of course, the pod was pink. “Mmm,” he muttered with his mouth full of peas. “They’re kind of like M&M’s. Everything tastes like candy here!” he shouted in pure joy.

  Suddenly, small pink creatures that looked like babies with tiny wings began to flutter around them. “They’re pink cherubs,” said Captain Bruzelski. “You know, like you see flying around in old paintings or on wrapping paper for
baby showers. Oh, they’re so cute,” she said as she reached up to tickle one of them.

  Before the Star-Fighters could politely refuse, the little cherubs were serving them all kinds of candy plants, along with large cups filled with fruit punch from the river.

  “Tastes like candy!” they repeated as they feasted on the dif-ferent candy-flavored plants. Not too surprisingly, plants that looked like pink cotton turned out to taste like cotton candy.

  Beamer noticed that for some reason they were all talking and acting more like their kid selves than their Star-Fighter characters.

  A cherub with a crew cut scooped some pink mud into little cups for the Star-Fighters. It felt and tasted like soft-serve ice cream — peppermint flavored, of course.

  MacIntyre turned to see Bruzelski take a bite of what looked like pink cauliflower.

  Noticing that he was staring at her, Captain Bruzelski said, “Tastes like white chocolate. Honest.”

  The little cherubs began dancing wildly. Some appeared with heavy-metal band instruments and started playing while others danced.

  Ives covered his ears and burped loudly. “What I wouldn’t give for a french fry.”

  “What did you say, Ives?” asked MacIntyre, unable to hear anything above the band. “I don’t suppose there are any rice and beans around here?” he asked as one of the creatures flew by. “I’m all sugared out.”

  “Me too,” shouted the captain, who apparently had the best ears in the team. “I never thought I’d say this, but spinach is beginning to sound good to me.”

  “Yeah, I could even do with some okra,” said MacIntyre. Yep, his sweet tooth was definitely getting worn out.