saults and cartwheels before they began shooting indiscriminately into the grandstands where Sarah and Mick were sitting. Sarah dove for the floor as blaster shots pinged all around her.
She covered her head and screamed and looked up at Patrick Gravy, who was smiling down at her from his seat. “Isn’t it incredible how close they can come to shooting us and still miss?” He shouted, “Deadly marksmanship!”
She looked at Mick, who was smiling along with Patrick, but Sarah could tell he was a bit unsettled. “Good show, Gravy. Now listen, about that—”
“Oh, sir,” Patrick interrupted. “You haven’t seen the finale. You’re going to love this.”
Sarah gave Mick a worried look. He flared his eyes a little in understanding, but kept his fake smile plastered on his face.
Patrick pointed in the distance, and though it was daytime, a large moon shone in the Planet Valkyrie sky. There was a rumble nearby, and a giant missile launcher rolled into place on the platform where the Valkyrians had been performing their military exercises.
The missile slowly raised and pivoted until it was pointing directly at the moon.
Patrick offered his Telly to Mick. “Sir, would you like to do the honors?”
Mick cleared his throat and said, “There is nothing in the universe that would please me more than destroying a harmless space object that isn’t bothering anyone, but I should really decline, since—”
“Great, I’ll do it!” Patrick shouted. He quickly punched his Telly with a fat finger and the missile sailed into the sky with a flash of heat and a deafening hiss.
“Mick…” Sarah whispered, but he waved her off.
There was a blinding flash of light and Sarah shielded her eyes. When she looked back at the moon it had been replaced by a bright cloud of smoke. Just as the cloud started fading, a thousand shooting stars lit up the Valkyrian atmosphere and pieces of the moon rained down. There was a streak of light nearby and a meteor struck the ground with thundering force, throwing a shower of dust into the air. Sarah dove back down onto the floor and covered her head, praying that a meteor wouldn’t hit them.
“Ha-ha!!” Patrick shouted. “I always hated that moon!”
Sarah snuck a glance back up at the sky as the meteors began decreasing in frequency until she finally felt safe to stand up on shaky legs.
As they walked toward the Valkyrie bunker after the demonstration, Sarah grabbed Mick by the arm and whispered urgently, “These people are terrifying. What are we doing here?”
“We need their endorsement,” Mick whispered. “The Valkyrians are very popular. Astrals love explosions, and they’re terrified that… General Gravy!” he said in greeting as a taller version of Patrick appeared outside of the bunker.
“Candidate Cracken,” the man said with a gravelly voice. “I hope you enjoyed the demonstration.” He bowed slightly and gestured to the doorway. “Shall we?”
He led them into a dark room with an industrial metal table lit by a single lamp. There were space maps on the walls with military formations drawn in. They sat down around the table and Sarah was reminded of hostage negotiations she had seen in action movies.
“First things first,” Mick said. “Where is Dexter Goldstein?”
General Gravy sneered at Patrick, who looked away in embarrassment. “Goldstein has escaped with the space monkeys. They were too clever for my son. He can’t help it, he’s a very stupid boy.”
Patrick’s face brightened and he said, “Thanks, Dad!”
General Gravy smiled and patted him on the back proudly. “Takes after his old man.”
Mick spread his hands. “Let’s get down to business. As you know, I’m—”
“Wait,” Sarah interrupted. “What about Dexter? Where did the space monkeys take him?”
Mick pursed his lips and asked grudgingly, “What are we doing about Goldstein?”
“I have it on good authority that Mr. Goldstein is in police custody with Space Officers Bosendorfer and Erard,” General Gravy said.
“Thank goodness!” Sarah said. “How do we find him now?”
“Later,” Mick said.
“But…”
“First we talk business,” Mick said. Sarah thought about protesting, but she let it drop. The sooner Mick finished talking to the general, the sooner they’d get off this crazy planet.
“General Gravy,” Mick said, “do I have your endorsement?”
The general stood up and began pacing the room. He walked over to one of the space maps and peered at it for a moment, scratching his chin. He carefully moved a blue marker a few inches to the right. He nodded to himself and then turned back to face Sarah and Mick.
“I’ll need more weapons systems,” General Gravy said, tapping his fingers together in thought. “We’ve been operating on SEER donations up until this point, but I’ll need at least ten percent of the government’s budget and official Astral Military status.”
“What’s ‘seer’?” Sarah asked.
Patrick laughed. “The Earther doesn’t know what—” But a look from Mick cut him off.
“Ten percent is too much,” Mick said. “I need all the money I can spare for bribes. I’ll give you five percent and you can be an authorized militia. And I want your word that you will complete Operation Mousetrap. Successfully this time.”
General Gravy stared at Mick with his best intimidating glare, and Mick just smiled back.
“Fine,” General Gravy spat.
Mick stuck out his hand. “So we have a deal?”
General Gravy let Mick stand there with his hand outstretched for a few moments. He scratched his nose and stared at one of his fingernails. “Oh, there’s one last thing. I’m sure, given the value of the Valkyrian endorsement, you wouldn’t hesitate to accept this small request. I would hate for the Astral people to think you don’t have their safety in mind.”
“What do you want?” Mick said through his teeth.
“If you win, I want authorization to destroy the target of my choosing.”
Patrick pounded the table and gave his dad a gleeful fist pump. Mick glanced quickly at Sarah. She was baffled. What target were they talking about?
Mick swallowed and kept his hand outstretched. He gave a faint nod.
“Deal.”
Sven, the Planet Royale butler, backed away from Rufus, who was prancing and baring his teeth in a threatening fashion. Dexter tried to get Rufus to calm down, but the chimp didn’t like it when servants entered the room, and he was ready to defend Dexter with his life.
“Oh my,” Sven said. “Nice monkey… nice monkey… Mr. Goldstein, there’s been an incident in the kitchen. We were hoping you could—”
“An incident?” Dexter jumped up. “I’m coming.”
Dexter told Rufus to stay put, but Rufus immediately grabbed him by the leg and made it clear that Dexter wasn’t going anywhere without him. Dexter finally extricated himself from Rufus and managed to convince him to stay. He ran with Sven down the hall and across a courtyard, into a giant kitchen. The monkeys were nowhere to be found, but the entire kitchen was in shambles. There were eggs smashed on the walls, canisters of flour and sugar broken on the floor, dented pots, and banana peels everywhere. The monkeys had destroyed nearly everything.
Dexter found the chef slumped on the floor, his face in his hands. He looked up at Dexter and tears were streaming down his face.
“Chef!” Dexter said, “I’m so sorry, I…”
“This is the greatest day of my life! The greatest!” the chef cried. He let out a great sniffle and looked at Dexter through gushing tears. He grabbed Dexter’s shirt, leaned in, and whispered, “I’ve never had such an enthusiastic response to my bananas Foster recipe. Never.”
“Oh,” Dexter said, “so… you’re not mad?”
The chef looked around at the kitchen and smiled weakly. “I don’t know if I shall be this happy ever again.”
“Dexter?”
Dexter turned and saw the king of the universe st
anding in the doorway, his white beard standing out against his gold robes. He was holding Boris’s hand, and the grizzled old chimp looked very pleased with himself.
“Can I have a word?”
Dexter’s heart thumped in his chest as he followed Boris and the king into the gardens outside of the palace. He saw Mortimer the pink dolphin fly into the air and say, “Hello!”
Dexter hastily shouted, “Hi!” back, knowing Mortimer would continue shouting greetings for hours until he received a response. Mortimer soared into the air and did a belly flop.
“Hey, you!” someone shouted from behind him. Dexter looked up and saw a construction crew sitting on the edge of the roof of the palace, dangling their feet over the side as they ate lunch. The man who shouted held up a large metal lunchbox. “I’m a manly man. That’s why I’m yelling at you. I just thought you should know. Are you a manly man?”
Dexter covered his eyes from the sun’s glare and said, “No. Not really.”
He turned back to follow the king, and the construction worker shouted, “That’s right! Keep walking! I knew you were scared!” Dexter shook his head as the construction workers started chanting, “Man-ly men!! Man-ly men!!”
Dexter caught up with the king, who was showing Boris a tree with very smooth bark. Boris slapped the tree and leaned up to see if anything would happen, then quickly scrambled up into the branches. He plucked an acorn from a branch and threw it at Dexter, chirping happily.
“What are the construction workers doing?”
The king turned back to look at the palace as if he was curious to see it still standing there. “It will not be a palace much longer. It will be the seat of the government, and we have to be ready for the new president and representatives to move in.”
“But…” Dexter started, but the king had turned his back. He walked along the path through the gardens and stopped at a fountain in the shape of an old spaceship. Dexter followed behind him. He wondered why the king was stepping down. He summoned his courage and asked, “What’s going to happen to you?”
The king stared down at Dexter for a moment. Dexter made eye contact with him for a brief, terrifying second before he found a pebble on the ground to look at instead.
“What is the one thing you wish you could change about yourself?” the king asked.
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
Dexter thought about the time when Jacob and Sarah had called Maria Garcia and handed him the phone. They had already checked ahead of time to make sure she would say yes if Dexter asked her to go to the movies, and even though he knew that she would agree, he still couldn’t bring himself to say a single word. He hung up in a panic. Sarah screamed bloody murder, Jacob shook his head with a sad grin, and Dexter had made up an excuse about his mom wanting him to sort the recycling and ran home. Dexter wondered if there was a girl somewhere out in the world who would be willing to communicate solely through letters, because he was pretty sure she would be his soul mate.
“I wish I were brave,” Dexter said.
The king continued to stare at Dexter and did not betray a hint of feeling. “If I were to give you a potion that would make you the bravest person in the universe, would you take it?”
Dexter recoiled. “You have that?!”
“No.” The king smiled. “I don’t.”
“Oh. Because that would…” Dexter trailed off. He thought about suddenly being filled with Jacob Wonderbar–level bravery and finally being able to talk to Maria and getting through the day without being terrified that his mom would make him move his aquarium out of his room in punishment for getting detention. Courage would certainly solve a great number of his problems. But then he also imagined himself getting into trouble all the time and possibly jumping into a fire or performing stunts that would result in disfiguring injuries because he would be too brave to be a highly sensible individual who knew better than to throw himself into certain danger. “I guess I probably wouldn’t take it.”
The king responded by pressing a piece of green plastic into Dexter’s hands.
“What’s this?” Dexter asked.
“It’s an Astral Telly. You can use it to call anyone in the universe. I think it’s time you rejoined your friends.”
“Wow.” Dexter turned the Telly around in his hands. He had so much to tell Jacob and Sarah about Patrick and the crazy Valkyrians blowing everything up and about how they thought they were kidnapping Jacob Wonderbar and how he called Dexter a dirty Earther and said the king was the only person protecting Earth.
The king turned and started walking away, and Dexter steeled his nerves for one last question. He shouted, “Why did you nominate Jacob for president?”
The king said over his shoulder, “No Astral was brave enough to run against Mick because of his tricks.” He paused and turned back to gaze at Dexter directly. “But mainly because the survival of Planet Earth depends on it.”
Dexter felt a shiver down his spine to hear his worst fears about Patrick and the Valkyrians confirmed. He had to warn Jacob to make sure he knew how important it was to win the election. It was a matter of planetary life and death.
Dexter heard a screech. He turned back to the palace and saw Rufus scramble over a balcony and bound toward him. He turned away and braced himself as Rufus launched himself into the air and plowed Dexter into the ground.
“I wasn’t going to leave without you!” he said as the chimp buried his face in Dexter’s back.
Jacob stared at his Telly for a long time in the darkness aboard Praiseworthy. He was resting in bed on his way to a campaign event in a distant region of the galaxy. He had watched enough ANN that he was growing used to being whisked in and out of news stories, but after listening to two commentators yell at each other for fifteen minutes about whether Mick Cracken was going to receive 90 percent of the vote or 95 percent, he’d had enough and shouted, “Off!”
He knew his campaign was foundering and that he should probably call it off and admit defeat. The Astrals were hostile to Earthers, and as much as he tried to assure them they were wrong about Earth, he couldn’t convince them to vote for him.
But there was some part of him deep down that refused to give up, not when it meant losing to Mick Cracken and not before he had given it everything he had. He still had Catalina, and even if she had her own agenda, at least she knew the Astrals and what they wanted.
Sometimes Jacob even pictured his dad watching him be named president of the universe, and he wondered what his dad would feel in that moment. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted his dad to be proud of him or whether he wanted him to be sad, to be forced to admit that he had been wrong about Jacob and was wrong to have left him behind. He wasn’t sure what being elected president would prove to himself or his dad, but he knew it would mean something. He knew he had to run even if it meant certain defeat.
He stared at the phone. There was still something that wasn’t right.
“Call Sarah Daisy,” he said to the Telly.
The phone rang for a long time. He waited, hoping she would pick up, and then suddenly he was inside another spaceship. He looked around. He was in a bedroom. The walls were all painted black, and there were graffiti paintings on the wall in gold frames. Sarah was sitting on a bed in the middle of the room, holding a lavender Telly and looking over at Jacob wistfully. The bed was also covered in a lavender comforter.
“Mick’s idea of a joke, I think,” she said quietly. “He knows I hate lavender.”
Jacob stared at her. He couldn’t believe that she had actually joined Mick’s campaign and was working against him.
“Who are you talking to?” he heard Mick’s voice say.
Sarah scowled and shouted, “I’m on the Telly, and if you tell Mick about this, I swear I’ll stick a fork straight in your hard drive. Don’t think I won’t do it!”
“Who was that?” Jacob asked. “That was Mick?”
“Mick Jr.,” she said. “Mick programmed his nav system with his own
personality.”
Jacob couldn’t help but grin. “You have to deal with two of them?”
Sarah smiled faintly. “You should hear it when they argue with each other.”
Jacob laughed and then stopped and stared at his feet for a moment. They caught each other’s eye and then both looked away.
Sarah stared at the wall. “Why didn’t you go back for Dexter? If you had just gone back for him none of this would have happened.”
“Oh I see,” Jacob said. “Kind of like how you stranded Dexter and me on Numonia last time? You’re one to talk. Every time something happens, you go running off with Mick Cracken.”
Sarah shook her head. “It’s not about Mick,” she said.
“Sure it isn’t.”
Sarah threw aside the covers and stood up. “What about you and Princess Pointyhead?! Every time that alien shows up you go all weak in the knees. You should have seen the look on your face when she walked into the room on Planet Headline.”
“That’s not true.”
“‘Can I call you Cat?’” she said in an exaggerated Jacob Wonderbar impression. “‘No? Princess Cat? Whatever you want, darling! I’ll follow your stupid personality anywhere because you’re so beautiful.’”
Jacob felt the blood rushing between his ears and he thought about saying, “End call” and leaving Mick’s ship, but he stood rooted to his spot. “I have to do this,” he said quietly. “It was hard, but I had to leave Dexter behind and I had to make Catalina my running mate. It was my only shot at winning.”
“Winning,” Sarah said with a sour expression. “I’m going to make sure you lose. So things will go back to how they were.”
And with that, Jacob knew why she’d run off with Mick. He remembered their conversation on the curb before they blasted off to space, how worried she was about him winning and everything changing and never being able to see each other. Sarah just wanted to go back to Earth so everything would go back to normal. A part of him even understood where she was coming from.
Jacob Wonderbar for President of the Universe Page 6
