The Extreme

by K. A. Applegate

  "Always here for you, Marco," she said. But already Rachel was changing.

  I focused my cold-addled brain on the new image of the seal. And then, slowly at first, I began to morph.

  My arms began to shrink. Smaller, smaller. Weird doll-sized replicas of arms that shrank till they were no more than three inches long.

  106 My fingers shrunk, too, but from the tips grew long, ice-gripping claws. The fingers melted together, then instantly separated again, drawing a thin web of flesh between.

  My legs were almost disappearing. I knew I was going to fall, but it still surprised me when I sudde nly just plopped over, face first, onto ice. My feet shrank and narrowed and transformed themselves into the seal's flippers.

  All the while my torso was growing smaller and yet chubbier. Blubber bubbled up beneath my skin. It was a little like that movie with Eddie Murphy, The Nutty Professor. Like that, only on a smaller scale.

  I heard squishy sounds as my internal organs twisted around to fit my new body. My bones cracked and groaned, reshaping themselves to form my new skeleton. I was now an over-inflated football with flippers.

  On my still-human face I grew long whiskers. My ears shriveled up and into my skull, leaving just a pair of holes! My head was no bigger than a baseball, while my nose stretched itself out until it was shaped like a puppy's.

  I looked out at the frozen world through large, dark eyes and discovered that they saw about as well as my human ones.

  Finally, short, thick fur sprouted all over my

  107 body, rippling across my chest and down my back like I was a Chia pet.

  And then ... and then ...

  Oh! The joy! The blessing! The fabulous, incredible, sensuous sensation! The most wonderful thing I have ever felt from the day of my birth to that very moment.

  Warmth!

  I was warm! Warm! If the heavens had opened and a giant hand had come down out of the clouds, giving me a billion dollars, my pick from the entire cast of Baywatch - past and present, and allowing me to grow two feet taller while magically acquiring all of Michael Jordan's skill with a basketball, I could not have been happier.

  I! Was! WARM!

  Cold? What cold? There was no cold.

  I was on the beach at Malibu, sipping lemonade and talking trash with Tom Cruise.

  I felt other things, of course. The seal's instincts were all there: an urge to run, an urge to chase fish, yadda yadda, but come on, I was warm!

  My whiskers were amazingly sensitive. They felt even the slightest change in wind, the slightest movement from anyone else in our group. And part of me was still sniffing for my mother,

  108 but I, Marco, was the one in control. And I, Marco, was warm.

  Did I mention I was warm? And happy? For about three seconds.

  "The Venber!" Tobias yelled, blowing my happy mood away.

  "Where?" Jake snapped. TSEEEEEEEEW!

  A huge bolt of blistering light hit the ice not a foot away. If it had hit rock, we'd have been blown apart in the shrapnel explosion. But it hit a patch of perfectly smooth ice SHWAAANGGG!

  Ricochet! The Dracon cannon blast hit at a low angle, hit reflective ice, bounced, and blew a hole in the side of the ridge behind us.

  It was a one-in-a-million shot. We decided not to try for two.

  "Run! Dive! NOW!" Jake yelled.

  Run. Yeah, right, no problem. I spun my ball-shaped body. We were only a few feet from the water, but it seemed like a mile with these weird little legs. No, not legs. Feet. Feet with no legs. Not a good land-going combination. I shuffled my fat belly right and left, right and left, and inched toward the water.

  It probably looked funny. It didn't feel funny

  TSEEEEEEW!

  Ka-BOOOM!

  109 A miss, but not by much. Water and oil rose in a column behind us, Old Faithful at sub-zero temperatures.

  "They must have just seen us morph!" Cassie said.

  "Maybe they just really hate seals," I said. But even in my panic I realized the importance of what Cassie had said. If the Venber knew we were human, we couldn't allow them to reach the Yeerks again.

  I shuffled my fat belly over the ice, picked up momentum, saw the water's edge, kicked frantically and ...

  The next cannon blast blew the spot where we'd been into ice cubes.

  But by then, I was in the water.

  110 Awkward as our seal bodies were on land, they were perfect for the water. We couldn't swim as fast as dolphins, and our tail flippers weren't as efficient as a dolphin's tail, but we cruised, using our front flippers as rudders.

  "We should be safe under the surface," Jake said. "There's no way they can follow us, right, Ax?"

  "I believe not, Prince Jake," Ax replied.

  I noticed one of the others doing it first. Making little clicking noises. Echolocation. Like dolphins. Like bats. Like Venber.

  I shot off a few clicks of my own. What bounced back was an amazing picture of my

  111 surroundings: every fish, every plant, several other seals close by, every chunk of ice floating on the surface.

  We swam for maybe half an hour. Back toward the Yeerk base. Back toward our mission, long-forgotten in the rush to stay alive.

  It was also, we hoped, a good tactic. We would be doubling back on the Venber. With any luck at all, they'd search the ice for us till they became extinct. Again.

  "Did they see us? I mean, as humans?" I asked.

  "Why else would they take a shot at a bunch of seals?" Tobias wondered.

  "Great. Now we have a whole new problem," Rachel said. "We can't let them reach the Yeerk base."

  "Go kick their butts, Rachel. Let me know when you're done."

  "There is a way to ensure that these Venber do not connect with the Yeerks," Ax pointed out. "Destroy the Yeerk base."

  "Yeah, 'cause that'll be so easy," I said.

  "Wipe out the base, we eliminate the problem," Jake reasoned. "Kill two birds with one stone, as they say. Sorry, Tobias," he added as an afterthought.

  We stopped twice to surface and catch a

  112 breath. Seals can only hold their breath for about ten or fifteen minutes. We spy-hopped up through holes in the ice, but the frozen monsters were nowhere to be seen. Neither were any bears.

  For the first time since we'd landed in this godforsaken place, I felt almost comfortable. I should have known the feeling wouldn't last.

  "Here they come!" Cassie yelled. For a split second I didn't know what "they" were, but then I felt a vibration in my whiskers and knew the threat came from the water.

  That meant one thing.

  Orca! Killer whales!

  "MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!" Jake screamed.

  We moved. But then, down through the murk of water, I saw them. Twin submarines in white and black.

  Willy-free and looking for a seal meal.

  "Oh, man," Tobias groaned. "They're on us!"

  "These are very large creatures," Ax said with more than a little panic in his voice.

  "Yeah, they are," Rachel replied. "And I think they've got big appetites, too."

  I pumped my rear flippers as fast as I could. Above us, sheet ice. A hole! We needed a hole!

  There! Light!

  I shot toward the hole. I saw the others converging with me.

  113 One, two, three, four, five, six, we blew through the hole, into the air and landed on ice.

  Mad scrambling to get away from the hole, crazed, clumsy scrabbling. But then I looked down. Down through the ice I saw a black-and-white smile.

  I could see the orca. Which meant ...

  "Cut left!" I yelled.

  Crrrrrack! Pah-LOOOSH! The huge, blunt snout exploded through the ice like a scene out of Hunt for Red October.

  Right beside me! The ice rose up, a brand new mountain. I slid down the steepening slope and motored my pathetic claws.

  Crrrrrack!

  The second killer whale erupted, not ten feet in front of us. They were working together. Trapping us.

&nbs
p; "I am so totally sick of this mission!" I shouted.

  "Morph!" Cassie yelled. "They hunt seals, not humans."

  Great advice. But try demorphing when the Navy from Hell is popping up all around you, grinning big toothy grins and eyeballing you like you're a cheeseburger.

  I scrambled and slid and began to emerge into my human shape.

  114 The orca behind me dropped down into the water, then shot - if you can picture a black-and-white sausage the size of a stretch limo shooting - straight up.

  Over my head and dropping toward me!

  Any normal seal would have kept going in a straight line, and any normal seal would have been lunch. But I had a human brain. I dug one claw into the ice and spun to my right.

  A huge load of sleek blubber landed with a crash inches behind me. Mouth open, the orca was ready to snap me up.

  Only I wasn't there anymore. And by the time Willy spotted me again, I had very cold arms and very cold legs and was hobbling away like some hideous freak of nature.

  Willy thought that over. He decided he didn't want to be eating anything that looked quite like me.

  The two seal-killers slid back down through the ice and went off about their murderous day while I stood there, demorphing and shaking and shivering and chattering out words I can't repeat here.

  I saw the others, spread out over a hundred yards or so, all in their normal bodies, all looking about like I felt.

  "Is this just the absolute armpit of the universe?" I demanded.

  115 "Ask him," Rachel said.

  Only then did I notice that everyone was not staring at me. But past me.

  I turned. And I said, "Hi. Um ... no offense about the armpit thing and all."

  "None taken," he said.

  116 I guess I expected him to run. But he didn't. He just stared at me, then at the others, then back at me.

  He was sitting in a beat-up little fishing boat with a small outboard motor. It suddenly occurred to me that he'd probably scared the killer whales off with his engine.

  I kept looking at him. He kept looking at me. I didn't know what to do. Or what to say.

  So I waved and said, "Hi. How's it going?"

  He didn't say anything for a minute. Just stared. Finally he said, "You some kind of spirit or something?"

  I put my frozen hand on my frozen chest. "A

  117 spirit? What makes you say that?" I made a lame attempt at laughter.

  He grabbed his oar and paddled closer.

  He had a large, round face, with slightly slanted black eyes and skin like well-worn boot leather. Inuit, I guessed, what with this being the frozen north. In any case, I was pretty sure he wasn't French.

  He was wearing a weird combination of clothes. Pants made of fur, mittens made of some other kind of fur, and a shabby, big, blue parka that c ould have come from Eddie Bauer's.

  "You look cold," he said when his boat had touched the edge of the ice. "I didn't think animal spirits got cold. You want a blanket?" He held up a huge piece of fur, dark gray and silver with light gray rings. The same kind of fur I'd been in just two minutes ago. I took it and wrapped it around myself and under my feet while he drove a spike into the ice's edge, anchoring his boat.

  "How about your friends?" he asked. "They animal spirits, too?"

  "I guess so."

  He eyed me with more curiosity than fear. More interest than skepticism. He wasn't much older than I was. It seemed weird that a kid so

  118 young would be out all by himself in the middle of nowhere.

  Of course, I wasn't one to be calling anyone else weird.

  "My grandfather used to talk about animal spirits all the time. I just thought he was crazy." He spun his finger around his ear in that universal gesture of insanity. "But I always told him, 'Yeah, that's right, Grandpa.' "

  "Uh-huh," I said, covering my ears from the freezing wind. "I mean, you never can tell, can you?"

  He stared some more. "Tell your friends I have more pelts."

  "He has pelts!" I yelled a little too loudly. "How about if you guys all come on over and have some nice, warm pelts?"

  Not that I was worried. Not that I needed company.

  The others came closer.

  The guy began handing up sealskins out of his boat. They were piled high. But a number of them looked as if they'd been burned. Scorch marks parted the fur.

  "Are you an eagle?" he asked Tobias, peering curiously at him.

  "A hawk, actually. A red-tail. We're a very common species."

  119 "Not around here. The birds around here don't talk." Then he focused intensely on Ax. "What are you?"

  I could almost hear everyone sigh in relief. If this guy was a Controller, he would (a) know an Andalite when he saw one and (b) stay far, far away.

  "I'm an Andalite."

  "You a common species, too?"

  A joke! I decided to like the guy. Besides, anyone who could be this laid-back about running into our little freak show had to be all right.

  "That's a lot of sealskins," Cassie said, huddling within one herself.

  "Yeah. A lot. Not so good, though. All those burned ones, barely worth hauling to the trading post. And anyway, they'll come off my quota. Bad."

  "How did they get burned?" Cassie asked, already knowing the answer as well as I did.

  "Those crazy Star Trek men. Shooting seals with phasers and all. Like those people are using them for target practice or something. They show no respect. Makes me mad."

  "Star Trek guys?" I said.

  "Yeah," he replied. Then, "Oh, I guess you animal spirits don't watch TV, huh? You need to get a satellite dish, Spirit-boy."

  120 "The name's Marco. That's Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Tobias ... he's the one with the wings and Ax. Ax isn't from around here."

  "Hi. I'm Derek."

  "Derek?" I don't know what I expected to hear, but it wasn't Derek.

  "Are you all alone out here?" Cassie asked.

  "Yeah."

  "How far away is your home?" Tobias asked.

  "Oh, a ways." He cocked his head toward the west. The kid was talking to a bird. But he didn't even flinch. "Coupla days."

  "A couple of days?" Jake said.

  "Sure. I go on hunts every year," he said. "Since I was a kid."

  "And you hunt seals?" Cassie asked, her voice level.

  "Yeah." Derek cocked his head. "You don't like hunting?"

  "Well ... not like the crazy Star Trek guys."

  "Hunting for sport. Like it's a game. Yeah, we get guys come up here for that. Up from New York and Detroit. Shoot bears and caribou from helicopters. No respect for nothing, those guys. Those guys at the station, though, they're the worst. They're just crazy for killing." He cocked his head. "That must make you animal spirits mad."

  121 "We ... we never exactly said we were spirits," Jake said.

  "No? So what are you, then?" he asked. "Aliens?"

  "He's an alien," I said, pointing at Ax. "The rest of us are just idiots."

  The guy smiled. His expression hardened. He didn't like not getting answers. "You have something to do with that station they're building? With those big ice creatures? With the spaceships?"

  I shot a look at Jake. He shrugged.

  "Yeah, we have something to do with them," I said.

  "Yeah?" he answered. "Well, I don't like them. What are they doing up there, anyway? They aren't any of those ecology people come up here sometimes. They aren't hunters, either. They're making a mess in the water. Scaring away everything with their noise and their weird guns. Who are they? Who are you!"

  "I guess you could say they're the bad guys," Jake said. "And we're the good guys. We came here to destroy that station."

  "Sounds good to me," Derek replied. Like it was no big deal. Like we'd just suggested a visit to the local 7-Eleven. "I hope you do. I worry Nanook's gonna stick his big nose around

  122 there and end up getting it shot off or something."

  "Nanook?" Jake said. "Who's Nanook?"

&
nbsp; "Nanook's my friend. You don't know Nanook?"

  "Uh, should we?" I said.

  "You must've seen him," he continued. "He's been around here the last few days. I've been following him. I like to watch him work. He's a very great hunter."

  "Maybe we have seen him," Jake said, puzzled. "What does he look like?"

  "Well, he's pretty big, with white fur," he began.

  "Oh, himl" Great. The Inuit comic. "Yeah, we've seen him."

  "You've been hunting him?" Rachel said. "With that?" She pointed at the rifle in the bottom of his boat. And his short spear. "You're gonna need more firepower."

  "Not hunting him. Tracking him. Nanook's my buddy. Known him since I was a kid."

  "Well, here's a really insane question," I said brightly. "Do you think we could pet him?"

  123 We didn't have to go far to find Derek's friend Nanook.

  We morphed back to seals, followed Derek's boat, and found the polar bear sprawled on the ice on his back, lounging in the sun. Like he was at the beach. Frankly, it annoyed me. How could any creature enjoy this place?

  We crawled up onto the ice a few hundred yards away from the bear and demorphed to human.

  "I wish I could do that," Derek said, watching with interest as human faces appeared on seal bodies.

  We'd been careful to stay downwind of the bear. We'd been chased enough.

  124 The plan was simple. The kind of plan we come up with when we just can't think of anything smart or subtle.

  "So you're gonna just go grab old Nanook?" Derek asked skeptically.

  "Yeah. Why? Something strange about that? Something totally, absolutely INSANE about that?" I asked.

  "That is sarcasm," Ax helpfully explained to the Inuit.

  "Yeah," Derek said. "I thought maybe it was."

  I looked at Rachel. She and I had the fun part of this plan.

  She grinned her Xena grin. "Okay, Marco, yes, even I think this is insane."

  She was already morphing. Growing huge-shouldered, with rail-spike claws and shaggy brown fur. I was morphing, too. Back to gorilla. The only other morph we had that could help with this particular plan.

  Together our little gaggle advanced on the polar bear. A grizzly, a gorilla, a bird, an alien, and two humans wrapped in seal pelts.

  Derek stayed behind. He didn't offer any explanation. None needed: He was sane. When you're the only sane one at the lunatic picnic, you don't have to explain.