There's a Spaceship in My Tree!

by Robert West

  What was going on? He spotlighted first the ramp, then the door. It hadn’t been your usual “let’s pretend” experience — it had been more like a parallel universe or something . . . where almost everything is the same but some things are different.

  His mom had said it was just his super-charged imagination. Maybe, but he hadn’t had anything so totally off-the-wall, suck-up-your-brain real in a long time. It was like being a character in your own video game — virtual reality way beyond virtual.

  He panned his flashlight across the tree ship’s surface like a searchlight. Maybe it is haunted after all.

  12

  Meteor

  Weeks passed. Squirt guns and water slides were replaced by footballs and crisp, multicolored leaves piled high for diving into. Beamer spent countless hours in the tree ship with his new friends.

  And his family found a good church to attend, much to the relief of Beamer’s parents, who insisted they all attend not only Sunday morning service, but Sunday evening, as well. When the kids protested, Dr. Mac reminded them that this church was their new “family” now, and it was time to get to know their relatives.

  Secretly, though, Beamer was happy to settle into the well-worn cushions twice each weekend. He missed his old church and all his church friends. Plus, this church had something new to offer: the scent of warming casseroles and baking desserts wafting from the church basement promising a scrumptious potluck dinner after services.

  Besides church, weekends were now filled with Boy Scout activities. That’s how, one Saturday afternoon, Beamer found himself standing before a big rock in the park museum.

  The boys’ rating system for the exhibits had ranged from empty stares to snickering. The biggest hit had been a statue — okay, sculpture — made out of clothespins and hubcaps. It hadn’t been a good day for the arts in America.

  But here they were in front of this big rock. The writing on the plaque said the rock was a meteor. To an old space trader like Beamer, that was news in itself. It didn’t look like much, though — no star-shaped crystal, pulsing with energy. It was just a shiny, dark rock with a chip missing.

  No wonder I’m still in Middleton, thought Beamer, as he remembered his wish that first night in town. Anyone who believes some gnarly old rock can grant wishes needs to have his head examined. Still, it is from another world.

  The plaque read: “Found July 20, 1919, at a site 877 yards west of its present location.”

  West? Beamer thought about it: Let’s see, west is that-away — over toward Murphy Street. He tried to remember how long a yard was. One thing was for sure: he was going to work harder on the weights and measurement tables. Okay, let’s see . . . there are a hundred yards in a football playing field. That would make it just under nine football fields to where the meteor landed, which would put it —

  All at once the image of the split tree trunk burst into his imagination. His eyes grew wide. You don’t suppose . . . What if this meteor crashed into my tree?

  Twenty minutes later, scout compass in hand, Beamer was stepping off huge steps due west from the museum. “Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine — ”

  He glanced up. Yep, so far, so good. The way led right up to the brick wall. He’d just walk it off to there, then pick it up again when he went around to the other side of the wall — as long as it wasn’t Ms. Parker’s yard, that is.

  With his eyeball planted on his compass, Beamer didn’t notice what was going on around him. So, when he looked up again, he was totally unprepared to see a football on a trajectory straight for his nose.

  All Beamer could do was open his mouth. For that matter, nothing else would move. He watched the perfect spiral plummeting toward him like a dark falling star. He could see the little puckered seams and the threads spinning slowly around. One microsecond before he was to lose his face, a pair of hands erupted into the picture and caught the ball. Then the body attached to those hands slammed into Beamer like a Mac truck.

  * * * * *

  The next thing Beamer knew, he was laid out on his bed with three Moms hovering above him. Something was definitely unscrewed in his brain. He saw her mouth (or mouths) moving, but all he could hear was a roaring sound, like from a waterfall.

  She stroked Beamer’s hair fondly. “Oom-aa-faaa-blll-yrsssss-braww-ooo-omm” is what he heard her say. Later he learned that one of the football players, who also happened to be the paperboy, had brought him home. Her lips were moving again: “Oooollll-beee-aaaallll-riiii-ohhh-yrrrr-goiing-taaave-a-ud-siize-knot-on-heedd,” he heard.

  The doorbell rang. “I’ll be right back,” she said and hurried out of the room.

  As her footsteps tripped lightly down the staircase, he heard a noise above the ceiling — something crashing. The scientists weren’t working in the attic today, so there shouldn’t have been anyone up there to break something. He sat up, and then grabbed his head with a heavy groan. Feeling a little better, he shook his head and wobbled through his door and into the hallway. At that moment a kitten slipped from behind the attic door, which somebody had apparently left ajar.

  “Lacy!” Beamer yelled after her. “You’re not supposed to be up there!”

  It was Erin’s cat — the result of a deal she hadn’t been able to refuse when her mom had sent her to the nearby mini-market last week. If those scientist guys find out a cat’s been up around their equipment, they’ll be . . . Beamer opened the attic door and, holding the rail firmly, slowly stumbled up the steps. He wasn’t supposed to go into the attic, but he thought he might be able to fix what the cat had done. At least, that was going to be his excuse if he was caught. What he really wanted, of course, was to see what was going on with the now famous “MacIntyre web.”

  The attic was bright this time of day, with beams from the low-hanging sun blasting through the large back windows. Beamer was more concerned, though, about the dark shadows — about whether anything with eight legs and man-eating mandibles was hiding in them. After a careful scan with his super peepers, he relaxed. Anyway, if the entomologists hadn’t seen the creature in all the weeks they’d been up here, he figured he was pretty safe.

  At the moment, though, with all the scientific equipment planted around it, the web looked more like a web Darth Vader built. Toss out the web and combine the windows into a view screen, and the attic might look like the bridge of a starship. The web was awesome. Glowing golden-yellow in the evening light, it cast a huge shadow across one whole side of the attic, including Beamer’s face. It made him feel very uneasy, and he kept wiping his face, trying to rub off the web that wasn’t really there.

  The mystery of the web was growing almost every day. Its silk threads were thicker than those in normal webs, and they were enormously strong. The big question, of course, was What or Who built it? One entomologist thought some mad scientist had created it for a weird experiment. All the rest were sticking to the mutant-spider theory. Their research had led them to agree on only one thing — that the web had been built a long time ago — maybe eighty or ninety years ago. That made the chances of either the mad scientist or the mutant still being alive pretty remote . . . although the word mutant suggested all sorts of possibilities. Beamer also wondered why nobody had reported the web until now. Hadn’t anybody used the attic before Beamer’s family moved in?

  New mysteries were always popping up too. Beamer had heard a scientist — the one his sister had a crush on — say that he’d detected a faint electro . . . something . . . field around the web. Whoever heard of an electric cobweb?

  The shadow of the web on Beamer’s face made him anxious to leave. But before he left, he scanned the room for any sign of wreckage from the cat. He sighed in relief when he saw that the only thing broken was a soda bottle. He picked up as many pieces as he could and deposited them up next to the wall.

  Parker’s Castle was framed through one of the front windows. He couldn’t see anyone in the tower, but he knew she was there. He’d seen her there often enough, usually after dar
k when the lights were on and he could see her shadow silhouetted in the window.

  He looked the other direction — out the back window. There was the tree ship. He walked over to the window, opened it, and stepped out onto the roof. He then scooted down the shingles, swung onto a large tree branch, and made his way to the tree ship.

  It was very quiet at the moment — hardly a breeze — with only a few insect noises. As Beamer looked at the ship, he could see how much progress they’d already made in fixing it up. Scilla had been replacing the broken chairs with her grandma’s garage-sale rejects.

  Beamer, meanwhile, had been working on the problem of, well, beaming. Let’s face it, as things stood now, getting into the tree ship was a major chore. Molecular dematerialization was a little beyond him at this point, but he had some ideas.

  One glance at Beamer trying to stretch an extension cord to the tree had already persuaded Dr. Mac to string heavy-duty electrical conduit from the attic to the tree ship. She even went so far as to suspend a huge fishing net beneath the tree to catch anyone who might miss a step.

  The observation screen was Ghoulie’s project. “On-screen” wasn’t going to mean quite what it did on Star Trek, but it wasn’t going to be half bad for seventh-grade engineering. Anyway, it would become real enough when their brains warped into full-blown Star-Fighter mode. Yep, that’s what the ship told them they were — Star-Fighters.

  “Hey!”

  Beamer turned to see Scilla’s face upside down in a window. No sooner had they started working on their respective fix-up operations than they heard another voice: “Hello up there,” Ghoulie called.

  Ghoulie had brought one of his dad’s old video cameras to hang beneath the ship, and, considering that Ghoulie’s dad always snatched up the latest high-tech upgrades, “old” meant last July’s model. Ditto for the wide-angle, high-res, glue-ya-tothe-tube video screen.

  While the ship was looking better, they hadn’t yet figured out what was going on with their blow-em-outta-the-sky adventures. It only happened once in awhile, and they could never predict when. Beamer thought they came more often after he’d had a bad day at school with Jared.

  “He’s got to have a weak spot, you know,” said Beamer, out of the blue.

  “Who?” asked Ghoulie.

  “Who do you think? Jared, of course! He must have an Achilles’ heel! We’ve just got to find it.”

  “Kill what?” asked a confused Scilla.

  “Not kill,” said Ghoulie, rolling his eyes. “A-kill-eez — the Greek hero.”

  “He was invincible,” explained Beamer, “except for one weak spot — his heel. That’s how they got him — shot him in the heel.”

  Suddenly a rumble like a train approaching shook the tree, rattling the tree ship like a box of toys, throwing each of them to the floor.

  13

  The Return of the Star-Fighters

  When they opened their eyes, the ship was on fire! Or was it? Beamer looked out the view port. Filling the screen was the face of a planet — a planet on fire! A moon-sized, crater-pitted asteroid had just collided with the planet, shattering its hard outer shell — causing the fiery molten core to erupt into space like splattering catsup.

  Their ship, meanwhile, was whirling through space like a corkscrew roller coaster.

  “Captain MacIntyre! Gravitational controls!” a voice commanded.

  The part of the Captain that was still Beamer turned to see Scilla looking very grown-up and very much in command.

  “We’ve got gravity from the planet and the asteroid hitting us at the same time!” Ghoulie shouted from a smoking, sparking control panel. “Engines and shields are off-line, Admiral Bruzelski!”

  Admiral? How did she get to be “Admiral”? part of Beamer’s mind asked.

  Globs of red molten lava were being flung their way like massive paint balls. “We are about to be spattered by some very hot spaghetti!” yelled Beamer. “. . . with meatballs!” he then added, seeing monstrous, jagged fragments from both the planet and the asteroid tumbling toward them like a sidewise avalanche.

  “Get those engines fired up now, Captain!” cried the Admiral. “Commander Ives, direct reverse tractor beam at those lava flares!”

  Beamer rushed toward the trap door, dived through the floor, and started ripping out circuit boards.

  Suddenly the ship rocked violently, like they’d been smacked with a giant flyswatter. “Hull’s still intact!” Ghoulie assured them. “But we won’t be able to handle many more impacts like that.”

  Beamer jammed a new electronic panel into a slot and the ship suddenly surged into darkness. He fell backward into another panel which sparked and sizzled like he was sausage in a frying pan. “Yeow!” he yelped as he leaped back to the main deck.

  “Talk about the nick of time!” yelled Scilla. “Good job, MacIntyre. Ives, we’re jumping blind! Put us back into normal space before we jump into the middle of a sun!”

  The engines cut off and they were again in normal space. Then Beamer noticed that fire still filled one of the view screens. “Hey! Didn’t we go anywhere?”

  “What’s the matter with navigation?” asked the Admiral.

  “We’ve moved,” said Ghoulie. “We did — about three hundred million kilometers!”

  “Then where are we, and why do I feel like I’m being barbequed?” demanded Scilla, wiping sweat from her face.

  Beamer decreased magnification on the view port. Something that looked like a humongous, thick, fiery rope stretched across the sky. At either end of the rope were two stars — one large and red, the other smaller and white.

  “Ach! The noise!” cried Beamer, holding his ears.

  “It’s a massive energy stream!” Ghoulie shouted. “The suns in this binary system are so close together they’re stealing energy from each other.”

  The sound of static on their sensors was deafening. Beamer ran to an instrument panel and flipped the speakers off. He glanced over at the dark view port on the other side of the ship. “There goes the planet!” he yelled, seeing the tiny, distant flare of the exploding planet.

  A much brighter flash suddenly streaked past them, then another. The ship quaked each time, like they had suddenly dropped a few floors in an elevator. Beamer readjusted the view port displaying the two suns and then instinctively ducked as a blinding fireball skimmed across the screen. “Hey, haven’t you guys ever heard of water balloons?” he yelled at the two suns, which seemed to be hurling energy plumes at each other.

  “Get us out of here, Commander! Now!” ordered Scilla.

  Again the screens streaked into darkness. A few moments later the ship once more emerged into normal space. Or was it? The black velvet sky ahead of the ship was ablaze with stars — millions of them — rolled into a bright, raggedy ball.

  “We’re right next door to a globular star cluster,” announced Ghoulie. They suddenly felt the ship shudder. “Now what?” groaned Ghoulie as he checked his sensors. “Shock waves, lots of them on all sides!”

  Another glance at the view ports made their situation clear. They were in the middle of a fleet of space ships.

  “It’s a whole armada!” Ghoulie gasped. Checking his sensor screens again, he continued, “They’re using pre-hyperspace technology — traveling at sub-light speeds. We can easily outrun them.”

  “I’m just glad they don’t seem to be trigger happy. Hail them!” ordered Scilla.

  “I am,” answered Ghoulie. “All I’m getting is a recording and — surprise, surprise — they don’t speak our language.”

  One corner of Ghoulie’s mind made a note to paint a universal translator into the ship before their next trip.

  “See if you can hack into their computer systems,” ordered Scilla.

  Moments later the view screen displayed a series of pictures like you’d see from surveillance cameras. Their gasp nearly sucked the air out of the ship. Rows and rows of what looked like transparent cigars, set on end, lined ten decks of a very large ship. />
  “Magnify!” ordered Scilla.

  Beamer adjusted the view screens. Encased within those fat cylinders were bodies.

  “It’s a ghost ship!” exclaimed Beamer.

  “Yeah, as in bug ghosts,” gulped Ghoulie.

  The bodies, which seemed to be swimming in a cloudy yellowish mist, had large insect eyes, armored torsos and — exactly how many they couldn’t see — definitely more than two legs.

  “Oops,” corrected Ghoulie. “Guess what? They’re alive.”

  “D’ya mean they’re asleep?” stammered Beamer.

  “Yep, they’re all nighty-night in suspended animation,” added Ghoulie.

  “So that’s why they’re not shooting at us,” said Scilla.

  “I’ve calculated their origin,” said Ghoulie as his hands skipped over the instruments. “They’re from the exploding planet. Left several months ago, I’d guess.”

  “Refugees, eh. Heading where?” asked Scilla.

  “Toward the globular cluster,” answered Ghoulie. “At their present speed it’ll take them years to get there. We’ll probably be ghosts before they find a suitable planet.”

  “Somebody’s in for a major alien invasion if they choose one with indigenous, intelligent life forms,” muttered Scilla.

  “At least they won’t be looking for an earth-type planet,” said Ghoulie. “The yellowish mist in those canisters isn’t oxygen/ nitrogen.”

  “Priscilla! Priscilla!” a woman’s voice called. “Are you all right, honey?”

  Scilla blinked and winced, once again a girl in jeans and ponytail. “I’m fine, Grandma,” she said, leaning out the window. “What’s the matter?”

  “Didn’t you feel the quake?” Grandma held a hand over her chest, breathing heavily. “It nearly shook my china to the floor. Come on down, now. I don’t want you up a tree if there’s an aftershock.”

  “Okay, I’ll be right down,” Scilla called to her.

  “Earthquakes? Here?” Beamer asked.