by Mark Crilley
“Fladiating the twerb?”
He chuckled at my ignorance. “But of course, Akiko. You can't expect a spaceship to go about with an unfladiated twerb, now can you?”
I decided to leave it at that.
Spuckler ran to the back of the ship, pried open a door in the wall and pulled out a small piece of machinery that looked like a cross between a toaster oven and a Lava lamp. He was only able to pull it about three feet out of its compartment because it was held back by at least a half-dozen thick black-and-yellow cables.
“Won't be needin' this no more,” Spuckler said as he severed one of the cables with a pair of clippers.
A small cloud of yellow gas—presumably the same stuff I'd just seen outside the windshield—billowed into the air, adding a nasty chemical odor to the already foul stench of grull.
Spuckler turned to me. “All right, 'Kiko. Looks like you got a job to do after all. I'm puttin' you in charge of coolin' the Twerbo-Fladiator.”
I swallowed hard.
Spuckler pulled a lever, and a small seat unfolded from the wall. He had me sit down and strap myself in. Then he lifted the toaster oven–Lava lamp and placed it in my lap.
“See this here dial?” He pointed to a small gauge on top of the contraption. Its needle quivered in a fan-shaped field that was shaded red on the far right edge.
“Every time this needle gets anywhere near the red part—anywhere near it—ya gotta do like this.”
Spuckler lifted his left hand and placed it upright, slightly cupped, on the left side of his mouth. Then he lifted his right hand and placed it upright, slightly cupped, on the right side of his mouth, all the time gazing into my eyes to make sure I was paying the utmost attention. Then he lowered his face to the Lava lamp part of the machine and began blowing on it with all his might, as if he were trying to get a fire going on a camping trip.
PHOOO-PHOOO-PHOOOOOOOO &
Mr. Beeba, Gax, and Poog gathered around me, their faces indicating that I was being invested with a truly awesome responsibility.
“You mean & you want me to cool this thing down by & blowing on it & with my mouth,”I said. “You're kidding, right?”
Spuckler's gaze grew even more intense. “I ain't never been so serious about nothin'& in my & entire & life.”
All was silent except for a quietly buzzing light on the dashboard and the distant sound of another ship roaring past us outside. Looking around at everyone, I realized that I, like it or not, was now the official Twerbo-Fladiator Cooler.
“Just one question, Spuckler,” I said. “What happens if this thing overheats?”
Spuckler shot a glance at Gax, who shot a glance at Mr. Beeba, who shot a glance at Poog.
Spuckler looked at me with about as much intensity as his little eyes were capable of.
“You don't wanna know.”
Spuckler pulled levers. Spuckler did everything he could to dislodge the front of our ship from the hole it had made in the stone. I held tightly to the Twerbo-Fladiator as we all lurched up and down and back and forth.
“Spuckler,” said Mr. Beeba, “now that we're preparing to reenter the Labyrinth, I feel compelled to ask what I'm sure you'll agree is a highly pertinent question.”
Spuckler grunted loudly as he pulled one more lever and finally managed to free the ship.
GRR-JUNT!
“Do you or do you not have even the faintest idea how to get through this maze?”
“I know this place like the backa my hand! It's left-right, left-left, right-right-right, left-right, left-left, right-right, left-left-left!”
For a moment there was no sound but the rumbling engines as we all took this in. Or tried to, anyway.
Then there was a very high-pitched series of warbly syllables: Poog, talking a good deal more loudly than he normally did, and for a lot longer than usual too.
“Poog says,” translated Mr. Beeba, taking a deep breath before continuing, “that it's left-right, left-left, right-left-right, left-right, left-left, right-left, left-left-left.”
There was another long pause. Spuckler shifted the ship into neutral and we just hovered there for a minute while he thought this over.
“Tha's what I said!” said Spuckler.
“Oh, but you said nothing of the kind, Spuckler. You claimed it was left-right, left-left, right-right-right, left-right—”
“Aw, fer cryin' out loud!” yelled Spuckler. “Poog! Get your purple heinie over here an' tell me which way t' go!”
Mr. Beeba and Poog took positions at the front of the ship, flanking Spuckler like a pair of bodyguards. Every time we came to a fork in the gorge, Poog would chirp one of two different sounds, which Mr. Beeba would translate as either left or right. There was a bit of confusion at first (during which it occurred to me that maybe Spuckler didn't entirely know his left from his right to begin with), but eventually they had it down to a smoothly efficient system.
As we made our way through the maze, we began to see wreckage. At least three of the grand platinum ships that had started the race were now collapsed hunks of scrap metal on the roadside, their drivers beside them, gesturing angrily and stamping their feet in frustration. That left just eight ships—including ours—still in the race.
After another fifteen minutes and several more well-timed directions from Poog, we shot through one final narrow passageway and out into a spacious canyon. In the middle was an enormous loop of steel standing upright like a gigantic Hula-Hoop balanced on its side. It was covered with flashing lights and arrows pointing toward its center.
We soared through the hoop and up and away from the surface of Lulla-ma-Waygo.
“Whaa-HOOOOOOH! ” cried Spuckler. “We did it!”
“You mean Poog did it,” said Mr. Beeba.
“Yeah, all right,” Spuckler said after a brief pause. “I reckon I owe ya one there, Poog.”
Poog smiled modestly.
Within seconds we were back among the stars, sailing peacefully through the blackness. The TwerboFladiator sat heavily in my lap. I watched the needle but it didn't seem to be moving much at all. Still, after all the fuss Spuckler had made about this new job of mine, I wasn't about to take my eye off that gauge.
Mr. Beeba and Gax continued shoveling grull into the belly of the ship, and before long the stars were racing by as fast as they ever had. Through the wind-shield I could see seven tiny slivers of light ahead in the distance: the other ships.
“More grull!” shouted Spuckler again and again. Each time, Mr. Beeba groaned and protested, but in the end he always grabbed his shovel and got to work. I could tell by the way he was digging deeper and deeper into the grull bin that we were already running low.
After a half hour or so Spuckler had relaxed to the point of sharing another of his strange space songs with us. This one he called “The Ballad of Ruggleby Kloink.”There seemed to be an endless number of verses, one of which went something like this:
“Where did he come from? No one knows,
With his fifteen eyes and his ten-foot nose,
Ya could smell him—hey!
From a mile awaaaaaaaaaay,
O, the girls did love ol' Ruggleby &”
I was searching the room for something to stick in my ears when Spuckler mercifully ended his song to announce our next stop.
“There she is, folks!” he said, pointing at an irregularly shaped space station hovering before us. “Gorda Glassdok!”
to the ramshackle outpost, the stranger it looked. It was like a frontier town in one of those old Hollywood westerns, except instead of a desert it was surrounded by nothing but stars. There were several tall wooden towers and many more twoor three-story structures, all built around a central channel where spaceships could stop to refuel.
Mr. Beeba removed his spectacles. “Gorda Glassdok's owners boast that it is the universe's only wooden space station.” He drew a handkerchief from his belt and wiped a speck from one of the lenses. “They are evidently somewhat less proud of its distin
ction as the universe's most abominable fire hazard. The entire complex has burned down more than one hundred and fifty times.”
All seven of the other ships were drawn up alongside large spherical tanks, the only parts of the space station that were made of steel. Spuckler steered our ship toward a dingy wooden platform near the back: the grull depot.
“There ain't nothin' like Gorda Glassdok grull!” said Spuckler as he positioned the ship beneath a rickety wooden chute. “Ya can tell it's the good stuff 'cause it stinks so bad.”
Gax and Spuckler hurried out to do some quick repairs while Mr. Beeba stayed inside to make sure the grull bin filled up properly. I got out to stretch my legs and have a look around.
Nearby was a small wooden kiosk run by a fat alien with big black eyes and very bad teeth. Every nook and cranny of his cramped quarters was packed with glass jars and crates full of oddly shaped vegetables, like an extraterrestrial farmers market. Strange reedy music was playing on a beat-up transistor radio dangling from the ceiling. He was tending a grill in front of him, slathering some sort of greasy sauce over a bunch of plump little things that looked like squids with insect wings. As I drew closer, he snatched up one of them with his bare hands, thrust a wooden skewer through it, and jabbed it in my direction.
“Horb-nok?” he asked with a big gap-toothed smile. “Ob-zwotch horb-nok. Ob-zwotch, OB-ZWOTCH!”
“Uh, no thanks,” I said before walking away as quickly as I could. “I already ate.”
I went over to the front of our ship, where Spuckler and Gax were busily fixing the damage we'd done on
Lulla-ma-Waygo. Just then a voice echoed from somewhere up above.
“Still using grull, eh, Boach?”There was a dismissive snort. “I respect that. Very old school of you.”
Gax's head spun all the way around.
“Bluggamin Streed,” said Spuckler without taking his eyes from his work. “Had a feelin' I'd be runnin' into you on this race.”
I looked up. A tall man gazed down at us from several stories above. He was very young—maybe even still a teenager—and dressed in a spotless white spacesuit. His hair was blond, his skin darkly tanned.
“You made it through Lulla-ma-Waygo in this hunka junk?” the man said. “You lead a charmed life, my friend.”
“Boach's Bullet ain't never failed me yet, Bluggy,” said Spuckler, still keeping his eyes on the repair work. “An' I'll take grull over that highfalutin brew you're usin' any day of the week.”
“Thermo-Propahol wins races, Boach,” said Streed. “Left you in the dust in the Whundy 2000, as I recall.”
“Ain't you got nothin' better to do, Bluggy?”
Spuckler finally met Streed's gaze.
“Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Boach,” said Streed with exaggerated politeness. He turned and disappeared over the edge of the platform. “Still kind of sore about that, aren't you?”
“Dagnabbed upstart,” grumbled Spuckler as he soldered a piece of steel back into place. “Sassy as they come.”
I was going to ask Spuckler to tell me more about Bluggamin Streed, but I got the feeling he wasn't exactly in the mood to talk right then.
GUDDA-GUDDA-GUDDA-GUDDA-GUDDA &
A thunderous rumble filled the air as grull poured through the chute into our ship. Five minutes later the noise died down, then came to a stop altogether. Mr. Beeba's head popped out of the door of the ship, his hair green with grull dust.
“Full to the gills!” he announced.
“All righty,” said Spuckler with one final blast of his soldering gun. “Let's get goin'.”
A minute or two later we were all back in our assigned places, and the wooden way station of Gorda Glassdok was far behind us. As the stars whizzed past, Spuckler reached down to a grease-stained paper bag he had brought in with him before we took off.
“Got a surprise for ya, 'Kiko,” he said as he opened the bag, pulled out one of the blackened squid creatures, and slapped it into my hand. It was still smoking from the grill. “A barbecued horb-nok. Think of it as a li'l reward for comin' along with us!”
I smiled what I hoped was a convincing smile.
“Thanks, Spuckler.”
“Don't mention it.” He took a big chomp out of a horb-nok he'd bought for himself. “You keep that Twerbo-Fladiator cool and I'll see if I can rustle up another one for ya.”
Spuckler polished off his snack in just a few bites, then began calling out for more grull.
“Come on, now, Beebs! We gotta really get cookin' if we're gonna keep ahead of ”—a split-second pause— “all them ships back there!” Spuckler grunted, pulling levers on the dashboard left, right, and center.
All them ships? Or just one ship in particular? Spuckler was too proud to say it, I guess, but I knew what was on his mind. From now on this race had nothing to do with winning the Centauri Cup, and everything to do with crossing the finish line before Bluggamin Streed.
of the race in which there was nothing to do but fly straight on to the next big hurdle. Spuckler had Mr. Beeba madly shoveling grull into the ship's belly every ten minutes, eventually bringing us back to second place: one ship ahead of us, six ships— one of them Bluggamin Streed's—far behind. Gax kept a watchful eye on a series of dials and gauges throughout the ship, rolling from one to the other on his squeaky wheels. Poog stayed up near the front of the ship with Spuckler, and I sat strapped in my seat, occasionally cupping my hands and blowing on the Twerbo-Fladiator. The needle didn't look like it was getting any nearer to the red part of the gauge, but I blew on the thing anyway, just in case.
We all settled into the rhythm of our own routines, and the rumbling of the wall behind my back was starting to make me feel awfully sleepy. I checked my watch again: 2 P.M. If I were still on Earth, I'd have already been back from Middleton Park for several hours, two or three big bowls of my mom's vegetable soup in my belly, curled up on the couch with a blanket and a book, nothing but my heavy eyelids to keep me from drifting off to &
DREEEE-YAA! DREEEE-YAA! DREEEEEEEE-YAAA!
What a screech! Mr. Beeba dropped to his knees. Gax spun around. Spuckler leaped from his seat.
There in front of us on the floor was…
…well, it looked like a bug. One of those little roly-poly gray ones that curl up into a ball when you touch them. But bigger. A lot bigger. It was about the size of a soccer ball, and it was shaped like one too, all closed up and rocking back and forth on the floor. It was covered with bluish gray scales, tinged green from grull dust.
“Don't touch it!” Mr. Beeba said, holding his shovel above his head like a club.
“Wh-what is it?” I asked, peering over the TwerboFladiator at the strange gray creature.
Spuckler drew a red laser pistol from a holster at his side. “I'll tell ya what it is,” he said. “It's a stowaway.”
Poog floated in to get a closer look. Gax scooted over to Spuckler's side.
“HOW DID IT GET INSIDE THE SHIP, SIR?” he asked.“DO YOU THINK IT'S BEEN HERE ALL ALONG?”
“It was hidin' in the grull we took on at Gorda Glassdok.” Spuckler aimed his laser pistol squarely at the little gray ball. “Beeba must've tossed the li'l sucker in the fire. Tha's what all that yappin' was about.”
Just then the little ball opened up, just a crack, and two tiny blue antennae emerged from inside. There were little purple bulbs on the ends, as if they'd grown from inside some strange alien flower.
“Shoot it, Spuckler!” Mr. Beeba squealed.
“Now, before it attacks us!”
“No, wait!” I said.
“Wait?” Mr. Beeba's eyes were as big as baseballs. “Wait until it attaches itself to my forehead, liquefies my brain, and slurps it out like a smagberry milk shake? No, no, no, Akiko. Now is not the time for waiting. Now is the time for aiming and zapping!”
“Look,” I said, “we've got to think this through. Who knows if this creature is good or bad or, or & neither? We can't just zap it without asking any questions.”
&nb
sp; “Sure we can, 'Kiko,” said Spuckler. “I do it all th' time. Askin' questions is for sissies.”
The creature's blue antennae touched the floor in several places and twirled slowly in the air like a pair of rubber periscopes. Then they silently withdrew into the center of the ball, which curled itself back up as tightly as before.
I guess I should have been afraid of the thing. I mean, I've seen those movies where aliens are all scary and slimy and do horrible things to people. But this creature was nothing like that. It reminded me of a frightened puppy.
“All right, on the counta three,” said Spuckler, stepping forward and extending his laser pistol to near-point-blank range. “One &”
“No, Spuckler!” I said. “I won't let you hurt it! This creature hasn't done us any harm. Maybe it stowed away on this ship by accident!”
Spuckler squinted at me like he thought I was nuts. He stopped counting, though, and pulled his pistol back a bit.
I carefully set the Twerbo-Fladiator on the floor and unbuckled my seat belt.
“Akiko!” Mr. Beeba said, his voice trembling with tension. “What are you doing?”
“Shhhhhh.”
Everyone got very, very quiet. I dropped down on my hands and knees and crawled forward until I was only about a foot or two from the creature.
“Don't be afraid,” I said, just a breath above a whisper. “We won't hurt you.”
With that the little ball opened up again and the antennae reemerged. This time they stretched toward me and moved in slow, silent circles, as if studying my face.
“Come on,” I said. “Open up a little more. Let us see what you look like.”
The little antennae reached out until they were just a few inches from my face, each positioned neatly before one of my cheeks.
Mr. Beeba swallowed loudly.
The antennae quietly withdrew again into the little gray ball, and then, ever so slowly, the creature uncurled itself. The hard exterior folded back to reveal puffy pink flesh within. One by one, soft little legs popped out, until there were six in all. They extended from either side of the creature's body, which was as plump as a newborn piglet. The stalks of the blue antennae receded into a hole where the neck should have been; for a second or two I thought the creature had no head! But then the hole opened wider and wider, and, like some kind of alien turtle, out came a round blue face with big, blinking, shiny black eyes and a tiny toothless mouth. All in all, it was the most harmless little thing you could imagine.
