Akiko and the Alpha Centauri 5000

by Mark Crilley

  “Hmf!” snorted Spuckler, clearly disappointed.

  “Mr. Beeba,” I asked without taking my eyes from the creature, “have you ever seen one of these before?”

  “Never,” he replied. “He looks like a rather kindly little fellow, though, doesn't he?”

  The creature smiled a big toothless smile and nodded.

  “He understands what we're saying!” I said.

  “You mustn't jump to conclusions, Akiko,” Mr. Beeba warned. “In my experience aliens of this sort hardly ever possess the faculties of speech recognition—”

  “Ozlips.”

  There was shocked silence. The creature had just spoken to us. He turned his little face from Mr. Beeba and me to Spuckler, Gax, and Poog, smiling and nodding meekly.

  “Ozlips,” he said again, his voice husky, like a child with a cold.

  “Ozlips?” I asked.

  “Ozlips,” the creature said again. “Moy neem. Ozlips.”

  “Moy nin,” said Mr. Beeba. “I believe he's speaking a dialect of the G'niki tongue.…”

  “Nu, nu!” said the creature, frowning at Mr. Beeba. “Moy neem. Moy neem esh Ozlips.”

  “Moy neen, eh?” Mr. Beeba rubbed his jaw. “It'sPradasha. I'm sure of it. An exceptionally rare language spoken only on the planet Triddi B'Doosh.…”

  “Nu-nu-nu-nu-nu.” The creature waved his little arms in frustration. “Moy neem esh Ozlips.”

  “Neem?” Mr. Beeba repeated, now looking thoroughly baffled. “Neem! I'm pretty sure that's the Droobanese word for postage overdue.…”

  “Mr. Beeba,” I said, “I think what he's trying to say is ‘My name & is Ozlips.'”

  “Yish, yish, yish,” said the creature, nodding enthusiastically. “Moy neem! Moy neem esh Ozlips!”

  “Heavens!” was all Mr. Beeba could say. “His pronunciation is atrocious.”

  “Hello, Ozlips,” I said, smiling. “Nice to meet you. My name is Akiko.”

  “Gah-gi-go,” said Ozlips, smiling back at me. “Nesh tu beet chu.”

  “Did you hear that? He said ‘Nice to meet you'!”

  “All right, all right.” Spuckler stuffed his laser pistol back in its holster. “So he can talk a little. He's still a sneaky little stowaway. We'll toss him off the ship first chance we get.”

  “Spuckler!” I said, raising my voice. “We can't abandon him in the middle of nowhere. Maybe he was hiding in the grull for a reason.”

  Ozlips waddled over a little closer to me.

  “Yish, yish!” he said. “Reeshun, reeshun. Perry kood reeshun!”

  Spuckler squinted again.

  “Moy mashtur,” Ozlips continued, raising his stubby little arms to his head and scrunching up his eyes in a show of pain. “Moy mashtur peet-mi. Heff-ry dee peet-mi. Peet-mi, peet-mi, peet-mi!”

  Everyone turned to me, clearly not having understood a word. Suddenly I was the expert on translating Ozlips-ese.

  “Didn't you hear him? He says his master & beat him.”

  There was an awed silence.

  “What about the ‘heff-ry dee' part?” Mr. Beeba asked.

  “Simple: ‘Every day.'”

  “Oh dear,” Mr. Beeba said. “An abused servant. Poor little chap, no wonder he wanted to escape Gorda Glassdok.”

  “Hey, now, this ain't no charity ship!” said Spuckler. “A stowaway's a stowaway, plain an' simple. We gotta get rid of 'im!”

  “No, Spuckler.” I put a protective arm around Ozlips. “So long as I'm on this ship, he's staying right here.”

  “'Kiko,” Spuckler whined, “we're tryin' t' win a race here. I don't want this little alien twerp slowin' us down.”

  “He's not a twerp,” I said, glaring at Spuckler. “And he's not going to slow us down. Who knows, he might even be able to help us win.”

  “Yish!” Ozlips said. He nodded excitedly and moved even closer to my side. “Hail-pew! Hail-pew!”

  “Come on, Spuckler,” I said. “Look at him. He's cute.”

  Spuckler stared at me—at the two of us, really—his eyes squinted nearly shut, his lips like stone.

  “Cute,” he mumbled. “I hate cute.”

  No sooner had these words left his lips than the whole ship rocked violently to one side, sending all of us tumbling to the floor. I threw my arms around Ozlips, forgetting all about the Twerbo-Fladiator.

  Just as suddenly the ship was nice and steady again. Through the windshield we saw a fiery flash and a big white rocket zooming ahead of us.

  “Streed!” Spuckler growled as he leaped back to the controls.

  for grull, but Mr. Beeba was already on the job, heaving shovelfuls into the ship's furnace as fast as his spindly arms would allow. I strapped myself back into my seat and held both the Twerbo-Fladiator and Ozlips tightly, one under each arm.

  “He bumped us,” Spuckler kept saying, over and over. “Bumped us! I can't believe it!”

  I noticed with a quiet horror that there was a tiny crack in the Lava lamp part of the Twerbo-Fladiator. Had that happened a second ago? Maybe it had been there before and I hadn't seen it.

  Yeah, right. I decided not to say anything.

  GUDDA-GUDDA-GUDDA-GUDDA &

  Mr. Beeba's grull shoveling was paying off. We passed a silver ship—the one that had been in first place just minutes before—and drew closer to Streed.

  “HE'S DOING THIS ON PURPOSE, SIR,” Gax warned,“TRYING TO PREEMPTIVELY EXHAUST OUR FUEL SUPPLY.”

  “I know that, Gax,” Spuckler replied with irritation. “Whaddaya think I am, some kinda nitwit?”

  Gax wisely chose not to answer this question.

  “BUT HADN'T WE BETTER CONSERVE OUR GRULL FOR LATER IN THE RACE?”

  “Yeah, of course we should & ” said Spuckler, “but he bumped us, Gax! I can't let 'im get away with that!”

  Every time we got to a point where we were nearly neck and neck with Streed, he'd accelerate even more and leave us shuddering in his wake.

  “The little ding-danged frim-frammin' varmint!” Spuckler grumbled, sounding like there were other words—really ugly ones—that he'd rather use just then.

  By now the needle on the Twerbo-Fladiator was moving toward the red zone on a regular basis. I cupped my hands and blew on it with all my might, finding to my relief that two or three strong puffs were enough to cool it down each time.

  Ozlips, seeing what I was doing, tried to help out. His tiny little breaths were more or less useless; judging from the size of his body, he only had lungs the size of lima beans! Still, I was touched to see how hard he was working on my behalf.

  “Thanks, Ozlips,” I said.

  “Moy plissure!” he replied with a gasp, already thoroughly winded.

  Poog began making warbly little announcements about once every five minutes. Mr. Beeba, consumed with his shoveling duties, failed to translate any of it.

  “Hey, come on,” I said at last. “What's Poog saying?”

  “He's simply keeping us informed,” Mr. Beeba wheezed, propping himself unsteadily on the handle of his shovel, “of our progress toward the Almost-Black Hole of Luzbert-7.”

  “The Almost-Black Hole?”

  “It's more of a deep shade of indigo,” Mr. Beeba explained with a grunt, already back at work.

  I took a few seconds to think this one over. Mrs. Jackson, my science teacher back at Middleton Elementary, had once spent an entire lesson teaching us about black holes. I was really hungry that day and wasn't paying as much attention as I should have. But I did remember at least a few things.

  “Now wait a minute,” I said to Mr. Beeba. “A black hole can't be indigo. Or any color, can it? It's not even really a hole. It's like a tiny little spot in space where gravity sucks everything in, right? I'm pretty sure that's what my teacher told us, anyway.”

  “Let me guess,” Mr. Beeba replied. “You were told that it is a point of extreme mass in space-time with a gravitational field so intense that it traps all electromagnetic radiation, including light.”

&nbs
p; “Um,” I said, “something like that, yeah.”

  “Ah, Earth scientists,” Mr. Beeba said with a chuckle. “So much left to learn!”

  I was going to ask another question when I felt a mild vibration against my left arm, like the gentle purring of a kitten: Ozlips. He had fallen asleep— from the exhaustion of trying to cool the TwerboFladiator, I guess—and was curled up against me, very nearly as small and round as when we'd first seen him.

  “Really!” I whispered. “How could they even think of abandoning this poor little guy?”

  He wormed around a little, burrowing himself even deeper into the warmth of my arm.

  “More grull!” Spuckler shouted for the umpteenth time.

  We were now within a quarter mile or so of Streed's ship and were gaining on him bit by bit. Looming ahead of us was a huge mass of blue clouds spiraling in toward a &

  & well, it was a dark blue hole. But not dark blue, really.

  It was a deep shade of indigo.

  b'fore Streed!” Spuckler shouted, pulling down every lever on the entire dashboard. “The racin' order's pretty much set once everyone goes through the Hole! It's pretty near impossible to make up lost ground later on.”

  I held on tightly to Ozlips as I watched our progress through the windshield. With each passing second we drew closer to Streed's ship. The spiraling blue edge of the Almost-Black Hole spread out above and below us. We began to experience turbulence that quickly grew so violent, I thought the ship was going to shatter into a million pieces.

  “WE'VE GOT TO KILL THE ENGINE, SIR!” Gax cried. “NO ONE FLIES INTO THE HOLE FULL THROTTLE LIKE THIS!”

  “No one but me, Gax!” Spuckler said, his voice all but submerged in the rattling of the ship and the high-pitched howl of the engine.

  “Spuckler!” Mr. Beeba wailed as he tossed the grull shovel to the floor and strapped himself into his seat. “Shut off the engine at once, you lunatic! This will be the death of us all!”

  Again we were nearly neck and neck with Streed. With all the shaking and rocking it was hard to see who was ahead. The whirling indigo clouds of the Almost-Black Hole were now surrounding us on all sides. Directly in front of us was the hole itself: slightly oval, shimmering and flashing with bursts of blue electricity.

  “Hang on to yer hats, folks!” Spuckler shouted as he pulled a big black knob from the dashboard, finally killing the engine. The rattling immediately subsided and the scream of the engine slowly died down to a low-pitched hum.

  I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking the worst was over. (Yeah, I know. How stupid can you get?)

  Looking around, I noticed with some alarm that Mr. Beeba and Spuckler were gritting their teeth and closing their eyes. Gax scooted over and locked himself into his spot on the floor, while Poog floated toward me and Ozlips, a worried expression on his face.

  The gravitational force of the Almost-Black Hole took over. Spuckler had let go of the steering wheel entirely and was holding on to the dashboard with tensed, outstretched arms. Through one of the portals I could see Streed's ship: It was just a dozen yards or so away from us, and it was whirling around so quickly, it looked like a spinning top!

  That's when our ship gradually turned upside down. We flipped over once. Then twice. Then a third time and a fourth, until finally we were spinning repeatedly, faster and faster, flattened against the walls, getting whipped around and around like socks in a clothes dryer. Finally I just had to close my eyes because everything was turning into a twirling, circular blur.

  SHUDDA

  SHUDDA

  SHUDDA

  The ship was filled with this weird rhythmic sound, loud and deep, pulsing through the walls and into our bodies. Then—

  ZZZZZRRRRRR and FFLLRRRRRRRRR and SPPLLLLLUUUUURRRRRRRRRPP!

  I opened my eyes.

  The spinning had stopped. The ship was perfectly level again.

  Okay. You know what it's like when you're spinning around and around and then you suddenly stop: You get dizzy. Well, I was dizzy all right. More than dizzy. Way, way, WAY more than dizzy. I was so disoriented right then, I'd have had better luck walking on my hands than my feet. Even sitting down, with seat belts strapping me in, I could still barely keep my balance. So I just held tightly to the Twerbo-Fladiator and waited for the tornado in my head to spin itself out.

  The ship might have stopped flipping, but our speed hadn't been reduced at all. Now we were flying faster than ever, even with the engine shut off, zooming through space so quickly, the stars in the windows were nothing more than stretched-out streaks of light.

  “That's it,” I heard Spuckler say. “We're on the other side.”

  The fixtures of the ship were still whirling wildly in my eyes, but little by little I was able to focus on individual objects. Then—it took a while, for some reason—I became aware of a slimy feeling on my arms and face. Looking down, I saw that I was covered from head to toe with some sort of weird yellow goop. And I wasn't the only one. Mr. Beeba, Spuckler, Gax, Poog, every last square inch of the interior of the ship & everyone and everything was just dripping with this awful greasy gooey stuff. It gave off a really nasty smell, too, like old cheese—you know, the kind of cheese that's pretty stinky even when it's not old.

  “Black-hole mucus,” said Mr. Beeba, wiping a dollop of the stuff from his eyes. “One of the unfortunate side effects of passing through a black hole.”

  Ugh! It was without a doubt the grossest substance in the universe.

  “My science teacher definitely didn't tell us about this.”

  Gax had found some kind of vacuum-cleaner thing inside his body and was using it to suck the goop off Poog before attending to himself. The rest of us tried to clean ourselves off, but it was pretty much a losing battle. The yellow goo was so oily that even hot water and industrial-strength detergent probably wouldn't have done much. Even Gax's vacuum cleaner was only partially effective, leaving him and Poog still half-covered with the stuff. Spuckler was the only one who didn't seem to mind how filthy he'd become. He was too busy revving the engine back up to full throttle and scanning the windshield for signs of Bluggamin Streed. He was practically bouncing with glee.

  “I think we musta passed him back there in the hole! I can't see him round here nowhere!”

  Incredible. We were now in first place. Maybe we'd win this race after all.

  Just then I noticed with a shock that I was still holding the Twerbo-Fladiator, but not &

  “Ozlips!” I cried. “Where is he? I've lost him!”

  He had utterly disappeared.

  Mr. Beeba stared at me and chuckled. Spuckler turned around, looked at me, and broke into loud hyena-like laughter. Even Poog was smiling.

  “What?” I asked. “What?”

  Mr. Beeba smiled apologetically.

  “He's on top of your head, Akiko,” he said.

  Sure enough, Ozlips had somehow climbed up on my head and was—believe it or not—licking my hair.

  Mr. Beeba stepped closer to me and examined Ozlips with great interest.

  “Good heavens,” he half whispered. “Ozlips is giving you a jolly good cleaning.”

  “He is?”

  “My word, yes,” he answered, stepping around to view me from a variety of angles. “He's licking that mucus off you as if it were a right tasty little treat.”

  Ozlips didn't stop at the top of my head. He was just getting started.

  In a matter of seconds he had worked his way down to my face. I wish you could know what it feels like to have that silky little tongue flicking across your cheeks. It was like being kissed by an extremely affectionate fish. Let's just say it's a good thing I'm not particularly ticklish.

  Before long Ozlips had removed every last trace of the black-hole mucus from my arms and hands and neck and all my clothes, including the bottoms of my shoes! He sucked the mucus off the tips of my shoelaces and licked his lips as if he'd just finished off a plate of spaghetti.

  But he still wasn't done.

&n
bsp; He moved right on to Mr. Beeba and started all over again. Unfortunately Mr. Beeba was ticklish—extremely ticklish—and for several minutes the ship echoed with the sound of his cackling laughter, interrupted only by desperate pleas to “Stop!” and “Take it easy, you little fiend!” Now it was my turn to smile.

  In the space of half an hour Ozlips cleaned the black-hole mucus off Mr. Beeba, Spuckler, Gax, Poog, the floor, the ceiling, and all the walls of the whole ship. How he managed to fit all that stuff into his tiny little belly is something I will never understand (and a subject that Mr. Beeba will no doubt theorize about for the rest of his life).

  His goo feast finished, Ozlips crawled again into the crook of my arm. Then he tossed his head back and let out a loud and impossibly long belch.

  “Nnnn,” he said. “De-litz-zusss.”

  A few seconds later he was sound asleep again.

  After that everyone began to treat Ozlips a little better than they had before. He became a mascot for us, like a stray dog we'd picked up and decided to call our own. Even Spuckler seemed to be getting used to him.

  “I guess he ain't all that bad,” he said, “for a stow-away.”

  one more stop before the last stretch of the race. Actually, I don't think you could call it a stop. It was kind of a rolling stop.

  Spuckler used a walkie-talkie thing on the dashboard to make a quick call, something about “two tons” and “an extra twen'y gilpots if ya make it snappy.”

  A moment later I saw a large rectangular spacecraft zooming in toward us from up ahead. It was like a big shoe box with one wide groove cut in the bottom. There were small windows on the sides through which I saw the shapes of—well, there's no other way to say it: little green men.