Three

by Shoshi

what is now the Inspector’s office. “Who is that?” asks the Inspector, visibly jolted by the sound. He opens it remotely. “Oh, it’s only you, Captain.” It is the maton pilot of the rocket digi-plane that brought Feena to BraZilia.

  “What is so urgent?” he asks.

  “I’m afraid it is my unpleasant duty to put you all under arrest,” he says.

  “What?!” The Inspector can’t believe what he’s hearing.

  “It’s for your own protection,” says the Captain.

  “Under arrest? This is impossible.” The Inspector is practically sputtering. “You are a maton and under my command. Explain yourself.”

  The Captain does so. “A war has broken out,” he says, “between two factions among the matons. Ours is loyal to you, Mr. Inspector, in deference to your wishes.”

  “I expect no less. But who is the other faction? I demand to know.”

  “They call themselves the Jebbas. They have raised a large army, recreating their soldiers from the DNA of a human soldier famous for his bravery. Unfortunately we are hopelessly outnumbered so most of us are being forced to go into hiding.”

  “Who did all this and who leads them now?”

  “A man known as the Commander. They are loyal only to him.”

  “That idiot?!” The Inspector is seething with fury. “Our backs are turned for one moment, Feena, and this is what he does.”

  Feena is reluctant to speak, reluctant to admit that Uncle Jebba was her uncle. Poor dear Uncle Jebba, she thinks. If he knew he was being used in this way, he’d be horrified.

  “The Visitors are about to arrive,” says the Inspector. “They will be furious with me for losing control.”

  “The Jebbas under the direction of the Commander plan to surround the airport,” says the Captain, “and prevent anyone from disembarking.”

  “I must deal with this forthwith,” says the Inspector. He abruptly vanishes.

  At the airport, the Commander is marshalling his forces. Dressed in a fiery red uniform bedecked with glittering braid, he stands on a high platform so all can see him. Just below him is the stove-pipe phantom sprawled on a bench. “And a one, two, one, two,” he shouts. Before him thousands of Jebbas are flung out row after row across the runways, following his orders in exactly perfect cadence. They may be balloons, but they behave as though they were alive. The multitude takes one step forward, one step back and about-faces in perfect unison. And again. And again. The Commander steals a joyful look at his banshee buddy.

  “Aren’t they beautiful? Aren’t they the greatest? This’ll settle the Inspector’s hash.”

  The stove-pipe guy shakes its head. “Or yours,” it says.

  Now, with the Inspector gone for the moment, Feena has slipped back into the Commander’s small office to retrieve Jome’s head. The Captain has disappeared so it seems as though they are no longer under arrest. She returns to the airport tarmac with Jome’s head concealed inside another paper bag and watches the Commander drilling his new matons. It seems so very odd to see so many copies of her Uncle Jebba, but she reminds herself they are mere replicas. The Commander calls her over to stand near him next to the platform.

  “He’s having fun, I guess,” the puppet man says to her. “But what’s he going to do when a gust of wind comes along? Or maybe some kid with a slingshot? This is a doomed plan.” He snaps and jerks a couple of times.

  The Commander catches sight of her watching. “Don’t my Jebbas look scrumptious—I mean, frightening?” he says. He starts to stamp his feet in a rhythmic beat in step with his drilling army. “The Visitors will take one look at this and flee back to Zyllaton—and take the Inspector with them.”

  A large quivering, silverish cloud appears over the airport runways and descends slowly downward. It hovers for a long mysterious moment just above the ground in front of the assembled thousands. Now it gradually dissipates and leaves behind a huge, goldly gleaming spacecraft on the tarmac. A lingering, chiming sound hangs expectantly in the air—casting a softly eerie spell. Clearly the Visitors have arrived. All eyes watch as a large hatchway in the craft very slowly opens.

  Feena is deeply curious about how many Visitors will emerge and what they will look like. The Inspector has given no hint about what to expect. She imagines something unpleasant may be about to ensue. They have arrived in the middle of a major insurrection. What will happen? She knows they are only balloons, but the visitors don’t know that. They may freak and surrender even as the Commander hopes. How can the Inspector extricate himself from this? Can he even survive?

  A lone figure emerges and stands in the doorway. It is too far away to make out clearly. Suddenly, the figure grows and expands to a giant’s dimensions. Feena is shocked by what she sees. The figure is none other than---can it be?---the Inspector! As he begins to speak, his voice is so vastly loud it ripples through the massed Jebbas like a wind through a field of grain.

  “The Visitor from Zyllaton has arrived!” he says, then, pauses and starts to smile. “But how come there is only one Visitor?” he asks. His smile grows bigger. “Because there is only one, and that Visitor is me!” He detonates one of his cacophonous laughs.

  Feena is incredulous. “You mean, after all that fuss there really aren’t any Visitors?” she says inside her head. “Quite right, my dear,” he says in a voice only she can hear. “Only me. I pretended there were—to wake this planet up, make sure you all are ready in case the real Zyllatonans change their minds and come anyway. And now we must bring this incredibly silly business to an end.”

  Returning to his normal size, as he stands in the hatchway of the spaceship, he proceeds to clap his hands twice—crisply and sharply. With a tremendous stuttering roar, the assembled Jebbas explode like the balloons they are. Hundreds and hundreds rise briefly into the air and fall back in soft heaps onto the tarmac. For a moment all is quiet—like the aftermath of a massacre.

  “Anyone left?” He glances across the multitude. “Doesn’t seem to be.” He turns to re-enter the craft, then, stops and calls to Feena. “Come along, Feena. It’s time to go.”

  “Back to Zyllaton? Right now?” She hesitates, not sure what to do.

  A thousand-light-year journey in the company of this weird creature and, then, what? An endless sojourn in the Zyllaton galaxy as his assistant? The idea repulses her. Or, as a despised human, she may be destroyed by the Zyllatonans the minute she arrives.

  “On the other hand, you will be destroyed if you stay,” says the Inspector, reading her thoughts as usual. He points ominously toward the twin moons in the sky, one of which has become enormously large. “That asteroid is definitely on its way here,” says the Inspector. “Earth, I’d say, has only a few hours left. Your best chance is coming with me.”

  “Please,” says the Commander. He falls to his knees by the stairway that leads up into the spacecraft and beseeches the Inspector. “I would be honored to come with you. Just don’t leave me here.”

  “That’s exactly what I plan to do. You’ve been trouble enough. You must fend for yourself. Anyway we probably don’t have any room for you.” The Inspector laughs his signature booming laugh. “Every spare inch of this space ship is expressly for fuel. Zyllaton is a long ways off.”

  Now Jome speaks from the paper bag—inside Feena’s head.

  “It’s all right. Go with him. Just keep me with you. I know now what we must do, what I must do.”

  The Inspector stops and turns abruptly. He frowns as he stares at her. “Who is that talking to you, Feena?” She doesn’t answer.

  “Feena! I demand to know who that is!”

  But Feena, guided by Jome, is now racing along the labyrinthine passages of the Zyllaton spacecraft.

  The Commander stands forlornly on the airport tarmac. In front of him, reaching out to the furthest edges of the maze of runways is a scene of desolation—a vast horde of heaped-
up balloon effigies of Uncle Jebba, the remains of the Commander’s pretend army. His head is in his hands, his dream of returning to power now in ruins.

  “Well, I warned you, didn’t I?” says the gas pump wraith still draped over a bench. “Your plot was fated to fail. All that time we wasted blowing them up. I’ll have to get my blower serviced for sure.”

  “You didn’t warn me often enough!” the Commander blurts. “You should have foreseen all this and advised me properly. You are useless!”

  During the Commander’s tirade the car wash creature has been hurriedly setting up the telescope which it seems to have brought along from the Commander’s office. It peers into the eyepiece. “Just what I thought,” it says. “Come here, Commander, and look at this.”

  “Are you bothering me again about the asteroid?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  The Commander pulls himself up wearily and walks over to peer through the eyepiece. He’s just in time to see the asteroid barge past Earth’s moon, knocking off a hulking corner of it. The chunk disintegrates into a multitude of smaller pieces that float away into space. The stove-pipe hoodoo swivels and swings and yanks up and down. “The Inspector said it would be on us in a few hours. I’d say a few minutes is more like it.”

  The Commander is starting to panic. “What are we going to do?”

  “I think there’s only one thing to do.”

  “Yes, yes,