Escape from the Pipe Men!

by Mary G. Thompson

  I was hungry. I had barely eaten anything since the Brocine food the night before, but I shook my head.

  “The first day, nobody noticed. I guess they were going to let you rest. But this morning, I was sitting in there watching the TV—some fascinating programs here on Earth—when I felt the message wind. I couldn’t quite understand it—they calibrate it to your from chemistry, you know—but I knew they were calling you. I must admit I panicked a little. I went around opening and closing doors and things, jumping in and out of rooms, trying to make them think there were three people in here instead of just one Hdkowl-lll-ll-wyyyn. I don’t know if it worked, but it certainly confused them. The wind became very strange, blowing around all over the place.” Ip coughed. “If you find anything broken, that’s why.”

  “Anyway, a couple of the Masters finally came looking for you. Yel-to-tor was one of them. It sounded like it knew you, calling out your name.”

  “It’s my tutor,” I said.

  “Well, that explains it. Though my tutor never seemed to like me much. Anyway, I didn’t know what to do, so I just hid outside.”

  “Outside! Was it daytime?”

  “Yes, yes, but no one saw me. I was behind one of those things.” Ip gestured to one of Mom’s hanging plants.

  My mouth dropped open.

  “Don’t look that way. It was bigger than that one. Anyway, the sun was too bright for anyone to see anything.” Ip’s giant, darkness-adapted eyes didn’t blink.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Becky.

  I gave a brief translation of what Ip had said so far.

  She giggled. “I wonder if that kid saw him. You know, the one who stopped us when we went out.”

  “I wonder.” It was too late now. If the Earth police were going to come, they would have come already. “What happened next?”

  “Well, I crept right up to the window—” Ip pointed to the living room window, the one that, if the curtains were open, would have looked right out onto the front yard.

  I groaned.

  “To see if I could hear the Masters talking. We Hdkowl-lll-ll-wyyyns have exceptionally good hearing, you know.” Ip shook his horn and smiled. I couldn’t see anything that looked like ears anywhere on his body. “One says to the other, ‘Bless my eyes! what happened here?’ and the other one says, ‘I don’t know, but those froms are gone—and what happened to that Hdkowl-lll-ll-wyyyn?’ That’s when they all rushed in! A whole bunch of the Masters. I couldn’t see much through the curtains except shadows, but they were all over. There was so much talking at first that I couldn’t understand any of it, but then someone mentioned the Hottini and the Brocine and some kind of emergency. It sounded like the planets had all moved around, but I must have heard that wrong.”

  “Did they say what happened to the planets?” Gript cut in.

  “I don’t know—it was all confused. Something about repairing a rift of variable infinity, whatever that means. Anyway, they kept saying ‘stolen’ and ‘specimens,’ and I realized they meant you children. I finally figured out that they were saying the Hottini had stolen you. Then someone said, really loud, ‘Did they steal that Hdkowl-lll-ll-wyyyn too?’ Well, I figured the best thing to do would be to play along, so I ran through the door and fell down on my face right there.” Ip pointed to the linoleum in front of the front door. “I pretended to be out of my mind.” He smiled.

  “What did you tell them?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear it.

  “Well, they were trying to wake me up, asking me all these questions about what happened. I took a while to come around, played it up a little. Then I told them that the Hottini jumped out of nowhere, right there”—he pointed to the living room—“and they jumped on top of me, holding me down with their twisted claws—”

  “Twisted claws? Ip, have you ever seen a Hottini’s foot?”

  Ip pulled his blobby arms closer to his body. “No.”

  “They don’t have claws! They have fingers like ours.” I wiggled them. “Eight on each foot.”

  “Well, no one questioned it!” Ip snapped. “I said that the Hottini pulled you two back through thin air, and I was so distraught and mad with grief that I hid in the foliage until the Masters showed up.”

  I sighed. It was better than nothing. At least the Pipe Men might still think none of this was our fault. “Okay, fine. Our story is that these Xaxor rescued us from the Hottini. We have no idea how anyone figured out how to open a portal. We’ve just been along for the ride the whole time.”

  Ip eyed the row of silent Xaxor. “What really happened?”

  I gave him a brief synopsis, leaving the details out.

  Ip shook with laughter. “Two days go by, and you’ve got everyone in the universe after you!”

  Gript wriggled on my shoulder. “When did you see my family?”

  “That was earlier today,” said Ip. “I just came back here for the night in case something came up. And the Earth air!” He breathed deeply, then exhaled with a sigh that nearly blew Gript off my shoulder.

  “We can’t keep wasting time!” said Gript. “It will be light on O-thul-ba before too long, right?”

  I nodded. “It’s close to Earth time.”

  “Then we must get to them! My children are not as well trained to be away from the pack as I am. They were only to be gone for a few days! From what you describe, they won’t survive much longer!”

  “He needs to rescue his family, and we need to get to Dad. I don’t think we can wait until morning,” I said to Becky.

  Becky nodded. “You go help Gript. I can get to Dad. I think I figured the doors out.”

  “You think? That’s a nice offer,” I said, “but I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

  “I can do it!” She folded her arms. “They go duh-dum, duh-dum. Then dut-dut-dut. Then dut-dut. Dut-dut, and there’s the right door.”

  “Maybe if we hurry to the hospital—”

  “His family is going to die,” Becky said. “I know how to get there.” She glared at all the Xaxor. “I don’t need them.”

  I didn’t like the thought of her going alone, but the hospital was close, and she had already proved that she could navigate the portals. And that she could act adorable enough to get in to see him. I couldn’t let any of the Xaxor be alone with her. And if I went with her, and they stopped us from leaving, Gript might never find his family, and we might lose our chance to escape. Listen to your sister, Ryan. She has a natural talent. The memory of Front’s voice vibrated inside my head. “Okay, and what are you going to say when the Pipe Men ask where I am?”

  “You’re at home sleeping, and I snuck out because I had to see my daddy.” Becky scrunched up her face and gave her best puppy-dog eyes.

  “Right, and how did we get home?”

  Becky glared at the row of Xaxor again. “They rescued us while we were escaping from the Hottini and took us to Earth. We don’t know how they know where Earth is.”

  “Right.” I turned to Ip. “We can get to the Brocine sector through ours, right?”

  Ip nodded.

  “Can you take us there?”

  Ip rolled his eyes toward the anxious Brocine on my shoulder, then toward the silent Xaxor. “All of you?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I had thought we needed the Xaxor, but now they seemed ominous, waiting to jump out and carry us away again. Did they really want to help us? Still, if we needed to make a quick escape, I was toast without the calculator. “Yes,” I said. “All of us.”

  Ip looked from Becky and me to the Xaxor, then back again. He leaned in very close to me and whispered, “You know you can’t trust a Xaxor, don’t you, Ryan?” At least, he attempted to whisper. I was pretty sure that it came out loud enough for the Xaxor to hear.

  “I know.” I said it in my normal voice.

  Ip leaned back. “All right, then! To the Brocine sector before the sun comes up!”

  Twenty-Eight

  “HOW AM I GOING TO FIND YOU AGAIN?” Becky asked. I couldn�
�t see her face in the darkness of the closet. She sounded a little teary.

  “Once Dad is okay, you try to meet us at the Brocine sector in the zoo. If you can’t get there, you take Mom and Dad to Front. Do you think you can find Frontringhor?”

  “Yes. But what if Mom and Dad don’t believe me?”

  “You have to make them believe you. You got the antidote, didn’t you? Mom sent you all the way across the universe for it.” I couldn’t help but start getting angry. Mom had sent us on this crazy quest without having any idea what she was getting us into. “If she’s going to make us go through all this, she has to believe us and do what we say!”

  Becky was quiet for a second. “I’m scared,” she whispered.

  I was scared too. “There’s nothing to be scared of,” I said. “The Pipe Men don’t want to hurt us.”

  “Then why are we trying to escape? I don’t want to live on some other planet! Froms don’t know anything. I want to learn about bok from the Pipe Men and meet lots of new froms and go through the portals.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to escape either, not unless we had to. I would miss Yel-to-tor, and even Hon-tri-bum and the other spectators. “Well, then there’s nothing to be afraid of. If they catch you, they’ll just keep you here.” And keep us from ever going back to Earth. I tried to push the picture of the Earth sky out of my mind, but it kept pressing behind my eyes. I felt like I was missing something, not being there.

  She was quiet.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m afraid they’ll take me someplace different from you,” she said.

  “I’m not going to let that happen.” I pulled her into a hug. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d really hugged her.

  “Okay,” she said. “Bye.”

  “Bye.” There was an almost imperceptible buzz as she stepped into the portal. I stepped out of Mom and Dad’s closet, wiping tears away from my eyes. I didn’t want anyone to see them, but everyone was standing in the bedroom, waiting.

  “Come on,” I said, brushing past all of them. I didn’t wait to see who was behind me, but I could hear them following. Ip lumbered and clumped, and I could even hear the Xaxor, treading lightly but humming a little—and stinking. Their smell probably hadn’t really gotten worse, but I felt like I was right under their bellies again.

  Gript rustled in my backpack.

  “Quit moving,” I snapped.

  He rustled for another second, then was silent.

  I stepped into the living room closet, then straight through the portal into our sector without stopping. Though it was dark, tiny lights dotted the tops of the invisible walls, just enough for me to make out the basics. There was the table where Becky and I had sat just a couple of days ago, eating our lunch in front of the Pipe Men. There was the spot where I’d talked to Hon-tri-bum and its little five-eyed friend. I’d had no idea that Hon-tri-bum was such an important person. No idea that the Pipe Men were feared for their immense power over something I didn’t understand. No idea that they kidnapped children and exploited planets, or that we were really and truly captives.

  There was the table where Yel-to-tor had taught me their language and tried to teach me math. Just enough so that I could repeat it, but never enough so that I could really understand, assuming I was too stupid to figure it out. Beyond that was the perfectly calibrated play structure for Earth children and the table where Becky used to sit with her tutor, Bre-zon-air, understanding more than I did, proving them wrong.

  She should be entering the hospital by now. What would she find? The Pipe Men we thought we knew, who would take her to our parents, or the Pipe Men everyone else in the universe saw? I had never seen our zoo sector this dark and deserted before. It looked like a completely different place.

  Ip globbed past me and waved for me to follow.

  As I started walking, letting my boots spring off the familiar rubber ground, our Xaxor slunk up alongside me. It held out the tablet, the words barely visible in the dim light.

  They found us. I didn’t bring you to them.

  I pushed the tablet back. “You poisoned us.” I poked angrily at the welt on my neck.

  We could not get away. It seemed easier on you. It stared up at me with two eyes, keeping one on our path. We were passing the play structure, heading for the edge of our sector, toward a part of the zoo I’d never seen.

  “You told them about the calculator.”

  The Xaxor typed furiously. I did not tell them. You think we’re stupid because we look like tiny creatures on your planet with no brains. You and the Hottini created a rift of variable infinity. Everyone was chasing you. And we disappeared from the Hottini ship, only to be found on Brock. Do you think the Xaxor slept through all of it?

  I hadn’t thought about that. It seemed obvious, now that it had said it. That I couldn’t hide what I had while at the same time jumping all over the universe. Front must have realized that. But why did he give it to me? Maybe it was Front’s fault that I was in this mess. We could have found the door. The Hottini would have taken us to the Brocine. The Brocine would have helped us. Everything would have been fine if Front hadn’t given me something everyone was willing to chase me around the universe for. I wasn’t ready to let the Xaxor off the hook, though. It had poisoned us instead of waking us up and warning us.

  The Xaxor kept typing. You have started this war. We only want to end up with something when it is over.

  I had started a war? No one had shot each other, the way they did on Earth TV. But what if that changed? What if people got hurt, all because I went running across the universe without knowing what I was doing?

  Ip turned his horn and touched something invisible with it, then went on walking through the invisible door. The sector just beyond ours didn’t look much different, but I had never been there before. I had seen the froms who lived there only from a distance. Thin, jagged creatures that crawled on the ground, they had never approached us, and we had never approached them. I didn’t know whether they lived on their own planet like we did or whether they were forced to stay in their sector twenty-four and a half hours a day.

  The ground didn’t change as I walked through, and neither did the air. Surely something so different from us would need to live differently? There were large holes in the ground marked by mounds of Pipe Man fabric, and the area reminded me of our so-called play structure, so different from the real thing. How would these creatures live if they had the choice? How would I?

  It took at least fifteen minutes to walk through the sector. Our Xaxor tripped quietly next to me, and the others stayed a little ways behind. It gave me a lot of time to think. About what my life would be like if I could go outside on Earth more often, if I could go to school and have Earth friends. If I could have friends at all who weren’t aliens constantly commenting on my body parts. Outside of Becky, regular visitors like Hon-tri-bum were my best friends. And I was just an exhibit to them. No better than a pet. But what if I was like all the other Earth people? They didn’t even know about the Pipe Men or any of the froms. They didn’t know about portals, or space travel, or bok. What would it be like to never see another face from a different planet, to be ignorant like a goldfish swimming around and around in a tiny bowl?

  Ip took us through another invisible wall, then another. The landscape changed from bumpy little hills and caves to tall trees, then to thick bushes. We came to a sector that had both giant caves and tall trees, rising far above our heads on our left, where I imagined there must be a portal be that led to a giant, monster planet. One thing was always the same—the ground was always made of Pipe Man fabric, the same color and texture everywhere.

  No one seemed to be awake. I had never wondered about the zoo at night, never tried to come back and see what it looked like. We were told to go, and we went. We were told to come back, and we came back.

  Ip led us through another door, another invisible barrier that I had never thought about trying to walk through. The landscape was
flat, peppered with basketball-sized holes, spaced at regular intervals a few yards apart.

  Ip held out a blobby arm. “The Brocine are here somewhere,” he whispered. “I don’t know where they sleep.”

  I looked around to make sure that no Pipe Men had come out, set my backpack on the ground, and unzipped it. “Gript,” I whispered, “Ip says this is it.”

  Gript crawled out of the backpack on all fours and stood on the Pipe Man fabric ground, claws bouncing against the rubber. He looked up at me. “It’s dry.” He walked over to one of the holes and peered down it.

  I leaned over him, but it was too dark for me to see.

  Gript squeaked something in their language into the hole, then waited for a response, but there was nothing. “I need to go down.”

  “Okay.” I pulled a roll of twine out of the backpack and tied the end around Gript’s waist.

  Gript tugged on it to make sure it was secure, then jumped into the hole. The twine tightened slowly in my hands.

  I looked around at the barren landscape, the silent Xaxor, Ip standing too still. The lights were as dim as before, but they began to stand out, to make me more nervous now that we weren’t moving. The Pipe Men didn’t even need this much light to see. They could be watching us right now, with no trouble at all.

  “Ryan.”

  “Who said that?” I whispered. It wasn’t Ip, and it couldn’t have been the Xaxor.

  Ip looked around him.

  “You let me see him! That’s my daddy! I want to see my daddy!”

  “Becky?” It was her voice, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

  “I . . . WANT . . . TO SEE . . . MY . . . DADDY!” Becky screamed. She was jumping up and down now. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it. I’d seen her act this way a thousand times. I just never thought I’d be happy to hear it. So much for acting adorable.

  “Honey, hush. Stop—” Mom’s voice.

  “DAD-DY!”