by Jon Scieszka
Major Fluffy ate another Almond Joy.
He jumped into his wheel, ran like mad, spun around, and flipped out again.
And again.
And again.
No one in room 501-B was going anywhere or saving anyone anytime soon.
The purple octopus spun slowly overhead for hours.
Michael K. wobbled. His head was full of weird sea creatures and that nonstop xylophone tune.
“Now?” said the chief.
Michael K. took a deep breath. He shook his head. “Never.”
“Arrrrrrrrr!” yelled the chief.
“Beep,” beeped the coffeemaker on the chief’s desk. And then it started talking. “Brew finished. Chief, report!”
The chief jumped like he had been shocked. “General Accounting!” the chief squeaked in a very high voice. “It is so good to hear from you.”
“What is report?” hissed the coffeemaker. “Gonf must be bllrrped NOW!”
“Oh, yes!” said the chief. “I’ve got everything under control.” The chief looked frantically around his office. “Just about ready . . .”
“No more time, Chief,” said the coffeemaker. “You are—”
“All set!” said the chief. “We are all set for graduation! It’s a very big ceremony here on Earth. Perfect for bllrrping Gonf!”
“PSSSSSSS,” said the coffeemaker.
The chief grabbed the microphone for the school PA system. “Here, listen! I was just going to make the announcement to all of the Earth persons.” The chief pressed the speak button on the microphone. “Attention, all classes. Attention. This is your principal. I have decided that school is over. Graduation is tomorrow at noon. And I have a very big surprise for everyone.”
Michael K. heard the sound of surprised cheers from the classrooms.
“Hmmmmmm,” said the coffeemaker. “Earth tomorrow at noon. That is the End. Beep!” The coffeemaker powered off.
The chief plopped down in his chair. He looked at Michael K.
“Now it’s time to get serious.”
* * *
Outside the principal’s office the kids and teachers of P.S. 858 chattered and hummed with excitement. Graduation tomorrow. Summer vacation was coming early.
In room 501-B, Mrs. Halley and her fifth graders were a mess.
Everyone had crashed. And crashed hard. Kids were sprawled on tables, curled in the Science Corner, passed out under the math bins, snoring facedown on their laptop keyboards.
Mrs. Halley sat perfectly upright in her chair, but her eyes were closed, and she was furiously dreaming of winning Math Blaster and mowing down enemy attackers.
* * *
Inside the principal’s office was an even bigger mess.
The chief unleashed every AAA and evil intergalactic trick he knew to break Michael K.
The chief tried sad-eyed puppies, elevator music, flashing neon lights.
Michael K. still said no.
Morning turned into afternoon.
All of the kids and teachers, except room 501-B, went home to get ready for Graduation tomorrow.
The chief tried snakes and spiders, terrible smells, promises of candy.
Michael K. still said no.
Afternoon turned into evening.
Room 501-B woke up and started gaming, watching, and wanting again.
The chief tried foot tickling, scary stories, offers of fame and money.
Michael K. still said no.
Evening turned into night.
Except for classroom 501-B and the principal’s office, P.S. 858 was dark and quiet.
“This is getting ridiculous,” said Michael K.
“Yes, it is,” said the chief. “It’s time you gave me that brain wave. Because now I’ll use the last resort.”
The chief held up a small black plastic rectangle with colored buttons.
“Ooooooh,” said Michael K. “A TV remote. Very scary.”
The chief smiled a mean smile. “Oh, but this is not any remote. This is not a remote that changes channels. This remote changes Energy Waves.”
Michael K. remembered seeing the remote somewhere before.
“You saw this remote on the first day of school,” said the chief, like he was reading Michael K.’s thoughts. “Your SPHDZ friends stupidly used it to change forms. It is also how we SPHDZ travel. By changing energy channels.”
“So what?” said Michael K. “So you are going to change me into a wrestler or a unicorn?”
“Oh, no,” said the chief. “I am going to change you into a worm. A small, disgusting, slimy worm.” The chief aimed the remote at Michael K. “So this is it. Your last chance. I won’t get your brain wave. But you will be nothing but a worm. Give me your brain wave or—”
A metallic crash sounded just outside the principal’s office.
The chief froze. He tiptoed quietly over to the door. He grabbed the doorknob and whipped the door open.
He could not believe what he saw.
“What?!” said the chief. “You?!”
Major Fluffy jumped into his hamster wheel.
Again.
Major Fluffy started racing.
Again.
Major Fluffy spun around and around and flipped out of the wheel.
Again.
But this time Major Fluffy fell into a foil wedge of a Hershey’s Kiss wrapper, which wrapped his head like a perfect hat.
The buzzing and humming and wanting inside Fluffy’s head suddenly stopped.
Major Fluffy sat up and looked around room 501-B.
He wondered what the heck everyone was doing still playing away in the middle of the night.
“CHANGE YOUR LIFE IN THIRTY DAYS!” said Jennifer.
“MICROFIBER COMFORT!” cheered Bob.
“THE RELIEF GOES ON!” said Venus.
Major Fluffy stood on top of his cage to tell everyone that this was crazy, they were all being controlled by WantWaves, that Michael K. was in trouble in the principal’s office, and that they all needed to go save him. Right now.
Major Fluffy banged his water bowl on his wheel.
Everyone in room 501-B paused and looked up.
Major Fluffy explained, “Eeeee eeek weeek eeek! Weee eeek eee eee, eek ee eeeek, week weee wee eee eee eeek, eeek eeek eeek eeek, eee weee eeeek, eek eeeek eee eeek weeek weeek wee we we we, wee eee eek. Eeeek eee.”
“Yes,” answered Bob. “And it removes lint from hard-to-reach places.”
Fluffy tried again.
“Bark bark woof! Woof!”
“ZERO CALORIES. MAXIMUM PEPSI TASTE,” said TJ.
“Goo goo gah?”
Mrs. Halley yelled, “REMEMBER REACH! FINISH THE FIGHT!”
Nobody was getting it.
Major Fluffy desperately tried a few of his other languages.
“Meow cheep honk tweet oink snort ribbit bweeee!”
Venus looked up. You could almost see her thinking. And then she said: “Side effects may include dizziness, diarrhea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, a bad taste in your mouth, and limited brain function for life.”
Major Fluffy collapsed back into his pile of candy wrappers.
This was not good.
Everyone was too media zonked out to hear anything.
Someone had to save Michael K. And that someone was a Spaceheadz in the form of a fifth-grade class hamster.
Major Fluffy took one more bite of a Nestlé Crunch bar, slid down the leg of the science table, and sneaked out of room 501-B and down the night-quiet hallways of P.S. 858.
Major Fluffy didn’t know what he was going to do. But he knew he had to do something to save Michael K. . . . and the world.
A ragged taco wearing Elmo slippers flattened himself against the outside brick wall of P.S. 858.
It was the middle of the night, but light blazed from two rooms.
The taco looked at a diagram of the school floor plan on his Picklephone® and said, “The principal’s office . . . and room 501-B. I was right! I knew something
was wrong here.”
The taco slippered quietly up the stairs and through the unlocked main door.
Something was definitely wrong.
Though the taco disguise was pretty darn good.
Bam! “Oooof!” The taco bumped his head on the cardboard HAPPY GRADUATION sign.
The taco dived flat on the floor and listened for an alarm.
Nothing.
No, wait.
The sound of a voice. Two voices. One squeaky. One not so squeaky. Coming from the main office. The principal’s office.
The taco crawled along the floor. He wormed into the office, behind the desk. The voices were arguing.
The taco stood up very slowly, very quietly. The most valuable weapon in a situation like this would be the element of surprise.
The taco edged slowly toward the door marked
The taco reached for the doorknob and . . . CRASH! knocked a pencil-filled Folgers coffee can to the floor.
Taco Umber froze.
The principal’s door whipped open.
Umber could not believe what he saw.
“What?!” said the chief. “You?!”
Taco Umber tried a quick AAA karate chop attack but forgot that his arms were stuck inside his taco. Umber fell forward, knocking the chief back into the room.
“Aieeeeee!” yelled the chief, dropping the Spaceheadz remote.
He waved his short little arms but couldn’t balance himself. He couldn’t stop from falling backward against the giant metal ray gun.
The chief hit his head with a BOING and was knocked out cold.
“Agent Umber!” said Michael K. “You did it!”
“I did?” said Umber, still not sure exactly what he had done.
“Quick, untie me. We have got to get the rest of our Spaceheadz team and get out of here!”
Taco Umber fumbled with the knots in the jump rope.
The chief moaned.
“Faster,” said Michael K.
“The knots are too tight!” said the taco.
The chief rolled over onto his hands and knees.
“He’s waking up!” said Michael K., because that’s all he could do.
Taco Umber decided to forget the knots. He scooped up Michael K., chair and all, and ran out of the office, bouncing off the doorway, the file cabinets, and the desks on the way out.
“Stop!” yelled the chief, staggering to his feet. “Give me that Michael K. brain wave!”
The chief grabbed his stapler and fired a blast that smoked Umber’s lettuce.
Umber ran down the hall, ducking and dodging and carrying Michael K. at the same time.
“Stop!” yelled the chief.
Taco Umber made it to the top of the stairs. “We’ll have to come back for everybody else.”
Umber hopped down the stairs as fast as he could.
“Go, Umber, go!” said Michael K.
The chief’s stapler blasts bounced off the tile walls and floors.
Umber bent over to shoulder open the door.
The chief lined up his stapler for one perfect shot and fired.
BZZZZZZZTTTT!
The laser blast hit Umber square in his taco butt.
The blast knocked Umber down the stairs. But he landed miraculously on his Elmo-slippered feet and ran off safely into the night with Michael K., still tied to the lunchroom chair.
The chief, too late, burst out of the front doors.
“You think you got away!” the chief yelled at the dark street. “But I’ve still got your friends!”
Umber stopped running for a second and turned around.
“Give me your brain wave or I will change every one of your friends’ channels tomorrow at graduation!”
The chief turned back and walked into school, fuming. He was mad. So mad that he never even saw a small hamster in a foil candy wrapper hat slip outside just before the school doors closed.
Back at Spaceheadz HQ, Umber used Bob’s Dora safety scissors to snip off the last of the jump rope holding Michael K.
“Agent Umber. You saved my life.”
Michael K. fell out of the chair, rubbing his sore wrists. He was so thrilled to be out of the principal’s office, and so glad to see Umber. He told Umber everything in one long sentence.
“You are not going to believe it, but the chief got rid of the rest of our team by having them chase fake chiefs all over the world so he could sneak into school and disguise himself as principal and turn everyone into want-zombies by using the IWANT Pulsar so he could get my one brain wave, which did not load into the Brainwave globe because I can resist it, which is why he can’t fire the Red-Hot Ray to bllrrp Gonf and take over the universe!”
“Wow,” said Umber, peeling off his taco.
“You can say that again,” said Michael K.
“Wow,” said Umber.
“No, I didn’t mean . . . oh, never mind.” Michael K. paced back and forth. “We have to get everyone back here now.”
“I’ll send out the word on my Picklephone®,” said Umber.
Umber pulled his Picklephone® out of the laser-scorched butt pocket of his taco disguise. The Picklephone® was a laser-blasted blob of melted plastic and metal.
“Oh, no,” said Michael K.
Umber cradled his Picklephone® sadly. “Poor little guy got fried, but he saved my butt.”
“Now we are fried. We can’t contact anyone. Venus has all the secret contacts on her laptop.”
The TVs that were always on at Spaceheadz HQ flickered five different late-night talk shows.
“There must be something we can do with all of our Spaceheadz.”
Michael K. used the Spaceheadz computer to log on to spaceheadz.com. He checked the latest counter number.
“Look at all of these Spaceheadz who are still signing up to help us! Nobody even knows this is a fake counter to hide the terrible news that the chief stole the Brainwave. . . . There must be something we can do. Some way we can use our Spaceheadz to fight the chief. We can’t let everyone down.”
“Eeek weee ee eeek.”
Michael K. looked up from spaceheadz.com. “I didn’t know you spoke Hamster, Agent Umber.”
“I didn’t say anything,” said Umber.
“Weee eeee eee,” came the voice again.
“It’s coming from outside the door,” whispered Umber. “It sounds like Major Fluffy.”
“But he’s still trapped in school,” whispered Michael K. “It must be a trick. You open the door. I will whack whoever it is.”
Umber nodded.
Michael K. tiptoed over to the door, picked up Jennifer’s New York Rangers hockey stick, and raised it over his head.
Umber flung open the door.
“EEEEEEEEeeeee!” squeaked a hamster wearing a tinfoil cap on his head.
Michael K. couldn’t stop himself. He swung the hockey stick and smashed it down with all his strength.
CRAAACK! went the hockey stick.
“EEEEK!” went Major Fluffy.
But luckily for Major Fluffy and the future of the universe, Michael K. was a terrible hockey player.
He missed Fluffy by a mile.
“Sorry, Major Fluffy,” said Michael K. “We thought you might be someone else.”
“Squee eee? Squee eeek weee eeek?” asked Major Fluffy. Then he quickly ran inside HQ.
Umber shut and locked the Spaceheadz HQ door behind him.
“Thank goodness you are here, Major Fluffy,” said Umber. “We are in a total pickle.”
“Weee ee ee,” said Major Fluffy. “Eeeeek eeek eek eee?”
Major Fluffy looked at Umber and Michael K., waiting for an answer to his question.
Michael K. and Umber looked at each other. Neither understood a word of what Major Fluffy had just said.
Michael K. sat down at Jennifer’s computer again. He clicked on Major Fluffy’s “eeek!” section.
Then he clicked on
On the right side of that page, Michael K. clicked on
; A translation box appeared.
“Okay,” said Michael K. “What did you say?”
Major Fluffy repeated, “Weee ee ee. Eeeeek eeek eek eee?”
Michael K. typed, translated, then read what Major Fluffy had said: “ ‘The chief must be stopped. What are we going to do?’ ”
Michael K. held his head in his hands. He felt dizzy, beat up, and completely empty. “I just don’t know. If I don’t agree to give the chief my brain wave, he is going to really mess up Bob and Jennifer and TJ and Venus.”
Agent Umber peeled off his taco. “But if you do give it to him, he is going to use it to bllrrp Gonf, then turn off Earth. And that will mess up everyone.”
Michael K. groaned. Why did this all have to happen to him? “My brain wave will give the chief the power of our whole network. I wish we had an even bigger network to smash him. We need a giant army.”
“Yeah,” said Umber, taking off his Elmo slippers. “Like the whole army of ants I saw in the Amazon. There were millions.”
Fluffy sat up on his hind legs. “EEEE! Eeee eeeek eeek!”
Michael K. leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “Yeah. Like a huge herd of animals . . .”
“EEEE! Eeek eek eeek!” said Fluffy, tugging at Michael K.’s pants.
“Or a school of fish . . . ,” added Umber.
“EEEEK!” squeaked Fluffy as loud as he could.
“Or all of those flocks and herds and colonies of insects we read about in our science book all year,” said Michael K.
Major Fluffy ran in a circle. Major Fluffy jumped up and down. Neither Umber nor Michael K. paid any attention to him. Major Fluffy decided it was time for drastic action. Major Fluffy pulled down the top of Michael K.’s sock. He opened his mouth as wide as he could . . . and bit down on Michael K.’s ankle with his needle-sharp teeth.
“YOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!” yelled Michael K. He shook Major Fluffy off his ankle. “What did you do that for?”
“Eeeee EEEE!” explained Major Fluffy. “Eeeee eeee eeek eeee!”
Major Fluffy pointed to the translator.
“Oh, sorry,” said Michael K.