My Teacher Flunked the Planet

by Bruce Coville

  For some reason it made me start to cry.

  “Your planet has some wonderful things,” said Broxholm just before Kreeblim sent us speeding into the night again.

  We weren’t in the dark for long. Her little ship was so fast it could go halfway around the world, from darkness to daylight, in a matter of minutes. She took us to Asia, though as Broxholm said, we could have gone almost anywhere—Africa, Central America, Europe—and seen the same thing.

  “Prepare yourselves,” Kreeblim said, slowing the ship until it was barely moving. “This is the heart of the problem. And it isn’t pretty.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Problem Written in Blood

  I’d seen people die on television, of course—sometimes in made-up stories, sometimes on the news. Let me tell you, it’s not the same as seeing it happen, not the same as actually watching people shoot each other, watching flesh rip and blood spurt as men, women, and children fall, never to rise again.

  Not the same at all.

  As I stared at the battle I remembered Broxholm telling me that it had been over three thousand years since any other intelligent species in the galaxy had had a war, and I understood why the aliens were so frightened of us.

  I glanced at my friend. His skin, usually a deep lime-green, was an off-yellow that told me he felt very ill.

  “Perhaps it would be better to put an end to this,” he whispered, his voice thick with sorrow. “We cannot allow such a sickness to escape into the galaxy at large.”

  I understood what he meant. Trying not to cry, I watched as Duncan, his face grim, pressed his poot against his shoulder. I remembered him telling me that he had never been allowed to have a teddy bear, because his father thought it would make him a sissy. I wished I had brought Murgatroyd; I could have used something to hold onto myself.

  Another round of gunfire shook the air beneath us. More blood, more screams. Suddenly Susan grabbed my arm. “What’s he doing?” she whispered.

  Looking in the direction she pointed, I saw a man crawling across the line of fire. Then I spotted his goal. He was trying to rescue a boy, not much older than me, who had been wounded and couldn’t get away from the fighting.

  It was terrible to watch. I felt my muscles begin to tense, as if somehow I could lend the man strength. Nearer he crept, and nearer. Then, when he was less than a yard from the boy, a bomb landed. Mud erupted into the air.

  Man and boy were gone.

  I could feel Susan shaking. “We didn’t even know which side they were on! Were they good guys or bad guys?”

  I closed my eyes, unable to answer.

  Susan turned to Kreeblim. “Please take us out of here.”

  “We can go,” said Kreeblim. “But it won’t end the battle.”

  * * *

  Our next stop was in South America. The aliens flew us over a vast section of charred, black land, where smoke curled from the remains of fallen trees. My first thought was that this was the aftermath of some enormous forest fire.

  “I can’t believe people are so careless,” I muttered.

  “Careless?” asked Broxholm. “This was no accident.”

  Then he explained that we were looking at a section of Amazon rain forest that had been burned to clear grazing land for cattle.

  “You seem to be at war against the planet itself,” said Kreeblim after she had shown us a Russian river thick with poisonous chemicals and an American forest brown from acid rain. The tone in her voice told me she found the idea almost impossible to understand. “It’s as if there is some secret rage in your species, some hidden pain that is driving you to destroy the things around you.”

  Broxholm echoed her confusion. “To treat your planet this way—it’s like being at war with your own body.”

  Susan, Duncan, and I were silent. What could we say?

  Moments later we were flying above Africa. Kreeblim shielded the ship so that it could not be seen. As she brought it down for a landing, Broxholm pulled three small chains from a compartment located beneath the control panel. From each chain dangled a metal sphere. One by one, he hung the chains over our heads. Then he took a small box from the same compartment. It had a yellow button on the top.

  Broxholm pushed the button.

  “Hey!” cried Duncan. “Where did everyone go?”

  I laughed. It didn’t take Duncan long to see (or not see, so to speak) his mistake.

  “Oh, wow! We’re invisible! How did you do that?”

  “You can access the technical details through the computer in Kreeblim’s house,” said Broxholm. “Peter will show you how.”

  I started to object, then realized I didn’t really mind showing Duncan how to get into the computer.

  “We want to go up close for this observation,” said Kreeblim, “and we want to do it unseen. However, we also need to be able to communicate. Broxholm, if you would refocus us for a moment . . .”

  Suddenly we were all visible again.

  “Take one of these,” said Kreeblim, handing each of us a V-shaped strap. The straps had small, squishy balls at their upper ends, and dime-sized circles made of some sticky fabric at the bottom. “Tuck the receivers into your ears,” she said, demonstrating with her own strap, “then attach the transmitter to your throat.”

  The balls were the receivers, the sticky patch was the transmitter. I pressed the patch lightly against my throat and felt it stick to my skin.

  “These will let us speak to each other without being heard by anyone else,” said Kreeblim. “The slide on the right strap sets the volume at which you hear what we say. Start at about halfway, then adjust it as you please. Tap the throat patch twice to turn the device on, three times to turn it off.”

  After we had fiddled with our devices a bit, I heard Kreeblim ask, “How does this sound?”

  I blinked. She had moved her lips in silence. Yet her words came clearly through the little receivers in my ears.

  “If you whisper without speaking aloud, the throat patch will pick up the vibrations and broadcast them,” Broxholm explained.

  “LIKE THIS?” asked Duncan.

  I felt as if someone had bellowed directly in my ear.

  Broxholm flinched, and closed his eyes in pain. “No, not like that!” he whispered fiercely.

  Duncan looked crushed. He started to apologize, then stopped, afraid of messing up again.

  “Remove the patch from your throat,” said Kreeblim.

  Duncan did as she instructed.

  “All of you,” she said, looking at me and Susan.

  We did the same thing.

  “I should have given you a chance to practice first,” said Kreeblim. “It’s not really your fault, Duncan.”

  He nodded, but I could tell he felt bad anyway. It was kind of sad. The old Duncan would have thought what he had just done was funny.

  Or would he?

  Suddenly I realized he might simply have pretended to think it was funny. I wondered if Duncan had always been sensitive about his mistakes.

  “Try to speak without letting any sound come out,” said Broxholm.

  We all practiced for a bit. When we thought we had it right, they let us reattach the throat patches.

  “How’s this?” I asked, in a voice softer than a whisper.

  Kreeblim smiled and nodded. “Just right,” she replied directly in my ear.

  We practiced a little longer, then stepped from the ship, invisible and silent. I gasped. If fimflits had made my tongue think it had died and gone to heaven, what I saw now made my heart feel like it had died and gone to hell.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Forty Thousand

  The sun was hot, the land was dry, and the people were dying. Not rapidly, as they had in the war zone. Slowly.

  Very slowly.

  We were standing outside a refugee camp where people had come in search of food. But there was no food, or at least not enough to make a difference.

  I don’t know how to write about this, how to explain it
to you. Even now my fingers tremble and my eyes blur with tears. I remember what Kreeblim said to Susan: “You’re going to see some things that aren’t pretty; things some adults would say are unsuitable for children to know about.”

  I thought about that as I stood near a fence, staring at a girl. If it was unsuitable for me to know what was happening to her, what was it for her to have to live with it? Was that suitable?

  Though the girl was about my age, I’d be surprised if she weighed fifty pounds. I made a circle with my thumb and forefinger. I couldn’t see it, because I was invisible, but I could tell that I could have made it around her upper arm and had room to spare. Her face was gaunt, her eyes large. She walked like an old woman.

  “Why did you bring us here?” demanded Susan. She was speaking to the aliens, not me, but the transmitter at her throat sent her words directly into my ears. Even though she hadn’t spoken aloud, her voice was thick with emotion.

  “The first step is to identify the problem,” replied Broxholm.

  I decided to follow the girl. She came to a tent where two younger children sat, both as skinny as she was. The youngest—it was hard to tell his age—was naked. His arms were like sticks, but his belly was round. He stared into the distance like someone who was already dead.

  The girl spoke. I was momentarily startled at understanding her, until I remembered that our Universal Translators could interpret Earth languages.

  “No food today,” was all she said.

  The other two didn’t say anything, didn’t cry, didn’t complain, and I knew it was because they had no hope. They were expecting nothing, and it was no surprise when nothing was what they got.

  I realized that I had never been hungry in my life. I had thought I was hungry lots of times. I had been mad at my father because he hadn’t bothered to shop, because all we had in the house was food I didn’t care for. But I had had no idea what real hunger was all about.

  “Eat your food, there are children starving in Ethiopia,” parents tell kids. We joke about it, because we know the food we don’t eat won’t do those kids any good. But it didn’t feel like a joke now. Once when I was connected to Duncan’s brain I had found a memory of how he had hidden in the dumpster behind our school. Now I thought: the trash he had been wallowing in could have saved these kids’ lives.

  I walked on, coming to a tent where two doctors, a man and a woman, were working. People sat, stood, lay on the ground, waiting to see them. The doctors looked tired.

  “What am I doing here?” whispered the male doctor as he stuck a needle into an arm that was more bone than flesh. “I don’t have to be here. Why am I doing this?”

  I was startled to realize that he was an American.

  “You can go home anytime,” said the woman, her voice soft, sad.

  The man shook his head. “This would be the only thing I could think of.”

  “I know,” said the woman.

  They went back to their work.

  On the far side of the tent I saw a young woman sitting beneath a ragged, drooping tree. The woman was holding a baby to her breast, which was as flat and wrinkled as a crumpled paper bag. She had no milk. I looked at her for a long time.

  After a while she lowered the baby into her lap and closed her eyes. Her shoulders began to shake.

  That was when I realized the baby was dead.

  I turned and ran.

  “Why did you take us there?” demanded Susan when we were back on the ship. Her face was pale, her cheeks moist with tears that kept coming, no matter how many times she wiped her eyes. She was as angry as I have ever seen her.

  “Because we want you to explain it to us,” said Broxholm.

  “Forget explaining it,” said Susan. “Why don’t you do something about it?”

  Broxholm looked at her, his orange eyes glowing in astonishment. “What do you mean?”

  “Stop it. Fix it! You could feed those people, couldn’t you?”

  “Why should we?” asked Broxholm, genuinely puzzled.

  “Because it’s so terrible.”

  “Yes, but why should we stop it when you can do it yourselves?”

  “But we can’t. We just don’t have enough food for everyone!” Susan’s voice began to falter. “Do we?”

  Kreeblim looked at Broxholm. He nodded, and she sent the saucer into the air. Soon we were hovering over a large building, not that far from where we had seen the starving people. Kreeblim made some adjustments to the control panel, then said, “Turn around.”

  The center of the floor contained a holographic image, a three-dimensional picture of the warehouse below us.

  “Watch,” said Broxholm.

  Kreeblim made another adjustment. The image shifted as the walls of the building vanished, revealing what was inside.

  It was food. Enormous amounts of food.

  The aliens spent the next hour taking us around the world, showing us place after place where vast amounts of food were stored. We saw mountains of food that weren’t being used, enough for every hungry person on the planet.

  “All right, I believe you,” said Susan finally.

  “You really didn’t know, did you?” asked Broxholm in astonishment.

  “I knew,” said Duncan.

  I looked at him in surprise. It had been a long time since he had spoken.

  “I know a lot of things,” he said. His voice sounded haunted. “I tried to tell our government about it, but they wouldn’t listen. At first, I thought it was because they didn’t understand. I don’t believe that anymore. I believe that for some reason they’re convinced it can’t be helped. But I can’t understand why.” He put his hands on either side of his head. “For the time being I am one of the smartest people in the world. Possibly the very smartest. Yet I can’t make any sense out of what’s going on down there.”

  Kreeblim flapped her nose in dismay. “It has us baffled as well,” she said. “But it has to be connected to the whole situation. There must be a reason why you can let people starve when there is enough to go around.”

  “But it’s not that many, is it?” asked Susan desperately. I could tell she was aching to believe that what we had seen was some weird accident, a mistake.

  “Forty thousand,” said Duncan. His eyes were closed, as if he were reading from a page inside his head.

  “What?” asked Susan.

  “Forty thousand,” he repeated. “That’s how many kids die every day from things that could be changed if we, all of us, the people of Earth, decided they should be.”

  I took in a sharp breath; forty thousand was more than twice the population of Kennituck Falls.

  “Forty thousand a day,” continued Duncan relentlessly. “That’s a quarter of a million a week. Over a million a month. Nearly fifteen million a year. They die from not having vaccinations that cost less than a dollar apiece. They die from dirty wells and lack of food. They die from the fact that people don’t care, at least, not enough to change it.”

  Duncan sat frozen, as if in a trance. Tears leaked from beneath his lowered eyelids, cutting paths through the dust of the camp that still covered his cheeks. His voice was like the voice of God, listing our sins.

  “Last year fourteen million children died because we earthlings chose to spend our money elsewhere. It happened the year before, too. And we’re going to let it happen again this year.”

  Suddenly he opened his eyes and looked right at me. “Peter, I learned a lot in the last few weeks. I read more than you can imagine. I have millions of facts in my head that I’m trying to put together. I don’t know what it all means, but I know the numbers. I know one day’s worth of the money our world spends on guns and bombs and soldiers could save fifty million children over the next ten years.”

  As Duncan spoke I had a vision, a fantasy, that the people of Earth—not the leaders, not the government, just the people—were suddenly able to speak with one voice. And they said, “Enough. We don’t want it to be this way anymore. Make it right!”
<
br />   But we couldn’t speak with one voice. For some reason we were no better than mute in the face of a disaster that we all wanted to pretend didn’t exist.

  I was sick with shame and anger. And I knew that I would never be the same after that night.

  I had been witness to a crime.

  Now I would have to testify to what I had seen. Because to keep silent would also be a crime.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Button Pushers

  When that first flight was finally over we were all exhausted—and not just because we had stayed up for most of the night. It was the things we had seen, the feelings they had created, that were the most tiring. Even now I don’t remember how I got out of the saucer and into bed. But I must have, somehow, because the next thing I knew the sun was shining in my face and I realized that I had a pillow beneath my head.

  I wondered if Broxholm had carried me upstairs. I could remember my father doing that once, when I was very little.

  I lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling and thinking about the night before. My mind kept coming back to the two doctors in Ethiopia, and the man who had died trying to save the boy on the battlefield in Asia. No one was forcing those doctors to stay there. No one had forced that man to risk his life for the boy.

  Kreeblim had said we were looking for hope. We had found a little even in the worst of places. Maybe things weren’t hopeless after all.

  After a while I noticed Big Julie’s breathing. I glanced at the clock beside my bed. Almost noon. Fishing some clean clothes out of my backpack, I dressed and wandered downstairs.

  Susan, Kreeblim, and Broxholm were in the kitchen already, eating breakfast. Since the aliens weren’t wearing their masks, the scene looked like a cross between Leave It to Beaver and The Twilight Zone.

  “Have a pleskit,” said Kreeblim as I sat down. She handed me something round and purple.

  I stared at it.

  “You eat it,” said Broxholm.

  I had already figured that out. But I was thinking of the people we had seen the night before. How could I eat after that?

  “Starving yourself won’t help them,” Broxholm said sharply, as if he had read my mind. “Eat.”