13.
I’M WRONG:
It only takes two minutes for John Henry Knox to start to annoy me.
That’s because, almost as soon as he takes a seat at my kitchen table, he starts spewing out a series of totally random, utterly useless facts.
For instance:
“Did you know that caterpillars have more muscles than humans?”
Or:
“Did you know that the average lead pencil can draw a line thirty-five miles long?”
Or:
“Did you know that it’s against the law to fall asleep in a cheese factory in Illinois?”
It’s after this one that Mikaela finally starts getting annoyed too.
“John Henry Knox,” she says. “While the breadth and depth of your knowledge is truly astounding, this constant stream of facts is—”
“Slightly irritating?” he interrupts her to ask.
“Well…,” she says.
“It’s okay,” he assures her. “I’ve been told as much before. But one more fact is that, when I’m anxious, reciting trivia helps to keep me calm, and I am quite anxious to make sure that Dan has not been harmed and to find out what he has learned about the danger our planet is facing and if there is anything we can do to—”
Knock! Knock! Knock-knock knock!
Knock!
Knock!
My heart skips a beat.
But I tell myself not to get my hopes up.
Because the way today’s going, it’s not going to be Dan knocking at the door.
It’s going to be Jerry.
Or Edsley.
Or, I don’t know, someone who wants to talk to my parents first thing in the morning about how they can save forty-seven cents on their monthly energy bill by switching to a different provider.
But then whoever’s knocking on the door goes and opens it on their own.
And a voice says, “Hello?”
It’s a very familiar voice.
Dan’s.
A beat later, he limps into the kitchen, a pained expression twisting up his face.
14.
MIKAELA GASPS AND LEAPS TO her feet. “What happened?” she asks.
“Did the alien…,” says John Henry Knox, “… hurt you?”
I’ve got some questions too, but my heart’s beating too erratically and my throat’s too tight to possibly get a word out, much less a whole string of them. All I know is that I shouldn’t have ever let Dan get on that spaceship. I should’ve stopped him. I should’ve protected him. What kind of best friend am I?
Dan looks at us for a moment, his face as serious as it’s ever been.
Then he bursts out laughing.
I share a confused look with Mikaela and John Henry Knox.
“I’m fine,” Dan says once he stops laughing. Then he hooks a thumb over his shoulder. “I tripped on the stairs out front and banged my shin.”
Air comes rushing out of my lungs.
I guess I’d been holding my breath.
“Bem would never hurt me,” Dan tells us.
“Bem?” asks John Henry Knox.
“That’s his name?” Mikaela says.
Dan doesn’t answer. Instead he waves me over to his side and throws an arm around my shoulders when I get there.
“I need something to eat,” he says as I help him over to the table. “Also, like, ten thousand gallons of water. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
15.
WE LEAP INTO ACTION LIKE only EngiNerds can.
John Henry Knox gathers some supplies from the fridge and then gets to work at the stove.
Mikaela finds a giant thermos and fills it with ice-cold water.
I grab a tube of antibiotic ointment and a few Band-Aids and help Dan cover up the scrape on his shin.
Just a few minutes after he limped through the doorway, Dan’s bandaged up, thoroughly hydrated, and seated at the kitchen table with a plate of scrambled eggs and toast in front of him.
John Henry Knox forgot to get him a fork. But Dan’s clearly as hungry as one of his robots. He just nudges some of the steam-spewing eggs onto one of the pieces of warm, buttery toast and scarfs it all down at a somewhat alarming speed.
Then he wipes his mouth.
Sits back.
Lets out a little burp.
And says:
“First of all, if any of you ever get a chance to go for a ride in a Plerpian spaceship, take it. That. Was. Rad.”
I don’t know what “Plerpian” means, but hearing Dan say this, the last of the weight on my shoulders—all the worry and guilt I felt about letting him board that ship—drifts away.
But half a second later, the delight disappears from Dan’s face, and a new kind of weight settles on me in the old one’s place.
“Now,” Dan says, “on to the other stuff…” He pauses to take a breath. “I guess I should start by telling you that our alien pal’s name is Bempulthorpemckrackleflackin. But mostly what you need to understand is that it’s all about the beans.”
16.
“DID YOU JUST SAY BUMBLE Kraken?” I ask.
“Did you just say beans?” asks Mikaela.
John Henry Knox says, “Did you need a fork?”
Dan answers him first. “I’m good,” he says, and then begins fixing himself another piece of egg-topped toast. “And don’t worry about the name. He said all his friends back home call him ‘Bem.’ ”
“And where, exactly,” I ask, “is home?”
Dan pauses with his second piece of toast a few inches from his mouth. He eyes each of us in turn, then says, “Bem’s from a planet called Plerp-5, way over on the other side of the Milky Way.” He lifts an eyebrow. “Do you all need a second?”
I nod, and then so do Mikaela and John Henry Knox.
Dan decimates his toast.
I watch him eat and replay his words in my head.
Bem.
Plerp-5.
Other side of the Milky Way.
It feels like my brain has been turned into a balloon and someone’s pumping the poor thing full of way too much helium.
John Henry Knox, meanwhile, looks like he just got banged over the head with a frying pan.
And Mikaela?
She’s just smiling. Probably because she’s been so confident all along that there was extraterrestrial life out there in the universe, thriving on planets other than our own.
But her smile doesn’t last long.
After just a handful of seconds, it flips over into a sort of determined frown.
“Okay,” she says. “Now can we get back to the beans? And whatever it is they’ve got to do with our planet being reduced to dust in a couple weeks?”
17.
DID YOU KNOW THAT BEANS are packed full of protein, fiber, vitamin B, iron, folate, calcium, potassium, phosphorous, and zinc? And did you know that they’re also low in fat? Or what about the fact that all of this taken together means that eating lots of beans can help keep your blood and heart and lots of other important parts of your body healthy?
If you didn’t know all this, don’t worry.
Neither did I.
But John Henry Knox knew it (as he made sure to inform us).
And evidently, so have most of the rest of the life-forms existing in our galaxy.
Beans.
They’re a big deal.
“Like, a really big deal,” Dan tells us. “It’s basically all they eat on Bem’s planet, Plerp-5. And basically all they eat on Plerp-1, Plerp-2, Plerp-3, Plerp-4, Plerp-6, Plerp-7, Plerp-8, Plerp-10, Plerp-11, and Plerp-12, too.”
“Wait a second,” says Mikaela. “What happened to Plerp-9?”
Dan shakes his head.
“That’s a whole separate story.”
“Oh,” Mikaela says.
“Anyway,” Dan continues, “for years and years and years, Plerp-5 has been the main source of beans in the Plerpian System. Pretty much everyone on the planet is somehow involved in bean production, bean preparation, or bean
packaging. There are the bean farmers, of course, and then the scientists who develop fertilizers and other stuff like that to help all the different varieties of beans grow as well as they possibly can. There are the engineers who make the machines that harvest the beans, and also the machines that help sort and ship the beans to the right factory. There are the factory workers, who perform quality control tests on the beans they get sent, and rinse and dry the bean varieties that need rinsing and drying, and then finally dump the things into cans or tubs or whatever other type of container they’re supposed to be dumped into. And that’s not even the half of it.”
Dan stares down at his empty plate, like he was hoping another heap of hot eggs and a third piece of toast were going to have magically appeared. He presses some of the little leftover bread crumbs into his fingertips, sprinkles them onto his tongue, and then goes on.
“There are the Plerpians who run the companies that sell the beans, and all the employees there who help do what it takes to run a whole big bean company. There are the designers and artists who make the logos that go on the cans and tubs and other containers of beans, and the musicians who make the songs that they play on the commercials to advertise them, and the—”
“Okay,” I say, stopping Dan before he can start telling us about the team of Plerpians who make the glue that they use to fix the labels to the cans and tubs and containers of beans, or the individual actors who play the happy bean-eating Plerpian family in the commercials in which the Plerpian musicians’ songs play.
I’m beginning to see why it took Bem all night to explain things to Dan.
“We get it,” I say. “It’s all beans all the time over on Plerp-5. The whole planet runs on the things. What’s that got to do with us?”
“Well, that’s the thing,” says Dan. “The whole planet ran on beans—until recently.…”
18.
I WON’T MAKE YOU SIT through Dan’s whole long explanation of the economic woes of Plerp-5. Instead, I’ll just tell you what you need to know:
A few years ago, the Plerpians on Plerp-12 got sick and tired of the Plerpians on Plerp-5 running the bean show. (Not The Bean Show, which, Dan shared, is a long-running variety show produced by a team of Plerpians on Plerp-7. Apparently Plerpians from all the planets in the Plerpian System agree that The Bean Show is totally wonderful, and nothing should be done to mess with it.) Anyway, the sick and tired Plerpians on Plerp-12 began playing around with producing beans on their planet. It took some time, but evidently Plerp-12 developed a sort of super bean—at least that’s what they’re calling it in all their advertisements. And whether or not it’s true (Bem, for what it’s worth, is fairly certain it’s not), the rest of the Plerpians in the Plerpian System are buying it. Literally. Sales of Plerp-5 beans have totally tanked. And so the Planetary Leadership of Plerp-5 has decided to launch a little advertising campaign of their own.
“It’s wild,” Dan says. “The Plerpians on Plerp-5—they’ve developed these crazy new billboards. They’re gigantic. Enormous. Humongous. They’re—they’re ginormongous. Some of them are, no joke, the size of a planet. They light up and glow and even beam and project, and they’ve got this positioning technology they use that means if they put them in certain spots the things can be seen from, like, light-years away. It’s pretty astounding.”
“Sounds cool,” Mikaela says. “But I’m still not—”
She stops midsentence.
And her eyes go wide.
Like, scarily wide.
“What?” John Henry Knox asks her. “I don’t—”
Now his eyes go wide.
And he says:
“Oh. Oh no.”
19.
“ALL RIGHT,” I SAY. “IF someone doesn’t clue me in as to how in the world all this nonsense about beans and ginormongous billboards is related to our planet being reduced to dust in the frighteningly near future, I may just lose my mind.”
Dan looks at me, and then over at Mikaela.
Then they both turn their heads toward John Henry Knox.
“What?” I say, growing increasingly frustrated that I haven’t figured it out yet.
“The billboards…,” Dan says. “They have to be placed in particular, very specific locations in order to be seen from far away…”
“You said that already,” I tell him, still not getting it.
“And,” Mikaela adds, “he said that some of the billboards are as big as planets.…”
“And I heard him,” I say. “But what does that—”
It’s then, at last, that it clicks.
“Oh.”
I sit there with the realization for a minute. It’s a lot to take in, especially on top of all the other stuff I’ve had to take in over the course of the last twenty-four hours or so. And once I’ve finally begun to wrap my head around it, I ask Dan, just to make sure I’m right.
“Our planet…,” I say. “Earth… It’s—it’s one of those locations?”
Dan gulps.
And nods his head.
20.
MY HEAD’S SPINNING LIKE A merry-go-round moving at warp speed. My heart’s thrumming like a possessed jackhammer.
I’m on my feet.
Pacing back and forth across the kitchen.
Kind of—
Scratch that.
—definitely freaking out.
“So they’re just gonna destroy our planet so they can put up a billboard?” I say. “That’s—that’s ludicrous. That’s absurd. It—it should be illegal. I mean, don’t these Plerpians have laws? Isn’t there some kind of rule about not reducing a planet with nearly eight billion self-conscious life-forms and thousands of years of recorded history into dust just to save your bean business?!”
“Well,” says Dan, “that’s sort of the problem.”
I stop my pacing.
“What is?”
“Us,” he says. “And our history. The most recent bits of it, at least.”
I go back to the table.
Take a seat.
And lean in nice and close to Dan.
“WHAT?!”
Dan scoots his chair back.
Wipes the spit I accidentally deposited on him off of his face.
Takes a deep breath.
And explains…
21.
“THE PLERPIANS OF PLERP-5 IDENTIFIED our planet as an ideal location for one of their billboards about three months ago,” Dan says. “Ever since then, they’ve been keeping an eye on us, exhaustively studying our ways. They’ve been sending ships, disguised as clouds, for the past several weeks, and consuming as much of our culture as they can. Because, sure, they’re desperate to get these billboards up. But they’re not, as you said, Ken, going to annihilate a planet with nearly eight billion self-conscious life-forms and thousands of years of recorded history just to do it.”
“Oh-kay…,” I say. “Then I really don’t see what the problem is.”
“The problem,” says Dan, “is that we’ve done a darn good job convincing the Plerpians that we’re just a bunch of selfish, careless, destructive idiots, and that we don’t actually care much for our planet or anyone else’s, either.”
I look around the table, at Mikaela and John Henry Knox.
“No,” says Dan. “Not, like, us specifically. I mean the collective we. Humanity as a whole.”
I turn back to Dan.
“Continue…,” I say.
“At first, the Plerpians assumed that we were getting ready to abandon our planet and take up residence on a brand-new one. That was the only way they could make sense of our behavior, so much of which is actively damaging our planet, making it increasingly less habitable for ourselves and most other living things by the day. But when they couldn’t find any indication that that was true, they were forced to conclude—”
“That we’re a bunch of selfish, careless, destructive idiots,” Mikaela interrupts.
“And that we’re on the verge of annihilating our planet anyway,” adds John Henr
y Knox.
“Exactly,” says Dan. He winces. “But then it sorta gets a little bit worse.…”
“Worse?!” I say. “How can it possibly get any worse?”
“Well,” he says, “some of the Plerpian scientists are under the impression that if we’re allowed to continue in our selfish, careless, destructive, idiotic ways, we’ll not only destroy our own planet but potentially start doing damage to our solar system, and maybe, eventually, even the galaxy as a whole.”
“Okay,” I say, slumping in my chair. “I guess that’s how it gets worse.”
“We’re like the ultimate bad neighbors,” Dan says. “So for the Planetary Leaders of Plerp-5, it’s kind of a win-win. They get to feel good about knocking a dangerous species out of the galaxy, plus they get to build their billboard and try to save their bean business.”
And then Dan’s silent.
We all are.
Because here’s the thing:
The Plerpians—they’re not wrong.
Humans haven’t been doing all that great of a job taking care of our planet. We have, in fact, been doing a terrible job of it. And even though the four of us sitting at that table haven’t been the ones making the big decisions that are most responsible for the damage being done to the planet—well, in this situation, it doesn’t matter. Because as far as the Planetary Leadership of Plerp-5 is concerned, it seems, we’re all responsible. And maybe that’s sort of true. Maybe all the rest of us haven’t been doing enough to stop the decision-makers from making those big, terrible decisions.
The silence stretches on.
And on.
And I’m pretty sure it might just go on stretching until my house and kitchen and the chairs under our butts all get reduced to dust along with the rest of the world.
But then Kitty lets out a wobbly moan from somewhere else in the house.
And I know the pup’s probably still asleep, dreaming about rolling around in a heap of leftover pieces of pizza or diving into a massive muddy puddle. But I can’t help but think that maybe Kitty’s been listening in on our conversation, and that that wobbly moan is an expression of how he feels.
The EngiNerds Strike Back Page 3