Dinosaur Boy Saves Mars

by Cory Putman Oakes

  “Oh, not especially,” Sylvie said, sandwiching a pink Starburst between two yellow ones and biting them in half. “All Martians speak English.”

  “Really?” I asked. “That seems weird.”

  “Why?” Sylvie asked, lowering her voice to an even quieter, mysterious tone. “Who do you think taught it to you Earthlings?”

  “Really?” I said again, louder this time.

  “Shhh!” Ms. Filch hissed from the front of the room.

  We were both quiet for a minute. When Ms. Filch returned to her book, Sylvie leaned toward me again.

  “Actually, it’s because Martians are obsessed with American TV,” she confessed. “All the planets are. My dad says nothing has united the galaxy like everybody’s shared love for American Idol. They speak English at all important intergalactic summits now. It’s very trendy.”

  “Huh,” I said thoughtfully.

  I returned to my notebook and wrote “TV” as the first item on my list.

  I crossed it off a second later, after I remembered I hardly ever watched TV. There had to be something I was more passionate about than that.

  Lunch seemed to take a lot longer than usual. By the time the bell finally rang, I had eaten my entire salad and had written and crossed out three more items on my list. Sylvie had ripped her Starburst wrappers into tiny pieces and used them to spell out ORLANDO SUCKS across her desk. At the back of the room, Elliot had his legs stretched out in the aisle, his head tilted over the back of his chair, and was taking what looked like the world’s most uncomfortable nap.

  Ms. Filch got up from her desk and gave Orlando a pointed look.

  He pushed his glasses farther up his nose and blinked at her.

  Ms. Filch sighed. “It looks like we’ll all be having lunch together tomorrow too.”

  The UFO

  We had lunch inside every day for the next week. Ms. Filch refused to back down and Orlando refused to confess. I had just begun to think I would be spending every lunch period for the rest of fifth grade at my desk when finally, the following Tuesday, Ms. Filch was forced to let us outside.

  It wasn’t because Orlando confessed. It was because the school had finally decided to do something about the crickets, and the stuff the pest-control people sprayed inside the school was supposed to dissipate for an hour before any of us breathed it. So my class got to join the rest of the school in the courtyard during lunchtime.

  I had just finished my salad. I was standing around with Elliot and Sylvie, enjoying the feel of the sun on my plates, when all of a sudden a tornado-level wind whipped up and knocked over every trash can in sight. Garbage scattered everywhere and some of the smaller kids had to grab on to bigger ones so they wouldn’t get blown away too. Everyone was staring up at the sky and pointing. I craned my dinosaur neck at a painful angle so that I could see the large, circular object that was hovering over the quad and blocking out the sun.

  The disk just hung there for a split second, like a humongous spinning quarter. Then the wind stopped and it fell to the ground with a deafening crash. Pieces of asphalt went flying in all directions, and roughly half the kids standing nearby were knocked off their feet. It was a miracle that no one got flattened.

  The UFO did take out three of the four outdoor basketball hoops on its way down. But nobody seemed to notice because as soon as the disk stopped spinning, a small door opened on the underside and two enormous polar bears came charging down the gangplank.

  The bears tore through the crowd, making weird, trumpetlike sounds and knocking kids aside like bowling pins. The panic was total. Everybody, including me, scrambled, trying to find a safe direction to run in. But whenever I managed to get myself out of the path of one of the bears, I instantly found myself right in front of the other one. So I ended up huddled between Elliot and Sylvie, smashed in a shaky clump with a large group of other fifth graders.

  Eventually the bears stopped running and started pacing. They made slow circles around us, clicking their long, black claws against the cracked asphalt and holding their noses high. The larger of the two passed within a foot of me. It was sniffing the air in an expectant way. Exactly like Fanny does when my mom cooks bacon.

  Which made me wonder if perhaps we were the bacon in this scenario.

  But before I could get too worried about it, another figure appeared on the UFO gangplank. It was not another polar bear. It was a man—a rugged-looking, gray-haired man wearing a leather Indiana Jones hat and jeans. He raised his fingers to his lips and let out a shrill whistle.

  The polar bears stopped dead in their tracks. Then they lowered their heads and backed away, just like Fanny does when she’s caught misbehaving. When they were about ten feet away from the mass of students, they both sat down on their hindquarters so that they strongly resembled enormous, salivating teddy bears.

  My grandfather lowered his fingers from his mouth and shouted, “Who’s got the peanut butter?”

  • • •

  Nobody answered him, so my grandfather repeated the question as he came toward us.

  “Who’s got the peanut butter?”

  I heard mutterings of confusion in the huddled mass of kids around me, but nothing resembling a response until Gary Simmons timidly cleared his throat and raised his hand.

  “Yes?” my grandfather called on him, impatiently.

  “Um, well, sir,” Gary stammered. “We’re actually a nut-free campus.”

  “A what?”

  “Nut-free. Be-be-because so many people have allergies.”

  My grandfather blinked at him for a moment, then shook his head resolutely.

  “Nope. Somebody has peanut butter. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have acted like that.” He motioned to the polar bears. They were still frozen in teddy-bear poses, which would have been funny if we weren’t all still shaking so badly.

  My grandfather narrowed his eyes, just as Emma Hecht pushed past me and took a step forward.

  “It’s me,” she admitted, looking horribly ashamed as she handed my grandfather a pink Hello Kitty lunch sack. “My grandma packed my lunch this morning. She never remembers the rule about nuts. I’m sorry.”

  My grandfather opened the sack and pulled out a plastic bag, which contained a slightly smushed, crustless peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich cut into triangles.

  The polar bears both sat forward eagerly.

  “I never even took it out of the bag,” Emma said hurriedly. “Just in case.”

  “That was smart of you,” my grandfather said and gave her a reassuring smile as he tossed the sandwich toward the bears. Each one caught a triangle in midair and gulped it down. Then they sat back on their haunches, smacking their lips with long, black tongues.

  My grandfather cleared his throat.

  “No harm done,” he said to Emma, and then he raised his voice so that even the kids in the back of the crowd could hear. “But let this be a lesson to all of you. If you don’t respect the dietary restrictions of your fellow classmates, the polar bears will come back. Got it?”

  There was a smattering of mmm-hmms, yeses, and nods. But basically everybody just continued to stare at him.

  My grandfather nodded smartly, finally spotted me in the crowd, and grinned.

  “Ah, Sawyer,” he said. Then he noticed Sylvie and Elliot standing beside me. “And Sylvia, good. And also…also…”

  He frowned for a moment over Elliot’s name.

  “Elliot,” Elliot reminded him.

  “Of course, Elliot,” he said, as he handed Emma back her empty lunch sack. “Glad to see you. I came here looking for the three of you.”

  “You did?” I asked, feeling rather awkward. Emma slipped back behind me, holding her lunch sack protectively to her chest.

  “Yes. I’m afraid Sylvie’s father may be in trouble. I’m going to need your help.”

  Elliot and
I just stood there dumbly. But Sylvie let out an enormous sigh of relief.

  “Finally,” she muttered. Then she slung her enormous lunch bag over her shoulder and walked up the gangplank of the ship, right past my grandfather, without looking back once to see if Elliot and I were coming.

  My grandfather grinned down at me.

  “Well? Are you ready for an adventure or what?”

  Extinction and Stuff

  The UFO was smaller on the inside than it had looked from the outside. But even though it wasn’t very big, there seemed to be a lot of empty space. The interior was a circular room that had absolutely nothing in it except leather armchairs. They encircled the ship’s only window, which happened to be in the middle of the floor.

  When Elliot and I got onboard, Sylvie was already sitting cross-legged in one of the chairs, drumming her fingers on the armrest.

  My grandfather came in behind us. He shut the door behind the polar bears and took the seat next to Sylvie.

  I frowned at the nearest chair. It was one of those squishy leather recliners, and there was no opening for my tail to go through the back. There was also no seat belt, which I suppose meant we didn’t necessarily have to sit in chairs. With a questioning glance at my grandfather—who nodded OK—I took a seat on the floor next to the window.

  My grandfather picked up an iPad and pressed a button. There was a slight whirring sound, a metallic groan from somewhere deep in the wall, and then a sensation like we had just stepped into a high-speed elevator.

  Elliot sat down to my right, and his eyes got as big as saucers as we both stared out the window and watched the quad, then the school, then Portland, and then the entire state of Oregon disappear beneath us.

  One of the polar bears lumbered over and dropped to the floor on my other side. I stiffened, and my tail spikes gave an instinctive twitch. Ready to do…I don’t know what. But the bear just stretched out its paws and leaned its large, shaggy head out over the window, fogging up the glass with its peanut butter breath. I might have been imagining things, but I thought the enormous, brown eye closest to me looked sad.

  The other bear was lying on the floor behind Sylvie’s chair, its head on its paws and its eyes closed. Both bears seemed much calmer after eating Emma’s sandwich. But even so, I made sure my tennis-balled spikes were within easy reach of my hand.

  “We’ve got one stop to make before we deal with Sylvie’s dad,” my grandfather said. He looked up from his iPad. That must be what he was using to fly the ship. I couldn’t imagine how else we were moving. There wasn’t a control panel, a wall of buttons, or anything remotely electronic anywhere. The curved, wood-paneled walls all around us made the room look more like my family’s summer cabin than a spaceship.

  The door and the gangplank had disappeared behind one of the panels as soon as the four of us and the two bears had gotten inside. I had lost track of where it had disappeared. Something about the room being a circle made me lose my sense of direction.

  “A stop?” Sylvie asked, sounding irritated. She sat forward, shook her hood off, and gave my grandfather a severe look. “Where? Why are we stopping?”

  “Saturn,” my grandfather answered and gestured to the polar bears as though that should explain everything. “We’ve got to drop these guys off.”

  “On Saturn?” Elliot exclaimed with a dubious look at the bears. “I thought Saturn was made out of gas.”

  “Just the outer layers,” my grandfather assured him, then started feeling around his seat as though he had dropped something. “Has anyone seen my Snickers bar? I could have sworn I left it here when we landed.”

  Sylvie turned to Elliot and me. “Saturn is a game preserve,” she explained. “Kind of like a big zoo, but fancier.”

  “You’ve been to Saturn?” I asked, not knowing quite why I was surprised.

  “Oh yeah,” Sylvie said, like it was no big deal. “We used to go there all the time on school field trips.”

  Elliot shook his head, as he often did after one of Sylvie’s especially odd pronouncements.

  “So we’re bringing the polar bears to a zoo on Saturn?” I summed up, just to make sure I had it right.

  “Yes,” my grandfather answered. As he spoke, he searched the empty chairs around the circle, still looking for his candy bar. “The bears are part of the Amalgam Labs Extinction Eradication project. When a species in our galaxy arrives at the brink of extinction, our lab recruits two volunteers, one male and one female of the species, and relocates them to Saturn. There they enjoy a pampered life in a simulated habitat while we can be sure that their genetic material will be preserved.”

  “And we have to do that now?” Sylvie inquired, sounding antsy.

  “This ship belongs to the lab,” my grandfather explained. “I needed a legitimate, scientific purpose to bring her out. Listen, are you sure you’re not sitting on my candy bar? I know I—”

  “Will it take long to drop them off?” Sylvie pressed him, ignoring his question.

  The polar bear beside me snorted, and Elliot and I both jumped.

  “So sorry to be a bother,” the bear said. “We had no idea that the predicted extinction of our entire species would be such a massive inconvenience for you all.”

  • • •

  Neither Sylvie nor my grandfather appeared to be alarmed (or even surprised) that a polar bear had just spoken to us. Let alone sarcastically and in a voice that sounded like it belonged to somebody’s English grandmother.

  Elliot and I were not nearly so cool about it.

  “You—you, you can talk?” Elliot squealed, scrambling behind me and using me as a shield as we both backed away. “In English?”

  “Yes, I speak English. Also Finnish,” the bear bragged.

  “Big whoop,” Sylvie said from safely over on her chair.

  The bear whipped her head toward Sylvie and made a growling noise in the back of her throat. I scooted back some more, bumped into Elliot, and motioned for him to scoot back more too.

  “Harriet,” scolded the other bear from over beside Sylvie’s chair. He—his voice had sounded male—raised his head ever so slightly and yawned without opening his eyes. “Do try to keep it together.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Roland,” the bear next to me retorted, sitting back on her haunches in much the same manner as she had after my grandfather whistled. “But I still have very mixed feelings about this whole thing.”

  “What?” My grandfather looked up suddenly. “I was told you had both been fully briefed and signed all of the necessary paper—”

  “We have and we did,” the male polar bear—Roland—assured him, rolling lazily onto one side. “Harriet is just having an attack of nostalgia. Aren’t you, dear?”

  Harriet gave him a look. It clearly said, “Don’t you dear me,” in polar bear. Or possibly Finnish. Then she snorted and looked back down at the portal window. Which, I realized suddenly, had gotten much darker. The Earth was now a small orb, no bigger than a basketball floating in a sea of black.

  “Wow,” I said, deciding to risk creeping slightly closer to the bear so I could see out the window better.

  “Good-bye, home,” Harriet said wistfully, and I felt a sudden stab of pity for her. I wanted to do something to make her feel better. But I was not at all sure how to go about comforting a homesick polar bear.

  Sylvie cleared her throat.

  “Can we get back to my father, please?” she asked testily. She turned to my grandfather. “You said you think he’s in trouble?”

  “Yes,” my grandfather said, picking up his iPad again. “I believe he may have been kidnapped.”

  Gloria

  “Kidnapped?” Sylvie sounded unconvinced. “Who would kidnap him?”

  My grandfather started to turn the iPad screen toward Sylvie, then hesitated.

  His face softened. And for once he look
ed more like a grandpa than a scientist. Or Indiana Jones. He put his hand on top of Sylvie’s.

  “I don’t want to upset you,” he told her.

  Sylvie stuck her nose in the air.

  “It’s my father we’re talking about. I need to know what’s happened to him.”

  My grandfather considered this, then nodded slowly and patted her hand.

  “When you told me, months ago, that you hadn’t heard from him since you got to Earth, I got suspicious. So I convinced Amalgam Labs to start monitoring all communications coming from Mars. Recently, we intercepted an interesting series of transmissions. Most were scientific in nature. But we found one snippet we believe might be a distress signal sent by your father.”

  “How do you know it’s from him?” Sylvie asked.

  My grandfather handed her the iPad.

  “It’s incomplete,” he warned, and Elliot and I came over so that we could see too. “Most of the file has been corrupted, so we only have pieces.”

  Gloria

  A*(798H FSKJHF89 FHSDOFj

  LK(* hJK *(&# being held against my will FHKF 8F*(&( FSkk 2 kjfu4

  Tell Sylvie not to *(&*(SFKH 290HJKHK

  (&)(Jkhkjh @GHJGJH &F(HJK#

  “Who’s Gloria?” Elliot asked, peering over Sylvie’s shoulder.

  “My mom,” she answered. Her voice sounded a little shaky, but her eyes were steely when she looked up at my grandfather.

  “Who’s holding my father against his will?” she asked.

  “We believe it’s Sunder Labs,” my grandfather answered. “Amalgam Lab’s greatest rival. Until about a year ago, they were based out of Houston, Texas. But then they ran into money problems and abandoned their campus there. We—Amalgam Labs, that is—suspect that they have reestablished a secret base on Mars, where land is cheaper. But no one has been able to find it yet. We believe their new lab is the source of these transmissions.”

  “And you think my father is there?” Sylvie asked.