by Jeff Norton
The Pansies: “Yep, the plant pot guys – do not mess with them or they will mess with you.”
The football team: “Erudite, sophisticated, subtle – hahahahahaha.”
The Fungi: “They never sit at their table, but it’s still their turf – dude, avoid, or they’ll never let you forget it.”
The Martians: “Little-gray-men guys – not really Martians, but they’re rocket guys, like you, good racers.”
I wondered what “good racers” was all about, but kept listening.
“Then there’s us, right here,” Octo continued. “Welcome to Octo’s Seafood Snack Bar. Behind you, your garden-variety Xenophine Reeds—”
Five of them billowed at their table, chattering to themselves. They rose, fell, and twisted as if they were dancing to their own unheard tunes.
“Behind them is the insect quarter,” he said, pointing to two tables of giant-sized spiders, scorpions and caterpillars. “Then you’ve got your Slugs, and over there are your Fartulas.”
“Fartulas?” I asked. “Those dumpy potato guys?”
“Do not sit at their table, okay?” Octo warned. “And don’t ever sit downwind of them.”
I tried to take it all in, keep it all straight in my spinning head. Octo laughed his gurgling, cephalopod laugh.
“You’ll get it,” he said.
“You think?”
“Just remember, there’s a strict order to life here at Groom Lake High. Everyone in their place.”
“It just doesn’t seem fair.”
“Fair? Ha! The whole system is rigged against you and punctuated by rituals designed to test your mettle: football games, the school play, Prom, Rocket Races—”
“Rocket Races, what’s that?”
He laughed. “Like a moth to a flame, you! Rocket Races are the Groom Lake take on drag-car racing. You know, with rockets instead of cars. Speaking of, why weren’t you at Rocket Camp today?”
Rocket Camp appeared to be the nickname for Intergalactic Physics and Astro-Mechanics, the class before lunch.
“I had Math instead,” I confessed. “I’m not allowed to ‘partake’ in Astro-Mechanics, in case I get tempted to build anything … space-faring.”
“You’re a marked man, Capote,” he chuckled. “A marked man.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Pizza Night
That evening, Dad arrived from his first day at work in his general’s formal dress, minus the decorations, holding a steaming box of What Beats a Pizza? pepperoni pie.
He popped his version of gourmet cooking onto the table, and summoned us to family mealtime.
“Did you learn anything new today at school, kids?” he asked, sounding like he was on autopilot.
I nearly choked on my slice. Was he kidding?
“I learned that just when I thought Sherman couldn’t ruin my life any more,” said Jessica, “he finds another way.”
“I learned that ALIENS ARE REAL!” I shouted, hoping to get a reaction from Dad.
My father, former four-star general Frank Capote, had never really been the same since Mom died. He’d been drifting through the days in a kind of ambivalent fog, unfazed by anything. But if there was one thing I thought might snap him out of his funk, it’d be aliens on Earth.
“What did he do this time?” he asked Jessica.
“ALIENS!!!” I repeated.
“He totally sabotaged the play for me. I’m Lady Capulet because I can’t be Juliet.”
“Sherman to Dad! Aliens! On Earth!”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Living among us!”
“Because Sherm-eo here got the male lead.”
“Technically, Sherman, in Groom Lake, it’s we who live among them,” my dad corrected. “And I thought you hated drama?”
“Arrgghhh!” said Jess. “This is about me, not him!”
“Dad,” I said, “aren’t you surprised, excited … I don’t know, some kind of emotion?”
He loosened his tie and let out a breathy sigh.
“Sherman, when you get older, you’ll come to appreciate that life is basically a series of disappointments. Yesterday I was a four-star general reporting to the Joint Chiefs. Today, I’m in charge of ordering stationery and reporting to a two-headed, walking iguana from outer space. Yesterday Jessica was starring as the lead in the school play, and today she’s got a supporting role as an overprotective matron. Yesterday, Sherman, you were just a maladjusted fourteen-year-old, but today you’re a wanted man for inciting global thermo-nuclear war.”
I took a big bite of pizza. I needed pepperoni to get through Dad’s sad-ologue.
“And yesterday I thought that human beings were the only intelligent species in the universe, not counting whales and dolphins, because they are smarter than most people give them credit for; but today, I know that humanity is just one little cluster on one little ant hill in one small corner of the universe. It’s about lowering your expectations, and then lowering them some more. So, was I surprised to turn up for duty this morning and discover that the toilets were designed for those with alien anatomy? Yes. But mostly, I was disappointed. And not just because I had no place to pee.”
Jessica and I stared at each other, both wondering who would be the first to break the awkward silence. I mouthed, Is he okay?
She shook her head, mouthing, I don’t think so, and twirling her index finger in the universal hand gesture for crazy.
As much as we loathed one another, we also knew that we had only one parent left, and both of us were worried we might be losing him in his own Frank Capote way.
“Now, don’t you kids have homework?”
Homework.
The magma mission.
“Actually,” I said, “I have a group assignment for Planetology. But I, um, have to meet up with the others to do it.”
Dad shot me a suspicious look.
“He does,” Jessica said. “He got in trouble today for talking in class and has to give a presentation as punishment.”
“You see: disappointment,” said Dad. “Off you go, Sherman. Home by nine, no leaving base and, though it should go without saying, I’ll say it anyway: no rockets of any kind.”
I took a slice of pizza for the road and dashed out of the house, knowing I was about to break at least two of those rules.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Holy Flying Easter Egg
I followed the map Sonya had given me towards Area 51’s scrapyard. As I walked through the quiet, residential part of the base, past identikit houses, I realized I’d never lived anywhere this hot before.
The warm, dry air reminded me of vacations when Mom was still alive. I remembered one trip, about four years ago, probably the last time I had been back to the States, when we all flew to Disney World. Jessica had gone gaga over the Magic Kingdom, but for me, the real highlight wasn’t in Orlando, it was on the Atlantic coast: the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. I marvelled at the rockets on display and Mom told me all about watching the Apollo missions when she was growing up. Jess couldn’t drag us out of there for all the Dumbos at Disney.
My memorial rocket launch may have ended with Dad and Jess hating me, but I was still glad I’d launched Mom’s ashes into space. Dad may have been disappointed in life, but it would have disappointed Mom if I hadn’t tried to give her wings in death.
I picked up my pace to a light jog, passing the low bungalows that glowed from their living rooms’ televisions. I spotted a family of giant worms curled up on the sofa watching a cop show and wondered what they must think of humanity’s obsession with dramatizing murder in primetime. Across the street, a pair of six-armed apes desperately tried to soothe their crying baby. In another house, a family of AJABots haggled over Monopoly. Seeing all of these alien families made me wish that my family could be a bit more, well, normal.
But, like Dad said, maybe I needed to lower my expectations.
I followed the map across Groom Lake High’s football field and kept to the edges, in the
shadows. Then I climbed over a high fence in the end zone into the scrubby, parched stretch of desert between my new school and the outermost offices of the Bureau’s military base.
The blinds were drawn on the two-floor beige office buildings and I snuck past without drawing attention to myself. The road dead-ended at a massive scrapyard of machinery, dilapidated hangars and rocket parts.
“Psssst,” someone whispered.
Sonya emerged from behind the office building, her pink face half-hidden in a hoodie but her reflective black eyes glinting in the moonlight.
“Come on,” she whispered, and we ran into the yard. We weaved through piles of scrap that to anyone else would look like old jet parts and cargo containers – but to me, a self-trained rocket builder, these were ingredients for a gourmet space meal.
Gorgeous guidance systems.
Stranded starships.
Rusting rockets.
And stacks of silvery, metallic components that I couldn’t quite identify – but they had my rocket-sense tingling like crazy.
“Sherman,” Sonya asked, “are you licking your lips?”
“This is crazy!” I exclaimed. “Why would they leave all this great stuff out in the open?”
“Reverse psychology,” Sonya speculated. “People assume anything out here can’t be that important. It’s genius. And it’s a great place to hide the Eggcraft.”
I’d assumed that her triple tongue gave her an occasional speech impediment and that she’d actually said “spacecraft”. But no, once we rounded a corner, I saw it. And it was most definitely an egg.
An egg the size of a garbage truck.
An egg with two triangular cockpit windows, gold landing gear, exhaust pipes along the side like a dragster, and warm red light shining from an open hatch in the back, down onto the wire-mesh steps of the gangplank.
Houston, with eyes glowing orange and servos whirring softly, was running his silver fingers very slowly over the shell.
“Houston, why are you caressing my egg?” asked Sonya.
“I’m checking the hull for cracks,” he said. “Better safe than … incinerated.”
“Don’t be such a downer,” Sonya said. “She’s solid.”
I was trying to fathom the size of the chicken capable of laying this space-faring egg. “Can we go back to the egg part?” I asked.
“Come aboard,” Sonya beckoned. “I’ll show you how to fly her.”
“No,” Houston said. “Wait …” He straightened up, rotated his head and moved more robotically than I’d ever seen him move. “Vehicle approaching. Take cover.”
Houston backed himself into the nearby space junk, switched off his eyes and disappeared. He was completely camouflaged amid the metallic cylinders and disused fuselages.
Sonya and I listened. All I could hear were the cicadas, and the breeze whistling through all that lovely space steel.
“Um, Houston,” I said, “I don’t hear—”
“Shhh,” Sonya said, flicking her tongues. “I hear it too. Get down.” She closed the hatch of the Eggcraft with a keyring remote, and dragged me over to join Houston.
From the darkness, we watched and we waited.
Finally, I heard the car. The chugging engine – louder and louder – of a four-by-four or maybe a truck. Its headlights reflected off the various rocket bodies until a bright red Toyota pick-up with no roof came into view, skidding to a halt. A familiar blue-and-yellow tentacle snaked out from the driver’s side. And then another, and another …
“Bet you thought a ventitent couldn’t drive one of these things, eh, bipeds?” Octo yelled.
He slammed the pick-up’s door shut, all three of his beaks beaming with pride. “Um, bipeds?”
Sonya rolled her eyes and came out of hiding. “We’re doing this in secret, remember?”
“What?” Octo shrugged. “You don’t like my wheels?”
“You’re telling me the guy with twenty legs couldn’t just walk?” Sonya asked.
Houston had resumed his inspection of the egg, ignoring Octo.
“It’s a style statement, and the ladies love it,” he claimed. “Hiya, Houston, what’s up?”
“We will be,” he said, “at forty thousand feet, traveling over a thousand miles per hour, and I thought someone might appreciate a pre-flight hull integrity check before we take off.”
“I keep telling you, the Eggcraft’s solid,” Sonya asserted.
“I can’t believe you’ve got your own car,” I said.
“Technically, it’s my dad’s,” Octo explained. “Hank won it in a poker game but he can’t stay out of the water long enough to drive it. So, it’s now the Octo-mobile.”
“You dad sounds awesome,” I said.
“Hank’s all right, but he’d drown me if he found out.”
“Can we forget the ventitent’s car, please?” Sonya said. “We have a volcano to study. Houston, are you satisfied?”
“Eggcraft hull,” Houston said with a nod, “is ninety- eight-point-two-one-two-per cent sound.”
“I smell pizza,” Octo said, sniffing me. “I don’t suppose you brought—”
“Rounding up, that’s good enough for me,” declared Sonya. She reopened the hatch with the chirp-chirp of her keyring clicker and leaped up the gangplank in what I swear was a ballet jump. “C’mon, if we take off now we can get out of here before NED finds us.”
“Too late, Pinkberry,” said a snobby voice from the darkness.
The deity-wannabe stepped out of the shadows, shimmering as he examined the giant egg. “But nobody said we’d be riding in … Oh, is that your birth-egg?” He screwed up his nose as if someone had farted.
“What?” Sonya hissed. “Not as shiny as the spaceship that daddy promised to buy you?”
“I can’t think of anything more repulsive,” NED said, “than a spaceship that came out of someone’s—”
“But you’re not invited,” Sonya said.
“I want to be amused,” he announced. “So make room. I’m coming with you.”
“If you want to be amused, NED,” said Sonya, “get a mirror. We’re outta here.”
“Then you’ll all be expelled in the morning,” he threatened. “Unauthorized departure from a classified facility is a serious offence.”
“Are you kidding?” Sonya said. “The Eggcraft has a cloaking device. Makes her totally undetectable. Nobody’s gonna find out a thing.”
NED pulled his neon phone from his pocket, held it up and – FLASH – took our photo. “Maybe I’ll just email this right now to Meltzer. Or should I wait for the video of you mortals taking off?”
Sonya fumed. Octo froze.
“If I get expelled, dude,” he explained, “I’ll have to go back to the home planet, and that would not be good for my allergies.”
“All right, NED, get aboard,” said Sonya. “But don’t expect me to amuse you.”
NED sauntered up the gangplank, whistling “Leaving on a Jet Plane”. I followed him into the ship and took my first look inside a bona fide spacecraft.
I tried to block out the fact that my least favorite alien was along for the ride, and that the egg came from a giant reptile’s bottom.
I didn’t want to lower my expectations.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Houston, We Have
Lift-Off
The inside of the Eggcraft looked more like a trendy nightclub from Jessica’s favorite TV show, Drummer Girl, than a spaceship.
The floor was flat and shiny, but the walls curved up into the ceiling, with portraits of what must be famous Aristox singers and movie stars. A row of red velvet benches was built into each side, with six small tables lining the central walkway to the cockpit, each with a vase holding a single flower. The whole chamber had a freshly-cut-grass smell, which kinda made sense, since it was one hundred per cent organic.
It was pretty amazing to think that in a few moments, I’d be who-knew-how-many thousands of feet up … in an egg.
“She’s like
my home away from home,” Sonya said, disappearing into the cockpit through the front hatch.
Octo took up the entire bench on the left and Houston and NED took the right bench, distancing themselves from each other and leaving a space inbetween for me – one that I really didn’t want to fill.
“Did you mean it?” I asked Sonya, peering into the cockpit. “About showing me how to fly this thing?”
“How to fly this Eggcraft,” Sonya smiled, waving me in. “Welcome to the flight deck, Mr Capote.”
The cockpit was minimalist chic with two blue- leather seats facing two chrome steering columns. The dashboard was cream-colored and smooth, no knobs or dials. Above the dash, two large triangular windshields gave us a great view of the rocket graveyard by moonlight.
Sonya had draped her hoodie over the back of her seat, revealing a T-shirt that read “Cold Blood, Warm Heart” above a funky, scratchy picture of a rock star – I guessed an Aristox one – playing a Fender Stratocaster, which was weird, I thought, it being an Earth guitar. It made me wonder if we used things on Earth that were alien and we just didn’t know it. Microwave ovens? Maybe. Bluetooth? Probably. Those weird toilets you flush just by waving your hand at the sensor? Definitely.
The hatch hissed closed behind me, and I strapped myself in next to Sonya. Her skin, I realized, was the exact same color as Bubblicious gum, and you could only make out her little ladybug-sized scales if you really stared, so I tried not to. I was pretty sure that on her home planet, Sonya was seriously hot stuff.
“So is everybody playing nicely back there?” she asked.
“It’s a bit tense for my liking,” I said. “Octo and NED are doing that stare-down thing that boxers do before the bell rings.”
“Do boxes have eyes on this planet?”
“Boxers,” I clarified. “You know, two people punching each other? In a ring?”
Sonya looked at me with a frown of bewilderment.
“It’s a sport,” I explained.
“Hold on, human,” she gasped. “Punching is a sport here?”
“Um, yeah, kind of tells you everything you need to know about humanity,” I replied, realizing that I couldn’t defend most of what passed for sports on this planet. “So, how do I fly this?”