Ben eased his head up the final inch so that his eyes were just over the wall. He didn’t know what to expect. He was praying it wouldn’t be a horrific scene of total devastation.
Thankfully, what he did see was a little unusual, but it wasn’t terrifying.
Mom, Dad, Ant, and Carla were all on the bimah in the center of the shul. The metal suitcase was open and Dad, Ant, and Carla seemed to be building something.
There was a circular metal base into which they were placing long, thin, silver rods. It looked a bit like a round cage without a roof. From what Ben could make out, they only had a few more rods to put in and then, who could tell what was going to happen?
Ben continued watching intently as they fitted the last few rods into the base, when suddenly he realized something. There was absolutely no noise coming from anyone else in the shul. Not only that, but when he looked at all the other people, none of them were moving. Not even one tiny bit. They had all been frozen. Or turned into statues. Or were playing statues extremely well, though Ben thought that was unlikely. They were all just like the man Ben had seen behind the shul earlier in the week. The aliens must be getting ready to take over all of their bodies!
Then, with a shock that almost froze Ben himself, he understood that this must have been what Alien Dad, Ant, and Carla had been doing when they had gone inside and left Alien Mom outside. Just three aliens had done this to all those people.
Ben looked around again. It was very spooky. Three hundred people all sitting completely still. Each one of them quieter than a mouse that had lost its voice.
“Why is this taking so long?” asked Alien Mom.
Ben thought she sounded cross, but then, in an icy realization, he also thought that she was now speaking quite normally. For Mom. It made it much easier for him to find out what the aliens were planning, but they were learning how to be humans at an alarming rate—soon there really would be no way of telling who had been taken over by them.
“The invisibility ray is not easy to build,” said Alien Dad. “It will not work if anything is in the wrong place.”
“Hurry,” said Alien Mom. “The others are waiting to come down and take over the human bodies. We need the roof to disappear soon.”
So that was why they needed the invisibility ray: to get rid of the roof so that an awful lot more aliens could come down and easily take over all of those humans.
Ben glanced at all the frozen people in the shul. If he didn’t do something, then pretty soon, every single one of them would have an alien in their body. Then they would almost certainly all go out into the world and freeze more people so that they could be taken over. It probably wouldn’t take them long to take over every single human being on the planet—maybe only a day or two!
Ben had to go down there and stop them, but there were still at least two aliens guarding the doors downstairs—he was sure they were aliens now—and the third one would be back there soon.
Jumping over the balcony wasn’t really an option. He would almost certainly break a leg, and even if he didn’t, he would draw a lot of attention to himself and they would be on him before he knew it.
“Hang on a minute,” Ben suddenly thought.
A few weeks ago the rabbi had taken him on a tour of the building and, if he remembered correctly, there was a …
Yes!
At the far end of the balcony there was a door. It led to some stairs down to another door which let you in by the side of the congregation, to the right of the bimah. The rabbi had told him that sometimes, when he needed a little break, he would slip out of that door and sit down for a couple of minutes.
Ben crept along and, keeping low, eased the door open. The coast was clear and he bounded down the stairs as quickly as he could until he reached the door at the bottom. He didn’t have long. The alien woman on the balcony and the other two aliens guarding the door would soon begin to wonder where he was.
He put one ear to the door and listened.
“Everything is in place,” he heard Alien Dad say. “The invisibility ray is now ready.”
“Good,” said Alien Mom. “Start the countdown and prepare for the first phase of takeover.”
This was it. Ben had no choice. He had to get in there. He had to stop the aliens from taking over the world.