Jasper rushed across the green, glassy hills, waving his arms and leaping.
Here he had come fifteen hundred light-years—and he might miss the person who was coming to meet him!
He jumped up and down, almost yelping with the effort.
But he was a tiny dot on a huge landscape. The flying car slid through valleys toward the distant antenna.
Jasper started running toward it as fast as he could.
He knew there was no way he would make it there in time.
“By the Greater Magellanic Cloud!” he brayed.
He grabbed his ray gun out of its holster. He held it straight up and fired several bolts of light into the sky. They were not bright: The electrical people had sapped the gun’s energy.
The aircar was still headed away from him.
Desperately, he fired a final few shots—killing the batteries.
He watched across the huge gulf as the aircar quivered in the sky. He longed for it to turn around and come to him. It was time for his party. Time for his cake. Time to find out what his whole life was about.
. . . And the aircar turned. Someone had seen him. The flying ship zipped across the chasms and canyons and made its way straight for him.
Jasper didn’t know how to contain his happiness. He hopped up and down and waved again.
It might be his father in that aircar!
It settled down near him, kicking up a fine green dust.
A door on the side slid open.
Jasper Dash happily stuck his ray gun back in its holster.I
He waited to see who would come out of the dark portal.
But what came out was not exactly a “who.”
I Busby Spence wished he had a ray gun like Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut’s. He wanted to be able to point it at battalions of tanks or enemy ships and, with a huge blue bolt of anger, make them all disappear. When he went to the movies and they played a newsreel before the show, he watched the scenes of battle—the eruptions in the water; the white wisps of tracer bullets in the air; the dull gray landscapes flowing beneath planes, blossoming with blasts; the dark antitank guns lifting up and rearing back—and Busby imagined himself there with his ray cannon, squinting his eyes cruelly and making the whole terrifying Nazi Wehrmacht disappear in a burst of light.
Of course, when he thought about it, he realized Jasper Dash’s ray gun ran out of batteries too frequently. For this reason, he decided he preferred Captain Galactic’s sonic blaster, even though Captain Galactic wore dumb boots.
Once, when he and his mother were sitting in the movie theater, waiting for a new episode of Captain Galactic, the newsreel showed some of the fighting in the Pacific. There was a picture of a tropical island. The tide was coming in, and the bodies of dead American soldiers were floating facedown in the water.
Busby Spence’s mother got up and yanked Busby up the aisle and out of the theater. They missed the movie.
That was the episode of Captain Galactic where they finally reached the castle of Drong, Slayer of Worlds. Busby Spence never forgave his mother for making him miss it.