The little door on the counter slid open, and Katie and Lily uncurled themselves. They were in the kitchen, kneeling in puddles of no-name cola. Faintly, they heard many feet heading their way.
“The Dirrillill! He’s coming!” whispered Lily.
“Where’s Jas?”
“I don’t know! We’ve got to hide!”
They lowered themselves off the counter.
Jasper was still mashed next to the fridge. He struggled desperately to make a noise.
Lily said, “I hope he’s okay.”
Jasper’s face turned red as he tried to scream.
The footsteps were getting closer. There was no time to dally. Katie waved to Lily, and the two of them stepped out of the room and into a hallway. They flattened themselves there and listened.
The Dirrillill stumped into the kitchen, several mouths whistling in harmony.
Eyes flicked back and forth, up and down.
“Where, where, where has the Dash kid gone?” said the Dirrillill. He thumped around the counter. “Aha! You fell behind the counter like an old corn chip.” The Dirrillill went over and got a broom from a closet. With several of his arms, he maneuvered it behind the counter and rattled and bumped and scraped Jasper until the paralyzed Boy Technonaut thumped out onto the kitchen floor. “Voilà!” said the Dirrillill. “Now I’m going to unfreeze you so you can speak.” The Dirrillill shot a faint ray at Jasper’s head.
Jasper gasped with relief. He squinched his eyes shut. He opened them again. He worked his cheeks.
“All right, all right,” said the Dirrillill. “It is indeed your dear mother who’s come to visit, I believe. So: Have you made your mind up? Will you help me invade the Earth?”
Jasper declared, “By Jove, never! Never in a thousand millennia!”
“Your mother, Jasper Dash. Think of your mother.”
Jasper fell silent. He didn’t want to have to make a choice.
“We can do this a different way,” said the Dirrillill.
“You will never conquer the brave people of—”
ZAP.
Jasper was frozen again.
“Blah-dee blah-dee blah,” said the Dirrillill. “For someone saying, ’No,’ your mouth sure does flap a lot.”
He heaved Jasper up on several of his shoulders. “Now. We’re going to try something different. We’ll see how this goes: I’m going to use a brain machine to hypnotize you. Then you will follow my every command. By the time this charge wears off, you’ll be back on Earth—and you will have built a larger booth for me there. I will join you. You’ll get to watch as I destroy your civilization.”
The Dirrillill walked with Jasper through the castle.
He did not notice that two girl-shaped shadows followed them, trying to keep far enough behind the Dirrillill that he wouldn’t notice them.
While he walked, the creature said, “Soon, my boy, everything on Earth will reflect the glory of the Dirrillill. I’ll lump your planet’s statues of heroes together so they all have more arms, more legs, more noses. ’Don’t Walk!’ signals will show three hands instead of one. Hah! Just one? Hah! And all of you will help me make more weapons so that I can invade more worlds spread far across the galaxy.”
The girls snuck along after the Dirrillill through different strange alien chambers. Some had huge round plates moving up and down in stacks.
Others had lots of spiky levers.
The girls hung back.
The Dirrillill and the Boy Technonaut slung over his shoulder had come to some kind of scientific room. There were lots of strange machines and rays and chemicals. The Dirrillill laid Jasper down on an operating table.
“Now! To get to work!” exclaimed the Dirrillill.
* * *
Outside the door, Lily and Katie looked at each other in panic. They heard the Dirrillill calling out medical things to himself: “Brain helmet?”—“Check.”—“Hypnotism glasses?”—“Check.”—“Hypnotism ray?”—“Check.”
In a minute, Jasper would be a mindless minion of the last Dirrillill!
Lily said, “We’ve got to stop him.”
Katie nodded. “No duh.”
“I think I can lead us back up to those rooms with all the rays and missiles. We can find a ray gun like the Dirrillill’s and freeze him.”
Katie gave her the thumbs-up.
They crept away.
Behind them, there was the eerie, wobbling wail of science fiction machinery.
Jasper Dash was losing his mind.