The girls stood in the fortress’s arsenals, where all the weapons were kept. They looked up in awe at all the explosives and ray guns.
Lily and Katie were horrified. With this kind of stockpile, even a single Dirrillill could bring the Earth to its pudgy, green-and-blue knees. All a single Dirrillill would have to do was broadcast a message about which city he was going to destroy next—and then take his pick of how to blow it off the map. He could probably just whisper to one of the tiny bombs where to fly—and leave all of Beijing, China, a huge glass pit. He could turn New Delhi, India, into a blackened desert. He could stand on Mount Hood and shoot slices out of Portland, Oregon. Lily imagined Chicago with perfect round holes in the Sears Tower and sight lines through whole sets of old skyscrapers, so that when you stood at one end of the holes, they all lined up, and you could see through the entire city, as through a telescope. And that’s if the Chicagoans were lucky. Otherwise—boom!—the Windy City would just disappear without so much as a soft little breeze left behind. That could be the fate of New York, Paris, Moscow, and Sydney. People all over the globe would be terrified and helpless. They would agree to any interplanetary bully who demanded things then.
So even a single Dirrillill, Lily realized, could proclaim himself the emperor of Earth. And he didn’t need more equipment than would fit into one—just one—of those flying cars.
He had to be stopped.
“What do you think these do?” Katie asked, picking up a little bubbly sphere.
Lily shook her head and shrugged. She was looking for a ray gun like the Dirrillill’s.
And then they heard Jasper’s voice. “Lily. Katie. You’re alive.”
They turned, delighted.
There stood Jasper Dash, with the Dirrillill looming behind him.
Jasper had his ray gun pointed right at Lily and Katie. He was ready to fire.I
I More and more, Busby Spence decided that if he had a ray gun, he would not just blow up the enemy, he would blow up everyone.
He hated the war now. He was tired of it, and he knew everyone else was tired of it too. It just kept going on and on. The president of the United States had died. The Germans had surrendered. But still, out in the Pacific, the battles went on ferociously, island after island, and it seemed like it would never end. There would always be rationing. There would never be enough sugar in the sugar bowl, and the answer about going places in the car would always be, “No. We only have a thimbleful of gas left this week.”
The spring was wet and cold. Busby’s house was always hazy with his father’s cigarette smoke.
Busby took all the model planes he had built and brought them down from the tree house, and then he and Harmon dropped rocks on them. They said it was antiaircraft fire. Busby’s squadron was destroyed. The wings were smashed and the cockpits were crunched and everything was in pieces on the dirty snow.
Then there was nothing left to do.
The only thing to look forward to was a Science-Fantasy Movie Spectacular. It was going to last all day, featuring several Captain Galactic serials and a full-length Jasper Dash picture (Jasper Dash and the Mystery of Phantom Mesa). They were holding it a couple of towns away at the opera house. It was a benefit for the war effort. In order to get in, you either had to buy US war bonds or bring a piece of scrap to donate. Scrap was the ticket.
Harmon had earned enough money for some war bonds by babysitting for the Maszlovskis. There was not enough money on Earth to get Busby to take care of that Maszlovski kid. That kid was still at the age where he threw up cheese.
Busby Spence got other odd jobs to pay for a ticket. He broke up ice for the Lyttons and fetched groceries for Mrs. Benoit. He worked hard to get the money.
There was no way he was going to miss the Science-Fantasy Movie Spectacular.