Jasper Dash stared senselessly up at the purple sky. The glass of his helmet reflected passing clouds of dust from the shattered tower. It reflected the three faces staring down at him, concerned.
The alien antenna had collapsed. The stone chamber was nothing, now, but a huge burial mound for the last of the ancient race of the Dirrillillim.
Now the surface of the planet was silent beneath the hideous, eventful skies.
Lily, Katie, and Mrs. Dash sat by Jasper. The Boy Technonaut lay motionless. With the destruction of the Dirrillill and all its equipment, he was no longer hypnotized, but his brain was still recovering from control. He lay there in psychic shock.
Katie went and inspected the ruins. “We’re stuck here,” she said. She put her hands on her hips. “The transporter machine is under all this junk. That’s it. So much for us. No more shampoo. No more World Series. No more fried mozzarella sticks. We’re dying right on this planet, as little old ladies with gardens full of spiky plants that cough when you rake them.”
Mrs. Dash murmured, “Don’t be so down, darling. We’ll think about that in a tick when Jasper wakes up.”
Katie crossed her arms and kicked at the rubble.
Mrs. Dash sifted sand through the fingers of her glove, looking into the streaked skies. She said softly to Katie and Lily, “When I was a young astronomer back in the early twentieth century, I was always some scientist’s sidekick. You’ve seen old science fiction movies, so you know how that is. Those awful men in lab coats and knit neckties are always rushing around from room to room, fiddling with test tubes or diodes while a UFO invasion goes on—and just at the last minute, they strike their big, creased, lobey foreheads, and they say, ’I’ve got it! It’s a crazy idea! Mad, completely mad! But it just—might—work!’ And then, as I recall, they waited for me to kiss them.
“Thankfully, I quit that job when Jasper was born. And things have changed since then, both for mothers and for laboratory assistants. Katie, Lily, remember this: When you are a parent—as when you are a scientist—you cannot wait for some chump in a patched tweed jacket to come up with solutions for you. And you won’t, because you’re wonderful, smart, opinionated girls. But it isn’t easy. Parents, my dears, are always just saying, ’It’s a crazy idea—but it just might work.’ And sometimes we fail.” She said sadly, “Oh, I’ve made some terrible mistakes. Though in my day I did also stop the asteroid P-33 Omega from crashing into the Earth.”I
Katie said, “You’re a great mom, Mrs. Dash. And I don’t just say that because you’re going to have to raise us while we live here on this planet, hunting giant stinkbugs with pointed sticks.”
Lily, meanwhile, was surveying the horizon. She looked at the other antennas on the other hilltops. “Maybe we don’t have to stay here,” she said. “Each one of these antennas probably was used to communicate with a different planet,” she said. “Each one of them was used to send out a signal that could be made into a hypersmart being from that world who would build a teleporter and welcome the Dirrillillim. Each one of them probably has a teleporter somewhere in the ruins.”
“Sure,” Katie grumped. “If you want to go live on Dumb World. Or Dumb World Minor.”
“No, Katie, don’t you see? If we can just wake Jasper up, he can probably reset one of the other teleporters so it’ll send us to his booth back on Earth.”
“He’s coming around slowly,” said Mrs. Dash. “If only we could slap him. Unfortunately, his faceplate gets in the way.”
Katie sighed.
Above them, the oily clouds of the Horsehead Nebula spun and devoured one another.
* * *
Back on Earth, in the town of Pelt, in an old concrete house of the future, five of the Garxx of Krilm knelt around Jasper Dash’s teleporter, inspecting its workings.
One said, “If we take this crystal out, the teleporter will be broken.”
Another said, “It will no longer teleport anyone.”
A third said, “It will be useless.”
“But we don’t care about the Mother of Dash and her child.”
“And we have to take the crystal out.”
“To understand how it works.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
The Garxx all nodded their big, finny heads.
If they took it out, Jasper, his mother, and his friends would have no way to return to Earth.
One of them started to undo the wires connecting the crystal to the machine. Just as he was about to break the connection, one of the Garxx said, “Wait. The captain is not here. Wait till the captain comes back from the ship.”
“Yes. We will wait for his permission before removing the crystal.”
“Yes.”
“Yes. We will wait.”
“He will be back in just a few minutes.”
“Yes.”
“Agreed.”
“Yes.”
The Garxx sat on the floor in a line, their thin arms on their thin knees. They looked like a bunch of stretched-out kids at a sleepover wearing footy pajamas.
And when their captain got back, they were going to strand Jasper, Katie, Lily, and Mrs. Dash in a sleepover that would last forever.
* * *
In the region of the Horsehead Nebula, on the third planet of the star Zeblion, Jasper Dash struggled in his sleep, remembering a horrible dream where he had been frozen. . . . When was that? His eyes blinked rapidly.
There . . . in a helmet . . . was his mother’s face looking down at him with worry.
“Gosh,” he said. “Mother.”
And he was awake.
I See Appendix A.