“Help! Captain! We’re being boarded!” cried Bruzelski as she began to swat the mechanical bugs. The good news was that the little buggers didn’t squish into bug juice when she trounced on them. The bad news was that more spider bots kept coming.
Commander MacIntyre once again tried to fire the thrusters. “Still nothing, Captain,” he shouted as he swiped a couple of the metal bugs off of his control panel.
The spider bots didn’t look like they were trying to harm anybody. In fact, the control panel was shining and clean after they crawled across. Places on the floor were also showing a nice polish.
“Hey y’all, look at my hand,” Bruzelski shouted as she shook a spider bot off. “It polished my nails!”
But just when they were ready to laugh, they noticed a wobbling spider bot moving across a wall, cutting out a slice as it moved. “Uh, oh, some of these guys are out of wack too. Stop that!” cried Bruzelski, taking a broom to the malfunctioning arachnid. “Yipe!” she yelped as another one scrambled across her shoe, shaving off the front edge just in front of her toe. Then it scrambled across a table and cut a groove across the top. “Captain, these guys have lasers. We’d better do something quick, or we’re going to get sliced up like pastrami.”
“MacIntyre, open fire!” ordered the captain.
“At what, the spider bots?” asked the frustrated commander.
“No . . . at everything outside!” Captain Ives yelled. “We have to deactivate the tractor beam that pulled us onto the space platform.
The control transmitter has to be out there somewhere!”
The commander shrugged and started shooting all the ship’s weapons at once, including the veton depth charges and the stickeyon emissions. With the gravitation field of the space platform no longer functioning, the stickeyon emission traveled much farther than usual. That sticky substance must have gummed up a rotating radio control transmitter because everything ground to a stop, including the spider bots. Even better, whatever was pinning the ship to that platform was also shut off.
“We’re on our own power!” cried MacIntyre. He gunned the thrusters, and they took off.
They were no sooner back in space than they suddenly found themselves back in the tree.
“It’s about time!” sputtered Scilla, erupting from beneath a cluster of disabled spider bots. Her uniform was in tatters. “I was within seconds of becoming human confetti.” At that moment, her uniform transformed once again into jeans, sweater, and an overcoat. She looked down at the spider bots. They had turned into piles of twigs and shirt buttons.
“I’m just glad the ship is still in one piece,” said Ghoulie with a huge sigh. He fingered a burn streak across one corner of a plywood table. “Do you ever wonder how much of our adventures might be real?” he asked thoughtfully.
“Like if that space platform is really out in space somewhere?” Beamer echoed his thoughts.
“Come on, y’all,” said Scilla with a twisted grin. “Do you really think we could be whisked to the farthest edge of space in the blink of an eye? Not possible. Hey, Mr. Spock,” she said to Ghoulie. “Come on, where’s your science?”
“Of course, you’re right,” he said, shaking his head as if to clear his mind. “It’s just that it always seems so real. After all, it wasn’t our imagination that sliced through this table.”
“Whether it’s real or not, I wish we knew what happened to that space platform,” said Beamer. “I mean, if it was attacked or bombarded by asteroids, why didn’t anybody bother to fix it? Did they all die or just give up?”
That night, while he was staring up at the water-stained ceiling above his bed, the idea of giving up rolled around in Beamer’s head like a loose marble. He was thinking that it was about time to do just that with his baseball career. The season was long over, of course, but soon he’d have to make a decision about the next season. It wasn’t like he’d had this big dream of becoming a major league star.
Among the ranks of little league baseball players, he was a fairly decent pitcher. But when it came to batting, all he ever hit was air. Why can’t I get the stupid bat to go where my eyes tell me it’s supposed to go? His dad had told him about “eye-hand coordination” — that some kids got it earlier than others. But that didn’t help much when the guy wearing a bag on his chest shouted, “Strike three!” Beamer remembered how, after his last time at bat in the championship game, the umpire had jerked his arm back like he was cocking a rifle. Talk about rubbing it in. Where did that ump think he was, Yankee Stadium?
But the worst moment came when he heard a rasping chuckle behind him. He looked over to see Jared watching him through the chain-link fence. Jared had stopped being a direct threat to the Star-Fighters, thanks to that little battle in the tree last fall. Nor could he any longer get away with fleecing kids at school of their milk money. Still, Beamer knew that this underage Terminator was aching to return to the top of the middle-school food chain.
On that day, though, Jared wasn’t using his fists. He was using his bat to intimidate everyone. He was a year older than Beamer, but they were in the same division. And while Beamer was fanning away, his cud-chewing nemesis had the highest batting average and the most home runs in the league. How was Beamer supposed to compete if his brain and his reflexes wouldn’t cooperate? So why not just give up? Besides, if he didn’t compete, he couldn’t lose. Right?
The next morning, Middle America got hit by another snow storm, and Beamer was forced to wear his snow boots again. As he pulled them out from the closet, he noticed something stuck to the bottom of one of the boots. It was an old piece of paper — old as in ancient Egyptian papyrus — dull yellow-brown and extra crispy. The huge wad of bubble gum that glued it to the tread was also holding the paper together, since it was cracked into about a million pieces.
Beamer hadn’t worn the boots since they had visited the old trolley terminal. Sure enough, the paper was a memo from the trolley company. It announced a farewell party being held at the company president’s house — Solomon Parker’s house! The address was in more pieces than anything else, but he could pick out the street name: “onial.” He made a copy of the bottom of the boot on the family’s all-in-one printer/ copier, in case the note fell apart when he tried to remove it. Then he taped the gummy note together and carefully pried it off, hoping the tape would hold it together.
He’d never heard of an Onial street. Later that day, Beamer got Ghoulie and Scilla to check out all the maps they could find. But no luck — no Onial. Even Mr. Parker’s street had dropped off the planet. He still had the copy of the note in his hand at dinnertime when his mom plopped down a plate full of meat loaf, peas, and macaroni.
“What do you have there?” she asked Beamer as she returned to the kitchen. “Uhven two at twenty pahcent; uhven wun, awf,” he heard her say. She’d been getting better at talking to the appliances. Practically nothing in the house worked unless you talked to it — not just in English, but in a Southern accent. His mother, who was usually called Dr. Mac by her kiddie patients, came back in with two more plates. She then looked over Beamer’s shoulder at the paper. “What is that a copy of ? Looks pretty old,” she said, seeing all the cracks in the note. “Where’d you get it?”
Suddenly there was a screech and a whisk of wind as Beamer’s little brother, Michael, flew around the table and ripped the note out of his hand. “Got it!” he chortled. “The treasure is mine!”
Beamer was on him in an instant. “Give that back, noodle brain; it’s not a treasure map!” Before Michael could uncross his eyes from trying to read the note, Beamer had it back. “It’s a memo with the address to Old Lady Parker’s brother’s house.”
“Beamer!” said his mother through tight lips, with her hands on her hips. “It’s not respectful to refer to someone as ‘Old Lady.’ ”
“Sorry, Mom,” he said with a guilty look. “It’s just that I can’t find Mr. Parker’s street name on any map.”
“Here, let me have a look,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. She took the note as Beamer propped his elbows on either side of his plate and dropped his head into his hands.
“This is a Xerox of your boot?” she asked incredulously. “Where’s the str — ?” she started. “Oh, I see — onial.” She suddenly laughed. “Onial’s only part of the name, honey. I’d put my bet on the name being Colonial. There’s a Colonial Street just a few blocks away.”
That’s how Beamer, Ghoulie, and Scilla found themselves standing in the middle of Colonial Street a few days later. Ghoulie had wondered how they’d find the house without a street number, but that turned out not to be a problem. The houses down one side of the street were no bigger than Beamer’s house. There was only one house on the other side of the street. At least they figured a house was there somewhere. All they could see was a wall high enough to hold back King Kong. Whether it was made of brick or stone or Lego blocks, they couldn’t tell, for it was completely covered with a thick layer of vines. And on top of the vines was a heavy coat of snow. Frankly, if the gate hadn’t been set between two towers, they wouldn’t have known where it was. The gate was, however, firmly locked.
“Now what?” muttered Scilla. “It might be easier to get into Fort Knox.”
“There’s got to be a calling thingy here somewhere,” Ghoulie said as he started shuffling through the vines on left tower.
“Maybe the place is too old for stuff like that,” said Scilla as she tried shaking the huge iron gate. A snow clod the size of a beach ball immediately fell and plastered her from ponytail to galoshes.
“Great!” she said as she wiped a handful of snow from each eye. She shed more snow as she turned toward Beamer and Ghoulie, who were snickering like a couple of hyenas with the hiccups. She cocked her hip, throwing off still more snow, and gave them a slow burn. A moment later her gaze lifted to a spot on the gate tower behind them. “When you’re through polluting the sound waves, you can push that button behind you.”
The boys twisted their heads around and saw the message console only partly cluttered with vines. Beamer reached up and pushed a button. “Hello . . . uh . . . my name is Beamer MacIntyre, and I’m one of the Star-Fighters — ”
Above the button was a small TV screen. It was blank, but they heard a snooty, feminine recorded voice say, “We are not receiving unsolicited visitors at this time. However, if you have a visitor’s pass, please enter your code now.”
“I repeat,” said Scilla to her buddies, once again cocking her hip, “now what?”
“The lady on the speaker doesn’t sound very friendly to me,” said Ghoulie. “I say we forget Mr. Parker, especially since everybody else seems to have forgotten him.”
“You’re probably right,” said Beamer with a sigh. He kicked a rock into the street, walked up to it, and kicked it again to the other side of the street.
“We’ve got better things to do than chase down people who don’t want to be caught,” Ghoulie added as he followed Beamer across the street.
Suddenly the speaker croaked, and a very weak, breathy voice said, “Is somebody there? Who did you say you were?”