Against All Odds (12 page)

S
queak stepped toward the console. He squinted behind his goggles at the aliens. “So … let me get this straight … that blob—”

“—Our Flatulous,” the alien with the mug corrected him.

“VERY expensive creature,” the other alien said. “Cost a fortune, not to mention the dozens of workers we’ve hired to wrangle it over the years.”

“Yes, but grey men are cheap,” the first alien said.

“A dime a dozen,” the other agreed.

Boney’s face fell. “But we killed your blob by feeding it clones.”

“It was old,” the first alien said, dismissing Boney’s concern.

“REALLY old,” the second one said. “We would have had to acquire a new one soon anyway. Clones
never agreed with it. Too much protein. You couldn’t possibly have known that.”

Squeak coughed to get their attention. “So … your
Flatulous
required sugar to create noxious gases through the digestive process … which you then harvested as fuel —”

The whistle alien raised his finger. “And pressurized using a three-stage diaphragm compressor …”

Squeak nodded. “Taking into account the compression efficiency as a ratio of theoretical temperature rise and heat loss versus the actual numbers.”

“Exactly,” the aliens said.

Itchy turned to Boney. “Do you have any idea what they’re talking about?”

“Wait a minute,” Sam said, obviously distressed. “Why would you use such an antiquated method to propel your ship? There are far less dangerous and more environmentally conscientious ways to travel through space that don’t have such a negative impact on delicate ecosystems.”

Her question hung in the air as the aliens exchanged worried looks once again.

“Well …” the first one began but was interrupted by the second, who threw his hands in the air.

“For the love of Zoilus, we dropped out!”

“Mobius, please!” the other alien said.

“What’s the point of trying to hide it, Servil?”

“Dropped out of what?” Sam asked. “School,” Mobius confessed.

Servil pouted. “It was too difficult. All those rules and equations and the ENDLESS homework.”

“So here we are,” Mobius said. “Stuck on some silly little planet in a galaxy far, far away.”

“The earth isn’t silly,” Itchy snipped.

Servil elbowed Mobius in the ribs. “You’re doing it again …”

“Oh, right. I always forget how sensitive humans are. It’s a lovely little place. We just don’t know how to get out of here. As we said earlier, the only reason we came at all was to fill up our gas tank. We had no idea we’d end up shipwrecked.”

Servil massaged his eyes with his fingertips. “What an infernal mess.”

Sam considered the problem for a moment. “Why don’t you just reroute your impulsion system?”

“Sure, sure,” Servil agreed. “Except—
we don’t know how.”

“We skipped that day in school,” Mobius said.

Itchy stepped forward. “So … if you’re such
losers,
how did you get this ship and all these little grey guys to work for you?”

Mobius pointed a skinny blue finger at Servil. “His father is quite influential back on Zoilus. He gave us this old clunker just to get rid of us.”

“Mobius!” Servil admonished.

“It’s true and you know it,” Mobius insisted.

Servil hung his head. “He’s right. My father can’t stand the sight of me. He’d rather throw money around just to get me out of his hair.”

“Your father has hair?” Itchy asked.

Servil waved his hand in the air. “It’s just a figure of speech.”

“Servil is an embarrassment to his family,” Mobius added.

“It can’t be that bad,” Sam said.

“Oh, it is,” Mobius assured her.

Servil nodded sadly. “My father’s going to be angry when he discovers we ditched the ship and lost Our Flatulous.”

“Well, what does he expect?” Mobius bristled. “He should have given us something nicer than this heap of junk. We’re the laughingstock of the entire universe.” He kicked feebly at the side of the ship.

Sam looked at Squeak, who raised his eyebrows and nodded.

“We can show you how to reroute your impulsion
system,” she offered. “That way you won’t get into trouble—and you’ll never have to use dirty fuel ever again.”

Servil jumped up from his chair. “Could you?”

“Just direct us to your engine room,” Squeak said. “If you have the parts we need, it shouldn’t be too difficult to set it up.”

“Oh hurrah!” Mobius cheered. He clapped his hands, then grabbed Servil and began dancing him around behind the console.

“Of course … we only understand how these propulsion techniques work in theory,” Squeak confessed. “We’ve never really done them before.”

Sam turned to Squeak. “It’s not as if we’re at risk of blowing them up or anything.”

“No,” Squeak agreed. “There’s no fear of that. The worst that could happen is a total system failure.”

“Would we go down with the ship?” Mobius asked.

“No,” Squeak said. “You may just be stranded here for life.”

The alien shrugged. “I’m willing to take that chance. Then we won’t have to rely on slimy blobs to fuel our ship.” He wrenched Servil by the arm and spun him around and around until the alien’s pale blue skin took on a sickly tinge of green.

Itchy interrupted the celebration. “Just a minute.
We’re not going anywhere to do anything until I’ve had something to eat. I’m starving.”

“Of course, you have to eat,” Mobius said sympathetically. He reached under the console and produced a white box, handing it to Itchy. It was filled with chocolate-glazed doughnuts. “We took them from one of your clones,” he explained. “The chocolate ones are our favourite.”

Itchy eyed the doughnuts, sniffed one, and began shovelling them in, one after the other, swallowing in big gulps. The aliens watched with fascination as Itchy finished the entire box and licked his fingers before letting out a big, satisfied burp. Boney leaned toward Squeak. “Maybe we could just leave Itchy in place of the Flatulous.”

“I heard that!” Itchy said, as Mobius reached under the console and produced another box of doughnuts.

M
obius raised a little silver remote and pushed a button, opening the door. The hordes of Itchys were still bumping and meeping like confused zombies in the corridor. Henry squawked the second he saw the clones. The kittens hissed and growled.

Mobius cussed, and a long series of bleeps blared from the translator. “Servil … could you make a call for a clean-up in corridor four?”

Servil leaned into the microphone and pressed a switch. He began talking in a series of clicks and blips. Within seconds, a dozen grey aliens in blue overalls scuttled up and began herding the clones like cattle down the hall.

“What’s going to happen to them?” Itchy asked between doughnut bites.

“We’ll just send them back where they came from,” Mobius said.

“What do you mean?”

Servil made a pressing motion in the air with his finger. “There’s a delete key on the clone machine. All you have to do is press it.”

Itchy’s eyes grew wide with horror.

“It’s all very painless,” Mobius assured him.

“Completely painless,” Servil said.

Itchy licked the chocolate from his lips. “But … where do they go?”

Mobius gave a quick whistle. “Back into the machine. Clones are completely recyclable.”

“Hmmm. Good to know.” Itchy pulled another doughnut from the box.

Once the clones were sent on their way, Mobius ushered the four friends into the hall. “Shall we?”

Boney, Itchy, Squeak, and Sam followed the two aliens through the stark white corridors of the spaceship to the engine room. They seemed to have been walking around and around the same hallway when Mobius finally stopped and held up the remote. He pointed to a spot on the wall and pushed the button. The door whizzed open to reveal a dirty, steam-filled room, machines pumping and banging, little grey men scurrying here and there, their faces smeared with grease, their noses pinched with clothes pegs against the smell. They looked up in surprise when they saw the humans
gazing with curiosity into the room. Mobius stepped aside and gestured for the friends to enter.

“The heart of the ship,” he said, with a hint of sarcasm. He handed out clothes pegs to the four friends, gave one to Servil, and kept one for himself. “It’s the best we can do on our budget.”

Clipping the clothes pegs on their noses, Boney, Squeak, Itchy, and Sam began to explore the room. There were valves opening and closing from giant canisters of green gas. Long glass pipes criss-crossed the room, carrying gas from the canisters to huge compressor chambers where the fuel was condensed. Several bellows heaved in and out, creating a strange rasping sound, like a dinosaur with asthma.

“It’s amazing any of this works, it’s so old,” Squeak said.

There was a loud pop as one of the machines blew a valve, sending hot steam hissing into the air. The little men scurried faster, desperate to fix the valve and cap the steam before it filled the entire room.

Mobius sighed with exasperation. “See what we have to work with?”

“Do you think you can help us?” Servil asked.

Squeak pushed on the bridge of his goggles. “These machines are quite worn … but I think we should be able to find what we need. We’re going to have to cannibalize
parts from your existing operation.” He turned to Sam for her opinion.

She stood, wrinkling her nose against the smell. “I think we should be okay.”

Squeak and Sam continued to inspect the machines, pointing and nodding and making notes while Boney and Itchy loitered on the periphery, watching the little grey men scuttle and scurry about. After several minutes, Squeak and Sam returned with a list of parts they would need.

“It won’t take long,” Squeak said. “You’ve got all the right technology here, and your ship can easily be retrofitted to support the newer system. All we need is a carbon-dioxide laser, a parabolic mirror, and an absorption chamber. Your ship is already made of silicon carbide so we’re ahead of the game there.”

“What a relief,” Servil said.

“We’ll use a superconducting magnet in conjunction with the magnetic meridians of the earth to help propel the craft into the air,” Sam added. “The only drawback to this system is the potential non-lethal genetic modification of plant material on the ground as well as telltale patterns at the point of takeoff and landing.”

“Crop circles!” Mobius shrieked, clapping his thin blue hand to his face. “I’ve always wanted to lay a patch like that. When can we get started?”

Squeak handed him his list of parts. “Right away.”

“Well, what are we waiting for?” Mobius chimed.

The two aliens inspected the list, then called several little grey men over. They spoke in clicks and beeps, writing a column of strange symbols down one side of Squeak’s notebook and handing it to the workers. There was a flurry of activity, with Squeak and Sam giving orders and Mobius and Servil translating. Boney helped gather the necessary parts while Itchy languished on a small, mushroom-shaped seat, snacking on chocolate-glazed doughnuts and repeating Squeak’s orders as though he was the one in charge.

When the work was finished, Sam, Boney, and Squeak sat back, wiping the sweat from their faces.

“Is it ready?” Mobius asked.

Sam handed him several pages torn from her notebook. “Yes. I’ve made notes in case you have any problems or need to make repairs. It’s pretty straightforward.”

“Good thinking.” Mobius handed the pages to Servil.

“We also wired your remote so you can start the craft from anywhere on the ship,” Squeak said. He gave Mobius the remote. “But we should perform a test run to be sure everything is in order.”

Itchy stepped forward. “Before we do that, I need to ask about the clones again.”

The aliens gaped at him.

“I’d like to see what happens to them.”

“Sure,” Mobius said. “We don’t mind, do we, Servil?”

“No, not at all,” Servil pleasantly agreed.

Mobius walked over to a monitor on the wall and touched the screen. Multiple images of the ship appeared, and he shuffled through them until he found the one he was looking for. He enlarged the image so that it filled the entire screen. “There they are,” he said, pointing to a room filled with Itchys, Boneys, and Squeaks.

“And there they go,” Servil said, pressing a code into the keypad on the side of the screen.

A blue light flashed. The room where hundreds of clones once stood was now empty.

Itchy stared at the screen. “They’re gone.”

Mobius snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

“What about the clone the police put in jail?” Itchy asked.

Mobius smiled. “History.”

“What about the warehouse in the woods?” Squeak said. “Where did it go?”

Mobius snapped his fingers again. “Folded like a circus tent.”

“An entire building?”

“It was really more of an illusion than a building,” Servil explained. “Think of it as … an extraterrestrial sleight of hand.”

“And the DNA for creating the clones?” Sam asked. “Is it still in your data bank?”

Mobius called up a folder on the screen and hit delete. “Done.”

The four friends exchanged looks.

“You don’t have anything to worry about,” Servil said. “Clones are only good on the planet they originate from. They’re no use to us anywhere else.” He turned to Sam. “By the way, that Disruptor device is a little piece of genius. We could have really used it around here.”

Sam beamed. “Thank you. Except that it only works the first couple times you deploy the rays. Subsequent use seems to have less effect on the clones.”

“Maybe you just need to reconfigure the signal so that it’s slightly different each time,” Squeak suggested. “That way the clones can’t assimilate the frequency—”

“Yeah, anyway, we thought it was brilliant,” Mobius interjected. “Where did you get the idea?”

Sam pulled a small beige hardcover book from her bag and held it up. “I used the basic premise in this dissertation and simply modified the application. I met the author at a trade show.”

Mobius read the title and let out a grunt.
“Satellite Technology!
Ugh! That was one of our textbooks back on Zoilus.”

Boney narrowed his eyes. “How could it be one of your textbooks on Zoilus?”

“Yes, how could it be?” Sam asked. “I met the author.”

Servil coughed nervously. Mobius flopped his hands around. “I must be confusing it with something else.” He gave an apprehensive laugh.

Sam put her hands on her hips. “Unless you’re implying that the author is an alien …?”

The Odds eyed each other. Squeak raised his notebook and pencil. “If you don’t mind, we have a number of questions we’d like to ask.”

Mobius’s eyes twitched. “Of course … ask whatever you want …”

He looked at Servil, who forced a smile, then shot out his hand, hitting a button on the wall.

A hatch fell open in the floor and the troop of friends and their animal companions were sucked from the room in a blast of cold air. They dropped, yelling and hollering and squawking and mewing through a long tube to be spit out with a heavy thud onto the ground. There was a blinding flash, and the spaceship launched into the sky, punching through the clouds. Itchy and Boney and Squeak and Sam coughed and gasped for air, struggling to breathe in the heavier atmosphere outside the spaceship. Henry clucked and the kittens mewed.

“How rude!” Sam blurted out the minute she caught her breath.

Boney spit dirt from his mouth. “After everything we did for them.”

“At least we know the light propulsion system works,” Squeak said, rubbing his shoulder.

Itchy lay splayed across the ground like a discarded plate of spaghetti. He groaned feebly. “I’m hungry.”

Boney stood up and helped Itchy to his feet. Sam and Squeak bumped heads as they tried to stand, blushing instantly. The four friends brushed the leaves and dirt from their clothes, then adjusted their slings, making sure the kittens and Henry were all right.

“I’m hungry,” Itchy said again, scratching Henry on the neck.

Squeak consulted his watch. “I’m not surprised. It’s nearly four o’clock.”

Boney gazed at the ragged hole left in the clouds by the spaceship. The sunlight shone through its tattered edges, dancing through the leaves as it reached for the forest floor. He breathed in deeply. “Come on, guys. Let’s go home.”