Akiko in the Sprubly Islands (2 page)

“Okay,“ I said,
trying to use a very businesslike voice, “the first thing we have to do is decide whether or not we’re really lost.”

“We’re
lost
, all right,” Spuckler snapped.

“Quiet, Spuckler,” I snapped back at him. “If you want to say something at this meeting you have to raise your hand.”

Spuckler rolled his eyes and Mr. Beeba smiled triumphantly.

“Now, Mr. Beeba,” I continued, trying to think of a gentle way to approach the subject, “Are you willing to admit that we
might
be lost?”

Mr. Beeba pulled a handkerchief out from beneath his belt and began cleaning his spectacles. He took his time answering, as if he enjoyed making us all wait for him.

“We may possibly be a
tad
off course, yes,” he said quietly, focusing most of his attention on a smudge he was trying to remove from one of the lenses.

“A
tad
?” Spuckler snorted.

“
Please
, Spuckler,” I said, glaring at him. “It doesn’t do us any good to point fingers at one another. If we’re lost, the most important thing is to get
un
-lost. Remember, Prince Froptoppit is out there locked up somewhere, and like it or not, we’re his only hope of being rescued.’’

An air of helplessness fell over the whole group. Even Gax and Poog seemed perplexed.

“Now, any way you look at it, I’ve got to admit this mission of ours hasn’t gone very smoothly so far. But at least we’re all still together.’’

“Yes, quite,” Mr. Beeba murmured, not sounding particularly pleased. There was a long pause, during which Spuckler rubbed his chin and scratched at the back of his head.

“Now, Mr. Beeba,” I asked, “is there any way you know of getting us back on course?’’

“Tragically, no,” Mr. Beeba replied, a dejected look coming over his face. “Though this vessel of ours is very charming, I’m afraid it is not equipped with the sort of navigational equipment we so desperately need at the moment.”

There was another long pause as we all sat and tried to come up with a way out of our dilemma. Just when I was starting to think the whole meeting idea might turn out to be a big waste of time, Poog spoke up. It had been quite a while since he’d said anything, so I was a little startled to hear his warbly, high-pitched voice. It still impressed me that Mr. Beeba was actually able to understand Poog’s bizarre alien language.

“Really?” Mr. Beeba asked in response to what Poog had just said. “Well, now,
that’s
encouraging!”

Poog continued with another brief burst of syllables, then stopped and smiled, blinking his big black eyes once or twice.

“Poog has just informed me of someone who might be able to help us,” Mr. Beeba announced, his voice now very hopeful. “Her name is Pwip. She’s the Queen of the Sprubly Islands.”

“The Sproobly Islands?” I asked.

“
Sprubly
, Akiko. Rhymes with ‘bubbly.’ It’s a small chain of islands in the middle of the Moonguzzit Sea. Poog tells me that if we can find Queen Pwip, she might be able to show us how to get to the place where Prince Froptoppit is being held captive.”

“You mean Alia Rellapor’s castle?’’ I asked.

“Exactly,” Mr. Beeba answered, a mysterious look coming over his face. “Not only that, but Queen Pwip is evidently something of a clairvoyant.”

“What’s a claire buoyant?” I asked, never having heard the word before.

“A
clairvoyant
, Akiko,” he corrected, “is someone who has the ability to see or know things beyond the realm of normal perception. Queen Pwip, it seems, has just such an ability. She may even be able to foresee the future.”

“Wow! She really
is
the sort of person we need,” I said, sitting up straight. “Thank you, Poog, for telling us about her. I have a feeling this could make all the difference.”

“Well, I don’t know if I believe in fortune-tellers and all that kind of razzmatazz,” Spuckler said, scratching his head again, “but if she can show us the way to Alia’s castle, I reckon it’s worth lookin’ her up.”

“That settles it, then,” I said in an authoritative voice, bringing the meeting to a close. “Our mission for the time being is to look for the Sprubly Islands and find Queen Pwip!”

“Thank you, Akiko,” Mr. Beeba whispered to me a moment later. “That was a
very
productive meeting.”

We all spent
the rest of the afternoon looking down at the Moonguzzit Sea, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Sprubly Islands. Mr. Beeba even brought the ship down to a lower altitude so we’d get a clearer view. There was nothing to see, though, but clear blue water stretching off in all directions.

The air began to cool as the sun went down, and Spuckler prepared a light dinner from the food remaining in the ship’s storage compartment. I ate a big piece of bread and four or five plump little pickles, and washed it all down with a bottle of turquoise liquid that tasted something like watermelon juice. Spuckler kept eating long after Mr. Beeba and I had finished. He only stopped when Mr. Beeba insisted that we had to ration the food for the days ahead.

After dinner we all sat back and enjoyed the sunset. It was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen. The sky turned bright red and orange and the clouds went from white to blue to purple. The view we had was like something you’d see from up in an airplane, except instead of peeking through a tiny little window, I was able to look around in every direction and feel the breeze blowing across my face.

After sundown it got even better. One by one the stars began to appear, and before long the whole sky was covered with them. You could even see two or three planets nearby, each different shades of green and yellow. I’d never seen even
half
as many stars back in Middleton, even on the clearest night of the year. I thought briefly of my parents and wondered what they were doing. I wished I could see them or talk to them somehow, just to be sure they were okay.

Mr. Beeba started to give me a little astronomy lesson, but I was already much too sleepy to pay attention.

“. . . and that one over there to the left,” I heard him say as my eyes grew heavier and heavier, “is more than 375,000 light-years away. Mind you, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it a great deal closer. . . . ”

“Let her sleep, Beeba,” Spuckler whispered. “Poor girl’s exhausted.”

Spuckler threw a blanket over me and tucked it in all around my body. I opened my eyes and caught one last dazzling view of the stars before drifting off to sleep.

The next morning I awoke to find the sky dark gray, with big black clouds rolling in overhead. A strong wind whistled across the deck and my skin got goose-pimply all along my forearms. I pulled my blanket up around my shoulders, trying to stay warm.

“Mornin’, ’Kiko,” Spuckler said. “Weather’s kinda turnin’ against us today. Don’t worry, though. A little rain never hurt no one.”

I looked around and saw Mr. Beeba staring gloomily into the sky. Poog and Gax seemed relatively unaffected by the change in the weather, as if it didn’t really matter to them one way or the other.

As the sky got darker and darker, Poog made an announcement.

“Heavens!” Mr. Beeba said as he began to translate. “Poog says we’re heading into a skugbit storm!”

I had no idea what a skugbit storm was, but I could tell by looking at Mr. Beeba’s face that it was something pretty bad.

“Now, hang on, everybody,” Spuckler said. “Let’s not get worked up into a panic over this. Poog might be wrong”

“Poog’s never wrong!” Mr. Beeba warned.

“We’ll see about that,” said Spuckler, turning to his trusty robot. “Gax, switch on your weather sensors and see what’s goin’ on out there.”

“
WEATHER SENSORS
?” Gax asked hesitantly. There was an embarrassing pause, as if he had no idea what Spuckler was talking about.

“
OH, WEATHER SENSORS
!” he added a second later, his head popping up a few inches in recognition.
“JUST A MOMENT, SIR. I KNOW THEY’RE DOWN HERE
SOMEWHERE
. . . .
” And with that he began searching through the various compartments and pieces of junk that were hidden inside his body.

Just then something dropped down and hit Gax right on the top of his helmet.

TWANG!

Spuckler reached out and caught it as it ricocheted into the air.

“Hang on, Gax,” he said, “I think we got your forecast right here.”

“What’s that?” I asked, leaning over to get a better look.

“It’s a skugbit,” he answered, dropping it into my hand. It was a round rock, about the size of a golf ball, but covered with little scratches and pockmarks. It was also warm, as if its quick fall through the air had heated it up.

“When there’s a storm,
millions
of these little suckers start fallin’ down outta the sky,’’ Spuckler added. The sky grew darker and we heard high-pitched whistling sounds as more and more skugbits began to whiz by the ship on all sides, some of them missing by just a few feet.

“Sh-should we be worried, Spuckler?” Mr. Beeba asked, looking nervously at the sky.

Suddenly there was a huge crash just a few feet away from me as an enormous skugbit smashed right down into the middle of the deck. Pieces of the deck shot up in all directions and the whole ship shuddered from the impact. The skugbit was about the size of a beach ball, or even bigger! We all circled around the monstrous thing and stared at it in horror.

“Yeah,” Spuckler said, leaning over to inspect the damage, “if you’re thinkin’ about bein’ worried, I’d say now’s as good a time as any.”

Within a few
minutes we were in the thick of the storm. Skugbits of all sizes were raining down on the ship, tearing great big holes in the sails. With each skugbit that landed on the deck, the ship dropped a bit lower in the sky, moving ever closer to the surface of the Moonguzzit Sea. Spuckler took charge of the situation.

“Throw ’em overboard, everybody!” he shouted, pointing at the dozens of skugbits that had accumulated on the deck. “They’re weighin’ down the ship!”

So we started throwing the skugbits overboard as fast as we could. They were incredibly heavy, though, and for every one or two we succeeded in getting off the deck, seven or eight came crashing down in their places. Even Spuckler, who had the muscles to work a lot faster than the rest of us, just couldn’t keep up.

The ship dropped lower and lower under the weight of the skugbits. We sank slowly at first, then faster and faster until we reached a dizzying speed. Before long the waves of the Moonguzzit Sea were rushing up to meet us.

“Brace yourself, guys!” Spuckler hollered. “It’s gonna be a rough landing!”

The ship hit the water so hard it almost broke in half. Water poured over the sides and up through the holes that had been made by the skugbits. Soon we were all soaking wet, and the waves were lapping over the ship from all directions.

“Dear heavens, we’re sinking!” I heard Mr. Beeba squeal as another wave came crashing down on top of us.

“Grab a piece and hang on!” Spuckler shouted back to him.

Before long the entire ship was submerged, leaving Spuckler and me clinging to a piece of the mast. Mr. Beeba ended up staying above water by clutching Gax (who turned out to be surprisingly seaworthy), and Poog hovered in the air just a foot or two above the spot where Spuckler and I were floating.

It had all happened so quickly that we didn’t have a chance to think what we’d do next. Fortunately the skugbit storm began to blow over, so at least we didn’t have to worry about more rocks crashing down on top of us.

However, we soon had something much more frightening to worry about.