No Other Story (7 page)

Penny looked to Jones, who seemed thoroughly confused by the entire situation. “Do you have a pen and paper?” she asked.

“I have some paper, but no pen. I'm sure Stig wouldn't mind if you used some of his cave paints.”

“Paint?” Mr. Cheeseman spouted. “I cannot compose with paint!”

“Hmm.” Jones thought further. “I'd loan him my eyetop, but I haven't used it in so long I totally forgot the password.”

“Why do you need a password for a computer that's attached to your eyeball?” asked Teddy.

“Well, in case someone steals my eye, of course,” said Jones, as if this made perfect sense. “Don't you have crime where you come from?”

“Not the kind where people steal your eyeballs,” said Gravy-Face Roy.

“I have a pencil,” said Professor Boxley. He removed the stubby writing instrument from his pocket and found that the point had not survived the avalanche. Luckily, he also had a small plastic sharpener.

He handed the items to Ethan, and Jones sent Teddy to get the paper, which was sitting on a small metal shelf across the room. Teddy retrieved it, but not without a very dramatic huff. It was bad enough to be bossed around by your own family, but to be ordered about by complete strangers was something else. He returned with the paper and handed it to the person whom he had known his entire life as his father, but was now forced to refer to as Signor Gioachino Rossini.

“
Grazie,
” said Ethan in perfect Italian. Up to that point, his knowledge of the language had been limited to words like
spaghetti, pepperoni
, and
mama mia
.

“Let's get you set up at the kitchen table, Signor Rossini,” said Jones to Mr. Cheeseman. “I'm sure Gurda won't mind if you do a little composing while she smashes roots.” Jones spoke to Gurda in that guttural caveman language. Gurda returned a few grunts and Jones smiled. “See?” he said to the others. “I told you she had a great sense of humor, LOL.”

Once Mr. Cheeseman, a.k.a. Signor Rossini, had taken his position at the table and had begun composing his latest opera, Chip, Penny, and the professor gathered around the fire pit to discuss the situation with Jones. Meanwhile, Teddy, sick and tired of being bossed around, wandered throughout the cave, with Pinky on his heels, snuffing and snorting at each and every corner. Teddy found the underground home much larger than it appeared at first glance.

In two years on the run, Teddy and his family had stayed in some pretty interesting houses. There was the old white farmhouse with the creepy attic. There was the little house that smelled like damp wood, which was odd for a house made of brick. And who could forget that house with the flat roof that had been painted the color of pea soup? It featured burnt-orange carpeting throughout, which Penny and Teddy would pretend was molten lava, forcing them to make their way through the house by jumping from one piece of furniture to the next.

But of all the houses they'd been in, this one was the strangest. There were several passages throughout the cave
leading to several different rooms, all of them illuminated by the same type of tiny lights that hung across the wall of the main room.

Some of the rooms were empty. One was heavily stocked with food and other supplies. Another appeared to be a bedroom, the floor covered with animal skins and woven blankets. A room much smaller than the rest, located near the very back, contained nothing but a small, cardboard box. Teddy could not resist. Quietly, he inched into the room, toward the mysterious container. Pinky gave the box a curious sniff, then Teddy's curious fingers reached out slowly and pulled back the tattered flap. Cautiously, he leaned over and peered inside the box, then nearly fainted at what he saw.

Last weekend, I went to the opera, because I am a sophisticated and refined person of impeccable taste, and because I won two free tickets in a burping contest.

The opera was called
Aida
and was performed entirely in Italian, which, despite recent strides, is still considered a foreign language. In fact, most operas are performed in Italian, so, in order to make your opera-going experience a more enjoyable one, you should first attempt to familiarize yourself with a few simple Italian words and phrases. For instance,
amore
is one word you will hear often, as it is the Italian word for love, or for what happens when the moon hits your eye like a bigga pizza pie.

By brushing up on my Italian before the big show, I was able to surmise that
Aida
is the story of an Ethiopian princess who falls in love with an Egyptian prince and is hit in the eye with some pizza. And, as if that weren't tragic enough, in the end Aida and the prince are killed.

Now, don't go getting the idea that all operas are tragedies and that an evening at the opera has to be a depressing one; many of the great operas are comedies.
It all depends on what you think of someone getting a face full of cheese.

Either way, you'll want to bring along a set of binoculars, known as
opera glasses
, to ensure that you get a good view of all that slapstick comedy—or, as it may be, slapstick tragedy. And, because your average opera can run upward of four hours, you can use your binoculars to stave off boredom by looking through the wide end and pretending the people sitting around you are actually very far away.

“Hello over there!” you shout. “Would anyone like to challenge me to a burping contest?!” And, if you holler loudly enough, security will wrestle you to the ground and see to it that you never go to the opera again. This is not as bad as it sounds, because, as you will soon see, you don't have to actually go to the opera in order for it to one day save your life.

Ethan Cheeseman sat at the stone slab table, scribbling so furiously that his pencil broke every couple of minutes. Luckily, he was very amused by the sharpener Professor Boxley had given him, and so the frequent breakage seemed to have no ill effect on his mood or on his frantic composing. He wrote as if driven by the music in his head, his eyes transfixed on the paper, his hand stopping only to sharpen the pencil or to wipe away a bit of spattered root that landed on the page as the result of Stig and Gurda's equally enthusiastic mashing.

So engrossed was he in his work, he had no idea that only a few feet away, people were talking about him. “I don't understand it,” whispered Penny. “My dad doesn't even like classical music. He thinks it's for old people.”

“That's right,” Chip agreed. “In the car, he makes us listen to classic rock, which we think is for old people.”

“And I'm sure he's never even heard of Rossini,” said Penny. “So what happened?”

Jones thought for a short time. “Well, I'm no
psychologist, but I'd say it's probably like introjection, IMHO,” he said, saving an entire .3 seconds by using an abbreviation for
in my humble opinion
.

“Introjection?” said Penny. This was a word even she, with her absurdly high IQ, had not heard before.

“A theory of Freud's,” offered Professor Boxley. “It's the process of absorbing personality traits from an outside source.”

“That's right,” said Jones. “There are so many imposing historical figures in Some Times that it's possible for outsiders to find themselves taking on a foreign psyche.”

“By why this one?” asked Penny. “He's a scientist, not a musician. You would think he'd be more likely to wake up thinking he's Galileo or Sir Isaac Newton.”

“I'm afraid I don't have an answer for that,” said Jones. “Other than to say that Some Times is one crazy place.”

“It sure is,” said Penny. “Dinosaurs, Vikings, summer and winter, all happening at once. And how is it that you know so much about it?”

Jones shrugged. “You're right,” he said. “I'm an outsider, like you. But I've been here a very long time. Twenty-six winters, forty-two springs, thirty-nine summers, and eighteen autumns, so I've pretty much seen everything. But the main reason I know so much about it is that my great-grandfather discovered it.”

This was shocking and discouraging news, especially for Chip. The only good thing about being shipwrecked in Some Times was that, if somehow they were able to make it back, he and his family would go down in history as the
first to visit this mysterious world. Now they didn't even have that to hang on to.

“I thought we discovered it,” said Chip, unable to hide his disappointment.

“Sorry,” said Jones, who did not seem sorry in the least. “But it was definitely my great-grandfather. It's well documented. So what are you guys doing here in Some Times? I know you don't work for Plexiwave.”

Penny gasped at the very mention of the weapons manufacturing company responsible for the death of her mother. And it was now apparent why Jones had inspected their arms when he first found them: he was looking for a small tattoo worn on the left wrists of all operatives of the evil corporation. The tattoos typically read
3VAW1X319
, or, when viewed in the mirror,
Plexiwave
.

“You know about Plexiwave?” asked Chip.

Jones scoffed at the absurdity of such a question. “Do I know about the company that's taken over the entire world? Duh.”

What? thought Chip. Did he just say that Plexiwave had taken over the entire world? And furthermore, did he just say
duh
? The information hit the Cheeseman children like a sharp punch to the gut.

“Plexiwave killed our mother,” said Penny. “And now you say they've taken over the world?”

“Afraid so. Where I come from, they run everything,” said Jones. “That's why I originally came here. To hide out. So, tell me then—why are you here?”

“We were bounced off the Time Arc on our way back to save our mother's life,” said Chip. “And now we're stuck here on account of some stupid dinosaur that decided to smash …”

He abruptly stopped talking, because his mouth suddenly stopped receiving instructions from his brain, which was, at the moment, too busy trying to process the information being sent to it by his disbelieving eyes, which were focused on Teddy, standing there, wearing an odd smile. But it wasn't what was on his face that shocked everyone, but rather what was on his hand.

Jones saw it too. He moved toward Teddy, and Teddy stepped back. “What are you doing with that?” Jones demanded. “What are you doing with Steve?”

Sure enough, perched upon Teddy's right hand was an exact replica of the sock puppet his mother had knitted for him before she passed away over two years ago. And, stranger yet, that dead and buried sock puppet named Steve and the one Teddy now held seemed to have the exact same name.

“Steve is mine,” Teddy insisted. “My mother made him for me.”

“Obviously, you're mistaken,” said Jones. “If Steve was yours, then how would he have gotten into my cave here in the middle of Some Times?”

“I don't know,” said Teddy. “But he's mine. You can even ask my brother and sister.”

He could've asked Chip and Penny, but they were struck
speechless by the sight of a grown man arguing with an eight-year-old boy over ownership of a sock.

“I believe that you think he's yours,” said Jones. “But he's obviously mine. Now please take him off. He's very old. Steve was a gift from my grandfather.”

As Teddy and Jones continued to squabble over who had exclusive rights to the ratty old sock puppet, something suddenly occurred to Penny.

“Excuse me, Mr. Jones?”

“Huh? Yes, what is it?”

“You say that Steve was a gift from your grandfather. Just out of curiosity, what's your grandfather's name? His real name?”

Jones placed his hands on his hips and pushed out a long, slow breath. He looked at Penny, then, one by one, at the rest of the strangers in his cave. “Well,” he said. “I guess I can trust you. My name's not John Jones.”

“I didn't think so,” said Chip.

“It's Moss. Sullivan Moss.” The name meant nothing to Chip and the others, but what Mr. Sullivan Moss said next was truly astonishing. “And my grandfather is the famous author Simon Cheeseman. Perhaps you've heard of him.”

Teddy's arms dropped limply to his side, causing Steve to slip off and fall to the dirt floor. When he did, Sullivan took the opportunity to scoop him up and place him on his own hand. Teddy didn't so much as bat an eye, for he was, at that moment, in a state of shock. Since he and his family had been forced to go on the run, Teddy had used so many aliases that he had almost forgotten his real name. Hearing
it now, for the first time in two years, was weird, to say the least.

“That's
my
name,” he whispered. “
I'm
Simon Cheeseman.”

“That's an awfully strange coincidence,” said Professor Boxley.

“Or is it?” said Penny. Without realizing it, she began pacing like a lawyer on cross-examination. “Your great-grandfather, Mr. Moss, the one who discovered Some Times—was his name Ethan Cheeseman, by any chance?”