Authors: K. A. Applegate
Jake smiled. “Marco doesn’t believe in optimism.”
Tobias flew almost silently into the barn through the open hayloft.
“Okay, Ax. Time to morph,” Jake said.
“And, um, don’t forget the morphing outfit, okay?” I reminded him. The concept of clothing kind
of puzzled the Andalite. We’d gotten him skintight bike shorts and a T-shirt that he could use for morphing, but he still didn’t know why.
It’s one of the most annoying things about morphing — dealing with clothing. We’d learned how to morph clothing, but only things that were real tight-fitting. Any time you tried to morph a jacket or sweater they just ended up shredded. And shoes? Forget about shoes.
“Time,” Jake said, pointing at his watch.
Ax began to change.
I’d only seen him do it once before—soon after we rescued him from the sunken Andalite Dome ship.
I’ve seen a lot of morphing. I’ve done a lot of it, too. It’s always creepy watching a human being become some strange animal. But watching Ax morph was different. He wasn’t becoming an animal. He was becoming a human being.
The stalk-eyes shrank and disappeared in his head. The deadly scorpion tail shriveled and withered and slithered up inside him like someone sucking up a piece of spaghetti.
His front hooves disappeared completely.
“Whoa, look out,” Jake said. He caught the
Andalite as he fell forward, with no front legs to support him.
A gash opened in his face and grew lips and teeth. A nose grew where there had just been small vertical slits. His eyes became smaller, more human.
But the weirdest thing about Ax morphing was not just that he looked like a human. It was that he looked like a
particular
human.
Actually,
four
particular humans. See, he had absorbed DNA from Jake and Cassie and Rachel and me. Somehow, by some process we did not understand, he was able to combine all four genetic patterns to come up with one person.
The end result was definitely strange and disturbing.
I looked at him and saw some of myself, and Jake, and Rachel and Cassie, too, although Ax was male. That was the most bizarre part. Looking at him and thinking,
Hey, he looks familiar, really familiar; in fact, hey, that’s my hair!
“Ax, you could be either a really pretty guy, or a kind of unattractive girl,” I said.
“I am an Andalite,” he said. “Andalite. Lite. Ite.”
“Okay, put on those additional clothes,” Jake
said. “Let’s get going. Tobias?” He looked up to the rafters.
“More clothing? Clo. Clo-theeeeng. Clotheeng?” Ax said.
“Ax? Don’t do that,” I said.
“What? Wha wha wha. Tuh.”
“That. Where you play with the sounds. Just say what you need to say, and stop.”
Like I said, the Andalites have no mouths and no spoken speech. Ax seemed to think mouths were some kind of toy.
“Yes,” Ax agreed. “Yah. Ess.”
“And one other thing? The shoes go on your feet. Not in your pockets.”
“Yes. I remember. Mem. Ber.” He pulled his sneakers out of his pockets and looked at them helplessly. Rachel and Cassie each took a foot and got him laced up.
“People are going to think he’s weird,” Rachel said, sounding exasperated.
“Fortunately, it’s the mall on a Saturday morning,” I pointed out. “It’ll be full of weird people.”
“Not
this
weird,” Rachel said. “This could be trouble.”
“Isn’t it a little late for you to admit that I was
right and this idea is insane?” I asked her. “Besides, no need to worry. I’ll be there.”
“Great. Then it’s sure to be a disaster.”
We caught the bus without any problem. Ax made strange mouth noises the entire trip, but the bus was mostly empty.
We got to the mall right on time.
“So far, so good,” Jake said as we headed into the mall.
I rolled my eyes. “Jake? Do me a favor. Don’t ever say ‘so far, so good.’ The only time anyone
ever
says ‘so far, so good’ is right before everything blows up in his face.”
“So far. So far. Farrrrr. Faaaar,” Ax said, trying out the sounds. “So. Sssso far so so so good.”
“Oh, man,” I said.
T
he mall was a zoo. Wall-to-wall people. Old people moving real slow. Married people with squalling babies in big, huge strollers. High school kids trying to look cool. Mall police trying to look tough. Good-looking girls carrying bags from clothing stores.
Your basic Saturday at the mall.
“Okay, where is Radio Shack?” Jake wondered.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Is it up on the second level? You know, down by Sears?”
“Is that it? Or is that the computer place?”
“Let me check the map over there. Ax? Come on
with …” Jake stopped suddenly. “Marco? Where is Ax?”
I spun around. “He was right here!”
Bodies everywhere! All I saw were bodies. Men, women, boys, girls, babies. But no aliens. At least not that I could see. We had lost Ax!
It had taken a total of about two minutes for us to mess up.
Then, suddenly, I saw a strangely familiar face. “There he is! On the escalator!” “How did he get all the way over there?” Jake demanded.
We took off after him, but it was so crowded we could barely move. Jake started pushing his way through. I grabbed him by the arm.
“Don’t run, man. The mall cops will think you’re ripping something off. Besides, we can’t attract attention. Controllers shop, too.”
Jake slowed instantly. “You’re right. This many people, some of them are sure to be Controllers.”
We threaded our way, moving as quickly as we could without being too obvious. I just kept saying “excuse me, excuse me,” and tried not to bump into anyone who looked like he’d get mad and pound me.
It seemed to take forever to reach the escalator. By then we had totally lost sight of Ax.
“As long as he doesn’t demorph we’re okay,” Jake said. “I mean, what’s the worst he could do?”
“Jake, I don’t want to think about the worst he could do,” I said.
“There!”
“Where?”
“Over at Starbucks.”
I’m not as tall as Jake so I couldn’t see him as easily. But as we got near Starbucks, I spotted him. He was standing patiently in line.
We got to him just in time to hear him say, “I’ll have … I-yull, Ile, have a double latte, too. Double. Bull. Bull. Latay ay ay.”
“He must have heard someone else say it,” I whispered to Jake.
“Caff or decaf?” the clerk asked.
Ax stared. “Caff? Caff caff caff?”
“That will be three fifty-five.”
Ax stared some more. “Fi-ive.”
Jake reached into his pocket and yanked out the money he’d brought to pay for things at Radio Shack. “Here you go,” he said, peeling off four dollars.
I took Ax’s arm and guided him to the pickup counter. “Ax,
don’t
go off on your own, okay? We almost lost you.”
“Lost? I am here. Hee-yar.”
“Yeah, look, just stay close, okay?” I gave Jake a
look. “See? It’s your fault. You said, ‘so far, so good.’” The Starbucks guy handed Ax a paper cup. Ax took it. He looked around to see what other people were doing. Like them, he put a sleeve on his cup. Then, still mimicking the others, he attempted to drink.
“Um, Ax?” I said. “You have to drink where the little hole is in the lid.”
“A hole! In the lid! No spills! Ills!”
This was the coolest thing Ax had ever seen. I guess coffee cup technology hasn’t advanced very far on the Andalite home world. Probably because they don’t have mouths, and so drinking is not a big concern. But whatever the reason, Ax wouldn’t shut up about it.
“So simple! Imple. And yet so effective!”
“Yeah, it’s a real miracle of human technology,” I said.
“I have wanted to try other mouth uses. Drinking. Eating.” Then, as an afterthought, he added, “Eeeeting. Ting.”
“Just line the little hole up with your mouth,” I said. “Come on, there’s Radio Shack. We’ve already lost, like, ten minutes.”
The two of us hemmed Ax in and herded him toward Radio Shack.
Then he drank the coffee.
“Ahhh! Ohhh! Oh, oh, oh, what? What? What is that?!”
“What?” I asked, alarmed. I swiveled my head back and forth, looking for some danger.
“A new sense. It … I cannot explain it. It is … it comes from this mouth.” He pointed at his mouth. “It happened when I drank this liquid. It was pleasant. Very pleasant.”
It took a few seconds for Jake and me to realize what he was talking about. “Oh. Taste! He’s tasting it,” Jake said. “He doesn’t normally have the sense of taste.”
“At least he stopped repeating sounds,” I muttered.
“Taste,” Ax said, contradicting me. “Aste. Tuh-aste.”
He drank his coffee and we rushed him to Radio Shack.
“Okay, look, Ax, we have very little time. See if the stuff you need is here.”
I’ll say this for Ax. He may have been a little weird by human standards, but the boy knows his technology. I mean, he went down the pegboards in the back of the store and just started lifting off different components.
“This must be a primitive
gairtmof,”
he said, inspecting a small switch. “And this could be a
sort of
fleer
: very primitive, but it will work.”
In ten minutes’ time he’d accumulated a dozen components, ranging from coaxial cable to batteries to things I didn’t even recognize.
“Good,” he said at last. “All I lack is a Z-Space transponder. Transponder. PONder.”
“A what?”
“A Z-Space transponder. It translates the signal into zero space.”
I looked at Jake. “Zero space?”
Jake looked back at me and shrugged. “Never heard of it.”
Ax looked doubtful. “Zero space,” he repeated. “Zeeeero. The opposite of true space. Anti-reality.” He looked patiently from one of us to the other. “Zero space, the nondimension where faster-than-light travel is possible. Bull. Possi-bull-uh.”
“Oh,” I said sarcastically.
“That
zero space. Um, Ax? Sorry to be so primitive and all, but we don’t have faster-than-light travel. And I’ve never heard of zero space.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.
Oh.”
“Let’s get this stuff and worry about the other thing later,” Jake said calmly. But I could tell he was getting slightly angry. “I’ll go pay for this stuff.”
Ax drained the last of his coffee. “Taste,” he said.
“I would like more taste.” He cocked his head. “I smell things. I believe … buh-leeve … blee … bleeve … there is a connection between smell and taste.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “We can’t travel faster than light, but we can make a sticky bun that smells pretty good.”
“Sticky,” Ax said. “Must I carry this?” he asked, indicating his empty coffee cup.
“No, you can just throw it away.”
Bad choice of words. Ax threw the coffee cup. He threw it hard. It hit one of the cashiers in the head.
“Hey!”
“Sorry, it was an accident, man,” I yelped, rushing to the cashier. “He’s … he’s sick. He, um, has this condition. You know, like out-of-control spasms.”
Jake said, “Yeah, it’s not his fault. It’s like a seizure!”
The clerk rubbed his head. “Okay, forget it. Besides, he’s out of here and that’s all I care about.” “He’s what?”
Jake and I turned fast. But Ax was gone.
Jake grabbed the bag of stuff and raced after me out into the stream of people.
Ax was nowhere to be seen.
But then I looked down at the lower level. There was a crowd of people kind of surging. All moving
in the same direction. Like they were running to see something.
“They’re heading toward the food court,” Jake said.
“Oh, I have a
very
bad feeling about this,” I said.
We ran for the escalator. We shoved down it, yelling “excuse me” every two seconds.
We got to the food court. We wormed our way through a crowd of laughing, giggling, pointing people.
And there, all alone—because all the sane people had pulled away—was Ax.
He was racing like some lunatic from table to table, snatching up leftover food and shoving it in his mouth.
As I watched he grabbed a half-eaten slice of pizza.
“Taste!” he yelled as he took a huge bite. He threw the rest of the pizza through the air. It just missed the mall cop who was closing in on him.
Ax couldn’t care less. He had found a piece of Cinnabon. “This was the smell!” he cried. He jammed the roll in his mouth. “Ahhh! Ahhh! Taste! Taste! Wonderful! Ful. Ful.”
“They
do
make a good sticky bun,” I muttered to Jake.
“We have to get him out of here,” Jake hissed.
“Too late. Look! Three more mall cops.” The cops jumped at Ax.
Ax decided it was a good time to throw the rest of the bun away. It hit the nearest cop in the face.
“Ax! Run! Run!” I yelled.
I guess I got through, because Ax ran.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t run very well in his two-legged human morph.
So as he ran and stumbled, chased by huffing, puffing mall police, he began to change.
S
top!” a cop yelled. “I am ordering you to halt!”
But Ax wasn’t interested in halting. He was panicked.
A woman stepped out of the Body Shop holding a bag full of colorful jars. Ax plowed into her. The bag went flying.
The stalks began to grow out of the top of his head. The extra eyes appeared on the ends and turned backward to watch the people chasing him.
Jake and I were two of those people. We were ahead of the cops, but not by much. Fortunately,
I guess the cops assumed we were just idiots running along for fun.
I could hear one of the cops yelling into his walkie-talkie. “Cut him off at the east entrance!”
Legs began to grow from the chest of Ax’s human morph. His own front legs, small at first, but growing rapidly.