Clones vs. Aliens (8 page)

Alex crawled over to Fisher.

“
Still
think this was a good idea?” Fisher said.

“Sure do,” Alex said, gasping. “I actually came prepared for just such a situation.” He picked himself off the ground and then limped over to a duffel bag sitting to the bleachers. From it, he pulled out a thick handful of translucent plastic.

“Are those my strength-enhancing sleeves? The ones I’ve been working on in
secret
?” Fisher said pointedly, emphasizing
secret.
Alex acted as if he hadn’t heard. As soon as Mr. Wells was bent over the water fountain, Alex called a huddle and began distributing the sleeves to his teammates.

Fisher scrambled to his feet and yanked Alex back from the crowd. “I only made four of them,” Fisher whispered. “Prototypes.”

“Mm-hm,” Alex said, sliding one of the sleeves onto his right arm and flexing his fingers.

“You stole one and duplicated them!” Fisher said.

“Seems like you’ve figured everything out by yourself,” Alex said, pulling the last of the sleeves onto Fisher’s arms. “Just suit up, ’kay?”

Fisher complied, sighing. Just because they got along now didn’t mean the old Two was gone. Sometimes, Alex’s unpredictability had saved Fisher’s life, and sometimes it filled him with the urge to throw his clone off a house and into a swimming pool full of mustard.

Alex had made an important modification to Fisher’s design—after stealing it, Fisher thought grumpily. The sleeves took on the skin tone of their wearers, becoming nearly invisible once worn.

“Ready?” said Mr. Wells. His whistle shrieked, and the second battle was on.

This time, the students had the firepower they needed. The Gemini were caught totally off guard. They couldn’t dodge the much-faster balls, which whistled through the air like cannon fire.

Fisher ducked under a bright green ball, cocked his right arm back like a baseball pitcher’s, and slung his orange ball at Bee with a stinging
whishhhhh!
Bee tried to sidestep, but his augmented throw tagged her right on the ribs, and she staggered and finally collapsed to the floor. Amanda took a two-step windup, hurling her own orb of rubbery destruction from a full backward extension like a javelin. Anna took the shot on her left hip and flailed, balance gone, until she landed right on top of Bee. A sinister grin curled Amanda’s lip.

Fisher picked up another ball and searched for a new
target. As he held the dodgeball up in a ready position, his bicep twitched. Unfortunately, the sleeve augmented the muscle movement, making Fisher’s arm thrash sideways and slam the ball into his own head.

As Fisher stumbled, he noticed other kids having similar problems. The sleeves were very powerful, but they weren’t fine-tuned. Alex had taken and copied them before Fisher had had time to properly test them. Every few seconds a dodgeball would go flying in a completely random direction.

Despite the malfunctioning sleeves, however, in the end, the humans narrowly prevailed. The Gemini sat or lay on the floor, looks of utter shock on their faces, as the human students let out cheers and excited whoops.

“Round two to Wompalog!” Mr. Wells said. “I knew you just needed to warm up a little. Okay, we can take a water break if you …” He stopped, tilting his head, and his nose began to twitch. “What is that sound? Is—is somebody making
popcorn
?”

Oh, no,
thought Fisher,
not again.

BOOM.

What was left of Mae and Nina had turned a section of the bleachers into a spray of mulch and an enormous puff of sawdust. A thin layer of green glop coated a fair amount of the gym floor. A girl named Kiera was screaming as the other kids flattened themselves to the ground,
clearly assuming they were under attack. Mr. Wells had fallen over, partly from the blast wave, but mostly from surprise. He popped up quickly, doing a rapid check to make sure everyone was all right.

Fisher put his arms around his knees and bowed his head. Sirens were audible in less than a minute.

The Gemini smoothed their hair in unison.

“We would like to play a different game,” said Anna, smiling.

“This whole situation is hovering an inch from disaster,” Fisher said gloomily as he and Alex trudged home from school. “How did this happen?” He kicked angrily at a pile of leaves.

“We weren’t ready for the Gemini, pure and simple,” Alex said, his right hand tapping a nervous rhythm against his right leg. “If Mom and Dad had warned us the Gemini were coming, maybe we could’ve prepared.”

“I doubt it,” Fisher grumbled.

The Bas boys had taken the fall for the explosion in the gym. They’d confessed to using strength-enhancing sleeves and claimed that an external power generator to which they were wirelessly connected must have overloaded. There were so many Gemini, no one had noticed that two of them had been incinerated by the blast.

Because nobody had been hurt, the fire department
had simply confiscated the sleeves, but the fire chief had sternly said that Fisher and Alex could expect to hear from the police soon. Meanwhile, Principal Teed had gotten word and was deliberating on their suspension.

Alex’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He put it to his ear, listened, and groaned.

“Voice mail from Mom,” he said, slipping it back into his pocket. “She and Dad went to a research lab at Stanford this afternoon to do more work on the Gemini. She said that we shouldn’t expect them back tonight. I don’t think the principal got hold of them before they left.
Supposedly
, the Gemini will be confined to their bus until they get back.” Alex made it clear that he thought the possibility unlikely.

But Fisher felt a flare-up of hope. “That gives us time to plan,” Fisher said as the cluster of antennae on top of their house appeared over the rooftops. “I think we need to change our approach.”

“What we need is to give the Gemini an actual education,” Alex said. “We need to teach them what things are like on Earth and why you can’t just blow up when you get annoyed.”

In the house, Fisher and Alex kicked off their shoes like they were stinging insects. Fisher felt like he’d lived two whole lifetimes since the morning. FP romped down the hall from the kitchen, trailing the remains of a
torn-apart cereal box from his tail, and started nuzzling Fisher’s ankles with happy snorts.

Paul ambled on his tentacles down the stairs and gave Alex a few friendly pats. Alex looked at Fisher.

“All right,” said Fisher. “Time for some serious planning. We need mind fuel.”

“Guacamole?” said Alex.

“You know it,” said Fisher.

They trekked into the kitchen. Fisher grabbed a big bag of tortilla chips from the pantry and Alex walked up to the fridge.

“Hey, fridge,” Alex said.

“Greetings, Alexander,” said the fridge in a pleasant, mellow, female voice. It had made a point to be especially courteous since its brief rebellion caused by Three’s chaos signal.

“Is there any guacamole left from last night?” Alex asked.

“Yes,” said the fridge. “You can find it next to the milk on the lowest shelf. I have kept it at optimal temperature. Your mother also requests that you take care not to jostle the middle shelf. She is incubating a semi-intelligent micro-arboreal fungivore.”

“Oh yeah,” Alex said. “The scum-eating fridge tree. She really hates scrubbing you.” He opened the door and swiped a little Tupperware container from inside.

“Most cheerful greetings to you both, my dear boys!” the toaster piped up in his posh English accent. “I trust your day was a success in every regard?”

Lord Burnside sat happily on the countertop, like any other toaster but with much greater poise and refinement. He was capable of very sophisticated conversation but his dreams remained the same: achieving the ideal crunchiness on the topmost layer of a slice of bread.

“Not so much in the lack-of-explosions regard, Lord Burnside,” said Alex, sitting down next to Fisher at the kitchen table and popping the lid off the guacamole as Fisher opened the chips.

“Oh dear,” Lord Burnside said, the glowing spots that served as his eyes dipped in sympathy. After a moment they took a quizzical bend. “Perhaps it is merely my lack of expertise in any other realm than the crisping of whole wheat slices, but it seems that large explosions occur with unusual frequency in your lives. Is this typical?”

“Not quite,” said Fisher, scooping up a healthy amount of the dip with his first chip.

“So what do we do?” Alex asked, the question muffled by a full mouth of chips. “How can we establish a diplomatic relationship with the Gemini when we never know what might literally set them off?”

“Knowledge is always the key,” Fisher said, leaning back in his chair. “We need to understand them in
order to make this arrangement work. And
they
need to understand
us.
As much as they’ve studied us from up in space, they’re clearly missing some important points about human interaction.” He sighed. “We need to clear up some things with them before they come back to Wompalog. I mean, it’s obvious they
mean
well—”

They heard the front door open.

“Huh,” Fisher said. “I guess Mom and Dad came back early.”

Alex’s eyes widened. “Not unless Mom and Dad sound like half the kids at Wompalog,” Alex leapt to his feet and dashed out of the kitchen. Fisher heard the growing babble of voices and raced to the front hallway.

Kids were pouring in the front door. A high percentage of the seventh grade, plus some sixth and eighth graders. Before Fisher or Alex could react, the house was full.

“How’d they get through the gate?” Fisher shouted.

At the center of the throng were the Gemini.

“Fisher,” Alex said, tapping the screen near the door to bring up the front gate camera.

“What the …” Fisher said, staring at the image of Zoe standing in the Liquid Door to keep it open and waving in a few stragglers from school.

“How is it opening for her?” Fisher said, then noticed a small object in Zoe’s hand. “Is that … is that a comb?”

Alex patted his back pocket.

“Yes,” he said. “
My
comb. Mental note, the genetic scanner of the Liquid Door is hypersensitive and needs serious adjustments.”

“We’ll have to get on that if our house is still standing tomorrow,” Fisher groaned.

“What’s going on?” shouted Alex above the clamor, stepping forward to confront the Gemini.

“What’s it look like?” asked Bee. “Everyone at Wompalog’s got so much work to do. Stress is a killer, am I right?”

Bee and Anna executed a perfect fist bump.
A fist bump?
Fisher thought.

“We decided to invite them over for a little fun!” Bee went on.

“I thought—” Alex’s eyes were ticking back and forth frantically, like a metronome gone wild. He gulped. “But what about staying on the bus?”

Anna rolled her eyes and lowered her voice. “We traveled two thousand light-years in a ship to get here! We’re tired of sitting still. Besides—” she sniffed disdainfully. “The bus doesn’t even have Wi-Fi!”

“Wait!” Fisher said, snatching a vase out of George Katz’s hand, which he’d been about to use as a football to hurl across the living room. “We can’t throw parties here! This house is full of experimental technology and potentially dangerous lab equipment!”

Anna and Bee merely shrugged and pushed past them.

“Wait!” Fisher called again. But they were already gone.

He followed four of the Gemini from somewhere in the middle of the alphabet into the kitchen and found the fridge flung wide open.

“Stop!” he said. “That’s our food!”

It was too late. They’d cleaned out the fridge in a matter of seconds. Fisher spotted the fridge tree crawling away by its little branches and managed to grab it before it became Gemini salad.

“Enough,” he said. “If you’re that hungry, you should … what are you still eating, anyway?” The food was gone, but the Gemini still had their mouths full. “Never mind,” Fisher said. “Just … don’t move. I’ll be back.”