George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt (7 page)

When the plane landed, George and Gran joined the line to get through immigration and customs. Eric and Annie were waiting in the arrivals area. Annie shrieked and jumped up and down on the other side of the barrier as soon as she saw him.

“George!” she hollered. “George!” She ducked under the rail and grabbed him. She was taller and more tan than he remembered. She hugged him and whispered in his ear, “It is sooooo good you are here! Can't tell you now, but we are in an emergency! But remember, shush! Say nothing.” She took his cart and careered off with it toward Eric. Gran and George hurried after her.

George had a shock when he saw Eric. He looked so tired, with some strands of white in his dark hair. But he smiled when he saw George, and his face lit up just like it used to.

They said their hellos, and Gran shook hands with Eric and got him to write down comments in her notebook. Then she gave him an envelope marked
George's Emergency Fund
, hugged her grandson, grinned at Annie, and went off to greet her friends, who had come to the airport to meet her. “A bunch of old rogues and rebels from my past, who live near Eric and Susan,” she had told George. “Nice chance for us to relive some of our hijinks.”

But the people who came to pick up Gran were so old and wobbly-looking, George couldn't imagine them ever being young, let alone having an adventure. Gran tottered off into the distance with them, and he felt his stomach shrink as he watched her leave. It seemed very big and bright here in America—everything was much shinier and larger and louder than it was at home. A wave of homesickness struck him. But not for long.

A smaller boy with thick glasses and a very peculiar hairstyle had appeared from behind Eric.

“Greetings, George,” he said earnestly. “Annie”—he shot her a look of total disgust—“has told me all about you. I have been eagerly anticipating interfacing with you. You sound a most interesting person.”

“Back off, Emmett,” said Annie fiercely. “George is
my
friend, and he's come to see
me
, not you.”

“George, this is Emmett,” Eric told him calmly, while Annie glared at Emmett and Emmett looked away with pursed lips. “He is the son of one of my friends. Emmett is staying with us for a while this summer.”

“He's the son of doom, more likely,” Annie whispered in George's ear.

Emmett snuck around to George's other side and hissed in his other ear, “The girl humanoid is a total moron.”

“As maybe you can tell,” continued Eric lightly, “there's been a small falling-out between these two.”

“I told him not to touch my Girl's World action doll!” Annie exploded. “And now it only speaks Klingon.”

“I didn't ask her to cut my hair,” Emmett bleated. “And now I look stupid.”

“You looked stupid before,” muttered Annie.

“Better to speak Klingon than just garbage like you,” retorted Emmett. His big eyes, magnified by his glasses, looked very shiny.

“George has had a long journey,” said Eric firmly. “So we are going to take him to the car and drive home,
and everyone is going to be nice to everyone else. Do you hear me?” He sounded quite stern.

“Yes!” said George.

“It's all right, George,” said Eric. “You're always nice. It's the other two I'm worried about.”

E
ric drove them to the big white wooden house where his family now lived. The sun was beating down from the perfectly blue sky, and the heat rose up from the ground to smack George in the face as he got out of the car. Annie scrambled out after him. “Come on,” she said as Eric unloaded George's bag from the trunk. “We've got work to do. Follow me.” She took him around to the back of the house, where a huge tree shaded a veranda with a table and chairs on it.

“Up the tree!” Annie instructed him. “It's the only place we can talk!” She shinned up to a large overhanging branch. George slowly clambered after her. Susan had come out onto the veranda, carrying a tray. She stood underneath Annie and George, with Emmett close behind her.

“Hello, George!” she called up into the tree. “It's nice to see you! Even if I can't actually see you.”

“Hello, Susan,” George called back. “Thanks for inviting me.”

“Annie, don't you think George might like a rest?
And something to eat and drink after his journey?”

“Give it to the tree,” said Annie, sticking her head out through the papery green-and-white leaves. She reached down with an arm and grabbed a juice box, which she handed back to George, and then a load of cookies.

“Okay, we're good now!” she sang. “Bye, other people! You can vamoose!”

Emmett just stood there, looking longingly up into the tree.

“Can Emmett come up and join you?” asked Susan.

“Quite literally,” said Annie, “no. He might fall out of one of the brancheroonies and damage his amazing brain cell count. Better stay safely on the ground. Ciao, you guys! George and I are busy.”

From the tree, they heard Susan sigh. “Why don't you sit here?” she said to Emmett, arranging a chair for him under the branches. “I'm sure they'll come down soon.”

Emmett made a small snuffling noise, and they heard Susan comforting him.

“Ignore him—he's a total crybaby!” Annie whispered to George. “And don't start feeling sorry for him—that's lethal. The minute you show weakness, he pounces. I felt sorry for him the first time he cried. And then he bit me. My mom's too sappy—she just can't see it.”

Susan's footsteps tapped away into the house.

“Okay, hold on to that branch,” ordered Annie, “in case you faint away in shock at what I have to tell you.”

“What is it?” said George.

“Huge news,” confirmed Annie. “So huge-ously huge, your bottom will fall through your pants in surprise.” She looked at him expectantly.

“Well, tell me,” said George patiently.

“Promise you won't think I've gone bananas?”

“Um, well, I pretty much thought you were already,” admitted George. “So that won't change anything.”

Annie swatted him with her free hand.

“Ouch!” he said, laughing. “That hurt.”

“George, are you okay?” came a little voice from below. “Do you need protection from the renegade one? She can be really evil.”

“Shut up, Emmett!” Annie shouted down. “And stop listening to our conversation.”

“I'm not trying to listen!” came Emmett's high-pitched whine. “It's not my fault that you're sending a stream of useless vibrations into the atmosphere.”

“Then go somewhere else!” yelled Annie.

“No!” said Emmett obstinately. “I'm staying here in case George needs my superintelligent assistance. I don't want him to waste his bandwidth on your rudimentary communication.”

Annie rolled her eyes up to heaven and sighed. She inched along the branch toward George and whispered in his ear: “I've had a message from aliens.”

“Aliens!” said George loudly, forgetting about Emmett below. “You've had a message from aliens!”

“Shush!” said Annie frantically. But it was too late.

“Does the young female humanoid really believe that a life-form intelligent enough to send a message across the vast expanse of space would pick her to receive it?” said Emmett, standing up and looking into the tree. “And anyway, there are no aliens. We have no proof of another intelligent life-form in the Universe at this moment. We can only calculate the probability that on some other planets, there are conditions suitable for forms of extremophile bacteria. Which would have the approximate IQ level of Annie herself. Or probably a bit more. I can calculate the probability of intelligent life for you, if you like, using the Drake Equation.'

“Well, thanks for that, Professor Emmett,” said Annie. “Your Nobel Prize is in the mail. So now why don't you bacteria off yourself? Go find some of your own species to hang out with? Actually, George, there
are
aliens on Earth, and Emmett is one of them.”

“No, no, rewind,” said George urgently. “You've had a message from some aliens? Where? How? What did it say?”

“They sent her a text message to say they would be beaming her up to the mother ship at twenty-one hundred hours,” said Emmett. “We live in hope.”

“Shut up, Emmett.” This time it was George's turn to feel annoyed. “I want to hear what Annie has to say.”

“Okay, here's the scoop!” said Annie. “Settle down, friends and aliens, and prepare to be amazed.”

Below them, Emmett was hugging the tree in an attempt to get closer to them.

George smiled. “I'm prepared, agent Annie,” he said. “Go for it.”

“My amazing story,” began Annie, “starts one ordinary evening when no one could have predicted that for the first time ever in the history of this planet we would finally hear from an ET.

“Me, my family, and I—,” she continued grandly.

“And me!” squeaked Emmett from below.

“And him,” she added, “had just come back from watching a robot land on Mars. Just your everyday family outing. Nothing special. Except that…”