The Boy from Earth (3 page)

“This is the basement, right?” I ask.

Norbert nods. –
Betunkaville is a walled territory, with the royal palace as part of the wall. The secure strategy center, where we are now, is in the basement of the palace. You're in the safest part of the hemisphere right now.

Butterbean is ahead of us. He stops to beckon us onward. “This way, my prince,” he calls, in his light voice.

Norbert waves.

“Do you want me to call you Prince too?” I ask.

–
It would be appropriate. But I wouldn't expect it of an earthling.

“Hey, don't knock us earthlings,” I say. “We're saving your planet.”

Butterbean reaches a narrow door, and ducks into it. Norbert follows easily, but I have to turn sideways to
fit. My stomach scrapes against the side of the doorway.

The size of a building, indeed!

We're in an anteroom, rounded and dark. I feel like I'm inside a loaf of pumpernickel bread. Four guards stand in front of an arched doorway on the far side of the room. They wear uniform pants and jackets that stick to their skin like glue, and tight-fitting combat helmets. I recognize them at once – army men. I had a set like them when I was little. There's a guy about to throw a grenade and a guy with his rifle stuck out sideways and a pair in charge of a bazooka.

“Geez!” says the rifle guy, hoarsely. “Look at him!”

By “him,” they mean me. They all stare.

“He's even bigger than they said,” says one of the bazooka guys.

The rifle guy salutes as Norbert passes. He nods, and follows Butterbean into the next room. I follow at a slight distance. The guards stare as I crouch to get through the arched doorway.

It's a lab with benches and sinks and Bunsen burners like science class at school, only without Mr. Buchal and his elaborate sarcasm. (You want permission to go to the bathroom, Dingwall?
Permission?
Surely you jest! You have my enthusiastic approval, my unbridled support for your quest! By all means, go to the bathroom, Dingwall. I insist! And feel free to stay as long as you like!)

Mr. Buchal looked like a needle, and had a voice to match. The man at the far end of the lab is his exact opposite: short, round, and booming.

“Behold!” he cries, in a voice of thunder. He has hair the way Arnold Schwarzeneggar has muscles – lots, and all over the place.

“Mad Guy?” I whisper to Norbert.

–
Mad Guy
, he whispers back.

“Behold the boy from Earth!” Mad Guy declaims, more like a church minister than a scientist. He moves towards us in a weird rolling gait. An old old man down the street from me walks like that because he lost his leg in the war. I don't know which one (which war, I mean. It was his right leg). “This is a proud day for our planet!” he cries. “Welcome, Earthling! Welcome back, Prince Norbert.”

He has his hands full, balancing a tray. On it are three thimbles and one good-sized cup. Steam rises from them. I can't smell anything through my helmet, but I can guess what's in the mugs.

–
Ah, cocoa!
cries Norbert.
Mad Guy, you think of every thing!

“Yes, cocoa! Cocoa for heroes!” cries the little round man, in his booming voice. “Cocoa and fruit. Come and eat and drink!”

He's smaller than Norbert and Butterbean – not even up to my waist – but he lifts the tray onto a workbench without spilling a drop. There's little cakey things as well. They don't look like fruit to me.

Trying to hop onto a stool, Mad Guy overbalances and falls to the floor. He then begins to topple slowly backward, arms flailing. His center of gravity is so low that he
stops at an impossible angle, and then his whole body snaps back to vertical. His head, moving through a big arc, strikes me forcefully in the side of my right knee. I go down like a felled tree, bruising my shoulder under the space suit and knocking my head against the stone floor, sending my helmet flying.

I'm not seriously hurt. More embarrassed, really. Sitting up, rubbing my head, blinking in the lab's bright light, I realize two things.

First, that I can see. I mean, really see. When my friend Nick, who is extremely nearsighted, got his first pair of glasses back in kindergarten, his world changed for the better. He told me about it later. “I wasn't caring how much of a Poindexter I looked,” he said. “I was like: Wow! That thing on the floor is my baby brother! I thought it was a dog all this time.” That's how I feel with my helmet off. I can see. If you really need your glasses, you'll know what I mean.

The walls are smooth and kind of light brown, except for a dark square of
TV
screen. Butterbean's vest is yellow, and Mad Guy's wild stick-out hair is white, like Albert Einstein's. And Mad Guy is short and moves oddly because he's got no legs – just a rounded bottom half. He's like that Daffy Duck punching bag I had when I was little: I'd knock it down, and it'd come bouncing right back at me. Daffy could floor me then, and Mad Guy can floor me now.

The second thing I realize is, that without my helmet, I am breathing Jupiter air. And it's fine. In fact, it's beautiful – full of the heady scent of dark chocolate.

“How can I be breathing?” I ask Mad Guy. I'm not worried, but perhaps I should be. “Why am I breathing? I should be dead. Why aren't I dead?”

Mad Guy holds my helmet in one hand. His eyes are wide open and interested. His mouth has a humorous twist. “Who can answer that question?” he says. “Not me. I am only a scientist. I can tell you that you are breathing. I can tell you how you breathe. I can tell you that breathing keeps you alive. But I cannot answer why you are breathing.”

He shakes his head, and pitches the helmet away. “You want a theologian,” he says. “Or a philosopher. Or a psychologist.”

“Actually,” I say, “I want something to drink.”

He laughs, and helps me up, pushing me back onto my feet. “Good for you, son. That's the right attitude. I am glad to see you. My name is Guillermo, but they call me Mad Guy.”

I introduce myself, and lower myself slowly onto a stool. When I'm finally down there, my legs stick out the other side of the table. Butterbean is beside me. His whiskers are covered in cocoa.

“You have an exceedingly droll aspect, boy from Earth!” he exclaims. “Your outer integument appears to have been burnt.”

I frown. “Are you talking about my red hair?” I've had it since I was born. I'm used to it. “It's that color naturally,” I say.

Mad Guy is sitting up at the table himself now. He pushes the big mug towards me, and gestures to the plate
of fruit. “Have some cocoa. And something to eat. You have a long journey ahead of you, and a difficult task when you get there.”

He's talking about finding the castle and beating the Dey. “How long?” I say. “And how difficult?”

“Ah,” he says. “Those are good questions.”

I take a bite of fruit. It's flaky, like pie, and sweet. Weird, but tasty. I ask Norbert what it is, and he tells me it's pace, which means nothing to me, and then I remember him making a joke in school about the pace-trees of Jupiter.

“Hey!” I say. “This does taste like pastry!”

–
That's what I said. There's a huge pace-tree in Nerissa's garden in Sheldonburg. I remember we used to …
He stops, and his view screens go blank.

You've probably worked it out already, but I now realize that they're not view screens. They may look like they're part of a space helmet, but the two tear-shaped screens are his eyes. He brushes his arm across them.

–
Sorry
, he says.

Poor guy. Is this what love does to you? I wonder. Would I feel like that if the Black Dey took Miranda away? (She's a girl I kind of like, back home in Cobourg. Brown hair falling soft as summer rain, bright eyes, a strong right foot from all the soccer she plays.) I'd like to see him try to take Miranda. She'd kick a goal with him.

While I eat, Mad Guy asks me about the despacer Norbert used to get me here. Did it hurt? Could I feel it working? I tell him about being in the minivan and watching myself shrink lower and lower in the seat, until
I woke up in Norbert's spaceship. He shakes his head.

“The scale is so confusing,” he says. “The idea that one of our spaceships could fit inside your nose is amazing to me, but not as amazing as the idea that you could then be shrunk so small that you could fit into that spaceship. And all because of the space between atomic particles.”

I'd ask more about the despacer, but I'm sure I wouldn't understand. I mean, I couldn't even understand Mr. Buchal's explanation of the carbon cycle. I raise my cup, and nearly choke because the stuff inside is so good! It's sweet and thick and strong, like drinking a chocolate bar. I feel warmth and energy and sweetness flooding into me, like sunlight through a newly-opened window.

“This is wonderful cocoa,” I say.

Mad Guy nods solemnly. “Yes, it is.”

The overhead lights are out. An image flickers on the lab TV screen. Not a photograph – more like one of those artist's representations of the accused during a trial.

“Behold,” says Mad Guy again, in his preacher voice.

It's hard to work out what I'm seeing. A vaguely human shape, billowy dark garments and a black helmet. One muscular arm clutches an enormous double-bladed sword. The image moves jerkily across the screen, like a cheap cartoon.

“This is the Black Dey, Dingwall: the enemy whose doom you are supposed to bring about. I'm sorry I can't give you a better sense of what he looks like,” says Mad Guy.

“We interviewed hundreds of eyewitnesses in order to attempt a consensus,” says Butterbean. “The discrepancies
in their testimonies made this impossible. All they had were impressions: enormous size, a swirling cloak, a helmet, a long sword.”

“The problem,” says Mad Guy, “is that we got these witnesses after the Dey had finished with them.”

“Oh. And I guess they weren't feeling well,” I say.

“They weren't making sense. They'd been beaten by the Scourge.”

I make a face. None of us says anything. None of us wants to think about what will happen to Nerissa if I don't save her.

“The Scourge?” I ask. “What's that?”

I hear a delicate slurping sound: Butterbean finishing his cocoa. The picture on the
TV
screen spreads a cold gray light around the room, like twilight in December.

“We don't know much about the Scourge,” says Mad Guy. “We don't even know if it exists for sure. The witnesses are confused. One of them called the Scourge a spider; another said it was a crowd of people. The stories don't make any sense.”

I lean towards Norbert. “Did you know about the Scourge?”

–
I'm just a prince, here. No one tells me anything.

I peer closely at the pictures on the screen. I can't see anything to measure the Dey against. “How big is he?” I ask.

“Big!” cries Butterbean. “All the witnesses say that. And with a black helmet.”

“Yes, but what does big mean? Big like a baseball stadium? Big like a telephone pole? Big like an extra
helping of mashed potatoes?”

I can sense Mad Guy shrugging in the dark. “Who knows?” he says. “Big enough to be scary. Apparently you never see him and the Scourge together. We wonder if the Scourge might actually be the Dey, in some kind of disguise. Maybe when he takes his helmet off, he becomes the Scourge.”

“One witness described the Scourge as a giant snake,” says Butterbean, with a shiver of his own. Of course, he wouldn't like snakes much.

I tilt my cup all the way and find a trickle of cocoa at the bottom. Cold cocoa, but it's still really good. We watch the cartoon Dey swing his sword over his head, one-handed, and move brokenly across the screen. He looks like a medieval knight.

“Do I get a sword too?” I ask. “If I'm going to fight him, I'll want a weapon.”

“You'll get all you need from the gym,” says Butterbean. “I don't know about a sword, but there'll be something for you there. Slippers, for sure.”

“Slippers?”

“For traveling. You'll have to cross a lot of country.”

Butterbean clitter-clatters away to turn on the lights. I'm thinking about the slippers. How are they going to help my travel?

Mad Guy levers himself down from the table, rolls sideways, and bounces back upright again. This time I don't try to help him.

Norbert gets down too. –
Come on, Dingwall. We'd better be on our way. Thanks for the briefing, Mad Guy. The gym, is two claps up, right, Butterbean?

“Correct, my prince.”

Mad Guy bows to Norbert, and shakes my hand. “Good luck, son,” he says.

Butterbean shows us a circle in the floor at the back of the lab. About the size of a manhole cover, and bright bright green.

–
Clap twice, Dingwall
, says Norbert.
Then step inside. Like this.
He claps his hands once, twice. Then he steps forward into the green circle, and disappears.

I look a question at Mad Guy. “It's a transporter,” he explains. “Clap once for each stage you wish to bypass. The gym is two claps up from here. When you're finished with the gym, come to the map room. Four more claps.”

There's a faint hissing noise coming from the green circle. “It's really just a vacuum,” says Butterbean.