He Laughed With His Other Mouths Read online

  They waited for the Dirrillill to leave the roof.

  Up above, he stood near the crumbled edge of the landing pad, smiling to himself lots of times.

  Satisfied, he went inside to eat dinner off Jasper Dash.

  “Okay, okay,” said Katie, panting. “We’ve got to . . . let ourselves . . . down . . . slowly. . . .”

  She loosened her grip and slid down several feet.

  Lily was still dangling up above her. “I can’t let go! I can’t make myself! I can’t!”

  “Just take a deep breath,” said Katie. She listened for a second. Then she said, “Okay. Take fewer deep breaths. Lily? Fewer. Lily! No! If you keep taking that many deep breaths, you’re totally going to faint.”

  Lily unclenched her hands a little from the fabric of electricity.I

  She scraped downward.

  Katie slid down after her.

  They slid and skidded past windows and cannons, clutching the force field.

  Thump!

  They were both on the rocky ground.

  “Now what?” muttered Katie.

  “We have to save Jasper,” said Lily. “Who knows what’s going to happen to him?”

  Katie nodded. “How are we going to get to him?”

  Lily said, “We’ve got to get back in.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Look,” said Lily. “There’s the hatch the food went in. Maybe we can get in through there.”

  “I’m bigger than food.”

  Katie was not actually bigger than many of the things the Dirrillill often ate. I say that in a menacing kind of way.

  There was not much room between the force field and the side of the building. They had to scrunch themselves up and slide along the wall.

  But they were right near the hatch.

  As they approached it, they heard a loud beep. The hatch had seen them.

  * * *

  I Remember: IT’S SCIENTIFIC. DON’T ASK QUESTIONS.

  JASPER TAKES A NOSEDIVE

  Out of the corner of his frozen eye, Jasper could barely see the two lumps examining the food hatch. He struggled to move. He tried to make a sound, but he couldn’t even unclench his teeth.

  He heard the voices of his friends. “I don’t know,” said Lily. “Nothing seems to open the hatch.”

  “You’ve tried pulling?” said Katie. “Maybe the Dillirrillirrillum pulls.”

  “Yeah, and I’ve tried pushing and sliding. You can probably only work the hatch from that button on the counter. If only there was some way to press it . . .”

  Jasper strained. He was on the counter right next to the button. If he could only roll a little bit . . . before the Dirrillill got back . . . he could press it. . . . He could get them in to save him. . . .

  With all his might, he tried to heave.

  And there was a little motion. He actually wobbled.

  Katie said, “Well, we’re going to have to look someplace else. Come on.”

  Jasper heaved again. He rocked a little.

  Lily said, “All right. Maybe there’s another door.”

  No! Jasper thought at them. He rocked desperately. The Big Gulp drinks toppled to the side and spilled. Cheap soda pop crawled across the countertop.

  He could see his friends starting to walk away, smooshed between the force field and the wall.

  Argh! By the Teflon mines of Neptune! he swore. He couldn’t quite roll over. . . .

  The screen clicked off.

  He wanted to sob, but he couldn’t move his face.

  The screen clicked on again. “Did you hear a sound?” Lily said. “It sounded like someone thumping over a loudspeaker.”

  Slowly, deliberately, Jasper began trying to roll over again, tensing his dead arm, his half-thawed leg, and his wooden belly.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” said Katie, shrugging. “Let’s go look around the other side.”

  Jasper could hear his own ragged breathing through his clenched teeth. He tried not to panic. He tried to budge . . . wobbling his hips and shoulders as if he were doing disco. . . .

  “Maybe we’ll have more luck over there,” said Lily miserably. She began to walk away.

  Jasper grunted.

  Almost there . . .

  (Katie had started to climb over a rock.)

  Almost there . . .

  (Lily had climbed over the rock and was outlined against the purple sky.)

  Yes . . . Almost there . . .

  With a final whap! Jasper flipped and hit the button!

  Hurrah!

  And then he kept on rolling . . . No! . . . off the counter and onto the floor. Ouch. He could not move as he lay there. He was behind the counter, smooshed next to the refrigerator.

  But he heard the voices on the monitor. “The little door!” Lily cried out. “It just opened!”

  Jasper panted with relief.

  He heard someone clamber into the food elevator.

  There was a hum as it rose.

  And then he heard a distant noise: many footsteps.

  The Dirrillill was coming down to demand a decision: Earth or Mom.

  Jasper’s father-like-thing was coming back.I

  * * *

  I After Busby Spence’s father got home, he spent months walking from one chair to another chair and then sitting down again. He did not talk much with Busby or with Mrs. Spence. He didn’t seem to listen to much they said. He often cleared his throat.

  Years later, Busby remembered his father always sitting slumped to one side during the last year of the war. Either his left shoulder was higher than his right, or his right shoulder was higher than his left. He sat unmoving, as if he had been paralyzed by some alien freeze ray while smoking a cigarette. His face was pale and large and he breathed smoke and watched people without speaking. He did not seem interested in anything Busby did—in baseball or in reading or in chasing away the raccoons from the tree house. Busby’s father didn’t seem very interested in anything.

  Mr. Spence went out sometimes to try to get work, but they lived too far from cities and there were not many jobs at that point in the war. After a day of hunting for work, he would come home and walk slowly through the rooms, not saying much.

  Busby and his mother learned to sort of ignore Busby’s father. They just went about their business. Busby set the table, and his mother made the supper, and then Mr. Spence arrived and sat down and ate silently, except when he cleared his throat. After supper he got up and went into a different room.

  At first Busby tried talking to him sometimes. Busby’s father shrugged and said nothing. Busby felt then like he himself was the one who had been hit with the freeze ray and his face and even his heart had stopped working. His blood slowed down. He stayed standing right there, not moving—while his father walked away slowly.

  A SIDE OF MASHED DASH

  The little door on the counter slid open, and Katie and Lily uncurled themselves. They were in the kitchen, kneeling in puddles of no-name cola. Faintly, they heard many feet heading their way.

  “The Dirrillill! He’s coming!” whispered Lily.

  “Where’s Jas?”

  “I don’t know! We’ve got to hide!”

  They lowered themselves off the counter.

  Jasper was still mashed next to the fridge. He struggled desperately to make a noise.

  Lily said, “I hope he’s okay.”

  Jasper’s face turned red as he tried to scream.

  The footsteps were getting closer. There was no time to dally. Katie waved to Lily, and the two of them stepped out of the room and into a hallway. They flattened themselves there and listened.

  The Dirrillill stumped into the kitchen, several mouths whistling in harmony.

  Eyes flicked back and forth, up and down.

  “Where, where, where has the Dash kid gone?” said the Dirrillill. He thumped around the counter. “Aha! You fell behind the counter like an old corn chip.” The Dirrillill went over and got a broom from a closet. With several of
his arms, he maneuvered it behind the counter and rattled and bumped and scraped Jasper until the paralyzed Boy Technonaut thumped out onto the kitchen floor. “Voilà!” said the Dirrillill. “Now I’m going to unfreeze you so you can speak.” The Dirrillill shot a faint ray at Jasper’s head.

  Jasper gasped with relief. He squinched his eyes shut. He opened them again. He worked his cheeks.

  “All right, all right,” said the Dirrillill. “It is indeed your dear mother who’s come to visit, I believe. So: Have you made your mind up? Will you help me invade the Earth?”

  Jasper declared, “By Jove, never! Never in a thousand millennia!”

  “Your mother, Jasper Dash. Think of your mother.”

  Jasper fell silent. He didn’t want to have to make a choice.

  “We can do this a different way,” said the Dirrillill.

  “You will never conquer the brave people of—”

  ZAP.

  Jasper was frozen again.

  “Blah-dee blah-dee blah,” said the Dirrillill. “For someone saying, ’No,’ your mouth sure does flap a lot.”

  He heaved Jasper up on several of his shoulders. “Now. We’re going to try something different. We’ll see how this goes: I’m going to use a brain machine to hypnotize you. Then you will follow my every command. By the time this charge wears off, you’ll be back on Earth—and you will have built a larger booth for me there. I will join you. You’ll get to watch as I destroy your civilization.”

  The Dirrillill walked with Jasper through the castle.

  He did not notice that two girl-shaped shadows followed them, trying to keep far enough behind the Dirrillill that he wouldn’t notice them.

  While he walked, the creature said, “Soon, my boy, everything on Earth will reflect the glory of the Dirrillill. I’ll lump your planet’s statues of heroes together so they all have more arms, more legs, more noses. ’Don’t Walk!’ signals will show three hands instead of one. Hah! Just one? Hah! And all of you will help me make more weapons so that I can invade more worlds spread far across the galaxy.”

  The girls snuck along after the Dirrillill through different strange alien chambers. Some had huge round plates moving up and down in stacks.

  Others had lots of spiky levers.

  The girls hung back.

  The Dirrillill and the Boy Technonaut slung over his shoulder had come to some kind of scientific room. There were lots of strange machines and rays and chemicals. The Dirrillill laid Jasper down on an operating table.

  “Now! To get to work!” exclaimed the Dirrillill.

  * * *

  Outside the door, Lily and Katie looked at each other in panic. They heard the Dirrillill calling out medical things to himself: “Brain helmet?”—“Check.”—“Hypnotism glasses?”—“Check.”—“Hypnotism ray?”—“Check.”

  In a minute, Jasper would be a mindless minion of the last Dirrillill!

  Lily said, “We’ve got to stop him.”

  Katie nodded. “No duh.”

  “I think I can lead us back up to those rooms with all the rays and missiles. We can find a ray gun like the Dirrillill’s and freeze him.”

  Katie gave her the thumbs-up.

  They crept away.

  Behind them, there was the eerie, wobbling wail of science fiction machinery.

  Jasper Dash was losing his mind.

  IN THE ALIEN ARMORY

  The girls stood in the fortress’s arsenals, where all the weapons were kept. They looked up in awe at all the explosives and ray guns.

  Lily and Katie were horrified. With this kind of stockpile, even a single Dirrillill could bring the Earth to its pudgy, green-and-blue knees. All a single Dirrillill would have to do was broadcast a message about which city he was going to destroy next—and then take his pick of how to blow it off the map. He could probably just whisper to one of the tiny bombs where to fly—and leave all of Beijing, China, a huge glass pit. He could turn New Delhi, India, into a blackened desert. He could stand on Mount Hood and shoot slices out of Portland, Oregon. Lily imagined Chicago with perfect round holes in the Sears Tower and sight lines through whole sets of old skyscrapers, so that when you stood at one end of the holes, they all lined up, and you could see through the entire city, as through a telescope. And that’s if the Chicagoans were lucky. Otherwise—boom!—the Windy City would just disappear without so much as a soft little breeze left behind. That could be the fate of New York, Paris, Moscow, and Sydney. People all over the globe would be terrified and helpless. They would agree to any interplanetary bully who demanded things then.

  So even a single Dirrillill, Lily realized, could proclaim himself the emperor of Earth. And he didn’t need more equipment than would fit into one—just one—of those flying cars.

  He had to be stopped.

  “What do you think these do?” Katie asked, picking up a little bubbly sphere.

  Lily shook her head and shrugged. She was looking for a ray gun like the Dirrillill’s.

  And then they heard Jasper’s voice. “Lily. Katie. You’re alive.”

  They turned, delighted.

  There stood Jasper Dash, with the Dirrillill looming behind him.

  Jasper had his ray gun pointed right at Lily and Katie. He was ready to fire.I

  * * *

  I More and more, Busby Spence decided that if he had a ray gun, he would not just blow up the enemy, he would blow up everyone.

  He hated the war now. He was tired of it, and he knew everyone else was tired of it too. It just kept going on and on. The president of the United States had died. The Germans had surrendered. But still, out in the Pacific, the battles went on ferociously, island after island, and it seemed like it would never end. There would always be rationing. There would never be enough sugar in the sugar bowl, and the answer about going places in the car would always be, “No. We only have a thimbleful of gas left this week.”

  The spring was wet and cold. Busby’s house was always hazy with his father’s cigarette smoke.

  Busby took all the model planes he had built and brought them down from the tree house, and then he and Harmon dropped rocks on them. They said it was antiaircraft fire. Busby’s squadron was destroyed. The wings were smashed and the cockpits were crunched and everything was in pieces on the dirty snow.

  Then there was nothing left to do.

  The only thing to look forward to was a Science-Fantasy Movie Spectacular. It was going to last all day, featuring several Captain Galactic serials and a full-length Jasper Dash picture (Jasper Dash and the Mystery of Phantom Mesa). They were holding it a couple of towns away at the opera house. It was a benefit for the war effort. In order to get in, you either had to buy US war bonds or bring a piece of scrap to donate. Scrap was the ticket.

  Harmon had earned enough money for some war bonds by babysitting for the Maszlovskis. There was not enough money on Earth to get Busby to take care of that Maszlovski kid. That kid was still at the age where he threw up cheese.

  Busby Spence got other odd jobs to pay for a ticket. He broke up ice for the Lyttons and fetched groceries for Mrs. Benoit. He worked hard to get the money.

  There was no way he was going to miss the Science-Fantasy Movie Spectacular.

  BOMBS AWAY!

  Usually when people in science fiction books have been taken over by brain rays, people try to talk them out of it by telling them to remember love or laughter or something. Katie decided that this was the best way to go, and so she said, “Jasper! It’s Lily and me! We’re your best friends! It’s human to love! It’s human to cry! Think about a baby’s first laugh!”

  “Or just shoot,” suggested the Dirrillill.

  Jasper fired his gun.

  Katie went tumbling backward!

  But only because she was surprised. You’ll remember that Jasper’s battery had been eaten by the electrical people. Being hit with his laser bolt was a little bit like having a flashlight shined at her knees.

  Still, she had dropped the little sphere she was hold
ing.

  “Ha ha,” said Katie. “I guess love always wins over lasers.”

  While the Dirrillill started to make a smart comeback with one mouth, a bunch of eyes saw the little sphere rolling across the floor—and then a bunch of the other mouths yelped. A bunch of arms pointed.

  The sphere Katie had dropped was starting to glow.

  For some reason, the Dirrillill was panicking. He was galumphing toward the door. Behind him, he dragged his hypnotized friend. Jasper’s head reeled in his helmet as he was shoved along by the alien monster.

  “Wait a second!” said Katie. “We have to finish with love winning! What’s the big hurry?”

  Lily pointed at the rolling sphere. “I bet it’s a time bomb or a grenade or something!” she said. “Come on! We have to get out of here!”

  She and Katie ran away from the sphere.

  She wasn’t wrong about it. It was some kind of time bomb, as small as a jawbreaker, but with the power to blow a lot of things up.

  The girls flung themselves up a ramp and out onto the roof. They had to get away from the building before it exploded.

  They could see the Dirrillill shoving Jasper into his flying car.

  Lily pointed at the car next to it. She and Katie started working their way toward it, heaving the force field off their heads.

  It made Katie’s hair very staticky.

  Just as they got to the door of the airship, the Dirrillill’s car lifted off.

  For one glorious second the force field snapped off—the Dirrillill had shut it down. His flying car zoomed away.

  “Come on!” Lily said as they jumped into their aircar. “We’ve got to catch up to him!”

  But the force field came on again, almost as if the Dirrillill were leaning down and shouting, “So long, suckers!”

  “Ohhhhh . . .,” Katie whined, looking up through the windows at the shimmer of energy.

  Lily pulled up controls like she’d seen the Dirrillill do. She looked at all the crazy signs and symbols floating in the air around her two hands. She tried to figure out what he had done.