Akiko and the Journey to Toog Read online

  To Conrad Hilberry,

  who taught me about words,

  and David Small,

  who taught me about pictures

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to all the Akiko readers who have demanded “More Poog! More Poog!” over the years. I might never have gotten around to this story if not for you. Thanks to my editor Jennifer Wingertzahn, who helped me write about a character who has no arms and no legs and who speaks a language even I don't understand. A special thank-you to my new book designer, Marci Senders, who is truly a joy to work with. Thanks also to Colleen Fellingham, Emily Jacobs, Channing Saltonstall, and Ashley Caro. And, as always, hugs and kisses to my wife, Miki, and son, Matthew (who is now old enough to draw lovely Poogs of his own).

  My name is Akiko I'm a pretty average fifth grader in a pretty average town that's right in the middle of a pretty average part of the country. My life is for the most part extremely dull. For the most part. It's the least part that's always getting me into trouble. The part that has to do with me being taken off to other galaxies, battling strange aliens, piloting rocket ships, and, on occasion, eating in intergalactic fast-food restaurants.

  People are always telling me not to exaggerate. Which bugs me because I never do. It's just that the things that happen to me tend to happen in a pretty big way. So please don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that the story I'm going to tell you right now is basically about the end of the world. Well, the end of a world, anyway.

  Or a world that nearly came to an end. Very nearly.

  Maybe I'd better just tell the story.

  It all started on my way home from school.

  I had just gone into Chuck's. Chuck's is this convenience store about three blocks from Middleton Elementary. It doesn't look like much from the outside, but it has the biggest supply of bubble gum in town. All the usual gums, of course, but the rare stuff too: Arkey Malarkey's Rain-Bo Day-Glo Sparkle Gum. Captain Zack's Holy Mackerel Rub-A-Dubble Gum. Even Abe & Mabel's Pop-N-Ploppin Super-Supple Bupple-Gum (That's right: Bupple). The gum I bought that day was something I'd never tried before. It was called Dr. Yubble's Ooey-Gooey Double-Trouble Bubble Gum.

  I gave Chuck his money and got my nickel in change. Then I stepped out onto the corner, pulled out a piece of gum, unwrapped it, popped it in my mouth, and chewed.

  So was it double trouble?

  Not really. It was gooey. And ooey. Definitely ooey. But to call it trouble? I don't know. That's going too far.

  Oh well, I thought. At least it's ooey. That's hard to come by in a gum.

  So there I was, chewing gum, standing on the corner of Wabash and Fifth. The light changed and I began to cross the street. But before I got even halfway …

  BUH-WOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo

  A siren! I spun around and found a black-and-white car barreling down the street at me, its siren blasting, its tires weaving back and forth. It squealed to a halt just inches from my legs.

  They're pulling me over? For what?

  I looked around to see if anyone was watching; the last thing I needed was a bunch of gawkers crowding in to see what was going on. I was lucky. The only witnesses were a grandma and her cat peering down from a third-story window across the street, and a grocer, half a block away, squinting from the shade of his awning.

  I turned back to face the patrol car. I'd never been so close to one before. The words MIDDLETON POLICE were painted on the hood, black on white. On the roof of the car was not one but eight flashing lights, each spinning and strobing a different color. Smoke billowed out in all directions, delivering a stink like an airport runway, only worse.

  This was one weird police car.

  The siren stopped.

  KLAKKA-K'CHAK!

  A door popped open in the middle of the hood, and out came a small mechanized megaphone. It could have come from a sci-fi movie, except it looked more like a sixth grader's homemade science project. It rose into a position between me and the windshield and rotated until it was pointed directly at my head.

  A crackle of static, then:

  “Please step over to the door of the vehicle, Aki—”

  A pause.

  “—er, little girl.”

  I took a few steps toward the driver's side of the car.

  Aki—? Whoever was manning that megaphone had started to say my name. And he sure didn't sound like a policeman. He sounded an awful lot like …

  “Not that door.” A cough. “The other one.”

  I stopped in my tracks, reversed direction, and walked to the passenger's side of the car. There was a muffled whump and all the lights on the roof went out. Then they flashed on again. Finally there was a louder whump and they went out for good.

  This was not the Middleton Police.

  The passenger-seat window went down, and there before me was Mr. Beeba. He was dressed in his usual brown space suit and oversized yellow gloves but was wearing dark glasses for some reason.

  “Quickly, Akiko!” he whispered, the words coming from both his mouth and the megaphone. “Into the backseat!”

  “Shut off the dagnabbed speaker thing, will ya,Beebs?” Spuckler Boach was at the wheel, unshaven chin, scraggly blue hair, and all. “You're whisperin' to the whole dang neighborhood!” Mr. Beeba twisted a knob on the dashboard and with great effort managed to get the megaphone switched off and back under the hood. Through the open window I could just make out the silhouette of Gax in the backseat, his robot head quivering nervously on his long, spindly neck.

  “HELLO, MA'AM,” he said.

  “Quickly!” Mr. Beeba said again, this time without the echo of the megaphone.

  It's funny. Seeing my friends from the planet Smoo hiding in a police car was one of the silliest things I'd ever laid eyes on. They just looked so ridiculous. But something told me—the expressions on their faces, mostly—that this was no laughing matter.

  “Please, Akiko.” Mr. Beeba's brow was furrowed into several chunky wrinkles. “Time is of the essence. We'll explain later.”

  These guys. They always explained later.

  “Now, hang on a second,” I said. “This, uh …” I waved a hand in front of me. “This isn't a real police car.”

  Mr. Beeba adjusted his dark glasses. “It's not only a police car, no.”

  I narrowed my eyes.

  “It's a spaceship, isn't it?”

  He and Spuckler both nodded.

  I took another long look at the boxy black-and-white car parked in front of me. It was hard to believe this thing had just rocketed through a half-dozen distant galaxies before landing near the corner of Wabash and Fifth.

  “There ain't no time for chitchat, 'Kiko,” Spuckler said, pulling a knob that popped open the back door on my side of the car. “Trust me, you gotta come with us. Right now.”

  I looked across the street and down the block. Both grandma and cat had gone inside their apartment, and the grocer was busily rearranging a pyramid of grapefruits with his back turned to me. No one would notice a thing. But …

  “Guys, guys, guys. We've got to make some rules here. This whole zooming-into-Middleton-c'monAkiko-let's-go thing is really starting to get on my nerves.”

  “It's Poog,” Mr. Beeba said.

  Poog. I leaned over to get a better view of the car's interior. My round, purple floating friend was nowhere to be seen.

  “He's in trouble.” Mr. Beeba took off his dark glasses, revealing panicked eyes. “Grave, grave trouble.”

  Poog? In trouble?

  That changed everything.

  I shook my backpack off my shoulders as quickly as I could and scrambled into the back of the car, slamming the door behind me. Spuckler and Mr. Beeba smiled from the front seat, both vi
sibly relieved.

  “What are you waiting for?” I said. “Poog's in trouble. Go!”

  I'd almost forgotten the most important part of leaving Earth: the replacement robot.

  “Where is she?” I asked as Spuckler pulled into a nearby alleyway.

  “In the trunk.” He stopped and yanked a lever. There was a loud wunk directly behind me.

  “The trunk? You've had my replacement robot trapped back there all this time?”

  “She's a robot, Akiko,” Mr. Beeba explained. “Robots don't mind being locked in trunks. They're very used to that sort of thing, I assure you.”

  “TYPICAL,” Gax said with an indignant squeak.

  A moment later I was looking at myself—or a pretty good copy of me, anyway—standing outside the car. She had the exact same clothes as me, the same pigtails, everything.

  dunk dunk dunk

  She was knocking on the glass.

  “Yes?” Mr. Beeba lowered the window nearest me. “What is it?”

  “The backpack,” said the Akiko robot. “I'll be needing that.”

  “Oh jeez, yeah,” I said, handing it to her. “Good luck! I'll be back, uh …”

  I looked questioningly at Mr. Beeba. He shrugged.

  “… whenever.”

  I fastened my seat belt and watched as the Akiko robot trotted back to Wabash Avenue and continued my walk home.

  “All righty, folks,” Spuckler said, “hold on to your heinies!” He hammered a button on the dashboard: The entire car noisily hoisted itself upright like a dog rising on its haunches. Soon the hood was pointed straight up at the sky and we were all flat on our backs, feet in the air.

  Spuckler revved the engines and the car began to lift off. “Say goodbye to planet Orth!”

  “Earth!” I shouted, but I'm pretty sure he didn't hear me.

  The walls of the alley blurred and zipped away as we shot up over the rooftops. The car filled with sunlight. Middleton and the countryside around it twirled off beneath the clouds. Within seconds we passed through the upper reaches of the atmosphere and rocketed out into the stars. Peering through the back window, I watched the blue-and-green circle of Earth shrink, shrink, shrink and finally vanish altogether.

  I slumped into the cushions of the backseat. All right. Time to find out what was going on.

  “What sort of trouble is Poog in?”

  Mr. Beeba turned to me from the front seat. “We're not exactly sure. As with so many matters pertaining to Poog, it's all a bit of a mystery, I'm afraid.”

  “Oh, come on. You must know something.”

  “Yes, well, a few days ago Poog received an urgent distress call from his home planet….”

  “Toog?”

  “Ah, you remember.” Mr. Beeba tapped a finger on his temple. “That's a real gem of a brain you've got there, Akiko. Such a shame you're frittering it away at Middleton Elementary. When are you going to start pursuing a master's degree, that's what I'd like to know.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Only Mr. Beeba could go off on a tangent at a time like this. I turned to Spuckler. “So Poog got a distress call from the planet Toog. Then what?”

  “Well, he kinda flipped out, 'Kiko,” Spuckler said, turning to shoot a glance at me, “which—you know Poog—ain't somethin' he does too often.”

  “Flipped out?”

  “Oh yeah, he was practically bouncin' his little purple self off the walls, yammerin' away about how the whole darn planet was in a world of hurt. So he took off for Toog all by himself, jus' as fast as his legs would carry him. If he had legs. You get what I mean.”

  “You guys let him go there all alone?” I asked. “When the whole planet was in danger? What are you, nuts?”

  “WE HAD NO CHOICE, MA'AM,” Gax said. “HE INSISTED ON US NOT JOINING HIM.”

  “Really? That's weird.”

  “Oh, but it isn't, Akiko,” Mr. Beeba said. “The inhabitants of Toog believe their planet is very sacred—one of the universe's holiest places, in fact. It is a violation of their principles for any non-Toogolian to set foot on its surface.”

  “So where are we going right now?”

  Mr. Beeba's mouth curled into a half smile. “Why, Toog, of course.”

  I looked at Mr. Beeba, then Spuckler, then Gax.

  “I take it we're about to violate some sacred principles.”

  Spuckler spun all the way around. “Well, what th' heck else are we s'posed to do? Here Poog goes high-tailin' it off into the thick of danger, tellin' us he'll be right back an' everything'll be just fine 'n' dandy. Then we don't hear a peep out of him for three solid days.”

  “Clearly something has gone wrong,” Mr. Beeba said. “Much as I hate to desecrate holy ground, I'm afraid we've got to find Poog and make sure he's not been hurt.”

  I stared out the window at the sea of stars flowing by. “A whole planet in trouble, eh? I wonder what the problem is.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Akiko,” Mr. Beeba said. He paused, then added: “Well, very nearly as good as mine, at any rate.”

  “Do we even know how we're going to find Poog once we get there?”

  “Nope,” Spuckler said.

  I was beginning to get a very bad feeling about this whole situation. We were heading to a planet none of us had ever been to before—a place where we were apparently not the least bit welcome—to deal with some sort of terrible threat that we knew absolutely nothing about. It sounded like an excellent recipe for total disaster.

  But one thing was clear: Poog was in trouble. And if Poog was in trouble, I wanted to be right there in trouble with him.

  An hour or so passed. The more I thought about Poog, the more I realized how little I knew about him. He was such an important part of our team, but I could hardly tell you anything about his past, his likes and dislikes, or even if he had any family. After all the adventures we'd been on together, and even though I felt some sort of special … I don't know, connection with him, I had to admit I knew practically nothing about what was hidden behind that round purple face and those shiny black eyes.

  Finally the planet Toog came into view. It was a tiny thing, probably a tenth the size of Earth, completely hidden beneath a white shield of cloud cover. As we circled it, we came upon something tucked away on the other side: a gigantic space tanker, yellow with black trim.

  “An interstellar transport cruiser,” Mr. Beeba said. “That's odd. Decidedly odd.”

  I leaned over to get a better look. “What's so odd about it?”

  “Ships of this sort are used mainly for transgalactic irrigation, Akiko; they move huge quantities of water from overly wet planets to overly dry ones. I don't recall Poog ever saying that his home planet had an excess of water. Or a paucity of it, for that matter.”

  “Paw-city?” I asked.

  “Paucity. A very important word, Akiko. You should commit it to memory and use it in conversation as often as you can. Think of it as the opposite of surfeit.”

  “Surf-it?”

  “Really, Akiko. You must start carrying a dictionary around with you.”

  “Don't listen to him, 'Kiko,” Spuckler said. “Dictionaries're for sissies.”

  We were steadily moving closer to the vast yellow ship. It was miles from one end to the other, with little orange lamps running its entire length, blinking on and off like lights on a radio tower.

  “Better not get any closer, Spuckler,” Mr. Beeba warned. “We have no idea whether this is a friend or a foe.”

  “Sure we do,” Spuckler said. “It's a foe.”

  Mr. Beeba's face shivered in disbelief. “Then why in heaven's name are you heading directly toward it?”

  “Beeba, we're talkin' about an irrigation ship. What's it gonna do, squirt water on us?”

  “I'M AFRAID I MUST CONCUR WITH MR. BEEBA, SIR,”GAX SAID. “TRANSPORT SHIPS OF THIS SORT, THOUGH GENERALLY UNARMED, ARE SOMETIMES ACCOMPANIED BY …”

  FLOOOOOM!

  Something shot by us on the left, filling the cabin w
ith a flash of blinding white light.

  “… DEFENSE MECHANISMS.”

  “Wh-what was that?” I asked, whirling my head to follow the path of the object.

  “See whatcha done, Beebs? Ya got 'Kiko so nervous she's jumpin' at her own shadow.”

  “She's not jumping at shadows, you nincompoop!” Mr. Beeba growled. “She's jumping at that!”

  A white orb of light, hundreds of yards away, was carving a silent arc through the stars, circling back toward us.

  “Well, I'll be jiminy-jiggered,” Spuckler said. “A spolarian drobe mine. One of them new heat-seekin' models.”

  “Don't just sit there admiring the thing, you fool! Get us out of here!”

  Spuckler took both his hands off the wheel and sighed. “Look. Who's flyin' this ship? You?”

  “Spuckler!” I cried. “It's going to hit us!”

  The glowing white orb grew larger and larger. You could actually hear it rocketing through space.

  ssssssshhhhh

  “Look, 'Kiko, I know you're in the fifth grade an' everything.” Spuckler put one hand on the steering wheel and rested the other on the dashboard. “But don't you think I know a little bit more about spolarian drobe mines than you do?”

  Mr. Beeba was stabbing at the window with his fingers, gasping for air. “It's … it's … it's …” He never did manage to complete the sentence.

  SSSSSSSSHHHHH

  “THREE SECONDS TO IMPACT, SIR,” Gax said.

  The cabin filled with white-hot light. I braced myself for the blow.

  SSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHH

  “TWO SECONDS.”

  SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHH

  “ONE SECOND …”

  ZOOOOOOSSSSHHHH!

  We dropped at top speed, like a roller coaster off its steepest hill. My stomach felt as if it had leaped into my lungs—my head, even. Mr. Beeba's face was smooshed up against the ceiling, surrounded by several of Gax's spare parts, which were plastered into position as if they'd been glued there.

  “Whaa-HOOOOOH!” cried Spuckler. He finally punched a few buttons on the dashboard, abruptly slowing our fall. My stomach relocated to somewhere down around my knees.