Pieces of Gax Read online

  This book is dedicated to

  my dear friend Ian Jackson,

  and to his wife, Francesca,

  and sons, Thomas and George.

  “Roommates for six months,

  Roomies for a lifetime.”

  My name is Akiko. You know how whenever something really amazing happens to you, you just can't wait to tell all your friends about it? And how sometimes the amazing thing that happened to you is so incredible and mind-blowing that even after you've told your friends about it they think you made the whole thing up? And how sometimes you don't even dare to tell any of your friends about the amazing thing that happened to you because it all took place while you were on another planet in a distant galaxy, surrounded by aliens and robots and exploding volcanoes and stuff, and if you were fool-hardy enough to even begin to tell your friends a word of it, they would decide then and there that you were completely and irreversibly out of your mind?

  Don't you hate that?

  Well, hey, right now I don't care whether people who read this think I'm making it up. If they think I'm a few cards short of a full deck, they can go right ahead and think that. My only concern is to put all this stuff down on paper, in the exact order it happened, and to get the details right. Because if I don't write it down and I end up forgetting some of it after a while, that really will make me crazy.

  Here's what you need to know:

  I'm an ordinary sixth grader. A human being, I swear.

  A few years back I became friends with a bunch of space people from a planet called Smoo.

  Since then, every few months or so, these friends of mine come to Earth and say they need to take me into outer space because … well, they've always got one excuse or another, and it always sounds pretty reasonable at the time.

  All right. Now I can tell the story.

  When it comes to meeting up with me on Earth, my friends from Smoo have made some pretty weird entrances over the years: appearing in rocket ships disguised as police cars, intergalactic transit systems on shopping mall rooftops, you name it. But the way they showed up this last time really raised the bar in terms of sheer ridiculousness.

  I was on vacation with my mom and dad. We were staying at my aunt Lucille's house in Minnesota. (Aunt Lucille, who has an unexplainable fondness for big floppy hats and bright orange lipstick, has made some pretty weird entrances of her own over the years, but that's a different story.) We'd been there for a couple of days, and my cousin Earl had grabbed his fishing poles and taken me down to Wacahoota Creek to see if we could catch anything “big enough to stick in the bathtub and scare the bejeezies outta Mom.” Me, I wasn't sure I wanted to see Aunt Lucille any more freaked out than she already was on a day-today basis. But hey, it was my third day in the backwoods of Minnesota, and my entertainment options—even my reasons for staying awake — were severely limited.

  So there I was with Cousin Earl, sitting at the end of a mossy makeshift dock with a fishing pole in my hands, staring down into the brown-black waters of Wacahoota Creek. In spite of Earl's claim that this spot was “world famous” as the best fishing hole in Putnam County, we'd caught nothing but dead leaves and, in what was possibly the low point of the vacation so far, a pair of discarded diapers from somewhere upstream.

  “That reminds me of a funny story,” Earl said, tossing the diapers as far as he could back upstream (thereby all but guaranteeing that we would catch them again a few minutes later). “This one's a real gut buster.”

  He went to his tackle box and began noisily rummaging through it. “You know what a gut buster is, right?” Earl had an amazing ability to tell “funny stories” that weren't funny and—this takes talent— really weren't even stories. They started at point A, moved on to point G, and then just sort of petered out somewhere in the middle of an entirely different alphabet.

  Without waiting for me to either confirm or deny that I knew what a gut buster was, Earl launched into his diaper-related tale. I stopped listening by around the third rambling sentence.

  Then, to my shock, I actually felt something tugging on my line.

  “Hey, Earl…,” I said, then nearly bit my tongue off trying to stop myself midsentence. There, about six inches below the surface of Wacahoota Creek, was a small glass dome, the kind you would see at the top of a deep-sea submersible on the Discovery Channel. Through the dome, which was attached to a submarine-like vessel, I saw the face of none other than Spuckler Boach, grinning from ear to ear and giving me an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Behind Spuckler, squeezing in to make sure I'd see him, was a cheerful but panicky-looking Mr. Beeba.

  I blinked in disbelief: my friends from Smoo had somehow found their way into the best fishing hole in Putnam County and were inches from rising to the surface and scaring the bejeezies out of my cousin Earl.

  I motioned furiously to Spuckler and Mr. Beeba to stay underwater.

  “What's up?” said Earl, still rummaging through his tackle box. “Getting crawdad nibbles again?”

  “No!” I said a little too loudly, setting my fishing pole on the edge of the dock. “I mean, um …” I tried desperately to come up with a good reason for having said “Hey, Earl” two seconds earlier, one that wouldn't encourage him to come back over. The interstellar submarine had not broken the surface of Wacahoota Creek, but if Earl joined me on my side of the dock, he'd see it as plainly as I did. “Could, could, could you go back and repeat that last part of the story? It was, uh, so funny I gotta hear it again.”

  Earl turned his face in my direction, so pleased with my sudden appreciation of his genius for storytelling that he failed to notice I'd broken into a sweat. “Which part? The part about the bald-headed squirrel or the part about the surfer dude from Saskatoon?” I briefly marveled at the fact that these two topics had not only nothing to do with each other but also nothing whatsoever to do with diapers. “Um, both. You should be a stand-up comedian, Earl, I swear.”

  Earl chuckled, cleaning his glasses with the hem of his T-shirt. “You are not the first person to say that.”

  The second Earl turned back to his tackle box, I began motioning to Spuckler that he should steer their submarine as far as he could downstream and that I would catch up with them in—I pointed to an imaginary wristwatch and splayed all my fingers two times — twenty minutes.

  Spuckler drew his eyebrows together and gave me a supremely confident gotcha-cap'n-over-and-out nod before leaning down to pull a lever.

  GLOOSHHhhhhhh

  The submarine dome bubbled forth from Wacahoota Creek, sending a spray of muddy water in all directions.

  “What the—” Earl whipped around and began charging toward my side of the dock.

  “An octopus!” I shouted before realizing it was the worst explanation I could possibly have concocted. Earl was just a couple of footsteps from catching sight of Spuckler's sub. I bailed on talking my way out of the situation and instead jumped up and tackled Earl like a linebacker.

  My plan—to the extent that I had any plan at all—was to send him flying backward across the dock toward the shore. Instead, I knocked him clear off the dock and into Wacahoota Creek. I watched with horror (and, okay, a certain amount of pleasure) as Earl flew headlong into the shallow end of the fishing hole. Then I spun around to see Spuckler's red and blue submarine rise all the way out of the water and hover there for several seconds. The upper half of Spuckler's head was visible through the dome, and he was clearly wrestling with the controls of the vehicle, trying to get it to do his bidding.

  I turned back to Earl and watched him emerge from the creek, his dripping wet hair half concealed by a soggy diaper, which he was now wearing like a hat. “The heck you do that for?” he grumbled as he chucked the diaper into the mud and began fishing around for his glasses, without
which, I then gratefully recalled, he could hardly see his hand before his face. If he'd still been wearing them, he'd have seen Spuckler's submarine floating in the air right behind me.

  “Sorry, Earl,” I said. “I was, uh, trying to stop you from knocking the bait off the dock.” I rolled my eyes at my own pathetic excuse, then listened with amazement as Earl proceeded to take it quite seriously.

  “The worms, eh?” Through the shallow water I could just make out the shape of Earl's glasses, a good ten feet away from where he was searching for them. “Well, that's understandable. Those suckers cost me five bucks.” No way. He was practically thanking me. “So didja make the save or not?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, watching as Spuckler's anti-gravity submarine rose another thirty or forty feet. “All worms are, uh, present and accounted for.” The caster on my rod and reel whizzed as the hook at the end of my line—still securely fastened to the exterior of the sub—rose higher and higher into the sky. Finally I just let go of the fishing pole and allowed it to be carried away like a strange anchor.

  The sub turned and silently hovered directly over me and Earl, blocking out the sun for a moment and drizzling a considerable amount of creek water on both of us as it continued on its skyward path.

  “What is it, raining?” Earl asked, squinting up at what must have looked to him like an incredibly thick and low-lying thundercloud.

  “D-darnedest thing” was all I could manage to say as Spuckler's sub disappeared over a nearby oak tree. It was the first time in my life (and the last, I sincerely hope) that I have ever used the word darnedest.

  Now that I felt sure that Earl's bejeezies would remain safely intact, I rolled up my pant legs, jumped into the water, and fished his glasses from the creek. “Found your specs, Earl,” I said as I trotted up to the tackle box and grabbed a dry cloth. “Here, I'll clean them off for you.”

  “Thanks, cuz,” said Earl. Now he really was thanking me.

  Moments later Earl had squeezed as much water out of his jeans as he could and was heading back to the house—a good ten-minute walk—to change his clothes. “Now, I don't know what you saw there in the creek, cuz,” he said before sloshing his way up the dirt road that had brought us here, “but you can take my word for it: it wasn't no octopus.”

  “You can say that again,” I whispered to myself, then went off into the woods in search of a certain space-faring submarine.

  It took me all of sixty seconds to find Spuckler's ship: red and blue rocket ships tend to stand out in the backwoods of Minnesota. It was parked in a grassy clearing, its single door propped open on one side, grayish green steam rising from its tail fins. Spuckler and Mr. Beeba stood before the ship and were gesturing frantically at me with their whole bodies, as if I needed to pick them from a crowd of other extraterrestrials equally interested in meeting up with me that day.

  “'Kiko!” shouted Spuckler. “Gitcher little Earth-ian bee-hind over here and gimme a hug!” He was grinning like crazy and had already bounded halfway across the clearing to facilitate my bee-hind's progress in the endeavor.

  “Do accept my apologies for the grotesquely crude manner of our arrival on the scene, my dear child,” said Mr. Beeba, trotting along the path cleared by Spuckler. “I told Spuckler that the notion of our emerging from the watery depths whilst you were in the midst of an angling expedition was as outlandish as it was fraught with perils, but did he listen to me? No.”

  “Lookitcha, lookitcha!” Spuckler completed the last few leaps that brought him to my side, threw his arms around me, and whirled me around three or four times before plunking my feet back on the ground. “Ever' time I see ya you're taller an' prettier. Smarter, too, I'll bet,” he added with a wink.

  “Smart enough to know,” said Mr. Beeba, panting heavily as he caught up with Spuckler, “that one doesn't arrange a secret rendezvous by hiding one's spaceship underwater, then making one's presence known at the most inopportune moment imaginable.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Spuckler, poking a finger into Mr. Beeba's chest. “Well, that must mean she's smart enough to know that one oughta keep one's trap shut if one doesn't want one's head smacked so hard he has to spend one hundred and one days in the hospital!”

  At this point I had to step in and introduce a healthier amount of breathing room between them.

  “All right, all right,” I said. “How about if someone tells me what's going on before my cousin Earl comes back and sees what a bunch of intergalactic kooks I've been hanging around with for the past few years?”

  “Oh, you're gonna like this, 'Kiko,” said Spuckler, the spat with Mr. Beeba already forgotten. “We're takin' you to Gollarondo. Yeah, that's right: Gaw-law-rondo!”

  “An architectural wonder of the first order, Akiko,” Mr. Beeba added. “You'll not want to miss it, I assure you.”

  “Now, slow down a minute,” I said, knowing from experience that when Spuckler and Mr. Beeba said they were taking me somewhere, the “somewhere” tended to be in a different galaxy, and the “taking” generally resulted in my (a) being chased by aliens, (b) dodging meteors, (c) getting covered in goo, or (d) being subjected to none of the above, but something a whole lot worse. “First, before there's any talk of my going anywhere other than back to that dock, I need the two of you to promise me something.”

  “You name it, 'Kiko,” said Spuckler, and Mr. Beeba nodded his agreement.

  “No slime, grime, mud, or misery.”

  “Gotcha,” said Spuckler.

  “No being sent on missions that have virtually no hope whatsoever of success.”

  “Understood,” said Mr. Beeba.

  “No near-death experiences.”

  “Does that include being-knocked-near-unconscious experiences?” asked Spuckler before receiving a very sharp elbow to the gut, courtesy of Mr. Beeba.

  “You have my word, Akiko,” said Mr. Beeba, “that the visit to Gollarondo will be a vacation unlike any you have ever had, and that includes a distinct absence of misery, missions, and near-death experiences.”

  “Oh, come off it, ’Kiko,” said Spuckler. “You know ya wanna go, and the choice couldn't be plainer. Come with us, ya got guaranteed thrills 'n' spills. Stay here, ya got Cousin Earl an' a bucket fulla worms.” Spuckler gave me a knowing look while lazily reeling in an imaginary fish with an imaginary fishing pole. “Now, which one're ya gonna choose?”

  Spuckler had called my bluff. Was it really that obvious that I wanted to go with them, regardless of the risks that might come with the bargain? Judging from the grin on Spuckler's stubbly face, it was more than that obvious.

  One peek over at the spaceship decided it once and for all. There, just inside the doorway of the ship, were Gax and Poog. Gax had his robotic head cocked eagerly to one side, while Poog, floating in the shadows, simply blinked and smiled.

  How could I say no to these guys?

  “Okay, okay,” I said, happily caving in. “So where's my replacement robot?”

  “Perfect!” said Mr. Beeba, dancing a jig back to the spaceship. “You'll not regret this, Akiko. I promise!”

  Moments later we had made the necessary adjustment to the Akiko-replacement robot—the modest tan I'd acquired in recent days was replicated on her at the touch of a button—and sent her back to the dock with my fishing pole (once we'd gotten it unhooked from the spaceship, that is).

  As I watched my robotic twin disappear into the foliage of backwoods Minnesota, I marveled at the fact that Cousin Earl would return to an entirely different Akiko from the one he'd left and yet remain blissfully unaware that anything had changed.

  “Better get a move on, 'Kiko,” bellowed Spuckler from the ship. “We got six star systems t' get through before the day is out. Seven, if you count this here dinky one that you're a part of.”

  I climbed aboard and quickly found my seat in the surprisingly roomy vehicle.

  “IT IS A PLEASURE TO SEE YOU AGAIN, MA'AM,” said Gax, his tin-can voice containing more emotion than usual. “I F
EARED THAT AFTER OUR LAST ADVENTURE YOU'D GIVE UP ON SPACE TRAVEL.”

  “What, and miss the chance to hang with my favorite robot in the whole universe?” I said, reaching over to pat Gax's helmet. “Not on your life.”

  Gax rocked contentedly from side to side.

  A series of garbled syllables filled the ship as Poog floated over to greet me.

  Mr. Beeba listened carefully, then provided his translation: “Poog says he will do everything in his power to see that no harm befalls you during this excursion. And as you know, Poog doesn't make promises lightly.” Poog smiled at me and moved close enough that I could see my reflection in his big shiny eyes.

  “Thanks, Poog,” I said, giving him a gentle hug. “You're the best.”

  Poog gurgled a pleased response that was soon drowned out by a loud hum from the engine. “Hold on tight, 'Kiko,” hollered Spuckler from the driver's seat. “Next stop: Gollarondo!”

  “So just what exactly is Gollarondo,” I asked, peering out one of the windows as Earth receded into the stars, “and why is it such a big deal?”

  “Gollarondo is a city on the planet Smoo,” replied Mr. Beeba, his eyes gleaming, “and there are a great many things that make it a ‘big deal.’”

  He did a couple of highly exaggerated air quotes with his fingers to make it clear that big deal was my choice of words, not his.

  “Firstly, it boasts magnificent examples of glipto-hoobian architecture, all of them impeccably restored and preserved. Secondly, it is known throughout the universe as a center of gracious living, academic excellence, and unparalleled mastery of the culinary arts. ‘All who live in Gollarondo,’ goes the saying, 'are well bred, well read, and well fed.’ Finally—and this is my personal favorite feature—it is home to the SMATDA: the Smoovian Museum of Ancient Tomes and Dusty Artifacts. I promise you an extensive tour, conducted by yours truly.”

  Mr. Beeba closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. In his mind, I imagined, he was already strolling happily through the corridors of the SMATDA, holding forth on every object he saw whether we wanted him to or not.