Текст книги "Animorphs - 10 - The Android"

Автор книги: Katherine Alice Applegate

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Except that he had been there for my mother's funeral.

A funeral without a body.

Some other kids from school had come, so I didn't think anything much about it. Still, it was a nice thing for him to do.

And now he was working for The Sharing.

The Sharing is a front organization for Controllers. On the surface, it's a sort of club. Kids join it and go on camp-outs and field trips and stuff. Adults join it and supposedly do business deals together and take weekends at ski resorts.

And probably most members of The Sharing never even know what's really going on. But the Controllers who run The Sharing are always on the lookout for some person with problems.

See, the Yeerks don't just spread by forcing themselves on people. A lot of people become Controllers by choice.

I guess they want to feel like they're part of something bigger. Or maybe it's the secrecy they think is cool. I don't know.

All I know is that the Yeerks would rather have a voluntary host. They'd rather have you surrender your mind than have to take it by force.

They work you up slowly through the levels of The Sharing, till they decide you're ready. Then they make promises and tell you lies, and the next thing you know, you're a slave inside your own mind, all the more easily controlled because you let it happen.

I shoved the tray away from me and picked up my pencil again. I stared down at the paper. But I was seeing a funeral service. Singing. Flowers. Some priest talking about how great my mother had been. He hadn't even known my mother.

I remember turning around in my pew to look at the church. A lot of people had come. A lot of sad faces. A lot of tears. Most people just looking solemn because that's the way you had to look at a funeral.

Erek had been three rows back. He was wear– ing a suit that was probably scratchy and uncomfortable. But he didn't look solemn. He looked angry. And he was shaking his head slowly, barely, from side to side, as if he was unconsciously disagreeing with everything the priest said.

At the time I figured he was mad because he had to dress up. I understood that.

And now Erek had reappeared. The boy who didn't smell human. The boy who worked for The Sharing.

"Well, Erek," I muttered under my breath, "we'll have to see about you. We will definitely have to see."

I here may be something in this world cooler than flying on your own wings, but I can't imagine what it is.

Rollerblading? Hah! Surfing? Big deal.

Skydiving? Closer, but not halfway to actual flying.

Nothing is as cool as flying.

It was after school that same day. I'd finished the English paper exactly nine seconds before the teacher came around to collect it. Then I'd gone to history and been assigned another paper. That's the nature of school: It never really ends.

But finally the bell rang and blessed freedom! I was outta there and looking for a private place to morph. I wanted to check up on Erek.

Remembering the funeral and all had made it seem even more important, although I wasn't sure I knew why.

I climbed up onto the roof of the gym. Of course, no one is supposed to go up there, but hey, it was for a good reason. I morphed into an osprey.

It's a bird, a kind of hawk that usually lives right near the water.

I spread my broad wings and I flew away from school.

Tell me you haven't sat there in some boring class, while some teacher went on and on (and on and on) about how x equaled y but only if you multiplied it by pi, and wished you could just fly right out the window. Zoom! Good-bye! Well, I can't fly right out of class because if I morphed in class there would be a lot of screaming and hysteria. But I can come close to doing it.

Kids were still piling onto the buses as I caught a nice little headwind and used it to go airborne. I zoomed high above all the kids heading for their buses, and all the teachers heading for their cars. People were just ovals of black, brown, blond, and red hair to me. That's mostly what a person looks like from a hundred feet up. A hair oval.

I have never felt as totally alive as when I'm in a hawk morph. Tobias doesn't have it all that bad, in some ways. There are so many worse animals to be.

I felt a thermal, a pillar of warm air, billow up beneath my wings and I went for it. Zoom! Like riding an elevator to the top floor! Up and up. The warm air currents swept me higher and higher.

"Yah-Hah!"

Now the hair ovals were just dots, and the buses were bright yellow toys pulling slowly away from the school.

But even from five hundred feet up in the air, as high as a fifty-story building, I could still see faces behind the school bus windows. With the osprey's eyes, it's like wearing binoculars.

I floated up there, wings spread wide, my tail fanned out to catch every bit of lift, my talons tucked back against the underside of my body.

Air rushed over the leading edge of my wings, making a slight fluttering sound. Wind flowed over my streamlined head, and I kept my hooked beak pointed forward to maintain every ounce of momentum.

I rode that thermal as high as it would carry me.

I'd learned that from Tobias. See, the thermal will give you altitude for almost no effort, and you can turn that altitude into distance. It's like soaring to the top of a mountain, then skiing down the slopes in whatever direction you want to go.

Still, it did eventually require some hard wing-flapping to get to Erek's neighborhood.

I spotted Tobias from far off, when he would have been invisible to any human eye. He was riding the wind, just like me. Maybe with a little more style, since he'd had so much more experi ence.

When I got close to enough to try thought– speak, I called to him.

"Tobias? Can you hear me?"

"I can hear you and see you, Marco. I've been watching you for twenty minutes."

"No way. I just spotted you."

"You have to know what to look for, Marco. By the way . . . when I count to three, you need to bank a very sharp, very fast left turn."

"Turn? Why?"

"Just do it! One. Two.

THREE!"

I raised one wing, lowered the other, skewed my tail, and cut a sudden, sharp left.

FWOOOOM! "Aaaahhhhh!"

A missile blew past me, doing what seemed like a thousand miles an hour! Only it wasn't coming from the ground upward, it had fallen from the sky down! And this missile had gray feathers.

The wind from its passing nearly knocked me off balance. It was half a mile away, down and south, by the time I could even try to think about focusing.

I saw swept-back, slate-gray wings and a tight tail. It was diving away from me so fast it made me look like I was standing still.

"What the ...

What was thatl backslash"

I yelled.

"Heh, heh, hen. Welcome to my world." To bias said. "That's a peregrine falcon. You know, like Jake's morph. They usually prefer to knock off a tasty pigeon or the occasional duck. It must have been the way you were flying. He probably thought you were a big old clumsy duck."

"Jeez. What did I ever do to make him mad?"

"Shake it off." Tobias advised. "He missed, right? I know that bird. He's not as good as he thinks he is. He's taken a shot at me before. He must be hungry."

Suddenly flying didn't seem nearly as fun.

"Yeah. I'll shake it off. That should be easy, since I'll be shaking for at least another hour."

"lt's not all just about riding thermals." To bias said dryly. "Come on, you want to see our boy Erek?"

I moved closer to Tobias. Much closer. This was his world up here in the air. He knew what he was doing. "By the way, thanks." I said.

"Always remember to look up." Tobias advised. "The danger is usually above you. But on a lighter note . . . that's Erek right there. He walks home from his school. See him? Coming to the corner?"

I spotted the oval of hair below me. "Yeah, I see him."

"I watched him this morning on his way in.

I watched him play soccer during gym -"

"They play soccer? They play soccer during gym? Man, we never get to play soccer."

"Now he's heading home. I'm going to let you take over because I am hungry. And I am also bored with looking at the top of his head."

"Did he do anything weird or different?"

"He scored a goal in soccer. Does that count?"

"Hey. Look." I had noticed three guys closing in behind Erek. Something in the way they moved caught my attention. From high up, it looked almost as if they were hunting Erek.

"Hmmm. That's not good."

Tobias said.

We both spilled air from our wings and dived, wanting a closer look. I could see the face of one of the guys behind Erek. It was an expression I had seen before: the idiot, giggling sneer of a bully.

Suddenly, the guys raced forward. Erek spotted them and started to run.

It was a street on the edge of a development. There was a lot of traffic to Erek's left and a stone wall to his right. The stone wall ended about fifty yards away, where it opened for the entrance to the subdivision.

"lf this guy is a Controller, these punks are making a serious mistake."

I said. "They may get him today, but they might regret it later."

"Maybe I'll just give that one jerk a little talon haircut." Tobias said.

Tobias hates bullies. Back when he was human, he was the kid most likely to be pounded on. Jake met Tobias when Tobias's head was just about to be flushed in the toilet. Naturally, Jake helped him.

"Tobias, I don't think com" I started to say, but it was too late.

Tobias was in a stoop and aiming for the biggest guy's head.

It all happened in a flash.

Erek ran. He tripped. He sprawled forward, out into the street. He slammed into the broad side of a passing bus.

WHAM! I could hear the impact from up in the air.

And then . . .

And then ... for just a second, Erek wasn't there anymore. Something else was where he had been.

Something that seemed to be made of patches of steel and milk-white plastic.

Then, in the next split second, Erek was back. A normal boy, lying winded on the sidewalk.

The bullies ran off. The bus driver never even noticed and drove on.

Tobias opened his wings and nearly stopped in midair.

"Did you see t?" Tobias asked.

"Yeah. I sure did."

"What was t?"

"I don't know." I said.

"But 1 know what it wasn't.

It wasn't human."

"We need to talk to Ax." I said to Tobias.

"Definitely. That was not human. That was seriously not human."

"So you did see it, right? I'm not crazy?"

"Yes, you're crazy. But I did see it." Tobias said. "Very weird."

Below us, Erek climbed up off the sidewalk, dusted himself off like nothing had happened, and resumed walking toward home.

"Hang a right." Tobias said. "We'll get some good updrafts off the road. Whatever your friend Erek is, I don't think he's from around here."

We flew hard and fast toward home. Tobias split off to round up Ax. I demorphed and headed home to check in with my dad and let him know I still existed. Then I called Jake.

I got Tom instead.

"Hey, Tom. Is Jake around there?"

"I don't know. JAKE!" he yelled. "He said he's coming."

"Cool."

"Haven't seen you around here much," Tom said.

"Keeping busy?"

I felt a little chill. It's weird, talking to Controllers when you know that's what they are. It was Tom's voice, and it acted like Tom, but it wasn't Tom. Tom was cowering helplessly in a corner of his own mind.

I was talking to a Yeerk.

"Yeah, I guess so," I said.

"Uh-huh. We're going up to the lake, do some waterskiing."

"You and Jake?"

"Yeah, right. No, me and The Sharing. You know Jake's too much of a social misfit to join,"

Tom said with a totally human, big-brother laugh of derision. "It's just that we have too many girls going and not enough guys."

A lie, of course. A lie that was supposed to entice me. Why was Tom suddenly trying to get me interested in The Sharing again? He quickly gave me the answer.

"S. I heard your dad was back at work. That's cool."

"Yeah, I guess so," I said. My father had gone through a bad time after my mom "died." Now he was back at work. He's an engineer, but he's heavily involved in computers, too. He had been working with the new observatory on ways to design software that would aim the telescopes bet ter.

He was also working on some projects he couldn't even talk about. Projects I figured must involve the military.

"You could bring your dad," Tom said as ca sually as he could. "I mean, not like anyone wants their fathers along, usually, right? But I mean, maybe he's ready to get back out there in the world and all. The Sharing is a good place to make business connections, you know?"

"Yeah, I'll ask him," I said.

"Do that, okay? Your dad could probably use some down time to relax, take it easy, meet some people."

S. They were after my father now. I felt something burning inside me, like I'd taken a gulp of lava. I wanted to reach right through the phone and take a baseball bat to the evil creature in Tom's head.

"Here's Jake," Tom said. There was a scuffling sound as he handed the phone off. Then Jake's voice.

"Hey, Marco. What's up?"

I went off. "What's up?! What's up? Those scumbags are after my father, that's what's up! How do you live with that? How do you look at that piece of crap every day? He's all like, "Bring your dad to The Sharing, do a father-son bonding thing, and oh, by the way, would you mind if we stuck a – ?"

"Shut up," Jake hissed.

I shut up. But my hand was squeezing the receiver so hard I could have snapped it. Jake let me calm down for a minute. He made "uh-huh"

noises in the phone, like he was listening to me talking. He made a couple of laughing sounds. I guess Tom wasn't far away from the phone.

I knew Jake was right. We don't talk secrets over the phone. There's no way of knowing who might be listening in.

"Okay, I'm cool," I said. I wasn't cool, but I was under control again.

"That sounds good to me," Jake said, still pretending to have a conversation.

"We have to get together," I said. "It's a nice day out."

That was the signal that we should meet in the woods.

"Okay. Later," Jake said casually.

He hung up.

I took a couple of deep breaths. Then I took a couple more.

The Yeerks had taken my mother. They weren't getting my father. Before that happened I'd tell him everything. Before I'd let that happen I'd take Tom down, no matter what Jake said.

I'd take Tom, I'd take Chapman, I'd take every Controller I knew of before I'd let them have my father. I had power. Deadly animals lived inside me. Their DNA swam with my own.

I could feel the rage flowing through me, the blind, violent rage that became little films in my head – little head-movies of revenge and destruction. I pictured the things I would do to Tom ... to Chapman . . . someday even to Visser Three. I would do terrible things to them. Terrible, violent things.

It was a sick feeling. It was sick, and I knew it, and yet I ran those images over and over in my head.

Rage is addictive, you know. I guess it's sorta like a drug. Anger and hatred get you high.

They get you high, but like any addiction, they hollow you out and tear you down and eat you alive.

I guess I knew all that. But all I could think of was that they were not getting my father.

So I ran the scenes of violence over and over in my head. I rode that rush of fury till at last it burned itself out and left me feeling empty and beaten.

–L hooked up with Jake and the two of us rode our bikes to Cassie's farm. He didn't say anything about my conversation with Tom. Jake knew how I felt. We've all felt it before.

From Cassie's farm we walked across the fields to the edge of the forest. There's a place we meet there, deep enough in the trees that no one is likely to see us.

Rachel and Cassie were already there. Cassie was on her knees in the pine needles, looking into a burrow hole. I have no idea what was in there, but she seemed fascinated. Rachel was sitting on a fallen log.

"Tobias is off finding Ax," Rachel said as we approached.

"I think there are three of them," Cassie said. I guess she was talking about whatever was in that burrow.

"So? What's the big panic?" Rachel asked.

Before Jake or I could answer, I heard something crashing through the brush.

He leaped into view, sailing over the log Rachel was sitting on.

Aximili-Esgarrouth-lsthill.

"Hey, Ax," I said. "Very dramatic entrance."

Of course, any appearance by Ax was going to be dramatic. Ax is an Andalite. The only Andalite to survive when their Dome ship was destroyed by the Yeerks in high orbit. He's an alien.

You know how on Star Trek the aliens are always just humans with a little nose putty and some bad outfits? But they basically look human and act human and speak English? Well, Ax isn't like that. You take one look at Ax and you know he isn't from around here.

Picture a sort of big, blue-and-tan deer.

Only instead of a deer neck and head, you have a semi-human chest with two weak arms, topped by a head that is definitely unusual. Ax has no mouth and four eyes. Two of his eyes are in the usual location, but his other two eyes are mounted on stalks on top of his head. The stalk eyes can aim totally independently. Ax can look right at you with his two main eyes, and still be looking behind him with one stalk and off to the right with his other stalk.

It's kind of unsettling, till you get used to it.

But not nearly as unsettling as his tail. The tail makes you think scorpion. It curves up and over, so that the razor-sharp blade-tip is usually poised somewhere above his sloping shoulders.

That tail is fast and dangerous. Very fast, very dangerous. Basically, Ax could slice-and-dice a human into bite-sized chunks in about two seconds.

Fortunately, Ax is on our side.

"Hello, Prince Jake.

Hello Marco, Rachel.

Cassie? Did you lose something?"

Cassie stood up. Then, as an afterthought, she brushed off her knees. "Baby opossums,"

she said, by way of explanation. "Too big for the pouch, not ready to leave the den."

"Don't tell Tobias," I said. "He'll eat "em."

"I already know about them." Tobias said.

I looked up in surprise. He was in the tree above me. I hadn't heard him arrive.

Cassie shrugged. "Tobias is a hawk. He has a right to be a hawk." Then she looked up at Tobias and smiled. "Of course, they are awfully cute."

"0h, man." Tobias groaned. "0kay, okay, this litter is off-limits. Happy now?"

"You're a sweetheart, Tobias," Cassie said.

"We should move while we talk." Tobias suggested. "There are some kids playing soldier just about three hundred yards west. Let's stay well out of range."

We all started walking east, and Tobias went up again to scout ahead for any danger.

"Okay, Marco," Jake said after a few minutes. "This is your party. What's up?"

I told them all what Tobias and I had seen. Tobias came back and added some details.

Then I looked to Ax.

"So, Ax, you're the official alien. What does this sound like to you?"

Ax turned his head toward me, making eye contact with his main eyes. "Marco? Something has happened to your hair. I believe it has become shorter. Are you suffering from some sort of illness?"

"That does it!" I yelled, as the others all broke up giggling. "It'll grow out, all right? It'll grow out. Besides, it's easier to take care of. Man! I make one little change!"

"Have I said something wrong?" Ax wondered.

"No," Jake assured him. "Not at all.

Marco is just a little sensitive. Go ahead, Ax.

What do you think about this Erek person?"

"I do not know. It ... it doesn't sound like any species I know of."

"What? Dude, you're the expert on aliens," I pointed out.

"Marco, even we Andalites don't know every species in the galaxy."

I swear he sounded embarrassed. Although since he was using thought-speak, maybe "sounded" isn't the right word.

"You don't recognize the description?" Jake asked.

"No."

"The way you guys describe it, it sounds more like a robot or something," Rachel ventured.

"But how does it pass for human?"

"0h, that is technologically possible." Ax said, relieved to be able to add something to our speculation. "lt's probably a holographic projection. Like your primitive TV, only three– dimensional."

"Primitive TV? Hey, we have cable at my house," I said. Ax didn't think it was funny, but Cassie smiled.

Tobias swooped low over our heads and came to rest on a branch. "So when Erek gets hit by the bus, he drops the hologram for just a split second."

"The power supply may have been inter rupted or overloaded." Ax suggested.

"But that's the interesting question: What power supply? It would take a great deal of power to maintain such a hologram, hour after hour, day after day."

"Hey, maybe Erek is nuclear-powered," I said.

Ax laughed. Then I guess he realized I wasn't joking. "I don't think nuclear power is likely." he said, still sort of giggling like I was the primitive moron of the universe. "I think it would take something much more advanced."

"Is there any way to see through this holo gram?" Cassie asked.

"We could hit him with something as big as a bus," Rachel suggested.

"Now, there's a classic Rachel suggestion," I said with a laugh. I was feeling better, hanging with my friends.

"Marco found out The Sharing is having a lit tle waterskiing thing up at the lake," Jake said.

He bit his lip and added, "Tom told him. Erek is in The Sharing. He'll probably be there, too.

Per fect chance for us to get a good look at him.

That's the 'where." Now we just need the "how.""

Ax thought for a moment as we ambled through the woods. "The hologram is meant to trick humans. It would be tuned for human sight.

Hawk eyes are better than human, but still see similar wavelengths of light. Maybe a totally dif ferent sort of vision would be able to penetrate the hologram."

My heart sank. I knew what was coming next.

Some gross morph.

"Unusual vision is our specialty,"

Rachel said with a careless laugh. She slapped me on the back like life was just one big adventure.

Sometimes Rachel really grinds my nerves.

"No bugs, okay?" I said. "All I'm saying is, no more insect morphs. Is that too much to ask?"

J. guess it was too much to ask, as I found out a couple days later.

"What do you mean, we're going to draw straws?"

I asked suspiciously.

"To see who morphs our new morph," Rachel said. "Ax is in, regardless. We need his expertise in aliens. One of us has to go in with him."

"What's the morph?" I asked suspiciously.

"Spider," Cassie said.

We were at Cassie's barn. It was Saturday morning. On Friday I'd found out I'd gotten a B on my English paper. How cool is that? I'd stayed up watching TV with my dad and been late for this meeting.

This was the kind of insanity they cooked up when I wasn't there.

"Excuse me? I must have something wrong with my ears." I tapped the side of my head with my palm. "Because, see, I thought I heard you say the word "spider." And I remember saying "no insects.""

Cassie held her hand out to me. And in that hand was a spider. "It's not an insect. Arachnids have eight legs and two body segments. Insects have six legs and three segments."

I swear, I took a look at that spider and almost passed out.

"Since I knew we were doing this today, I decided to do some reading. This is a wolf spider. It has pretty good eyesight. In fact, it has eight eyes."

Cassie said this like having eight eyes was a good thing. Like eight eyes was something everyone should want.

"Go away, Cassie. Go away. Go away, go away, I am going to morph a spider! You can morph a spider. I don't like spiders."

Jake gave me a look. "Marco, Cassie always gets stuck doing the new morphs. Besides, this is more your mission than anyone else's."

"What? Why?" I demanded angrily. "Why is this my mission more than yours or Rachel's?"

Jake shrugged. "Erek is your friend."

"My friend? When did I ever say he was my friend? He's not my friend. I barely know the guy!"

"Marco, you're such a wuss," Rachel said.

"Hey, you want to be a spider?"

Rachel shuddered slightly. "Sure." She was lying. I just knew it. "If I draw the short straw, I'd love to go spider."

Then she grinned. She couldn't keep a straight face.

"Look, you don't have to do this," Jake said. "It's just that we're going to be infiltrating a meeting of The Sharing. The Yeerks are totally on alert for animal morphs.

We have to fit into the environment of the lake. Whatever morphs we use have to belong there. We can't be showing up there as lions and tigers and bears."

"Oh, my," Cassie interjected.

"We need good vision, but not standard mammal-type eyes. And we can't all go in the same way. I want two people to hang back as a rescue squad in case we get into a mess. Ax has to go because we need him to see if he can figure out what Erek is. Ax is going in as a spider, and we need someone to go with him."

"Has anyone told Ax about this?"

"He was here earlier. While you were sleeping in late. He said he thought a spider's body was much more sensible than a human's body,"

Cassie said. "His exact words were, "Ah, good. With eight legs it won't fall over like a human.""

"Be glad we waited for you at all," Rachel growled. "Just draw a straw."

Jake had five pieces of hay in his fist.

There was no way to tell which was the shortest one.

"Hah. I know how to beat this," I said.

"It's mathematical. If I choose first, my odds are just one in five. The next person to choose has odds of one in four, then one in three, and so on. So the safest thing to do is choose first."

I took a deep breath, reached out, and yanked up a straw.

I took another deep breath and looked at the very short straw. "Really, it made perfect sense mathematically," I said.

I felt like crying.

Rachel rolled her eyes. "You know, if you're going to be a big baby, I'll do it."

I should have just said "okay." That's what I should have said. What I did say to Rachel was, "Don't condescend to me, oh mighty Xena.

Just because I'm not a reckless idiot doesn't mean I'm a wuss. I've never chickened out on a morph yet. And if Ax is in, so am I. You can hang around and be the backup, Rachel. I'm going where the action is."

To which Rachel replied with a very calm, "Okay."

See, this is why guys and girls should not be in combat together. Because it's much harder for a guy to be a coward when some girl is watching. Especially when she's all gung ho. If it had just been Jake and Tobias, I'd have been weeping and groveling on the ground.

Cassie held out the spider. "It's not bad,"

she said. "I morphed the spider yesterday, just to see what it was like.

Charlotte's Web was one of my favorite books."

"It would be," I muttered. Well, that was the clincher. Rachel was ready to go, and Cassie had already done it.

I reached out a finger to touch the spider. It was shaking. My finger, not the spider.

I touched the spider's back. It tried to get away but Cassie closed her hand around the spider and the tip of my finger.

The spider became very still as I acquired it.

Thanks to the Andalite technology that had transformed me, the spider DNA entered my system.

Maybe the Yeerks were right. Maybe the An-dalites were just the big meddlers of the universe.

I know one thing: At that moment, as I touched the spider's bristly body, I really wished the Andalites had found someone else to give this power to.

lake is in the mountains. It's a long way from where any of us live. And if we'd had to walk it would have taken several days. Fortunately, we didn't have to walk.

We have our own little airline. TWA: Travel With Animorphs.

It was a beautiful day. Just a few puffy clouds in a blue sky. Bright sun. A canopy of trees spread out beneath us as we flew toward the mountains.

With my osprey wings spread wide and the sun toasting the ground so it sent up elevators of warm air, it was as perfect as life can get.

If you overlooked the fact that we were head– ing toward utter, unspeakable grossness and certain destruction.

"Time to split up."

Tobias said. "The lake is just over that next ridge."

We had not been flying close together because that would have looked massively suspicious. Two ospreys, a harrier, a bald eagle, a peregrine, and a red-tailed hawk, all flying together? Not in the natural world. But we were all within a mile of each other, and all heading in the same direction.

Tobias went into a lazy upward spiral, hanging back. Rachel and Cassie split off, too. The Yeerks would have heavy security around the meeting of The Sharing. The Yeerks know all about morph-+. They would be on alert.

Ax, in a harrier morph, Jake, in his peregrine falcon morph, and I flew on toward the lake, though still far apart.

"You know, one of your kind tried to kill me the other day." I said to Jake.

"Tobias told me."

Jake said. "Gotta watch out.

Falcons rule."

"Yeah, well I noticed he didn't try it a second time."

"Don't diss falcons."

Jake said.

"0ne-on-one in a fair fight, an osprey would kick your butt."

"As if." Jake sneered.

"Excuse me." Ax interrupted. "ls there some special meaning to this conversation that I don't understand?"

"Yeah." I said. "The meaning is that Jake and I are scared, so we're babbling in a desperate effort not to think about it."

"Ah. I am frightened, too. I don't really like morphing tiny animals. I keep thinking about all the rest of my mass."

"Your what?" I asked, not really caring. I was focused on the morphing ahead.

"My mass. When you morph something smaller than yourself, your body mass must go somewhere.

So it goes into Zero-space. Zero-space is the space that ships travel through when they are going faster than light. It's not very likely to happen, but sometimes a ship traveling in Z-space will intersect with a temporarily parked mass."

This got my total, complete attention.

"Wait a minute. Are you telling me that when we get small, all the leftover . . .

stuff ... all the extra flesh and guts and bones go bulging into Zero-space like some big balloon of human tis-sue?"

"0f course. Where did you think all the mass went?"

I shuddered. "I really didn't think about it."

Jake was no more thrilled than I was. "So right now there's a big bag of Jake floating in Zero-space? And it's possible some spaceship will zoom along and hit it and splatter it all over?"

"No, no, of course n."

Ax said.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Too soon, it turned out.

"0f course no ship would actually hit a floating mass." Ax said, talking to us like we were nitwits. "The ship's shielding systems would disintegrate the mass. That's what troubles me about doing small morphs. It very seldom happens. The odds are millions to one.