Dinosaur Boy Saves Mars (3 page)

The UFO was smaller on the inside than it had looked from the outside. But even though it wasn't very big, there seemed to be a lot of empty space. The interior was a circular room that had absolutely nothing in it except leather armchairs. They encircled the ship's only window, which happened to be in the middle of the floor.

When Elliot and I got onboard, Sylvie was already sitting cross-legged in one of the chairs, drumming her fingers on the armrest.

My grandfather came in behind us. He shut the door behind the polar bears and took the seat next to Sylvie.

I frowned at the nearest chair. It was one of those squishy leather recliners, and there was no opening for my tail to go through the back. There was also no seat belt, which I suppose meant we didn't necessarily have to sit in chairs. With a questioning glance at my grandfather—who nodded OK—I took a seat on the floor next to the window.

My grandfather picked up an iPad and pressed a button. There was a slight whirring sound, a metallic groan from somewhere deep in the wall, and then a sensation like we had just stepped into a high-speed elevator.

Elliot sat down to my right, and his eyes got as big as saucers as we both stared out the window and watched the quad, then the school, then Portland, and then the entire state of Oregon disappear beneath us.

One of the polar bears lumbered over and dropped to the floor on my other side. I stiffened, and my tail spikes gave an instinctive twitch. Ready to do…I don't know what. But the bear just stretched out its paws and leaned its large, shaggy head out over the window, fogging up the glass with its peanut butter breath. I might have been imagining things, but I thought the enormous, brown eye closest to me looked sad.

The other bear was lying on the floor behind Sylvie's chair, its head on its paws and its eyes closed. Both bears seemed much calmer after eating Emma's sandwich. But even so, I made sure my tennis-balled spikes were within easy reach of my hand.

“We've got one stop to make before we deal with Sylvie's dad,” my grandfather said. He looked up from his iPad. That must be what he was using to fly the ship. I couldn't imagine how else we were moving. There wasn't a control panel, a wall of buttons, or anything remotely electronic anywhere. The curved, wood-paneled walls all around us made the room look more like my family's summer cabin than a spaceship.

The door and the gangplank had disappeared behind one of the panels as soon as the four of us and the two bears had gotten inside. I had lost track of where it had disappeared. Something about the room being a circle made me lose my sense of direction.

“A stop?” Sylvie asked, sounding irritated. She sat forward, shook her hood off, and gave my grandfather a severe look. “Where? Why are we stopping?”

“Saturn,” my grandfather answered and gestured to the polar bears as though that should explain everything. “We've got to drop these guys off.”

“On Saturn?” Elliot exclaimed with a dubious look at the bears. “I thought Saturn was made out of gas.”

“Just the outer layers,” my grandfather assured him, then started feeling around his seat as though he had dropped something. “Has anyone seen my Snickers bar? I could have sworn I left it here when we landed.”

Sylvie turned to Elliot and me. “Saturn is a game preserve,” she explained. “Kind of like a big zoo, but fancier.”

“You've been to Saturn?” I asked, not knowing quite why I was surprised.

“Oh yeah,” Sylvie said, like it was no big deal. “We used to go there all the time on school field trips.”

Elliot shook his head, as he often did after one of Sylvie's especially odd pronouncements.

“So we're bringing the polar bears to a zoo on Saturn?” I summed up, just to make sure I had it right.

“Yes,” my grandfather answered. As he spoke, he searched the empty chairs around the circle, still looking for his candy bar. “The bears are part of the Amalgam Labs Extinction Eradication project. When a species in our galaxy arrives at the brink of extinction, our lab recruits two volunteers, one male and one female of the species, and relocates them to Saturn. There they enjoy a pampered life in a simulated habitat while we can be sure that their genetic material will be preserved.”

“And we have to do that now?” Sylvie inquired, sounding antsy.

“This ship belongs to the lab,” my grandfather explained. “I needed a legitimate, scientific purpose to bring her out. Listen, are you sure you're not sitting on my candy bar? I know I—”

“Will it take long to drop them off?” Sylvie pressed him, ignoring his question.

The polar bear beside me snorted, and Elliot and I both jumped.

“So sorry to be a bother,” the bear said. “We had no idea that the predicted extinction of our entire species would be such a massive inconvenience for you all.”

• • •

Neither Sylvie nor my grandfather appeared to be alarmed (or even surprised) that a polar bear had just spoken to us. Let alone sarcastically and in a voice that sounded like it belonged to somebody's English grandmother.

Elliot and I were not nearly so cool about it.

“You—you, you can talk?” Elliot squealed, scrambling behind me and using me as a shield as we both backed away. “In English?”

“Yes, I speak English. Also Finnish,” the bear bragged.

“Big whoop,” Sylvie said from safely over on her chair.

The bear whipped her head toward Sylvie and made a growling noise in the back of her throat. I scooted back some more, bumped into Elliot, and motioned for him to scoot back more too.

“Harriet,” scolded the other bear from over beside Sylvie's chair. He—his voice had sounded male—raised his head ever so slightly and yawned without opening his eyes. “Do try to keep it together.”

“Well, I'm sorry, Roland,” the bear next to me retorted, sitting back on her haunches in much the same manner as she had after my grandfather whistled. “But I still have very mixed feelings about this whole thing.”

“What?” My grandfather looked up suddenly. “I was told you had both been fully briefed and signed all of the necessary paper—”

“We have and we did,” the male polar bear—Roland—assured him, rolling lazily onto one side. “Harriet is just having an attack of nostalgia. Aren't you, dear?”

Harriet gave him a look. It clearly said, “Don't you
dear
me,” in polar bear. Or possibly Finnish. Then she snorted and looked back down at the portal window. Which, I realized suddenly, had gotten much darker. The Earth was now a small orb, no bigger than a basketball floating in a sea of black.

“Wow,” I said, deciding to risk creeping slightly closer to the bear so I could see out the window better.

“Good-bye, home,” Harriet said wistfully, and I felt a sudden stab of pity for her. I wanted to do something to make her feel better. But I was not at all sure how to go about comforting a homesick polar bear.

Sylvie cleared her throat.

“Can we get back to my father, please?” she asked testily. She turned to my grandfather. “You said you think he's in trouble?”

“Yes,” my grandfather said, picking up his iPad again. “I believe he may have been kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped?” Sylvie sounded unconvinced. “Who would kidnap him?”

My grandfather started to turn the iPad screen toward Sylvie, then hesitated.

His face softened. And for once he looked more like a grandpa than a scientist. Or Indiana Jones. He put his hand on top of Sylvie's.

“I don't want to upset you,” he told her.

Sylvie stuck her nose in the air.

“It's my father we're talking about. I need to know what's happened to him.”

My grandfather considered this, then nodded slowly and patted her hand.

“When you told me, months ago, that you hadn't heard from him since you got to Earth, I got suspicious. So I convinced Amalgam Labs to start monitoring all communications coming from Mars. Recently, we intercepted an interesting series of transmissions. Most were scientific in nature. But we found one snippet we believe might be a distress signal sent by your father.”

“How do you know it's from him?” Sylvie asked.

My grandfather handed her the iPad.

“It's incomplete,” he warned, and Elliot and I came over so that we could see too. “Most of the file has been corrupted, so we only have pieces.”

“Who's Gloria?” Elliot asked, peering over Sylvie's shoulder.

“My mom,” she answered. Her voice sounded a little shaky, but her eyes were steely when she looked up at my grandfather.

“Who's holding my father against his will?” she asked.

“We believe it's Sunder Labs,” my grandfather answered. “Amalgam Lab's greatest rival. Until about a year ago, they were based out of Houston, Texas. But then they ran into money problems and abandoned their campus there. We—Amalgam Labs, that is—suspect that they have reestablished a secret base on Mars, where land is cheaper. But no one has been able to find it yet. We believe their new lab is the source of these transmissions.”

“And you think my father is there?” Sylvie asked.

My grandfather nodded. “Yes. As soon as we drop the polar bears off, we're headed to Mars.”

Sylvie nodded, seemingly in agreement with this plan, as she handed the iPad back to my grandfather. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Roland, still lounging behind Sylvie's chair.

The big bear had opened his eyes.

“Why would a laboratory kidnap Sylvie's dad?” I asked. “I thought he owned a bunch of restaurants.”

Roland rolled to his feet, nose in the air. Over by the portal, Harriet's nose was also twitching.

“In addition to being a restaurateur, Asaph Juarez is the Chancellor in Charge of Martian-Human Affairs,” my grandfather reminded me, watching as the polar bears began a slow circuit of the ship, industriously sniffing each wood panel in turn. “Mars has a delicate political situation at the moment. It's possible Sylvie's dad got caught in the middle of it.”

“Political situation?” I repeated.

“Just local politics,” he said as Roland and Harriet lingered in front of a nondescript piece of wall, almost directly across the ship from where I was crouched beside Sylvie's chair. “Nothing to do with us.”

“Asaph Juarez?” Elliot said thoughtfully, looking at Sylvie. “I thought that was your mom's last name.”

“It is,” Sylvie said. She was watching the bears too. Roland was now standing on his hind legs, his front paws braced against the panel.

“Yeah, but aren't they…well, divorced?” Elliot asked. “Why didn't your mom change her name back to what it was before she married your dad?”

“Juarez was my mom's name,” Sylvie informed him. “In Mars, when you get married, the guy takes the girl's last name.”

“You mean
on
Mars?” Elliot said, smirking.

“No, Elliot. How many times do I have to tell you? When you're talking about Mars, you always say—”

But she was interrupted when Roland raised a paw and ripped a rectangular section of wood paneling right off the wall. A smell, like a combination of sauerkraut and dirty socks, filled the air. There was a small yelp of surprise, and Roland and Harriet both backed out of the way as something fell out of the wall.

It froze in place, hanging strangely out of the hidden cabinet with its head on the floor and its legs sticking up in the air. It was about Sylvie's size, maybe a bit smaller. But this was no Martian. Most of its body was covered in a skin-tight, black bodysuit. But the parts that were sticking out—its hands, feet, and head—were all a faint shade of blue.

It was clutching a half-eaten Snickers bar in one of its hands.

By the time I got to my feet, my grandfather was already over by the panel, pointing a large, silver revolver at the creature's head.

“Freeze, BURPSer,” he said icily.