Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow (15 page)

Sarah's hand went to her mouth and she had to pause for a moment to make sure she had heard what she thought she had just heard. “That's what you think of me? How shallow do you think I am?”

Mick's lips curled into a snarl. “You pretended you liked me and now you want to take it back. I see right through you.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

Mick sat by himself in silence and stared into space.

Sarah did have to admit that she had been somewhat rude to Mick on occasion, but in her defense, he had been quite a toad himself, lying to her about the Dragon's Eye and always bragging about stealing this and coming up with a masterful plan for that. It wasn't as if he had been such a pleasant individual to be around, and he would have to think again if he thought she was going to go gaga over him just because he happened to be a pretend prince of the crazy universe.

She gave up on attempting to be civil to Mick Cracken. She had to plan her escape. She was going to save Jacob Wonderbar.

“Mistress Daisy,” Praiseworthy said, “If I might interject, we are nearly at Planet Royale, and your hosts would like to know whether you would prefer to take breakfast in bed or while sunning on a beach. Furthermore, they would like to know your favorite candies and snacks so that your guest suite might be properly stocked with the closest handmade approximations. Lastly, they would like to know your favorite color, as they are arranging an evening gala in your honor and will have a gown prepared for your arrival. They asked me to express their dearest hope that your stay at the palace will be perfectly extraordinary and marvelous.”

Mick shook his head with disgust. “I hate this place.”

A
fter they finally set their course to Planet Paisley, Jacob began to feel that there was something very strange afoot.

The trip to Planet Paisley aboard a research vessel should have only taken a few hours, but his captor kept getting distracted by fascinating star system formations, and they took several lengthy detours. They passed through an asteroid belt that traced a figure eight around two twin blue planets, saw the impossibly bright, pulsing light of a faraway supernova, and came just close enough to a black hole to feel a slight tug from the intense gravity before they sped safely away. If Jacob hadn't been under arrest he might have actually enjoyed himself.

The first moment that pricked the back of his neck came when he tried to change the subject from galaxy formations and dark matter to Planet Paisley, and the scientist simply continued with his monologue on the wonders of interplanetary formations.

The second peculiar moment occurred when they entered Planet Paisley's atmosphere and the scientist identified Jacob to the customs authorities as “Antoine Exupery” rather than by his actual name.

“Why didn't you give them my real name?” Jacob asked when they were cleared to land.

“We wouldn't want to alarm the locals.”

“What does that mean?” Jacob asked.

The scientist smiled. “It's for your own safety.”

“But ...”

“We will be landing shortly.”

They touched down in a park. Jacob stepped onto the grass and turned back to ask the scientist where he should go, but he was greeted by a slamming cargo door and the sounds of a spaceship readying for takeoff.

Jacob darted away and was barely out of range of the rocket boosters when they fired with a fierce blast and the ship rose back up into the atmosphere. As he watched the ship sail away out of sight, Jacob felt a mixture of relief and nervousness. He was finally free of the crazy scientists. But he had a bad feeling about Planet Paisley.

Jacob found the edge of the park and took a look around. Apart from a slightly greenish sky, the street looked like it could have been located in any city on Earth, with a concrete sidewalk and cars streaming down the street. Jacob passed a clothing store that displayed floral print dresses, pointy glasses, and beige clogs in the front window, and another that advertised ten-speed bicycles.

But as he walked down the street, he noticed that there was something strange about the pedestrians. The women wore old dresses and sensible shoes, and they all seemed abnormally tall. The men wore ill-fitting khaki pants and blazers over T-shirts or sweaters that were several sizes too large. Glasses were common, and apparently the thicker the frame, the better. The people all looked vaguely familiar. Jacob had an eerie feeling that he had seen some of them before, but he couldn't place them.

Jacob walked over to a woman who was peering through her glasses at some sheets of papers in a manila folder.

“Excuse me,” Jacob said. “I—”

“Why are you not in class, young man?” the woman said.

“I—”

“Where were you when your class was taking roll?”

“Taking roll? I—”

“Say hey there, little fella,” said a man wearing a mock turtleneck, navy blazer, khakis, and Birkenstock sandals with white socks. He had his shaggy hair pulled back into a ponytail. “You probably think I'm a square because of my day gig, but did you know that I paint some pretty radical art in my spare time?”

“Young man,” the woman said, “you have five seconds to tell me why you are not in class on your own planet. Five . . . four . . . three ...”

“I don't know what you're talking about!” Jacob yelled.

The woman peered down at Jacob, holding her glasses up to her eyes, and recoiled with a start. “Oh my . . . Do you . . . do you see who this is? It's . . .”

“Who?” the man asked. Then he looked at Jacob more closely and backed up, raising his hands. “Whoa. Back off, kid. Stay away from me.”

“Help!!” the woman shouted. “Someone please help! It's Jacob Wonderbar! On our planet! Someone call the principal!”

“How do you know who I am?!” Jacob shouted.

“We've been warned about you,” the woman said.

“We've
all
been warned about you,” the man said.

Jacob looked around at the women and men on the street wearing out-of-style fashion, and it slowly dawned on him. The mock turtlenecks. The thinwheeled ten-speed bicycles. The cardigans. The faint smell of stale coffee.

They were substitute teachers. All of them.

Jacob screamed. The subs screamed.

Jacob started running.

D
exter Goldstein stared out the cockpit window at the Spilled Milky Way galaxy. The universe was just as he and his friends had left it in the aftermath of the giant space kapow: broken. Space was streaked with light and pulsating stars for as far as he could see. The mess was surely many light-years across, and he knew that Earth and his parents and his home were on the other side.

Dexter thought about what had led him to a point in his life where he was flying a spaceship without his friends and had been partially responsible for a colossal interplanetary explosion. He had gone willingly with Jacob and Sarah, he had agreed to spacewalk when he should have insisted that they go straight home, and he had deferred to Sarah when she wanted to steal the Dragon's Eye.

Dexter was tired of being a follower, always letting Jacob get him into trouble, and he imagined remaking himself into a new, confident individual who wasn't scared of disappointing his friends. He would be more like his mom, who always knew what to do and made sure that he and his dad were given proper instructions, using intimidation and force of will if necessary. He would be strong and decisive and powerful. People would fear him. It would be the Era of Dexter.

“Calculate a way through, Lucy,” Dexter said in his best captain's voice.

“There's no way through,” Lucy said.

“Then calculate a way around.”

Lucy sighed. “By the time we made it around and back to Earth, you would be old and gray.”

For a moment Dexter wondered what Jacob Wonderbar would do, but then he remembered that Jacob Wonderbar would probably do the first thing that popped into his head and blow them all to bits.

“Go forward!” Dexter shouted.

“Young man ...”

“I said forward!” Dexter wondered if he was being rude, and his heart began racing with nervousness that he had crossed the line. He hoped that Lucy still liked him. “Um, please?” He furrowed his brow. Did leaders say “please”? Being captain was harder than he thought. He wondered how anyone could make decisions at all when there were feelings to consider. He needed to buy a book on leadership.

“Lucy, are you mad at me?”

“I might be if I weren't so overwhelmingly bored.”

“Can you please let me know if you're ever mad at me? I really don't want to have a situation where we're ...”

Dexter trailed off when he saw flashing lights ahead that weren't cosmic at all but rather looked man-made, or at least Astral-made.

“Please slow down.” He wondered if his tone was appropriate, and added, “If that's okay with you.”

As they approached the flashing lights, which were affixed to a bulky spaceship, Dexter saw a large man in an orange spacesuit floating in space and holding a red stop sign. Lucy stopped beside him, and the man peered absentmindedly through the window at Dexter.

“Hello?” Dexter said through the intercom. “What's happening?”

“Construction,” the man said.

“Do you know if Earth is okay?”

“Earth? No.”

“Earth is gone?!” Dexter shrieked.

“ ‘No' as in, no, I don't know if Earth is okay.”

“Oh.” Dexter took a deep breath. “How long is the construction going to take?”

The construction worker squinted his eyes and thought about it for a while. “Mmmm . . . a project like this, if we work some overtime and assuming material costs don't go too high and we get all the parts we need . . . I'd say you're probably looking at a millennium or two. Give or take.”

“A thousand years? Is there a detour?”

“No sir, there is not.”

“That's what my spaceship said,” Dexter said. “I don't think she likes me.”

The construction worker blinked at Dexter. “Uh-huh.”

“Are you sure there isn't any possible way through? It's really urgent. I'm not supposed to be in outer space and my parents don't know I'm here.” Dexter felt tears forming in his eyes, and he was embarrassed that the construction worker could see them. “I really, really have to go home right now.”

“Wow, I'm sorry, kid,” the man said. “We'll probably have an alternate route set up in a year or so, but I . . . wish there was something I could do.”

“A year?! I can't wait a year!”

“Young man,” Lucy said, her voice uncharacteristically soft. “I can't take you home, but I do know about something that could help. There's something called the Looking Glass.”

“Yes, the Looking Glass,” the construction worker said. “Good idea, spaceship!”

“My name is Lucy,” she snapped.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“What's the Looking Glass?” Dexter asked.

“It's a mirror you can look into and see anything in the universe. Anything anywhere. You won't be able to talk to your parents or to go Earth, but you might be able to see how they are doing.”

“Where is it?”

“Well . . . It's back on Planet Archimedes.”

S
arah Daisy awoke from a deep slumber in the perfectly soft sheets and heavy blankets of her bed on Planet Royale. As her eyes slowly began to focus, she stared up at the twenty-foot ceiling painted with murals of stars and spaceships. She had tossed and turned with worry the night before, but had eventually succumbed to sleep. She realized how tired she had been, not only from the stress and chaos of her space voyage, but from the early-morning soccer practices and the piano lessons and the homework and extracredit homework and all of the other extracurriculars she had to endure so that she would have a bright future and get into a top-tier college.

After a couple of minutes staring at the ceiling, Sarah finally decided that she needed to get up and move around. She put on a robe that had been draped over a magnificent antique chair. As she slipped into it she was suddenly so comfortable she nearly tripped and fell.

She opened the French doors to her terrace and she gasped when she saw the view. She had arrived the night before and was seeing Planet Royale in the daylight for the first time. Her terrace overlooked a beautiful turquoise lagoon surrounded by crystal white sand beaches and exotic green trees. The water stirred and a pink dolphin sailed into the air in a graceful arc before splashing contentedly back down. The splash was followed closely by a smaller dolphin, who leaped into the air and said “Hi!” before landing with a belly flop and heading back beneath the surface.