There's a Spaceship in My Tree! (4 page)

“Sh . . . shh . . . sure,” Beamer gurgled, his only air supply coming from the bully's hot ravioli breath. Any closer to terminato-kid's flared nostrils and Beamer could have checked out his sinuses.

“You've got a few things to learn” snarled Jared, suddenly pushing Beamer away. Then, before Beamer could remember how to breathe, a bulging finger jerked in front of his nose. “One!” Jared growled. “You don't get in my way. Two . . .” A second finger snapped up next to the first. Beamer's eyes crossed, trying to focus on them. “I run the local charity. And, as of today, you're my biggest contributor!”

“Con-tri-bu-t . . . ?” Beamer squeaked, his voice box not yet thoroughly decompressed.

“Money, stupid,” one of the other goons explained.

“You give two dollars to ‘The Fund,' ” said Jared, “and everybody gets taken care of.”

“Two!” Beamer gasped. “But I don't need taking care of.”

“You will, dude, if you don't pay,” the shortest of the gang members promised, giving him a twisted grin.

“What Slocum means,” added the leader in a suddenly formal voice, “is that the Fund is how we take care of kids . . . uh . . . less fortunate than us.”

“That's right,” said an adult who suddenly appeared next to Jared. “Hi! You must be new,” she said, looking at the still-pale Beamer.

He recognized her as the “yard duty” volunteer.

“You know,” the smiling lady continued, “with many kids around here having trouble just getting milk money, Jared's idea has been a godsend. I know you'll be proud to be part of it.” She gave Beamer's tormentor a friendly pat on the shoulder and walked off.

Beamer tried to wander off too, but Jared smacked him to attention with a backhanded blow to the chest. “Oh, and another thing,” he said in a hushed voice, “watch who you choose for friends.”

No sooner had Beamer gotten his breath back than he heard, “Don't forget: two bucks . . . tomorrow!” Jared was looking back at him over his shoulder, pointing his finger like a pistol, “or it's ‘
Hasta la vista
to you, baby.' ”

Beamer finally drew his first decent breath. Every kid within fifty feet was staring at him. Tucking his hands in his pockets, he tried to whistle, but he sounded more like a sputtering teapot. Thankfully, his audience began to melt away.

Great!
Beamer groaned to himself.
My first day in school and I'm already public enemy number one to the school's number-one public enemy
.

*   *   *   *   *

Money . . . money . . . money
was all that Beamer could think of as he walked home that afternoon. Maybe he could bring in a little cash by making a deal not to show his sister's naked baby pictures to the ninth-grade drill team. Unfortunately, with Dad out of work so long, the idea of an “allowance” was ancient history.

As he turned to walk up his driveway, Beamer noticed a squirrel next to the backyard fence. It had something shiny in its mouth.
Hey
,
maybe the little rodent had found a gold ring or a diamond or something.
He quietly dropped his backpack and crept slowly toward it. Suddenly he crunched a puddle of leaves. The squirrel darted across the yard and up the bent trunk of the tree. Beamer dashed after it and ran halfway up the trunk before the little pipsqueak disappeared between two leafy branches.

Beamer sighed and leaned against a branch. He could barely see the tree house far above. It looked like a banana with outriggers . . . or something else. He couldn't quite put his finger on it. But, then, of course, he didn't care.

No sooner had he slid back down to the ground than he heard a chittering sound. Looking back up the tree, he saw the squirrel again, chattering away like Aunt Bertha on Thanksgiving. Beamer started to walk away, but right when he thought he had a grip on reality, the squirrel's noises started to make sense!

“Hey, brick foot!” the squirrel said in a high-pitched chirp. “Get those nut-crunchers off my turf!”

“What?” yelped Beamer, looking down at his feet, then back up in surprise.

“My acorns, you lunk head! You're trompin' all over 'em!” the squirrel chattered louder in a decidedly Southern accent. The squirrel suddenly disappeared again between the branches.

“Hey! Wait!” Beamer said, climbing hands and feet like a kid going the wrong way up a playground slide. “How come you can talk?”

“Squirrels only!” the little rodent ordered as it stuck its head out of a hollow in the tree — probably where it hid its hoard of nuts. “Didn't you read the sign?” Then it giggled.

“Sign?” Beamer questioned, looking around.
Hey, since when do squirrels giggle? Okay, maybe Chip and Dale, but they're chipmunks, not squirrels, and cartoons on top of that.

Suddenly the giggles broke into laughter and out from behind the branches peeked a girl. “Had ya goin', didn't I?” she chortled.

At least Beamer
thought
it was a girl. The jeans, camouflage shirt, and four-barrel, super-charged squirt gun slung across her back didn't help. Then she turned her head and there was a dishwater-blonde ponytail. Of course that wasn't a sure sign, but it was a start.

“The squirrel and I are old friends,” she said. “His family's lived in this here tree forever.” She stretched out her words in a drawl wide enough for
Gone with the Wind.

Beamer climbed toward her. “What are you doing in my tree, anyway?”

“Your
tree? Part of it hangs over
my
yard, ya' know.” She pointed to a second floor window in the house next door. “That's my room up there.”

Beamer looked around. Sure enough, he was standing where the bent trunk hung over the next yard. “Well, so what?” he shrugged. “The tree is
planted
in
my
yard and no court in the country would say this is
your
tree.” He looked up at the tree house. “And if you've been messin' up my tree house, you're in a lot of trouble.”

“Hah! That shows how much
you
know! It's not a tree house!”

6
Spaceships Don't Grow on Trees

“What are you talkin' about?” Beamer said, rolling his eyes. “Of course it's a — ”

“It's a spaceship!” she trumpeted.

“A what?” Beamer stammered with a stunned look. He peered up through the branches like he was trying to use X-ray vision.

Of course! Why didn't I see it before — the bullet shape, flattened out some — broader than it is high.
The ship's nose was tilted down slightly, as if it had crashed into the tree.

“If you'd cared the tiniest bit,” the girl chided him, “you'd have known.”

But he could barely hear her now. There was something — no more than a speck — way out in space. All of a sudden, it was like he could see . . . forever.

The next thing he knew he was inside it, looking out the window.

A lower half of a huge ball with rings around it loomed before his eyes. It's the planet Saturn. The spaceship is doing the loop the loop around Saturn!

Bad move. Every star pilot from Rigel to Betelgeuse has heard of the rings. Forget the exploded moon dust theory and the ice cube ring-around-the-planet idea.

Where did that come from?
Beamer thought
. What made me think I knew that?

The truth is that the rings are an infamous graveyard of spaceships, which makes Saturn one major tombstone. For a million years, interstellar voyagers have been trapped in the giant planet's super-cool, freeze-your-buns electromagnetic whirlpool.

Of course, at first nobody knows it is a trap. They just think it is the ride of their lives, whirling around that multicolored ball, playing big-time dodgeball with all the pretty rocks that make up the rings. Only too late do they discover that they are doomed to become one of those shiny chunks. Yes, by the time they figure out there is no exit to this ride, their spaceships will be halfway cocooned in a kind of sticky gook.

What am I doing here? For that matter, who's talking in my head?

This time is lucky, though. One of those gooey rocks nicked the ship — actually splattered was more like it, exploding into something between fireworks and a huge geyser of multicolored paint. The ship recoiled, spinning away from the rings, end over end.

Inside the ship, Beamer was also spinning end over end. By the time his head cleared, the monster-planet Jupiter was outside his window. Unfortunately, the giant red spot in the middle of the planet seems to have taken a liking to the little rocket and it's trying to suck it up like a Popsicle. It's a tussle to escape the big planet's puckered, red lips, but a little backfire from the rockets and those lips spit us back out into the cosmos.

Scenes change quickly. Now we're shooting the asteroid belt like a pinball. Shields on full, we bounce off those little planetoids as if they are made of rubber. Even so, the ship doesn't take it too well. Gravity control is going haywire and everybody and everything is bouncing around.

Somewhere this side of Mars, something really goes wrong. The sensors fail to detect a passing comet. It whirls the ship around like a carnival ride and flings it toward a small blue and white planet — the third one from the star.

“Hey! Are you listening to me?” a voice piped in. “What are you doing, anyway?”

“Huh?” Beamer mumbled, shaking his head to clear his vision.
Wow! I've had some hare-brained fantasies in my time, but this one —

“Nothing,” he said. “Go on. What were you . . . uhm . . . saying?”

“I was saying that it's haunted!”

“Haunted? What is?” Beamer asked, thinking about the big house down the street.

“The tree ship!” the girl repeated impatiently. “What's the matter with your ears?”

Beamer sat in stunned silence. Haunted cemeteries, haunted houses he could understand, but haunted spaceships . . . and in trees, no less. “That's ridiculous!”

“Good grief! Don't you know anything?” she scolded him. She started to shinny along a branch toward him. “It's practically a legend!”

“Legends are for Indian mounds, foggy castles, and other ancient-type stuff,” Beamer cried impatiently. “Not tree houses!”

“Well, it's practically ancient,” she insisted, hanging upside down in front of him like a tree sloth. “It's been here as long as anybody can remember.”

“So what does the haunting? A ghost made out of leaves?” Beamer said with a smirk.

The girl straddled a branch above him. “Well, there's one way to find out, kid.”

“Beamer, the name's Beamer!” he retorted. “Beamer MacIntyre. And I want nothing to do with that thing, haunted or not — nothing to do with this house, this block, or anybody livin' on it. And the last thing I need is a girl who thinks she's a commando and talks about haunted tree houses!”

“Oooooh . . . major attitude problem,” she taunted him. “Seein' how ya' rescued Ghoulie today, I expected better.”

She swung to the lowest branch and dangled in the air a moment before dropping to the ground. Whether or not she was a girl, Beamer was pretty sure she was half monkey.

“Incidentally, my name's Scilla — Scilla Bruzelski. And just you try and keep me outta
my
tree!” she yelled up at him as she huffed and strode like a peacock through her back door.

Beamer heard the screen door slam behind her. He wasn't proud of the way he'd just acted, but he was too busy feeling sorry for himself to worry about anyone else. After all, besides leaving his old friends, having the local creepazoid on his case, being hero to a nerd, and being condemned to live on a prehistoric street, how many things could go wrong in one lifetime?

An insect landed on his hand. “Yipe!” he yelped, flinging it off. It landed on a branch nearby. He raised his foot for the death squish, and then remembered his mom's words. “Oh, a cricket!” He crawled over for a closer look. It was such a pale green that it was almost white. It turned and faced him as if it was sizing him up, then suddenly sprang away.

Beamer was usually pretty much the Terminator where bugs were concerned, but it didn't seem right to kill one that was supposed to sing. Of course, the crickets around here didn't appear to sing at all, as far as he could tell.
Maybe they all have laryngitis or something.

*   *   *   *   *

Beamer thought he had it knocked the next day. Good ol' Mom came through with the milk money. After all, it was for a good cause — sort of. Before the first bell, Beamer headed straight for Jared in playground central. As confident as a mouse about to snatch cheese from a mousetrap, he dug into his pocket and pulled out a wad of crisp bills.

Luckily Jared never heard the vacuum-powered gasp behind him. Like the dutiful, trustworthy Scout he was, Beamer had put his mom's money into his bank. The only trouble was that was where he'd also kept his old play money. Yep, you guessed it. He was standing within spitting distance of Jared holding a fistful of worthless colored paper!

As luck would have it, Jared chose that moment to turn around. Fortunately, or maybe thanks to a little angel dust, somebody opened the restroom door smack in front of Beamer's face. And Jared stepped inside without even seeing him.

It was time for plan “B,” otherwise known as cold, sweaty panic! When that didn't work, he opted for plan “C,” which was to lay low. It wasn't particularly cool stopping to peek around every corner and through the hinges of every door. But it was either that or face the Matter Disintegrator —Jared's fists.

The hardest times were lunch and recess. Once, Beamer had to hide inside a playground slide tube. Luckily, by the time the next kid slid down and bumped him out of the tube, Jared's warp-brain goon was gone.

Five minutes after the final bell, however, Beamer's luck ran out.