Whales on Stilts! (14 page)

No. 25. Jasper Dash Down the Volga with Nary a Paddle

AVAILABLE AT FINE STORES NEAR YOU!
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And hurled himself bodily into them.

Ray came flying into the room, knocking down several goons. Jasper, reacting as quick as lightning, knocked a goon over the head with the butt of his harpoon gun while, with the other hand, he gripped another goon under his arm in a headlock.

Now if you'll pause for a moment and consider, you'll remember that Jasper was still in his bubble. This meant that the man in the headlock had bubble-bag over his head and couldn't breathe. So, he started kicking his legs and arms.

Larry advanced menacingly toward them.

Then there was a big fight. Most of the goons were knocked out or in some kind of disarray.

That sounds sloppy. But please. Take my word for it; they were out of the picture, okay? I could describe the whole tedious fight. I could work it out numerically and mathematically, but goons—and hand-to-hand combat with goons; anything to do with goons—it all really bores me to the point of weeping. Their equipment, their martial arts training, their love of dried flowers, their fondness for sports bars... I am not goon friendly.
Bing, bang, biff.
Clocked on the jaw; hip check; knee to the nose; leap out of the way so two of them run into each other;
swing;
pow;
knuckle sandwich. Let's just assume that they're all knocked out.

Larry advanced menacingly toward Ray and Jasper.

Ray hurled himself again, this time right at Larry.

Larry raised one rubbery blue fist and knocked him backward. Ray teetered and slumped, still tied up like a beach umbrella in February.

It was up to Jasper.

Jasper raised his harpoon gun. Larry spun and kicked. His heel whopped the edge of the bubble, knocked the harpoon gun askew just as the harpoon was fired. The
harpoon shot through the bubble and clanged uselessly against the ceiling.

Larry laughed—for about a nanosecond. And then he saw what was happening:

Jasper's pierced bubble was deflating with Jasper in it—shooting around the room like a punctured balloon—making a disastrous sputtering noise as Jasper ricocheted off the walls— banged into light fixtures—slammed into computer panels.

Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, was interfering with the whale mind-control, using only his elbows, face, and midriff.

Now that's a hero for you.

And in Smogascoggin Bay, the radio tower stopped sending out its wicked signals.

And in Decentville, the whales paused and listened to the whale song Lily played on the phonographs.

They heard their brethren from the sea. Their minds suddenly felt clearer.

From the phonographs came the lonely cries of whales on ancient voyages, barnacled with age. They heard songs that told of warmer climes, where the sun dapples your back when you sound with your calf in the afternoons; tales of the mysterious North, where ice floes like
castles drop their battlements into the chilly sea. They heard of their race's heroes, and of their travels to frigid deeps. They heard of the slumberous beauty of tides, the seductive murmur of kelp.

And the whales wanted to go home.

Sheepishly they looked at one another.

Without mind-control they couldn't remember what they were doing on land at all.

So they started to walk back to the shore, trying to pretend that nothing had happened.

In the town they left behind, there was cheering.

 

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No longer available on the shelves at fine stores near you. Available now
exclusively and by special arrangement
on the shelves of old vacation rental cottages, where you can often find Jasper Dash books in the living room, as well as old
National Geographics,
Chinese checkers, half colored-in Herbie the Love Bug activity books from 1978, used up Mad Libs, and dog-eared, boring novels for adults by Leon Uris, Colleen McCullough, and James Michener, I mean big, thick books with names like
Space
and
Novel,
you know what I mean, right on the shelf under the dead mounted alligator that Sheryl, your uncle Georgie's new girlfriend, has to keep turning toward the wall because it gives her the creeps. And all the books are dry and yellow from the sun, and all of them have wrinkly pages from the salt water, and when you flip through them, sand falls out as if it was index cards marking the place of former summers; and your little brother Dooky finds some half-melted army men on the shelf and goes out to the sandpit to play with them, which is good, because he was completely getting on your nerves in the car, what with his dumb elephant joke that he told about twenty thousand times; but after him spending like an hour out there, you'll be ready to talk to him again, especially if the two of you can convince your mom to let you go out to dinner at this place that serves spicy fries. And the really good thing about Uncle Georgie always having new girlfriends is that the new girlfriends are always really, really nice to you because they're trying to impress Uncle Georgie, before they realize that he's nice but kind of a wiener and has a big gambling problem; and you think Sheryl is probably the best girlfriend that he's had in a long time, because at least she can do card tricks, so on the beach, you sit next to her on your blanket, and you're reading the adventures of Jasper Dash and you're wondering who originally read them, years ago, who were the faceless kids, now grandmas or now dead, who lay like you on the beach and read them back when your parents weren't even born yet, and their names are written in pencil on the first page—“This book belongs to Caroline Botts”; “Hank Botts read it, too”— but the people who own the cottage you're renting are called Martelli. Your older sister Gina refused to put on suntan lotion for some reason, so now her skin is all purple and green, and a lot of the local boys have come over to admire it, and they're going, “Whoa! Cool!” and she smiles at them, with a kind of crackling sound as the skin on her face moves. And your mom and Uncle Georgie are playing Frisbee on the beach, calling to each other, and Sheryl is lying there next to you, studying for some graduate school exam, wearing big sunglasses; and Gina has just gotten sand in her sandwich and is complaining about it to everyone, because she says it
clings
to the swiss cheese, like
clings,
you know? and everyone is going, “Just brush it off,” and she says she can't, because her hands are sandy, and Dooky says, “What are you complaining about? Sand...
Sand-wich.
Sand... Sand-
wich,”
which actually is pretty funny, because it makes Gina even angrier, and she goes, “Mom! Tell him to stop being a jerk!” And the top of your head gets warm as you read on about Jasper's adventures in the cloud caves, and you don't even notice the green flies buzzing around you anymore, and you've spent nights having clambakes down by the ocean, and you had a lobster for the first time, and Gina was allergic, and she got hives and piles, so she looked like she was leopard skin, a leopard-skin Gina, and Sheryl was really good with her and helped her apply ointment, and Dooky kept going,
“Oinkment,
more like it”; and you brush flies away from your hair, and your uncle, who is sitting next to you, trying to hitch a flying kite to his leg, sees you, and somehow overcome, your uncle Georgie smiles— and he says to you, “I hope you will always feel this kind of joy”; and motorboats go by out in the salt marsh, and they startle egrets so they fly up toward the empty, cloudless sky.

Larry watched the screens in despair. “My army... my army!”

Jasper picked himself up from the floor, struggling a bit with the deflated Oxysphere around him. “I'm afraid they're gone, sir. Gone back to the sea, where they belong.”

One after another, the whales tumbled into the water, their stilts lying desolate, like hydraulic pickup sticks, on the shore.

“It's all ruined!” Larry growled.

By this point Ray had freed himself from the ropes and picked up one of the guns from the floor. Larry strode right past him, knocking his hand aside. Larry turned at the door. He growled, “I'm going to swim away, through my
yacht's screen door. But mark my word, Boy Technonaut—I'll be back. You'll see me again! Someday I'll be back, and more fearsome than ever!”