Attack of the Spider Bots (4 page)

“Not much of a haul, if you ask me,” said Scilla as she picked up a little statuette of the Empire State Building. It was missing its top spire.

“Yeah, I think my mom can do better in a morning of shopping garage sales,” said Beamer with a wry grin. He tipped the airplanes and spaceships that were hanging from a rack to make them swing back and forth. Action figures, trucks, and tanks — all missing pieces here and there — were arranged for battle on a bench below.

They moved on toward the back of the trolley and found a few blankets and a ratty pillow set up on a bench next to a heater. “Well, at least it's not too cold here,” said Ghoulie. “It looks like he's using propane gas.”

“Probably stolen, like everything else,” grumbled Beamer.

“Maybe not,” Ghoulie corrected as he shook a propane bottle taken from a pile of them. “These are all only part full — probably leftovers that people had thrown away. The trouble is, it can be dangerous to use this stuff inside.”

Shirts, pants, and other clothes were hung or draped on window hooks. In the very back of the trolley was a small, beat-up camping stove and some boxes and cans of food. A nearly empty bowl of cereal buried in half-frozen milk was sitting on a small bench.

“All the comforts of home,” said Beamer with a smirk. Beamer was angry enough to think about taking the kid's stuff as payback, but then returning thievery for thievery didn't sound quite right. He was pretty sure Jesus wouldn't do it. He'd been taught to ask himself what Jesus would do whenever he wasn't sure about the right choice. Of course, that meant he had to get to know Jesus pretty well. Luckily, although Jesus lived an incredible 2,000 years ago — back in the days of gladiators and emperors — four guys wrote whole books telling his story. No, Jesus wouldn't take something that belonged to someone else, and he wouldn't hurt someone in anger.

“Well, at least we know where the kid lives,” said Ghoulie. “We'd better get home. The snow's getting thicker in the sky out there.”

Just then they heard a loud
smack
and saw an explosion of white on the front window.

“What was that?” yelped Ghoulie.

“A snowball the size of a cantaloupe!” shouted Beamer as he ran out the door. “Show your face, you thieving wimp!” So much for Beamer's conquest of anger.

“Any sign of him?” asked Ghoulie as he and Scilla came up beside Beamer.

“Nope, but I'm not giving up on this guy. I'll be back!”

Beamer shouted like some half-pint Terminator. His voice echoed through the empty lot, but he heard no answer.

The three friends took a few wrong turns, trying to find their way back to the torn patch of fencing. By then, the whirling snowflakes were as thick as chicken dumplings. Beamer still managed to find his wallet, minus a few dollars, lying next to the torn fence. So much for his snow-shoveling money.

“Look at it this way,” said Scilla. “The kid didn't have to return your wallet.”

Beamer grumbled and muttered to himself as he put the wallet back into his pocket. He gazed one more time at the snow-frosted trolley station as the bus pulled up at the stop.

Later that evening, Beamer told his parents about the boy in the trolley car. The funny thing was they spent more time s colding Beamer for going there than they did knocking the kid for stealing Beamer's wallet. Of course, Beamer didn't know he was going to Middleton's skid row. Their response was that he should have left as soon as he realized it. But then, if he had, they wouldn't have known about the kid living in a trolley car in the middle of winter.
Sometimes parents made no
sense at all.

The next thing Beamer knew, his mother was all over the Internet and on the phone trying to find out what to do about that kid — to find out who he was and how to help him. All Beamer could do was roll his eyes.
Yep, his mom
never did anything halfway.

The next day, Beamer was in his attic getting things to take over to the tree ship. The attic was a pretty good shortcut to the tree, actually. Beamer could climb out the attic window, skitter across the roof a few steps, and launch onto a tree branch for a quick climb over to the tree ship.

The problem was that, to get to the attic window, he had to get past . . . the web. Beamer and his family had found the giant web in their attic when they moved in. It was so huge, stretching from the floor all the way up to the apex of the roof, that Beamer's dad had called in some scientists to investigate it. The attic still looked like the engineering deck of the starship Enterprise, alive with blips and beeps, bubbling chemicals, flashing lights, and twisting, illuminated lines from all the electronic and chemical equipment scientists were using to study the now-famous MacIntyre Web. Nobody'd ever seen the mutant octopod that had supposedly built this two-story silk metropolis. Beamer had named it with the scariest sounding name he could think of at the time — Molgotha.

Actually, some of the scientists didn't think the web had been built by a real spider. They thought some person had put it together as a hobby or a joke or a scientific experiment. The trouble with that theory was that the web was made of genuine spider material — DNA positive.

On the other hand, the web did some things that most spiderwebs didn't. Beamer had told the scientists that the web seemed to suck up energy. He'd told them that he had caught a glimpse of it through the attic window, glowing hot the moment before the tree ship had warped into one of their adventures. Unfortunately, nobody past puberty believed that their experiences really happened. Well, at least Beamer always got a good laugh. Sometimes he thought he was cut out to be a stand-up comic, except that nothing else he ever said drew any laughs.

Getting past the web, though, was no laughing matter. Beamer eyed suspiciously the dark corners of the attic, looking for signs of movement or a large flying thread of spider silk. Let's face it, Molgotha — or whoever built that thing — was one top-gun silk architect. He/she/it or his/her/its descen-dants weren't going to leave it abandoned forever. Beamer sucked in his breath and scooted slowly beneath the sticky little arch the web made above the floor. All Beamer could do, then, was to hope and pray that a gust of wind wouldn't make the web billow, or that he wouldn't accidentally take a breath.

Having already completed that process, Beamer popped his head out the attic window. In the fall, Beamer had wondered if the tree that held the tree ship would lose leaves like the other trees. After all, this tree had its own ecosystem, its own weather pattern, its own insect population, and its own energy field. There could be a windstorm in the tree while the rest of Murphy Street was as quiet as a tomb. As it turned out, the tree did lose its leaves. It seems that the cycle of life rules, no matter what.

Trees always seemed so pitiful when they lost their leaves. They went out in a blaze of glory, Beamer had to admit, with all the red, yellow, and purple colors of fall, but then they were left looking like skeletons of their former selves.

When snow came, though, the picture was totally different. Those naked tree limbs were coated a glistening white with icicles draped all over them. The whole treescape shimmered and twinkled like a magical fairy land — if you believed in such things.

It was a little tougher working on the tree ship when you were wrapped up like an Eskimo, but Beamer's mom always insisted he dress warmly. Ghoulie and Scilla got the same lecture from his nanny and her grandmother. Actually, it turned out to be a good thing, because whenever any of them rocked the tree, they'd suddenly be pelted by a load of snow bombs from the branches above.

At the moment, the tree ship had its own layer of snow frosting with icicles hanging all over it like Christmas decorations. “How's it going up there?” he yelled at Ghoulie through the attic window.

Ghoulie winced as an icicle drop fell into his eye. He wiped it off and went back to tucking wires into the instrument panel. “How should I know?” he shouted back irritably. He was supposed to be making a universal translator, but that wasn't easy to do when you didn't have all that good a grip on your own language.

Beamer snickered to himself. Nobody could juggle numbers and electrons around better than Ghoulie, but, at the moment, he wasn't on the best of terms with verbs and adjectives. Oh, he could talk circles around anyone and used words big enough to strangle a normal person's brain, but diagramming sentences in English class drove him nuts.

“D' ya'll need any help?” yelled Scilla as she swung up onto the trunk where it crossed into her yard.

“No, I think I've almost got it,” Ghoulie shouted. “Okay . . . it's finished . . . I think,” Ghoulie said with a shrug. “At least it's as finished as I can make it.” All he'd done was load word processing and voice recognition software into the ship's computer and attach a microphone and a speaker. Just reading English was going to be a stretch. “Universal” it was not. All Ghoulie could hope for was that when they and the ship warped into one of their adventures, it would work just as well as everything else did. Let's face it: in the real world, a plywood ship in a tree had little chance of making light speed. In fact, it was right in the middle of that thought that Ghoulie's stomach dropped, his eyes blurred, and his ears filled with a
whoosh
.

5

Siege on Bot World

Up in the attic, Beamer saw a yellowish white light in the corner of his vision. He whirled around to see the web glowing like . . . like — he couldn't think of anything it was like — maybe fairy dust. All he knew was that it meant the ship was taking off, and he wasn't on it!

“Wait!” he yelled as he scrambled out the window and fell in a roll down the roof to the tree. He clamored along the branches, jostling snow clods into pelting him with every frantic movement.

It momentarily occurred to him that he might see what the tree ship looked like when it warped away.
Of course, if the whole experience is only in my head, the
tree ship isn't really going anywhere — or is it? Maybe the
ship took them into another dimension.
Whatever it was, Beamer wanted to be
in
the ship, not watching it. “Wait!” he shouted with even more urgency.

Ghoulie looked out the cockpit window. The sky was now black with tiny sparkling dots. He looked down and noticed that he was wearing a red, yellow, and blue uniform with brass buttons. He'd gotten a promotion since their last jump — all the way to Captain.

The captain's eyes flared wide when he saw, directly in front of the ship, what looked like a large battleship floating sideways in space.

Ghoulie suddenly realized that Beamer and Scilla were nowhere to be seen. They'd been working outside the ship when it jumped. Fighting a growing sense of panic, he leaped from his seat and ran to the back of the ship. It took a strangely long time to get there. For one thing, the ship was growing longer right before his eyes. He knew that the bridge always seemed bigger than their little plywood cock-pit, but he'd never been outside the bridge before. The ship didn't grow to be as big as Darth Vader's star destroyer, but it wasn't far from being as big as the Millennium Falcon or Princess Amidala's Naboo Royal Cruiser.

“Bruzelski . . . MacIntyre! Where are you?” Captain Ives shouted into his communicator. “Report! Report!” he yelled again as he ran from compartment to compartment.

He got a blast of static and then heard, “We're coming in now, Captain. Opening air-lock door.”

The captain then saw them outside the window, wearing bulky white suits and floating in space like birthday balloons. He sighed in relief as he watched them enter the air lock and saw the robotic arm next to them retract back into its compartment.

Minutes later, they were all together in the ship's bridge, staring at a space battleship on their view screen. Actually, it was bigger than a battleship. As they drew closer they began to see tall buildings and needle spires growing out of its smooth, dark surface.

“It's a floating city!” exclaimed Commander MacIntyre.

“Not a favorite vacation spot, I think,” said the captain wryly as he saw gashes and rubble where building walls should be.

“Not unless you're into digging through ruins,” said Officer Bruzelski.

“Man! I hope we haven't dropped into the middle of a war,” grumbled MacIntyre. “I'm fresh out of bravery pills.”

“What do you think, Commander?” Captain Ives asked. “Warfare or a friendly visit from the neighborhood asteroid field?” Impact craters covered the surface of the space platform like it had been a shooting gallery. Through the craters, he could see a trash heap of what had once been buildings and streets beneath the surface. Whether the damage was from exploding bombs or just big rocks, the captain couldn't tell.

“Either way, she's totally gutted,” said MacIntyre. “If she'd been on the sea instead of in space, she'd have sunk faster than the Titanic.”