There's a Spaceship in My Tree! (8 page)

But the ship was already too low. It was coming down like a meteor in a blaze of fire. The crystal-Albumidium magnetronic outer coating had already melted. The sillidium shell went next, followed by the megabidium, then the jillibidium, and all the other idium layers.

“Captain!” Ghoulie shouted. “We're being peeled like an onion. Another ten seconds and we'll be fireworks!”

Then Beamer saw it — something rising from the edge of a small primitive city, reaching toward them. A faint siren sounded in the background. Tendrils wrapped around the ship like a squid about to have lunch and pulled her down.

“What's happening?” cried Scilla.

“We're caught in some kind of . . . biological nightmare — hard, crusty limbs, draped with green stuff, coming out of the ground reaching into the sky. . . . Release the orthomoponic plantipus delimiter,” Ghoulie cried.

“The what?” Scilla asked.

“The weed killer!” Ghoulie yelled. But once again it was too late.

There was a PH UD, a CRUNCH, and a rustle-rustle. The ship was stuck — in something the crew would later learn was called a “tree.” All that was left of her eight-layer hull was the frame, swaying in the branches.

“Beamer!” his mother's voice called from the back door. Beamer, Ghoulie, and Scilla looked at each other in bewilderment. They were their old selves again — shorts, jeans, T-shirts, ponytail, and all. The instrument panels were again broken plywood with painted dials and broom handle levers.

That night, after everyone else had fallen asleep, Beamer crawled out his window and sat on his roof staring at the tree ship. He couldn't see much of it in the light of a half moon, but he had a flashlight.

What was going on?
He spotlighted first the ramp, then the door. It hadn't been your usual “let's pretend” experience — it had been more like a parallel universe or something . . . where almost everything is the same but some things are different.

His mom had said it was just his super-charged imagination. Maybe, but he hadn't had anything so totally off-the-wall, suck-up-your-brain real in a long time. It was like being a character in your own video game — virtual reality way beyond virtual.

He panned his flashlight across the tree ship's surface like a searchlight.
Maybe it is haunted after all.

12
Meteor

Weeks passed. Squirt guns and water slides were replaced by footballs and crisp, multicolored leaves piled high for diving into. Beamer spent countless hours in the tree ship with his new friends.

And his family found a good church to attend, much to the relief of Beamer's parents, who insisted they all attend not only Sunday morning service, but Sunday evening, as well. When the kids protested, Dr. Mac reminded them that this church was their new “family” now, and it was time to get to know their relatives.

Secretly, though, Beamer was happy to settle into the well-worn cushions twice each weekend. He missed his old church and all his church friends. Plus, this church had something new to offer: the scent of warming casseroles and baking desserts wafting from the church basement promising a scrumptious potluck dinner after services.

Besides church, weekends were now filled with Boy Scout activities. That's how, one Saturday afternoon, Beamer found himself standing before a big rock in the park museum.

The boys' rating system for the exhibits had ranged from empty stares to snickering. The biggest hit had been a statue — okay, sculpture — made out of clothespins and hubcaps. It hadn't been a good day for the arts in America.

But here they were in front of this big rock. The writing on the plaque said the rock was a meteor. To an old space trader like Beamer, that was news in itself. It didn't look like much, though — no star-shaped crystal, pulsing with energy. It was just a shiny, dark rock with a chip missing.

No wonder I'm still in Middleton,
thought Beamer, as he remembered his wish that first night in town.
Anyone who believes some gnarly old rock can grant wishes needs to have his head examined. Still, it is from another world.

The plaque read: “Found July 20, 1919, at a site 877 yards west of its present location.”

West?
Beamer thought about it:
Let's see, west is that-away — over toward Murphy Street
. He tried to remember how long a yard was. One thing was for sure: he was going to work harder on the weights and measurement tables.
Okay, let's see . . . there are a hundred yards in a football playing field. That would make it just under nine football fields to where the meteor landed, which would put it —

All at once the image of the split tree trunk burst into his imagination. His eyes grew wide.
You don't suppose . . . What if this meteor crashed into
my
tree?

Twenty minutes later, scout compass in hand, Beamer was stepping off huge steps due west from the museum. “Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine — ”

He glanced up.
Yep, so far, so good.
The way led right up to the brick wall. He'd just walk it off to there, then pick it up again when he went around to the other side of the wall — as long as it wasn't Ms. Parker's yard, that is.

With his eyeball planted on his compass, Beamer didn't notice what was going on around him. So, when he looked up again, he was totally unprepared to see a football on a trajectory straight for his nose.

All Beamer could do was open his mouth. For that matter, nothing else would move. He watched the perfect spiral plummeting toward him like a dark falling star. He could see the little puckered seams and the threads spinning slowly around. One microsecond before he was to lose his face, a pair of hands erupted into the picture and caught the ball. Then the body attached to those hands slammed into Beamer like a Mac truck.

*   *   *   *   *

The next thing Beamer knew, he was laid out on his bed with three Moms hovering above him. Something was definitely unscrewed in his brain. He saw her mouth (or mouths) moving, but all he could hear was a roaring sound, like from a waterfall.

She stroked Beamer's hair fondly. “Oom-aa-faaa-blll-yrsssss-braww-ooo-omm” is what he heard her say. Later he learned that one of the football players, who also happened to be the paperboy, had brought him home. Her lips were moving again: “Oooollll-beee-aaaallll-riiii-ohhh-yrrrr-goiing-taaave-a-ud-siize-knot-on-heedd,” he heard.

The doorbell rang. “I'll be right back,” she said and hurried out of the room.

As her footsteps tripped lightly down the staircase, he heard a noise above the ceiling — something crashing. The scientists weren't working in the attic today, so there shouldn't have been anyone up there to break something. He sat up, and then grabbed his head with a heavy groan. Feeling a little better, he shook his head and wobbled through his door and into the hallway. At that moment a kitten slipped from behind the attic door, which somebody had apparently left ajar.

“Lacy!” Beamer yelled after her. “You're not supposed to be up there!”

It was Erin's cat — the result of a deal she hadn't been able to refuse when her mom had sent her to the nearby mini-market last week.
If those scientist guys find out a cat's been up around their equipment, they'll be . . .
Beamer opened the attic door and, holding the rail firmly, slowly stumbled up the steps. He wasn't supposed to go into the attic, but he thought he might be able to fix what the cat had done. At least, that was going to be his excuse if he was caught. What he really wanted, of course, was to see what was going on with the now famous “MacIntyre web.”

The attic was bright this time of day, with beams from the low-hanging sun blasting through the large back windows. Beamer was more concerned, though, about the dark shadows — about whether anything with eight legs and man-eating mandibles was hiding in them. After a careful scan with his super peepers, he relaxed. Anyway, if the entomologists hadn't seen the creature in all the weeks they'd been up here, he figured he was pretty safe.

At the moment, though, with all the scientific equipment planted around it, the web looked more like a web Darth Vader built. Toss out the web and combine the windows into a view screen, and the attic might look like the bridge of a starship. The web was awesome. Glowing golden-yellow in the evening light, it cast a huge shadow across one whole side of the attic, including Beamer's face. It made him feel very uneasy, and he kept wiping his face, trying to rub off the web that wasn't really there.

The mystery of the web was growing almost every day. Its silk threads were thicker than those in normal webs, and they were enormously strong. The big question, of course, was
What
or
Who
built it? One entomologist thought some mad scientist had created it for a weird experiment. All the rest were sticking to the mutant-spider theory. Their research had led them to agree on only one thing — that the web had been built a long time ago — maybe eighty or ninety years ago. That made the chances of either the mad scientist or the mutant still being alive pretty remote . . . although the word
mutant
suggested all sorts of possibilities. Beamer also wondered why nobody had reported the web until now. Hadn't anybody used the attic before Beamer's family moved in?

New mysteries were always popping up too. Beamer had heard a scientist — the one his sister had a crush on — say that he'd detected a faint electro . . . something . . . field around the web.
Whoever heard of an electric cobweb?

The shadow of the web on Beamer's face made him anxious to leave. But before he left, he scanned the room for any sign of wreckage from the cat. He sighed in relief when he saw that the only thing broken was a soda bottle. He picked up as many pieces as he could and deposited them up next to the wall.

Parker's Castle was framed through one of the front windows. He couldn't see anyone in the tower, but he knew she was there. He'd seen her there often enough, usually after dark when the lights were on and he could see her shadow silhouetted in the window.

He looked the other direction — out the back window. There was the tree ship. He walked over to the window, opened it, and stepped out onto the roof. He then scooted down the shingles, swung onto a large tree branch, and made his way to the tree ship.

It was very quiet at the moment — hardly a breeze — with only a few insect noises. As Beamer looked at the ship, he could see how much progress they'd already made in fixing it up. Scilla had been replacing the broken chairs with her grandma's garage-sale rejects.

Beamer, meanwhile, had been working on the problem of, well, beaming. Let's face it, as things stood now, getting into the tree ship was a major chore. Molecular dematerialization was a little beyond him at this point, but he had some ideas.

One glance at Beamer trying to stretch an extension cord to the tree had already persuaded Dr. Mac to string heavy-duty electrical conduit from the attic to the tree ship. She even went so far as to suspend a huge fishing net beneath the tree to catch anyone who might miss a step.

The observation screen was Ghoulie's project. “On-screen” wasn't going to mean quite what it did on
Star Trek
, but it wasn't going to be half bad for seventh-grade engineering. Anyway, it would become real enough when their brains warped into full-blown Star-Fighter mode. Yep, that's what the ship told them they were — Star-Fighters.

“Hey!”

Beamer turned to see Scilla's face upside down in a window. No sooner had they started working on their respective fix-up operations than they heard another voice: “Hello up there,” Ghoulie called.

Ghoulie had brought one of his dad's old video cameras to hang beneath the ship, and, considering that Ghoulie's dad always snatched up the latest high-tech upgrades, “old” meant last July's model. Ditto for the wide-angle, high-res, glue-ya-tothe-tube video screen.

While the ship was looking better, they hadn't yet figured out what was going on with their blow-em-outta-the-sky adventures. It only happened once in awhile, and they could never predict when. Beamer thought they came more often after he'd had a bad day at school with Jared.

“He's got to have a weak spot, you know,” said Beamer, out of the blue.

“Who?” asked Ghoulie.

“Who do you think? Jared, of course! He must have an Achilles' heel! We've just got to find it.”

“Kill what?” asked a confused Scilla.

“Not kill,” said Ghoulie, rolling his eyes. “A-kill-eez — the Greek hero.”

“He was invincible,” explained Beamer, “except for one weak spot — his heel. That's how they got him — shot him in the heel.”

Suddenly a rumble like a train approaching shook the tree, rattling the tree ship like a box of toys, throwing each of them to the floor.

13
The Return of the Star-Fighters