Whales on Stilts! (9 page)

They talked over their plan of action. They decided that Katie and Lily would go over to the Smogascoggin Oceanographical Institute and see what they could find out about whales. Jasper said that he would go out in his Marvelous Subaquatic Zephyr to see if he could
spot any whales gearing up for battle on the ocean floor of the bay. While Lily talked on the phone, she watched people making appointments with the dentist's receptionist.

Suddenly it hit her: If she and her friends didn't do something, the appointments would never happen. Things scheduled for Tuesday would never come to pass. But people all around her were going on like normal, not knowing that everything was about to change.

Lily pictured the dentist's office and all the buildings around it as just a pile of gray bricks, scattered with drills and dentures, as if the rubble was hungry and openmouthed and would snap up passing flies.

Lily was such a nice person, it didn't even occur to her that a vision of the dentist's office destroyed should have actually cheered her up.

Later that day Lily and Katie went over to the oceanographical institute. They learned a lot about whales. They learned that whales survive underwater through various means, such as a surplus of oxygen-storing myoglobin in the whale's muscle tissue. They learned that whales make noises but have no vocal cords. They learned that the blue whale—the largest animal ever to exist—can weigh up to two hundred tons. The heart of one giant blue whale weighed about fifteen hundred pounds. They learned that most baleen whales eat euphausiids, cope-pods, and amphipods. They learned that the song of the humpback whale can last up to thirty-five minutes.

But they didn't learn anything specifically about combating walking whales with laser-beam eyes.

So let's leave them behind.

Meanwhile, far below the waters of the bay, a fake boulder slid aside and Jasper's Marvelous Subaquatic Zephyr slid out into the murky, polluted tides. His lights trawled the depths.

He headed cautiously toward the docks near the Abandoned Warehouse. He passed the piers, waving with green algae and speckled white with barnacles. He shone his lights over the bottoms of sailboats and motorboats, where they rocked on the waves above him. He passed two deep-sea divers giving each other a high five. They had just found a roll of quarters that had dropped off a harbor cruise.

Near the Abandoned Warehouse, the piers were broken and jagged. There were the remains of docks on the bottom, puffy with green slimy growth. Blind fish swam through fields of rusted cars and cans.

Jasper reached a brick wall—the back wall of
the Abandoned Warehouse. He knew that's what it was because it was painted on the bricks, in big letters:

There, right below the wall, was a secret berth—a big platform made of metal, with all kinds of industrial tools in brackets. The berth was shaped like this:

Jasper narrowed his eyes and scanned the sub's lights over the berth. There was no mistaking it—this was no flounder factory. This was definitely where the whales had been equipped with all of their “accessories,” like the lasers and the mind-control helmets.

Now,
he thought,
the trick is to find the whales themselves.

He headed back out into the bay. For hours
he drifted back and forth, marking his path on a chart. He saw great boulders and old decaying trees. He puttered by manta rays. No whales, though.

At dinnertime he surfaced briefly to eat a sandwich. He opened his hatch and sat above water, munching on ham and cheese, sipping a wonderful tall glass of chocolate Gargletine Brand Patented Breakfast Drink, which left him feeling healthy, heroic, and refreshed. Why, every household should have a canister of Gargletine—fortified with seventeen essential nutrients found in no other foodstuff! Give it a try, moms of America, and you'll see why it's called “Pluck in a Bucket.”

As he was sitting there, enjoying the great, sweet, laminated taste of Gargletine, he noticed something on the horizon.

Smoke.

No, not smoke. It was a kind of strange fog, rising from the water. It obscured the little pine-covered islands in the bay. It drifted up toward the moon.

No, not fog. It blew across his face. It was warm. He dropped his sandwich. “Steam,” he said. “Steam! From the lasers! By george!”

Jasper scrambled below, clanged shut the hatch, and threw the Zephyr into Full Speed Ahead. It chugged swiftly through the darkened waters. Peering through his Aquatic Night Goggles, Jasper shut off the lights. His night goggles detected heat, instead of light. In total darkness his vessel shot past rocks and wrecks. He saw them through the goggles as dim purple shapes, lit by the bright green of living things— fish, clams, and sea anemones.

And finally, whales. Yes, he'd found the whales.

There were a huge number of them. Above, the surface of the water was roiling with the motion of them all, bubbling beneath the moon. They were circling around something he couldn't make out... Something purple with lots of swirls and curves ... (He squinted.)... Something with many arms ...

A squid—the natural enemy of the whale!

But there was something strange about the squid.... Living things showed bright green in Jasper's goggles. The squid was purple. Was it dead?

No, he realized. Not dead. It wasn't real. It was a target.

A bright light flashed. The whales were using a wooden stand-up squid for target practice. They were training themselves to use their eye lasers.

It was the heat from the lasers that had made the clouds of steam.

Jasper stayed well away from the whales. He didn't want to be detected. With so many of them, they would be able to crush his Zephyr like an aluminum can.

He had seen all he needed to. The whales were getting ready for war.

Quietly he backed his ship away from them. He headed toward shore.

On the way home from the oceanographical institute, Lily and Katie stopped at the police station.

I don't think I need to tell you how this conversation went.

Have you ever told the police that your house has been pillaged by whales? And then mentioned that tomorrow whales will invade the town?

In Lily and Katie's experience, the police responded by saying things like:

“What do you mean exactly by ‘invasion'?”

“The whales,” explained Katie, “are going to invade.”

“Can I tell you a story, girls?” The police officer leaned back and rested his heels on his computer keyboard. He said patiently, “In the nineteen-sixties there was something called the British Invasion. But no British people really
invaded
us. It was called an
invasion,
but all that happened was a lot of British bands sold a lot of records in the United States.”

“So you're saying,” said Katie, “that really these whales are just going to release a lot of hit singles.”

“Don't get fresh,” said the police officer. “I'm saying that just because there was something called the British Invasion doesn't mean you should be afraid of British people. See what I mean? The British have never
invaded
America.”

Lily mumbled, “What about during the War of 1812?”

“What about it?”

“They burned down Washington, D.C.”

“Yeah.” The policeman bit an apple. He chewed. “Do you girls ever do a sport?”

Let's end this painful interview and move on to something else.