Walter Stickle and the Galactic Rangers, page 18
“Your planet is in peril. Attack is imminent.”
“Go home, Tobine!” someone shouted.
When Walter saw Captain Kleeg raise his weapon, he threw off his raincoat and hat and sprinted toward the stage, shouting, “Tobine, in the name of the Galactic Rangers, you are under arrest.”
For the first time in his life, Walter Stickle was cheered. He had been thanked many times, had won awards and been patted on the back, he had been kissed and hugged, but he had never, ever been cheered. It felt good. No, it felt great. He waved to the crowd and bowed.
Captain Kleeg stepped out from behind the backdrop with his weapon raised, and First Officer Gak approached from the other side. Both had dropped their trench coat disguises. The crowd went wild at the sight of two blue-skinned, big-brained Galactic Rangers aiming Lason-Ts at the evil villain, Tobine.
“There is no escape, Tobine,” Walter shouted. He felt stupid not carrying any weapon, so he pointed his finger at Kelso and threatened, “Give yourself up, or else.”
Kelso’s hand slipped under the black sheet and when it came out again, something was in it.
“He’s got a gun!” someone yelled.
Captain Kleeg fired and the sheet exploded in a blizzard of swirling lights and spangles that sizzled as they hit the stage. Kelso was left standing in nothing but blue jeans and a hoodie. Kleeg adjusted his Lason-T and fired again, but Kelso jumped off the stage before the particle beam incinerated the podium and blew a hole in the floor. Sparks showered the curtain, and it caught fire. Cheers turned to screams. The sprinkler system activated, and it began to rain throughout the auditorium. The audience panicked and ran for the doors.
Walter shouted, “Don’t run! Walk!”
As he turned back toward the stage, Kelso crashed headlong into him, knocking him to the floor where they landed together in a lump.
Beside them on the carpet lay a pair of thick glasses, the thickest he had ever seen, and when Walter rolled over and looked under the hood into Kelso’s one green and one blue eye, he said, “Vivien?”
“Stay down, Walter,” she said, sliding something into his hand and squeezing it closed as Captain Kleeg lifted her off him and threw her against the stage. Vivien raised her hands and said, “I surrender, Captain.”
“You!” Captain Kleeg snarled. “Where is the traitor?”
“I don’t know.”
The captain took aim. “The record will read that you resisted arrest and that I had no choice but to terminate you. This is the end of your miserable illegitimate life.”
“Captain, she is lying,” said Gak. “She knows where Tobine is. I suggest we return to the ship and use the Memory Reader on her.”
“I have a different suggestion, First Officer.”
“Captain,” said Gak, putting his hand on Kleeg’s weapon. “She is not armed and has surrendered. Killing her at this time would be in direct violation of Congress of Planets Article 51.2 and will not serve our primary purpose.”
The captain’s face darkened more than any drawing Walter had seen of it in the comic strip, but he lowered his weapon.
Gak cuffed Vivien and then said into his communicator, “Mr. Sparks, lock onto my signal. Three to beam. Execute.”
Vivien smiled at Walter one last time before she shimmered and dissolved in the rain, leaving him holding a small object that looked like a metal potato in one hand and her Coke bottle glasses in the other. The audience had surged toward the exits when the fire first broke out with everyone pushing and shoving to get through the doors, but the fire was no match for the sprinkler system, and the panic no match for the calls for calm from Batman, Superman, and the other superheroes spread throughout the auditorium.
Walter put on his raincoat and ran out of the building through the emergency exit behind the stage. He got to the car before the calamity had worked its way through the exhibit hall, and not knowing what else to do, he drove home.
Chapter 16
Walter parked the car in his driveway and ran inside the house. Something smelled terrible, like the time he had left a pot of water on the stove to boil and forgotten about it, only remembering when the water had evaporated and the smell of the melting pot had drifted upstairs to where he was cleaning the bathroom. This smell wasn’t coming from the kitchen, however. He followed the noxious haze to a pile of melted plastic and metal in the living room where his TV and computer had been. After emptying his downstairs and upstairs fire extinguishers onto the mess, Walter changed out of his uniform. As he set it down, it disintegrated into a lifeless heap of brittle red and yellow crepe paper.
He phoned Vivien, listened twice to the message, “The number you have dialed is no longer in service,” hung up, and ran over to her office. The door was locked. The sign in the window was gone. Walter didn’t know what to do. What do you do when the woman who you’re sorry is going away forever happens to be going away to outer space, to be taken by intergalactic police to the other side of the galaxy to stand trial before the Congress of Planets as an agent of the evil Tobine? Walter ran home again.
He was angry: angry with the Rangers, angry with himself for believing them, angry with Vivien for not telling him, angry at everything. Growing up, whenever he had gotten so angry that he could spit, his dad’s advice was always, “Cool off. Take a shower. You’ll feel better.” Walter went upstairs, kicked the remains of his Galactic Ranger uniform under the bed where he wouldn’t have to look at it again until the next time he declared war on the Thing-Under-The-Bed’s evil dust empire, and took a long shower.
Afterward, he made himself a cup of strong tea, went out to the porch, and sat on the glider. Mrs. Mooney was trimming her hedges across the street. She waved. She had the nicest hedges in Pitville. The Farrells two doors down were having their gutters replaced and he could hear Mrs. Farrell arguing with the workman who had parked his high-lift in her yard making indentations in the sod they’d paid a fortune to have laid down last spring. Someone in the next block over was mowing the lawn. It was just another day in Pitville for them, another normal day, but for Walter, sitting there on his porch in his glider with a cup of strong tea, it was about as normal as the metal potato that he was turning over and over in his hand. Smooth as a mirror, it had tiny potato eyes that sparkled like dots of light. It had no moving parts, no seam that opened by pressing a secret button. It was just a metal potato.
“Whatcha got there, Mr. S?” said Biff, who had come up onto the porch without him noticing.
“Nothing,” said Walter. “Just something a friend gave me. Sorry, I couldn’t get Kelso’s autograph for you.”
“No problem. I checked it out, and it’s not worth the trouble to eBay it.”
“Where’s Frank?”
“Aw, he’s grounded. We got old man Bender’s dog good with a water balloon, and he got caught.”
“But you didn’t?”
“Almost did. We were hiding behind the trashcans in the alley and Bender would have nailed us both, but Frank jumped out in the open and gave himself up. He told Bender it was just him who did it.”
“I guess he did it to save your butt.”
“I guess.”
“But he’s your buddy, isn’t he?”
“So?
“So, don’t you think you should help him?”
“How do I do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you should turn yourself in too.”
“What good will that do?”
“I don’t know,” Walter shrugged.
“That’s pretty lame advice, Mr. S. No offense.”
“It’s all right. This hasn’t exactly been my day. I’m kind of in the middle of something, Biff. Don’t you know someone else who could help Frank out?”
“Yeah, the Galactic Rangers, or maybe Tobine,” Biff laughed and ran off down the street.
Walter stood up and dropped his cup, spilling what was left of his tea. On any other day he would have rushed inside to get the sponge to clean it up before it stained the wood, but not on this day. He stared at Vivien’s glasses and at the metal potato, and knew he was looking at the solution to his problem of what to do. He put the glasses in his shirt, shoved the metal potato into a pants pocket, jumped over the porch rail mangling his floodlight neighbor’s marigolds, and ran for the car. This was the man who had traveled to outer space and back again with a band of alien cops. This was the man who had flumped through the moon in a dispersed molecular state to help capture the underling of one of the most dangerous criminals in the galaxy only to find out that she was the woman he couldn’t stop thinking about. This was Walter Stickle driving his borrowed Prius twenty-five miles per hour to Lenny’s apartment because that was the speed limit.
He rang the bell. He knocked. He shouted. When Lenny finally answered the door, Walter said, “They took her, Lenny.”
Lenny didn’t ask “Who?” He didn’t ask “Why?” He just let Walter into his apartment and closed and locked the door again.
“You knew they were the Rangers, didn’t you?” Walter said.
Lenny nodded.
Walter waved the potato at the old man. “I want answers, Lenny, and if you don’t tell me what I want to know…” He stopped and lowered the threatening metallic vegetable when the old man began to shake. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t know what to do. Please, help me.”
“We have to get to Millie,” said Lenny.
Walter drove east then north and took the back roads to the Wharton Forest to avoid going anywhere near the Comic-Con in Dantford. The top story on the radio was what they were calling an accident at the convention center. The reporter had labeled it a publicity stunt gone wrong. The police and fire marshal were investigating and were interviewing witnesses at the scene. Kelso and the actors who had taken part in it were nowhere to be found. Damage to the auditorium had been minimal. Convention organizers seemed to think that it was the best thing that could have happened to their event. They made the national news and people would flock to the center for the final day of the Comic-Con on Sunday, making the event a spectacular success despite the minor mishap. Walter turned off the radio when they said that there were no reported deaths and only minor injuries.
When they got to the break in the guardrail on the unmarked two-lane road in the Pine Barrens that led to Millie Varger’s, Lenny said, “Such a beautiful world this is.”
“I guess,” Walter said.
“Where I come from it was all metal and buildings and bad air. We had nothing like this. Nothing.”
“Where I come from, people don’t pay much attention to it. They’re too busy complaining about the bugs or the humidity or their neighbor’s floodlights.”
“Never take this for granted, Walter. Trust me. You don’t ever want to do that.”
Walter turned onto the gravel road and followed it to where a fallen tree blocked the way.
“Turn right,” said Lenny.
“I thought it was left, Walter said.
“Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.”
Walter turned right, and they drove down the dirt road into the wilds of the Pine Barrens. The sky had clouded over on the drive north as afternoon bled into evening, and what had been distant rumbles and muted flashes on the horizon turned to jagged lightning and deafening thunder as a storm settled over the forest. It began to rain in earnest as they pulled up to Millie’s shack. Rusty was sitting on the porch. She barked once, trotted over to the passenger side of the car, and sat down in the mud.
Lenny got out and patted her on the head. “Good dog,” he said.
When Walter opened his door, the dog snarled at him. “William Bendix,” he said, and the dog snarled again. “Life of Riley?”
Millie came out onto the porch. “Bendix,” she called and lowered her shotgun. Rusty barked and wandered off into the trees.
Walter held up Vivien’s glasses and the potato. “I want answers, Millie,” he said.
“Come on in out of the rain,” she said. “I already put the coffee on.”
She went downstairs, Lenny relaxed on the sofa, and Walter watched the rain turn the clearing to a sea of mud.
“What took you so long getting here?” Millie asked when she returned with the coffee and a plate of cookies.
“You act like you were expecting us,” said Walter.
“Of course, I was. I’ve been tracking you since you left Dantford.”
“Blame Walter,” said Lenny, throwing his hands up. “Sock issues, driving issues, the man is a mess.”
“I don’t have driving issues,” Walter said. “I was going the speed limit.”
“The fate of the world in his hands, and he goes the speed limit,” said the old man, taking a bite of a cookie. “Ah, my favorite.”
Walter took one too, and bit into it. “Mmm. They are good.”
“Thanks, said Millie. “It’s my special recipe. See those little things that look like chocolate chips? They’re dried beetles and fox dung that I foraged this morning.”
Walter began to turn green.
“Don’t spit it out on the rug, for Pete’s sake,” she said. “I was just kidding.”
Walter sniffed the coffee to make sure it really was coffee. “What do you mean, ‘the fate of the world?’”
“What he means,” said Millie, “is that if the Rangers find out what we’ve been up to on your little planet, they won’t hesitate to blow it to kingdom come and let evolution try again.”
“Who are you people?” Walter asked.
She looked at Lenny, and he just shrugged.
Millie began, “On June 10, 1947, a scout ship from the planet Argon crash-landed on Earth.”
“Let me guess, in Roswell, New Mexico?” said Walter.
“Yes.”
“I thought it was in July.”
“That came a little later. The ship’s captain was a Galactic Ranger. His name was Benoit.”
“I heard that too. What were they scouting?”
“Your planet, Walter. We were sent here on a follow-up mission to determine your current technological state and perform a threat assessment.”
“We? Why don’t you sound like a backwoods hick anymore?” Walter asked, when he realized that Millie had dropped her accent and quaint mannerisms.
“Oh, I’m a hick at heart,” she smiled, “just from a different backwoods. I was communications officer on that ship. I’m an Argonian, too, Walter. My name is Varger, but call me ‘Millie’ or I’ll feed you to the dog.”
“You’re an ethereal?”
“Was,” she said. “Now I’m fully acclimated and for all intents and purposes, entirely human.”
“How were you tracking me?”
“Put the glasses on,” she said. “You’ll see.”
When Walter looked through Vivien’s glasses, he suddenly felt as if he was falling with nothing to hold onto. The Earth was hundreds of miles below, and there were a million bits of dust and debris shooting by him so fast that he thought he was back in space again about to flump through the moon. He groped for anything to stop the fall.
Millie steadied him. “Sorry,” she said. “They take some getting used to. Close your eyes and open them slowly, just a peak, and focus on me.”
When he did that, looking through the glasses was more like squinting into a wind tunnel cranked all the way up, something Walter had actually done once as a boy when his parents toured an air base where his uncle was a test pilot. As he peered through the glasses, he saw the Earth rotating below and the stars framed in what looked like a targeting grid showing distances, locations, vectors, and speed in a constantly changing display. Behind it all was Millie waving at him.
“I’m here,” she said. “See me? Focus on me, not on the motion.”
Walter took the glasses off. “I think I’m going to throw up.”
“There’s a bucket on the porch,” she said. “Just don’t empty it where Rusty can get at it. Throw it in the bushes.”
He swallowed hard. “No, I’m all right. Just give me a minute.”
“The glasses have a built-in locator beacon that transmits a signal I can track. I designed and made them myself for Vivy.”
“Why did I feel like I was flying through outer space looking through a gun sight?”
“Well, you were, in a sense. What you saw was a view of space from the nose of Scout Ship Alpha orbiting the planet at 18,000 miles per hour. You were looking through the targeting lens of their primary weapon. You see, those glasses are the other communicator that your buddies upstairs are searching for.”
“But Sparks disabled it. They shut down the view screen and are going to bypass it.”
“He’s wasting his time. What he found is a decoy. He’ll never find the circuit alterations I made.”
“Can you make these glasses see inside the ship?”
She nodded. “Yep, we have access to the entire kit and caboodle, every deck, every room, anywhere there’s a camera.”
“We have to find Vivien.” Walter put the glasses back on too suddenly and began to heave. He ran outside and threw up in the mud.
When he came back in, Millie said, “Well, you saved me getting something to eat for Rusty. You okay now?”
“Yes. How do I get these things to locate Vivien?”
“Slow down, Walter. You wanted answers. I’m going to give you answers, but I want you to know the whole story before you decide what to do about it. You might not like it.”
“But they have Vivien.”
“Calm down. We still have a few hours before they can leave orbit. I don’t think she’s in any immediate danger.”
“They’re going to use that Memory Reader thing on her. Won’t that empty her brain?”
“It could, if someone hadn’t fiddled with it. They’ll only see what we want them to see. It might hurt a bit, but it won’t do any permanent damage. Trust me.”
“Okay, fair enough. I guess I’ll trust you on that.”
Millie continued, “Our first officer was Benoit’s wife. Vivien, that was her name. She and I were the only ones to survive the crash. The captain, our navigator, and an entire company of Sleepers didn’t make it.”
