not to be a butterfly.
Then, just when Thomas figured he should start washing himself and
changing clothes for supper, just when he was going to pull back from
the Bad Thing, it went somewhere. He felt it go, bang, there one second
and far away the next, slipping past where he could keep a watch on it,
out across the world, going the same place where the sun was taking the
last of the daylight. He couldn’t figure how it could go so fast,
unless maybe it was on a jet plane having good food and a fine whine,
smiling at pretty girls in uniforms who put little pillows behind the
Bad Thing’s seat and gave it magazines and smiled back at it so nice and
so much you expected them to kiss it like everybody was always kissing
on daytime TV. Okay, yeah, probably a jet plane.
Thomas tried some more to find the Bad Thing. Then, by the time the day
was all gone and night all there, he gave up. He got off his bed and
got ready for supper, hoping maybe the Bad Thing was gone away and never
coming back, hoping Julie was safe forever now, and hoping there was
chocolate cake for dessert.
BOBBY CHARGED across the floor of the diamond-strewn crater, kicking at
the bugs in his way. As he ran he told himself that his eyes had
deceived him and that his mind was playing nasty tricks, that Frank had
not actually teleported out of there without him. But when he arrived
at the spot where Frank had been, he found only a couple of footprints
in the powdery soil.
A shadow fell across him, and he looked up as the alien craft drifted in
blimplike silence over the crater, coming to a full stop directly above
him, still about five hundred feet overhead. It was nothing like
starships in the movies, neither organic looking nor a flying
chandelier. It was lozenge shaped, at least five hundred feet long, and
perhaps two hundred feet in diameter. Immense. On the ends, sides, and
top, it bristled with hundreds if not thousands of pointed black metal
spines, big as church spires, which made it look a little like a
mechanical porcupine in a permanent defensive posture. The underside,
which Bobby could see best of all, was smooth, black, and featureless,
lacking not only the massive spines but markings, remotesors, portholes,
airlocks, and all the other apparatus one might expect.
Bobby did not know if the ship’s repositioning was coincidental or
whether he was under observation. If he was being watched, he didn’t
want to think about the nature of the creatures that might be peering
down at him, and he sure as hell didn’t want to consider what their
intentions toward him might be. For every movie that featured an
adorable alien with the power to turn kids’ bicycles into airborne
vehicles, that were ten others in which the aliens were ravenous flesh
eat with dispositions so vicious as to make any New York he waiter think
twice about being rude, and Bobby was certain that this was one thing
Hollywood had gotten right. It was hostile universe out there, and
dealing with his fellow human beings was
scary enough for him; he didn’t need to make contact with a whole new
race that had devised countless new ways of its own.
Besides, his capacity for terror was already filled to the brim running
over; he could contain no more. He was abandon on a distant world,
where the air-he began to suspect-might contain only enough oxygen and
other required gases to keep him alive only for a short while, insects
the size of kittens crawling all around him, and there was a possibility
that much smaller dead insects was actually fused with the tinicals of
one of his internal organs, and a psychotic blond giant super human
powers and a taste for blood was on his trail-and the odds were billions
to one that he would ever see Julie again or kiss her, or touch her, or
see her smile.
A series of tremendous, throbbing vibrations issued from the ship and
shook the ground around Bobby. His teeth chattered and he nearly fell.