Smek for President Read online

  WELCOME!NOW Human or

  humanslanguage-learner to the

  MUSEUM OF NOISES. As you saunter

  throughinto our many room and bodegas,

  electrical eyes will study your

  progress and beam to you a secret

  hullaballoo! whenfor you are humid.

  A fat time for all.

  At this momentnow you are enjoying the

  greeting-call of the

  Goozmen of Gooz-7. For learning more

  about the Goozmen,

  kindly visit Flatulenture! on Level 2.

  I moved through the foyer, far enough from the plaque that the eye beam stopped horking at me. Another picked up my movement and made some kind of birdcall. I passed into the next room, and a third sent a trickling sound that made me realize suddenly that I hadn’t peed in kind of a while. I was wondering what to do about that when a fourth eye beamed me a new noise that might have meant something okay to Boov but on Earth is NOT COOL.

  I found a Boovish bathroom, the less said about which the better.

  I stumbled through a room tiled with rubber cushions that honked and whistled when you stepped on them. And you couldn’t not step on them. A bright scoreboard on one wall kept a tally of the tiles I honked and whistled, and at the end it played a sad tubaharp noise and announced, “YOU HAVE SAVED ZERO BABIES.”

  The next room was a gift shop.

  Then there were some exhibits about other alien races J.Lo had told me about, like the Mah-pocknaph’ns, who can only speak telepathically, through living puppets. Or the Habadoo, who believe there is a name that, if ever uttered, would destroy the universe. The Habadoo all claim to know it, and they all vow to never say it out loud.

  After that there was another gift shop.

  Then a supercomputer that was attempting to create new noises no one had ever heard before. Then an exploration of the philosophy of noise, with questions like “If a koobish falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” (answer: no, not really) and “What is the sound of one hand snapping?” (answer: snap). Then there was a statue of a Gorg that you were encouraged to make whatever noise you liked at. I passed it quietly.

  Then a gift shop.

  At the other end of the gift shop was a map of both the museum and a little of the surrounding area. It was here that I learned that I was just one room away from the Green Exit, and that I’d actually been in Sector 3 for a couple of exhibits now, and that visitors were discouraged from turning left out the Green Exit because that way was all work camps and a detention nub. Success! I nearly skipped through the next corridor. It opened onto a room that was wide and round and empty and tall.

  I stopped abruptly. The scuff of my sneaker echoed back and forth in stiff little whispers.

  High above the center of this big bell-shaped chamber was a marquee that read THE SOUND OF SPACE. It wasn’t like the other exhibits. It didn’t have any electronic eye, just four helmets hanging down from accordion tethers around a little center pedestal. To hear the sound of space you apparently had to put one of these helmets on.

  “That’s dumb,” I whispered to Bill. Bill didn’t have an opinion about it. I was going to have to pass these helmets to get through the room, but I wasn’t tempted. “There is no sound in space,” I told Bill.

  I walked right through the center of the room. The helmets were hanging so high I wouldn’t even have to duck. As I approached, each helmet dipped to meet me, but like any good city girl I avoided eye contact, didn’t take a flyer, didn’t stop to sign the petition or listen to the hard-luck story. They reeled up again after I’d passed.

  At the Green Exit I looked back. “I don’t get it,” I said. I returned to the pedestal, and a helmet lowered itself, slowly, like it was worried I’d make it look foolish again. I read the English inscription on the pedestal as a cool plastic pate settled on my head and arms flexed inward to cradle my ears.

  Todaynow, the Boov are nearly 8 million solar lengths from home, I read. That is fifteen light-years. That is 142 trillion kilometers. That is 88 trillion miles.

  The helmet on my head began to hum softly.

  The Boov will never again see that motherworld that made us, it continued, and which we then treated shabbily, and did not respect, and was later then forfeit. The Museum of Noises introduces to you the Sound of Space, withto evoke the vast distance inbetween the Boovish peoples and our lost HOME.

  That was everything on the plaque. Then a pair of blinders flapped down to cover my eyes, and the hum of the helmet fell away, and I heard nothing.

  Not a recording of nothing, but actually nothing. The earpieces somehow canceled out the sounds of the air, and Bill’s faint whirr, and distant noises I hadn’t even realized I was hearing until they were suddenly gone. I heard nothing. Just my heartbeat.

  “Big deal,” I whispered. The sound of it was all inside my skull, and surprisingly loud. Cowed, I fell silent again and listened. I wondered what I was supposed to be thinking about. I wondered if I was supposed to remove the helmet myself or if it was a moment-of-silence kind of thing; I’d just have to ride it out until the helmet decided I’d searched my soul or whatever. My big dumb soul.

  I couldn’t tell if Bill was still there. I couldn’t tell if any walls were still surrounding me. I might have been anywhere; I might have been home. Fell asleep with my headphones on again, I thought with a smirk.

  When it came, it came without warning. I thought it was going to be a yawn. Something ordinary but unstoppable, rising up from my chest, seizing control of my mouth and eyes. Just a yawn.

  Oh, I thought suddenly. I’m crying.

  Inside my blinders tears pooled and escaped, drawing shameful lines down my cheeks. Like coward’s war paint, I thought angrily. For J.Lo’s rescue I needed battle cries, not the regular kind. I sat heavily on the floor, sobbing, trying to catch my breath.

  I stayed there a while, and cried, and thought about vast distances.

  Then the blinders flipped up, and the hum returned. I frowned and blinked into the dim light.

  “THANK YOU FOR VISITING THE MUSEUM OF NOISES,” said the helmet. Some flutey music played. “AS YOU LEAVE THESE VAUNTED HALLS, REMEMBER THAT NOISES ARE NOT JUST FOR MUSEUMS. YOU MAY MAKE AND LISTEN TO NOISES ALL THROUGHOUT THE YEAR.”

  I ripped the helmet off my head and threw it carelessly to the side. It retreated back up to its station.

  I pressed my palms against my eyes and heard Bill whirr close.

  “Something’s wrong with me, Bill,” I said, breathing hard and sniffling.

  Bill sank down to the level of my face, looking wobbly through my tears. He swiveled around and popped a bubble against my nose.

  I laughed, and sniffed, and pulled my hands across my eyes. After a minute I stood.

  “Let’s go get my friend and get out of town,” I told Bill.

  YES.

  ELEVEN

  The Sector 3 detention nub was a dusty little pimple of a building in the center of a ring of tall fencing. Dim lights were shining up at it from the ground. The fence wasn’t going to give me any problem—I was pretty sure I’d be able to vault it with my low-gravity superpowers. Then it was about a hundred feet to the edge of the dome. I couldn’t see a way in from where I was standing.

  Actually, the fence looked so easy that it made me a little suspicious. How secure could any prison be when every Boov had a flying scooter and a gun that could make holes in anything? I squinted into the darkness and looked around, but there didn’t seem to be anyone patrolling the grounds. It was a really small prison; J.Lo was probably the only one in there. Maybe Boov just did what they were told. Maybe Boov just stayed where they were put.

  I wanted something to throw over the fence, just to see what would happen. I wished I had a racquetball.

  “Oh!” I whispered to Bill. “Shoot a bubble over there!”

  YES.

  Bill rose to just above the level of the fence, turned, and launched a bubble
inside the perimeter. It slowed once it was about thirty feet in, then drifted lazily on the ammonia-scented breeze. Nothing. No other movement inside the fence.

  “Shoot another one,” I said. “Shoot a big bunch.”

  Bill made an arrangement like a clump of grapes and snapped at it with his antennae, and it sailed over the compound like a parade balloon.

  “You’d think someone in there would tell us to keep our bubbles out of his yard,” I whispered.

  “I would,” said the Chief, who’d just joined me at the fence. “If it was my yard.”

  “You would, wouldn’t you,” I said. “You’d grab the bubbles and be all like, ‘These are my bubbles now. You’re not gettin’ ’em back.’”

  The Chief nodded slowly. “The Spook in there?”

  “Yeah,” I sighed, and stared through the bars. “I’m scared for him.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “No plan,” I said. “Did I have a plan when I saved the whole world? Not much of one, anyway.”

  We were quiet a moment. Which is to say that I was quiet and the Chief was a figment of my imagination.

  “I’ve decided you were wrong before,” I told him after a while.

  “Oh, good.”

  “It isn’t just kids who go about everything wrong. It’s people. I mean, I don’t want to offend you or anything—”

  “Ha! Since when?”

  “—but you weren’t exactly the most popular guy back at the casino. Or in Roswell. People thought you were...hard to get along with. Some people. And you are no kid, pardon me for saying so; you’re like two hundred and fifty years old, so shouldn’t you know by now how to make everybody like you?”

  “Ah, you put your finger right on it. I could no longer give two horse apples what people think of me. That’s what maturity’s good for. Might be the only thing it’s good for.”

  He paused to cough.

  “The curse of immaturity,” he said, “is that the more immature you are the more desperate you are to impress others. An’ the less likely you are to do the right thing, the thing that’s gonna impress ’em. So you get the teen who likes to rev his engine, drive too fast, all to show what a capable and heroic adult he is. An’ all the adults he passes shake their heads an’ think, ‘What an idiot kid.’”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s how I know I’m mature. I saved the whole world, and I don’t care that no one knows it. I’m not trying to impress anybody.”

  The Chief nodded, gravely. “An’ I can tell how much you don’t care,” he said, “by the way you’ve mentioned it twice in the past three hours.”

  I squinted at him.

  “Whatever,” I said finally, backing up and squaring my body against the fence. “I’m going for it.” I looked up at the top of the fence. I could definitely jump that.

  “Don’t be reckless, now.”

  “It’s not a problem,” I said, shifting my weight back and forth. “I’m a superhero here.”

  I dug in and leaped into a run just as a high chirp sounded and something in the sky caught my eye. It was one of those kite-shaped birds, flying overhead, flying over the fence, flying over the little dome, whereupon a big gun ratcheted up and vaporized it.

  I skidded to a halt and fell over.

  Inside the fence, a couple of feathers pinwheeled to the ground—they were all that was left of the bird. With a whirr, the big gun folded itself back into the top of the dome.

  “Seems automatic,” said the Chief. “Probably motion activated.”

  I crab-walked backward, heaving from the adrenaline and probably a little from a general lack of fitness. If I ever got home again, I swore, I was going to start doing jumping jacks or something. “Bubbles didn’t set it off,” I muttered.

  “Nope.”

  We were quiet a while. Bill fizzed around my head.

  “Well, so...” I began, looking at the Chief. “You’re ex-military, right? What do you think I’m up against here?”

  “I am not ex-military,” said the Chief, “because I’m not real. I’m just your imagination, which you can tell by the way I’m now wearing a Hawaiian shirt.”

  I scowled. But he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt suddenly.

  “I don’t know anything you don’t know,” the Chief concluded. “Go ahead: ask me something you don’t know.”

  I looked at the dome.

  “Are we...J.Lo and me...” I sighed. “What’s going to happen to us?”

  The Chief smiled sadly.

  “You’re gonna be okay, kid,” he said.

  I frowned. “What makes you say that?”

  He shrugged. “You made me say that. Suppose you must believe it.”

  I breathed, and nodded.

  “Okay,” I said, getting up. “Bill? Bubble-girl disguise, take two.”

  TWELVE

  Something atop the prison growled. Some little servomotor whined like a dog. The motion sensors, wherever they were, ogled the yard between the jail and the fence and thought they saw a ghost.

  I was dressed in bubbles. Covered head to toe in a really unflattering outfit of bubbles. It was Halloween, and this year I was going as...bubbles. I was trick-or-treating my first house, a big pimple with a gun that would vaporize me if it didn’t like my costume.

  I shuffled forward, cocooned inside a fine froth. That fine froth was inside a layer of bigger beads, then another layer like party balloons, and all of this inside one big bubble the size of a tollbooth.

  Bill was in there with me. Every now and then he snapped his antennae, sending little electric orders to the bubbles to keep them all together.

  I was passing a ring of lights now, lights that shone directly on the dome ahead of me. I was always taught that you should try to draw attention away from a pimple this size, but whatever, different strokes.

  I was about halfway there, and I still couldn’t see a way in.

  Some motion sensors won’t detect you if you’re not moving fast enough. Some motion sensors can’t see you if you block them with clear glass. All of this came to me now, half remembered from an episode of MythTesters. So I minced forward in my bubble ensemble, and tried not to breathe too flamboyantly, and dared that automatic rifle not to pop suddenly out the top of the prison and erase my head.

  You know what I never liked as a kid? Jack-in-the-boxes. I don’t know why I mention this.

  I left the lights in the yard behind, and winced at the way they cast my blurry shadow up the side of the dome.

  I mean, I played with my jack-in-the-box because I didn’t have a lot of toys, but I basically hated every minute of it. I’d crank it really slowly because I was too young to know that playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” slowly is what directors do to make their movies scarier. Then the clown would bang out of his clown hole, and I’d scream and whack him with a TV remote until he was locked up again.

  I was still forty feet away when the dome growled another growl and the rifle cocked up and swiveled around. I froze.

  It was pointed dead at me. Then with a clack it twitched to my right. Then a little too far to the left. It kept jerking its head around like a bird, an anxious mother bird who couldn’t decide if I was after her egg or not.

  I held my breath and did not move a muscle.

  After about forty seconds of this I was turning blue, but the rifle whirred and snapped itself back into the dome again.

  I exhaled, then sucked back air. When I was sure I wasn’t going to pass out, I took one slow turtle step toward the jail.

  CLACK, the rifle raised its head again.

  And snap, Bill broke free of our bubble coat and flew off around the dome.

  Coward, I thought. And my second thought was, No, that’s mean—he’s already been super helpful for a billboard. And then I watched the rifle swing away from me and follow Bill and I thought, Oh.

  Bill was fast. The rifle swung a full circle, chasing him, and around went Bill again. And again, drawing a ring of bubbles behind him, tracing and retracing
an O above my head.

  I surged toward the dome, leaving my disguise behind me like a cartoon cloud. I heard the rifle seize up, swing back the other way. We had it good and confused now, and it fired over my head, erasing the bubbles and creating a good-sized divot in the yard. I reached the edge of the dome and leaped, landing on my hands and knees about halfway up and scrambling the rest of the way, then ducking as the rifle came around again. I stood up behind its butt end and scrambled this way and that to stay behind the butt end as it swiveled back and forth.

  I said “butt end” a couple of times. Pardon my language.

  Anyway, the rifle looked like it might have Bill in its sights, so I leaped on top, trying to wrestle it in a safer direction. Instead it spun so fast it threw me clear.

  “YeeeeEEEEE!” I shrieked, and skidded a few feet down the side of the dome. I raised my head and saw the rifle turning to give me a good look up its barrel again, so I pushed off with my legs as hard as I could. The rifle lit up again and fired, and I heard a loud BWOMP behind me.

  Now I was just crouching under the rifle’s chin. It spun and spun but couldn’t find me anymore. I glanced back and saw that the dome had a small smoking dent where I’d been sitting a moment before. A dent, but no hole. So there—this prison was made from some reinforced material that even the eraser guns couldn’t breach.

  Up high like this, I could see that the dome was connected by a covered tunnel to a smaller dome near the fence on the opposite side. But more importantly, there was a narrow hole in the tippy-top of the dome where I was crouching—a missing jigsaw piece the exact size and shape of a collapsible rifle. It was small—way too narrow to fit a Boov. But a thirteen-year-old who hadn’t had anything to eat for the past twenty-four hours?

  I squinted down through the gap. It was kind of dark in there, but it looked like a hallway. Possibly an empty hallway. I kicked my legs in, dangled them down, pushed my fat belly through, then got stuck at the shoulders.