“Okay. Where’s my mom?”
J.Lo looked at me, then back at the casino.
I’d left her again.
“We have to help her.”
“We have to hide away the telecloner!” gasped J.Lo. “He will search out here!”
I swiveled around and noticed the big white poker tent lying rumpled and deflated on the ground.
“Looks like he already searched there. C’mon.”
We drove up to the edge of the tent, and I lifted the surprisingly heavy canvas while J.Lo drove Slushious underneath. I was already running back to the emergency exit before J.Lo even crawled out from under the tent. I got close enough to see that the door had been torn off its hinges.
“No,” I whispered. “No no no.”
I ducked into our apartment and saw it had been trashed. The sinks were overturned and leafs of scorched books fluttered through the air. But Mom was gone. There was no sign of her.
I bolted through our apartment door, to see a crowd of people staring out the front of the casino.
“Gratuity!” said Joachim as I approached. “Hold on—”
I ignored him and forced my way through the crowd, just in time to see two Gorg strapping jetpacks to their backs. One of them had my mom thrown over his shoulder.
“QU LU EHED SEG FIP’W AR NI’IZS IHEX?” said the Gorg holding Mom as he slapped the other Gorg across the face.
“FUD,” said the other, poking and then punching the first Gorg in the arm. “NAG IG’F TAD’Q GU VEF’G FGAB, LU W’ZO?”
“Your mom…she said she was you,” explained Joachim.
Then something amazing happened. The Gorg holding Mom made a noise.
“Was that a sneeze?” someone asked.
J.Lo arrived just in time to see the other Gorg sneeze, too. Then both of them were in fits, sneezing back and forth as they fiddled with their jetpacks.
Mom raised her head and looked right at me. Then the rockets ignited, and all three of them disappeared into the darkening sky.
I was breathing hard. Everyone around started trying to console me and put their hands on my shoulder, but I only wanted them to go away.
“Say,” J.Lo whispered, “they sneeze near to any person who has spent a lot of time around a Boov. Did you notice? But…the Boov never did make them sick before.”
“No, the Boov never did,” I agreed.
And suddenly I had a plan after all.
“Oh, are they gonna get it,” I said as we soared across the desert. “I will destroy them. You can’t kidnap my mom and expect me not to destroy you. I would have destroyed the Boov, but you gave her back just in time.”
“Thank goodness,” said J.Lo. “Explain, please, again about the cats.”
“The Gorg are allergic to cats! Seriously allergic! You saw how they were around Mom.”
“But Tipmom is not a cat.”
“We have cat hair all over us. Trust me. When you own a cat it’s unavoidable. And why else would the Gorg go to so much trouble to get rid of all of them? And Mom—Mom said she sat right next to some Gorg before we arrived, and they didn’t sneeze at all. But after we brought Pig into the casino? Boom!”
“Boom!” shouted J.Lo. “Boom!”
“Thank God we didn’t lose Pig that night. Thank God we kept her safe.”
“But whereto are we going?”
“Somewhere secret,” I said as I steered Slushious through camps of scattered tents. “Somewhere we can hatch our plan.”
“This is exciting,” said J.Lo. “We are sneaky agent men, like Bond James Bond.”
“I don’t know where you pick this stuff up.”
All traces of the city were far behind us when we neared a rustic sign that read “Old Tucson Studios.”
“Oh, perfect,” I said.
I pulled Slushious into the center of a Wild West ghost town in the middle of the mountains. There were authentic-looking saloons and general stores and a Spanish church lining the dusty street.
“This should do,” I said.
“Now we can teleport to the Gorg bases or their ship,” said J.Lo, “and find Tipmom and bring her home!”
“We’re going to do a lot more than that,” I said.
“Yes? What are we going to do?”
I grinned and said, “Feedback loop.”
“Feedback loop?”
“Feedback loop.”
I stood in the middle of the street, with J.Lo eyeing me nervously. If I’d had a six-shooter I could have looked just like Clint Eastwood, but the only thing I was staring down was a teleclone booth. Plus, I was wearing a World War II army helmet, so the image was shot.
The helmet was way too big for me, but my hair kept it in place. I had a handful of aspirin—the cold-expanding foam kind—for emergencies. The Gorg telecloner had cloned them from the last remaining pill in J.Lo’s toolbox. It worked. The aspirin were complex things no Boov cloner could make, but we’d made them.
In the last twenty minutes, J.Lo had put the machine back together and inspected it over and over. I’d stroked Pig and looked through the Chief’s boxes.
“I have a signal,” J.Lo had said finally, next to the softly humming machine. “We are connected to the Gorg computer.”
So we’d tested it by making aspirin, and now I was standing in front of it, wondering how I got here.
“There are signals from many other teleclone booths. Gorg bases. Twelve bases in Arizona, more elsewheres.”
“I guess we should just try the closest one.”
“I should go,” J.Lo said. “I should be the one to test it. It is my fault if it fails.”
“If it fails,” I said, “you’re the only one who can possibly fix it. So I have to go.”
In my other hand was a pebble. If I managed to teleport anywhere without getting turned into milk shake I would send it back so J.Lo would know to follow with Pig.
“Okay…okay,” I said, shaking out my hands. “Okay.” I was breathing hard and fast, probably hyperventilating. I was suddenly thinking that maybe I would just faint. Then I wouldn’t have to teleport. Nobody could expect you to teleport after you fainted, it was like an unwritten rule, it was fairly common knowledge that you were never asked to teleport after—
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Anything else you can tell me?”
“Hm. Well, it would be betters if you were chewing gum, your ears will probably pop—”
“AHHH!” I shouted, then ran for the cage, and crossed my fingers, and jumped.