The Suspicion Read online

«Up! Up! Up!» some of the Helmacrons shouted.

  «Down! Down! Down!» others shouted.

  The Galaxy Blaster shot downward. But the four-wheeler was coming at us at an incredible closing speed. A bumper the length of a coastline filled the screen.

  And then, by a millimeter, we slipped beneath it. Wheels flashed by. Wind whipped at us. We blew out beneath the back bumper.

  97 Another car was right ahead of us. But the Helmacrons had decided the disagreement over "up" and "down" required some more correction of error. The long swords flashed.

  I shrank back against the curved bulkhead and hauled a horrified, fascinated Marco with me.

  "We have to get out of here," I said. "Now."

  "I'm with you. But how?"

  "We have to morph."

  "Morph? These guys see right through morphs. We morph wolves or whatever, they'll just shoot us!"

  "It's all about size," I said grimly. "We can't get big enough to fight them. But we can get small."

  "No, no, no, no," he said, shaking his head.

  "No other way."

  "We don't even know what'll happen!"

  "We have to find out."

  He shuddered. "What, flea?"

  I shook my head. "Flea is too out of control. Besides, their senses are weak. I think fly. Very, very tiny flies."

  He nodded reluctantly, clearly afraid. It's not like I could blame him. We'd morphed flies before. But we were going to be going to a dimension neither of us could even imagine.

  Our baseline size was a sixteenth of an inch.

  98 If we morphed flies, we'd be smaller in proportion.

  And that was very small.

  I focused my thoughts, even as another idiotic cheer broke out from the Helmacrons.

  I looked at Marco. He was shrinking. So was I.

  I saw the spiky hairs shoot from his back. I saw a middle set of legs sprout from his chest with a wet sound. His mouth twisted and began to push out. Out and out, into the long, sucking, sponging mouthparts of a fly.

  I was still looking at him when the bulging, glittering, multifaceted fly eyes popped out of his face.

  Just then, the nearest Helmacrons noticed what was happening.

  «You will cry for all eternity for this!» they yelled.

  They closed in around us. But now the Helmacrons were big, clumsy, slow-moving behemoths. They reached for us and missed.

  And still we shrank.

  99

  We shrank down toward the seemingly smooth deck. But just as the dirt had become rocks and boulders the first time we shrank, the smooth metal floor was now becoming a rugged plain of weird shapes, upjutting points, and cauliflower extrusions.

  I was seeing it all through fly eyes. A hundred TV sets, each seeing the same scene from slightly different angles.

  The colors were weird. They always are when you're in fly morph. But now I was seeing things not even flies see.

  A huge Helmacron hand came reaching down from heaven to grab me. But as it neared I

  100 shrank faster and faster. And by the time it came its closest, I wasn't looking at flesh anymore.

  I was seeing individual cells.

  «Aaaahhhh!» I yelled in shock.

  «0h, man!» Marco yelled. «Biology class!»

  The wall of cells seemed to be moving in slow motion. Slower and slower. As we got smaller, we got faster. Faster and stronger, relatively speaking. Just as we had when we'd become humans a sixteenth of an inch tall.

  The Helmacron hand moved through molasses. The cells of the finger were like irregular bricks in a wall. But these bricks were bigger than we were. A lot bigger.

  Some were clearer, more translucent than others in the bizarre light. Some I could see right into. They were like clear plastic trash bags stuffed with faintly pink Jell-0. Suspended in the Jell-0 like so much fruit cocktail were all the cell structures: a big nucleus, only slightly darker than the protoplasm, mitochondria, vacuoles . . .

  «So, that's what a ribosome looks like,» Marco said. «They aren't all different colors, like in the textbooks.»

  «Who knows what color anything is with these eyes and in this light?»

  Slowly the wall of ceils receded, leaving us as

  101 the smallest flies anyone had ever imagined. We were flies smaller than a skin cell.

  «Well, they can't catch us,» Marco said. «But now what are we supposed to do?»

  «Get away?» I said doubtfully.

  «lf we fly for a few weeks we can probably make it two or three feet,» Marco said grimly.

  He was right. Maybe. «0n the other hand, this ship can smash into a brick wall and it probably won't hurt us.»

  «We still have a two-hour limit on this morph. And there's no way we're staying in this morph!»

  «Hey! We hitch a ride!» I suggested. «Grab that Helmacron finger.»

  We fired our wings and took off. I don't know how far away the finger was in actual distance, but it seemed near enough to us. We flew at shocking speed and caught the wall of cells. My fly feet grabbed on easily enough, and then slowly the cell wall continued to rise away from the floor.

  But now, with the cell membrane directly beneath my feet, I noticed something very unsettling.

  «It's . . . like vibrating,» I said. «The ground. I mean, the cell wall. It's . . . vibrating.»

  «Yeah. And I don't even want to tell you why.»

  102 «Tell me.»

  «l think those are individual molecules we're seeing. I mean, not actually seeing, but the way it looks like on a TV screen up real close? All the tiny, shifting, vibrating dots? I think those are molecules.»

  I felt sick inside. Fascinated, amazed, but sick. «Were small.»

  «0h, yeah. We are seriously small.»

  «And that's not the only problem we have. The cell we're standing on is about to divide.» Looking down through the buzzing surface of the cell, I could see the nucleus beginning, oh so slowly, to pinch in two.

  «Look! The sky!»

  From above us a new wall of cells was approaching very slowly. It was coming down toward us at an angle. But a line of darkness was moving across the landscape.

  «l think we may be upside down now,» I said, trying to make some logical sense of the direction of the light. «l think ... I think that surface above us is actually below us.»

  «Let's get off this finger.»

  «Why?»

  «Because human or Helmacron, you just never know where a person's gonna stick their finger next,» he said.

  I took about three seconds to think about

  103 that. I shuddered. «Thanks for that image, Marco. Let's try for that surface up there. Or down there.»

  I fired my fly wings, and even this tiny, the fly could live up to its name. It flew. And it flew like a rocket. A fly is always acrobatic. But now it seemed amazingly fast as well.

  Maybe it was all an illusion. Who knows? Nothing made sense at this scale. But I felt like someone had tied rockets onto our hairy thoraxes and lit them up.

  We blew through the air, heading up, down, sideways, whatever direction it was.

  We flipped in midair and landed on the new surface. It was much like the finger. But we could hope it was safer in the long run.

  As the finger slowly pulled away, we looked around our new location. It seemed to be an endless, flat plain. But towering impossibly high above us was a globe the size of a green moon. We could only guess at its extent because it stretched away in all directions. All we could tell was that the wild, rough surface, made up of extravagantly colored cells, was spherical.

  «Eyeball,» Marco said. «l think we're on some Helmacron's head. And that's an eyeball.»

  We were gazing up at this sight when the eye blazed a brilliant red. I could see the individual eye facets close in rapid response.

  104 But it was more than light.

  A wave of heat propelled on a hurricane came rolling across the Great Plains of the Helmacron's head.

  And across
the flat head of the Helmacron came something no human eye would ever see. At least not in all its horrifying detail.

  I think we both knew right away what it was. But your mind doesn't want to believe what it's seeing.

  The flash had been the light of a Dracon beam. Light is light, of course, and is equally fast whatever size you are.

  But as the wave of energy spreads through the body hit by a Dracon beam, the physiological reaction of cells blowing apart happens more slowly.

  Ax explained to us once that this was a unique Yeerk technology. The Andalite shredder whose technology the Yeerks used in developing the Dracon beam kills instantly, painlessly.

  The Dracon beam is specifically modified to destroy more slowly. The Yeerks want their enemies to feel the agony of cells exploding.

  And now, standing there on cells whose molecules vibrated beneath our fly feet, we saw the line of destruction advance. Cells erupted, exploding like mini-geysers, swelling with steam,

  105 blowing nuclei and mitochondria and flaming cytoplasm like shrapnel.

  «MOVE!» Marco bellowed, breaking me out of my horrified trance.

  I fired the fly's wings and rose off the skin just as the line of explosion rolled beneath us.

  106

  Tornado winds, so hot they singed our wings, caught us and threw us through the air. We slammed into each other and instinctively grabbed hold, fly feet clutching fly hairs.

  We were thrown like meteors, rolling and tumbling out of control through the air.

  Everywhere there was fire. Everywhere there was deep, pounding bass drum noise. We were in a whirlwind that moved with weird slowness and impossible-to-resist force.

  We must have been knocked unconscious. Because it felt like much later when I next heard Marco's thought-speak voice.

  107 «Dracon beam!» Marco said. «The Yeerks must have hit the ship.»

  «We were in the middle of a busy highway,» I said, still clutching tight to a fly and thinking its foul body was all the salvation in the world.

  «l think the wind is dying down. Heat is lower,» Marco observed.

  Still we held tight, till slowly, slowly, the wind did die down, the blast furnace heat lessened. The mad chaos subsided.

  We separated at last and flew side by side through the air. Were we still in the ship? Was there a ship? There was no way to tell. Nothing was close enough to see.

  We could be anywhere. We could be an inch above the ground or a hundred miles up. We could be within six inches of a person or the last creatures left alive in the universe.

  «We have to demorph,» I said.

  «We could be anywhere,» Marco said. «We could be in the middle of that highway with a truck bearing down on us.»

  I tried to look around, using my fly eyes. But fly eyes aren't great at distances. Flies have no need to see far. I tried out the sense of smell, but it was like it had been turned off. The scent molecules I would normally have "tasted" were probably

  108 too large, relatively speaking, for me to make sense of.

  «lf we demorph slowly we'll settle toward the ground as we gain weight,» I said.

  «Unless the truck hits us.»

  «I'll go first,» I said.

  «Don't go all heroic on me,» Marco said with a laugh. «lf we're gonna get hit, we'll get hit together.»

  I focused my thoughts, fighting down the fear. And fighting down, too, the urgent desire to get as large as I could as fast as I could.

  I felt the changes begin and I backed off. I was larger, three or four times what I had been. And now I could better feel the direction of gravity. But even with my wings held immobile, refusing to answer the instinct to fly, I floated through the air.

  I demorphed a bit more. I was now dozens of times larger than I had been to begin with, but not all the way back up to the sixteenth of an inch size.

  I was definitely dropping now. I could feel the direction of gravity. I knew up from down. I fell, but slowly. The air still buoyed me up, as well as the most wonderful thermal.

  Now, however, my human eyes began to replace the compound eyes of the fly. I saw Marco,

  109 like me, a hideous mix of fly and human, half-falling, half-drifting, on the breeze.

  Then, far beneath us, I saw the ground. Or at least what might be the ground.

  I felt like a parachutist in free fall, spinning and failing, spinning and falling toward the ground. Only instead of a square patchwork pattern of cornfields and roads, I saw what looked like a nest of gigantic snakes reaching up out of the distance.

  «0h, that looks good,» Marco muttered.

  But now the breeze was blowing us across the huge snakes toward an area that was more open. It was like an endless pink plain, curved away toward the horizons.

  I let myself demorph some more. What other choice was there?

  I fell faster, but still slowly. I could see the snakes were a bit smaller, though still monstrous. And rather than being snakes, they looked like unbelievably long palm trees.

  They were planted in the ground a few miles down. They had rough, slender, waving, bent trunks. And at the top they split in two or three and became rougher.

  «0h, my God, they're hairs,» I said. «We're landing on someone's head.»

  «0r armpit,» Marco said.

  110 We came down at the edge of what seemed like a forest on one side and an endless plain on the other.

  We fell down through a widely spaced thicket of the rough-textured hairs, down, down toward the scalp below.

  It became darker down in the hair forest. And we were not alone.

  There were no bright eyes blinking at us from the dark, like in some cartoon jungle. No, the creatures we passed had no eyes. They clung to the scalp at the base of the giant hairs and almost seemed to be waiting for us as we fell.

  Eight-legged, clumsy, clanking, awful beasts. They were there by the hundreds. Everywhere around the base of the hairs. In the normal world they were too small to be seen. But to us they were as big as dogs.

  «Mites,» I said, fighting an urge to throw up. «Everyone has them.»

  «Let's get big, right now!»

  We demorphed the rest of the way, rocketing back to our sixteenth of an inch height. Just as we landed between a pair of mites.

  We were now far bigger than the mites. They were like rats to us. And they were not aware of us, interested in us, or able to respond to us.

  111 Still, those hideous mechanical things scared me down deep inside.

  Fully human once more, we ran at full speed toward the line of hair and scalp.

  «Thank goodness they haven't totally cured baldness yet,» Marco said as we rushed, panting, out onto open, pink scalp.

  We could see again. Like humans. And we could hear.

  What we heard did not make us feel any better.

  «A Helmacron ship,» Visser Three said. «It's almost . . . cute . . . what's left of it. Hah hah HAH!»

  Then a human voice vibrated up through the scalp, resonating beneath us like the biggest sound in the world.

  "Congratulations on your defeat of them, Visser!"

  «Pah! Defeating Helmacrons is no great honor, Chapman.»

  I looked at Marco. He looked at me. "Chapman?" we both said at the same moment.

  We were on Chapman's head. Chapman, our vice principal. Chapman, the head of The Sharing.

  Partly bald Chapman.

  «0h, there you are!» a thought-speak voice said.

  Ill

  112 I jumped about three feet. Or maybe a thirty-second of an inch. My heart was in my throat before I registered the familiarity of that "voice."

  «I've been looking all over for you guys,» Tobias said calmly as he swooped down from the sky an inch above us.

  113

  ?Tobias! What are you doing here?" I yelled in sheer joy at seeing him. I also yelled because although hawk hearing is better than human hearing, we were still very small.

  «You're standing on Chapman's head and you want t
o know what I'm doing here?» He laughed. «You had us worried.»

  "How did you find us?"

  «The other Helmacron ship. The Planet Crusher. Rachel managed to smash it with a tire iron. Knocked it down. Jake grabbed it and clamped it into that vise in Cassie's barn.»

  He landed beside us, sinking his talons into scalp.

  114 "The one my dad uses to hold wood he's working with?" I asked. My father has a small tool bench in the back of the barn. He uses it to repair cages and fix the barn itself. There's a large vise mounted on the tool bench.

  «Yeah, he got 'em in the vise and kept squeezing till they agreed to help us.»

  "You didn't trust them, I hope," Marco said.

  «We're not idiots. They gave us hostages. Their captain and a bunch of other high-ranking-»

  "NOOOO!" I yelled.

  "You are idiots!" Marco cried. "All Helmacron leaders are dead! They don't trust anyone living, so all their leaders have to be dead!"

  «Say what?»

  "Just go with it," I said. "Are Jake, Rachel, and Ax here, too?"

  "And where is here, by the way?" Marco asked.

  «Yeah, they're all here, but in morph. It's a meeting of The Sharing. Visser Three is here at the secret part of the meeting. You know, where only the leading Controllers attend. He's playing show-and-tell with the Galaxy Blaster. He smoked it with a Dracon beam, I guess. He's holding it up and babbling about the Helmacrons. Chapman is applauding.»

  115 Now that I thought about it, I could feel a sort of concussion that translated up through Chapman's head. It might be clapping.

  And if I looked hard toward the horizon, I could see the tops of other heads. Kind of like a chain of mountains in the distance.

  There was a continuous rumble of noise. Speaking voices and occasional applause.

  Suddenly, I had a terrible premonition. "Where's the blue box?" I demanded.

  «Well ... Ax has it. We're in that old meeting hall The Sharing uses sometimes,» Tobias said. «Ax is outside in human morph. He's waiting till we rescue you guys. Then we're going back to the Helmacrons to get them to unshrink you.»

  "Why would you bring the blue box here?!" Marco raged.

  «The Helmacrons want it bad. We couldn't be sure we could hide it well enough from their sensors. So we had to bring it with us. We can't lose it. After all, the Helmacrons need it to unshrink you guys, which they've promised to do, and -»