Stinker from Space Read online

  The creature continued forward. Suddenly it stopped, swayed, and shrieked like a bagpipe. The gelatinous mass at its top began to solidify and crack. Blindly the thing staggered back and forth, its top disintegrating into powdery shards. The shrieking died hollowly away, and the pole legs clattered to the ground.

  “Wow!” Jonathan blurted out. His legs were suddenly trembling as they staggered back toward Stinker. “I guess those Zarnk guys are allergic to skunk spray.”

  Karen was shivering, wishing she hadn’t seen what she just had. That was nightmare material, for sure. She shook her head. “Some allergy! All I’ve ever had is a rash from eating shellfish.”

  Stinker was silent, his nose twitching as he gazed at his fallen enemy. “I can’t believe it,” he muttered mentally. “That Zarnk nearly shot me. I wanted to run, and this idiotic body made me do that instead. I’ve never seen that happen to a Zarnk before.”

  “First class chemical warfare,” Jonathan said, trying to sound calm through chattering teeth.

  “It certainly was,” the skunk answered thoughtfully.

  “Uh, Stinker,” Karen ventured, “are there likely to be any more of those things about?”

  “Huh? Oh, no, not likely. He was probably a lone scout sent to follow my trail. But we’d better get moving. If he got some sort of message off, they might investigate sooner or later.”

  With renewed commitment, they hauled the wagon out of the woods and aimed their procession toward Karen’s house. “We can hide this thing in the gardening shed,” she suggested. “My mom won’t be pottering around in there again until spring.”

  After dragging the wagon into the cramped, musty-smelling shed, they stuffed it into a corner, then covered it with half-filled bags of mulch. For added effect, they stacked some rakes, hoes, and trellises against it. Finally they stepped back out into the gray daylight, and Karen firmly shut the shed door.

  She wished she could shut her mind as firmly against the memories of that thing in the woods. Here was space adventure at her doorstep, but somehow it wasn’t as clean and exciting as maybe meeting the Dark Destroyer or the Princess of Light. It was downright scary.

  8

  The Best Laid Plans

  During the next week, Karen and her skunk were regular afterschool visitors at Jonathan’s house. Both mothers acted insufferably pleased, much to their children’s annoyance. Theirs was, as Jonathan said pointedly, “purely a business relationship in support of a mutual friend.”

  Stinker soon turned from examining the shuttle information to tearing apart the ham radio. At first this put Jonathan in a dither, but the little skunk did seem to know what he was doing. When handling human-designed tools for a job proved too difficult, he’d use his sharp little claws.

  “But I really don’t understand,” Jonathan had said early on, “how this is going to help. I mean, ham radios don’t pick up NASA—not the secret important stuff, anyway.”

  “Ah yes, but it’s wonderful what a little tinkering can do, particularly when I can link things up with your home computer here. It is incredibly primitive, but it does what we need, just the same.”

  “And exactly what do we need?” Karen asked.

  “We need to change the reentry programming and bring the shuttle down in that field out there.”

  Karen looked out the window, pulling aside the curtains with their red and blue rocket-ship design. Jonathan followed her gaze, a frown wrinkling his forehead.

  “I hate to be a spoilsport, but I don’t think the shuttle can land on a soybean field. It’s too uneven, too many ruts. The landing gear is pretty much like an ordinary airplane’s, you know.”

  “You mean your airplanes can’t land on a flat surface like that?”

  “Well, there aren’t any huge bumps, but it’s hardly flat, not smooth anyway. That’s why planes need paved runways or dry lakebeds or something, so they don’t flip over while they’re landing.”

  Stinker thought something that did not translate. Then he clambered up on the window sill and glowered out. “All right. Next assignment, team. I’ll look up the width of the shuttle’s axle, and you two go down and measure the width of that road.”

  “The road!” Karen exclaimed.

  “Why not? It’s straight for a long distance. Quite long enough, I think.”

  Jonathan looked at Karen, sighed, then went to his closet and fetched a yardstick that carried the legend “Time Measures All Things,” courtesy of a funeral home. Soon the two were headed outside.

  The road never carried much traffic, so it wasn’t long before they felt safe getting down on hands and knees and measuring the width of the pavement and the hard gravelly shoulder.

  “This is crazy, you know,” Jonathan muttered as he scuttled like a crab over the asphalt.

  “Yeah, particularly since this whole thing is probably going to fail.”

  “Good thing, too.”

  Karen looked at him. “You mean you don’t want him to succeed? Then why … ?”

  “Oh, I want him to. That’d be best, sure. But have you thought about what happens to accomplices of folks who hijack space shuttles?”

  She swallowed hard. “Well, no. No one’s ever done it before.”

  “Then we may be the first to find out.”

  Steadily the date drew nearer for the proposed launch of the shuttle. Karen and her furry companion regularly watched the evening news for any references to it. Her father commented on her commendable new interest in public affairs, which she hastily attributed to her current events unit at school.

  One night after the news, while the family was eating dinner, a large expensive-looking car rolled up their gravel drive. Through their dining room window they saw a middle-aged woman with a great beehive of hair get out of the car and walk importantly toward their door.

  Karen’s mother answered as soon as the doorbell rang, and the strange woman gushed in. “Hello, hello. I am Mrs. Van Voorhis. I should have phoned I know, but I couldn’t wait. I wanted to come right away and surprise everyone.”

  “Uh … yes,” Karen’s mother said. “But about what?”

  “It’s your ad in the paper. I’ve come to retrieve my dear little Flower.”

  “Flower?”

  “The skunk, my dear. You advertised that you found my pet skunk.”

  Karen suddenly jumped up from the table. “Oh, but Stinker can’t be yours!”

  “Stinker indeed!” Then she smiled. “But yes, he must be mine. I lost my little Flower while passing through your town last spring when we were driving back from Florida. My sister-in-law chanced upon your ad in the paper and sent it on to me. The skunk you found must be mine, dear. Tame skunks aren’t very common, you know.”

  “Maybe not, but this one isn’t yours.”

  “You can’t be sure of that, Karen,” her mother said. “He very well might be.”

  In the kitchen where Stinker had been eating with Sancho, he’d picked up Karen’s alarm. Now he had pushed his way through the swinging door and was making like a furtive shadow along the wall toward the stairs.

  But Mrs. Van Voorhis caught a glimpse of black and white. “Ah, there he is now, my sweet little Flower. Come to Mama, Sweetkins!”

  Stinker darted for the open door. As the creature dashed between his legs, Karen’s father reached down and grabbed him around the middle. Stinker squirmed and thrashed but was held firm. “Quick, Helen, get me something to put him in!”

  Karen’s mother looked around frantically. Running into the living room, she dumped out some books they’d been boxing for a rummage sale and hurried back with the box.

  Squealing “No, no!” Karen tried to grab Stinker away, but her father managed to cram the squirming animal into the box and jam down the lid.

  “Here,” he said, handing the box to the woman, his lips a tight angry line. “It would have been better if you’d called first. We’ve all become rather attached to him, I’m afraid. But I’m sure Stink … Flower will be happy with his rightful owner again.”

  Awkwardly the woman took the box as it thumped and jumped from inside. “Yes, I understand. He’s such a little sweetypie, I can see how he’d win anyone’s heart. And I am so grateful for you taking care of him all this time. Isn’t there something I can… .”

  “No, no. I think you’d better just go now. Good-bye, Mrs. Van Voorhis.”

  The door closed and Karen burst into tears. “Oh, Daddy, how could you?”

  “Karen,” he said firmly. “I liked him, too. But he was her skunk. To keep him, once we knew that, would have been theft.”

  “But we didn’t know that. Skunks do look a lot alike, but he wasn’t her skunk!”

  “He had to be. She was right: tame skunks are not very common. And she lost hers right around here. It’d be too much of a coincidence to have two skunks like him in the area.”

  Karen stared at her father. “Oh, you don’t understand!” she wailed, then turned and ran up the stairs. She slammed her bedroom door behind her. No, she thought miserably, you won’t find two skunks like that very easily. Not two stranded skunks from outer space.

  9

  A Missing Conspirator

  Karen found the next few days nearly unbearable. For a while she thought that if Stinker could just get to a phone, he’d call, and she and Jonathan could set up a rescue. But then she realized that was silly. After all, he couldn’t talk, not out loud, and she imagined one couldn’t just think over a telephone.

  Finally the day of the shuttle launch arrived. Earlier, Karen had planned to play sick so she could stay home from school and watch it. Now she couldn’t wait to get away from the house and the morning radio’s chatter about the upcoming launch.

  Grimly she stood by the roadside in front of her house waiting for the
school bus. She looked up as Jonathan plodded dejectedly down the road to join her.

  “No word, I take it,” he said flatly.

  “None.”

  “I don’t get it. I mean, surely he could have gotten away from that woman by now. She wouldn’t know she was dealing with more than your average skunk intelligence.”

  “Yeah, but in the meantime, she could have driven three states away. I don’t guess it’s very easy for unescorted skunks to travel long distances. He couldn’t just hop a Greyhound.”

  They were silent a moment. Karen thought about skunks trudging along highways and about all the dead skunks you always see in the middle of roads. “And think of the dangers of traveling that far. Cars and dogs and… .”

  “And Zarnk.”

  “Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “You think there could be more of them?”

  “Stinker said there was a chance that the one fellow could have gotten off a message. And later when he looked and couldn’t find that Zarnk’s ship, he said it could have been programmed to go into orbit after a certain time and act as a beacon.”

  Karen shivered at the thought of a Zarnk hit squad clattering about. She was actually relieved when the bus came and took them off to the comforting normality of school.

  In the afternoon, the school bus dropped her off at home just as the mail truck was pulling away. Her mother was already out at the box sorting through the mail.

  “Bills, ads, and bank statements. Dull, dull. Here’s something for you, Karen. My word, it looks as if it’s been dragged through the gutter. You’d think the postal service would take better care of things.”

  She handed Karen a pictureless prestamped postcard. It was creased down the middle and blotted with a coffee stain. On one side an address was written and just as neatly crossed out in ink, while beside it in stubby pencil her own name and address was written in a clumsy childish hand. Perplexed, she flipped the card over and scanned the penciled message. Her heart leaped.

  “Karen: Escaped crazy lady. Have important errand. Will be back in time. Please lay in big stock of peanuts, peanut butter, etc. Your friend, S.”

  She whooped with delight and ran up the road to show Jonathan. She found him in his kitchen, putting together an afterschool snack.

  He read the card and his normally solemn face bloomed into smiles. “Boy, it looks like he pulled this out of some garbage can. Must have rooted around for hours before he found something he could reuse. Guess he figured most post offices wouldn’t sell stamps to a skunk.”

  “I wonder what his important errand is.”

  “I don’t know, but he’d better come back soon. He’s monkeyed with my radio so much, I’m afraid to touch it. I might disintegrate myself or something.”

  Karen was about to chide him for caring more about his old radio than their friend. But she stopped. Clearly Jonathan was very happy to hear that Stinker was all right.

  “Well,” she said after a minute, “at least we can get on the provisioning detail. Maybe instead of catching the bus after school we should go stock up at the grocery store and walk home.”

  Jonathan groaned at the thought of the long walk. “Yeah, I guess we’ll have to. Can’t exactly ask our mothers to pick up a crate of peanut butter next time they’re at the store—not without a few questions. Do you suppose real skunks like the stuff as much as space skunks?”

  “Probably. I think skunks like everything. But let’s lay in some lettuce or something else too, so he doesn’t get scurvy.”

  The next day they told their parents they’d be late getting home from school. It was nearly dusk when they finally staggered up the road from town, grocery bags bulging with peanuts, peanut butter, peanut butter cookies, and bags of dried apples. Allowance hoards had been severely depleted, and all the way back Jonathan had grumbled about the unlikelihood of getting repaid by the Sylon government.

  At last, slipping into the gardening shed they hid the provisions with the alien engine under bags of mulch and potting soil.

  The next few days were passed in anxious waiting. Homework suffered, but neither Karen nor Jonathan missed a word that TV or radio had to say about the ongoing shuttle flight. They knew who was spacewalking outside the ship and testing what pieces of equipment. They knew the family background of every astronaut, which scientific tests were successful and which firmly refused to work, and they knew what the crew ate and who got most severely space sick.

  Karen went to bed with technical terms buzzing around in her head: extravehicular activity, O-ring seals, solid fuel boosters, manned maneuvering units. She knew the shuttle was orbiting 185 miles up at a speed of some 17, 270 miles per hour. She never used to have any interest in these details but now found them surprisingly compelling. Even the Princess of Light, she grudging admitted, had to know how her flittership worked when she set off on some space adventure.

  As the days of the mission passed by with no sign of Stinker, Karen and Jonathan became worried again. One news item on a local station caught Karen’s interest for a moment because it dealt with skunks. State police several counties to their north had reported an unusual migration of skunks, a black and white wave pouring across the highway like lemmings marching to the sea. The announcer treated it like a joke, quipping that they’d have to add Skunk Alert to other things like Tornado Warning and Winter Storm Watch.

  It was interesting enough, but Karen didn’t see how it could have anything to do with Stinker. She just hoped that farmers didn’t get so upset at the thought of hordes of skunks that they’d shoot one on sight. As the days passed she kept worrying more and more about farmers with guns, and dogs, and cars, and … even Zarnk. It didn’t help her sleep any.

  The day before the shuttle was scheduled to land, Karen and Jonathan avoided each other on the bus and at school. Both of them almost believed that their adventure and possibly their friend had come to an end. But somehow it seemed that if they didn’t speak these words it wouldn’t be true. That night Karen ate very little and went to bed early, causing her mother to worry that she was ill.

  She dreamed that Mr. Spock of the Starship Enterprise was teamed up with the Princess of Light, who looked remarkably like the teacher Karen had had back in second grade. Hiding on a garbage truck, they were trying to escape from samurai warriors whose main weapon seemed to be bamboo wind chimes that they shook threateningly. Mr. Spock, who, to nobody’s apparent surprise, had sprouted a skunk tail, was trying to construct a grenade out of empty peanut butter jars, when suddenly one of the wind chimes came alive and started loping down the road after their slowly escaping garbage truck. The Princess of Light desperately hurled peanut shells at it.

  Shivering and sweaty, Karen woke up. She could still hear the clatter of peanut shells against bamboo. The sound outlasted the wisps of dream.

  She sat up and stared fearfully at her window. Outside in the dark, one branch seemed to be bobbing up and down, tapping rhythmically against the glass pane. A dark lump squatted on the branch, and from it came the glint of eyes.

  10

  Unscheduled Stop

  Karen was at the window in one leap. Struggling with the latch, she slid up the lower half of the window. The dark lump moved awkwardly down the branch, almost falling onto the window sill.

  A thought buzzed in her head. “Remember reading in the encyclopedia that skunks are not natural climbers? Let me tell you, they were right. Whew!” Stinker belly-flopped to the floor as his quivering little legs gave out totally.

  Instantly, Karen scooped him into her lap and stroked his matted, brier-studded fur. “Oh, Stinker, I’m so glad to see you. We thought that dogs or Zarnk had got you.”

  “Zarnk? You haven’t seen any of them, have you?”

  “No, but I have an overactive imagination when it comes to disasters.”

  “Ah, yes. Well, there’s no time for imagination or explanations now, I’m afraid. Skunk legs are maddeningly short; things took much longer than I’d planned. The shuttle will be breaking orbit soon. I’ve got to get to Jonathan’s, and I need your help.”

  “Sure. What can I do?”

  “Well, I can’t just go knock on his door in the middle of the night. And there’s no tree by his bedroom window—not that I would ever try that again. I was thinking of throwing something against his window so he’d come down and let me in. But skunks, I’ve discovered, have pretty poor aim.”