Young Adventurers Read online

“And yet,” Rip retorted, “you say you’re always ready to confront the things that woman was not meant to know–”

  “That’s different!”

  “Be reasonable, Morg’. She doesn’t look like she’d hurt a fly.”

  “All right. But if she does hurt a fly–i.e. us–let me be the first to say “I told you so.”

  “She won’t. She’s probably from Gallifrey.”

  That insult directed at her favorite TV hero’s homeland was something Morgan was only prepared to accept from Rip, just as only Morgan could get away with sassing the “Enterprise” crew in Rip’s presence and not risk angering the latter.

  “You,” said Morgan, “are terrible. Let’s go.”

  Their approaching footsteps made the girl turn around immediately, like she was fearful of being attacked. However, as soon as Morgan and Rip introduced themselves, all was well.

  “I’m…Sibyl,” the girl said, evasively. “Just got in from…away.”

  “Don’t you have your family with you?” Morgan asked.

  “I’m a…” Sibyl groped for the right word to say, as if English was not her first language. “I’m that…thing…where your parents die before you and you have to fend for yourself…”

  “An orphan,” supplied Rip.

  “Right!” Sibyl slapped her forehead. “The word was right on the tip of my tongue.”

  “How old are you?” Morgan asked.

  “How old are you?” Sibyl answered.

  “Fourteen,” said Morgan.

  “Same for me,” agreed Rip.

  “What a coincidence,” said Sibyl. “So am I. Listen, do you know a place where a girl can get a room?”

  “Sure,” Rip said, trying to be friendly. “There’s a hotel in…”

  “No.” Morgan overruled her friend.

  “What do you mean, Morg’?” Rip asked.

  “I mean that she belongs in the orphanage.”

  “Orphanage?” Rip queried.

  “No way!” Sibyl objected to the idea. “Orphanages are for BABIES!”

  “No, they’re not,” Morgan said, touching a finger to her head. “Any minor who hasn’t obtained their majority, and doesn’t have parents or guardians, the way Rip and I have, has to be remanded to the care of the State until they obtain their majority…”

  “Smart, isn’t she?” Rip said. “She remembers a huge ton of whatever she reads. Wish I could do that.”

  Sibyl was less impressed.

  “I’m not going,” she pouted.

  “Yes, you are!” Morgan’s face and voice shifted to “game” mode.

  “In my land,” Sibyl said, “everyone is free to act according to their own free will and intelligence…”

  “We’re not in your “land”, wherever it is.” Morgan balled her fists aggressively as she raised her voice in anger. “In the United States of America, we obey the LAWS! And so will you!”

  “You gonna make me, STILTS?” Sibyl challenged, balling her own fists.

  “If I have to!” declared Morgan.

  Before violence could break out, Rip stepped between them.

  “Why don’t you just go to the orphanage and leave it at that?” she said to Sibyl. “It’s not that bad, really. You get looked after for a few years, and then you can be on your own again, like you want. And you…” here she addressed Morgan, “BEHAVE YOURSELF! She hasn’t done anything to harm us, so relax.”

  “All right.” Morgan stood down and became friendly again. “Sorry, Sibyl. I know you’re not from here, so I just wanted to…”

  “I got it, Morgan!” Sibyl waved her hand dismissively. “I have stuff to learn about this place. Maybe you could help me learn about it.”

  “Maybe we could,” agreed Morgan.

  Being that Morgan and Rip lived in a small town, where almost everybody knew everything about almost everybody else, it was a small and simple matter for them to introduce Sibyl to the local orphanage director, explain her situation, and get her taken on as a boarder. At the same time, Morgan and Rip, who had started to grow friendly with Sibyl, promised to help her assimilate into her new environment, and, they hoped, stay there, to remain friends with them for a long period of time, as Morgan and Rip themselves were.

  This would prove not to be the case.

  When Morgan and Rip arrived at the orphanage the next day to visit Sibyl, they found her in what, to them, was a rather unorthodox position on the floor. Still dressed in the same patched-rag outfit she’d been discovered in, for she seemed to own no other clothing, Sibyl was sitting beside her bed in a posture resembling a child in old-fashioned nighttime prayer to God, before sleep. However, what she was uttering was not prayer, but, rather, a one-way conversation.

  “I got in fine,” was what she was saying as Morgan and Rip entered the room. “No trouble. The thing runs like clockwork…no, no issues with the humans. Found a couple of kids my age in the woods to help me with the plan. Perfect patsies- they got no idea what…DAMN! Gotta go!”

  She had, at this point, discovered the presence of her erstwhile “friends” in the room, and rapidly took pains to conceal whatever apparatus it was she had been speaking into. That, as was soon discovered, was something resembling an early 20th century model telephone-a black, clarinet-like stick with an earpiece of the same color attached by a hook. This she accidentally dropped, and it rolled on the floor towards Morgan, who picked it up.

  “Hey!” said Sibyl, viciously, when she saw this. “Don’t touch that!”

  “How come?” Rip asked innocently. “It doesn’t seem like much. Just an old telephone.”

  “Because…” Sibyl began, nervously.

  Immediately, she regretted saying this, because Morgan, always alert to when things got “wrong” in her presence, pounced on the evasive excuse.

  “Because why, Sibyl?” she demanded.

  Sibyl realized immediately that her powers of deception were no match for Morgan’s intelligence, and confessed.

  “All right,” she said, defeated. “You got me. I hid where I came from and how I got here. I shouldn’t have.”

  “No,” Morgan agreed, in an offended tone. “You shouldn’t.”

  “But I can make it up to you,” said Sibyl. “I’ll tell you the truth. You deserve that much, for trying to befriend me and all.”

  “So tell, already,” said Rip.

  “You better have a good excuse,” added Morgan. “I don’t like being fooled.”

  “Not here!” Sibyl said.

  “Why?” demanded Morgan.

  “Because I don’t want anyone else to hear it except you two,” she said. “This is important stuff. And you’re the only two people I know here who can handle it. You’re the only two people I know here, period, but that’s not the point. Can you handle it?”

  Morgan and Rip nodded.

  “And, after I tell you, you will not speak a word of this to anyone else. Agreed?”

  They agreed, again by nodding.

  “Fine,” said Sibyl. “What say we reconvene in ten minutes, out where you found me?”

  That was agreed to, as well. Ten minutes later, Sibyl spoke to them in the new venue.

  “Okay,” she said. “I told you I was fourteen and an orphan. That’s true. But the rest of it is…I’m an alien.”

  “An immigrant?” Rip asked.

  “No,” said Sibyl, with a raised left eyebrow, in a don’t be more stupid than you already are tone. “An alien. As in, a being not of this Earth, as your Hollywood would put it.”

  Morgan and Rip looked at each other, briefly and excitedly, as if they’d had met a favorite pop singer by chance and by accident. This was the moment they had been waiting their whole lives for! However, they were quick to retain their normal demeanors.

  “How did you get here?” Morgan asked.

  “The flash of lightning you saw before I came. Obviously, you’ve never heard of the Starlight Express. Fastest rapid transit system in the galaxy. You get in and out of places in seconds, no q
uestion asked. The trip from Ziltox to Earth is pretty fast even by those standards.”

  “Ziltox?” Rip asked.

  “My home planet. And…” suddenly and fiercely, her voice took on an acidic, Satanic tone, “the one that will soon reduce yours to ASHES!”

  “WHAT?” Morgan and Rip shouted, backing up from her in genuine horror.

  “Ahhhh! DAMN IT!” Sibyl slapped herself on the forehead. “I gave it AWAY!”

  “What?” Morgan asked, angrily, getting the picture. “Your plan for conquering the Earth?”

  “Yeah,” said Sibyl. “I got too much of a loose tongue. See, I’m the advance scout for the Army, and I’m supposed to see whether they can take you Earthlings in a fair fight. But, from what I can see, you can’t do anything of the things we Ziltoxians can do, so it should be easy.”

  “What can you and your kind possibly do that people on Earth can’t?” said Morgan. “I mean, you seem almost exactly like us…”

  “Well, among other things…”

  Sibyl expelled a beam of light from her right hand, which landed in a nearby tree and reduced it to a flaming ruin. This freaked Morgan out.

  “YOU…” she shouted, in shock. “You…just…”

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” said Sibyl.

  Abruptly, she picked up Morgan and Rip and juggled them in the air, as if they were balls or clubs. Rip was simply reduced to awed silence by the act, but Morgan, who was reduced to gibbering panic, started screaming almost as soon as she was lifted up in the air.

  “AAH!” she shouted. “PUT US DOWN! PUT US DOWN! PutusdownputusdownputusdownPUTUSDOWNNN!”

  Eventually, Sibyl agreed, and they were placed on the ground. Outraged by the alien’s insensitive treatment of them, Morgan moved towards her.

  “HOW DARE YOU!” she stormed. “Rip and I were trying to be friendly, and you…treated us…like…DIRT! I don’t care if you are an alien, or what you can possibly do to us or to Earth! I will not have myself and my friend be treated like TOYS for your amusement…”

  “PUT A SOCK IN IT, EARTHLING!”

  Sibyl’s voice and face darkened with these words, which drove Morgan back towards Rip.

  “Now,” Sibyl said, with firm seriousness, “here’s how it’s going to be. In one day–ONE–you two will come back here, and explain exactly why and how this pitiful excuse for a planet should be spared the wrath of the Ziltoxians. Because what I just showed you is a mere FRACTION of what we are capable of doing to this pestilent rock! And, if the INSOLENCE you just showed me is the best line of defense Earth has, then it’ll be over faster than that your Six Day War was in the 1970s.”

  “How do you know about…?” Rip began.

  “We just know, okay?” said Sibyl. “First rule of war is- know your enemy. You’ll need to know that in the future–if you live.”

  “How can you just…decide…to…get…rid of us…?” Morgan began sobbing, weakly. “Don’t you…care…about…?”

  “Hah!” Sibyl growled. “If your “science fiction” stories are to be believed, Earth has never CARED about the civil rights of ANY alien race! So why should WE care about YOURS?”

  She stormed off into the forest, turning back only briefly, to say one more thing.

  “Remember. One day. OR ELSE!”

  Having no other choice in the matter, Morgan and Rip resolved to meet the following morning to discuss what, if anything, they could do to save the Earth before Sibyl and the Ziltoxians chose to destroy it- if they were feeling so inclined. Rip, tired by the day’s activity, slept well. Morgan did not.

  When they met at the agreed time the next day, that much was clear. Morgan looked as if she had barely slept at all, by Rip’s gathering, fueled by the coffee that still lingered on her breath. Worse still, the half-crazed expression she sported on her face meant that, in the rush to accomplish everything she wanted, she had forgotten to take the pills that typically kept her emotions in check. And, if Sibyl somehow set her off, or vice versa, something bad was going to happen.

  This is going to be interesting, Rip thought, ruefully, to herself. But, to her friend, she simply said:

  “You…slept okay, Morg’?”

  “What does it LOOK like?” the taller girl shrieked. “Yes! I slept like a BABY!”

  “No, you didn’t,” Rip replied, stating the obvious.

  “Don’t you know SARCASM when you hear it? You use it all the time on me, and I…”

  “…can’t “get” it ‘cause you have Asperger’s. Yeah, I know that. I also know that you’ve been pulling an all-nighter. That’s not like you, Morg’. You’re usually so prepared…”

  “Not this time, Rip! I couldn’t find it.”

  “Couldn’t find what?”

  “The INFORMATION!” She began pacing the street in front of them, almost ignoring Rip in the process.

  “What information…?”

  “About Ziltox! I went through the Internet and all my reference books, and I couldn’t find it anywhere!”

  “All of ‘em?”

  “Yeah. There’s nothing about Ziltox anywhere. I’m starting to think we hallucinated when we saw those lights in the sky, and we somehow dreamed Sibyl into existence because we wanted to meet an actual alien…”

  “Morg’…”

  “I mean, people do have those kind of experiences, when they’re on cocaine, or marijuana, or hashish or opium or something like that, and they read about far away or fictional places, but we were both totally sober when we saw those lights and we met Sibyl, weren’t we?”

  “Uh, Morgan…”

  “And everything she said was so plausible! Aliens stronger than men and women, capable of killing us all! But there’s no information related to the planet at all, ANYWHERE, let alone a scientific study of it. How can we understand the Ziltoxians if there’s no information about them at all?”

  “Morgan!”

  “Oh, this is HOPELESS! We can’t talk to anybody because of that gag order she put on us, and, even if we did, they would just laugh at us and say we made it up, or someone else made it up, like they USUALLY do, even though this time our butts are REALLY on the line…”

  “MORGAN!”

  This bellowing cry from Rip- about the only resource she had to stop Morgan from going on with her complicated and fear-laden speech- was enough to scare Morgan and stop her in her tracks. Which was its intended effect.

  Rip took a needed “hit” and then continued.

  “You’re looking at this the wrong way,” she said. “It’s not important that we know anything about Ziltox if we want to deal with Sibyl.”

  “But that’s where she comes from!” said Morgan.

  “She’s not there, right now. She’s HERE!”

  “You mean…?”

  “I mean, we need to think about what things are here on Earth to stop her.”

  “Rip, there’s no way we could get other human beings to help us stop her. She said so herself.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Then what do you mean?”

  “I believe we’re both well-acquainted with H.G. Wells’ The War of The Worlds?”

  “We are. But how will that help us?”

  “Remember the end of the story. Why the Martians didn’t win.”

  For the first time that day, Morgan’s fear dissipated, and she became calm and rational again.

  “I see what you mean,” she said.

  “Well,” Sibyl said, when Morgan and Rip met her soon afterwards. “I see someone’s been pulling an all-nighter. Won’t do you any good, though.”

  The all-nighter reference was clearly aimed at Morgan, causing Rip to aim an “I told you so” glance at her friend. Morgan simply ignored the remark.

  “It was worth it, though,” Rip said, with a Cheshire Cat grin. “She found out the kind of stuff that’ll make it much easier for you to take over Earth.”

  “Really?” said Sibyl, suddenly pleased. “Do tell.”

  “We can’t,” Mo
rgan answered, with a Cheshire Cat grin of her own.

  “How come?” Sibyl demanded. “What is it? You blackmailing me or something? ‘Cause you know what I can do to…”

  “No!” Morgan said, failing to hide the fear now emerging in her voice. “I mean…”

  “We just want to convey our information to you in the same way you did to us- secretly,” Rip finished on Morgan’s behalf. “This stuff is so secret we got to whisper it in your ear.”

  “Fine.”

  Sibyl walked over to Morgan and Rip until they were only inches apart. Sibyl expected the two of them to begin telling her what she needed, but that was not what happened.

  Morgan and Rip spat in her face, at exactly the same time, from two separate angles.

  Repulsed and angered, Sibyl started to withdraw.

  “How disgusting are YOU!” she proclaimed. “If you’re going to act like pigs, then you might as well die like them. Nobody spits on a Ziltoxian and…URRRGGGGGHHHHHH!”

  Abruptly, she clutched her throat and began rolling on the ground in agony, as she turned a ghastly pale. Morgan and Rip simply stood and watched.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Sibyl croaked.

  “Nothing,” said Morgan. “Except you getting your just desserts!”

  “But how…?”

  “You’re an alien, right?” Rip explained. “Well, it stands to reason that you’ve never been exposed to the microorganisms of Earth. Therefore, if one of them gets inside of you, you get sick immediately, and, ultimately, you die.”

  “What do you mean, “ultimately?” said Sibyl. “I’m dying now!”

  It was true. While they were talking, Sibyl’s bones had begun to give way, reducing her body to a gelatinous mass. But she still had fight in her, and crawled threateningly towards Morgan and Rip.

  “Serves me right for trusting you two!” Sibyl snarled.

  “Well, you betrayed our trust first!” said Morgan. “We don’t like that.”

  “Besides which,” Rip added. “This is what happens to any alien that gets sick on Earth. Even you supposedly mighty Ziltoxians aren’t a match for the germs of old Earth. That’s why nobody can invade Earth successfully, ‘cause they forget that!”

  “You BITCHES!” Sibyl cried. “I’ll…uuuuhhhhhhh…”

  “RUN!” Morgan shouted. “She’s gonna blow!”