The visser indicated the no-longer-in-one-piece horse-Controller, like it had been someone else's fault he'd been lost.
"And now you don't even know what you saw?"
He was enraged. And Visser Three mad is beyond dangerous. His horse-Controllers backed away as far as they dared.
"l will have the secret!" the visser said in a suddenly low, sinister, thought-speak voice. "l will have it!"
For a while no one moved or spoke or even breathed. No one, me included, wanted to take any chance of attracting the furious visser's at- tention.
Then, "AII right, I've punished the one responsible. Transport will come for the rest of you.
We still have the backup plan. It was always the better plan. We'll simply take control of a few of the humans working at this base. Have you idiots at least identified the right targets to infest?"
"Jihal,Visser!" one of the horse-Controllers said.
"Good. Then you can live. We'll target the right humans, and seize them tomorrow at . . ." Suddenly he stopped. "Those horses. What are they doing with you? They are not our people."
In Galard,the horse-Controller explained that it was normal for horses to herd together. It was good for real horses to be there. It provided camouflage of sorts.
This was not the answer the visser wanted to hear. He aimed his Andalite stalk eyes directly at me. "Fool, do you not realize that the Andalite bandits who plague us can morph any animal they like, including horses? I will have to kill these creatures, just to be sure."
"No one move. No one act like they heard anything," I hissed to the others. I lowered my big golden head and crunched up a mouthful of grass. And then I did what horses do. And I wasn't modest about it.
The visser laughed derisively. "l suppose they are real horses, after all." I took a relieved breath.
"Still, better kill them."
"Uh-oh," I said.
The Hork-Bajir warrior leveled his Dracon beam at us. A second Hork- Bajir came running from inside the Bug fighter.
I felt a thrill of terror. I ordered myself to run away. But I wasn't the only creature in my head right then. Minneapolis Max was in there, too. And he didn't feel like running away.
My hindquarters bunched up and fired every muscle fiber at once. And, before I knew what was happening, I was running. But not running away.
I ran straight for the first Hork-Bajir.
"HrrrEEEEE-HEEE-he-he!" I whinnied. I reared up, all the way back till I was standing on my hind legs, and I flailed madly with my forehooves.
I couldn't exactly aim my hooves, mind you. Horses aren't predators. But I flailed away and just as the Hork-Bajir was pressing the trigger...
BONK!
"Raaahhhh!" the Hork-Bajir bellowed. He dropped the Dracon beam from his hands. It clattered on the ground, and down I came. I landed directly with both hooves on the weapon.
. CRUNCH!
I'd like to say it was deliberate. But the truth is that with my side-vision horse eyes I could barely even see my hooves, let alone aim them. But sometimes luck is as good as skill.
"Haul butt!" Jake yelled.
NowMinneapolis Max was ready to run away. So I ran. We all ran.
The two Hork-Bajir took off in pursuit.
"lf they catch us, we're dog food," Rachel said. "Two Hork-Bajir versus six horses? Not a prayer."
She was right. And to be honest, if it had been a hundred horses versus two Hork-Bajir, the horses would have lost. "How fast are Hork-Ba-jir?" I asked Rachel. She had morphed a Hork-Bajir once.
"Fast," she said grimly.
We bolted. We hauled. But the two bounding Hork-Bajir were hot on our trail.
Then we saw spotlights bouncing wildly toward us. Humvees! The security troops from the base were coming out to investigate.
We ran and the Hork-Bajir hesitated. When I looked back next, they were gone.
"Well, that was stupid from start to finish," Rachel said as we got far from Zone 91. "We could have gotten killed. And for what? Over something even the Yeerks don't recognize."
"Whatever that thing is, it sure doesn't look like a spaceships Marco admitted.
"Or a secret weapon," Jake said. "And it doesn't look human, but who knows?"
"lt is not a spaceships Ax said. "0r a weapon. But it is also nothuman."
"Well, I guess we'll probably never find out what it is," I said with a sigh.
"Why won't you find out?" Ax asked.
"Because it's not worth risking our lives again," I said. "lf the Yeerks don't even know what it is —"
"Of course the Yeerks don't know what it is," Ax said calmly. "They have never been aboard an Andalite Dome ship."
One by one, we each stopped walking. One by one we turned to face Ax.
"Ax, are you telling us you do know what that thing is?" Tobias asked.
"Of course. I started to tell you, but we were interrupted."
"So? So what is it?" Marco demanded.
"lt's a disposable module of a type used in the old days on the first generation of Andalite Dome ships. When the modules were used up, they were jettisoned into space. They were supposed to be aimed toward a star, so they'd be burned up without a trace. This one must have .
drifted through space, eventually being caught by Earth's gravity."
"So it's a space engine?"
"lt's a weapon?"
"No, of course not. It's . . . well, this is a bit embarrassing. It's an Andalite Dome ship's modular waste disposal system."
For about a full minute, no one said anything. Then Marco spoke.
"You're telling me the Most Secret Place On Earth, the fabled Zone Ninety-one, the Holy Grail of conspiracy nuts, is hiding the secret of an Andalite toilet?"
"Only a very primitive model," Ax said condescendingly. "Since those days there have been huge technological improvements."
Chapter 21
We got out of horse morph and into bird morph and flew home.
We alone now knew the secret of Zone 91. An entire base built to analyze what they thought was an alien spaceship but was, in reality, a high-tech Andalite Porta-John.
There was, according to Ax, absolutely zero chance that the Andalite toilet would give humans the ability to fly through space.
We had done some very important things as Animorphs. We had fought some terrible and vital battles.
This wasn't one of them.
I got home just in time to walk into my living room and realize both my parents were waiting for me.
They had their angry-parent faces on.
"Where have you been?" my mother demanded.
Mom always takes the lead in discipline. She knows my dad will give in too easily. She thinks she's tougher. She thinks that because it happens to be true.
"I was out with Rachel," I said, more or less truthfully.
"Out with Rachel doing what?" my mom hissed. "You missed dinner. It's dark out. You didn't tell us where you were going."
My mom isn't a real big person. Until she's mad. Then she somehow gets larger. She seems to rise up and tower over me. It's weird. I mean, normally she's maybe two inches taller than me, but right then she was at least eight feet tall.