“This is making me dizzy,” sighed Babs, putting her hands to her head. “It’s like a beautiful dream. If only people can—oh, wait, what about nuclear explosions?”
“That could be the biggest problem of all,” said Cobb. “It would be easy to alla up a twenty-five-pound ball of plutonium. A supercritical mass. Instant atomic bomb.”
“Shit,” said Babs. “There’s got to be a way out. Will the alla actually make plutonium? Let’s check.”
Randy, Babs, and Yoke uvvied inward, examining their alla catalogs, and sure enough, plutonium was listed.
“Don’t try making any of it,” cautioned Cobb. “It’s highly poisonous, even in small amounts.”
“We have to get the aliens to talk to Om,” said Yoke. “To tell Om not to let the allas make nuclear fuel. Uranium, plutonium—no evil heavy metal. Om ought to be able to control what the allas can do. They’re all connected to her, you know.”
“Yes,” said Babs. “And then everyone gets an alla.”
“Here we are gettin’ all worked up,” said Randy. “And we don’t know how to copy no alla in the first place.
“The Metamartians do,” said Cobb. “Remember, Yoke? Josef said they know how to use the alla to make an alla. We should ask them how to copy the allas and at the same time get them to tell Om to not let allas make uranium or plutonium. Let’s go to the Anubis now!”
“Have you ever been on the Anubis before, Babs?” said Yoke.
“My brother and I went there right before I moved in here,” said Babs. “Just to look it over. It seemed kind of sad. Lots of xoxxy people. If we go over there, I think we should have a plan. We’re supposed to beg the aliens to tell us how to make an alla with the alla? And to block plutonium?”
“Begging is about all we can do,” said Yoke. “We can’t really threaten them or anything. I mean, they have built-in alla power, and they can see a little way into the future. No way we can hurt them.”
“Maybe I can get Siss hot for me,” said Cobb. “When Randy and I got onto Kleopatra and Isis the other night, Kleopatra said I was good. I think Siss is kind of interesting.”
“Who knows, Babs, if we beg, maybe the Metamartians will help us,” put in Randy, eager to move the conversation forward. “From what Yoke and Cobb say, Om does plan for everyone to get the alla. And it’s not like she’s out to destroy the planet. All Om wants is to memorize us each and every one. It’s like the allas are the ultimate reward for filling in your questionnaire.”
“Do you think you can handle being on the Anubis, Randy?” asked Babs. “Without going on another sporehead cheeseball rampage?”
“If you with me, girl,” said Randy sticking out his hand. “You all I see. We’ll leave Willa Jean here to watch over things.”
Phil spent four days in the powerball—from the Monday when Yoke flew back to San Francisco through the Thursday when things came to a head on the Anubis. The first three days went as follows:
While his dad guzzled wine with Darla and Tempest, Phil pulled himself to the other end of the oak tree. Right near the last branch was the flaw in their hyperspherical space. Things looked funny near the flaw. Goaded on by the inane chatter of the drunk pheezers, Phil got a firm grip on the branch, took a deep breath, and pushed his head out through the hole.
His viewpoint swung about with uncontrollable rapidity, like the view from a video camera left running while it dangles from a wrist-strap. Phil saw an endless landscape of curved pink surfaces—it was a bit like an ant’s-eye view of a million-mile tall woman’s body, not that the surfaces had the order and symmetry of a human form. Awed and dizzy, he let his eyes follow along six metallic tendrils that led out of the cosmic pink form. The tendrils eventually ran into a great circular expanse of rock and mud that wavered and became a disk of water. When Phil turned his head a bit farther, he saw blinding bright light. Around then, Phil’s face began to feel frostbitten and he realized he was desperately out of breath. For one panicked instant he couldn’t figure out how to pull back his head—so formless and disorienting was hyperspace. It took a special effort to remember to bend the arm belonging to the hand holding the branch. This quickly brought his gasping head back in through the hole. Anxiously, Phil patted his face, but the skin wasn’t frozen, just very cold.
He needed something like a limpware bubbletopper space-suit if he were going to explore out there. But it seemed futile to try and find a human spacesuit in Om’s Metamartian alien alla catalog. The “yam-snoot” Tempest had fed him—had that even been food? His mouth felt greasy and nasty.
Phil’s eye fell on the Humpty-Dumpty doll, big as a watermelon. It was made of good moldie imipolex and could, in principle, serve as a spacesuit. But would he be able to get it to stretch itself over him? It didn’t look very intelligent. Silly Putters weren’t exported to Earth from the Moon, so Phil had never actually handled one before. They were said to be poised halfway between DIMs and moldies in intelligence. Supposedly, the famous inventor Willy Taze had developed an algorithm to keep them from unexpectedly tunneling into ungovernable moldie consciousness.
“Come here,” he said, beckoning ingratiatingly to the Humpty-Dumpty. The fat egg smiled uncertainly. Phil decided to try uvvying into it. The mind of the Humpty-Dumpty was what one would imagine the mind of a dog to be: a simple, affectless reflection of the passing scene. “Come here,” repeated Phil. “I need for you to help me. Come on, Humpty. Come to Phil.” Slowly the egg inched closer along the branch.
“Can you wrap me up?” asked Phil, forming a mental image of a man in a bubbletopper. “Can you act like a spacesuit and give me air?”
Humpty-Dumpty’s face split in a big smile, and it uvvied back something that sounded like prerecorded ad copy. “Yes, Humpty-Dumpty can act as a spacesuit. Every genuine Corey Rhizome Silly Putter doll is usable as an emergency bubbletopper. It’s just another reason why every loonie family should own at least one!”
The egg waddled closer, opened its mouth wide and gently bit onto Phil’s arm. And then its plastic flesh liquefied and flowed all over Phil, sealing him up inside a full-body suit. Cheesy-smelling air trickled out of an indentation over Phil’s nostrils, and the imipolex over his eyes became a transparent visor.
Grabbing the branch again, Phil stuck his head out into hyperspace for a second time. Again, the first thing he saw was a great expanse of pink—it had to be the body of Om.
In an effort to keep his viewpoint from thrashing about, Phil made every effort to hold perfectly still, even though he was holding onto a drifting tree with a dog and three drunk old people at the tree’s other end. Phil tried to compensate for the jiggling by turning his head this way and that, but he couldn’t quite put it together. No action seemed to have the expected consequence; it was like trying to do something with his hands while watching them in a mirror. Everything was upside down, backward, and maybe even inside out.
Even so, he was able to get a better look at some of the things he’d seen before. He found that when he unexpectedly lost sight of something, he could wobble his head to scan back and forth to find it. Wobbling had the additional effect of sometimes showing him a series of views that his mind could integrate into a solid whole. Some of the endless pink surfaces were spheres that seamlessly blended together—surely these were views of the hyperspherical powerball finger of Om whose hypersurface enclosed the rest of his body. And the pink curves beyond the spheres? Further sections of Om’s body—Phil got the feeling she was astronomical in size.