My Teacher Flunked the Planet

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE LAST WORDS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR

  For today’s 40,000 . . .

  and tomorrow’s

  and the next day’s

  until it is finally over.

  Greetings, Earthlings . . .

  My name is Peter Thompson, and I am either the greatest hero in the history of the Earth, or the biggest traitor the planet has ever known.

  I guess it all depends on your point of view.

  Whatever label you decide I deserve, traitor or hero, I have to share it with Susan Simmons and Duncan Dougal.

  Only they’re gone now, and I’m the one who’s left to tell the story.

  If you’ve read the other books Susan, Duncan, and I wrote about our adventures with the aliens, you can go right to the first chapter—though you might want to read the rest of this as a reminder of what’s already happened. If you haven’t read those books, let me tell you what you need to know.

  This whole thing actually started with Susan. When our sixth grade teacher, Ms. Schwartz, disappeared it was Susan who discovered that our substitute teacher “Mr. Smith” was really an alien named Broxholm, who was planning to kidnap five kids from our class and take them into space.

  Susan came to me for help. She chose me, even though I was the class geek, because I read a lot of science fiction, and she figured I would be more likely to believe her than anyone else she knew. I did believe her, too—but not until we had slipped into Mr. Smith’s house and found Ms. Schwartz being held prisoner in a force field in his attic.

  At the last minute Susan discovered a way to defeat Broxholm. The other thing that happened at the last minute was that I decided to go with him—which is how I ended up traveling across the galaxy in a spaceship called The New Jersey.

  When school started again in the fall, our class bully, Duncan Dougal, discovered there was still an alien teacher around. This one was a female named Kreeblim. She fried Duncan’s brain, turning him into a genius, just so she could use him to replace a communication device that had been in Broxholm’s ship the night he and I took off.

  While Duncan was getting his brains fried, I was making friends with aliens. My favorite was a little blue being named Hoo-Lan. He gave me a new name—Krepta, which means “Child of the Stars”—and informed me that he was going to be my teacher.

  Hoo-Lan was mysterious about a lot of things, and I suspected that he knew more than he was telling me. But he was kind and funny, and I really liked him.

  Then a tragedy happened. Hoo-Lan, who was fascinated by the idea of telepathy, tried to connect his brain to mine with a machine he had been working on. When he turned on the machine and made contact with my mind, the experience drove him into a coma!

  His last wish before sinking completely into the coma was that the Interplanetary Council, which was talking about blowing up Earth, would give the planet a final chance.

  Which is what I want to tell you about now.

  —Peter Thompson,

  Child of the Stars

  My Teacher

  Flunked the Planet

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Nikka, Nikka, Flexxim Puspa!”

  Broxholm’s orange eyes were glowing. The leathery, lime-green skin of his face was stretched tight in a look that I could not interpret. The viewscreen behind him showed an image of the Earth, floating in the dark glory of space.

  Broxholm pointed to a red button that glowed more brightly than his eyes. “This is it,” he said. “The button.”

  My throat was dry. “What would happen if you pushed it?”

  His lipless mouth pulled back in something like a smile, revealing rounded, purplish teeth. “Nothing. At least, not now. It takes a complex series of secret commands to activate it.”

  “And if that series of commands is used?” asked Susan Simmons, who was standing beside me.

  Broxholm turned and gazed at the image of Earth. “Stardust,” he whispered.

  “Whoa!” said Duncan Dougal. “Major bummer!”

  Another being entered the chamber. Turning, I saw Kreeblim, the alien who had fried Duncan’s brain and made him super-smart. Her lavender hair, thick as worms, was writhing around her head. “The council is ready to see us,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder with her long, three-pronged nose.

  I swallowed. The Interplanetary Council was trying to decide how to handle what they called “the Earth Question”—which was basically, “What do we do with the only species on ten thousand planets that is bright enough to figure out space travel, yet dumb enough to have wars?”

  That species was human beings, of course, and I didn’t much care for any of the aliens’ current plans, which I had explained to Susan and Duncan earlier that night when I told them the story of my experiences since I had gone into space with Broxholm.

  “If we start with the least nasty option and work up,” I had said, “then Plan A calls for the aliens to leave us alone for now.”

  “That’s not so bad!” Susan had said.

  “Unfortunately, most of the aliens who favor it do so because they figure if they leave us alone, we’ll destroy ourselves before we make it into space. That way the problem is solved, and they don’t have to feel guilty.”

  “That stinks!” Duncan had cried.

  “Agreed. Now, the aliens who support what we’ll call Plan B would like to take over the planet.”

  Susan’s eyes had widened. “An alien invasion, just like we feared from the beginning!”

  “Not quite. This group wants to fix things. They would cure diseases, stop wars, end poverty, that kind of thing.”

  Duncan had blinked in surprise. “Sounds great!”

  “It would be, except they’ll only do it if we give them total control of the planet.”

  Duncan had started to ask why, then nodded. “They’re afraid once they give us their technology we’ll use it against them.”

  “You’ve got it,” I’d said, reminding myself not to be surprised when Duncan figured things out.

  “So what’s the third option?” Susan had asked.

  “Plan C: restrict us to our own solar system, either by sabotaging our science so we never develop faster-than-light travel, or by setting up a military blockade.”

  Since I have always believed it is our destiny to go to the stars, I hated that idea more than I can tell you.

  “Most aliens think that wouldn’t work,” I had continued. “They figure sooner or later we’d get out anyway. So we have Plan D—D for destruction, you might say. The group supporting this wants to blow us up now, before we can get into space and really make trouble. They believe if we make it out of the solar system, the final cost in lives and destruction will be far greater than if they simply wipe us out today. They look at us the way we would look at a group of monkeys that accidentally learned to make atomic bombs: interesting, but too dangerous to be allowed to live.”

  The bad news was, the aliens seemed to be leaning toward Plan D. The good news was, they were going to let us try to change their
minds.

  We followed Kreeblim to the wall. She had her pet poot—which was also named Poot, for reasons I didn’t understand—riding on her shoulder. Poot was sort of an alien slug that oozed and changed shape. I had noticed that Duncan seemed to be very fond of it. I guess it was fond of Duncan, too, since when it noticed him it raised a blob of itself and cried, “Poot!”

  Kreeblim stopped in front of a large circle. Mounted in the wall next to it were twelve rows of multicolored marbles. She punched six of the marbles. The circle turned blue.

  This was what the aliens call a transcendental elevator. It could transport beings from one place to another instantly—which was just as well, since the New Jersey (that was the spaceship we were on) had thousands of miles of corridors.

  I followed Kreeblim through the circle and into the meeting chamber of the Interplanetary Council.

  Susan gasped when she came in behind me. I didn’t blame her. Each of the eight beings on the council came from a different world. Seeing them all together was plenty strange.

  Actually, what we were seeing were holographic projections of the council members. The council members themselves remained on their own worlds. However, the three-dimensional images were so realistic, I rarely thought about that.

  First to speak was an alien who looked like a pile of red seaweed with thick green stalks growing out of the top. It made a series of popping, bubbling sounds, then wiggled the squishy-looking pods that dangled from the end of each stalk to indicate that what it had said was a question.

  I understood the gesture because the aliens had installed a Universal Translator in my brain, and it interpreted whatever any of them said. In turn, I was to translate their sounds (and gestures) for Susan and Duncan.

  I turned to Susan. Her hair, usually blond, had a green tint from the odd light of the chamber. Susan is very pretty by Earth standards, but I had seen so many versions of beauty since I joined the aliens I didn’t think about that much now. “He wants to know if you understand why you are here,” I said.

  “I do,” she replied, speaking directly to Red Seaweed. “Peter told me all about it.”

  “And do you accept this task?”

  Susan took so long to answer that I began to fear that the alien might get upset. I understood; it was a big job. But even so . . . I gave her a nudge.

  “I accept!” she said, more loudly than I expected.

  “And you, Duncan Dougal?” asked an alien who looked more like a shadow than anything real and solid. It spoke by changing the way light reflected from its body.

  Duncan’s round face was serious. It was hard for me to imagine a kid who had bullied his way through grade school, a kid who appeared to have all the sensitivity of a brick, being responsible for the survival of the planet. But I was prejudiced. Duncan had been picking on me—and everyone else in our class—for so long that it was hard to remember how different he was now that the aliens had unleashed his natural intelligence by frying his brain.

  When I translated the question, Duncan nodded. “I accept,” he said solemnly.

  “And you, Krepta?” asked a tall, sea-green alien.

  I hesitated for only a moment. After all, the mission had been partly my idea. “I accept,” I said. Though I meant to say it proudly, my voice came out sounding small and scared.

  Next to speak was a purple alien whose long tentacles stretched across a silvery rack. A nozzle mounted above the rack sprayed lavender mist over the tentacles, keeping them slick and shiny.

  “Broxholm ign Gnarx Erxxen xax Scradzz?” it asked.

  That mouthful of syllables represented Broxholm’s full name, including his family group (Gnarx Erxxen) and his planet (Scradzz). Broxholm was standing behind me. I turned to look at him. Putting a hand on my shoulder, he wrinkled his high, green forehead—his way of signaling agreement.

  The final member of our party to be sworn in was Kreeblim. Her thick lavender hair was rippling with so many conflicting emotions she looked as if she had a colony of confused worms climbing out of her head. I began to wonder if she had changed her mind. But after a moment she closed her third eye, the one in the middle of her forehead, and said, “I accept.”

  The council didn’t ask us to swear on a holy book or anything; the aliens expect that if you say you’ll do something, you’ll do it. Only I wasn’t entirely sure what we had just said we would do.

  Basically, they had given us the last three weeks of October to put together a report on the state of Earth and its people.

  But what was supposed to be in the report? How could we make them think better of us? At the moment, the aliens viewed us the way you and I look at flu germs—insignificant, yet nasty and dangerous. Or worse. I think they considered all of humanity as a sickness threatening to overtake the galaxy if something wasn’t done about us.

  “The newcomers will need translators,” said a large, bat-like alien who dangled from the ceiling in a sling. Its voice, which I had not heard before, was like nails scraping over concrete. I could feel it in my spine.

  After Susan and Duncan took their hands away from their ears, I translated the alien’s screech. Duncan looked puzzled. “Why do we need translators to go back to Earth?”

  “Because your planet, which has yet to figure out the benefit of true communication, has hundreds of different languages,” screeched the bat-like alien.

  The other aliens made sounds of sorrow and disapproval at our backward ways.

  When I explained Bat-thing’s answer, Duncan’s eyes lit up. “You mean these translators will let us understand any language on Earth?” he cried eagerly.

  “They would hardly be Universal Translators if they didn’t,” said Red Seaweed, adding a gesture that meant something like, “Is water wet?”

  “Wow!” said Duncan. “This is going to be great!” Suddenly his smile faded. The blood drained from his face. “Wait a minute,” he said, his voice quavering. “Are you going to do brain surgery on me?”

  In my opinion, brain surgery on the old Duncan would have been a good idea. He’d had nothing to lose, and it might have improved things. But now that I had been inside his brain a couple of times (as a result of being hooked into some alien communication machines), I understood why he was so upset. Since the aliens had fried the thing, it was pretty amazing. I wouldn’t have wanted to take a chance with it, either.

  I was trying to decide whether to tease Duncan or reassure him when a wave of dizziness swept over me. My own brain felt as if it had come loose inside my skull and begun to spin.

  “Nikka, nikka, flexxim puspa!” I cried.

  As I was wondering where the words had come from, everything went black, and I collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Long Division

  Weird images seemed to crawl through my mind: exploding television sets, vast sea creatures, things being cut in half, things being put together. I felt big. I felt tiny. I felt connected to something huge. I was swimming in an ocean that wasn’t made of water, but of—I don’t know. Electricity, maybe, though that idea was too weird to hold onto.

  Ahead of me was a wall. I had to get past it. But how? Knock it down? Go under it? Swim right through it?

  I didn’t know. I only knew that something terribly important was waiting on the other side.

  Before I could find a way past the wall I heard Susan calling me. Duncan took my hand, and snap! I was out of the dream (the vision, whatever). Opening my eyes, I saw four faces—two human, two alien—staring at me with grave concern.

  “Peter, what happened?” asked Susan.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said, thinking how good it was to see her face.

  “What was that thing you said?” Duncan asked. “What did it mean?”

  I must have looked blank.

  “You know, that thing about ‘Nikka, nikka, flexxim puspa.’ ”

  Suddenly I remembered the words. Though they hadn’t made sense when they first came out of my mouth, I un
derstood them now. They were in the language of Hoo-Lan, the little blue alien who had become my teacher on board the ship. It was Hoo-Lan who had named me Krepta. I was very fond of him. I was also very sad when I thought of him, since he was now in a coma, and no one knew for sure if he would live or not.

  Even worse, what had driven him into the coma was trying to make a telepathic link with my mind.

  “Well?” asked Duncan.

  “They mean, approximately, ‘One for all and all for one,’ ” said Broxholm before I could answer.

  It was Duncan’s turn to look confused. “That’s the motto of the Three Musketeers.”

  I thought: I really do have to get used to the fact that Duncan knows things like that. Then I decided I could get used to it later. The first thing I needed to figure out was why I had been quoting a phrase from a French novel in an alien language.

  “Can you stand, Krepta?” asked Kreeblim gently.

  I had known her only a few hours; I was pleased to hear how kind her voice could be.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Is the boy all right?” asked Red Seaweed as Susan and Duncan helped me up.

  “I’m fine,” I muttered. “Just a little woozy.”

  Actually, I wasn’t sure how I was. Only I didn’t say that, for fear I would be taken off the mission.

  “I believe he needs some rest,” said Broxholm.

  Considering what I had been through in the last twenty-four hours, this made sense.

  “He can relax in his room while the others receive their translators,” said the purple alien.

  Duncan was looking more and more nervous. Finally he turned to Kreeblim and said, “Do you suppose I could take the poot with me?”

  Kreeblim paused, then pulled the glowing, jellylike blob from her shoulder.

  “Poot!” it said, sticking out a couple of eyestalks.

  Kreeblim looked at Duncan. “You really do like Poot, don’t you?”

  Duncan nodded.

  Kreeblim seemed to be thinking. At last she grasped the slug firmly in both hands. Then she yanked her arms sideways, pulling the poot like a piece of taffy.