Applegate, K A - Animorphs 04 - The Message Page 6

  91

  «H ey! Half a sandwich! It's salami!»

  «Look over there. Is that a Jujubee?»

  «Pizza! Pizza! Part of the crust and it's one of those stuffed crusts!»

  Fortunately, one thing we always have plenty of in the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center (also known as my barn) is seagulls.

  We acquired the seagull DNA. Then the four of us, with Tobias watching from the high rafters, morphed into the new bodies.

  I have been a bird before. An osprey, to be ex act, one of the types of hawk.

  But gulls are different in some ways. For one thing, they are scavengers, not predators. So as we took wing and flew in a rush of white from the

  92 open hayloft, I noticed different things, felt dif ferent things. My seagull mind was not searching for mice or scurrying animals. It was much more openminded. My seagull intelligence looked for anything - anything - that could even possibly be food.

  Fortunately, the gull brains were close enough to the other bird brains we'd all experienced that it was fairly easy to control them. We didn't waste a lot of time getting started.

  Although, once we did get started, everyone was constantly pointing out food.

  «Hey! Look! French fries on the ground.»

  «Whoa! That's half a 3 Musketeers bar by that car!»

  «O ooh, ooh! Look at the Dumpster behind that McDonald's!»

  Sometimes you just have to accept the ani mal's basic mindset and go with it.

  «There's the beach,» Jake said as we flapped and soared and flapped some more.

  It's easier being an osprey in some ways. Much less flapping.

  Once we were out over the water, we could at least stop scanning for food. Mostly.

  «Hey! Is that a bag of potato chips floating down there?»

  We flew low, just a few dozen feet above the

  93 water. Not like hawks, who can ride the thermals up to the bellies of the clouds.

  But Tobias wasn't much higher than we were now. There are no thermals over water and he was having to flap a lot to stay aloft.

  We flew on, skimming the choppy surface of the water.

  «Hey, look,» Rachel said. «0ver to the left.»

  Sleek gray shapes sliced through the water, up, down, up, down, breaking the silvery barrier between sky and sea. It was a school of dolphins.

  «You know, sometimes this is just so wonder ful^ Rachel said. «l mean, we're flying. We're flying! And later, we'll be like them, at home in the water.»

  «Yeah, just us and the sharks,» Marco said darkly.

  «Still, it is cool,» Rachel said.

  «There's a ship up ahead,» Jake announced.

  «You just now noticed it?» Tobias laughed. «Wow. Seagull eyes aren't exactly great, are they? It's a container ship called Newmar. It's from Monrovia. You want to know what color the captain's hair is?»

  «Show-off,» Jake grumbled.

  Hawk eyes are totally amazing. As long as it's sunny out, Tobias can read a book from like three blocks away.

  94 It was hard, flying to catch up to the ship. It was moving fairly fast, and by the time we were close I was exhausted.

  The ship was gigantic, painted a rusty blue, with a deck longer than a football field. The superstructure was all crammed toward the back. That's where the crew would be, so we flew forward, hoping to find someplace private.

  The deck was stacked with containers, big steel boxes like trailers. Row after row of them lined the deck, and we could see hundreds more down in the hold.

  We settled in the narrow space between two rows of containers, far forward. It was like having walls all around us. Corrugated metal walls that went high over our heads.

  «Tobias? How much time?» Jake asked.

  Tobias twisted his head down to see the tiny watch strapped to his talon. « It's been about an hour and a half.»

  We decided to resume our human shapes. The space between the rows of containers was even narrower when we were fully human again.

  "Brrr. It's chilly out here," I said. The steel deck was cold beneath my bare feet. And even though the sun was high in the sky, we were in shadow.

  "Man, I swear, this is the worst thing about

  95 morphing," Marco said. "Can someone please figure out how to morph shoes, and maybe a sweater? Come on, Cassie. You're the morphing genius. I'm sick of these morphing outfits."

  "But you look so cute in Spandex," Rachel teased him.

  "Plus, they aren't exactly fashionable. All I'm saying is - uniforms. Something cool-looking. And warm. Warm would be nice. When winter comes, we are going to be some sad little Ani- morphs."

  "I have a more important question," Rachel said. "How do we know when we're there? You know, our destination."

  Jake made a "who knows?" face. "I figure this ship is going like, what, twenty miles per hour? Figure an hour, and that puts us twenty miles out, right?"

  Rachel pointed a finger at her forehead and said, "Jake's a total mathematical genius. One hour at twenty miles per hour. Right away he fig ures out that's twenty miles."

  Jake laughed. "That's about all the math I can do."

  «Actually, we're moving about eighteen miles per hour,» Tobias said.

  We all just stared at him.

  «l fly along the roads sometimes and watch

  96 the car speedometers. So I have a pretty good idea how fast I'm flying. When we were flying alongside the ship, I clocked it.»

  "Okay, eighteen miles an hour, more or less, straight south," Marco considered. "That would put us within a couple of miles of where Cassie thinks we should go."

  I winced. Every time anyone said something about me deciding where to go or what to do, it made me nervous.

  «l'd better head back,» Tobias said regret fully. «l don't want to try and fly eighteen miles back without a rest. And if I stay on this ship I'll end up in Singapore.»

  "Singapore?" Rachel asked.

  «Yeah. I read the captain's log as we were fly ing alongside. That's where they're headings

  Tobias flew off, leaving us the little watch.

  It was extremely dull waiting for an hour, with nothing to do but try and guess what was in the big containers all around us. On the other hand, we knew what we had to do next would definitely not be boring.

  So basically, we were happy to just be bored for a while, huddling together to stay warm in the whipping ocean breeze.

  After a long time, Jake checked the watch. "It's been about an hour. Cassie? What do you think?"

  97 "I don't know," I admitted. "I ... I guess I was hoping that when I was back in dolphin morph I would be able to make sense of more of the details the whale communicated to me. It was mostly images. And some of the images were about sounds and currents and water tempera tures, and stuff you can't see from the surface."

  Jake thought for a moment. "Oh, well, now is as good as any time, I guess. Let's head for the side."

  We stood up, uncramping our cold, stiff legs and arms. We moved along the row of containers toward the left side of the ship. The port side, as they say.

  We reached the side. There was a solid steel railing that ran all around, about waist high. Jake checked to see if we would be in view of the bridge, and we headed forward a little more to a blind spot where no one should see us.

  The four of us leaned over the rail and looked down at the water. It looked like it was a million miles below.

  Marco whistled. "Man. That is some high dive."

  "No big deal for a seagull or a dolphin, but a mighty long way for a human," I agreed.

  "We can't morph up here. We'd never get our dolphin bodies over the side," Rachel pointed out.

  98 "Nope," Jake agreed. "We have to jump in with our human bodies. All except Marco. He can't swim. I thought he could morph up here, and then we could all shove him over the side."

  Rachel looked skeptical. "Jake? When Marco is in dolphin morph, he'll weigh like four hun dred pounds."

  Jake looked worried. "I
kind of didn't think about this when I was planning."

  I had a sinking feeling. The plan was falling apart before it had even begun.

  "I'll lean against the railing," Marco sug gested. "I'll start morphing, then, before I lose my legs, you guys help shove me over. I'll finish morph ing within a few seconds of hitting the water."

  "Unless the water knocks you out and you just sink," I said flatly. "Forget it. Forget it. Let's just morph back to seagulls and fly back home. This is insane."

  "Insane?" Marco echoed. "Hey, that's my word. Look, we came this far."

  "I don't care!" I yelled, surprised at my own passion. "I'm not going to be responsible for any one dying! This isn't going to work. I don't know where I am. I don't know where we're going. I don't know what to do!"

  Marco laughed. "Excellent pep talk, Cassie. Now I'm really looking forward to this."

  99 I was going to yell at him, something like, "Look, Marco, this is not a joke." But when I looked at him, I saw that his face was bulging way out, forming a long, grinning beak.

  He had already started to morph.

  "I'm nock koink to ..." he started to say. But his mouth no longer worked.

  He was growing larger, straining his weak human legs with his weight. His arms were flatten ing into flippers.

  "Now!" Jake said. He grabbed Marco's flipper arm. Rachel and I jumped forward and seized his legs just as they began to shrivel.

  "Heave!" Jake yelled.

  Marco, half human, half dolphin, tumbled backward over the railing and fell into the sea.

  "Let's go," Jake said.

  "Yee-hah!" Rachel said with a wild grin. She jumped up on the railing, balanced for a moment like the gymnast she was, then launched herself off in a neat swan dive.

  Jake and I exchanged a glance.

  "Rachel," he said, and rolled his eyes.

  "She's your cousin," I pointed out.

  "On the count of three. One, two . . ."

  "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" I climbed over the rail ing and launched myself as far from the steel wall of the ship as I could.

  100

  ?A laaaaaaaaaahhhh!"

  I fell for what seemed like a very long time.

  PAH-LOOOOSH!

  I hit the water feet first and plowed beneath the surface in a pillar of bubbles.

  The cold shocked me. The water was like ice. And just a few feet away was the intimidating steel wall of the tanker, sliding past at what felt like incredible speed.

  I kicked my feet and began to rise to the sur face. I've been a swimmer since I was little, but it frightened me, being this far out in water this deep. This wasn't a pool or a pond. This was the ocean. Twenty miles from land.

  I broke the surface and gasped a lungful of air

  101 and a mouthful of saltwater. What had looked like a little choppiness from up in the ship felt like towering waves down here. I couldn't see any of the others. All I could see was the side of the ship.

  Come on, Cassie, I told myself, morph. Do it. This is no place for a person.

  There is just about nothing as helpless as a human being in the ocean. Without my ability to morph I would not have lasted an hour.

  I felt the change begin as I focused on morphing. At first, I thought it would kill me. I soon had most of the weight of a dolphin, with nothing but my human feet paddling to keep my head above water. My arms had already become flippers.

  A wave washed over me, leaving me sputtering from my mouth and my blowhole at the same time.

  I realized I could no longer keep my head above water. I took a deep lungful and let myself sink.

  As my eyes went from human to dolphin, my underwater vision improved. I could see other figures kicking and writhing in the water around me. Jake, half-changed. Rachel, almost corn plete. Marco, with a dolphin grin, looking amused.

  Then, with a kick of my newly completed tail, I knew I was safe. I had made the change. I was a

  102 dolphin in a dolphin's world. The human clumsi ness, the human cold, the human fear of an alien environment, all evaporated.

  I was warm and in control and right where I should be.

  «Everyone okay?»

  One by one they answered. We had made it. Too bad this was just the easy part of the mis sion.

  «Well, that was fun,» Marco said sardonically. «Let's never, ever do it again.»

  «Cassie?» Jake prodded me.

  I tried to relax, to let my human mind recede just a little. I needed to listen to the dolphin instincts. I needed to understand the whale's in structions. Something no human could ever do.

  «Not far,» I said. «We're just a few . . . urn . . . Forget it, there's no word for it. Just be lieve me, we're close.»

  «After you, Cassie,» Jake said.

  It felt strange, taking the lead. But only I knew the way. We traveled near the surface for a while. This made it confusing for me, because whales go deeper, and the world the whale saw and knew was a deeper world than I, as a dol phin, experienced.

  And yet, I knew I was going in the right direc tion. My echolocating clicks painted murky, half- understood pictures in my mind of underwater

  103 hills and valleys and rifts. I felt currents tugging at me. I sensed changes in water temperature.

  In the end, I just knew.

  « Okay , everyone, get a good lungful,» I said.

  We surfaced, blew out the stale air, and filled our lungs with the good clean ocean air.

  «Hey. What's that?» It was Rachel.

  «What?» I asked her.

  «O ver there. It's a helicopter.»

  We all watched as a helicopter flew low and very slowly over the water. It was just a few hundred yards away, and with our dolphin vision, we couldn't see it as well as we might have with our human eyes.

  But as it flew closer, I could see that it was dragging a cable through the water.

  «Som e sort of sensor,» Jake speculated.

  «They're looking for something in the water,» Marco agreed.

  « It's them,» I said.

  No one argued. We all knew it was true. Con trollers were flying that helicopter.

  The Yeerks were here.

  104

  «E veryone take in as much air as you can,» I said again. «We're going deep.»

  We dove and swam almost straight down. Down, down, leaving the bright barrier behind. Away from the sun. Away from the light. Away from the air that we needed just as much as hu mans did.

  I echolocated a school of fish ahead, just below us. But we weren't there to eat lunch. We swam through the fish and still we headed down. Down until we could see the ocean floor beneath us.

  We leveled off and skimmed across the ocean floor, like low-flying jets racing at treetop level. Over waving fields of seaweed. Through darting

  105 schools of fish. Over jutting extrusions, of rock, encrusted by barnacles and home to a thousand bizarre crabs and lobsters and urchins and worms and snails.

  Ahead was a ridge, a sort of long, low hill. We sailed over it.

  « I'm starting to feel like maybe taking a breath would be a good thing,» Rachel said. «How much farther - »

  We all saw it at the same time.

  Saw it, yes, but could hardly believe it.

  I've become used to seeing impossible things - aliens, spaceships, my own friends turning into animals. But this was just plain mind-boggling.

  It was round. As round as a plate. A very large plate. From one side to the other, the diameter must have been half a mile.

  It was covered by a transparent dome. Clear glass, or whatever it is the Andalites use for glass.

  And within the dome, protected from the crushing force of the water, was what looked very much like a park.

  A park, in a plastic dome, at the bottom of the ocean.

  There was grass, more blue than green, but it still looked like grass. There were trees like huge stems of broccoli. And other trees like orange

  106 and blue asparagus spears. At the center was a sma
ll lake, crystal-clear blue water. From the water grew fantastic, transparent green crystals in shapes like eccentric snowflakes.

  «Whoa,» Marco said.

  «Man,» Jake commented.

  «I s this what you expected, Cassie?» Rachel asked me.

  «I ... I had dreams ... I saw flashes of something . . . but this! This is unbelievable.»

  «l think that may be a hatch down there,» Marco said. «You see the part that sticks out?»

  «L et's try it,» Jake said. «l can't hold my breath much longer.»

  We arced down toward a part of the glass dome that seemed different from the rest. As we got closer, we could really begin to feel the size of the dome. It was like approaching one of those huge stadiums where they play football. But even bigger, if you can imagine that.

  «I t is a hatch,» Rachel reported. She was a little ahead of the rest of us. « It's some kind of a glass door. On the other side there's a little room, then another door that leads into the dome. There's a little red panel beside the outer door.»

  «Let's either try it or surface,» Marco said ur gently.

  «That red panel. That's got to be the door-

  107 knob,» Jake said. «Here goes. Let's hope this works.» He pressed his beak against the panel.

  Instantly the outer door opened.

  «We should try this one at a time, see if it's safe,» Marco said.

  «Not enough time,» I said. My lungs were burning. I needed air.

  The four of us swam in through the outer door. There was a second red panel. I punched it with my beak and the door closed, sealing us into a small, glass room. We could see out and up into the ocean all around. But the side leading into the dome was opaque.

  «l knew we'd end up in an aquarium sooner or later,» Marco said.

  The water began to drain from the room, slowly, a little at a time. This opened an area of air at the top of the enclosure. I raised my blow hole and sucked in blessed oxygen.

  « Okay , let's morph,» Jake said.

  I had already started. By the time the enclo sure was half drained, I could stand on my own human feet.

  "We made it," Marco said after his human mouth reformed. "I don't know where we made it to, but we made it."

  The enclosure was empty now. The four of us stood there barefoot, dressed only in our soggy

  108 morphing outfits. There was one last red panel beside the door leading into the dome.