A few moments later I saw a vast eyeball, stuck on the end of a long stalk, come shooting up toward us where we hung upside down. One of Ax's extra, stalk-mounted eyes. The eye turned to look at us.
Then, a violent vibration in the air. The eye disappeared from sight.
And a second vibration, like something heavy falling.
"Ax? Are you okay?"
"Yes. There was a human here. But he is un conscious now."
51 Chapter 13
We demorphed as quickly as we could. When my human eyesight returned, I saw Ax, standing calmly in his Andalite form. Against the far wall was a man in a white coat, holding a clip board.
He was crumpled and unconscious, but alive.
"Knowing your brother is a Controller, I did not kill this creature," Ax said. "I feared it might be him."
"No. It's not. But that's a good instinct, Ax. Whoever this guy is, he's someone's brother or son or even father."
I took a look first at my own body. I was barefoot, like I always was when I came out of a morph. And wearing only my silly-looking bike shorts and tight T-shirt. (Even Ax can't figure out how to morph anything more than the most minima! clothing.) But I seemed to have all my usual legs and arms.
"You okay, Cassie?" I asked.
"I'm fine." She pointed at what had looked like a shiny superdome to us as flies. It was a stainless steel vat about eight feet across.
I laughed. "You know what this is? This is a whirlpool. A Jacuzzi. Someone just put a lid over it.
Why would they have this in a hospital?"
"For therapy," Cassie said. "You know, for people with muscle strains or back problems."
I stepped to the side of the whirlpool. I grabbed the handles on the lid and lifted. It opened easily on hydraulic hinges. I looked inside. I recoiled.
The water was sludgy, brown, and viscous.
And roiling with slugs.
Yeerks. In their natural state.
"Well, well, well," I said.
"Yeerks," Ax said, with that combination of disgust and pure hatred Andalites always showed.
"A portable Yeerk pool. There must be a small Kandrona nearby." Yeerks must leave their host bodies every three days to return to a Yeerk pool. In the Yeerk pool they feed by soaking up various nutrients, but especially Kandrona rays, which are like the rays of their home sun. Kandronas are artificial sources of Kandrona rays.
"Can they see us? Now, I mean?"
52 "No, Prince Jake. In their natural state they are blind."
I walked slowly around the whirlpool. My foot hit something solid. The pump for the whirlpool action. It was disconnected, with a wire pulled out of the wall socket. The control panel had been ripped away, exposing bare wires.
"Ax? What do you think would happen to all those Yeerks in there if the temperature of the liquid suddenly went up to say, one hundred twenty degrees? And the liquid was all agitated?"
Ax looked puzzled. "I believe the heat and the agitation might destroy them."
"Well. That would be a pity." I made a quick decision. "Ax? Watch the door to the hallway.
Cassie? We may need you in some more dangerous morph. What have you got?"
"Wolf?"
"Perfect. But no howling."
"What are you going to do?" Cassie asked.
"We came here to stop this sick operation, right? Well, wiping out a hundred or so Yeerks might be a good way to start. I'm going to hook this thing back together, and Jacuzzi these filthy creeps to death."
There were no tools in the room. But I did find some tape and a pair of tweezers. That was all I needed. I began reconnecting wires, red to red, blue to blue, green to green. Without the switches, the settings would all automatically be at maximum. Maximum heat, maximum jets.
But all the while, in the back of my head, was this nagging feeling.
It couldn't be this easy.
I connected the last wire.
Cassie had finished the transformation into her wolf body. She stood by patiently, like a very big, very tough-looking dog.
"Okay. Time to boil some Yeerks."
I reached down and stuck the plug in the outlet.
It took a few seconds, then the boiling sound began. The familiar Jacuzzi bubbling.
The door opened. A man and a woman, both wearing white lab coats. For a split second they just froze and stared.
"Andalite!" the woman yelped.
53 Cassie was on her in a flash. She leapt, hit the woman hard, and knocked her to the floor.
Ax moved toward the man, but the man was fast. He dodged, staying out of range of Ax's tail.
I was still behind the whirlpool, out of sight. I was trying to focus on morphing into tiger form for a fight.
But then, two more men, dressed in uniform as guards, came plowing into the room. The first one leveled a gun.
"Ax!" I shouted. "A gun!"
Ax's tail flashed.
"Aaaargghh!" the Controller screamed.
The hand that had been holding the gun was no longer attached to the man's arm.
"Get backup to the pool area! Andalites!" the second guard screamed into a walkie-talkie. Then he drew his gun.
BLAM! BLAM!
They told me later there was a third shot. But I didn't hear it.
A sledgehammer blow struck the side of my head. A ricochet. For a brief second I clung to consciousness. But then, I swooned. I fell.
Facedown in the whirlpool.
Facedown in the bubbling, boiling mass of dying Yeerks.
54 Chapter 14
"Facedown, unconscious, in the superheating Yeerk pool.
I don't know for how long.
When I woke I had two terrifying, overwhelming feelings. One was suffocation. I had breathed in a lungful of the liquid from the pool.
I came to, gasping and hacking and gagging. I was alive, but I could hardly breathe. Each breath was a struggle. I coughed and I think at one point I threw up.
The second feeling was of pain in my head. Pain like nothing I had ever even imagined be fore.
It was like someone was drilling a hole in my ear, drilling straight into my brain.
I wanted to scream, but I was still choking. I was on my knees on the floor of the hospital room, wanting to cry from the pain and gasping for every half-breath of air.
All the while, a battle raged. They were trying to get in the doorway. But it was too narrow for more than one or two human-Controllers at a time to attack. Ax's tail and Cassie's long wolf teeth were enough to hold them off.
BLAM! Another gunshot!
"Stop firing, you fool!" someone shouted. "The pool is in there! Visser Three will eat your guts!"
Even in my condition I could see that Ax and Cassie couldn't last. I needed to morph, to join the battle. But I could not seem to do it. The pain ... or maybe the lack of oxygen ... I couldn't concentrate. My brain was fuzzy, drift ing ...
I heard a rumbling, pounding noise from the hallway outside. There were cries and screams of rage. Suddenly, into the room burst a huge black gorilla and a second wolf.
Marco and Rachel.
They had driven the attackers away, but only for a few seconds.
"Jake's hurt," I heard Cassie say. "He fell in the Yeerk pool."
"Marco, grab Jake," Rachel ordered. "Get something to cover his face. Ax, Cassie, keep holding the door. I'm going to change morph. We need more firepower."