“Calm down and wait till I go up there and see what the situation is,” said Willy.
“I think the Stairway To Heaven is a flesher trick to kill all the moldies!” said the green cactus-like moldie, waving its spiny arms. “Gurdle-7 is a traitor!”
“I’ll kill him if no one else will!” yelled another moldie, the one like a red crab. “I’m going to get Gurdle-7 right now!”
“Kill Terri Percesepe too! She came here inside Quuz! It’s all her fault!” shouted the cactus moldie.
“Destroy the Stairway To Heaven!” said one and then five and then a host of others, falling into a chant. “Bomb the lab! Bomb the lab! Bomb the lab!”
“Local network mode,” said Willy, and all the Nest moldie presences disappeared from Terri’s uvvy—all except Gurdle-7, Jenny, Frangipane, and Ormolu. “We have to leave right away,” Willy told them. “Exit Plan K. Hurry!”
Looking through the wall into the cave, Terri saw the four moldies race out of the lab. And then she saw them circle around to the front of the pink-house. Gurdle-7 and the original Jenny pushed their way into the pink-house’s air lock and Willy slammed on the lock’s air feed. Outside, Ormolu and Frangipane stood guard, Frangipane holding a heavy-duty needler and Ormolu wielding an O.J. ugly stick.
Now Willy opened the inner door of the air lock and Jenny and Gurdle-7 came writhing in. Looking outside, Terri could see the approaching lights of perhaps a dozen moldies. Not as many as she’d feared. Frangipane turned on her needler and swept its laser ray through an arc of warning.
“Hello there, Terri Percesepe,” said Gurdle-7 as he bowed down by Willy’s side and split his back open. The opening of his tissues changed his reek from intense to unbelievable. “Perhaps you don’t know this, but without your husband Tre’s contribution, the success of my Gurdle decryption process would have taken much longer. We are grateful.”
“Maybe we’re grateful,” said carrot-shaped Jenny, who’d flopped down in the middle of the oriental carpet next to Terri and was splitting herself open as well. “But so far your decryption hasn’t done us one bit of good, Gurdle. Get on in me, Terri. Snug as a bug.”
“Don’t be superficial, Jenny,” said Gurdle-7, sealing himself up over Willy. “This is the most important day in the whole history of the world.”
“I just hope we live through it!”
So Terri got inside Jenny, and then they went out through the air lock and back onto the floor of the Nest. The red moldie with claws like a crab came running toward them. Shiny Ormolu braced himself and fired off a burst of metal darts that cut the crab moldie into three or four twitching chunks. Two boxy blue moldies scavenged up the broken pieces of the crab. Meanwhile flowery Frangipane leaned back and sent a needler blast up into the core of the cactus-shaped green moldie as it powered down toward them. The attacker melted and splattered to the Nest floor in lumps that were gathered up by other opportunistic moldies.
“Hold tight, Terri, we’re going airborne,” said Jenny, rearing up onto the fat end of her carrot body. There was a poofing sound and the four moldies rose up into the great vacuum of the Nest, each propelled by a slim ion beam. Ormolu and Frangipane fired some shots back at the moldies still coming after them, and soon those moldies abandoned their pursuit.
Terri sighed in relief and looked downward. The sight of the Nest floor was mesmerizing. It felt almost as if they were gnats inside a giant old-fashioned computer box, with the floor a great motherboard covered with winding lines and square-chunked chips.
Looking toward where they’d come from, Terri realized that the pursuing moldies had turned back in order to trash Willy’s dome and Gurdle-7’s lab. There was a small bright grouping of moldie dots down there—and now there was a sudden flash as a bomb destroyed all of the lab’s equipment.
“That’s seven lives’ work!” screeched Gurdle-7 over the uvvy. “Let’s go back and punish them! They’ve destroyed all my S-cubes! All of my records were in there. And our backup of Wendy Mooney! Those ignorant chauvinistic fools! They’re no better than fleshers!”
“You do have all the Stairway To Heaven knowledge stored in your own body, don’t you?” asked Willy.
“Yes, but that’s the only complete copy. If something were to happen to me . . . “
“Silence,” urged Frangipane. “Who knows who is listening?”
They rose farther, with Ormolu and Frangipane having to shoot at several other moldies who came darting out at them from the narrowing Nest walls. Up above them Terri could see the blazing light prism through the crater hole. And then they sailed up through the crater hole and around the prism. The boundless open space of the Moon’s surface sprang out around them, silvery and gray.
“Willy,” said Terri, her voice shaking despite herself. “I still want to uvvy my husband. How do I place the call?”
“Push the button,” said Willy, his icon distractedly fashioning a virtual button and displaying it in front of Terri. Terri pushed the button right away, and after a little bit Tre’s face appeared.
“Tre!” cried Terri. Like radio waves, uvvy signals were electromagnetic waves that travel at the speed of light, and even light takes over a second to make a one-way trip between Earth and Moon. An agonizing two and a half seconds elapsed while Terri’s info traveled down to Earth and Tre’s info traveled back.
“Terri! Are you okay? Where are you?”
“I’m inside a moldie who just flew out of the moldies’ Nest, Tre. We’re going to the dome of a man named Corey Rhizome.” Another long pause. Terri noticed that Willy and the four moldies were eavesdropping.
“Oh, darling.” Tre’s voice was breaking. “I heard about Blaster crashing into the spaceport and I thought—”
“I surfed my way through it,” said Terri, her own tears starting to flow. “It was terrible. And things still aren’t too glassy.” They’d risen up to nearly a mile above the Moon now, the four moldies flying in formation.
“1 love you, Terri,” said Tre’s dear voice.
“I love you too. Give the children a big kiss from me.” Another two-and-a-half-second wait.
“I will. But tell me more about what happened, Terri. The only news we’re able to get about it is dooky kilp from freelance newsies in Einstein. Why did Blaster crash? And what happened to all the moldies at the spaceport?”
“Willy Taze and a moldie called Gurdle-7 invented a kind of program that changes the dimensions of imipolex or something. And that makes the moldies get possessed by like alien personality waves. Gurdle-7 said you helped them, but how?” Now Gurdle-7, Jenny, Ormolu, and Frangipane cut back their power and let themselves coast up to the top of a huge flight parabola.
“My God!” came Tre’s reply. “They must have used my N-dimensional Perplexing Poultry design! Someone or something called Jenny showed me Ramanujan’s Tessellation Equation, and I designed the new Poultry for her. Is there maybe a Jenny up there?”
“Um-hmmm!” uvvied Jenny, displaying her teenage girl icon as she butted into the conversation. “I’ve got your little wife right inside me, Tre! Too true!”
“I’ll call you again when I get some privacy,” said Terri. “It looks like we’ll be landing down at Corey’s house soon. Apparently some of those alien things are inside it. Wish me luck. And—and good-bye, darling, just in case. I’ve always loved you. You’ve been good to me.” She waited the two and a half seconds for Tre’s wet-eyed good-bye, and then she pushed the virtual button to end the heart-wrenching call.
They were arcing down toward a small crater filled with a shiny dome. Corey Rhizome’s isopod. The moldies turned their ion jets back on to brake the fall. When Terri had composed herself again, she asked Willy a question.
“Did you really use Tre’s Perplexing Poultry to design the Stairway To Heaven?”