George Brown and the Protector (7 page)

The protector suddenly put on a burst of
speed and George had to stretch just to keep up with him.

CHAPTER 11: The Ant

As George
rounded the corner, he saw the protector’s Volkswagen parked a
short distance up the street. The big man George had seen on the
park bench the day before was sitting in the driver’s seat, staring
straight ahead. George slowed down and approached the car
cautiously. The protector leaped through the passenger window and
stood on the passenger seat with his paws on the dashboard.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, seeing George’s
hesitation as he came slowly up to the car.

“Martin,” said George quietly. “I don’t think
my mom would want me to go with him.”

The protector laughed. “That’s very logical
and you’re right, you should never go in a car with strangers. But
you have nothing to worry about. Martin is an ant.”

George stared blankly at the protector. “An
ant?” he said dumbly.

“That’s right,” replied the protector. “Ant
#4, to be exact. Have you ever noticed how ants always seem to know
where they’re going, and can always find any little speck of food
or crumb on the ground? And how they can work their way through
hordes of other ants without getting confused?”

“Yeah,” said George slowly, wondering what
the protector was talking about.

“Well,” continued the protector, “I figured
if ants have that good of a sense of direction and that much
ability to handle traffic jams, they should be pretty good as
drivers! So I used the transformer to change an ant into a human to
become my driver.”

“Wow!” said George, looking at Martin in
amazement. “So, he’s an ant!”

“That’s right,” said the protector.
“Actually, he’s ant number four. Ants don’t live very long, you
know, so I’ve had to replace my driver four times.”

“Replace him?” said George uncomfortably.

“Yep,” replied the protector. “Each ant’s
human form aged very quickly so I could tell when he was getting
close to the end. Then I would just change him back into an ant and
get a new driver. It was hard saying good-bye to my old drivers, of
course, since I got rather attached to them.”

“That’s terrible,” said George without
thinking.

“I agree,” said the protector. “It’s a shame
ants have such short lives, and that no one seems to care when they
die. Where I come from, every form of life is greatly respected.
But I’ve found that most people on this planet don’t feel that way.
Whoever cares if an ant lives or dies? Whoever cares if they step
on an ant?”

“Well, I guess that’s true,” said George,
feeling confused. He found himself wondering how many times he had
stepped on ants without paying any attention. “But people would
care if the ant looked like a human.”

“Probably so,” replied the protector. “But it
would still be an ant.”

Still confused, George slowly got into the
Volkswagen, and sat down on the back seat.

“So, where are we going?” asked the
protector. “Where is the fallen star?”

“Just outside town, right past the orchard,”
said George slowly.

Immediately Martin started the car and began
driving towards the outskirts of town.

“He understood me?” asked George in
surprise.

“Yep,” replied the protector. “I don’t know
why, but the ants I’ve transformed understand everything I say.
Maybe when they go through the transformer they take on some human
attributes. But they never talk. Martin has never said a single
word to me.”

“He hasn’t?” asked George, turning to stare
at Martin again.

“Have you ever heard an ant talk?” replied
the protector.

“No,” said George. There was silence for a
moment while Martin drove silently on.

“What I’m going to be looking for at the
fallen star is just any clue we can find,” said the protector,
changing the subject. “I don’t actually know what it might be – it
could be anything. Hopefully we’ll find something that helps.”

“We’re getting close,” said George, looking
out the window. “It’s right over there, past the end of the
orchard.”

Martin brought the car to a stop at the
specified place and George and the protector got out. “It’s just
over that rise, out of sight.” The protector trotted ahead with
George following close behind.

The site was the same as when George had been
there last. The circular fallen star lay half submerged in the
earth where it had landed, with the hook-like appendage pointing up
to the north. There was nothing else around at all. George felt a
twinge of guilt at being here again. His mother had not wanted him
to come back here. But he had only promised to not come here alone,
and since the protector was with him, it was easy to rationalize
that he had not broken his promise.

The protector looked closely at the fallen
star and tapped it with his paw.

“It’s not a meteor or an asteroid. It looks
like it was made by somebody, and I would guess it’s not here by
accident. I would think that hook-like part pointing up has a
definite purpose, although I can’t imagine what it would be.”

“Really?” replied George. “I thought this was
just something that fell randomly from space.”

“I doubt it,” said the protector. “It looks
almost like it’s positioned for something.” He paused. “Where did
you find the Uth rock?”

George pointed out the spot in the grass near
the fallen star, and the protector went over to it. “This is
another reason why I decided to be a dog today. Their sniffers are
much better than those of a human.” He then sniffed all around the
grassy area George had pointed out, and looked carefully through
the grass. But he found nothing.

“It can’t be a coincidence that the Uth stone
was right here with the fallen star,” muttered the protector. “The
two must have come together. But why?” After looking around for
another minute, the protector said to George, “there’s a camera on
the front seat of the car. Can you get it? I need to take some
pictures so we can analyze them.”

George quickly went back to the car and
retrieved the camera. Unlike the protector’s other gadgets it
looked perfectly normal.

“I bought it at Wal-Mart,” said the protector
sheepishly when George brought it back, and he noticed George
looking at it curiously. “Your earth cameras work pretty well.”

The protector then had George take several
pictures of the fallen star from different angles. When they were
finished, the two walked slowly back to the car. Ant number 4 was
still sitting in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead with a
vacant expression on his face.

“Take us back to the street we started from,”
instructed the protector after he and George had got into the car.
As the car began to move forward, the protector said to George, “as
you recall, yesterday I had my settings arranged so that you would
shrink when you came in the window—“

“Yeah, that’s right,” said George,
remembering.

“Today, I’ve got it set to shrink only when
you actually touch the little door into my home,” said the
protector. “Watch.” He reached out a paw and bumped it against the
tiny door. Instantly he shrank to about an inch in height. It was
as if George were watching him through a zoom lens working in
reverse. The protector was still a dog though, who now looked like
a toy.

“Wow!” he said in amazement.

The protector’s tiny voice reached up to him.
“Remember to whisper so you don’t deafen me. Now it’s your turn.
Come here and touch the door, but be careful you don’t crush me in
the process. Then we’ll go inside and look at the pictures.”

George moved to the front seat and cautiously
stretched out his finger toward the door.

CHAPTER 12: Another Fallen Star

George felt
tense and nervous, since he knew what was about to happen. The
instant he touched the door he felt like his tongue was being
sucked right down into his stomach. Everything around him seemed to
be growing at fantastic speed. Then he found himself on his hands
and knees looking up at the door which had been so tiny only a
second ago.

“Wow!” said George, shaking a little as he
dizzily stood up. “That is so weird.”

“Kind of fun, isn’t it?” replied the
protector. “You’ll get used to it.” Then he trotted through the
door. George followed and watched in amazement as the protector
instantly changed from a dog back to his former flabby-skinned self
the instant he went through the door.

“Come on in and let’s do a search on these
pictures,” said the protector, taking the camera (which had also
shrunk) from George. They went over to what looked like a simple
printer, such as the one his mother had for her camera at home.

“I got this printer at Wal-Mart too,” said
the protector with an embarrassed smile at George. “Not all of my
gadgets are fancy, high tech things from outer space.”

The protector connected a cord to the camera
and quickly printed off the pictures they had taken at the fallen
star. Then he led George over to a plain glass screen with a slot
below it, right next to the snorkfinder they had used the day
before.

“This is the news finder,” said the
protector. “It’s kind of old fashioned, but it still works quite
well. All you do is put a picture or a request into the slot and it
will search all of the newspapers on every planet in the known
universe and show whatever it matches.”

“You mean other planets have newspapers?”
asked George in surprise.

“You bet,” replied the protector. “Although
most of them are never actually printed on paper. They usually come
over the viewscreen. Anyway, let’s put in a picture of the fallen
star and see what we get.”

The protector popped a picture into the slot.
A humming noise immediately started from the news finder. The
protector turned to George and said in embarrassment, “like I said,
it’s a bit old fashioned. I really should replace it. Sometimes it
takes a whole 15 seconds to do a universe search of billions of
newspapers, and give a result. Terribly slow, you know.”

A voice suddenly came out of the machine,
startling George. Mechanically it said, “there is only one matching
result out of 10,487,501,908,432 news sources. There are 90,586,273
similar objects that are not quite a perfect match. Would you like
to see all of them?” The voice sounded anxious, as if begging to
show them all of its matches.

“No thanks,” said the protector. There was a
sigh of disappointment from the news finder. “That’s pretty
incredible, though,” the protector said to George. “Only one
exactly matching result in the entire universe! Usually there’s at
least 20 exact matches for about everything I ever search for. I
even searched for an Australian platypus once just for fun, and
found 34 exact matches across the universe!”

The protector touched the upper right hand
corner of the screen. “The upper right hand corner is exact
matches, and the upper left is similar objects,” he explained.

A picture and text appeared on the screen.
The picture showed an object that looked so much like his fallen
star that George had a hard time believing it was not the same one.
The text was unreadable, but looked familiar somehow.

“Gorzubee!” cried the protector. “This
newspaper picture is from right here on earth! It’s from a
newspaper in China! Out of millions of worlds across the galaxy,
that was the only match!”

“China?” said George in surprise.

“That’s right,” said the protector. “Here,
let’s get a translation so we can read what it says.” He touched
the lower right corner of the screen. Instantly the text changed to
English, and George read the following:

“In the early morning of July 7, residents of
Xhengxou were startled out of their sleep by a falling star which
crashed into the ground on the outskirts of the city. Authorities
have closely examined the meteorite and determined that it is not
radioactive or dangerous. It consists of a metallic-like substance
with an extension pointing in a northward direction. Authorities
estimate that the meteorite was several times larger than it now is
before it tumbled to earth, but most of its mass burned off due to
the intense heat of entering the earth’s atmosphere. Officials from
the army are guarding the meteorite until it can be safely
transported to the National Museum. Meanwhile, many residents near
where the meteorite landed have relocated out of an unfounded fear
that others may fall nearby.”

“Well, isn’t that interesting?” said the
protector, rubbing his flabby chin. “This report is both right and
wrong in what it says about the object burning off a lot of its
mass upon entering the earth’s atmosphere. Normally that is the
case, but my examination of your fallen star led me to believe that
very little if any of its surface burned off during entry. It seems
to be made of an extremely high grade metal, similar to NASA
spacecraft, that doesn’t melt off with heat. I’d bet the Chinese
authorities know that, but didn’t want it repeated in the
newspaper, since that would arouse greater suspicion. That’s why
they’re calling it a meteorite, when it’s really not.”

“Why would they be worried about that?” asked
George curiously.

“They probably don’t want to admit that it
appears to be made by someone or something, which would indicate
life outside your planet,” the protector replied. “That could
create widespread anxiety and draw more attention to it than they
want, at least until they know more about what the thing is and how
to protect their people from whoever is out there. The Chinese
government is far more secretive than your own. It’s surprising
they revealed even this much information about the fallen
star.”

“But why would the exact same fallen star
come down in China?” asked George. “And almost at the same time,
too. The one fell here on July 6th.”