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sarcastically. “I’ll get the bumper stickers printed up.”
    “You wouldn’t have that attitude if you’d been up there with me,” Tobias said angrily. “It was cool being a cat and all. But a hawk! It’s just total, absolute freedom.”
    I hadn’t ever seen Tobias so happy. I mean, Tobias has a pretty lousy home life. Thinking about it, I suddenly had this feeling….
    I repeated the warning. “No more than two hoursin any morph, right? You keep track of the time, right?”
    Tobias smiled. “Yeah. I don’t have a watch or anything, but with hawk eyes you can actually see the hands of someone’s watch when they’re half a mile below you. It’s like being Superman. You can fly, plus you have super vision.”
    “Now he’s Superman,” Marco muttered.
    “I was looking around. I guess I thought I might be able to see something from the air,” Tobias said. “I was looking for something that might be a Yeerk pool.”
    The phrase sounded vaguely familiar. I remembered Visser Three saying something about “Yeerk pools.” “What’s a Yeerk pool?” I asked Tobias.
    “It’s where the Yeerks live in their natural state. Every three days a Yeerk has to leave his host body and go into the Yeerk pool to soak up nutrients. Especially Kandrona rays.”
    Marco and I exchanged a suspicious look. Neither of us knew any of this.
    “At the end,” Tobias explained, “when the Andalite told us all to run for it, I stayed behind for a few seconds. I guess maybe I was too scared even to run.”
    I shook my head. I knew better. Tobias just hadn’twanted to leave the Andalite alone. I think maybe the Andalite meant even more to Tobias than to the rest of us.
    “Anyway, he gave me … visions, I guess you’d call them. Pictures. Information. A lot of it, all at once. All jumbled. I haven’t even started to sort it all out. But I do know about the Yeerk pools and the Kandrona.”
    Marco held up his hand, silencing Tobias. “Let me check the door,” he said. He went to my door and peeked out into the hallway. “All clear,” he announced.
    Tobias gave Marco a questioning look.
    “Tom,” Marco said. “He’s one of them.”
    “Don’t make me hurt you,” I warned him angrily. “Tom is not a Controller.”
    “Either way, we should be careful,” Tobias said. He lowered his voice. “The Kandrona is a device that produces Kandrona particles. See, it’s like this little portable version of the Yeerk’s own home sun. The Yeerks need Kandrona particles to live, like a human needs vitamins or whatever. The Kandrona particles are beamed from wherever the Kandrona is and concentrated in the Yeerk pool. Once every three days, every Yeerk has to leave his host and go into the pool. They soak up the particles and then they reenter the host body.”
    “What does this have to do with you flying around playing Superman?” I asked.
    “Well, it seems dumb now, but I was thinking maybe I could see the Yeerk pool.” He made a rueful smile. “Saw a lot of swimming pools and some ponds. You get up there and you realize there are ponds and lakes and streams everywhere. But I didn’t see anything special.”
    “And what if you found some Yeerk pool? Then what?” Marco demanded.
    “Then we’d blow it up,” Tobias said.
    “Wrong,” Marco said. “We decided
not
to get into this.”
    “No, we decided not to decide yet,” I said.
    “Well, I’ve decided,” Tobias said.
    “Suddenly the wimp is a hero,” Marco sneered.
    This time Tobias didn’t blush. “Maybe I just found something worth fighting for, Marco.”
    “You don’t even fight for yourself,” Marco said.
    “That was before,” Tobias said softly. “Before the Andalite. Before he died trying to save us. I can’t let that go. I can’t let him die for nothing. So whatever you guys decide, I’m going to fight.”

CHAPTER 13
     
    W e find the Yeerk pool,” Tobias said. “And when we do, we blow it up and kill every one of those evil slugs.”
    I