Read Online There's a Spaceship in My Tree! by Robert West - Free Book Online Page B

that-away — over toward Murphy Street . He tried to remember how long a yard was. One thing was for sure: he was going to work harder on the weights and measurement tables. Okay, let’s see . . . there are a hundred yards in a football playing field. That would make it just under nine football fields to where the meteor landed, which would put it —
    All at once the image of the split tree trunk burst into his imagination. His eyes grew wide. You don’t suppose . . . What if this meteor crashed into my tree?
    Twenty minutes later, scout compass in hand, Beamer was stepping off huge steps due west from the museum. “Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine — ”
    He glanced up. Yep, so far, so good. The way led right up to the brick wall. He’d just walk it off to there, then pick it up again when he went around to the other side of the wall — as long as it wasn’t Ms. Parker’s yard, that is.
    With his eyeball planted on his compass, Beamer didn’t notice what was going on around him. So, when he looked up again, he was totally unprepared to see a football on a trajectory straight for his nose.
    All Beamer could do was open his mouth. For that matter, nothing else would move. He watched the perfect spiral plummeting toward him like a dark falling star. He could see the little puckered seams and the threads spinning slowly around. One microsecond before he was to lose his face, a pair of hands erupted into the picture and caught the ball. Then the body attached to those hands slammed into Beamer like a Mac truck.
    *   *   *   *   *
    The next thing Beamer knew, he was laid out on his bed with three Moms hovering above him. Something was definitely unscrewed in his brain. He saw her mouth (or mouths) moving, but all he could hear was a roaring sound, like from a waterfall.
    She stroked Beamer’s hair fondly. “Oom-aa-faaa-blll-yrsssss-braww-ooo-omm” is what he heard her say. Later he learned that one of the football players, who also happened to be the paperboy, had brought him home. Her lips were moving again: “Oooollll-beee-aaaallll-riiii-ohhh-yrrrr-goiing-taaave-a-ud-siize-knot-on-heedd,” he heard.
    The doorbell rang. “I’ll be right back,” she said and hurried out of the room.
    As her footsteps tripped lightly down the staircase, he heard a noise above the ceiling — something crashing. The scientists weren’t working in the attic today, so there shouldn’t have been anyone up there to break something. He sat up, and then grabbed his head with a heavy groan. Feeling a little better, he shook his head and wobbled through his door and into the hallway. At that moment a kitten slipped from behind the attic door, which somebody had apparently left ajar.
    â€œLacy!” Beamer yelled after her. “You’re not supposed to be up there!”
    It was Erin’s cat — the result of a deal she hadn’t been able to refuse when her mom had sent her to the nearby mini-market last week. If those scientist guys find out a cat’s been up around their equipment, they’ll be . . . Beamer opened the attic door and, holding the rail firmly, slowly stumbled up the steps. He wasn’t supposed to go into the attic, but he thought he might be able to fix what the cat had done. At least, that was going to be his excuse if he was caught. What he really wanted, of course, was to see what was going on with the now famous “MacIntyre web.”
    The attic was bright this time of day, with beams from the low-hanging sun blasting through the large back windows. Beamer was more concerned, though, about the dark shadows — about whether anything with eight legs and man-eating mandibles was hiding in them. After a careful scan with his super peepers, he relaxed. Anyway, if the entomologists hadn’t seen the creature in all the weeks they’d been up here, he figured he was pretty safe.
    At the moment, though,