Heroes of Earth. Martin Berman-Gorvine

whistled appreciatively. Then she jumped as a dark figure leapt out from behind a fence. Arnold jumped too, and even Dad looked scared for a second. But it was only crazy Barry Freed.

      “Area 51,” he said. He was wearing a plaid shirt that was buttoned up wrong. One side was untucked.

      “Hi, Barry,” Dad said calmly. “What’s Area 51?”

      “A secret Air Force base in Nevada. Ever hear of it?”

      “Uh, no, Barry.”

      “Right, because it’s secret,” Mr. Freed said, as if Dad might be stupid. “And do you know why they want it kept secret?” Even Arnold knew who Mr. Freed meant by “they.” The Establishment, the government, the men in gray suits and dark sunglasses. The High Satrap himself was just a tool of Them, if you believed Mr. Freed—not that anybody did.

      “That’s a rhetorical question, isn’t it, Mr. Freed?” Arnold said, and was rewarded with a scowl.

      “Area 51, ladies and gentlemen, is where they make the fake aliens.”

      “Fake aliens, Mr. Freed?” Alison said. She had told Arnold she felt sorry for him. Arnold didn’t—he was scared of him.

      “The so-called High Ones. They’re a fake, I tell you, the biggest fraud in history! Don’t feel too bad that you fell for those big blue sea slugs—so did everyone else! Area 51 is the key to everything, I’m telling you! It’s where They make the phony flying saucers—”

      “I’ve been in them myself, Mr. Freed,” Alison explained patiently. “That’s why you never see jets anymore—they’re such a cheap, comfortable way to fly.”

      “—and the controlled fusion reactors, and the make-believe interstellar travel, and…”

      Dad looked at Arnold and Alison and jerked his head toward home, and the three of them started walking, with Mr. Freed gradually falling behind as he trailed after them.

      Once they had the front door safely shut behind them, Dad turned and said slowly to Arnold and Alison, “What do you suppose Mr. Freed would say if he knew we were just in a whole other universe?”

      CHAPTER 7

      The first day Arnold spent at home was like a vacation. It was too cold to go to the beach, but he lay on the sofa reading Twain’s Letters to a Woman Sitting in Darkness and listening to the cries of seagulls in the midday quiet. You couldn’t hear the surf on the ocean beach at Assateague, not with the loblolly pine forest, the salt marsh, Assateague Channel, and half of Chincoteague between here and there, but Arnold felt the presence of the sea nonetheless. An island like Chincoteague was a boat afloat in vast waters that had covered the world for hundreds of millions of years, long before the dinosaurs had walked the earth, back before the continents had split apart and slowly assumed their current positions and shapes. You couldn’t sense it if you were stuck in a classroom, but you could now in the faint salt tang of the air and the faint ringing of bells on buoys strung along the narrow channels surrounding the island. It surrounded and comforted him as he read about how Private Shipman and his companions had caught a Filipino rebel named Felix and given him “the water cure.”

      “He choked and sputtered and begged us by God and Mother Mary to stop. Deadeye Don snickered and flicked him with another wet towel, putting it over his face when he wouldn’t shut up so he gagged and wriggled like a beached fish. Then he stopped moving. Tom said, ‘I dunno, Don, I think you might have kilt him,’ and Don said, ‘Who cares? He ain’t told us nothin’ worth hearin’ nohow.’ And that, my darling Daisy, is how we civilized Felix.”

      Arnold laid the book aside, put his hands behind his head, and stared at a painted-over crack in the ceiling for a while. What he’d told Gloria wasn’t 100% true; not every Twain book was banned by SCOD, and he’d actually read Tom Sawyer in fourth grade. But he knew The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn only from Dad’s library, and he’d never read anything like the Letters. It went even further than Dad did when he got together with his buddies back in Pikesville, or now with Mr. Nomura, and complained about the government and “our big blue friends running around telling us what to do.” What would Mark Twain have had to say about the High Ones? Would he have approved of the way they stopped people from fighting each other, or would he have scorned them like Huck Finn scorned the “do-gooders” who were always trying to “sivilize” him? Arnold longed to talk about it with Mom, but it sounded like she was having one of her “bad days,” tossing and turning and groaning loudly in bed, and he didn’t want to disturb her.

      There was a knock at the door and Arnold sat up guiltily, until he realized it was hours too early for either Alison or Dad. Though he didn’t want to talk to anyone, curiosity won out, and he got off the couch and opened the door a crack, leaving the chain in place.

      A green eye crinkled at him from about his own height. “Hi Arnold, can I come in for a second?”

      “Sure, Gloria.” Arnold slid the chain back and opened the door for the librarian. Or is she a magician? What should I call her? Whatever she was, today she had on a black jacket with bulked-up shoulders that looked like it had come out of a Goodwill bin that specialized in Eighties castoffs, a shimmery purple skirt, and thigh-high black suede boots that had been ruined by salt-marsh mud with that giveaway rotten-egg smell.

      As she shut the door behind her Arnold studied the cardboard box she was carrying under one arm. It was about thirty centimeters on a side and ten centimeters thick, and was labeled, THE REUNION, CENTRAL PARK, SEPTEMBER 6, 1983. “What’s in there? Records?”

      “That’s right. I’m giving them to you for keeps. Do you have a turntable?”

      “I think we might, in the closet somewhere. No one seems to listen to anything that isn’t on the n-network anymore.”

      “I know, but I thought you might be different.”

      “Because I’m a weirdo?”

      “Because you’re out of step with the times.” Gloria smiled. Some of her teeth were crooked, but this didn’t make her ugly. To the contrary.

      “That’s true enough,” Arnold said. “Matt and his buddies tell me so all the time—usually not so nicely, though. Let me see if I can find that record player.” He started to turn toward the coat closet, but paused halfway and said, “You’re shivering. Are you cold?”

      “N-not at all, d-dear,” Gloria said, her teeth knocking together.

      “Are you scared, then?”

      “Only a little.”

      What do you do when the grown-ups around you are scared? Arnold remembered the hushed late-night conversations Mom and Dad used to have behind their closed bedroom door back in Pikesville. Occasionally Mom would raise her voice to a near-shout, or Dad would snarl something too low to make out.

      Arnold was already much too old to think that Tiger was anything more than a stuffed animal so old he had lost his eyes and smelled like dust and ancient drool. But he used to hug him tighter whenever he heard his parents arguing and worrying. He’d try to imagine he was holding a real tiger with real sharp teeth who could tear to bloody shreds Dad’s mean boss Mr. Armstrong and the mysterious “them” even he was scared of. Remembering, Arnold suddenly wondered whether Dad’s “them” overlapped with Mr. Freed’s, if that was why Mom and Dad and Alison always tried to be nice to the old hippie, and if Gloria was scared of the same shadowy conspiracy.

      He wasn’t really Sir Arnold the Brave, but he could give Gloria a quick, shy hug, with his head turned to the side and his eyes squeezed shut, and so he did before darting over to the closet, tossing old galoshes and scarves into a heap on the floor in search of Dad’s record player. He missed seeing the single crystalline tear Gloria shed, a perfect diamond-bright globe that fell to the polished wooden floor and rolled like a miniature marble, coming to rest in a dim corner.

      “Here it is!” he said triumphantly, pulling out the heavy, blocky black base of the turntable, knocking its