The Planetoid of Amazement. Mel Gilden

in his dream the night before. The huge bear wearing the utility belt and the stool helmet was motioning to him in an incomprehensible way. Meanwhile, a kangaroo creature was rushing from place to place in the round room, obviously searching for something. Occasionally the kangaroo creature would look at him and at the bear and shake its head.

      Rodney inhaled deeply and took in the cool air, which smelled faintly of machine oil. He was doing all right so far. He was a little afraid, but only a dope wouldn’t be. Mostly, he was interested, curious, and ready to expect the unexpected. He looked around the room.

      The walls were covered with buttons and gauges and small toggle switches. At one side of the room—­you couldn’t say that a round room had an end—was a single round window that seemed to be blank.

      When Rodney walked over to look out the port­hole, what he saw surprised him, excited him, and made him more afraid. Outside, hanging among the powdering of stars, was the planet Earth, looking blue and serene, much as it did in Space Agency photo­graphs. Everything and everybody he knew was down there. He was alone. All questions about his ability to handle an adventure were about to be answered. And there wouldn’t be any last-minute rescues, not even if he needed one.

      Rodney turned around when the bear said some­thing that sounded like “Ompah! Veigh iz tzoo mere! Slignathi tzoo mere!” His voice was kind of a growl, pretty much what you’d expect from a bear.

      The kangaroo answered, “Some tau!” and rushed around the compartment with even more determina­tion. The kangaroo’s voice was a surprise. It was the voice of a sweet young girl.

      Rodney said, “What’s going on? Where am I?”

      The kangaroo cried, “Lerique! Lerique!” and handed the bear a white thing like a toothpaste tube.

      The bear motioned Rodney closer, opened the tube, and squeezed out a column of clear jelly on the calloused black pad of a finger. He held up the finger to Rodney’s forehead. Rodney flinched, then stood steady. The bear rubbed the jelly across the top of the yellow sticker, and seconds later the sticker fell away. Rodney rubbed the itchy spot as the bear threw the sticker down what appeared to be a disposal chute.

      The kangaroo held up a sheet of paper to Rodney. In the funny squiggles, it said IF YOU CAN READ THIS, WAVE YOUR HANDS! This was amazing! Evidently, the sticker was not a translator, but a teaching aid. It had actually taught him to read the alien language, perhaps permanently. Enthusiastically, Rodney waved his hands.

      The kangaroo waved back at Rodney and then handed the bear a pad of blue stickers. As he tore one off and held it up to Rodney’s forehead, Rodney wondered where he could get his own tube of that jelly. The bear applied the blue sticker.

      “How’s that?” the bear said.

      “I can understand you fine,” said Rodney. He wasn’t even surprised. The activities of the past twenty-four hours had prepared him for something just like this. Rodney said, “What language are we speaking?”

      The kangaroo said, “This is Mobambi, the interstel­lar trading language. But I want to introduce my boss. This,” the kangaroo said with a flourish of one hand, “is Grubber Young, owner and operator of the House of Amazement on Hutzenklutz Station—­sometimes known as the Planetoid of Amazement. You are aboard his ship, the Ship of Amazement. I am Drum, whom he employs as his finder.”

      “I am Rodney Congruent.”

      “Rodney?” said Grubber Young. He and Drum shared a worried glance.

      “Sure. Rodney, son of Watson and Pennyperfect.”

      “Not Watson himself?”

      “No. But I had his permission to open those enve­lopes, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

      “What a surprise!” Drum said, as if she were really bowled over by the news.

      “That’s nothing compared to how surprised I am that you know my father and his address.”

      “Nothing to be surprised about,” said Grubber Young. He nodded to Drum. Drum pushed a button, and a ball of lightning fizzed briefly in a niche in the wall. When the lightning went away, Drum took a sheet of paper from the niche. Rodney was convinced that the sheet had not been there before. Drum said, “This is just a copy, of course,” and handed the paper to Rodney.

      Half of the paper was taken up with a simple out­line drawing of a naked man and a naked woman. The other half of the paper was covered with line after line of squiggles. “What is this?” Rodney said.

      “You’ve never seen it before?” Drum said.

      “No.”

      Drum showed Rodney a thing that looked like a ballpoint pen. When Drum clicked the stem at the top, a cone of light came out of the end where the pen point would have been, and touched the paper. Wherever it touched, it magnified. Drum handed the magnifier to Rodney, and he played it over the squiggles.

      Each little bunch of squiggles seemed to be a mes­sage of some sort. One said GREETINGS FROM PLANET EARTH. Another said WE’LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS. A third was a complex math­ematical equation followed by the words CAN YOU TOP THIS?

      “I don’t understand,” Rodney said.

      “Look here,” said Grubber Young, and he aimed the magnifier at a squiggle farther down the page. There, in the same wiggly handwriting as had been on the envelopes, was the name WATSON CONGRU­ENT and the address of the Congruent home.

      “Where did you get this?” Rodney said.

      “Off a space probe.”

      “A space probe from Earth?”

      “So we’ve been led to believe.”

      “Believe? By what? By who?”

      “Take a look at these,” Grubber Young said as he pointed to some rectangles along the bottom edge of the paper.

      Rodney shone the magnifier onto the rectangles and saw that they were photographs of famous places all over the world. There was the Sphinx and the Eiffel Tower and the Great Wall of China and a lot more.

      Grubber Young pointed at the Statue of Liberty and said, “That was the giveaway. Drum?”

      Drum was ready with a postcard. She handed it to Grubber, who handed it to Rodney. On the postcard was a picture of the Statue of Liberty. But the picture was better than a photograph because it was three ­dimensional, and the clouds moved and Rodney imag­ined that he could hear the ocean licking against the island where the statue stood. At the bottom, in Mobambi, it said LOCAL FOLK TRANSPORTATION ICON: WOMAN FLAGGING DOWN A BUS. (Photo by Sak Nussemm, of Earth origin).

      “I see,” said Rodney. He tried not to laugh. After all, it was possible that archeologists and anthropolo­gists on Earth made mistakes about ancient cultures all the time. Nobody would ever know. “But I still don’t understand how my address got on the side of that probe.”

      “It’s your probe,” said Drum, laughing. “You tell us.” Nobody spoke. Rodney could hear air moving through the ship like an endless breath. Somewhere, a relay snapped. Rodney needed to change the subject. He tapped the edge of the postcard on the palm of his other hand and said, “Where do you get postcards like this?”

      “From the Starship Club,” said Grubber.

      “What’s that?”

      “It’s a wonderful organization,” said Drum. “They supply emergency interstellar service, sell insurance, and run a travel agency at cut rates. Grubber has been a member for years. They send us postcards like this all the time.”

      “But how did you find the Earth?”

      Grubber said, “There are instructions.” He pointed to a complex diagram between the naked man and the naked woman. Rodney shone the magni­fier on it and saw that it had spectrum lines defining Earth’s sun by its chemical composition, and all kinds of arrows and circles. Generally, the