Akiko and the Alpha Centauri 5000 by Mark Crilley

Author:Mark Crilley [Crilley, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-51076-1
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2003-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

That's when our ship gradually turned upside down. We flipped over once. Then twice. Then a third time and a fourth, until finally we were spinning repeatedly, faster and faster, flattened against the walls, getting whipped around and around like socks in a clothes dryer. Finally I just had to close my eyes because everything was turning into a twirling, circular blur.

SHUDDA

SHUDDA

SHUDDA

The ship was filled with this weird rhythmic sound, loud and deep, pulsing through the walls and into our bodies. Then—

ZZZZZRRRRRR and FFLLRRRRRRRRR and SPPLLLLLUUUUURRRRRRRRRPP!

I opened my eyes.

The spinning had stopped. The ship was perfectly level again.

Okay. You know what it's like when you're spinning around and around and then you suddenly stop: You get dizzy. Well, I was dizzy all right. More than dizzy. Way, way, WAY more than dizzy. I was so disoriented right then, I'd have had better luck walking on my hands than my feet. Even sitting down, with seat belts strapping me in, I could still barely keep my balance. So I just held tightly to the Twerbo-Fladiator and waited for the tornado in my head to spin itself out.

The ship might have stopped flipping, but our speed hadn't been reduced at all. Now we were flying faster than ever, even with the engine shut off, zooming through space so quickly, the stars in the windows were nothing more than stretched-out streaks of light.

“That's it,” I heard Spuckler say. “We're on the other side.”

The fixtures of the ship were still whirling wildly in my eyes, but little by little I was able to focus on individual objects. Then—it took a while, for some reason—I became aware of a slimy feeling on my arms and face. Looking down, I saw that I was covered from head to toe with some sort of weird yellow goop. And I wasn't the only one. Mr. Beeba, Spuckler, Gax, Poog, every last square inch of the interior of the ship & everyone and everything was just dripping with this awful greasy gooey stuff. It gave off a really nasty smell, too, like old cheese—you know, the kind of cheese that's pretty stinky even when it's not old.

“Black-hole mucus,” said Mr. Beeba, wiping a dollop of the stuff from his eyes. “One of the unfortunate side effects of passing through a black hole.”

Ugh! It was without a doubt the grossest substance in the universe.

“My science teacher definitely didn't tell us about this.”

Gax had found some kind of vacuum-cleaner thing inside his body and was using it to suck the goop off Poog before attending to himself. The rest of us tried to clean ourselves off, but it was pretty much a losing battle. The yellow goo was so oily that even hot water and industrial-strength detergent probably wouldn't have done much. Even Gax's vacuum cleaner was only partially effective, leaving him and Poog still half-covered with the stuff. Spuckler was the only one who didn't seem to mind how filthy he'd become. He was too busy revving the engine back up to full throttle and scanning the windshield for signs of Bluggamin Streed.

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