Planet of the Penguins by David LaRochelle

Author:David LaRochelle [LaRochelle, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling Children's Books

I gave a pretend sigh and lowered it onto her head. Instantly her squeaky voice came through the earpieces.

“What is this thing? Who are you? Why do you keep following me? And if you try to hurt me, you great big monsters, I’ll bite your funny-looking feet!” She then began pecking at my tennis shoes with her tiny sharp beak.

“Take it easy,” said Lamar. “We’re not going to hurt you. We only want to take you back to your father.”

She looked at us skeptically and put her stubby little flippers on her fuzzy hips.

“I don’t believe you.” Then she grabbed Lamar’s shoelace and began pulling.

“It’s true,” I said. “Look.”

I held out the Chronok that King Pong had given us. By now, five of the nine wedges had turned blue.

“Your father gave us this when he sent us to find you. He’s worried because you didn’t return to your spaceship when you said you would.”

Princess Ping dropped Lamar’s shoelace from her beak.

“I couldn’t return!” she squawked. “I couldn’t reach the right buttons!”

My theory was correct!

“And now I was trying to push one of these boxes over to the keypad so I could reach the numbers to take me back,” said Ping. “But the box is too heavy.”

“Then it’s a good thing we came along,” said Lamar, retying his shoe. “Come with us, and we’ll take you to your dad right now.”

You would have thought that Lamar had said he was going to drop three six-pack crates of fifteen-pound bowling balls on top of the princess.

“NO!” she squawked. “No! No! No!”

She threw herself down onto the floor and began kicking her tiny feet. “I’m not going anywhere without these boxes!”

“But you don’t need them,” I said. “We can push the buttons for you.”

“I need what’s inside the boxes,” demanded Ping. “When we landed on this planet, we wanted to refill our water supply. I decided to find the water all by myself. And I did! I found a whole room full of water globes, just like we have on our planet.”

So that’s what WGW stood for: Water Globe Warehouse!

“And I’m going to bring them all back to my daddy, or I won’t leave!” she pouted. “So there!”

The princess might be smart and curious, but she was also as spoiled as last year’s yogurt.

I thought about the size of the transport cube and compared that to the size of these boxes. At most, we could fit ten boxes in at once. I had already counted ninety stacks. There were nine boxes in each stack. To transport just the boxes I had counted would require . . . eighty-one trips!

“You don’t need them all?” I asked. “Do you?”

“Noooooo,” said Princess Ping reluctantly. “I suppose not. Water globes are concentrated. That means that one little globe makes a lot of water. We only need one globe for every twenty penguins on our ship.”

The spaceship was huge. I had counted 242 penguins earlier, but I knew there must be more than that. A LOT more. Maybe even triple that amount.

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