As it turns out, walking as a Gedd isn't nearly as hard as the leg thing makes it look. Basically, you dig the foot of the shorter leg into the ground, swing the longer leg around your body like a sideways pendulum, and then dig that foot into the ground and use it to hoist the shorter leg forward, sort of like a lever. It's a pretty complicated way to walk, and it takes a little while to learn – but then, the way chickadees fly is complicated, too, and you don't hear me complaining about that.
Besides, the Gedd brain knew how to walk like that, even if we didn't, so we managed to get the hang of it in about four minutes (even Anifal, who walks like a drunken stork in his human morph). After that, it was just a matter of making distance and watching the scenery.
When I tell you that making distance was the fun part, that should give you some idea of what the scenery was like.
It took me a while to figure out what was so creepy about Apollo. At first I thought it was just the sheer weirdness of the place, but that wasn't it, or at least not all of it. I'd experienced enough weirdness in the past year to know the difference between weird and spooky, and this place was both.
The problem wasn't the twelve-legged dragonfly-things flying around making wailing noises, or the "trees" whose branches were eight times as long as their trunks, or the giant tongues that came up out of holes in the ground to grab unwary animals that looked like six-legged pigs without heads. The problem was that, as we walked along, all the dragonfly-things were making the same wailing noise, all the mini-trees had exactly the same leaves, and it was always the same kind of tongue that came out to grab the same kind of headless pig-thing. The planet felt like one giant assembly line, and to me – the girl who considers it a bad day when only six species show up at our bird-feeder – that kind of uniformity was scary.
For about the first mile and a half, I kept quiet about it. After a while, though, I felt like I just had to say something, or I was going to go nuts. You know the feeling.
«Well,» I said, trying to sound casual. «Not much for biodiversity, these folks, huh?»
«No,» Anifal said. «Evolution on the Yeerk homeworld works on the principle of conquest rather than coexistence.»
«What's that mean?»
«There is a pattern to Yeerk-homeworld life,» Anifal said. «When an ecological niche opens up, several different species rush to fill it. These species then begin a fierce competition between each other, one that does not cease until one species has totally annihilated all the others. Once this occurs, the successful species begins the task of adapting perfectly to the habitat it has thus appropriated. This generally takes several million years, at the end of which time the niche is very likely to have disappeared or been replaced by a different niche. The species duly goes extinct, and the cycle begins all over again.»
He paused. «It explains a great deal about the Yeerks, really.»
«Wow,» said Richard. «And I thought Earth was a tough neighborhood.»
«It is,» said Anifal firmly. «Much tougher than this world. A life-form on Earth cannot simply battle three or four other species for control of a specialized niche: it must battle all the other species on the planet simply to stay alive. That is why Earth's ecosystem is so varied and subtle. It is why humans adapt so readily to change.» He turned and grinned at us. «It is why the four of you have, in a matter of months, become four of the galaxy's greatest warriors.»
I don't know if Gedds can blush, but I definitely felt a tingle on my cheeks just then.
Or maybe that was just the rain.
«Say,» I said, suddenly remembering. «What's going to happen when we get back to the ship?»
«What do you mean?» said Josh.
«Well, we're going to be dripping with acid, aren't we?» I said. «That can't be good for a delicate machine-organism-whatever like the Ssstram ship. Is Chester going to blow-dry us off before he lets us in, or something?»
Anifal gave me a weird look. «Elly,» he said, as though he couldn't believe how ignorant I was, «the skin of our morph contains a base exactly opposite to the acid in the rains; any acid that touches us is neutralized, no more hazardous than pure water. That is why the Gedd morphs were necessary in the first place. The Ssstram ship cannot possibly be in any danger from us.»
I was a little irritated at Anifal's tone. I'm only in seventh grade, after all; I can't be expected to have learned all of this stuff. (Though to hear Anifal talk, Andalites are probably taught chemistry in kindergarten, so from his perspective I guess I can.)
«Hang on,» said Richard. «Is that really how this morph works?»
«Of course,» said Anifal.
«But acids neutralize bases the same way that bases neutralize acids,» said Richard, «so our protective coating should be vanishing with every raindrop.»
«And so it is,» said Anifal. «Cellular reproduction, however, occurs much more quickly in Gedd skin than it does in any Earthly organ, so the supply of the base – Andalite scientists call it fiastha – is replenished as quickly as it is consumed.»
«Oh.» Richard thought about that. «Is that why the Gedd's skin is so wrinkly?»
«Exactly,» said Anifal, sounding pleased that one of us was catching on. «The excess skin produced must go somewhere, and Gedds are too vulnerable to predators for constant shedding to be practical, so it simply accumulates on the body.
«In fact,» he added, «since swift skin growth is such an important aspect of health in a Gedd, the number and size of wrinkles is a large part of the male's mating display. In the rutting season, a…»
«Oh, shut up!»
The four of us turned to stare at Abby, who had been unusually quiet till now.
«Don't any of you realize?» she said. «We're on another planet. We've reached out into the great expanse of Elsewhere and found solid ground. We should all be struck dumb with awe right now, and you people are talking about skin cells!»
«Certainly,» said Richard, with that irritating more-rational-than-thou tone he sometimes gets. «Despite what you may have been told, Abby, ignorance is not a prerequisite to aesthetic appreciation. Sometimes, you can when you know something about a place, you can actually appreciate it more.»
Abby glared, but Josh cut her off before she could come up with a reply. «Richard,» he said, «if Abby doesn't want to listen to a biology lecture, she doesn't have to. You and Anifal can chat about Gedd mating displays in private thought-speak, and the rest of us can be alone with our own thoughts.»
That's my brother for you, always the politician. Richard gave him a long-suffering look, the way Galileo probably did when they made him deny the heliocentric theory. Then he turned to Anifal, and I guess they continued their conversation because Anifal shook his head a lot, but the rest of us couldn't hear a thing.
In the silence, I looked around at the landscape and thought about what Abby had said. It was another planet, that was for sure – I've seen pictures of Jupiter that looked more like Earth than this place did – but it sure didn't strike me dumb with awe.
Then again, maybe that was my own prejudice. Maybe if I stopped wanting Apollo to be Earth and just tried to appreciate it for what it was, then the whole cookie-cutter quality of the place would turn out to be as beautiful in its own way as Earth was. I doubted it, but it was worth a try.
So for the next ten minutes or so, I did my best to look at the Apollic scenery as if I'd never walked through an Earthly meadow in July, and I think I had some success, in the sense that I wasn't actively hating the entire ecosystem when Josh said, «Look sharp, folks. Target at ten-o'-clock.»
We all looked up and to our left. About forty yards away, almost hidden in the rain, was a pulsing, yellow force field, and inside that force field were two animals that had to be the Yeerkbanes.
They looked like huge, long tubes covered in purple fur, scuttling around on six insect-like legs. At one end of their bodies was something I guess you have to call a tail; anyway, it was raised higher than the rest of the body, and its hairless tip waved and twitched constantly, as though it was sniffing the air. That was a little creepy, but not half as bad as what was at the other end.
Because where an ordinary animal would have had a head, these things had long, hairless, almost transparent tubes, ending in a sort of mouth big enough to swallow a human head. When they opened their mouths, which they did at least twice, you could see hundreds of tiny, slime-covered suckers, each throbbing and pulsing like they wanted to suck out your soul – which, in a sense, I guess they did.
«Now that's what I'm talking about,» said Richard.
«Very impressive,» Anifal acknowledged. «They should make a highly successful battle morph.»
«That's putting it mildly,» Abby said, laughing. «I can't wait to see the look on Visser Seven's face when we come barreling into the Yeerk pool wearing those babies!»
Josh nodded. «Quite. Okay, let's see – we'll need to deactivate the force field, get inside, reactivate it to keep the rain off, demorph, acquire the vanarges, remorph, deactivate the force field again, and leave. Think we can handle that, Anifal?»
«Most probably,» said Anifal. «The force field is designed as an enclosure for sub-sentient life-forms, so it oughtn't to be very difficult to deactivate. The only possible difficulty lies…»
TTTTTSSSAAAPPP!
A nearby tuft of grass sizzled and burst into flame right in front of Anifal's longer leg. Instinctively, we all whipped our heads in the direction the shredder bolt had come from.
A small, dome-shaped shelter stood nearby the vanarges' enclosure. Just inside it, out of reach of the deadly rain, were two Andalite warriors, both holding shredders and both staring at us with cold fury.
«In that,» Anifal finished.