Grasping branch after branch, Beat hoisted herself up the old oak tree until she was more than twenty feet from the ground. One of the limbs made a broad sweep over the school's front yard, so she began to creep along it, holding tight with both arms and legs. She had often dreamed about climbing a tall tree, and on this occasion she did so without fear, knowing that when she reached the end, she would jump. She had to jump. She was the jump.

On the ground, Alan and Prunella were discussing their joint book report when they caught sight of Beat shimmying along the bare limb. "Omigosh," exclaimed Prunella. "What's she doing up there?"

Alan bolted across the lawn until the girl's shadow touched him. "Beat!" he cried, cupping his hands over his mouth. "Get down from there before you fall and kill yourself!"

She paid him no attention, but went on climbing. Alan easily calculated that she was at least thirty feet above him. "Help! Help!" he began to yell at everyone within earshot.

"Somebody call the fire department!" shouted Prunella, running frantically in a circle.

Beat seemed oblivious to the crowd gathering below as she cautiously straightened her knees while stretching out her arms for additional balance. The limb quivered, and she quivered with it. Not once did the thought of the injuries she might sustain enter her mind; the only words she could hear were flying leap, flying leap, flying leap…

She struck a graceful pose as if preparing to dive, and a crackling, snapping noise filled the air—the limb was collapsing under her weight. It broke free from the main trunk in a spray of sawdust and plunged downward, Beat flailing her arms as she descended with it.

The kids fled in fear, leaving only one individual between the girl and the ground. Mrs. Krantz steeled herself as the long shaft of wood came at her, striking her in the exact spot where she parted her hair, midway between her antlers.

Beat tumbled to the earth and felt her breath fly from her lungs. As the children watched, the moose woman stood rigid as a pillar with the limb seemingly wedged in her scalp, for the space of five whole seconds. She then proceeded to topple over forwards.

When Prunella and Alan reached her, she was prostrate and nose-down on the grass, her pupils askew, the heavy limb pressing against her back. "Mrs. Krantz?" said Alan earnestly. "Are you okay?"

The teacher opened her mouth slightly and groaned.

"How many fingers do you see?" said Prunella, opening her hand in front of the woman's face.

"Eleventy-one," was her delirious reply.

Hearing the wail of an ambulance, Sue finally stepped outside to check on the situation. What she saw was two paramedics pulling a stretcher from their vehicle, Beat sitting up and clutching her left side, and her adoptive mother stretched out and motionless in the grass. "Mom!" she exclaimed, rushing forward. "What happened?"

"She got beaned by a branch," Alan reported. Consumed with worry over the fallen Mrs. Krantz, Sue remained unaware that Beat had suffered an accident as well.

"You may have a broken rib," said one of the paramedics to the rabbit-aardvark girl with the pain-wracked face. "Here, let me take a look."

"Keep your eyes off my chest, you pervert," said Beat sharply.

The remainder of the school day was tense for Mrs. Krantz's students, who were temporarily thrust into the fifth-grade class of Mrs. Pike. This teacher, they discovered, had earned a reputation for toughness that nearly rivaled that of Nigel Ratburn. She had, in addition, something that Mr. Ratburn lacked—a moustache.

During every break, Sue hurried to the principal's office and asked the same question of Rodentia: "Any word on my mom and Beat?"

By the middle of the afternoon she finally had an answer: "Miss Simon has a cracked rib. Mrs. Krantz suffered a concussion—she's not entirely lucid yet, but she'll recover. If not for those rock-hard antlers of hers, it would've been much more serious."

I guess we're stuck with Mrs. Pike for the long haul, thought Sue. Stupid Beat. What possessed her to fall out of a tree? "For tomorrow, I want you all to complete problems 1-10 in chapter 12 of the math book," said the jeans-clad teacher in her mannish voice. "If you're from Mrs. Krantz's class and you haven't read chapter 12, then I'd like to introduce you to a wonderful invention that'll let you study twice as much in half the time. It's called the Power Off button on your TV remote."

When school ended for the day, Alan was one of the first to leave the premises. Climbing into the family car with his mother and sister, he said to Tegan, "We all turned into zombies, and Beat fell out of a tree and broke her rib. How was your day?"

"Kinda boring," replied the teenager. "I scored perfectly on all the quizzes without even studying. During lunch my female friends and I held a rally to protest the cruel treatment of Paris Hilton at the hands of California's legal system."

"What," said Alan, "you mean going to jail for a month over a drunken driving charge?"

"Drunken driving?" said Tegan, surprised. "Is that what she did?"

Their first stop, even before returning home, was the Katzenellenbogan Memorial Hospital. "We're here to see a patient named Raymond Mansch," Mrs. Powers informed the receptionist.

After a quick look through her database, the woman said, "He's in room 289."

A nurse led Alan, Tegan, and their mother to the suite where Mansch was being treated. "He's on painkillers at the moment," she told them. "If you have questions for him, this probably isn't the best time."

"So what happened to him?" inquired Mrs. Powers.

"Broken sternum, internal bleeding," answered the nurse. "It's like he was punched by a T-rex."

They found the diminutive cat man on a bed, his gown partially concealing the plaster cast around his torso. His eyes, which Alan had once regarded as pools of deceit, were filmy and inattentive. As Tegan smiled, Alan scowled, and Mrs. Powers stood to one side, Mansch weakly rolled his head to get a better view of the visitors.

"Alan…" he groaned in a raspy voice.

"Hi, Ray," said Tegan. "It's me. I'm here, too."

"Alan," Mansch repeated.

"How'd you recover from the mind wipe?" the boy asked rudely.

"Alan," said Mansch, ignoring his question. "The sphere."

"Sphere?" said Alan impatiently. "What sphere?"

Mansch breathed in as deeply as he could without causing himself pain.

"You must…destroy…the sphere," he gasped out.

To be continued