The Boy With Orange Hair

by Bill Bowler

Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
appear in this issue.

Chapter 9

They turned around, the door to the room had opened, and a short, chubby man with stubby little legs and a great big belly, dressed completely in black, had come in. He glared at them with beady little yellow eyes under big bushy eyebrows. He was completely bald.

“What do you think you’re doing?!” he shouted.

“Is this your house?” asked Gerry the groundhog.

“Of course it’s my house! Whose house did you think it was?”

“We rang the doorbell but no one answered,” said Gerry. “We just wanted to take a look at your machine here. What kind of machine is this, anyway?”

“None of your business!” shouted Quigley.

“Now don’t get excited,” said the boy with orange hair.

“Can I have a drink of water?” asked Gerry

Muttering under his breath, Quigley poured a glass of water from the sink and handed it to Gerry. Gerry took a gulp and put the glass down on the table, spilling a few drops.

“Do you have any cookies?” asked Gerry.

“YES I HAVE COOKIES!” shouted Queezy Q. Quigley. He glared at them, “I’ll be right back. DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!” And he left the room, muttering under his breath.

They crowded around the machine again. The boy with orange hair started turning all the dials and pushing all the buttons, but nothing happened.

Gerry the groundhog noticed a big switch on the side of the machine marked “Safety Release. Do Not Touch.”

“Hmmm,” he thought. “I wonder what that does?” And he flipped the switch. The machine started making louder noise and shaking harder.

Chuga-chuga chuga-chuga CHUGA-CHUGA CHUGA-CHUGA

“Hey, look at this,” said Gerry. He grabbed the big lever in front and pushed it all the way forward. Purple beams shot out from the machine and the room filled with a purple glow.

“I don’t feel well,” said General Rickrack.

“Look,” said Gerry. “Everything’s getting bigger!”

And it was true. The machine was growing larger and they couldn’t reach the buttons and levers anymore. The window they crawled in was now way up out of reach. The table had grown to the size of a house. Everything in the room was getting bigger and bigger but the reason was, they were all shrinking, smaller and smaller and smaller and ping! — they disappeared into a drop of water.

“Wheeeeeeeeee!” shouted Gerry.

“He-e-e-e-e-elp!” yelled General Rickrack, but it was too late. They seemed to be floating weightless in a cloud.

“Where are we?” asked General Rickrack.

“I don’t know,” said Gerry as he floated by.

“What happened?” asked the boy as he floated by upside down.

“I-feel-ve-ry-strange,” said Gerry as he drifted by sideways. “Hey! Who’s that over there?”

They looked where Gerry was pointing and saw a little face.

“I’m Oxygen,” the little face answered.

“And who are they?” asked Gerry, pointing to two twins holding hands with Oxygen.

“Why, we’re Hydrogen,” they said.

“Say,” said General Rickrack, “do you ever get the feeling someone is watching you?”

“Yeah,” said Gerry. “I kind of feel that way now.”

“Look! Look up there!” shouted General Rickrack. They all looked up and saw a gigantic eye in the sky.

“What the heck is THAT?!” asked Gerry the groundhog.

It was Quigley’s eye looking through a microscope trying to find them. The eye stared and stared, and then blinked and disappeared. Quigley got up from the microscope and rubbed his eyes. He walked over to the machine, turned the dials, flipped a switch, and pulled the big lever back. The purple beams dissolved and the machine began to glow with an orange light around the edges. Quigley heard his phone ring in the other room and went to answer.

Inside the drop of water, the guys were making a plan.

“You see that orange glow over there?” said the boy. “Those are growth rays. Quigley’s machine is the reversible dual ray model. If we could just swim over there into the orange part, the orange rays should grow us back out of here.”

The three of them swam and floated and wiggled and squirmed their way through the molecules towards the orange area and, one by one, they entered the orange glow and boooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOP! they popped out of the drop of water and sprang back into the room with Quigley’s deluxe reversible shrink and growth ray generator.

“The next step,” said the boy with orange hair, “is to get back to normal size. And we better move fast. Quigley could come back any minute.”

The boy ran to Quigley’s machine and studied the gauges and dials. He set the dial to full orange and pushed the big lever back in the opposite direction.

The machine started shaking faster and faster and louder and louder and the orange glow got brighter and brighter and the whole thing seemed about to explode when beams of orange filled the room and they started growing bigger and bigger, until they pushed through the roof and grew back to normal size and were giants again in the Land of Little.

“All right,” said Gerry with a big smile. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

The boy reached down into the little house and picked up a little box.

“What’s that?” asked General Rickrack.

“It’s Quigley’s machine,” said the boy with orange hair, and he put it in his pocket.

It was only one step over Dark Mountain — it was just a sand dune really — and two more steps back to the beach. When they got there, the boy used Quigley’s little machine to grow the ocean liner back to normal size. They climbed up the ladder onto the deck and stood on the foredeck while the Captain set course.

Bzzzzz, bzzzz...

Gerry slapped his cheek.

“What’s that?” asked General Rickrack.

“Just a fly,” said Gerry.

Bzzzzz, bzzzz...

General Rickrack brushed his hand in front of his nose, “Darn bugs.”

The Captain sailed for the up whirlpool, which looked like a huge, hazy upside down funnel on the horizon. It seemed that, finally, things were going well. It seemed like they would soon be back on the surface where their troubles would be over. But what they didn’t know was that one-inch Queezy Q. Quigley III had climbed into the tiny Fokker tri-plane and chased after the giants as they were leaving his house. The little buzz was the tiny motor. Quigley had flown on board.

To be continued...