Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl Read Free Page B

never seen any flying saucers," I said.
    "That's because you're always in that bookshop," the professor said. "And a flying saucer bookshop at that. But anyone who has lived here for any length of time has seen them. Here! I'll ask this passerby. You there! Yokel! Have you ever seen a flying saucer?"
    A guy in overalls was walking along the road. "Who wants to know?" he asked.
    "Just a seeker after truth," the professor said. "Now fess up. Have you noticed any lights in the sky?"
    "Quite often, especially on Wednesdays," the guy said. "And I've seen them land behind the old stone barn."
    "There you are! The voice of the people! Thank you, my good man."
    "Escaping from the nut farm, are you?" the stranger asked.
    "Just for the afternoon," the professor said. "The old stone barn, you say?"
    "Just down the road," the local said. "Have a nice day!"

CHAPTER 7
The Old Stone Barn

    The way we were going was down a road with tidy houses, trees, and yards on both sides. Like a lot of streets in Poughkeepsie, it had once been all farmland, and in some places we could see past the houses to cultivated fields. It was easy to see that the old stone barn was built before the houses—it looked hundreds of years old. And it was stone, and it was a barn, and it had a sign on it that read OLD STONE BARN , and another one that read COCA-COLA , and a blackboard on which was written "Apple Fritters."
    Sometimes as you go from one place to another, step into a room or out a door, you suddenly get a mental picture of how you might appear to someone seeing you for the first time. As we entered the
small lunchroom that took up a corner of the old stone barn, I got a flash of the three of us: a tiny girl with a strange, crazy gaze, a gray-bearded old man in a makeshift dress, and a tall girl with pussycat whiskers. We must have been fairly noteworthy. But there were no customers in the place to take note—just the proprietor.
    Behind the counter was a tremendously fat woman with a hairnet and a red face. "Apple fritters?" she asked, looking at Professor Tag.
    "Apple fritters!" the professor said.
    Then she looked at Molly. "Apple fritters?"
    "Um..."
    "Apple fritters?"
    "I have money," I whispered to Molly. "It's my treat."
    "Apple fritters?"
    "Well, I..."
    "Apple fritters?!?" the fat, red-faced, hairneted woman shouted.
    "Apple fritters!" Molly shouted back.
    Then she looked at me. "Apple fritters?" she hollered at the top of her voice.
    "Apple fritters!" I screamed.
    "Apple fritters!" the woman yelled, and hustled into the kitchen to make them.
    We took seats along the counter.
    "You know, I bet she sells a lot of apple fritters for a little neighborhood place like this," Professor Tag said.
    The woman reappeared and banged a plateful of apple fritters with powdered sugar on top down in front of each of us.
    "Coffee?" she yelled.
    "COFFEE!" all three of us yelled back as loud as we could.
    "COFFEE!" the woman shouted. Then, with a big smile on her red face, she drew three mugs of coffee from a big percolator and banged them down on the counter, one, two, three.
    The apple fritters were delicious.
    The coffee was fragrant and creamy and hot.
    "I was conversing with a bumpkin just now," Professor Tag said to the apple fritter woman. "He said he has seen flying saucers in this vicinity."
    "They land in the back," the woman said. "My apple fritters have an interplanetary reputation."
    "What, the space men come in for fritters?"
    "Space men and space women. I thought you three might be some of them at first."
    "Ah. Is that why you stuck to one expression—'apple fritters'?"
    "Some of them don't know a lot of English."
    Now, it is a fact that even if you have worked out logically that the odds are vastly in favor of life on other planets, even if you have had experience that supports the idea that travel between worlds is not only possible but common, and even if you have actually seen or otherwise had personal experience of spacecraft or