Invaders From Mars Read Free

why you’re having nightmares and help you get rid of them. Remember when Dr. Stewart took your tonsils out to get rid of that awful sore throat? It’s sort of like that.”
    But it hadn’t been like that. Dr. Stewart was a pleasant man with silver hair who gave his patients chewing gum before they left the office.
    Dr. Wycliffe had been short and fat with a pinched voice. The first thing David had noticed about him was his hair. There had been something odd about it. On his third and last visit to Wycliffe, he figured out what it was: the hair wasn’t real! It was a wig! A “too-pay,” Dad had called it. David decided that any guy who’d wear a wig had to be pretty loopy. Besides that, he couldn’t stand Dr. Wycliffe’s squeaky voice and the way he was constantly flicking his pudgy little nose with his finger, as if it were always itching.
    Dad had talked it over with Mom and they’d decided that David wouldn’t have to go back to Dr. Wycliffe if he really didn’t want to. Maybe the nightmares would go away.
    They did, eventually, just as Dad had said they would. But David still had one now and then. Sometimes he dreamed about Dr. Wycliffe’s “too-pay”: a black, furry animal squatting on the fat man’s head.
    David leaned forward in the seat as they approached the marine base. It was set a short distance off the road, surrounded by a tall chain-link fence with barbed wire around the top. At the front entrance, uniformed guards stood around what looked like the box office at the Sky-Vu Drive-in and a large sign hung over the gate. It read in bold letters:
    U.S. MARINE CORPS BASE
CAMP LEWIS B. PULLER
CALIFORNIA
    “Can we go in, Dad?”
    “Uh-uh.”
    “C’mon, just for a minute? We’ve come this far.”
    “Not today. We’re late already. You want us to get caught playing hooky?”
    David squinted at him. “Hooky? You mean cuttin’ class, Dad. Nobody says hooky anymore.”
    “Whatever. They’ve probably got bloodhounds searching for you right now, sniffing at your dirty old sweat socks.”
    David laughed and punched his dad’s shoulder. Then he spotted the radar and leaned forward again, putting his hands on the dashboard. “There!” he exclaimed, pointing. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
    Within the compound, two large radar dishes slowly and diligently swept back and forth, scanning the sky.
    “Yep,” Dad said. “They’re fully operational now.”
    “How does it work?”
    “Okay, see, it’s a phased-array system,” he explained, hunkering forward over the steering wheel, as if he were leaning over a campfire to tell a story. “A short pulse of energy is transmitted into the sky, and if something’s out there, the energy is reflected back and detected on a sensitive receiver.”
    As Dad drove slowly by, David watched the two radar dishes, his lower lip tucked between his teeth. He tried to imagine what those energy pulses would look like if he could see them as they shot into the sky—like big, glowing candy bars? Like bolts of lightning?—and he tried to imagine them bouncing off the side of an enemy jet or . . . or maybe even an alien spaceship, zooming back to earth like high-tech Paul Reveres with a message of impending danger.
    Two jets roared by overhead, flying low and breaking through David’s daydream.
    “What if the energy pulses missed, Dad?” David asked.
    He shook his head. “If something’s out there, they’ll find it.”
    David turned around in the seat and got on his knees, watching the dishes grow smaller as they drove on.
    “What if they didn’t come back?”
    Dad thought about that a moment, then said slowly, “Well, then, I guess we’d have to put an ad in the paper offering a reward to anyone who finds and returns some lost energy pulses.”
    For a moment, David thought his dad was serious; then he saw the crooked smile and laughed, turning back around in the seat.
    “You sure we can’t go in for just a minute, Dad?” he asked.
    “Positive. But . .