“Comic Coo-Coo Boo,” said Simon, who had been making Jackson Pollock compositions on the stainless-steel tray of his high chair with his noodles and spaghetti sauce. He was the only one of us able to gaze directly at the Cosmic Cue-Ball with his cyclopic, red-lensed goggles, while the rest of us were practically blinded.

The incandescent orb looked just the way it was drawn in the comic books, but instead of harsh, black outlines, it burned as brightly as tungsten. The Orb of Great Power, as I’d heard it once described, hung in mid-air over us only briefly before it darted through the kitchen toward the open back door, stopping at the screen. Duchess, barking, chased after it; leaping up, her front paw came down on the handle of the screen door. Her weight carried her out of the house and onto the patio, and the Cue-Ball, sensing an opening, darted out into the back yard.

“That dog’s smarter than you, Trent,” said Preston. “That’s quite a door-opening trick.”

“I never said she wasn’t,” said Trent.

The two men, already standing, raced to the back door.

Outside, we could her Duchess continue to bark, suggesting the glowing orb hadn’t flown off but was lingering in the back yard.

Avie and I got up and ran to look out the kitchen window. The Cue-Ball was circling around the yard, all right, seemingly to tease the dog, who ran in circles after it.

Suddenly, a giant, glassy sphere of light—maybe twenty feet in diameter—surrounded the Cosmic Cue-Ball, making a loud, vibrating din. At first, I assumed the Cue-Ball itself had generated the crystalline membrane of plasmic energy. But its erratic behavior inside the sphere demonstrated that the Cue-Ball was ensnared, like a butterfly trapped in a butterfly net.

Someone or something had thrown an impenetrable barrier around the Cosmic Cue-Ball, and meant to imprison it for good.

It was difficult to see through the glare, but I could have sworn I saw another sphere—green—glinting way in the back of the yard.

“The Partyers from Mars!” I cried.

Forgetting my limp, I burst past Trent and Preston at the back door and ran out onto the patio, stopping short at the edge of the grass. Duchess was still running around in circles on the lawn, barking up at the sphere of plasmic energy above, which made an awful, vibrating din with the Cosmic Cue-Ball racing around inside it, like a marble in a glass bowl, unable to escape.

At the back of the yard—I had to squint to see them—stood half a dozen diminutive aliens in mismatched attire, all in a row. Behind them was a small, green-domed flying saucer that couldn’t possibly have contained them all, parked on the lawn. I recognized them from previous encounters with them in my home reality. Two of them wore helmeted space suits and wielded rifles attached by hoses to battery units on the ground. The rifles projected pulsating beams of light, sustaining the plasmic sphere surrounding the Cosmic Cue-Ball.

“We’ve finally got it!” cried one, his tortoise head visible inside his bubble helmet. His voice slightly muffled, and he had to shout to be heard over the noise. “We finally trapped that accursed, renegade Mutanium Particle—after so many lightyears! Now, to salt it away in the Absolute Zero Containment Unit once and for all!”

A large, black box, roughly the size of a picnic cooler, sat between him and the second rifleman, lid open. The device wafted frigid vapors that spread across the yard is if from a fog machine.

“Careful, Officer Pup,” the tortoise intoned. “This is the crucial part of the procedure …”

“It’s not my first time to the rodeo, Horace,” replied the figure holding the second rifle. Inside his helmet was the head of a black Labrador retriever, slobbering at the mouth as he shouted to be heard. “Just don’t reduce the size of the force field too quickly. Ya gotta reel a Mutanium Particle in slowly, little by little …”

“Don’t tell me what to do, Peleus,” snarled the tortoise Horace to the Labrador. “You act like you’re the most experienced Mutanium trapper in the universe …. I wasn’t the one who blew it in Central Park, or the time before in Las Vegas, or at the Berlin Wall …”

The two struggled like cowhands that had separately lassoed a bucking bronco. The crystalline sphere of energy shook as the Cue-Ball bashed around inside it more and more violently, attempting to burst free, threatening to pull the Labrador and the tortoise off the ground.

“Steady, you clowns,” said a pointy-eared, elfin girl in tattered fishnets and a leather mini-skirt. I recognized her as Polly Parsec, the saucer’s media officer. “We’ve tracked this errant particle through Seven Heaven-Worlds; if we screw it up again, it could mean yet another forty solar cycles on this dungball they call a planet.”

Two more Partyers—a one-eyed squid girl and a skull-faced ship’s surgeon—each latched onto the Labrador and the tortoise respectively, giving the riflemen more ballast against the tug of the Cosmic Cue-Ball.

***

Turning my attention back to the Cue-Ball, I strode forth from the patio, mesmerized by the sight of the orb and the evanescent, ephemeral shapes trailing behind it—triangles, crescent moons, pentagrams, crosses, swastikas—shapes and symbols of no apparent significance that appeared for a brief instant then disappeared just as quickly. The Cosmic Cue-Ball now seemed securely confined to a slowly tightening net of pulsating plasma, its incandescence dimmed considerably as it exhausted its energies inside the crystalline membrane.

Trent’s dog was still barking. “It’s okay, Duchess,” I said, kneeling down to pet her; this seemed to calm her down. “So this is the Cosmic Cue-Ball,” I said to myself. “The Billiard of Great Power … the Mutanium Particle … that split reality in two and set divergent realities on their courses …”

“That’s definitely the object,” confirmed Grandma Seedy. “That’s what Willard Helveticus Brainard was tampering with the day he disappeared in 1940, all right.” She had come out from the house and stood on the edge of the patio apprehensively. “Be careful, Sissy—it’s probably even more dangerous now, knowing it’s been caught and is going home.”

All my friends had come out of the house by now. Trent and Preston had taken seats on top of the pine picnic table, followed by Avie in her Wondrous Warhound costume. Stella, holding eighteen-month-old Simon in his Megaton Baby outfit. Simon was applauding loudly, crying, “Comic Coo-Coo Boo! Comic Coo-Coo Boo!”

My Civilian friends on the patio could be forgiven for assuming this was all some kind of theatrical entertainment dreamt up by Avie, the theater geek and Grandma Seedy, the costumer.

“This is great,” said Trent. “Where’d they get the kids to play the Martians?”

“Maybe from the daycare center up the street,” said Preston, lighting a cigarette. “That saucer looks pretty convincing, too—how did they move a prop like that into the yard when we weren’t looking? I was just out here carving pumpkins before dusk.” He took a thoughtful drag. “Ah, they must’ve hidden it behind the garage!”

Avie, ever the improviser, reinforced their misperceptions when she actually jumped into the piece, playing her part as the Wondrous Warhound to the hilt for Simon’s benefit. “Looks like mission accomplished for Ms. Megaton Man,” she declared, hands on hips. “Now, our friendly neighborhood Halloween aliens will be taking that pesky billiard ball back to whatever quadrant of the galaxy from whence it came!”

“No kidding, Avie,” I cautioned her in a whisper. “We do not want to fuck with this thing …. Where do you get such corny dialogue, anyway?”

Suddenly, another Partyer called out to me:

“Ms. Megaton Man! What are you doing in this reality?”

***

It was a familiar voice, although I to squint to see the familiar, Jheri-curled captain of the Partyers, the captain of the crew and brother of the elfin girl.

“Anton Parsec!” I replied. “You recognize me?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” asked Anton, striding out to meet me in the middle of the yard, underneath the electrical field. “You’re wearing the uniform of America’s Nuclear Powered Hero, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but I’m just plain, old, Civilian Clarissa James in this reality,” I said. “This is only a Halloween costume—although a pretty good one—cooked up by my grandma here.”

“You can’t fool a Partyer from Mars,” said Anton. “Time, space, and alternate realities mean little to us … we’re Multimensionals. I could always spot the genuine Ms. Megaton Man a starlength away.”

Anton noticed Stella in her costume. “Yo! See-Thru Girl,” he said, winking and giving her a thumbs up. “Looking good!” She looked confused. “Oh, that’s right,” said Anton. “We haven’t met in this reality … yet!”

I explained to Anton that while I was dressed as Ms. Megaton Man, I didn’t have any Megapowers in this reality. “In fact, I have a bum hip,” I told him. “This trip began as an astral journey; I was just a phantom presence to begin with. Then, I accidentally jumped into this Civilian body …”

“We Partyers from Mars know all about what can go wrong during astral travel,” said Anton. “Didn’t I tell you? We’re in the Astral Fleet!”

“Could we please cut the chatter?” said the skull-faced surgeon, who was hugging the tortoise for dear life. “Captain, we’ve got to secure the Mutanium Particle inside the ship, then get while the getting’s good!”

“Yeah,” concurred the cyclopean squid-girl, who was doing the same to the Labrador. “Forty years on this rock is enough!”

The rifle-wielding Labrador and the tortoise were at delicate point in their operation. They had slowing diminished the plasmic membrane surrounding the Cosmic Cue-Ball to about six feet in diameter; inside it, the Cosmic Cue-Ball itself seemed to be losing steam, orbiting more and more slowly as it became resigned to its confinement. The vibrating hum, still considerable, had died down to a roar.

“Looks like we’re nearing the end of our four-decades-long sojourn on your world, Clarissa,” Anton whispered to me, so as not to distract the crew. “We’ll all be climbing aboard the George Has a Gun shortly, and high-tailing it out of this quadrant of the galaxy once and for all.”

“The George Has a What?” asked Avie.

“George Has a Gun,” shouted Polly, in order to be heard over the hum of the pulsating plasmic membrane. “It’s the name of our …”

The phrase sent a sudden shockwave of panic through the crew.

“George has a gun?!” shrieked the Labrador retriever.

“George has a gun?!” cried the tortoise.

“George has a gun?!” screamed the squid-girl, clinging tighter to the Labrador.

“Who in the name of God let George have a gun?!” shouted the skull-faced surgeon.

The Labrador, the tortoise, the squid girl, and the skull-faced ship’s surgeon all repeated the alarm over and over as they glanced around the back yard, as if expecting an armed attacker to lunge at them from the darkness at any moment.

“Pipe down, everybody!” scolded Polly. “I was just repeating what the Captain said. Stay focused, Officer Pup, Helmsman Horace!”

“Don’t scare me like that!” said the Labrador, badly shaken, but maintaining his grip on the plasma rifle. “All we need is for George to show up, with a gun … !”

“Lucky it was just a false alarm!” said the tortoise, trying to stay cool. “George doesn’t have a gun … that’s a good thing. George doesn’t have a gun …”

“Let it go, will you?” snapped Polly.

“Let it go? Now?” asked the Labrador, looking up at the plasmic membrane.

“Not the Mutanium Particle, you idiot!” said the skull-faced surgeon. “She meant let go of the ‘George has a gun’ bit …”

“Wait, does George have a gun or not?!” asked the one-eyed squid girl. “Now I’m confused! I wish you guys would make up your minds!”

“Hold steady, you idiots,” said Polly to the crew. “I was just telling these Earthlings the name of our saucer, the … You-Know-What.”

Anton shrugged his shoulders. “You see what I have to deal with? The very name of our ship sends its crew into a panic every time it’s uttered.”

***

I had to ask, “Why do you Partyers from Mars call your saucer the George … I mean, such an odd name, anyway? Particularly if the mere mention of the phrase strikes terror in the hearts of your crew?”

“Why do you call yourselves the Partyers from Mars?” asked Grandma Seedy, ever the scientist. “There’s no sign of intelligent life on that planet.”

“You’re telling me,” said Polly. “It just sounds cool, I guess.”

“It’s a long story,” said Anton, who was watching the plasmic membrane contract inch by inch around the Cosmic Cue-Ball.

“Well, we’ve got a minute,” I said. “Besides, we’re never going to see you again, Anton. Why not relate to us the origin of the Partyers from Mars?”

“All right,” said Anton. “You asked for it.”

The Origin of the Partyers from Mars

“You see, our crew first met at the Astral Fleet Academy. We were all at the bottom of our class, and served several detentions together for various behavioral infractions—me; my sister, Media Officer Polly Parsec; First Science Officer Peleus Pup; Helmsman Horace (the Tortoise) Glump; Cruise Director Corey “Squiggles” Psyclope; and Ship’s Surgeon Scully Bones. There’s also our engineer, Hack “Fur-Ball” Froebel, our obese feline coder-in-residence, but we can seldom persuade him to venture out of the saucer.

“Back at the academy, of course, we didn’t have any of those titles yet. In fact, we were at risk of never getting assigned to any reputable Starship at all, and faced the very real prospect of being drummed out of the Academy altogether …”

“You should tell them about our family,” said Polly.

“Oh, right,” said Anton. “Our family, the Parsecs, is pretty well off; most of us on the crew of the You-Know-What happen to be privileged rich kids their well-to-do families sent off to military school to get rid of us for one reason or another. Us Parsecs made our fortune from mining Mutanium—one of the rarest elements in the universe—and exporting it all over half the galaxy. Obviously, Mutanium is prized for its many time-travel and reality-altering properties, to say nothing of its applications in swallowing black holes …”

“I can see why Willard was so fascinated,” said Grandma Seedy.

“One day, our commanding officer—a particularly bad-tempered giraffe, Admiral Longnecker—summoned us all to his Command Post.

“‘I’m assigning you misfits to your own ship,’ he announced.

“‘Great,’ I said. ‘Anything to get out of the brig.’

“‘You won’t be so thrilled when you hear what your mission is,’ he said.

“He explained an errant Mutanium Particle has escaped from a shipment our family’s company was delivering to a star system near the Crab Nebula. The Particle somehow broke free from the cargo hold and shot clear to the other side of the galaxy—to your Earth, as it turned out. Since the Fleet couldn’t spare any of its first-class Starships on such a routine clean-up mission, the commander decided to send us instead. ‘It’s your family’s mess,’ he told us, ‘so you and your good-for-nothing friend might as well clean it up.’

“We were ordered to appear at the loading dock, where we found this runty little saucer,” said Anton, pointing to the green dome resting on its blue base. “Unchristened and unnamed, and hardly space-worthy at first glance. Although, I have to say, it’s proven itself …”

“Explain who George is,” Polly reminded him.

“Oh, yeah. George the Porpoise was one of our fellow cadets in the Astral Fleet Academy, a roly-poly Pantagruel type,” said Anton. “He had a few, um, issues, shall we say, with the rigorous discipline of military life—even more than we did. He was a maladjusted whack job, if I’m being completely honest about it. A weapons specialist, he was a crack shot, too. Unfortunately, whenever he went off his medications, he’d break into the laser arsenal and try to frag the officers, and generally cause mayhem. The alarm would sound, someone would cry out, ‘George has a gun!,’ and panic would ensue. We’d hit the deck, shelter in place, and keep our heads down until the Military Police had flushed him out of whatever sniper’s lair he had barricade himself, and cart him way to the brig.

“Well, just as we were about to christen the ship so we could get underway, it happened again. There we were, standing with the honor guard in their formal regalia, and the commanding office, Admiral Longnecker, saying, ‘I christen thee …’ and the cry goes up, ‘George has a gun!’ We all knew what that meant. We hit the deck, etc., etc. Well, after it was all over, Admiral Longnecker, who had a real bug up his ass about us anyway, and a real nasty streak, thought it would be funny to declare that to be the name of the ship. The Honor Guard summarily tossed us into the saucer, told us not to let the door hit us in the ass as we left, and shot us into deep space; we were on our way.

“The problem was, all during the voyage, any time any one of us said the name of our saucer, the George Has a Gun, everyone panicked, worried that maybe ol’ Georgie the Porpoise had somehow managed to stow away on the ship. We’ve never found him, although as you can see the fear persists.”

“Wow,” I said. “That is a really stupid origin story. You should tell that one at the Origin Legion next time you’re in Tudor City.”

***

We continued to watch the sight above us as the plasmic membrane contracted to only a few feet around the Cosmic Cue-Ball. The orb seemed docile now, resigned to its fate to be returned to the other side of the galaxy, after having caused so much havoc in our world. Polly and Anton stood ready by the frigid Absolute Zero Containment Unit, ready receive the captured Mutanium Particle and close the lid.

“If only we had the opportunity to study such a magnificent source of energy,” said my grandmother. “How much mankind could learn from the Cosmic Cue-Ball.”

“Alas, you lack the means of containing a Mutanium Particle on this backward little planet,” said Polly. “Your scientists have tried. But even surrounded as it with a coating of pure Extanium—which gives it its white, billiard-like appearance, it’s still too rambunctious an object.”

“That’s true,” I told my grandmother. “Rex Rigid tried to keep it isolated in my reality, and it still got away.”

“Just look at the mischief it’s created since 1940,” said Anton. “That may be only yesterday to us, but it split your reality into two disparate histories, which have probably multiplied into fifteen hundred by now. Just think of all the strife and disaster is has wrought. You’ll be glad to be finally rid of it.”

Just then, the oval opening of the Dimensional Doorway appeared over the driveway in front of the garage. On the opposite side of the yard, crackling dots of pure energy appeared, announcing the arrival of the Time Turntable.

“Uh-oh,” I said. “This Trick or Treat ain’t over!”