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  “So could we talk about my mom again?” she asked. “About telling her?”

  The Big Cheese made a sign that could have meant either “Sure, sure” or “Don’t bother me with that now”—the two front paws flapping without much conviction. Plainly, that wouldn’t be the main focus of the meeting. So what would?

  Sir Quentin closed his eyes as he translated the paw-flap into a speech beginning: “With regard to the possibility of enlightening the female parent,” and the humans saw something that sent cold shivers down the backs of their necks, even in this heat.

  As Trey whispered the translation behind Sir Quentin’s back, the Big Cheese was saying something none had expected: “If you don’t come, we may all die.”

  hen the videoconference was over that Friday, the four humans in Cleveland sat in silence for a minute, gazing at each other. Julia had jumped onto Megan’s lap for comfort.

  Was she trembling? Megan could understand how she must feel. Mice thought of the Big Cheese as all-powerful, and they liked it that way. Any crack in that armor would shake them deeply, and today he had seemed like one scared mouse.

  Megan looked over at Trey, who shrugged.

  “Don’t ask me,” he said. “No idea what’s happening. No clue.”

  “Could you e-mail some friends?” asked Jake.

  “No way,” said Trey. “You know how fast rumors get around in human society? For mice, it’s twice the speed. Wouldn’t be good.”

  “But we have to find out what the problem is,” said Uncle Fred.

  “Hey, maybe there’s an earthquake coming,” said Joey. “California—that’s big earthquake country. And animals get some warning, don’t they?”

  “If they do, it’s probably only a couple of hours at most,” said Jake. “Not days.”

  “Maybe the building’s going to be torn down,” Megan speculated, remembering her visit to Headquarters the year before. “It’s sort of old.”

  “But why would that be such a secret?” wondered Jake.

  “We have to go there to find out,” said Uncle Fred, with a sigh. “We don’t have a choice.”

  “I think we should both go, Fred,” said Jake. “My guess is if it’s just mice he’s scared of, the Big Cheese could cope by himself. This must be bigger. Must involve humans in some way.”

  “Can’t we all go?” asked Megan.

  “Not really worth it,” said Jake. “It’ll be just a couple of days. You can both stay in my house and I’ll get Cathy to move in and look after you. Okay? Then you guys can keep the factory going.”

  Cathy. The nice woman who cleaned his house. A babysitter.

  “But, Dad,” said Joey, “I might have a game on Monday.”

  “Ah yes,” said Jake. “Monday. The little matter of baseball.”

  “No way you can miss that game, Jake,” said Uncle Fred. “If Joey wins tomorrow, you have to go to the game on Monday. Then Megan could come with me. Right, Meg? You know your way around Headquarters!”

  Well, yes, but that was when the Big Cheese was firmly in control. Not when his whole nation, his whole world seemed to be collapsing.

  It was impossible to decide anything, of course, until Joey sorted out his “if/then” problem.

  If his team won tomorrow, and if he and Jake went off to the next game on the road to the Little League World Series, then Megan and Uncle Fred would fly out to California.

  And if the team lost tomorrow, then Megan and Joey would be stuck in Cleveland with a babysitter, while the two men went off on their adventure.

  Some choice. Joey had to win.

  They all went to Joey’s game the next afternoon, which was a great way to stop worrying about Headquarters.

  Curly and Larry never missed a game, of course. Jake had bought a hat with a tall crown, and he’d sewn two little hammocks into it so the mice could watch in comfort through the hat’s eyelet holes.

  Trey and Julia weren’t normally crazy about baseball, but they couldn’t miss this game, and watched it through little holes Megan had made in a pocket of her backpack.

  Uncle Fred wasn’t crazy about baseball either—college football was his passion. But that afternoon he got so involved that he kept leaping to his feet, to the great annoyance of the people behind him, because at his full height, Uncle Fred could blot out the sky.

  For the first five innings the game was close, and Joey’s team even fell behind by one run. Then, with two out in the last inning, Joey himself sent a double screaming past the third baseman to knock in two runs for the win.

  Joey ended up under a pile of boys near home plate while everyone in Megan’s section leaped to their feet and chanted “Jo-ey, Jo-ey,” while Megan held her backpack high, and didn’t care what people thought about it.

  And the hat danced.

  “I’m so sorry I’ll miss Headquarters,” said Jake later that night as they celebrated at a Chinese restaurant, one that didn’t mind if a cageful of mice had a chair to itself, with occasional pieces of noodle passing through the bars.

  But Jake had a huge grin as he said it, so you could tell just how sorry he was that Joey’s team would get to play at least one more game.

  “I’m relying on you to look after your uncle, Megan,” he said.

  Megan guessed he was only half joking. Uncle Fred was a very smart guy, and if you put him in a garage with a bunch of tiny electronic parts, he could invent anything. And he was so big that when she was with him, she felt nothing terrible could happen to her. But he was not the most practical of humans, and if his mind was fixed on a new invention or something, he could seem terminally goofy.

  “He’s not safe out!” her mom had exploded once, when she’d asked her brother to return a book to the library and drop off some shirts at the dry cleaner’s. He was thinking so hard about a new way to fasten a Thumbtop to a key ring that he’d pushed the clothes through the “return” slot at the library and hadn’t realized his mistake until the dry cleaner told him she didn’t clean books.

  “Don’t worry,” Megan said now, reaching out to pat her uncle’s hand. “We’ll be fine.”

  Right.

  There was one problem: what to do with the factory? Yes, the mice ran the assembly lines more or less by themselves, day and night, but there was always a panic button they could push if they had to send an alarm to a human cell phone.

  True, no one had ever pushed the button, but if those phones were miles away when an emergency struck, who knew what could happen?

  “We’d better stop the line for a couple of days,” said Uncle Fred. “Give the workers a vacation.”

  “Do mice even take vacations?” wondered Jake as he reached out his chopsticks for the last piece of sweet-and-sour pork.

  Joey had the dreamy look that meant his imagination was coming uncorked. “These guys can be the first. We could put some sand in a corner of the factory with those little umbrellas that people stick in drinks, maybe get a sunlamp and a big dish of water for them to wade in.”

  “You think?” said Jake, laughing.

  “Listen to this,” said Megan. She’d used the toothpick she always carried to click on her Thumbtop, and brought up Whiskerpedia, the site where mice first look for answers to their questions. Peering through the magnifying glass that she wore around her neck, she read the entry under “Vacation.”

  Vacation

  A period of enforced boredom and idleness. Humans pretend to enjoy “vacations,” in which they roast their skin in the sun, travel to countries where the food upsets their digestion, immerse themselves in water until their pelt wrinkles, or inflict pain on their bodies with unaccustomed exercise.

  “Fred, you want to tell them we’re sentencing them to a vacation?” asked Jake.

  “Let’s give them a job instead,” said Megan. “A different kind of job.”

  “Like what?” asked Joey.

  Megan thought fast, and it came to her.

  “Remember that idea my mom had, the week before she went to Green St
ars?”

  Jake nodded. “Sure. She was planning something for kids, like maybe a book on how climate change affects animals.”

  “Well, maybe the workers could do some of that research,” said Megan. “And it could be sort of a gift for my mom, whenever the Big Cheese says we can tell her the truth.”

  “Works for me,” said Jake. “‘Welcome to our world, Susie, and here’s everything you need for that book.’”

  So it was decided. That evening, the four humans made a surprise visit to the factory to give the workers their urgent new task, one that would require them to use their brains rather than their paw-eye coordination.

  The workforce would be divided into four teams, for mammals, birds, sea creatures, and insects. Each team would have access to four Thumbtops, and would use them to research the most endangered creatures they could find, digging up facts about their habitats, food and life cycles, and how these might be affected by climate change.

  True, each individual mouse might have to wait a while for his or her turn at a Thumbtop. But at least it was just waiting. Not a dreaded vacation.

  Early on Sunday morning, Jake and Joey dropped Uncle Fred and Megan at the airport. It took a while for all the good-byes because Curly and Larry were going off with Joey for his big game. Julia had always longed to see Headquarters, and would fly west with Megan even though that meant being separated from her clanmates for the longest time ever.

  Trey looked on impatiently as the farewell huddle went on. And on. And on. Yes, yes, yes, those three were tied together by a powerful clan bond that meant they could never feel quite complete when they were apart for more than an hour or two. Trey envied them in a way, because the bond with his own clan had been broken early in life, when he’d been whisked away to the Talking Academy as a very young mouse. True, he’d found a clan of sorts there; he’d bonded with the other students. But that bond was nothing like this, which required five minutes of good-byes before Uncle Fred and Megan could check in for their flight.

  And there were more delays at the check-in desk because there was no way—make that NO WAY—Megan could take those two mice on board; not in that cage, where all the passengers could see them and freak out because they looked like verm… They didn’t even look like pets.

  Uncle Fred had to buy the smallest animal carrier in the airport shop, one that was meant for cats. And Megan had to admit that it had its advantages. First, it was quite entertaining when people peered through the carrier’s little mesh window with a, “Hey, kitty, kitty, kitty, EEEK!”

  Second, this carrier was much more comfortable for mice than the old cage, which Uncle Fred stuffed into the overhead compartment.

  And third, when the mice wanted to see out, Megan didn’t have to unleash her braids so they could hide behind her hair, as she’d done on previous flights. Now she could just hold the carrier up to the window, and they all looked down together, checking for signs of climate damage.

  Actually, America looked normal from here. The massive snows of last winter had melted, and the massive floods of spring had receded. While some forests had burned up in the heat last year, others still looked green, and in this part of the continent, at least, farmlands looked fertile.

  “It’s okay,” Megan whispered. “I think you can save it.”

  Depending on what was really happening at Headquarters. Could it be something that threatened the very existence of the Mouse Nation? And with it, Operation Cool It? And with Operation Cool It, the planet?

  egan had been dozing when something leaned over and squashed her against the plane’s window: a large uncle who’d noticed that they were flying over mountains, and wanted a better look.

  There was a map of America on his knees, and now he pointed to it and said, “I think your mom’s right down there, or maybe a couple of valleys over.”

  You couldn’t see much from up here, of course. They were too high over the Rockies to pick out anything that might be summer camps tucked into the woods. But what you could get from up here, Megan found, was guilt. How could she have forgotten, even in the excitement of packing and leaving, that today was Sunday? That her mom would have driven far out of her valley to a place where cell phones worked so she could make her only weekly call? To her only daughter?

  Megan couldn’t wait to get to San Francisco, hoping her mom would linger outside the valley today, waiting.

  But she didn’t.

  Megan turned on her phone as the plane taxied to the gate, and all she could get out of it was a voice mail that (if she’d been a mouse) would have shriveled her whiskers or put a kink in her tail, big time.

  “Hey, where are you?” said her mom. “I’m really mad at you for leaving your phone off! Didn’t we agree that you’d keep it on every Sunday? It’s just one day a week, kiddo—is that too much for you to remember? Can’t hang around here all day—I’ll send you an e-mail before I go back to camp.”

  Megan felt herself going red, because that’s what happened when she felt guilty or mad, and now she felt both, though the mad part was at herself.

  Uncle Fred gave her a hug. “Let’s wait till we see what’s in her e-mail,” he said. “Then you can send her a voice mail. Even if she won’t get it till next Sunday, it’ll show you tried.”

  “But what can I tell her?” Megan asked. Not the truth, for sure.

  “Tell her you’ll explain next Sunday,” he said. “Hey, maybe by then you can tell her the truth! Maybe you’ll have permission.”

  Yes, that was a thought to hold on to.

  Deep in Silicon Valley, the Big Cheese had spent this weekend pretending that Headquarters was getting ready for a normal meeting, under normal circumstances, following the normal rules of mouse protocol. And as part of that preparation, he was choosing the official interpreter for the meeting.

  Sir Quentin had been first to try out.

  “I am familiar with the necessity for dignity,” he began. “It is such an enduring honor to be engaged in this bi-species enterprise, this fruitful collaboration.…”

  The Big Cheese let him rumble on for a couple of sentences, then thanked him and called for Savannah–Talking Mouse Seven. When she’d arrived at Headquarters a couple of months ago, he had been secretly amused by her antics. At least she was different, sashaying around on her hind feet with a pink bow pasted to her head! True, since he’d sent out that memo she’d been mostly back on all fours. And according to her performance evaluations, she was working harder at her job in the Training Department, helping young mice to understand human speech.

  But now, at the prospect of meeting humans, she’d reverted to her old ways, walking on her hind legs with an extra swivel to the hips. As she stopped in front of her boss, she reached up with one paw to tweak the pink bow.

  “Like, I talk modern?” she said. “Like a real human? From, you know, totally this century? I’ll be all, ‘Hi, guys! My name is Savannah and I’ll be your spokesmouse for today!’”

  She looked at the Big Cheese sideways as if expecting applause—but all she got was a deep sigh of disapproval. Hadn’t she learned to behave like a mouse after all? Did she have no sense of dignity? No sense of occasion?

  “If there is one thing we need, small as we are,” he said, “it is gravitas. Heft. We cannot let our guests of honor think we are a bunch of…of flibbertigibbets. Talking Mouse Five will be the interpreter on this occasion.”

  “Aw!” said Savannah, coming down onto all fours. “Anytime you want a flibberti…what you said, I’ll be your mouse, okay?”

  The Big Cheese sighed again as the two mice left, then went on to the next part of his preparations: hearing the ceremonial song from the Youth Chorus. The young mice shuffled in and, at a signal from the Master of Mouse Music, lurched into their signs. But they didn’t have it quite right. Instead of:

  Welcome, dear humans!

  a couple of mice made the signs for:

  Hi there, clunky mammals!

  And when the words were meant to go:
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  Your factory for Thumbtops

  Is cooling the earth!

  someone signed:

  Your factory for Thumbtops

  Is making planet ice cream!

  “They’ll know their words tomorrow,” said the Master of Music. “I guarantee it.”

  And he was surprised that the boss didn’t seem too upset. In fact he’d hardly seemed to be watching, as if something much weightier than song was pressing on his brain.

  Uncle Fred aimed the rented Prius southward on the freeway that led to Silicon Valley, and for the first twenty miles it was way too scary for Megan to even think about reading the e-mail from her mom.

  As she knew all too well, freeways and Uncle Fred were not a good mix.

  “I don’t know what it is with Fred and cars,” her mom had said. “He understands mechanical things, so you’d think he’d be a good driver.”

  You’d think wrong. Uncle Fred liked his mechanical things very, very small. He and cars did not get along. He only drove when he had to, and on this freeway he stayed in the slow lane, lurching from one side of it to the other, leaning forward and gripping the wheel in both hands while trucks roared past.

  They were more than halfway to Silicon Valley before he made peace with the Prius, and Megan felt relaxed enough to click on the e-mail from her mom. She read it aloud:

  Subject: Grrrrr

  Hey, I’ve calmed down a bit since I left you that voice mail. But next Sunday…

  If you’d answered your phone we could have talked about the new campers who arrived yesterday. I told you Daisy Dakota was coming, didn’t I?

  Megan broke off her reading. “Remember her, Uncle Fred? In Island Princess? Daisy Dakota—she must be just about the most famous teenager on the planet!”

  Megan went back to her reading:

  Daisy is SO much smarter than people think, which is great because every kid in America will follow her lead. Oh yes, and Rocky Stone’s here. I guess Joey’s a fan of his. Great action hero.