Go Big or Go Home by Will Hobbs Page A

extraterrestrial disease. Those thirty-four Mars rocks I’ve told you about, shaved into many pieces in some cases, have been handled endlessly in labs and gem shows. Nothing’s ever happened.”
    â€œBet you anything,” Quinn said with a glance in my direction, “Fred’s bugs turn out to be the good kind, like the ones in our guts that help us digest food. They might, like, affect our muscles and make them stronger.”
    â€œWouldn’t that be marvelous,” the professor agreed.
    A few minutes later we were back at the bike rack in front of the museum. “I admit it,” I said before Quinn could beat me to the punch. “I was too chicken to bring up losing Fred.”
    â€œGood thing. The news might’ve killed the professor. No meteorite, no Nobel Prize. Tell him sometime later. Here’s what I want to know—did you ever spit on Fred?”
    â€œI don’t think so…Let me think. Oh yeah, sort of.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘sort of’?”
    â€œThat morning you got here, I woke up with Fred against the side of my face, at the corner of my mouth. I was drooling all over him, actually.”
    â€œWell, that explains it. Not only did you drool on Fred and activate the microbes, you even got the microbes in your mouth. Makes me wish I’d chewed on Fred instead of only handling him. Now we have to hope the Carvers don’t drag him up and catch his bugs.”
    â€œThat doesn’t sound very likely.”
    â€œCan you imagine what they’d be like on the football field all juiced with bacterial Martians? How many guys would they kill in their first game?”

17
Boldness or Folly?
    I T WAS NEARLY SIX by the time we reached home, and I was expecting my dad to be back from work. His pickup wasn’t around, but Uncle Jake’s Harley was parked out front. We went inside to see what that was all about.
    We found a note. The two of them had taken off for western Wyoming. They’d gone over there so my father could check out the area around the Jonah gas field where Uncle Jake was looking at working. I asked Quinn where exactly that was. “Fifty miles past nowhere” was all he would say.
    The note said they’d be away for two nights, possibly three if Uncle Jake decided to go ahead and move the household stuff from Lead to the trailer he’d rented on the July trip with Quinn. My dad said he thought thetwo of us could fend for ourselves for a few days.
    I got a large pizza out of the freezer and heated it up. Quinn noticed an empty to-go cup from Grabba Java. He wondered if his dad had mustered the courage to go back to Maggie’s window. It came out kind of sour instead of as a joke. His mind was on Wyoming, on leaving the Black Hills. He’d just found out it was almost a sure thing, and he was sick about it. I knew he didn’t want to talk about it, not now.
    As we were devouring the pizza, I asked Quinn if he wanted to play some one-on-one. “Nah,” he said. “Maybe another time.”
    It wasn’t like he meant anything by it, but this hurt. Quinn was always up for shooting hoops, and he was at his best when he was taking out his frustration about something or other.
    Duh, I realized, no wonder he doesn’t want to play. He was picturing me running circles around him and dunking. I could try to make a joke and say I’d go easy on him. Right now, he wouldn’t think that was very funny.
    I got up and put away the plates. “Another time, sure,” I said from the sink. “It’s been a long day. What are you up for?”
    â€œVideo games, I guess. Maybe some TV.”
    We played Snowboarding for the Insane, then Skateboarding for the Insane. He’d given them to me, one for Christmas and the other for my birthday. With Quinn’s lightning-fast reflexes, he’d always had the edgewhen it came to video games, and that’s the way it went for an hour or