| #43: The Test |
Detailed Plot: A deaf boy named Bobby is lost in the woods and a bad storm is about to start. Tobias flies around in the forest mulling over what he's become since his capture and torture at the hands of the Yeerks (specifically, human-Controller Taylor) in a previous book. Despite the fact that his friends are expecting him, Tobias decides to try to play hero, and finds the boy in a sinkhole. He thought-speaks to him and tells him help is on the way, then goes off to find help because he doesn't think he has a morph that can help Bobby. He finds the search party and Bobby's dad, and thought-speaks to him too, leading him to his son. Rangers rescue him and the family is reunited, and Tobias flies off feeling he's done something wonderful. That is, until he gets smashed by a golden eagle and loses consciousness. He wakes up in a cage at a clinic where the people are calling him "Superbird" and know he's the hawk that led Bobby's dad to him. He flips out because he knows the Yeerks will probably be very interested in the newspaper headlines about a mysterious rescue hawk, but he can't morph because there are cameras in the clinic. After the employees leave, Hork-Bajir burst in and try to get him. Tobias doesn't have time to morph before a Hork-Bajir takes his cage, chortling about how he's going to be praised by Visser Three. Then out in the hall human-Controllers attack the Hork-Bajir and they start fighting over him. Tobias doesn't know who to root for. Tobias's cage gets smashed around while the two groups fight each other, but then Animorphs arrive! Rachel assures Tobias that they've got it covered, but the battle is difficult and Tobias ends up being picked up and stolen by . . . Taylor, his old torturer. He has the presence of mind to grab her hand and acquire her DNA while she's gassing him, and though he gets his prize, she succeeds in knocking him out. When he comes to, Taylor has taken him to some seedy trailer, where Dracon beams are aimed at him inside the cage. Taylor tells him if he morphs they will be triggered to shoot him. Then she tells him that civil war is coming among the Yeerks and that she needs his help. She says there's a group of them that despises the stupid in-fighting amongst the vissers and how the Council runs things, and that they're sick of dealing with setback after setback. They want the Andalites and the humans to help them set up a democratic Yeerk society and Taylor is willing to let Tobias go to prove that she wants to be on equal terms. She gives him a Web address to contact her at, tells him to talk it over with his friends, and lets him go. After morphing and demorphing to heal his injuries and then checking to make sure he isn't marked with a tracking device, Tobias contacts his friends and they meet in Cassie's barn. Most of the others don't want to trust that Taylor is telling the truth, but Cassie thinks it could be true since Yeerks have had changes of heart before, and Tobias is left to make the decision since he knows the most about Taylor. They end up using Ax's refurbished laptop computer to pull up the Web address Taylor gave Tobias, and they use the message box to reply "Okay, we'll play." In an hour or so, she replies with instructions about meeting her at Borders so they can attack the Yeerk pool. They obviously have to use human morphs, but who should go? Tobias decides to use his morph of Taylor herself. And of course since the morph uses DNA to create itself, he doesn't have the problems the real Taylor has--namely, the fake limbs and reconstructed face that she sports now that she's recovered from a fire. He's actually more beautiful than the real Taylor, which throws her off-guard. She wants to know how he acquired her morph if he did it while actually in hawk form, but he just tells her they have scientists too. The two Taylors have coffee drinks together and discuss the plan. Taylor wants the Andalite bandits to burrow into the Yeerk pool using Taxxon morphs, which will allow for a pipeline of natural gas to be inserted into the pool to kill everyone down there. (That includes the hosts.) Taylor hopes to use this major catastrophe to enslave any Yeerks loyal to the Empire because they will need to get Kandrona rays somewhere. But during the discussion of the plan, Tobias gets a rare glimpse of the real Taylor--the host--who wrests control just long enough to beg Tobias not to listen to her Yeerk. That makes everything even more fishy. Obviously Tobias and his friends don't want anyone to kill all the hosts down in the pool, but Tobias has to play it cool and pretend he's kind of impressed with Taylor's ruthlessness. They establish that if the Andalites are in, they'll show up at the natural gas facility that night, and if not, they don't. Rachel's okay with the idea of becoming a Taxxon, though Marco hates the idea. But a Taxxon's hunger is hard to deal with, which is supposedly why Taylor didn't ask any of the Yeerks she knows with Taxxon hosts; they're unpredictable after they've been dealing with a Taxxon mind for very long. While Tobias and his friends discuss the issue at the mall food court, they argue about whether it's right to destroy the pool when it contains possibly thousands of innocent people and also Yeerks who might be in the peace movement. Cassie argues that it'd be like bombing a food court at the mall, and though Jake thinks casualties have to be accepted to make strides in a war, Cassie just can't face it and decides to sit the mission out. Tobias will be on his own trying to figure out what Taylor really wants. Ax and Tobias meet Taylor at the natural gas facility and are shown where to go to get their Taxxon morph. Down into a cellar they go, where the Taxxon surprises them and attacks Tobias. Ax manages to wound the Taxxon and they both acquire him before he dies. Tobias has a weird reaction to the Taxxon DNA--he feels like it means he's absorbed something fierce and unnatural. Jake does some last-minute negotiation with Taylor by e-mail and tells her not to show up before 8 AM, and she agrees while seeming awfully eager. When they get to the site, Tobias is told to be the first to try the Taxxon morph, which he does after dropping into the tunnel where they're supposed to dig. He was prepared to endure rabid hunger, but it's worse than he thought, and he finds himself trying to get to the surface to eat his friends. He does manage to stop himself from doing so, but he doesn't really have control of the morph. He focuses his energy on digging in the dirt to make a tunnel like he's supposed to, eating and excreting the dirt, and then when it's time for him to come out he again has trouble stopping himself from eating people. Taylor is there and has her Dracon beam, and mixed with his hatred for her and his desire to eat, Tobias loses his judgment and tries to eat Taylor. Taylor had promised not to fire her Dracon beam on a setting above 3, but she threatens Tobias with vaporizing level 6 and actually tries to administer it. She would have killed him if Ax hadn't modified her weapon to be unable to fire at above 3. Next is Ax's turn in the tunnel. He doesn't have the trouble Tobias did because he triggered Taxxon hibernation and suppressed his urges to eat his friends. Then he digs like he's supposed to, and Tobias and Rachel have a little chat. She actually finds herself worrying about the human and Hork-Bajir hosts who are going to get caught in the crossfire on this mission, and Tobias just says they're Yeerks and they need to die. They killed his father and sentenced him to life as an unloved bully magnet who turned into a fierce predator. He wants them dead. Ax has some trouble with his morph because he's eaten himself to exhaustion, and the others very nearly don't bring him back in time, but after he demorphs Tobias takes his turn again and finally makes it to the Yeerk pool, gnawing through the hard rock. He sees the various hosts--enslaved, temporarily free, or a third option he doesn't recognize; this group looks resolute and grim. He's surveying the scene when Taylor comes up next to him and paralyzes him with her weapon, then says she wants to talk to him. She's paralyzed his friends too. She says she wants him to be her host and help co-found a new Yeerk society. He rejects her after saying she wouldn't be able to give him freedom and happiness, knowing that being able to make decisions is important whether it's for better or for worse. Taylor responds by running back down the tunnel toward his friends, and he tries to warn them. They can't shake off the paralysis fast enough to stop her, and she makes it to the gas pipe and threatens to blow a hole in it. Tobias reminds her that she was supposed to give them twenty minutes to get away, and she thinks it's funny that they believed her. Tobias pretends to still believe her, and says she'll die too if she does that, but she claims she won't; Taylor's skull is reinforced from her reconstructive surgery, so the body might burn up but the Yeerk won't. And Taylor isn't bluffing. She rips a hole in the pipe with her weapon and gas comes barreling out, pushing all of the Animorphs down the tunnel. Tobias is able to use his many Taxxon legs to slow their forward momentum and keeps his friends from flying into the Yeerk pool, but they aren't able to breathe properly and it's only thanks to the fact that the gas stopped that they survived. Tobias pushes his friend back up the tunnel and resists eating them, barely, and they demorph. But who turned off the gas? They don't know. When they emerge, they find a bunch of human-Controllers having been in a battle of some kind, injured and sprawled around the gas station--and the gas station looks like it has been attacked by something big and fierce. What's happened? Tobias finds Cassie crying inside--she'd been the one to turn off the gas and hurt a bunch of people in the process--and though he knows she saved their lives and tells her it's okay, she feels it will never be okay. The next day, Rachel and Tobias fly out to the beach and discuss what they've learned. They figured out that the Yeerk peace movement folks were the ones whose hosts looked different than the others, and that they tend to feed at the same time so they can exchange information. Cassie had warned her Yeerk peace movement friends and found out that a bunch of them were in there, which forced her to battle human-Controllers and turn off the gas so they wouldn't be wiped out. Visser Three and Taylor had been in cahoots, trying to destroy both the Andalite bandits and the peace movement while trying to make it look like the peace movement Yeerks engineered an attack on the pool. Tobias doesn't know if Taylor survived. He hopes one day that the girl Taylor will be free of her Yeerk. Narrator: Tobias New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: None Marco: None Rachel: None Ax: Taxxon Tobias: Human (Taylor), Taxxon Notable: This book is ghostwritten by Ellen Geroux. Tobias is trying to rescue little Bobby, but has to go for help because he "doesn't have a morph that can haul Bobby out of there." Tobias's large land morphs include a polar bear, a horse, and a bull, not to mention his own human self; "I don't have a morph for that" seems like a poor excuse. When Tobias is imprisoned after getting injured, he claims he can't morph even though the Yeerks might come and get him, because there are video cameras recording him. After the humans left, it would have been much more practical to morph into a fly and get out of the cage than it was to just sit and wait to be found. Tobias seems to be making a lot of stupid decisions in this book. This book incorrectly uses the term "jerry-rigged." The accepted terms are "jerry-built" or "jury-rigged." Something that's "jerry-built" is inexpertly thrown together and it's always an insulting term. "Jury-rigged" just means that you rather ingeniously thought of a temporary solution. This book again mentions "AOL," even though their fake version of AOL in a previous book was called "Web Access America." In this book they say that Taxxons are only given as hosts to low-ranking Yeerks, because their insane hunger is very hard to master. But in a previous book, it's established that two of the Council members--the highest-ranking Yeerks in existence--have Taxxon hosts (albeit Taxxon hosts who are fed scraps of meat nearly constantly). Two new Andalite terms are introduced in this book: unschweet, which is a process of cutting an Andalite's fur as a dishonor, and notallssith, which means being unable to control a morph. It's been said in other books that sometimes Yeerks try to escape a dying host's head "before the death reaches them." And yet in this book Taylor suggests she will survive if she crouches inside the skull of her host inside a reinforced metal shell. It seems like if the host dies, she should die too regardless of whether the Yeerk's physical body is preserved--unless she disengages completely from the brain somehow, and that isn't specified. Best lines: Tobias: I didn't realize that torture doesn't end when you're freed. Tobias: Ever have something work out so perfectly, you feel you could fly? That's how I felt--and the cool thing was, I could actually do it. I could actually fly.
Taylor: "Good. It would be much harder to solicit help from an Andalite who's dead."
Barista: "Uh, what can I get you?"
Marco: "Well then, what am I waiting for? Sign me up! An army of cold, power-hungry Yeerks can't control the Taxxons. Not to worry. The short kid who got a B-minus in gym won't have any problems." Marco (when Ax in Taxxon morph won't move or answer): "It's a comprehensive system failure. Can't be fixed on-site. We'll have to haul this beauty back to the shop."
|