Free There's a Spaceship in My Tree! by Robert West

with all the scientific equipment planted around it, the web looked more like a web Darth Vader built. Toss out the web and combine the windows into a view screen, and the attic might look like the bridge of a starship. The web was awesome. Glowing golden-yellow in the evening light, it cast a huge shadow across one whole side of the attic, including Beamer’s face. It made him feel very uneasy, and he kept wiping his face, trying to rub off the web that wasn’t really there.
    The mystery of the web was growing almost every day. Its silk threads were thicker than those in normal webs, and they were enormously strong. The big question, of course, was What or Who built it? One entomologist thought some mad scientist had created it for a weird experiment. All the rest were sticking to the mutant-spider theory. Their research had led them to agree on only one thing — that the web had been built a long time ago — maybe eighty or ninety years ago. That made the chances of either the mad scientist or the mutant still being alive pretty remote . . . although the word mutant suggested all sorts of possibilities. Beamer also wondered why nobody had reported the web until now. Hadn’t anybody used the attic before Beamer’s family moved in?
    New mysteries were always popping up too. Beamer had heard a scientist — the one his sister had a crush on — say that he’d detected a faint electro . . . something . . . field around the web. Whoever heard of an electric cobweb?
    The shadow of the web on Beamer’s face made him anxious to leave. But before he left, he scanned the room for any sign of wreckage from the cat. He sighed in relief when he saw that the only thing broken was a soda bottle. He picked up as many pieces as he could and deposited them up next to the wall.
    Parker’s Castle was framed through one of the front windows. He couldn’t see anyone in the tower, but he knew she was there. He’d seen her there often enough, usually after dark when the lights were on and he could see her shadow silhouetted in the window.
    He looked the other direction — out the back window. There was the tree ship. He walked over to the window, opened it, and stepped out onto the roof. He then scooted down the shingles, swung onto a large tree branch, and made his way to the tree ship.
    It was very quiet at the moment — hardly a breeze — with only a few insect noises. As Beamer looked at the ship, he could see how much progress they’d already made in fixing it up. Scilla had been replacing the broken chairs with her grandma’s garage-sale rejects.
    Beamer, meanwhile, had been working on the problem of, well, beaming. Let’s face it, as things stood now, getting into the tree ship was a major chore. Molecular dematerialization was a little beyond him at this point, but he had some ideas.
    One glance at Beamer trying to stretch an extension cord to the tree had already persuaded Dr. Mac to string heavy-duty electrical conduit from the attic to the tree ship. She even went so far as to suspend a huge fishing net beneath the tree to catch anyone who might miss a step.
    The observation screen was Ghoulie’s project. “On-screen” wasn’t going to mean quite what it did on Star Trek , but it wasn’t going to be half bad for seventh-grade engineering. Anyway, it would become real enough when their brains warped into full-blown Star-Fighter mode. Yep, that’s what the ship told them they were — Star-Fighters.
    â€œHey!”
    Beamer turned to see Scilla’s face upside down in a window. No sooner had they started working on their respective fix-up operations than they heard another voice: “Hello up there,” Ghoulie called.
    Ghoulie had brought one of his dad’s old video cameras to hang beneath the ship, and, considering that Ghoulie’s dad always snatched up the latest high-tech upgrades, “old” meant last July’s