The answer, p.10
The Answer, page 10
They are your teacher, your pastor, your best friend. They are the police officer, the TV newsman, the soldier. Anyone.
Jake’s parents had recently been taken; they were human-Controllers — people controlled by Yeerks.
Jake’s brother Tom, my cousin, had been a Controller for a long time. He was a powerful Yeerk. Jake still cared for him, still hoped somehow he could be saved.
Jake had sent me away with Tom.
I understood. I approved. If Jake hadn’t sent me I’d have gone anyway.
Still, though, I was scared.
I had power myself. We all did. The strange, unsettling power to absorb DNA from any living creature, to then alter our physical bodies to become that creature.
I’ve been a whole zoo, you know. Everything from a fly to an elephant. Bat. Owl. I’ve flown, way up in the sky with eagle wings. I’ve flown up there with Tobias. Way up in the clouds. If there’s something better than that, well, I never found it.
It’s not magic. Just technology. Of course technology always seems like magic at first. Haul a tenth-century knight into the modern age and show him your cell phone or your TV or your computer or your car. Magic.
This technology came from the Andalites. The Andalites are enemies of the Yeerks, and I guess allies of ours, though right at the moment they were more likely to annihilate Earth than the Yeerks were. You know the old saying, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”
Anyway, it began with a chance meeting. An Andalite prince named Elfangor crashed his shot-up fighter in our path. Coincidence? No, history. And a helping hand from the Ellimist who of course never lends a helping hand.
Elfangor died, but not before he told us what was happening and gave us the morphing technology.
I’ve been a rat. A dolphin … oh, man, do they have fun. That rush when you’re zooming straight up through the water, when you see the ripply surface of the sea, when you blow through that barrier and soar through the air … And then, splash! And do it all over again.
So, anyway, we decided we had to try and stop the Yeerks. Jake and Tobias and Cassie and Marco and Ax, who is Elfangor’s little brother, and me. We lived this secret life. We fought and mostly lost, but we survived. We frustrated the Yeerks. We ruined Visser Three’s life, though he still managed to be promoted to Visser One.
Maybe we did too good a job frustrating the visser. The Yeerks grew tired of infiltration. Visser One had been craving open war. And when we blew up their ground-based Yeerk pool, the source of their food, the center of their lives, it was gloves off.
So much the better as far as I was concerned. The time had come to settle things.
The Yeerks obliterated our town to create a dead zone around their construction of a new Yeerk pool. They were in a hurry. Without a functioning pool they were getting hungry.
But there was a worm gnawing at the Yeerk race. They had acquired morphing technology themselves — in part because of what Jake thought was Cassie’s betrayal.
Cassie sees further than I do. Further than any of us. She sees deep. The girl cannot dress or accessorize to save her life, she’s a girl who wears manure-stained Wal-Mart jeans for crying out loud, but Cassie sees connections and possibilities that others don’t.
She let Tom take the morphing cube. And that changed everything. Some Yeerks began to see a way out of their parasitic lives. The hunger-crazed Taxxons — a race held captive by the Yeerks — began to dream of a life without their Yeerk overlords. A revolution was brewing.
At the same time, the Andalite fleet was closing in, ready to obliterate Earth as the only way to stop the Yeerk infestation. They had watched the Yeerks concentrate their forces on Earth. They were ready to bring down the curtain: Obliterate Earth and the Yeerk Empire would be gutted.
Too bad about those creatures who got in the way. What were they called? Oh yeah, humans.
But Tom betrayed his visser, betrayed the Yeerk race. Not for the sake of poor old humanity, but for his own ambition. He would escape with the morphing cube and with a hard core of faithful Yeerk supporters. He would abandon the Yeerk people to the Andalite vengeance, destroy the hated Animorphs, and if H. sapiens was annihilated, too, well …
That’s where Jake saw his chance. Tom’s Yeerk is smart. Jake is smarter.
Now Jake and the others had control of the Yeerk Pool ship. Tom had control of the visser’s own personal Blade ship.
Tom — the Yeerk in Tom’s head — was closing in for his final act of betrayal: He would kill his master, Visser One, and doom his fellow Yeerks. He thought we were already dead.
Surprise, Tom.
My favorite morph was the grizzly bear. Seven feet tall standing erect. You cannot imagine the power, especially when united with human intelligence and knowledge. Compared to my grizzly morph a human being is like something made out of glued-together Popsicle sticks.
How many times have I felt that change as muscle piles on muscle, as the thick brown fur covers me, as the rail spike claws grow from my fingers?
The grizzly bear and I had been through a lot together.
I would go to grizzly to kill Tom.
About the Author
The Animorphs series, written by Katherine (K. A.) Applegate with her husband, Michael Grant, has sold millions of copies worldwide, and alerted the world to the presence of the Yeerks. Katherine and Michael are also the authors of the bestselling Remnants and Everworld series. On her own, Katherine is the author of Home of the Brave, Crenshaw, Wishtree, and the Newbery Medal–winning The One and Only Ivan. Michael is the author of the Gone and Front Lines series.
The invasion has begun.
Catch up on Newbery Medal–winner K. A. Applegate’s world-conquering series.
#1: The Invasion
#2: The Visitor
#3: The Encounter
#4: The Message
#5: The Predator
#6: The Capture
#7: The Stranger
#8: The Alien
#9: The Secret
#10: The Android
#11: The Forgotten
#12: The Reaction
#13: The Change
#14: The Unknown
#15: The Escape
#16: The Warning
#17: The Underground
#18: The Decision
#19: The Departure
#20: The Discovery
#21: The Threat
#22: The Solution
#23: The Pretender
#24: The Suspicion
#25: The Extreme
#26: The Attack
#27: The Exposed
#28: The Experiment
#29: The Sickness
#30: The Reunion
#31: The Conspiracy
#32: The Separation
#33: The Illusion
#34: The Prophecy
#35: The Proposal
#36: The Mutation
#37: The Weakness
#38: The Arrival
#39: The Hidden
#40: The Other
#41: The Familiar
#42: The Journey
#43: The Test
#44: The Unexpected
#45: The Revelation
#46: The Deception
#47: The Resistance
#48: The Return
#49: The Diversion
#50: The Ultimate
#51: The Absolute
#52: The Sacrifice
#53: The Answer
#54: The Beginning
Text copyright © 2001 by Katherine Applegate
Cover illustration by David B. Mattingly
Art Direction/Design by Karen Hudson/Ursula Albano
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, ANIMORPHS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
e-ISBN 978-1-338-21785-8
First edition, May 2001
K. A. Applegate, The Answer
