Part 3, Pages 290-426Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Attack of the Clones”
Part 3, Pages 290-327 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.
J.Lo finds a “Party Patrol” energy drink-branded car for them to take. J.Lo takes Tip to a half-lit tunnel under the junkyard to retrieve the teleporter. Tip explores a ladder that leads into a water tower and finds a flock of Boovish animals called koobish. J.Lo draws a comic about how Boov sent koobish into space during their early ventures. He guesses a capsule that was thought to have been destroyed was knocked off course, landing in the water tower.
They return to Chief’s UFO. Tip rips off the papier-mâché to reveal a real ship underneath. They use the six-foot fake energy drink from the Party Patrol car to store the teleporter and attach it to Slushious and then use parts of the Boov ship to repair Slushious. They leave a note for the Chief. About 80 miles out of town, they see the Gorg ship burning Roswell.
When they enter Arizona, they see human communities. J.Lo puts his ghost disguise back on. Two police officers take Tip to the station, where she explains Lucy’s abduction. J.Lo is still disguised as “JayJay.” They escort her to Flagstaff, where the Bureau of Missing Persons (BMP) is operating. She also registers Lucy’s name with the “Lost List,” a civilian-run word-of-mouth search.
In the evenings, Tip helps J.Lo repair the teleporter. J.Lo tries to find out what the Gorg added to give the Boov teleportation mechanics the ability to teleport complex matter. When he says they’d need a computer the size of a “small moon” to store information about how all the particles of the object are arranged, they think about the round purple ship that looks like a small moon. J.Lo hypothesizes that the Gorg created a skin barrier around a cloning satellite and pumped the air inside full of “electrical computer gas” to store data (315).
The next day, the Boov hold a meeting with humans. Captain Smek says human leaders met with Gorg yesterday, and the Gorg likely promised many things they will not deliver. They urge humans to band together with the Boov instead. A BMP worker named Mitch tells Tip that a human leader named Daniel Landry is negotiating with the Gorg.
Chief arrives in Flagstaff, and they go to his hospital room. He knows Tip is traveling with a Boov but won’t tell. He says everyone, including the koobish, escaped Roswell. He asks if they have the teleporter. They do, but they don’t know who to trust, since government men like Mitch seem to trust the Gorg. Chief says he’ll work with them once he’s out of the hospital.
For the next week, they do jobs around town for supplies, Tip reads books to J.Lo, and they talk to the Chief. He tells her about the Boov ship crashing in 1947. The pod hit a weather balloon and then ricocheted into his water tower. The government only found the weather balloon debris and publicized that story: No one believed Chief’s claims about the pod. On his own, he managed to fix the pod and take it into orbit once.
Part 3, Pages 327-365 Summary
In a newspaper, Tip finds a map of Arizona that shows how the state has been segregated by race, age, religion, and ethical beliefs since all humans moved there.
A man who works for the Lost List tells Tip they found Lucy living on a reservation near Tucson in Daniel Landry’s district. Tip and J.Lo leave immediately. As they approach the casino where Lucy should be, they see Gorg and Boov fighting.
Outside the casino, they see a girl who says Tip can see Lucy after leads a local meeting. Two armed guards want to take J.Lo’s sheet off and search them, but their demeanor changes when they hear who Tip’s mom is. Tip doesn’t think Lucy would be a community leader, so she is doubtful until she sees her. They hug and cry. Tip tells Lucy to pretend “JayJay” is her son.
Once they’re alone, Tip tells her J.Lo’s identity. Lucy is glad to see Pig but says she met with the Gorg last week, and they outlawed cats in Arizona. She quietly tells Tip she doesn’t want J.Lo to stay with them.
The next day, Lucy leaves for jury duty and says not to let anyone in. Someone claiming to be Lucy’s friend, Katherine Hoegaarden, wants to show them around. Tip denies her, but when Pig starts meowing, J.Lo puts on his sheet, and they leave to stop Mrs. Hoegaarden from inquiring. She shows them around and then leaves.
Tip tells J.Lo they can’t trust anyone. Lucy and Daniel Landry overhear them. Landry has Lucy translating for Mexican families even though she speaks Italian, not Spanish. Landry talks “like he was on TV” and looks around to see who hears him (360). When Tip says she wants to help get rid of the Gorg, he says “the Boov were the bigger problem” (361). Humans are working with the Gorg, who want to hold a festival for them.
When they leave, J.Lo says the Gorg will use the festival as an opportunity to round up, enslave, and kill humans, as they have to other species. In their room, he works on the teleporter. They want to tell someone about it, but Tip doesn’t totally trust Lucy unless they can convince Landry the Gorg are “bad news.” When Lucy returns, she tells Tip to be careful walking around with J.Lo. J.Lo stands up to Lucy, telling her what he learned about families and how brave Tip has been. This seems to win Lucy over.
Part 3, Pages 365-426 Summary
J.Lo wants to go with Tip to meet Landry, but she urges him to stay at the casino, as Gorg frequents Landry’s office. J.Lo seems sad. Near Landry’s office, Gorg inspect Slushious and sneeze around her again. Security lets Tip see Landry when they hear she’s Lucy’s child.
When Tip asks Landry if there is resistance to the Gorg, he says she should trust her leaders. He compares what the Gorg and Boov are willing to give him. He wants people to be “good and obedient” to the Gorg until they leave (373). He thinks the cloning abilities of the Gorg will soon stretch them too thin and their enterprise will implode. He dismisses Tip.
She goes back to the casino hotel and tells everything to J.Lo, who disagrees with Landry’s hypothesis. Tip thinks about how the quality of music degraded when she used to copy it onto a tape deck. She wonders if the same thing is happening with Gorg. When Tip expresses worry to Lucy about what will happen at the festival, Lucy tells Tip the Gorg are “bringing us the cure for cancer” (378).
As they talk, the Chief knocks on their door. Tip introduces him to Lucy. After dinner, the Chief tells Tip he’s going to look for people they can trust among his old Air Force friends and family on the reservation. He tells her to be wary of Landry.
The next day, the Boov seem like they will surrender, and the Gorg announce the festival will move up to tomorrow. Confused, Lucy goes to ask Landry about this. Tip cautiously asks J.Lo what he will do. Upon his prompting, she admits it would be harder without him around. He decides to stay, saying he wants to help his “family.”
Lucy returns, furious because she hasn’t been allowed to see Landry. They tell her about the teleporter. She sends Tip to recruit help, but when she gets downstairs, she sees Gorg looking for her by name. Mrs. Hoegaarden helps her get to safety. J.Lo is near Slushious with Pig and the teleporter. They hide the car and try to find Lucy, who the Gorg is holding inside. She told them she was Tip. The Gorg are holding her sneezes, just like they sneeze around Tip. They take off into the air with Lucy.
Tip realizes the Gorg are allergic to cats. She drives Slushious to a deserted town nearby. J.Lo connects the teleporter to the Gorg computers. They test clone items to make sure it works. Then, Tip walks through it to the nearest paired teleporter. She finds herself in Landry’s closet and hears him talking to a Gorg. Landry asks why the Gorg are after Tip, and they admit they took Lucy instead. They promise Landry the festival will go on, humans will be “sorted,” and he’ll be instated as a powerful leader.
Tip returns to J.Lo. Together, she, Pig, and J.Lo link the teleporter to the strongest signal, hoping it’s the Gorg headquarters. They emerge in a boys’ bathroom. A Gorg finds them, but Pig scratches him, and he has a gruesome allergic reaction. Tip shoves the Gorg through the teleporter to a distant state. While Tip explores and finds out they’re back in the Happy Mouse Kingdom, J.Lo discovers the Gorg are storing Lucy as data in their ship. They communicate via radios from Chief. Tip runs from the Gorg and encounters Christian, Curly, and the other boys. J.Lo clones Pig thousands of times, releasing them through teleporters everywhere. Tip and the boys return to J.Lo through a teleporter. The Gorg beg to leave, saying they are defeated, and J.Lo uses a teleporter to let them. He teleported Pig’s hair to their large round ship, causing it to react. He used a teleporter to reconstitute Lucy.
Hundreds of cats rub up against J.Lo, but only one goes to Tip, so she knows who the original Pig is. When they return to Tucson, they hear the tale Landry told: He drew upon an “ancient Gorg tradition” by challenging their leader to a duel, beat him, and banished the Gorg (420). Since they left, Tip heard of other communities who fought back across the globe. The Boov also decided to leave, as payment for humans defeating the Gorg. J.Lo stays with Tip, but she catches him looking up at space sometimes.
Tip never tells anyone about her role in what happened because she sees the havoc fame brings upon Landry’s life. In the narrative present, a news clipping says Tip died at 113, survived by her husband, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and a Boov. Her time capsule is unveiled. A picture on the novel’s final page shows a family picture from 2015, with Tip, Lucy, and J.Lo.
Part 3, Pages 290-426 Analysis
In the latter half of Part 3, Tip recounts how she and J.Lo found her mother, identified the Gorg’s weakness, and got both extraterrestrial species to leave Earth. There are never any good-faith attempts at understanding between the Boov and humans after the Gorg arrive. In a rally in Flagstaff, Captain Smek asks humans to “[f]ight alongside us […] for a brighter, shiny Smekland” (318). Though this overture ostensibly proposes an alliance between them, he still calls Earth “Smekland.” This shows that he considers Earth to be under Boov’s control. By contrast, as J.Lo started deviating from the HighBoov’s indoctrination, he began calling Earth “Earthland,” reverting to the human name for the planet.
Rex explores The Nature of Cross-Cultural Understanding between Boov and humans through the individual interactions between J.Lo and Tip. Tip shares more about human culture with J.Lo. She reads to him aloud from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which he enjoyed, and War of the Worlds, which he believed was “too one-sided.” She shares the literature of her world, and he shares his opinions and analyses of it. When it becomes clear that the Boov are being defeated and will soon leave Earth, J.Lo declares his intention to stay because he “can be a help to [his] family” (384). Though he did not grow up with a concept of family, his interactions with Tip and what he has learned from her make her, Lucy, and Pig his family.
The author also shows how Chief’s Indigenous identity allows him to empathize with a Boov more than other humans, fostering increased cross-cultural understanding. Tip is shocked to find out that Chief has known J.Lo was a Boov since the Gorg attacked his junkyard and has been helping them anyway. As a Diné man, Chief has a first-hand perspective on being violently colonized and displaced. However, he says he “[c]an’t hate all” of the people who stole his people’s land, or he’d spend his “whole life shouting at everyone” (322). Instead, he measures people on individual merit. Chief is more accepting and understanding of J.Lo, a Boov who vocally opposes his people’s colonization efforts. In this way, Chief serves as a foil to Vicki, who perpetuates racist rhetoric and stereotypes against Indigenous people.
Through the novel’s depiction of J.Lo aiding humanity and humans perpetuating racist rhetoric or exploitative actions, Rex continues to complicate the binary of “good guys” and “bad guys” in historical events. This further develops The Complexity of Living Through and Recording Major Historical Events. Hinkel, the man with whom Chief shares a hospital room, constantly tells Chief how “Indians like me ought to live somewhere else” (321). However, he’s in the hospital because he got beat up by “someone who thinks gay people like him ought to live somewhere else” (322). Rather than building solidarity between marginalized groups, Hinkel holds prejudiced beliefs and discriminates against other marginalized people—even though his identity group faces discrimination too.
These divides and lack of cross-cultural understanding between human groups are evident on a larger scale in the way that Arizona immediately becomes segregated. In a newspaper, Tip sees how human communities have made sub-states and countries within Arizona. Tip is biracial, with a white Italian mother and a Black father. Her identity gives her perspective and makes her doubt “that whole America-as-Melting-Pot thing” (330). She’d hoped that when faced with an extraterrestrial occupation, humans would intermingle. However, she finds that segregation is worse than ever. Payson has become 99% white, functionally becoming a sundown town. Other cities are predominantly senior citizens or “hippie types.” Mesa hosts only members of the Mormon Church. The entire Grand Canyon area became “BullShake™ Presents Xtreme USA” after a branded energy drink company (331). Phoenix has become a “shaky military dictatorship ruled by a warlord” (332). Social systems are collapsing, and rather than uniting, human social groups seize power and become more exclusionary.
Seeing this segregation, Tip is one of the only characters who wants to work together across human groups to expel the Boov and Gorg. She meets resistance from human government officials and leaders, like Mitch and Landry. Tip tells Chief that Mitch is “all about trusting the Gorg and making deals” (324), and Landry tells Tip she needs to “trust in [her] leaders” (372). Human officials want the populace to follow their direction without question, which is not dissimilar to how the HighBoov control the Boov and want humans to follow their directives, like relocating or fighting against the Gorg, without question. In both cases, these groups do not genuinely desire the best outcomes for their populations. They want to accumulate power. People like Tip and J.Lo, who push back against the strategies of their leaders for moral and ethical reasons, threaten that power.
The author characterizes Landry as someone with bluster and showmanship, cementing his role as a minor antagonist. Landry was not elected to pre-extraterrestrial government and has not proven his leadership abilities in real situations. All his authority relies on his appearances and assumptions about the traits of people who have extreme material wealth. Tip notes how Landry shows off his book collection to her “the way another guy might display his animal trophies” (371). He uses his books to signal his wealth, knowledge, success, and power. This projection he creates does not align with what Tip hears him saying. He tells Tip that one of the reasons he wants to work with the Gorg is because the Boov gave them “one state” while the Gorg “are giving back the whole Southwest” (372). In reality, Landry does not stand up for the autonomy of humankind but accepts the better of two meager concessions by two occupying forces. In reality, Landry cuts secret deals with the Gorg to betray humanity to accumulate power.
Landry’s actions further develops The Impact of Colonization from a Child’s Perspective, as Tip sees his work with the Gorg. While Tip, J.Lo, and their allies are the ones who fight the Gorg, Landry advances a fictitious narrative of his role in the events, which later becomes the official historical narrative. He claims he “challenged the Gorg leader to a duel of strength and wits” (420), and his victory made the Gorg leave in embarrassment. At the novel’s end, Rex reveals that Tip wants the diary’s contents to be read after her death because it presents a different version of historical events than what is largely accepted as true. Additionally, she sees how the hyper-visibility that comes with historical renown ruins his life. Instead, she decides to privately reckon with how she “will never again do anything as fantastic and important as [she] did when [she] was eleven” (423). Despite this claim, the newspaper clipping at the novel’s end about her death states that she is survived by multiple generations and J.Lo, with whom she maintained a lifelong friendship. In this way, Tip did achieve important things, including defeating the Gorg.
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