Praise for Dominic Green’s Smallworld:
“...a showcase for Green’s bone-dry satire and deadpan humour...Green’s agile imagination constantly wrong-foots the reader. A delight.“
Peter Ingham, The Telegraph
Saucerers and Gondoliers
published by
Dominic Green
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2008 Dominic Green
Discover other works by Dominic Green at smashwords.com
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Table of Contents
Chapter 2 - One Small Step for a Man
Chapter 3 - One Mountain of Crisp Packets Later
Chapter 4 - Our Friends the Americans
Chapter 9 - Aboriginal Megafauna
Chapter 10 - A Life on the Ocean Wave
Chapter 13 - Air Conditioning can be Fun
Chapter 14 - Attack of the Pantbeast
Chapter 15 - Man Can’t Live at this Speed
Chapter 17 - Sheer Neurally-Induced Ecstasy
Chapter 18 - A School of Mullets
Chapter 19 - Wakey Wakey Rise and Shine
Chapter 21 - Attack of the White Van Man
Chapter 1 - Down In The Woods
"Course it's got vipers. Issa forest, innit? Bin ere since King Arold oo got shot in the eye by Robin Ood."
Ant's dad spat at a passing squirrel. Ant had hoped the squirrels here would be red, with pointy ears. Like every other squirrel in England, they were grey and tufty.
"I thought Old English forests were all deciduous", said Cleo.
Ant's dad turned round and stared at Cleo as if she'd been a large, red, pointy-eared talking squirrel.
"Deciduous? Wossat mean then?"
He grinned a huge row of horribly maintained teeth at Cleo, then carried on heaving stuff into the back of the truck.
"He does know what it means", whispered Ant to Cleo. "He taught me what it meant. It means the opposite to evergreen."
Cleo looked puzzled. "Why does he pretend he doesn't know, then?"
Ant shrugged. "I dunno. Sometimes he just seems to enjoy pretending to be a moron."
Ant's dad continued to load stuff into the truck. Ant suspected the truck should not be parked here. It was illegal to park anywhere that came straight off a motorway, wasn't it? This little service road wasn't the sort of road you normally left a motorway on, and it had had a sign saying SERVICE VEHICLES ONLY in big red-and-white letters.
It was amazing how loud the motorway was, even here in the trees. Ant's dad's eighteen-wheeler was parked well back in the pines, where passing traffic cops would only see it if they craned their necks back and to the left while they sped by. Still, the truck / trailer combination was the length of a row of houses, a difficult thing to miss. Ant's dad was using the trailer's tail lift to load pallets that had been poorly stacked with gigantic drums of something. It was impossible to see inside the drums, but what was inside sloshed and slopped like a liquid.
"What's in the drums?" Ant had said to his dad as he grunted and struggled under one of the drums.
"Green diesel", his dad had said, and winked, and had not explained further.
The two men who had delivered the drums stood by watching him load them, not helping in any way. Their truck, parked a few yards further back in the trees, still had its engine running. The only other thing parked in the layby was an old Luton van, so badly rusted that its numberplate was held on with wire and its boot held shut with a padlock. The two drum deliverymen had investigated the Mysterious Van carefully when they first arrived, and seemed to have satisfied themselves that it presented no threat to them.
Eventually, Ant's dad heaved the last enormously heavy cylinder into the back of the York and began securing the tailgate. He had been manhandling drums since first light, and the trailer was kneeling heavy on its axles. The two men found their feet and approached him again.
"Well, it's been a pleasure doing business with fellow workers", he said. "This stuff'll keep our members going for a good month or more."
The bigger of the two men smiled widely at the smaller - a little more widely than Ant liked.
"There's just the question of payment", he said.
"Fellow workers", said Cleo to Ant quietly. "Your dad's a communist."
"Of course." Ant's father fumbled in his back pocket for his wallet, too quickly. Ant noticed that his hands were actually shaking. There were not many men who made Ant's father shake, although the number of Saturday night fights he lost suggested he ought to be more afraid of other men than he was. The roll of cash he pulled out of his back pocket made both Cleo and Ant gape.
"I've not seen that many queens' heads on anything that folds before", said Cleo. "Magic! Your dad's a criminal."
"If he's a communist, he's the richest communist I've ever seen", nodded Ant, who was thinking, He doesn't usually have that much money. How did he get that much money together without drinking it?
"There's ten thousand litres here, right?" said Ant's dad, counting out odd-coloured notes that had 50 printed on them. Ant had never seen a fifty-pound note, and suspected his father had seen very few of them in his life too, but what else could they be?
One of the men shook his head. "Eight", he said. His accent made it sound like 'eeyat'.
"He's Irish", said Cleo, making a final decision. "Your dad's a terrorist."
The money didn't change hands. But Ant's dad's voice was still shaky. "We agreed ten", he said.
The other man smiled. "Difficulties with supply. You know how it is."
"We agreed ten." Shaky though his voice was, Ant's dad was sticking to the guns embroidered in his tatty Arsenal cap.
"Let's get out of here", said Ant. "Based on past experience, this is about to get ugly."
***
The forest was green as diesel, and Ant suspected it would have been full of singing birds and the noises of squirrels scampering through undergrowth if it hadn't been for the constant roar of the motorway. But the local wildlife didn't seem to mind the sound. Usually, the sorts of places Ant's dad took him to were massive tarmacked yards supporting miles and miles of corrugated iron sheds, each one with a big company sign on the front saying things like ROTOWIDGET or BRITSTUFF PLC. Sometimes, the yards were on the Continent rather than in Britain, and the signs said GEMEINE DEUTSCHE DINGE GmBH or FRANCOTRUCS ET CIE, but the basic iron sheds were still the same.
"Sorry he had to bring you along", said Ant, chucking sticky darts at the back of Cleo's jacket.
"Thanks a lot", said Cleo.
"No, I didn't mean it like that. I mean, I'm sorry he let me bring you along when he knew he was going to be doing something tasty."
"Tasty?"
"Dodgy. Off the back of a lorry. Under the counter. Illegal. He's been hanging out with a worse and worse crowd since the start of the Fuel Protests."
"Cor." Cleo's face went wide. "Was all that illegal?"
"You knew bloody well it was!"
"No, I was only taking the mick. Your old man's a Gangsta Rude Boy." Ant was not entirely sure what a Gangsta Rude Boy was, but Cleo had said it in a manner that suggested it was something to be greatly admired.
"What's a Gangsta Rude Boy?" said Ant.
Cleo shrugged, and kicked a pile of leaves. "I dunno."
"What are you doing tomorrow?"
Cleo grimaced. "My dad's taking me to work. It's the union's Take Your Kid To Work Day. He's going to wow me with all the really interesting stuff he does for a living."
"Think yourself lucky", said Ant, scoring a direct hit on the back of Cleo's hair extensions with a sticky dart. "For me, every weekday in the holidays is Take Your Kid To Work Day."
"Doesn't he think it's weird, you hanging out with girls?"
"I think he thinks you're my girlfriend."
"WHAT? That's GROSS!"
"I know, it's repugnant and disgusting. I have tried to dissuade him from this point of view, but he won't have anything different", said Ant. "He keeps winking at me and saying 'All right, squire, I know the score.' It drives me bloody mental."
Cleo grinned. Her grin seemed to go all the way round her head. "I think it's weird, you hanging out with girls. You're going to be playing with Barbie dolls and plastic vacuum cleaners next."
"You don't play with Barbie dolls and vacuum cleaners."
"I wouldn't play with Barbie dolls. There's a special Afro-Caribbean Barbie designed specially for black girls. Her name is Christie."
"No way."
"Yes way. But Christie isn't allowed anywhere near Ken, oh no. Christie comes with her own Afro-Caribbean boyfriend, whose name is Steven. Barbie and Christie are valuable educational aids that teach all us Afro-Caribbean girls what colour of boys we should be going out with. I could never go out with you, Ant, because you are Ken-coloured."
"I am so not Ken-coloured! Ken has one-piece plastic hair and a weird, smooth, underpant-shaped groin."
"Boys' dolls are better", said Cleo. "They have camouflage trousers and guns rather than hairdryers. And accessories that aren't pink. Do you know what happens to an Action Man head you put in the oven?"
"No, and I don't want to. Besides, Action Men aren't dolls. They're Action Figures. Hang on, what's this?"
Ant had no idea where the concrete strip had come from. There were similar strips all the way through the woods, suggesting that someone, at some time, had needed to drive heavy machinery into the trees. Maybe trucks for logging, he thought. His dad had said they still cut timber here, and that the woods were owned by the Forestry Commission. Ant's dad had made the woods seem really exciting, far more exciting than a weekend with his mum, at any rate. But the woods were not exciting. They were made of sharp-needled conifers with thin sappy trunks that were no use for climbing. In some parts, the trees were even planted in straight lines. Occasional bits of rubbish that a thousand picnickers had dropped were to be found in the undergrowth everywhere.
Certainly no-one was using the path for logging now. It was overgrown and cracked from side to side, with grass growing in the cracks.
"Maybe this used to be an airbase, and these were runways", said Cleo hopefully. "Before it was a forest, I mean."
"What, for really small aeroplanes?" said Ant. It was true. The concrete path would only barely have allowed a small van to squeeze through. Cleo giggled.
Then, she squinted into the trees, and pointed. "There's something parked up there."
Whatever it was, it was large, white, and definitely man-made.
Or at least, made by somebody.
The curves of it suggested a big heap of some stuff farmers liked to make big heaps of, covered with polythene, maybe weighted down with tyres for good measure. Farmers liked to make the landscape tidy by wrapping it in polythene, and they seemed to like making sure it didn't blow away by covering it in rubber too.
They walked further into the concrete clearing. The thing was not a thing made by any farmer. Nor would it have been any use in clearing or transporting logs.
It was roughly the shape of two woks, hubcaps, or indeed saucers, slapped together. On its front surface - or what Ant decided to think of as its front surface - a line of aerials and antennae poked out, with no clue as to their function. There were panels round the curve of its hull which might perhaps be opened to refuel or repair it, just like any other vehicle, for it was certainly a vehicle of some sort. There were also struts and rails attached to its underside to which ground crew might fix extra fuel tanks or other equipment that wouldn't fit inside it. On top of the thing, a bulge of hull was pinched up into a cockpit shape. The bulge had a surface that might be glass or plastic, but which reflected light like a huge, teardrop-shaped mirror. Two small vanes, far too small to be aeroplane wings, protruded from what Ant decided to call its fuselage, though fuselages were seldom saucer-shaped in his experience. The whole thing was about the size of a large caravan - one of the big ones that old people sometimes drove down the road to live in at weekends rather than staying in their own houses.
"It's an aeroplane", said Cleo, with something less than total conviction.
This aeroplane, though, had neither ailerons nor engines, and the dull and faded lettering that swirled around its hull was not in any alphabet Ant recognized.
Most unsettling, however, was what the thing was resting on - or rather, wasn’t. Its complete lack of wheels, skids, struts or bricks-propped-under-axles only became apparent when Ant and Cleo bent down and squinted underneath the thing and saw nothing but the forest on the other side of the clearing. The thing was certainly some sort of aeroplane, for it was hovering in mid air.
It was, by now, absolutely certain what was being dealt with here.
"It can't be", said Cleo.
"No", agreed Ant. "Not parked up in broad daylight like a Ford Fiesta."
Then the man who'd been in the clearing with them all the time, and who they'd both either not noticed or simply ignored because the thing in the clearing had been more interesting, cleared his throat, and said: "Hello there, boys."
He was wearing a sweater and coat - the sort of thing a man might wear if he stood outside in the cold for a living. He was also wearing a pair of binoculars. He didn’t wear them, though, in the way that people normally wore binoculars, slinging them around their necks - these binoculars were a big, complicated-looking assembly of lenses strapped directly onto his forehead, under which he grinned at Cleo and Ant as if they saw men with binoculars strapped to their heads every day of their lives.
"What are you doing out here on your own?" he said, as if being out on their own on these woods was in some way illegal. Ant hoped it wasn't.
"Who's he?" said Cleo. "I thought you said this place was open to the public."
"There's only two sorts of people who wear jumpers, coats and ties", said Ant under his breath. "Racetrack tic tac men and policemen. Leg it."
They legged it.
Unfortunately, he legged it after them.
First of all, he gained on them, having the advantage of longer legs to leg it with, even though he was wearing shoes that were no good for the purpose. But once they dodged into the woods under the overhanging branches, their pursuer became curiously unwilling to carry on running headlong into facefuls of twigs and needles, and there were no more footsteps crashing through the brush behind them. Ant and Cleo cowered in a bush and squinted back through the trees to see their attacker talking into what looked like a big mobile phone, and was probably a two-way radio.
"Maybe he's talking to his bookie", said Cleo hopefully.
Ant shook his head. "Not a chance. He's a copper all right. Probably here to nick dad. We've got to get back and warn him."
The man's voice could be heard clearly - perhaps he was unaware of how close they were to him.
"Got two unwanted guests. Afraid so. Only kids, one cauc, one afro. Ran off into the woods north before I could catch them. Over.
"Weren't wearing hiking boots, and didn't look tired on their feet. Came here on bikes, maybe? Still no cars in the parking area for the picnic site, Dave, over?
"There's no other places a car could park. We've secured the roads all the way round the forest. It has to be bikes. Maybe they hid them, over.
"Well look again. The kids are here. They're hiding in the bushes about thirty yards away. Probably think I can't see them, over."
Ant looked at Cleo.
"We get the blooming heckfire out of here now", said Cleo.
Ant nodded. "Maybe we can circle around back to the truck."
***
Minutes later, covered in muck, moss, grass seed and sticky darts, they were not much closer to the truck. Navigating towards the roar of the motorway, though, they were making headway.
"I think he wasn't a man at all", panted Cleo as she struggled over a log. "I think he was an alien."
"Looked like a man to me. Only real human beings look that ugly."
"That was a flying saucer, man! With all alien writing all over it."
Behind them, the voice of Binocular Man could still be heard. It was fainter, but that might have been the sound of traffic.
"I can see you, boys! No use running away from me! It'll be dark soon, and I can see you even then, and what'll you do then when you can't take a step without running into a tree CRASH AAARGH."
"Maybe those binocular things let him see in the dark", said Cleo.
"They must be tough at any rate, he's bumped into four or five trees in them already", said Ant defiantly. "And they don't seem to be able to let him see you're a girl, either. And besides, I know a short cut."
"Where?" said Cleo - and then, after she had followed Ant down the next bank:
"Oh, yeah. That."
***
Running down the motorway hard shoulder was faster than running through the underbrush, and Ant doubted the Binocular Man could see them through the banks of earth either side of the road, even if he could see in the dark. As cars whizzed past, Ant hoped that none of them contained plain clothes policemen.
"Most police cars are Vauxhall Omegas", he said to Cleo. "Watch for Vauxhall Omegas."
"What do they look like?"
"They've got three headrests in the back."
"That means we'll only be able to see them after they pass us, numbnuts."
"DOWN! This is the bridge!"
They crouched behind a roadside crash barrier to stare down at the layby where Ant's father was illegally parked. There were still two trucks and a van at the roadside, but now there were also three other vehicles. One of them was a car, a gigantic glittering black thing of the sort Ant's dad's friends cut up and made hot rods out of. Two looked like vans, but not vans of the sort that were painted white and contained mobile plumbers. These were black, and square, and large, and Ant had an uncomfortable feeling they were bulletproof.
There were also many, many men - men in camouflage fatigues, and men in suits and ties and overcoats. Most of the men in camouflage gear were wearing binocular headgear, and all of them were carrying rifles. The rifles were not the sort normally used by the British Army. They were very large and bulky, with holes drilled in the sides of their barrels.
In the centre of a ring of these men, Ant's father and the two Irishmen were kneeling on the tarmac with their hands cuffed behind them. Ant's father was bleeding from the face.
"Dad!" hissed Ant.
"They're probably going to Execute them", said Cleo learnedly, "as Terrorists."
Ant looked hard at Cleo, then moved along the crash barrier closer to the line of soldiers.
"Policemen don't execute anyone", he said, crossing his fingers mentally.
"They're not policemen", said Cleo. They're aliens."
Ant snorted in derision, but Cleo shook her head with an air of vastly greater knowledge of alien species. "They came out of a flying saucer, didn't they? And why are they wearing those face masks? Because underneath, their eyes aren't human."
Ant shrank behind the concrete support, hoping this was not true.
Then, one of the men in suits and overcoats, his face clearly visible as he wasn't wearing the same odd strap-on goggles as the others, walked up to Ant's father, who appeared to be spitting out teeth, and said to him, like an adult to a baby:
"Now, tell us again and we can avoid all this unpleasantness. Where is the Highwayman?"
"- don't KNOW! Don't KNOW where the bloody Highwayman is! Don't even know WHO he is! Look in the back of my truck - only bloody GREEN DIESEL, for god's sake OOF."
Ant's dad was momentarily quiet as someone clubbed him in the kidneys with a rifle.
"That one's not an alien", said Ant. "He's got a human face."
It wasn’t a pleasant face. It had probably been quite good-looking once, but a lifetime of scowling had made it sag like melted wax. It was human, though. The man’s hair was corpse-grey, and his clothes immaculate, as if he checked himself over in every mirror he passed.
"He's probably been taken over", said Cleo, "by some Alien Mind Control Device."
One of the men in suits held up a device looking very like a TV remote control. A green light was flashing on it. Cleo pointed to the device and looked at Ant with an expression of immense superiority as if to say, told you so.
But then the man holding the device said: "He's telling the truth, I'm afraid, Alastair."
"You put too much faith in those things", said Alastair.
The other man smirked. "Care to tell it whether you've ever stolen government property, gone AWOL, or doodled a moustache on the picture of the Queen?"
Alastair didn't answer, but turned to face the ring of troops. "SPREAD OUT. LEAVE NO STONE UNTURNED AND NO BUSH UNBAYONETED. OUR MAN WON'T GO FAR WITH WHAT HE'S CARRYING. IF THE SIZE OF THE VAN HE USED IS ANYTHING TO GO BY, THE CONTRABAND MUST WEIGH HALF A TON."
Ant noticed suddenly that the back of the Mysterious Van was now open. The doors appeared to have been cut open - probably by the acetylene torch he could see resting up against the side of the vehicle.
The soldiers left the layby and disappeared into the forest. Alastair raised a two-way radio and spoke into it.
"Simon, we've found his delivery vehicle in a motorway layby on the other side of the forest. What idiot was it who failed to realize the M1 runs through these woods? Have you found those children yet?"
Cleo and Ant gingerly edged back along the crash barrier and then, once the motorway embankment hid them from view from below, ran like flaming hell.
"NOW", they heard Alastair's voice crowing as they ran, "LET ME SEE. TERRORISTS FUNDING THEIR ACTIVITIES VIA ILLEGAL FUEL SMUGGLING. WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH YOU?"
***
"We're back at their Space Ship."
Ant shrugged. "They'll never suspect we'd go back here."
"Because it's bloody mad, that's why! Only a bloody lunatic would go back here! That makes us a couple of bloody lunatics!"
"I'm interested."
"But they might take us back to their home planet or something."
"I'd be safe. You're a girl, though. They might stick probes up your bottom or implant an alien embryo in you or something. Hold it."
They stopped on the edge of the clearing. Someone else was already here.
***
The new man looked tired and thin, and had a haircut that suggested he spent a lot of his time in prison. He was wearing neither a suit nor combat fatigues, but a pair of Levi's which still had the label dangling from the back of them, and a maroon T shirt. The T shirt had aliens in flying saucers on it, along with the words SPACE RASTA. The aliens had enormous dreadlocks and were smoking intergalactic cigarettes of some description. The man was, however, clearly neither a Rasta nor an alien, being white-skinned and blue-eyed. He was also wearing new Nike trainers, and was trying to pull a load ten times his size in the direction of the Space Ship.
The load consisted of a variety of odd objects. There were plants that had tags from garden centres, and still others that appeared to have simply been dug out of the ground and wrapped in plastic. There was a pallet of fluorescent yellow spheres stencilled CAUTION FRAGILE DANGER OF DEATH, on top of which other objects seemed to have been dumped and slung with gay abandon. There were T shirts piled up saying GALLERIE DEGLI UFFIZI FIRENZE, MY FRIEND WENT TO SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T SHIRT, and I'VE BEEN TO DISNEYLAND. There were homespun shawls covered in pictures of what looked like llamas in orange, white and black thread. There was an immense wooden table so thickly covered in carvings that it befuddled the mind. There was a snowstorm globe the size of a human head, with a cathedral the size of a baby's head in the centre of it, and a nameplate saying IL VATICANO.
There was food and drink, too - for some reason, mostly crisp packets in a bewildering variety of flavours and colours, on top of black puddings, boxes of tea, jars of jam, jars of Marmite, and many, many bottles of different types of beer, gin and whisky. All the food and drink had probably been purchased at Tesco's. Ant suspected this because it was all still jammed inside a supermarket trolley, the chain of which appeared to have been sawed through.
On top of the plants, yellow spheres, shawls, T shirts, and other paraphernalia were various items of electronic, scientific and heavy engineering equipment, all piled into a confusing jumble. Ant recognized a mass spectrometer (although more, to be fair, by the words 'MASS SPECTROMETER' written on the outside of its plastic packaging than by any great familiarity he had with mass spectrometers). There was a conical-hatted plastic doll in a box which read A PRESENT FROM WALES. There was a conical-bodied, beaked thing which Ant recognized with dread as a Furby.
This whole unlikely jumble was resting on a platform about the size of an average warehouse pallet, made of the same weird material as the Space Ship. And like the Space Ship, it was resting on absolutely nothing. The man was pulling the platform on a long rope looped round handles on the platform edge. The platform edge had lights which were flashing urgently in red.
The man had seemed harmless up to this point, as he was so obviously exhausted, and particularly since he was towing the platform using one hand. The other hand flopped uselessly at his side, as if he had no feeling in it. It was bleeding.
"He's hurt", said Cleo.
But the man did not seem quite so harmless when he turned to see the two of them, let go of his tow rope, and proved to have been holding a gun in the hand he'd been pulling with. The gun was pistol-sized, but otherwise looked similar to the guns the Binocular Men had been carrying. It was very large, and was pointing directly at them.
Ant and Cleo put their hands up slowly.
The man threw Ant the towrope. It wrapped round his hand like a lasso.
Ant and Cleo put their hands down. The man nodded at the towrope. Ant took hold of it. The man crossed the clearing to his Space Ship, flipped open a panel in its seamless hull, and put his bloody hand into the cavity he'd opened. The whole side of the vehicle dropped open and became a ramp which swung down to the ground. Lights came on in the inside of the ship. Ant could see seats, consoles, dials, and rows of switches.
The man gestured with his gun in the direction of the ship.
"There's no need to be so rude", said Cleo.
"Maybe he can't speak English", said Ant. "Being from Alpha Centauri and all."
"Not from Alpha Centauri", said the man. "From Alpha Centauri! Ridiculous! From Lalande 21185, me."
He slumped against the wall of the ship, as if he needed it to hold him up. His eyes did not appear to be focussing on anything.
Ant and Cleo took hold of the rope and leaned on it, expecting the load to be almost impossible to move. It was actually easier than they'd thought, as it didn't have to be dragged across the ground or tugged along on wheels - but once it started moving, it was difficult to stop it. It crashed into the side of the ship with a clang. The man looked up and stared at them severely.
"Sorry", said Cleo.
With difficulty, and with the man waving encouragingly at them with the pistol, they managed to drag the platform into the hole in the hull, and then up into the inside of the Flying Saucer. Inside, things were surprisingly cramped for a vehicle designed by an advanced spacefaring species. The hydraulic assembly that raised and lowered the saucer's tail lift - Ant could only think of it as a tail lift, though the thing was clearly not an articulated lorry of any kind - took up much of the room. The space at the top of the loading ramp was cramped, not much larger than the floating platform the man was manhandling into it, and stray crisp packets scrunched against the walls as the platform screeched into place. It appeared to have been designed to fit into the ship, and clicked flush into clamps on the deck which the man then locked, with difficulty, with his gun hand. At the front of the cramped cargo compartment was a ladder leading upwards into a dimly-lit space where the backs of three chairs were visible in front of banks of switches, knobs and dials. Past the chairs and the knobs and dials, Ant could see trees, dim and distorted; he had been right to think the dome on top of the saucer was made of some kind of mirrored glass. He also noted with approval that the upholstery on the chairs was made of real leather. Alien or not, the man travelled in style.
After covering the locked-down floating platform with a sort of thick clingfilm rolled out of a slot in its side, the man jabbed at a control on the wall, and the ramp began to fold up into the Flying Saucer behind them. By now, they could hear shouts, and footsteps crashing in their direction through the undergrowth.
"It's the Binocular Men", said Cleo forlornly, staring at the loading door as it closed over what might be their last sight of Earth. "They were the good guys."
Chapter 2 - One Small Step For A Man
The man settled into the seat, and tried to put his hands on the controls. One of his hands fitted into the grips on the throttle in front of the largest seat. The other hand tried ineffectually to swat at the lines of switches. The man seemed to have no control over it whatsoever.
He turned in his seat with a look of despair on his face, and used his bad hand to point vaguely in the direction of Ant.
"You", he said. "Be my right hand." He pointed at a bank of switches. "Trip the third switch from the left."
The shouts and crashings were now all around the machine, along with a crackling that sounded like many, many rifles being cocked. With some fear, Ant reached out to push the switch down. He got the wrong switch. Something inside the structure of the spaceship screamed like a scalded cat.
A voice that sounded as if it was talking through a megaphone came from outside the ship. Ant could not make out all of what it said.
"- TURN OFF YOUR PRIMARY DRIVE AND LEAVE THE MACHINE -"
"DON' YOU KNOW RIGHT FROM LEFT?" roared the man. "Turn it OFF!"
Ant turned it off, and pushed the right switch. The scalded cat noise subsided, to be replaced by a gentle purr. A line of green lights streamed across the console. Curiously, the lights were all labelled in English, although they were incomprehensible. They said things like COIL, COOL, ING, XER, and STD.
"Do what I say, 'zactly when I say it", murmured the man. "Or we all die. Pull that long lever back half way. NO, THE ONE NEXT TO IT."
Chastened, Ant Pulled The One Next To It. The man watched lights stream around the rows of consoles round the cabin, and flicked switches absently with his left hand, without seeming to need to look at them. Then he moved his hand back to the steering column.
"Now trip the big orange switch above my head."
Ant reached up and flicked the switch.
"THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING", came the voice from outside. "OPEN THE HATCH AND SURRENDER YOUR VEHICLE OR WE WILL OPEN FIRE -"
Then the vehicle took off like a bullet from a gun.
***
Ant and Cleo fell immediately as if the floor itself had swatted them like a giant cricket bat. Then the floor tilted as the nose of the ship thrust upwards, and they were squashed into the rear wall of the cabin. Ant gasped for breath, splayed out against the wall behind him, which was vibrating like the skin of a drum.
"Can't breathe - " gasped Cleo.
Gradually, Ant forced himself out of a state of panic, and told his lungs to heave themselves open and shut against the terrible pressure of acceleration. Outside, the air itself could be seen rushing round the cockpit, flowing in waves like water. The horizon ran from floor to ceiling, and was visibly bending like a longbow bent by a giant. Then it tilted and rolled to port, and the ship was flying across it rather than up out of it once again. The pressure on Ant's lungs released, and he was able to claw his way across the floor back to the man's chair again.
A large green disc had lit up on the control console, and the man had slumped himself across it to watch it. He was bleeding onto the display, and had to wipe his own blood off the glass absent-mindedly with his cuff. The display looked like a radar screen, but as Ant moved his head to look at it, the red white and blue dots in the display moved too, as if there were actually tiny points of light scooting around inside a tank in the machine.
"What does it show?" said Ant, trying to make conversation.
"Three-dimensional radar display. White dot in the middle is Us. Red dots closing are Them."
"Who's Them?" said Ant.
"Tornados. Interceptors scrambled from Mildenhall. First line of defence."
"Tornado fighters? They're trying to shoot us down?"
The man nodded as if his head was very heavy. "Will if they can. Don't worry about them. Outrun them easily."
"What are the blue dots?"
"Aurora. Second line of defence. More difficult to outrun."
"What's Aurora?"
"If they get close enough for you to see, it'll be the last thing you do see." His good hand still on the throttle, he waved in the direction of a panel on the console with his bad hand. "Open that. Red lever inside. Pull it down when I say and ONLY when I say."
The big red dots had now spat out smaller red dots which were converging on the centre of the display. "What are those?" said Ant.
"Missiles from the Tornados. Outrun those easily."
"These Aurora things are faster than a missile?"
"Faster than turbodriven lightning." The man eyed the blue dots professionally. "Get ready to pull the lever - NOW."
Ant yanked the lever. The sky around them lit up with space ships, travelling round their own vessel in convoy, reflecting the sun so brightly that Ant thought at first that their own ship had exploded. The outside surfaces of the ships glowed an eerie green, as if they were some weird type of firework.
"Is that what our own ship looks like from the outside?" said Ant.
"Exactly", said the man, and pointed at the cockpit of the nearest ship. Ant looked and saw his own face looking back at him.
"Only an image", explained the man. "Trying to fool the enemy into shooting the wrong us." The explanation seemed to take a lot out of him, and he stared bleary-eyed at a button on the control panel, as if expecting it to tell him whether to push it or not.
"Gosh", said Ant, looking at his image. "Am I really that ugly?"
The man nodded gravely.
"Cushty!" said Cleo. "Reinforcements!"
"No", said Ant. "It's only an illusion." He pointed out Cleo's face next to his own. Meanwhile, the man was flicking switches, turning knobs and examining dials like a sleepwalker, automatically, without appearing to think a great deal about what he was doing.
Then, finally, he swayed backwards, pointed at the console, and said:
"Push the blue button."
- and toppled backwards into his chair.
Outside the cockpit, the blue had gone out of the sky. Ant remembered from lessons at school that the blue in the sky was the result of sunlight being scattered in the air. The sky outside was black. That meant there was no longer any air.
They were on the edge of space. The blue dots on the display were closing.
There was only one blue button. It was marked C+. Ant pushed it. The universe changed.
***
The sky glowed, so hard it hurt the eyes. The cockpit blister of the ship seemed to darken like light-sensitive sunglasses until the view was bearable. The ship was scudding through great billowing clouds of something Ant was certain wasn't air. In fact, the clouds looked oddly solid, as if the ship wouldn’t just zip through one if it hit it.
"Where are we?" said Cleo.
"I don't know", said Ant. "In space?"
"Space is black", said Cleo.
"Then we're not in space", said Ant; and then, he muttered:
"Maybe not in time, either."
The wrenching acceleration of the trip out of the Earth's atmosphere had gone, but Ant felt cheated. He should by rights be feeling light as a feather and floating round the cabin. Instead, he was standing behind the pilot's chair, while the pilot dozed fitfully in front of him.
"He's asleep", said Cleo.
Ant examined the pilot carefully. He shook his head. He put his hand inside the sleeping man's jacket, and brought it out for Cleo to see, covered in blood.
"I don't think he's asleep", he said. "I think he's unconscious. He wasn't just wounded in the hand."
"Well, that's just fine", said Cleo angrily. "Just great. Now we're stranded in the middle of wherever we are without anyone who can fly this bag of bolts." She strode round the cockpit swatting at things. "Just look at the state of this place. You call this a flying saucer?" She picked up a half-eaten apple core by the stalk, then dropped it disgustedly into a corner.
It was true. The spaceship's owner did not appear to spend a great deal of time cleaning up. The copilot's seat was a mess of pork scratching packets and beer bottles.
"Just look at this dial", she tutted, pointing at a dial on the console. "It's not even digital." She squinted at the maker's nameplate on the control console. "Just as I thought. Made in Britain. If this was a Japanese spaceship, it'd have cupholders and curry hooks -"
Ant gaped. "Made in Britain?"
"Hawker Siddeley Aviation, it says here."
"Cleo, there is something very wrong with a Flying Saucer that is Made in Britain."
Cleo seemed unconcerned. "Don't I know it. This passenger seat doesn't even adjust."
"And Hawker Siddeley Aviation stopped making planes years ago. The last thing they made was the Harrier jump jet. Only the Americans, Russians and Chinese have ever built man-carrying space ships, and none of them have ever built anything like this."
Suddenly, a chunk of space rock big enough to have baby mountain ranges of its very own tumbled past the window. Ant jumped. Cleo screamed. Ant pressed his face up against the window, following the thing with his eyes as it hurtled away. It hurtled so quickly that it was almost gone already. Parts of the rock were glowing, as if it was a piece of sinter that had just flown out of a furnace. Further in the distance, now that he was looking for them, Ant could make out other flying islands glowing in the dark.
“The clouds”, he announced, “are not clouds. Every little particle in one of those clouds is a chunk just like that one.”
“But where did it come from? If it’d hit us at that speed -“
“I don’t know. And yes, we’d be toast. Thin sliced toast. Cut into soldiers.” Ant shook the pilot gently. "Wake up." He turned to Cleo. "He won't wake up."
"If you shake him and he's injured, it could make it worse."
"He might bleed to death. And then we'll never get home."
"Is there a first aid kit around here anywhere?"
Ant hadn't thought of that. He searched round the walls until he found a small aluminium box bolted to the steel skeleton of the ship. It was painted white, with a red cross.
"What if a red cross is, like, alien for Self Destruct?" said Cleo.
Ant squinted at the alien box. Its underside said that it had been Made In England. He took it off the wall, and opened it. It contained bandages, plasters, a large bottle labelled 'Ethyl Alcohol', a huge number of tiny glass cylinders labelled 'Morphine Sulphate', and a box labelled 'Space Sickness Tablets - Do Not Consume Under Thrust'. There was also a syringe large enough to harpoon a small whale.
"I don't think there's much in here that'll do him any good", said Ant.
"The alcohol might do him some good", said Cleo. "If we pour it over him and set light to it, it'll cauterize his wounds."
Ant looked at her severely.
"What? I saw it in a movie, all right?"
They eased the man off the pilot's seat and onto the floor. He moaned, but didn't wake up. As he came free of the pilot's chair, it crackled as the dried blood parted from the seat. Blood was still coming out of him, but Ant noted that the rate of bleeding seemed to be slowing.
"He's a poor sort of alien", said Cleo. "Why couldn't we get abducted by an alien who didn't bleed so much, and stayed conscious?"
"We're going to have to take his clothes off to get at the wounds."
Cleo crossed her arms defiantly. "I ain't taking his clothes off. He can die for all I care."
"Easy. He isn't wounded anywhere you wouldn't see down a swimming bath. Help me get his shirt off."
They stripped him of his jacket and shirt, and found an ugly-looking wound in his side. Not really knowing what to do with it, they dabbed it with alcohol soaked into a bandage, but not too much, because this made him start moaning again.
"He's going to die, isn't he", said Cleo. Ant didn't know what to say in reply.
They wrapped a bandage round the wound, and tied it up with a safety pin Cleo had been using to tie a scarf round her waist.
"Whatever we do, anyway, we won't starve", said Ant, looking at the mountain of crisp packets spilling off the cargo platform.
Chapter 3 - One Mountain of Crisp Packets Later
"I'm sick of Worcester Sauce flavour. Have you got any Prawn Cocktail?"
Cleo shook her head slowly. Ant could swear she had gained several stones. "It's all Mango Chutney flavour over here." She sat up and squinted at the cargo platform, bleary-eyed. "Are you sure we didn't find anything to drink in there but beer?"
Ant nodded sadly, and stared at the label on his beer bottle. "Iss strange - the more I drink of it, the more thirsty I seem to get." He hiccuped.
"I have got to get out of here by tonight", said Cleo. "I am going to a party tonight."
"I've heard of parties", said Ant. "What are they like?"
"You mus' get invited to parties" said Cleo, burping.
"Not really", said Ant. "I think most of the kids at school think being poor is catching."
"My dad likes me going round with you. He thinks it means he's still in touch with the proletariat."
"Whassa proletariat?"
"What lots and lots of poor people are called when they get together", said Cleo.
"What, like a Council Estate?"
"Sort of."
"Hey - the room is spinning round", said Ant. "We must be landing."
"Iss not spinning round", said Cleo defiantly. "You're not spinning round."
"Ah", said Ant, holding up a finger. "But if the entire room is spinning round, we will both appear to be stationary from the standpoint of each other."
"Don' you hold your finger up at me."
Cleo rested her head back against the spaceship hull. "I do not know", she said, "what adults see in this stuff."
"My dad", said Ant, "sees things that chase him out of the window."
"How is our patient?"
Ant had forgotten their patient. He looked sideways to check on the patient, who was still breathing, though he had now turned a beautiful shade of pink. He also seemed to be doing rather a lot of breathing, perhaps rather more than he really should.
"The patient", announced Ant, "is fine."
Suddenly, the entire room shifted, as if the ship really was landing. The cargo pallet, fixed to the floor and secured with straps and sheets of polythene, did not move. The crisp packets, and all the crisp crumbs associated with them, floated gracefully into the air, accompanied by all the beer bottles. The patient rose into the air. Cleo rose into the air. Ant rose into the air, as if floating on a cushion of nothing. Ant's arms rose into the air. Ant's legs rose into the air. And Ant's stomach, the stomach he had just filled with beer and crisps until he could stand the thought of Smoky Bacon Flavour no more, rose with them.
"Oh, no", said Ant. "Not zero gravity now."
***
"YEEEEUCH!!!!"
The floor was covered with crisp crumbs, and with bits of crisp that had been all the way to Ant's stomach and back. The seats were covered in the stuff, the console and Ant himself were covered in it, and crucially, Cleo was also covered in it.
"For PETE'S SAKE, Ant, can't you control yourself for just one lousy minute??? This is DISGUSTING!!!
Ant did not care. His stomach hurt badly enough for nothing else in the universe to matter. Zero gravity had always seemed like fun for astronauts, but he could now tell anyone who would listen that it felt very little like being either Peter Pan or Superman. Did NASA astronauts feel like this?
Everything in the ship had been weightless for just thirty seconds, and then the weight had come back again. Unfortunately, those thirty seconds had been all Ant's vomit reflex had needed. It now had to be at least an hour since the gravity had suddenly turned itself back on; Cleo's complaining muscles, however, had not begun to tire yet.
Cleo lurched across the cabin. "I've GOT to clean myself up - oh, this is VILE - OMIGOD."
Ant forced himself to look. Cleo was staring at a panel she had opened in the wall.
"This toilet", said Cleo with a contempt she normally reserved only for disc jockeys and the criminally insane, "is for Men Only."
She held up a length of flexible hose, the correct use of which could only be imagined.
Ant sniggered.
"Maybe they don't have women on their planet", he said.
"Omigod. How am I going to fit myself into this. DON'T WATCH."
Ant took down a space helmet from the pressure suit on the wall, put it down over his head, closed the silvered visor and folded his arms solemnly.
"I can't do this. I can't do this. I will simply have to cross my legs till Planet Bong, or wherever it is we’re going."
"Planet Bong", said Ant with an air of superior knowledge, "is not a planet, but a shop on Camden High Street."
"Ohhhhh ANT, we're going to spend FOREVER out here -"
"Or at least till the air supply runs out", muttered Ant to himself.
"We'll never see our mums and dads AGAIN -"
"Suits me", muttered Ant to himself. Two nights ago, his own dad had raided Ant's piggy bank for the third time that month, and then recycled part of the piggy bank money as Ant's pocket money the following day. Ant had marked the notes, and he'd had to mow the lawn to get them back.
Then Cleo said a thing which made him sit up sharp in his helmet.
"Ant - the universe is back."
***
He raised his helmet visor. Small untethered objects were floating around the inside of the ship again. Ant was floating around the inside of the ship again. Luckily, his stomach had done all the throwing and spewing it needed to. Also luckily, most of the liquid yawn from last time seemed to have dried hard on the spaceship walls.
It was back, but it was not the same old universe. There was no Sun, no Moon, and no Planet Earth. Instead, there were three huge impostor Moons, each a different colour, each many times the size of the old Moon he remembered. There was a red Moon, a scarlet Moon, and a crimson one.
"That one's the Moon", said Cleo. "No - that one. No - that one. Erm."
"None of them are the Moon", said Ant. "There's no trouser-shaped piece on the right hand side where Neil Armstrong landed in the right leg. And there's no Oceanus Procul Harum, which is the big dark blot on the left that doesn't look like anything but another Oceanus Procul Harum. And it's red", he added.
"Maybe we're looking at the Dark Side", said Cleo. Ant went quiet. He hadn't thought of that.
There was no proper Sun either; instead, there was a dull red smouldering mass that seemed to fill up half the sky. The windows took a good half minute to adjust to it, and Ant was certain he'd get sunburn even through his silvered visor. With his visor down, he found he could look almost directly at it. It was circular, like the sun.
But the most peculiar thing of all was the planet.
It was certainly a planet; it was even a planet like Earth, with seas and continents and icecaps and the occasional swirling hurricane. But it wasn't Earth. The continents were Earth-coloured in their middles, a sort of brick red; but the oceans were a darker red, the colour of dried blood; and where the continents met the oceans, they were sometimes a dingy maroon colour, sometimes a vibrant auburn. The icecaps were pink. The clouds were scarlet.
"That's not Earth, is it?" said Cleo.
Ant shook his head.
"That bit there looks a bit like Africa."
"It's also covered in snow."
"It snows on top of Mount Kilimanjaro. Mount Kilimanjaro's in Africa."
"Granted. But there are parts of Africa that are not on top of Mount Kilimanjaro. Otherwise Mount Kilimanjaro would not be in Africa. It would be the other way round."
Cleo nodded grudgingly, but Ant suspected she did not really believe him.
They stared at their new universe for a long time.
Then, Cleo screamed.
"I'm floating!" she yelled.
"Have you only just noticed?"
She took a second more to think about it, and then announced: "I feel sick."
Ant sighed, yawned, and settled back in mid-air with his hands clasped ostentatiously behind his head. "Take a Space Sickness pill."
Cleo examined the Space Sickness pills minutely. "It says they're Not To Be Taken Under Thrust", she wailed.
"Well, don't Take Them Under Thrust, then."
"How do I know whether I'm Under Thrust or not?"
"Do you feel Under Thrust?"
Cleo thought a moment. "I suppose I'd know, if I was", she said. "Wouldn't I."
So saying, she swallowed half the packet. Ant was beginning to realize uncomfortably that he, too, was soon going to need the toilet.
"What's that thing over there?" said Cleo.
"What thing?"
"That bright thing. That saucer shaped thing that's, erm, coming our way, very fast."
***
It was a saucer like their own. But it was much larger, maybe the size of a portokabin rather than a caravan. It was difficult to judge sizes in space, but the pilot's cockpit, if it was a pilot's cockpit, was much smaller in relation to the rest of the ship, being a rather tiny blister infecting the top of the main saucer shape rather than a dominant feature of the design. The leading edge of the ship bristled with aerials and needles and radar dishes, just like Ant and Cleo's own vessel.
"What are all those big holes along its bow?" said Cleo.
"No idea", shrugged Ant. "Probably intakes for jet engines."
"Air intakes", said Cleo witheringly, "in space."
"Maybe they only use their jet engines in an atmosphere", said Ant curtly.
"They're gun ports, aren't they", said Cleo.
"They're far too big to be gun ports", Ant said, hoping that this was true. "Besides, anyone advanced enough to travel in space wouldn't be using guns that fired bullets."
"Or jet engines", added Cleo.
The saucer also seemed, to Ant's inexperienced eye, to be in a bad state. There were streaks of corrosion all over it, and places where the stuff of its hull seemed to have been replaced with patches of what looked worryingly like bacofoil. It was possible to see the joints between the plates its outer skin was made of.
"Crikey", said Cleo, "it's in even worse shape than ours."
"It has a pilot", pointed out Ant. "Ours doesn't."
Cleo floundered around in the air until she could flick herself in the direction of the control panel. "Does this thing have a radio? We could call for help - whoops, what did I turn on?"
The lights went off all over the ship.
"Erm", said Cleo. "Which button did I push?"
The alien saucer turned side-on to the light, and Ant saw a faded emblem stencilled across its side. A star in a circle, two rows of stripes like wings, and the letters USASN.
"We're saved!" he said. "It's friendly!"
"How do you know it's friendly?"
"It must be friendly! It's American!"
Chapter 4 - Our Friends The Americans
Things went dark as the much bigger saucer of the other ship closed over the sun. Then there was a CLANG as the two vessels' hulls collided.
Then, suddenly, the wheel in the hatch door above their heads (which had originally been in the floor) began to rotate, as if someone or something else was turning it from the other side.
"What if it's not an American", said Cleo, shrinking back behind a chair in fear. "What if it's an Alien."
"Not much difference between the two in my experience", said Ant.
The hatch swung inwards on metal hinges that shrieked like a scalded cat being dragged down a blackboard. The cargo pallet pinged free of its fastenings - it had been clipped into place over the hatch - and floated free into the centre of the cabin, big, heavy, and covered in sharp corners. The metal of the hatch door was thick as a finger, and it banged hard against the saucer's hull as it flew back.
A voice said: "Sensor says the atmosphere's breathable. Normal oxygen nitrogen." Then, it became puzzled and said:
"Traces of alcohol and hydrochloric acid."
The voice was American. Ant was reassured.
"Better watch your six in there, Billy Hank. Them alien sons of mothers might just breathe alcohol sure nuff."
"Just you pack that alien stuff in there, Wayne Bob. This here is a Royal Space Force moke. Filled to the sills with cucumber sandwiches and English muffins, I reckon."
"It's on the stolen list and you know it", said the second voice sulkily. "Besides, what killed her driver, you tell me that iffen you can."
"We've no proof the driver is dead, Wayne Bob." A head and a pair of hands emerged into the saucer. The head was human. It was the head of a white man with a flat-topped haircut. He winked at Ant.
"Well, what have we here. The RSF is training midgets as pilots to reduce payload weight. Gimme some thrust in here, Wayne Bob, I don't hold with this Free Fall stuff."
The deck around Ant rumbled gently, and all the debris in the air fell to the floor. Ant felt himself drift gently down with it.
"The gravity's back", whispered Cleo. "What did they do?"
"Fired their engines, most likely", Ant whispered back. "It's not real gravity - it's caused by acceleration, like the feel of the seat pressing against your back when you take off in a plane." He kicked himself mentally. "Of course! That's why we had gravity for the trip out here. Our engines were turned on."
"Why did the gravity go off halfway through the trip, then?"
"The ship stopped accelerating forwards and started decelerating. Spaceships don't brake like cars. It takes them a long time to stop."
Billy Hank rolled down into the cabin. He was moving like a moonman - gravity was still feeble.
The American spaceman held a torch, which he played round the cabin.
"Your average human stomach contains a deal of hydrochloric acid, I reckon", observed Billy Hank. "Been a whole lot of barfing going on in here, Wayne Bob."
"Smells like the inside of a diaper", agreed Wayne Bob.
"What's a diaper?" said Cleo.
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