Only You Can Save Mankind

It was just out of gun range. He raced along behind

Ahead, he could see some of the big capital ships of the fleet manoeuvring clumsily out of the way. They spread out slowly, trying to avoid colliding with one another. Seen from the front, it was like watching the petals of a flower opening.

The attacker roared for the middle of the fleet. Then it rolled gently and fired six missiles, one after another. A moment later, two of the small ScreeWee fighters exploded and one of the larger ships spun around as it was hit.

The attacker was already heading for another fighter. Johnny had to admit it - it was beautiful flying. He'd never realized before how badly most players flew. They flew like people who lived on the ground - from right to left and up and down, woodenly. Like someone moving something on a screen, in fact.

But the attacker rolled and twisted like a swallow in flight. And every turn brought another ScreeWee ship under its guns. Even if they had been firing back, it wouldn't have been hit, except by accident. It pirouetted.

The Captain's face appeared on the screen. 'You must stop this!'

'I'm trying! I'm trying! Don't you think I'm trying!' The attacker turned. Johnny hadn't thought it was possible for a starship to skid, but this one did. It paused just for a moment as its jets slowed it down, and then accelerated back the way it had come.

Right down his sights.

'Look, stop!' he shouted. He had a missile ready. Why even bother to shout? Players couldn't hear, they only saw the game on the screen- 'Who are you?'

It was a very clear voice, and very human. The Cap- tain sounded as though she'd learned the language out of a book, but this voice was one that someone had really used since they were about one year old.

'You can hear me!'

'Get out of the way, stupid!'

The two pilots stared at one another across a distance that was getting smaller very, very fast.

I've heard that before, Johnny thought. That voice. You can hear all the punctuation .

They didn't crash - exactly. There was a grinding noise as each starship scraped the length of the other, ripping off fins, ripping open tanks, and then spun drunkenly away.

The control panel in front of Johnny became a mass of red lights. There were cracks racing across the cockpit.

'Idiot!' screamed the radio. 'It's all right,' said Johnny urgently. 'You just wake up - His ship exploded.

7

The Dark Tower

It was 16:34° by the thermometer. Time was different in game space. No matter how often you died, you never got used to it. It wasn't as if you got better with pract- She'd heard him. Inside the game. He sat up.

The ScreeWee were inside the game because it was their world. Wobbler and the rest hadn't really been in it; he was pretty sure he'd just dreamed them in because he needed someone to pilot the food tankers.

But he'd heard her in Patel's. That ringing, sharp voice, which made it very clear that its owner thought everyone in the whole world was dim-witted and had to be talked to like a baby or a foreigner.

On the screen, empty space rolled onwards. He had to find her. Apart from anything else, no-one who flew like that should be allowed anywhere near the ScreeWee.

Wobbler'd probably know who she was.

He found the room moving around him when he stood up. He probably really was ill, he thought. Well, not surprising. What with Trying Times and stupid school and parents trying to be friends and now having to save an entire alien race instead of..

He made it to the hail and took the phone off its base and brought it back upstairs. He'd just extended the aerial when it rang.

'Um, hello - Blackbury-two-three-nine-nine-eight- zero-who's-that-speaking-please?'

'Is that you? This is me.'

'Oh. Hello, Wobbler.'

'You ill or something?'

'Flu. Look, Wobbler-'

'You seen the papers today?'

'No. Mum and Dad take them to work with them. Wobbler-'

'Thing in the papers about Gobi Software. Hang on ... says, "NO ENCOUNTERS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST KIND." That's the headline.'

Johnny hesitated.

'What does it say?' he said, very cautiously.

'What does "inundated" mean?'

'S'like "overwhelmed",' said Johnny.

'Says that Gobi Software and computer games shops have been ... inundated with complaints about Only You Can Save Mankind. Because they made that offer of five pounds if you shoot all the aliens, and it says people aren't finding any aliens. And Gobi Software are in trouble because of the Trades Descriptions Act. And they keep on using the word hacker,' said Wobbler, in the sneering tones of one who knows what a hacker really is and knows that most journalists don't. 'And there's a quote from Al Rampa, president of Gobi. He says they're recalling all the games, and if you send back the original discs they'll send you a token for their new game, Dodge City 1888. That got four stars in FAAzzzzAAAP!.'

'Yes, but you haven't got the original discs,' said Johnny. 'You hardly ever have any original discs.'

'No, but I know the guy whose brother bought it,' said Wobbler happily. 'So it was just a problem with the game, right? You weren't mental after all.'

'I never said I was mental,' said Johnny.

'No, but ... well, you know,' said Wobbler. He sounded embarrassed.

'Wobbler?'

'Yes?'

'You know that girl who was in Patel's?'

'Oh. her. What about her?'

'D'you know who she is?'

'She's someone's sister, I think.'

'Whose?'

'Goes to some kind of special school for the termi- nally clever. She's called Kylie or Krystal or one of those made-up names. What do you want to know for?'

'Oh, nothing. Just because she complained about the game in Patel's, I suppose. Whose sister is she?'

'Some guy called ... oh ... Plonker. Yeah. Friend of Bigmac's. You sure you're all right?'

'Yes. Fine. Cheers.' 'Cheers. You going to be in tomorrow?' 'Spect so.' 'Cheers.' 'Cheers.

Bigmac wasn't on the phone. Where Bigmac lived, people hardly even got letters. Even muggers were frightened to go there. People talked about the Joshua N'Clement block in the same way that they probably Spanish Inquisition's reception area.

The tower loomed all alone, black against the sky, like someone's last tooth.

There wasn't much else around the place. There was a row of boarded up shops, but you could see where the fire had been. And there was a pub made out of neon lights and red brick; it was called The Jolly Farmer.

The tower had won an award in 1965, just before bits had started falling off. It was always windy. Even on the calmest day, gales whistled icily through the concrete corridors. The place was some kind of wind reservation. If the Joshua N'Clement block had existed a few thousand years ago, people would have come from all over the country to sacrifice to the wind god.

Johnny's father called it Rottweiler Heights. Johnny could hear them barking as he walked up the stairs (the lifts had stopped working in 1966). Everyone in the tower seemed afraid, and mostly they seemed afraid of one another.

Bigmac lived on the fourteenth floor, with his brother and his brother's girlfriend and a pit bull terrier called Clint. Bigmac's brother was reliably believed to be in the job of moving video recorders around in an informal way.

Johnny knocked cautiously, hoping to be loud enough to be heard by the people but quiet enough to be missed by Clint. No such luck. A wall of sound erupted from behind the door.

After a while there was the clink of a chain and the door opened a few centimetres. A suspicious eye appeared at about the height an eye should be, while a metre below there was a certain amount of confused activity as Clint tried to get both eyes and his teeth into the same narrow crack.