He'd taken one mouthful when something slammed into the ship. A red glare filled the cabin; alarms started to blare.
He looked up in time to see a ship curving away for another run.
He hadn't even glanced at the radar.
He'd been eating his tea!
He spun the ship. The multi-vitamin sandwich flew around into the wiring somewhere.
It was coming back to get him. He prodded furiously at the control panel.
Hang on ...
What was the worst that could happen to him?
He could wake up in bed.
He took his time. He dodged. He weaved. Another missile hit the ship. As the attacker roared past, Johnny fired, with everything.
Another cloud of wreckage.
No problem.
But it must have fired a missile just before he got it. There was another red flash. The lights went out. The ship jumped. His head bounced off the seatback and banged on to the control panel.
He opened his eyes.
Right. And you wake up back in your bedroom.
A light winked at him.
There was something beeping.
Bound to be the alarm clock. That's how dreams end
He lifted his head. The flashing light was oblong. He tried to focus.
There were shapes there.
But they weren't saying 6:3=.
They were spelling out 'AIR LEAK', and behind the insistent beeping was a terrible hissing sound.
No, no, he thought. This doesn't happen.
He pushed himself up. There were lots of red lights. He pressed some buttons hurriedly, but this had no effect at all except to make some more lights go red.
He didn't know much about the controls of a star- ship, other than fast, slow, left, right and fire, but there were whole rows of flashing alarms which suggested that a lot of things he didn't know about were going wrong. He stared at some red letters which said 'SECONDARY PUMPS FAILURE'. He didn't know what the secondary pumps were, either, but he wished, he really wished, they hadn't failed.
His head ached. He reached up, and there was real blood on his hand. And he knew that he was going to die. Really die. No, he thought. Please! I'm John Maxwell. Please! I'm twelve. I'm not dying in a spaceship The beeping got louder. He looked at the sign again. It was flashing 6:3= About time, he thought, as he passed out . .
And woke up.
He was at the computer again. It wasn't switched on, and he was freezing cold.
He had a headache, but a tentative feel said there was no blood. It was just a headache.
He stared into the dark black screen, and wondered what it felt like to be a ScreeWee.
It felt like that, except that you didn't wake up. It was always AIR LEAK, or *Alert*Alert*Alert* beep- ing on and off, and then perhaps the freezing cold of space, and then nothing.
He had breakfast.
You got a free alien in every pack of sugar-glazed Snappiflakes. It was a new thing. Or an old thing, being tried again.
The one that ended up in his bowl was orange and had three eyes and four arms. And it was holding a ray gun in each hand.
His father hadn't got up. His mother was watching the little television in the kitchen, where a very large man disguised as an entire desert was pointing to a lot of red and blue arrows on a map.
He went down to Neil Armstrong Mall.
He took the plastic alien with him. That'd be the way to invade a planet. One alien in every box! Wait until they were in every cupboard in the country, send out the signal and bazaam!
Cereal killers!
Maybe on some other planet somewhere you got a free human in every packet of ammonia-coated Snappi- crystals. Hey, zorks! Collect the Whole Set! And there'd be all these little plastic people. Holding guns, of course. You just had to walk down the Street to see that, of course, everyone had a gun.
He looked out of the bus window.
That was it, really. No-one would bother to put plastic aliens inside the plastic cereal if they were just, you know, doing everyday things. Holding the Cosmiczippo RayTM hedge clippers! Getting on the MegadeathTM bus! Hanging out at the Star Thruster Mall!
The trouble with all the aliens he'd seen was that they either wanted to eat you or play music at you until you became better people. You never got the sort that just wanted to do something ordinary like borrow the lawn mower.
Wobbler and Yo-less and Bigmac were trying to hang out by the ornamental fountain, but really they were just hanging around. Yo-less was wearing the same grey trousers he wore to school. You couldn't hang out in grey trousers. And Wobbler still wore his sunglasses, except they weren't real sunglasses because he had to wear ordinary glasses anyway; they were those clip-on sunglasses for tourists. Also, they weren't the same size as the glasses underneath, and had rubbed red marks on his nose. And he wore an anorak. Wobbler was probably the only person in the universe who still wore an anorak. And Bigmac. in addition to his camou- flage trousers and 'Terminator' T-shirt with 'Blackbury Skins' on the back in biro, had got hold of a belt made entirely of cartridge cases. He looked stupid.
'Yo, duds,' said Johnny.
'We've been here ages,' said Yo-less.
'I went one stop past on the bus and had to walk back,' said Johnny. 'Thinking about other things. What's happening?'
'Do you mean what's happening, or sort of hey, my man, what's happening?' said Wobbler.
'What's happening?' said Johnny.
'I want to go into J&J Software,' said Wobbler. 'They might have got Cosmic Coffee Mats in. It got a review in Bazzammm! and they said it's got an unbreak- able copy protection.' 'Did they say it was any good?' said Bigmac. 'Who cares?' 'You'll get caught one day,' said Yo-less. 'Then you get given a job in Silicon Valley, designing antipiracy software,' said Wobbler. Behind his two thicknesses of glasses, his eyes lit up. Wobbler thought that California was where good people went when they died.
'No, you don't. You just get in trouble and you get sued,' said Yo-less. 'And the police take all your com- puters away. There was something in the paper.'
They wandered aimlessly towards the computer shop.
'I saw this film once, right, where there were these computer games and if you were really good the aliens came and got you and you had to fly a spaceship and fight a whole bad alien fleet,' said Bigmac.
'Did you beat it? I mean, in the film, the alien fleet got beaten?'
Bigmac gave Johnny an odd look. 'Of course. Sure. There wouldn't be any point other- wise, would there.' 'Only you can save mankind,' said Johnny. 'What?' 'It's the game,' said Wobbler.
'But it always says something like that on the boxes you get games in,' said Johnny. Except if you get them from Wobbler, he added to himself, when you just get a disc. 'Well. Yeah. Something like that. Why not?'
'I mean they never say, "Only You are going to be put inside a Billion Pounds Worth of Machine with more Switches than you've Ever Seen and be Blown to Bits by a Thousand Skilled Enemy Pilots because You Don't Really Know how to Fly It." They wandered past Mr Zippy's Ice Cream Extravaganza. 'Can't see that catching on,' said Wobbler. 'Can't see them ever selling a game called Get Shot to Pieces.'
'You still having trouble at home?' said Yo-less.
'It's all gone quiet,' said Johnny.
'That can be worse than shouting.'
'Yes.'
'It's not that bad when your mum and dad split up,' said Wobbler, 'although you get to see more museums than is good for you.'
'Still found no aliens?' said Yo-less.
'Um. Not in the game.'
'Still dreaming about them?' said Wobbler.
'Sort of.'
Someone handing out leaflets about Big Savings on Double Glazing gave one, in desperation, to Yo-less. He took it gravely, thanked them, folded it in two and put it in his pocket. Yo-less always filed this sort of thing. You never knew when it might come in handy, he said. One day he might want to doubleglaze his sur- gery, and he'd be in a good position to compare offers.