On the radar screen he saw two white dots, which meant that it had fired a couple of missiles. They streaked towards one of the smaller ScreeWee ships, with the attacker close behind them, firing as he went.
The ScreeWee burst into flame. Johnny knew you shouldn't be able to hear sound in space, but he did hear it - a long, low rumble, washing across the stars.
The human ship turned in a long curve and came back for another run.
The Captain's face appeared on the screen. 'We have surrendered! This must not be allowed!'
'I'm sorry, I-' 'You must stop this now!'
Johnny let his own ship accelerate while he tried to adjust the microphone.
'Game player! Game player! Stop now! Stop now or -
Or what, he thought - or I'll shout 'stop' again? He raised his thumb over the Fire button, took aim at the intruder ... 'Please! I mean it!'
It was plunging on towards another ship, taking no notice of him.
'All right, then-'
Blinding blue light flashed across his vision. He shut his eyes and still the light was there, purple in the darkness. When he opened them again the ship ahead of him was just an expanding cloud of glittering dust.
He turned in his seat. The Captain's ship was right behind him. He could see its guns glowing.
They never did this in the game. They had much more firepower than you, but they used it stupidly. It had to be like that. You could only win against hundreds of alien ships if they had the same grasp of gunnery techniques as the common cucumber.
This time, every gun had fired at exactly the same time.
The Captain's face appeared on the screen. 'I am sorry.
'What? What happened?'
'It will not happen again, I promise you.'
'What happened?'
There was silence. The Captain appeared to be look- ing at something beyond the camera range.
'There was an unauthorized firing,' she said. 'Those responsible will be dealt with.'
'I was going after that ship,' said Johnny, uncertainly.
Yes. It is to be hoped that another time you can do so before one of my ships is destroyed.'
'I'm sorry. I - I didn't want to fire. It's not easy, shooting another ship.'
'How strange that a human should say that Clearly the Space Invaders shot themselves?'
'What do you mean?'
'Were they doing you any harm?'
'Look, you've got the wrong idea,' said Johnny. 'We're not really like that!'
'Excuse me. Things appear differently from where I sit.'
It would have been better if she had shouted, but she didn't. Johnny could have dealt with it if she had been angry. Instead, she just sounded tired and sad. It was the same tone of voice in which she'd spoken about the Space Invaders wreckage.
But he found he was quite angry too.
She couldn't be talking about him.
He picked spiders out of the bath, even if they'd got soapy and didn't have much of a chance. Yet she'd looked at him as if he was Ghengiz the Hun or some- one ... after blowing a ship into bits.
'I didn't ask for this, you know! I was just playing a game! I've got problems of my own! I ought to be getting a good night's sleep! That's very important at my age! Why me?'
'Why not?'
'Well, I don't see why I should have to be told how nasty we are! You shoot at us as well!'
'Self-defence.'
'No! Often you shoot first!'
'With humans, we have often found it essential to get our self-defence in as soon as possible.'
'Well, I don't like it! Find someone else!'
He switched off the screen and turned his ship away from the fleet. He half expected the Captain to send some fighters after him, but she did not. She didn't do anything.
Soon the fleet was merely a large collection of yellow dots on the radar screen.
Hah! Well!
They could find their own way home. It wasn't as if they needed him any more. The game was ruined. Who was going to spend hours looking at stars? They'd have to manage without him.
Serve them right. He was doing things for them, and they were only newts.
Occasionally a star went past. You didn't get stars going past in real space. But they had to put them in computer games so that people didn't think they'd got something like Wobbler's Journey to Alpha Centauri.
Interesting point. Where was he going?
The radar screen went bing.
There were ships heading towards him. The dots were green. That meant 'friendly'. But the missiles streaking ahead of them didn't look friendly at all.
Hang on, hang on - what colour was he on their radar?
That was important. Friendly ships were green and enemy ships were yellow. He was a starship. A human starship.
But on thc other hand, he'd been on the same side as the ScreeWee, so he might show up- He grabbed the microphone and got as far as 'Um, I' before the rest of the sentence was spread out, very thin, very small, against the stars.
He woke up.
It was 6:3=.
His throat felt cold.
He wondered why people made such a fuss about dreams. Dream Boat. Dream River. Dream A Little Dream. But when you got right down to it dreams were often horrible, and they felt real. Dreams always started out well and then they went wrong, no matter what you did. You couldn't trust dreams.
And he'd left the alarm set, even though this was Sunday and there was nothing to do on a Sunday. No- one else would be up for hours. it'd be a couple of hours even before Bigmac's brother delivered the paper, or at least delivered the wrong paper. And he was all stiff from sitting at the computer, which wasn't switched on.
Maybe tonight he'd put some stuff on the floor to wake him up.
He went back to bed, and switched the blanket on. He stared at the ceiling for a while. There was still a model Space Shuttle up there. But one of the two bits of cotton had come away from the drawing pin, so it hung down in a permanent nosedive.
There was something in the bed. He fumbled under the covers and pulled out his camera.
Which meant
Some more fumbling found a rectangle of shiny paper.
He looked at it.
Well, yes. Huh. What'd he expect?
He got up again and turned the computer on, then lay in bed so that he could watch the screen. Still more fake stars drifted past.
Maybe other people were doing this, too. All over the country. All over the world, maybe. Maybe not every computer showed the same piece of game space, so that some people were closer to the fleet than others. Or maybe some people were just persistent, like Wobbler, and wouldn't be beaten.
You saw people like that in J&J Software, some- times. They'd have a go at whatever new game old Patel had put on the machine, get blown to bits or eaten or whatever, which was what happened to you on your first time, and then you couldn't get rid of them with a crowbar. You learned a bit more, and then you died. That's how games worked. People got worked up. They had to beat some game, in the same way that Wobbler would spend weeks trying to beat a program. Some people took it personally when they were blown to bits.
So the ships he'd seen, then, were the ones who wouldn't give up.
But the Captain hadn't been at all grateful to him! It wasn't fair, making him feel like some kind of monster. As if he'd like shooting anyone in cold blood! They'd just totally destroyed another ship. OK, it was attacking them after they had surrendered, but after all it was a only a game .
Except, of course, it wasn't a game to the ScreeWee.
And they'd surrendered.
That didn't make them his responsibility, did it? Not the whole time? It had been OK for a little while, but he was getting tired of it.
He padded downstairs in the darkened house and pulled the encyclopedia off its shelf under the video. It had been bought last year from a man at the door, who'd persuaded Johnny's father that it was a good encyclopedia because it had a lot of colour pictures in it. It did have a lot of colour pictures in it. You could grow up knowing what everything looked like, if you didn't mind not knowing much about what it was.