Only You Can Save Mankind

by Terry Pratchett

  ‘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 once talked about the Black Hole of Calcutta or the 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.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Is Bigmac in?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  Johnny knew about this. There were only four rooms in the flat. Bigmac’s family was huge and lived all over the town, and practically no member of it knew where any other member was until they were quite sure who was asking.

  ‘It’s me, Johnny Maxwell. At school.’

  Clint was trying to push a fifteen-centimetre-wide head through a five-centimetre-wide hole.

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ Johnny felt that he was being carefully surveyed. ‘He’s down the pub. Yeah.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Johnny in what he hoped was a normal voice. ‘I mean, yeah.’

  Bigmac was thirteen. But the landlord of The Jolly Farmer was reputed to serve anyone who didn’t actually turn up on a tricycle.

  His way home led back past the pub anyway. He agonized a bit about going in. It was all right for Bigmac. Bigmac had been born looking seventeen. But Bigmac turned out to be outside anyway, leaning against the bonnet of a car. He had a couple of friends with him. They watched Johnny intently as he approached, and the one who had been nonchalantly fiddling with the car’s door handle stood up and glared.

  Johnny tried to swagger a bit.

  ‘Yeah, Johnny,’ said Bigmac, in a vague kind of way.

  He’s different here, Johnny thought. Older and harder.

  The other youths relaxed a little. Bigmac knew Johnny. That made him acceptable, for now.

  ‘Don’t often see you up here,’ said Bigmac. ‘You drinking now or what?’

  Johnny got the feeling that asking for a Coke would definitely be bad for his street cred. He decided to ignore the question.

  ‘I’m looking for Plonker,’ he said. ‘Wobbler said you know him?’

  ‘What d’you want him for?’ said Bigmac.

  On the wall in school, or down at the mall, Bigmac wouldn’t have even asked. But there were different rules here. Like, in school Bigmac tried to hide how good he was at numbers, and up here he had to hide his ability to hold a normal conversation.

  Johnny saw a way through.

  ‘Actually I’m looking for his sister,’ he said.

  One of Bigmac’s friends sniggered.

  Bigmac took Johnny’s arm and led him a little way off.

  ‘What’d you come up here for?’ he said. ‘You could’ve asked me tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s . . . important.’

  ‘Bigmac! You coming or what?’

  Bigmac glanced over his shoulder.

  ‘Can’t,’ he said. ‘Got to sort out something else.’

  One of the kids said something to the other one, and they both laughed. Then they got into the car. After a little while it started up, bumped up on to the pavement and off again, and then accelerated into the night. They heard the tyres screech as it turned the corner on the wrong side of the road.

  Bigmac relaxed. Suddenly he was a lot less tough, and a bit shorter, and more like the amiable not-quite-thicko Johnny had always known.

  ‘Didn’t you want to go with them?’ said Johnny.

  ‘You’re a right nerd, aren’t you,’ said Bigmac, in a friendly enough voice.

  ‘Wobbler says you have to say dweeb now, not nerd,’ said Johnny.

  ‘I usually say dickhead. Come on, let’s go,’ said Bigmac. ‘ ’Cos there’ll probably be some unhappy people around here pretty soon. ’S their own fault for leaving a car here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dweeb. You don’t know nothing about real life, you.’

  ‘It’s just games,’ said Johnny, half to himself. ‘All different sorts. Bigmac?’

  Somewhere away in the distance a car horn wailed, and was suddenly cut off. Bigmac stopped walking. The breeze blew his T-shirt against him, so that ‘Terminator’ was superimposed on a chest that looked like a toast rack.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Look, have you ever wondered what’s real and what isn’t?’

  ‘Bloody stupid thing to wonder,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Real’s real. Everything else isn’t.’

  ‘What about . . . well, dreams?’

  ‘Nah. They’re not real.’

  ‘They’ve got to be something. Otherwise you couldn’t have them, right?’ said Johnny desperately.

  ‘Yeah, but that’s not the same as really real.’

  ‘Are people on television real?’

  ‘ ’Course!’

  ‘Why’re we treating them as a game, then?’

  ‘You mean . . . on the News—’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘That’s different. You can’t have people going around doing what they like.’

  ‘But we—’

  ‘Anyway, space games aren’t real,’ said Bigmac. He kept looking down the dark street.

  Johnny relaxed a little.

  ‘Are you real?’

  ‘Dunno. Feel real. It’s all crap anyway.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Everything. So who cares? Come on, I’m going back home.’

  They strolled past what had been, in 1965, an environmental green space and was now a square of dog-poisoned earth where the shopping trolleys went to die.

  ‘Plonker’s a bit of a maniac,’ said Bigmac. ‘Bit of a wild man. Bit of a loony. Lives in a big posh house, though.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Oh, in Tyne Avenue or Crescent or somewhere,’ said Bigmac.

  A blue light lit his face for a moment as a police car flashed past the end of the road, its siren dee-dahing into the distance.

  Bigmac froze.

  ‘What’s his real name?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Eh? Yeah. Garry, I think.’

  Bigmac was staring at the end of the road. The blue light was still visible. It had stopped about half a mile away; they could see it reflected off an advertising hoarding.

  ‘Just Garry?’ said Johnny.

  Bigmac’s face was wet in the light of the street lamps. Johnny realized that h
e was sweating.

  ‘Might be Dunn,’ said Bigmac. He shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

  Another siren echoed around the night. An ambulance went past on the main road, ghostly under its flashing light.

  ‘Look, Bigmac—’

  ‘Bugger off!’

  Bigmac turned and ran, his Doc Martens crashing on the pavement. Johnny watched him go. He thought of all the things he should have said. He wasn’t stupid. Everyone knew what happened to cars around the dark tower. What could he say now?

  And his body thought: You don’t say anything. You do something. It started running all by itself after his friend, taking his brain with it.

  Despite a bedroom full of weight-training equipment that would have been of considerable interest if the police had ever bothered much about a recent theft down at the Sports Centre, Bigmac wasn’t in much of a condition. He had been born out of condition. Johnny caught him up on the bend.

  ‘I told you . . . to . . . buggeroff! Nothing . . . todo . . . withyou!’ said Bigmac, as they headed towards the distant lights.

  ‘They crashed it, didn’t they.’

  ‘Nozzer’s a good driver!’

  ‘Yeah? Good at going fast?’

  There was a crowd standing around at the traffic lights further down the road. As they ran, another ambulance overtook them and rocked to a halt. The crowd parted. Johnny caught a glimpse of – well, not a car, but maybe what a car would look like after trying to be in the same place as a liquid-cement truck. He knew it was a cement truck, because one had climbed up the pavement and lay on its side. Its load was fast becoming the biggest brick in the world.

  In the distance there was the scream of a fire engine, getting nearer.

  He grabbed Bigmac’s arm, pulling him around. ‘I don’t think you want to go any closer,’ he said. Bigmac shook himself free, just as the police managed to lever the crumpled door open.

  Bigmac stared.

  Then he turned, tottered over to a low garden wall by the roadside, and was sick.

  When Johnny reached him his whole body was shaking, with cold and terror.

  ‘Bugger you, I could have been in that, you—’

  Bigmac was sick again, all down the front of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Johnny took his coat off and put it over the other boy’s shivering shoulders.

  ‘—they kept goin’ on at me, I told them, I said—’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, that’s right,’ said Johnny, looking around. ‘Look, you just sit here . . . there’s a phone— You just sit there, all right? You just—’

  ‘Don’t go away!’

  ‘What? Oh. Yes. Right. Come on then—’

  Click!

  ‘Hello, this—’

  ‘Yo-less? It’s Johnny.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your mum in the hospital tonight?’

  ‘No, she’s on days this week. Why?’

  ‘Can you get her to bring her car down to Witheridge Road?’

  ‘What’s up? You sound as if you’ve been—’

  ‘Look, shut up! Get her to do it, right? Please! It’s Bigmac!’

  ‘What’s up with him?’

  ‘Yo-less! This is important! This is really important!’

  ‘You know how she goes on when I—’

  ‘Yo-less!’

  ‘Oh, all right. Hey, is that a siren?’

  ‘We’re in a phone box. You’d better get her to bring a blanket or something. And hurry up, it’s dead smelly in here.’

  ‘That was a siren, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He put the phone down.

  Bigmac wasn’t being sick any more. He hadn’t got anything to be sick with. He was just leaning against the door, shaking.

  ‘She’ll be along right away,’ said Johnny, as cheerfully as he could manage. ‘She’s a ward sister. She knows all about this stuff.’

  Outside, one of the ambulances drove away. Firemen were all over the wreck. Some of them were getting equipment off the engine.

  Bigmac stared at the scene.

  ‘They’re probably fine,’ lied Johnny. ‘It’s amazing how people can—’

  ‘Johnny?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No one’s fine who looked like that,’ said Bigmac, in a flat voice. ‘There was blood all over.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘My brother’ll kill me when he finds out. He said if I have the cops round again he’ll throw me out of the window. He’ll kill me if he finds out.’

  ‘He won’t, then. You didn’t do anything. We were just hanging out and you felt ill. That’s all.’

  ‘He’ll kill me!’

  ‘What for? No one knows anything except me, and I don’t know anything. I promise.’

  *

  It was gone eight when Johnny got home. He left his coat in the shed until he could sneak it in and sponge it off, and said he’d been round at Yo-less’s, which was true, and was a pretty good way of avoiding questions, because his parents approved of Yo-less on racial grounds. To object to him being round at Yo-less’s would be like objecting to Yo-less. Yo-less was dead handy.

  Anyway, it wasn’t as if anyone had cooked any dinner. Mrs Yo-less had made him a hot chocolate when he was there, but he hadn’t accepted a meal, because that suggested you didn’t have them all that often at home and you didn’t do that. She’d put Bigmac to bed. Bigmac with his skinhead haircut.

  He microwaved himself something called a Pour-On Genuine Creole Lasagne, which said it served four portions. It did if you were dwarfs.

  The phone went as he was carrying it upstairs. It was Wobbler.

  ‘Yo-less just rang me.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Why didn’t you get them to put Bigmac in an ambulance?’

  ‘Who with?’

  There was a moment of silence from Wobbler as he worked this out. Then he said, ‘Yuk.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Anyway, people’d ask questions. Bigmac’s been in enough trouble as it is, what with his brother and one thing and another.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Wow!’

  ‘Got to go now, Wobbler. Got to eat my dinner before it congeals.’

  He put the phone down on the tray, and looked at it. There was something else he was going to do. What was it? Something, anyway.

  The lasagne looked real. It looked as though someone had already eaten it once.

  The Captain looked up.

  Most of her officers were standing in front of her. Except for the Gunnery Officer, who was looking smug, they all wore rather embarrassed expressions.

  ‘Yes?’ said the Captain.

  To her surprise, it wasn’t the Gunnery Officer who spoke. It was the Navigation Officer, a small and inoffensive ScreeWee who suffered from prematurely shedding scales.

  ‘Um,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’ said the Captain again.

  ‘Um. We – that is, all of us – ’ said the Navigation Officer, looking as if she wished she was somewhere else, ‘—we feel that, uh, the present course is, uh, an unwise one. With respect,’ she added.

  ‘In what way?’ said the Captain. She could see the Gunnery Officer grinning behind the little ScreeWee. No one could grin like a ScreeWee – their mouths were built for it.

  ‘We, uh – that is, all of us – we are still being attacked. And that last attack was a terrible one.’

  ‘The Chosen One stopped it, at the cost of his own life,’ said the Captain.

  ‘Um. He will return,’ said the Navigation Officer. ‘Um. Twenty of our people will not.’

  The Captain wasn’t really looking at her. She was staring at the Gunnery Officer, whose grin was now wide enough to hold a set of billiard balls and probably the cue too.

  He’s been talking to them, she told herself. Everyone’s on edge, no one can think straight, and he’s talking to them. I should have had him shot. They wouldn’t have liked it, but I could probably have shouted them down.

  ‘So what is it you
are suggesting?’ she said.

  ‘Um. We – that is, all of us,’ said the little ScreeWee, with an imploring glance at the Gunnery Officer, ‘we feel we should turn and—’

  ‘Fight?’ said the Captain. ‘Make a last stand?’

  ‘Um. Yes. That’s right.’

  ‘And that’s the feeling of all of you?’

  The officers nodded, one after another.

  ‘Um. Sorry, ma’am,’ said the Navigation Officer.

  ‘The others stood and fought,’ said the Captain. ‘The . . . Space Invaders. And the others. We’ve all seen the wrecks. All they knew was how to attack. They stood and fought, and fought and died.’

  ‘We are dying too, um,’ said the Navigation Officer.

  ‘I know. I am sorry,’ said the Captain. ‘But many are living. And every minute takes us further from danger. We are so near the Border! If we stop . . . you know what will happen. Game space will move. The Border will retreat. The humans will find us. And then they will—’

  ‘Die,’ said the Gunnery Officer. ‘And we shall win. Those others were stupid. We are not. We can win. We shall give the humans the mother of all battles.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the Captain. ‘Mother and grandmother of battles. Battles that breed more battles.’ ‘And this is your leader speaking,’ sneered the Gunnery Officer. ‘The leader of the fleet. It is pathetic. Cowardly.’

  ‘When we are home—’ the Captain began.

  ‘Home? This is our home! We have no other! All this talk of the Border, and a planet of our own . . . Have any of us seen it? No! It’s a legend. Wishful thinking. A dream. We lie to ourselves. We make up stories. The Chosen One. The Hero with a Thousand Extra Lives! It’s all dreams! We live and breed and die on our ships. That is our destiny. There is no choice!’

  Chapter 8

  Peace Talks, Peace Shouts

  Johnny awoke in the starship.

  Normally he was some way from the fleet, but this time it was around him. There were ScreeWee ships on every side.

  They were flying the wrong way.

  Immediately, a face appeared on the screen. Except for a few differences on the crest, and a slight orange tint to the scales, it might have been the Captain.

  ‘Calling the human ship.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am the new Captain. These are my instructions—’

  ‘What happened to the old Captain?’