Only You Can Save Mankind

by Terry Pratchett

  Johnny saw it all in one long, long second.

  Firstly, the bridge was big. It seemed to be the size of a football pitch. And at one end there was a screen, which looked almost as big. He felt like an ant standing in front of a TV set.

  The screen was covered with green dots.

  Players. Heading for the fleet.

  There were hundreds of them.

  Right in front of the screen was a horseshoe-shaped bank of controls, with a dozen seats ranged in front of it.

  It’s here, he thought. When I was sitting in my room playing, they were in here in this great shadowy room, steering their ship, firing back . . .

  Only one seat was occupied now. Its occupant was already standing up, half turning, reaching for something . . .

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Kirsty. ‘Make my stardate.’

  The Gunnery Officer froze, glaring at them.

  ‘Too late,’ he said. ‘You’re too late!’ He waved a claw towards the screen. ‘I’ve taken us back to where we belong. There is no time to turn us round again. You must fight now.’

  He focused on Johnny. ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  ‘The Chosen One,’ said the Captain, starting to walk forward. The others followed her.

  ‘But we must fight,’ said the Gunnery Officer. ‘For honour. The honour of the ScreeWee! That’s what we are for!’

  Johnny’s foot touched something. He looked down. Now that his eyes had become accustomed to the gloom, he could see that he’d almost tripped over a ScreeWee. It was dead. Nothing with a hole like that in it could have been alive.

  Kirsty was looking down, too. Johnny could see other shapes on the floor in the shadows.

  ‘He’s been killing Sc— people,’ he whispered.

  Shoot them in space, shoot them on a screen, and there was just an explosion and five points on the score total. When they’d been shot from a few metres away, then there was simply a reminder that someone who had been alive was now, very definitely, not alive any more. And would never be again.

  He looked up at the Gunnery Officer. ScreeWee were cold-blooded and a long way from being human, but this one had a look about it – about him – that suggested a mind running off into madness.

  There was a silvery sheen on his scales. Johnny found himself wondering if the ScreeWee changed colour, like chameleons. The Captain had always looked more golden when she was acting normally, and became almost yellow when she was worried . . .

  She was the colour of lemons now.

  She hissed something. The guards looked at her in surprise, but turned and filed obediently out of the bridge. Then she turned to the Gunnery Officer.

  ‘You killed all of them?’ she said, softly.

  ‘They tried to stop me! It is a matter of honour!’

  ‘Yes, yes. I can see that,’ said the Captain, in a level voice. She was shifting position slightly now, moving away from the humans.

  ‘A ScreeWee dies fighting or not at all!’ shouted the Gunnery Officer.

  The Captain’s scales had faded to the colour of old paper.

  ‘Yes, I understand, I understand,’ she said. ‘And the humans understand too, don’t you.’

  The Gunnery Officer turned his head. The Captain spread her arms, opened her mouth and leapt. The male must have sensed her; he turned, claws whirring through the air.

  Johnny reached out and caught Kirsty’s gun as she raised it.

  ‘No! You might hit her!’

  ‘Why’d she do that? I could easily have shot him! So could the guards! Why just jump at him like that?’

  The fighters were a whirling ball of claws and tails.

  ‘It’s personal. I think she hates him too much,’ he said. ‘But look at the screen!’

  There were more green dots. Red figures that might have meant something to a ScreeWee were scrolling up on one side too fast for a human to read.

  He looked down at the controls.

  ‘They’re getting closer! We’ve got to do something.’

  Kirsty stared at the controls too. The seats were made to fit a ScreeWee. So were the controls themselves.

  ‘Well, do you know what means?’ she said. ‘Fast? Slow? Fire? The cigarette lighter?’

  The fighters had broken apart and were circling each other, hissing. The green and red light from the screen threw unpleasant shadows.

  Neither ScreeWee was paying the humans the least attention. They couldn’t afford to. ScreeWee walked like ducks and looked like a cartoon of a crocodile, but they fought like cats – it was mainly watching and snarling with short, terrible blurs of attack and defence.

  A light started to flash on the panel and an alarm rang. It rang in ScreeWee, but it was still pretty urgent even in Human.

  The Captain spun around. The Gunnery Officer jumped backwards, hit the ground running, and sped towards the door. He was through it in a blur.

  ‘He can’t go anywhere,’ said the Captain, staggering across to the controls. ‘I . . . can deal with him later . . .’

  ‘You’ve got some nasty scratches,’ said Kirsty. ScreeWee blood was blue. ‘I know some first aid . . .’

  ‘A lot, I expect,’ said Johnny.

  ‘But not for ScreeWee, I imagine,’ said the Captain. Her chest was heaving. One of her legs seemed to be at the wrong angle. Blue patches covered her tail.

  ‘You could have just shot him,’ said Kirsty. ‘It was stupid to fight like that.’

  ‘Honour!’ snarled the Captain. She tripped a switch with a claw and hissed some instructions in ScreeWee. ‘But he was right. Sadly, I know this now. There is no changing ScreeWee nature. Our destiny is to fight and die. I have been foolish to think otherwise.’

  She blinked.

  ‘Take off your shirt,’ Kirsty demanded.

  ‘What?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Your shirt! Your shirt! Look at her! She’s losing blood! She needs bandaging!’

  Johnny obeyed, reluctantly.

  ‘You’ve got a vest on underneath? Only grandads wear a vest. Yuk. Don’t you ever wash your clothes?’

  He did, sometimes. And occasionally his mother had a burst of being a mother and everything in the house got washed. But usually he used the wash-basket laundry, which consisted of going through the basket until he found something that didn’t seem all that bad.

  ‘But she said you wouldn’t know anything about ScreeWee medicine,’ he said.

  ‘So what? Even if it’s blue, blood’s still blood. You should try to keep it inside.’

  Kirsty helped the Captain to a chair. The alien was swaying a bit, and her scales had gone white, speckled with blue.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ said Johnny.

  Kirsty glanced at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Is there anything you can do?’

  She turned back to the Captain.

  We’ll all die, Johnny thought. They’re all out there waiting. And here’s me at the controls of the main alien ship. We can’t turn round now. And I can’t even read what it says on the controls!

  I’ve done it all wrong. It was all simple, and now it’s all complicated.

  You think about doing things in dreams, but we’re always wrong about dreams. When people talk about dreams they mean daydreams. That’s where you’re Superman or whatever. That’s where you win everything. In dreams everything is weird. I’m in a dream now. Or something like a dream. And when I wake up, all the ScreeWee will be back in game space and they’ll be shot at again, just like the Space Invaders.

  Hang on . . .

  Hang on . . .

  He stared at the meaningless controls again.

  On one of them the symbols rearranged themselves to form ‘Main Engines’.

  This is my world, too. It’s in my head.

  He looked up at the big screen.

  All of them. They’re all there, waiting. In bedrooms and lounges around the world. In between watching Cobbers and doing their homework.

  All waiting with their fingers on the Fire buttons, an
d each one thinking that they’re the only one . . .

  All there, in front of me . . .

  ‘I wasn’t expecting to do this,’ said Kirsty, behind him. ‘I wasn’t expecting to be bandaging aliens. Put a claw on this knot, will you? What’s your pulse level?’

  ‘I don’t think we have them,’ said the Captain.

  The ship thumped.

  The distant background rumble of the engines was suddenly a roar.

  The seats had bits sticking up where humans didn’t expect bits to stick up. Johnny was sitting cross-legged on one, both hands on the controls, face multi-coloured in the light of the screen.

  Kirsty tapped him on the shoulder. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Flying,’ said Johnny, without turning his head.

  ‘He said it’s too late to turn round.’

  ‘I’m not turning round.’

  ‘You don’t know how to fly one of these!’

  ‘I’m not flying one of these. I’m flying the whole fleet.’

  ‘You can’t understand the controls!’

  Green and red light made patterns on his face as he turned to her.

  ‘You know, everyone tells me things. All the time,’ he said. ‘Well, I’m not listening now. I can read the controls. Why not? They’re in my head. Now sit down. I shall need you to do some things. And stop talking to me as if I’m stupid.’

  She sat down, almost hypnotized by his tone of voice.

  ‘But how—’

  ‘There’s a control that lets this ship steer all the others as well. It’s used on long voyages.’ He moved a lever. ‘And I’m flying them as fast as I can. I don’t think they can go any faster. All the dials have gone into the – that’s ScreeWee for red.’

  ‘But you’re heading straight for the players!’

  ‘I’ve got to. There isn’t time to turn round . . .’

  Wobbler had a pin-up over his bed. It was a close-up photograph of the Intel 8O586–75 microprocessor, taken through a microscope; it looked like a street map of a very complicated modern city. His grandfather complained that it was unhealthy and why didn’t he have a double page spread from Giggles and Garters instead, but Wobbler had a vision: one day, if he could master GCSE maths and reliably pick up a soldering iron by the end that wasn’t hot, he was going to be a Big Man in computers. A Number One programmer, with his hair in a ponytail at the back like they all wore. Never mind about Yo-less saying it was all run by men in suits these days. One day, the world would hear from Wobbler Johnson – probably via a phone-line it didn’t know was connected to its computer.

  In the meantime, he was staring at columns of numbers in an effort to make a completely illegal copy of Mr Bunky Goes Boing. It had been given four stars and declared ‘megabad!!!’, which was what Splaaaaatttt! magazine still thought meant pretty good if you were under sixteen.

  He blinked at the screen, and smeared the grease on his glasses a bit more evenly.

  And that was enough for tonight.

  He sat back, and his eye caught sight of Only You Can Save Mankind, under a pile of other discs.

  Poor old Rubber. Of course, you called people mental all the time, but there was something weird about him. His body walked around down on Earth but his brain was probably somewhere you couldn’t find with an atlas.

  Wobbler shoved the disc in the drive. Odd about the game, though. There was probably a logical reason for it. That’s what computers were, logical. Start believing anything else and you were in trouble.

  The title came up, and then the bit that Gobi Software had pinched from Star Wars, and then—

  His jaw dropped.

  Ships. Hundreds of them. Getting bigger and bigger. Yellow ships, filling the screen, so that it was just black and yellow and just yellow and then blinding white—

  Wobbler ducked.

  And then a black screen.

  Almost black, anyway.

  For a moment the words hung there—

  Hi, Wobler—

  – and then vanished.

  *

  More alarms were clanging and whooping.

  Kirsty peered out from between her fingers.

  ‘I don’t think we hit anyone,’ said Johnny, tapping on the keys.

  ‘You flew straight through them!’

  ‘That’s right!’

  ‘OK, but they’ll still come after us.’

  ‘So now we turn round. It’ll take a little while. How’s the Captain?’

  A clawed hand gripped the back of his chair, and her snout rested on his shoulder.

  ‘This is very bad,’ said the Captain. ‘Our engines are not designed to run at this sort of speed for any length of time. They could break down at any moment.’

  ‘It’s a calculated risk,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Really? How precisely did you calculate it?’ said the ScreeWee.

  ‘Well . . . not exactly calculate . . . I just thought it was worth a try,’ said Johnny.

  ‘You’re turning back towards the players!’

  ‘And we’re still accelerating,’ said Johnny.

  ‘What were you typing just then?’ said Kirsty.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Johnny, grinning. ‘Just thought I saw someone I recognized. You know, as we flashed past.’

  ‘Why are you looking so happy?’ she demanded. ‘We’re in terrible trouble.’

  ‘Dunno. Because it’s my trouble, I suppose. Captain, why have all those lights over there come on?’

  ‘They’re the ships of the fleet,’ said the Captain. ‘The commanders want to know what’s happening.’

  ‘Tell them to hold on to something,’ said Johnny. ‘And tell them – tell them they’re going home.’

  They both looked at him.

  ‘Oh, yes, very impressive,’ said Kirsty. ‘Very dramatic. All very—’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Johnny again, his eyes not leaving the screen.

  ‘No one tells me to shut up!’

  ‘I’m telling you now. Just because you’ve got a mind like a, a hammer doesn’t mean you have to treat everyone else like a nail. Now – here they come again . . .’

  Wobbler took the disc out of the drive and looked at it. Then he felt around the back of his computer in case there were any extra wires.

  That Johnny . . . he was the quiet type. He always said that all he knew about computers was how to switch them on, but everyone knew about computers. He’d probably messed around with the game and given it back. Pretty good. Wobbler wondered how he’d done it.

  He put the disc back in and started the game again.

  ‘Only You Can Save Mankind’ . . . yeah, yeah.

  Then the inside of the starship. Missiles, guns, score total, yeah, yeah . . .

  And stars ahead. The sparkly ones you got in the game. He’d done much better ones for Voyage to Alpha Centauri.

  No ships to be seen.

  He picked up the joystick and moved it, watching the stars spin as the ship turned . . .

  There was a ship right behind him. Very much behind him. Dozens of ships, again. Hundreds of ships. All getting bigger. Much bigger. Very quickly.

  Very, very quickly.

  Again.

  When he got up off the floor and put the leg back on the chair, the screen was all black again, except for the little flashing cursor.

  Wobbler stared at it.

  Logic, he said. Not believing in logical reasons was almost as bad as dropping hot solder on to a nylon sock. There had to be a logical explanation.

  One day, he’d think of one.

  ‘They’re following us! They’re following us!’

  Little coils of smoke were coming up from the controls. There were all sorts of vibrations in the floor.

  ‘I’m pretty sure we can outrun them,’ said Johnny.

  ‘How sure?’ said Kirsty.

  ‘Pretty sure.’

  Kirsty turned to the Captain.

  ‘Have we got any rear guns?’


  The Captain nodded.

  ‘They can be fired from here,’ she said. ‘But we should not do that. We have surrendered, remember?’

  ‘I haven’t,’ said Kirsty. ‘Which one fires the guns?’

  ‘The stick with the button on the top.’

  ‘This? It’s just like a games joystick,’ she said.

  ‘Of course it is,’ said Johnny. ‘This is in our heads, remember. It has to be things we know.’

  The screen showed the view behind the fleet. There were green ships bunched up behind them.

  ‘They’re coming right down our tailpipe,’ said Kirsty. ‘This is going to be really easy.’

  ‘Yes, it is – isn’t it,’ said Johnny.

  There was a dull edge to his voice. She hesitated.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

  ‘Just dots in the middle of a circle,’ said Johnny. ‘It’s easy. Bang. Here comes the high score. Bang. Go ahead.’

  ‘But it’s game space! It’s a game. Why are you acting like that? It’s just something on a screen.’

  ‘Fine. Just like the Real Thing. Press the button, then.’

  She gripped the stick. Then she paused again.

  ‘Why do you have to spoil everything?’

  ‘Me?’ said Johnny vaguely. ‘Look, if you’re not going to fire, switch the screen back to what’s ahead of us, will you? This dial here says we’re moving at per , and that’s times faster than it says we ought to be going.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, I just think it’d be nice not to run into an asteroid or something. Of course, if you want us to end up five miles across and one centimetre thick, keep looking back.’

  ‘Oh, all right!’

  She took her finger off the screen switch.

  And then she gasped.

  They stared at the expanse of space ahead of them, and what was in the middle of it.

  ‘What,’ said Kirsty, after a long pause, ‘is that?’

  Johnny laughed.

  He tried to stop himself, because the ship was groaning and creaking like a tortured thing, but he couldn’t. Tears ran down his cheeks. He thumped his hand helplessly on the control panel, accidentally switching a few lights on and off.

  ‘It’s the Border,’ said the Captain.

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnny. ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘But it’s—’ Kirsty began.

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnny. ‘The Border, see? Beyond it they’re safe. Of course. No one crosses the Border. Humans can’t do it!’