‘I hope you’re right,’ said Milk. ‘I really do. But it seems utterly hopeless right now.’
he boys and alien girls had fallen silent for a while, rather weighed down by the enormity of their current predicament. No light was appearing at the end of the very long and dark tunnel in which they now sat.
As if to further darken it, Zigg and Tarduz had wandered down the hill and passed by the window, their metal legs clanking and squeaking. They appeared to have worn themselves out in the effort and stood for a moment, wheezing.
‘What are they doing?’ said Sponge.
‘Who knows,’ said Mildew.
‘We have less than an hour left!’ cried Enderpenny.
There was a collective gasp.
‘But I don’t understand,’ said Furthermore. ‘If your vessel uses jewels as a fuel, why don’t you search elsewhere? There are jewels all over this planet. There are jewellers’ shops full of them. There are mines. There are –’
‘And how would they get there?’ said Kenningworth. ‘They are trapped here!’
‘No – not any jewels, in any case,’ said Milk. ‘Whiznixoflax are incredibly rare and powerful. Only one has ever been recorded in this sector of the galaxy. We have a special scanner that picks up its trace and shows its history. We know where it has been for centuries. Look …’
Milk took out a small device from her pocket, tapped it a few times and it projected an image of a large ball on to the wall.
‘What is that?’ said Mildew.
‘Don’t you recognise your own planet?’ said Spoon. The boys gasped.
‘From our records the whiznixoflax came to Earth via a meteor shower many thousands of years ago. A portion of the meteor was found by a goatherd in a place you call China.
‘It was kept in his family as a treasured item until sold to a trader by his widow many years after his death. From there it travelled along the Silk Road and on to Constantinople and then to Venice, where it was broken by accident to reveal the whiznixoflax within. Believing it to be an ordinary, if precious, jewel, it was made into a ring for a sister of the Doge of Venice.
‘Centuries later the descendants of that lady, much reduced in circumstances and wealth, decided to emigrate to America, taking the ring with them. The ship was bound for Boston when it was intercepted by a vessel under the command of a jewel-obsessed pirate captain called –’
‘Greenbeard?’ cried Mildew and Sponge.
‘You’ve heard of him?’
‘Mildew is an ancestor,’ said Sponge.
‘Descendant,’ said Mildew.
‘I always get that wrong,’ said Sponge.
‘Greenbeard is your ancestor?’ said Milk excitedly. ‘Then do you have the whiznixoflax? Might he have handed it down to you?’
Mildew sighed.
‘No,’ he said. ‘If it was here, then it would have been among all the other jewels that were snaffled.’
‘So where are they now?’ said Milk.
‘No one knows,’ said Sponge. ‘They could be anywhere.’
‘But the scanner is still showing them as being somewhere close by,’ said Milk, tapping the device. ‘Although it seems not to be working properly. It says they are here and yet it also says they are not. Very confusing.’
‘They were last seen heading west in a balloon,’ said Mildew. ‘Your machine must be faulty.’
‘Even so,’ said Milk. ‘I have to keep trying. If we can find the whiznixoflax we can at least draw the Neenor away from this planet. I’m going to carry on scanning.’
With that she walked away.
‘Who are you, anyway?’ said Kenningworth. ‘You never told us.’
‘We are children, just like you,’ said Spoon. ‘But we were taken from our parents by the Neenor and forced to live in a terrible place, far away. It’s on the dark side of a damp moon and is perpetually gloomy.
‘It is a frightening and fearful place where we are forced to perform boring and pointless tasks over and over again. It’s probably hard for you to understand.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Kenningworth. ‘It has a familiar ring to it.’
‘But why did your parents let them take you?’ said Sponge.
‘They had no choice,’ said Spoon. ‘The Neenor kidnapped us in order to make our parents do their bidding. Our families are slaves of these monsters, kept in line by the fear of what will happen to their children. When we are old enough we will in turn become slaves.’
‘That’s horrible,’ said Sponge.
‘Yes,’ said Spoon. ‘We chose to escape because some of us were about to be vaporised for crimes against the Mordentor Federation. We had nothing to lose. We stole a podule and this is as far as we got.’
‘What was your crime?’ said Mildew.
‘Oh,’ said Spoon. ‘Among the many pointless tasks we were given, we were asked to write a long essay about how the Great One had improved the lives of so many living on planets in the Mordentor Federation, but someone …’
Here she cast a quick glance in the direction in which Milk had gone.
‘Milk forgot to pass on the note telling the rest of us that it had to be in by the following moonrise. She feels very bad about it.’
‘Wait,’ said Mildew. ‘Are you saying that the hideous crime the Neenor accused you of, the one they thought so terrible they could hardly mention – one that meant they chased you across the universe and threatened to vaporise our planet unless we handed you over – was basically that you hadn’t done your homework?’
Spoon shrugged.
‘The monsters,’ said Kenningworth. ‘Even old Drumlin isn’t that strict.’
‘Who are the Neenor anyway?’ said Furthermore.
‘They weren’t always like this,’ said Spoon. ‘The Neenor were a peaceful race until a party of their explorers searching the universe in the service of the advancement of knowledge arrived at a far-flung planet and found a creature there.’ ‘Mr Stupendo,’ said Mildew.
‘The Neenor brought this human home with the intention of studying him, but the creature quickly became dominant and they became subject to his iron will.
‘He turned them from a race of happy, peaceful academics into furiously competitive tyrants. Competitive sport became a religion to them.’
‘What happened to the Great One?’
‘The Great One died many millennia ago, but before he did the Neenor used their advanced technology to turn him into a kind of self-aware hologram.’
‘A hologram?’
‘It’s like a projection of something – it has no form except as an image. You might think of it as a ghost.’
‘Stupendo is a ghost?’ said Mildew, horrified.
‘In a way,’ said Spoon.
‘The hologram now rules in his stead and his cruel regime is enforced as a religion by the fanatical Neenor.’
The boys groaned.
‘Maudlin Towers has exported its misery to the galaxy,’ cried Mildew. ‘Sports teachers should never be allowed power. Everyone knows that!’
‘So you know the Great One?’ said Spoon.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mildew. ‘We most certainly do.’
‘This is all our fault,’ said Sponge. ‘Because it was we who sent the Great One back in time to be taken by the Neenor in the first place.’
‘My prickly-headed friend is correct,’ said Mildew. ‘We are very sorry.’
‘Oh no,’ said Furthermore. ‘Mordentor. It’s Maudlin Towers, isn’t it? Mordentor. Maudlin Towers. The words have been sanded down a bit by the passage of time.’
‘We’re to blame!’ shouted Mildew.
‘You could never have known,’ said Spoon.
‘Odd that you tracked the jewels to Maudlin Towers though,’ said Furthermore. ‘You would have thought it might have tracked them to wherever they are now.’
‘True,’ said Spoon. ‘That is odd. It’s almost as though they were still here. But they can’t be. Oh, what are we going to do?’
No
ne of the boys had a satisfactory answer to this, and with a long sigh, Spoon walked away.
‘What are we going to do, Mildew?’ asked Sponge when she was out of earshot.
‘I don’t know, old friend,’ he replied. ‘I really don’t know. And our time is running out …’
ilk did not return and Zigg and Tarduz were now standing in the sports field drumming their legs impatiently on the grass. Mildew and Sponge watched them through the window.
Spoon gathered her fellow alien girls together and much whispering ensued. After a few moments they approached the boys, their faces cast down, their expressions a picture of despair and desolation.
‘We have talked among ourselves,’ said Spoon, ‘and we have agreed that we will give ourselves up. We should have done it before. We can’t allow your planet to suffer on our account.’
‘No,’ said Mildew. ‘We can’t let you surrender to those monsters.’
‘Thank you,’ said Spoon. ‘But we have placed you all in danger and it is time for us to leave you in peace.’
‘No!’ said Kenningworth forcefully.
The boys turned to him in surprise.
‘I’ve had my fill of being bossed around by those eight-legged abominations,’ he said. ‘I may seem like a bit of a blot sometimes …’ He looked at Mildew and Sponge. ‘Maybe I am a bit of a blot sometimes. But there comes a time when one has to say: enough is enough.
‘If we get vaporised, then so be it. At least I won’t have to go to my cousin Rupert’s wedding a week next Thursday. Or wear the ghastly velvet suit my mother has had made for me.’
‘Kenningworth is right,’ said Mildew. ‘You can’t do it. We’re all in this together. We all agree, don’t we, boys?’
The other boys nodded their assent.
‘But what are we going to do?’ said Filbert. ‘Are we just going to wait to be vaporised?’
‘I don’t really want to be vaporised,’ said Sponge.
‘At least there won’t be any soup,’ said Mildew.
‘Soup?’ said Spoon.
‘It’s what we say instead of blood,’ said Mildew. ‘Because …’
Sponge teetered sideways and was caught by Mildew.
‘Ah,’ said Spoon. ‘I’m not very keen on soup myself.’
Sponge smiled weakly in his wibbliness.
‘But we won’t let you just give into these horrors,’ said Sponge, straightening himself up. ‘It’s not right.’
‘The Neenor are behaving more and more oddly,’ said Mildew, peering out of the window as Zigg tried to give the passing Kevin a flick with one of its feet but missed and fell over, sending Tarduz sprawling too. ‘They’ll probably vaporise us anyway just for the fun of it.’
‘They are acting strangely, aren’t they?’ said Sponge. ‘I’ve noticed that. They seemed just odd in an alien-type way before, but now they seem more … more … I can’t quite put my finger on it.’
‘Yes,’ said Kenningworth. ‘You’re right. They are getting odder. No – not odder, exactly. More stupid.’
‘I have a theory about that,’ said Furthermore.
Kenningworth rolled his eyes.
‘What is it?’ said Spoon.
‘I think the mind-connector must, to some degree, be two-way. So although the aliens can go into your minds and search about at will, there is also danger of contamination.’
Mildew and Sponge stared at Furthermore for a while, then at each other, and both shrugged in bafflement. Kenningworth chuckled.
‘He’s saying the aliens have become infected with your idiocy, you pair of dimwits.’
Furthermore nodded.
‘Basically, yes, I am,’ he said.
‘How dare you?’ said Sponge. ‘That’s outrageous.’
‘Ah – hello, boys,’ said Mr Painly, wandering towards them. ‘And ladies. You haven’t seen the rest of the staff, have you?’
‘Mr Painly!’ cried the boys.
‘How did you escape, sir?’ said Mildew.
‘Escape what?’ said Mr Painly.
‘Didn’t you hear the Headmaster’s announcement?’
‘I hear nothing when I’m reading The Bored Boy’s Book of Moderately Diverting Things. What’s happening? Why are you all clustered together in this strange fashion?’
‘We have been invaded by creatures from another world, sir,’ said Mildew.
Mr Painly smiled and opened his mouth to speak.
‘Not the girls, sir,’ said Mildew. ‘Although …’
‘Real aliens, sir,’ said Sponge. ‘From another planet and such forth.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Painly. ‘Don’t think you boys can fool me so easily.’
‘Show him the drawing, Mildew,’ said Furthermore.
Mildew reached into his pocket, took out the drawing and solemnly unfolded it in front of Mr Painly.
‘Oh, sweet merciful heavens,’ he said. ‘It’s true!’
Mildew recapped all of the previous events to the bemused Mr Painly, who sat scratching his head in wonder with every new revelation. He seemed particularly intrigued by the notion of the aliens being contaminated by Mildew and Sponge’s simple-mindedness.
‘So you say that the aliens are behaving more and more like you and Master Spongely-Partwork?’ he asked. ‘Curious.’
‘Some sort of cross-contamination from their mind probe,’ said Furthermore.
‘This gives me an idea!’ said Mildew.
Kenningworth groaned.
‘Hear him out,’ said Mr Painly. ‘We are desperate, after all.’
Mildew frowned.
‘Thank you, sir. Well, if what Furthermore suggests is true, then I think we may be able to stop them.’
‘But how?’ cried Sponge.
Mildew smiled.
‘Maths!’ said Mildew.
‘Maths?’ said Sponge. ‘But how can that cruel magic be used against the Neenor?’
Mildew tapped the side of his nose.
‘Wait and see,’ said Mildew. ‘Mr Painly. A quick word, if you please.’
‘Hello,’ came a now familiar voice behind them.
They all turned to see the black-clad girl from the future walking towards them. The boys and girls stared at her in amazement. Enderpenny was about to point out her black nail varnish when Mildew spoke.
‘I was wondering when you’d appear,’ he said.
‘You don’t seem very surprised to see me,’ she said. ‘Or very cross that I took your time machine.’
‘We already know,’ said Sponge.
‘Who is this?’ said Furthermore. ‘Is she another alien?’
‘She’s from the future,’ said Mildew. ‘Sorry, you never did tell us your name.’
‘Oh. It’s Ella. What’s yours?’
‘Mildew,’ he replied. ‘And this is Sponge.’
Ella peered at the girls.
‘I thought this was a boys-only school back in your day,’ she said. ‘What are they doing here?’
‘It is,’ said Mildew. ‘These girls only look like girls. In reality they are creatures from another world. Our teachers are held captive up on that hill by giant mechanical spiders whilst that giant floating eyeball spies on us …’
Kevin drifted by the window.
‘Cool,’ said Ella.
‘I’ve just thought of a plan to destroy those monsters and stop them from vaporising the planet,’ said Mildew. ‘So you need to go to the time machine and take it back to us in the future where you left us stranded, so we can return here where I come up with this idea. Do you see?’
‘I … think … so …’ said Ella.
‘Good,’ said Mildew. ‘Thank you. When you get to the future you’ll find us standing looking baffled in front of the talking painting in the school hall.’
‘I’d rather stay here,’ she said with a weak smile.
‘But you can’t,’ said Mildew. ‘Sorry. In any case, you will only get vaporised along with us if you do.’
The girl nodded and began to walk aw
ay, before coming back and hurriedly kissing Mildew on the cheek. Then she headed off to the bothy.
‘What a strange person,’ said Mildew, frowning and blushing and breaking out into a sweat.
‘You look faint, Mildew,’ said Sponge.
‘What?’ said Mildew, leaning on a chair for support.
‘Mildew!’ said Sponge. ‘Pull yourself together!’
Mildew shook his head and stared off to the door through which Ella had recently departed.
‘Wait!’ shouted Mildew. ‘Ella!’
‘Really, Mildew,’ said Sponge. ‘There are more important things to –’
‘Shhh, Sponge,’ said Mildew. ‘She’s got the time machine!’
‘I know!’ said Sponge. ‘But –’
‘Come on. I’ll explain on the way!’
lla was just entering the bothy as Mildew and Sponge galumphed up behind her, gasping for breath. Mildew had tried to explain to Sponge on the way, but all he had managed was ‘past’, ‘bust’ and ‘jewels’.
‘Ella, wait!’ said Mildew.
She turned round.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘Change of plan,’ said Mildew. ‘We need the time machine.’
‘But what about rescuing yourselves from the future?’ she asked.
‘That will have to wait,’ he replied.
‘Will you please tell me what’s going on?’ said Sponge, only just getting his breath back.
Mildew took a deep breath and explained.
‘The alien girls need the whiznixoflax to power their craft and the whiznixoflax was in Greenbeard’s hoard of jewels …’
‘Which was stolen by Felicity Fallowfield,’ said Sponge.
‘Wait – who’s this Felicity Fallowfield character and what’s all this about a hoard of jewels?’ said Ella.
‘Greenbeard was a pirate,’ said Mildew. ‘He had a thing about jewels. Couldn’t get enough of them. He stashed them away in Maudlin Towers, where they were subsequently stolen by one Felicity Fallowfield, international girl of mystery and serial jewel-thief. One of those jewels is apparently something called whiznixoflax and it is fuel for the alien craft. So I thought we could –’
Attack of the Meteor Monsters Page 8
