by Steve Cole
Ray nodded. “We’re not going to just sit around while our planet’s in danger.”
Kimmy took up the propaganda: “So the Big Suits – you know, the scary secret spook guys in charge – let us use high-tech supplies from the stockrooms to give this place a techno-makeover.”
My eyebrows flew up. “How did you get them to let you do that?”
Ray smiled modestly. “I just built a small bomb with some parts Kimmy took from the stores, and threatened to blow up the Big Suits’ virtual golf course if they didn’t give in to our demands.” He honked with laughter. “Blow it up! Ha ha ha.” He produced an asthma inhaler and scooshed a couple of puffs into his mouth. “Whoa. Good times.”
“But didn’t they just threaten to hurt your parents if you didn’t behave?” I asked.
“Nope,” said Elodie. “Cos we warned them that if they did, we would have to switch on the antigravity pads we’d hardwired into their planes, satellites and space probes, smashing them into the roof and causing billions of dollars’ worth of damage.”
“We’re like flippin’ GANGSTERS,” said Kimmy, striking a weird pose I guessed was her idea of what a gangster did. “Only, science is our gun, and intelligence is our, um, other gun.”
“And when the Big Suits saw the quality of our work, they caved in straight away and gave us what we wanted.” Elodie grinned. “It’s pretty good, having that power.”
“It must be,” I said, wishing for once that I was clever, that I had the power to impress like that too. “What did your parents say?”
Ray grinned. “Mum said, ‘That was clever of you, dear. Now, pass me that strontium rod and insert it into the neo-chemical matrix.’” He suddenly burst out into honks of laughter, like this was the funniest thing ever. Kimmy and Elodie guffawed too. “Hahahahahah, strontium rods, ha ha ha ha ha . . .”
“It’s all about the strontium rods with your mum, isn’t it?” Kimmy wiped tears of laughter from her eyes. “My dad was like, ‘You let them see your antigrav systems? You want them to steal your designs? What are you, flippin’ NUTS? We could have sold them those designs for a fortune! If you have lost our family this fortune I will sue you for the full flippin’ amount! And legal fees!’”
“Well, my mum was just relieved we used conventional explosives instead of radioactive materials,” said Elodie, smiling. “She’s very green, if you know what I mean. Obsesses over the environment.”
Finally, something I could relate to. “I do know what you mean.” I paused. “Although, I’m actually pretty glad you didn’t make an atom bomb, too.”
“Oh, we made one all right,” said Ray casually. “We just decided not to deploy it.”
“It’s in the cupboard over there,” said Kimmy.
“You’ve got, like, an atom bomb stored in your cupboard?” I stared at them. “Isn’t that . . . dangerous?”
The others nodded solemnly. Then they burst out laughing and high-fived each other.
“Your face!” Ray laughed so hard he needed another puff on his inhaler.
“We totally tricked you,” said Kimmy, clutching her scrawny sides. “Of course we didn’t build an atomic device.” She grinned wickedly. “It’s just an emergency bomb made using conventional explosives, in case we have to destroy our own work to stop the military stealing it.”
“You can’t be too careful, eh?” Elodie agreed.
“I hope you will be,” I said out loud (while thinking “in quiet”, You’re all completely bonkers!).
“Anyway, the truly explosive news is that I think we’re close to ironing out the bugs in this base’s super-secret hyper-beam space travel system.” Ray nodded eagerly. “El, did you calculate those matter-offset equations I asked you for?”
Elodie shook her head. “My mental maths took a nosedive thanks to Tim here. But it shouldn’t take me more than a few hours.” She rubbed her hands together. “I can’t wait to see the looks on the Big Suits’ faces when a bunch of kids solve their problems for them.”
Kimmy nodded too. “It’s gonna look SO sweet on my application to Cambridge University next year.”
“Uh-huh, and when I sign up for my PhD at the University of California, Berkeley,” said Elodie, also nodding. Everyone was nodding, except me. It was like they’d suddenly all turned into those weird toys with the wobbly heads. Big heads.
“Well, I’m sorry I messed up everything.” I looked around the Crèche, trying to spot a spare place. “Um, is there anything I can do here?”
Ray considered. “Why don’t you do some nice theoretical research in the work cubicle over there, Tim?”
“Probably because I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
Elodie shrugged. “OK, well, do you think you could maybe defrag the main computer’s hard drive?”
“Defrag it? I didn’t know it was fragged in the first place.”
“Maybe you could just sit in the corner and draw a nice picture of a snowman,” said Kimmy impatiently.
“No, thanks,” I retorted, wittily. “I think maybe I’ll just go back to my room and wait for Dad to finish. Back home, he was studying space-travel stuff – had me staying up all night timing bursts of ultra-cyclic radiation or something.”
“Mmm, interesting,” said Ray, although frankly I could think of nothing more boring. “What’s your dad’s name, anyway?”
“Eric Gooseheart,” I said. “He used to work at the Strategic Space Centre—”
“No!” Elodie jumped back from me as if I’d burst into flame. “No way!”
I frowned. “He did work there.”
“Get out. Stop it. No! No way. But then . . .” Elodie looked to have gone into a state of shock. “No. Nuh-uh. Enough of that. Quit it. He can’t be. YOU can’t be. Shut UP! I gotta . . .” She backed away, bumped into a lab bench and knocked her quantum flux polariser to the floor, where it sparked and went PHUT! She didn’t even blink.
“Elodie!” Ray groaned. “Look what you did! Look!”
But Elodie wasn’t looking at anything. She went racing out of the Crèche like she had bats biting her bum. I watched her go, and all I could think of was . . . This girl talks about giant sense-shattering aliens, and the end of the world, like it’s nothing. But when she hears who my dad is . . . then she freaks out?
Kimmy had scooped up the quantum stick-thing. “NOOO! Elodie bust the inner couplings.” She shook her head furiously. “I should sue her!”
“You can’t sue her, Kimmy,” said Ray wearily. “You’re only nine years old.”
“That’s defamation of character, Ray. I’m suing you too!”
“But you ARE nine!”
“Only in a numerical sense . . .”
Leaving them to it, I turned and walked away, my head awash with all I’d learned and seen.
Sergeant Katzburger was standing in the corridor, her Mohawk high, her wide face set in its usual hangdog expression. “Didn’t go so well at Crèche, then?”
“Nope.”
“I knew it wouldn’t.” She sighed. “What did you say to send Miss Uptight-Buns sprinting off like that? Never seen her move so fast.”
“I have no idea.” I sighed. “Actually, I have no idea about anything.”
“Join the club, kid,” said Sergeant Katzburger. “It’s a lousy club. Its prices are kept artificially high, they play bad music and they never clean the washrooms. The club stinks. But you end up joining it anyway. That’s life, kid. Or it is round here for dummies like us, anyway.” She shook her head, miserably. “Wanna go to your room now?”
“I think I want to go to a whole other planet,” I said.
“Hey, I forgot to say.” As we neared my room, Sergeant Katzburger brightened a fraction – which is to say, she only looked colossally glum instead of hideously depressed. “You’re going to have a reunion.”
Unaccustomed to good news of any sort, I looked at her oddly. “I am?”
“Sure,” she said, �
�we got—”
“Little G! Hello!” came a familiar, jaunty growl beside me.
I jumped – but not very far, because two long green arms were wrapped around my waist.
“Hug, spaceboy!” Little G was gazing up at me. “It’s you! Hug! I got the tongue . . .”
“Get lost, alien freak!” snarled Katzburger.
Little G scowled and held up his scrawny fists and skinny arms like he wanted a fight. “Sargey Katzbonker make me? Huh? Huh?”
She pointed her gun at him. “You’ve got till the count of five to withdraw from this area, squirt.”
“Uh-oh!” Little G squealed with terror and waddled off at high speed, sandals slapping down the corridor. “See you later, spaceboy! See you! Bye!”
Katzburger lowered the gun. “They should keep that thing locked up. He gives me the creeps.”
“Better than giving you the hugs,” I said shakily. I was glad he’d gone, but couldn’t help feeling kind of sorry for Little G – used and abused and shunned by others. I could relate to that. Typical, isn’t it? I thought. I make a better impression on an alien from another world than on kids from my own.
Katzburger grunted. “Anyway. What I was going to say is . . . your goldfish is here.”
“Herbert?” I threw open my bedroom door – and there was my special fishy friend at last, darting about in his bowl, which now stood on the desk with a tube of fish food beside it. “Herbert!” I yelled happily and, as so often, I wished I knew what he was thinking now that he’d seen me again.
Herbert didn’t look as bright orange as usual, but that happens to goldfish when they’ve been kept in the dark for a bit. I was so glad to see him and watched, delighted, as Herbert turned figures of eight in the water, thinking he must be pleased to see me, thinking how wonderful it was to be reunited with my pet . . .
For all of three joyful seconds.
“Did you know the collective noun for goldfish is a ‘troubling’?” Katzburger piped up. “A troubling of goldfish. Yeah, well. They’re troubling all right. Troubling to the soul.”
Uh-oh, I thought. “They are?”
“I had my own goldfish, once, back when I lived with my folks in Minnesota. Six of them. Goldfish I mean. Six magnificent creatures of the deep.”
A tank can’t be very deep, I thought. But Katzburger’s face had become a somewhat less magnificent creature of the deeply depressed. She stared into the middle distance like people do on TV when they’re having flashbacks.
“The boy next door . . . He threw a football and it smashed our window and knocked my hairdryer into the fish tank and my fish somehow turned on the hairdryer and the whole tank exploded in an unholy firestorm . . .”
If Herbert came with ears, I’d have tried to cover them. “That actually happened to you?”
“I was thirteen,” she revealed. “And guess what? The boy only made such a lousy pass cuz he was distracted by weird lights in the sky.”
“Wow,” I breathed. “Is that what’s made you sad all the time?”
“Partly,” Katzburger admitted. “I’m also sad all the time because when I was fourteen, my pet dog was run over by a combine harvester. Guess what? The driver had been distracted by an unidentified flying object in the sky. And when I was fifteen, my tortoise was flattened by a falling piano – because the guys lowering it out of an upper storey window were—”
“Distracted by UFOs?” I surmised.
Katzburger nodded. “I went on to lose a mouse, a guinea pig, two hamsters and a boa constrictor thanks to idiots getting distracted by those lights in the sky. That’s why I joined the military – so that one day I could join the secret anti-alien division and get some payback.” She smacked her fist into her palm. “Justice.”
“Um . . . is that why you don’t like Little G?”
“If I didn’t know for certain that the little alien squirt was a military prisoner during the years my pets were massacred – so he couldn’t have been flying UFOs at the time – I’d have dealt with him, believe me.” Her clenched knuckles were growing whiter. “No, I reckon these invisible GETs are responsible. And believe me, I’m gonna do all I can to make sure they pay for it. They will pay big time. Believe me. Oh, yes, they will suffer just as I have. BELIEVE ME.”
I did believe her.
“Meantime, treasure your fish, kid,” said Katzburger. “Love him. Be there for him. Let him help you try to make some sense out of this harsh, terrible life.” She stomped away and slammed the door behind her.
“This place is full of nuts, Herbert,” I confided. “But at least we have each other now.”
Herbert drifted down to the bottom of his tank. Goldfish have no eyelids, so I couldn’t be sure, but either Sergeant Katzburger’s moaning had stunned him unconscious . . . or he was asleep.
It sounded like a good plan to me, too. So I made sure the door was locked, curled up on the hard little bed and fell asleep myself.
After dark dreams stuffed with exploding pets and hostile aliens, I woke up to the sound of knocks on the door.
“Who is it?” I called nervously.
“Dad,” said Dad (factually accurate as ever).
I realised I’d been asleep for a whopping ten hours – and when I unlocked the door and saw how pale and tired Dad was, I realised guiltily he’d been in his meeting for just as long.
“Are they treating you all right?” Dad asked searchingly.
“Sure. Aside from the weird little alien who keeps saying ‘hello’ and trying to hug me and smell my tongue, and the hyper-smart gangster children in the Crèche, and the depressed soldier who wants revenge on aliens for accidentally causing the death of her pets, and . . .”
I began to dump my troubled, befuddled thoughts onto Dad, but it was my talk of Little G that took his real interest.
“All this stuff I’ve heard so much about, and seen on secret videos, and in conference calls, all of that . . . Here I can touch it! Be a part of it!” Dad actually smiled, gazing into space – in his head, outer space. “They’ve made so many strides forward with the hyper-beam, Tim! The actual projection of matter through the void . . . bypassing conventional rockets completely . . . We’re so tantalisingly close to making green, environmentally friendly space travel a reality. But the system doesn’t quite work.” He scowled. “Little G must come from a race of geniuses – how come he’s so stupid? It’s not fair! We NEED him to make it work . . .”
“We can’t all be super-clever,” I said with feeling.
“The high-ups running this place think that Little G is only pretending to be dim,” said Dad. “They let him roam where he likes, but secretly he’s being recorded at all times – in the hope he’ll accidentally drop his stupid act one day and give himself away.” He shook his head. “Apparently, he gets on best with children. He’s more likely to drop his guard around you than with any of the adults who’ve held him prisoner.”
I looked at him suspiciously. “Is that another reason why these Big Suits brought me and the other kids in the Crèche along? To get the truth out of a weird little alien?”
“I suspect so,” said Dad. “They’re desperate, Tim. Clutching at straws. They really feel that our planet is in mega-trouble, and we have to find the answer to the riddle of the space-projection system – urgently.”
I felt my stomach churn. “Well . . . maybe Elodie and the others will come up with something. They’re on the case.”
“Elodie?”
“One of the kids I told you about.”
“Elodie who?”
“Something weird. Um . . . Hongananner.”
“HONGANANNER?!” Dad bounced off the little bed like his butt was full of springs. “You mean . . . she is the daughter of Hannah-Anna Hongananner?”
I nodded, startled. “How many Hongananners can there be in the world?”
“Too many,” said Dad, pacing the floor like he was stamping on invisible ants. “Too many and too close and NO
OOOOOOOOOOO, I can’t deal with this now!”
I had never seen Dad so agitated. “What is it, Dad? Elodie freaked when I told her who you were, and now you’re freaking when—”
“You told her my identity?” he hissed, red-faced with anger.
I shrank back. “Yeah! She asked me who my dad was, and I told her. What was I meant to say – it’s Herbert?”
Dad buried his face in his hands and let out a soft, pitiful moan. “I should’ve known this would happen. It was inevitable, I suppose.” He walked to the door. “Well . . . I’m tired. Goodnight, Tim. See you in the morning.”
I checked my watch. “Dad, it IS morning. It’s half-past ten!”
He groaned again, and left. He slammed my door. I heard him open his own door. He slammed that one too.
Fantastic, I thought. It’s the end of the world, and Dad’s cracking up.
Dad’s snores shuddered through the wall. I just lay on the bed, chatting to Herbert – a pretty one-sided conversation as you can imagine. He kept bonking his nose against the glass as if trying to get out.
“I wouldn’t bother, Herb,” I told him. “Believe me, there’s nowhere to go. Unless the aliens vaporise this entire base. Then the snow and ice will melt and flood the ruins, and maybe you can swim for it.”
I wanted Dad to wake up so I could ask him why he’d acted so weird. Not that he’d ever agree to tell me. Like he’d never told me where I came from . . .
It’s the grown-up’s job to worry about their kid’s behaviour, isn’t it?
I thought back to Elodie’s outburst. She clearly knew something about my dad . . .
Suddenly I heard a clanking noise in the ceiling above me. Hot water pipes, I supposed. The ones in the Rubbish House had hissed and gurgled all the time. Stupid pipes. I felt a pang of homesickness for our old house in the city, and Nanny Helen. I wanted to see her now more than anything. If only she still lived with us, she could’ve been shot with a tranquilliser dart, abducted by scary men and dragged here with me, which would have been much better. Well, for me, at least.
