Only You Can Save Mankind Read online

  ‘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 someone . . . 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 the 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, sometimes. 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.

  After ten minutes with the index he got as far as prisoners of war, and eventually to the Geneva Convention. It wasn’t something you could illustrate with big coloured pictures so there wasn’t much about it, but what there was he read with interest.

  It was amazing.

  He’d always thought that prisoners were, well, prisoners – you hadn’t actually killed them, so they ought to think themselves lucky. But it turned out that you had to give them the same food as your own soldiers, and look after them and generally keep them safe. Even if they’d just bombed a whole city you had to help them out of their crashed plane, give them medicine, and treat them properly.

  Johnny stared at the page. It was weird. The people who’d written the encyclopedia – it said inside the cover that they were the Universal Wonder Knowledge Data Printing Inc, of Power Cable, Nebraska – had shoved in all these pictures of parrots and stuff because they were the Natural Wonders of the World, when what was really strange was that human beings had come up with an idea like this. It was like finding a tiny bit of the Middle Ages in the middle of all the missiles and things.

  Johnny knew about the Middle Ages because of doing his essay on ‘What it felt like to be a peasant in the Middle Ages’. When a knight fell off his horse in battle the other side weren’t allowed to open him up with a can opener and torture him, but had to look after him and send him back home after a while, although they were allowed to charge for the service.

  On the whole, the ScreeWee were letting him off lightly. According to the Geneva Convention, he ought to be feeding all of them as well.

  He put the book back and turned the television on. That was odd. Someone was complaining that the enemy were put
ting prisoners of war in buildings that might be bombed, so that they could be bombed by their own side. That was a barbaric thing, said the man. Everyone else in the studio agreed.

  So did Johnny, in a way. But he wondered how he would explain something like this to the Captain. Everything made sense a bit at a time. It was just when you tried to think of it all at once that it came out wrong.

  There was too much war on television now. He felt it was time to start showing something else.

  He went out into the kitchen and made himself some toast, and then tried to scrape the burnt bits off quietly so as not to wake people up. He took the toast and the encyclopedia upstairs and got back into bed.

  To pass the time he read some more about Switzerland, which was where Geneva was. Every man in the country had to do army training and keep a gun at home, it said. But Switzerland never fought anyone. Perhaps that made sense somewhere. And what the country used to be known for was designing intricate and ingenious mechanical masterpieces that made a little wooden bird come out and go cuckoo.

  After a while he dozed off, and didn’t dream at all.

  On the screen the fake stars drifted by. After an hour or so a yellow dot appeared in the very centre. After another hour it grew slightly bigger, enough to be seen as a cluster of smaller yellow dots.

  Then Johnny’s mother, who had come to see where he was, tucked him up and switched it off.

  Chapter 5

  If Not You, Who Else?

  There was a constant smell of smoke and burnt plastic in the ship now, the Captain noticed. The air conditioners couldn’t get rid of it any more. Some of the smoke and burned plastic was the air conditioners.

  She could feel the eyes of her officers on her. She didn’t know how many of them she could count on. She got the feeling that she wasn’t very popular.

  She looked up into the eyes of the Gunnery Officer.

  ‘You disobeyed my orders,’ she repeated.

  The Gunnery Officer looked around the control-room with an air of injured innocence.

  ‘But we were being attacked,’ he said. ‘They fired the first shots.’

  ‘I said that we would not fire,’ said the Captain, trying to ignore the background murmur of agreement. ‘I gave my word to the Chosen One. He was about to fire.’

  ‘But he did not,’ said the Gunnery Officer. ‘He merely watched.’

  ‘He was about to fire.’

  ‘About is too late. The tanker Kreewhea is destroyed. Along with half our campaign provisions, I should add . . . Captain,’ said the Gunnery Officer.

  ‘Nevertheless, an order was directly disobeyed.’

  ‘I cannot believe this! Why can’t we fight?’

  The Captain pointed out of the window. The fleet was passing several more ships of the ancient Space Invader race.

  ‘They fought,’ she said. ‘Endlessly. And look at them now. And they were only the first. Remember what happened to the Vortiroids? And the Meggazzoids? And the Glaxoticon? Do you want to be like them?’

  ‘Hah. They were primitive. Very low resolution.’

  ‘But there were many of them. And they still died.’

  ‘If we are going to die, I for one would rather die fighting,’ said the Gunnery Officer. This time the murmur was a lot louder.

  ‘You would still be dead,’ said the Captain.

  She thought: There’ll be a mutiny if I shoot him or imprison him. I can’t fine him because none of us has been paid. I can’t confine him to his quarters because . . . she hated to think this . . . we might need him, at the end.

  ‘You are severely reprimanded,’ she said.

  The Gunnery Officer smirked.

  ‘It will go on your record,’ the Captain added.

  ‘Since we will not escape alive—’ the Gunnery Officer began.

  ‘That is my responsibility,’ said the Captain. ‘You are dismissed.’

  The Gunnery Officer glared at her.

  ‘When we get home—’

  ‘Oh?’ said the Captain. ‘Now you think we will get home?’

  By early evening Johnny’s temperature was a hundred and two, and he was suffering from what his mother called Sunday night flu. He was lying in the lovely warm glow that comes from knowing that, whatever happens, there’ll be no school tomorrow.

  The backs of his eyeballs felt itchy. The insides of his elbows felt hot.

  It was what came of spending all his time in front of a computer, he’d been told, instead of in the healthy fresh air. He couldn’t quite see this, even in his itchy-eyeball state. Surely the fresh air would have been worse? But in his experience being ill always came of whatever you’d been doing. Parents would probably manage to say it came of taking vitamins and wrapping up nice and warm. He’d probably get an appointment down at the health centre next Friday, since they always liked you to be good and ill by the time you came, so that the doctors could be sure of what you’d got.

  He could hear the TV downstairs. He spent twenty minutes wondering whether to get out of bed to switch on his old one, but when he moved there were purple blurs in front of his eyes and a goioioing hum in his ears.

  He must have managed it, though, because next time he looked it was on, and the colours were much better than usual. There were the newscasters – the black one and the one who looked like his glasses fitted under his skin instead of over the top – and there was the studio, just like normal.

  Except that it had the words ‘Scree Wee War’ in the corner, where there were usually words like ‘Budget Shock’ or ‘Euro Summit’. He couldn’t hear what people were saying, but the screen switched to a map of space. It was black. That was the point of space. It was just infinity, huge and black with one dot in it that was everything else.

  There was one stubby red arrow in the middle of the blackness. Several dozen blue ones were heading towards it from the edge of the map. In one corner of the map was a photo of a man talking into a phone.

  Hang on, thought Johnny. I’m almost certain there wasn’t a BBC reporter with the ScreeWees. They’d have said. Probably there isn’t even a CNN one.

  He still wasn’t getting any sound, but he didn’t really need any. It was obvious that humans were closing in on the fleet.

  The scene changed. Now it showed a tent somewhere, and there was the huge man, standing in front of another copy of the map.

  This time the sound came up. He was saying: . . . that Johnny? He’s no fighter. He’s no politician. He goes home when the going gets tough. He runs out on his obligations. But apart from that, hey, he’s a real nice kid . . .’

  ‘That’s not true!’ Johnny shouted.

  ‘It isn’t?’ said a voice behind him.

  He didn’t look around immediately. By the sound of it, the voice had come from his chair. And that was much more impossible than the ScreeWee being on television. No one could sit in that chair. It was full of old T-shirts and books and supper plates and junk. There was a deep sock layer and possibly the Lost Strawberry Yoghurt. No one could sit down there without special equipment.

  The Captain was, though. She seemed quite at home.

  He’d only ever seen her face on the screen. Now he could see that she was about two metres long, but quite thin – more like a fat snake with legs than an alligator or a newt. She had two thick, heavy pairs about half-way down, and two pairs of thinner ones at the top, on a set of very complicated shoulders. Most of her was covered in a brown overall; the bits that stuck out – her head, all eight hands or feet, and most of her tail – were a yellow-bronze, and covered in very small scales.

  ‘If you parked out in the road Mrs Cannock opposite will be really mad,’ Johnny heard himself say. ‘She goes on about my dad leaving his car parked out in the road and it’s not even a thousand metres long. So this is a hallucination, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ said the Captain. ‘I’m not sure that real space and game space are connected, except in your head.’

  ‘I saw this film once where spaces
hips could go anywhere in the universe through wormholes in space,’ said Johnny. ‘That means I’ve got a wormhole in my head?’

  The Captain shrugged, which was a very interesting sight in a being with four arms.

  ‘Watch this,’ she said. ‘This is very impressive. I expect this will be shown a lot.’

  She pointed at the screen.

  It showed stars, and a dot in the distance. It got bigger very quickly.

  ‘I think I know that,’ said Johnny. ‘It’s one of your ships. The sort you get on level seven, isn’t it?’

  ‘The type, I think, will not matter for long,’ said the Captain quietly.

  The ship was heading away from the camera. Its rocket exhausts got larger and larger. The camera seemed to be mounted on a . . .

  ‘Missile?’ said Johnny weakly.

  The screen went blank.

  Johnny thought of the dead Space Invader armada, turning over and over in the frosty emptiness between the game stars.

  ‘I don’t want to know about it,’ said Johnny. ‘I don’t want you to tell me how many ScreeWee there were on board. I don’t want you to tell me what happ—’

  ‘No,’ said the Captain, ‘I expect you don’t.’

  ‘It’s not my fault! I can’t help what people are like!’

  ‘Of course not.’

  The Captain had a nasty way of talking in a reasonable voice.

  ‘We are under attack,’ she said. ‘Humans are attacking us. Even though we have surrendered.’

  ‘Yes, but you only surrendered to me,’ said Johnny. ‘I’m just me. It’s not like surrendering to a government or something. I’m not important.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said the ScreeWee, ‘you’re the saviour of civilization. You’re all that stands between your world and certain oblivion. You are the last hope.’

  ‘But that’s not . . . real. That’s just what it says at the start of the game!’

  ‘And you did not believe it?’

  ‘Look, it always says something like that!’

  ‘Only you can save mankind?’ said the Captain.

  ‘Yes, but it’s not really true!’

  ‘If not you, then who else?’

  ‘Look,’ said Johnny, ‘I have saved mankind. In the game, anyway. There aren’t any ScreeWee attacking any more. People have to play it for hours to find any.’