Boom! Read online

  I staggered backwards and grabbed the handrail to stop myself falling over. “So, this is…”

  “Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy,” said Britney. “Ten out of ten.”

  “But…but…but…How did I get here?”

  “No idea.” Britney held up two hairy legs. “My brain is small.”

  “So this place…this planet…it’s…”

  “Plonk.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Plonk.” Britney waved a leg over the barren landscape. “It is the name.”

  “Plonk!?” I said. “That is the most stupid name for a planet I have ever heard.”

  Britney looked decidedly huffy. “It is a most serious and shiny name in our language.”

  “Oh.”

  “You have one called Moon,” said Britney. “That is our word for passing wind out of the bottom. Now follow me.”

  “So those people…” I said. “Mrs Pearce and Vantrethingy…”

  “Not human,” said Britney. “Short hairy tails and no belly buttons.”

  I thought of Mrs Pearce with a short hairy tail and it made me feel a bit ill. So I decided to stop asking questions.

  “Whoa there!” said Britney.

  We’d stopped by a section of wall with the words ARRIVALS UNIT on it. Britney said, “Snekkit,” there was a pop! and a door appeared in the wall. “Through here.”

  We stepped into another corridor. The people here looked almost normal. None of them were wearing purple robes. Most were wearing jeans and T-shirts. There was a DOCTOR WHO T-shirt. There was a XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS T-shirt. One woman with large bosoms was wearing a T-shirt which said SET LASERS TO STUN.

  “Your room,” said Britney. “Snekkit!” The wall opened with a pop! “Go in, human boy.” She was obviously still huffy about the Plonk thing.

  I stepped inside. There was a white bed. There was a white chest of drawers. There was a white cubby hole containing a white toilet and a white sink.

  Britney said, “Snore now. Door locking.” There was another pop! and the door disappeared. “Hey!” I banged on the hard white surface. I shouted, “Snekkit!” thirty times at different volumes in different accents, but all to no avail.

  I sat down on the bed, exhausted. On top of the chest of drawers was a kettle and a selection of tea bags and prepacked biscuits, just like in a bed and breakfast.

  In the first drawer was a small library of boy books: SAS memoirs, football annuals, superhero comics…

  In the third drawer there was nothing except some coloured balls the size of large marbles. I picked a few up. As I was doing this, I dropped one. A red one. Except it didn’t drop. It just stuck in the air. I reached out and gingerly touched the ball. I could move it easily, but it wouldn’t fall. It was like pushing a coin around a table, except in three dimensions. Wherever I shoved it, it simply hung there motionless.

  The other balls were the same. I could arrange them in mid-air in any shape I chose. A line. A cube. A smiley face. I put five of them in my pocket. I couldn’t wait to show them to Charlie.

  Charlie. I’d forgotten about Charlie. I felt a stab of guilt. He was here somewhere. Probably. I hoped. And here I was mucking about with floaty balls and thinking how cool they were.

  I had to find him. Except the door was locked and I was shattered. In the morning. Yes, I’d find him in the morning. But right now…

  I laid my head down on the pillow. It was amazingly soft and comfortable. I was asleep in seconds.

  ∨ Boom! ∧

  14

  Little blue suckers

  I was sitting in the kitchen with Mum and Dad and Becky. Charlie was there too and we were eating lasagne and it was really, really good lasagne. Except someone was shaking my shoulder, so I rolled over and opened my eyes and screamed.

  “Shift your potatoes,” said Britney.

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes.

  “How is the small one this morning?” asked Britney. “Are your feelings good?”

  “Of course my feelings aren’t good. I’m on some stupid planet called Plonk in the…in the…in the Dancing Hamster Galaxy. And I’m talking to a monkey-faced spider called Britney.”

  “Beastly child,” said Britney. “Get walking. I will take you to breakfast. Put some food in your talk-hole.”

  I made her wait outside while I went to the loo, then she led me through a maze of white corridors to a huge circular hall filled with people. The T-shirt people, not the purple robe people. There was a high domed roof and curving, star-filled windows, and everyone was milling and chatting and eating at long tables. It was like a massive school dining room, with space outside and giant monkey-spiders clearing away the dirty plates.

  A middle-aged man with a flowery Hawaiian shirt and a ponytail wandered up to us. “You must be a new guy.” He held out his hand. “Bob Smith. Pleased to meet you.”

  I didn’t shake it.

  “Take him,” said Britney. “He hurts my head.” And with that she turned and scuttled away.

  Bob Smith was still holding out his hand.

  “Where’s Charlie?” I said.

  “Who’s Charlie?”

  “I want to see my friend. And there is no way I am going to shake the hand of some hairy-tailed, kidnapping alien with no belly button.”

  Bob laughed. “I’m human. Like you. Assuming you’re human.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I shook his hand. “Jimbo. My name’s Jimbo.”

  “You’ll be hungry,” he said. “Coming up the Weff-Beam really takes it out of a guy. Let’s get you some tucker.”

  I followed him to a round table at the edge of the room. Sitting on the table were a number of little blue suckers. He picked one up. “Stick it onto your forehead.”

  “What?”

  “You think of a type of food and it…well, it appears. It’s totally brilliant. Look.” He pressed a disc to his own forehead and grimaced like he was doing his thirteen times table. There was a ping! and a plate of scampi and a pint of lager appeared magically in the centre of the table. He picked them up.

  “You have a go,” said Bob. “You can get anything. Absolutely anything. You can get vomit if you want. Most people try it once. But it annoys everyone. You know, the smell.” He chuckled merrily. “Oh, and trust me. There is nothing you can do to badger to make it taste good. Baking, boiling, stewing, puff pastry, batter…I’ve tried.”

  I put the sucker to my head and tried very hard to clear my mind. If I wasn’t careful I was going to get a serving of badger in vomit. “Brie and marmalade sandwich,” I said to myself. “White bread. No crusts. Brie and marmalade sandwich. White bread. No crusts. And some hot chocolate.”

  There was another ping! and suddenly there it was. Brie and marmalade sandwich. White bread. No crusts. Mug of hot chocolate. Creepiest of all, the hot chocolate was in my battered Captain Scarlet mug. Or something that looked very like it.

  “Come on,” said Bob. “Let’s find us a seat.”

  We sat down and I took a bite of the sandwich. It tasted a bit like Brie and a bit like marmalade and a bit like petrol.

  “Yeah,” said Bob. “It’s not perfect, but” – he looked around – “is this whole place not totally the most incredible thing? I mean, we’re on another planet, man.”

  “No,” I said. “Totally the most incredible thing would be finding my best friend and going home.”

  “You’re not into the whole sci-fi trip, then?”

  “Look. No. Wait.” I was holding my head. This was all too much. Seventy thousand light years. The hairy tails.

  The disco spiders. “I mean…what the hell is going on?”

  “It does kind of throw you a bit, doesn’t it?” said Bob, chewing a mouthful of scampi. “At first, I mean.”

  “Yeah. It does. A bit.”

  “They can’t have children,” said Bob. “Some kind of genetic malfunction.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Fifty years and they’ll all be dead.” Bob washed the scampi
down with a swig of lager. “So they decided to repopulate the planet.”

  “By stealing people from Earth?”

  “We’re, like, the closest match. I mean, there’s a lot of intelligent alien species out there. But some of them are seven hundred miles long, and some of them look like snot.”

  I looked around the room. “But everyone seems really happy about it. Don’t they have, like, families and jobs and friends and stuff?”

  “They’re sci-fi fans,” said Bob. “Clever, eh? You know, choosing the kind of people who’d really dig this place.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “They’re going to populate a whole planet with sci-fi fans? Is that sensible?”

  “I guess you must be an accident,” said Bob.

  And that’s when I saw him. Hunched over a table on the far side of the room. I’d have recognized him anywhere.

  I leaped to my feet, spilling hot chocolate and sending Brie and marmalade flying and shattering the Captain Scarlet mug on the floor.

  “Easy, tiger!” said Bob.

  “Charlie!” I shouted. “Charlie!”

  I ran across the room, tripping over the legs of a giant monkey-spider carrying a stack of crockery. “Tighten your pants!” it shouted.

  Charlie spun round in his seat. “Jimbo!” He jumped off his bench and ran towards me and I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite so wonderful in my entire life.

  “Charlie!”

  “Jimbo!”

  We threw our arms round one another and jumped up and down and spun around whooping.

  “Charlie!” I said. “It is so good to see you!”

  He grinned. “I knew you’d make it, Jimbo. I just knew it.”

  “You’re here!” I said. “I didn’t even know whether you were alive.”

  “So,” said Charlie, sitting down again, “did they capture you or what?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. We knew they’d got you. And they tried to get me too. The guy with the suit. And these other men.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Charlie.

  “But Becky and Craterface, they turned up at the flat and Craterface fought them off and Becky and I borrowed Craterface’s motorbike.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Charlie.

  Something was wrong. He wasn’t excited enough. He wasn’t interested enough. Maybe it was shock. Maybe it was the petrol-flavoured food. I carried on. “But the important thing is, we’ve got to find a way out of here.”

  “Actually,” said Charlie, “I think I’m going to stay.”

  “What!?”

  “Look at this place. It’s brilliant.”

  “What!?”

  “They’ve got hover-scooters. I bet you haven’t seen the hover-scooters yet.”

  “No, listen,” I said. “Shut up about the stupid hover-scooters. I came all this way to help you escape, so – ”

  “That’s really good of you,” said Charlie. “But I like it here. I really do.” His voice was calm and he was smiling like he’d become a member of a weird religious cult.

  I stood up and leaned across the table. “Shut up, you idiot. I nearly died looking for you. Your mum and dad are going out of their minds. And now my mum and dad will be going out of their minds.”

  “Give it a few days,” said Charlie in the same creepy, chilled-out way. “It really grows on you.”

  I slumped back down onto my seat. “They’ve brainwashed you, haven’t they? They’ve given you drugs. Or put electrodes into your brain. They’ve turned you into a zombie.”

  Charlie laughed. “Of course they haven’t. You’re just suffering from jet-lag. Trust me.”

  I was too angry to speak. I grabbed him by the collar and shook him hard. “You’re meant to be my friend! You’re meant to be my friend!”

  “Hey, hey, hey,” said Charlie. It was the same grown-up voice Mum and Dad used when I was getting upset. “It’s going to work out fine.”

  “Fine!?” I swung my fist and hit him as hard as I could.

  “Ouch!” He put his hand to his face and took it away again. There was actual blood.

  I pushed him backwards so that he fell to the ground. Then I turned and ran.

  ∨ Boom! ∧

  15

  Orange toilet plungers

  I reached the edge of the room. I was about to shout “Snekkit!” and leap through the door when the lights went out and the entire dining hall went dark. I skidded to a halt. I could see absolutely nothing.

  I expected people to start screaming, but all I could hear were excited Ooohs and Aaahs that died away to a hushed silence. There was a distant whirring noise and a line of soft white light fell across the middle of the room.

  I looked up and saw the roof opening like a huge eye to reveal an enormous glass dome. Beyond the dome lay a trillion miles of darkness filled with twinkling stars.

  Bob appeared beside me. “I saw that thing back there. The bust-up with your friend. That was a seriously bad trip, man.”

  “What’s happening?” I said. “I mean, the roof and everything.”

  “Wait and see,” said Bob. “It’s kinda mind-boggling.”

  The whirring stopped. The roof was now fully open. Way over to my right the two green suns were revolving slowly around one another. Over to my left…

  “Here comes the ferry,” said Bob.

  “The what?”

  “The intergalactic ferry,” said Bob. “Goes round all the neighbouring star systems. Picks up passengers and cargo and stuff.”

  A vast object began to slide into view. A spaceship. A real live spaceship. Antennae and gantries and rockets and pods and fins and tubes. Moving as slowly as an oil tanker but a hundred times the size.

  “The scorch marks are from jumping in and out of hyperspace,” said Bob. “It gets pretty hot. And look at the front. You can see the asteroid bumper. That huge panel with all the dents in.”

  There was a deep and distant rumble. You could feel the floor vibrating gently.

  “Cool or what?” said Bob.

  “Cool,” I said. “Definitely cool.”

  “It’s not home,” said Bob. “There’s no football on the telly and the scampi’s a bit rubbish. But if you’re going to spend the rest of your life on another planet, then this one’s not a bad choice.”

  He was right. Of course he was right. I was lucky. I was alive. I should be grateful.

  There was a faint shooshing noise and little tongues of orange flame flickered from twenty rockets down the side of the intergalactic ferry.

  “Final adjustments,” said Bob. “You know, before coming into dock.”

  “Wow.”

  We stood in silence, watching the ferry fly slowly over the dome until the last tail-fin disappeared and we were left staring up into the night sky.

  The lights clicked back on and everyone covered their eyes while they got used to the brightness. The roof began whirring shut and the chatter started up again. Then I heard someone whispering, “Smelly fart,” in my ear, which was quite odd.

  I turned and found myself looking at Charlie. “Smelly fart,” he said again. “Gordon Reginald Harvey Simpson Bennett Junior and walkie-talkies and raspberry pavlova. I’m still Charlie. Just…come and sit down and talk to me, OK?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Jimbo, please. Just…”

  He was still Charlie. Whatever they’d done to him. I couldn’t carry on being angry for ever. “I’ll come,” I said. “But don’t give me any more twaddle about how you’re staying here, or I swear I’ll brain you.”

  “Promise,” said Charlie.

  We walked back across the room and he sat me down while he went to get some more food.

  Two women at the next table were arguing about whether Daleks were scarier than Cybermen. It puzzled me. The inhabitants of Plonk were meant to be super-intelligent. They had hover-scooters. They had a ferry that went through hyperspace. Why didn’t they repopulate their planet with engineers? Or fighter pilots? Or accountants?

  Charlie came ba
ck carrying a huge bowl containing an industrial volume of tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce. The smell was not good.

  He stuck his spoon into the bowl and started fiddling and stirring. Like those kids at school who don’t really enjoy eating, but love building snowmen out of mashed potatoes and smiley faces out of peas. I wanted to tell him to grow up and actually talk to me. But it was good sitting here with him, and if he didn’t say anything I could just about pretend they hadn’t done anything to his brain.

  At last he stopped playing with his spaghetti. “Try some,” he said, pushing the bowl towards me.

  “No way,” I said. “I hate spaghetti.”

  “Yes,” said Charlie. “But this spaghetti is special spaghetti.” He had the weird, religious-cult-member face on again.

  “Charlie,” I said, trying to control my rising frustration, “I don’t like spaghetti. And you know I don’t like spaghetti because the last time I ate a tin of spaghetti I barfed the whole thing up. And you know I barfed the whole thing up because I barfed it up all over you.”

  Charlie rubbed his forehead and took a deep breath and looked at me and squeezed his face up like he was having serious trouble on the toilet. “Jimbo, this is alphabetti spaghetti.”

  “You’re eating alphabetti spaghetti?” I said. “Well, that’s really reassuring. Are you seven years old?”

  “Just look at the bowl!” said Charlie.

  “No,” I said, folding my arms.

  Charlie stood and leaned across the table and shouted, “How thick are you!? Of course I hate this place. Of course I want to escape. And I had a brilliant plan. But you have totally screwed it up by being a total, total moron. Look at the bloody bowl!”

  I looked at the bowl. The letters of the spaghetti were arranged to read:

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s why you were acting weird.”

  “Yes,” said Charlie sarcastically. “That’s why I was acting weird.”

  “Because you wanted them to think you really liked it here.”

  “Yes,” said Charlie sarcastically. “Because I wanted them to think I really liked it here.”