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 back 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.”

“So,” I said, “what happens to you if you don’t like it here?”

“They fire you into space?” said Charlie. “Or feed you into some kind of grinding machine? I have no idea. But it basically starts with a couple of armed spiders dragging you off screaming. Like this.”

He pointed over my shoulder. I turned round. Captain Chicken aka Bantid Vantresillion was standing at the edge of the room in his violet robe, with two giant monkey-spiders at his side. The spiders were wearing crash helmets and carrying orange toilet plungers.

“Seize them!”

The giant monkey-spiders sprinted towards us.

“Run!” said Charlie.

We dodged and dived. We slid along benches and jumped over tables. I covered a woman in mushroom soup. Charlie sat in a bowl of treacle pudding. A spider raised a toilet plunger and a fizzing line of laser-light zapped past my leg, singeing my jeans. Charlie dodged a second one and it set fire to the hair of a sci-fi fan who was eating a knickerbocker glory.

“I love the nightlife!” shouted one of the spiders.

“Bumper cars!” shouted the second.

Somehow we made it to the main entrance. I shouted, “Snekkit!” the wall opened up and we raced into the corridor.

I have to say we did pretty well. I don’t think either of us had run that fast in our entire lives. At one point I shoved a fat guy off a hover-scooter and we both leaped on, but the joystick looked like a tomato and I had no idea how to use it so the scooter just sank to the floor with a squirty hiss. We leaped off and kept on running.

They caught us, of course. They had more legs and the deadly toilet plungers. So I guess we were pretty lucky they didn’t fill us full of smoking holes. We ground to a halt and stood with our hands on our knees, puffing and wheezing. A couple of seconds later our arms and legs were wrapped in hairy brown tentacles. The spiders were surprisingly strong. And their breath was appalling.

“Snack them down!” said one of them. “Alive! For freshness!”

“Foot on the brake!” said the other. “We do not want the electric prod.”

“No,” said the first. “We do not want the electric prod.”

Vantresillion appeared behind the spiders. “Take them to the holding cell.”

“What are you going to do to us?” asked Charlie.

Vantresillion laughed, then turned and walked away.

“Come with us, little bald monkeys,” said the first spider.

We were lifted into the air and they scuttled off at high speed in the opposite direction, jiggling us up and down and not bothering at all about banging our heads on the walls when they went round corners.

Three minutes later they snekkited a door open and threw us into a small room and snekkited the door shut behind us.

This room was different. This room was not white. This room was grey and black and brown. The walls were made of something like concrete and they hadn’t been cleaned for a couple of hundred years. There was brown goo running down them and a mess in the corner like something had died there quite recently.

“Lovely,” said Charlie.

We didn’t say anything for a while.

I took a deep breath. “Sorry, this was my fault.”

“It’s OK,” said Charlie. “I forgive you. Sort of.”

Once more we didn’t say anything for a while.

“What was the plan?”

“The plan?” asked Charlie.

“Yeah,” I said. “The brilliant plan. The one I screwed up by being a total, total moron.”

“Oh, that one,” said Charlie. “Well, if you put those suckers on your forehead and think hard enough, you can make Brussels sprouts that go off like grenades when you throw them.”

“And …?”

“I was collecting them,” said Charlie. “You know, building up an arsenal, so I could fight my way out.”

“To where?” I said. “We’re seventy thousand light years from planet Earth. Unless you’ve got some black forest gateau that turns into a spaceship.”

“OK,” said Charlie. “No need to be sarcastic. At least I was trying.”

There was a sinister grating noise from the other side of the wall.

“That’s probably the grinding machine,” said Charlie. “Thanks for coming to get me, by the way.”

I nodded. “No problem. I mean, obviously I didn’t have a choice. You being my friend and everything. Plus I missed you.”

“Yeah, me too. I think I’d have gone mad if you hadn’t turned up. Everyone talking about Blade Runner and speaking Vogon.”

I don’t know how long we were in the holding cell. The lights were on all the time and our watches hadn’t worked since we arrived on Plonk. We talked about Megan Shotts and the locusts. We talked about Mr Kosinsky’s snowman socks. We talked about salmon mousse, and strawberry jam and Cheddar cheese sandwiches.

But thinking about home made us sad. So we played noughts and crosses on the floor by scraping the dirt with the toes of our shoes. Then we tried to name all the countries in the world. Except we kept remembering that we were going to be killed, which was a bit distracting.

Ten hours passed. Or maybe twenty. Or thirty. We got really tired. We tried to lie down and sleep but it was hard to relax lying in brown goo. So we stood up again. And then we got so tired we didn’t care about the brown goo any longer so we lay down and slept.

We hadn’t been asleep for long when we were woken by two more giant monkey-spiders. Or maybe it was the same ones. It was hard to tell.

“Do the locomotion,” said one.

“Walkies!” said the other.

“Are you going to execute us now?” asked Charlie.

“Hurrah,” said one. “You are a clever boy.”

“We are the champions!” sang the other. “But you’re not.” Then it snickered gleefully.

We fought for a bit, but it was no use. They grabbed us by the arms and legs and hoisted us over their heads and hauled us off down the corridor.

Five minutes later we were taken into a hi-tech white office with blue rubber plants and Bantid Vantresillion sitting behind a desk. The giant monkey-spiders dropped us onto the floor.

“You may go now,” said Vantresillion and the spiders scuttled out.

“Charles…” said Vantresillion. “James…”

“Are you going to kill us?” asked Charlie again, getting to his feet.

“No,” said Vantresillion.

“But the spiders,” I replied, “they told us…”

“They have a strange sense of humour,” said Vantresillion.

“Oh.”

“Normally we’d kill you,” said Vantresillion. “But I think you may be able to help us.”

I felt a huge wave of relief and everything went a bit wobbly for a few seconds. But Charlie still had his head screwed on properly. “Great,” he said. “Just fire away and we’ll see what we can do. We like being helpful, don’t we, Jimbo?”

“Er, what?” I said. “Yes, that’s right. We like being helpful.”

“Hmmm,” said Vantresillion. “I have a problem. Every time one of the Watchers travels to Skye to come back to Plonk we lose contact with them.”

“Plonk,” said Charlie, chuckling. “That makes me laugh every time.”

“Charlie…?” I said.

“What?”

“Don’t be rude about their planet, all right?”

“Good idea,” said Charlie. So I reckon he was feeling a bit wobbly as well.

“And every time we beam someone down to find them, we lose contact with them too.”

“That’ll be the army,” said Charlie. “Or the police. Both, probably.”

“But no one knows about the Weff-Beam,” said Vantresillion through gritted teeth.

“Yeah, they do,” said Charlie. “Jimbo told them, didn’t you, Jimbo?”

“Did I?”

“It’s OK,” said Charlie. “You don’t have to keep it secret any longer.”

“Right,” I said. I had no idea what Charlie was doing, but I had no other ideas so I decided to go along with it. “Yeah. We had a notebook. And a map and stuff. From Mrs Pearce’s attic. And I gave it to Mum and Dad. So they know all about the Weff-Beam thingy.”

“You’re lying,” said Vantresillion.

“Scout’s honour,” said Charlie, holding up three fingers. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Come to think of it, he was probably right. Becky had seen the Weff-Beam. She’d go to the police. They’d have the place surrounded by now. Tanks, barbed wire, marksmen.

“I guess they’re shooting them as they come up out of the ground,” said Charlie. “Because they’re aliens with tails.”

“I have lost five Watchers,” said Vantresillion darkly. “Any more and I swear I will kill everyone on your benighted little planet.”

“You’re just kidding, aren’t you?” said Charlie, smiling.

Vantresillion leaned over and pulled a black box into the centre of the desk. There were a series of buttons on the box. He placed his finger on the red one. “I press this,” he said, “and your planet blows up. No Eiffel Tower. No Great Wall of China. Just a load of smoking rocks in space.”

“What do the other ones do?” asked Charlie. “Do they make cappuccino?”

I turned to him and scowled. “Just try and be a bit nicer, OK? He might actually be telling the truth.”

“Look,” said Vantresillion. He spun round and a screen appeared on the wall. In the centre of the screen was a planet. Sort of like Saturn, with rings around it and three moons. “Zip Seven,” said Vantresillion. “We’ve got a Weff-Beam there too.” He pressed the yellow button. There was a loud bang and the planet erupted in a vast ball of fire.

“Holy cow!” said Charlie.

The planet was gone. Just a load of smoking rocks and three little moons drifting sadly off into space.

“My God,” I said. “Were there, like, people on that planet?”

“Yes,” said Vantresillion. “But they looked like squirrels and they were stupid and I didn’t like them very much.” He took two brass wristbands from his desk and threw them to us. “Put these on.”

We put them on. He pressed a third button and they snapped tight.

“Ouch!” said Charlie.

I tried to get mine off but it had shrunk and there was no way I could slip it over my hand.

“You go down on the Weff-Beam,” said Vantresillion. “You talk to whichever moron is in charge down there and you tell them we want the Watchers back.”

“But…” said Charlie. I could hear the wheels spinning in his brain. “They’re not going to believe us. “The Earth is going to be blown up.” It doesn’t sound very convincing, does it?”

“Then you must be persuasive,” said Vantresillion. “Snogroid!”

A door opened and a spider scuttled in. Vantresillion chucked the spider another wristband. “Put this on.”

The spider put it on and we heard it snap tight. “Delightful bangle,” it said. “And most snug.”

Vantresillion turned back to us. “You will have five minutes. Then you call me using the wristbands. If you have not solved the problem, then this happens to Charles.” He pressed the green button. There was another bang and a hideous scream. The spider erupted in flames and the room was filled with brown smoke and the smell of burning hair. When the smoke cleared there was a ring of black ash on the floor and a buckled wristband, still glowing slightly from the heat.

“That should help change their minds,” said Vantresillion. “Five more minutes and I will do the same to James. After that I will just lose patience and press the red button. Then I will press the last button and get a nice cappuccino.” He thought this was very funny and laughed for a long time. “Now. Follow me.”