What happened was:
BOOM!
Alexander was suddenly granted a profound insight into what it must feel like to be a cannonball, as the detonation sent the FREAKs flying along the few remaining metres of tubing and out onto the floor of the shield power-generating facility.
CHAPTER 46
THE GREAT DILEMMA
THE VENTILATION SHAFT entered the shield room at floor level, which meant that they came skidding out on their bums, rather than crash-landing on their heads.
Their sudden and dramatic appearance was as startling to the half-dozen Borgia technicians as it was to the FREAKs. This was a further piece of luck, as, with ringing ears, hazy vision and wobbly legs, they were in no condition to fight straight away.
Really Annoying Girl was the first to recover. Years of having to listen to her own raucous voice had left her immune to loud, unpleasant noises. She went to work with her bag, flailing right and left like a berserker Viking warrior. The technicians were not battle-trained, and two fell before her onslaught like corn before the scythe.
Tortoise Boy was next onto his feet, and soon he and Cedric had taken out two more, the unfortunate creatures left liquefying on the floor.
The last two made a wobbling run for the door. The Hurricane gassed one with a quick spurt of eggy cabbage (or cabbagy egg), and Jamie clutched the second in his mighty embrace. But it was like trying to grab the soap in the bath, and it squirted free. It hit the control panel and sped through the opening door, venting a warning to the guards as it went.
Plymm was at the door a second later. She had the override code, and locked it down.
Well, it was Plymm and yet not Plymm. She now looked more like a human than a Borgia blob.
She sent out a gaseous message to The Hurricane.
‘She says that will hold them for a few minutes.’
‘Could you ask her why she suddenly looks like a . . . like a girl,’ said Alexander.
There was a quick exchange of smells.
‘She says that when they are young, the Borgia are more, um, malleable. If that’s the word. They can change shape. They lose that ability as they reach adulthood. She likes the way we look, so she’s adopting our form. But it means she’ll be like this for ever.’
As The Hurricane spoke, Plymm moved around the room, smashing dials, throwing switches, wrenching out wiring. The others joined in, performing more or less random acts of vandalism. It may not have contributed much to disabling the shield, but it certainly made them feel better.
As they worked, they heard the hissing sound of a laser torch cutting through the door. And then a louder humming sound filled the ship, followed by an ominous silence.
‘That’s it,’ said Plymm, through The Hurricane.
Actually, not just through The Hurricane. For the first time, her venting was accompanied by a barely audible, inarticulate, but still recognizable version of the words.
The Borgia was learning to speak. The FREAKs were too busy to be freaked by this.
‘Now we go,’ she whispered ploppily. ‘We have seven minutes. We go escape pod through breathing tube how we came.’
They began to crowd around the ventilation shaft, desperate to grasp this one slim chance of life.
‘Wait,’ said Melvyn.
‘No,’ stressed The Hurricane. ‘You heard her: we’ve got to get out of here!’
Alexander began to say something, but Melvyn stopped him.
‘This is important. I’ve thought it through. Plymm says that this will work if we’re lucky. Put that the other way round. It will work if the Borgia and that monster, Thlugg, are unlucky. It means that we’re relying on chance, on fortune. And this is too important for that. Well, I know how to change the odds.’
‘What are you on about?’ said Titch.
‘Guys, we got to split,’ added The Hurricane. ‘Like, now.’
Alexander was ahead of the others. Melvyn was his best friend, and he knew what he was thinking.
‘Mel, no—’
Melvyn put his hand up. ‘Enough, Alexander. I’m staying on this ship, and that’s that. If I stay, the asteroid will smash it to pieces. If I go, it won’t. It’s a luck thing. I’m going to keep my bad luck here with me where it can do some good. It’s why I’m here. It’s my power.’
‘Well,’ said Really Annoying Girl, ‘I did not know you was gonna say that.’
‘I can stay right here with the remaining ray guns and take out any blob that tries to get through that door.’
Alexander looked at the door. The Borgia were nearly through.
‘You know this is the right thing, Alexander,’ Melvyn continued. ‘You want to be a leader? Well, now’s the time to lead. Get them out of here.’
Plymm had been following the conversation, helped by The Hurricane. She touched Alexander gently on the arm. ‘Boy right,’ she whispered. ‘He stay here and stop Borgia come fix shield. But now we go or all die.’
Alexander looked around at the others. Felicity was crying. Heck, they were all crying.
‘Jamie stay too. Help my friend.’
‘If he stays, I stay,’ said Tortoise Boy.
‘And me,’ said Titch.
That was it. Alexander had to act to save them, even if it meant sacrificing his best friend.
‘No, Melvyn’s right. Let’s go,’ he said, desperately trying hide his own emotion.
Felicity let out a wail of despair, but Alexander grabbed her roughly, and dragged her towards the ventilation shaft.
‘Please, Felicity, do this for me. I have to save you. I have to . . . Think about Jamie – we can’t let him die here.’
Felicity nodded, and with tears streaming down her face, she took Jamie by the hand and led him into the shaft.
The Hurricane and Plymm helped shepherd the others after them. Alexander was the last to enter.
‘Get going,’ he screamed. ‘I’ll see you there.’
CHAPTER 47
BUTCH AND SUNDANCE
THEN, AS QUIETLY as he could, he crawled back out again. Melvyn was waiting by the door, a ray gun in each hand.
‘I’ll take one of those,’ Alexander said to his startled friend.
‘But . . . no . . . you’ve got to go!’
Einstein’s underpants had become rather skewed. Alexander tugged them determinedly down over his ears. ‘I’m seeing this through with you.’
‘But it’s my luck, my rotten luck, not yours.’
‘Mel, I’ve been with you every time you’ve had a bucket of paint dropped on your head; every time you’ve fallen into a manhole; every time you’ve almost been killed by an out-of-control ice-cream van; every time you’ve been bashed and bumped and scraped. And I’m going to stay with you now.’
Melvyn started to reply, but even though these were going to be his best friend’s last words, Alexander found himself zoning out.
He was having an idea.
An amazing idea.
He tingled with the electric fizz of genius.
Actually, idea wasn’t quite the right word. He was experiencing understanding. Things that had been clouded were now becoming clear.
‘What are you smiling about?’ said Melvyn, puzzled.
But Alexander just grabbed his arm and, laughing now, said, ‘There’s no need . . . We have to get off . . . The . . . It’s . . . I’ll explain on the way.’
Melvyn could not resist him. Together they dived into the shaft and scuttled after the others. Along the way the path subdivided many times, but they were able to follow the scent trail left by The Hurricane and Plymm’s conversations. And soon they saw a dark shape ahead of them.
‘Hey,’ yelled Alexander, ‘we’re coming!’
Seconds later they were all dropping out into a new compartment. It was a wide circular space, and the walls were lined with escape pods, each with enough room for all the children and Plymm.
The others crowded round Alexander and Melvyn, their expressions perplexed, puzzled, joyous.
And Melvyn smiled a slow smile of recognition. ‘Luckeon,’ he said. ‘I like it.’
And then Plymm urged them into one of the pods, using what were now long, elegant arms and delicate fingers. As they strapped themselves in (loosely, for of course the seats were designed for Borgia proportions), she rapidly pressed a sequence into the control panel buttons. A handle eased down from the cockpit roof, and she yanked it.
The pod whooshed down a launching tube and out into the vacuum of space.
CHAPTER 48
DOWN THE THLUGG-HOLE
‘SHIELD!’ SCREAMED THE admiral. ‘Where is that shield? GET ME MY SHIELD!’
‘It . . . appears . . . to be—’ But those were the last smells ever emitted by that particular Borgia officer, as he was split and sucked dry by Thlugg, the way an ape eats an orange.
‘Fools!’ Thlugg splurted. ‘Side thrusters, full impulse power. And get me a visual on that thing.’
A glowing green representation of Asteroid c4098 was projected in 3D glory into the middle of the command deck. It grew by the second, until its dimensions were greater than the room, and they were all contained within it.
‘Why aren’t we moving? Where are those thrusters? Who . . . ? What . . . ? Why . . . ?’
And then Thlugg began to laugh.
He laughed because the Borgia, although nasty, brutal, smelly and silly, are not cowards, and every Borgia likes to meet his fate laughing.
The explosion was the single brightest event in the history of the Earth. Where it had been night, it was day. Where it was day, the Sun suddenly appeared like a smudge of dark brown against the new light’s intensity.
If the FREAKs had been looking back, they would have been blinded. But their eyes were on the blue Earth as it sped towards them.
‘Whoooaahh!’ they said, in one voice.
And, with the brightness filling the frail vessel, Alexander looked around at his companions, gazing into the eyes of each one.
There was Titch, whose poisoned Death Cards had cut a swathe through their foes, whose flashes had baffled their pursuers and propelled them magically to their destination.
There was Tortoise Boy, Cedric snoozing on his lap. Without them, they would never have battered their way through the Borgia guards.
There was The Hurricane, hand in hand with the lovely green Plymm. Where would they have been without his bottom? Without her help?
There was Really Annoying Girl, still clutching her lethal handbag, her face almost beautiful now that it was in repose.
And there was Jamie Superstrong, asleep and smiling in his sleep, because his mind was as pure as his body was strong, and he could sleep whenever he closed his eyes, and his dreams were always happy dreams.
And Felicity, who made him blush now by gazing back at him. Had he perhaps done it all for her?
And last, Unluckeon, now reborn as Luckeon. Melvyn, his bestest friend in the whole wide world, who had been prepared to sacrifice himself to save them all.
No, not last, because there, reflected in the thick glass of the escape pod’s window, was his own face. The face not of a genius, but of an ordinary boy who had saved the planet.
EPILOGUE
OTTO, AGAIN
‘AND THE ESCAPE pod brought you back to England? That was nice. Could have been Siberia. Or Belgium.’
Uncle Otto had a room all to himself at the psychiatric hospital, but he liked to potter about in the grounds when the weather was sunny. He was now sitting on a bench under an enormous beech tree, with a tartan rug over his knees. The hospital staff were kind and let him wear his tin-foil helmet under a woolly hat, to prevent mind-reading. He was surrounded by photos and articles he’d cut out of magazines.
‘That was Plymm. She’s a pretty nifty space pilot.’
Uncle Otto nodded. ‘And now she’s taken fully human form?’
‘Yeah. She’s still a bit, you know, green. But she’s kind of foxy. For an alien. She goes to our school now. Lives in The Hurricane’s spare room. I think they have a thing going on, which is kind of weird. But at least he’s got a girlfriend at last.’
‘And brilliant, the way you worked out that your friend Melvyn was really lucky after all. It was just the twist the story needed.’
‘I’d never have done it without Einstein’s underpants.’
‘Ah, the pants,’ said Otto craftily. ‘You’ll have finished with them then . . . ?’
‘Oh . . . well, I was kind of hoping . . .’
Otto’s eyes suddenly blazed red. ‘They are my . . . precious.’
‘Precious?’ Alexander edged away a little. ‘But they’re only . . . and I was sort of hoping I could keep them – you know, for the next time we need to save the world.’
Otto passed his hand over his face, and then seemed to recover himself. ‘And they call me crazy. It wasn’t the pants. It was you. You’re the genius. The pants were just . . . well, they were scaffolding. And when the building’s finished, you take the scaffolding away.’
Alexander nodded. ‘I’ll bring them next time I come.’
‘Oh, I’ll be out of here soon. You can drop them off to me at home. I’m a bit short on pants. I don’t like the modern ones. They have electronic tags so the authorities know where you are.’
Alexander looked at Otto. Was he mad? Was he joking? It was hard to tell.
Then a nurse appeared beside them under the tree. ‘I think that’s enough for today,’ she said, smiling at Alexander. And then, to Otto, ‘And time for your meds, Mr Richards. Let’s go in.’
Alexander said goodbye to Otto. As they shook hands, Otto said, ‘You did well, boy. You did very well.’
‘Thanks, Uncle.’
As Alexander walked away, he found that he was rather uncomfortable. He paused, shook one leg, wriggled around and dug his fingers into his pockets, trying not to draw too much attention to himself.
Einstein’s underpants may have helped to save the world, but they didn’t half ride up.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank Kelly Hurst, Alex Antscherl and Sophie Nelson for their efforts to turn a flabby mess into a lean, mean fightin’ machine. But most of all I’d like to thank the wondrous Philippa Milnes-Smith for bending it, and me, into shape.
Also by Anthony McGowan
For younger readers:
The Bare Bum Gang and the Holy Grail
The Bare Bum Gang and the Valley of Doom
The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Face-off
The Bare Bum Gang Battle the Dogsnatchers
For older readers:
Hellbent
Henry Tumour
(winner of the Booktrust Teenage Prize, 2006)
The Knife That Killed Me
EINSTEIN’S UNDERPANTS – AND HOW THEY SAVED THE WORLD
AN RHCB DIGITAL EBOOK 9781448100293
Published in Great Britain by RHCB Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
A Random House Group Company
This ebook edition published 2011
Copyright © Anthony McGowan, 2010
First published in Great Britain
Corgi Yearling 2010
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