‘—to surf. We surf the radio waves.’
‘No. I mean, what will you do when you’ve found the person you want?’
‘We have found him.’
‘Wow! Where is he?’
‘He is here.’
‘Here? What? In this town?’
‘In this café.’
‘Yikes! Which person? What’s he like?’
I looked around the takeaway place. I didn’t see anyone I knew or anyone especially interesting.
‘He’s got a good brain for a human. He’s unappreciated at home. He’s wasted on Planet Earth.’
‘I know the feeling.’
‘Of course.’
‘Why “of course”?’
‘Because, Monster, it is you.’
‘Me!’ I was so amazed I sucked a French fry straight down in one gasp.
9
Shall we go?’ Herm got up. ‘Would you like another ride in my car?’
I wasn’t so keen now. ‘Look, I’m trying to escape, to run away. If you wouldn’t mind dropping me off somewhere far away, that’d be just great.’
‘I’m sure I can do that.’ He smiled.
We walked into the morning sunrise, across the sparkly parking lot and got into his strange, curved, yellow car with the huge dashboard and instrument panel.
He did something on the instrument panel and my door clicked shut. There was no door-handle or lock on my side. He clicked my seat-belt shut. We whizzed along the roads, going out of town, out of the area I lived in.
‘But why me?’ I asked Herm.
‘You are the Earthling we have chosen.’ Herm said this very, very seriously. ‘I told you this before.’
We were going further and further from town, from home, from my duvet, from Pus. And right then I knew this alien was for real. He was kidnapping me. Me! Monster! No! Never!
I wasn’t some wimpy nerd you could just abduct—I was going to fight. Leaving Earth. Leaving my family, leaving my duvet, the garage, my spiders, Muggeridge, Pus, even Sis. No! It was impossible. I couldn’t, wouldn’t go.
‘I’m allergic to outer space,’ I told Herm.
I watched helplessly as Herm put his foot down, softly, on the accelerator. ‘I thought you were joking!’ I screamed, and fought a battle with my as-used-in-space seat-belt. The seat-belt won.
‘We do not joke.’
I felt the door panel. There were no buttons, no ways of opening the door. Of course a spaceship would have central locking. I was trapped.
‘You cannot escape,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you are frightened. We will look after you. I like you very much.’
‘But, why? Why me? I’m just an ordinary, normal, boring Earth person! Aren’t I?’
‘I’ve been watching you.’
‘Why does everyone watch me all the time? If I’m so good to watch, why am I not a film star?’
‘You are the chosen one.’
‘I’m not! It’s impossible. Stop the car!’
Herm continued talking as if nothing important was happening.
‘I’ve searched the world. I’ve had seven years to do it, remember? At last I came to your town. I heard stories about Monster, a boy who was highly inventive and original. I thought he’d be ideal. I watched you. I followed you.’
‘How dare you!’
‘I started to measure your brain waves. They are more active than anyone else’s we’ve come across. I noticed how you concentrate most when you sit on sheep dung or when covered with a duvet. I went to your school and I noticed you seemed to be subconsciously practising for Plongo because you drew a line around yourself.’
‘What?’ Then I remembered Muggeridge drawing around me onto a piece of paper in maths. Muggeridge had used a very fat pen from the teacher’s whiteboard and when I got up I had this black line across my head, down the sides of my face, along my shoulders, down my arms and legs.
‘So?’
‘We do this on Plongo when we are ready to mate.’
‘What? You must be joking! You don’t know nothing!’ I was real angry. I felt invaded. All this spying he’d been doing, it was creepy.
‘As I said, one day I saw you with the special markings on your head that we get when we do the splits.’
‘The splits! I was having a maths class.’
‘Whatever. With us it is different.’
‘Let me out!’
Herm smiled and told me to tighten my seat-belt. ‘Your traffic police are my worst enemies. Their cars accelerate faster than my craft. They catch me. They are an inconvenience.’
He hurled the car around a corner marked 50. The speedo said 85 kph. ‘I corner well, I just can’t accelerate fast.’
We turned onto an empty, straight road. I had to get out of here. I had to think, fast. I decided I might as well keep him talking. The more I could find out, the more chance there was I could work out an escape plan.
‘What will you do with me?’ The ‘me’ came out all squeezy.
‘We will teach you our skills, including the skill of thinking and simultaneously making something happen. We will mate you with a Plongon, and study the outcome. If it’s successful, we’ll come back for other Earthers, mate them with Plongons, and eventually seed Earth with Plongons so Earth can stop going around and around in circles and blast out into the inter-galactic skyway with us.’
‘Why?’
‘The more surfers searching the big waves, the better. It is, after all, the point of life, eh?’
We seemed to have reached a part in the conversation where mutual understanding was impossible.
‘Bet you’re glad to be away from your family, eh?’ Herm asked.
I didn’t like the way Herm said that. It was something for me to feel, not for Herm to say.
‘On Plongo we don’t go in for families. We have a much more evolved structure. We don’t have children, so there’s no need to waste years processing them.’
‘Processing?’
‘Teaching them. Bringing them up.’
We were quiet for a long while. I felt carsick. I thought about the phrase, ‘bringing them up’. I imagined people vomiting up their kids. It wasn’t nice. The strawberry thickshake was doing funny things in my shrivelled stomach.
Towns flew by. The countryside was one green blur.
Then Herm said, ‘I’ve been plugging into your thought waves.’
‘What? When?’
‘Just now.’
I’d been thinking about cuddling up on the couch with my duvet and Mum on Sunday night to watch our fave show on TV. I felt embarrassed.
‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ Herm said. ‘I know your thoughts well now. At first it was hard to get your wave-length and I do apologize for the static that caused—’
‘You mean when I got headaches and felt a beehive was in my head! That was you? You’ve no right!’
‘What’s this about rights? I was getting to know you.’
‘You mean, when I invented the kid-friendly car, you were the one keeping me awake, feeding me the ideas?’
‘Well, not quite.’
‘I’m going to report you. To a policeman.’
‘No one else has seen me. Only you.’
I got the point. If no one else saw him, then everyone would think I was a nutter.
‘Look, I could do a deal with you. I’ve got this sister who’s not allergic to outer space. In fact she reads—’
‘We have no need for your sister.’
He smiled in a strange way and it reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t remember who.
We zipped around an S-bend so fast I felt I was on a Big Dipper. My stomach was sloshing around. I remembered the lumps in the strawberry milk shake. All this talk about bringing up children, and the fast cornering, was making waves and swells in my stomach. It wouldn’t be long now before Herm found out the downside of our eating habits.
I tried talking to take my mind off my stomach. ‘How do Plongons do…er…mating?’
‘Simple. We split i
n half.’
‘What?’
‘We stand front-to-front, staring into each other’s eyes with our arms wrapped around each other.’
‘We do something similar, I think.’
He took no notice of me. ‘When our thoughts are on exactly the same wave-length—zam! The two people split down the middle, cutting through each of them in the middle of the back, making two more people, but each one is half the other.
‘This is a much more sensible way to reproduce than your way, because we don’t have children. The new person is fully grown. Each new person magically gets the whole brain capacity of both the parents, so with each generation we double our brainpower. You know what you’re getting. The exact combination of those two people. None of this stuff about having to look after helpless babies and reprogram brains each generation. That’s inefficient.’
I had to think very hard about this. But I couldn’t work it out. All I could see was this horrific picture of me, Monster, splitting down the middle and having both halves of me glued to the halves of someone else. And that someone an onion-headed alien.
The inevitable happened. I threw up French fries all over the dashboard.
Herm just ignored the dripping vomit and went on talking about the people who did the splits. I guess if you don’t eat, vomit doesn’t offend you. It’s possible.
‘Don’t you die?’ I asked.
‘No. You will be immortal when you add yourself to the Plongon gene pool. The trouble is, over generations we’ve all done the splits with everyone else on Plongo. We desperately need fresh material. That’s why we’re catching radio waves in any direction, riding them, seeing where we wash up, always on the lookout for new genetic material.
I didn’t say anything. What was there to say? The thought of Mum and a mug of cocoa and Dad oiling the car, and Sis, even Sis, on the phone all the time fizzing and giggling—it appealed more than it ever had before.
I looked around, desperate now for something I could push that would open the door. Nothing.
Yuck. I was looking down when the car curved around a corner. My head swam. I looked up just in time to see the sign: Motorway 20 km.
Herm put his foot down on the accelerator.
10
I panicked. I swivelled my head madly, trying to move. I screamed. The seat-belt held me tighter. Herm took no notice of my distress. Herm said that for takeoff we had to get on the motorway and get to 200 ks and then and only then could we take off with sufficient speed to activate the thrusters to turn the car into a spaceship and increase speed to blast through the Earth’s measly stratosphere and up into the lovely calm ocean of space.
‘Hey! I don’t want to go to your horrible Plongo and be split in half!’
My yelling and screaming came out quite softly, as though the volume had been turned down. It was freaky.
Up until then I’d still thought in some part of my mind that this was all a joke, that this guy was having me on. But this speed-freak driver really was trying to kidnap me before turning me into sexy sliced salami—this was real. It had to be real. Look at the car!
I took a deep breath of lovely Earth air and tried to free myself from the seat. I managed to move my arms. I waved them about weakly.
‘We do not feel pain, like you humans. That is a defect we corrected years ago. Fight me: I will feel nothing.’
‘You can’t take me to Plongo. I’ll starve! I won’t be able to breathe.’
‘All that will be resolved when you do the splits. Until then, I have everything that is necessary for your survival in this craft. Food, air, gravity machines.’
I looked out at the road blurring past us. We were at the intersection before the motorway on-ramp. A car was parked beside the intersection. A cop car! Herm roared straight through the intersection. He didn’t stop for a tractor trying to cross on his right. The tractor had the right of way. The tractor couldn’t get out of the way. I shut my eyes. Herm screamed around the tractor and accelerated up the ramp to the motorway. I glanced in the rear-vision mirror and saw the cop car pull onto the road behind us.
I tried to signal to the cop car. I couldn’t move because of the G-forces. All I could do was a wink into the rear-vision mirror. Some hope that the cops would see that!
We roared onto the motorway and into the fast lane. There were no other cars around, except the cop car behind us.
With Herm’s foot flat to the floor, we sat on 110 ks. Like he said, this thing didn’t accelerate fast at all. Strange.
Wah! Wah! Wah! The cop car put its siren on. Herm took no notice. The chase began.
My mind, the only bit of me that moved, noticed everything that happened…The cop car’s gaining on us. Herm’s pumping the pedal but the craft isn’t accelerating any more. It’s stuck on 115 ks. The cop car’s right behind us, swinging to the right and left of our bumper. Its lights flash around the inside of the craft. Herm’s foot jiggles. No more power. The cops can pass us easily.
There’s a roar. The cop car passes and crosses into our lane in front of us. I think the cop looks like the bulky cop. Herm does his donut turn and shoots off the other way. The cop does a three-point turn with heaps of squealing of brakes and revving and roaring, and he catches up with us. The two cars are side-by-side, belting along at 110 ks. Yes, I’m sure that’s the bulky cop. This is gut-churning. I’m going to be sick again any moment.
Another cop car appears in the rear-vision mirror. It gets larger. Larger. The first cop car shoots forward and into our lane. The new one skids up beside us. I look into the eyes of the nice woman cop who’s sitting in the passenger seat. I recognize her.
‘It’s not my fault,’ I try to mouth. But no words come out. My lips don’t even move.
Another cop car hurtles towards us from in front. We’re going to smash head-on! I look down. I wrap my head in my arms which miraculously move freely. We’re all slowing down.
Bang! A tyre burst.
We lurch around, tilting sideways. We skid. We spin. We stop. My seat-belt holds me in, but my stomach seems to fly through the air, up, up, curving down, down, and—
I throw up again; lumpy strawberry milkshake everywhere.
A whole row of cops is walking towards our car. I don’t know what I’m more scared of—Herm, or the cops, or the mess I’ve made.
I crouch down. Herm crouches with me. Herm doesn’t seem to have special powers any more. The cops loom over the car.
11
The cops seized Herm, handcuffed him, and frisked him.
One cop was gabbling into his phone. ‘Yep. It’s the Speed Demon all right. 942 traffic offences in six years, 568 of them for speeding.’
Seems they’d been trying to catch him for ages. I had to admit he hadn’t understood our road code, from what I’d seen.
‘We’ll bring him in. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
Why were all the cops smiling? Why were they using ordinary cell phones?
Herm and I stood beside the road while the cops examined the craft.
No one took any notice of me. I felt dizzy. My arms and legs were weak as. I looked sideways at Herm. Herm looked miserable, too.
It made me feel dreadful because I had liked Herm when Herm wasn’t planning to abduct me and give me a half-life on Plongo. When Herm was just being a normal, but fun-loving human, he was OK.
The bulky cop yelled, ‘Find out who that kid belongs to!’
‘I know who he is,’ said the nice cop. ‘It’s Monster.’ They all groaned. ‘Might have known he was behind all this.’
Herm muttered, ‘I’ll see you right, Monster.’
What could that mean? Whatever it meant, I felt terrible. At least the onion-head alien had understood me.
Herm winked at me and stared at me, hard.
‘I’ll never get off the Earth now, with my special tyres destroyed. They’ve taken my communicator. I can’t contact Plongo now. I’m here forever. Help me, Monster.’
‘What can I do?’
; ‘Promise to tell no one who I am. Humans don’t like people who are different.’
‘Yeah. I know that.’
‘Maybe I could mate with an Earthling. At least that would stop my Plongon genes disappearing forever.’
I felt confused and as though I was going to be sick again.
‘I’ll help you, Herm. Maybe we could work on reinventing the wheel—the Plongon wheel—so we could get you on the road again. I think I know of places you could get up to 200 ks for a long period with no cop car in sight. In Australia. But there’s a price.’
‘Anything, Monster. I am in your hands.’
‘Move the prisoners out,’ the bulky cop ordered.
They pulled Herm away from me and stuffed him in the back seat of one of their cars.
I couldn’t escape. I was surrounded by cops.
I think I passed out. The next thing I remembered was waking up in my bedroom cuddling my duvet. Mum and Dad appeared out of nowhere with the nice cop. They all made a fuss of me, telling me I’d been kidnapped by the notorious Speed Demon of the highways who was taking me hostage so he couldn’t be arrested. They had some theory he lived in a cave in the mountains, where he had a workshop full of cars he’d designed. They reckoned he was trying to break the land speed record.
‘Has a way to go,’ said a cop. ‘It’s 1,019 ks an hour.’
I could see a rumour starting here. I decided to let it roll. At least I’d be a hero at school for a while if this kept up. Headlines flashed in front of my eyes. Local kid helps cops chase traffic hoon.
I could hear Sis wailing and gulping in her room.
‘Tell Sis not to worry about me,’ I said bravely.
Mum and Dad just smiled. Mum seemed to be struggling for something to say.
‘You are very lucky to be alive. Something terrible could have happened to you.’
Yeah, Mum, like doing the splits in outer space. Nah, I didn’t bother to tell them. They would never believe me.
I listened more carefully. The gulps weren’t quite right for wailing. They were more like giggles, gasps, pops, fizzes, giggle-gaggles. What was going on?
‘Have a sleep now, Monster, and we’ll talk in the morning.’ Mum pulled my new duvet up to my chin.
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