Danny Danger and the Space Twister

by Adam Frost

  “Sorry, Mia,” said Danny. “You’re completely right. I should have listened. I’ve messed everything up.”

  “Yeah,” said his sister, folding her arms. “You have.”

  “It’s just – I thought the Time Tablet would help me get the remote,” said Danny. “I’d be able to see where everyone was. But then it broke. The Space Twister wasn’t in it. Then you weren’t in it. Then Uncle Charlie wasn’t in it. It all went wrong.”

  “What do you mean, I wasn’t in it?” said Mia.

  “You weren’t in Grapeshot Hall,” said Danny. “Your file just vanished.”

  “We went back to the cave to get Roxie’s catapult,” said Mia. “We must have been about five minutes. We wouldn’t have been in Grapeshot Hall during that time.”

  “Oh,” said Danny, “that makes sense. But what about Uncle Charlie? And the Space Twister?”

  Mia shrugged. “What does it matter now? Your Time Tablet may as well be broken. We’re trapped in a nuclear bunker. I cannot believe this is STILL my birthday.”

  Eric had been looking at the radiation gauge. Roxie had been inspecting the lift doors. Now they both came over to join Danny and Mia.

  “So why’s he keeping us alive?” said Eric. “Why aren’t we six feet under?”

  “I don’t think we’re a threat to him any more,” said Danny.

  “What do you mean?” said Roxie.

  “He told me that he’s found something that will make him live forever,” said Danny.

  “What else did he say?” Roxie shot back. “Think, Danny. This could be really important.”

  Danny took a deep breath. He had been trying to forget his confrontation with the Space Twister. He didn’t want to remember those cruel eyes, that sinister voice. Very slowly, Danny explained that the Space Twister had wanted the remote to make him stop time forever but it hadn’t, he’d kept getting older, so now he was looking for something that could make him young again.

  “This is bad,” said Roxie. “If he has the remote and something that stops him dying, then he’ll be – unbeatable – all-powerful.”

  She leapt over the back of the sofa and switched on the TV. A news reporter was standing at the end of a suburban street. He spoke in an urgent, staccato voice: “Shock scenes in Delhi today when the Indian National Museum announced that it had mislaid every item in its collection.”

  More headlines appeared across the bottom of the screen:

  MUSEUM OF ANDALUCIA SAYS ANCIENT VASES ARE MISSING

  ARIZONA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY LOSES NATIVE AMERICAN JEWELLERY

  “It doesn’t make sense, Danny,” said Mia. “I thought you said he had some evil plan to live forever.”

  “Looks like he’s just collecting more antiques,” said Eric.

  “Those aren’t just antiques,” said Roxie.

  “What do you mean?” asked Danny.

  “Every culture has a story about an object or garment that can make its owner immortal,” she said. “You drink from the Holy Grail, you wear a phoenix’s feather, you live for ever. All those museums he’s looting. It can’t be a coincidence. Each one of them contains their culture’s most prized relic. The one that’s supposed to grant you eternal life. We’ve got to get out of here before he finds the right one.”

  “You mean, there’s a right one?” asked Eric, looking astonished.

  Roxie pursed her lips. “Probably shouldn’t have said that. Look, it’s top secret, OK? Nobody outside of EUREKA! knows about it. I can’t say anything more.”

  Quick as a flash, Eric pulled out his Truth Spray and squirted it at Roxie.

  “Dammit, that’s not fair,” said Roxie.

  “Course it is,” said Eric. “Now, what are you talking about?”

  Roxie clamped her mouth tightly shut and shook her head, but the words eventually burst out: “There’s an amulet, made seven hundred years ago by the medieval German craftsman Thelonius Grebe. It was meant to be presented to King Caracas of Velubia on his eightieth birthday, but the king died two days before the amulet was finished.”

  “So what does it do?” asked Mia.

  “Anyway who wears it round their neck is immortal,” said Roxie.

  “Just like that?” asked Danny.

  “We think so,” said Roxie, “but we’re not sure. There may be a trigger. Something that you need to do before its energy is released.”

  “So where is it?” asked Danny.

  Roxie shrugged. “Nobody knows. It went missing on the day that Thelonius Grebe himself died. All we’ve got to go on is a riddle that he sent to the Queen of Velubia: ‘My face is gold, my case is gold. For gold keeps out the wind and cold’.”

  Mia, Eric and Danny repeated the riddle to themselves.

  “That could be anything,” said Mia. “I’ve got a gold filling, he’s welcome to that.”

  “My uncle’s got a Labrador called Cindy,” said Eric. “She’s got a gold face.”

  “Exactly, it’s hard to work out what it means,” said Roxie, “but it sounds like the Space Twister has heard rumours about the amulet. And, given he can pause time, he’s likely to find it. We’d better get to it before he does.”

  “Great,” said Eric, “as if we didn’t have enough on our plate.”

  “I think we should start in Hamburg,” said Roxie. “That was Grebe’s hometown. Hamburg is bound to give us some leads.”

  “And how do you know this amulet works?” asked Mia.

  But the spray had worn out and Roxie was shaking her head. She pulled out her catapult. “Save your spray for the bad guys, Eric. Unless you want a face full of pellets.”

  Eric put the Truth Spray back in his pocket.

  “The less you know about the amulet, the safer you’ll all be,” said Roxie.

  “So all we’ve got to do,” said Mia, “is get out of here, find out where this amulet is, go and fetch the amulet, track down the Space Twister, get the cosmic remote back and put the Space Twister somewhere he can’t make any more trouble.”

  Roxie nodded. “So let’s start by getting ourselves out of here,” she said, putting her hands on her hips and staring at the lift.

  Roxie sprinted over to the lift and ran her finger along the join where the doors met.

  “Stand back,” she said.

  She fired her catapult continually for at least a minute, aiming for the dead centre of the lift, but the pellets just bounced off.

  “Try standing here,” said Eric, pointing at a spot a few metres to the left of Roxie.

  Roxie looked over her shoulder.

  “You’ll be at a fifty-five degree angle,” Eric added, “and if your pellet reaches one hundred and twenty miles per hour, it should cause a chain reaction in the molecular structure of the right-hand door.”

  “For real?” Roxie asked.

  Eric shrugged. “Think so.”

  Roxie did what Eric suggested, the pellet hit the centre of the lift with an ear-splitting clang, and the doors hissed open.

  “You beauty!” exclaimed Roxie, running over to the open doors.

  “Blimey, Eric, how did you work that out?” asked Danny.

  “Granville’s Eighth Law of Base Metals,” mumbled Eric, with a shrug. “I thought everyone knew about it.”

  Roxie was peering into an empty lift shaft. She twisted her head round and looked straight upwards. “I can just about see the bottom of the lift. I’ll try to get it down here,” she said.

  She glanced at the control panel next to the lift. She pulled open the radiation monitor and yanked out several metres of wire and cabling. She put one end of the cable into the sling of her catapult and leant into the lift shaft.

  She fired the cable straight up the shaft, aiming at the lift.

  The top of the cable wrapped itself around a metal strut on the bottom of the lift; the rest of the cable dangled down into the shaft. Roxie started to climb.

  She was about to disappear from view when she looked back into the bunker and said, “Mia, see if you ca
n find any mirrors in here, any reflective surface, anything your Mirror Key will open.”

  She looked at Danny and Eric. “Use the Time Tablet to find out anything about the Space Twister’s plans. Whether he’s close to the amulet. And also – work out why Jasper hasn’t flippin’ beamed us out of here yet.”

  She pulled herself up the cable and out of sight.

  Mia looked at Danny and Eric and said, “Let’s go.” She started going through drawers and cupboards, looking for even the smallest mirror.

  Danny and Eric sat side by side on the sofa and turned on the Time Tablet.

  “Who shall we look up first?” asked Eric.

  “Uncle Charlie,” said Danny.

  He typed in Uncle Charlie’s name and this time the Time Tablet found his uncle’s file. But it still seemed to have a bug or glitch.

  mackerel … hold your horses …

  up down up up …

  Charlie and Jasper were back underneath the clouds.

  “So the crystal wasn’t there either,” said Jasper with a sigh.

  “There’s one last place we can try,” said Charlie.

  “You know what, we should have kept the Time Tablet. Then we could have just typed in the original inventor’s name and found out everything he knew.”

  Charlie fired another sky rope into a long bank of clouds. “No way,” he said. “Danny needed it far more than us. Besides, you know that it wouldn’t work. It’s programmed to respond to Danny’s thumbprint.”

  “That’s true. I forgot,” said Jasper.

  “Every EURKEA! agent gets just one gadget,” said Charlie, “but lucky Danny gets two. Because in fact the cosmic remote and the Time Tablet are two halves of one gadget. The control panel and the hard drive. That’s why one fingerprint controls both.”

  “I remember now,” said Jasper.

  “Every time someone uses the cosmic remote, it searches the contents of the Time Tablet,” said Charlie, “that’s how it knows what to rewind, what to pause. Hang on, we’re going above the clouds again…”

  Charlie fired a sky rope into the highest cloud in the sky.

  “Danny, if you’re reading this … remember what I said about … hide … wait at the … find you … find you …

  tea cosy … decathalon …

  Danny frowned. “It did that before,” he said. “Stupid thing.”

  But Eric was only half listening. “I get it,” he mumbled. “The cosmic remote moves time, but the Time Tablet tells it what to move. They’re linked. The cosmic remote is the car, but the Time Tablet is the sat nav.”

  “Eric, what are you talking about now?” asked Danny.

  “When you press Rewind or Pause, the remote checks the Time Tablet and finds out what people are doing. What they’ve done. It’s the remote’s brain. So what if we hack into its brain!”

  “I still don’t get it,” said Danny.

  “Well, at the moment, you can only read the Time Tablet,” said Eric, “but what if you could write into it, too? What if you could change everyone’s files? We’d soon get out of here. We’d soon beat that Space Twister bloke.”

  “Hang on,” said Danny. “Say that again.”

  Eric repeated what he’d just said.

  “You’re serious?” asked Danny. “That’s possible?”

  “It must be,” said Eric. “Every system can be breached. Remember when I hacked into the school website and changed all the teachers’ names to Shirley Ollerinshaw?”

  Danny nodded and then a light went on in his eyes.

  “Hang on, Eric,” he said. “The Space Twister told me that, when we nearly beat him before, it was because you took that robot that Mia got for her birthday and hacked into it. Made it shoot lasers.”

  “Wow,” said Eric. “I did that?”

  “Yeah, you did,” said Danny. “So you should definitely try hacking again.”

  “Not a problem,” said Eric, rubbing his hands together. “Let’s find the back door. Every programmer always puts in a back door. Click there. Now double click there.”

  Danny looked at his Time Tablet and did what Eric said.

  Mia was crawling under the bunk beds now, still looking for a mirror.

  “No, not there,” said Eric. “Go back, go back. Bring up the map again. Now zoom into there.”

  Danny clicked and zoomed.

  “That’s it!” exclaimed Eric. “That small island: St Zoombia. It can’t be real. Zoombia’s a game for the B-FORCE 250. The developer must have created it specially. That’ll be the way into the program settings.”

  Danny clicked on the island. A box full of icons filled the screen.

  “Now tick the box that says administrator,” said Eric.

  Danny ticked the box.

  “Click the button that says Save settings,” said Eric.

  Danny clicked the button.

  “And we’re in,” said Eric.

  He clapped his hands. Mia looked up from a chest of drawers and walked over to her brother and Eric. “What have you done now?” she asked.

  “Open someone’s file,” said Eric. “Actually, open mine.”

  Danny typed in Eric’s name and brought up his file.

  “Now click on it and look,” said Eric. “There’s a menu of options. You can Cut, Paste, Edit, Delete. Move people round. Change their lives.”

  “Danny, hang on,” said Mia. “This is serious stuff. Just hold on a minute.”

  “You can get us out of here!” said Eric enthusiastically. “Don’t worry, I’ll go first. Just click on my file and select Cut. Then navigate to my house. And paste me there.”

  “Eric, don’t be a nut,” said Mia.

  “It’ll be fine,” said Eric. “It’ll just be treating me like a block of code. Safer than a flippin’ plane or your uncle’s sky ropes, that’s for sure. Come on, click Cut. I’ll vanish for a bit, but that’s what’s meant to happen.”

  “Eric, shouldn’t we try this on someone else first? Someone we don’t like?” asked Danny.

  “No way,” said Eric. “I hacked into it, I go first. Come on, Danny, I want to go home.”

  “Don’t do it, Danny,” said Mia. “You can’t trust that fruitcake.”

  Danny looked at Eric. “Maybe not, but it’s his choice,” he said.

  He gritted his teeth and clicked Cut.

  Eric vanished from the bunker.

  “Oh no, oh no,” stammered Mia. “What have you done?” She ran over to the lift shaft and called out, “Roxie! Roxie!”

  Danny was concentrating on the Time Tablet. He was going to do exactly what Eric said. He found the file for Eric’s house, opened it and clicked Paste.

  Eric’s file appeared next to GEORGE TAYLOR and LUCY TAYLOR. Danny opened the file and quickly scrolled to the end. It read:

  Eric materialised in the middle of his room.

  “Woah, that was seriously weird,” he said. “It’s like I’ve just come off a roller coaster.”

  Eric looked down at the floor.

  “Oh no, I landed on my mp3 player,” he said, lifting up one of his feet.

  “He’s OK!” said Danny. “It worked!”Mia was peering over Danny’s shoulder. “This can’t be possible,” she said. More words appeared at the end of Eric’s file, one letter at a time.

  “You know what, Danny,” said Eric. “This would be a good time to see if Edit works. See, you should be able to change people’s files.”

  He picked up a twisted piece of plastic from the floor.

  “Just select Edit and then click into the end of my file and type ‘Eric found a brand-new mp3 player under his bed’.”

  “What’s he talking about?” said Mia.

  “Eric said you could edit people’s lives,” said Danny. “You can type new sentences into them.”

  Danny clicked on Eric’s file and chose Edit. Then he clicked after the last sentence in Eric’s file and a cursor appeared.

  “Oh my…” stammered Danny.

  “I don’t believe it,” sa
id Mia.

  Danny typed:

  Eric found a brand-new mp3 player under his bed.

  There was a brief pause and then the Time Tablet took over. Two sentences quickly appeared.

  Eric picked up the mp3 player and grinned.

  “Thanks, Danny,” said Eric. “I could use some new headphones, though. I trod on them as well.”

  Danny looked at Mia in wonder. Then he typed:

  Eric picked up a pair of headphones from the bed.

  There was a pause and then more words started to shoot across the screen.

  He plugged the headphones into his mp3 player.

  “Brilliant,” said Eric. “Now you’d better get yourselves out of there, too. Cut and paste just like you did with me. See you in here in a few minutes.”

  He started to press the buttons on his new mp3 player.

  “This is a Hansen G75,” said Eric. “Nice one, Danny.”

  Danny closed Eric’s file.

  “I can’t believe it actually worked,” said Danny. “I teleported Eric. I typed something into his file and it actually happened.”

  “You’re like a Greek god or something,” said Mia.

  “If only the Space Twister was in the Time Tablet, I could just type ‘He dropped the cosmic remote down the toilet’ and it would all be over,” said Danny quietly.

  “OK, look,” said Mia. “Let’s just wait for Roxie before we do anything else. Who knows what you actually just did?”

  “No way,” said Danny. “I’m getting us out of here. It’s my fault that we all ended up in this bunker. I’m going to put it right.”

  “No, hang on…”

  “I’ll paste you out, then Roxie, then me,” said Danny. “Then we can all go and find the Space Twister together.”

  “It just feels dodgy,” said Mia.

  “It’s fine,” said Danny, “but look, if you want me to go next… ”

  “No, no, OK, OK,” said Mia. “I’ll go next. If it goes wrong, then I’ll get vaporised, not you.”

  Danny gave a short nod.

  He typed in Mia Danger and found his sister’s file. He clicked on it and selected Cut. Mia didn’t disappear.