by Jean Ure
GALAXY PATROL
Jean Ure
Illustrated by Mark Oliver
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
James and the Alien Experiment Sally Prue
Time and Again Rob Childs
Chapter One
Last summer, I was abducted by aliens. One minute I was sitting there, in front of the television: the next minute, I’d vanished. I mean it! Completely vanished. My brain was still whizzing about, but the rest of me had gone.
The question was, gone where? I felt like I’d been scrambled. Scattered, in a million pieces. But I could see bits of what looked like body – my body – floating past me. A finger, a toe. A nose. My nose! My knee. The one with the scar, where I’d come off my bike. My arm, still in its green sweater. An eyeball. What was going on here?
And then it hit me… I was caught in a transporter beam!
I’d been watching one of Dad’s old Star Treks when it happened. Captain Kirk had just told Scotty to beam him up – when I got beamed up.
My sister had been there, supposedly doing her homework. She wasn’t meant to be there, she was meant to be up in her room. As Mum always says, ‘How can you concentrate when the television is turned on?’ The truth is, she can’t. I can, ’cos I have extra powers of concentration. If I was doing my homework and the television was on, I would simply blot it out. Rosie, on the other hand, has no powers of concentration. I sometimes think her mind is full of ping-pong balls, all bobbing up and down. And, unlike the television, her voice is practically impossible to blot out.
Every few seconds it was, ‘I don’t know how you can watch this stuff. Honestly, it’s so stupid! Little green men? Death rays? Oh, please!’ And then she would go, ‘You! Jake!’ and prod me in the ribs with one of her bony fingers. ‘You listening? I said it’s stupid! Stupid boy stuff.’
She can pack a whole load of scorn into her voice, can Rosie. Just because she’d rather watch stupid girl stuff. All pink and shrieky. I pointed out that so far not a single little green man had appeared, but she just did this impatient clicking thing with her tongue and said, ‘Aliens, then! It’s all the same. They don’t have to be green … it’s still stupid.’
‘For all you know,’ I told her, ‘aliens could be all around us.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ She made a scoffing sound. ‘Haven’t seen much evidence of it.’
‘There,’ I said. I pointed. ‘On the screen… What’s that? You don’t think they just pluck these things out of nowhere?’
She looked at me, like, un-be-lievable.
‘It’s a story,’ she said. ‘It’s made up. Dumbo!’
I was prepared to agree that the actual storyline was made up. ‘But all the other stuff,’ I said. ‘Spaceships, for instance. Spaceships exist!’
She looked at me again. This time it was more like, pathetic.
‘Well, they do,’ I said. I know about these things; I’ve done research. ‘Those people that have seen flying saucers … they can’t all be imagining it. And warp drive! Bending space. Everyone knows that’s possible – well, in theory. We just haven’t quite got there yet. But that’s not to say that other life forms haven’t!’
‘Yeah yeah yeah,’ said Rosie, going back to her laptop. ‘Just button it, I’ve got homework to do.’
She clicked furiously for a bit, giving me a few minutes peace and quiet; but, like I say, she has no powers of concentration. I don’t think girls do. Not most of them. That’s why they can manage about a hundred things all at once. My powers of concentration are so great that I can only do one thing at a time. And right then I was trying to watch Star Trek. Dad has boxes and boxes of the DVDs. I know them all practically by heart, but it is still very irritating to be constantly interrupted by ignorant remarks. Or, in this case, a sudden shriek of laughter.
‘What is that supposed to be?’
I gritted my teeth. ‘That,’ I said, ‘is a creature from another planet. Otherwise known as an extraterrestrial.’
‘You mean, an alien.’
‘Well, yes. Except…’ I frowned. ‘I’m not really sure we ought to call them that.’
‘You just did! Just now!’
I said, ‘Yes, I know, but it’s not politically correct. They’re just different life forms, that’s all.’
‘Huh!’ She tossed her head. ‘Some life form. Looks like a perambulating octopus.’
I nearly said ‘You what?’ but thought better of it. She’s always trying to confuse me by using words I’ve never heard of.
‘Actually,’ I said. ‘It could be deadly.’
‘So what’s he going to do? Your hero – Captain Kirk. What’s he going to do? Get it with his ray gun? Psht!’ She made her fingers into a gun shape and aimed them at the screen. ‘Zap! And then it explodes, blood and guts all over the place… I s’pose the blood’s some yucky colour, like yellow, or something.’
‘This particular extraterrestrial,’ I informed her, ‘doesn’t happen to have any blood. It doesn’t have blood of any colour. And Captain Kirk,’ I added, ‘does not have a ray gun. Ray guns,’ I said,‘are simply figments of your imagination.’
‘Oh.’ She sniggered. ‘Pardon me! So what’s all this stuff? I thought it was science fiction.’
It is science fiction based on fact. That is what she cannot grasp. She likes to pretend it’s all just nonsense. She was about to learn…
‘Oops!’ She fluttered her hands, pretending to be scared. ‘Watch out! It’s got him in its tentacles. Now what’s going to happen?’
I said, ‘He’ll tell Scotty to beam him up.’
‘Yay! The famous transporter! Wish they’d hurry up and invent it. I could do with one of them for getting me out of maths lessons.’
Rosie is dumb at maths. She seems to think it’s amusing, having to add up on her fingers. She does know a lot of long words, though; I’ll give her that. But I reckon maths is more important, ’specially if you want to understand temporal mechanics. Ha! She wouldn’t even know what that was.
‘Matter of fact,’ I said, carelessly, ‘they already have transporters.’
Her lip curled. ‘Who does?’
She never believes a thing I tell her.
I said I wasn’t sure exactly who. ‘It might still just be alien technology. But they do exist.’
She opened her mouth to say ‘Oh, yeah?’ She is always saying ‘Oh, yeah?’ Anything she can’t argue against. Oh, yeah? Only this time she didn’t get the chance, ’cos at that very moment Captain Kirk spoke into his communicator: ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’ And that was when I disappeared…
Chapter Two
Whoosh! I’d landed.
Some of me had landed. I could feel that some bits were still missing. The odd toe. The nose. My right ear.
Well, that was OK; I wasn’t too anxious about it. I knew that body parts didn’t always reassemble themselves at exactly the same moment. Some of them were probably still floating around in the transporter. Yup! That was my nose. Back in the middle of my face, right where it ought to be. Oh, and here came the toes! A whole bunch of them. I hadn’t realised so many were missing. Now I was just waiting for my right ear.
’Ere,’ere. Dad would make a joke of that. Dad makes jokes about everything. But I bet even he wouldn’t make a joke if he were all exploded into atoms and having to wait while he got put together again. It might have been a bit scary if I hadn’t seen it so often on Star Trek. Of course, there was the occasional accident, when people didn’t get put back together … but most of m
e was back. I guess you can live without a right ear.
BOY LOSES EAR IN TRANSPORTER ACCIDENT. I could already see the headline in the local paper. Not that anyone would believe it, ’cos people never do. They wouldn’t have to, anyway, ’cos suddenly there it was. Back! A big flapping elephant’s ear stuck to the side of my head. (It’s Rosie who says I have elephant’s ears. She can talk! She has a nose like a blob.)
Now that I was all in one piece, I could concentrate on my surroundings. Where had I been brought? A spaceship, that was for sure. I could recognise the inside of a spaceship when I saw one. Seemed like they’d beamed me direct to the control deck. Wow! Serious stuff. Whoever they were, they obviously meant business.
Some of them were standing there, watching, as my body reassembled itself. Two men and a woman. They all wore uniforms, like black tracksuits with coloured logos. They didn’t look like aliens… I mean different life forms. Creatures from other planets. But they obviously had to be.
Humans might have gone to the moon, and Mars, and places like that, but we hadn’t yet invented transporters. Not as far as I was aware. Only other life forms had those. We knew about them; but we didn’t actually have them. Which meant that these three people weren’t really people at all…
They were pretending to be people. It was obviously some kind of disguise. Some kind of cloak they wrapped themselves in to fool you. Or to make you feel more comfortable, depending on what sort of life forms they were. Friendly, or … the other sort. It wasn’t really possible to tell.
One of the men stepped forward. He had a red logo with gold stripes, so I guessed he had to be the captain. The others only had silver, and only one stripe each. The captain had three. He raised a hand, very solemnly, palm upward. I raised mine back; it seemed only polite. Unless it was some kind of threat? No! He was smiling. A friendly smile, like Captain Kirk. Now his lips were moving. What was he saying? I couldn’t hear anything. There wasn’t any sound! Had I gone deaf? I rubbed at my right ear, checking that it really had come back.
‘I beg your pardon.’ The captain pressed a little button in the middle of his logo and his voice came booming out. ‘A translator blip. Forgive me. I say again… Hail, Earthlings!’
Earthlings? How many of us were there? Don’t say my body had reassembled itself into two!
And then, from somewhere behind me, a familiar voice spoke. It sounded a bit irritable.
‘Well, hail to you,’ it said, ‘but d’you mind telling us what’s going on?’
Rosie! What was she doing here? What could anyone possibly want with her? And why did she have to be so rude?
‘I mean, for starters,’ she said, ‘where exactly are we?’
Such bad manners. We were guests in this spaceship! If I’d been the captain, I’d have told her to watch herself. You just don’t talk that way to other life forms. If they’re friendly, it’s ungracious; and if they’re not friendly… Well! Who knows what they might do?
She could have got us into a whole load of trouble. We could have been vaporised on the spot! As it was, the captain obviously decided to make allowances for her ignorance.
‘First of all,’ he said, ‘allow me to introduce myself. I am Captain Cranko. This is Lieutenant Malandra, and this is Lieutenant Bendra. And this…’ He waved a hand. ‘Is the command deck of the starship Galaxy Empire. We welcome you aboard!’
I knew it, I knew it, I knew it! I knew spaceships existed. I knew there were extraterrestrial beings. I knew they had transporter beams. I shot a triumphant glance at Rosie. Now let her say it was stupid boy stuff!
Rosie took absolutely no notice at all. She never does when I’ve proved her wrong. She stood glaring up at the captain, all butch and aggressive.
‘If this is some kind of joke,’ she said, ‘I don’t think much of it. I was in the middle of trying to finish my homework when you went and did whatever it is you’ve gone and done!’
She practically stamped her feet. But the captain just smiled – which made her even madder. I could see she was about to start up again, so I stepped in, hurriedly.
‘I was watching Star Trek,’ I said. I didn’t say it to complain; I just wanted to make it clear that one of us knew what was going on. ‘They were exploring a distant planet, deep in outer space, and Captain Kirk had just asked Scotty to beam him up.’
‘A wise man.’ Captain Cranko nodded. ‘Lieutenant Malandra here is our transporter chief. She has often come to my rescue.’
Lieutenant Malandra did the hand thing, palm up. Obviously a kind of greeting. ‘I trust,’ she said, ‘your journey was a smooth one?’
I assured her that it was. ‘I didn’t feel a thing, except it was a bit weird seeing my body parts.’
‘I agree,’ said Lieutenant Malandra. ‘It takes a while to grow used to it. I remember my first time, three of my feet – ’ She stopped, abruptly. If she’d been human, I’m sure she would have blushed. But now I knew for sure she wasn’t! Three of her feet… How many did she have?
Rosie was making impatient huffing noises, blowing through her mouth. ‘It is a joke, right?’
‘Wrong, I’m afraid.’ The captain shook his head. I found myself wondering if it was his only head, or if, like Lieutenant Malandra and her feet, he had several of them. ‘We are on an extremely serious mission.’
Rosie’s chin tilted. ‘So what’s it to do with us?’ she said.
‘Everything! As you shall hear. Meanwhile…’ He turned, gravely, to me. ‘I regret pulling you away in the middle of your Star Trek, but it will be there waiting for you when you get back. You will find Captain Kirk just as you left him, preparing to beam up. I give you my word! Nothing will have changed.’
‘How come?’ said Rosie.
‘Let us just say that … time has temporarily come to a halt. So, please! There is no need to worry.’
I hastened to make it clear that I, personally, wasn’t in the least bit worried.
‘Well, you mightn’t be,’ said Rosie. ‘I am! It means my homework’ll still be there, as well. I could have finished it by now, if you hadn’t…’
Her voice trailed off. Her eyes slowly grew as big as satellite dishes. Her jaw dropped, taking her mouth with it. She gobbled a bit, but no words came out. Just a sort of strangled cry. ‘Hahhhhhaahaaargh…’
I turned to see what the problem was – and my jaw dropped as well. I have to admit it. It’s best to be truthful about these things. I didn’t make the hahhhhaa sound, but that was only because I’d clamped a hand to my mouth.
One of the walls had silently gone into meltdown, and a creature had come slithering in. It was all head and tentacles. Big purple head and long green fronds, coiling and writhing. Come to think of it, rather like the octopus thing we’d just seen on Star Trek.
What was a bit worrying was that I couldn’t remember whether the octopus thing had been deadly, or whether it had simply wanted to shake tentacles. Did Captain Kirk get beamed up in time? Or did the octopus thing get him?
For a minute, I was close to panic. But Captain Kirk never panicked, and neither would I. In the face of danger, remain calm. I drew myself up, very stiff and straight. I wasn’t going to be terrorised by some octopus thing!
Slowly, it started to coil its way through the door. One of its tentacles, not looking where it was going, touched the edge of Rosie’s foot and instantly drew back. Rosie screeched. Long and loud. She clutched at my arm. What was the matter with her? The thing hadn’t done her any harm! It was just a different life form. Nothing to be scared of. All the same, it gave me a lot of satisfaction. Now let her say that aliens didn’t exist!
Chapter Three
As the octopus thing coiled back on itself, away from Rosie’s foot, the captain stepped forward. Very coldly he said, ‘Zzexxxbjaaarx!’ Or something like that. It obviously made sense to the octopus thing. Even though it was an octopus thing, you could tell it was ashamed of itself. Its tentacles began to twist and turn, curling up at the ends like my toes do when I get in
to trouble.
‘Xxozzaaaz!’ barked the captain. Or maybe it was ‘Zzoxxaaax.’ Whichever, it sounded painful. Like he was clearing razor blades out of his throat.
The poor old octopus thing turned bright purple. I mean, it already was purple; but sort of pale. More lavender coloured. Now it looked like a big ripe mulberry. Like it might burst at any minute.
Slowly, starting at the tips of its tentacles, it began to shrivel. As the tentacles shrivelled, the big purple mulberry began to swell, until it was the size of a football. The size of a beach ball. And still growing!
I held my breath, waiting for the explosion. Bracing myself for the splat of purple innards landing on my face. But then, quite suddenly, the octopus thing disappeared in a shimmer of light, and in its place stood what appeared to be a normal human being. I knew, of course, that it wasn’t really human; it was the octopus thing in disguise.
The captain cleared a few more razor blades out of his throat. ‘Graarx orx!’ he barked.
The octopus thing snapped to attention. It was wearing the black tracksuit with the logo. The logo was blue, but without any stripes. Must be very junior, I thought. It stood, head bowed before the captain, and earnestly spoke in octopus language. Well, what I took to be octopus language. It didn’t sound like razor blades. More like blobs of jelly. Whatever it was, it obviously didn’t impress the captain. He snapped, ‘Zzexxxgraaach!’ and pointed sternly in our direction. The octopus thing swivelled round to face us. Captain Cranko pressed the button on his logo.
‘Ensign Gork,’ he said, ‘wishes to apologise.’
Ensign Gork bent low before us. ‘I deeply regret,’ he said, ‘my thoughtless behaviour. I had not realised there were visitors aboard. But that is no excuse,’ he added. ‘I am truly sorry for any distress I may have caused.’
‘So I should think,’ said Rosie, crossly. ‘Coming in looking like something that’s been fished out of the ocean!’