Aliens!

by R. McGeddon

  Once the teacher had gone back to her shaky scribbling, Arty continued.

  “You can look at the Moon anytime,” he said. “The Sitting Duck Observatory has one of the most powerful telescopes in the world!”

  “Why?” asked Emmie. “Where did it get that from?”

  “Stella won it in a raffle,” Arty explained.

  “Who’s Stella?” asked Sam.

  “Stella Gazey, the chief astronomer. She’ll be there at the party pointing out all the exciting stuff.”

  “What, like the exit?” said Emmie, quietly.

  “You’ll like her,” Arty said. “She’s cool. And she’s really keen on the idea of making contact with distant worlds and alien civilizations.”

  Emmie rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah,” she snorted. “She sounds really cool.”

  It was about then that Sam realized someone was talking to him. It took him a moment to retune his hearing, but then …

  “… tell us the answer, Mr. Saunders?”

  Sam looked up to find Miss Tribbler staring expectantly at him. She was giving him that evil eye that all teachers get programmed with when they’re being put together at the factory.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  Sam glanced around at the rest of the class, but they all had their hoods and umbrellas up, and he couldn’t read anything on their faces.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Can you repeat the question?”

  “Maybe if you would listen once in a while!” the teacher sniped. “I asked you what substance makes up twenty percent of the Earth’s atmosphere?”

  Sam had absolutely no idea. He puffed out his cheeks and decided to hazard a wild guess. “Jam?”

  Ouch. Even I didn’t expect it to be quite that wild a guess.

  “Of course it isn’t jam!” spat The Dribbler. “What sort of mess would we all be in if one-fifth of the atmosphere was made of jam?”

  “Quite a sticky mess?” Sam ventured.

  “Oxygen is the answer, Mr. Saunders,” Miss Tribbler sprayed. “Oxygen. Perhaps if you paid more attention you might know the correct answer once in a while. If you want to pass this subject, then I suggest you—”

  “Professor Pamplemousse, you’re back!” cried Emmie, pointing to the door.

  With a scream, Miss Tribbler raced to the stationery cabinet at the back of the classroom and tried to hide inside. Unfortunately, she neglected to open the door. She clattered into it with a thud, staggered slightly, then toppled backward onto the floor.

  “Oops, sorry,” said Emmie, flashing Sam a grin. “False alarm!”

  * * *

  Avoiding a Teacher’s Question

  So you haven’t been paying attention, and now your teacher is going to ask a question and you have absolutely no idea what the answer is. Here are ten handy tips to help you avoid being selected.

  1. Don’t come in that day.

  2. Hide under your desk.

  3. Turn invisible.

  4. Hide under your desk and turn invisible (better safe than sorry).

  5. Move to England. Unless you live in England, in which case move somewhere else.

  6. Stick your hand up, wave frantically, and go “Me! Me! Me!” like you can’t wait to answer.

  7. On second thought, forget #6.

  8. Disguise yourself as a lion.

  9. Play dead.

  10. Come back from the dead. (No one likes a zombie.)

  * * *

  Chapter three

  Arty’s mom’s car swept up the long gravel driveway leading to the observatory, its headlights cutting through the dark like car headlights through the dark.

  Squished between Sam and Arty in the back, Emmie filled everyone in on her latest daring escape. For reasons far too terrible to go into right now, Emmie lives with her Great Aunt Doris. Despite the name, Doris isn’t a great aunt at all; she’s a terrible one. She’s always shouting all over the place and trying to make Emmie trim her toenails (Doris’s toenails, I mean, not her own) and grounding her for months on end for no reason whatsoever.

  Emmie doesn’t really pay attention to the shouting, though, and she never goes near the mad old bat’s toenails. As for the groundings, Emmie has become a master of escaping right out from under Doris’s wrinkled red nose.

  “Once I had found the trip wire it was easy,” Emmie told them. “I just limboed under the laser beams, tightrope-walked across the washing line, then stuck a bucket over the cat. Same old, same old, really.”

  “Well, I’m just glad you could make it,” Arty said. The car turned a bend and they all slid left. “It’s going to be great.”

  “No, it’s going to be out of this world!” said Deepta, Arty’s mom.

  “Ha! Good one, Mrs. Dorkins,” said Sam.

  “Out of this world. Brilliant,” agreed Emmie.

  “Oh yeah, you laugh when she says it,” Arty sulked.

  Emmie shrugged. “She tells it better.”

  “Yeah, she really nailed the delivery,” Sam agreed.

  They weren’t kidding—Deepta really had told the joke better than Arty had, but that wasn’t the real reason they laughed along with it. The real reason was that Deepta was Arty’s mom, and one of the three unwritten Rules of Friendship is that you should always be polite to your friends’ moms. It’s the second most important rule, coming before “Friends don’t sell friends at auction,” and immediately after “Everyone just play nice.”

  With a screeching of brakes, Deepta brought the car to a screamer of a stop. Arty, Sam, and Emmie were thrown forward in their seats until their seat belts went tight and slammed them back again.

  “Nice driving,” said Sam.

  “Let’s get out of here before this maniac kills us all,” Emmie mumbled, ignoring the Rules of Friendship completely. She leaned past Sam and threw open the door.

  They spilled out onto the gravel drive and there, right before them, like a big overturned bowl with a giant telescope poking out of it, stood the observatory.

  “Have fun, you three!” called Arty’s mom, then she floored the accelerator and the car sped off down the hill again, back toward the bright lights of Sitting Duck.

  “Are you sure the party’s tonight?” Sam asked as they made for the front door of the observatory. The entire building was in darkness, with not a light burning in any of the windows. “It looks pretty … closed.”

  “It’s definitely tonight,” Arty assured him. “I calculated which day this week would give us optimum visibility of the night sky, and tonight’s the night!”

  Sam and Emmie peered upward. A cushion of cloud blocked out every one of the stars. “You might want to double-check your calculations,” Emmie suggested.

  Arty checked his watch and grinned. “Come on, I always double-check my calculations,” he said. “Three, two, one…”

  Like a theater curtain, the clouds parted. The sky hung there like a black cloth with a million tiny pinpricks letting light through from the other side. Arty drew in a deep breath and gazed at the wonders of the Universe.

  “Pretty impressive, eh?” he said.

  “Not bad,” Sam admitted.

  “Where are these hot dogs, then?” asked Emmie, not all that excited about the wonders of the Universe. Not when there was grub on the go. “I’m starving over here.”

  With a final glance at the stars, Arty opened the door of the observatory and stepped inside. A still and gloomy silence met them.

  “Absolutely certain it’s tonight?” said Sam.

  “Yeah,” said Arty, although he didn’t sound all that confident. “I’m … I think so.” He fumbled about on the wall searching for the light switch until …

  “Surprise!”

  On came the lights, and out of the darkness ran a tall, spindly woman with bulbous, insectlike eyes. Emmie’s initial reaction was to punch her to the ground, but luckily she managed to stop herself just in the nick of time.

  The woman stopped charging and grinned at them all. The lenses of her round glasses w
ere ridiculously thick. They made her eyes look three or four times bigger than they should be, and Sam wondered if she hadn’t gotten her specs mixed up with a couple of telescopes when putting them on that morning.

  “Surprise!” the woman said again.

  “What is?” asked Sam.

  “Er … this. The party!”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Emmie.

  The woman frowned. “I’m pretty sure it is.”

  “Does anyone here look surprised?” Emmie asked. She met the woman’s wide-eyed stare. “Apart from you, I mean.”

  The woman dug a skinny hand inside the pocket of her woolly fleece and took out a scrap of paper. She read it quickly, then stuffed it back into the pocket.

  “Not surprise!” she chirped. “Definitely not a surprise. Thinking of someone else. Sorry!” She shook their hands one by one, nodding and grinning with each pump of her arm. “Hello! Good evening! I’m Stella. Which one of you is the birthday boy?”

  Arty’s hand shot up. “Me!”

  “Super! Splendid! Many happy, et cetera, et cetera,” she said, beaming. “I hope you’re ready for a party that’s … wait for it … out of this world!” She winked one enormous eye at them. “See what I did there?”

  Emmie turned to Sam. “Is it time to go home yet?”

  “Ha ha!” whooped Stella. “Don’t fret. You’ve got hours to go before the fun’s over! What should we do first?”

  “Eat cake,” suggested Emmie.

  “Watch television?” suggested Sam.

  “Buzz! Wrong answers,” laughed Stella, quietly congratulating herself for throwing in a fleeting reference to Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the surface of the Moon. Which she knew all about, obviously, because that sort of stuff is right up her alley. “We don’t even have a television up here.”

  Sam gestured to the banks of screens that took up one whole wall of the room. “What about them?”

  “Those aren’t televisions—they’re computer screens,” Stella said. She flicked one on and rows and rows of bright green numbers scrolled across the display.

  “What does all that mean?” asked Emmie.

  “I have absolutely no idea,” Stella confessed. “Sometimes they’re green. Occasionally they go orange. Every once in a while it makes a sort of bleeping noise. I tend not to bother with it, really. I’m much more interested in”—she turned their attention to a bank of dials and switches on the opposite side of the room—“this.”

  Sam, Arty, and Emmie approached the equipment. Static hissed from a large wooden speaker, broken every so often by a high-pitched chirp.

  “Is that what I think it is?” asked Arty in a hushed whisper.

  “Do you think it’s a state-of-the-art radio transmitting and receiving unit, harvesting waves from all across the known galaxies?”

  Arty nodded. “That’s exactly what I think it is.”

  “Then no, it’s not one of those,” Stella said. Her wide eyes widened even farther, so they took up half her face. “It’s a state-of-the-art radio transmitting and receiving unit that’s harvesting waves from all the known and unknown galaxies!”

  “Whoa!” gasped Arty. “So you can use that to listen into signals from outer space?”

  “From other worlds!” cried Stella. “Eventually,” she added. “If we ever find one.”

  Emmie leaned closer to Sam. “What a waste,” she whispered. “If I had that, I’d be listening in to everyone in Sitting Duck all day. You’d be able to hear them all gossiping and arguing and…”

  “Farting.”

  Emmie winced. “Oh yeah. Didn’t think of that.”

  “Any questions so far?” asked Stella.

  “Yeah,” replied Emmie. “Any chance of something to eat?”

  “Yes! Yes! Very soon,” said Stella, clapping her hands excitedly. “But first … I wonder if anyone here would like a look at my telescope?”

  “Not particularly,” shrugged Emmie.

  “If we must,” said Sam.

  “Ooh, me! Me!” yelped Arty.

  “Then onward!” announced Stella, marching toward a set of double doors at the back of the room. Arty raced to keep up, leaving Sam and Emmie trailing along behind. They glanced at each other and sighed. There was no doubt about it.

  It was going to be a very long night.

  * * *

  * * *

  Other Things That Have Been Spotted by the Telescope in Sitting Duck

  • Another much smaller telescope

  • Great Aunt Doris hanging out her frilly knickers

  • A man carrying a fridge

  • Zombies eating people’s faces off. I mean, like, right off. It was horrible.

  • A duck (sadly not sitting)

  • Arty’s brother, Jesse, shrugging a lot and looking confused

  • A really exciting but completely top secret thing

  • Some houses

  * * *

  Time passed. To Sam and Emmie, it felt like weeks. To Arty, it felt like just a few minutes. Who’s to say which of them was right?

  Me, actually. And they were both wrong. It was three hours, nine minutes, and eleven seconds.

  Arty had spent the most fascinating evening of his young life gazing up at the heavens, admiring the stars and ignoring the Moon, because what’s the point of looking at that when you can see it pretty much any night you want, and even in the daytime sometimes when it’s getting ideas above its station?

  Sam and Emmie had eaten pizza and hot dogs and planet-shaped fizzy sweets until they felt sick. It was after 11 PM now, and although the sugar surging through their veins meant they weren’t tired, they both wanted to go home.

  “Guys!” cried Arty, peering through the viewfinder of the telescope exactly like he had been for the past hour and a half. “You won’t believe what I’m seeing!”

  “Is it another big lump of rock?” Emmie guessed.

  “It’s a meteor!” Arty yelped.

  “Which, when you think about it, is another way of saying a big lump of rock,” Sam said.

  Arty was about to reply when the clanging of an alarm echoed around the room. Emmie and Sam bounded to their feet.

  “What does that mean?” asked Emmie hopefully. “Is it home-time?”

  Stella frowned. She raced over to another bank of monitors and hurriedly clicked on the screens. “I’m … I’m not sure,” she said.

  The letters on the screens came into view. They were red and flashing furiously.

  “Are they supposed to be doing that?” Sam asked, shouting to make himself heard over the din.

  “Again, not sure,” Stella admitted. “Never seen it do that before!”

  On the far side of the room a printer began vomiting out reams of paper. Stella darted over, and as she read the printout her eyes became wide enough to eat your dinner off.

  “Arty, turn that telescope!” she cried. “Eighteen degrees west, twenty-seven degrees north.”

  Arty didn’t need telling twice. He spun a little handle down near the lens of the telescope and the whole thing began to swivel into position. Locking it in place, Arty pressed his eye up against the viewfinder.

  He leaned back.

  He blinked.

  He leaned in again.

  “Uh, guys…”

  “Let me guess,” said Emmie. “More rocks?”

  Arty looked up. “N-no,” he said. “It’s a … It’s a…”

  “It’s a what?” shrieked Stella.

  Arty chewed his bottom lip nervously. “It’s a UFO!”

  * * *

  Space Jokes!

  Q. What do aliens like to read?

  A. Comet books!

  Q. When does the Moon know it has had enough to eat?

  A. When it’s full!

  Q. Why did the cow go into outer space?

  A. It didn’t. NASA sent a mouse instead.

  Q. Which of the planets is the only one to be married?

  A. None of them. Planets were formed over
millions of years as matter was condensed into spinning spheres of molten mass. They can’t get married. Obviously.

  Q. What did the alien say to the garden?

  A. Take me to your weeder!

  * * *

  Chapter four

  “Very funny,” tutted Emmie. “Stop trying to make this interesting. It’s not going to work.”

  “I’m serious!” Arty cried.

  “Yeah, right,” said Sam.

  Stella bounced excitedly from foot to foot. “This is it!” she yelped. “This is it! After all these years! Let’s have a look.”

  She flicked a number of important-looking switches and pointed to one of the monitors. “Behold!”

  Nothing happened.

  “Any minute … now!” she said.

  Nothing happened.

  “Now!” Stella said. “Wait for it … now!”

  “Does it need to be plugged in?” asked Sam, holding up a power cord.

  Stella gave an embarrassed cough. “Um … go on, then.”

  Sam plugged in the monitor and suddenly everyone could see what Arty was seeing through the telescope.

  Emmie got slowly to her feet. “It’s … It’s…”

  Sam stared. Arty stared. Stella came dangerously close to wetting herself with excitement. Even Emmie held back on the wisecracks, which really wasn’t like her at all. Everyone expected her to come out with something sarcastic as usual, but instead she just said: “What is that?”

  “A flying saucer,” breathed Arty, and he wasn’t far off. The thing buzzing around in front of the Moon was definitely saucer-shaped, only bigger, obviously, because saucers are far too small to go winging around in space all by themselves.

  The saucer seemed to shudder as it moved back and forth, back and forth in front of the Moon’s big Moon face. It reminded Sam of the spaceship from a fuzzy old black-and-white sci-fi film he had watched late one night when he couldn’t sleep. If he had to give the UFO a score for special effects, it’d be a three at most, and he still couldn’t quite believe that what he was seeing was real.