by Adam Frost
Jasper and Roxie looked at each other.
“Hey, do you want to listen to an actual conversation between two Martians?” asked Jasper, holding out his headphones.
“Stop it, Jasper,” said Roxie. “You’d want to know the truth if it was your uncle.”
“Depends on the uncle,” said Jasper. “If it was Smelly Uncle Trevor, I wouldn’t give a monkey’s.”
“The thing is, Danny,” said Roxie, putting her arm on Danny’s shoulder. “We’re not sure. He set off to find you two days ago.”
Danny looked down at the floor.
“All I can say is, your uncle’s gone missing before,” said Roxie.
“Like about a million times,” said Jasper.
“And he always comes back,” said Roxie.
“Sorry,” said Mia, stepping forwards. “Who are you? You could be anyone.”
“Hey, you must be Mia,” said Roxie. “Let’s bump fists. Charlie said you’d come through for your brother.”
Roxie held out a clenched fist. Mia touched it warily with her own.
“Look, sister,” said Roxie, “I wish we had time to explain, but we don’t. Jasper will leave you with a booklet about EUREKA!”
Jasper patted his pockets and murmured: “Left it in the car.”
He opened the palm of his hand and frowned at it as hard as he could. A booklet slowly materialised, one particle at a time.
“Eat after reading,” said Jasper, handing it to Mia with a wink.
“Now we have to get Danny to the Professor,” said Roxie, flicking a chunk of green hair over her shoulder. She crouched down and put a hand on Danny’s shoulder. “Do you need to say goodbye to anyone? Friends? Relatives?”
“Just Mia and Eric,” said Danny.
Mia was skimming the booklet about EUREKA! “I can’t believe Uncle Charlie is part of this,” said Mia. “EUREKA! is amazing, Danny. They’ve only got seven agents, but they protect the whole world from people like the Night Scientist.”
“OK, cool,” said Danny. “So – so – I should go with them, should I?”
“Definitely,” said Mia. “Sounds like they save the planet twice a week and no one even notices.”
Mia turned to Danny and gave him a hug, holding him tight for a full minute.
“I’m going to say goodbye to Eric too,” said Danny.
Mia nodded.
“Do you need me to get Mum and Dad out of the way?” she asked Jasper and Roxie.
“No, it’s OK,” said Roxie. “Jasper hypnotised them. They now think they’re warthogs.We thought it was easiest.”
So Mia stood by the front door, waving Danny off, while her mother rooted through the cupboards for food and her father dug up the front garden with his bare hands.
Danny knocked on Eric’s front door. Jasper and Roxie waited in the street.
Eric opened the door with the robot parrot under his arm.
“I’ve got it working, Danny,” he said excitedly. “Properly this time. Not like my robot. It can go left, go right. It hardly ever flies into things.”
“Cool,” said Danny. “Hey, sorry if I got you in trouble last night.”
“It’s fine,” said Eric. “I just told my mum I got on the wrong bus home from the shops. She’s happy enough now.”
“Erm, there’s something else,” said Danny. “I’ve got to go away. You remember Jasper and Roxie –”
“The holograms? From your remote?” asked Eric.
“I’m going away with them,” said Danny.
“For quite a long while, I think.”
“Oh,” said Eric.
Danny nodded mutely.
“Oh,” said Eric again.
“Can you look after my books and clothes and everything?” said Danny.
“Of course. They can just stay in the playroom,” said Eric.
Then Eric cleared his throat and held out the parrot. “Here,” he said.
“What?” replied Danny. “Oh, no, Eric, no, seriously.”
“Take it,” said Eric. “You’re going to need it if you come up against that Night Scientist guy again.”
“No, honestly, Eric,” said Danny. “I’m sure Jasper and Roxie will look after me.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Eric. “But this parrot definitely will. Look, I think I can build another one myself. The wiring’s much easier than I thought.”
“But you need to protect yourself too…” said Danny.
“Take it, Danny,” said Eric, wedging it under Danny’s arm. “Take it.”
Danny smiled at his friend. “OK.”
“It’s all voice activated,” said Eric enthusiastically. “Just speak clearly: ‘take off’, ‘fly north’, ‘fly south’. To switch it on, twist its beak forty-five degrees clockwise. The only thing you must never do is remove this screw here. I put it there to disable its homing instinct.”
“Its homing instinct?” asked Danny.
“Yes, it’s designed to return to the Night Scientist at the end of every mission,” said Eric. “If you take that screw out, that’s where it will go. Back to its master.”
“Crikey,” said Danny, looking warily into the parrot’s jewelled eyes.
There was a hoot behind them. Danny turned round and saw Jasper and Roxie in a large white van. It had aerial masts and satellite dishes attached to its roof. Roxie climbed out and slid open the side door.
“Let’s roll!” she shouted.
“Wow! Are they making a TV show? Looks like an outside broadcast van!” exclaimed Eric.
He turned to Danny. “When you come back, ask them if I can be on telly. You know, just in the background. Doing a wheelie on my bike or something.”
Danny smiled and walked over to the van.
“You’ll be in the back with me,” said Roxie. “You can put your fluffy toy in the front if you want.”
Danny was going to explain that the parrot wasn’t a toy, but in the end he just said, “No, he’s staying with me.”
Danny stepped into the back of the van. It had no windows, but instead it was full of computer terminals, TV screens, humming metal boxes and panels covered in switches and buttons. Roxie slid the door shut, shouted “Go!” and Jasper pulled away. Danny’s eyes moved from one monitor to the next. “What is all this stuff?” he said. Roxie smiled.
“The basic tools of a EUREKA! agent,” she said. “Your uncle told you about EUREKA!, right?”
“A bit,” said Danny. “You go round the world, collecting people’s inventions. Or something.”
“Sort of,” said Roxie. “EUREKA! stands for Experts in Unusual and Remarkable Electro-Kinetic Artefacts.”
“Electric Septic What?”
“Magical gadgets. We make sure the bad guys don’t get their hands on them.”
She pointed to a yellow box with a bleeping radar screen.
“That’s BARF. The Brain Activity Reader and Finder. It tells us whenever anyone in the world invents something. See all those red dots. Those are all the people with highly active brains. When the dot goes green, they’ve finished an invention. So we send an agent to check it out.”
She jerked her thumb at a large monitor with a map of the world on it.
“That’s PLOP. The Physical Location of Operatives Panel. Shows the whereabouts of all seven EUREKA! agents. We work out which agent is closest to the new invention. Then off they go. Look, that’s us there.”
She pointed at a white flashing dot in the south-east of England.
“So, ah, which one’s Uncle Charlie?” stammered Danny.
“Like we said, he’s, er, gone undercover, so we can’t, ah, see him on this map,” said Roxie. “I’ll just finish the tour. That’s GUFF. A video phone that lets us talk to other agents. That’s PONG. An online record of every gadget we know about.”
“And what’s that?” asked Danny, pointing to a square box with a black dial on the front.
“That’s the toaster,” said Roxie with a smile. “Fancy a slice?”
Danny g
rinned and shook his head. He decided he liked being with Roxie and Jasper.
Jasper went over a bump and Danny remembered something.
“Can these computers tell you where my remote is?” he asked.
Roxie looked at Danny and shook her head.
“Aren’t you going to find it then?” asked Danny.
“Hope so,” said Roxie. “Unless the Night Scientist destroys it first.”
“Destroys it?” exclaimed Danny. “Why would he destroy it?”
“Out of frustration maybe?” said Roxie. “Or spite? Because it won’t work for him.”
Danny suddenly remembered what Mia had said. “Is that because I’m the only person who can use it?” he asked.
Roxie nodded. “You got it. Charlie made sure it was fingerprint-protected. If anyone else pushes those buttons, it locks ’em out.”
Danny wondered how Uncle Charlie had managed to get his fingerprints. Then he remembered his uncle’s visit before last when they had played at being detectives. Charlie had rolled Danny’s fingers on a large ink block.
So they hadn’t been playing after all.
At that moment, Roxie frowned and pulled a catapult out of her back pocket. It had a red handle and yellow elastic and seemed to be buzzing.
“That’s weird. It only shakes when there’s something hostile in the area,” she said.
She banged the metal panel that led to the driver’s cabin. “Jasper, open up the back.”
Two seconds later the double doors at the back of the van swung open. They were on an empty country road that whizzed away behind them.
“Hmm,” said Roxie. She pressed a button on the handle of her catapult and a small glass sighting disc appeared on top of the right-hand prong. She squinted down it. “Think it’s one of the Night Scientist’s surveillance droids,” said Roxie. “Take a look.”
Danny leaned across and saw, in the middle of the sights, a small metal flying fox with black slits for eyes, hovering in front of a cloud.
“OK, Dan, stand back,” said Roxie. She pulled a gold pellet out of her front pocket and placed it in the middle of the sling. She stared down the sights again and stretched the sling back as far as it could go. Danny could just about make out the flying fox in the sky: a tiny black dot, at least two miles above the ground. Roxie released the sling, there was a fizzling noise and the black dot instantly vanished, leaving behind a puff of smoke.
“Got a range of five miles,” she said. “Fires pellets at a thousand metres per second. Comes in handy in situations like that.”
She returned the catapult to her back pocket and closed the back doors of the van.
“Trouble is, that means the Night Scientist knows where we are,” said Roxie. “We need to get to the hideout fast.”
She was about to tell Jasper to get a move on, when the van screeched to a halt, and they were thrown forwards.
As they were picking themselves up, Jasper slid open the hatch and poked his head through. “Come and look and this,” he said.
Roxie climbed out of the side door, followed by Danny clutching his parrot. They joined Jasper in front of the van.
“Hang on,” said Roxie. “This is Bardley Park. There’s the row of oak trees. So where’s the hideout?”
“Exactly,” said Jasper. “It’s like the ground just swallowed it up.”
Danny looked at the large green field and said, “You mean, there used to be a house here?”
Roxie pulled her catapult out of her pocket. It was buzzing loudly.
Jasper turned to Roxie and said, “Are you thinking tunnelling animals? The Night Scientist attacked the foundations?”
Roxie looked at her catapult and said, “I’m thinking we’ve got to get out of here. Now.”
They all climbed into the front and sat side by side. Before Jasper could turn the key in the ignition, the van lurched backwards and the back wheels seemed to drop half a metre into the ground.
“Something’s underneath us,” said Roxie. “Drive, Jasper, drive!”
The van lurched forwards and its front wheels sank into the road. The windscreen was now level with the tarmac.
“We’re sinking too fast, we can’t move!” Jasper yelled.
As they disappeared further into the ground, a large black metal beetle scuttled up the bonnet and stared at them through the windscreen. It had sharp metal pincers on its head. Danny instinctively reached for his remote. He checked his left pocket and his right, before he remembered.
“Beetles! I should have known!” exclaimed Roxie. “They must have dragged the house underground too.”
Two more beetles climbed on to the windscreen and tapped it angrily with their pincers.
“We’ve got to get out of here, Rox!” said Jasper.
“You don’t say,” said Roxie. “Come on, up on the roof.”
Jasper wound down his window and swung himself on to the roof of the van. He put his arms back into the cabin and shouted, “Come on, Danny.”
Danny looked down at the parrot in his lap. “Take this first,” he said, holding it out.
So the parrot and then Danny and then Roxie were pulled out of the van and on to the roof.
Danny looked over the edge of the van and saw, about a metre down, dozens of beetles scurrying around the wheels and scratching at the doors.
Again, he fumbled in his pocket, searching for his remote. Again, he stopped when he remembered.
“Can you lift us out?” Roxie said to Jasper.
“I don’t know,” said Jasper. “The heaviest thing I’ve ever lifted was, you know, that sofa bed.”
The van tilted further back. Danny managed to keep his balance by using his parrot as a crutch.
“Come on, Jasper,” whispered Roxie. “Let’s fly through the sky.”
“OK, OK,” said Jasper. “I’ll try.”
He closed his eyes and frowned. Roxie pulled her catapult out of her back pocket and moved to the front of the roof, firing pellet after pellet at the insects below.
Jasper was holding his hands out. Danny felt the van jerk forwards and then move, very slightly, upwards.
“That’s it, Jasper! That’s it!” shouted Roxie, blasting another beetle to bits with her catapult.
Jasper’s body started to shake as the van moved another half a metre out of the hole. Danny looked over the edge of the roof again and saw hundreds more beetles pouring on to the road.
Then he looked at the parrot under his arm and seemed to remember something. He twisted its beak round forty-five degrees clockwise and said: “Fight the beetles!”
The parrot’s eyes lit up and it hopped off the edge of the van, dropping into the hole and attacking any beetle it saw.
“Can’t do – much – more,” murmured Jasper as the van rose higher. His face was white and his jaw was slack.
Danny watched as his parrot landed on the road ahead with three beetles in its claws. The parrot jabbed its beak into each beetle’s neck and pulled out a crackling tangle of wires.
While he was watching this, Danny didn’t notice a beetle sprinting up the windscreen and scuttling across the roof. The beetle stopped and looked at Danny’s hand. It opened its pincers and closed them around Danny’s thumb.
Danny screamed.
At the same moment, Roxie cut the beetle in two with a well-aimed pellet.
Danny looked down at the two dots of blood at the base of his thumb.
“He was a sneaky one, wasn’t he?” said Roxie, turning back round and firing more pellets at the beetles in the road.
As Jasper lifted the van another metre into the air, Danny could see the hole beneath them more clearly. It was nothing but a writhing mass of black metal shapes, thousands and thousands of beetles.
Danny wanted his remote. He needed his remote. He felt useless without it. He felt pointless.
Jasper let out a massive groan and slumped forwards. The van dropped back towards the ground and Roxie and Danny nearly fell off the sides. The van landed awkwardly,
its front wheels hit the road, its back wheels were still hanging over the edge of the hole.
“I’m sorry,” Jasper was murmuring. “I’m sorry.”
Roxie was still firing her catapult at the beetles. She looked over her shoulder at Danny. “You need to get out of here! How strong is your parrot? Can it carry you?”
Danny nodded.
“Then go! Now! We’ll find you!”
Danny shouted, “Parrot! Return to base!” It appeared by his side a split second later. It had a beetle’s leg sticking out of its beak.
Danny said: “Pick me up and fly west.”
He was pulled off the roof of the van and into the sky.
As they soared above the road, Danny watched the van tilt further back into the hole. Jasper had come round and was standing next to Roxie. The hole, the road and the fields around it were covered with black shapes.
Danny realised that he had made an important decision. He reached up with his hand until he felt the screw that was sticking out of the parrot’s neck. This was the screw that Eric had inserted to disable the parrot’s homing instinct. If Danny removed the screw, the parrot would return to the Night Scientist.
Danny removed the screw.
The parrot veered round and flew east. It seemed to flap its wings with fresh urgency and purpose. Danny put the screw in his pocket and imagined that the remote was back in his hand, the amber crystal glowing gently in his palm.
“The remote will make everything right again,” whispered Danny into the wind.
10
POWER ON
They flew over forests and fields and they flew over towns and cities. The land suddenly ran out and they were flying over the sea, with nothing but water stretching out on all sides. The wind picked up, buffeting them and spraying them with sea water. As the parrot flew higher, the temperature dropped, and Danny’s teeth started to chatter.