Little Green Gangsters

by Steve Cole

  One of the large ceiling tiles above me rattled. I looked up and frowned.

  CRRAASH! The tile came hurtling down from the ceiling. As it fell, I glimpsed something lumpy and green riding it like a surfboard. THUMP – it landed right on top of me and whumped the air from my lungs.

  “Hello!” Little G’s big ugly face was suddenly in my own. “Hello, spaceboy! Hello!”

  “UGHH!” I pushed him away, rolled out of bed and landed heavily on the floor, staring at him in fascination and revulsion. He’d changed his clothes, now wearing a skinny-fit superhero T-shirt, flip-flops and a kilt. “What the hell are you doing, coming through the roof?”

  “Hello!” Little G smoothed out his top and straightened his medallion. “I heard you.”

  “But I didn’t say anything!”

  “You did.” He looked at me, all three eyes intent. “Said you are home-sock.”

  “Home-sock?” I echoed.

  Little G nodded. “You are sad. You miss your banana, mmm?”

  “Homesick, you mean . . .” I stared at him, in wonder. “And it’s my old nanny, not a nana. But I never said that out loud.”

  “You did, spaceboy!” Little G retorted. “Nana! Home-sock! You did just now!”

  “But that was after you said you heard it.” I was getting confused. “So how did you know?”

  He opened his arms. “Hug? You want a big hug, home-sock spaceboy?”

  “I’m not home-sock!” I insisted. “Homesick, I mean. Now, please, get out of here!”

  “Wait.” But now Little G was looking past me – at Herbert. “Hello!” He started bouncing on the bed excitedly and waving. “Hello! Hello!”

  “That’s my pet goldfish,” I said. “He can’t talk.”

  “Hello! Little G. Hello!” He hopped off the bed and came running at Herbert, his stumpy legs a blur. Instinctively I put myself in front of the bowl and held out my arms to protect it. But that seemed to give Little G the wrong idea.

  “HUUUUG!” he warbled, jumping into my outstretched arms. “I smell the tongue! Mmm, tongue! Gimme, gimme!”

  “Stop it with the tongue thing!”

  “TONGUE!” Little G was wriggling like a big slimy puppy in tweed and sandals. “Little G, TONGUE, spaceboy! Mmmm!”

  I was about to yell for help when the door swung open – and in stomped Sergeant Katzburger, her gun at the ready. “Step away from the goldfish!”

  “Please, Sargey Katzbonker!” Little G whimpered. “Me need to listen to the tongue.” He pointed to Herbert. “Put him in my mouth! Help you, spaceboy! You need help!”

  “That’s enough!” boomed Katzburger. She grabbed Little G by the back of his t-shirt and heaved him into the air. “No innocent pet fish is gonna get eaten by an alien! Not on my watch! Not ever!” She hauled the struggling Little G to the door and threw him outside where he landed with a SPLUMP. “And stay out of the ventilator shafts, too, or else! What do you think this is, a science-fiction film or something? Stay away from here. You get me?”

  “Hug, Sargey Katzbonker?” called Little G pathetically.

  “I’d sooner hug a nuclear warhead!” Katzburger slammed the door. “What is that thing’s problem?”

  “I don’t know.” I shuddered. “Thanks for the rescue.”

  “We have him under observation. When the monitors picked him up in here, I came running. Well, jogging. Well . . .” Katzburger thought some more. “I came striding quite quickly, anyway. Ish.”

  “I can’t believe Little G!” I shuddered, though Herbert seemed unaffected, still bonking his head against the glass. “He scared the heck out of me, coming through the ceiling like that. What if he does it again and gets Herbert when I’m out?”

  “I’d guard your fish myself, if I could.” She sighed. “But I’ve got . . . other duties. Looks like I’m not going to be around here much longer.”

  “Really?” I felt a twinge of regret – Katzburger was hardly (Nanny) Helen, but at least I felt she was sort of on my side. “Are you being transferred or something?”

  “Ha! You could say that. This is one heck of a transfer.” She shook her head and her Mohawk quivered. “Well, before I go, I’ll get maintenance to fix this hole. And I’ll get security to bar the little green bonehead from entering the vents. That might help to keep your fish alive when I’ve gone. Might. But it may not.” She paused. “In fact, it probably won’t. Truthfully, kid, if your fish is marked for death by the cold momentum of implacable fate, well, that’s it – he’s gonna die. You can’t stop that. I can’t stop that. No one can. Death, death, death. It’s inevitable. Death. For you, for me, for the whole wide stinking world. DEATH.”

  Well, that put a bit of a downer on things, as you can imagine. Thanks for the pep talk, I thought.

  “I heard something top secret today,” said Katzburger shiftily. “Wanna hear?”

  I grimaced. “If it’s top secret, are you meant to be telling me?”

  “Nope,” she said. “But what does it matter? Nothing matters. Nothing in the whole, wide, stinking world—”

  “Please tell me,” I said, hoping to dodge another lengthy road trip into misery.

  Katzburger sighed. “You know that team of experts trying to see past the Giant Extra-Terrestrials’ invisibility shield thing? Well, they’re getting somewhere.”

  “They are?”

  “You saw the footprints on your way here, right?” She waited for me to nod, then went on. “Well, our special spy satellites have picked up similar footprints at the South Pole and in two other places – in the Borneo rainforest, and on one of the Galapagos Islands. And the team’s come up with some special filters that show some kind of structure . . .”

  “A structure?” I frowned. “So, they’re building something?”

  “No one knows what it is. But it’s not gonna be good, is it? It’s gonna be BAAAD. End-of-the-world kind of bad.” She shrugged her shoulders and walked away. “Well, that’s it. So long, kid.”

  Yeah, thanks, I thought. After all her moaning, you’d think she’d be glad to be ditching the base for somewhere different. I know I would be.

  Once she’d gone, and it was just me and Herbert in my room again, I began to feel anxious at the thought of these giant alien buildings . . . Where were the Galapagos Islands, anyway? Where was Borneo? Wasn’t that a type of dog chew or something? I needed to know . . .

  There was a map in the Crèche. I could check it out, and check in with Elodie.

  I waved bye to Herbert, left the room, locked the door behind me and set off for the Crèche, ready to tell the other kids my secret news . . .

  Completely unaware of the secret news they were going to tell me.

  When I went inside the Crèche, Kimmy, Ray and Elodie were working on new versions of the important parts that I’d managed to break the day before. And in the quiet booth in the corner of the room, reading a comic upside down was . . .

  “Hello!” Little G jumped up when he saw me. “Hello! Hello!”

  “What’s he doing here?” I demanded.

  Ray and Kimmy looked over, while Elodie remained apparently engrossed in her work.

  “He was upset after he got thrown out of your room,” said Ray. “He came here for some quiet time. You can see he’s upset.”

  Little G was jumping up and down excitedly. “Hello, spaceboy! Hello!”

  “He doesn’t look upset,” I argued.

  “It was emotional cruelty, Tim!” Kimmy added. “That’s pretty serious. Little G could sue you for that.”

  “He can’t sue anyone, he’s an alien!” I protested. “Besides, I could sue Little G for attacking my goldfish!”

  “The tongue!” Little G crooned. “Come to papa!”

  “Leave my goldfish alone!” I cried.

  “Enough, already!” snapped Elodie. “People trying to work here.”

  Little G sighed and muttered a last, mutinous “Hello” under his breath.


  “You have a goldfish?” Ray asked.

  “Yeah, he was kidnapped with me and DAD.” I emphasised the word, hoping for some further reaction from Elodie. “DAD got him for me when I was small. I’ve had Herbert my whole life thanks to DAD.”

  She kept on working and didn’t react.

  “Little G does seem very interested in goldfish,” said Ray thoughtfully. “He likes watching all the crazy goldfish movies on YouTube.”

  “What crazy movies?” I wondered.

  “Mmmm!” Little G grabbed a laptop in his long green fingers and flipped it open as he ran over. “Tonnnnngue! Look! Here! Hello!”

  I saw several pages had been opened, with a different little film on each one showing goldfish turning loop the loops and wiggling about upside down, the kinds of trick that Herbert had learned to do.

  “So it’s not just my goldfish,” I breathed.

  “In me!” Little G patted his tummy through his waistcoat. “Mmmm! Nice tongue. Hello!”

  “You are NOT eating my goldfish,” I told him.

  “G, could you go back to the quiet place?” Elodie called over without looking up. “Trying to work here.”

  I closed the laptop and handed it back to him. With a sigh, Little G waddled off back to the quiet booth. I supposed that at least while he was here I could be sure he wasn’t chowing down on raw Herbert.

  “So, Elodie,” I tried again, “how’re things?”

  “Good, thanks.” She looked up at me coolly. “You just caught me by surprise last night.”

  I waited for more, but it wasn’t forthcoming. So I went on casually, “Weirdly, my dad reacted kind of similar when I told him about you.”

  “Did he?” Elodie jumped up, swaying like a beanpole in a high wind. “He grew emotional, eh? In a good way? Was he happy? Was he sad? Oh my god he was sad, wasn’t he? Was he angry?”

  Before I could speak, Kimmy jumped in. “Elodie!” she said sternly. “What have we agreed about displaying strong emotions in the Crèche during flippin’ work hours?”

  “Sorry, Elodie, but Kimmy’s right,” Ray joined in. “We don’t have much time, remember?”

  “Hug,” piped up Little G, holding out his arms.

  “Give me five minutes, guys.” Elodie duly went over to the quiet booth and stooped to put her arms around Little G.

  “Mmmmm,” rumbled the weird little alien. “Hug!”

  I looked at Ray. “You’re right – there isn’t much time. I heard something last night . . .”

  “Uh-huh,” he said knowingly, “about the hyper-beam system being a pile of pants that kills anyone who uses it, yeah?”

  I froze, all else forgotten. “What?”

  “Oh,” said Kimmy. “Guess you didn’t hear that.”

  “Hello!” called Little G, jumping away from Elodie. “Hello!”

  “Shh,” said Ray.

  “What d’you mean, it kills people?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Sure you can handle the truth, Tim?” Elodie said softly. “They say pets are often like their owners . . . and a goldfish has no stomach.”

  “True,” I countered, sticking out my jaw. “But it does have a digestive tract about twice the length of its own body – and that’s a lot of guts.”

  “Good for you, dude.” Ray picked up a remote and one of the screens changed to show a view of a large, bright yellow room, empty except for a black circle on the floor and something like a massive electronic funnel hanging down from above. “The Big Suits here don’t know that Elodie’s hacked into their top-secret camera feed.” He took a scoosh on his inhaler and started to rewind the footage.

  “They’ve really been pushing the hyper-beam experiments lately,” said Kimmy. “We think they’re expecting some sort of showdown in space with the GETs . . .”

  I felt a familiar tingle down my spine. Such incredible, far-out stuff, being talked about as though it were double Maths on a Tuesday!

  “Trouble is, the Big Suits are dang-fast running out of volunteers for the hyper-beam project,” said Kimmy. “It’s probably a good job the astronauts do keep coming back dead and in pieces, or this place would be getting sued, like, a thousand times over.”

  I grimaced. “But . . . didn’t they, like, test it out on dummies first?”

  “Sure they did,” said Elodie. “Plenty of dummies volunteered. Unfortunately, the hyper-beam turned those volunteers into vol-au-vents.”

  Ray pointed at the screen. “Here’s a transfer they tried out last week . . .”

  I saw a man in a hazard suit and space helmet, like the one who’d turned up in the Rubbish House, walk into the yellow room and stand in the middle of the black circle. A red light flashed out from the funnel-thing, making the screen turn orangey. I braced myself.

  “The idea of the hyper-beam seems to be this,” said Elodie. “First, the projection unit shrinks you to the size of an atom. Then the travel beam opens up a tiny hole in hyperspace, draws you inside and spits you out at the place of your choosing, back at normal size. Then it’s supposed to do the same thing in reverse to bring you back here. I say ‘supposed to’ because, so far, no one has actually been brought back . . .”

  Suddenly the man on the screen vanished. The red light switched off. Ray fast-forwarded a bit.

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked gingerly.

  “Brace yourself,” said Kimmy. “Your eyes might sue the rest of your body for making them see this . . .”

  I saw the yellow room on the screen darken suddenly as an unlikely shape appeared. It was a space boot. A space boot as big as a sofa, and gently steaming.

  “That’s what I call flippin’ incredible footage,” said Kimmy solemnly.

  “It’s all that’s left of the astronaut after he’s made the return trip,” murmured Elodie.

  “Humans get boot,” said Little G quietly. “Boot. Hello! Boot.”

  “The astronaut’s right foot?” I stared. “But . . . it’s so big.”

  “Must be a mix-up in the matter-offset equations,” said Ray. “To be fair, the fact that they got back any part of him at all is a positive. The hyper-beam normally loses them completely. Apart from the exploding guy. That wasn’t good. He exploded.”

  I shivered and turned away. “Maybe they should just give up.”

  “They can’t. Getting out there is too important, Tim.” Kimmy took the remote from Ray and pressed some buttons. “Elodie showed me how to hack into the observation team’s deep cosmic scanners too. Want to know what’s out there in space between Mars and Jupiter? Do ya? Huh?”

  “Don’t forget to switch on the observation team’s counter-alien eyesight filter.” Ray flicked a switch. “There.”

  I saw a strange, blurred something on one of the other screens. At first my eyes didn’t know what to make of it. It was a shimmering, solid, metallic but kind-of-watery square oval shape. And yes, I know that doesn’t make any sense – despite the filter it was hard to make anything out. Even so, the more I stared, the more I felt a deep, primal fear flood through my lower intestine (cast-iron proof that, like Herbert, I really did have guts).

  “That’s the GETs’ spaceship, isn’t it?” I whispered.

  “Yep,” said Elodie softly. “That’s it head on, pointed our way. Estimated to be thirty thousand miles wide, fifty thousand miles high, and maybe fifty million miles away.”

  Kimmy nodded. “And the Big Suits think that with technology as big and advanced as that, it probably has the offensive capability to fry all life on the planet.”

  I stared, as the invisible orchestra in my head launched into an ominous

  D A A –

  DAAAAH

  DAHHHHHHHH!

  Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yep. This is a pretty good time to end a chapter.

  I shuddered. “Let’s switch off the picture.”

  “Don’t lose sight of the obvious point here, Tim,” said Ray, attempting a smile. “The aliens haven
’t fried us. That suggests they must be peaceful. Right?”

  “What if they’re planning something else,” I said slowly. “Something . . . bigger?”

  Everyone looked at me, ready to hear to what I had to say. Though I was scared to death, at the same time it was quite a cool moment.

  So I told them what Sergeant Katzburger had told me about the aliens making . . . something. They listened in silence, and I crossed to the map on the wall to point out where the footprints had been found, together with the “structures” near the North Pole, at the South Pole, the Galapagos Islands and Borneo.

  And as I did so, I saw that the Galapagos and Borneo are both on the equator, on pretty much opposite sides.

  The alien structures were sited at what you might call the four corners of the world. Not that they’re really corners. But, well, you know.

  “That’s not just coincidence, is it?” I realised. “The GETs must have picked those places on purpose. They must have some kind of plan.”

  Elodie crossed coolly to a computer and started typing madly at the keyboard. “I am SO hacking into the observation team’s Earth-scan database.”

  “Go for it,” Ray told her.

  “I’ve heard your mum talk about those four places, Ray,” said Kimmy. “She and the other brainiacs working on the smell code reckon that the air is smelliest around each of those points on the globe.”

  “Uh-huh!” said Ray. “Conclusion: if the smell IS a code, then these structures have been set up to spread the ‘message’ – all over the world.”

  “Done it!” called Elodie, blowing on her fingers as if to cool them. “Hack attack complete! Here’s Borneo . . .”

  On the screen there was a blurry aerial view of some enormous, angular thing rising up from sprawling rainforest.

  “It’s some kind of machine,” breathed Elodie. “Got to be as big as a skyscraper.”

  Kimmy switched the view to the South Pole. A similar shape stood there, glistening and shimmering amid heavy snowfall.

  “Another one.” I gulped. “Giant machines, pumping out stinky molecules.”

  “Sending out a message of some kind,” Kimmy agreed, “and altering the atmosphere while they do it.”

  “Right,” Elodie agreed, as the view changed to show a tropical scene, blighted like the others by the creepy blurred criss-cross structure. Finally, the screen showed the nearest structure, standing proud in the frozen Arctic landscape. I shivered to see huge, deep footsteps dotted around it.