by J. J. Green
“So you have absolutely no idea where we are, or where we’re going.”
“Ermm...” Carrie disliked the implications of what she was about to say, but couldn’t think of a way to avoid saying it. “No.”
“Carrie.” Dave grabbed her shoulders and spun her round. His hair, which had been perfectly, stylishly groomed only an hour or so previously was now a tussled mess. Though quite attractively tussled, Carrie thought. His skin shone with sweat. “Carrie. What are we going to do? How are we going to get back? We can’t wander through this forest forever. We don’t have anything to eat, or drink, or, or...what’s wrong?”
She hadn’t noticed it at first, distracted as she was by Dave’s dishevelled good looks, but even she couldn’t fail to see the giant metallic object that was behind him. How it had got there she didn’t know. Maybe it had been following them silently, or it had appeared out of nowhere. But there it undeniably was. A huge, grey length of metallic tubing that was folded—overlapping at the beginning and end—into a rectangle with curved corners. Through the hollow centre Carrie could see the giant leaves that led back the way they had come.
Reading Carrie’s expression, Dave slowly turned around and looked behind him. He grabbed her arm and leaned in close to her ear.
“Is that what I think it is?” he whispered.
Carrie nodded. “A gigantic paperclip.”
Chapter Seven – Out of This World
A sound like ten thousand six year olds having their first violin lesson split the air. Carrie bent double and clasped her hands to her ears. She grimaced as the noise winkled its way between her fingers and penetrated her eardrums. She pressed her upper arms to her ears, but still the sound reverberated around her skull. Opening one eye a tiny slit, she found she was looking at Dave’s neatly brushed suede boots. She squinted upward. He was standing, hands on hips, nodding thoughtfully at the massive paperclip. His lips moved, but Carrie couldn’t make out his words above the off-key screeching.
She nudged him with her elbow, and he looked down at her. He raised his eyebrows. She read his lips. What’s wrong with you?
“What’s wrong with me?” she shouted. “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you hear that terrible noise?”
“What...” Dave’s attention was drawn back to the paperclip. He shook his head and said something, spread his hands wide and shrugged.
“Dave,” called Carrie. “What’s going on? Are you...”
He was shaking his head vehemently. The discordant sound stopped, and in its place a low vibration hummed. The ground throbbed. Dave raised his arms as if to ward off a blow and began to rise into the air. His feet kicked uselessly. An invisible force gripped Carrie and began to lift her, too. As she left the ground, she spun round and tried to grip the pale, dusty sand, but her fingers snatched at air. She was carried inexorably upward.
Dave was rising with her, his arms and legs windmilling as he fought to free himself from the invisible force that gripped them. They floated towards the empty centre of the paperclip, where they hung suspended in midair. Open-mouthed, they stared at each other. The low vibration grew more intense, and the metal tubing surrounding them began to blur. The ground drew slowly away. The paperclip was lifting off and taking them with it.
Carrie closed her eyes as she bobbed gently between the two long lines of metal tubing. After a while, when nothing else seemed to be happening, she opened them again. Below her were the forest of red leaves, the grey plain, and the yellow ocean, all three receding at a steady pace. Above, the mauve sky deepened in colour. She gulped. “I hope this thing’s safe,” she said. “I wouldn’t like to fall from this height.”
Dave was swaying lazily next to her, his arms and legs akimbo, like a marionette whose puppet master had forgotten what he was supposed to be doing. He set his lips and glared.
“What?” said Carrie. “What have I done?”
“What have you done? What have you done? You invited me to your house for a housewarming party, only I was the only one invited. I decided to stay because you seemed lonely and I felt sorry for you, and as a reward for my kindness I was vacuumed underneath your sink and onto another planet.” He paused for breath. “Now I’m flying through the air inside an overgrown item of office stationery towards interrogation and probable execution on an alien spaceship. That’s what you’ve done, Carrie. That’s what you’ve done. If I hadn’t gone to your housewarming—” he raised two fingers of each hand to signal quote marks “—I’d be sitting at home right now with a cup of hot chocolate watching the closing credits of a very interesting biopic on Leonardo DiCaprio. The next time someone’s stupid enough to take the job of supervisor at my call centre, remind me to not to give them cake!”
Carrie’s mouth opened and shut and opened again. “What was that you said about interrogation and probable execution?”
“What? Didn’t you hear what the paperclip said?”
“No, all I could hear was a terrible noise pretending to be music.”
“What are you talking about? It was speaking English, clear as day.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Yes, it...” Dave grasped his hair before throwing his hands up. “Oh, never mind. It was asking us what we were and where we were from. When I answered, it got really angry. Then it said we were an unauthorised presence on a colonial planet, and if we couldn’t explain ourselves to its commander we would be subject to the highest penalty. And if the paperclip and its friends were responsible for the bombing, I think we can both imagine what that might be.”
As Carrie digested this latest piece of information, the sky turned a deeper mauve and the horizon became curved. The yellow ocean stretched over the planet surface as far as she could see. A small patch of red signalled the forest they had left what seemed only a short time ago. The forest sat at the edge of a large, grey, roughly crescent-shaped island.
Carrie thought back over the last twenty-four hours. It had been an eventful day for sure, what with her interview with the bug, her first day at the call centre, finding herself in a war zone, and now zooming up and away from an alien planet while being held within an invisible force field. Through all those events, though, in all that time, at no point had she thought this might be her last day alive.
She gasped. Toodles and Rogue. Who was going to feed them? Who was going to take care of them? Her lower lip trembled, and she began to cry.
Dave grimaced. “Look, it probably won’t come to that. Maybe I misunderstood.”
Carrie was shaking her head, the force making her sway gently. “It isn’t that,” she said. “I’m sorry—” A fresh wail escaped her, and she couldn’t finish her sentence.
Dave sighed. “You don’t have to apologise. I didn’t mean what I said earlier. It isn’t your fault. All this...” He gestured at the deep mauve sky filled with stars and yellow planet below. “It could have happened to anyone.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. I meant I’m sorry for Toodles and Rogue. Who’s going to look after them when I’m gone? They’ll be all alooooone.” Her final word dissolved into fresh sobs.
Dave rolled his eyes. “Oh well, don’t mind about me, will you? I mean, I’m only another human being, practically a stranger, who you dragged into this mess.”
But Carrie didn’t hear him. She was howling, her head buried in her hands. Tears dribbled from between her fingers and hung suspended in midair. Dave batted them irritably.
A light from above distracted Carrie from her misery. Looking up, she closed her eyes to slits as the light grew more intensely bright. It was surrounded by pitch blackness. As they drew closer, the blackness was revealed to be a massive spaceship. Its outline was edged with stars, but they were faint in comparison to the brilliant light shining from the ship. The paperclip headed towards the light, which grew larger and larger until finally they flew right into it.
As the paperclip carried them into the spaceship, Carrie’s faint hope that it might be the place she had been interviewed was
dashed. The interior was bright, shining silver, and the lighting was so intense that at first it dazzled her. The paperclip released them, and they hit the floor with a clunk. The surface was cold and smooth, and the ship was completely different from the place where Carrie’s interview had taken place. Her giant insect interviewer—who might have been able to get them out of their predicament—was unlikely to be found here.
They seemed to be in a large holding bay or warehouse of some kind. All around machinery moved, transporting and stacking matte black boxes. Carrie edged away from the open hatchway, where the yellow planet was visible far below. She rubbed her knees, which had taken the full force of her fall. The moment it had deposited them, the paperclip had zoomed away. Dave was standing, watching the metal machines. Carrie also watched them, and after a few moments of observing the wide range of shapes and sizes, realised they all looked familiar.
She stood, joining Dave, who was frowning.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked.
In answer, she pointed to a long, cylindrical object that narrowed to a point at its top end and had a spring-loaded protuberance at the lower end, on which it bounced along. “Pen,” she said.
Dave pointed at another machine that consisted of two levers, hinged in the middle and bearing fangs at each end. “Staple remover.” The machine ran on caterpillar tracks.
Something else had a wide handle, a square base and two round poles that moved up and down caught Carrie’s attention. She pointed at it and looked at Dave with a frown.
“Hole punch,” he said.
The two stood without speaking for several moments as the machines moved around them, taking no notice of the humans within their midst as they stacked the matte black boxes. It was Dave who finally gave voice to the inevitable conclusion. “We’re in a gigantic office stationery shop.”
Carrie gripped his arm. The paperclip was returning through a wide doorway. Before it even came close, the screeching began. She squinted as she watched the conversation between it and Dave, the terrible sound digging channels through her brain. The conversation was very brief. The paperclip glided away and Dave followed. Carrie trotted along after. “How come you can hear that thing and I can’t?”
“I don’t know,” replied Dave, but Carrie noticed he avoided her eyes as he spoke.
“So, did it say where we’re going?”
“We have to follow it to the ship’s commander.”
The passages they went down were wide, square and metallic, so that Carrie felt as if she were walking through air vents. Their footsteps echoed as they walked quickly to keep pace with the zooming paperclip. What type of office equipment was the commander? Carrie wondered, rubbing her arms as a couple of horrible possibilities crossing her mind. Maybe it was a letter opener, or a pencil sharpener?
As it turned out, the creature that awaited them was even worse than she had imagined. It was a massive rectangular box, lying longest side down, the narrow end facing them. Running right across the front of the machine, from the top to the bottom, was a row of tall, metal teeth.
Dave and Carrie exchanged glances. Carrie gulped. “Shredder,” she said.
Chapter Eight – In the Hold
Carrie and Dave stood before the glinting steel maw. To one side of them the paperclip hovered. Carrie clamped her hands over her ears, anticipating the noise the shredder might make compared to the paperclip. A deep, reverberating bass shuddered through her. Dave seemed, as usual, to have no problem dealing with the sound, so she left him to the conversation and hoped he could save both their lives.
In an effort to distract herself from her probable imminent death, Carrie concentrated on happy thoughts. She thought about Toodles and Rogue, her animal best friends. Then she remembered they were alone in her flat on Earth, and that she might not be coming back. She decided to think about something else.
Her interview with the giant bug sprang next to mind. She scrabbled for any information that might be useful in their current predicament, but she couldn’t recall anything useful. The job didn’t even seem to be detective work like the creature had said. It was all very odd. But maybe she’d got something wrong.
Carrie reflected instead on her job at the call centre. Her first day had seemed to go quite well, but as she went over the day’s events she developed a strong suspicion that in fact she hadn’t done a good job. She hadn’t even read, let alone followed, the work manual. It was far too boring, and she could hardly understand a word of what the customers were complaining about. Now, the people she’d told she would help were not going to receive any service, and when the complaints started coming in again, this time they would be complaining about her. Carrie groaned. Another job she had failed at.
Dave’s conversation with the shredder seemed to be going on forever. She took a peek. He was gesticulating wildly and seemed upset. She groaned again and shut her eyes.
Silence. Carrie looked at Dave. He had his hands on his hips and seemed thoughtful. “What happened? What did it say?”
The paperclip began to leave, and Dave spread an arm wide, inviting Carrie to follow it with him. “Well,” he said as they walked, “the shredder knew all about us, which was surprising.”
“Really? How on Earth did it know who we are?”
“Not us as in you and me, Carrie. Us as in human beings. It knew we were humans.”
“Oh. Was that a good thing?”
“Only in the sense that recognising a species that has subjected your own to slavery, persecution, and destruction is a good thing.”
“So...not a good thing at all, really.”
“No. I tried to explain that the office stationery on Earth probably wasn’t its long-lost cousins, but it wasn’t having any of it.”
“But how does it know? I mean, that’s so weird. Those things haven’t been to Earth, surely?”
Dave shrugged. “I’m only reporting what it said. I wasn’t the one asking the questions. It was quite aggressive, let me tell you.”
Carrie stepped to one side as a huge stapler travelling in the opposite direction zoomed past. “So what’s going to happen now?”
“That part I wasn’t too clear on. It was reeling off chemicals and percentages.” He frowned. “What were they? Oxygen, sixty-five per cent; carbon, eighteen point five per cent; hydrogen, nine point five per cent. It mentioned nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus and a few others. I can’t remember the percentages for those, though. What could that be about, do you think?”
Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen? The elements and their percentages were tantalisingly familiar, and the others chemicals, too. “I know,” she exclaimed, “there was a question on that in The Horse and Hounds Pub Quiz Championship last year. They’re the amounts of the main elements in the human body, I’m sure of it.” She grinned triumphantly, then her smile faded. As the implications of her realisation sunk in, they were silent for a while.
“Now I know what it meant by atomise,” said Dave.
The paperclip drew to a halt, and a hole opened in the floor of the passageway. From a brief burst of discordant violin music Carrie understood they were to jump in. She peered down. It was a simple metal box. There was no sign of anything that might atomise them as they entered it. She landed safely at the bottom, and Dave followed. The air in the hole was humid and smelled faintly sweet.
“I wonder what they normally keep in here?” asked Carrie.
Dave slumped down in a corner. “Who knows? Printer ink? Glue? After today, I’d believe anything.”
Carrie watched him for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sorry for inviting you to my house. Sorry for getting you involved in all of this.”
“It’s okay. It isn’t like you did it on purpose. And if we’re going to be giving apologies, I have one of my own.” He looked down.
“What? I don’t understand. You haven’t got anything to apologise for.”
Dave took a deep breath. “I have, actually. It’s this.” He stood and pulled som
ething from his pocket before holding it out to her. The object was blue, cylindrical and about the length of his palm. It squirmed like a snake. Carrie recognised it immediately as one of the weird instruments in her space detective bag.
“It was wriggling like it wanted to be picked up,” said Dave. “I felt sorry for it.”
“Oh,” said Carrie. “I see. Well, that’s still no reason to apologise. I mean...” Her brows knit. “Hold on, if you were just picking it up, how did it end up in your pocket?”
“I should explain a bit more. You see, I have this condition where—”
Carrie gasped. “You took it. You stole it from me. Dave, that’s despicable.”
“Like I said, I have a condition. I’m sorry, I do try to control myself, but sometimes I can’t help it.”
“You came to my house as a guest, then you went into my kitchen pretending to put your glass away, and you took something that didn’t belong to you. You—you—”
“Now that’s not strictly true. I really was putting my glass away. But I saw all that amazing stuff you had, and there was this thing separate from the rest. It was at the edge of the table, like it was about to fall off. I didn’t think you’d miss it—”
Carrie crossed her arms. “Hmphhh.”
“Look, I said sorry didn’t I? And I’m giving it back. Here, you can have it.”
Carrie snatched the device from his hand.
“Maybe you’ll understand the stationery now,” he said. “I think it must be a translator or something, and it was working for me because I had it on me. If you carry it, maybe you’ll understand what the aliens are saying.”
“Oh, great. A fat lot of good it’ll do me now. I’ll be able to understand them give the order to atomise me. Thanks a lot, Dave.”
Carrie plonked herself down at the opposite end of the cell and put the translator in her pocket. She glared at Dave, whose eyes roamed the cell. Whenever his gaze met Carrie’s he looked quickly away. Pulling out his phone he checked it, but he didn’t, apparently, have any new messages. He put his phone away and looked round the cell again.