For Iszi
CONTENTS
Prologue: Earth
Chapter One: Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
Chapter Two: Cestrypip
Chapter Three: Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
Chapter Four: Ramflot
Chapter Five: Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
Chapter Six: Lemmerold
Chapter Seven: Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
Chapter Eight: Geflu
Chapter Nine: Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
Chapter Ten: Faddertyre VI
Chapter Eleven: Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
Chapter Twelve: Belf-Trooga
Chapter Thirteen: Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
Chapter Fourteen: Middling Otherbridge, England, Earth
Chapter Fifteen: Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
Chapter Sixteen: High Earth Orbit
Chapter Seventeen: Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
Chapter Eighteen: Deep Space
Postlogue: Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
Could You Be A Reporter Like Greta?
Sneak Preview of Book Two
Prologue: Untold Miles Beneath the Earth’s Crust
Chapter One: Greta Zargo’s House, Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
Chapter Two: Greta Zargo’s Back Garden, Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
About the Author and Illustrator
PROLOGUE
Earth
LAST SUNDAY
NO ONE ON Earth knew that their planet was being observed.
No one realised that vast computer brains waited, hidden in high Earth orbit, plotting and planning the planet’s destruction.
No one detected the silvery robot as it descended from the blue summer’s sky with a slow, quiet whoosh of unknown energy and flew towards the small English town of Middling Otherbridge.
No one knew that only three things stood in the way of their complete and utter annihilation: one elderly parrot, one eleven-year-old spelling mistake and one intrepid young newspaper-reporter-cum-schoolgirl in search of a Big Scoop.
And yet, that’s exactly what’s at stake in this book: the fate of the entire planet Earth.
Now read on …
CHAPTER ONE
Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
LAST MONDAY
WHEN GRETA ZARGO’S parents accidentally died she was left the family home, everything in it, a large bank account, a library card, three hamsters (now dead, stuffed and on the mantelpiece), a lifetime subscription to Clipboarding Weekly magazine (the magazine for all clipboarding enthusiasts) and a pair of scissors she was to never run with. Since she had only been a baby at the time, all of this was held in trust for her by her Aunt Tabitha until her eighth birthday.1
As soon as she turned eight Greta moved out of her aunt’s house and into her own one, just over the road. Naturally her aunt kept an eye on Greta, whenever she remembered to, and in the three years that followed absolutely no disasters had occurred. Other than perhaps that one time the fire engine had to come to get her off the roof. But even then, as Greta pointed out in a stiffly worded letter to the school newspaper, she hadn’t actually been stuck. So, no disasters at all.
It was in the bathroom of that very house that Greta Zargo was now hiding underneath the bubbles in a deep, hot bath she’d run for herself. She soaked in the steaming tub, and breathed deep of the foamy perfume. This wasn’t the best idea since it tickled her nose and made her sneeze, which blew a hole in the bubbles through which she could see the bathroom ceiling.
The ceiling, being a little grey at the edges, reminded her of her disappointing morning.
It was the summer and, being a girl of sparky determination, she’d got herself a holiday job as a Very Junior Reporter for The Local Newspaper.2 It wasn’t a real holiday job, since there are laws against employing eleven-year-old children, but when she’d followed Mr Inglebath (the newspaper’s editor) across the park, through the library and into the swimming pool, asking to work for him, she had seemed so like a girl who wouldn’t take no for an answer that he’d said yes.
He quickly explained, however, that he wasn’t going to pay her (though she was welcome to a biscuit or two whenever she visited the office).
This was fine by Greta. She wasn’t in it for the money.
She had bought herself a new reporter’s notebook and her aunt had made her a press badge with a tiny tape recorder hidden inside it.
When you pressed the button labelled ‘Press’ on the press badge it recorded everything it heard, which meant she didn’t need to use the reporter’s notebook to take notes, unless the press badge had run out of batteries, which it sometimes did. So, with the press badge pinned to her jacket and the notebook in her bag, just in case, she was ready to go out and report the news.
Oh, she had been so excited, and then …
The problem was that as a Very Junior Reporter it was her job to go where her editor sent her and to cover the stories he told her to cover. That was just the way of things, and this morning Mr Inglebath had sent her to talk to Hari Socket about his missing Battenberg cake (he’d bought it for his son’s birthday and had taken it out of the wrapper and put it on a plate in the kitchen from where it had mysteriously vanished while he was watching Stop! Look! Redecorate! in the front room). It had taken Greta two minutes and twenty-three seconds of investigation for her to realise this was a rubbish story. This was not front page material, and never would be, not unless a whole lot more cakes went missing, and what was the likelihood of that happening?
Had Greta been asked to explain exactly why she needed a bigger story to make her happy, she could have pointed to three very important reasons.
Firstly, halfway through the summer term she’d been kicked off the school newspaper for having published those photographs of the Head kissing Mr Biggingstock in the stationery cupboard. Being told that she couldn’t be a reporter any more made Greta more determined than ever to be a reporter (in the same way that, when as a very young girl Aunt Tabitha had once told her not to eat soap, she proceeded to demolish two whole bars before burping bubbles for the rest of the week). When school started up again in September, she’d write in her ‘What I did during the holidays’ story: I became an Ace Reporter and got the Big Scoop. (The ‘Big Scoop’ being an impressive story no one else had discovered, rather than an oversized trowel or a standard portion of ice cream.)
Secondly, there was the clause in her parents’ Last Will and Testament (clause seventeen) that said: Darling, try to find out as much stuff as you can. Knowledge is fun and useful. The world needs bright, inquisitive people like you to help it get by. Darling, be brilliant.
Ever since she’d read the Last Will, sat on her aunt’s workbench as a little girl (burping bubbles), she’d tried to live up to it. She’d stuck her nose in all the mysteries she could find, and all the books and up all the trees, and that was simply the way it was.
And thirdly and finally, a simple, boring cake theft was not the sort of story that would win her the Prilchard-Spritzer Medal, the quite famous award for great journalism.
It was a beautiful medal and would look lovely displayed above the mantelpiece next to her swimming certificate and the Best in Show rosette her mother had won once with a particularly handsome terrapin. Just think how that would look when she got back to school: Sacked School Reporter Scoops Sensational Reporter Prize. That would show them doubly. Twice over. Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
Lying back in the bath with great mountains of foam drifting around her, Greta shut her eyes, dozed and dreamt of the day Mr Pril
chard3 himself would loop the medal’s ribbon around her neck. The wavering floral scent of the bubble bath hid the smell of fish that always followed Mr Prilchard around (even an imaginary Mr Prilchard in a daydream) and Greta smiled broadly.
As she began her acceptance speech a bell rang.
That’s odd, she thought.
As she began her short list of thank yous and longer list of I told you sos again, the bell rang a second time.
She woke up in the bath realising that it was actually the doorbell ringing.
Grabbing a towel, she stepped on to the toilet, pushed open the fanlight at the top of the bathroom window and peered out.
There was no one there.
‘That’s odd,’ she said to herself.
She had heard, just before she reached the window, a slow quiet whoosh of unknown energy and, assuming it was the asthmatic blackbird4 that liked to hang out in the big oak tree across the road, she ignored it.
Getting back in the bath, she found her daydream rather spoilt. The assembled crowd had mostly gone home and it seemed silly reading her acceptance speech to the few who remained, since they were mostly just there for the free buffet.
She got out of the bath and made herself some toast instead.
1The relevant sentence in her parents’ Last Will and Testament should, of course, have read ‘eighteenth birthday’ but contained a legally binding spelling mistake. (It should be noted that this is not the spelling mistake mentioned in the Prologue; that’s a different one made around the same time.)
2The Local Newspaper was an award-winning newspaper, as it proudly boasted on the front cover. It had won the Most Accurately Titled Print Periodical Prize four years running, until the Adverts for Old Fridges (Incorporating Gossip & Photos of Local People) Weekly beat it to the top spot last time round.
3Mr Prilchard owned Prilchard’s Pilchards (and Other Fish), the fishmonger’s who sponsored the prize.
4The slow quiet whoosh of unknown energy had actually been a silvery robot floating above her doorstep, which flew off as she opened the window.
CHAPTER TWO
Cestrypip
965 LIGHT YEARS FROM EARTH 107,242 YEARS AGO
THE PEOPLE OF the planet Cestrypip had a unique life cycle: like insects on Earth they went through a series of stages.
After a five year period as a large, wriggling white grub, and a further fifty or sixty years as a green-skinned, lizardish humanoid doing all the usual stuff humanoids do (having jobs, arguing about sports and giving birth to large, white maggoty grubs) the Cestrypippians would give away all their possessions, say farewell to their families and put down roots, put out leaves and spend a century as a slow-dreaming tree. When the dream was ended, they would shed their bark, pull their feet from the soil and spend a vigorous decade in their final life stage as a shouty but encouraging PE teacher.
It was during his humanoid life stage that the great Cestrypian scientist Harknow-Bumfurly-Histlock formed a plan to explore and investigate the entire galaxy.
He talked the people of his world into taking apart some of the other, less important planets in their solar system and using them to build a fleet of Huge Space-Going Robots (each filled with a host of smaller robots) which they would send flying out to nearby star systems to explore and investigate and compile detailed reports on.
Within a few centuries of their launch, the first giant space-going robots started beaming back images of new planets, strange stars and amusingly shaped asteroids for the Cestrypippians to compile into the fabled Harknow-Bumfurly-Histlock Big Book of Galactic Facts™, the ultimate collection of galactic information, stored in enormous computers buried deep beneath the Croomock mountain range and powered by the magma heart of the planet itself.
And so it began.
CHAPTER THREE
Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
LAST TUESDAY
‘SO, MRS HUMMOCK,’ Greta Zargo said (as she pressed ‘Press’ on her press badge). ‘Give me the facts. Just the facts.’
‘Pardon?’
(Mrs Hummock, a lady of early late middle age with large blonde hair, a small grey beard and extravagant purple-rimmed glasses, had opened the door to find a little girl standing there smiling at her. The little girl had said she was writing a story for The Local Newspaper, which had sounded quite sweet, but now that the questioning had begun Mrs Hummock was beginning to have doubts.)
‘What sort of cake was it?’
‘It was a sponge,’ Mrs Hummock said, ‘with peanut butter fondant icing. You see, Mrs Wedlock likes –’
‘This cake,’ Greta interrupted, not wanting to hear about Mrs Wedlock.1 It was important to keep the focus on the facts. ‘Where was it when it went missing?’
Greta had her notepad out and tapped it urgently with her short pencil.
‘When it went missing?’ Mrs Hummock asked.
‘That’s what I said. Quit stalling, lady.’
Greta had read more than the usual amount of detective novels for a girl her age. Her mother had been a fan of Augusta Crispy and had left a complete set of her novels on the third shelf down in the second bedroom. This was exactly how the private eyes in them spoke.
Mrs Hummock looked puzzled for a moment, huffed, and then said, ‘But if I knew where it was when it went missing, it wouldn’t be missing, would it?’
Greta sighed. This being-an-investigative-reporter business was hard work when you went face to face with the intellectual giants of Upper Lowerbridge.
‘Mrs Hummock,’ she said, looking sternly at the woman through narrowed eyes, ‘why are you being so unhelpful? What is it you’ve got to hide? Did your cake really go missing, or did you just eat it? Is that it? Mrs Wedlock comes round for afternoon tea and you’re too embarrassed to admit you’ve already eaten the cake? You make up some ridiculous story about a cake theft to cover your embarrassment? But then the police are called and they dust your kitchen for fingerprints and now there’s no way you can get back to the truth. Not without being arrested for wasting police time. Is that it? Did you eat the cake, Mrs Hummock? Did you eat it?’
Mrs Hummock stood slightly dazed and windswept by the unexpected force of Greta’s questions, her mouth hanging slack and her glasses askew. Eleven-year-old girls were supposed to be nicer than this. They were supposed to respect their elders.
After a moment Mrs Hummock closed her mouth.
After another moment she spoke.
‘I’m going to talk to Wilf about this,’ she said, before slamming the front door in Greta’s face.
Wilf was Wilfred Inglebath, Greta’s boss, who was also Mrs Hummock’s brother-in-law.
Greta walked up the path with a slump in her shoulders.
It had turned out that Hari Socket’s Battenberg had just been the beginning of things. When Sophie Doodad (in the corner shop) had told her that Mrs Hummock’s cake had gone missing too, she’d rushed round, eager to get an exclusive.
But she’d been too eager. She’d let the little whiff of a Big Scoop make her forget who she was. Forgot where she was. She’d started acting like a hard-nosed detective from the big city rather than a small-time summer-holiday schoolgirl-cum-journalist from the not-exactly-bustling small country town.
Five minutes later she cycled into her street and up on to the pavement outside her house.
‘Hi, Greta,’ said Jessica Plumb, the girl from number five who was Greta’s best friend and let her copy her answers in maths lessons.
‘There was a big silvery robot asking after you earlier. It said it would call again. Flew off with a slow, quiet whoosh. A bit like that blackbird. The asthmatic one.’
Greta had too much on her mind right then to pay attention to what Jessica was saying, so she smiled, nodded and went ‘Uh-huh’ as she dropped her bike on the grass of the front garden.
‘I’m excited about the Cohens’ party on Friday,’ Jessica said, bouncing a little. ‘I’m starting work on my costume tonight, but I’m not going to tell you wha
t it is. I want it to be a surprise. Mum’s bought me some extra tin foil though.’
‘Tin foil,’ said Greta, for the sake of saying something.
(Jessica was so good at her side of a conversation that Greta never needed to say very much to keep her happy, which was fortunate because Greta never really knew what to say to Jessica. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her – Jessica was her best friend. It was more that Greta was never quite sure what friends were actually for … what you were supposed to do with them.)
‘Cheerio,’ Greta said as she opened her front door.
‘Cheerio,’ waved Jessica from the pavement.
Greta went indoors, and as she was wondering how she could write up her very short interview, the telephone rang.
‘Hello?’
‘Greta?’
‘Yes, Mr Inglebath?’
‘I want a word with you, young lady.’
‘Yes, Mr Inglebath?’
‘Do you know what that word is?’
‘No, Mr Inglebath.’
‘Fired.’
‘Oh, Mr Inglebath.’
She put the phone down.
She had a word for Mr Inglebath too, but being only eleven years old, and knowing her mother wouldn’t have approved of her using language2, refused to think it.
1Mrs Wedlock was Mrs Hummock’s gossip partner. The two of them got together several times a week to share rumours and say rude things about everyone else in the town. Mrs Hummock did the talking while Mrs Wedlock did the tutting, but Greta already knew that.
2Clause thirty-seven of her parents’ Last Will and Testament said: Greta, darling, do try to speak nicely. Keep the swearing to a minimum, please.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ramflot
657 LIGHT YEARS FROM EARTH 73,102 YEARS AGO
THE PEOPLE OF the planet Ramflot had been surprised by the appearance of a silvery floating robot in their caves, partly because they didn’t see many silvery floating robots any more, but mostly because it was Thursday.
Greta Zargo and the Death Robots from Outer Space Page 1