The Ramflottians never visited one another’s caves on a Thursday. It had always been considered unlucky ever since Rarf had hit her head on an unexpected stalactite while visiting Glarf’s cave on a Thursday three weeks before.
The inhabitants of this particular cave stared at the robot with wide eyes and narrow mouths.
‘Art flarge grongko pop pip,’ the hovering robot said, meaning, ‘Take me to your leader.’
The robot had learnt the Ramflottian language from television signals it had picked up in space on its approach to the Ramflottian solar system. Unfortunately, in the time between the robot’s learning the language and its arrival on Ramflot, a series of rather serious global wars had taken place, which explained why the last seventeen Ramflottians were all living in caves.1
Before the war there had been two languages spoken on Ramflot. Uniquely, both languages had consisted of exactly the same words, but each language used those words to mean different things. The upshot was, if you didn’t check carefully which language the Ramflottian you were speaking to spoke, it was remarkably easy to accidentally insult her. Which explained the recent series of rather serious global wars.
Which in turn explained why the Ramflottians the silvery robot encountered were dressed in animal skins instead of the super-smart business suits they’d worn in the television shows the robot had watched.
Robot: ‘Art flarge grongko pop pip.’
Meaning, in the Ramflottian language off the television: ‘Take me to your leader.’
But meaning, in the Ramflottian language spoken in the cave: ‘A yellow fruit, a bit like a hinkleberry, smells of sadness.’
Rarf, turning to Harrerf, one of the other Ramflottians in the cave: ‘Art flarge gringki pop pop.’
Meaning, in the Ramflottian language spoken in the cave: ‘Those yellow fruits, a bit like hinkleberries, do smell a lot like sadness, don’t they?’
But meaning, in the Ramflottian language off the television: ‘Here. This is our leader, just here.’
The floating robot, turning to Harrerf: ‘Crumk bilf tiffle pop pip pop?’
Meaning, in the Ramflottian language off the television: ‘Please may we have your planet?’
But meaning, in the Ramflottian language spoken in the cave: ‘How tall is your aunt, not including her hat?’
Harrerf, shrugging: ‘Grampf.’
Meaning, in the Ramflottian language spoken in the cave: ‘Huh? I do not have an aunt, and she does not have a hat. Who are you, strange intruder-into-Thursday? Maybe you should come back tomorrow, and ask about my uncle.’
But meaning, unfortunately, in the Ramflottian language off the television: ‘Yes, take our planet.’
The silvery robot said thank you (or ‘Plike afgoff rilp felp dagog burf werf wilf pip pap aggle cade cathell brime welf paddlog’, which was about the only phrase that was the same in both Ramflottian languages2) and drifted away with a slow, quiet whoosh of unknown energy into the Ramflottian sky.
These sorts of coincidental conversations are exactly what keep the universe running the way it does, which is proof, some philosophers suggest, if any were needed, that there must be a much better organised universe somewhere else that we’ve not been invited to.
* * *
Once the silvery robot had reported the answer back to the Huge Space-Going Robot, a thousand other small silvery robots of different shapes and sizes emerged from its insides and flew towards Ramflot.
The robots circled around, taking measurements and photographs and recording all the important stuff before they dismantled the planet.
All the rocks and metals and gases that had once been the planet Ramflot were used to build another six Huge Space-Going Robots, each filled with a thousand smaller silvery robots, and all aimed at other nearby star systems judged by their vast computer brains as being ripe and ready for exploration.
And, finally, the original Huge Space-Going Robot transformed itself into an enormous round blue space station orbiting Ramflot’s sun, just as Ramflot once had. It turned its antennae toward that little spot of space where the home planet Cestrypip was and beamed back all the information it had collected about Ramflot and its seventeen inhabitants.
Off into space flew images of them and of the Ramflottian flora and fauna, along with details of its size and position and how many moons it had had, and copies of the television programmes it had recorded on its long approach to the planet: information that would become a brand new in-depth entry in the Harknow-Bumfurly-Histlock Big Book of Galactic Facts™.
1An intelligent species only lives in caves twice in its history, once on the way up and once on the way down.
2That and ‘Pilf foolp flartle dowg’ of course, which meant ‘My silver jumpsuit has been at the dry cleaner’s since Monday’.
CHAPTER FIVE
Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
LAST WEDNESDAY
SOPHIE DOODAD RAN the shop on the corner.
Greta had popped in to buy some sherbet and a pair of rubber gloves.
‘There’s been another ’nother theft,’ Sophie had whispered as she handed Greta her change.
‘Another ’nother theft?’ Greta had asked.
‘Another ’nother cake’s gone missing,’ Sophie had whispered, tapping the side of her nose.
‘Oh,’ Greta had replied.
‘Swiss roll,’ Sophie had whispered, looking around to make sure they weren’t being listened to. ‘Oscar Teachbaddly.’
Greta’s brain had buzzed.
‘Thought you should know,’ Sophie had whispered.
‘Thanks,’ Greta had said.
She hadn’t had the heart to tell Sophie that she didn’t need to know, not any more, not since she’d been fired from the newspaper.
But she was still thinking about Mr Teachbaddly’s vanishing Swiss roll as she pottered about in the garden later that morning. (Not having any parents left to do the gardening meant that she did it herself.1 Over the years she’d grown a wide variety of weeds, tangles and both under- and overgrowth. There was, however, a small patch of carefully cultivated flower bed near the back door that she actually kept looking neat. And this was where she was pottering as she thought.)
There was nothing she wanted more than to rush round to Mr Teachbaddly’s house and ask him some Very Nosy Questions.
‘Was there anyone else in the house when the cake went missing? How long were you upstairs for? Were there any doors or windows open?’ (It had been a warm evening, stuffy and sticky, she remembered.)
‘Ouch!’ she said suddenly, pulling her hand away with a sting of pain.
She’d not been concentrating on what she was doing and one of Aunt Tabitha’s clawberries had bitten her.2
It had bitten quite deep and there was blood pooling on the back of her hand.
Giving the clawberry plant a stern stare, which was entirely pointless since the clawberry didn’t have any eyes to see the stern stare with, Greta clambered to her feet and headed back to the kitchen to clean the bite and find a plaster.
As the water gushed out of the tap and the pipes gurgled and clanked (she really needed to get someone to come and look at those) the doorbell rang.
‘Just a minute,’ she shouted.
But by the time she’d dried her hand off and pressed the plaster in place, whoever had rung the bell had gone away.
She stood at the open door, smelling a faint whiff of something strange, looking at an empty patch of front path and not noticing the quietly whooshing silvery robot floating away above her head.
1Aunt Tabitha attempted to help out now and then. For example, she’d once made Greta an automatic spade to help with the digging, but once it had been switched on they had been unable to switch it off, since Aunt Tabitha had misplaced the remote control. It had dug and dug and dug. So now, Greta simply didn’t go near that end of the garden any more. Sometimes when she looked out of an upstairs window at night, she saw a flickering glow from deep in the hole reflecting up o
n to the undersides of the trees.
2Aunt Tabitha had developed the clawberry, a strawberry plant that was trained in self-defence, as another attempt to make gardening easier. No slug survived an encounter with the clawberry, and the more slugs the clawberry ate, the fatter and juicier its berries became (which was nice, even if they tasted a little of slug).
CHAPTER SIX
Lemmerold
387 LIGHT YEARS FROM EARTH 42,973 YEARS AGO
LEMMEROLD WAS INHABITED by highly talkative blimp-like beings who drifted through algae-like clouds. They siphoned food from the air with their many eating-holes, while simultaneously singing the songs of their people with their many singing-holes.
They sang very loudly, and their songs contained all the gossip, all the wisdom, all the boasts, all the histories and all the knowledge that the Lemmeroldians had gathered over the centuries of their drifting, airborne lives.
The reason they sang so loudly was that Lemmeroldians didn’t get on very well with one another. (Mainly because of all the gossip, wisdom, boasts, histories and knowledge that other Lemmeroldians insisted on singing when they should have been listening to my song, they each thought.)
It had been lifetimes since any Lemmeroldian had actually heard what any other Lemmeroldian had to say, and so most of the gossip, wisdom, boasts, histories and knowledge was long out of date, fairly out of tune and totally unnecessary.
When the silvery robot landed on the back of one of the large, floating, drifting, singing Lemmeroldians, it spoke to a pik. (Piks were a small, intelligent, triangular-ish race with no ears, who farmed the barndub fields that grew on the mist-swathed backs of the Lemmeroldians.)
‘Take me to your leader,’ it said.
The pik said nothing, but looked at the robot as if it had never seen a large, silvery floating metal thing with flashing lights before. (Which it hadn’t.)
The Lemmeroldian it was stood on had just finished a long verse about why greenish purple algae-like clouds are better than purple-ish green algae-like clouds, and was beginning a new verse about how someone called Quallllm had once borrowed a flowmp-droffer from someone called Qualllum and had not yet given it back.
As the pik felt the familiar, comforting rumble of the Lemmeroldian’s song change and shift beneath its feet, it understood that everything was perfectly normal, even with this never-before-seen metal thing flashing lights at it. The pik knelt down and patted the good, comforting Lemmeroldian. Then it stood up, got on with hoeing the damp skin-soil and ignored the New Thing.
The robot interpreted the pik’s patting as meaning ‘Here is my leader,’ which wasn’t entirely incorrect.
It floated down to hover beside the giant eyeball of the singing, drifting Lemmeroldian and, having studied the creature’s song for several hours, sang, ‘Please may we have your planet?’ quite loudly and slightly out of tune.
‘“Yes, yes, yes, of course! A hundred times yes,” said Quallllm,’ sang the Lemmeroldian, ignoring the robot, just as it had ignored the rest of its singing species for thousands of years. It continued its operatic warble:
Again Quallllm said, ‘Yes.’
Flowmp-droffer was useless at that time of year,
but had he known … had he known!
A quarter solar cycle later he would need it.
Need it a lot!
But where was Qualllum now?
Where was Qualllum?
And where, oh, where was the flowmp-droffer?
… and so on, for several weeks.
But the silvery robot had listened no further than the first ‘yes’ before it flew off with a slow, quiet whoosh of unknown energy.
* * *
The Lemmeroldians continued singing the songs of their people, and the piks continued tending to their barndub fields, right up until the planet no longer existed.
Images of the planet and its inhabitants, measurements and recordings, beamed across the depths of darkest space towards the planet Cestrypip to become another entry in the Harknow-Bumfurly-Histlock Big Book of Galactic Facts™.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
LAST THURSDAY, BREAKFAST-TIME
WHEN GRETA TRIED to have her breakfast she discovered that the cornflake packet contained two cornflakes. It wasn’t much of a breakfast for a young lady of her height and haircut.
She gave a deep sigh but tipped them into a bowl nevertheless.
When she went to the fridge to get some milk to put on top of them, she discovered she had plenty of milk. A big bottle, nearly full.
As she tipped it, however, the bottle slipped and a great big glug of milk sloshed out, filling the bowl and splashing all over the countertop.
The two cornflakes were swept away, over the edge of the counter, along the kitchen floor and under the washing machine.
Greta put the milk bottle down and stared at the mess.
Even though two cornflakes weren’t much, she’d still been looking forward to them.
She had tried to make toast for her supper last night, but the bread had gone mouldy.
The biscuit barrel looked like it had biscuits in, but they were just the paintings of biscuits on the side of the jar.
There was sherbet in the cupboard, but she was saving that for her lunch.
It was at times like this that she almost wished her mum and dad hadn’t died in that marshmallow factory accident. One of them would’ve gone up to Doodad’s corner shop and bought some more cornflakes for her. Greta was in her pyjamas and she didn’t fancy going out like that and she didn’t have anyone else to send, so she just sat at the kitchen table and drank milk from the bowl with a spoon.
And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, there was a knock at the doorbell.
She half-smiled and half-sighed.
The only person she knew who knocked on her doorbell (three short, sharp rings) was Aunt Tabitha, and Greta didn’t know if she could face her today. She was always so jolly and Greta didn’t feel jolly in the slightest. She felt like a failure. No parents. No breakfast. No job.
No Big Scoop.
Slump.
The letterbox rattled.
‘Rise and shine. Cooee! Greta. Up and at ’em. Cooee!’ her aunt called through the oblong slot.
‘I’m not in,’ shouted Greta. ‘I’m still in bed. I’ve gone to the shops. I’m on Mars.’
A key rattled in the lock and the front door opened.
‘Morning, darling,’ Aunt Tabitha said, looking her up and down and plonking some bubbling cheese on toast on the table. ‘I heard what happened from Wilf.’1
‘Oh yes?’ said Greta.
‘I must say,’ her aunt went on as she poured some hot chocolate from a flask into a cup, ‘I gave him a piece of my mind.’
‘Which piece?’
‘Number 8.’
That was, Greta knew from experience, quite a serious piece.
She mumbled some extra thanks as she gobbled the cheese on toast.
‘I don’t think I’ll be getting a Christmas card from him this year,’ Tabitha said.
‘I didn’t mean to get you in trouble, Auntie,’ said Greta as she sipped the hot chocolate.
‘Don’t be so silly, Greta,’ her aunt said, opening the fridge and looking inside. ‘You know I don’t care about Christmas cards, and anyway I expect by Christmas he’ll have forgotten he’s not sending me one and it’ll probably turn up just as normal.’
Greta poked at her half-empty bowl of milk with her spoon. She had a feeling bubbling deep in her stomach that was saying two things to her. Firstly it was saying, Greta, when you get back to school you won’t have anything interesting to write in your ‘What I did during the summer holidays’ essay, and the Head will have won. And secondly it said, Greta, cakes have been going missing left, right and centre and only you can find out why.
‘Auntie,’ she said, not listening to her stomach. ‘I’m going back to bed. I’m going to stay there until I’m old enough to not have to go
back to school.’
‘Oh,’ said her aunt. ‘If only I’d got the regenerating edible pyjamas to work, then maybe you could, but … Or perhaps I could try a pillow-cake. Lavender-scented, maybe, to encourage sleep …?’
‘Cakes,’ Greta mumbled. She explained to Aunt Tabitha about all the cakes that had gone missing in the last few days, and how she couldn’t investigate the mystery now Mr Inglebath had sacked her.
‘Pish and nonsense,’ replied her aunt, banging the table. ‘The Greta I know has been an investigative reporter from the day she solved the Riddle of the Missing Asparagus2 when she was just four years old.’
‘You still don’t like asparagus, do you?’ said Greta.
‘No, and people still insist on serving it. I’ve had to build a bigger handbag.’
Greta smiled, and then stopped smiling.
‘But Mr Inglebath fired me, Aunt,’ she repeated.
‘Did that stop you from solving the Mystery of the Unexpected Dalmatian?3 You didn’t have a job then, did you? In actual fact, you had a spelling test.’
‘Which I failed.’
‘Failing a spelling test is hardly the end of the world, darling. It’s really not that important.’
Greta shrugged.
‘Greta, dear,’ her aunt went on, ‘it’s always you who has the presence of mind and determination to look into these things, who cares enough about The Truth to hunt it down wherever it may be. Remember when you solved the Enigma of the Cross Bees?4 Hmm?’
‘OK, Auntie,’ Greta said, standing up and filled with fire. ‘Enough now! You’re right. I can’t just let this go. Cakes have gone missing and someone has to work out why and where and who and when and how and why and where. I was Mr Inglebath’s best reporter –’
Greta Zargo and the Death Robots from Outer Space Page 2