No. The Bar-Tarry-Tuffians never did any of that, because the Bar-Tarry-Tuffians never let on just how angry they were. None of them ever said anything. They had been brought up to be polite to one another and to not make a fuss. So they all smiled and just got on with their lives as if they were perfectly happy. But they weren’t.
For example, when Filtash Quink was swimming lengths and Putnose Flarnk bellyflopped into the pool, making Quink breathe some unexpected water and lose count, the conversation went like this:
FQ, treading water, talking to himself: ‘Blast. I’ve lost count of the number of lengths I’ve swum. Was it one hundred and seventeen or one hundred and eighteen? Oh blow, I’m just going to have to start again.’
PF, seeing Quink and swimming over: ‘Hey, Quink! Did I splash you? Soz, mate.’
FQ, happily: ‘No problem, Flarnk. I needed the exercise. Ha ha!’
PF, swimming off, noisily: ‘Jolly good, buddy.’
FQ, shouting after PF: ‘No worries. It’s all good. Have a nice day, friend.’
FQ, inside: Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.
And then one day a silvery robot descended from the sky and landed in the city square, in amongst a whole crowd of Bar-Tarry-Tuffians.
‘Take me to your leader,’ it said in a calm, friendly metallic voice.
‘Leader?’ they said.
‘Yes,’ the machine said. ‘Please take me to your leader.’
As the robot spoke, something strange happened.
The crowd of Bar-Tarry-Tuffians found themselves thinking, Why on Faddertyre VI does the robot want to see him?
Glaunch Wedfarc had only recently been elected Notwash. Wedfarc is an incompetent imbecile, they thought. Not only does he have three widdlepaps1 and that weird orange glumblefloam2, but he tilts his head-lobe to the left in a really annoying way whenever he speaks. It’s too much to stand. Just too much!
‘You don’t want to see him,’ said one Bar-Tarry-Tuffian. ‘He’s an idiot.’
The other Bar-Tarry-Tuffians looked at the Bar-Tarry-Tuffian who had just spoken her mind to this robotic visitor and they were amazed. Their speaking tubes flopped with admiration (mixed with a seething anger at the fact that they hadn’t said it first).
‘Nevertheless,’ said the robot, ‘it is my desire to speak to your leader.’
‘He’s a jerk,’ whispered another Bar-Tarry-Tuffian, with a secret thrill.
‘A right pimbledot,’ said a third, blushingly.3
‘He’s a disgrace to the name of Wedfarc. My uncle was called Wedfarc and he was wonderful. How dare the Notwash go around with the same name as my uncle! What a grippit!’4
The voices were getting angrier.
What had happened? What was going on? No one had ever spoken like this before.
There was something about this visitor, this stranger, this thing from beyond Faddertyre VI, this outsider, that made them feel, for once, they didn’t need to hide their feelings, that made them feel that, for the first time in their lives, they could open up and tell the truth and they wouldn’t be judged for it.
And it felt so good.
The silvery robot didn’t judge them. It didn’t tut or humph or look disappointed; it just floated there looking silvery and robotic, listening to whatever they wanted to say.
When reports of what was happening in that distant city square reached the Notwash’s office, the Notwash was furious, absolutely fuming. How dare they, the people for whom he worked his flippers to the nub every day … how dare they say such awful, hurtful things about him? It was absolutely unfair and unheard of. His emotions bubbled inside him like molten lava in a shoddily constructed volcano.
‘It’s a very pretty day today, lovely sunshine. Very warm and pleasant,’ he said to Gufftog, his assistant.
When the robot arrived in the Notwash’s office five minutes later, it said, ‘Please may we have your planet?’ as usual, unaware of the disturbance it had been causing.
Wedfarc Glaunch, the Notwash of Faddertyre VI, looked at this strange metal thing from beyond the world of the Bar-Tarry-Tuffians and felt the same loosening of good manners that the others had experienced in the city square.
He looked at the robot floating there in mid-air, all silvery and with little flashing lights, and realised that this thing probably didn’t care about etiquette and not hurting anyone else’s feelings. It was a messenger from beyond and it just wanted to know the truth.
‘Please may we have your planet?’ it asked again.
Wedfarc thought about all the irritating Bar-Tarry-Tuffians he had met during his lifetime and about the annoying shade of blue the sky always insisted on being.
He thought about the noise Gufftog made when she chewed yaffle5 and about how you could never get fresh sadboll6 in the city.
He thought about the way it always rained when he’d forgotten his hat, but never when he remembered it, and how all the Bar-Tarry-Tuffians he passed on the way to his office had four widdlepaps.
The volcano that had sat dormant but bubbling inside him for his entire life finally burst and he said, shouted almost, ‘Goodness, yes! Take the planet! Take it all! Good luck to you, silvery robot-thing!’
And he ripped off his clothes and rolled on the floor in utter, sheer pleasure, burbling to himself and saying all the things he’d never been able to say before.
Faddertyre VI is not there any more.
1A widdlepap is a bit like a spunion, but typically a slightly different shade of quelch, much longer and used for fallshappling rather than follshippling.
2A glumblefloam is simply another name for an ilfbelp.
3A pimbledot is a fruit that smells a bit like a Bar-Tarry-Tuffian’s second elbow joint.
4A grippit is a small unsatisfying meal, only eaten while on a small unsatisfying holiday.
5Yaffle is a thick porridge-like drink, made from the juice extracted from pimbledots. By the time it has been made into yaffle, the smell has mostly gone.
6Sadboll looks almost exactly like the Earth plant spinach, but tastes almost exactly like lipplopp juice. It is prized by Bar-Tarry-Tuffians because no one enjoys squeezing lipplopps to get the juice out, especially not the lipplopps.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
LAST THURSDAY, TEATIME
IT TOOK GRETA a few moments to work out where she was.
It was dark and warm in the cupboard.
She’d been asleep.
She pushed the door open and carefully climbed out.
On the kitchen table there was a plate but … no cake.
‘Blast it,’ she said.
She’d missed the thief, when they’d struck in her own house in the very trap she’d set to catch them. If only that cupboard hadn’t been so dark and warm, and if only the thief hadn’t taken so long.
She examined the plate to see if there were any clues.
A few crumbs and a couple of little spiky muddy smears on the wood of the table.
Were they clues?
The crumbs were from the carrot cake – she was sure of that – but what was the mud?
She looked over at the kitchen window.
On the lip of the sink, which was set into the countertop just below the window, were a few more muddy marks.
Greta had left the window open just a few inches and it didn’t seem to be open much further now.
She looked closer.
There were more crumbs there, carroty ones, but there was something else too.
Snagged on the window frame were a few tufty hairs.
Getting a pair of tweezers from her bedroom she picked them off the frame and dropped them into an envelope for safe keeping.
They were grey.
So, she thought, the Upper Lowerbridge Cake Thief had grey hair. Or, more correctly: the Upper Lowerbridge Cake Thief was missing some grey hair.
This was the first clue that actually gave her something solid to look for: a small person missing some grey hair. How many peopl
e could that be? How many people could she now eliminate from her enquiries? Loads, probably.
And then, as she was examining her thoughts, she heard a noise. Outside.
She pulled the back door open and something moved, knocking over a flowerpot and darting away.
She caught only a fleeting glimpse of the person who’d run (they’d definitely been short and grey), but by the time Greta reached the edge of the patio, they’d already leapt over the hole at the far end of the garden and scrabbled across the great mound of earth beyond it, over the top and out of sight.
It had been the thief.
There were crumbs all over the patio. Some of them quite big.
What sort of person with grey hair could move like that? The thief had run at speed, bouncing along, and with one swift jump had leapt the hole. With almost supernatural nimbleness, they had got away.
If only she’d been quicker and had got a better look at them.
There’d been something else weird about the thief; she was sure of that. It had looked as if they’d been wearing a huge furry backpack. Old people (those with grey hair) didn’t often wear great big fluffy backpacks, she thought, or run so fast.
Maybe the thief was a grey-haired kid?
Greta ran through a mental list of all the kids in her school and none of them had grey hair, and most of them were taller than the thief anyway. The Great Upper Lowerbridge Cake Thief (which was what she thought she’d call them in the paper) had been very short.
It was frustrating.
Next time she’d just have to be smarter, quicker, sharper.
Would the thief fall for a second trap if she laid one? It seemed unlikely. Maybe she’d just have to wait for someone else’s cake to go missing? How could she work out where the thief would strike next?
It was then that something Jessica had said the other day popped into her mind like a tiny memory-shaped balloon: there was to be a party. She’d said something about tin foil.
Unable to remember any more, Greta jumped the low fence in between her garden and that of Brigadier Ryefoot-fforwerd (Rtd1), who lived next door, scooted across his lawn (as he stood on his patio and shouted at her, shaking his stick and turning red2) and jumped the fence on the other side.
‘Jessica,’ she shouted.
A window on the first floor of the house in whose garden Greta now stood opened and Jessica stuck her head out.
‘Hi, Greta,’ she said. ‘I was just about to have a biscuit.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Greta. ‘You said something about a party?’3
‘It’s at the Cohens’ house, Friday night.’
‘Will there be cake?’
‘There’s always cake at the Cohens’ parties, Greta. Don’t you remember last year when Sophie Doodad ate too much and fell in the pond?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Greta, ‘of course.’
She remembered the chocolate cake, which had had a horrible coffee cream in the middle of it. She also remembered there were an awful lot of other cakes there too. Would the cake thief be able to resist so many cakes all in one place? Unlikely.
‘What are you going as?’ Jessica asked.
But Greta was too busy thinking about finally catching the thief to hear the question.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, as she jumped back over the low fence and headed home.
‘Goodbye,’ said Jessica, waving at her best friend and listening to Brigadier Ryefoot-fforwerd (Rtd) shouting. She made a note of some of the more colourful language in the special glittery notebook she kept for vocabularial purposes.
1‘Rtd’ is an abbreviation of the word ‘retired’, which means he’s no longer in the army, not that he’s recently had new air-filled rubber bits fitted to his wheels.
2Brigadier Ryefoot-fforwerd only had three volumes: shouting, snoring and silence. The third of these could very occasionally be heard in the small gaps between the other two.
3Clause nineteen of Greta’s parents’ Last Will and Testament said, Greta, darling, do try to attend as many fancy dress parties as possible, especially those held by our near neighbours, the Cohens. It wasn’t Greta’s favourite bit of the will. She found parties a bit confusing, all those people expecting you to say things to them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Belf-Trooga
4.3 LIGHT YEARS FROM EARTH 438 YEARS AGO
THE SMALL, FURRY creatures that inhabited the planet Belf-Trooga had found the journey to civilisation to be a long and difficult one.
The main cause of difficulty was that Belf-Trooga was a windy planet and the Belf-Troogans were a small and furry people. Fire is an essential stepping stone on the path across the river of progress, but when you are small and furry and the weather’s windy, fire isn’t always your friend.
As it happened, fire was actually discovered many times by many different Belf-Troogans over the millennia. Most Belf-Troogans who witnessed the discovery of fire by a fellow Belf-Troogan (a) vowed never to discover fire themselves, because it looked noisy, hot and painful, and (b) ate tasty, freshly cooked meat for the first time in their small, furry lives.
Eventually a Belf-Troogan called Feefal, who took the bold step of growing so old that she went bald, plucked a blazing branch from a lightning-struck tree and didn’t immediately burst into flames herself. Instead she poked several long-haired verfell-hogs with the burning stick and watched as they became juicy, flavoursome and calorifically rich meals.
And so it was that Feefal finally set her people on the long road to civilisation, and now, several thousand years later, Belf-Trooga was a planet on its way up.
Glorious shining cities reached for the skies and glorious shining ships sailed the oceans. Belf-Troogans had even ventured into space, sending back photos of amusingly shaped asteroids, and there was a general feeling of optimism in the air. Belf-Trooga was a planet at peace with enough food for everyone; skateboards were back in fashion and a new series of Once a Deptrok, Always a Deptrok was beginning in the autumn. Ah, but it was bliss to be alive in those times.
And then, as if from nowhere, a strange silvery robot landed in the main square of Belf-Trooga’s main city, Belt-Nagling.
‘Take me to your leader,’ it said.
‘We all lead,’ said a surprised, passing Belf-Troogan. ‘This is a democracy. Look, here is my voting pod.’
From underneath its fur it produced a little device with glowing buttons. Every few minutes the voting pod would buzz and a question would appear on the little screen and the Belf-Troogans would press the appropriate button and the votes of the whole race would be tallied up by a giant computer that would then make something happen.
In centuries past, long and desperate wars had been fought in the name of democracy, and now, finally, it was here in its truest form and at last everyone felt included, felt a part of the system. Everyone’s vote was counted and every vote counted. No one was left out.
The voting pod buzzed and the Belf-Troogan talking to the robot said, ‘Excuse me a moment,’ read the question (‘Should ziffgubs be blue or green this week?’), pressed one of the pod’s buttons (‘Blue’) and turned back to the robot.
‘You are the leader?’ the robot asked.
‘Yes. As much as anyone,’ said the Belf-Troogan.
‘Very well. Please may we have your planet?’
The Belf-Troogan’s fur fluffed like a startled krowt-pip.
‘Pardon?’ it said, just to make sure it had heard right.
‘Please may we have your planet?’
However polite the question had been, the Belf-Troogan didn’t like it. Its species had spent thousands of years living through history, not always happily, not always easily. And now some silvery robot from outer space just turned up and asked to have the planet? The hard sacrifices made by generations of Belf-Troogans to ensure their offspring would finally know democracy and daylight and skateboards bubbled inside the small, furry creature. No shiny silver robot was going to take that away from them.
; ‘Over my dead body,’ it said, pulling itself up to its small height and rippling its fur in an aggressive manner.
The silvery robot lifted up in the air and whirred as it double-checked its language banks. It didn’t want to make a mistake.
‘Thank you,’ it said, and, opening a little hatch in its side, extended a painless death ray towards the Belf-Troogan, who collapsed in a painless dead heap.
One problem with robots is, of course, their habit of taking everything at face value; that is to say that they always assume people are telling them the truth. They don’t recognise nuance and metaphor, subtlety and delicacy, tiptoeing and sidestepping in a language, that is to say, wordplay and poetry, smoke and mirrors, cheekiness and talking round the houses, and so you should always be careful and clear when speaking to them. If you mean no, just say ‘no’.
Within the hour a fleet of silvery robots had completed their survey of the planet and the more destructive robots had begun their syphoning, storing, dismantling and recycling work.
No amount of pressing the ‘Ask the Death Robots from Outer Space to Leave’ button on their voting pods had any effect. It was too late; the robots were no longer listening.
And so another planet was replaced by a huge blue Memory Station spinning slowly and silently, sharing images of a lost people and a lost place within the cosmos, as another entry for the Harknow-Bumfurly-Histlock Big Book of Galactic Facts™ was beamed back across the galaxy towards distant Cestrypip.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
LAST FRIDAY, BREAKFAST-TIME
FRIDAY MORNING ARRIVED at about eight o’clock and Greta woke up.
She normally went to visit her grandads, Jasper and Zoltan Zargo, on a Friday. (She caught the bus in the morning during the holidays, or after school during the not-holidays.)
Greta Zargo and the Death Robots from Outer Space Page 4