Golden Spy

by Jill Marshall

  ‘It’s a little boy,’ she told her mum, realizing that Jean did not have the advantage of Ultra-gogs. ‘Remember the boy we saw on the beach?’

  ‘Oh yes. The one on the rocket with us,’ said Jean. She let out a brittle laugh. ‘Listen to me. The one on the rocket. As if it was actually true!’

  ‘He’s looking for something. I’m going to help him.’ Without giving herself the chance to think it through more logically, Janey pointed her laser finger at her SPIsuit and pressed. The same ambient glow filtered out across the room, and the boy’s head snapped round towards her. As soon as he’d registered who she was, his face fell and he started to peer around the room again. ‘Well, it’s not us he’s interested in,’ said Janey. ‘Come with me, Mum.’

  Shuffling around in a close-linked pair, the marmoset still on Jean Brown’s shoulder, Janey and her mother edged towards the gorilla cage. Once the two inhabitants were lit up, swaying restlessly on their enormous knuckles, Janey looked straight into the boy’s eyes. He gazed at her for a moment, and then in a tiny shadow of a movement shook his head.

  ‘Not the gorillas then.’ Janey guided her mother across to the orang-utans and glanced at Twelve. Again he shook his head, glancing back along the corridor nervously before shaking his head more emphatically. ‘He can hear someone coming. Quickly.’ They stumbled sideways and illuminated the mesh enclosure of the smaller monkeys. No. Tears were welling up in Twelve’s eyes. Janey hurried on. There was only one cage left: the chimpanzees with their quiet, desperate chattering. One was clinging to the bars at the front of the cage, and her eyes – somehow Janey knew it was a girl, another girl, like herself – glimmered in the laser light with something that could have been tears too.

  And when Janey saw the expression of joy that spread up Twelve’s face at the sight of the chimpanzee, she knew that they had found what he was looking for. ‘It’s this one,’ she said, and moved closer to the cage so that Twelve would have a better view.

  Jean looked for a moment, then reached out a hand to the chimpanzee’s fingers. ‘Poor little thing. Is it his pet, do you think?’

  ‘Must be. He’s waving.’

  He was also beginning to look very panicked, Janey noticed. He waved again, turned his head to look back along the corridor and then turned to stare at Janey with such pleading in his eyes that Janey understood. These two – this boy and this chimp – wanted to be together. She knew it. When she recalled what he had drawn on the beach, she was absolutely sure. It wasn’t potatoes. It wasn’t food at all. It had been a clumsy attempt by a small boy to draw a chimpanzee.

  But what could she do? She lifted her arms and hands, tilted her head to one side and shrugged. It’s hopeless, she was trying to say. I don’t know what to do. Tell me how to help. Why’s this one so important?

  But of course he could not speak. ‘But he can use sign language,’ she said suddenly. She remembered what he had signed down to the chimp in the rocket’s hold earlier. Quickly she linked her pinky fingers together, tapped her fourth finger on her left hand twice, then slapped two fingers into her left palm. Then she nodded towards the chimpanzee, as if to say, ‘Shall I tell her?’

  And at that moment great tears started to roll down Twelve’s face. He nodded, then shrugged helplessly and whipped around to stare back down the corridor. What was it she had said? Janey knew that the two fingers and the fourth finger had spelled out NO. It was the most urgent puzzle she had ever had to work out. N was two fingers. O was a tap on the fourth finger. O was the fourth . . . something. But the fourth what?

  And like a lightning strike Janey knew what it meant. O was the fourth vowel. The word he’d been spelling out ended with N, had two Os preceeding it, and the first letter was something to do with two links, formed in this case by the two little fingers joined together. ‘Moon,’ she said hopefully. Twelve shook his head. ‘Two links . . . I . . . I don’t know . . . oh! S!’ she cried. ‘Soon!’

  Twelve nodded furiously as Jean said, ‘What?’

  Janey had no time to explain. ‘Soon. You’ll get her out soon?’

  At that the boy’s little face crumpled. He shook his head sadly, and Janey understood. It was too late. Janey’s breath caught in her throat. The boy looked devastated. Carefully moving one hand off the door frame, he held a fist near his heart in a gesture that Janey couldn’t mistake. ‘You love her. I’ll tell her,’ she shouted, hoping he could hear her through the thick door. ‘I’ll tell her you love her. Is she your pet?’

  But now Twelve turned around again. Someone was coming. He dropped out of sight, but just as Janey was turning to pass on his message to the chimpanzee, she saw both of his small hands in the window. He needed two hands but wasn’t tall enough to see through at the same time so was reaching above his head, his back to the door so Janey could see what he was saying.

  Both pinkies linked together. S.

  The index finger of the right hand tapping the middle finger of the left. No idea.

  Both pinkies linked again. S.

  Followed by . . . a time-out sign?

  Then the index finger of the right hand tapping the index finger of his left hand.

  Finally, his right index finger crooked against his left palm.

  Then the hands were whipped out of sight and footsteps rattled away down the corridor.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know what it means. S . . . something . . . S. SOS?’ Janey spread her hands and wiggled her fingers in frustration. ‘No, it can’t be, because O was the fourth finger. So the fingers are vowels, and the middle finger . . . A . . . E . . . I. It’s I. SIS . . .’

  Janey stopped short, looking up at her mum who was watching her in complete bewilderment. ‘S. I. S,’ she whispered. ‘Then a time-out sign. Or maybe that’s the sign for T. Second finger on the left hand, the second vowel. That’s E. S . . . I . . . S . . . T . . . E . . .’ And she put her rounded index finger in her palm as Twelve had done.

  ‘R,’ said Jean Brown, looking at the shape Janey had made. ‘Definitely R. S.I.S.T.E.R. Sister. But what does he mean?’

  ‘Sister!’ Janey’s voice could hardly get through her closed throat as she looked into the sad eyes of the chimpanzee. ‘She’s his sister.’

  ‘But he’s a boy,’ said Jean.

  But Janey knew the truth. ‘He is now, but he wasn’t always,’ she said, the full horror of what she had just discovered nudging against her brain, a dark shadow, threatening, deathly. ‘It’s R-Evolution. Rapid Evolution. That’s why Copernicus has got all these apes.’

  She turned slowly to look at all the faces behind the bars. And there had been more apes on the rocket.

  It was monstrous. ‘He’s not Twelve’s father. He hasn’t even given him a name. Just a number. There were twelve chimpanzees, and he was the twelfth. Copernicus made him, Mum. And he’s got all these others here so he can put them through the R-Evolution process.’

  Janey swallowed as her mother stared at her, puzzled. ‘You don’t mean . . .’ said Jean, slowly working it out.

  ‘He’s changing all these apes. Into humans.’ Janey could hardly believe it, but she knew that Copernicus was capable of anything. ‘He’s making his own human race.’

  And as soon as the words were out of her mouth, Janey understood what Copernicus planned to do. He would have his own breed of humans, spies, Copernicus followers. So he would have no use for the existing human race. In fact, they would simply get in the way.

  Jane Blonde, for one, intended to get in the way one last time. ‘Gina Bellarina,’ she said urgently, ‘we have to get out of here.’

  With a quick smile at the startled expression in her mother’s eyes, Janey headed for the gorilla cage just as someone else appeared at the door.

  tube signs

  As Janey released the gorillas from their cage, the door blasted open with G-Mamma, Mrs Halliday, Alfie and Tish still attached to it by their feet. The combined explosions of their Four-Fs had been enough to tear it from its hinges. Now the gorillas sprang into act
ion, wrenching the fronts off the cages and beating out a wild, threatening tattoo on their enormous chests as they followed the other escaping primates along the corridor.

  ‘Great gorilla bums!’ From the floor, where she was still lying, G-Mamma covered her face. ‘Don’t let that thing stand on me!’

  Janey helped her up. ‘They’ve gone. But there are others.’

  ‘We know that, Blonde,’ said Tish. ‘Two of them – well, we thought they were gorillas, but they turned out to be men – found us having a sneaky peek into Mission Control.’

  ‘We were thrown in a huge storage room with a load of them,’ said Alfie, with a look of disgust. ‘The stench was unbelievable.’

  ‘Hmm. You’ve obviously never emptied your PE bag,’ said his mother. ‘Jean, Janey – are you both OK?’

  Jean shot her a dark look, just the hint of a question hovering at the edges. ‘Apart from wishing we’d gone to Bournemouth on holiday, I think we’re fine.’

  But Janey knew they were going to be far from fine if they didn’t act quickly. ‘Listen: the little boy, Twelve, is an ex-chimpanzee. Those guards used to be gorillas. Copernicus is going to R-Evolutionize all those apes into humans, and then I bet he’ll try and destroy Earth with that laser beam he’s got trained on it.’

  ‘And you know all this how?’ said Alfie.

  Janey knew it because it all made sense. The logic, warped as it was, worked perfectly. In changing hippos into killer whales, Copernicus had been trying out the R-Evolution process. Once he’d perfected it, he’d tried it on a chimp and managed to turn it successfully – although Janey wasn’t really sure if it could count as ‘success’ – into a little boy. He knew he could do it, and now he was shipping apes away from Earth to populate a whole new planet. It was what he’d always wanted to do. Rule the universe. He’d even made his planet golden like the sun, just to be sure everything revolved around him, the Sun King.

  ‘There’s just something I want to check,’ she said as she reached for her PERSPIRE. ‘Let’s

  see.’ She typed ‘SIGN LANGUAGE’ into the search engine and a diagram popped up showing that she’d guessed correctly. Twelve definitely had been saying ‘soon’, ‘no’, and, most disturbingly, ‘sister’.

  British Sign Language

  Finger Spelling Alphabet

  She showed the others.

  ‘Far out!’ Alfie whistled. ‘So he made Twelve and now he’s passing him off as his son. Hey.’ A look of horror flashed across his face as a thought occurred to him. ‘You don’t think that I . . .’

  ‘It would explain a lot, Monkey Boy,’ said G-Mamma.

  His mother snorted. ‘Don’t be silly, Alfie. You’re perfectly normal . . . ish.’

  Janey spoke quickly and decisively. ‘We’ve got to get the other apes away from here so that they can’t be R-Evolutionized too.’

  ‘Back to Earth?’ said Tish hopefully.

  ‘I’m not sure Earth’s going to last very long,’ said Janey quietly. ‘Get as many as you can on the rocket. There may be another way out of here . . .’ When she’d seen Copernicus as she’d left the rocket, he had appeared out of nowhere. There had to be another way of coming and going from his planet. ‘I’ll go out and check.’

  Janey ran on ahead, anxious to see what their other escape route might be, though she knew that before they escaped she’d have to find out more about Copernicus’s laser beam. There was no point going back to Earth if he still had the means to destroy it. Although how a laser beam could destroy an entire planet, she wasn’t sure . . .

  It was only as she shot up the entry tube that Janey realized she hadn’t stopped to put on a spacesuit. Fear gripped her insides: without the protection of the suit and the gravity boots, she might well find herself launched out of the tube and straight into space. There was no way she could stop and so she thrust her SPIder between her lips and chewed furiously. If it supplied oxygen underwater, maybe it could do the same for her in space.

  She popped out of the entry tube and looked around. The ‘Copernicus’ bus stop was just visible in the distance and she strode towards it, leaping in strange clumsy bounds as her Four-Fs ripped away from the planet and then made contact again with an odd magnetic pull. The Supersized piece of the Earth’s core that stabilized this planet obviously gave it some form of gravity, but it was not quite like walking on Earth.

  When she reached the bus stop she stopped and gave it a long, hard look. It wasn’t a bus stop, she suddenly realized. This was more like a sign on the subway. As she looked at it, she recalled what Copernicus had said back in Florida. Back on Earth. He said he’d be taking the tube. Could he really have meant it? Literally? Could this possibly be a . . . tube station? The disc of air, shimmering weirdly beside her, seemed to whirl for a moment, like water disappearing down a plughole.

  She couldn’t risk trying it herself and there was only one thing she was carrying that she could afford to lose. She wriggled the signal mirror out of her pocket and held it out towards the disc of moving air. The little silver circle nosed into the wind, and two things happened at once. The wind suddenly sucked so hard that Janey could barely hold on to the mirror, and in the same moment four names flashed up under ‘Copernicus’ on the tube sign: Moon, Canaveral, Sunny Jim’s, Antarctica.

  The shock of seeing the locations of Copernicus’s other Spylabs made her release her grip on the mirror. The wind immediately took firm hold of the little stick and whisked it away. Janey couldn’t see where exactly, but by the way the word ‘Canaveral’ was flashing, she guessed that the Spylab under the Kennedy Space Center was where the mirror was headed. She was so busy staring at the sign that for several moments Janey did not realize that the beeping sound in her ear was coming from one of her own SPI-buys.

  ‘At last,’ she thought, tearing off her PERSPIRE. ‘An email!’

  AT SPACE CENTER WITH BIRDS ’N’ DIVAN. SUFFOCATING HEAT. WHERE DO WE FIND YOU? A X

  Janey translated quickly. Her dad had got her SOS email, followed them to Florida with Eagle, Peregrine, Blackbird, Rook – the Birds and Ivan Erikssen. She needed to brief him on the whole situation before the sleeping sickness caused by the heat took hold of him. Ignoring the strange grinding sensation that was juddering through the ground, Janey typed out a message.

  ‘FIND TUBE,’ she wrote. ‘THERE MUST BE—’

  But she never got to finish. Dropping her PERSPIRE, she ducked as a laser beam shot over her head. She looked around. There was nobody else on the surface of the planet, but just beyond the entry tube to the Spylab a giant zapper was poking out of a hole. Pointing directly at her. She had two choices. She could leap down the tube to another of Copernicus’s labs, possibly ensuring her own safety. Or she could get back to the entry tube, back to the people she loved, to find another way to save the world.

  It was no choice at all, really.

  Stuffing her PERSPIRE back on her head, Janey crawled on her elbows as far as she could, then stood up and tried to make a run for the entry tube. She galloped across the sandy surface, launching herself as high as she could to leap over a low-flying laser beam, bounding left and right like some crazed gazelle in an attempt to dodge the radiant shots of light that were aiming directly at her. She had the entry tube in sight. She reached out to punch in the code, the code she had worked out herself, and just as she readied herself to leap away from the keypad in a perfect starjump, the laser beam caught her full in the middle and she tumbled, doubled over, into the top of the entry tube as blackness closed in around her.

  laser boy

  With a start, she instantly came to as the entry tube suctioned her through its lower levels and then jettisoned her neatly into the Spylab corridor. Janey checked her stomach. There was a slight warm patch – the arrow of golden light had obviously touched her, but it had not pierced her SPIsuit. In fact, she didn’t feel too bad, apart from a slight need to shake her head and yawn.

  The figures all around her had not fared so well, however. Piled up
against the walls of the corridor, slumped wherever they had fallen, were mounds of monkeys, chimpanzees, orang-utans and gorillas.

  ‘Oh no.’ Janey spat out her SPIder and thrust it into a pocket of her golden suit as she looked around. She touched the nearest primate. It was Twelve’s sister, she was sure of it. How was she going to tell him that his sister was dead? But then she felt the warmth beneath her fingers. They weren’t dead. They were sedated. They had all been knocked out.

  Suddenly G-Mamma careered around a corner, heading towards the entry tube like a runaway juggernaut. Janey jumped to one side, but as she did so she saw a bullet of light flash through the air, narrowly missing Alfie and Mrs Halliday, who had just followed G-Mamma into the corridor, and catching G-Mamma squarely in the back. The SPI:KE looked mildly startled for a moment, then tipped forward with her arms around the entry tube. Her eyes rolled back before closing tight, and her mauve lipstick smeared against the perspex as she slid down the tube. In less than a second, G-Mamma was sitting on the floor, wrapped around the tube as if it was some great fireman’s pole, completely unconscious.

  Alfie ducked then feinted left and right, pushing his mother ahead of him as they both sprinted for the entry tube. ‘Watch out, JB, he’s got some kind of . . . arggh!’

  Janey struggled to her feet, but she was already too late. One of the glowing bullets had ricocheted off the wall and bounced right on to Alfie’s chin. He clutched his face, groaned and passed out right across his mother’s path. She tried to leap over his body, but in doing so she jumped into the trajectory of another blast. Now she too was slumped on the corridor floor.

  Who’s left? Janey thought wildly. ‘Tish! Go back!’ she yelled. But as she raced up the corridor she saw Tish slither out of a side corridor like a penguin sliding on ice, with her eyes shut tight and her mouth wide open in a loud snore. She’d obviously taken a full and direct hit.