Planet of the Girls – Opening Chapters

1

OH BROTHER!

BEFORE I TELL you about the crazy and incredible adventure my brother and I recently stumbled into, I think I had better just say a word or two about him. His name’s Gerald and he thinks of himself as a great writer. No doubt, he would believe that he should be writing you this story. But I think when you get to really know him, you’ll probably think, maybe it’s just as well I’m writing it—not that I think I’m liable to win the Nobel Prize for Literature or anything. To give you an idea of Gerald’s talent, he recently sent a manuscript of his first novel to a publisher. The publisher eventually wrote back:

 

Dear Gerald Linden,

 

Thank you for your manuscript titled: A Day in the Life of a Road Sweeper. In your covering letter, you asked us to be frank with you regarding any potential you might have as a writer. We are happy to oblige.

 

It is an interesting effort, and we admire your tenacity to spend “three years, four months and twelve days” writing it. However, as a self-proclaimed “Epic”, it was a bit on the short side, being only twenty-one pages long, especially as these pages consisted of doubled spaced lines. Gerald, they say every person has a great book in them … We look forward to yours.

 

Please try other publishers before us in future.

 

Many thanks,

Ivor Novella.

 

Welsh Valley Publishing House.

 

You’d think a reply like that would dampen his spirits, wouldn’t you? Nope. All he said was, “Paul”—that’s my name, by the way—“it’s pretty encouraging that they’re telling me to send my work off to other publishers. They must think it’s well good. Hmm … I shall have to look up the word ‘tenacity’. I won’t give up until I find it.”

Just to finish off describing him, he’s two years older than me, and I’m thirteen. He looks like a bigger version of me, slim with black hair and green eyes—but that’s where any resemblance ends. By which I mean, I’m no Albert Einstein; but when it comes to brains, my brother seems to be at least ten jellybabies short of a packet.

I won’t say any more about my brother because you’ll see what he’s like for yourself.

 

2

THE STRANGE STRANGER

OUR ADVENTURE BEGAN in the most unlikely of fashions. There we were, Gerald and I, on our way to West London Swimming Pool on a sunny Sunday morning, with our backpacks bulging full of sandwiches, drinks and swimming gear, when suddenly a voice fired towards us from the shadows of a side street …

“Hey, boys? I need some help to get my vehicle working?”

The man who said it was peculiarly dressed. He had a strange sort of lime-green woollen overcoat and matching balaclava on, and all in the height of summer (I did say our adventure began in the most unlikely of fashions). The overcoat was weird because it seemed to be held together with invisible buttons. All you could see of his face were his hooded eyes, his nose, and his mouth; and all in dark shadows.

Gerald looked at the man, then at me. And he shrugged his shoulders.

“What sort of vehicle is it?” I asked. “I mean we’re not pushing a lorry up a hill, you know.”

“It is … it is … well, it does not matter, does it?” he said. I realised then, as my eyes got used to the shadows, that his nose seemed to have three nostrils instead of two. And his lips were blubbery like a fish’s and hardly opened when he spoke. Poor guy, I thought.

“Will we be able to help you; there are only two of us?” I asked.

“Definitely, my fortuitous friends. It is most definitely an easy function to achieve.”

Not only did he dress funny, but he talked funny too.

“What’s he on about?” said Gerald, looking extremely puzzled.

“I think he needs our help with his vehicle, and it’s easy for us to help him. Maybe we should give the guy a hand. What do you think?”

“Er—dunno, really. I mean, we might be late for the cheaper half-priced swimming session, and then we’ll have to go home as we can’t waste money on a normal-priced session.”

Gerald was a stickler for not wasting money because he never had any, unless Mum gave him some. No one would give him a job anymore because he was completely unreliable and incompetent. For instance, they’re absolutely desperate for paperboys in West London—I say “paperboys” but, of course, they’d take a four-year-old girl if only they could—but Gerald only managed eight days before he was sacked. You see, he kept mixing up the deliveries, and when Vicar Dawkins received Extreme Nudist Bodybuilder Monthly instead of Regency Vicarage Restorations, well, things finally came to a head. Especially as the Vicar was extremely short, less than five-foot tall, and as skinny as a catwalk model on a hunger strike. Not to mention the fact that I once saw the vicar cuff a small eight-year-old girl on the back of her head for wearing a short-sleeved blouse on a double-decker bus: “Bare arms are the work of the Devil, you shameless hussy!” he had barked.

Gerald would do anything to earn some money, if only someone would give him the chance.

And then suddenly, it looked to Gerald as if a chance had come …

“I will reward you handsomely, boys,” said the man, patting one of his bulging lime-green overcoat pockets, which jingled and jangled impressively.

“When do we start?” said Gerald before I could say anything—and I can tell you it’s a rare thing when Gerald beats me to the mark.

“Ah, so you both agree to help me?”

“Yes,” we both said—in for a penny, in for a pound, I thought.

“Good,” said the man, rubbing his hands together with glee, and I’d never seen such huge fingers and certainly not six on each hand! “I have to get your agreement, or I will lose my Advanced Stationary Driving License, which allows my vehicle to become still.”

The guy was surely as batty as Batty MacBat of Battinghamshire, who recently won a prize consisting of a pair of Batman underpants for being the battiest man in Batland. The more I looked at him, the more I began to conclude that he must have been born in the core of a nuclear reactor. Still, he looked like he was reaching into his pocket for his wallet, so what the hell if he escaped from a mutant farm.

Well, I thought we were going to push a car to help get its engine turning or something like that—but we weren’t. Out of the blue, the man whipped from his pocket not a wallet but what looked like a mobile phone—only it wasn’t. He pointed his strange device at us and seemed to press an invisible button …

Kappow!

A flash of light blinded my eyes, and a crash of thunder deafened my ears—!

 

3

THE STRANGE VEHICLE

SUDDENLY, GERALD AND I found ourselves in a classroom-sized room full of weird machinery and gadgetry, the like of which I had never seen before—not even on science fiction videos. There were no windows to look out of and the whole place smelt strongly of peppermint. The man was still standing opposite us in his lime-green overcoat, holding his mobile device.

“Oh my giddy aunt!” I naturally exclaimed. But Gerald just stood there with his jaw falling to the floor. A floor that was covered in a shallow, swirling blue mist, a floor that felt smooth and hard, like a carpet of steel beneath our feet.

“Do not panic, my little friends,” the man said. “This is my vehicle, that is all.” The man at least lowered his mobile gizmo and tucked it back inside his overcoat.

“But we’re not used to being … erm … teleported,” I protested, “as such methods of getting from A to B only exist in futuristic books and films.”

“Yeah,” piped up Gerald, “we can’t afford to pay any fare either.” Then Gerald said, “Ow!” because I kicked him in the shins.

“I asked you to help me,” said the man, “and you agreed. All I want you to do is hold down that Navigation Stabiliser Lever.” He pointed at a red lever sticking out of a mass of weird circuitry. I’d like to describe this mass of circuitry, but, well, it’s pretty indescribable. Gerald, in one of his moments of inspiration as a writer, later described it as “a fragmented metally-plastically-crystally spaghetti of glows and wires”, if that’s any help. Just don’t kid yourself that describes it well enough though.

“What will happen if we do hold down the lever?” I asked tentatively.

“My vehicle will function splendidly,” said the man.

“The vehicle won’t move, will it?” I said. “My brother and I won’t help if this vehicle is going to move off.”

“I assure you the vehicle will not move off. It will not move anywhere. Not a single nanometre. When you both hold down the lever and I start the vehicle, its speed shall be zero.” He said all this sounding as honest as a Sunday school teacher’s white cotton socks, and for the first time since we met the weirdo, he smiled, revealing his teeth. Teeth that were sharply pointed like a shark’s. And to make matters worse, a forked, snake-like tongue wiggled for a moment out from between two of his upper fangs.

Gerald whispered to me, “There’s something not quite right about this man.”

“That’s an understatement,” I whispered back.

“Look at his teeth,” added Gerald under his hand. “And did you see his tongue? One of his parents must be a lizard or something.”

“Yeah, and have you noticed his unusual nostrils and his fingers?”

“I have now!”

“Aha, I see you are beginning to wonder about my appearance,” correctly guessed the man. “But fear not, I will explain exactly who I am after you have helped me get my vehicle working. I am sure your curiosity will encourage you to help me,” he said, rubbing his hands together enthusiastically.

Well, although I was feeling a bit scared of the situation I had found myself in, I was very curious, as the man had guessed. He was good at guessing things, I guess. I didn’t know what Gerald was thinking, but he didn’t look that curious. He took out a packet of chewing gum and popped a chunk of it in his mouth. His mind seemed to be wandering. I could see he was thinking of offering the man some gum, so I decided to get on with things.

“Come on,” I said to Gerald, “let’s get it over and done with.”

So we grabbed the red lever. It felt cold and metallic. We started pulling it downwards. It was heavy, but the two of us managed it comfortably enough. Gerald’s pretty strong, much stronger than me. We held it steady in what seemed to be its maximum down position.

“Good,” said the man. “Keep it held down in that position or it will spring back up. You see, the Navigation Stabiliser Lever malfunctioned when I accidentally attempted to park on a spider that happened to be walking along minding its own business on an empty Dentist’s car park floor. And my vehicle cannot park on a living creature, so it quickly veered and lurched to an adjacent car parking space in the car park that was absent of spiders or any other living creatures. Now the lever will not stay down as it should, and it must stay down for the vehicle to work. I cannot reach the lever while administering vehicle navigation control; that is why I needed your help, little friends. Now all I need to do is press a few buttons and rotate a few dials, and the vehicle will start working.”

“The vehicle manoeuvred itself to avoid a spider … what sort of vehicle can do that?” I grunted, clinging on to the lever like a limpet.

“This one can,” answered the man simply. He then turned his attention to fiddling about at a … er … control panel, for want of a better word. It seemed to appear from nowhere and bits of it seemed to be hanging in mid-air. I thought perhaps these bits were held in space by magnetism. But I was wrong, as I would eventually find out.

Then, quite unexpectedly, the whole vehicle shook as if it had sneezed!

Gerald and I fell on the swirling mist-covered floor, losing grip of the lever. We watched in horror as the lever shot back up in the air. It snapped off whatever it was connected to and plunged down beneath the blue mist, smashing into the floor with a jarring clang.

“Noooo!” screamed the man, with wild eyes—which I noticed for the first time were exactly like our family cat’s.

Gerald and I shot back up off the floor because we didn’t much like sitting in a strange, swirling blue mist.

The man was raging with anger.

“The Navigation Stabiliser Lever has broken beyond repair!” he roared.

Then suddenly he threw off his lime-coloured overcoat and balaclava to reveal more of his true form—and boy, was it weird, even though it kind of made sense. To go with his six huge German sausage sized fingers on each hand, triple nostrils, cat’s eyes, and pointed shark-like teeth, he had a gaunt face, ears like Brussels sprouts, and was as bald as a pink snooker ball. And now that his face was finally in full view, you could see it looked like the facial sculpture of a Greek god—the sort attempted by a talentless old age pensioner with severe learning difficulties at a local primary school’s evening pottery class. He was dressed in what can best be described as a bright yellow three-piece suit that seemed as if it had invisible buttons. Wherever this guy came from, it seemed the illusion of invisible buttons was obviously at the height of fashion.

Despite the sight of the stranger—okay, let’s face it, alien—being kind of interesting, it nevertheless came across as terrifying. Just try imagining yourself in such a predicament.

While I was trying my best not to puke up, Gerald took to kneeling and praying—and blowing a huge bubble with his chewing gum. The alien took no pity on us, of course. He hopped about insanely and angrily, looking like a giant banana on an invisible pogo-stick (amazing the way he seemed to use invisibility—even when he wasn’t!). I thought for a minute he might well be about to explode. He hopped on one leg, then on the other. He was literally hopping mad!

After a few moments, the alien stopped his raving about and marched right up close to us.

Well, the last time I remember praying was when I didn’t want Mum to find out I had chased Blackie (our ex-cat) out of the garden … and into the path of a steamroller. I’d never seen a steamroller before—neither had Blackie … and she never saw one again because in an argument between a cat and a steamroller there can only be one winner—and it sure isn’t a cat. I remember scouring cat homes for similar-looking cats to fool Mum into thinking Blackie had never died. I found a suitable cat eventually, the only problem being it was the wrong colour. Still, I brought it home, and I bought some jet-black hair dye and made it look exactly like Blackie. When the dye faded and the cat’s fur returned to its natural ginger, Mum just assumed it was a natural feline phenomenon. Nowadays everyone wonders why our ginger moggy is called Blackie; well let them wonder; at least we know why; I guess I let the cat out of the bag—which is fine, as long as it doesn’t run off under a steamroller! Anyway, with this alien standing in front of me, it was time to pray again!

So there we were, the Linden brothers, kneeling side by side, praying (and in Gerald’s case, blowing the odd bubble).

The alien bent his head down so close to us that we could smell his breath; and that’s when I realised where the peppermint smell was coming from. His cat-like eyes blazed with anger and his razor-finished pointed teeth glinted on their tips as he thundered, “You do not understand, do you, you malfunctioned idiots? WE COULD BE ANYWHERE!”

I was just approaching my second “Hail Mary” when the alien suddenly scooped up the Navigation Stabiliser Lever from the blue mist and raised it above his head …

 

4

FARTHER AND FASTER BY STANDING STILL

I THOUGHT GERALD and I were about to be pulverised. And it’s not very nice to know you’ll be hit on the head until you’re dead by something heavy, metal and red. But unexpectedly, the alien span around and hurled the lever through the air, with a scream of anguish; down it crashed, clanging more loudly than ever. “Bah!” cried the alien. “Balderdash!” Then he crumpled down into the blue mist and sank onto his haunches, sitting cross-legged with his back turned to us and started crying.

I nudged Gerald in the side, and whispered, “Psst, Gerald, stop praying and blowing bubbles and get a load of this.” I nodded over to the alien. “He’s off his trolley.”

“What’s he crying for?” asked Gerald.

“Come on, let’s find out. He would have harmed us by now if he had wanted to. Anyhow, my knees are killing me.”

We clambered upright and walked around the alien to face him. He was sobbing gently into his long, six-fingered hands.

“It can’t be that bad,” I said, trying to sound deeply concerned.

“It cannot be much worse,” said the alien.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

The alien whisked out a rather large red-spotted handkerchief from one of his yellow suit pockets and wiped his eyes, then blew his nose. “Well, the vehicle has started now, but without the Navigation Stabiliser Lever, I cannot control it. We are in the lap of the gods.”

“You’re not saying we’re moving, are you!” I said, worried.

“Oh no,” he said, “I told you before that the vehicle will not move when it starts working. We Salamans are completely honest, unlike you Earthlings.”

“Thank goodness for that,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief.

“Er, mister—um—sir … whatever … can we go home now?” asked Gerald.

“My name is Ambergarb, hence my clothing. In my world we dress according to our name.”

“Ambergarb?” said Gerald. “What’s that got to do with your yellow-coloured three-piece suit?”

“‘Amber’, is a sort of yellow,” I explained to Gerald, “and ‘garb’ is a type of clothing.”

“Hmm … well, I still don’t get it?”

“Never mind, Gerald,” I said.

“So you want to go home?” said Ambergarb.

“Yes,” said Gerald, “can you use your mobile thingamajig?”

“‘Thingamajig’?” said Ambergarb with a befuddled expression, causing his eyebrows (which were thankfully normal—by which I mean human-looking) to dive towards one another.

“Yes, that hoojamaflip … erm … doodah, doodad, thingamabob,” said Gerald.

“Sorry,” said Ambergarb, “I cannot possibly hope to understand you, my well-intentioned friend. My Earth languages are limited to only English and Cherokee.”

I said to Ambergarb, “He means the mobile contraption that zapped us from the streets of London to this … vehicle.”

“Oh, I see,” said Ambergarb. “Well, you can just as well use the door over there.” He pointed to what looked like a steel-like metal door. It bore a resemblance to the lift-door in the tower block at the end of our street. “Just press the green button on the right of the door and the door will slide open.”

Then just as Gerald started towards the door, Ambergarb’s arm sprang out and his long, thick fingers grabbed Gerald’s collar like a scrap yard mechanical grabber, and he added with a tone of warning, “Young man, I would check the window first, to see what you are walking out into!”

“What window?” I asked on Gerald’s behalf as he gormlessly looked about the apparently windowless room we were in.

“See that large circular porthole over there? Press the green button to the right of it, and its cover will slide open, revealing a diamond-compressed see-through window allowing a crystal-clear view of whatever’s outside.”

“I think we best take Ambergarb’s advice, Gerald. We might be parked by the side of a motorway or something. Who knows where we are?”

“We are not parked,” said Ambergarb.

“But you said we weren’t moving?” I questioned.

“Yes, and we most certainly are not. If you do not believe me, look out of the porthole window.”

Well, I don’t mind admitting that I was growing more confused by the second. There was something humongously fishy going on …? And I knew there was only one way to start getting to the bottom of it …

“Come on, Gerald, let’s see what’s cooking.”

“But I can’t see a kitchen anywhere.”

“I mean, let’s see what’s outside through the porthole and see where we are.”

“Oh, I see.”

We drifted through the blue mist swirling in hypnotic patterns beneath our shins, dodged our way between two stacks of impressive-looking gadgetry, until we found ourselves standing in front of the huge closed porthole. It stood with its bottom tip beneath the mist, probably touching the floor, and reached a height of two metres. It was slightly recessed into the wall, and the covering seemed to be made of the same steely material as the door. The walls of the vehicle were made of some sort of metal too, but of a much lighter grey colour than the porthole and the door. The porthole looked like a one-metre radius faceless silver coin that had been pushed into the wall. I pressed the square green button to the right of the porthole, and with a high-pitched hissing sound, the porthole cover slid smoothly to the left and into the thickness of the wall, revealing an unexpected, incredible sight …

“What!” I cried in a complete state of astonishment.

“What?” echoed Gerald in a complete state of bafflement.

He continued, “We seem to be in a dark building with lots of snow drifting past.”

“No, no, Gerald,” I cried, alarmed, “I think we’re in Space, and those are stars drifting past! We must be moving at an unbelievably stupendous speed. We must already be hundreds of light years from the Earth! Probably millions knowing our luck!”

Ambergarb slouched over to join us, bringing his peppermint smell with him. I hate to think what we must have smelt like to him. “You were closer the second time,” he said sadly. “But, in fact, we are actually billions of miles from the Earth by now, and without the Navigation Stabiliser Lever, I cannot control where we will end up. It is a tragedy.”

“But you said the vehicle would not move; I call this one hell of a movement!” I protested scornfully.

“It is one hell of a movement,” agreed Ambergarb, “but it is not us that are moving. It is everything else. We are completely still!”

“Huh?” said Gerald and I, in a rare show of un-intellectual unity.

“This is how the most advanced races travel through Space. You see the whole Universe is still, yet everything in it moves at tremendous speeds. If nothing moved, there would be no Universe. It all started with what you Earthlings tend to call the Big Bang. Most intelligent races call this moment of creation the First Movement. When we were parked on the Earth, invisibly cloaked in the Dentist’s car park, we in this vehicle were moving at an unbelievable speed through Space. You see, your Earth spins, it orbits the Sun, the Sun orbits the Galaxy, and the Galaxy is absolutely thundering through Space as if there is not going to be a tomorrow. Now we are still! That, my learning friends, is how long distance travelling is done: farther and faster by standing still. Of course, to make a vehicle stand still is no mean feat. You have to remove your inertia and complicated things like that. How else can you travel from galaxy to galaxy? Answer me that!”

I got the gist of it, and I was impressed, but I wondered how on earth we would ever get home, if you’ll excuse the pun. Gerald seemed so confused that he finally decided to offer Ambergarb a piece of chewing gum, as if that would help.

“Oh thank you, but no thank you, my most generous friend,” said Ambergarb to Gerald’s offer. “The only sweets I partake in are peppermints.” He plucked a huge crumpled white paper bag full of peppermints out of one of his many suit-jacket pockets and shovelled about ten down his throat straight from the bag. “Mmm!” he said, smacking his blubbery lips together rhythmically as his forked tongue whipped in and out. “My mother says I eat so many peppermints that one fine functioned day I will definitely turn into one.”

I believe her!

“Erm, Ambergarb, how will we ever get home?” I asked.

“We will need some luck, my fine functioned friend,” he replied. Then he rested his six friendly pink banana-like fingers on my shoulders, and said eloquently, “By the way, I know the bigger version of you is called Gerald, but I do not believe your name has ever been mentioned?”

“Er … oh, my name’s Paul,” I said, trying to smile, but it wasn’t easy.

“That is all of us fully introduced then,” said Ambergarb, and he seemed to be recovering now from the tragedy the three of us found ourselves in. He relieved my shoulders of his pink bananas. “Now let me explain an extra detail regarding the vehicle’s function. Yes, it keeps still, but this particular vehicle works by diverting its stillness in subtle ways, which allows it to travel through locations where intelligent sentient creatures exist. Do not ask me to explain how. I do not know. I am not an engineer. I only know what the system is called: Vehicle Engineered Relativistic Yielded Sentient Tangential Inertia Linkage Loading—or VERY STILL, for short. It can only stop at these intelligent life locations too. So you see, we will stop at the first location where intelligent life exists in the direction we’re travelling. And I have no idea what direction that is, or where we will stop. All I can say is we are bound to stop within ten minutes.”

“So we have to hope wherever we stop we will be able to repair the vehicle, right?” I reasoned.

“Yes,” replied Ambergarb.

“What places are we likely to stop at?” said Gerald. “Do you know?”