Saucerers and Gondoliers - chapter 1

Chapter 1 - Down In The Woods

"Course it's got vipers. Issa forest, innit? Bin ere since King Arold oo got shot in the eye by Robin Ood."
Ant's dad spat at a passing squirrel. Ant had hoped the squirrels here would be red, with pointy ears. Like every other squirrel in England, they were grey and tufty.
"I thought Old English forests were all deciduous", said Cleo.
Ant's dad turned round and stared at Cleo as if she'd been a large, red, pointy-eared talking squirrel.
"Deciduous? Wossat mean then?"
He grinned a huge row of horribly maintained teeth at Cleo, then carried on heaving stuff into the back of the truck.
"He does know what it means", whispered Ant to Cleo. "He taught me what it meant. It means the opposite to evergreen."
Cleo looked puzzled. "Why does he pretend he doesn't know, then?"
Ant shrugged. "I dunno. Sometimes he just seems to enjoy pretending to be a moron."
Ant's dad continued to load stuff into the truck. Ant suspected the truck should not be parked here. It was illegal to park anywhere that came straight off a motorway, wasn't it? This little service road wasn't the sort of road you normally left a motorway on, and it had had a sign saying SERVICE VEHICLES ONLY in big red-and-white letters.
It was amazing how loud the motorway was, even here in the trees. Ant's dad's eighteen-wheeler was parked well back in the pines, where passing traffic cops would only see it if they craned their necks back and to the left while they sped by. Still, the truck / trailer combination was the length of a row of houses, a difficult thing to miss. Ant's dad was using the trailer's tail lift to load pallets that had been poorly stacked with gigantic drums of something. It was impossible to see inside the drums, but what was inside sloshed and slopped like a liquid.
"What's in the drums?" Ant had said to his dad as he grunted and struggled under one of the drums.
"Green diesel", his dad had said, and winked, and had not explained further.
The two men who had delivered the drums stood by watching him load them, not helping in any way. Their truck, parked a few yards further back in the trees, still had its engine running. The only other thing parked in the layby was an old Luton van, so badly rusted that its numberplate was held on with wire and its boot held shut with a padlock. The two drum deliverymen had investigated the Mysterious Van carefully when they first arrived, and seemed to have satisfied themselves that it presented no threat to them.
Eventually, Ant's dad heaved the last enormously heavy cylinder into the back of the York and began securing the tailgate. He had been manhandling drums since first light, and the trailer was kneeling heavy on its axles. The two men found their feet and approached him again.
"Well, it's been a pleasure doing business with fellow workers", he said. "This stuff'll keep our members going for a good month or more."
The bigger of the two men smiled widely at the smaller - a little more widely than Ant liked.
"There's just the question of payment", he said.
"Fellow workers", said Cleo to Ant quietly. "Your dad's a communist."
"Of course." Ant's father fumbled in his back pocket for his wallet, too quickly. Ant noticed that his hands were actually shaking. There were not many men who made Ant's father shake, although the number of Saturday night fights he lost suggested he ought to be more afraid of other men than he was. The roll of cash he pulled out of his back pocket made both Cleo and Ant gape.
"I've not seen that many queens' heads on anything that folds before", said Cleo. "Magic! Your dad's a criminal."
"If he's a communist, he's the richest communist I've ever seen", nodded Ant, who was thinking, He doesn't usually have that much money. How did he get that much money together without drinking it?
"There's ten thousand litres here, right?" said Ant's dad, counting out odd-coloured notes that had 50 printed on them. Ant had never seen a fifty-pound note, and suspected his father had seen very few of them in his life too, but what else could they be?
One of the men shook his head. "Eight", he said. His accent made it sound like 'eeyat'.
"He's Irish", said Cleo, making a final decision. "Your dad's a terrorist."
The money didn't change hands. But Ant's dad's voice was still shaky. "We agreed ten", he said.
The other man smiled. "Difficulties with supply. You know how it is."
"We agreed ten." Shaky though his voice was, Ant's dad was sticking to the guns embroidered in his tatty Arsenal cap.
"Let's get out of here", said Ant. "Based on past experience, this is about to get ugly."
***
The forest was green as diesel, and Ant suspected it would have been full of singing birds and the noises of squirrels scampering through undergrowth if it hadn't been for the constant roar of the motorway. But the local wildlife didn't seem to mind the sound. Usually, the sorts of places Ant's dad took him to were massive tarmacked yards supporting miles and miles of corrugated iron sheds, each one with a big company sign on the front saying things like ROTOWIDGET or BRITSTUFF PLC. Sometimes, the yards were on the Continent rather than in Britain, and the signs said GEMEINE DEUTSCHE DINGE GmBH or FRANCOTRUCS ET CIE, but the basic iron sheds were still the same.
"Sorry he had to bring you along", said Ant, chucking sticky darts at the back of Cleo's jacket.
"Thanks a lot", said Cleo.
"No, I didn't mean it like that. I mean, I'm sorry he let me bring you along when he knew he was going to be doing something tasty."
"Tasty?"
"Dodgy. Off the back of a lorry. Under the counter. Illegal. He's been hanging out with a worse and worse crowd since the start of the Fuel Protests."
"Cor." Cleo's face went wide. "Was all that illegal?"
"You knew bloody well it was!"
"No, I was only taking the mick. Your old man's a Gangsta Rude Boy." Ant was not entirely sure what a Gangsta Rude Boy was, but Cleo had said it in a manner that suggested it was something to be greatly admired.
"What's a Gangsta Rude Boy?" said Ant.
Cleo shrugged, and kicked a pile of leaves. "I dunno."
"What are you doing tomorrow?"
Cleo grimaced. "My dad's taking me to work. It's the union's Take Your Kid To Work Day. He's going to wow me with all the really interesting stuff he does for a living."
"Think yourself lucky", said Ant, scoring a direct hit on the back of Cleo's hair extensions with a sticky dart. "For me, every weekday in the holidays is Take Your Kid To Work Day."
"Doesn't he think it's weird, you hanging out with girls?"
"I think he thinks you're my girlfriend."
"WHAT? That's GROSS!"
"I know, it's repugnant and disgusting. I have tried to dissuade him from this point of view, but he won't have anything different", said Ant. "He keeps winking at me and saying 'All right, squire, I know the score.' It drives me bloody mental."
Cleo grinned. Her grin seemed to go all the way round her head. "I think it's weird, you hanging out with girls. You're going to be playing with Barbie dolls and plastic vacuum cleaners next."
"You don't play with Barbie dolls and vacuum cleaners."
"I wouldn't play with Barbie dolls. There's a special Afro-Caribbean Barbie designed specially for black girls. Her name is Christie."
"No way."
"Yes way. But Christie isn't allowed anywhere near Ken, oh no. Christie comes with her own Afro-Caribbean boyfriend, whose name is Steven. Barbie and Christie are valuable educational aids that teach all us Afro-Caribbean girls what colour of boys we should be going out with. I could never go out with you, Ant, because you are Ken-coloured."
"I am so not Ken-coloured! Ken has one-piece plastic hair and a weird, smooth, underpant-shaped groin."
"Boys' dolls are better", said Cleo. "They have camouflage trousers and guns rather than hairdryers. And accessories that aren't pink. Do you know what happens to an Action Man head you put in the oven?"
"No, and I don't want to. Besides, Action Men aren't dolls. They're Action Figures. Hang on, what's this?"
Ant had no idea where the concrete strip had come from. There were similar strips all the way through the woods, suggesting that someone, at some time, had needed to drive heavy machinery into the trees. Maybe trucks for logging, he thought. His dad had said they still cut timber here, and that the woods were owned by the Forestry Commission. Ant's dad had made the woods seem really exciting, far more exciting than a weekend with his mum, at any rate. But the woods were not exciting. They were made of sharp-needled conifers with thin sappy trunks that were no use for climbing. In some parts, the trees were even planted in straight lines. Occasional bits of rubbish that a thousand picnickers had dropped were to be found in the undergrowth everywhere.
Certainly no-one was using the path for logging now. It was overgrown and cracked from side to side, with grass growing in the cracks.
"Maybe this used to be an airbase, and these were runways", said Cleo hopefully. "Before it was a forest, I mean."
"What, for really small aeroplanes?" said Ant. It was true. The concrete path would only barely have allowed a small van to squeeze through. Cleo giggled.
Then, she squinted into the trees, and pointed. "There's something parked up there."
Whatever it was, it was large, white, and definitely man-made.
Or at least, made by somebody.
The curves of it suggested a big heap of some stuff farmers liked to make big heaps of, covered with polythene, maybe weighted down with tyres for good measure. Farmers liked to make the landscape tidy by wrapping it in polythene, and they seemed to like making sure it didn't blow away by covering it in rubber too.
They walked further into the concrete clearing. The thing was not a thing made by any farmer. Nor would it have been any use in clearing or transporting logs.
It was roughly the shape of two woks, hubcaps, or indeed saucers, slapped together. On its front surface - or what Ant decided to think of as its front surface - a line of aerials and antennae poked out, with no clue as to their function. There were panels round the curve of its hull which might perhaps be opened to refuel or repair it, just like any other vehicle, for it was certainly a vehicle of some sort. There were also struts and rails attached to its underside to which ground crew might fix extra fuel tanks or other equipment that wouldn't fit inside it. On top of the thing, a bulge of hull was pinched up into a cockpit shape. The bulge had a surface that might be glass or plastic, but which reflected light like a huge, teardrop-shaped mirror. Two small vanes, far too small to be aeroplane wings, protruded from what Ant decided to call its fuselage, though fuselages were seldom saucer-shaped in his experience. The whole thing was about the size of a large caravan - one of the big ones that old people sometimes drove down the road to live in at weekends rather than staying in their own houses.
A magpie fluttered into a distant tree, shrieking like a football rattle.
"It's an aeroplane", said Cleo, with something less than total conviction.
This aeroplane, though, had neither ailerons nor engines, and the dull and faded lettering that swirled around its hull was not in any alphabet Ant recognized.
Most unsettling, however, was what the thing was resting on - or rather, wasn’t. Its complete lack of wheels, skids, struts or bricks-propped-under-axles only became apparent when Ant and Cleo bent down and squinted underneath the thing and saw nothing but the forest on the other side of the clearing. The thing was certainly some sort of aeroplane, for it was hovering in mid air.
It was, by now, absolutely certain what was being dealt with here.
"It can't be", said Cleo.
"No", agreed Ant. "Not parked up in broad daylight like a Ford Fiesta."
Then the man who'd been in the clearing with them all the time, and who they'd both either not noticed or simply ignored because the thing in the clearing had been more interesting, cleared his throat, and said: "Hello there, boys."
He was wearing a sweater and coat - the sort of thing a man might wear if he stood outside in the cold for a living. He was also wearing a pair of binoculars. He didn’t wear them, though, in the way that people normally wore binoculars, slinging them around their necks - these binoculars were a big, complicated-looking assembly of lenses strapped directly onto his forehead, under which he grinned at Cleo and Ant as if they saw men with binoculars strapped to their heads every day of their lives.
"What are you doing out here on your own?" he said, as if being out on their own on these woods was in some way illegal. Ant hoped it wasn't.
"Who's he?" said Cleo. "I thought you said this place was open to the public."
"There's only two sorts of people who wear jumpers, coats and ties", said Ant under his breath. "Racetrack tic tac men and policemen. Leg it."
They legged it.
Unfortunately, he legged it after them.
First of all, he gained on them, having the advantage of longer legs to leg it with, even though he was wearing shoes that were no good for the purpose. But once they dodged into the woods under the overhanging branches, their pursuer became curiously unwilling to carry on running headlong into facefuls of twigs and needles, and there were no more footsteps crashing through the brush behind them. Ant and Cleo cowered in a bush and squinted back through the trees to see their attacker talking into what looked like a big mobile phone, and was probably a two-way radio.
"Maybe he's talking to his bookie", said Cleo hopefully.
Ant shook his head. "Not a chance. He's a copper all right. Probably here to nick dad. We've got to get back and warn him."
The man's voice could be heard clearly - perhaps he was unaware of how close they were to him.
"Got two unwanted guests. Afraid so. Only kids, one cauc, one afro. Ran off into the woods north before I could catch them. Over.
"Weren't wearing hiking boots, and didn't look tired on their feet. Came here on bikes, maybe? Still no cars in the parking area for the picnic site, Dave, over?
"There's no other places a car could park. We've secured the roads all the way round the forest. It has to be bikes. Maybe they hid them, over.
"Well look again. The kids are here. They're hiding in the bushes about thirty yards away. Probably think I can't see them, over."
Ant looked at Cleo.
"We get the blooming heckfire out of here now", said Cleo.
Ant nodded. "Maybe we can circle around back to the truck."
***
Minutes later, covered in muck, moss, grass seed and sticky darts, they were not much closer to the truck. Navigating towards the roar of the motorway, though, they were making headway.
"I think he wasn't a man at all", panted Cleo as she struggled over a log. "I think he was an alien."
"Looked like a man to me. Only real human beings look that ugly."
"That was a flying saucer, man! With all alien writing all over it."
Behind them, the voice of Binocular Man could still be heard. It was fainter, but that might have been the sound of traffic.
"I can see you, boys! No use running away from me! It'll be dark soon, and I can see you even then, and what'll you do then when you can't take a step without running into a tree CRASH AAARGH."
"Maybe those binocular things let him see in the dark", said Cleo.
"They must be tough at any rate, he's bumped into four or five trees in them already", said Ant defiantly. "And they don't seem to be able to let him see you're a girl, either. And besides, I know a short cut."
"Where?" said Cleo - and then, after she had followed Ant down the next bank:
"Oh, yeah. That."
***
Running down the motorway hard shoulder was faster than running through the underbrush, and Ant doubted the Binocular Man could see them through the banks of earth either side of the road, even if he could see in the dark. As cars whizzed past, Ant hoped that none of them contained plain clothes policemen.
"Most police cars are Vauxhall Omegas", he said to Cleo. "Watch for Vauxhall Omegas."
"What do they look like?"
"They've got three headrests in the back."
"That means we'll only be able to see them after they pass us, numbnuts."
"DOWN! This is the bridge!"
They crouched behind a roadside crash barrier to stare down at the layby where Ant's father was illegally parked. There were still two trucks and a van at the roadside, but now there were also three other vehicles. One of them was a car, a gigantic glittering black thing of the sort Ant's dad's friends cut up and made hot rods out of. Two looked like vans, but not vans of the sort that were painted white and contained mobile plumbers. These were black, and square, and large, and Ant had an uncomfortable feeling they were bulletproof.
There were also many, many men - men in camouflage fatigues, and men in suits and ties and overcoats. Most of the men in camouflage gear were wearing binocular headgear, and all of them were carrying rifles. The rifles were not the sort normally used by the British Army. They were very large and bulky, with holes drilled in the sides of their barrels.
In the centre of a ring of these men, Ant's father and the two Irishmen were kneeling on the tarmac with their hands cuffed behind them. Ant's father was bleeding from the face.
"Dad!" hissed Ant.
"They're probably going to Execute them", said Cleo learnedly, "as Terrorists."
Ant looked hard at Cleo, then moved along the crash barrier closer to the line of soldiers.
"Policemen don't execute anyone", he said, crossing his fingers mentally.
"They're not policemen", said Cleo. They're aliens."
Ant snorted in derision, but Cleo shook her head with an air of vastly greater knowledge of alien species. "They came out of a flying saucer, didn't they? And why are they wearing those face masks? Because underneath, their eyes aren't human."
Ant shrank behind the concrete support, hoping this was not true.
Then, one of the men in suits and overcoats, his face clearly visible as he wasn't wearing the same odd strap-on goggles as the others, walked up to Ant's father, who appeared to be spitting out teeth, and said to him, like an adult to a baby:
"Now, tell us again and we can avoid all this unpleasantness. Where is the Highwayman?"
"- don't KNOW! Don't KNOW where the bloody Highwayman is! Don't even know WHO he is! Look in the back of my truck - only bloody GREEN DIESEL, for god's sake OOF."
Ant's dad was momentarily quiet as someone clubbed him in the kidneys with a rifle.
"That one's not an alien", said Ant. "He's got a human face."
It wasn’t a pleasant face. It had probably been quite good-looking once, but a lifetime of scowling had made it sag like melted wax. It was human, though. The man’s hair was corpse-grey, and his clothes immaculate, as if he checked himself over in every mirror he passed.
"He's probably been taken over", said Cleo, "by some Alien Mind Control Device."
One of the men in suits held up a device looking very like a TV remote control. A green light was flashing on it. Cleo pointed to the device and looked at Ant with an expression of immense superiority as if to say, told you so.
But then the man holding the device said: "He's telling the truth, I'm afraid, Alastair."
"You put too much faith in those things", said Alastair.
The other man smirked. "Care to tell it whether you've ever stolen government property, gone AWOL, or doodled a moustache on the picture of the Queen?"
Alastair didn't answer, but turned to face the ring of troops. "SPREAD OUT. LEAVE NO STONE UNTURNED AND NO BUSH UNBAYONETED. OUR MAN WON'T GO FAR WITH WHAT HE'S CARRYING. IF THE SIZE OF THE VAN HE USED IS ANYTHING TO GO BY, THE CONTRABAND MUST WEIGH HALF A TON."
Ant noticed suddenly that the back of the Mysterious Van was now open. The doors appeared to have been cut open - probably by the acetylene torch he could see resting up against the side of the vehicle.
The soldiers left the layby and disappeared into the forest. Alastair raised a two-way radio and spoke into it.
"Simon, we've found his delivery vehicle in a motorway layby on the other side of the forest. What idiot was it who failed to realize the M1 runs through these woods? Have you found those children yet?"
Cleo and Ant gingerly edged back along the crash barrier and then, once the motorway embankment hid them from view from below, ran like flaming hell.
"NOW", they heard Alastair's voice crowing as they ran, "LET ME SEE. TERRORISTS FUNDING THEIR ACTIVITIES VIA ILLEGAL FUEL SMUGGLING. WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH YOU?"
***
"We're back at their Space Ship."
Ant shrugged. "They'll never suspect we'd go back here."
"Because it's bloody mad, that's why! Only a bloody lunatic would go back here! That makes us a couple of bloody lunatics!"
"I'm interested."
"But they might take us back to their home planet or something."
"I'd be safe. You're a girl, though. They might stick probes up your bottom or implant an alien embryo in you or something. Hold it."
They stopped on the edge of the clearing. Someone else was already here.
***
The new man looked tired and thin, and had a haircut that suggested he spent a lot of his time in prison. He was wearing neither a suit nor combat fatigues, but a pair of Levi's which still had the label dangling from the back of them, and a maroon T shirt. The T shirt had aliens in flying saucers on it, along with the words SPACE RASTA. The aliens had enormous dreadlocks and were smoking intergalactic cigarettes of some description. The man was, however, clearly neither a Rasta nor an alien, being white-skinned and blue-eyed. He was also wearing new Nike trainers, and was trying to pull a load ten times his size in the direction of the Space Ship.
The load consisted of a variety of odd objects. There were plants that had tags from garden centres, and still others that appeared to have simply been dug out of the ground and wrapped in plastic. There was a pallet of fluorescent yellow spheres stencilled CAUTION FRAGILE DANGER OF DEATH, on top of which other objects seemed to have been dumped and slung with gay abandon. There were T shirts piled up saying GALLERIE DEGLI UFFIZI FIRENZE, MY FRIEND WENT TO SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T SHIRT, and I'VE BEEN TO DISNEYLAND. There were homespun shawls covered in pictures of what looked like llamas in orange, white and black thread. There was an immense wooden table so thickly covered in carvings that it befuddled the mind. There was a snowstorm globe the size of a human head, with a cathedral the size of a baby's head in the centre of it, and a nameplate saying IL VATICANO.
There was food and drink, too - for some reason, mostly crisp packets in a bewildering variety of flavours and colours, on top of black puddings, boxes of tea, jars of jam, jars of Marmite, and many, many bottles of different types of beer, gin and whisky. All the food and drink had probably been purchased at Tesco's. Ant suspected this because it was all still jammed inside a supermarket trolley, the chain of which appeared to have been sawed through.
On top of the plants, yellow spheres, shawls, T shirts, and other paraphernalia were various items of electronic, scientific and heavy engineering equipment, all piled into a confusing jumble. Ant recognized a mass spectrometer (although more, to be fair, by the words 'MASS SPECTROMETER' written on the outside of its plastic packaging than by any great familiarity he had with mass spectrometers). There was a conical-hatted plastic doll in a box which read A PRESENT FROM WALES. There was a conical-bodied, beaked thing which Ant recognized with dread as a Furby.
This whole unlikely jumble was resting on a platform about the size of an average warehouse pallet, made of the same weird material as the Space Ship. And like the Space Ship, it was resting on absolutely nothing. The man was pulling the platform on a long rope looped round handles on the platform edge. The platform edge had lights which were flashing urgently in red.
The man had seemed harmless up to this point, as he was so obviously exhausted, and particularly since he was towing the platform using one hand. The other hand flopped uselessly at his side, as if he had no feeling in it. It was bleeding.
"He's hurt", said Cleo.
But the man did not seem quite so harmless when he turned to see the two of them, let go of his tow rope, and proved to have been holding a gun in the hand he'd been pulling with. The gun was pistol-sized, but otherwise looked similar to the guns the Binocular Men had been carrying. It was very large, and was pointing directly at them.
Ant and Cleo put their hands up slowly.
The man threw Ant the towrope. It wrapped round his hand like a lasso.
Ant and Cleo put their hands down. The man nodded at the towrope. Ant took hold of it. The man crossed the clearing to his Space Ship, flipped open a panel in its seamless hull, and put his bloody hand into the cavity he'd opened. The whole side of the vehicle dropped open and became a ramp which swung down to the ground. Lights came on in the inside of the ship. Ant could see seats, consoles, dials, and rows of switches.
The man gestured with his gun in the direction of the ship.
"There's no need to be so rude", said Cleo.
"Maybe he can't speak English", said Ant. "Being from Alpha Centauri and all."
"Not from Alpha Centauri", said the man. "From Alpha Centauri! Ridiculous! From Lalande 21185, me."
He slumped against the wall of the ship, as if he needed it to hold him up. His eyes did not appear to be focussing on anything.
Ant and Cleo took hold of the rope and leaned on it, expecting the load to be almost impossible to move. It was actually easier than they'd thought, as it didn't have to be dragged across the ground or tugged along on wheels - but once it started moving, it was difficult to stop it. It crashed into the side of the ship with a clang. The man looked up and stared at them severely.
"Sorry", said Cleo.
With difficulty, and with the man waving encouragingly at them with the pistol, they managed to drag the platform into the hole in the hull, and then up into the inside of the Flying Saucer. Inside, things were surprisingly cramped for a vehicle designed by an advanced spacefaring species. The hydraulic assembly that raised and lowered the saucer's tail lift - Ant could only think of it as a tail lift, though the thing was clearly not an articulated lorry of any kind - took up much of the room. The space at the top of the loading ramp was cramped, not much larger than the floating platform the man was manhandling into it, and stray crisp packets scrunched against the walls as the platform screeched into place. It appeared to have been designed to fit into the ship, and clicked flush into clamps on the deck which the man then locked, with difficulty, with his gun hand. At the front of the cramped cargo compartment was a ladder leading upwards into a dimly-lit space where the backs of three chairs were visible in front of banks of switches, knobs and dials. Past the chairs and the knobs and dials, Ant could see trees, dim and distorted; he had been right to think the dome on top of the saucer was made of some kind of mirrored glass. He also noted with approval that the upholstery on the chairs was made of real leather. Alien or not, the man travelled in style.
After covering the locked-down floating platform with a sort of thick clingfilm rolled out of a slot in its side, the man jabbed at a control on the wall, and the ramp began to fold up into the Flying Saucer behind them. By now, they could hear shouts, and footsteps crashing in their direction through the undergrowth.
"It's the Binocular Men", said Cleo forlornly, staring at the loading door as it closed over what might be their last sight of Earth. "They were the good guys."