Saucerers and Gondoliers - Chapter 2

2 - One Small Step For A Man

The man settled into the seat, and tried to put his hands on the controls. One of his hands fitted into the grips on the throttle in front of the largest seat. The other hand tried ineffectually to swat at the lines of switches. The man seemed to have no control over it whatsoever.
He turned in his seat with a look of despair on his face, and used his bad hand to point vaguely in the direction of Ant.
"You", he said. "Be my right hand." He pointed at a bank of switches. "Trip the third switch from the left."
The shouts and crashings were now all around the machine, along with a crackling that sounded like many, many rifles being cocked. With some fear, Ant reached out to push the switch down. He got the wrong switch. Something inside the structure of the spaceship screamed like a scalded cat.
A voice that sounded as if it was talking through a megaphone came from outside the ship. Ant could not make out all of what it said.
"- TURN OFF YOUR PRIMARY DRIVE AND LEAVE THE MACHINE -"
"DON' YOU KNOW RIGHT FROM LEFT?" roared the man. "Turn it OFF!"
Ant turned it off, and pushed the right switch. The scalded cat noise subsided, to be replaced by a gentle purr. A line of green lights streamed across the console. Curiously, the lights were all labelled in English, although they were incomprehensible. They said things like COIL, COOL, ING, XER, and STD.
"Do what I say, 'zactly when I say it", murmured the man. "Or we all die. Pull that long lever back half way. NO, THE ONE NEXT TO IT."
Chastened, Ant Pulled The One Next To It. The man watched lights stream around the rows of consoles round the cabin, and flicked switches absently with his left hand, without seeming to need to look at them. Then he moved his hand back to the steering column.
"Now trip the big orange switch above my head."
Ant reached up and flicked the switch.
"THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING", came the voice from outside. "OPEN THE HATCH AND SURRENDER YOUR VEHICLE OR WE WILL OPEN FIRE -"
Then the vehicle took off like a bullet from a gun.
***
Ant and Cleo fell immediately as if the floor itself had swatted them like a giant cricket bat. Then the floor tilted as the nose of the ship thrust upwards, and they were squashed into the rear wall of the cabin. Ant gasped for breath, splayed out against the wall behind him, which was vibrating like the skin of a drum.
"Can't breathe - " gasped Cleo.
Gradually, Ant forced himself out of a state of panic, and told his lungs to heave themselves open and shut against the terrible pressure of acceleration. Outside, the air itself could be seen rushing round the cockpit, flowing in waves like water. The horizon ran from floor to ceiling, and was visibly bending like a longbow bent by a giant. Then it tilted and rolled to port, and the ship was flying across it rather than up out of it once again. The pressure on Ant's lungs released, and he was able to claw his way across the floor back to the man's chair again.
A large green disc had lit up on the control console, and the man had slumped himself across it to watch it. He was bleeding onto the display, and had to wipe his own blood off the glass absent-mindedly with his cuff. The display looked like a radar screen, but as Ant moved his head to look at it, the red white and blue dots in the display moved too, as if there were actually tiny points of light scooting around inside a tank in the machine.
"What does it show?" said Ant, trying to make conversation.
"Three-dimensional radar display. White dot in the middle is Us. Red dots closing are Them."
"Who's Them?" said Ant.
"Tornados. Interceptors scrambled from Mildenhall. First line of defence."
"Tornado fighters? They're trying to shoot us down?"
The man nodded as if his head was very heavy. "Will if they can. Don't worry about them. Outrun them easily."
"What are the blue dots?"
"Aurora. Second line of defence. More difficult to outrun."
"What's Aurora?"
"If they get close enough for you to see, it'll be the last thing you do see." His good hand still on the throttle, he waved in the direction of a panel on the console with his bad hand. "Open that. Red lever inside. Pull it down when I say and ONLY when I say."
The big red dots had now spat out smaller red dots which were converging on the centre of the display. "What are those?" said Ant.
"Missiles from the Tornados. Outrun those easily."
"These Aurora things are faster than a missile?"
"Faster than turbodriven lightning." The man eyed the blue dots professionally. "Get ready to pull the lever - NOW."
Ant yanked the lever. The sky around them lit up with space ships, travelling round their own vessel in convoy, reflecting the sun so brightly that Ant thought at first that their own ship had exploded. The outside surfaces of the ships glowed an eerie green, as if they were some weird type of firework.
"Is that what our own ship looks like from the outside?" said Ant.
"Exactly", said the man, and pointed at the cockpit of the nearest ship. Ant looked and saw his own face looking back at him.
"Only an image", explained the man. "Trying to fool the enemy into shooting the wrong us." The explanation seemed to take a lot out of him, and he stared bleary-eyed at a button on the control panel, as if expecting it to tell him whether to push it or not.
"Gosh", said Ant, looking at his image. "Am I really that ugly?"
The man nodded gravely.
"Cushty!" said Cleo. "Reinforcements!"
"No", said Ant. "It's only an illusion." He pointed out Cleo's face next to his own. Meanwhile, the man was flicking switches, turning knobs and examining dials like a sleepwalker, automatically, without appearing to think a great deal about what he was doing.
Then, finally, he swayed backwards, pointed at the console, and said:
"Push the blue button."
- and toppled backwards into his chair.
Outside the cockpit, the blue had gone out of the sky. Ant remembered from lessons at school that the blue in the sky was the result of sunlight being scattered in the air. The sky outside was black. That meant there was no longer any air.
They were on the edge of space. The blue dots on the display were closing.
There was only one blue button. It was marked C+. Ant pushed it. The universe changed.
***
The sky glowed, so hard it hurt the eyes. The cockpit blister of the ship seemed to darken like light-sensitive sunglasses until the view was bearable. The ship was scudding through great billowing clouds of something Ant was certain wasn't air. In fact, the clouds looked oddly solid, as if the ship wouldn’t just zip through one if it hit it.
"Where are we?" said Cleo.
"I don't know", said Ant. "In space?"
"Space is black", said Cleo.
"Then we're not in space", said Ant; and then, he muttered:
"Maybe not in time, either."
The wrenching acceleration of the trip out of the Earth's atmosphere had gone, but Ant felt cheated. He should by rights be feeling light as a feather and floating round the cabin. Instead, he was standing behind the pilot's chair, while the pilot dozed fitfully in front of him.
"He's asleep", said Cleo.
Ant examined the pilot carefully. He shook his head. He put his hand inside the sleeping man's jacket, and brought it out for Cleo to see, covered in blood.
"I don't think he's asleep", he said. "I think he's unconscious. He wasn't just wounded in the hand."
"Well, that's just fine", said Cleo angrily. "Just great. Now we're stranded in the middle of wherever we are without anyone who can fly this bag of bolts." She strode round the cockpit swatting at things. "Just look at the state of this place. You call this a flying saucer?" She picked up a half-eaten apple core by the stalk, then dropped it disgustedly into a corner.
It was true. The spaceship's owner did not appear to spend a great deal of time cleaning up. The copilot's seat was a mess of pork scratching packets and beer bottles.
"Just look at this dial", she tutted, pointing at a dial on the console. "It's not even digital." She squinted at the maker's nameplate on the control console. "Just as I thought. Made in Britain. If this was a Japanese spaceship, it'd have cupholders and curry hooks -"
Ant gaped. "Made in Britain?"
"Hawker Siddeley Aviation, it says here."
"Cleo, there is something very wrong with a Flying Saucer that is Made in Britain."
Cleo seemed unconcerned. "Don't I know it. This passenger seat doesn't even adjust."
"And Hawker Siddeley Aviation stopped making planes years ago. The last thing they made was the Harrier jump jet. Only the Americans, Russians and Chinese have ever built man-carrying space ships, and none of them have ever built anything like this."
Suddenly, a chunk of space rock big enough to have baby mountain ranges of its very own tumbled past the window. Ant jumped. Cleo screamed. Ant pressed his face up against the window, following the thing with his eyes as it hurtled away. It hurtled so quickly that it was almost gone already. Parts of the rock were glowing, as if it was a piece of sinter that had just flown out of a furnace. Further in the distance, now that he was looking for them, Ant could make out other flying islands glowing in the dark.
“The clouds”, he announced, “are not clouds. Every little particle in one of those clouds is a chunk just like that one.”
“But where did it come from? If it’d hit us at that speed -“
“I don’t know. And yes, we’d be toast. Thin sliced toast. Cut into soldiers.” Ant shook the pilot gently. "Wake up." He turned to Cleo. "He won't wake up."
"If you shake him and he's injured, it could make it worse."
"He might bleed to death. And then we'll never get home."
"Is there a first aid kit around here anywhere?"
Ant hadn't thought of that. He searched round the walls until he found a small aluminium box bolted to the steel skeleton of the ship. It was painted white, with a red cross.
"What if a red cross is, like, alien for Self Destruct?" said Cleo.
Ant squinted at the alien box. Its underside said that it had been Made In England. He took it off the wall, and opened it. It contained bandages, plasters, a large bottle labelled 'Ethyl Alcohol', a huge number of tiny glass cylinders labelled 'Morphine Sulphate', and a box labelled 'Space Sickness Tablets - Do Not Consume Under Thrust'. There was also a syringe large enough to harpoon a small whale.
"I don't think there's much in here that'll do him any good", said Ant.
"The alcohol might do him some good", said Cleo. "If we pour it over him and set light to it, it'll cauterize his wounds."
Ant looked at her severely.
"What? I saw it in a movie, all right?"
They eased the man off the pilot's seat and onto the floor. He moaned, but didn't wake up. As he came free of the pilot's chair, it crackled as the dried blood parted from the seat. Blood was still coming out of him, but Ant noted that the rate of bleeding seemed to be slowing.
"He's a poor sort of alien", said Cleo. "Why couldn't we get abducted by an alien who didn't bleed so much, and stayed conscious?"
"We're going to have to take his clothes off to get at the wounds."
Cleo crossed her arms defiantly. "I ain't taking his clothes off. He can die for all I care."
"Easy. He isn't wounded anywhere you wouldn't see down a swimming bath. Help me get his shirt off."
They stripped him of his jacket and shirt, and found an ugly-looking wound in his side. Not really knowing what to do with it, they dabbed it with alcohol soaked into a bandage, but not too much, because this made him start moaning again.
"He's going to die, isn't he", said Cleo. Ant didn't know what to say in reply.
They wrapped a bandage round the wound, and tied it up with a safety pin Cleo had been using to tie a scarf round her waist.
"Whatever we do, anyway, we won't starve", said Ant, looking at the mountain of crisp packets spilling off the cargo platform.