Chapter 1
Looking down upon the Earth from four hundred kilometres in space was, to Eric Steeple, one of the most frightening experiences of his life. Travelling at a speed of five miles per second, orbiting Earth every ninety minutes, while floating next to an object larger than your average passenger jet, was not his idea of Heaven and was about as close to Heaven as he could ever wish to get. It was worse even than that weekend in Blackpool with Susie Plinty, who had not only taken his last fifty quid and his ticket for the train home, but had left him bruised in a place where he thought he was not actually able to be bruised.
Eric was scared of heights; he always had been. As a kid, he couldn’t go on a swing, on the monkey bars, climb a tree or wear shoes with heels over one centimetre. Only once did his father carry him upon his shoulders. He had lost half an ear and several clumps of hair as Eric had fought to be released.
Needless to say, when the opportunity to go into space had arisen, Eric had jumped at it (clearly not literally).
His need to explore had overcome his fear of heights, although strictly speaking, he hadn’t overcome his fear of anything, merely buried it deeply in the recesses of his mind and concentrated on what he did best: lying.
Yes, Eric had lied his way into space. He was a good liar. He knew just about enough about pretty much everything to bluff his way into anywhere. He was the kind of person you would have loathed at the pub quiz, unless he was on your side of course, but even then, you would have felt a veiled, burning sense of dislike for him, much like the beginnings of a urine infection.
So once accepted onto the International Space Station, in a role as indistinct as any role could ever be (nobody up there ever quite knew what the title they were given really meant), he sort of just got on with it.
And much like the hated pub quiz team member who was always the one required to go to the bar, he wound up being the one that did most of the space walks.
People liked Eric, just so long as he wasn’t there.
So today, Eric had to go for his one hundred and tenth spacewalk.
He peered into the vast blackness that was spread before him, then cast his eyes Earthwards. He heard the vertebrae in his neck grind minutely as he turned his head. He heard his rapid breathing stutter inside his helmet. He heard the blood pulse in his ears. He heard the hairs on his head stand as a sudden realisation of where he was hit him.
It was like the sound of rhubarb growing.
He took some deeper, slower breaths and forced himself to calm down. How many times had he done this? This wasn’t height. It wasn’t as if he could fall. He was not atop a tall building or a chair. He couldn’t fall. It was that simple. All he could do was float. How cool was that. Four hundred kilometres high and he couldn’t fall.
He heard the hairs on his head settle again, heard the river-rush of blood in his ears slow to a meander.
That’s better.
Bill, a fat Canadian who was the other spacewalker-type, had done the second highest number of space walks after Eric, which totalled one. Today Bill was on the other end of the microphone.
In truth, neither of them had a clue what they were doing. Bill had qualified as an engineer, almost. After a college incident involving a moose, a beaver tail, a picture of Jacques Tati and the Dean’s daughter, he had been asked to leave.
Afraid of the shame his parents would feel (and display) for him, he spent the remainder of his time in a tent at the side of Route 148 just outside Montreal and eventually bought a fake qualification from what was probably a fake Indo-Chinaman.
He then went home, was greeted with love and affection by Mom and Pop, applied one drunken night for a job with the Canadian Space Agency and to his utter, utter, utter (etc) surprise was accepted.
Now Bill stared at the rows of buttons and lights before him and, with a contemptuousness that would have been a mite perturbing to anybody who had seen him, shrugged, tutted and waved a dismissive hand at them.
He picked out a chocolate from his box of All Gold and pressed the one button he did understand.
‘Eric? You alive out there?’ No reply quickly came. ‘Eric?’
‘Crap on a stick, Bill. I told you, cough or something before you speak. You just scared the hell out of me. You made me fart. Jesus.’
Bill looked apologetically at the microphone. ‘Sorry, eh.’
‘Well, I was just calming down. What do you want?’
‘Nothing really. I was just bored. Have you fixed the metal thingy yet?’
Eric frowned. ‘No. I can’t actually find it. I’m not even sure a little bent piece of metal actually matters that much. Do you know what it does? Does it do anything?’
‘I should think so. You want me to look through the book?’
‘You understand the book?’ There was an edge of hope to Eric’s question.
‘Heck, no, but I can read it to you,’ offered Bill. ‘If it would help. You think it would help?’
Eric sighed. ‘No. I can’t understand things when people just read them out to me. I like to see the words, you know? I have this concentration thing…’
Bill thought about this. ‘We could tell them you just fixed it. It’s not like anyone’s going to go and check is it, eh?’
Eric was tempted. He really wasn’t the space walker-type. He wasn’t any type really. He was the first to admit that he was probably the laziest person he knew. Well, maybe not lazy, but certainly apathetic.
‘Better not. Knowing my luck, it’s the one shot of this thing that’ll end up on the BBC. Where did they say it was?’
Bill consulted a profoundly complicated diagram before him and ran his finger along one of many little black lines. ‘Well, you know that thing that looks like a sort of wine gum?’
‘Madeira or vodka?’
‘Vodka.’
‘Uhuh.’
‘Just beyond that and to the left of the lady’s nipple?’
‘Uhuh.’
‘It’s there somewhere.’
‘Okay.’
Eric floated off towards the lady’s-nipple-sort-of-thing.
In the distance, something small and bright moved across the sky at about the same speed of something extremely fast. Eric didn’t see it but caught the reflection in his visor. He looked up quickly.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘A shooting star. Quite close too.’
Bill didn’t reply. He was now at the stage of his tour of duty when he no longer became excited. He just wanted to go home. He ate a chocolate.
Eric turned back to what he thought was the bent bit of metal.
He bent down, took out a tool that looked something like but ever-so-slightly nothing like a set of pliers and set about the repair.
‘Hi,’ said a voice that wasn’t quite Bill’s voice into his helmet. ‘How are you?’
‘Bill,’ said Eric. ‘Please stop trying to put on an English accent. I’ve told you before. It’s not funny and...’
‘Hello,’ said the voice again in an altogether too cheery way.
‘I’m sorry?’ said Bill who had been looking at the pictures of the chocolates on his box of All Gold. ‘I wasn’t listening. Say again.’
‘Excuse me,’ said the voice-that-wasn’t-Bill’s.
Eric tutted. ‘For goodness’ sake, Bill.’
‘What?’ said Bill.
‘I’m sorry, but are you from England? You know, on Earth?’ said the not-Bill-voice.
‘Of course I’m from bloody England you Canadian half-wit....’
Bill squinted angrily at the microphone. ‘Listen, you English snob...’
‘Oh,’ said non-Bill. ‘You are English. Listen, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I don’t suppose you know where the nearest Little Chef is, do you?’
Just after that moment, Eric died.
In space, no one can hear you scream.
That’s not quite true actually.
Bill heard Eric scream and Bill and Eric heard Snort Laughter (from a long line of Laugh Laughters) scream.
Pretty much everyone heard everyone else scream.
Like girls.
Bill screamed because he saw Eric float away into space and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
Had he actually been qualified (or even read the manual) he would have known that the small red button just eight inches from his right hand would have set off an alarm, which in turn would have instigated a rescue attempt by the on-call team that did nothing else that shift but play bridge and wait for someone to float away.
Snort Laughter screamed because this was what he did when somebody else screamed. It was an automatic reaction, partly born out of his need to imitate and therefore learn, partly born out of his need to mock funny sounds and partly because the noise had just scared the living crap out of him.
Eric screamed because he had just seen an enormous spaceship with a paint job not unlike that of a 1960s hippy camper van and also because at the very moment he turned to look at it, he accidently pressed the something or other that, had he and Bill paid any notice at all to their training, they would have known released the back pack that contained all the controls that enabled him to return to the ship.
And his oxygen supply.
His last vision before death was of a thing with yellow, red-flecked eyes, deathly blue skin, two holes for a nose and what he was sure was three arms.
Then he heard the sound of rhubarb growing and a strange ‘pop’.
Snort watched as Eric’s visor turned oily. Something inside him told him that he was perhaps more responsible for this than he would care to admit.
Bill gawped dumbly as the Spear of Light (the only one built by the Mitral Space Transport Corporation) shot away from the International Space Station and made a beeline for Earth.
Responsibility however, was not a big thing on the Snort Laughter radar. When your family has made over two hundred attempts on your life and you have seen them die at the very factory gates at which the spacecraft you are now flying was made, when you have vanquished the representative of the Devil himself on Earth, when you have lied and stolen just to make your way across the universe to find the ultimate eating experience in all the untold galaxies in the endless universe, responsibility gets about a two out of ten on the ‘make that responsibility mine’ scale.
The only thing that mattered now was the Little Chef on the A30 or anywhere else for that matter.
And the fact that he liked Earth.
It had been a good while since he’d been back. His last trip here had been eventful, to say the least. Of course, he’d often thought of Charlie and Arnie, but that was it, only thought. He was a free spirit. He had people to see, places to go, intergalactic police to keep running from.
Oh, yes. The Intergalactic Police Force.
It seemed that the original owner of the Spear of Light, a jumped up, very rich, pox-ridden little turd from Squamous Alpha (which is where Snort was born, for those of you too mean to buy the first book) had claimed that the Spear of Light was stolen, despite the fact that he had sold the craft to a scrappie after crashing it while reversing in a dangerously boastful manner from his garage.
In the wonderful way of most wealthy gits and pathologically criminal scrappies (a universal trait), they had made an agreement to tell the insurance company that the Spear of Light had been nicked, thus gaining an exorbitant about of lolly for the amoral yuppie and a cut of that dubious dosh for the money-sick scrappie.
This, backed up by the security film of Snort entering the aforementioned yuppie’s garage with a wrench with which he wallied the brakes, thus causing the crash, and then the film of him at the scrappies driving the Spear of Light away, was enough for the police of Squamous Alpha and her numerous moons to put out a warrant for his arrest.
Or his dismemberment, whichever came first.
So, for some time now, Snort Laughter had been playing planetary pinball with the police in an effort to avoid incarceration and/or death.
And the one place that the Intergalactic Police Force hated to go to was Earth.
There were several reasons for this.
One was that humans were very prone to shoot first and ask questions...well, never actually.
The other was that because of the pollution in Earth’s atmosphere, which was greater than any other planet in the entire universe, it was quite simply no longer safe to go there, not if you weren’t used to it and certainly not without one of the life-killingly expensive Universal Breatho-Masks made by the Universal Breatho-Mask Company of München 2.
At this point, the sharp-eyed and nerdy out there will have noted that München is German for Munich. You are right.
The reason München 2 is called München 2 is because in 1842 a German from Munich (or München) called Josef Diefenbacker was abducted by aliens from an as yet unnamed planet.
Josef, a lonely man with a large nose and strangely rounded teeth and who had little in common with his fellow humans, especially Helga, his large, cow like wife (she wore a bell, you know), actually got on remarkably well with his abductors.
There were obvious communication problems to start with but, because the aliens were so fascinated by Josef’s glottal sounds, they displayed an eagerness to learn from him and within six weeks, the entire planet was speaking German.
He asked his new friends what the name of the planet he was on was and they merely shrugged and said, ‘Wir haben keine idee. Was schlagen sie vor?’ and Josef suggested München 2, because München 1 already existed and, despite his loneliness when there, he still had a certain affection for his home town.
The Universal Breatho-Mask was actually more expensive than South Africa because of the tiny, rare microbes that were needed to filter toxins. These microbes, called Mikroben (of course), were (and still are) mined from beneath München 2’s surface at a depth of two inches.
It’s not actually the mining that’s the problem.
The fact is they’re very rare.
They only breed once every fifty-six years and only then if the two moons are in line with the old oak tree at the end of Münchengladbach Lane. Admittedly, they do have between two and twenty-two billion offspring when they are successful, but the demand for them is quite high, as you can appreciate when such things as using them in food, building materials and fruit tinning are taken into account.
So the long and the short of it was that the safest place for Snort to go at that particular moment in time was Earth.
Except for one thing.
(Skip next chapter to see what thing exactly)
Chapter 2
Arnold Layne had become a minor celebrity in Heaven. He had, after all, helped save a soul from the Devil himself and, with the help of an alien, destroyed a rather nasty piece of work named Halitosis Grunt.
More important than this however, he had saved himself. Had he failed then there was every chance that he would now have been shovelling extremely hot coal from one pile to another and back again for the rest of eternity. Not to mention the whippings and screaming and the complete lack of peace and quiet.
And Arnie did love his peace and quiet.
So, despite the fact that Saint Peter and Saint Paul had blatantly used him as a lure for the aforesaid Devil and Halitosis Grunt, in order that the aforesaid Halitosis Grunt could be destroyed and the aforesaid Devil could be...well, upset a bit, they had grudgingly welcomed him back and given him a nice little job as a welcomer to newcomers to Heaven.
This may not sound like much. There are welcomers at the front of most supermarkets now, those people who stand there with their cheesy grins and their hands hidden unthreateningly behind their backs (yet could have a knife) and who utter like budgies ‘Help you? Help you?’ whenever someone old or a single male (who is bound to be out of his depth because men who shop alone turn quite naturally into gibbering apes) comes in and dares to hesitate for one second once past the jerky revolving doors, despite the fact that all they’re trying to do is find their bearings or undizzy themselves.
No, this was more important than that. This was like being the doorman at the Ritz Hotel, only bigger. This was like being the doorman at the Ritz Hotel if the people you greeted were going to stay at the Ritz Hotel forever and were really scared because they’d just died.
The person needed to fill this post was someone who exuded Heavenly confidence, who had been there, done that and written the heavily indexed and cross-referenced book.
So Arnie stood behind a long, warm, dark wood reception desk, in his white suit and white tie (this was more of a ‘meeting expectations’ thing than a ‘Heaven is white and pure’ thing, though it can be). In front of him upon the reception desk was a thick, red leather register with heavy pages that caused a slight breeze when turned and next to the register a large, elegantly nibbed, plain, black ink pen.
When someone came, Arnie would smile and ask them their name and then smile again as if to say, ‘Of course. We’ve been expecting you’ and then, to reinforce that, he would open the pages of the register, run his finger down the page and say, ‘Oh, yes, there you are. Right on time. Welcome to Heaven’.
They would then be taken by the arm by another welcomer (or deceased family member) and led away to wherever they were due to go.
The only problem was that, despite the fact that he knew that his task was a good task, a valuable task, a task given by none other than God himself, it really was bloody, bloody, bloody, bloody boring.
Just once he wanted to run his finger down the register’s page and say, ‘I’m sorry, who? Say that name again, please. No. No one of that name in here’. Or ‘I’m sorry. Could you just hang on a sec? God needs to have a word’.
But no. It couldn’t be done. His sense of fair play and, it has to be said, his fear of the power of God, just wouldn’t let him do it. So he just carried on, day in, day out - ‘Welcome to Heaven...Welcome to Heaven...Welcome to Heaven...Welcome to Heaven...’
‘Excuse me.’ A cough. ‘Excuse me.’
Arnie snapped out of his daydream. ‘I’m sorry.’ He smiled. ‘Could I take your name, please?’ He smiled again.
‘Certainly. Steeple. Eric Steeple.’
Arnie opened the register and ran his finger down the page. ‘Oh, yes, there you are. Right on time. Welcome...’
‘My head exploded.’
Arnie looked up from the register. People didn’t usually interrupt at this moment. They were usually too amazed at the whole amazingness of Heaven or too busy crapping themselves. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘My head exploded. It was most disturbing.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Arnie, non-committally.
Eric narrowed his eyes. ‘I don’t think you can,’ he said slowly.
‘No,’ said Arnie. ‘I can’t.’
Eric leaned confidentially forward over the counter. ‘It really hurt.’
‘Well, there you go,’ said Arnie without trying to be too dismissive. ‘Now if you wouldn’t mind...’
‘It was the alien.’
Arnie paused, pen poised above the baby-soft paper in the register. ‘Alien?’
‘The alien,’ confirmed Eric with a nod of his reconstituted head. ‘Monstrous it was...’
‘I’m sure it was...,’ Arnie held out a hand to gesture Eric along. ‘You really ought to...’
Eric seemed to come out of a trance. ‘Of course. How remiss of me. Going on like that. I’ll be off then.’ And off he went, muttering. ‘It was those yellow eyes...’
Arnie looked sharply up.
‘And that...awful...blue...skin. And the three...’
‘Arms?’ added Arnie.
Eric nodded pensively. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And he was wearing those...you know...what the kids wear these days...’
‘Hoody?’
‘No,’ sang Eric drearily as he wandered away with a long forgotten relative on his arm. ‘Earphones. Those bloody earphones. No wonder so many people get run down...’
Arnie closed the register and pulled up a lump of cloud to sit on.
‘Snort,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘He’s back.’
The cloud deflated with a ‘wumph’ and left Arnie, not for the first time, on his backside.
Chapter 3
(Except for one thing.)
München 2 was a bustling little planet.
The inhabitants, furry, teddy-bear-like creatures with six eyes, (hence the name Sechs Augen-Teddybärleute, given by Josef Diefenbacker - the Six Eyed Teddy Bear People) were a constantly busy species, working the vast mining plains for Mikroben, filling tin after tin with fruit (and Mikroben) and building buildings (with Mikroben as an essential ingredient) for who knew what purpose, but that somebody knew that someday they would come in useful to someone.
They were a very prepared people.
Of course, they were also busy making the Universal Breatho-Mask.
They were also quite serious. In that part of the galaxy, people tended to steer clear of them, not because they were aggressive or moody or even off-hand but because they simply had no sense of humour whatsoever. We all know someone with no sense of humour, who takes a joke as an invitation to lecture upon its inaccuracies or as a declaration of war because they didn’t understand irony.
The other problem was that not many of the species in that arm of the galaxy (or any other galaxy for that matter) spoke German, so even if they had possessed the sharpest sense of humour ever in the history of time, nobody except some people in Europe, on Earth (and the odd few dotted about Pennsylvania), would have understood it.
Perversely, the Intergalactic Police Force was known to have one of the best senses of humour anywhere. They would laugh at practically anything; accidents, murders, lost puppies, fat kids, bruises, hair loss, anything and were, for all intents and purposes, multi-lingual.
But that didn’t mean that they didn’t take their job seriously. Once they had decided that a crime had been committed then, no matter what, they would solve that crime.
Even vehicle theft.
By Squamous Alphans.
Hence the reason that Space Detective Sergeant Agnosia Oliguria (Nosey to his friends...and enemies) had arrived on München 2 with a view to acquiring one Universal Breatho-Mask with the express purpose of going to Earth to catch Snort Laughter.
(For those of you who have become slightly lost, that was the ‘Except For One Thing’ bit)
Space Detective Sergeant Nosey Oliguria made his way to the München 2 Universal Breatho-Mask factory and sales department (side door only for public use) and stood at the counter.
He was not in uniform. He was an undercover cop working on the mean streets of space with no friends and nowhere to hide (and he didn’t actually have to wear a uniform, his boss had said). He was however immediately recognisable as being from the planet Handsome Bastards. This was not its real name, but it was a fact that he was from what was considered to be the planet with the most handsome males that ever existed.
There was nothing about them that specifically suggested that they were the most handsome males ever, but everything about them was just...right. The right nose, the right hair, the right eyes, the right mouth, the right ears, the way their thighs pressed against their trousers to form the ideal muscular outline. It all came together to create perfection.
Many of these males joined the IPF because no one else would employ such impossibly handsome men, as it was either too distracting for the females or too disheartening for the males.
He rang the little bell on the desk and heard the pat-pat of furry feet upon the floor. In came a teddy-like creature, about a metre high, with six eyes.
‘Good morning, sir...My God, you’re a Handsome Bastard. And a policeman too, I suspect.’
Nosey cast a narrow stare at the six eyes across the counter. ‘We prefer to call my planet Sezary Sprue, but you’re right and I am. I need a Universal Breatho-Mask and I need it now. I’m on a mission and have no time to waste.’
The teddy-like thing bowed minutely. ‘Very well, sir. I shall just fetch one. I won’t be a moment.’
The teddy-like thing disappeared through a door. Nosey could hear the sounds of earnest chatter from beyond it. One of the teddy-like things popped a head round the door, made an ‘Oooooh.’ sound and disappeared. More earnest chatter occurred.
The teddy-like thing who had gone in search of the Universal Breatho-Mask returned with a package. ‘There we go, sir. One Universal Breatho-Mask. That’ll be...’
Nosey Oliguria held up a hand, while the other hand whipped out his police badge. ‘Police business I’m afraid my little six eyed teddy-like thing. Consider this Universal Breatho-Mask requisitioned.’
‘Can you do that?’ asked the slightly perturbed teddy-like thing.
‘Can a Farnugian Whinladel aim at a Plid?’ Nosey burst into uncontrolled laughter.
The teddy-like thing shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. Perhaps...’
‘It was a joke, you dumb teddy-like thing. Have you no sense of humour?’
‘No,’ said the teddy-like thing earnestly.
‘Seriously? Bummer.’ Nosey took out a pad and wrote untidily upon it. ‘Here’s a receipt. Take it to Sezary Sprue and you’ll be reimbursed.’ He turned to walk away. ‘What am I talking about? No, you won’t. That piece of paper’s worth about as much as a midweek harrumph.’ He burst into laughter again and left the shop.
The teddy-like thing watched him go. His lip curled. ‘Damn those Handsome Bastards,’ he said.