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the arm of the sofa
and put her head in Marion’s lap.
    “Chocolate
milkshake please,” Tessa said. A milkshake appeared on the
occasional table in front of the sofa. “No, make that a triple
strawberry, chocolate, and passion fruit sundae.” Obediently the
ship replaced the milkshake with the sundae. Tessa reached out and
dragged a finger through the sundae, had a little taste and said,
“Delete all that.” The sundae vanished.
    “That’s just
wasteful,” Marion said.
    “It doesn’t matter ,” Tessa said and screamed with laughter.
    Digby returned.
“Are we doing the news now?”
    “S’pose,”
Marion said, finding that she didn’t care one way or another. She
looked at Digby suspiciously. “Is this food drugged?”
    “Think about
where you were this morning and where you are now. In between, a
huge amount has happened. A yearning for bed at this point would be
completely understandable.” He sat down on nothing but before he
could fall very far, a webbed arrangement enveloped him and he
settled back into that. In front, the curved windows were replaced
by a multitude of screens displaying news presentations from every
corner of the globe. Tessa tried mucking around with them but
nothing much happened and she assumed that either Digby or the ship
was overriding her thoughts. They watched the news.
    Only some of
the airline passengers would talk to the media, the rest were
either too traumatised to face the public, or afraid of being
disbelieved or ridiculed. The latter was a real fear. The world had
only the passengers’ testimony and hasty phone shots of the shuttle
which had been taken at night-time. The U.S. Department of Defense
refused to even acknowledge that it had footage from the jets and
helicopters at the airport. No one had seen aliens. There were no
alien spaceships in orbit around the planet. The sketches of the
jellyfish couldn’t be substantiated. Much of what the passengers
said was ascribed to the stress and trauma of their ordeal which
itself was in doubt. The big mystery was how the airline passengers
came to be in Washington, D.C., having taken off at Heathrow a week
before, the plane then disappearing without trace.
    Arrest warrants
had been issued for both Marion and Tessa. Digby was regarded as a
person they wanted to interview although ‘person’ was being used in
quotation marks and they were arguing over jurisdiction.
    Much yawning
later, it was bedtime.
    -oOo-
    In the morning,
which was now a relative term as they were on a spaceship, the
three of them had breakfast on a stone rotunda. The stone columns
of the rotunda were garnished with ivy and supported a marble dome
roof. Steps led down to a lush garden which spread out all around,
giving way to forest in the distance. A brook ran tinkling through
the garden. Birds sang joyfully. It was, as you would expect,
idyllic.
    After
breakfast, they relaxed with coffee.
    “Is today the
day we finally get told why we’re really here?” Marion said, idly
stirring her coffee with a spoon.
    “Yes. But let’s
cover some other ground first,” Digby replied, ignoring the
long-suffering and cynical look from Marion.
    The lush garden
disappeared and now the rotunda was sitting in a giant hangar
crammed with little lethal looking Starfighters and other high-tech
military equipment spreading out all around them into the
distance.
    “These are
really cool,” Tessa said. “It’s my favourite place on the whole
ship.”
    “I had sorta
gathered that,” Marion said.
    “Do the
Starfighters look familiar to you?” Digby said to Tessa.
    “Yeah. I was
trying to figure that out.”
    “Think movie,
specifically, ‘Revenge of the Gorgons.’”
    “That was it!”
Tessa said, snapping her fingers. And then her face fell. “Oh. Is
this just a made-up thing from my mind? I thought they were real. I
didn’t ask for this to be made.”
    “The
Starfighters are very real,” Digby said. “You could fly them out in
space and all the weapons