Only You Can Save Mankind Read Online Free PDF Page A

control panel.
    He opened his eyes.
    Right. And you wake up back in your bedroom.
    A light winked at him.
    There was something beeping.
    Bound to be the alarm clock. That’s how dreams end….
    He lifted his head. The flashing light was oblong. He tried to focus.
    There were shapes there.
    But they weren’t saying 6:3.
    They were spelling out “AIR LEAK,” and behind the insistent beeping was a terrible hissing sound.
    No, no, he thought. This doesn’t happen.
    He pushed himself up. There were lots of red lights. He pressed some buttons hurriedly, but this had no effect at all except to make some more lights go red.
    He didn’t know much about the controls of a starship, other than fast, slow, left, right, and fire, but there were whole rows of flashing alarms that suggested that a lot of things he didn’t know about were going wrong. He stared at some red letters that said “SECONDARY PUMPS FAILURE.” He didn’t know what the secondary pumps were either, but he wished, he really wished, they hadn’t failed.
    His head ached. He reached up, and there was real blood on his hand. And he knew that he was going to die. Really die.
    No, he thought. Please! I’m John Maxwell. Please! I’m twelve. I’m not dying in a spaceshi—
    The beeping got louder.
    He looked at the sign again.
    It was flashing 6:3.
    About time, he thought, as he passed out….
     
     
    And woke up.
    He was at the computer again. It wasn’t switched on, and he was freezing cold.
    He had a headache, but a tentative feel said there was no blood. It was just a headache.
    He stared into the dark black screen and wondered what it felt like to be a ScreeWee.
    It felt like that, except that you didn’t wake up. It was always AIR LEAK, or *Alert*Alert*Alert* beeping on and off, and then perhaps the freezing cold of space, and then nothing.
    He had breakfast.
    You got a free alien in every box of sugar-glazed Snappiflakes. It was a new thing. Or an old thing, being tried again.
    The one that ended up in his bowl was orange and had three eyes and four arms. And it was holding a ray gun in each hand.
    His father hadn’t got up. His mother was watching the little television in the kitchen, where a very large man disguised as an entire desert was pointing to a lot of red and blue arrows on a map.
    He went down to Neil Armstrong Mall.
    He took the plastic alien with him. That’d be the way to invade a planet. One alien in every box! Wait until they were in every cupboard in the country, send out the signal, and bazaam!
    Cereal killers!
    Maybe on some other planet somewhere you got a free human in every packet of ammonia-coated Snappicrystals. Hey, zorks! Collect the Whole Set! And there’d be all these little plastic people. Holding guns, of course. You just had to walk down the street to see that, of course, everyone had a gun.
    He looked out of the bus window.
    That was it, really. No one would bother to put plastic aliens inside the plastic cereal if they were just, you know, doing everyday things. Holding the Cosmiczippo Ray™ hedge clippers! Getting on the Megadeath™ bus! Hanging out at the Star Thruster Mall!
    The trouble with all the aliens he’d seen was that they wanted to either eat you or play music at you until you became better people. You never got the sort that just wanted to do something ordinary like borrow the lawn mower.
    Wobbler and Yo-less and Bigmac were trying to hang out by the ornamental fountain, but really they were just hanging around. Yo-less was wearing the same gray trousers he wore to school. You couldn’t hang out in gray trousers. And Wobbler still wore his sunglasses, except they weren’t real sunglasses because he had to wear ordinary glasses anyway; they were those clip-on sunglasses for tourists. Also, they weren’t the same size as the glasses underneath, and had rubbed red marks on his nose. And Bigmac, in addition to his camouflage trousers and “Terminator” T-shirt with “Blackbury Skins” on the back in