Galaxy Patrol

Jean Ure
Illustrated by Mark Oliver

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

James and the Alien Experiment Sally Prue

Time and Again Rob Childs

Last summer, I was abducted by aliens. One minute I was sitting there, in front of the television: the next minute, I'd vanished. I mean it! Completely vanished. My brain was still whizzing about, but the rest of me had gone.

The question was, gone where? I felt like I'd been scrambled. Scattered, in a million pieces. But I could see bits of what looked like body –
my
body – floating past me. A finger, a toe. A nose.
My
nose! My
knee
. The one with the scar, where I'd come off my bike. My arm, still in its green sweater. An
eyeball
. What was going on here?

And then it hit me… I was caught in a transporter beam!

I'd been watching one of Dad's old
Star Treks
when it happened. Captain Kirk had just told Scotty to beam him up – when
I
got beamed up.

My sister had been there, supposedly doing her homework. She wasn't meant to be there,
she was meant to be up in her room. As Mum always says, ‘How can you concentrate when the television is turned on?' The truth is, she can't.
I
can, 'cos I have extra powers of concentration. If I was doing my homework and the television was on, I would simply blot it out. Rosie, on the other hand, has no powers of concentration. I sometimes think her mind is full of ping-pong balls, all bobbing up and down. And, unlike the television, her voice is practically
impossible
to blot out.

Every few seconds it was, ‘I don't know how you can watch this stuff. Honestly, it's so stupid! Little green men?
Death
rays? Oh, please!' And then she would go, ‘You! Jake!' and prod me in the ribs with one of her bony fingers. ‘You listening? I said it's stupid! Stupid
boy
stuff.'

She can pack a whole load of scorn into her voice, can Rosie. Just because she'd rather watch stupid
girl
stuff. All pink and shrieky. I pointed out that so far not a single little green man had appeared, but she just did this impatient clicking thing with her tongue and said, ‘Aliens, then! It's all the same. They don't have to be green … it's still stupid.'

‘For all you know,' I told her, ‘aliens could be all around us.'

‘Oh, yeah?' She made a scoffing sound. ‘Haven't seen much evidence of it.'

‘There,' I said. I pointed. ‘On the screen… What's that? You don't think they just pluck these things out of nowhere?'

She looked at me, like,
un-be-lievable
.

‘It's a
story
,' she said. ‘It's
made up
. Dumbo!'

I was prepared to agree that the actual storyline was made up. ‘But all the other stuff,' I said. ‘Spaceships, for instance. Spaceships exist!'

She looked at me again. This time it was more like,
pathetic
.

‘Well, they do,' I said. I know about these things; I've done research. ‘Those people that have seen flying saucers … they can't
all
be imagining it. And warp drive! Bending space. Everyone knows
that's
possible – well, in theory. We just haven't quite got there yet. But that's not to say that other life forms haven't!'

‘Yeah yeah yeah,' said Rosie, going back to her laptop. ‘Just button it, I've got homework to do.'

She clicked furiously for a bit, giving me a few minutes peace and quiet; but, like I say, she has no powers of concentration. I don't think girls do. Not most of them. That's why they can manage about a hundred things all at once. My powers of concentration are so great that I can only do one thing at a time. And right then I was trying to watch
Star Trek
. Dad has boxes and boxes of the DVDs. I know them all practically by heart, but it is still very irritating to be constantly interrupted by ignorant remarks. Or, in this case, a sudden shriek of laughter.

‘What is
that
supposed to be?'

I gritted my teeth. ‘That,' I said, ‘is a creature from another planet. Otherwise known as an extraterrestrial.'

‘You mean, an alien.'

‘Well, yes. Except…' I frowned. ‘I'm not really sure we ought to call them that.'

‘You just did! Just now!'

I said, ‘Yes, I know, but it's not politically correct. They're just different life forms, that's all.'

‘Huh!' She tossed her head. ‘Some life form. Looks like a perambulating octopus.'

I nearly said ‘You what?' but thought better of it. She's always trying to confuse me by using words I've never heard of.

‘Actually,' I said. ‘It could be deadly.'

‘So what's he going to do? Your hero – Captain
Kirk
. What's he going to do? Get it with his ray gun? Psht!' She made her fingers into a gun shape and aimed them at the screen. ‘Zap! And then it explodes, blood and guts all over the place… I s'pose the blood's some yucky colour, like yellow, or something.'

‘This particular extraterrestrial,' I informed her, ‘doesn't happen to have any blood. It doesn't
have blood of
any
colour. And Captain Kirk,' I added, ‘does not have a ray gun. Ray guns,' I said,‘are simply figments of your imagination.'

‘Oh.' She sniggered. ‘Pardon me! So what's all this stuff? I thought it was science
fiction
.'

It is science fiction based on fact. That is what she cannot grasp. She likes to pretend it's all just nonsense. She was about to learn…

‘Oops!' She fluttered her hands, pretending to be scared. ‘Watch out! It's got him in its tentacles. Now what's going to happen?'

I said, ‘He'll tell Scotty to beam him up.'

‘Yay! The famous transporter! Wish they'd hurry up and invent it. I could do with one of them for getting me out of maths lessons.'

Rosie is dumb at maths. She seems to think it's amusing, having to add up on her fingers. She does know a lot of long words, though; I'll give her that. But I reckon maths is more important, 'specially if you want to understand temporal mechanics. Ha! She wouldn't even know what that was.

‘Matter of fact,' I said, carelessly, ‘they already have transporters.'

Her lip curled. ‘Who does?'

She never believes a thing I tell her.

I said I wasn't sure exactly
who
. ‘It might still just be alien technology. But they do exist.'

She opened her mouth to say ‘Oh, yeah?' She is always saying ‘Oh, yeah?' Anything she can't argue against.
Oh, yeah
? Only this time she didn't get the chance, 'cos at that very moment Captain Kirk spoke into his communicator: ‘Beam me up, Scotty!' And that was when I disappeared…

Whoosh! I'd landed.

Some
of me had landed. I could feel that some bits were still missing. The odd toe. The nose. My right ear.

Well, that was OK; I wasn't too anxious about it. I knew that body parts didn't always reassemble themselves at exactly the same moment. Some of them were probably still floating around in the transporter. Yup! That was my nose. Back in the middle of my face, right where it ought to be. Oh, and here came the toes! A whole bunch of them. I hadn't realised so many were missing. Now I was just waiting for my right ear.

'
Ere
,'
ere
. Dad would make a joke of that. Dad makes jokes about everything. But I bet even he wouldn't make a joke if he were all exploded into atoms and having to wait while he got put together again. It might have been a bit scary if I hadn't seen it so often on
Star Trek
. Of course,
there was the occasional accident, when people
didn't
get put back together … but most of me was back. I guess you can live without a right ear.

BOY LOSES EAR IN TRANSPORTER ACCIDENT
. I could already see the headline in the local paper. Not that anyone would believe it, 'cos people never do. They wouldn't have to, anyway, 'cos suddenly there it was. Back! A big flapping elephant's ear stuck to the side of my head. (It's Rosie who says I have elephant's ears. She can talk! She has a nose like a
blob
.)

Now that I was all in one piece, I could concentrate on my surroundings. Where had I been brought? A spaceship, that was for sure. I could recognise the inside of a spaceship when I saw one. Seemed like they'd beamed me direct to the control deck. Wow! Serious stuff. Whoever they were, they obviously meant business.

Some of them were standing there, watching, as my body reassembled itself. Two men and a woman. They all wore uniforms, like black tracksuits with coloured logos. They didn't
look
like aliens… I mean different life forms. Creatures from other planets. But they obviously had to be.

Humans might have gone to the moon, and Mars, and places like that, but we hadn't yet invented transporters. Not as far as I was aware. Only other life forms had those. We
knew
about them; but we didn't actually have them. Which meant that these three people weren't really people at all…

They were
pretending
to be people. It was obviously some kind of disguise. Some kind of cloak they wrapped themselves in to fool you. Or to make you feel more comfortable, depending on what sort of life forms they were. Friendly, or … the other sort. It wasn't really possible to tell.

One of the men stepped forward. He had a red logo with gold stripes, so I guessed he had to be the captain. The others only had silver, and only one stripe each. The captain had three. He raised a hand, very solemnly, palm upward. I raised mine back; it seemed only polite. Unless it was some kind of threat? No! He was smiling. A friendly smile, like Captain Kirk. Now his lips were moving. What was he saying? I couldn't hear anything. There wasn't any sound! Had I gone deaf? I rubbed at my right ear, checking that it really had come back.