I have to say we did pretty well. I don’t think either of us had run that fast in our entire lives. At one point I shoved a fat guy off a hover-scooter and we both leaped on, but the joystick looked like a tomato and I had no idea how to use it so the scooter just sank to the floor with a squirty hiss. We leaped off and kept on running.
They caught us, of course. They had more legs and the deadly toilet plungers. So I guess we were pretty lucky they didn’t fill us full of smoking holes. We ground to a halt and stood with our hands on our knees, puffing and wheezing. A couple of seconds later our arms and legs were wrapped in hairy brown tentacles. The spiders were surprisingly strong. And their breath was appalling.
“Snack them down!” said one of them. “Alive! For freshness!”
“Foot on the brake!” said the other. “We do not want the electric prod.”
“No,” said the first. “We do not want the electric prod.”
Vantresillion appeared behind the spiders. “Take them to the holding cell.”
“What are you going to do to us?” asked Charlie.
Vantresillion laughed, then turned and walked away.
“Come with us, little bald monkeys,” said the first spider.
We were lifted into the air and they scuttled off at high speed in the opposite direction, jiggling us up and down and not bothering at all about banging our heads on the walls when they went round corners.
Three minutes later they snekkited a door open and threw us into a small room and snekkited the door shut behind us.
This room was different. This room was not white. This room was grey and black and brown. The walls were made of something like concrete and they hadn’t been cleaned for a couple of hundred years. There was brown goo running down them and a mess in the corner like something had died there quite recently.
“Lovely,” said Charlie.
We didn’t say anything for a while.
I took a deep breath. “Sorry, this was my fault.”
“It’s OK,” said Charlie. “I forgive you. Sort of.”
Once more we didn’t say anything for a while.
“What was the plan?”
“The plan?” asked Charlie.
“Yeah,” I said. “The brilliant plan. The one I screwed up by being a total, total moron.”
“Oh, that one,” said Charlie. “Well, if you put those suckers on your forehead and think hard enough, you can make Brussels sprouts that go off like grenades when you throw them.”
“And …?”
“I was collecting them,” said Charlie. “You know, building up an arsenal, so I could fight my way out.”
“To where?” I said. “We’re seventy thousand light years from planet Earth. Unless you’ve got some black forest gateau that turns into a spaceship.”
“OK,” said Charlie. “No need to be sarcastic. At least I was trying.”
There was a sinister grating noise from the other side of the wall.
“That’s probably the grinding machine,” said Charlie. “Thanks for coming to get me, by the way.”
I nodded. “No problem. I mean, obviously I didn’t have a choice. You being my friend and everything. Plus I missed you.”
“Yeah, me too. I think I’d have gone mad if you hadn’t turned up. Everyone talking about Blade Runner and speaking Vogon.”
I don’t know how long we were in the holding cell. The lights were on all the time and our watches hadn’t worked since we arrived on Plonk. We talked about Megan Shotts and the locusts. We talked about Mr Kosinsky’s snowman socks. We talked about salmon mousse, and strawberry jam and Cheddar cheese sandwiches.
But thinking about home made us sad. So we played noughts and crosses on the floor by scraping the dirt with the toes of our shoes. Then we tried to name all the countries in the world. Except we kept remembering that we were going to be killed, which was a bit distracting.
Ten hours passed. Or maybe twenty. Or thirty. We got really tired. We tried to lie down and sleep but it was hard to relax lying in brown goo. So we stood up again. And then we got so tired we didn’t care about the brown goo any longer so we lay down and slept.
We hadn’t been asleep for long when we were woken by two more giant monkey-spiders. Or maybe it was the same ones. It was hard to tell.
“Do the locomotion,” said one.
“Walkies!” said the other.
“Are you going to execute us now?” asked Charlie.
“Hurrah,” said one. “You are a clever boy.”
“We are the champions!” sang the other. “But you’re not.” Then it snickered gleefully.
We fought for a bit, but it was no use. They grabbed us by the arms and legs and hoisted us over their heads and hauled us off down the corridor.
Five minutes later we were taken into a hi-tech white office with blue rubber plants and Bantid Vantresillion sitting behind a desk. The giant monkey-spiders dropped us onto the floor.
“You may go now,” said Vantresillion and the spiders scuttled out.
“Charles…” said Vantresillion. “James…”
“Are you going to kill us?” asked Charlie again, getting to his feet.
“No,” said Vantresillion.
“But the spiders,” I replied, “they told us…”
“They have a strange sense of humour,” said Vantresillion.
“Oh.”
“Normally we’d kill you,” said Vantresillion. “But I think you may be able to help us.”
I felt a huge wave of relief and everything went a bit wobbly for a few seconds. But Charlie still had his head screwed on properly. “Great,” he said. “Just fire away and we’ll see what we can do. We like being helpful, don’t we, Jimbo?”
“Er, what?” I said. “Yes, that’s right. We like being helpful.”
“Hmmm,” said Vantresillion. “I have a problem. Every time one of the Watchers travels to Skye to come back to Plonk we lose contact with them.”
“Plonk,” said Charlie, chuckling. “That makes me laugh every time.”
“Charlie…?” I said.
“What?”
“Don’t be rude about their planet, all right?”
“Good idea,” said Charlie. So I reckon he was feeling a bit wobbly as well.
“And every time we beam someone down to find them, we lose contact with them too.”
“That’ll be the army,” said Charlie. “Or the police. Both, probably.”
“But no one knows about the Weff-Beam,” said Vantresillion through gritted teeth.
“Yeah, they do,” said Charlie. “Jimbo told them, didn’t you, Jimbo?”
“Did I?”
“It’s OK,” said Charlie. “You don’t have to keep it secret any longer.”
“Right,” I said. I had no idea what Charlie was doing, but I had no other ideas so I decided to go along with it. “Yeah. We had a notebook. And a map and stuff. From Mrs Pearce’s attic. And I gave it to Mum and Dad. So they know all about the Weff-Beam thingy.”
“You’re lying,” said Vantresillion.
“Scout’s honour,” said Charlie, holding up three fingers. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
Come to think of it, he was probably right. Becky had seen the Weff-Beam. She’d go to the police. They’d have the place surrounded by now. Tanks, barbed wire, marksmen.
“I guess they’re shooting them as they come up out of the ground,” said Charlie. “Because they’re aliens with tails.”
“I have lost five Watchers,” said Vantresillion darkly. “Any more and I swear I will kill everyone on your benighted little planet.”
“You’re just kidding, aren’t you?” said Charlie, smiling.
Vantresillion leaned over and pulled a black box into the centre of the desk. There were a series of buttons on the box. He placed his finger on the red one. “I press this,” he said, “and your planet blows up. No Eiffel Tower. No Great Wall of China. Just a load of smoking rocks in space.”