“They’ve stopped sending men there, but they still send up scientific equipment and cameras. I don’t see why Meaty shouldn’t go with the next delivery. Why don’t you take him to the scientists in the United States who are interested in sending different things to the moon, to see how they get on? They sent a spider once, to see if it could still spin its web there. They might be very interested if you told them where Meaty came from and how he’s obviously in the wrong world here.”
As he spoke, he noticed that Meaty had stopped weeping and seemed to be listening intently. Now the little creature opened its mouth and said: “MEEEEE-MOOOOON.”
“There you are?” said Peter. “He wants to go! Maybe the meteorite was a chunk of moon and it’s his homeland.”
“HOOOOOMMME,” crooned Meaty.
“I do know an American scientist who works in connection with space probes,” the man murmured. “I wonder if it’d be possible.”
Brooding, he walked along with Meaty in his arms and Peter by his side. They had reached an unfamiliar part of the wood. Peter had never come as far as this before, and he knew he should be thinking of turning back, but he was too fascinated to leave his new friends—for he definitely thought of Meaty as a friend now.
At last they came out from the trees. A house stood in a clearing. Behind it was a garden with cages in which monkeys were climbing, chattering, eating bananas and playing with the skins.
“Where’s Meaty’s cage then?” Peter asked.
“That was it.” The man pointed to a heap of broken and tangled wire. “He literally burst out of it when he started growing. What I can’t understand is why he took off his blindfold.”
“Surely anyone would do that! I would if someone bandaged my eyes,” said Peter.
“But he’s intelligent. He knew what would happen and how dangerous it would be. He’s never disobeyed me in that way before.”
“SAAAAD. SAAAAD. SAAAANNNND,” said Meaty.
“Sad? Sand? What are you trying to tell me?” the man asked.
“SAAAANNNNDEEEE!”
“Oh! Oh, he did, did he?” The man thrust Meaty into Peter’s arms and said: “Hold him gently while I attend to the criminal.” He marched over to the cage next to the heap of broken wire. “Sandy? Sandy, what have you got there? No, that is not a banana skin. It’s a piece of material, isn’t it? All right, so you didn’t know what you were doing. I’ll forgive you this once, but you must not interfere with other monkeys and take their things.”
Sandy, a large, wistful-faced monkey looked at him gravely.
“He has a nice face,” said Peter. “What’s he done?”
“It’s obvious now. He put his arm out of his cage, through the bars of Meaty’s cage, and wrenched off the blindfold.”
In examining Sandy, Peter had drawn close to the cage. Now, quick as lightning, Sandy’s arm stretched out and strong, long fingers seized the bandage from Meaty’s eyes. Immediately the two red lights glowed, at first no more than pin-pricks. Then they grew larger, and so did Meaty. He became too large for Peter to hold.
“Meaty, close your eyes—close your eyes!” cried the man.
But Meaty, having tasted freedom, wasn’t going to give it up so easily again. He began to charge away from the garden, visibly growing as tall as the trees as he approached the wood. Peter and the man gave chase, but it was dark now and the monster merged into the tree-trunks and the leafy branches.
They ran through the wood, calling, and a little later clouds parted and the moon appeared. Everything was illumined with silver.
“We should be able to see him now,” the man said.
A second later, they did see Meaty.
He was standing quite still, his head uplifted, his red eyes glaring upwards at the moon. “MOOOON-HOOOOMMMMME-MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON . . .”
Then he wheeled round and looked down on the man and the boy. His eyes flooded them with redness. “MEEEE TOOOO MOOOON,” said Meaty. He held out his great arms towards the man, and closed his eyes. Quickly he shrank until he was a baby monster again. The man picked him up. “All right, Meaty,” he said. “We’ll take this young fellow’s advice. We’ll go to a clever scientist in America who will try to get you on a rocket to the moon. You’ll be free. You’ll have a world of your own.”
Peter began to follow them back to the house, but somehow he missed them in the shadows. The moon had vanished behind the clouds again. “Wait!” he called. But there was no response.
Common sense returned. It was terribly late. His parents would be having fifty fits wondering where he was. He must go home. There was nothing more to be done for Meaty. The monster would be going to the moon, where he could let his strange eyes and his great body roam at will.
What an adventure it had been!
Peter began to run home.
When he got there, he was overheated and dizzy with fatigue.
“Where have you been?” demanded his parents, angry with anxiety. He was too exhausted to think up any convenient lies, so he told the truth:
“That monster that stuck its head through my window—it wasn’t a dream—I followed it—it was enormous—it went small when it closed its eyes—the man who’d found it called it ‘Meaty’ because it came out of a meteorite and now he’s going to take it to America so that it can be sent to the moon, along with cameras and spiders spinning webs—it stood among the trees and held up its arms to the moon, then closed its eyes, good as gold, so it’d be small again and the man could carry it and—and I guess I’m fagged out.”
Then he fainted.
When he came to, their G.P. was by his bed.
“Touch of flu, old lad. There’s a lot of it about. I’ll give you some pills to make you feel better, then you’ll get yourself better, eh?”
“I’m not ill,” Peter protested. “I was only tired. I’d had quite a day, pursuing the monster and—”
“Yes, yes, your mother told me all about it. Fever causes the oddest hallucinations. Know what a hallucination is? It’s a kind of dream-awake.”
“But I wasn’t dreaming. Meaty was there, in the wood, and—”
The doctor was already dashing off to his next influenza patient. Peter slept.
When he woke he felt quite fit. “I haven’t got flu at all,” he protested, but his mother said she knew best and he mustn’t go to school, so he said no more. As he’d skipped a day’s school illicitly, the notion that he had flu was quite useful. His bedroom was gloomy as the window was temporarily boarded up, so he pottered about the house for a bit then asked if he might go for a walk. “The fresh air would do me good,” he said, thinking this would appeal to the adult mind. It did.
He caught a bus to the lane which led to the wood, then walked through the trees to find the house on the other side. But everything looked very different by daylight. He couldn’t even recognise the place where he’d met the monster, and he couldn’t find the house at all. Mystified, he began to walk back. A suspicion was coming into his mind that maybe the grown-ups were right—that the monster’s visit in the night had been a nightmare, and the events of yesterday afternoon and evening had been a hallucination, caused by fever, as the doctor had suggested. Had his grand adventure been no more than a spell of delirium? If so, what a rotten anti-climax. He felt depressed as he returned home.
Sounds of banging came from his bedroom and he went up there to find a glazier at work, replacing the glass in his window.
“Hello, young man. This must have given you a nasty shock when it happened,” said the glazier.
“It did,” said Peter. “Have there been any other broken windows around here?”
“Not shattered like this one, but one or two gardens seem to be in the same state as yours. There was some kind of a freak storm that night, quite localised. The weathermen didn’t forecast it, but they can’t win every time. Apparently machinery stopped working when it was on—some electronic effect—I don’t understand these things. No one heard thunder or saw lightning, so it’s quite a mystery.”