28

Lucy thrilled to the expert way The Journalist brought the landing craft down in what had been the garden of the old rectory. In the darkness, the ruined house looked even more desolate than it had on that fateful night: souvenir hunters had stripped it of everything movable including loose bricks.

The plan was to try and pick up Leovinus's trail, starting from the crash site. There was also the possibility that he might still be hanging around hoping that the Starship would return.

It was not a bad plan, as such, but as Dan jumped out of the landing craft a loud-hailer crackled across the old rectory lawns and a blinding searchlight hit him full in the face: 'Put your hands above your head! Do not make any sudden movements! You are surrounded by armed police!' They had not reckoned on the Oxfordshire Constabulary, who - flushed with their recent success in capturing an illegal immigrant - had set up a permanent watch around the landing site.

Dan instinctively did all the things the loud-hailer had told him not to. He didn't put his hands above his head. He leapt - very suddenly - back into the landing craft and screamed: 'Hit it!'

The Journalist fired the engine and the small craft leapt into the air, as a hail of gunfire exploded across the lawn. In a few seconds, the spacecraft had disappeared into the night, and the Oxfordshire Police were left staring at the empty sward.

'Calm down, everyone!' Nettie had taken over, although Lucy was contributing the most volubly to the discussion:

'Aaaarrrgh! Agggh!' She was choosing her words carefully.

The Journalist was concentrating on controlling the craft. Dan was shaking.

'OK,' continued Nettie. 'We've got twelve hours to find Leovinus. Our two chances are: one, picking up his trail around here and two, Nigel.'

'Nigel?' Dan's hackles were up - could this wonderful woman be still thinking about that schmuck?

'He's the one person we know was here at the site when Leovinus walked off the ship. He may have seen him - may even know where he is now!'

'Nettie! You're a genius!' said Dan.

'Aaaah! Ooooh!' Lucy added.

'I suggest you and Lucy investigate around here, while The, here, drives me to London to find Nigel.' Nettie had it all worked out. Within a few minutes, the landing craft had deposited Dan and Lucy in a quiet back lane near the hotel where they had been staying, and in another minute, Nettie and The Journalist were heading for the M40.

It began to get light as they approached the motorway. 'We don't want the police picking us up,' Nettie was thinking aloud. 'We'd better pretend we're an ordinary car - a Japanese copy of something Italian maybe. Can you drive this thing just a few inches above the ground?'

'Absolutely!' said The Journalist, and he swung the craft down onto the empty B-road. It took him a few moments to pick up the knack of keeping it steady at such a low altitude, but he was getting it.

'And you'd better cut the speed down just a tad, The,' said Nettie, '180 m.p.h. is a little fast for these bends.'

By the time they swung out into the fast lane of the M40, The Journalist had managed to get the craft down to a mere 80 m.p.h. and was giving a pretty good impression of a perfectly ordinary (if flamboyantly designed) motorcar. Nettie just hoped nobody would notice their lack of wheels.

Being the rush hour, most drivers weren't looking where they were going, as they crawled their way towards Central London. The finest jam, however, was reserved for the picturesque stretch after the Uxbridge turnoff. There were roadworks, and the rush hour simply ground to a deadening, inevitable halt.

'Purple Pangalin!' exclaimed The Journalist. 'What sort of a transportation system d'you call this? The more popular it is the slower it goes! What genius worked this out?!' He was really quite indignant.

'Well it's inevitable isn't it?' Nettie found herself being surprisingly defensive of her planet's right to have traffic jams.

'Of course it isn't!' exploded The Journalist. 'You have to devise a system that goes faster the more popular it is, so it can cope! It's perfectly obvious!'

Nettie was drumming her fingers on the dashboard of the landing craft, and smiling at anyone who happened to give them an odd look. Smiling was always the best way to make them look away. She was also glancing increasingly frequently at her watch. Time was running out.

The jam moved an inch nearer London.

'I mean a transportation system with an average speed of just above stationary is not really a transportation system at all!' The Journalist was raving by now. 'It's more like a storage system!'

'OK! Let's do it!' Nettie suddenly sounded decisive. 'I've always fantasized about this!'

'What?'

'Take her up! Nobody's watching!'

And sure enough, when The Journalist gunned the spacecraft up into the air and sped over the heads of the preceding traffic, nobody seemed to notice. He set the craft down again in an open space on the other side of the jam. The driver of the car they landed in front of was not a happily married man. He had been mulling over what would happen if his wife never returned from the skiing holiday she was currently enjoying. Perhaps she would run off with the instructor and breed Alpine sheep and serve English teas to walkers in the summer. But then there were the children. He'd have to get them to school every day on his own and he wouldn't be able to stay at the office after hours to chat up that new secretary... At this moment a sporty-looking car suddenly appeared in front of him. Jesus!' he exclaimed, swerving involuntarily, 'I didn't even notice it overtaking! God! The speed some people drive at!'

It was only as the sporty car sped away in the fast lane that he noticed it didn't seem to have any wheels. 'Concentrate!' he told himself. 'Otherwise you start seeing things.'

Another jam brought them to a resounding halt just as they reached the Westway fly-over.

'Oh no!' groaned Nettie,

'We used to have traffic problems like this on Blerontin,' observed The Journalist 'Several million years ago, before intelligent life developed.'

'Oh shut up!' said Nettie. She couldn't bear self-satisfied aliens who couldn't see any of the good things about Earth. 'This is hopeless. We've only got nine hours left!'

'Where have we got to get to?'

'The Earl's Court Road,' Nettie replied.

'Shall we take the shortcut?'

Nettie looked around, There were no police cars as far as she could see, and the woman in the car behind was picking her fingernails.

'Go for it!' she said, and the craft left the fly-over to the amazement of a couple of small children who were on their way to school.

'Look, Mum! That car's flying!'

'Well I never, dear,' said their mother, without taking her eyes off the Hello magazine she was reading. 'Whatever will we see next!'

Nettie and The Journalist swooped low over Notting Hill and effected a landing on the south side of Holland Park. Here they waited for their moment, hopped over a closed gate and filtered into the one-way system around Earl's Court.

'Eight-thirty!' said Nettie, leaping out of the 'car'. 'You stay here! If I know that scumbag Nigel, he'll still be in bed!'

She used her door key to get in, and was soon racing up the stairs to Nigel's flat. She let herself in and immediately fell over a broken ironing board that was lying across the doorway.

'Who's that?' called a voice from the bedroom.

'It's me!' yelled Nettie, picking herself up and striding into the bedroom.

The young girl with whom Nigel was currently in congress tried to pretend she was merely sitting astride a pile of old laundry.

'Shit! Nettie!' exclaimed Nigel, making an effort to disguise himself as the pile of old laundry in question by pulling all the sheets around himself. 'I thought you'd been abducted by aliens!'

'This is important, Nigel!' Nettie was straight to the point.

'I can explain all this.' Nigel began. You see Nancy here's mother died recently and I've been looking after...'

'Think back, Nigel! After the spaceship took off, did you see anyone?'

You mean like going to a psychiatrist?'

'No! No!' Trust Nigel to be only thinking of himself, thought Nettie. 'Did you see an old man with a white beard, hanging around the wreckage?'

'I think I'd better go,' said Nancy, who was actually nineteen but looked younger.

'No! No! Hang on,' said Nigel instinctively. He could see that Nettie had other things on her mind than putting his balls in the toaster, and he half-hoped he might be able to resume what he had been doing, once he'd sorted out whatever it was his ex-girlfriend actually did want of him. 'Did I see what?'

Nettie was suddenly overwhelmed by the hopelessness of it all. Here was a whole world - a whole civilization so much more advanced than her own - depending on her eliciting a sensible answer from this creep whom she'd once been in love with. What a hope in hell! She might as well try and teach Turkish to the cat!

'An old man with a white beard? He was in my car. I took him to the police station in Oxford.'

It took Nettie a moment to realize that this was exactly the information she had come all this way to extract. The moment she did, Nettie ran to the bed and gave Nigel a smacking kiss on the lips. Then she gave one to Nancy for good measure, and the next minute she was leaping down the stone stairs of the large Victorian mansion two at a time, whooping: 'The! The! The!'

'I think I'd better go,' said Nancy. She was just about to start a degree in Art History.