Eddy Stone and the Alien Cat Attack Read online

  “At the zoo in Saltburn Sands,” said Millie. “They have one. I have seen it.”

  “And how are we going to get it out?”

  “I don’t know,” said Millie. “I am four and three-quarters, not a famous ephelant thief.”

  “We’d never get away with it. It’s much too big.”

  “Then obviously you must make it smaller,” said a deep voice. A strange voice, that seemed to come out of nowhere.

  “Who said that?” said Eddy.

  “It was my tummy,” said Millie. “I think there is someone in there.”

  “My name is Blubblubblabblubblubblubblap,” said Millie’s tummy.

  “The Liquoid professor?” said Eddy. “You mean you are still alive?”

  “The oceans of my home world are raging pools of acid. If I can survive in them I can certainly survive in here. Though this is a lot smellier.”

  “But how can you talk to us?” said Eddy.

  “I can flow through this whole body. A few moments inside the brain were quite enough to learn your simple language,” said the Professor. “It took a lot longer to practise how to vibrate in here to produce the required sounds.”

  “It’s making my tummy wobble,” said Millie.

  “I have been listening to what you have been saying about the Malvalian plan to steal the water,” the Professor went on. “I am going to help you stop them. We liquids must stick together, after all. I have one of the most brilliant scientific minds in the entire galaxy. And it sounds like you need me if you don’t even know how to shrink things.”

  “Round here things generally stay the same size,” said Eddy.

  “How very dull,” said the Professor. “And inconvenient. If you can’t make things smaller, what do you do when you need to pack to go on holiday? Or get the family together to enjoy a game of Where Have I Hidden Grandma? You really mean you haven’t invented a shrinking device?”

  “My mum uses the washing machine,” said Millie.

  “If it will help you to beat the Malvalians,” said the Professor from Millie’s tummy, “I will build you one. We can use the technology from one of the engines on this podule.”

  “You know about the engines?” said Eddy.

  “I should do,” said the Professor. “The Malvalians forced me to design them.”

  “How do they go so fast?” said Eddy. “I thought that nothing could travel faster than light.”

  “You can’t really be blamed for making mistakes like that,” said the Professor. “Not with a brain like yours. Let me see if I can explain it in a way that even you can understand. To put it very simply, the engine shrinks a tiny strip of space in front of it, so that it has less far to go. And then it makes the space just behind itself a bit bigger, so it has already gone there. It fiddles around with the way time is passing, too. Do those things several million times a second, and you have a quantum wave accelerator engine that can zip along much faster than light.”

  “And I’ve got two of them,” said the podule. “Eat my space dust!”

  “And we can use one of them to make a shrinking machine that you can carry round,” said the Professor.

  “It sounds brilliant,” said Eddy. “Will it take long to make?”

  “Just a few minutes. It’s not a difficult job. It’s only rocket science, after all,” said the Professor. “A child could do it. In fact, a child will do it. Millie’s body simply has to follow my instructions. But we’ll need something to put it in. A small case of some sort. I must flow back into contact with her brain so I can control what we are doing.”

  “You could use my phone,” said Eddy. “It hasn’t recovered from meeting that yoghurt. Will that do?”

  It did. With the Professor directing her movements, Millie’s little hands worked at tremendous speed, delicately fitting tiny electronic parts into the shell of Eddy’s phone.

  “It feels really funny,” Millie said, as her fingers flashed and flitted at her task, “because I can’t do this.”

  But it was soon done. Millie was now holding a totally refitted and amazingly advanced device.

  With the job over, the Professor flowed down out of her brain.

  “I’ve got my fingers back,” said Millie. And dropped the phone.

  Eddy dived forward and caught it just before it hit the ground.

  “Oops!” said Millie. “But I did not break it.”

  “Not quite,” said Eddy.

  “But it was a good try,” said Henry.

  “And now to show you how it works,” said the Professor, who was back in Millie’s stomach. “Turn it on. I have connected the circuits inside so that all you do is point the camera at your target and click.”

  Eddy lined up a fallen tree trunk and pressed the button. For a couple of seconds the tree trunk glowed with a pale green halo. Then it suddenly shrank down to the size of a twig.

  “Wow,” said Eddy. “That’s incredible.” He picked up the tiny tree. “It has lost weight, too.”

  “That’s all part of the effect. I’ve set the device so it will shrink things down to a size that you can fit in your pocket,” said the Professor. “Now dial 3-2-1 and see what happens.”

  Eddy punched in the numbers.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I can’t see anything different.”

  “Look around,” said the Professor.

  Eddy did. He spotted a bird that was flying between the bare branches of a nearby tree. Except that it looked more like it was fighting its way through glue. He could see every beat of its wings as if it was in a film running in super-slow motion.

  “Has everything around us slowed down?” he asked.

  “Strictly speaking, you have speeded up. As well as shrinking things, your device can interfere with the way that time flows through the space around it. I won’t even try to explain this one. It involves using long complicated words that are so full of very advanced science that just hearing them could damage your brains. All you need to know is that one burst from your device gives you about ten minutes, while everyone on the outside only experiences thirty seconds. Now you had better turn it off to save the battery. Put that tiny tree down and stand well back because – well, you will see why.”

  Eddy hit the off button. As the power shut down, the tree trunk immediately returned to full size. The bird zipped past and up into the sky.

  “Once it stops transmitting, the effects are cancelled instantly,” said the Professor. “Just make sure you remember that.”

  “I will,” said Eddy. “Don’t worry.”

  “Let’s go and get a ephelant!” said Millie.

  “The shrinking device is great,” said Eddy, “but we’ve got less than five hours to get our three things to show to the Galactic Conservation Council. So we need to move fast. We’ll start with the pie. Then the elephant. And by then I should have decided what I’m going to choose. I just can’t make up my mind.”

  Eddy, Millie and Henry were walking into the centre of Saltburn Sands. Thursday had stayed behind at the podule, partly to make sure that everything was ready for the arrival of the Council, and partly because they had all agreed that the job of collecting the things they needed wouldn’t be made easier if the inhabitants of Saltburn Sands caught sight of a giant cockroachy prawny creature from outer space and started running round the town screaming their heads off.

  “Look. There’s a supermarket over the road,” said Eddy. “We can buy a pie in there.”

  “Buy? We’re not going to buy it,” said Henry. “I’m going to make it. These fingers are itching to get back in the baking game. The feel of raw pastry under your nails – you can’t beat it. I shall make the finest pie that you have ever seen, from crust to gravy. All those years locked in the alien cage I used to wonder, why me? Now I know. I was born for this moment – to bake the pie that saves the world.”

  “But we haven’t got anything to cook it in,” said Eddy.

  “I was an army cook, remember?” said Henry. “You don’t get to be an
army cook without learning how to knock up a field oven. A big cardboard box, a lot of silver foil to wrap it, a hole in the ground and a wood fire. It will be as good as any kitchen. You’ll see.”

  “If you are sure,” said Eddy.

  “Never surer,” said Henry.

  “I’ve got all the money I saved to buy Christmas presents in here.” Eddy pulled his wallet from his pocket. “So let’s shop.”

  It went pretty well. They soon found everything that Henry needed for his pies, and even remembered to buy something for breakfast. They stood on the pavement outside the shop, full of success and chocolate muffins.

  “We came,” said Eddy. “We shopped. We got the full list. Henry, you need to go back to the podule and build your field oven and bake pie as if the whole world is depending on you. Because it is.”

  But then Eddy and Millie had the job of stealing the elephant. And that was…well, it was like this.

  Down at the Saltburn Sands Ocean Park and Zoo, the grey sky had started to drizzle. The animals were huddling miserably in their cages. Except the fish, obviously, who couldn’t have cared less about the weather because they were already soaked to the gills. A gaggle of penguins stood hunched by their pool waiting hopefully for herrings. A pair of monkeys crouched in the next enclosure, baring their teeth and chattering. A handful of keepers sat on a damp bench under a canopy that didn’t quite shut out the weather, sharing a flask of hot tea.

  “There’s the ephelant,” said Millie, pointing to a large grassy enclosure opposite the monkey cage. “Let’s use the shrinker and grab him.”

  “We can’t just grab him,” said Eddy. “There’s a great big metal fence around his enclosure. We have to get past that to reach him.”

  “Shrink that too, then,” said Millie.

  “Not possible,” the Professor’s voice rumbled from her stomach. “The shrinking device doesn’t have enough power stored to shrink everything in sight.”

  “Will you please shrink something soon?” said Millie. “I want to see it work again.”

  “There’s a gate in the fence over there,” said Eddy. “With a big padlock on it. What we need is one of the keepers.”

  “Are we going to shrink him?” said Millie.

  “No. We need to get him to open the lock.”

  “I will do it,” said Millie.

  The keepers never stood a chance.

  “Hello, men!” said Millie, advancing on them behind her brightest smile, and clutching Horaceboris.

  “Hello, little girl,” grunted the keepers.

  “I do like your ephelant,” said Millie. “What does it eat?”

  “All sorts,” said one of the keepers. “Hay. Carrots. Bits of wood.”

  “I don’t think it eats wood,” said Millie. “I think you are teasing me because I am four and three-quarters.”

  “Really,” said the keeper.

  “Show me,” said Millie.

  “Not now,” said the keeper. “You’ll have to wait till feeding time.”

  “Is it feeding time now?”

  “No,” said the keeper, looking at his watch. “In about an hour.”

  “How many carrots does he eat?”

  “Loads. A whole sackful.”

  “How many is that? Forty-three? Two hundred and six? A million?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh,” said Millie. “Is it feeding time now?”

  “No,” said the keeper. “I said in about an hour.”

  “Is it an hour yet?”

  “No,” said the keeper.

  “Is it nearly an hour?

  “No.”

  “When will it be a—”

  “For goodness’ sake, Beaky,” said one of the other keepers, “go and feed the elephant. It won’t matter if we’re early for once.”

  The keeper rose stiffly from his bench and walked towards the elephant enclosure. Millie trotted alongside him. Eddy followed them.

  “Why do they call you Beaky?” asked Millie.

  “More than twenty years I worked here,” said the keeper, “and never a mistake. And then one day, I let a penguin escape. Slipped away from the Ocean Park while my back was turned during a rehearsal of Fishy Frolics. And would that lot let me forget it? Would they flip. Since then not one of them has called me by my proper name. It’s Beaky, this and Beaky that.”

  They reached the elephant’s enclosure. The elephant had seen them coming, and wandered over to the gate to see what was happening. The keeper picked a key from the large bunch attached to his belt, and turned it in the padlock. Then he pushed the gate open, his back towards Eddy and Millie.

  “Stay there, you two,” he said. “You’re not allowed inside.”

  3-2-1 Eddy dialled on the shrinking device. Everything around them went into slow motion. He darted past the keeper, selected the camera on his phone, pointed it at the elephant and pressed. The animal glowed with a pale green halo for a second, and then – zzzzzzipppp.

  “Yaaayyyy!” shouted Millie. She laughed delightedly.

  “What is that extraordinary noise?” said the Professor. “It’s like an earthquake in here.”

  “I’m laughing,” said Millie. “Because it shrinked.”

  “Laughing,” said the Professor. “I’ve never heard of that. Is it painful?”

  “You’re silly,” said Millie. And laughed again.

  It took Eddy a moment to spot the tiny elephant, which was hidden behind a dandelion. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an empty snackpack of raisins that he had left in there. He gently popped the animal inside the cardboard box, closed the lid, and put it back in his pocket, taking care to keep it the right way up.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Millie. “We need to get well away from here before time gets back to normal again.”

  Millie paused for a moment to speak to the zookeeper. His back was still turned towards her, and he was moving as slowly as if he was wading through treacle.

  “Thank you for the ephelant. And I don’t think you will have to worry about them calling you Beaky any more. Bye bye, Trunky.”

  And she skipped after her cousin.

  “I don’t know,” said Eddy. “There are so many things to choose from and it’s so important to get it right.”

  They were back in the centre of Saltburn Sands. The shrunken elephant was safely tucked inside the empty raisin packet in Eddy’s pocket. But he still couldn’t decide what he should choose to prove to the Galactic Conservation Council that Earth was special and had to be saved.

  “Well get a move on,” said Millie.

  “I think it should be something that humans are really good at,” said Eddy. “Maybe there’s something here that will give me an idea.”

  They were standing in front of a large noticeboard, which was covered with posters advertising what was happening in Saltburn Sands.

  “Like that,” said Eddy, pointing at the board. “Look at all the things that are going on. The choir singing. A play. An exhibition of flower arranging. Grown-ups are always banging on about films and books and art and music and how great they are. We can show the Council one of those.”

  “Let’s do music,” said Millie. “I can play my recorder. We all learned a tune at school last term called Blue Cs. It goes like this: Toot-toot-toot –” she began to sing – “toot-toot-toot. Tooooooot-tooooooot-tooooooooooooooooot. Toot-toot-toot…”

  “All on one note?” said Eddy.

  “Yes. C,” said Millie. “We are going to learn another note next term.”

  “I thought you were trying to save the planet,” said the Professor. “Anyone who had to listen to that would want to destroy it.”

  “Rubbish,” said Millie. “We did it at school and it made all the mummies and daddies smile. And some of them laughed out loud. One did it so much he fell off his chair.”

  “Maybe a painting would be better,” said Eddy. “Hang on, what’s this?”

  In front of Eddy was a large poster which read:

&
nbsp; “That,” said Eddy, “sounds very promising.”

  The famous artist’s studio was a vast loft with huge windows looking out over the broad sea. A few people were peering at paintings, large and small, that were hung on the other three walls. Next to an easel with an unfinished canvas on it stood a tall man with a small pointed beard on his chin and a paint-spattered suit on the rest of him. He was talking to a young woman who was recording his words on her phone.

  “…feeling,” he was saying, “I think that’s what made me such a success as an artist. And, of course, my simply enormous talent. Don’t forget to mention that to the readers of your newspaper.”

  Eddy looked round the room. He was surrounded by images of crashing waves and flying foam. The work of an internationally famous artist. One of these would surely do. But which one?

  “Man!” Millie called as she strode up to the figure in the suit. “Did you do them?”

  “Ah, the young. I always say one must encourage the young.” He smiled. “All my work, yes – and don’t touch that. Or anything.”

  “Have you got any with ponies on them?” said Millie.

  “I paint the sea, child, the sea in all its moods and mystery,” said Banderfield. “Not ponies.”

  “They could be having a swim,” said Millie. “They can swim, you know. And that way you don’t have to do their legs. They are the hardest part, I think. Is that why you paint the sea, because you can’t do legs?”

  “Amusing child,” said Banderfield, “run along now, why don’t you?”

  “No thanks,” said Millie.

  “Which do you think is your best painting?” Eddy asked.

  “I always say that my best painting is my next one,” said Banderfield. “You should put that in your article as well,” he told the reporter.

  Millie looked at the half-empty canvas on the easel.

  “Can you hurry up and finish it, please?” she said. “We need it today. Otherwise the space cat is going to take all the water and then you will be sorry because there won’t be any sea left so you will have to paint something else and learn how to do legs right. So can we borrow it when you’ve done it?”