‘Do what you’re told! Right now!’

The car skidded, spun half around, and headed up the off-ramp with smoke coming from its tyres.

‘Turn left!’

‘But there’s traffic coming, Sir John!’

‘If they haven’t got good brakes they shouldn’t be on the road! Good! You see? Turn right!’

‘That’s just a lane! I’ll lose my job, Sir John!’

Sir John sighed.

‘Hickson, I’d like to lose all our little helpers. If you can get me to Blackbury by myself I will personally give you a million pounds. I’m serious.’

The chauffeur glanced at his mirror.

‘Why didn’t you say, sir? Hold on to something, sir!’

As the car plunged down between high hedges, all three of the telephones started to ring.

Sir John stared at them for a while. Then he pressed the button that wound down the nearest window and, one by one, threw them out.

The fax machine followed.

After some effort he managed to detach the two screens, and they went out too, exploding very satisfactorily when they hit the ground.

He felt a lot better for that.

Chapter 4

Men in Black

The bus rumbled along the road towards Johnny’s house.

‘There’s no sense in getting excited about Mrs Tachyon,’ said Kasandra. ‘If she’s really been a bag lady here for years and years, then there’s a whole range of perfectly acceptable explanations without having to resort to far-fetched ones.’

‘What’s an acceptable explanation?’ said Johnny. He was still wrapped up in the puzzle of the newspaper.

‘She’s an alien, possibly.’

‘That’s acceptable?’

‘Or she could be an Atlantean. From Atlantis. You know? The continent that sank under the sea thousands of years ago. The inhabitants were said to be very long-lived.’

‘They could breathe underwater?’

‘Don’t be silly. They sailed away just before it sank, and built Stonehenge and the Pyramids and so on. They were scientifically very advanced, actually.’

Johnny looked at her with his mouth open. You expected this sort of thing from Bigmac and the others, but not from Ki— Kasandra, who was already doing A-levels at fourteen years old.

‘I didn’t know that,’ he said.

‘It was hushed up by the government.’

‘Ah.’ Kasandra was good at knowing things that were hushed up by the government, especially considering that they had been, well, hushed up. They were always slightly occult. When giant footprints had appeared around the town centre during some snow last year there had been two theories. There was Kir— Kasandra’s, which was that it was Bigfoot, and Johnny’s, which was that it was a combination of Bigmac and two ‘Giant Rubber Feet, A Wow at Parties!!!!’ from the Joke Emporium in Penny Street. Ki— Kasandra’s theory had the backing of so many official sources in the books she’d read that it practically outweighed Johnny’s, which was merely based on watching him do it.

Johnny thought about the Atlanteans, who’d all be two metres tall in Greek togas and golden hair, leaving the sinking continent in their amazing golden ships. And on the deck of one of them, Mrs Tachyon, ferociously wheeling her trolley.