‘What for?’

‘Make things more interesting, I expect. Probably Gobi Software will be putting adverts in the computer papers about it. You all right? Your voice sounds a bit squeaky.’

‘No problem.’

‘You coming down to the mall tomorrow?’

‘Yeah.’

‘See you, then. Chow.’

Johnny stared at the dead phone. Of course, there were things like that on computers. There’d been something in the papers about it. A Friday the 13th virus, or something. Something in the program kept an eye on the date, and when it was Friday the 13th it was supposed to do something nasty to computers all over the country.

There had been stories about Evil Computer Hackers Menacing Society, and Wobbler had come to school in home-made dark glasses for a week.

Johnny went back and watched the screen for a while. Stars occasionally went past.

Wobbler had written an actual computer game like this once. It was called Journey to Alpha Centauri. It was a screen with some dots on it. Because, he said, it happened in real time, which no one had ever heard of until computers. He’d seen on TV that it took three thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. He had written it so that if anyone kept their computer on for three thousand years, they’d be rewarded by a little dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and then a message saying, ‘Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home.’

Johnny watched the screen for a bit longer. Once or twice he nudged the joystick, to go on a different course. It didn’t make much difference. Space looked the same from every direction.

‘Hello? Anybody there?’ he whispered.

He watched some television before he went to bed. There were some more missiles, and someone going on about some other missiles which were supposed to knock down the first type of missile.

The fleet travelled in the shape of a giant cone, hundreds of miles long. The Captain looked back at it. There were scores of mother ships, hundreds of fighters. More and more kept joining them as news of the surrender spread.

The Chosen One’s ship flew a little way ahead of the fleet. It wasn’t answering messages.

But no one was shooting at them. There hadn’t been a human ship visible for hours. Perhaps, the Captain thought, it’s really working. We’re leaving them behind . . .

Johnny woke up in the game.

It was hard to sleep in the starship. The seat started out as the most comfortable thing in the whole world, but it was amazing how uncomfortable it became after a few hours. And the lavatory was a complicated arrangement of tubes and trapdoors and it wasn’t, he was beginning to notice, entirely smellproof.

That’s what the computer games couldn’t give you: the smell of space. It had its own kind of smell, like a machine’s armpit. You didn’t get dirty, because there was no dirt, but there was a sort of grimy cleanliness about everything.