She couldn’t be talking about him.

He picked spiders out of the bath, even if they’d got soapy and didn’t have much of a chance. Yet she’d looked at him as if he was Ghengiz the Hun or someone . . . after blowing a ship into bits.

‘I didn’t ask for this, you know! I was just playing a game! I’ve got problems of my own! I ought to be getting a good night’s sleep! That’s very important at my age! Why me?’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, I don’t see why I should have to be told how nasty we are! You shoot at us as well!’

‘Self-defence.’

‘No! Often you shoot first!’

‘With humans, we have often found it essential to get our self-defence in as soon as possible.’

‘Well, I don’t like it! Find someone else!’

He switched off the screen and turned his ship away from the fleet. He half expected the Captain to send some fighters after him, but she did not. She didn’t do anything.

Soon the fleet was merely a large collection of yellow dots on the radar screen.

Hah! Well!

They could find their own way home. It wasn’t as if they needed him any more. The game was ruined. Who was going to spend hours looking at stars? They’d have to manage without him.

Serve them right. He was doing things for them, and they were only newts.

Occasionally a star went past. You didn’t get stars going past in real space. But they had to put them in computer games so that people didn’t think they’d got something like Wobbler’s Journey to Alpha Centauri.

Interesting point. Where was he going?

The radar screen went bing.

There were ships heading towards him. The dots were green. That meant ‘friendly’. But the missiles streaking ahead of them didn’t look friendly at all.

Hang on, hang on – what colour was he on their radar?

That was important. Friendly ships were green and enemy ships were yellow. He was a starship. A human starship.

But on the other hand, he’d been on the same side as the ScreeWee, so he might show up—

He grabbed the microphone and got as far as ‘Um, I—’ before the rest of the sentence was spread out, very thin, very small, against the stars.

He woke up.

It was 6:3 ≡.

His throat felt cold.

He wondered why people made such a fuss about dreams. Dream Boat. Dream River. Dream A Little Dream. But when you got right down to it dreams were often horrible, and they felt real. Dreams always started out well and then they went wrong, no matter what you did. You couldn’t trust dreams.

And he’d left the alarm set, even though this was Sunday and there was nothing to do on a Sunday. No one else would be up for hours. It’d be a couple of hours even before Bigmac’s brother delivered the paper, or at least delivered the wrong paper. And he was all stiff from sitting at the computer, which wasn’t switched on.