Maybe tonight he’d put some stuff on the floor to wake him up.

He went back to bed, and switched the blanket on.

He stared at the ceiling for a while. There was still a model Space Shuttle up there. But one of the two bits of cotton had come away from the drawing pin, so it hung down in a permanent nosedive.

There was something in the bed. He fumbled under the covers and pulled out his camera.

Which meant . . .

Some more fumbling found a rectangle of shiny paper.

He looked at it.

Well, yes. Huh. What’d he expect?

He got up again and turned the computer on, then lay in bed so that he could watch the screen. Still more fake stars drifted past.

Maybe other people were doing this, too. All over the country. All over the world, maybe. Maybe not every computer showed the same piece of game space, so that some people were closer to the fleet than others. Or maybe some people were just persistent, like Wobbler, and wouldn’t be beaten.

You saw people like that in J&J Software, sometimes. They’d have a go at whatever new game old Patel had put on the machine, get blown to bits or eaten or whatever, which was what happened to you on your first time, and then you couldn’t get rid of them with a crowbar. You learned a bit more, and then you died. That’s how games worked. People got worked up. They had to beat some game, in the same way that Wobbler would spend weeks trying to beat a program. Some people took it personally when they were blown to bits.

So the ships he’d seen, then, were the ones who wouldn’t give up.

But the Captain hadn’t been at all grateful to him! It wasn’t fair, making him feel like some kind of monster. As if he’d like shooting anyone in cold blood! They’d just totally destroyed another ship. OK, it was attacking them after they had surrendered, but after all it was a only a game . . .

Except, of course, it wasn’t a game to the ScreeWee.

And they’d surrendered.

That didn’t make them his responsibility, did it? Not the whole time? It had been OK for a little while, but he was getting tired of it.

He padded downstairs in the darkened house and pulled the encyclopedia off its shelf under the video. It had been bought last year from a man at the door, who’d persuaded Johnny’s father that it was a good encyclopedia because it had a lot of colour pictures in it. It did have a lot of colour pictures in it. You could grow up knowing what everything looked like, if you didn’t mind not knowing much about what it was.

After ten minutes with the index he got as far as prisoners of war, and eventually to the Geneva Convention. It wasn’t something you could illustrate with big coloured pictures so there wasn’t much about it, but what there was he read with interest.