‘And you’ve got the fighters after you! Huh! You can’t even save yourself!’

Johnny didn’t take his eyes off the fleet, which was bouncing around the sky as he flung his ship about in an effort to avoid being shot at.

‘You might try to be some help!’ he shouted. There was a boom behind him.

‘I am.’

‘You’re shooting them?’

‘You’re very hard to please, actually.’

The Captain tried the door of her cabin again. It was still locked. And there was almost certainly a guard in the corridor outside. ScreeWee tended to obey orders, even if they didn’t like them. The Gunnery Officer was very unusual.

That, she thought bitterly, is what comes of promoting a male. They’re unreliable thinkers.

She looked around the cabin. She didn’t want to be in it. She wanted to be outside it. But she was in it. She needed a new idea.

Humans seemed much better at ideas. They always seemed to be on the verge of being totally insane, but it seemed to work for them. The inside of their heads would be an interesting place to visit, but she wouldn’t want to live there.

How do you think like a human? Go into madness first, probably, and then out the other side . . .

‘Listen! Listen! If you keep going this way, you’ll all be killed! You’re going back into game space! People like me will find you! You’ll all be killed! That’s how it goes!’

And then he died.

It was 6.3 ≡. He was lying on his bed with his clothes on, but he still felt cold.

Bits and pieces of his . . . his previous life trickled through his mind.

Sigourney!

Well, Yo-less would say that explained anything. And now it looked as if he’d be spending every night watching the ScreeWee get killed.

It was bad enough fighting off people in ones and twos. But they were just the ones who were weird or lonely or bored enough to go looking. Wobbler said thousands of copies of the game had been sold. Even if most people took them back to the shops, there’d always be someone playing. Once the ScreeWee turned up again, the news would get around . . .

And then, one day, long after no one played the game any more, there’d be these broken ships, turning over and over in the blank-screen darkness of game space.

And he couldn’t stop it. Kir— Sigourney was right. That’s what they were there for.

It was Tuesday, too. It was Maths for most of the morning. And then English. He’d better write a poem at lunchtime. You could generally get away with a poem.

He got his jacket out of the shed and sponged it off as best he could, and then propped it up by the heater. Then he investigated the fridge.

His father had been doing the shopping again. You could always tell. There were generally expensive things in jars, and odd foreign vegetables. This time there was Yoghurt Vindaloo and more celery. No one in the house liked celery much. It always ended up going brown. And his father never bought bread and potatoes. He seemed to think that stuff like that just grew in kitchens, like mushrooms (although he always bought mushrooms, if they were the special expensive dried kind that looked like bits of mouldy bark and were picked by wizened old Frenchmen).