Einstein's Underpants--And How They Saved the World (2 page)

The trouble with Big Mac was that he wasn't as stupid as he looked (or sounded). What he'd said was exactly what Alexander most feared about himself – that he was a nonentity, a nothing. When he'd said ‘No' to Big Mac earlier, it had come out of nowhere. It was as if he were a ventriloquist's dummy, speaking someone else's lines. But now a sea of rage and frustration boiled up inside him, and the words that followed were a surfer riding the wave.

‘My name's Alexander, and you can't have Melvyn's dinner money and you can't have mine. Now get lost, you squeaky-voiced fat baby, before I throw you out.'

It was the single bravest thing Alexander had ever done. Admittedly, there wasn't much competition. The second bravest thing was probably when he got a splinter and didn't cry too loudly while his mum pried it out with a needle.

If Alexander thought that his brave words would intimidate Big Mac, he was to be disappointed.

‘Excellent,' Big Mac said. ‘I haven't had an excuse to thump anyone for ages.' He held his sausagey fingers up in front of his face. ‘Poor little guys,' he said sweetly. ‘Been feeling all left out? I've been neglecting you, haven't I? Well, time to play.'

Then Big Mac pulled back his fist, ready to deliver the sort of thump that would knock out a tractor. Alexander considered ducking, but the trouble is that anyone who has to think about ducking has already been hit.

That Alexander
wasn't
was due to the fact that at that very moment Mr Van arrived, dragged along by Felicity.

‘Good to see you here, Donald,' he said loudly. ‘Always nice to have new members of the chess club. Why don't you play me, and we can see what sort of standard you are, eh?'

Big Mac's fat fist was stuck in the air, looking faintly ridiculous. He stared at it for a moment, then scratched his head. ‘I was just going, sir,' he replied squeakily. ‘I'll see you later,' he said menacingly, looking at Alexander.

Then he and his sidekicks sloped off.

‘Thanks,' said Melvyn, looking at his friend strangely.

Alexander shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, as if to indicate that he had no explanation for what had just occurred. He spent the rest of the day feeling puzzled and slightly scared. But nothing else unusual happened – on that day, at least.

CHAPTER 3

UNCLE OTTO

ALEXANDER WASN
'
T SURE
what was going on to begin with. In his dream, the blobby monster that was chasing him suddenly stopped, opened its horrible toothless mouth and started singing the theme from
Neighbours
.

Alexander woke up.

Must change that stupid ring tone
, he thought to himself as he answered his mobile.

‘Hello?' he said sleepily.

‘ALEXANDER, ALEX, LEXIE LEX, EX.'

‘What . . . ? Who . . . ? Oh, hello.'

Alexander realized it was his uncle Otto, the mad scientist.

Uncle Otto wasn't really Alexander's
uncle, he wasn't really called Otto, and he wasn't really a scientist, although he was probably mad. Uncle Otto was related to Alexander in some very obscure way that nobody in his family quite understood, involving second cousins, a secret marriage, an adoption, a long prison sentence, a divorce, and a baby found on a doorstep with a note pinned to its blanket saying:
Plese luk aftor me or I'll probibbly dye.

Uncle Otto was originally called Kevin, and for a long time he worked in a supermarket, eventually becoming assistant deputy manager of his local Tesco. He seemed happy enough, walking around the aisles, making sure that there were enough tins of baked beans and dog food, and that they didn't get mixed up, and he became very good at fixing the tills when they jammed, which was once every fifteen minutes.

But about five years before the events related here, he had climbed on top of the milk cabinet and declared to the world
that he was no longer an assistant deputy manager of Tesco but a scientist, doing ground-breaking work on the origins of the universe. He added that semi-skimmed milk was Satan's wee-wee and that eating yogurt made you blind.

Strangely, Tesco decided that they didn't particularly want him working for them any more, and from that day on he was free to dedicate himself to scientific research. He changed his name to Otto because, as he put it, ‘It's a good name for a scientist.'

Alexander's mum and dad were the only members of the family who stayed in touch with Otto (or Kevin). Once a month they would go round to his small flat and make sure he was OK. Usually, Uncle Otto wasn't OK, at least as far as Alexander's mum and dad were concerned. Sometimes he would have built a sort of den in his living room made of silver-foil takeaway food cartons.

‘Their mind rays can't penetrate the foil,' he explained.

Sometimes he would speak his sentences backwards. Or, in his own words,
Backwards sentences his speak would he sometimes
. Because that way, he told Alexander in a confiding tone, ‘Saying I'm what understand can't they.'

He never got round to saying exactly who ‘they' were – although, as we'll find out, that eventually became quite clear to Alexander.

Whatever the rest of his family thought, Alexander loved his uncle Otto. During their visits he would sit entranced listening to Otto's ideas about the universe. The great scientist had a telescope set up in his loft, looking out through the skylight. He claimed it was the most powerful telescope in private hands, although Alexander was sure he'd seen the same model for sale in Argos for £49.99, including a free book to help you identify the stars. Alexander would look through it into the night sky, but all he could ever see was smudges and splotches,
and not the moons, planets, galaxies and alien spacefleets Uncle Otto claimed were there.

Back to that phone call.

Alexander checked his alarm clock. It was 4.30 a.m.

‘Do you realize what time—'

‘They're coming for me!' Uncle Otto sounded pretty intense.

Alexander had invented his own scale for working out what sort of mood Uncle Otto was going to be in. The mildest, least insane Otto was just ‘batty'. From there the scale went through ‘fruitcake' to ‘bananas', ‘loop-the-loop', ‘mad as a monkey on a trike', all the way up to ‘screaming loony'.

Now, Alexander reckoned that Uncle Otto was about halfway between loop-the-loop and monkey on a trike.

‘Who's coming for you?' he asked sleepily.

‘Can't explain now. Come round right away.'

‘But, Uncle Kevin – I mean, Otto, it's the middle of the night . . .'

‘Who cares about the time? Don't you realize the future of the planet is at stake?'

‘How? What do you mean?'

‘I can't explain over the phone. They monitor all communications. I can't block them.'

‘I can't come round now. My mum . . . she'll go crazy.'

Uncle Otto started screaming at the top of his voice: ‘BUT THEY'RE COMING. THEY'RE COMING NOW! THEY'RE COMING TO EAT US. IT'S ALL DOWN TO YOU AND ME. WE'RE THE ONLY ONES WHO CAN SAVE HUMANITY!'

‘OK, OK. I'll be there in twenty minutes.'

That calmed Uncle Otto down, and he stopped screaming.

Alexander got up and pulled on his jeans and jumper over his pyjamas. He looked out of his window. The first glimmerings of dawn were lighting the edges of the world. A
massive yawn bubbled up from somewhere around his knees and burst out of his mouth.
Five minutes
, he thought,
won't make any difference
. He lay back down on his bed and closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, it was half past eight. Nobody had woken him yet because it was Saturday, but he could hear sounds from downstairs – his little brother watching cartoons, his dad burning the toast in the kitchen (‘
Aaarghhh!
Blast stupid toaster'), etc. etc. Alexander really wanted to go and watch the cartoons with his brother and eat some toast washed down by a cup of tea with four spoons of sugar in it. But his conscience wouldn't let him. He put on his socks and trainers and slipped quietly out of the back door.

CHAPTER 4

THEY TAKE POOR OTTO AWAY

DRIVEN BY GUILT
, his legs a spinning blur, Alexander cycled the two kilometres to his uncle's flat in five minutes.

He was fast, but he wasn't fast enough.

By the time Alexander reached Uncle Otto's flat above the butcher's shop in the High Street, the crowd had already assembled. Old ladies in vast coats, bald-headed men with sticks, fat mums clutching snotty-nosed toddlers all gathered to watch Uncle Otto being carried out by some burly ambulance men, helped by six police officers. Otto was strapped to a stretcher so he couldn't even move his arms. But they couldn't stop him from screaming.

‘
You're all doomed!
' he yelled. ‘They're
coming to get you. They'll eat every last one of you. Then you'll be sorry.'

The crowd didn't look very surprised to hear all this from Otto. Most of them had heard him yelling something similar from the window over the butcher's shop for the last couple of years.

Alexander pushed his way to the front of the crowd. Uncle Otto's wild eye swivelled and caught him.

‘Alexander, Alex, Lexie Lex, Ex,' he hissed. ‘Come here, boy.'

As Alexander approached, one of the policemen put his hand on his chest. ‘Close enough, lad,' he said. ‘This chap's dangerous. He's been ranting and raving. There've been complaints.'

‘He's not dangerous,' said Alexander. ‘He's my uncle.'

He jinked past the policeman, wormed his way between two of the astonished medics and reached the stretcher. He clutched Otto's tethered hand.

‘Are you OK, Uncle?' he asked with tears in his eyes.

He felt terrible. If only he'd come round when Otto had telephoned. He could have calmed him down, soothed him, got him talking about the planets and space and not this other crazy stuff.

‘These madmen don't know what they're doing,' replied Otto, spraying spittle like a garden sprinkler. ‘I've got the co-ordinates. I know which way they're coming. I've picked up their transmissions.'

‘Please just shush, Uncle,' Alexander said soothingly. ‘If you just keep quiet for a while they'll let you go.'

‘Not if they're secretly working with the others. Yes, that's it. They've been infiltrated. THEY'RE HERE ALREADY. THEY'RE EVERYWHERE.'

‘That's enough, son, I said.' The policeman grabbed Alexander and tried to pull him away. ‘You're only getting him worked up.'

But Uncle Otto's claw-like hand gripped Alexander's. ‘Alexander, listen. My observatory. My notes. I've left them for you. And instructions. It's down to you now. Trust no one.'

And then he hissed, ‘Here, here!'

Alexander bowed his head, and his uncle whispered something in his ear.

And then the stretcher was away, strong arms barging past.

CHAPTER 5

EAT NO YOGURT

ALEXANDER WATCHED AS
the doors of the ambulance slammed shut. The crowd drifted away, and he was left alone on the street. It was only then that he realized there was something in his hand.

It was a set of keys. The keys to Otto's flat.

There were two keys for two doors. The first was outside, next to the butcher's. As ever, Alexander was captivated for a moment by the grisly pink specimens in the window. Poor Otto was a vegetarian, and it grieved him to have to live over such a place, but the council had put him there.

The next door was at the top of a flight of dingy stairs smelling faintly of meat and blood. Not knowing what he was going to
find, his heart racing, Alexander opened the door.

Otto's place was always a bit of a mess, but he'd never seen it like this. There was junk everywhere. Empty bottles, sweet wrappers, scrunched-up tissues. There were half-eaten pizzas crawling like mutant monsters out of boxes. Fat bluebottles buzzed lazily. The place smelled like a vulture's burp. The TV was turned to face the wall, as if Otto was concerned that its screen concealed an ever-watching eye. On a shelf sat at least thirty naked Barbie dolls, their hair in disarray, looking like they'd witnessed some terrible act of barbarity. What were they there for? A warning? A threat? Or were they just Otto's friends, like the panda that Alexander still kept in his bedroom and had to hide whenever his mates came round to play?

But this wasn't what Alexander had come to see. To reach the laboratory and observatory Uncle Otto had constructed in
his loft you had to pull down a complicated folding ladder contraption. It had always seemed like an adventure to Alexander, but now his heart was filled with dread. As he climbed, his imagination filled the loft with bizarre monsters, yellow-eyed lizard men, beetles the size of dogs, human kebabs.

He pushed back the trapdoor, stuck his head through the square opening, and felt around for the light switch. Just as he flicked it on, his hand landed on something furry, and he screamed like an eight-year-old girl finding a spider in her curds and whey.

Dead rat?

Severed head?

Coughed-up hairball?

Alexander blinked in the light.

No.

It was just his uncle's purple bobble hat.

He pulled himself up and looked around. The floor was covered with newspapers, most of them elaborately annotated in green marker pen. Sections had been cut out
and rearranged. Some pages had been violently slashed, as if with a machete.

Almost every square inch of the walls was covered in scribbles in the same green marker pen. There were numbers and equations and diagrams and, amid much that was utterly incomprehensible, the occasional blunt statement.