How To Save The World: An Alien Comedy (9 page)

“More exciting than Suzuka Circuit?” Eric queried.  He placed a thoughtful expression on his face.  “Hmm … that’s a tough one.”

“Like, somewhere that’s, like, a natural wonder or something,” Jixyl advocated.  “Just cos places like racing tracks on obscure planets aren’t really that interesting for us.”

“Well, we could go to Mount Everest, I suppose,” Eric suggested.

And so they did.  And as they hovered above the peak of the highest point on Earth, Eric was almost as excited as he had been when he visited Suzuka Circuit.  “Ar, is there any way we can get out and stand on the top?” he inquired.

“No, the sudden massive increase in altitude would kill you,” Azleev explained.  “Your body couldn’t handle such a rapid change.”

“Ar, gutter,” Eric grumbled.  “That would have been a story to tell the grandkids, like.”

A surprised expression suddenly appeared on Jixyl’s face.  “Have you got grandkids?” he asked.  “How old were you when you had kids, like?”

“Ar, nar.  I didn’t mean literally,” Eric explained.  “I haven’t got grandkids, obviously.  It’s just an expression.  I just mean it would have been something to brag about.”

“You can’t tell anyone about tonight,” Azleev instructed.  “Earth is a non-contact planet and we’d get into loads of trouble if we broke that situation.”

“I thought going to non-contact planets was what The Nivlax Festival was all about,” Eric queried.

“Well, yeah … it is,” Azleev
acknowledged.  “But I mean … well, we’re only meant to play tricks on people.  We’re not meant to befriend them and take them for a fly about in our spaceship.”

“Ar, right.  Ar well … I wasn’t gonna tell anyone anyway,” Eric agreed.  “Just cos if I said, ‘Ar, I flew to Everest last night in a spaceship,’ everyone would think I was a mental freak.  So don’t worry, I’m not gonna tell anyone.”

Eric spent a few more moments staring down at Everest before a thought suddenly entered his head.

“Ee, man!” he suddenly exclaimed.  “I’ve just remembered!  I’m meant to be meeting this lass later on.  Ar, man.  I’m gonna be totally late.  She’ll be in a right strop now.”

“Well we can head back now if you want,” Jixyl offered.

“Ar, I dunno,” Eric replied.  “I should, like, cos lasses go in a right strop if you stand them up.  But on the other hand I’m gonna be late now in any case, so I might as well keep flying about and seeing more cool places.”

Eric had only seen the lass in question a couple of times previously, so although she seemed sound enough, he nevertheless reasoned that flying around in a spaceship currently topped his priority list right now.

“We should probably be heading off in any case,” Azleev remarked.  “If we head off now we’ve still got time to have one last shot at getting our double letter score.”

“Ar, gutter,” Eric shrugged, the disappointment evident in his shoulders.  “Ar, fair enough, then.”

So after a brief discussion as to where he wanted dropped off they headed back to Mount Helvellyn.  Eric would ideally have preferred to have got dropped off at the car park at the start of the Mount Helvellyn hike, but Jixyl and Azleev explained that this would create too great a risk of their spaceship being spotted by multiple witnesses.  And besides, the car park probably wasn’t quite big enough to fit the spaceship anyway, so they landed once again at the flat bit of land next to
Red Tarn just below the peak of Helvellyn.

A few seconds later Eric emerged from the spaceship and walked a metre
or so before looking back at Jixyl and Azleev, and raising his hand in a sort of cool acknowledgement.  Jixyl and Azleev responded by giving him an uncool wave back.

“Actually you don’t wanna be waving, like,” Eric advised.  “That’s more like what old untrendy people would do.  Just do what I did and raise your hand sort of nonchalantly.”  He raised his hand once again to demonstrate and Jixyl and Azleev returned the gesture, not looking quite as cool as Eric but nevertheless looking slightly less uncool than they did a few moments earlier when they waved.

“Right, then.  Well cheers for showing uz Suzuka and Everest and all that,” Eric thanked.  “And, like, if you’re ever on Earth again then we’ll have to meet up again for a few beers.  Well … a few beers for me and a few diquintenols for you.”

“Yeah, definitely,” Jixyl agreed.

“Anyway, nice meeting you,” Azleev added, “but next time if you could maybe try not to start things off by kicking uz in the stomach it’d be appreciated.”

“Aye, soz,” Eric chuckled.

“Actually Azleev…” Jixyl remarked, as an idea appeared in his head.  “You should give Eric your Nukol 4460 … just so we can keep in touch.”

“Do your mobile phone’s work all the way across the galaxy, like?” Eric inquired.

“Aye,” Jixyl replied.  “Some parts of the galaxy you don’t get very good reception, though.  But on Earth we’ve been getting class reception, like.”

“I’m not giving him
my
phone,” Azleev objected.  “Give him yours.”

“Well I would but I’ve already got a good phone,” Jixyl reasoned, “whereas you could do with an upgrade so you might as well give Eric your old 4460 and then get yourself a new one.”

“Nar, I like my 4460,” Azleev protested.  “Besides, mine’s on contract, whereas yours is just Pay As You Go.”

“But yours hasn’t even got G.O.T. 2.0, man!” Jixyl argued.  “How can you manage without lip synching imagery?”

“I’m not fussed about lip synching imagery,” Azleev insisted.  “It’s just what I’m used to.”

Jixyl tutted.  “I can’t believe you can walk round with that antique and not feel embarrassed by it, like.”

“It was a good phone in its day,” Azleev remarked.

“Aye but it
s day was 3.19726027 years ago,” Jixyl smirked.  “Here then, Eric,” he remarked, as he removed his mobile from his pocket.  “You can have mine … seeing as how Azleev is being a tight wad.”  Eric’s eyes widened at the prospect of the generous gift of alien technology.  “There’s just one condition, though.  Don’t go showing it around to everybody.  Like we’ve said, Earth’s a non-contact planet at the moment so we don’t want loads of people sussing that there’s loads of other inhabited planets in the galaxy.”

“Ar, no worries,” Eric
agreed.  “I wouldn’t have showed it to anyone anyway.  Cos like I said, if I started going on about aliens, people would think I was mental and I don’t want people to think I’m mental, like.”

“Sound then,” Jixyl replied.  “I’ll just run you through the features first, though.”  He firstly showed Eric how to work the G.O.T., then he showed him how to get on the G.I.N.
[16]
, but cautioned him not to use that very much as it was a total rip-off and he only had five hundred credits (roughly equivalent to about ten pounds) left on the phone.  Jixyl then ran Eric through a few of the phone’s other features but it had so many that in the end he just decided to show Eric how to bring up the internal instruction manual, so that he could learn how to use the features himself.

Finally, Eric was all clued up on his new phone.  “So, like, totally cheers, like,” he remarked, gratefully.  “I totally appreciate you giving uz your phone, like.”

“No worries,” Jixyl shrugged.  “The new Zekon Trav 72 came out the other day, like, so I fancy getting one of them in any case.”

“Ar, right.  Well anyway, sound meeting you and all that,” Eric remarked.

“Aye, sound meeting you as well,” Jixyl replied.  “It’s just a shame we couldn’t give you an anal probe.”  By now Eric was sufficiently over his paranoia to realise that this was a joke.

“Yeah, sound meeting you,” Azleev agreed, patting Eric on the back, in the style of someone sticking a piece of paper to someone’s back with a comedy phrase written on it along the lines of ‘Kick Me.’

Eric then set off on the hike down Helvellyn, looking back and giving them another nonchalant hand raise as he began his walk.  Jixyl and Azleev once again returned the gesture, this time with a bit more coolness, then headed back inside the spaceship.  When Eric got to the twenty metre mark he spent a few seconds moving his head backwards and forwards, marvelling as the spaceship disappeared then reappeared several times due to the wonders of light refraction displacement technology.  He then remembered, however, Jixyl’s joke from earlier on about it being ninety three percent safe and whilst he probably believed Azleev’s claims that this was just a gag and it was actually totally safe, he nevertheless got another slight pang of paranoia and therefore decided to stop messing about and make his way down the hill.

Jixyl and Azleev peered out of one of the spaceship’s viewing interfaces
[17]
and watched Eric head off into the distance.  When he was almost out of sight they looked at each other with smiles on their faces.

“Do you feel guilty?” Azleev asked Jixyl.

“Not at all,” Jixyl responded, shaking his head.  “You have to consider the greater good.”

“Yeah, that’s what it’s all about,” Azleev agreed.  “The greater good.”

Eric found walking down Helvellyn a lot easier than it had been walking up.  Partly due to the effects of gravity but also because his body was totally full of adrenalin from the excitement of his encounter with the aliens.  He spent the first few minutes of his descent with a big smirk on his face, sort of in a trance as the strangeness of his night started to sink in.  Then after about ten minutes he decided to give Monty and Garth a text.

‘Thanks for waiting for uz, you snides,
’ he texted.

Monty and Garth were currently in a pub at the bottom of M
ount Helvellyn enjoying a pint
[18]
and a game of pool.  They had decided that the best course of action was to wait for Eric in the safety of a pub, rather than hang about on the mountain.

They were pleased when they received his text, as it seemed to suggest that Eric was still alive, but at the same time they were a bit nervous about replying for fear of discovering what had happened to him.  They eventually sent back the following reply:

‘You should have ran away like we did.  Are you okay?’
  They were happy with this reply as it placed the blame for Eric’s predicament back on himself and thereby excluded themselves from any blame, if indeed anything had happened for which blame was relevant, which they didn’t as yet know.

‘Yeah, I’m not coming back though,’
Eric texted back. 
‘It turns out that the aliens are a species of Angelina Jolie look-a-likes so I’m just gonna live on their planet.’

Monty and Garth were pretty sure this was a joke but then again a couple of hours earlier they were pretty sure that they weren’t going to encounter an alien spaceship so they weren’t quite sure what to think.  They decided to text back, ‘Is that a joke?’

‘I got to visit Suzuka and Everest,’
Eric texted back.  He had toyed with the idea of stringing them along but decided the truth was impressive enough and couldn’t restrain himself any longer from bragging about his amazing adventures.

‘Suzuka?  Is that where they make the bikes?’
Monty texted back.

‘Nar, it’s where the Japanese Grand Prix is,
’ Eric texted back. 
‘Well at least it used to be, until Bernie decided that money was more important than having an excellent track on the calendar.’

‘Seriously?  You went to Everest?’
Garth texted back.

Actually, it’s probably easier to forego traditional grammar and just list what they texted to each other:

Eric: 
Aye, it was class, like.  I’ll tell you about it when I get to the bottom.

Garth: 
Okay.  No worries.

It was almost as if they knew the narrator had decided to change his writing style in anticipation of a long-winded text conversation and they had therefore deliberately decided to conclude their text conversation just to spite him.

Back at the pub Monty wanted Garth to give Eric a ring to further probe him about his alien encounter as he was too impatient to wait for Eric to arrive.  Garth was at first reluctant, as he was on a special T-mobile tariff which only cost him 3p per text, and the penalty for this was that it cost 40p per minute per call, but eventually Monty persuaded him that given the amazingness of the situation 40p per minute was more than worth paying.

Unfortunately though, Eric had at this point lost his signal so they had to wait for him to arrive at the bottom of the hill anyway and therefore decided to treat themselves to another round of drinks.

After another forty minutes or so,
Eric made it back to the bottom of Helvellyn and strolled into the pub.  The pub was empty apart from his two mates who were over at the pool table.

Eric strolled over to greet them.  “I’ve got one for you…” he announced.  “Your mate gets abducted by aliens … would you rather run away and leave him, or would you rather stay and try to help him?”  In reality Eric was too exhilarated from the excitement of the last few hours to be annoyed at his friends and was merely pretending to be annoyed.

“Soz, but we didn’t think there was anything we could do,” Garth explained.  “You should have ran away like us.”