Frank and Glad returned to the kitchen where Major Upshott was gathering up his laptop.
‘I said Glad should stay the night,’ Frank said to Em. ‘She can have Coral’s room.’
‘Ah, good, yes,’ Upshott said. ‘All interested parties on the premises, as it were.’
‘We’re not interested parties,’ Avril snapped, still tearful. ‘Those are our children!’
‘Yes. Quite.’ He nodded to the others and bustled out.
When he was gone, Avril turned on Frank and Em. ‘How you could let this happen.’
‘What do you mean?’ Frank said.
‘Let our children run around with a bunch of ... of space aliens.’
‘Who said they were––?’
Em said, ‘You missed that bit. Major Upshott had a message from the immigration department to say that no one named Kattflapp has entered the country in the last five years.’
‘Plus there’s no license or paperwork for that car and caravan down at the reserve,’ Glenn added. ‘The registration plates are fake.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Frank said. ‘They seemed like perfectly ordinary people. Albert was a bit eccentric, but––’
‘Perhaps you should have taken a little more interest.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Avril pursed her lips. ‘You’ve never had children, have you?’
Em bristled, but they were distracted by the sound of Smudge who’d found a ping-pong ball and was batting it furiously round the kitchen floor.
Glad raised a hand, ‘Frank and Em had absolutely no reason to suspect the Kattflapps were anything other than what they pretended to be; foreign tourists.’
‘Oh, and you would know, would you?’
‘My son’s missing too, remember.’
‘Yes, but at least he’s ... he’s ... still in one piece.’ Avril burst into tears again.
Frank looked to Glad hoping she might say more, but she shook her head. Not yet, it was too soon. And they’d never believe her anyway. She had no proof.
* * *
‘What d’you think?’
Norman held out a boulder the size of a soccer ball. He took his hands away and it stayed where it was, floating in mid-air.
‘It’s awfully big,’ Tim said, viewing the scene in the workshop via his walrus mask. Cleany-crawlies were going berserk in the background, scooping up the cloud of dust and grit that grinding the ball had created.
‘All this outer stuff will burn off when it enters the atmosphere. The real payload goes in here.’ Norman turned the boulder round and pointed to a hole in one side the size of a golf ball. ‘Once that’s inserted, we’ll plug it up.’
‘So how does it work exactly?’
The view shifted as Norman picked up the camera and aimed it at a wheeled cradle containing a short, fat rocket. Ludokrus was checking it, a probe in one hand, the calculator from Alkemy’s pink backpack in the other. He looked up and waved.
‘This goes in the nose cone,’ Norman pointed at the boulder, ‘then we fire it at Saturn.’
‘Saturn?’
‘We’re going to slingshot it around a couple of planets on the way. Their gravitational fields will give it even more speed, and it’ll disguise where it actually came from if anyone manages to track it.’
‘OK.’
‘On the dark side of the moon, the side facing away from Earth, the rocket will launch the boulder then self-destruct. I mean completely. Like nuclear. No one on Earth will see it, but Ludokrus reckons we might see the flash from here with a good telescope. Leave only footprints, and all that.
‘The boulder’s got some little thrusters on its outer surface for small last-minute corrections.’ He held the camera close and showed him. ‘But they’ll burn off as soon as it hits Earth’s atmosphere. Then it’s all down to how well we’ve done our calculations.’
‘How well have you done them?’
‘Albert’s checked our calculations. He says they’re fine.’
‘What does he think about it?’
‘He’s not happy, but I think he understands our reasons. The chances of NASA or anyone else spotting something this small are tiny, and even if they do, even if they track it and recover the payload, there’s nothing “technological” in it. Nothing that couldn’t have been made in any workshop on Earth.’
Tim had to admit it was a clever idea, sending a message back in what would appear to be a micro-meteorite. NASA reckoned a hundred tons of space dust and gravel entered Earth’s atmosphere every day, almost all of it burning up harmlessly. One more tiny piece was unlikely to be noticed.
Coral’s icon winked in his mask. Tim excused himself and his view switched back to the medical bay where Coral was strapping herself into a seat beside his bed, a pad and pen floating by her side.
‘Ready?’ she asked.
‘Yep.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Dear Mum and Dad,’ Tim began. “I’m getting Coral to write this because, as you probably saw on television, I got a bit knocked around before we blasted off from Earth ...’
* * *
The adults watched Alice’s interview in silence. She told how she’d left a plate of wholemeal pikelets for the visitors, returning later to find it broken, with birds picking over the remains. Upset, she’d run into the bush and lost her way, then stumbled across a flying saucer hidden in some ferns, right at the spot where – just hours later – what some claimed to be a meteorite had wiped it out and left a massive crater.
She even said she’d seen the craft’s inhabitants, she said: aliens disguised as mice.
Avril snorted. Clearly the interviewer didn’t believe her either, and the segment ended with Alice tugging off her microphone and stomping away.
Frank muted the sound. ‘Actually, that’s pretty much what she told us last Friday night.’
‘What? She told you about that spaceship?’ Glenn said. He looked at Em. Em nodded in confirmation.
‘She was in a hell of a state,’ Frank said. ‘Hysterical. We thought she’d got lost in the bush and hit her head or something.’
‘And you did nothing about it? Told no one?’
‘What were we supposed to do, Glenn? Who were we supposed to tell?’
Em added, ‘My sister can be a little unreliable at times.’
‘Not this time, apparently,’ Avril said.
‘So you did nothing,’ Glenn snapped. ‘And three days later ...’ He pointed at the silent TV where once again the aerial footage of the attack and blast-off were screening.
‘What would you expect me to do?’ Frank said.
‘You could have at least gotten off your arse and had a look!’ Glenn angrily snatched up his crutches and hobbled from the room, quickly followed by his wife.