Chapter Two

A planet called Earth

A zillion light years away, tucked in a quiet corner of the universe, Harvey Drew flung open his bedroom door and burst in. The draught made a dozen model spaceships hanging from the ceiling zoom around on their strings.

In one awesome move, Harvey dropped his school bag on the floor, front-flipped onto his bed, bounced sideways into the chair by his desk and switched on his computer. It was a skill he had perfected by doing it every day.

Here’s something else he did every day: he checked to see if his computer had picked up any messages from aliens.

(No, honestly, he really did. I’m not joking. I know this might seem a bit mad to you, because you’re from Earth – so you probably haven’t met any aliens, have you?)

Harvey has an Alien Alert App on his computer that scans the signals coming from outer space. Mostly it just picks up random noises like shwzz and zcherr and whhhssshh.

(Sorry, I’m not sure if I’ve spelt those properly – but if you have a go at saying them you’ll get the idea).

Harvey, like thousands of other people on your tiny little planet, believes that somewhere, far, far away in distant galaxies, there are real live aliens living on other planets.

And he believes that those real live aliens on other planets are trying to contact people who are living on other other planets. Such as, say, Earth.

(Oh, good grief, this is complicated.)

So lots of people on Earth are trying to make contact with aliens from the first lot of other planets – hang on, or was it the other lot of other planets?

(Sorry, even I’m confused now.)

SpaceMail!

Anyway, the important thing is that Harvey is convinced that one day there will be a message from real live aliens from outer space and he doesn’t want to miss it. So as soon as he gets home from school every day he checks to see if there is one.

And today, as usual, there wasn’t.

He wasn’t really surprised.

Of course the space crew of the Toxic Spew wouldn’t have been surprised to receive a message from aliens because they whizz around space all the time and they’ve actually met real live aliens from other worlds.

Interestingly though, they’d never met any humans, or been to Earth. In fact, they’d never even heard of it. But then no one on Earth had ever heard of the Toxic Spew either.

Well, not yet  … 

Harvey left the Alien Alert App on and settled down to play Space Quest Android Attack 4. He brushed his curly red hair off his forehead, and his green eyes narrowed and fixed on the screen. He reckoned he’d have time to complete the next level, fly his spacecraft through the meteor storm, battle an entire fleet of evil aliens trying to take over the universe, and save his ship and crew from total destruction before it was time to go to football training.

As it turned out, he didn’t.

He was just blowing up the last few battle androids when there was a soft bleep and the Alien Alert App icon flashed. Then two words appeared on the screen: INCOMING MESSAGE.

What? thought Harvey sitting bolt upright. And then again: What?!

He couldn’t believe it. It must be a mistake. But the Alien Alert App icon was definitely flashing. With trembling fingers he clicked on it  … 

And a message appeared on the screen:

(Actually, it was quite a long message and since you probably can’t understand it any more than Harvey could, I’ve only put some of it here.)

Harvey stared at the symbols trying to make out what they meant. No chance.

He scrolled down to the end of the message. But there were no clues there either.

He had absolutely no idea what it said.

What should he do? This must be the first message anyone on Earth had ever got from aliens. This was a mega important moment for mankind!

It was obviously far too important to ignore it. He had to reply. But what on Earth should he say?

A momentous message from mankind

He wanted to put something brilliant that people would always remember. You know, like when Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the Moon and said: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’

He thought hard and then he typed:

hello? is there anybody out there?