Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett Read Free Book Online

it!”
    It was plunging on toward another ship, taking no notice of him.
    “All right, then—”
    Blinding blue light flashed across his vision. He shut his eyes and still the light was there, purple in the darkness. When he opened them again, the ship ahead of him was just an expanding cloud of glittering dust.
    He turned in his seat. The Captain’s ship was right behind him. He could see its guns glowing.
    They never did this in the game. They had much more firepower than you, but they used it stupidly. It had to be like that. You could only win against hundreds of alien ships if they had the same grasp of gunnery techniques as the common cucumber.
    This time, every gun had fired at exactly the same time.
    The Captain’s face appeared on the screen.
    “I am sorry.”
    “What? What happened?”
    “It will not happen again, I promise you.”
    “What happened?”
    There was silence. The Captain appeared to be looking at something beyond the camera range.
    “There was an unauthorized firing,” she said. “Those responsible will be dealt with.”
    “I was going after that ship,” said Johnny uncertainly.
    “Yes. It is to be hoped that another time you can do so before one of my ships is destroyed.”
    “I’m sorry. I—I didn’t want to fire. It’s not easy, shooting another ship.”
    “How strange that a human should say that. Clearly the Space Invaders shot themselves?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Were they doing you any harm?”
    “Look, you’ve got the wrong idea,” said Johnny. “We’re not really like that!”
    “Excuse me. Things appear differently from where I sit.”
    It would have been better if she had shouted, but she didn’t. Johnny could have dealt with it if she had been angry. Instead, she just sounded tired and sad. It was the same tone of voice in which she’d spoken about the Space Invaders wreckage.
    But he found he was quite angry too.
    She couldn’t be talking about him.
    He picked spiders out of the bath, even if they’d got soapy and didn’t have much of a chance. Yet she’d looked at him as if he was Genghis the Hun or someone…after blowing a ship into bits.
    “I didn’t ask for this, you know! I was just playing a game! I’ve got problems of my own! I ought to be getting a good night’s sleep! That’s very important at my age! Why me?”
    “Why not?”
    “Well, I don’t see why I should have to be told how nasty we are! You shoot at us as well!”
    “Self-defense.”
    “No! Often you shoot first!”
    “With humans, we have often found it essential to get our self-defense in as soon as possible.”
    “Well, I don’t like it! Find someone else!”
    He switched off the screen and turned his ship away from the fleet. He half expected the Captain to send some fighters after him, but she did not. She didn’t do anything.
    Soon the fleet was merely a large collection of yellow dots on the radar screen.
    Hah! Well!
    They could find their own way home. It wasn’t as if they needed him anymore. The game was ruined. Who was going to spend hours looking at stars? They’d have to manage without him.
    Serve them right. He was doing things for them, and they were only newts.
    Occasionally a star went past. You didn’t get stars going past in real space. But they had to put them in computer games so that people didn’t think they’d got something like Wobbler’s Journey to Alpha Centauri.
    Interesting point. Where was he going?
    The radar screen went bing.
    There were ships heading toward him. The dots were green. That meant “friendly.” But the missiles streaking ahead of them didn’t look friendly at all.
    Hang on, hang on—what color was he on their radar?
    That was important. Friendly ships were green and enemy ships were yellow. He was a starship. A human starship.
    But on the other hand, he’d been on the same side as the ScreeWee, so he might show up—
    He grabbed the microphone and got as far as “Um, I—” before the rest of the sentence was