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

spread out, very thin, very small, against the stars.
     
     
    He woke up.
    It was 6:3.
    His throat felt cold.
    He wondered why people made such a fuss about dreams. Dream Boat. Dream River. Dream a Little Dream. But when you got right down to it, dreams were often horrible, and they felt real. Dreams always started out well and then they went wrong, no matter what you did. You couldn’t trust dreams.
    And he’d left the alarm set, even though this was Sunday and there was nothing to do on a Sunday. No one else would be up for hours. It’d be a couple of hours even before Bigmac’s brother delivered the paper, or at least delivered the wrong paper. And he was all stiff from sitting at the computer, which wasn’t switched on.
    Maybe tonight he’d put some stuff on the floor to wake him up.
    He went back to bed and switched the blanket on.
    He stared at the ceiling for a while. There was still a model space shuttle up there. But one of the two bits of string had come away from the thumbtack, so it hung down in a permanent nosedive.
    There was something in the bed. He fumbled under the covers and pulled out his camera.
    Which meant…
    Some more fumbling found a rectangle of shiny paper.
    He looked at it.
    Well, yes. Huh. What’d he expect?
    He got up again and turned the computer on, then lay in bed so that he could watch the screen. Still more fake stars drifted past.
    Maybe other people were doing this too. All over the country. All over the world, maybe. Maybe not every computer showed the same piece of game space, so some people were closer to the fleet than others. Or maybe some people were just persistent, like Wobbler, and wouldn’t be beaten.
    You saw people like that in J&J Software sometimes. They’d take a shot at whatever new game old Patel had put on the machine, get blown to bits or eaten or whatever, which was what happened to you on your first time, and then you couldn’t get rid of them with a crowbar. You learned a bit more, and then you died. That’s how games worked. People got worked up. They had to beat some game, in the same way that Wobbler would spend weeks trying to beat a program. Some people took it personally when they were blown to bits.
    So the ships he’d seen, then, were the ones that wouldn’t give up.
    But the Captain hadn’t been at all grateful to him! It wasn’t fair, making him feel like some kind of monster. As if he’d like shooting anyone in cold blood! They’d just totally destroyed another ship. OK, it was attacking them after they had surrendered, but after all it was a only a game….
    Except, of course, it wasn’t game to the ScreeWee.
    And they’d surrendered.
    That didn’t make them his responsibility, did it? Not the whole time? It had been OK for a little while, but he was getting tired of it.
    He padded downstairs in the darkened house and pulled the encyclopedia off its shelf under the video player. It had been bought last year from a man at the door, who’d persuaded Johnny’s father that it was a good encyclopedia because it had a lot of color pictures in it. It did have a lot of color pictures in it. You could grow up knowing what everything looked like, if you didn’t mind not knowing much about what it was.
    After ten minutes with the index he got as far as prisoners of war, and eventually to the Geneva Convention. It wasn’t something you could illustrate with big colored pictures, so there wasn’t much about it, but what there was he read with interest.
    It was amazing.
    He’d always thought that prisoners were, well, prisoners—you hadn’t actually killed them, so they ought to think themselves lucky. But it turned out that you had to give them the same food as your own soldiers, and look after them and generally keep them safe. Even if they’d just bombed a whole city, you had to help them out of their crashed plane, give them medicine, and treat them properly.
    Johnny stared at the page. It was weird. The people who’d written the