Jack shrugged. “You’ve been working out in a circus?” he wondered.
Ruby shook her head. “No, silly. These are climber’s shoes.”
“You’ve been to climbing lessons in that gear?” He looked at her leopard-print skirt. It clashed quite badly with the pink leg-warmers – even Jack could see that, and he was a boy.
“Mum thinks I’m doing something called modern jazz dance,” explained Ruby.
That made more sense. Jack hadn’t known Ruby that long but one thing he did know about the pretty dark-skinned girl was that she loved dangerous sports but her mum would never let her do anything but safe, girly activities. So Ruby maintained a complicated scheme of little white lies: her ballet classes were really a cover for surfing lessons, and now “modern jazz dance” was obviously a disguise for…
“Climbing lessons. I’ve only been going for a couple of weeks.”
“And you just climbed up here?” Jack asked. Ruby nodded proudly.
“But this is two floors up!” said Jack.
“Yeah…” Ruby shrugged and grinned. “But you have to start small, don’t you?”
Jack rolled his eyes and then a thought occurred to him.
“Isn’t it unsafe to climb alone? Shouldn’t you have a partner with you?”
“I do…” Ruby began but she was unable to finish her sentence as there was a loud crash from outside.
Jack rushed over to the window and looked out. Sprawled on the bins below his window was Oscar. He waved a cheery hand.
Ruby joined Jack at the window. “He has a way to go,” she conceded.
“Yes,” said Jack. “Up the stairs, it looks like.”
Oscar started to get to his feet.
“I’ll get the hang of it in a minute,” he insisted.
Jack shook his head. “Wait there,” he told his friend. “Snivel needs a walk, we’ll come down to you.”
Ruby began to climb out of the window. Jack grabbed her arm. “Not that way!”
A few moments later the three of them, along with Snivel, were heading for the park. They didn’t need to discuss where they were going, as each of them knew exactly where they wanted to go – and why. They were hoping to meet Bob – the mysterious GUNGE agent who would have the details of the next mission for them.
Once inside the park they headed for the area where they had last had contact with Bob. Previously Bob had talked to them from within a rubbish bin. Exactly how a grown man had managed to fit inside a park rubbish bin they had never asked.
But now it looked as if it was too late to ask any such questions. The bin – Bob’s bin – was no longer there. Bob had disappeared!
The three children stood in stunned silence around the space where Bob’s bin had been. Finally Oscar spoke.
“It’s gone!”
“Yeah, we noticed, Einstein!” said Ruby a little unkindly.
“But how are we going to find out about out next mission now?” Oscar continued, oblivious to Ruby’s comment.
Jack bit his lip. Bob had promised that he’d be in touch – and soon. Although they had successfully captured the Squillibloat and retrieved its segment of the Blower, the intergalactic phone that would summon a full scale invasion, there were still three different aliens, with three different bits of the Blower still at large.
“I guess it’s not so urgent now,” Ruby decided. “I mean, Bob’s got the first bit of the Blower safely locked away so the others can’t put their bits together and make it work, can they?”
“I don’t know,” answered Jack honestly. “Snivel?”
Snivel scratched his head with a back paw. “If the aliens get together with the other bits of the Blower they might be able to rig up a makeshift component to make it work. They may well be very stupid, and they definitely hate each other, but if they thought they could get hold of all the snot you humans make they might just find a way.”
Snot was what the aliens were all about. It was the key to their technology, the energy source they needed to power everything. There were four alien races in the alliance known as GUNK. Together they were the Galactic Union of Nasty Killer Aliens and they were on a mission – to seek out snot! If GUNK were able to mount a full-scale invasion of Earth, then pretty soon every single human being on the planet would be hooked up to a revolting milking machine, to suck the snot out of their heads.
Unluckily, a GUNK scout ship had recently discovered Earth – and had landed right on Jack’s town!
Luckily, it hadn’t really landed so much as crashed. The four aliens on board had been scattered by the explosion. And, because they didn’t trust each other, they each had one part of the Blower – the device that would allow them to tell their friends back home that they’d found a whole planet full of snot. Bob had explained to Jack and his friends that, as agents of GUNGE (the General Under-Committee for the Neutralisation of Gruesome Extraterrestrials), they needed to find the aliens, trap them using Snivel and capture the components of the Blower before they could be united to send that message back to their home planets.
But now Bob was gone.
Snivel’s third eye snapped wide open and began to glow red.
Jack bent down to take a closer look.
“Are you all right?” he asked. But something peculiar was happening to Snivel. He seemed entranced and his gaze was fixed on some point across the path, behind them. Jack turned around to see what it was that his robot dog was looking at. At first he couldn’t see anything but then he looked down. There – standing on the grass – was a squirrel. There was something very odd about this particular squirrel. For one thing it was not afraid of the humans. And beyond that, it was looking, really looking, at each of them in turn. As Jack watched, the squirrel turned its gaze first on Ruby, then Oscar and finally himself before looking back towards Snivel. And now the squirrel seemed to be making some kind of gesture with his little paws, almost as if he was…beckoning?
Suddenly the squirrel took off, running away at speed and before Jack could say or do anything Snivel sped off in pursuit. Jack, taken by surprise, was jerked along by the lead and, like an anchor being pulled behind a ship, he collided with his friends, knocking them all to the ground. He lost his grip on the handle of his dog lead and could only watch as Snivel disappeared around a hedge.
Quickly, the three children got to their feet and set off to follow the squirrel-chasing robot dog. The chase took them in and out of the hedge maze, through the ornamental garden and around the boating lake. At one point they nearly ran into the park keeper, but when he saw that the children running towards him included Jack and Oscar, the uniformed man turned tail and hid in his equipment shed.
Finally the trail led out of the park completely. Jack was beginning to run out of breath. Oscar ran ahead and called back, “He’s heading for the canal!”
Ruby had stopped to make sure Jack was all right. “Come on,” she said encouragingly, “he can’t get too far.” Jack instantly realised that she was right. The canal disappeared into an industrial park a few hundred metres from the park, and the public access towpath terminated in a dead end. Gathering himself for one last effort he started jogging again. Oscar was already on the towpath when he got there.
“Where…where’d he go?” gasped Jack, feeling very unfit and not at all like a top agent of GUNGE. First he’d lost his contact and now it looked like he was