HARRY AN INTERGALACTIC TAXI DRIVER

HARRY: AN INTERGALACTIC TAXI DRIVER CHAPTER TWO. Anecdotes can be funny. Over the years Graham had shared many stories and had laughed when others shared their jokes and witty tales. Today, however was different. It was different because all the anecdotes, stories, jokes and tales being told in the Festival Hall of Yarod 5, were all about him. Furthermore they were all in the past tense. Graham was sipping a drink as he watched a master of ceremonies point at people around the room and shout: "You! Your turn". The audience would cheer as that person stood up and said how they would best remember Graham now he had gone but he hadn’t gone yet. After a story had finished and the laughter died down in eager anticipation of the next tale, the master of ceremonies decided it was time for silence, so he shouted out in his booming voice "SILENCE". He thought this to be a useful word to use to shut people up and get their attention. Obviously an intelligent life form. Then he barked: "Projectionist please". “Oh no” Graham muttered quietly to himself. “They've got my home movies. They're not going to show my home movies and please, please don't let them show the slides from when I was a child. The lights were dimmed and a large white screen was lowered from the ceiling. Graham closed his eyes and prayed for the inevitable not to happen, which of course it did. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been inevitable, just likely, probably or maybe. He heard the "Aaaagghhhhh" and the "Oooohhhh" from the audience. No it wasn't November 5th in the UK on the Earth with everybody cooing at the spectacle of a firework 1 HARRY: AN INTERGALACTIC TAXI DRIVER display. There were no scruffy little kids walking around with wheel barrows and furthermore inside those wheel barrows that were not around were home made Guys wearing Grandad’s Sunday best suit and a shirt stolen from the washing line of that weird bloke next door. It was for this reason that you couldn't hear those children saying in their best East end accent "Penny for the guy". None of this happened. Graham slowly opened his eyes and saw the giant picture of a baby in a nappy with it’s finger delicately poised to re-enter the nose from where his other set of pinkies had just departed. It was him, aged two months. “This is getting quite ridiculous”. He thought. It was like being in hell's version of "This is your life" only they had re-named it "This was your life" and he was there watching it. In the darkness, he quietly stood up and made his way to the bar. He picked up two bottles of the strongest whisky he could find; a brand called "Fall down dead" and took them to his room where he planned to get blind drunk and if he was really lucky, do exactly what the brand name suggested. At three o'clock in the morning the party ended with the last news footage of Graham setting foot on Yarod 5. In various states of drunken stupors everyone went to their respective beds. Graham hadn't slept much. He wasn't dead yet but there was plenty of time for that, well at least until he arrived at the edge of the universe. He hadn't even managed to get tipsy and contemplated suing the manufacturers of a certain well known brand of whiskey for lying about the effects that their drinking product would have. Such lawsuits took years to complete so he decided that it wasn't really worth pursuing. Even if they decided to settle out of court he didn't have the time to spend the money. 2 HARRY: AN INTERGALACTIC TAXI DRIVER At four o'clock sharp, there was a loud explosion. It was so noisy that it was as if a whole wall of the space station had been blown apart. This was ironic really because a whole wall of the space-station had just been blown apart. Graham quickly jumped out of bed and got dressed as the red alert sounded. "If this is a surprise party and the red alert is just to get me out of bed and get me down to a conference room to meet a few surprise guests and shake hands with a few old school chums, well the ones I didn’t send on a mining expedition down a black hole then I am going to pretty annoyed". He said aloud. Graham didn't care too much for surprises. He liked the nice ones as most of us do but in his experience the nice ones didn't happen very often, or if they did, never to him. For example, finding out he had a losing hand in a certain game of poker or finding out when he was younger that his dog wasn't a dog after all but was really some sort of shape-shifter that had been trapped in the form of a Dog. The animal had developed Alzheimer’s Disease and had forgotten how to change back again. Graham had many happy memories of playing with Dfor and hadn't minded one bit when people came up to him and asked: "Why do you call your dog Dfor?" To which he would reply: "D for Dog". A tear appeared in his eye as he recalled being so upset when all those happy memories had been swept away from him when Dfor died (no pun intended). As Dfor lay in state he changed from a dog into an 8ft lizard with teeth the size of Graham's hands. All his family looked at the body and exclaimed "Aahh D for Doppelganger". No, the thought of people jumping out at Graham from the dark and shouting "surprise!" did not exactly appeal to him. Graham was right about one thing but wrong about another. He was right that it was a 3 HARRY: AN INTERGALACTIC TAXI DRIVER surprise he wasn't going to like but it wasn't a surprise party, well at least not the sort even he could have imagined. The control room of the space-station had only been alerted seconds before the blast occurred that an alien spacecraft was becoming visible at one of the docking bays. Despite fail-safe devices the alien vessel managed to dock. The alarms rang in the control room as security was well and truly breached. These so called fail-safe devices had indeed failed and had proven not to be very safe either. This was serious. The explosion destroyed the double thick security doors as if they had been made of paper (which they weren't, before you ask). Twelve heavily armed beings dressed in black from head to toe appeared through the demolished doors. The battle commenced when the four Yarod 5 guards who were first on the scene were killed by the invading force. The communications officer in the Yarod 5 control room signalled for the Royal Space Barge to send reinforcements, as most of the space-station's own security force were on holiday in Bognor Regis. After all it was the July holiday fortnight. The people frantically at work in the control room couldn't figure it out. It seemed that these beings knew that the security forces were away and also that any reinforcements would have to come from the Royal Barge. The invaders had in fact meticulously planned for this day for a long time. They were on one side of Yarod 5 with the Royal Space Barge on the other. It would take ten minutes for those guards to reach the invaders spacecraft. Graham's cabin was right in the middle and the invaders seemed to know the most direct way to get there. The next day at an inquest into events, the question of how the invaders could know short cuts was high on the agenda. The plans for Yarod 5 were not readily available. "Was it an inside job?" People asked. Those same people spent the next few weeks reading through the 4 HARRY: AN INTERGALACTIC TAXI DRIVER five huge volumes of "Hazlars practical guide to invading space-stations" and saw no mention of Yarod 5 or any of it's sister stations. The investigation, however, plays no major part in the rest of our story, so I will tell you what happened with the invaders and Graham because it's so much more exciting. Six of the invading force guarded their ship whilst the headed towards Graham's cabin. It was unfortunate that the guards that raced towards the invaders and indeed were first to reach them died so quickly and were unable to report to the control room what they saw. Well you never know, it might have helped. Then again it might not. Had the guards lived long enough to make their report they would have been able to describe the invaders in much greater detail. They would have been able to give a vivid account of how, out of the twelve invaders, there was one who wasn’t as mobile as his counterparts. He stood at the bottom of the gang plank to their craft leaning on a Zimmer frame and shouting orders to the others. The guards died before they saw another man firing laser blasts from his crutches and four more speeding down the ramp all guns blazing from their electric wheel chairs. The rest of the invading force walked, a couple even ran. It was these more mobile members that were dispatched to Graham's cabin. Upon reaching it, two stood at both ends of the corridor whilst the remaining two stood either side of the door. They blasted their way through the door and part of the cabin wall. The two men entered the room with their weapons still at the ready but as the dust settled in the room they found that the cabin was empty. Graham had always been a light sleeper. On occasions such as these, when there was far too much noise for him, sleep was nigh on impossible. He always found that a glass of warm milk helped him to rest. He decided it was best not to disturb anyone else with this request and 5 HARRY: AN INTERGALACTIC TAXI DRIVER went to the kitchen to help himself. That is why, when the invaders were ransacking his room, he was waiting for the microwave to ping and tell him that his milk was ready to drink at the required temperature. Once he had drunk it, he had decided to do to the control room and complain about the noise. Back at his cabin, the invaders were ordered to split up and find Graham, which they started to do. "There isn't much time left". They were told by their leader through their comms units. One waited in Graham's cabin just in case he returned. The other three hadn't gone very far when the guards from the Space Barge arrived on the scene. The mayhem of laser fire followed. Graham sat alone in the huge kitchen. It was a room fit for preparing the largest banquets or for simple things like glasses of warm milk, one of which he was enjoying now. It was at this point of time that the second red alert sign started to flash to tell the occupants of Yarod 5 that two red alert lights were flashing and not just the one. The voice of the Security Computer was heard all over the station. "Warning, intruder alert. Warning, intruder alert." “They're trying hard to get my attention”. Graham thought. “Just for a stupid surprise party”. He’d had enough of this, so he finished his milk and decided to go and lodge his complaint. As he got to the door and was about to open it, he heard people running by and the sound of lasers being fired. He realised that there was a small possibility, however unlikely, that there hadn’t been a surprise party arranged for him after all. In a way he was disappointed at being wrong. “So what is happening?” He said. 6 HARRY: AN INTERGALACTIC TAXI DRIVER He carefully opened the door, just slightly. The corridor was empty. He cautiously looked both ways but could see nothing. He opened the door fully, walked forward and fell, tripping over a dead guard. If I were to tell you that Graham picked himself up, there are those who may argue that this is an inaccurate statement to make, largely because you can pick something up, say for example a biscuit or a piece of Randoriog chocolate, alternatively, somebody else can pick you up and in two different ways. They can use physical force or corny chat up lines. You cannot however pick yourself up. Since the guard, who you may remember me stating, was dead, was in no position to be able to help Graham to his feet, Graham did not pick himself up. He did stand up though. I am sure everyone will find this a perfectly reasonable course of action to take, after all I couldn't have one of my main characters crawling all over the floor for the rest of the book could I? If I had wanted a character to do this, I wouldn't have made Dfor contract Alzheimer’s Disease and therefore he wouldn't have forgotten to change his form. The result of this would mean that he wouldn't have always been a dog and he could return to his normal form which you may recall was actually an 8ft lizard with teeth the size of Graham's hands. Had all this been the case I could then have written this story about a lizard character called Graham and not the Graham that just stood up. Graham hurried toward the control room. The more he thought about the laser fire and the possibility that there wasn't a surprise party, the more he thought there was trouble ahead for Yarod 5 but more to the point, he couldn't escape the feeling that the trouble was somehow directed at him. As he turned left at an intersection of the corridor, he heard a shout coming from behind him. The voice was vaguely familiar but seemed oddly throaty. He was just about to suggest to 7 HARRY: AN INTERGALACTIC TAXI DRIVER the owner of the voice that they ought to buy a packet of throat lozenges when he turned round and realised that the words "there he is, let's get him" had been directed towards him, and furthermore two people dressed in black and armed with laser blasters were running towards him, though not at any great speed. Graham started running away from them, after all it wouldn't have been a good idea to run towards them would it? He continued in the direction of the control room, thinking that if he could reach it, he would be safe. He turned another corner but two more of these beings in black garb came towards him. He quickly doubled back and went down a different corridor but knowing that he was heading away from the control room. His only chance was to reach the Royal Space Barge. The men in black communicated their locality to the one still waiting in Graham's cabin. He met up with the rest of his squad as they attempted to head Graham off. Graham ran down another corridor and was delighted to see two Royal Guards coming his way. His pleasure was short lived as laser fire was heard again and one of the Royal Guards died much to the surprise of both the other guard and Graham. "Call for help". The remaining guard told him. Graham took his communicator out of his pocket and started to push the numbers of an emergency code. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. He had pushed the buttons for the first three numbers in the sequence but then felt a burning sensation in his hand as the communicator was shot out of his grasp. "No!" He wailed as he watched it fly from his hand and halfway down the corridor. The guard made a brave dive for the communicator but more laser shots prevented him from reaching it. The communicator was hit again. The guard managed to swerve out of the way of two more 8 HARRY: AN INTERGALACTIC TAXI DRIVER laser blasts. He grabbed Graham by the arm, pulling him down another corridor. The last thing Graham heard as they tried to flee from the invaders was the bleep, bleep, bleep of his communicator finishing a number sequence of it's own accord. He turned as he was pulled by the guard and saw the communicator go up in smoke. Before it caught on fire he heard a computer voice say: "Your request has been accepted". Then it ceased to be a method of talking to people any more and became just a fizzled out piece of circuitry. "Come on". The guard said urgently, still pulling Graham with him. "Our only chance is to make it to one of the hangers". They ran to the end of the corridor and through a door at the end, still pursued by the six men. The guard pushed Graham towards a door that led to the Hanger 3 waiting lounge but as he tried to seal the first door and stop the invaders following them, they fired their lasers again. Graham dived to the floor to avoid their blasts. The guard was not so lucky and was killed. Graham pushed the button to open the door to the hanger that lay beyond but the access panel had been shot as well. The invaders, who seemed to be rather out of breath, advanced slowly on Graham who decided now was a good time to be even more scared than he was a few minutes ago. One of the men reached into his pocket and retrieved a small blue object. Graham winced as the man held it up but then held it to his mouth, inhaled a couple of times and seemed to breathe more easily. "At last". He said panting. "We’ve got him". Graham backed up to the door as much as he could. He looked up at the access panel knowing that the only way the door could be opened was from the other side. The likelihood of that was as remote as finding real Chicken in a Chicken Curry in Bradford, England on the planet Earth. 9 HARRY: AN INTERGALACTIC TAXI DRIVER As much to the astonishment of the invaders as it was to Graham, the door slid open and Graham who was pushing hard against it, fell into the room beyond. The invaders surged forward but Graham was too quick for them. He jumped up and touched the button to close the door. Exhausted, he slumped to the ground, closed his eyes and breathed a huge sigh of relief. He was safe. He recounted his steps of the last ten minutes and decided that he had handled the situation rather well, especially being able to open that door after the access panel had made it impossible to do so. At the thought of this he remembered the realisation at the time, that the door could only be opened from the side he was now sitting on. A cold chill ran down his spine as the thought of this filled him with dread. He opened one of his eyes and quickly shut it again. He didn't like what he could see. Graham tried to convince himself that he had post traumatic shock syndrome and that his mind was playing a trick on him. Testing this theory out he opened his other eye and shut it again. Realising that what he saw was real, he slowly opened both eyes to get accustomed to the sight, in the same way that a man that has spent hours in darkness does when he goes out into the light of day. His eyes were now fully open. In front of him was a large man whose arms were folded. He was impatiently looking down at Graham, tapping his foot on the floor to show that and patience he may or may not have, were running out. There is no other word in the known universe to describe the man Graham saw before him other than scruffy. His hair was a mess, his clothes were old and worn out and he didn't look as though he even knew what the words "wash" or “soap” meant. "Out of the Horatik meteor swarm and into the Lopdraq fire storm". Graham whispered under his breath. 10 HARRY: AN INTERGALACTIC TAXI DRIVER The man sighed heavily. Still fixing his gaze at Graham, he unfolded his huge arms and said: "Was it you that ordered the Taxi?” 11