reached for the brown package on the passenger seat.
Drying his hands, he unpacked the red, radiolike box inside it and pulled out its antenna. Switching on the device, he pointed it in the direction of Briersville Park, to its gardens and its swimming pool. The machine bleeped reassuringly.
“Got you, alien Moon girl,” AH2 said with a satisfied smack of his lips. He picked up his phone and tapped in a message to his superior, AH1.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
Two
Molly and Micky Moon were sitting in an emerald green sports car, speeding up the motorway under a heavy gray sky. Molly felt like some sort of pet animal, as she was stuffed in the cramped space behind the two front seats where her twin brother, Micky, and their new tutor, Miss Hunroe, sat at the wheel.
Miss Hunroe was very glamorous looking and not at all like Molly thought a tutor should be. Her hair was peroxide blond and kinked so that it almost formed stairs down the side of her head. Her hazel eyes, which Molly could see in the rearview mirror, watching any approaching cars that might be trying to overtake her, were large and long lashed. And her pale skin had a clean, translucent beauty. Her cheeks were tinged a pretty, wholesome pink. Her clothes were very unteacherly, too.
She wore a smart cream suit with a silk shirt underneath, and on one of her red-nailed fingers, she wore a heavy gold ring with an emerald embedded in it.
She steered the car with her left hand. Her right hand, meanwhile, held a gold coin. As she drove, she flipped it along her fingers so that it turned like a rolling wheel in between her knuckles. Every time another car obstructed the fast lane, she would flip the gold coin, saying, “Heads!” or “Tails!” She’d catch the coin on the back of her right hand. If she won the toss, she’d flash her lights and drive really close to the car in front until the vehicle moved over and let her pass. Then she’d speed off—well over a hundred miles an hour—until the offending car was a long way behind.
Molly gripped the back of Micky’s seat. Miss Hunroe’s driving, along with her rose-scented perfume, was making Molly feel sick. She hoped she wouldn’t be. That would really spoil the day, she thought, if she was sick all over the leather seats of Miss Hunroe’s car.
“Interesting way of driving,” Micky commented dryly, looking up from his crossword puzzle book as, yet again, Miss Hunroe flipped her coin and started to flash at the van in front.
“It keeps me amused,” Miss Hunroe replied. “I like to see the law of odds in action. There’s a fifty-fifty chance that I should or shouldn’t pass, yet somehow this coin always lands on what I’ve guessed it will land on. So I always pass! It’s as if the coin wants to get back to London as quickly as possible!”
And so on they drove, as if in some sort of a race, upsetting the other traffic on the road, causing other drivers to raise fists and blast their horns. Molly stared at the straight road ahead, as she knew that an eye on the horizon would help her carsick feeling. She watched a cat-shaped cloud turn into the shape of a dragon and kept watching the clouds until her stomach felt better. Every so often Micky began a conversation with Miss Hunroe. These went something like, “Butanoic acid. Miss Hunroe, isn’t that the name of the colorless liquid that causes that nasty rancid smell in butter?” or “That word
“Shall I tell you, Miss Hunroe? The answer’s E. The letter E. Clever, eh?”
“Sorry, dear, I can’t talk. I’m driving,” was usually Miss Hunroe’s answer to whatever question or riddle Micky threw at her, and so he went on with his puzzles alone, or he looked out of the window or craned his neck to talk to Molly or consulted his compass to see in what direction they were heading.
AH2 drove behind, in his sleek black car, keeping his distance. His locator box was switched on, so that however crazily the emerald green sports car drove, he could always tell where the alien girl, Molly Moon, was. He sucked on cool mints and listened to space-age ambient music that twanged and tocked, reminding him, he thought, of the size of the universe. He wondered how far away Molly Moon’s planet was. And he thrilled to think that soon he would meet a real, living extraterrestrial.
Finally the countryside gave way to concrete and brick, and soon he was driving on an overpass, past a glass- and-steel office building onto the main drag into London.
“Ah, the smoke!” Miss Hunroe gasped. “Culture and art! Heaven! Nearly in! Kensington and Chelsea soon! And the weather doesn’t seem to be bad at all!”
Both sides of the road now became punctuated with black taxis with their famous old-fashioned curvy design. Big red double-decker buses chugged past. Some were open-ended at the back so that people could jump on and off at traffic lights. And quicker than Molly had expected, they came to their destination. As the car drove alongside the tall iron railings of a giant Victorian building with four gothic towers spread out on its top, Miss Huroe announced, “So here we are! The natural history museum! This is where lessons start.” She swerved the car into a DIPLOMATS ONLY parking space.
“What’s a diplomat?” Molly asked.
“It’s a special person,” said Micky, “who works for the government of a country. Their job is to go and live in
“Oh, no!” Miss Hunroe answered, adjusting her wavy blond hair and turning the car’s driving mirror to put on her red lipstick.
“Um…then won’t you get a ticket?” Molly asked.
