During a game of Only You Can Save Mankind, the screen, from the Galactic Hordes, shows a message of surrender. Johnny, whose typing skills are fledgling, wonders if Wobbler has fed the game some sort of novelty virus.
Johnny: Is this a trick WObbler?
ScreeWee Captain: ...Am not trick wobbler. We give in. No more war.
Johnny: It says in the book you blue up a lot of planets.
ScreeWee Captain: Lies!
Johnny agonises over how to reply.
No I mean this cant happen, youre Aliens, you cant not want to be shot at, no other game aliens have ever stopped aliening across the screen, they never said We DonT want to Go.
Johnny recalls Wobbler's homemade computer game Journey To Alpha Centauri, which, should the player leave the computer on for three thousand years, will reward the player with a small dot; a welcome message, and an instruction to go home.
On Johnny's dreamed return to his starship, which, last time round, exploded, the ScreeWee Captain asks where Johnny goes between being blown up and returning to space. Johnny ponders.
What do I tell her? I stay awake in school. I stay in my room a lot. I hang out with Wobbler and the others. We hang around in the mall, or in the park, or in one another’s houses, although not my house at the moment, because of Trying Times, and say things like 'I'm totally splanked,' even though we’re not sure what they mean. We live in Blackbury, most excellent city of cool... I must have the most boring life in the entire universe. I expect there’s blobs living under rocks on Neptune that have more interesting lives than me...
Bigmac's thoughts on the potential collision of two starships respectively carrying milk and Snappiflakes:
'Snap, crackle, fabababaBOOM!' said Bigmac.
In the ScreeWee command ship’s air ducts, Johnny and the Captain get lost.
Johnny:{reproachfully} I saw a film where there was an alien crawling around inside a spaceship’s air ducts, and it could come out wherever it liked.
Yo-less mentions that his mother believes that role-playing games are the work of Satan. Yo-less deduces that Satan personally created role-playing games, including the dice and the combat tables.
Johnny and the Dead
Wobbler: It's Halloween next week. I'm having a disco. You have to come as something horrible. Don’t bother to find a disguise.
Johnny: Thanks.
Mrs Nugent was the Johnson's next door neighbour, and known to be unreasonable on subjects like Madonna played at full volume at 3 a.m.
Wobbler's mother was very easy-going in the matter of videos. According to him, he was allowed to watch ones which even people aged a hundred had to watch with their parents.
Wobbler's claim that animate corpses tend to be angry and can push their way through walls perplexes Johnny - the only thing for which his late great grandmother might conceivably push through a wall would be a television for whose remote control she won't have to fight fifteen other old ladies.
In the cemetery, Johnny knocks on Alderman Thomas Bowler's mausoleum door.
Wobbler: Here, you mustn't! Supposing he comes lurchin' out!
Johnny asks his three friends on an after-school visit to the cemetery.
In the cemetery, when the unseen dead approach Johnny, Wobbler says he should be doing his homework - a priority which, the narration notes, nothing short of zombies could sway.
With Johnny surrounded by dead people visible only to him, self-professed atheist Wobbler has a moment of uncertainty.
Wobbler: I’ll tell my mum of you! This is practising bein' satanic again!
Johnny tunes into Mad Jim's Late Night Explosion, to hear, on the line, William Stickers.
Mad Jim: Hi, Bill. You sound a bit depressed to me.
William Stickers: It's worse than that. I’m dead, Jim.
Mad Jim: Wow! I can see that could be a real downer, Bill. Care to tell us about it?
William Stickers: You sound very understanding, comrade. Well...
Johnny:{to himself} Of course he’s understanding. Everyone phones up Mad Jim in the middle of the night. Last week he talked for twenty minutes to a lady who thought she was a roll of wallpaper. You sound totally sane compared to most of them.
Unable to oblige William Sticker's request for an airing of "the Internationale", Mad Jim instead plays Michael Jackson's "Thriller," to which, on Johnny's Granddad’s transistor radio, Alderman Thomas Bowler passes on Johnny’s demonstration of the Moonwalk.
Sylvia Liberty: It is certainly a very interesting syncopated rhythm. Like this, you say?
Thomas Bowler: That's right. And apparently you spin around with your arms and shout 'ow!'
Johnny: Oh, no. On top of everything else, Michael Jackson's going to sue me.
In the broken telly's phantom broadcast of Cobbers, the dead are swiftly engrossed.
Addison Fletcher: What’s happening now?
William Stickers: Mr McKenzie has told Dawn that Janine can't go to Doraleen’s party.
Alderman Thomas Bowler: I must say, I thought Australia was a bit different. More kangaroos and fewer young women in unsuitable clothing.
William Stickers: I'm quite happy with the young women.
Sylvia Liberty: Mr Stickers! For shame! You’re dead!
William Stickers: But I have a very good memory, Mrs Liberty.
Solomon Einstein: Oh. Is it over? But there iss the mystery of who took the money from Mick’s coat!
Sylvia Liberty: The man in the television just said there will be another performance tomorrow. We must be sure not to miss it.
The dead decide whether to return to the cemetery.
Alderman Thomas Bowler: ...Well, I'm blowed if I'm going back in there.
Sylvia Liberty: Thomas Bowler!
Alderman Thomas Bowler: Well, if a man can't swear after he's dead, it's a poor lookout. Blowed, blowed, blowed. And damn. I mean look, will you? There's radio and television and all sorts. There’s things going on! I don’t see why we should go back in there! It’s dull. No way.
Sylvia Liberty: No way?
William Stickers: That’s Australian for 'certainly not.'
On the night before Halloween, several of the dead attend the Blackbury Odeon's horror marathon.
Freddie. Now that's a NICE name... And that's a nice jumper... But I don’t think THAT's very nice.
The dead's instinctive obligation to be back at their graves by dawn, it turns out, may be evaded by instantaneous travel around a spherical and therefore relatively nightly world. At this point, a hand is raised.
Addison Fletcher: Oh, yes. Thank you Mr Ronald Newton (1878-1934), former Chairman of the Blackbury Flat Earth Society. I know you have Views.
Via the telephone line, the dead, on an impromptu global tour, visit New York.
William Stickers: Is everyone keeping a look out for those Ghostbreakers?
Sylvia Liberty: I think that was just cinematography, William.
At Wobblers Halloween party, Johnny recalls Wobbler's computer club friends' ability to get drunk on "non-alcoholic alcohol."
Wobbler suggests watching Night of the Vampire Nerds.
Bigmac: I don’t believe in vampire nerds.
Wobbler: Oh, I dunno. It’s the sort we’d have round here.
Yo-less: They’d suck fruit juice.
Bigmac: Their mum’d make them go to bed really late.
But they had to think about that.
Yo-less drily summarises successfully setting the police on a pair of hired vandals.
Yo-less: Well Done, Said PC Plonk. You Have Captured The Whole Gang! Good Work, Fumbling Four! And They All Went Home For Tea And Cakes.
Johnny and the Bomb
Johnny ponders his tendency to worry.
Usually they were the same old worries - school, money, whether you could get AIDS from watching television, and so on. But occasionally, one would come out of nowhere like a Christmas Number One and knock all the others down a whole division.
On Wobbler:
He wanted to be a nerd, but they wouldn’t let him join.
Wobbler: It'd be sound to go back a long way back in time. Back to the dinosaurs. No chance of killing your granddad then, unless he’s really old. Dinosaurs‘d be alright.
Bigmac: Great! Then I could wipe ‘em out with my plasma rifle! Oh, yes!
Wobbler: Yeah. That’d explain a lot. Why did the dinosaurs die out sixty-five million years ago? Because Bigmac couldn’t get there any earlier.
Johnny: You haven’t got a plasma rifle.
Bigmac: If Wobbler can have a time machine, I can have a plasma rifle.
Johnny: Oh, all right
Bigmac: And a rocket launcher.
Mrs Tachyon’s cat Guilty presents his credentials.
When an early ape had cautiously got down out of its tree and wobbled awkwardly along the ground, trying out this new ‘standing upright’ idea all the younger apes were talking about, this was exactly the kind of snarl it hated to hear. It said to every muscle in the body: run away and climb something: and possibly through down some coconuts, too.
In an alley, Johnny is unfazed by an upturned shopping trolley - he suspects secretly sentient herds of them roam the town.
The boys wonder what might be inside a bin liner.
'None of them is big enough for a dead body,' said Yo-less, who wasn’t allowed to watch horror movies.
Waking up, Johnny recalls last night's custody of Mrs Tachyon’s foul-tempered cat.
There was a spray of milk across the wall and ceiling where Guilty had shown what he thought of people who tried to give him an unprovoked meal.
When Yo-less notes the risk of having been thought to have assaulted Mrs Tachyon, Johnny ponders their respective harmlessness.
It wasn't that Bigmac was actually evil. He'd happily fire imaginary nuclear missiles at people but he wouldn't hurt a fly, unless perhaps it was a real hard biker fly which'd given him serious grief. However, he did have a problem with cars, especially big, fast ones with the keys still in the ignition...Wobbler would admit to anything if you got him frightened enough. All the great unsolved mysteries of the world - the Marie Celeste, the Bermuda Triangle, the Loch Ness Monster - could be sorted out in about half an hour if you leaned a bit on Wobbler.
A phone call from Kirsty, whose query of "is that you?"
seemed to be saying that if you weren't you, then it was your fault. It was the voice of someone who dialled wrong numbers and then complained when the phone was answered by people she didn't want to speak too.
On social worker Ms Partridge:
When she'd started the job, less than a year ago, she'd firmly believed that everything that was wrong with the world was the fault of Big Business and the Government. She believed even more firmly now that it was all the fault of Bigmac.
Johnny recalls last winter's appearance in the snow of giant footprints.
There had been two theories. There was Kir- Kasandra's, which was that it was Bigfoot, and Johnny's, which was that it was a combination of Bigmac and two 'Giant Rubber Feet, A Wow At Parties!!!!' from the Joke Emporium in Penny Street. Ki - Kasandra's theory had the backing of so many official sources in the books she's read that it practically outweighed Johnny's, which was merely based on watching him do it.
In 1941, Bigmac is arrested on suspicion of being a spy. Why does his shirt bear the legend "Heavy Mental"?
Bigmac: They're a neo-punk thrash-band.
Captain Harris: A music band? And would we have heard them on the wireless, perhaps?
Bigmac: I shouldn't think so. Their last single was "I'm going to rip off your head and spit down the hole".
Sir John, aka Wobbler, having founded his own burger bar chain, notes use of Ronald McDonaldExpy Willie Wobbler.
